All entries for Monday 23 May 2011

A TALL Story – learning from the history of online distance education at Oxford

I recently gave a presentation to a group of people at Warwick who are involved in or interested in online distance learning of various flavours. I recounted my involvement with the pioneering Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) team at Oxford University. TALL are still leaders in the field, with particular expertise in helping people to make the move from on-site to online. I described (hopefully with a degree of accuracy) a significant period in the history of TALL, Oxford, online learning and higher education: 1999-2003 - the period in which we established the first successful online distance courses to be offered by an institution like Oxford.

This is an account, focussing on strategic issues, and highlighting several serious mistakes (or rather, opportunities to learn). The aim of this potted history is to ensure that the lessons that we learned are not lost. Most importantly:

1. Creating a running an online course requires a different kind of team, with different skills and responsibilities, and a different relationship between the academic, the course and their students (a less direct, more mediated relationship in which academics must give up control to people with roles that they may not understand).
2. Technology and techniques are still changing fast, meaning that courses are unlikely to stabilise as entirely repeatable unchanging end products.
3. Admin and support costs are higher for online than on-site.
4. Content is not king. You cannot build and sell a course on the basis of great content. People want to learn by interaction with great tutors and to a lesser extent great students. To do this well, you NEED A GREAT FORUMS SYSTEM, that is pedagogically designed.
5. Online tutoring is, at least, different to on-site. Many would say it is more difficult. Online tutoring skills are certainly less common. In running an online distance course, you need to make sure you will always have a good supply of skilled online tutors, perhaps supplemented by A GREAT FORUMS SYSTEM.
   

Here's the history... 

TALL was established in 1996 as a relatively independent innovation centre, as part of Continuing Education at Oxford University. It is associated with Kellogg College. It was the first of its kind. Its position as a unique innovator, along with Kellogg's links to wealthy US foundations, generated £millions in funding over 6 years. Further funding came from HEFCE and CONTED. Very little came directly from Oxford University's central admin. TALL has been a great success, and provided valuable knowledge on every aspect of how to do online distance learning. It now exists as a research and consultancy service and as a course development and support team.

TALL planned to launch with 3 part-time online distance courses: Advanced Diploma in Local History (2 years part-time with a summer school); Certificate in Computing (2 years part-time with a summer school); Immunology postgraduate CPD course.

The team: 

Director (negotiator, spokesperson, money-raising)
Course convenor (one per course, on-site and online)
On-site course teachers
Content author (4, shared across 3 courses, with 2 acting as project managers)
Multimedia content specialist (1 for all three courses)
Graphic designer (1)
Web developer (1)
Project manager (1 per course, also working as content authors and tutors)
Learning technology designer/developer (Robert O'Toole)
IT support (1 person - hugely over-worked)
Registry (also working as on-site registry, hugely over-worked)
Admin support
Online tutors
Director's PA

Business model: we were sure, from the outset, that the Local History and Computing courses would attract sufficient students - the combination of the Oxford name, and being the first to market guaranteed this - in fact the courses were massively over-subscribed. We received a subsidy for UK students from HEFCE. With many US students paying high fees, along with huge start-up funding, for many years money was not a problem. Summer schools provided further income. The consultancy and research business grew on the back of this experience. The Immunology course was a longer-term strategy, aiming to provide CPD material for professionals in the NHS. This proved to be a much more difficult market to engage with and learn from. It was assumed that admin and support costs and processes would be similar to those of the onsite courses - this was a major mistake.

Development model: provide a development team for each course, run the course with relatively intensive support until running perfectly, and then move the development team on to other courses. This worked well with the Computing and Local History courses. Much was learned during the first few years, and the approach changed in response (in terms of support and pedagogy). However, two issues seriously threatened the viability of the approach:

1. The fear of reputational damage to the institution: agile development of a live course is a dangerous technique to employ, especially when the students are wealthy well connected Americans.

2. By the end of the initial intensive 2-3 year development period, the techniques and technologies were already out of date, thus requiring constant redevelopment without the possibility of moving resources onto new courses.

Pedagogical model: The initial assumption was that the courses would be based around the _undeniably_ high quality content of existing Oxford courses, converted into online materials (largely text and image based) - very much an online text book. This was to be supplemented with Perception based online self-assessment tests. Interactive Flash content was added later. The Local History course involved a project using Microsoft Access. It was assumed that good on-site content could easily be converted to good online content. This was a mistake. The (very expensive) content authors had to work hard to produce good results. A significant amount of creative input was added by the content authors independently. Writing good online content is a highly specialised skill. We learned this as we went along. The inability of on-site teachers and convenors to help with the transfer made things much worse. Online teaching is a very different paradigm. They resisted the need to think and teach differently, and the subsequent need to let the course development team take responsibility for designing the courses.

The consumption of content and the completion of essays and project work were to be supported _reactively_ by online tutoring, in tutor groups, using the O'Reilly WebBoard forums systems. It was assumed that the quality of content and the self-supporting behaviour of the students would do most of the work for us once that the courses were running. This was a big mistake. Proactive and highly skilled online tutors proved to be vital. However, they are rare and expensive. Oxford now runs a training course for online tutors. TALL are using VLE technologies that to some extent alleviate the demands on the tutors. However, much more could be done (my advice: a great forums system is essential).

Robert O'Toole : 23 May 2011 09:21 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem