Pass the SoLT

It has been another busy week with several major commitments.

One of the commitments earlier in the week was a presentation on 'Student Engagement Through Blended Learning' at a professional development day hosted by Professor Mason Durie, Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Måori and Pasifika). It was encouraging to see so many people across the University coming together talking about issues of support, retention and completion, and the impact of critical interventions during the student life cycle. Massey University plays a particularly important role in providing access to university-level education for Måori and Pasifika students and many of the intervention strategies to support diverse learners are not rocket science.

On the other hand, I'm mindful of an excellent article on the thorny topic of student retention by two Massey colleagues. In a paper entitled 'Educational Quality, Institutional Accountability and the Retention Discourse', published in Quality in Higher Education, Nick Zepke and Linda Leach (2007) question three assumptions about retention:

• that government accountability measures can improve the quality of provision and subsequently retention;
• that institutions, by improving the quality of learning and teaching, can stem early departure;
• that retaining students in tertiary education is a universally good thing.

Read more »

This is a brief follow up to a previous entry on global elearning activity. Last week, I received an email alerting me to the Re.ViCa wiki. This wiki is a European project which aims to provide an inventory and systematic review of virtual campus initiatives by country. First published a few months ago, the wiki claims to be growing daily and in comparison to the recent JISC funded elearning report, it already appears to have a rich depth of locally produced content. From a quick analysis, the Country Reports Section has deeper and more extensive information about Australia and New Zealand than the JISC report.

That said, the entry for Massey University under the list of programmes is factually incorrect and needs updating as Massey has a history of 49 years of distance delivery. Unless someone else takes up the challenge, it looks like I may have to find time to update the wiki. Of course, the ability to update and make relevant changes does highlight the value of a wiki for this type of project.

Arguably, the section that has the greatest potential is the list of critical successful factors necessary for an organisation to fulfil its mission. The following nine critical dimensions are identified:

1. Money factors: positive cash flow, revenue growth, and profit margins.
2. Acquiring new customers and/or distributors - your future.
3. Customer satisfaction - how happy are they?
4. Quality - how good is your product and service?
5. Product or service development - what's new that will increase business with existing customers and attract new ones?
6. Intellectual capital - increasing what you know that's profitable.
7. Strategic relationships - new sources of business, products and outside revenue.
8. Employee attraction and retention - your ability to do extend your reach.
9. Sustainability - your personal ability to keep it all going

A list of critical factors is one thing but, assuming their validity, knowing how to address them on a whole of organisation scale is a very different beast. This is where important contextual factors come in to play. I look forward to returning to the wiki over the next few months to see how this list expands and the country reports grow as a potentially valuable repository of elearning activity.

This week a colleague alerted me to a JISC funded elearning report entitled 'Understanding Global Activity in Higher Education and Research'. The report describes global elearning activity in 10 different countries. Although the report describes some interesting initiatives at each country level, after reading the study my overriding impression is a deep sense of unease about the validity and trustworthiness of this type of research.

Put bluntly, the country reviews for Australia and New Zealand are poor. For example, in the case of New Zealand there is no mention of Ako Aotearoa, the eLab Group, the high level of Government support for the use and development of open source software, including high uptake of Moodle by education providers, and the success of the Massey University led Mahara eportfolio system now being used throughout the world. The Mahara experience alone is sufficient to challenge the following conclusion:

"The overall impression given is that New Zealand currently sees itself as an informed follower. It does not appear to set out to be a leader in the field as things currently stand."

One has to question how any researcher could confidently arrive at such a conclusion from an analysis of web-based literature. Accordingly, the report is found wanting on a number of fronts and serious doubts must be raised about the validity of the data collection. The authors appear to be sensitive to this criticism as the following statement appears at the start of the Executive Summary and on a number of occasions throughout the report:

"It needs to be stressed that this study is not an attempt to objectively and exhaustively identify all aspects of e-Learning and e-Infrastructure in each country. We have endeavored to highlight some interesting, innovative and important initiatives – but in so doing we offer no guarantees that major initiatives have not been over-looked."

Unfortunately this type of qualifying statement or 'get out of jail' card does not diminish the report's shortcomings. After all there is no such thing as objective social science as all research is value-laden. In terms of the exhaustive claim, the study may struggle to find all relevant documents and initiatives but it could have done a better job of developing a systematic approach to the literature search.

About four years ago, I was centrally involved in a study of elearning policy across a number of countries in a report entitled 'Global Picture, Local Lessons: E-learning Policy and Accessibility'. Notably our report was extensively draw on by the authors of the latest JISC study. In our earlier study we went to some lengths to document the way the literature was searched and to validate the country reports. We explicitly stated the importance of this strategy in helping to inform the conclusions:

"The area report validation process added significantly to the value of the final report. The contextual understandings and complexities of policy of which we were made aware by all validators ensured a more comprehensive and nuanced collection of area reports" (Anderson, Brown, Murray, Simpson & Mentis, 2006).

One can only speculate that the research timeframe and funding limitations prevented the researchers from undertaking a more thorough analysis of the different countries. However, it does raise a question of why you would bother to fund or commission such weak research. Perhaps this helps to explain why the report refrained from providing the reader with an overall synthesis and conceptual discussion of the country reviews. The lack of a detailed discussion section is a major weakness of this report as the reader is left to largely reach their own conclusions.

On a positive note, the Appendices contain a number of recommendations which if accepted in future research would address some of the methodological shortcomings identified in the above comments.