“The universities with students at a distance are more innovative”

The UOC has recently joined IMS Global Learning Consortium, a global, non-profit, member association that aims to enhance learning worldwide through the use of technology and provide leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries. Rob Abel, IMS Chief Executive Officer, has been in Barcelona to attend the opening ceremony of the University Campus Conference and contribute with his experience to the Campus Project, the pioneering initiative that will enable the Catalan universities to construct their virtual campuses using free software.

The UOC has recently joined IMS Global Learning Consortium, a global, non-profit, member association that aims to enhance learning worldwide through the use of technology and provide leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries. Rob Abel, IMS Chief Executive Officer, has been in Barcelona to attend the opening ceremony of the University Campus Conference and contribute with his experience to the Campus Project, the pioneering initiative that will enable the Catalan universities to construct their virtual campuses using free software.

The objective of IMS is to add efficiency to the implementation of these new technologies. In a new area such as user technology for learning, new products, categories and ideas are coming up all the time. There is a lot of innovation and the question is how are these upcoming innovations integrated with other products and services that might already exist. IMS helps by creating standards that allow new technologies to plug in with older technologies. In the last ten years there has been a tremendous rise of what some people call learning management systems: software systems that allow easy access to online learning material and interaction between students, teachers and faculty. One of the areas that IMS focuses a lot on are the various standards that allow these systems to integrate with administrator systems and with digital content that can be used within these course management systems. The main objective of the use of technology for learning is to increase access to education for people who may not be able to physically come to a campus or, even if they can, when it may not be practical for them. It may be more convenient for them if they do not have to come to a physical location as often. Yes, all of the above. Probably the largest need is in the first category that you mentioned, what most people would call the non-traditional students or the lifelong learner. There is a trend in our world today that education is very important. And what you need to know changes very fast! Yes, and as a result of that, many people find themselves in the situation where they are attending university while they are working or having a family, or both. Therefore, ease of access is extremely important. But this is just one of the goals. The second area is quality. In a classroom environment, the teacher has to teach one way despite the fact that the audience may have wide-ranging needs and different levels of prior experience. The hope with technology is to be able to customise the learning experience to individual needs and background. And the third is affordability, which is, to a degree, related to the first aim, accessibility, because you can serve more students if the whole educational experience is more affordable. The hope is that technology can aid in some of the more mundane tasks of the teaching experience, eg, marking homework, so the teacher can focus more on actually mentoring the student through the learning experience. It is really those three things: access, quality and affordability. I have to say that, officially, IMS is agnostic to the business model. In other words, our goal is to see the maximum return on investment across all types of products and services, whether they are open source or commercial. And therefore, our focus on standards helps make that happen. If a commercial proprietary learning management platform is built to the same standards that, say Moodle is, then what that means is that we have created an efficiency in the marketplace, so that others can build innovative technologies that work with either platform rather than one or the other. Now, that said, open source and open technologies in general play an important role in standards organisations because we like to have open reference models as standards and open source helps create those open reference models. A reference model is a set of software that anyone can get their hands on to understand how it works. So, when Moodle implements one of our standards we can point to many others in the community and say ?that is an example of how to do it?, whereas we cannot do the same with proprietary software... Right. So there is a nice coupling between the open source initiatives and IMS. In fact, Moodle is a member of IMS. When using technology to support education you need to have a vision of what constitutes a good education, what is going to be more effective for the student and the teacher. Having a platform you can customise gives you a greater possibility to create software that can implement that vision. So open source is particularly powerful for institutions that have a vision of doing new things with education. And we find that the universities that are serving students at a distance are more innovative. Some of the more revered institutions that are known for their research are among the least likely to move to new models. They are very comfortable with their current approach: they are comfortable in the knowledge that they are already revered, that they are known for their research, that they have their nice campus environment... In IMS we actually have some projects that are looking at replacing books with digital materials. Books are not going away overnight but there are good reasons to look for alternatives. The cost. In the US, the cost of the textbooks is a big issue. Students pay a lot of money for those physical textbooks. The publishers are large organisations that invest quite a lot in new developments and they realise that they have to address this problem. Congress has held hearings on this issue and it is just a matter of time before they will be under pressure to control the cost. Now the best way for them to do that is to offer a digital alternative so they can bring down the price to the student and still maintain their profit margin. They are now very motivated to move. That is the challenge. Students don?t really like digital copies of books. They prefer a regular one. But the opportunity is, and that is what we are working on at IMS, to create a new type of a book, a digital and more interactive book in which you could collaborate with your fellow students to exchange information and ideas about the reading. It is not something that is going to happen overnight, but we have actually started to produce prototypes of these things. In terms of mainstream production, 5 or 10 years. But, in terms of prototypes: right now. We are already working with Ohio State University on a test course where essentially they have an online set of materials that are replacing the textbook. However, my guess is that these technologies will not completely replace books, but the need to buy an entire book. This is an area in which it will be interesting to have the UOC collaborating on. Typically, the universities focused on distance learning have created their own materials that are like companion materials, printed materials that accompany the online set of materials. So they have complete control over this and, in a sense, they are publishers in their own right. So these are great people to have collaborating on this with us. Great question. We are only starting to define this collaboration, but I think there are a lot of opportunities. We have an initiative in the digital content area called Common Cartridge, which is gaining large support from platform companies, as well as from educational publishers. If the UOC incorporates this standard into its products, it will provide much more portability of content among different systems. In particular, some of the work that is going on in the UOC that relates to personalisation and accessibility seems to coincide to a great extent with work carried out by IMS. The UOC has already been using some of IMS?s specifications. Now they are in a situation where they can interact completely with a 100 other organisations that are doing the same: IMS?s members and subscribers. And IMS can benefit from the UOC?s participation, thanks to its knowledge and experience in innovation. We are very glad that the UOC has joined us. One of the observations in history has been that the technologies are most successfully adapted when they don?t really change what people do, but how they do it. In other words, they make their life more efficient, more productive and easier. I think what we are going to see in the next five years is more applications of technology to improve the productivity by which certain things can be done. One of the advances we can see right now is that the cost of producing multimedia has really gone down. The use of technologies like that will change teaching styles over time and that will represent the most revolutionary part. But let me add something about education. Sometimes people think of education as something that does not change much. In other words, we still educate now the same way we did a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, centuries ago in some cases. And some things have changed. For instance, to sort through a large amount of information is a real learning skill that people need and historically have not had to deal with. That is extremely important. The other is that, because of the explosion of information, knowledge itself has become more relative. It is harder to determine what is true and what is not. That itself is a huge challenge for education. And third, we are moving into a much more global society: are we really educating people to be global citizens? I think these three things are very unique new aspects of education. Well, your guess is as good as mine! But I think it all starts with defining what is a quality education and then we will have to get to the use of technology. Historically there has been a trade off between those three things we talked about ?access, quality and affordability? and we have to change that. If we really want the vast majority of the population to be able to deal with the issues I talked about, we need to have new approaches and that is where technology comes in: to make that learning process more effective.