This session at the International Conference of Distance Teaching & Learning was delivered by Susan Biro, Carlos Morales and Peter Shapiro, all of whom are PhDs in distance education and work in distance education environments across the United States. They participated together via video conference to the audience.
The question they were posing was, "Distance education often evolves 'organically' but when it is time for an organisation to change, what happens ? "
They idenitified what they see as current 'challenges' for distance education organisations, as being :
- Getting courses online.
- Where the responsibility for the online courses may lie, in the structure of the organisation.
- who carries the 'Vision' for online teaching, and who has the interest ?
Everyone in the group seemed to nod and raise their eyebrows.
They identified pressures on distance education, as :
- Dwindling local and semi rural populations in the United States for local education providers such as trade schools and community colleges ( Polytechnics )which sees those organisations having to go on lone or lose business to online providers.
- Online courses are now seen to be a competitive advantage for students, and the growing reason as to why they choose one education provider over another.
- The avaiability of experienced and committed online course teaching staff, and their access to further study to retain them as online teachers.
They saw these pressures and challaneges as positive reasons for organisational change. They and talked of how distance education organisations could :
- Provide access for students, if and when local education providers such as trade schools or polytechnics, close down or relocate their campus to urban centres.
- Provide opportunities for organisations to develop local and regional content for their courses, rather than online courses appearing to be generic and universal.
- Provide opportunities for growing numbers of new groups of students ... for example, the fastest growing student populations in distance education in the USA at the moment are students with disabilities who do not access F2F settings, and older students coming out of the workforce and doing retraining. The average age for enrolling is now 27 years old, rather than school leaving age.
The obstacles for organisational change and getting more courses online are:
- Pace and time it takes for organsiations to develop online learning, and the lack of preparedness of teachers when the courses go online.
- Reluctance of teachers to to work outside of usual timetables and in new time slots that reflect when the students are actually online.
- Problems when teachers no longer report to teaching managers for their online work but report instead to an online course administrator.
- Seperate contracts being issued to teachers for online teaching or development, and the dissonance that it creates when it comes in opposition to their usual teaching duties.
They see the pressures and challenges being categorised as :
- Programmatic.
- Administrative.
- Institutional.
These issues include:
- Who are the stakeholders? How do they communicate with each other ?
- What are the reporting lines?
- Who holds the resources / budget?
- How are online students resourced and funded, do they need to be resourced differently if they cost less to deliver to ?
- Losing the focus on the student as organsiations struggle amongst themselves to solve these issues.
- How to upskill and train part time staff as well as fulltime staff to deliver online or blended courses.
- The teacher trade unions in the USA seeing online teaching and course development as seperate contracts to usual teaching duties.
In summary, the speakers saw the greatest organisational challenge for distance education organisations across the USA as being " the acceptance of teachers to work online " .
What do you think ? That comment would be a good starter question to ask ourselves and our organisation. Blog away !
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One of the speakers at the DEANZ conference in August 2008, speaking about organisational change, quipped that it was all a bit like shifting a cemetery; it's a big job and you get no help from the inhabitants.
ReplyDeleteI feel for us the greatest challenge is taking into account the views of our stakeholders. The potential students the American speakers are talking about are young adults in their 20's, so they are tertiary students and they are post compulsory. Our students are neither of these. Many of our students leave school the day they are legally permitted to do so. This means the American experience may be of limited relevance to us.
This is the greatest challenge we face, but there are some students who do take up the challenge we present to them if it's given in a positive way - that is if you are learning about something you are interested in and can see there is pathway to getting there, you are part of the way.
ReplyDeleteAnother of the challenges we face is getting parents to realise that school has changed and so will the jobs that their children may do in the future. Therefore they need to have another think about getting their kids involved in learning, training and then work.
Is the difficulty that Bryce has suggested about getting teachers to work on-line or creating barriers for the students by saying that students don't have access, when there are many ways they can have access. Is it just all too hard?
Yup, it is hard. But then that means its worthwhile doing !
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