Integrating Service-Learning and Consulting in Distance Education

Marie-Line Germain

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787694118
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The pressures upon students from employers are greater than ever. Demands for a highly skilled workforce in a digitalized economy mean that higher education institutions need to do more to prepare their student bodies for this new way of working. The geographical boundaries set by traditional on-campus courses prevent most universities from allowing online students to engage in community service. Online service-learning responds to this limitation by initiating the transfer of in-person community service to the online environment. E-service learning addresses the growing demand for flexible online courses and programs. Anchored in research and supported by eight years of successful implantation, this book presents an award-winning e-service-learning model which allows students to enhance their employability with real work experience. Faculty can go beyond theory while building their service requirements, and may use e-service-learning to offer real world applications and hands-on experience. Clients benefit from pro bono services, and universities are able to fulfill their strategic goals, serve the community-at-large, and grow their online programs by offering students a unique online course experience.This book advocates a model and instructions for faculty to successfully integrate a remote service-learning and consulting component in an online course making this an illuminating text for higher education researchers and leaders alike.

PART I

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

CHAPTER 1

DISTANCE EDUCATION

CURRENT TRENDS IN THE UNITED STATES

We had a million users faster than Facebook, faster than Instagram. This is a wholesale change in the educational ecosystem.

– Daphne Koller (a founder of MOOCs provider
Coursera; The Guardian, 2017)

Higher education has been instrumental in the growth of and participation in our global economy. To be a competitive workforce, students must find opportunities to acquire or update their knowledge and skills beyond the two- or four-year experience on traditional college campuses. This means expanding access to formal and informal learning experiences, learning resources, faculty, peers, and mentors throughout their lives. Technology increases relevancy by aligning both content and learning approaches with the immediate and long-term needs and interests of learners.

The average annual growth rate of online enrollments in the United States between 2003 and 2009 was nearly 20 percent in higher learning institutions (Allen & Seaman, 2009). In 2010, 63 percent of all traditional schools agreed that online education was critical to their future class offerings. According to Allen and Seaman (2010), the growth of the online student body has exceeded the growth of on-site students, with a 21 percent increase in online enrollment versus a less than 2 percent increase in on-site enrollment from 2008 to 2009. A 2014 survey by the Babson Survey Research Group reveals that the number of higher education students taking at least one distance education course in 2014 was up 3.7 percent from the previous year, stating that online education is no longer an institutional accessory. Online enrollment growth has far exceeded that of overall higher education for the past decade. Additionally, distance education students are a growing segment of the overall student population – so much so that in the fall of 2013, they comprised 12.5 percent of all US higher education students.

Online education is typically offered in two formats: online courses (credit-bearing or not) and massive open online courses (MOOCs), for which certificates can be earned at no cost or for a small fee.

MOOCs are courses aimed at unlimited participation worldwide and open access via the web. Unlike regular college or university courses, MOOCs can attract thousands of enrollees around the world. The term “MOOC” was coined to refer to a 2008 course developed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens titled “Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge” (McGill, 2018). The creators’ intention was to utilize the possibility for interactions between a wide variety of participants. By using online tools, MOOCs might be able to provide a richer learning environment compared to traditional tools. Twenty-five students attended the on-campus course at the University of Manitoba, while 2,300 others from around the world participated online.

There are now thousands of MOOCs available worldwide from several hundred colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning (Srikanth, 2017). They can come in the form of active course sessions with participant interaction or as archived content for self-paced study. They are facilitated by lecturers, and the sessions sometimes feature high-profile guest speakers. MOOCs are primarily in the English language, sometimes with subtitles. The majority of top courses come from two platforms: Coursera and edX. The latter, in this case, amounts to MIT and Harvard University courses, whereas top Coursera courses come from a variety of schools.

MOOCs can be free, or there can be a charge – either on a subscription basis or a one-time charge. Some free MOOCs like Coursera have a paid “verified certificate” option (Online Course Report, 2019).

MOOCs have risen rapidly in popularity in the last decade, as they offer anyone with an internet connection access to free courses taught by some of the world’s most distinguished academics. According to a 2016 report from MOOCs aggregator Class Central, an estimated 58 million students worldwide are enrolled in 6,850 courses offered by more than 700 universities (Shah, 2016).

As of 2019, the top five MOOC providers by the number of users include Coursera (23 million users), edX (10 million users), XuetangX (six million users), FutureLearn (5.3 million users), and Udacity (four million users).

In the mid-2000s, Apple introduced iTunes U, a service that offered fee-based lectures on varied topics. In the early 2010s, Udacity and EdX, two online education providers’ websites launched.

In the fall of 2011, Stanford University offered three courses free of charge. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun offered their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence MOOC to over 160,000 people from around the world, 20,000 of whom completed the course. These MOOCs focused less on interactions between students and more on utilizing the possibilities of reaching a large audience. In February 2012, Thrun founded Udacity, which began to develop and offer MOOCs at no cost. A few months later, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, two other Stanford professors, founded Coursera, which partnered with universities in preparing and offering MOOCs.

To deliver MOOCs, MIT developed the MITx platform, which was renamed edX when a partnership with Harvard was formed. The nonprofit edX consortium has over 30 partner universities. The consortium has made available an open-source version of the platform that can be used and developed by other institutions and individuals. The consortium also carries out research into learning using new technologies by analyzing data from students enrolled in the courses.

To date, more than four million students have enrolled in Coursera MOOCs. Both Udacity and edX have enrolled over a million students in their MOOCs. Udacity also partnered with San Jose State University to offer for-credit courses. Although not free, these courses are low cost, and blended MOOCs material are developed by on-campus professors and teaching assistants. According to Sebastian Thrun, in 50 years there might only be 10 distinct institutions offering higher education.

The MOOC course with the highest known enrollment is taught by Dr Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at the University of Oakland, and Dr Terrence Sejnowski, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The course name is Learning How to Learn: Powerful Mental Tools to Help You Master Tough Subjects. It covers a number of learning techniques that are utilized in a wide array of fields, such as medicine, business, and education. Subject matter includes learning about the two main (and very different) ways in which the brain learns, as well as how the brain tends to “chunk” information. The course is geared toward people who are actively seeking to learn new skills or information and who are ready to assess and improve the way they learn. While educational theory is covered, the course also covers a wide number of practical learning tips. To date, this course has garnered more than one million enrollees (1,192,697) and is only the second MOOC to achieve this benchmark in history (Online Course Report, 2019). The Institution’s homepage belongs to the University of California – San Diego, and the platform used is Coursera.

MOOCs present several advantages over traditional online courses. First, MOOCs are trumpeted for their potential to reduce costs and expand access to higher learning, especially elite education (Selingo, 2014a). Also, they cover a wide variety of subjects, from philosophy and history to chemistry and mathematics. There are no prerequisite courses to take in order to enroll (Goldy-Brown, 2017), and they tend to be short-termed. Most MOOCs can be completed in 10 to 20 hours, at the learners’ own pace, using their own assimilation style, around their own schedule (Condruz-Bacescu, 2015; Sokolova, 2014). This is particularly attractive to individuals who want to sharpen up specific skills without having to commit to completing a degree. This addresses the need for what human resource professionals have termed “on-demand learning.” Employee performance and productivity can improve by up to 55 percent after completion of online training (Condruz-Bacescu, 2015).

Also, MOOCs erase geographical barriers. One does not have to live in the country where the course is offered. Some are offered in languages other than English, such as Chinese, French, and Arabic (Sokolova, 2014). Subtitles are particularly helpful to individuals with hearing or visual impairments (Goldy-Brown, 2017) or for those who are not fluent in the language of instruction.

Finally, MOOCs are efficient and economical for both the learners and the educational institutions offering them. As aforementioned, learners do not have to commit to taking more than one course at a time. They also do not incur any travel expenses. Educational institutions do not need to rent and maintain on-ground facilities to hold MOOCs (Condruz-Bacescu, 2015).

MOOCs do present some disadvantages. In his 2014b book MOOC U: Who Is Getting the Most Out of Online Education and Why, and in an essay for The New York Times’ “Education Life” adapted from his book, Jeffrey Selingo explains how MOOCs have largely failed to fulfill their promise to expand access. Selingo (2014a) explains that the average consumer of MOOCs is not the remote villager hungry for education or the college dropout in the United States looking for a second chance. It’s a young white American male with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job and with advanced degrees. MOOCs often serve a professional development function. Additionally, large MOOCs can be perceived as impersonal since they rarely provide personalized courseware or attention from an instructor (Srikanth, 2017). Other disadvantages include the difficulty of tracking students’ assignments and involvement, and possible difficulties for learners to access a reliable internet connection. Finally, MOOC dropout rates are notoriously high (around 90%), much greater than in on-campus, traditional education (Condruz-Bacescu, 2015). Students may be highly motivated at the start of a course, but their involvement may fade as the course becomes increasingly difficult.

Public and For-profit Universities

Distance education in public and for-profit universities did not start with the birth of the Internet.

Since the nineteenth century, universities in the United States and Britain have offered distance education in the form of correspondence courses. In tandem with technological progress, distance learning began to incorporate radio broadcasts, TV programs, and audio- and videocassettes. In the United States, the University of Chicago became the first university to offer “correspondence” courses in 1892. In 1922, Pennsylvania State College began to broadcast some courses over the radio. In 1953, the University of Houston in Texas was the first university to televise course materials. In the mid-1960s, the University of Wisconsin launched a phone-based distance learning program which was geared toward physicians. Britain’s Open University then took this concept to larger audiences when in 1971 it started to broadcast teaching materials on the BBC.

The first “virtual college,” Coastline Community College, appeared in the mid-1970s. It had no campus and all the courses it offered were broadcast. Several universities started online programs in the 1980s as more people had access to the Internet. Founded in 1989, the University of Phoenix became the largest and most popular online university in the country. The Interactive Learning Network (ILN) was created in 1997. It was released to multiple schools as the first e-learning platform used at universities such as Yale, Cornell, and the University of Pittsburgh. Also in 1997, Blackboard Inc., a content management system, was founded. Today, Blackboard remains the most commonly used online course management platform at many universities.

In the late 1990s, the introduction of online learning coincided with the expansion of for-profit providers, such as the University of Phoenix and Corinthian Colleges. The two trends were often conflated in the media, and the quality concerns that frequently dogged the for-profit industry rubbed off onto online programs.

Columbia University tried to change public perception in 2000, when it started a high-profile, $25 million online learning portal called Fathom (Tomsho, 2003), which aggregated content from 13 other top-ranked and prestigious institutions. Besides Columbia, Fathom’s founding partners included The London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, The British Library, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and The New York Public Library. At its launch, the consortia educational site announced that it aimed to become a “main street” for knowledge and education, serving a worldwide audience of business and individual users. The site provided access to thousands of online courses and knowledge products for a fee, including XanEdu CoursePacks, and offered free seminars and free access to articles, interviews, lectures, and reference materials.

It was an idea a decade ahead of its time. The prestigious brands were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• PART I: THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS
• PART II: APPLICATION: INTEGRATION OF E-SERVICE-LEARNING
• PART III: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SUCCESS
• Conclusion
• References
• Index