When I Think of the Future of Online Learning

I am attending a Summit later this week. The University Professional and Continuing Educational Association and the Association for Continuing Higher Education are co-hosting a sold out invitational meeting to consider the Future of Online Learning. Many dozens of learning leaders will be in attendence. I am looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.

As a long-time online learning / elearning / distance learning / teletraining kinda gal, these kinds of events please me in an odd, parental sort of way. It is quite satisfying to see how over the past more than 25 years of grinding their way into teaching practice, learning technologies now routinely extend the reach of the traditional classroom. Online learning has tipped into mainstream consciousness, even if mainstream exceptance continues to be somewhat elusive. 

Since I DO have some skin in this online learning game, let me tell you some of the things I hope we will hear about during the next few days:

• I hope we will hear that it is time to move past online learning as a technological analog of the traditional college classroom.
• I want us to talk openly about getting serious about high quality, online learning experiences that scale.
• I want to hear how more students will have the opportunity to achieve the dream of a college education.
• I want to hear more about the $10,000 degree. Or the $5,000 degree. Either one.
• I want to hear how we will make sure that online students can quit being ashamed to say they got their degree from an online school.
• I want to revisit how adult learners demonstrate that the knowledge they have accrued outside the classroom is a legitimate part of competency certification.  
• I want to hear how the campus learning portal / LMS is being deployed in new and innovative ways, 
• I want to hear how online learning professionals are going to use descriptive, inferential and predictive analysis of de-identified student records to better predict when students might benefit from a bit of extra help to stay on academic track.
• I want to hear how institutions are going to make online learning experiences more compelling,  engaging, personalized and professionally relevant.
• I want to hear that there is room for informal collaborative learning moments in every student's program of study.
• I want to see more attention paid to interactive digital learning content - PDFs and digital textbooks, apps and learning objects - that students produce and publish.
• I want to understand how OER will sustain itself.
• I want to understand how mobility is changing the online learning game, and how social media bring real-time interpersonal interactivity to our conversations.
• I want to see the use of game mechanics and gamification extend our thinking about how to motivate and engage learners without turning games into the next generation of crappy elearning.

From everything I can see on that horizon these issues are all going to be part of the future of online learning. With respect, they are already part of the present. IMHO, it's time to make dealing with these issues part of our practice. Looking forward to what comes next.

 

Comments

[Cali Morrison]

@Allison, I have to disagree here, I think the students are new because the mix of traditional aged, which you describe above, to non-traditional aged has, in the not so recent past, reversed itself. Only 15% or so of students fall into that category of the 18-to-22 year-old straight out of high school. The other 85% of students are older and have broader responsibilities in addition to school. These students, who are the key to meeting the national goals of increasing credential attainment, are who will benefit most from improving elearning in many of the manners Ellen suggests. However, on one level you’re right – the twenty year old probably still misses his Mom and his high-school girlfriend. Or does he? Much of the academic research published on “the college student” is on students from 2, 5, 10 or even more years ago - it's just the way peer-reviewed academic research works. I still find articles that quote research that was done on me – or students like me - when I was a traditional aged college freshman in 1997. A traditional freshman today has grown up in a much different world than did I. And he has so many different tools to stay connected than I did, for better or worse.

That said, if I’m reading you correctly, I agree, the key to success for all students – traditional and non-traditional alike – is having systems in place that help guide students through the online learning process, to ensure they have support when they need it and are allowed to spread their wings when they don’t. This is exactly what Ellen is talking about when she says, “I want to hear how online learning professionals are going to use descriptive, inferential and predictive analysis of de-identified student records to better predict when students might benefit from a bit of extra help to stay on academic track.” It’s about finding places where attrition happens and putting programs in place to support students through those times to help them reach that credential. Behind all the fancy statistical measures are students who are struggling and need support, those data just help us mine when those periods of weakness are and help shore them up.

And I am ever-so-hopeful that, even with higher ed moving as it sometimes does (more tortoise than hare), the future will be better than the past. That we’ll find ways to engage and ignite passions within our students to create the things that have yet to come to market. We’ll find ways to make going to class, in whatever form that is, exciting not dread-inducing. That we’ll move away from the sage on the stage dumping from their knowledge buckets into the buckets of their students to a place where everyone, students and faculty alike, add from their bucket to the greater pool of knowledge. I know that’s all a little whimsical, but hey, a little whimsy helps keep the engine moving in the right direction.

[Bill Waters]

I don't think it's the mainstream that is having the difficulty...it's the administrations in the middle that are having the problems.

Also, why is a 'Future of Online Learning' Conference limited and not available 'online'?

[Allison Rossett]

With higher ed, I tend to doubt that the future will be all that different from the recent past.

The technology is new and accessible, for sure, and of course, I like you am fascinated by the implications of mobile everything and lower cost degrees. For starters. I could go on.

But the students aren't new. Twenty year olds are easily distracted, uncertain, enthusiastic, changeable, lost, peer oriented, anxious, careerist, techie and not so much so. This means that the way-cool independent modes might not be suited to them. Consider a freshman who misses his mother or, more likely, his high school girlfriend.

Those students, even my grad students, require nifty guidance systems that help them use the technology to make good and consistent choices. Instructional designers used to rise and fall on the creation of programs and assets. Now, maybe, success will come from development of guidance systems with just the right amount of direction, interaction, and freedom.