Information communication technologies and tertiary education

Information communication technologies and tertiary education JUNE 2016 A research note prepared by Brent Neilson for the Tertiary Education Union Te Hautū Kahurangi o Aotearoa

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TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION Te Hautū Kahurangi o Aotearoa

INTRODUCTION which can negatively impact students and teachers alike.

Staff and students in tertiary education have embraced a range of information communication technology developments and tools in ways which contribute to improved delivery, enhanced teaching and learning, and the furthering of social and educational objectives of the sector.

Research on ICT shows conflicting accounts of the success or otherwise of technology across a spectrum of use, from more traditional forms of tertiary education and blended models, to increasingly virtual systems. The key to powerful, meaningful, engaging and inclusive uses of technology lies in models that hold technology as a tool to enable and enhance teaching and learning.

In this sense, sustaining technologies, which improve the performance of established programmes alongside existing tools, must be considered against disruptive technologies adopted for purely economic reasons.

The introduction of new technologies can be both disruptive, displacing previously dominant tools and forms of delivery, and sustaining by complementing and enhancing existing models of learning.

What has compelled the adoption of new technologies includes drives for economic and administrative efficiencies (such as teaching ever larger classes); the marketing of tools; penetration of these technologies across society and in particular modern workplaces; and a longstanding commitment to improving modes of delivery to meet the students where they are at.

The questioning of the adoption of new technologies citing the welfare of students and faculty, as well as longstanding social and educational objectives, should not be mistaken for inertia. With an increasing volume of research exploring ICTs in tertiary education, disruptive technologies must be assessed not merely in terms of their cost and convenience, but in terms of the benefits to individuals and to social objectives outlined by both tertiary education providers and governments.

ICTs and online provision offer many opportunities to improve education, particularly for on-the–job training and disciplines comprised of less abstract material. But technologies by their very nature create unintended consequences,

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND TERTIARY EDUCATION The New Zealand Productivity Commission rightly acknowledges the influence of ICTs in society,

Equating the industrial revolution and the emergence of general-purpose technologies with the debate today surrounding ICT and tertiary education exposes the dual attributes of disruptive technologies. Just as the mechanisation of manufacturing and agriculture increased profit and efficiency while also contributing to many of the social problems inextricably bound to modernity and post-industrial times; so too do ICTs potentially pose both positive and negative impacts on education and society.

Consideration must therefore be made of the unintended consequences of adopting new

“ICT has unlocked economies of scale in many existing services and created new services similar to the way in which GPT (general purpose technologies), such as steam and electricity, transformed manufacturing and agriculture. Extending this analogy, ICT is the ‘steam engine of services’” (NZPC, 2014: 154).

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technologies, and the motives of those who would push for the proliferation of ICTs and online learning without due consideration of the impact on learners, teachers and the social objectives of tertiary education.

itself has been at the forefront of ICT in adopting new technologies in the pursuit of educational and social objectives, but also in creating new technologies. From innovative experiential methods of learning such as fieldtrips, to today’s digital ‘fieldtrips’ offered through online, interactive gaming technologies, tertiary educators use technology and innovation alongside traditional forms of delivery to enhance learning and address the needs of a diverse population of students.

The assertion that there is ‘considerable inertia’ and ‘an unwillingness to try new things’ (NZPC, 2014: 1) in tertiary education runs counter to the sector’s long history of creativity and innovation in delivering education. The tertiary education sector

WHO BENEFITS FROM ONLINE PROVISION? The advantages of online learning have been clearly established by its proponents.

Academic research has focused on the potential of online provision and ICTs to enable, extend, and enhance student learning through increased access to education, meeting the needs of ‘non-traditional’ students, providing flexible pathways of learning, increased efficiency of delivery, the personalisation of learning processes (Emerson & MacKay; 2010; Holland, 2014; Jacoby, 2014), and increasing interactivity between the student and course material (Li, 2007). Much of this literature relies on an assumed link between accessibility and learning: that more learners equates in some way to better education, and that the instant and often uncontested nature of online provision is in keeping with the online, digitalised world today’s learners find themselves in. In substituting more traditional models of learning with those exemplified by the attributes discussed above, new models of learning also assume a homogeneity of students and their needs, which is said to be the weakness of today’s form of provision.

promotion of learner-to-learner interaction can increase student engagement with course content through shared reflection and understanding (Holland, 2014). Social interaction mediated digitally allows students to share and expand viewpoints, while building social connections and networks that have both immediate and future importance. Research shows social ‘presence’, offered digitally, creates the ‘feeling of community and connection among learners, (and) has contributed positively to learning outcomes and learner satisfaction with online courses” (Palloff & Pratt, 2005: 7).

While proponents of online education point to social interactivity and connectivity provided through online forums and other digital-social spaces, the unique environment of the physical campus cannot be reproduced digitally. The physical campus provides space, resources, services and a community that has built-up over time. The university campus in this sense offers a support system and a network for the creation and sharing of social capital, and for the kind of increased social connectedness endorsed by the Tertiary Education Union (Grey, et al. 2013) and crucial for a civil society. For many, particularly the inexperienced and those students which accessible tertiary education looks to attract, these support systems may be crucial to a positive learning and social experience.

From a practical perspective, online class material offers an alternative when students miss class, an opportunity to review course content, and online forums convey essential course information, while providing a virtual community of learners and a platform to share ideas and course information. This

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which can flourish to its full potential in systems that can respond to a learner differentially as time passes” (Saba, 2005: 264).

The stated benefits to teaching and learning created through online education result from the view that,

“Educational systems of the future must respond to learner differences dynamically as the learning process evolves and not necessarily be based on predetermined programs. Further, learning is a non-linear phenomenon

This understanding of the projected evolution of learning processes is central to much of the literature in support of increased online supervision. Yet at the heart of this view is the assumption of a causal path from increased accessibility to increased learning.

WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF ONLINE PROVISION? While some commentators praise online provision of education for its accessibility, scalability and efficiency, others criticize increasingly online models as a threat to students and teachers, to traditional models of learning and to the broader objectives of the tertiary education sector. Much of this threat lies in the potential of disruptive technologies, such as online provision, to negatively impact traditional forms of teaching and learning in implementing poorquality substitutes for current models of tertiary education.

leading changes in education, rather than being used as a tool to benefit the teaching and learning process, risks informing the development of policies which assume more technological change, is in some way ‘better’ by definition.

There is an abundance of emerging research on the use of ICTs and online provision in tertiary education. Emerson & Mackay (2011: 728) point to conflicting empirical testing of different modes of learning in their call for caution by the tertiary education sector in their use of online and blended learning.

They cite studies where it is shown there is no difference in outcomes between online, faceto-face and web-enhanced learners (Rivera & Rice, 2002); studies that show web-based students outperformed those engaged in faceto-face-learning (Hughes et al. 2007; Maki et al. 2000), and still more which indicate students in an online or online-enhanced class received considerably lower grades than their more traditionally taught counterparts (Mottarella et al. 2004; Wang & Newlin, 2000; Waschull, 2001). Emerson & Mackay’s (2011) own research found students taking part in traditional paper-based lessons performed 24% better than students who were taught the same lessons online.

A significant amount of academic literature in support of increasing the use of ICTs in tertiary education relies on and is premised by the essentialising idea of the ‘digital native’: those students ‘born digital’ with new skills and needs and therefore assumed to be more digitally capable than previous generations of learners. Increasingly virtual tertiary programmes depend heavily on the ability of students to navigate multiple digital spaces. The ‘participation gap’ (Literat, 2015) in today’s society, which accessible education looks to address, may actually work against the outcomes of some sections of students by decreasing face-to-face interactions and assuming a certain level of technological capability. The reality is not everyone benefits from the provision of online content: a fact that reflects the diversity of learners, teachers and disciplines in tertiary settings. The naïve assumption regarding the ‘digital native’ and the tendency for technology to be viewed as

Mehlenbacher et. al. (2000) point to research which shows the interactivity enabled by digital technologies, whether through a web environment, online games or other social modes of activity, actually work against the

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Given a diverse student population and the often-vast differences between disciplines providing online education, it is difficult to draw broad conclusions regarding the effectiveness of online provision.

Studies of this nature should not make sweeping generalisations regarding online effectiveness, nor should governments, in promoting sweeping reforms to models of education.

kind of deep learning required to engage intensively with educational material. This form of deep learning may be threatened or minimized in the adoption of technologies which promote cost and resource efficiency over lateral thinking and the level of contestability enabled by direct interactions between students and teachers. Furthermore, information posted in an online format runs the risk of going uncontested and under-discussed critically, if at all. Students passively absorbing or reading course content without being encouraged to interact with one another and the course material itself may experience a hindrance in their capacity for critical inquiry, while course content may become stagnant without a dynamic classroom environment. ‘Inertia’ in course content and in the student body itself is a very real possibility if a virtual model of learning is fully realised.

Studies that explore the risks of online education rarely call for an end to further innovation and uses of technology in the sector. Rather they point to the need to temper enthusiasm for what might be achieved with ICTs and instead develop a better understanding of the realities of students’ learning experiences; from easily measured outputs of achievement, to student and social outcomes which may not be immediate but which are integral to the role of tertiary education in society.

THE IMPACT OF MOOCS involvement of universities such as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and the Open University.

While distance learning and online provision has held a place in tertiary education for some time, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a relatively new phenomenon.

MOOCs first appeared in tertiary education in 2008, and have since been the centre of both public and academic discussion. Key issues related to this debate include the impact on teaching practice, quality assurance, and issues regarding accreditation (Jacoby, 2014). Massive Open Online Courses differ from previous forms of distance learning and online provision in their scale, their association with elite institutions, the fact they often do not offer formally recognized credits for achievement, their lack of prescribed teacher-student interactions and the fact, notably, that they are often offered free of charge (Tertiary Education Commission, 2014).

While MOOCs were originally created through a pedagogy of connectivism (cMOOCS), attention today has shifted toward an approach to MOOCs, with video lectures and quizzes and other traditional forms of teaching and evaluation, but delivered online and with very little or no face-to-face interaction between students or with their teacher (xMOOCS)(Literat, 2015). According to Stephen Downes, who instructed the world’s first MOOC with George Siemens at the University of Manitoba in 2008:

“MOOCs as they were originally conceived were the focus of learning activities and interaction, but as employed by commercial providers they resemble television shows or digital textbooks with – at best – an

The MOOC approach has been gaining considerable interest from the public, governments and in academia through the

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online quiz component…The idea of MOOCs as an experiment in pedagogy and educational organisation has been completely abandoned by the new platforms, to the detriment of MOOCs” (Parr, 2013).

the provider, exemplified by Auckland University’s MOOC program (Jacoby, 2014).

Interestingly, while Otago Polytechnic has offered online courses which follow the early connectivist MOOC format, the University of Otago’s ‘belief in the superiority of traditional delivery and the associated on-campus educational and social benefits, as well as concerns about the viability and sustainability of MOOCs’ (Tertiary Education Commission, 2014: 15) have held them from adopting the format. This concern for the economic, in terms of viability and sustainability, alongside the social and educational is indicative of a broader view of the potential of MOOCs held by those weary of its promises.

While online education has continued to rapidly increase in the US (Allen & Seaman, 2013), ‘New Zealand has experienced essentially static levels of online enrolment over the last decade’ (Guiney, 2011, cited in Marshall, 2016: 289). This status reflects both ‘traditional’ forms of online education, or distance learning’ and the new ‘MOOC’ formats. The University of Waikato became the first tertiary education provider to offer a MOOC in New Zealand, but did so independently and internally rather than partnering with another provider. Massey University’s MOOC partnership with the Australian provider Open2Study signaled the first formal New Zealand MOOC in 2013, followed by Auckland University’s collaboration with FutureLearn, also in 2013.

While it may be premature at this early stage in the provision of MOOCs in New Zealand to draw meaningful conclusions about such programs in the long term (Jacoby, 2014), according to Marshall (2016) it is not yet apparent how MOOC models can continue to operate without substantial and ongoing subsidies from the public and charitable sources. Furthermore, issues around MOOC quality and accreditation mean the adoption of MOOCs should be tempered until more is achieved in evaluating the experiences of students in these massively online programmes.

Apparent rationales for the provision of MOOCs in New Zealand emphasise the development of collaborative relationships in the case of Massey University, and the arguably more commercial desire of increasing the international reach of

CONCLUSION ICTs and online learning provide innumerable opportunities to enhance both learning and teaching and improve the accessibility of education. Using integrated curriculums, informed and purposeful instructional technologies, and by fostering innovation in the use of ICTs; tertiary education providers can create the knowledge and skills needed to prepare learners to work in future markets. Meaningful integration of new technologies and ICTs, however, requires the careful and informed selection of quality educational tools, which take into account best-researched instructional

practice, the course and discipline in question, and the heterogeneity of students. The utility of innovative teaching and learning practices is therefore best realised through a combination of new technologies and traditional modes of delivery.

Studies show, educational programmes that are driven by technological change and cost efficiency, rather than the quality education and needs of learners, may not result in the best outcomes for those involved,

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“Cost efficiency improvements would be useful and certainly technology does offer some opportunities, however it is now widely recognized that dramatic savings are unrealistic and much of the productivity improvements resulting from technology use have proven difficult to quantify� (Marshall, 2014: 296).

which enables better teaching and learning capabilities – offer the clearest response to questions of quality and efficiency in light of increased demand for tertiary education, a diverse student population, and technological change. An informed and purposeful mix of technologies can provide the flexible and dynamic models of education needed to address the many learning styles and the often-vast differences in teaching and learning-demands posed by both abstract and more hands-on programmes and disciplines.

The use of sustaining technologies, which enhance established models of teaching and learning, therefore hold the greatest promise in addressing the diverse needs of students into the future.

More research is therefore needed that holds the voice of students and teachers central, while providing a longitudinal understanding of the risks of ICTs and online provision. In the meantime, approaches to education which regard technology instrumentally - as a tool,

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