Creative CommonsCC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Image: Symbol for survey administration.

We have some data on the number of courses offered online and at a distance, as well as data on the kinds of online systems that our institutions are using. But to date, there has not been a national survey in Canada that takes a detailed look at all the management practices associated with online learning in higher education.

We often end up pointing to the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) reports that are prepared on an annual basis in the United States. And, our colleagues at the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) assist with publishing the results of the Campus Computing Project survey at the annual WCET conference.  Nothing similar happens in Canada.

Because no independent body in Canada appears to responding to this data vacuum, we’ve decide to prototype a survey instrument this year with our colleagues at eCampus Alberta, and we hope to invite OntarioLearn and ContactNorth to take the plunge with us.  Our intention is to prototype a survey that would allow us to compare data across Canada with similar data from the US.

The areas we hope to survey include:

• Policies, Plans & Budgets – Do you have a strategic plan for educational technology? Are there policies around use of social media, phones in the classroom, …? What % of your IT budget is for educational technology?
• Credentials, Programs, Curricula – What academic areas are online? What online programs do you offer? Credentials offered? Just courses? Using blended? Using fully online? Number of students involved?
• Infrastructure – On campus, shared system wide, cloud computing?
• Education technologies and LMS strategies – Spectrum of technologies used? Collaboration tools? Mobile? Social media? Single sign on? E-mail? …?
• Governance – Responsible authority / unit CIO? VP Academic? Teaching & Learning Centres? Deans / autonomous units?
• Staffing – Educational technology specialists? Instructional designers, media producers? Tech support?
• Practices – Pedagogies, funding/release time for development? Quality? Openness? Accessibility? Faculty development?
• Futures – Plans to do more? Partners? Trends and directions? Recommendations? Wish lists?

We invite feedback on questions or areas of practice that would be useful to probe within a national survey of online learning in higher education in Canada.

At BCcampus we usually get only one chance in any year to travel to Ottawa.

So, we were really pleased to line up three excellent sessions during the week of January 30, 2012 to talk about educational technology topics from a national perspective and to consider collaborative approaches on national scale that might work to benefit us all in the post-secondary sector.

Photo: Yann Fauché & Alma Mulalic. Parliament of Canada – Changing the Guard Ceremony.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

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Last week my colleague Paul Stacey and I were in Ottawa for a series of meetings with federal government contacts at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC).

We also met with our “e-campus” partners from eCampusAlberta, OntarioLearn and Contact North.

And, we had discussions about rekindling a pan-Canadian approach to a Creative Commons Canada affiliate with CIPPIC.ca (University of Ottawa Law School) and a Athabasca University. I’ll leave this part of the post for Paul Stacey to report and elaborate.

Our contacts at HRSDC set us up perfectly for a meeting with more than 20 participants from across federal government departments. They asked us to share a presentation on our work at BCcampus and then to situate the work in a national context. They also asked us to react to three skill-testing questions in the following areas during a three-hour session:

• Describe one or two real life examples in detail of the kinds of collaborative and innovative efforts by your member institutions – - and BCampus’s role in helping to bring these about. This will help people start with a tangible idea of the “what”, and provides a foundation on which to ground loftier extrapolations of how PSE may further transform in the future.

• Provide quantifiable evidence of the efficiency gains that such collaborative innovations have been able to achieve (in terms of either improved learning opportunities and outcomes or cost-savings, or both) and which thereby provide the main lines of the business case for governments and institutions to further expand such efforts in the future.

• Provide views on implications (if any) for HRSDC and more broadly for the Government of Canada. Are there federal programs or policies that should be adjusted to better support the efforts of institutions and provincial governments to expand efficient learning practices? Are there aspects of the modernization of PSE in Canada that require pan-Canadian coordination in order to achieve optimal economies of scale? And among these, do any require federal government involvement?

From the questions we were pitched from a primarily policy analyst audience, it was clear that government departments nationally, like their provincial counterparts, are looking for educational technologies to prove themselves on a number of levels of influence – strategic, pedagogic and economic.

Image: BCcampus 2012. CC_BY.

We were pleased to use our presentation and clear examples within it to reinforce the point that innovative and collaborative practices do have a measurable value proposition on those three levels.

We also made a pitch for HRSDC to consider some action initiatives it might support that could build towards a real national strategy:

1. Support the design of a resource library to share “open” trades training resources (Red Seal) across Canada
2. Support a prototype national survey (initially with 3 provinces – AB, BC, ON) to explore issues associated with management of online learning, faculty development, use of open resources, cloud-based delivery infrastructure, and quality assurance strategies
3. Support the establishment of a Creative Commons Canada as a Canada-wide open licensing service benefiting all provinces, sectors and creators
4. Help define the public service, economic benefits, and business models available to Canadians through open licensing
5. Support the generation of an action agenda and set of targets for solving skills and labour market needs through OER and educational partnerships.
6. Support the development of technical linkages between CoursesBC, BC Transfer Guide, Education Planner, and Job Trends data to help students identify gaps in their transcripts or program opportunities that link well with employment opportunities

So, we’re happy to announce that the BCcampus Strategic Council has approved our strategic plan for 2012-2015 and has directed us to proceed to drafting a fiscal year service plan for 2012-2013.

A previous post on evergreen strategic planning outlined some of the sources we’ve researched to write a plan that allows us to push into new educational technology focus areas while strengthening and maintaining the systemic infrastructure we’ve built in British Columbia to support the online learning initiatives of our system partners.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions about operational tactics that will allow us to achieve the key directions and goals outlined in our strategic plan.

Compass image by Jaypee. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

At BCcampus we monitor a number of sources for new information about strategic initiatives with systemic focus, internationally, nationally and regionally.  We keep an “evergreen” plan bubbling on the front burner, review it annually, and then take it forward to our Strategic Council for review and ratification. The plan provides the framework for our annual service plan that is funded by the Ministry of Advanced Education.

Our sources also include local institutions and their planning documents, as well as peer organizations worldwide.

This year we asked one our creative SFU co-op education students, Diana Chan, to put together a meta-view of all the relevant plans within the British Columbia post-secondary sector. Diana came up with a very nice annotated view as a GoogleDoc with links to the specific documents. You can see the meta-view here: Strategic Plan Research Summary.

In addition we have also received strategy documents from the Council of Senior Student Affairs Leaders (CSSAL) and from our AskAway colleagues at the BC Electronic Library Network.

Further afield, these are some of the information sources we reviewed in building our draft 2012-2015 plan:

Australia – Open Universities Australia (OUA) http://www.open.edu.au like BCcampus, is a relatively new initiative that provides centralized access to online courses with transferable credit in the Australian university context on a national basis.

The Campus Computing Project annually publishes an update on the management of information technology in the higher education sector. This year’s survey is titled, The 2011 national survey of information technology in U.S. higher education: big gains in going mobile; slow movement to cloud computing.

Canadian colleagues and organizations with whom we work with closely and share ideas for improvement:

• ContactNorth.ca – We have hosted delegations, board members and staff from Contact North (Ontario) at BCcampus, and are currently working with ContactNorth in a consulting capacity to plan an exciting new initiative in Ontario that will incorporate some BCcampus service models
• eCampusAlberta.ca – BCcampus has collaborated on professional learning initiatives with colleagues at eCampusAlberta and has contributed OPDF models for use in Alberta

EDUCAUSE – http://www.educause.edu BCcampus is an institutional member of this US-based organization that organizes research and practice knowledge about information and communications technology (ICT) for higher education professionals globally. Adrian Sannier’s article in the most recent edition of the EDUCAUSE Review, If not now, when? http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1161.pdf, provides lots of food for thought about technology-induced disruptive change on the horizon for higher education.

Horizon Report – http://www.nmc.org BCcampus monitors the influential yearly Horizon Report published by the New Media Consortium. BCcampus staff member, Scott Leslie, has served on the advisory board for the NMC Horizon Report.

JISC United Kingdom http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ – BCcampus has hosted individuals and met with JISC delegations in BC. We follow JISC’s strategic directions. JISC is a national entity in the UK that provides infrastructure and supports ICT research and innovation.

OECD http://www.oecd.org – The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes working papers and research documents relevant to higher education in a global context. OECD’s most recent report is Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society – Pointers for Policy Development. The first set of strategic initiatives undertaken by BCcampus in 2003- 2006 were reinforced by recommendations from OECD’s (2005) research publication E-learning in tertiary education: Where do we stand. These initiatives included:

• Encouraging the dissemination of good practices to stimulate innovation, avoid wasteful duplication of efforts, and scale up successful experiments.
• Exploring the issues surrounding intellectual property in e-learning and specifically the exploration of open educational resources (OER).
• Promoting a dialogue between IT providers and institutions, and supporting public-private partnerships, in order to keep costs at a reasonable level.

The Open Education Resource Foundation continues to probe and challenge higher education thinkers and practitioners to consider an alternative future in which open educational resources become the study materials for students who choose to pursue independent study practices towards a credential awarded partially through challenge or prior learning assessment and recognition. Already anchor partners in the Open Education Resource University (OERu) consortium are actively considering how to implement this version of the future.

Sloan Consortium Report 2011. http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011 These annual survey reports from the US are solid indicators of current practices and trending opportunities within the higher duration sector.

SURF Netherlands http://www.surf.nl/en/ – BCcampus has hosted delegations from SURF at our Vancouver offices. We follow SURF’s strategic directions closely. SURF has a national responsibility for infrastructure, innovation and ICT research in the Netherland, similar to JISC in the UK.

WCET – http://wcet.wiche.edu/ BCcampus is an institutional member of the WICHE Cooperative on Educational Technologies, and co-chairs the WCET eLearning Common Interest Group (CIG) that surveys systemic consortia in the US and Canada on a yearly basis. WCET is the largest and most well-known colleague network for e-learning consortia members worldwide. It is a child organization of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), and is based in Boulder, Colorado.

As a prelude to Open Access Week, BCcampus and partners invited higher education institutional participants to a special event exploring the ways in which Open Access and Open Educational Resources (OER) are opening up education, and probing how these ideas might provide an action agenda for BC higher education practitioners.

The event included a keynote address and panel presentations in the morning, and interactive sessions in the afternoon that were designed to collect feedback from the face-to-face participants as well as from online participants who followed the day’s events via live web streams and a backchannel Twitter feed. The web stream archive for each section of the Opening Education event can be found here –> open.bccampus.ca

Sir John Daniel’s speech on the topic of Publishing with Public Money for Public Benefit set the tone for the day on a high plane, one that validated the interest and commitment of audience members for making educational materials more freely accessible and remixable. Sir John’s speech also challenged us to confidently marshall our arguments in support of open education, open government and open data – in his words, “to provide a common wealth.”

The panelists, Venkataraman Balaji (COL), Wayne Mackintosh (OER Foundation), Rory McGreal (AthabascaU) and Joy Kirchner (UBC Library), each took a turn highlighting opportunities in the OER space for higher education institutions to engage students and instructors about the principles of open thinking. In each case the panelists demonstrated examples of practice from their areas of interest to show what is possible and where the future could take us. Their panel segments were web streamed.

• Balaji’s segment showed how COL has instituted open policies for its collection of highly valuable educational resources. He also complimented Canada’s expertise in agricultural sciences and noted that open knowledge in this domain could be used globally in support of food security initiatives

• Wayne provided a passionate overview of his work with world-class open projects such as WikiEducator and the newly minted concept of the Open Education Resource University (OERu)

• Rory spoke with his customary vigour about copyright and educational rights, highlighting Athabasca University’s approach to providing open access journals and other resources that it believes should be freely accessible under the mantra of open scholarship

• Joy presented a recent case-study of action on the scholarly communications front at the University of British Columbia, illustrating the actions that a large university must undertake in an effort to support its employees, instructors and students to operationalize a balanced approach to copyright management and open access

In the afternoon, Paul Stacey led an interactive session using wireless clickers to probe and collect audience opinion on issues associated with open thinking that might help us to build a systemic action agenda within the BC higher education sector.

Workshop participants discuss an “open” action agenda for BC higher education.

I followed Paul with an Etherpad session with the face-to-face participants and online audience to collect ideas on three themes that might helps us move forward on the open front.

1. How do we help educators learn more about open?
2. How can we best promote open teaching and learning practices in our institutions?
3. What can we do to influence policy in institutions?

For me it was a refreshing and re-energizing day, one that reinforced the spiral approach that needs to occur with innovative ideas as they move from the periphery to the centre of our thinking.

Open content and open access in higher education are barely 10-year old concepts in a digital age, but ones that I truly believe are beginning to show signs of becoming a larger part of the consciousness of students, instructors and institutions.

The stars are aligning in interesting ways to start this academic year.

It will certainly be a year of big challenges. And with those challenges will come the potential for breakthrough risk :: reward scenarios.

One of the challenges alluded to by the tweet copied above will be how institutions and instructors manage access to published educational resources for their courses, given the decision by UBC and a growing number of Canadian universities to back away from Access Copyright agreements. The proposed tariff increase was rightly viewed as gouging, and so 26 post-secondary institutions have decided to explore other options.

The options include direct negotiation with authors and publishers, as well as increased exploration of emerging alternatives such as open textbooks and other open educational resources (OER). No doubt there are many instances where the best resource is a published textbook or authored work. So, institutions will directly negotiate those rights as required to provide the resources that instructors and students can use.

And yes, it may be painful initially to move away from the current method of acquiring course-pack licenses, but the opportunity horizon is optimal for a new economy based on open resources, collaboratively built and shared among educators using Creative Commons licenses. This scenario is the upside that will be catalyzed by the proposed Access Copyright (AC) tariff increase that many major institutions are emphatically rejecting.

This may be the year that open educational resources become a mainstream alternative.

For the second spring in row, the instructional design community from BC post-secondary institutions organized a very successful one-day event on ID, that was hosted this year at the Ike Barber Centre at the University of British Columbia. We at BCcampus were pleased to provide some sponsorship for this professional event from our Curriculum Development and Academic Growth initiatives.

50+ professionals participated in a series of small group discussions on key topics including:

• Innovation/creativity and instructional design
• Social media, Web 2.0 and instructional design
• Mobile learning and instructional design
• Future of instructional design
• Designing for learning environments that aren’t courses (communities of practice, personal learning environments)

Dr. Tony Bates, mentor to our community, provided a short opening context-setting message and then circulated among the groups to hear the discussion and to pick up intel on the issues raised.

Tony brought the group full circle towards the end of the day with his usual brilliant synthesis of the issues and their implications for learning design and practice. A summary of the day’s activities with photos and video can be found here –> JustID Networking Event – May 2011.

A great day.

In Malaysia, like everywhere I’ve visited in Asia recently, the economy seems to be booming, with more and more Malaysian citizens seeking to upgrade their skills and accreditation by taking advanced studies, many through open and distance learning (ODL). WOU is a new university that is boldly differentiating its programs using a refined approach to ODL that draws on innovative practices and proven technologies that can support learners with their academic quests. So it’s no surprise that Wawasan is also interested in the capabilities afforded by OER for its students and instructors.

In fact one enterprising young faculty member had already built Wawasan’s first prototype course on computer systems from existing and reusable OER materials. By presenting his work in progress, he demonstrated how open scholarship can work, inviting his colleagues to probe and ask about his thinking processes for the course design and the value that he added locally to contextualize the materials for a Malaysian audience. Great stuff from an institutional role model.

Workshop participants joined us from Pakistan, Hong Kong and other Malaysian higher education institutions. They were a highly experienced and knowledgable group that had no difficulty in seeing the promise of open. And like their counterparts in institutions worldwide, their questions focused primarily on how to promote the value of OER consumption and contribution among their colleagues, the quality assurance aspects of open resources, as well as questions of community and how they could find supportive mentors and colleagues to help them move forward.

We workshop facilitators Venkataraman Balaji (COL), Wayne Mackintosh (OER Foundation) and David Porter (BCcampus) provided our individual insights into key OER concepts over three days, using a combination of short 20-minute presentations followed by 20-30 minute activities that involved participants individually and in small groups with hands-on activities designed to immerse them in the “doing part” of OER. We also provided a prototype wiki-based course environment for self-study that we tested and will release for open access in late June 2011.

The workshop was organized and hosted by Tan Sri Dato’ Prof. Gajaraj Dhanarajan, emeritus professor, and Wawasan Open University’s first CEO. Raj has been CEO of Commonwealth of Learning and the Open University of Hong Kong. He is well known as a leader in distance education circles and has a long history of promoting capacity-building activities in Asia and in other parts of the planet.

The workshop materials were funded through IDRC (Canada). The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is a Canadian government (crown) corporation with a focus on ICTs as a key means to foster development.

Keynote speakers Tony Bates and Michael Peters each provided a unique perspective on the road ahead. And, each used a solid research foundation to support their predictions.

Tony Bates presented with his customary well-documented and researched materials on the current state of technology-enabled learning in our institutions and a view to the future. As a supporter of open education in all its forms, Tony was clear that quality remains the key factor that will help drive open educational resources (OER) from what is primarily a supply phenomenon to one that addresses demand for quality OER teaching materials, too. This particular dynamic is documented in a a recent blog post from Tony, titled “A reflection on the OER debate: every which way but loose.”

Michael Peters provided a another well-researched view of the educational landscape, and expanded on concepts of openness well beyond the OER teaching resources and self-study materials, making a call for more open scholarship and support for a “recursive public.” Michael is editing a journal that is currently calling for papers on “open.” Take a look at the E-learning and Digital Media call for manuscripts about teaching and learning with OER.

I couldn’t find Michael’s paper from the TRU event online, but I did find this 2008 presentation that will give a flavour of his perspective.

Image source: By Tengis Bilegsaikhan from Milan, Italy (Naadam) [CC-BY-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

I traveled to Mongolia in September 2010 as part of an external resource team and as a guest of the DREAM IT research project. DREAM IT is the local coordinating project for IDRC-funded research in Mongolia. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is a Canadian government (crown) corporation with a focus on ICTs as a key means to foster development.

Mongolia is developing quickly with almost half its population located in its capital, Ulaanbaatar. One of the first signs I saw in Mongolia was a coming soon billboard for Ikea Ulaanbaatar. Along the roadway from the airport to my city hotel were dealerships for Mercedes and Jeep, as well as breweries that produce the many popular beers you can enjoy in Mongolia. This country is in rapid growth mode.

The city centre had many hotels, restaurants and new shops that demonstrated that Mongolia is quickly becoming a major tourist destination as well as a centre for business and commerce. Sukhbaatar Square at the centre of Ulaanbataar (UB) is an impressively large public square flanked by government buildings and imposing statues.

Traffic in UB is mega, with buses, trucks, SUVs and cars everywhere competing for driving lanes, giving the city a gridlock feel throughout the work day. Getting anywhere, even short distances within the city took a longish time. Contrast this with travel outside the city – in the wide open spaces, where few cars were seen on a 80 kilometre journey to a rural school in Erdene Soum.

The “model” school we visited in Erdene was both well-equipped and well run, judging from what I saw there and from the teachers, students and administrators I met. There were three computer labs we visited. One that was used for teaching high school students and the others that were part of a teacher-training centre within the school.

The administrators were totally up front about what worked and didn’t. Network bandwidth was not always good and the school team has resorted to keeping a set of caching servers available for bandwidth intensive applications such as video programs. Any thoughts of a networked-enabled distance learning initiative would clearly be a challenge. However, anything that relied on distribution systems based on discs and servers would be well supported.

I found references in school texts to a localized version of Joomla in use in Mongolian schools as part of the ICT course for high school students. We also learned that Moodle had been localized for use in Mongolia through a previous DREAM IT research project. Excellent first steps for an ICT education build out.

Mongolia is resource rich. The mining industry is central to country’s future. So, a careful approach to leveraging investment from resource extraction is seen as a key to the development agenda, as is investment in the education and training of the country’s citizens. It’s no coincidence that the DREAM IT project is active in the health, environment, IT and education sectors, sponsoring local research and development and capacity-building initiatives with a view to influencing policy development from the outcomes of successful projects.

During my ten days in Mongolia, I helped deliver a national seminar on distance education and open educational resources (OER) and demonstrated the potential of these strategies for bringing wider access to learning resources for all Mongolians. Educators, administrators, and researchers from the general education and TVET sectors attended the national distance learning and OER seminar and were highly engaged in discussions throughout the day-long event.

Mongolia is actively pursuing an educational reform process that will bring a new shape and structure to its elementary and secondary education systems. At the same time it is embarking on a major initiative to develop an innovative technical and vocational education and training (TVET) initiative supported by the Millennium Challenge Fund.

The primary outcome of the seminar and the many meetings throughout our team’s visit to Mongolia will be a research proposal to DREAM IT for the support of two 18-month long OER capacity-building initiatives in the general education and TVET sectors that will begin in 2011.

I know the initiatives will be a success because the spirit of Chinggis will make it so.

The Mulder presentation conveyed a sober view of what it actually takes to move open education and OER models forward in the context of academic, institutional and political structures that are specific to individual jurisdictions. Fred’s examples were attuned to the reality of the Netherlands, but much of his approach is likely generalizable in other western contexts.

My take-aways:

Have a systemic strategy (make it explicit)

Use a strategy than spans K-Life (K-12, post-secondary and beyond)

Market the strategy effectively (to colleagues, to funders, to politicians)

Draw upon supporting strategies from other contexts (The Netherlands pointed to India’s strategy)

Pick an ideal license model for OERs (even if you’ve previously chosen something less than ideal)

Seek adequate funding

Use open textbooks as an easy entry point to providing open resources systemically

Understand that a mix of open and proprietary may be a reality you will face

Ensure that training and research are the complementary bookends of the implementation process

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