The last few years have seen a massive rise in public interest regarding online education. The bulk of this attention is directed at online universities in particular, especially since the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oxford and other celebrated names started throwing their weight behind the concept. While this is great, education that falls outside of university-structured curriculums will prove itself a much more interesting topic in the years to come. This is because online education that doesn’t constitute a formalised bachelors or postgraduate curriculum won’t be held back by comparisons to its offline equivalent the way university-linked online learning has. Here, we are going to see much more experimentation and innovation, which will also mean much more market movement and opportunity for the emergence and growth of new training organisations. Australia’s position as an education-driven economy (with well over 5000 RTOs) puts companies here in a great place.
The roots of online education lie in the birth of the Internet, but the mechanics of how it functions currently, take more influence from distance education, which universities across Europe pioneered in the late nineteenth-century. Called correspondence courses,this method of education relied on textbooks and the mail system, but still largely tried to replicate the curriculum of universities at the time. In the 1930s, radio and television began playing a bigger role (especially in the United States) in delivering these correspondence courses. The idea of a master teacher delivering education in a sermon-like broadcast was touted as the future of education. Australia’s “School of the air” system followed this method and is now considered one of the pioneers of this format. Britain’s Open University broke new ground in the 1960s by tailoring their curriculum to suit the various formats they used to reach distance students. Open University was also significant because it brought forward another concept that has become linked to online education – namely that it is open to students from a variety of backgrounds who usually would not have had the capacity to achieve a formal education. Fast-forward to 2012 and the mass media was calling it “the year of the MOOC”. MOOC, for those who don’t know, stands for Massively Open Online Course. The core principles of MOOCs, are that they are scalable, have open-license content and, of course, feature online courseware. While being a MOOC isn’t exclusive to university curriculums, it is these institutions that have brought the concept to public attention.
Advocates of online education will point to the obvious benefits – accessibility of learning and openness of learning content. Adults who are working full-time can engage with learning resources delivered and consumed at times suitable to them without being dictated by business hours. People living in rural areas, and those with serious disabilities aren’t hindered in learning by location and mobility. Most significantly perhaps, those of a lower social economic status (from developed to underdeveloped countries) are now a huge step closer to being able to educate themselves. A cell-phone and an Internet connection is often all that is required now. There are of course other more complex benefits, one being that the proliferation of open courseware mixing with increased acceptance of online learning will lead to better matches between student and subject. Not every university offers a degree in Bowling Industry Management (Vincennes University does), nor does every student wishing to study it, live in Indiana (location of Vincennes University).
Criticisms of online learning have typically focused on three aspects: the fact that learners must self-regulate themselves (often with little or no consequences for failing to complete work), the typically low completion rate of online courses in comparison with offline courses, and the lack of interaction between educator and learner. The first two issues are intertwined and present an obvious problem. If there are few consequences for failing or not completing a course, the completion rate will of course be lower compared to those which come packed with a financial or social penalty for failing. If financial or social penalties are enforced, however, the course ceases to be open, and an essential benefit of online education is lost. The academic community has recently been grappling with the question of whether this will be responsible for an increasing aggregate level of education in society with an overall lower quality of that education, and what the consequences for this are. Is having two thousand moderately-good surgeons better than having fifty superstar surgeons? The third issue is a bit trickier. Key to reaping the benefits of open, online courseware is scale, and direct interaction between educator and learner doesn’t facilitate scale – because time and labour are fixed elements.
When it comes to implementing online education, there are currently four leaders: Coursera, edX, Udacity and Khan Academy. Coursera and edX are backed by major universities and offer a digitised form of their current course offerings. Coursera in particular, has proved itself innovative by allowing anyone to enrol in its courses for free while charging a fee for receiving official certification for course completion. This is an attempt to toe the line between making learning widely available and providing a platform for ambitious learners to distinguish themselves (and for the company to turn a profit). Many of Coursera’s courses have been specifically made for the platform by top-tier universities, although questions remain regarding learning outcomes given that most of the courses are still modelled after existing university courses and the primary method of assessing students is computer-based. edX focuses primarily on the open, largely dropping existing course material online in whatever form they come. Khan Academy is best known for its bite-sized, video-based courses that blend learning and entertainment, which have been very successful amongst children. Udacity began by offering university-level courses but has since moved towards vocational training for professionals. Since the move, Udacity has put the most emphasis on assessment, teaming up with Pearson VUE to ensure that results reflect the reality of learning outcomes.
Outside of university and school focused online learning, things continue to get more interesting. Eliademy puts emphasis on networking, encouraging students to create learning content as much as educators and offering a less structured system. Udemy is mostly market-driven, providing tools for anyone who wishes to create learning content and earn a profit in doing so. Codecademy, which is free and offers programming courses, tries to foster competitiveness in its learners by rewarding users who have completed certain exercises with badges and banners to display on their profile. Many commentators have praised this method of providing gratification for learning outcomes in smaller intervals than traditional courses. Each of these organisations is carving out a unique space in the learning industry and showing others that there are still many spaces available.
RTOs across Australia have a few tough decisions to make, but many opportunities to be realised when implementing online learning. Will the learning be synchronous or asynchronous? Faster internet connections have the potential to turn learning from a product back to an experience. How will the power of data analytics be used? Reading Eggs and Mathletics are helping identify very specific issues children are having with maths and reading in a way that a teacher may not have the time to. These concepts can certainly be applied in vocational training situations. Finally, how wide are training organisations willing to stretch the market for their training? There could well be people at the opposite end of the country, eager to take the course a training company is offering online. There could be people even further away.
