ATEM presentation
The INTERACTIVE E-Learning environment – retain a personal touch with interactive tutorials Session Introduction
Hello everyone – I’m pleased to see so many of you are still here and taking an active interest! Very unlike your students I imagine – who would have bunked off about 2 hours ago. You’re setting a very good example!
What I’m going to talk about today is the interactive e-learning environment. Now I’m quite sure that most of you are familiar with some form of e-learning already. The term refers to quite a broad area of technology. For instance, simply posting lecture notes on your website that your students have access to is a form of basic e-learning. In light of this I’m going to assume quite a varying degree of knowledge amongst you. For the more experienced please forgive me if I do cover familiar ground but by the end of this session, I think everyone here will have picked up some useful information.
The subject of my talk today is more about the future of e-learning. Where is it going? What factors should you be considering when investigating the latest e-learning solutions. Well, a clue in the future of e-learning is in the title of my presentation. INTERACTIVE. So by the end of this hour I hope you’re going to go away with a pretty good idea of what interactive e-learning is all about, how it fits in with your own development plans; what the pitfalls of interactive e-learning are, what type of solutions you should be looking for, and an idea of the challenges you should be expecting if you decide to implement
So what makes me the right person to tell you all this?
Well let me introduce my self. My name is Darren Thomas and I’m the Marketing Manager for Genesys Conferencing in Asia-Pacific. Part of my job at Genesys is to identify applications of our services and develop our services to suit those applications. For example, one of Genesys’ core services is audio conferencing, or conference calls. A key application of conference calls in the education sector is tele-tutorials. In case you’re unfamiliar with tele-tutorials, these are tutorials that are conducted by telephone. This can be considered a form of distance learning. Another core service of Genesys is web
conferencing and a key application of web conferencing is e-learning.
In the corporate sector, one of the key uses of our services is in corporate training and e-learning. Our customers use e-learning to train staff on everything from company inductions, their products and services and internal procedures to self-improvement courses and how to win over and influence university managers…….just checking. Our corporate customers are doing all of this to improve their business performance. The better skilled their workforce, the more competitive they will be. They want to fully utilize the brainpower within their company. And they want to do this in the most cost effective manner possible.
Now you can see where I’m going with this. Consider Australia as a business that the government runs. The population are its potential workforce that need to be trained and skilled in order to improve the competitiveness of the country. And so the applications of e-learning in the corporate sector are directly relevant to e-learning in the tertiary
education sector. I put it to you that the objectives of enhancing knowledge and
improving skills are common to both corporate and university education. What’s different is the intensiveness of the education, the materials and resources required, and of course the subject matter.
However, it doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re learning, sound teaching practice and well thought out content is key, and that’s the area that you and your teams specialize in.
Thus, E-learning is just another medium for you to deliver your services to your market – that market being people than want to learn.
Why should all of this be of relevance to you?
Well, as corporations generally have more money to spend on new technology and alternative working practices, they tend to lead the way it terms of trends and early adoption. So you, as University Managers have the chance to learn from the investment and mistakes of the corporate sector.
From the topics I’ve listened to over the last few days, I don’t envy your task! You guys face a number of challenges:
- You’re trying to increase student numbers, but you’ve got a limited geographical reach of student that can physically attend courses on campus.
- You’ve also got to keep a lid on costs; you can’t afford to keep building new faculty buildings, student accommodation and facilities, or for that matter, to buy swathes of land to build upon!
So herein lie the key points that form the basis of using e-learning technology today. But e-learning isn’t going to solve all your problems right?
Let’s face it - your regular student just out of high-school expects to come to campus everyday, interact with fellow students (typically while abusing a range of substances), and spend hours everyday thinking about starting their next assignment.
Whilst this segment of your student population is your reason for being, the more students of this type you have, the more resources you need to educate them; buildings, land, equipment, accommodation, teaching staff etc.
Which is why you also focus on more lucrative areas of education; mature students, business students, overseas students and consulting to the private sector. You want to attract those that are paying out of their own pockets, and even better – they are highly motivated to learn!
Socializing with fellow students isn’t as high up on the list of a post-grad or MBA student as your regular 18-21 year old. In fact, it’s these types of students that face a number of challenges themselves:
1 They’re short of time: from my own experience of post-graduate education, I had to travel up to London from my office after work, twice a week; which I found to be a real pain in the arse.
2 These people know how much they’re paying for their education so they expect. They expect a higher engagement with your institutions. Access to tutors.
Interaction with them. Good materials and opportunities to collaborate (on their course work) with fellow students.
3 There’s also the geography – you are probably trying to increase your catchment area; I guess this is quite relevant in Australia where population density is quite low once you are out of the main city areas. But your prospective student are also looking for ways to get the best education, without necessarily having to travel or relocate to get it. How can students across Australia, Australasia and Asia
participate without being forced to travel to your campus?
So you’ve guessed it. E-learning is a pretty good solution to meet the unique demands of an attractive student population.
Which is what brings us to interactive e-learning.
Before I get ahead of myself, let’s make sure we’re thinking about the same thing. Let’s define what e-learning is. And whilst we’re at it, let’s differentiate between distance learning and e-learning.
Gartner is a technology research analyst group and here’s how they define the two: “Distance learning” refers to all technologies that enable instruction independent of learners’ physical locations.
Now distance learning has been around for donkey’s years. It has leveraged all form of communication, from the post (tutorial packs), television (Open University), and more recently the telephone (through tele-tutorials that Genesys currently provide to many Australian universities – oops – how did that get in there?).
“E-learning” on the other hand refers to the subset of distance education that is delivered over digital networks – most prominently the Internet.
As in many other aspects of life, the Internet has revolutionized the opportunities for communication – from email to on-line games. And in the learning environment it’s revolutionized things to such an extent that learning via the Internet has its own term: E-Learning!
So as I mentioned before, the term e-learning does encompass any learning technique that uses the Internet as its communications medium. Even posting lecture notes on your website could be considered e-learning. And many of your already have some form of self-paced learning resources on-line.
But to reiterate, what I’m talking about when I refer to e-learning, and what e-learning will increasingly be associated with, is live, interactive learning experiences delivered over the Internet.
That’s all well and good. But the question remains: is the time right to use this format of e-learning as a primary method of education? Well the answer you may be surprised to hear me say, is ‘perhaps not’!
Part of the same Gartner study I referred to earlier also stated “The real growth of e-learning in higher education is in supplementing traditional instruction, not in purely remote courses. Students and faculty increasingly expect e-learning to augment classroom instruction.” Now this was a year ago, which is a long time in terms of technology. But at the very least, we’re in a phase where e-learning can start to
supplement more and more of the traditional techniques. I estimate that in 3 years, you’ll get the first fully Internet based courses, with no physical interaction whatsoever.
Still, what are the variables that stand in the way of that predication? Here are the key points:
1. Access to the Internet.
The National Office for the Information Economy produces statistics on Internet penetration in this country. I was surprised to find that Australia lags behind most 1st world nations in terms of connectivity and broadband access. The figures are from last year, but the NOIE calculate that just 52% of Australian households have Internet access. This isn’t that bad a figure in itself, but perhaps more telling is the fact that only 5% of households in 2002 had broadband, compared to 87% in Korea, 52% in Hong Kong and 25% in Singapore. I won’t dwell on the reasons for this low take up – there are good reasons why of course. But low take up does hurt Australia’s ambitions to be a key economic player in the Asia-Pacific region.
Back to the point however, and there’s no point offering education over the electronic medium if no one can access it. Nevertheless the numbers are only going to increase. And don’t forget that it the student segment that we are talking about here, the numbers of household with Internet access will be proportionately higher. And those other countries I mentioned with high rates of broadband penetration are the very countries that you can attract overseas students from.
Still, based on the Internet penetration figures – you should be looking for a solution that can be accessed by student on a basic 52k dial up connection. These solutions do exist. 2. Ease of use/stability of the technology:
What about the technology itself? Is it usable by your average student (and academic)? Good question. And it does vary according to the type of solutions you’re putting in place. Ease of use is one of those key factors you should have in mind when you’re evaluating the technology. It’s something I’m going to go into in more detail later on.
The inside story is this: the last 3-4 years has seen the introduction of several excellent web-based services that can support e-learning very well. The thing is, most development has focused on capabilities and features, to the detriment of actual usability. The focus however, has no changed. And most companies realize that to encourage greater adoption beyond the corporate technophiles and IT geeks, the systems must be easy to use. And this is where the great advances are being made right now.
I refer you to Genesys’ own services as well as that of other offerings in the market. Ultimately, in this phase of development it’s only through the feedback of real users (the early adopters that marketing nods like me love to refer to) that the services develop in such a way as to satisfy your expectations.
3. Culture
Is live, interactive e-learning too impersonal to be effective? This is a pretty fundamental question. I’m sure the same question was posed when distance learning started being explored and adopted as a learning method. I think everyone agrees that distance learning works up to a limit, but those limits are pretty restrictive.
If it works to an extent for distance learning, then what we’re talking about here is only an improvement on what is already practiced. Still, rather than the self-paced independent learning associated with distance courses, we are talking about instructor-led live
sessions. But when we’re talking about interaction, do the drawbacks such as loss of face-to-face contact, lack of student community, the lack of physical presence of the tutor negate the advantages to be had through e-learning?
Well this isn’t a straightforward yes or no. The interactive e-learning environment is in a phase of development. Much time and research is going into how these environments are designed and used. I think the ultimate goal is to replicate that of the real learning
environment as closely as possible. Give tutors and students an environment that they are familiar with, that they can associate with the physical environment.
It’s this development that I’d like to focus on for the rest of the session. If you’re looking at these types of e-learning solutions now, you need to properly evaluate the pros and cons of what is available to you.
Let’s start this bit by examining the real classroom environment OK – these are the basic components of the standard classroom.
First and foremost, you’ve got the tutor. He or she is there as the primary resource from which students learn from. The key capability is communication. Voice interaction. The tutor can react fully to the changing needs and questions from the students.
Then there’s the additional resources. Books, support documentation, hand outs and the like.
There’s also the other tools that the tutor and students have access to. Basic stuff like the Black/white board, a projector, their note pads etc.
Now it’s these components that I suggest you need in an e-learning environment at the very least; as I said, both students and tutors need some familiarity in the on-line environment.
The tutor is not a problem. (That’s not to say you don’t have problematic tutors – that’s not my area). But it should not be a difficult issue to persuade tutors to make a telephone call. For that is, after all, how the key interactive aspect is delivered. Speaking and listening over telephone.
I think many of you are already familiar with tele-tutorials. Here, students join a
conference call (again, a business tool used extensively in the corporate sector since the mid-eighties) lead by a tutor. Teltutorials are actually a prcursor to interactive
e-The fact that many Universities in Australia use Genesys to make their tele-tutorials happen is by the by! The point is that tele-tutorials satisfy most of the key criteria of an interactive environment:
Firstly, it’s easy to use and familiar – everyone knows how to use a telephone. Secondly it very simple. Just like talking on the telephone!
And thirdly, it’s universally accessible – 98% of Australian households have a telephone. The obvious drawback of tele-tutorials is that there’s no visual stimulation beyond any books that might be referred to. Nevertheless, it’s a half-way point to full e-learning and it’s the visual stimulus where the Internet can really be of value.
As far as teaching resources – books and support documentation can be delivered by post in advance of any courses. The drawback here is flexibility – what if there’s some last-minute documentation to distribute to the class? Or a quick example that the tutor would like to show? Well – email today is a suitable substitution for this – so long as materials can be converted into electronic format – not as much an issue today with most computer users using the same types of software and files such as .pdf.
Normally, tutors use the blackboard and white board to write key points or notes to students. These days, the more progressive academics may even use PowerPoint!
Now everything I’ve covered so far can be replicated in the e-learning environment. The main restriction we have to deal with is how to incorporate all these elements into a single, easy-to-use user-interface.
Naturally, to demonstrate this, I’m going to use screenshots of Genesys software to show you how this is done.
Let me explain what you are seeing. On the left hand side is everything the tutor needs to interact with students and manage the tutorial resources.
On the right portion of the screen is the visual aspects of the tutorial – be it slides,
documentation or anything else being shared with the students. No at first I want to focus on the actual interaction between tutor and student. There’s voice, there’s text and there’s non-verbal communication. This last one is interesting. Think of the non-verbal
communication in the classroom. Students may put their hand up to ask a question. Tutors can tell if the students are happy or confused by the expression on their faces. These purpose of these icons is to try and maintain some of that non-verbal
communication.
But there’s a whole let more to teaching than just the elements I’ve covered so far….Let’s consider the following:
What methods does the tutor employ to really get the point across? They could utilize quick-fire questions, a quick show of hands. Another classic tool is the test or exam. These tools should also be available through the e-learning environment. Put a quick multiple choice question up on the screen and students can quickly select an answer. Or give the whiteboard to a student to add their own contribution to a searching problem. It should be possible to conduct more formal tests through the e-learning environment as well, using various types of exam question.
And what about reporting? You need to make sure that your students are attending all the sessions, just like you do in physical tutorials. So the system should also be able to measure student access and participation, together with all their responses to the various questions they answered during the session!
Well I think that’s enough for you to consider for the moment. I’ve tried to show you a couple of things here – firstly that the e-learning environment is improving, the key aspects of classroom learning are matched on-line, but admittedly there’s a fair way to go yet.
The point is that the goal of supplementing traditional instruction with e-learning is technologically viable. And over time, e-learning can take a greater burden of the instruction as technology improves and more people have access to it over the Internet. So let me summarise the key points and fill in the last gaps about e-learning that you should be considering now or in the very near future:
1. Ease of use: Let’s face it – will tutors and academics ever be comfortable with technology? Already it’s the course administrators that do most of the technical work – from popping a video in the VCR to setting up a tele-tutorial. It’s a matter of training. Time and resources must be spend training those who you think should manage this sort of technology – be it the course administrators, the tutors or the students themselves – everyone needs training!
Again – service providers such as Genesys should offer this as part of the service they deliver. After all, there’s no point rolling out a service if no one knows how to use it. You should be looking for a comprehensive training package from your partners.
2. Technical requirements: Most e-learning platforms must take into account the user’s technology. Many students will be studying from a home PC – perhaps not as powerful as their ones at work. As we know, many will be on a dial-up
connection rather than broadband. Your chosen platform should be compatible with all of these things. At the moment, you need both a separate telephone line and dial up connection, or broadband offerings which nowadays enable
simultaneous telephone and internet access. There are alternatives such as audio streaming, but bear in mind that audio quality is reduced with streaming, and you also loose the interactivity. Still - perhaps streaming is an acceptable solution for those lecture style sessions……
3. Cost/billing: How can you keep the costs down for students whilst be able to establish the cost of the course? There are two components of cost to the student –
the telephone call and Internet access. Students should be able to access their tutorials for free using toll-free access. The costs are passed onto your institution, but this means you can also closely budget the course cost. You’ll know exactly how much a 60 minute session per student will cost. As for Internet access, dial up connections are inevitably taken on by the student. With broadband, access costs are not an issue.
4. Attendance: Again, system reporting should enable you to track which students have attended what sessions, and for how long.
5. Security/unauthorized access to course content. Are there ways to beat the system/cheat? You need to make sure that only students that have paid to attend actually access the on-line sessions. There are ways to do this through password protecting your tutorials and archives. Just something to consider. Although personally, I’d do anything to avoid further education in my free time.
But if you’ve been listening carefully, you’ll have noticed that e-learning brings a couple of unexpected benefits over traditional education:
Firstly, technology leads to automation and a reduction in overall workload. The benefit of conducting learning over the electronic medium is that everything is digital and anything digital can be processed and stored.
Think about it. If tests and exams are conducted via computer – then you’ll find more opportunities to automate marking and reporting processes. Now I’m not saying that major exams and term papers should be conducted on-line. Obviously the opportunities for cheating would be numerous! But for less formal tests, and quick quizzes – the less formal ways in which to measure the progress of students - these tools can be very useful. And remember, by conducting sessions over the electronic medium, they can all be recorded and archived for future reference. This makes it much easier for students to review earlier sessions, or catch up on the off session they missed whilst recovering from the night before. It’s all there for easy access – not only for them but also for you to review tutor performance and teaching standards.
So there you go. Is this the future of education? Will public education follow the same path as corporate training? I think those are questions you are left to ponder by
yourselves! In the meantime, I’ll through it open to you folks to ask some questions. Again – thanks for your time everyone and if you are looking into interactive e-learning, I’m happy to talk afterwards. Otherwise, good luck!