Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education

Leadership Strategies for the Next Generation

Gary E. Miller, Kathleen S. Ives

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781642671483
• eBook ISBN: 9781642671513
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Published in Association with

eLearning has entered the mainstream of higher education as an agent of strategic change. This transformation requires eLearning leaders to develop the skills to innovate successfully at a time of heightened competition and rapid technological change.

In this environment eLearning leaders must act within their institutions as much more than technology managers and assume the prime role of helping their institutions understand the opportunities that eLearning presents for faculty, for students, and for client organizations in the community. They need to prepare to participate in policy development around these opportunities. They must understand the multiple dimensions of practice in the field—operations, administration, and working within the complex culture of a higher education institution—while also functioning as scholars of the field who can bring the best ideas from other institutions to help shape policy around eLearning.

The second edition builds on the success of the first edition and presents both the collective expertise of veterans who have pioneered the field for 20 years, and of a rising generation of eLearning leaders that are transforming online programs at their own institutions, to address these challenges.

This edition has been updated and expanded to reflect the increasing complexity of the field with seven new chapters andthe revision of eight chapters that appeared in the first edition. New and updated topics include:

• The evolving role of the chief online learning officer
• Issues of diversity as more women and minorities enter leadership roles in the field
• The increasing role of learning analytics and data-based decisions
• The potential tensions involved in cohort-based versus individualized instruction
• The increasing need for faculty professional development
• The affordances of cloud computing, adaptive learning, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and mobile learning to the field
• The open educational resources movement and the implications for institutional policy and practice
• The challenges of an increasingly complex competitive environment
• Accessibility

There are few comparable positions in higher education than that of eLearning leaders who work across multiple academic and support units and whose work fundamentally affects the institution as a whole. This volume is written for them.

PART ONE

THE LEADERSHIP CONTEXT

1

eLEARNING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Gary E. Miller

eLearning began two decades ago as a disruptive change in higher education, centered around the use of online technology to transform the century-old practice of extending higher education to off-campus adult students through distance education. Today, it is emerging as a means by which higher education institutions can more effectively respond to diverse societal changes wrought by a maturing Information Revolution, helping students prepare for their roles as citizens and professionals in a rapidly changing environment. We begin this book on leadership with an overview of the field, starting with a brief history of distance education in the United States, followed by a survey of the many aspects of higher education that are being transformed with the full flowering of the information society. This chapter concludes with a summary of emerging leadership challenges facing the field.

A Historical Perspective

Many higher education professionals perceive distance education as a recent phenomenon, launched by the eLearning innovations of the 1990s. However, there is more to the story. The evolution of distance education is the story of how for more than a century and a half our college and university leaders have sought to use a variety of the strategies and technologies of the day to help their institutions adapt to dramatically changing social needs. A long view of the evolution of distance education can be helpful as we try to understand the leadership challenges facing the field today. Online distance education is emerging as one key to how higher education generally is adapting to the changes created by the Information Revolution. As we begin our look at the leadership challenges associated with the current transformation of higher education, a quick look backward will help us understand the challenge of leadership in today’s eLearning environment.

The Roots of Distance Education

Distance education has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1850s as a revolution in transportation—from steamships that created new markets for U.S. goods to railroads that opened the continent for rapid development. Industrialization stimulated urbanization as people moved from rural areas to rapidly growing cities to work in the new mills and factories. It also stimulated immigration, as new citizens were attracted by the promise of a fresh start in the new industrial democracy.

Policymakers recognized that the industrial economy would require new kinds of professional skills in the workforce: engineers, managers, scientists, city planners, and so on. They also recognized that the combined impact of immigration and urbanization education would require a more strategic approach to the primary and secondary education of immigrant children and newly urbanized rural families. New kinds of public higher education institutions were needed and indeed emerged in response to this challenge. Traditionally, higher education had been focused on the liberal arts and the preparation of students for the clergy and other traditional professions and was accessible only by the wealthy and socially elite. The Industrial Revolution demanded new institutions that could serve the growing middle class. The Morrill Act, or Land-Grant College Act of 1862, now considered a cornerstone of higher education in the United States, arranged for federal lands in each state to be sold and the proceeds used to establish a land grant college in each state to focus on “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life” (Morrill Act, 1862, section 4). In addition, normal schools—teacher education colleges—were created to produce the elementary and secondary school teachers needed in the growing public schools. In the end, the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Second Morrill Act of 1890 (United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, n.d.), which created many of the historically Black colleges and universities, established the foundation for U.S. higher education for the next century, including the emergence of the distance education movement.

There remained a concern that the nation would not be able to sustain the combination of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization that fed the Industrial Revolution unless it was accompanied by a revolution in agriculture. The land grant colleges took the lead on improving agricultural production, but policymakers were worried about how to “keep them down on the farm.” Rural life was isolated and hard, especially when compared to the growing consumer luxuries of urban life. One solution was to make rural life more attractive by extending home delivery of mail to rural areas: Rural Free Delivery (RFD). RFD was still experimental in the 1890s when institutions, including the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State College, and the University of Wisconsin, launched the first college-level correspondence study programs, giving birth to distance education as part of higher education’s outreach mission.

For much of the first half of the 20th century, correspondence study led the development of distance education in the United States. Most public programs were housed at land grant institutions. Some were focused on agriculture and related topics. Others offered a wide variety of undergraduate courses. Although institutions competed with each other for students, they also collaborated, producing integrated catalogs, for instance, and licensing print-based course materials to each other.

The Coming of the Information Age

If the Industrial Revolution began as a transportation revolution, the Information Revolution began as a communications revolution. By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, institutions around the nation, especially community colleges, began using local public television stations (some of which were owned by community colleges, school districts, or public universities) to extend access to college course lectures. A new form of media-based education emerged—the telecourse—that combined recorded video lectures with traditional textbooks, printed study guides that contained discussion and assignments and, in some cases, periodic class meetings. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, telecourse delivery tended to be limited to the broadcast area of the local public television station. This began to change in the 1970s as states built public television networks and as colleges gained control of local cable TV access channels. Still, access remained close to the campus of the sponsoring institution.

Several projects emerged that demonstrated the potential of video to serve more distant students. One example was the Appalachian Education Satellite Program (AESP) (Bramble & Ausness, 1974). Funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission, it used a then-experimental communications satellite, supported by local educational institutions, to deliver telecourses and other educational programs in areas such as nursing, teacher professional development, and firefighter training to a multistate area along the Appalachian Mountain range. It demonstrated the potential for satellite technology to bring both higher education and K–12 support units together across state boundaries to serve widely dispersed groups of adult learners.

A variation on the telecourse idea also underpinned a major international innovation in open and distance education: the formation of the British Open University in 1970. The British Open University (now the Open University of the United Kingdom) combined video programs produced by the BBC with highly developed printed materials and original readings, complemented by classroom sessions at regional study centers, to create interdisciplinary courses offered to adult learners throughout the United Kingdom. The British Open University became a model for the development of open universities throughout the world. In the United States the University of Maryland University College created the International University Consortium for Telecommunications (IUC) to adapt British Open University materials to the North American curriculum and then to license the resulting materials to its member institutions. Other consortia also began to emerge. Community colleges that produced telecourses created Telecourse People to jointly market their course materials to other institutions. In Detroit, Michigan, the To Educate the People Consortium brought together local colleges and universities with the automobile industry and unions to extend education to working people in that industry.

In 1978, satellite delivery took center stage as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began to distribute its programs to local stations via satellite and to make its excess capacity available to local stations affiliated with educational institutions to deliver other kinds of educational programs. PBS established the Adult Learning Service (ALS) as a national aggregator of telecourse distribution. PBS-ALS acquired distribution rights to telecourses from many different institutions and then, through its network of local stations, licensed local institutions to offer them for credit when they were broadcast locally. In the early 1980s, the Annenberg Foundation granted $150 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to support the development of high-quality telecourses using this delivery system in an effort to ensure that all adults would have access to key elements of the undergraduate curriculum.

PBS satellite service allowed local stations to not only receive programming but also originate programs to other stations nationally. This stimulated other partnerships. One such partnership, the National University Teleconference Network, was developed to coordinate national delivery of noncredit professional training programs. Another partnership, AG*SAT (later renamed the American Distance Education Consortium), was created to use satellite to deliver agriculture-related training among Cooperative Extension Service offices nationally and internationally.

eLearning Emerges

By the early 1990s, live, interactive, telecommunications-based delivery was becoming a major trend in distance education. As technology shifted from satellite to interactive telephone lines, lowering both the cost of infrastructure and the cost per minute of delivery, many thought that telephones would be the future of distance education. This changed in 1993 when the University of Illinois launched the first internet web browser. Within three years, the internet became an international phenomenon, and the modern eLearning environment was born.

There were experiments with online degree programs before the web browser. In the early 1990s, for instance, The Pennsylvania State University experimented with incorporating computer and telephone into a synchronous delivery system to support delivery of a graduate degree in adult education to students in Mexico and Europe. Around the same time, the University of Maryland University College launched a baccalaureate degree in nuclear science as a contract program with several major energy companies using a version of the Plato computer language.

In 1997, the Western Interstate Cooperative for Higher Education—a regional collaborative of governors of 14 western states—launched the Western Governors University, which focused on the use of online technology to reach the widely scattered populations of these states. It helped stimulate a broader interest in developing the potential of eLearning (Western Governors University, n.d.). At about the same time, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation launched its Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) Program (Mayadas, 1997). Over time, the foundation’s ALN Program provided more than $40 million to help institutions launch mission-centered, sustainable eLearning programs.

Standards for a New Field

As the field has developed, several organizations have articulated standards for the field that build on early experiences and set the stage for quality control as eLearning moves into its second generation. This section will highlight major contributions by the Online Learning Consortium and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU).

Pillars of Quality

Throughout the 1990s, eLearning proved to be a truly disruptive innovation. It attracted many institutions that had no prior tradition in distance education and, as a result, no familiarity with the historical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Leading the eLearning Transformation of Higher Education, Second Edition
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: The Leadership Context
• Part Two: Ensuring Operational Effectiveness
• Part Three: Sustaining the Innovation
• Contributors
• Index
• Backcover