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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Bob Zemsky

Is E-Learning Forever Trapped in a Field of Dreams?

In the years since Bill Massy and I published Thwarted Intervention, I have come to better understand higher education’s tepid embrace of the new learning technologies. My “aha” moment occurred at the San Diego meeting of the Spellings Commission in February 2006. Before us were three technology experts. Each had come to plead for more money to support the development of open-source educational software. More exasperated than usual, I mused during the comment period that what the technologists needed was not more money, but more customers. The genesis of my observation was the finding in Thwarted Innovation that there was no demand for e-learning software, particularly on the part of faculty, and hence no market.

It turned out that the most senior of our witnesses was even more exasperated. He was not interested in hearing that customer demand might be required to spur e-learning’s development. Looking me in the eye he said, “You don’t understand. If we build it they will come.” For nearly 20 years I had used that line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams to parody the assumption by educational researchers that what intrigues them will be of interest to those whose lives they are trying to change. I called it the Kevin Costner theorem of strategic change, after the star of the film about an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Suddenly it was not parody but fact — the deeply held conviction that the new technologies in themselves would drive educational reform. Faculty would change how they taught because they could not resist the beguiling power of the new technologies.

Sometimes the spread of an innovation does follow the “if we build it” scenario. It’s not clear, for example, that there was a huge demand for a new kind of MP3 player prior to Apple’s introduction of the iPod. But that device proved beguiling enough to spawn whole new forms of communication including, but not limited to, podcasts. What was clear to me that afternoon in San Diego, however, was that e-learning was no iPod. It was not an innovation that would drive change but rather would prove to be one that could spread only in response to someone else’s demand for change. In short, what the technologists needed was not more grant money but more faculty customers who were willing and able to invest their own time and their institution’s funds in a set of innovations that solved their problems rather than satisfying the technologists’ inquisitiveness.

Posted at 07:42:19 AM on April 8, 2008 | All postings by Bob Zemsky

Comments

  1. Excellent posting!

    This is one area where, unfortunately, tenure means never having to say you’re sorry (following the “film quote of the day” with this from “Love Story”). “Never having to say you’re sorry” to students whose lives are ever more entwined with technologies (like the iPod) and who expect their educational experience to reflect that reality. But it doesn’t.

    I recall reading in the CHE many years back that the Sloan Foundation (which was helping to bankroll SUNY’s e-learning efforts) found that a majority of the “distance learning” courses were being taken by resident students of the campuses.

    Duh….

    May I suggest that the faculty overcome their generational hesitations with technology (remember that grandpa or great-grandpa who would go directly to the store rather than call first to see if the product was in?) and partner with their students in the move to adaptation of newer technologies.

    I’ve found that students are more than eager to help this along and they do not begrudge the faculty member who seeks their input/assistance.

    After all, someday they’ll be fifty+, too, and they’ll be playing catch-up, as well. Although, given the accelerated pace of technological innovation, a generation “born running,” as it were, is better-equipped for change.

    All education is a process of change. Teaching from the proverbial “yellowed notes” is not change (nor is Power Point, which simply projects such notes in black and white and color).

    Faculty, change thyself — for today’s students increasingly, as the old saying goes, “vote with their feet.”

    Change as if your livelihood depended on it — because it will.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 8, 09:37 AM · #

  2. Having taught and taken on-line classes, I can testify to the absolute mental boredom I’ve experienced with the new “technology”. My classes have been little more than read the text, take the test, which is ok for some disciplines, but as for being a college experience – not so much.

    Having said that, on-line education is the only way public institutions can compete with for-profit schools who cater to working people in this over-credentialed world.

    E-learning has probably reached the point of diminishing returns for school budgets. The higher tech schools get, the less customers it will have simply because the technology is kitchy anf fun, but not adding anything to the educational experience compared to the cost.

    — Muap Conners · Apr 8, 09:38 AM · #

  3. What the edu-software peddlers refuse to admit—over and over again—is that their products have useless modules (why do I need an on line gradebook when excel will do fine?), absurd interfaces that do not even begin to replicate our experience with, for example, writing and distributing a syllabus, and all manner of bells and whistles that are not appropriate for every course or every discipline. I am no luddite—I am on the web and using new tools constantly—but no edu-shovelware has shown me that it can do more for me than gmail, google calendar, a copy of Adobe, and a ftp client.

    Edu-software might help us change the way we teach for the better—what the coders would improperly call a “paradigm shift” (Kuhn meanwhile spinning in his grave). But it won’t achieve these goals until it is as easy to use as gmail, facebook, or other applications that put the users’ needs first —that is, the teachers, not the coders, the students, or the vice provosts for academic technobabble.

    — Tom in Raleigh · Apr 8, 09:25 PM · #

  4. Smart people in technology do not waste time on elearning technology. That is because elearning technology is a strong analog of e-vegetable-cutting technology—a really dumb idea.

    There are huge industries making lots of money pushing technologies into every corner of the world that appears to have money to spend. THAT and ONLY THAT is why elearning exists as word at all and that is the only reason people talk about elearning—it is VENDOR idea not a user idea, a VENDOR idea not a professor idea, not a student idea. It is 100% PUSH—not an iota of PULL.

    Fortunately the kind of minds that get sucked into promoting elearning are not, how shall we say, top caliber, next to top caliber, next to next to top caliper—recurse endlessly.

    Two lovers whose genitals entertwine in regular meetings find that emails between such trysts work well. That demonstrates that IMMENSE personalness of relationship can extend itself across multiple-media. That does NOT demonstrate that tepid personalness or stranger-ness can extend similarly.

    The convenience of e-mediated media is their BIG selling point. It is like selling the convenience of two lovers getting together in a hotel without being found out. Convenience never was a major goal of any lover. Learning is a respectable analog of “lover” in this regard. It is an intense, hot, personal engagement of mind with heart, heart with heart, mind with mind, or heart with mind. Without a face to face basis, tepid e mediation simply is BORING.

    Furthermore—consider Kindle, as well designed as an iTunes analog as it really is—it is so procrustean in format restrictions that one can easily imagine none of the world’s professors ever composing anything for it. Invent a thing and then make people recompose, reformat to get their lifetimes of stuff onto it—what kind of stupid proposition is that?

    Scribd did the opposite—they invented software that does all the recomposing reformatting automatically for you—so whatever format you did, works in myriad other formats they can generate from that. Smart people!!!

    My colleges tend to have computer systems. They tend to try to put them in my office. I let them. BUT I have never, not ever, not even once, used any computer put anywhere by a college. This has become a mania in me, but originally it was merely a pragmatic generalization—any technology any college bought or developed (project Athena?) was guaranteed to be stupid, procrustean, worthless, bureaucratic, out of date, regularly interrupted and distrupted and rupted by “updates”, and a source of endless frustration.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 9, 06:48 AM · #

  5. Amen. We are awash in software for teaching and other functions. But what we need is some motivation to use it and, perhaps, a some professionals to help teach faculty how they can teach in this new environment. Finally, we need to continute to test the hypothesis that teaching and student learning are, in fact, important. Many (but not all) faculty members think so, but insufficient attention to rewarding teaching provides little incentive for a faculty member to become one of the customers needed to use and improve current software.

    — Dick Pratt · Apr 9, 06:55 AM · #

  6. There are lots of reasons not to use the computer your employer gives you (they might own everything you write on it and often put in special tracking devices).

    However, “e-learning” is not tied to software-vendors. In fact, way back a decade ago, IBM actually hired four people, I believe, Prof. James Noblitt of the U of North Carolina being one, to tour the country to try to convince faculty to take ownership themselves of the whole process of electronic-mediated learning. Prof. Noblitt demonstrated what he himself had developed for teaching in his field.

    I attended a demonstration of his work at a higher ed conference and it was excellent. Eventually, he sold it to a publisher to get wider distribution. Some of his work is still available; others were not used enough to warrant another edition, so the copyright reverted back to him entirely.

    Noblitt’s software was an add-on to, not a replacement for, the classroom, BTW. He had several enthusiastic faculty contact him still and he gave free permission for them to use (but not sell) it.

    Moral of the story:

    FACULTY should control the development of software, not vendors,

    BUT

    An apparent majority of faculty don’t want to do e-learning in any format whatsoever. Their disconnect with the evolving world of knowledge production and reception is becoming greater than that of many of their students — and poses serious problems of access and ttimeliness for both the teaching and scholarship of the university.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 09:13 AM · #

  7. Bob, thank you for the posting. The problem that you are writing about has more to do with “technophoria,” the misplaced belief that e-learning is about technology. It’s not. Technology is merely the device by which (hopefully) high quality instruction (or instructional guidance) takes place. E-learning is about so much more than iPods or Moodle. Universities, to be successful at e-learning, must engage in more thoughtful preparation, strategic development, market planning, faculty support, student service, benchmarking, and assessment if they are to be successful at e-learning. Most of them fail on at least a few of those counts. To be successful in e-learning, college and university leaders must understand the end game: mission or market. Is it the aim of the institution to reach out and make higher education accessible to many who have been disenfranchised? Or is the primary goal to increase market share, revenue, and profitability? Either direction is OK, but they—and the e-learning strategic plan and an understanding of the target market—are the factors that determine the appropriate technological tool for delivery. Technology companies will do well to understand the primacy of institutional goal-setting in their selling, and their own success will revolve around thoughtful placement of technology.

    In short, there’s no lack of a market for e-learning. The numbers of students engaged in e-learning has grown rapidly and continues at many institutions that have done their correct planning.

    — Richard Hezel · Apr 9, 09:20 AM · #

  8. I notice that Professor Zemsky’s comments are based on anecdote, not research, and most of the posts (except the first one) are likewise personal responses. I responded to the more fully developed but still not rigorous piece “Why the E-Learning Boom Went Bust” by Zemsky and William F. Massey in the Chronicle (July 2004) with an op-ed in the fall 2004 number of The Journal of Continuing Higher Education (“Whether E-Learning Went Bust”). It seems that neither his analysis nor my response have changed much. Prof. Zemsky and respondents 3, 4, and 5 here sound to me like American auto makers saying there’s no reason for people to buy Toyotas because American cars are just as good. So obviously all those people driving Toyotas don’t know a good car when they drive one. Right?

    I have spent more than ten years developing and working with online learning programs as a form of distance learning, and have worked with other distance technologies since before Al Gore invented the internet. Most online distance learning programs experience very rapid growth, because there in fact IS a market for anytime/anywhere learning. This market was not created by the for-profit providers nor was distance learning invented by the Sloan Foundation in 1994. Major public universities (Penn State and Iowa come to mind) were delivering reputable correspondence study programs over a century ago and are using the computer and the internet as merely the newest way to meet those educational needs.

    That “a majority of the ‘distance learning’ courses were being taken by resident students of the campuses,” as respondent 1 notes, does not diminish the legitimate and valuable service online learning provides for people who do not live near campuses or do not have enough control over their schedules to be able to take courses at set time. (Shift work anyone? Long commutes?) The for-profits have discovered this market precisely because traditional institutions have neglected it. And those resident students who enroll in distance-delivered courses are voting with—their checkbooks, if not their feet. (At many schools students must pay extra for online courses.)

    There ARE professionals on nearly every campus who can help those instructors willing to use new technologies, and there are, at many institutions, incentives for doing so, as respondent 5 desires. Those who do NOT wish to use technology are free to do so, but they should realize that the for-profits are gaining both market share and political attention. I fully agree that some applications of technology are trivial, distracting or useless, and I have seen overly-complicated “all the bells and whistles” courses that come close to being unteachable and unlearnable. (I myself start to twitch with unease when I read of a professor using Twitter to tell his students where he’s having coffee.) In fact, I sometimes wish technologies would NOT be used on campus where there are so many other means of teaching and learning. No technology should be used just because it’s new, but various computer technologies are in fact being used by reputable non-profit institutions to serve thousands of students who have no other way of reaching their educational goals.

    — Peg Wherry · Apr 9, 09:28 AM · #

  9. AMEN! Well stated Peg.

    Alvin Toffler wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read and write. They will be those who can’t learn, unlearn, and relearn”…and I add…and go the way of the dinosaur.

    Schools are recognizing the benefits (and the profits) of the online modality. Traditional schools are fine for some students however the online environment stretches outside the boundaries of the campus and allows those who don’t have the means or the time to attend a f2f class. Online works…check with the local businesses. Technology runs many businesses and are expecting new hires (graduates of fine traditional schools) to have the background to perform the day they get hired.

    — Cliff · Apr 9, 10:02 AM · #

  10. I’ve talked to a lot of other faculty members at our community college about this, and I have to say that I think that Mr. Zemsky is wong; at least at our college, there is a terrific faculty demand for “e-learning” technology, a demand that’s been building since the 1990s. However, I think that in one sense he’s correct. Our district has spent, in the last few years, tens of millions of dollars on things like Blackboard Vista, Banner, a CMS system for the college Web site and a Sharepoint server to create a faculty collaboration. Only a few of those I talk to are enthusiastic about this, and the majority refuse to use any of these “tools” at all.

    I spent two years as our online faculty coordinator trying to find out why there was this disconnect between the faculty’s demand for technology, and their reluctance to use the technology our district provided. The answer wasn’t hard to find: without exception, the technology adopted by our district was simply brain-dead, ugly and non-functional, and faculty members simply don’t want to waste their time on something that stupid. Let me give you an example.

    When Netscape 3 came out (in 1997, I think), it allowed me to sit at my desk and create an entire Web site for my class, with an editor that worked pretty much like Microsoft Word. Today, there’s a whole host of similar products—from Dreamweaver through Microsoft’s Expression blend to iWeb—that make creating and managing Web sites as easy as managing a folder of Word documents on your computer. Compare that with trying to create a Web page (or even posting a Web page) in a program like Blackboard Vista. I guess that they could make it more difficult and primitive; they could require us to do our work on punched cards.

    The upshot is that the faculty I know end up renting hosting space (on their own dime) to put up the Web resources they need for their classes, and the administration gets the idea that faculty aren’t interested in using technology.

    — Stephen Dean Gilbert · Apr 9, 10:30 AM · #

  11. At the risk of a “personal anecdote”, electronic conferencing formats have been developing fast apace — not only for the desktop/laptop computer but also for conferencing situations which actually project a life-size simulation of the other participating site(s).

    At one of these life-size events, a colleague witnessed one of the participants forget the simulation and actually pull out a business card to “give” to the distant interlocutor! Ergo, even “f2f” experiences are also evolving in their meaning.

    In addition, the fact that the Sloan Foundation’s surveys found resident students most heavily engaged in e-learning is not an anti-access statement. With a majority of undergrads working 30 or more hours a week to be able to pay for their college education AND with course scheduling and class size and availabilty on-campus designed to fit the faculty’s desires, not the students’ — well, e-learning is an access issue for students of all ages, both on and off the campus.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 10:35 AM · #

  12. It requires too much money, too much time, and too much reliance on others’ technical and financial support. Period. And because it is neither an inclination nor an availability to every instructor, it’s also a small factor in merit and tenure review. Not exactly the formula to attract quality faculty to the practice. It has to be made cheaper and easier, and these are not goals highly paid and proprietary-minded designers and programmers are interested in.

    — marci · Apr 9, 11:03 AM · #

  13. How many faculty even use the free software which is frequently included with the mass-market general education course textbooks in many disciplines?

    You know, the little CD that works in just about any computer running Windows or Mac (usually Windows)?

    How many faculty refuse to even engage in EMAIL with their students? Look around you. If you know of even a handful, that’s a handful too many.

    “The rhetoric of refusal….”

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 11:33 AM · #

  14. The “Times are a changing” for all of us in this world of globalization. The traditional faculty bias against the new technology and Elearning will have to change.

    I have taught at the university level and also had the opportunity to develop and teach varied distance learning classes. From my own traditional undergraduate student learning experiences I can truly say:Give me distance learning rather than sitting in a classroom listening to the same lecture that was offered five years before.

    Elearning (distance learning) is here to stay and the bricks and mortar institutions must transition or lose out on a lucrative but nontraditional revenue stream.

    Bill Goodwin
    361-442-4570

    — Bill Goodwin · Apr 9, 12:00 PM · #

  15. Faculty leadership, oversight and use of e-learning technologies is essential. We are part of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (www.cccoer.wordpress.com), whose goal is to encourage and support faculty professional development in the creation and use of open textbooks and materials. THe fundamental premise is that knowlege should be freely available and fully accessible to all learners. No student should be barred from a higher education organic chemistry class because the textbook costs more than $400. Institutions must support faculty to build upon the available content in their disciplines and put open textbooks in the hands of our students. Faculty should be supported to repurpose the content to meet their learning goals, and students should be able to get access to the core content anytime they wish. As an alternative to downloading the latest American Idol hit tune, we need to engage our students so they continuously download, read and think about the ideas and values that will enable them to be our next generation of leaders!

    — Martha Kanter · Apr 9, 12:17 PM · #

  16. My personal bias is for some version of the combo: “brick and click” ;-).

    As for open courseware, forget not that MIT has everything online free — and there may be some other joiners in that policy. MIT was, however, the first major university to do so, I believe.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 9, 01:04 PM · #

  17. Bob Zemsky is always interesting, always provacative and in this case absolutely right . . . and wrong.

    He is absolutely right that there is no need for the government to fund the development of e-learning software projects. With commercial efforts such as Blackboard and Desire to Learn, open source efforts such as Sakai and Moodle, and countless other options available, there are plenty of options and continued development going on out there.

    He is absolutely right that what is needed is for more faculty to be consumers of such software.

    Where Bob is wrong in this case is basing a demand function for e-learning software upon faculty demand. It is student demand that is driving and will continue to drive the demand for e-learning. For example, e-learning is on the verge of eliminating summer schools. Students would much rather take those summer courses as “distance” courses and be able to work a regular job in the summer than to sit in a classroom and forego that summer income. Students now demand that syllabi and materials for all courses be made available on-line. The demand for on-line resources at our campus is so strong that student government at our university just petitioned the University Academic Senate to pass a rule requiring that every professor at a minimum put their syllabus on-line for them.

    More students are looking to hybrid course formats for their regular courses to accommodate their educational needs in the midst of work, travel and family obligations.

    Students will continue to be the ones who drive this demand and that is what will drive the innovation needed.

    — Michael · Apr 9, 04:57 PM · #

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