PERSPECTIVES, PAST AND PRESENT: DRAWING FROM PAST ISSUES OF EDPATH AND REFLECTING ON TODAY

PERSPECTIVES, PAST AND PRESENT:
DRAWING FROM PAST ISSUES OF EDPATH AND REFLECTING ON TODAY

by George Lorenzo, Editor and Publisher

With the beginning of the third year of writing, editing and publishing Educational Pathways (EdPath), I found it beneficial to take a look back at some of the topics covered over the past two years. Seven personal perspectives came out of this informal study. In total, they reveal a relatively large, but by no means all-encompassing, state of affairs relative to distance education.

In addition to looking at past issues, I went back through some of the numerous interviews I have conducted with distance educators and extracted a bit of old-but-new information that I did not include in past issues.

1. What’s Up with Marketing?

Going back to November 2001, with the inaugural free-trial issue, the cover story headline notes that the marketing of distance education is a "challenging proposition." In that article, educators provided EdPath readers with the following straight-forward advice: Web content should be clear and easy to navigate through. Know how to maximize your Web site with course demos and request-more-information forms. Make use of traditional marketing vehicles, including return-reply direct mail and opt-in e-mail devices. Regularly analyze and strategize marketing efforts based on revenue goals and return-on-investment formulas.

Moving ahead to the September and October 2003 issues of EdPath, the two most popular issues in the publication’s history, the marketing of distance education picture reveals a growing world of "pseudo" and real distance-education Web portals, search engine optimization techniques, and online marketing strategies driven by such mechanisms as pay-per-lead and pay-per-click services.

Also, from talking with numerous distance educators about marketing challenges, it is plain to see that not much has changed. Many institutions, particularly at the state level, simply don’t have the administrative support they’d like to have, nor the knowledge or staff they need to possess, in order to effectively market and scale up their distance-education programs. The for-profits, in the meantime, are gobbling up the adult-learner demographics like never before.

2. The Standards Game

An article titled "SCORM Certified? Not!" was also in the inaugural November 2001 issue. Here I was first introduced to the "ble"-suffixed terminology that surrounds us, with words such as interoperable, accessible, reusable, adaptable, and repurposeable entering my distance-education lexicon. I guess the big question in my mind today, as it was in November 2001, is whether or not any higher education providers of distance-learning courses and programs have the inclination or time to actually take a keen interest in SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) conformance (certification is not the proper terminology), which is basically a growing collection of technology-in-education specifications and standards.

"Through the continued development of the SCORM," as noted on the ADL Web site (www.adlnet.org), "system vendors and content developers now have the opportunity to synchronize the evolution and convergence of commercial authoring tools, learning management systems and Web-based courses with evolving and harmonized specifications and guidelines." Conforming to these specifications and guidelines, now at Version 1.3, is important in the grand scheme of things, but, generally speaking, "it’s a huge job," noted Executive Director of the Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Carol Twigg, in an interview I conducted with her back in June of last year. "It requires all these independent companies to make changes to bring them into compliance with IMS standards. That is time consuming; they just can’t turn around and do it." In the meantime, many providers of higher education distance-learning courses and programs are too busy with the day-to-day management of their enterprises to be even remotely concerned with SCORM.

3. The Challenge of Scaling Up

The cover story on the January 2002 issue of EdPath was headlined "Experiencing Rapid Enrollment Increases: Three Successful Online Distance Ed Programs Talk About Scaling Up." This topic of scaling up is an interesting one that obviously relates to building infrastructure to support the growth of distance- education courses and programs. While studies support that an increasing number of institutions are developing more distance-education courses and programs, particularly in the asynchronous Web-based mode of delivery, many distance-education administrators I interview continue to claim that they remain at the, so to speak, 20-yard-line. In other words, they have the ability and know-how to score a touchdown and provide more learning opportunities to adult learners in their region, and beyond, who are seeking to enroll in flexible degree programs, but their administration will not support them with the means to hire more faculty and beef up instructional design support and student services. In an April 2002 interview I had with University of Maryland University College (UMUC) President Gerald Heeger, he explained that "managing growth and scale" is UMUC’s biggest challenge. "We constantly have to adjust our infrastructure, adjust our technology, manage our marketing, manage our 24/7 service capabilities." As one of the oldest and largest distance education providers in the country, UMUC has gone through the learning process of meeting such challenges, which accounts for its success today. Heeger added that "there are all kinds of new assumptions about organizing courses, managing courses and building courses that have to go into place before you can successfully sustain a true distance-education operation, and most institutions don’t’ really understand that." At the highest levels of higher-education administration, this statement by Heeger, recorded in April 2002, remains true today.

4. Online Student Services

Also in April 2002, current University of Continuing Education Association Board of Directors President, and Dean of Extended University Services at Washington State University (WSU), Muriel Oaks, talked about the importance of student services and how she saw such services increasingly moving to an online environment. Students prefer to be "self sufficient," said Oaks. By going online "they can get answers to questions when it’s convenient. If they have a problem that they can’t get an answer to online, we (WSU) have an 800 telephone number they can call. We get fewer and fewer phone calls because we have put a lot of our time and effort into expanding our Web-based services. We have spent money on that rather than putting more people here, and I think, in the long term, that really helps the students more." This topic of Web-based student services has been researched and studied extensively by the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET), which was covered in the May 2002 issue of EdPath. WCET has developed a number of valuable resources related to online student services, including a Web site for those who are seeking software to provide student services online or want to outsource to a service provider. Located at www.edutools.info/student/index.jsp, this Web site provides background on the companies, information on the products’ features, technical specifications, and other information for institutions to narrow their choices.

5. Online Teacher Education Programs are Growing Fast

Many issues of EdPath have featured stories about departments within colleges of education that are creating innovative online teacher education programs. I have been introduced to many new and innovative initiatives and programs that fit into this area, including Walden University’s graduate program in elementary reading and literacy, CalStateTeach’s state-wide program for getting working novice teachers certified, Pepperdine’s innovative educational technology program, Rio Salado’s online teacher preparation program and, most recently, Western Governors University’s new Teachers College online programs, and a dynamic science teacher education program created through a collaboration between Lesley University and TERC. All these entities are trend setters that deserve our attention. This past December, I spoke with Amy Glass, program associate for technology for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, about the growth of online teacher education programs and courses. "We are seeing more people putting together proposals for sessions at our annual meeting covering topics that deal with distance learning," she says. Some of the big hurdles, she claims, deal with how online-educated teachers can be assessed and how strong and vital relationships can be built between faculty and students in the online- learning environment. "How do we authenticate performance-based assessment in an online environment, and how do we compensate for that missing piece of face-to-face interaction between student and teacher?" asks Glass. The aforementioned institutions have got these issues figured out. More colleges of education are hitching a ride on the online- learning train for a number of reasons, including a variety of provisions inside the No Child Left Behind Act, as well as the National Council for Accreditation for Teacher Education’s (NCATE) relatively new commitment "to preparing candidates who are able to use educational technology to help all students learn. . ."

6. ePortfolios

Electronic Portfolios became my pet project in May of last year. ePortfolios relate to technology-in-education in highly interesting ways, but it’s still not on a lot of educators’ radar screens. From talking with numerous people on the forefront of ePortfolios, I believe that this kind of technology, which is most prevalent in teacher education programs, will ultimately force the teachers of our children to become more Internet-savvy and computer-software literate, because, quite simply, ePortfolios make excellent use of the combined power of the Internet and computer software in relatively easy-to-comprehend and highly creative ways. Teachers who adopt the use of ePortfolio tools into their classrooms will help break the digital divide by bringing more educational technology to K-12 in general. This can only help our children learn how to become adept at using important elearning tools that are already prevalent inside today’s professional workforce and knowledge society.