No 14 - Journal of Social Informatics / Revista de Informatica Sociala

INTRODUCTIONLeading practitioners and policy makers now widely recognize that major changes are needed andpossible in higher education, notably regarding its cost to learners and the benefits they derive fromthat investment. Institutions are finding their existing policies and strategies must be updated orreplaced. In particular, they need stronger ways than are in common use today to determine theirnear-term and future competitiveness, to identify their best course of action in current circumstancesand to increase their capacity to anticipate and cope with new challenges.Further, leading practitioners are realizing that a good starting point to make those changes is to usethe organizational capacities inherent in online, Web-enabled learning and competence building as aforce for transformation. About fifteen years ago a number of seeds were sown regarding this.Examples include:Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century [1], which calledfor higher education to re-align, re-design, re-define and re-engineer itself to the needs of theKnowledge Economy, including closer linkage between work and learning and lower cost ofcompetence-building;Baumol and Bateman wrote “How to Think About Rising College Costs,” in Planning forHigher Education [2], which suggested that higher education and health care needed to usetechnology to transform their practices and dramatically reduce costs – or risk becomingunaffordable for individuals or our nation;The Sloan Consortium was formed to advance online, asynchronous learning;Twigg and Heterick founded the National Learning Infrastructure Initiatives while atEducom, leading to pioneering work in leveraging technology to re-invent courses andchange patterns of interaction, which grew through Pew Foundation Funding intowidespread course re-design by the National Center for Academic Transformation [3]; andThe Mosaic Internet browser and subsequent innovations were introduced, catalyzing theevolution of the World Wide Web, which has emerged as the instrument for so-called Web2.0 applications,In October 2009, the 15th Annual Meeting of the Sloan Consortium explored the state of bestpractice in online, blended, and e-learning. The progressive growth of online learning has beenchronicled by Sloan’s Annual Survey. By extrapolating 2008 figures, Dr. Frank D. Mayadas,founder of the Sloan Consortium, projected that in 2009 well over four million students would beenrolled in at least one online course in the United States [4]. This figure underestimated the truepenetration of online practices. Many students are concurrently enrolled in blended and e-learningofferings at colleges and universities that that are enthusiastically rolling out new e-learningofferings from coast to coast and beyond.In addition, course re-design on the Twigg model has led to many advances on individualcampuses, where re-invention has both improved learner outcomes and reduced costs. But theseproven and well-known techniques, and other techniques and insights that our clients use, have notbeen deployed universally, systemically. As Norris argued several some years ago in TheEncyclopedia of Distance Learning, higher education institutions tend to set their sights too low inrelation to the benefits to learners of online technologies and innovations. An example is thecommon focus on using e-technologies to digitize existing approaches to teaching, rather thanexploring “…new experiences and value propositions that could be created for students, faculty,staff, and other stakeholders. Many institutions have failed to see e-learning infrastructures as partof emerging institutional and system-wide infrastructures that fuse academic and administrativeprocesses, experiences, and value propositions. And many institutions have so far failed to createenterprise-wide strategies for leveraging these resources in new ways.” [5]