Students' Experiences of e-Learning in Higher Education

The Ecology of Sustainable Innovation

Robert Ellis, Peter Goodyear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135215828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Students' Experiences of e-learning in Higher Education helps higher education instructors and university managers understand how e-learning relates to, and can be integrated with, other student experiences of learning. Grounded in relevant international research, the book is distinctive in that it foregrounds students' experiences of learning, emphasizing the importance of how students interpret the challenges set before them, along with their conceptions of learning and their approaches to learning. The way students interpret task requirements greatly affects learning outcomes, and those interpretations are in turn influenced by how students read the larger environment in which they study. The authors argue that a systemic understanding is necessary for the effective design and management of modern learning environments, whether lectures, seminars, laboratories or private study. This ecological understanding must also acknowledge, though, the agency of learners as active interpreters of their environment and its culture, values and challenges.

Students' Experiences of e-learning in Higher Education reports research outcomes that locate e-learning within the broader ecology of higher education and:

• 
  
  

• Offers a holistic treatment of e-learning in higher education, reflecting the need for integrating e-learning and other aspects of the student learning experience

• 
  
  

• Reports research on students' experiences with e-learning conducted by authors in the United States, Europe, and Australia

• 
  
  

• Synthesizes key themes in recent international research and summarizes their implications for teachers and managers.

1

Introduction

Universities play a pivotal role in society. They are hubs of innovation. They attract and develop talent. They provide a free and critical voice. They create and share new knowledge and enrich the arts. They are crucial assets in many metropolitan and regional economies. They link the local and the global. They do all these things with varying degrees of commitment and success, depending, in part, on the political and financial contexts in which they find themselves. No other institution provides this array of social benefits and few have shown comparable ingenuity and determination to survive (Smith & Webster, 1997; Bowden & Marton, 1998; Florida, 1999, 2003; Barnett, 2005). Not everyone speaks about universities in this way. Universities are often chided for being complacent, elitist, self-serving and detached from reality.

There is more than a grain of truth in such criticisms. But there is no point in trying to arbitrate. There is very little value in saying or showing that universities are necessarily and essentially innovative or hidebound, useful or beyond use. Discourses of derision, just like complacency, obscure the view of what needs changing, and how it might be changed. And there is an emerging consensus, particularly visible in universities in the richer nations, about the necessity of certain kinds of change. Against a background of declining public funding and intensifying global competition for good staff and students, universities are asking how they can provide better support for the education of a growing, diversifying, time-poor student body. How can they enhance opportunities for all the students who might benefit from university education: helping to make wealth, class, gender and ethnicity irrelevant as predictors of educational attainment? How can they upgrade curricula, teaching methods, assessment regimes and course outcomes so that all students are equipped to meet the uncertain challenges of the 21st century? (Simons, Linden & Duffy, 2000; Barnett, 2007; Kalantzis & Cope, 2008).

New technology – especially information and communication technology (ICT) – plays a surprisingly important role in addressing these questions. ICT is intimately bound up with powerful processes of globalisation, as well as with re-engineering business processes, accelerating product cycles, breaking down the economics, practices and assumptions of mass production, shortening the distance between producer and consumer (cutting out intermediaries), etc. The influence of technology needs to be understood on two levels: it enables these changes to happen but it also affects people’s expectations about what is normal and possible. For example, the use of ICT in higher education makes it possible for universities to offer students much more flexible access to learning resources, administrative services and academic staff, but it also encourages students to expect such flexibility.

Moreover, the use of ICT to increase educational flexibility raises fundamental questions about what is essential to a university. It raises questions about the value of having a physical campus. By allowing teaching to be casualised and outsourced, it raises questions about the links between research and teaching, and about who should be seen as core members of the academic body. Blurring the boundaries around distance-learning – what is the distance? – makes some universities footloose; less attached to place, they face huge questions about identity, brand, market, loyalty and competitive edge.

We have written this book to help sharpen thinking and discussion about technology and higher education. Like many people who research and write about this topic, we are fundamentally interested in the improvement of student learning through the enhancement of educational practice, including through better design and management of learning environments. But in tackling this we also raise questions about what 21st century students and teachers need and want, and about how universities should conceive of, and manage, their physical, digital and intellectual resources. ICT allows students and staff to change the ways they organise their activities in time and space. It is capable of supporting the development of new working relationships, from small groups to extensive learning networks and communities. Its management raises questions that are not merely technical: they go to the heart of what a university means to its students.

Two main themes are woven through the book. One is concerned with a richer conception of student learning; the other with part-whole relationships. We aim to help all those who are in a position to improve university education to discuss and co-ordinate their work, based on a shared understanding of good learning and of how it sits within a web of relationships – within an ecology of learning. It is neither practically useful nor intellectually defensible to see technology as separable from the normal, everyday activities of university students and staff. ‘E-learning’ is part of their workaday experience. It is also novel, complex, slippery and likely to present itself in surprising ways, as technological developments continue to accelerate.

Contemporary Pressures and Tensions

Most universities are finding it hard to protect the quality of students’ learning experiences, especially when faced with worsening staff:student ratios and declining public sector investment. Yet defending the status quo is neither possible nor desirable. There are unacceptable differences in educational outcomes for students from different socio-economic backgrounds. The quality of educational provision, and outcome, varies substantially between universities that are notionally equal. Variations in provision and outcome can also be found between departments in the same university. But unacceptable variation in outcome, using traditional measures of attainment, is only part of the problem. Even if these various levels of performance were brought up to the standards set by the best, we would still have to recognise that higher education is rather poor at defining, teaching and testing skills and knowledge fit for the 21st century. There have been radical changes in the nature of graduate employment. Even if the scope and scale of the knowledge economy is hard to map (Blackler, 1995; Brown, Hesketh & Williams 2003; Fleming, Harley & Sewell, 2004; Kenway, 2006), it is clear that the ways of defining and assessing graduate capabilities that crystallised in the industrial age are obsolescent, at best (Bereiter, 2002).

Other powerful changes are at work. Student numbers have grown. Students’ needs, expectations and demands have diversified. Students have become more assertive, especially when they see themselves as paying customers. They have less time available for study and they have become more savvy about technology, even if they are not sure how best to use it for learning purposes. Governments, through various agencies, have become more intimately involved in regulating the quality of educational provision and its intended outcomes.

In addition, academic work is changing. The processes of research, and knowledge-creation generally, have become more complex. University teachers, as researchers, perform on a global stage and engage, on a daily basis, with colleagues in other universities and other countries. Research for many academics, even in the humanities, is becoming more collaborative, team-based and dependent on technology. Disciplinary traditions have been challenged by society’s demands for applicable knowledge that cuts across subject boundaries. Projects involving partnerships with non-academic users of research are becoming commonplace. Academics are under increasing pressure to carry out research that is judged to be of high intellectual quality and to be of demonstrable social or economic importance. Academic work is now more closely monitored and measured, and its pressures are more intense, than ever before. In the developed world, these pressures are being felt by an academic workforce whose average age has increased significantly in the last 30 years. It is becoming harder to attract good people into the academic profession and there is a global war for talent, being waged around PhD candidates, first appointments and star researchers.

Higher education is not collapsing under these pressures. For all its problems and weaknesses, the system is sustained by the ingenuity and passion of those who have chosen the academic life. Some would argue that more of this innovative spirit can be seen in research than in teaching. We would have to agree that universities tend to be better at recognising, rewarding and fostering excellence in research than excellence in teaching. In some institutions, it is possible to prosper as a good researcher while being only an adequate teacher. A good teacher who is only an adequate researcher is unlikely to make full professor. The cards are still stacked against teaching, but there are more opportunities for advancement through innovation in teaching than there used to be (Ramsden, 2008). It is becoming quite respectable to engage in researching one’s own practice – contributing to the scholarship of teaching. Funding sources for educational innovation and quality enhancement have expanded and diversified in universities and HE systems around the world. There are vigorous, high-profile, politically astute organizations committed to the improvement of university teaching and learning, that can now provide funding, resources, recognition and validation for the innovative work of individual academics as well as for teams engaged in curriculum reform. (The Higher Education Academy in the UK, the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Ako Aotearoa in New Zealand, Educause in North America, are examples that come to mind.)

This reading of the landscape of contemporary higher education sees:

• universities and their staff as under huge pressure to demonstrate improvements in performance, across the board (even with declining resources);
• employers expressing dissatisfaction with the knowledge, skills and attitudes of new graduates (even if they cannot say precisely what they need);
• students demanding vocational relevance, flexible provision, good access to staff, timely responses and efficient systems (even if no-one is willing to bear the true costs);
• university teachers as ingenious, committed, intrinsically innovative people (even though they are overstretched, prone to burn-out, quick to blame the system and suspicious of ideas from other disciplines).

A growing cadre of university specialists – including educational designers, staff developers, pro-vice-chancellors for learning and teaching – find themselves working in this complex landscape. They will recognise the problems that arise from the lack of a shared language for talking about the subtleties of learning and teaching (Hedberg, 2004). One of our goals is to help everyone engaged in the improvement of university education find ways to talk about what is important to them. Another is to help university leaders, at all levels, to develop strategies for the enhancement of learning and teaching that give due acknowledgement to the constraints mentioned above, and especially to the related constraints of burn-out and innovation fatigue.

Purpose and Perspective

This book will help to improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education if it can convince you, the reader, of the following:

1. Enhancing student learning depends on understanding the relationship between the student experience of learning and the students’ learning environment. It doesn’t make sense to try to ‘fix’ the environment or ‘fix’ the students – they are not independent of each other.
2. Teachers can work themselves into exhaustion trying to help students find and persist with better ways of studying. A system which needs continuing inputs of energy is unsustainable.
3. Clever leadership, design and management can create an ecosystem which adapts to change, improves through learning, learns through experience and can bring itself back into balance through the efficient working of its own internal processes.

This book provides evidence for these claims and strategies for addressing the challenges they create. The evidence comes from a range of sources, including recent studies carried out by our research teams, including our graduate students. The strategy is really just a coherent way of thinking about a university as an educational ecosystem. Research involves learning. So do teaching, management and leadership. To understand a university is to understand an ecology of learning. Such systems can get out of balance, but with some careful attention to key internal processes, they are quite capable of looking after themselves.

This book is one of many that discuss e-learning. It differs from most of these books in two main ways. First, it offers a distinctive combination of ideas and evidence: some fresh ways of understanding ingrained and emerging issues in higher education. Second, while the book has a sharp focus on e-learning, we argue that e-learning has to be understood and managed as part of the broader ecology of learning and teaching. Each of these claims merits some unpacking.

Much of the evidence we present in this book comes from recent research into students’ and teachers’ experiences of using e-learning in situations where the use of technology is intended to be an integral part of the students’ learning activity. Some of this research is our own. Some has been carried out with and by our research students. Some is reported in the literature.

Our own recent research – and much of the research by our students – has taken a particular approach to understanding educational experiences. We believe this approach has the merit of being able to provide a unified account of learning and teaching in higher education – one which avoids the problems of taking either an individualistic, psychologically-oriented perspective or a more structural, sociologically-oriented perspective.

The psychology of learning has made great strides in the last 60–70 years. It was particularly successful at modelling the acquisition of perceptual and motor skills (in the 1940s and 1950s) and of some cognitive skills (especially in the 1980s). Earlier work in the 20th century had provided a foundation for understanding the learning of simple concepts, factual knowledge and propositions. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers using computer-based methods and analogies were able to model more complex cognitive achievements, introducing ideas such as mental schemata, mental models and rule-based production systems. Painstaking research on human response times, research involving attention to multiple tasks and information sources, and some elegant computer-based modelling allowed researchers in the emerging field of cognitive science to map the architecture of cognition: positing a set of mental processes and mental structures that could account for observed regularities in human performance. (For excellent, accessible overviews, see Ohlsson, 1995; Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000; Sawyer, 2006.)

Research on learning took a social or cultural turn in the early 1990s. In part, this was due to a drying-up of funding for computationally-oriented studies, especially in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, where some over-ambitious promises were made and not kept. In part, it was a response to a compelling critique of the computational, cognitivist approach, made most eloquently by Lucy Suchmann (1987/2007), Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (e.g. 1991). We do not have space here to trace the arguments. Suffice to say that some of the high ground in research on learning was taken by scholars who evinced no particular interest in the capabilities of the lone human, taken outside the contexts in which work or learning could be said to occur. For much of the 1990s, it became quite uncouth – in some circles – to talk about what might or might not be going on between a person’s ears. Learning came to be seen as a social or cultural practice. Competence came to be seen as situated in a context – emphasising that what one can do is very dependent on the tools and resources that come to hand, including the help available from other people. Alongside this socio-cultural work on learning, other researchers and commentators have continued to draw on broad areas of social theory and work out some of its implications for higher education. (Much of this writing has taken a critical stance, rather than engaging closely in the improvement of practice.)

Of course, work in the cognitive tradition has also continued and it is very lively and influential in some places. Critics might say that it is telling us more and more about less and less – that we are now getting some very detailed models of highly-specialised phenomena. But that would be to ignore the broad foundations provided by cognitively-inspired research of the last 30 years or so: foundations on which some influential ideas in the higher education literature are bui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgement of Copyright Permissions
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Thinking Ecologically About E-learning
• 3. New Students, New Technology
• 4. Student Experiences of E-learning in Higher Education: Learning through Discussion
• 5. Student Experiences of E-learning in Higher Education: Learning through Inquiry
• 6. University Teachers’ Experiences of E-learning in an Ecology
• 7. An Ecology of Learning: Practical Theory for Leadership, Management and Educational Design
• 8. Teaching-as-Design and the Ecology of University Learning
• 9. Leadership for Learning: Perspectives on Learning Spaces
• 10. Relating the Idea of an Ecology of Learning to Campus Planning
• 11. Concluding Comments: The Ecological Perspective, Balance and Change
• Notes
• References
• Index