Getting Close and Personal with Technology

Accepting and adopting eLearning is in away agreeing to your invasion of privacy. It also entails a move from a certain comfort zone, to a zone where you are moving to the very uncertain future of/with technology. It means that at anyplace, anywhere and anytime you are there! As an academic staff member, it means you need to put more and more efforts not only in course preparation, but also in online course facilitation among your other duties. A distressed student will send you an email a few minutes before you sleep, and you will have a number of recorded voice messages in the morning when you get to the office. Consultations are no longer restricted to the office hours thanks to technology.

In my previous blog, I mentioned the role of training and support - it is essential. However, it does not come if not asked for, or there is no need for it. To get close and personal with technology, one need to first acknowledge when s/he is stuck, and ask. Second, one should be willing to assist others with technology. Getting to out of "what would others think of me if I ask this question" or "will I appear stupid if I ask?" is the initial step. Asking technical questions come with practice - just like starting a blog like this one and telling everyone what your thoughts and reflections are. So, as a first step do not shy off asking your teenage daughter something to do with your phone. The second step is offering to assist. In line with an old Christian (I guess) philosophy that you gain more in giving than in receiving - offering to assist when you can not only boosts your confidence in the use of technology but also empowers someone. If the cycle of assisting each other with technology is enhanced and propagated, we can form a formidable team of experts!

In summary, to be close and personal with technology you acknowledge that you will be required to be available anywhere anytime, you admit that you cannot know everything to do with technology and that it is not stupid to ask a question, and you recognise the value of assisting others with technology related problems. To assess how close and personal you are with technology count the number of days you have worked from home, you have slept late replying to emails, you received 10 voice messages in a day, you called the technical department for assistance, you asked your son which key to press, you colleague came to ask you something about your latest laptop and so on.

Where does this Leave My Clients?

A few hours ago, our CIO issued a warning in a widely circulated letter that he will lobby for our institution to dissociate itself from any Novell software following the recent marriage between Microsoft and Novell. I do not feel obligated to comment about the bedroom matters of the marriage, but I wonder what two parties with a history of long court battles realised to seal the marriage deal. I personally feel betrayed by any move that would curtail the freedom I enjoy using Free and Open Software. I am also disturbed by the uncertainties that such marriages would bring on the face of the progress to more freedom. Is this not a betrayal of the people who have contributed to the success of the Novell applications? Or is there something am not understanding about the whole deal? Is this a genesis of more marriages of convenience? What is the next big news?

What is disturbing me the most is where decisions by organisations providing software applications agree on dining with the enemy, and the subsequent resolutions like the one our CIO is making leave the clients (the normal users of the services), who in most cases do not have an idea of what the marriage is all about. I wonder if the 6000+ users of our eLearning site know that it runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) - a Novell product. Happily there we are in the process of getting other solutions for the site and Novell products are definitely out of the equation. While for the server technology it might be easy to do a change over without the users' knowledge, I foresee hardships (that can be overcame) in changing the client technologies like the Novell Groupwise. I am also happy that for two months since I got SUSE 10 DVD, I have not brought down the Fedora Core 5 I use on my laptop and the Mark Webbink of Redhat has posted his criticism of the marriage. For now, I wait for Fedora Core 6 to be available on our mirror site for my next laptop!

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Do Online Learners Need Special Reading Skills?

We have been advocating for an paperless society where everything is digitized. This, for the environmentalist is a good approach given that there will be fewer trees being harvested to manufacture paper. I am not sure if the same environmentalists have considered to study what is the environmental impact on the production and disposal of the electronic devices that we use. This would make a good blog for another day. In the digitized world, every thing would be stored in electronic form. This has advantages in terms of speed of access, physical storage space - and some may argue on security.

Our learning materials are now digitized and we expect our students to use them to learn. I believe there is a significant difference in reading styles and skills between paper-based and electronic materials. I remember a few years ago when I was an undergraduate student, one of the introductory courses at the university was code-named "Communication Skills". It was a compulsory course for every first year student. During this course we are were taught among other things, reading and comprehension, writing and library searches always geared towards the paper-based media. Do we need such a course for online learning especially where there is use of the web browsers? Are we assuming that our users who have just started using eLearning have the skills to "learn online"? I think institutions now are required more than ever before to offer the "Communication Skills" course and include some specific lessons on how to read online. I have experienced students who print all the course content presented online. Though some of them would argue they do not have internet access at home, I strongly believe that a good number do not have the skills required to read on a computer screen.

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QC and QA in eLearning Courses in Higher Education

If we define quality assurance (QA) as the a standard procedure to ensure that an eLearning course conforms and abides to established requirements - pedagogical, technical and otherwise. And further define quality control (QC) as the operations geared towards checking for the fulfillment of the requirements, who would be in-charge of QA and QC in eLearning courses? Is it the eLearning support team. or the Subject matter experts (SMEs) or the faculty? What aspects of the Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/C) would fall on the hands of the eLearning support and why? Who determines the standards to be adhered to in eLearning courses?

I ask this because of a number of reasons. One, as a member of the eLeanring support team, I do not think its within my domain to offer the QA/C of eLearning courses - at least not the content. What I can only offer, is the adherence to the technical standards, that vary from one context to another. The level of educational quality of the content I cannot assure, neither can I control. Two, I wonder how QA/C is done for the traditional brick and mortar teaching and learning approach.Who does the QA/C of courses being offered f2f? How is the QA/C done and how often? Thirdly, with the emergency of 101 "eLearning Universities" what quality standards will we use to gauge the strength and quality of any certification attained from these universities?

One of the ways I think can be employed to improve on the quality of eLearning courses is making them open, or at least accessible through less restrictive licenses. This way, we will have a good review from peers, and also a good exposure of our ideas to criticism - that might point out to us all the misconceptions and inaccuracies that we might be holding and propagating in the courses we teach. Of course not everyone will be open to criticism especially if it is in a field where he believes to hold an unquestionable authority, but if through practices one can learn to accept criticism.

Another way of improving on the quality of online courses is through cooperation and collaboration. There are courses offered by different universities (or departments) that are similar. If all the universities collaborated in offering a course - say "Introduction to research methods", we will have, in my opinion, a superior course gathering expertise and resources from a number of professionals. This approach not only improves on the quality, but also it saves on resources due to the minimised duplication of efforts. For example, I took the faculty information booklets of a university and I found out that almost every department offers a course in research methods, each offered differently. This is a waste of the scarce resources.

For now, lets make our courses open, and lets also cooperate and collaborate with like minded people to ensure improved quality in eLearning course.

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The Question of ROI and eLearning

I facilitated a workshop yesterday on the role of training and support in eLearning success. This workshop was mainly around the issues I discussed earlier in my blogs (The Role of Training and Support in eLearning Success Parts I-IV).

One of the major question that was asked is how to convince the chief executives of African universities to increase/provide funding for eLearning. This is a hard stance given that in most universities, due to the commercialisation projects, one has to justify any expenditure with the Return on Investment (ROI). I am not convinced that asking for a justification for this kind of investment is really worthwhile or warranted. Elearning has become necessity that cannot be wished away. It is a way of life, an idea that is here to stay. Therefore the sooner the the CEOs in these universities realise this the better. A question might be asked, what is the ROI of the office spaces and lecture halls that we currently have in these universities? What is the ROI of a whiteboard or chalkboard in the lecturer halls (especially if we do not have students in the lecturer halls)? Would we still ask what is the ROI if a chemistry lecturer asks for funds to stock her laboratory with chemicals for students' experiments?

In my opinion, just like it is almost impossible to justify or quantify the ROI on educational investment, the same applies to eLearning. We do not stop sending our children to school because education has become too expensive and we do not know what we will get from their education. Or do we?

what if we see eLearning as an enhancement of our teaching and learning? Will still ask what is the same questions? What is the ROI of out teaching and learning - with or without technology? If we define eLearning as teaching and learning using technology, will we install overhead/LCD projectors in our classrooms/lecture halls?