2 Lessons from the Old Media: The Value of Sharing

The last two decades have seen significant growth and innovation in how educational institutions use the new technologies to engage learners.  However, there is still much to be done—and some lessons to be learned from earlier technologies.

I was surprised, when the World Campus came along, about the new community that was forming around online learning.  Previously, people tended to organize themselves around not the technology per se, but its use.  For instance, those of us using public broadcasting, cable, and interactive video to reach beyond campus formed a new division within what was then called the National University Extension Association (now UPCEA—University Professional and Continuing Education Association).   NUTN—the National University Teleconference Network—was also an association of continuing education folks.  Similarly, AG*Sat brought together Cooperative Extension leaders and counterparts at Historically Black Institutions and Hispanic Serving Institutions who were interested in collaborating via satellite.  NUEA, NUTN, and AG*Sat were all associations of continuing education/extension/outreach units in public universities, and we all tended to report to the Vice President or Dean of Continuing Education at our institutions.  However, when online came along, there was no common reporting line.  Some online initiatives reported to the Vice Provost for Information Technology; other initiatives were housed in a particular academic program; others were in the Provost’s Office or reported directly to the President; and, indeed, some reported to the Vice President for Continuing Education.  Frank Mayadas at the Sloan Foundation did a wonderful service to the field by bringing together all of his grantees for annual conferences about progress in the field.  These evolved over time into the Sloan Consortium (now the Online Learning Consortium).  It was inevitable, however, that we would lose some of the knowledge and, more importantly, institutional relationships that had grown up in these other venues.

One example was the spirit of collaboration and sharing that had marked early distance education efforts.  Online learning brought new institutions into the distance education community; it also focused on complete degree programs, making competition a real issue in some disciplines.  This was a significant change from earlier technologies.  The land grant universities offering correspondence study programs had set the example by publishing an annual catalog that listed correspondence courses available from all institutions.  They also tended to share course materials and help each other out by proctoring exams for students who lived in their states.

Resource sharing was absolutely vital to the use of telecourses via public broadcasting.  The entire purpose of PBS-ALS was to aggregate available telecourses and license their use out to other institutions served by local PBS stations.  In 1978, the Public Broadcasting System shifted its national program service—which delivered programs to local stations for broadcast—from land lines to satellite.  The result was not only a new way to deliver programming to local stations, but a new national public satellite network that could be used for other, related services.  The impact on course sharing was significant:

• PBS created the PBS Adult Learning Service as a centralized national distribution center for telecourses produced by local PBS stations and higher education institutions around the country. A collection of courses was fed by satellite to local stations every semester.  Local stations worked with the colleges and universities in their viewing area and broadcast those courses that the local institutions licensed.  PBS collected a fee (typically a standard $300 per course, plus $15 per enrollment) which it shared with the telecourse producer.
• The Annenberg Foundation gave the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (a federal corporation that distributed federal funding for public media) $150 Million to support the development of new telecourses for national delivery. The result was a collection of telecourses built around major public television documentary series.
• The University of Maryland University College established the National (later International) University Consortium, which worked with the Open University of the United Kingdom to adapt their materials to the North American curriculum. The resulting course packages were licensed to institutions throughout North America, as well as Australia, Asia, and Latin America.  IUC also produced new courses, working with its member institutions and the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting.
• The PBS satellite system also opened the door to other, nonbroadcast innovations. One was the National University Teleconference Network (now the National University Telecommunications Network), a network of colleges and universities that used the PBS satellite uplink and downlink network to deliver live teleconferences nationally.  An institution that wished to originate a teleconference would schedule the event with NUTN, which would announce it to its members.  Members that licensed an event would arrange for a downlink and schedule a live viewing in the local community.
• AG*SAT used the satellite system to create a network of Agriculture schools at land grant universities, historically black land grants, and Hispanic serving institutions, with the goal of sharing local expertise nationally. AG*SAT later became ADEC—the American Distance Education Consortium.

In all these cases, the idea of sharing was encouraged by the fact that, while distribution was national, actual use of the materials by institutions to serve students and other clients was remained essentially local.  We weren’t competing with each other.  Instead, we were using national technology distribution to enrich each other’s programs.

Collaboration in the Digital Learning Era

The idea of sharing has come more slowly to the online learning environment, perhaps because of the fact that the Internet knows no geographic boundaries.  That said, given that more institutions today are involved in online learning than were ever involved in video-based distance education, it seems reasonable to ask:  Should we not begin to share organized curriculum packages more widely, reducing the cost of course development at each institution?   Especially as institutions adopt the “flipped classroom” philosophy—in which content resides on the web and class meetings (physical or virtual) are focused on interpretation of content rather than simply transfer of content—it seems reasonable that idea of licensing content at the course level might be a good thing.  As with textbooks, the true value of a course should be less in the materials than in the unique interactions between faculty members and students and among student communities.

Tidewater Community College in Virginia demonstrated the potential for this kind of sharing when it developed a complete associate degree in business administration using Open Educational Resources (OERs).  As Creative Commons reported:

Tidewater identified 21 courses and signed up faculty members to design the curriculum.  They started with the desired outcomes for each of the courses, and then built the curriculum with OER materials that would meet those outcomes. Developing the curriculum took about 12 months. One year into the program, the early results are highly positive.

The OER degree program had two goals – to eliminate cost as a barrier, and to improve teaching impacts. The textbooks for an associate’s degree in business administration normally cost $3679, which is about a third of the cost of the degree from Tidewater.  Adoption of OER reduces these costs to zero. Students and instructors alike are happy with the quality of the OER materials used in the classes. 96% of the students enrolled in the courses have rated the quality of the OER content as equal to or better in quality to the textbooks used in other classes.

            This may signal a new level of institutional commitment to the OER concept that will reduce the cost of course development for individual institutions and greatly increase faculty access to content in order to serve students.

            Sharing at this level might best be done within families of institutions—community colleges, private liberal arts colleges, etc.—or within academic discipline communities.  ADEC has demonstrated the power of sharing content within agriculture disciplines, for instance.

Other new models for sharing have emerged that focus on sharing students and faculty rather than materials.  One example is the Great Plains Inter-Institutional Distance Education Alliance (IDEA), in which participating state universities work together to offer graduate degrees that include online courses from multiple participating institutions.  This kind of collaboration ensures that students have access to the best content in a specialized discipline, while opening new doors to collaboration among faculty.  Another example is the CIC CourseShare initiative in which participating institutions aggregate students in highly specialized courses to ensure a financially viable course offering that serves small groups of students at multiple campuses.  Both of these initiatives allow partner institutions to give their students better access to courses that might not otherwise be taught locally on a reasonable schedule.

Cross-Sector Sharing

A second area where we lost momentum during the shift from video to online is the idea of higher education partnering with the public schools to improve the school curriculum.  That was the original focus of educational/public television in the 1960s.   Today, policy makers are beginning to see the need to regain the momentum here.  Extending the Open Educational Resources idea to the schools is one option. In the sixties, public broadcasting was the broker that made the connection between school need and delivery of resources.  Fifty years later, we need a new broker.   The second option is for universities to make some online courses available as “dual enrollment” courses, through which students can earn credit toward high school graduation while simultaneously earning college credit.

The U.S. Department of Education has estimated that, in order for the U.S. to continue to compete in the global information society, we need to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to college from the current rate of 39% to about 60%.  The problem is that, today, most kids who graduate from high school ready to go to college already do so.  Thus, in order to meet the increased need for more college graduates, we need to increase the number of high school students who are ready for college when they graduate.  In the 1960s, the American response to Sputnik drove investments in the production and broadcast of instructional television for the schools. In the 21st century, STEM and both the workforce and citizenship needs of the global information society should drive investments in OERs and dual enrollment online courses.

Above all, it is important that institutions not define online learning by the technologies they use but by the services they provide, so that they can be flexible and innovative as new technologies arise, as they most inevitably will.  Technology is an enabler, not an end in itself.

Ultimately, I can see several benefits to sharing at this level: (1) to ensure that high-quality content is widely used, especially in specialized areas; (2) to reduce the cost of new course development, thus increasing the number of institutions that adopt online learning for their students; and (3) to increase access to higher education.