By Desmond Keegan
Distance Education International
Dublin, IRL
It is a pleasure to welcome a major book on e-learning from a European author.
e-Learning, more than any other sector of education and training provision, is dominated by North American influences.
The administration of e-learning is managed by North American Learning Management Systems (LMSs) like WebCT, Blackboard, Lotus Learning Space and Saba. The organisation of e-learning is done by North American standardisation methods like SCORM and IMS. The pedagogy of e-learning is dominated by North American techniques that have little resonance in European education like chatting, quizzing, reusable learning objects, multiple choice questioning and the templating of content.
Hence a European perspective is a welcome one.
This is a major book about a major new industry. Industry analysts put the size of the e-learning market at $3 billion in the United States alone in 2003 and forecast that it is set to grow to $15 billion by 2005. The book is large too. It comprises 337 closely printed pages for a total of more than 100.000 words.
The book is divided into four parts:
Part One is the pedagogical part. It is noteworthy that Paulsen uses the term 'online education' throughout rather than the more common term 'e-learning'. He provides a comprehensive definition of 'online education' but the analysis of the term 'e-learning' is less satisfactory.
Paulsen points out that there is more to online education than learning and it is important that this part of the book is titled 'online education, teaching and learning' without an over-emphasis on learning as in a range of recent studies. Paulsen's major contribution in this section is the classification of online teaching terms under four headings:
The author writes from a rich background in e-learning. His institution, NKI at Bekkestua, an outer suburb of Oslo, was one of the first online colleges in the world and has offered courses online continuously since 1987; it probably has today Europe's largest enrolment in e-learning courses for paying students; it has its own self-developed Learning Management System called SESAM; it has one of the world's few e-learning systems that is fully integrated with the institution's administration. The four interlocking systems for course creation, learning management, student management and the accountancy system all interchange data.
Part Two is a study of commercial and self-developed LMSs. It is built up from data from two European Commission Leonardo da Vinci projects CISAER (IRL/97/2/650/EA) and WEB-EDU (P/00/C/F/RF-92553).
This book should be of the greatest interest to the European Commission and steps should be taken at once to draw the attention of senior administrators within the Commission to it, because it demonstrates the value of Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates projects.
The great difficulty with most Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates projects is that although much good work is often done, the results do not have the impact that they should have and just become a file in an office in Brussels or on the Commission website. Rarely do they achieve publication with an ISBN number and thus enter permanently into the literature of the subject and into libraries throughout the world.
This book goes further. It shows how the findings of Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates projects can become building blocks for a major book on a major sector of education and training provision.
The achievement of the CISAER project was that it showed that by 1999 training on the World Wide Web was already a mature sector of education provision, with its own rules and regulations and with interviewees who spoke confidently of systems with 200, 2000 or 20000 enrollees. For a form of provision which began in 1995 this was remarkable.
The achievement of the WEB-EDU project was to show that the generally accepted view that e-learning in Europe was dominated by the major North American LMSs was incorrect. Regional variations were demonstrated. It was true that in the English-speaking countries of North Western Europe (Great Britain and Ireland) the major US systems dominated but in the Scandinavian countries a preference was found for locally developed LMSs in the native languages like Class Fronter. In Germany there were many self-developed systems and in the Czech Republic and Slovakia a locally developed system had achieved market penetration.
Paulsen skilfully weaves the findings of these projects into the text of his book.
Part Three is called Global e-learning in a Nordic perspective. This part is built up from a chapter on Denmark by Søren Nipper, a chapter on Sweden by Carl Holmberg and a contrast between Scandinavian and Australian e-learning. The chapters by Nipper and Holmberg are so good that one is tempted to ask why Paulsen did not get chapters on Norway, Finland and Iceland too. Norway, it is true, is represented by a study of NKI by Paulsen and his colleague Torstein Rekkedal.
Nipper identifies two trends in e-learning which he calls the Instructional Design school in which the focus is on the materials and the Collaborative Learning school in which the emphasis is on interpersonal interaction with tutors and fellow learners. He states that the Danish university and education ethos is in the Collaborative Learning field. He highlights the problems this causes:
It will be interesting to see how the LMS systems, with their strong roots in Instructional Design and their powerful tools for the automated monitoring, management and recording of learning and teaching activities, will merge with Danish educational culture and its fundamentalist belief in the teacher's indisputable and unlimited pedagogical-methodological freedom. The very concept of systems which manage learning is something foreign to Danish educational thinking.
He concludes his chapter with the telling question for Danish university professors: 'Was your lecture today SCORM-compliant, Professor?' This is a question with relevance wider than the Danish university system. It clashes too with the basic principle of German university education Die Freiheit von Forschung und Lehre (Freedom of research and teching) and with much of the ethos of Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese university teaching.
Holmberg starts his chapter with a detailed presentation of the technologisation of Swedish society. But he concludes:
This all shows intense use of the Internet for various purposes, not least in the educational sphere. But the very large expectations concerning the Internet as a carrier for education have not been fulfilled - yet. If Online Education is defined as a phenomenon close to Distance Education but fully based on the use of the Internet, as it is in this book, we have reached that to a very limited extent.
Holmberg then recounts a series of six decisions which, taken not in the context of the political evolution of Swedish society, but from the view of the development of distance education must all be seen as failures. 1. The decision in the late 60s to dismantle Europe's leading distance training provision. 2. The 1973 decision not to found an open university. 3. The decision in the late 80s to fund the development of distance education at Umeå University. 4. The funding of university consortia to organise distance education. 5. The funding in 1999 of Distum and Dukom and their closure in 2002. 6. The funding in 2002 of Nätuniversitetet, the Swedish Net University. Paulsen, himself, queries the sustainability of the Nätuniversitetet.
Part Four is on Trends and future developments. This comprises:
Again using data from the WEB-EDU project Paulsen lists potential areas for improvement in LMS provision. He then lists his forecasts for trends for the future under these headings: the mega trend, the systems integration trend, the standardisation trend, the market trend, the mobile learning trend, the broadband/multimedia trend, the globalisation trend. He uses these words:
The Cisaer project concluded that the financial barriers to online education are significant. The analysis indicates that there are few institutions that can claim that provision of Web based courses has been an economic success, if they disregard external research and development grants. At the same time, most of the Web courses have relatively low enrollment. The cost of development and maintenance may be high, and there are many examples of expensive pilot projects that experiment with high-cost, state-of-the-art technology. All this implies that it is necessary to focus much more on how online education could become more cost-effective.
The book concludes with useful lists of catalogues, books and journals.
Four themes run throughout the book:
Representatives of NKI, led by Rekkedal and Paulsen, have contributed extensively to the pedagogy of distance education and e-learning and this runs as a thread throughout the book. Paulsen is clearly convinced that the didactics of development of course content and of the provision of student support services are the cornerstones of success and an important part of the success of the NKI business model.
The scale of provision is clearly of importance to Paulsen and he constantly guages the progress of institutions from small scale to large scale provision (which he defines as a portfolio of at least 50 e-learning courses).
Sustainability is a related feature. Paulsen is caustic about e-learning offerings which collapse as soon as government or project funding is withdrawn. NKI has clearly achieved sustainability and Paulsen is constantly looking for the criteria which have led to its success and will lead to the success of other e-learning providers.
Research and evaluation are seen as important dimensions in the success of an institution and the publication of this book adds greatly to the extensive documentation provided by Rekkedal and Paulsen from NKI.
Two other features of the book are lists and anecdotes. At all important junctures of the book Paulsen provides lists of noteworthy factors. There are ten of them in the book in which the author summarises succinctly the points made in the text.
There are nine of what the book calls anecdotes. These are vignettes, printed in contrasting format to the text of the book, that illustrate themes of the text from a different point of view or offer commentary on major aspects.