Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
President (Rector) Svein O. Haaland Presentation
President (Rector) Svein O. Haaland, Lillehammer College, Norway
The pedagogical challenge. Research based teaching as a commodity in an online world.
Abstract.
The pedagogical challenge, with all its implications, is the most interesting issue to which technology-based teaching will have relevance. We are in the process of entering an on-line world for teaching and research; we have no choice; we must make the investment, whether we think we can afford it or not. It means competition and co-operation, between universities and between university and industry. Life long learning is a necessity in our quickly changing society. On-line teaching and flexible learning may benefit the process, but to do that we need change. We must meet the new students’ needs and develop their new curriculum. The "new" academics in the "new" universities have to do it.
Comparative cost efficiency between face-to-face and technology-based education is a matter of interest in controlling your budget. In his new book, Tony Bates has a chapter dedicated to that kind of analysis.
As he points out, technology investments in higher education have been driven, up to a point, primarily by administrative rather than academic requirements. Information systems were originally developed for student registration and records, financial tracking, and management. Communication systems like telephone and e-mail were also primarily developed for management and administrative purposes. University investments in video and television production facilities, in the Internet and World Wide Web, and now in the digitalisation and convergence of media, have been, and still are, very much educationally and academically driven.
Tony Bates makes a distinction between fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs do not change with student numbers, but the variable costs do. In conventional higher education models, cost has tended to increase with student numbers, otherwise the quality drops. Technology-based courses cost a good deal of money up front to create, but once created, many students can use them with relatively small increases in costs. A standard Web based course at UBC, with a mix of prepared web material, on-line discussion forum, and print (in the form of required texts), becomes increasingly more cost effective than face-to-face teaching as the number per class increases beyond forty per year over a four year period. In his conclusion, Bates says that we do not yet know the impact of technology-based teaching on indirect costs and benefits. Distributed learning may, for instance, lead to reduced demand for buildings and less traffic to campus. But most of all, we may reach new target groups of learners.
Lillehammer University College has been a dual mode institution since 1991. For the time being, we have as many part time, distant education students as we have on-campus students. If they were on campus, we would have a demand for more buildings, and the traffic would have been heavier.
Our first experiences with technology-based teaching came when we transformed some of our face-to-face courses into combined or distributed courses with the same curriculum and the same target groups. Since our campus was the Radio and Television Centre for the Lillehammer Winter Olympic Games in 1994, we did not have access to our buildings one year before and one year after the games. We used lectures on video, tutoring on telephone and fax. The video production facilities we used were the ones established for our two-year course in television directing. The students were scattered all over town in different provisional arrangements. The social costs were high; the college was not an entity for the students, they did not feel like students in a college, and student political activity suffered. It was impossible to give new students a good introduction to higher education. By now we have one the finest new buildings for higher education purposes in Norway. The students really feel like part of a College, and we get very high ratings on surveys on both curriculum and social life for students. The Norwegian Film school is now established as part of the College.
But the most interesting experience has been with new target groups. Norway has a small population, and the people are spread all over a 386,000 square kilometres mass of mountains, woods, and coastline. So are the Norwegian dentists. As in every other profession, they need further education. Together with the Norwegian Dentists Association, our Centre for Life Long Learning has developed courses for dentists. We do not educate dentists on a regular basis, nor do we have faculty who know anything about dental medicine. The closest we get is our Scottish layout designer and desk publisher, who started her vocational career as a dentist. The Norwegian Dentists Association contracted with our institution because of our competence in course planning, media pedagogics, and course material production. They wanted distributed or combined courses, courses using both face-to-face and technology-based teaching.
Every course has a curriculum similar to a 75-hour face-to-face teaching course. We use lectures, student group discussions, tutoring, and work with problem based learning (PBL). We have two days of seminar to start with, and the same in the end of the course. The rest of the work is done at home.
Traditionally, a course like this meant 10 days away from work for the dentist. On average, a dentist will lose 800 US$ (some claim to lose 1400 US$) income a day being away from work. In the old days, a course meant a total loss of 8000 US$, but now that they miss work for 4 days, that means a loss of 3200 US$. If we take into consideration 6 days in a hotel, we can add 600 US$ to the savings. This is based on the assumption that they will use evenings and weekends for their coursework. Every course is planned for 40 participants, who are paying a course fee of 920 US$ for each course. All together we are going to develop 5 courses in co-operation with the Norwegian Dentists Association. The five courses will cost a total of 1.184.000 US$ to develop. The intention is to use the courses for 10 years. The maintenance cost for the five courses is estimated at 178.000 US$ for the ten years.
The first course was oral medicine and gerontology. The patient is an age demented 76-year-old lady. The picture of her teeth is one of the cases presented for PBL work. The picture quality is excellent; the lady’s open mouth is no pretty sight close up. With the x-rays and the description of the patients situation, the pictures give excellent exercise material for problem based learning.
We have developed 7 five minutes films to trigger PBL exercises. The films are downloaded from the web, and take 15 minutes to download by ISDN. You do that while you put the kettle on, and when you sit down to work you have a high quality video to watch.
Because of the net based chat groups, problem solving, and tutoring, the dentists, especially the ones working in the districts, felt that they had a professional network for the first time. They felt confident with the other dentists in their group, and continued the contact after the course.
Both the economic and social benefits of this example are easy to see. The success is due to several factors. The co-operation between the Norwegian Dentists Association and Lillehammer College to develop the course was excellent. We could use the best professors in dental medicine as teachers and tutors. The dentist had the means to buy a computer, became interested in the possibilities of the Internet and web, and the course was suitable both for the combination of face-to-face and technology-based teaching, and for the PBL model.
The dentists have an academic background and are used to taking responsibility for their own development and learning. But we give other courses where some of the students are unfamiliar with academic work. We changed the expense structure for courses for employment agency people. They used to dedicate 70% of their educational budget to travel, board, and lodging, and only 30% to education. By using a combination of face-to-face and technology-based teaching, we managed to turn the expense structure the other way around.
We give courses to 600 social security people yearly. The courses are developed in co-operation with the National Social Security, and are given in collaboration with four other university colleges. I will not tire you with details, but I will mention that approximately 40% of these students have had no academic experience. They now have the necessary competence and, by graduation, did as well as the students with an academic background.
Comparative cost efficiency is, on the other hand, not a matter of concern when we decide to implement on-line teaching in our curriculum. Our new on-campus students communicate via e-mail and text messages on the mobile phone. They are acquainted with the possibilities of the PlayStation.
Convergence of media makes headlines everywhere. They have followed me on my way here: in my homely Aftenposten Saturday and Sunday before I left Norway, in the Financial Times of the 4th and 5th of March in Copenhagen, in BBC news in Ireland on Monday morning. Everywhere I met news about convergence and development of different parts of the ICT industry.
In Hannover, Ericsson has presented the integrated mobile phone, net reader, WAP, dairy, calendar, and much more, including a colour screen and wireless earplug and microphone. Ericsson has chosen the Norwegian Opera and not Explorer or Netscape as their net reader, by the way.
Every one of the 15,000 competitors last weekend in Vasaloppet, the 90 kilometre Swedish cross-country ski race, had a microchip strapped to their legs. As the skier passed sensors along the route, the times were taken, transferred via a computer in Mora to IBM’s supercomputer in Stockholm, and sent out to the Internet. People using a trial version of Ericsson’s R320 WAP phones were able to see the latest timings of any competitor by typing in the skier's start-number.
When the new Sony PlayStation 2 was launched in Japan, people from all over the world were there, queuing with the Japanese to be among the first to buy it. In two days, 980,000 new play stations had new owners. The station can also function as DVD player, for playing digital feature films on television and music cd’s. In two years time, you are promised to be able to connect PlayStation 2 to the Internet.
Intel said Tuesday that they would give all of its 70,000 employees free PCs and Internet access, and hoped that other companies would follow suit.
Financial Times presented the following headline: "Almighty grid promises a shortcut to knowledge. The scientists who brought us the Internet and then the web are now cooking up the ’grid’".
"Imagine being able to sit at your desk and access all the information in the world to answer your question, in the format you need. Not just a list of links to relevant web sites, or even selected on-line articles, but every piece of data ever collected on the subject, in a relevant, user friendly way." That vision of the next Internet generation comes from Britain’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, which is working with scientists from Cern, the European centre for particle physics research in Geneva, to take the first step towards a global grid.
Like it or not, information, education, and communication are all mediated more and more through screens, through the moving image. Convergence is happening between cinema, television, and computer, but also between factual and fictional production. Entertainment and information are all given in the shared language of the audiovisual. We have a powerful instrument of communication in the human drive to narrate both experience and vision. The storytelling habit is very useful when you present academics on the screen. In our institution, we talk of media pedagogics, the competence needed to develop a curriculum where the teaching is partly technology-based, and where storytelling is essential. Many a professor and an experienced lecturer have learned much about the screen lecture dramaturgy from our media educators. To get high quality distributed teaching products, we need collaboration between different competence groups.
Life long learning and further education are becoming a necessity for all, not only for the academics. Technology can help us to fulfil that need, but the challenges are many. We need to co-operate with other institutions of higher education and with the employers and employees in the private and public sectors in order to develop the kind of courses needed and wanted. Courses developed and given by us are assumed to be research based, of good quality, giving the student the opportunity to graduate and receive a degree. More and more, education will be part of the marketplace. We will encounter competition from our sister institutions, and also from private providers in a global perspective. In the Nordic countries, it is of utmost importance to co-operate across borders and have a common cultural heritage to hand over to the next generation.
But the utmost challenge is the pedagogical one. Is it possible to use technology to develop a better learning environment for the students? Every student is a unique individual, and her way of learning is unique as well. When the curriculum is partly technology based, we have to focus even more on the individual approach to learning. Pekka Himanen elaborated on this yesterday with the Socratic midwife idea, connecting people and the open content process with LINUX as model. The open source model is the academic way of working. Students should be more familiar with the faculties’ research projects. The research on pedagogical issues, which Gunnar Backman from the Swedish Learning Lab referred to yesterday, is of similar interest.
The significant issues for educational and social policy will be to prepare for:
- The new students that will be a heterogeneous group, in age, adult and young, with and without work experience, part time or full time student, each one needing flexible learning possibilities, and asynchronous as well as synchronous access to information at the time they need it.
- The new curriculum that will be developed in co-operation, between academia and industry, across traditional barriers, and will be based more on a master-apprentice relationship.
- The new academics, who have to be given academic merit for being innovative and developing new distributed teaching and courses, and for being a good teacher in the role Knut Lundby, among others, presented yesterday.
- The new university that will make all this possible, through co-operation and consortiums, exploiting the possibilities and expertise for giving people access to information, learning and development of knowledge, having in mind that university life is more than what is taught in the classroom.
Open and Distance Learning (ODL) has a long history in Norway. The first correspondence school was started in 1914. In 1948, Norway was the first country in the world to have its own Correspondence School Act. However, it was not until the 1980s that ODL was used to any great extent in higher education.
The Norwegian Executive Board for Flexible Learning in Higher Education (SOFF) is a national agency. Since its inception in 1990, SOFF has provided support for the development of about 200 open and distance learning projects at Norwegian universities and colleges. SOFF has actively encouraged collaboration among higher education institutions.
The Norwegian University Network for Life-Long Learning, Norgesuniversitetet, is planned as a joint venture between the universities and colleges through their Presidents’ or Rectors’ Conferences and the large organisations in the labour market, representing both the employers and employees. The main elements in The Norwegian University Network collaboration are:
- The establishment of a database and an advisory service that includes all continuing education courses at tertiary level in Norway. A partnership has been established with the University for Industry in Great Britain to work on the database.
- The creation of meeting points at different levels between the educational institutions and the labour market organisations to clarify the needs for education, with a view to developing flexible education in line with the desires of the labour market.
Great optimism prevails in association with the Norwegian Competence reform. The reform includes rights for all employees to take a leave of absence to pursue continuing education. The large organisations in the labour market, representing both the employers and the employees, are contributing to funds for the development of new continuing education courses.
Parallel to what is happening in many other countries, Norwegian higher education is in a period of drastic changes. The new situation is a pedagogical challenge for all of us. We need to develop the skills of our staff for using technology in education. Our research activity should concentrate on a high quality use of converged media in teaching, rather than on economic and social costs or benefits.
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