Minimum viable experience and the challenge of going online in 20/21

Our universities face a colossal and existential challenge about what to do for 20/21, what will the intake look like? What will the state of universities finances be? Will some go under? What restrictions and challenges will we still be facing?

No one is a seer, but 20/21’s academic year will be unlike any other. The idea that students will arrive on campus for freshers week seems unthinkable. So universities, just like they are at the moment, will need to find another way to teach and assess their students.

The emergency remote teaching we’re seeing right now is providing continuity but we might find that this is the easiest part. Assessment is starting to loom large and this could be the greatest challenge of all the university education integrants to deal with in the short term. Some will make wise or bold decisions and re-design effectively given the circumstances, some may struggle.

We may also see calamities as some institutions come unstuck due to a lack of creativity, collective will to significantly alter and a lack of compassion and understanding of the pervading effects of this global pandemic on everyone, not least their students, that leads to many grievances and calls for recourse.

Teaching and assessing students in 19–20 have been dominating efforts understandably but there’s the intractable issue of 20/21 bearing down on universities. If as many are expecting, the strictures on traditional on-campus education are continued, will universities be prepared to move beyond emergency remote teaching to something closer to pre-existing online courses and programmes?

Well over the past 10 years UK universities have been engaging with online education more in a number of different ways

Although the exaggerated claims of their pending seismic impact to higher education have long since been debunked, MOOCs and their hype did lead a number of universities to invest in online education in a way they hadn’t done before. Following on from the big US players edX and Coursera, the Open University owned FutureLearn was launched in late 2012 with 12 UK university founding partners. There are now over 40 UK universities partnered with MOOC platforms to deliver online education.

In some cases, universities made significant investments and recruited online education professionals and teams to deliver high-quality courses. But, in most cases MOOC activity has remained a niche, glossy add-on to universities core education business and portfolio, few have engaged with it strategically. Therefore, MOOCs have not moved most universities forward enough in online education to give them a basis for online delivery on a significant scale.

There are universities who have made more strategic in-house moves into online education and invested in and grown their online education portfolios. Some now have large teams of learning designers, developers, media producers, project managers etc. These universities who are very much in the minority, are likely to be some of the most prepared to develop online education at the kind of scale that might be necessary.

There are also now over 30 UK universities that have developed partnerships with online programme managers or OPM’s. These are private companies that provide services to help universities develop online education. These types of partnerships have been steadily growing in the UK, sometimes under the radar. The nature of these partnerships tends to be a long-term investment in online education as an additional income stream, to reach international markets and new demographics of mid-career professionals. Universities who have these partnerships may be able to capitalise on a little extra help for 20/21 but will probably most benefit from a potentially largely uninterrupted activity and income stream in testing times.

One other component of the preparedness of institutions to scale up online education for 20/21 is the fact that excluding the Open University, only a handful of institutions are actually delivering undergraduate degrees online. So even the most prepared universities will be offering some form of online undergraduate experience for the very first time.

Not only that they’ll be offering it to students who didn’t sign up for this and who haven’t previously been considered as having a strong appetite for online learning. The recent partnership between LSE and 2U to deliver seven online undergraduate degrees is evidence of this as it was framed as being “designed to accommodate adult learners looking to accelerate their careers.”

In all honesty, no UK university is prepared to take all of their courses and programmes and deliver them online in a way that’s broadly replicable to specifically purposed high-quality online education. Because very few universities have

1. A large proportion of academic teaching staff experienced and skilled in online teaching.
2. A large interdisciplinary learning design and production team to support online learning at that scale.
3. Well-developed and streamlined processes for developing online education that cohesively interact with other processes, procedures and systems.
4. Services that reflect the flexibility, any time any place nature of an online education experience.

Delivering a high quality online education experience entails much more than just the modality, as David Lefebvre rightly says

“The challenging part relates to organisational change. Switching to online teaching and learning means that everyone involved has to do their job in a slightly different way.”

So given we know that universities aren’t setup to deliver high-quality online education across the board in 20/21 and we’re starting to hear of student dissatisfaction with their online provision, what can universities do about addressing this in 20/21?

Well, one of the first steps to take, is actually one of the first steps you’d take in designing an online course — know your learners.

Let’s be frank, few if any who may study online for some of 20/21 will have wanted to in the first place. The on campus experience that they’ve signed up for is a holistic and rich one encompassing so much more than university studies, students come to study but many also come for much more than that.

We also know that most returning students will have had no experience of learning online either, other than the emergency remote teaching we’re seeing at the moment. Because in the UK we’ve lagged behind other countries like the US, which has seen consistent growth in the number of students taking an online course as part of their university experience.

These two factors highlight the scale of the challenge. Many of us who have worked in online education for years all know that there is little possibility of universities being able to offer the kinds of quality of courses and programmes that we’ve been designing and producing over longer timescales and on a smaller scale.

So we face a huge prioritisation exercise and I think one approach could be for universities to focus on how they can provide a high touch supported digital experience at a distance, because I think this kind of experience could paper over some of the inevitable cracks.

This is where we face further issues particularly in respect to learning technologies in universities, and especially the content centric LMS. This is not a technology designed to support high-touch modern digital experiences, it’s monochrome in a time of colour.

Anders Krohn describes this well:

First and most importantly, teaching and learning are complex activities that are fundamentally about people, not technology. As opposed to being the determining driver, technology should act as an enabler of certain ways of doing things. This means that what a product enables and encourages — its affordances — are crucial.

So as we start to prioritise things, strong consideration of more of a communication centred rather than content centred platform could be a part of a plan. There’s been much noise generated around communication and collaboration platforms as a replacement for the LMS and recent announcements like Coventry University adopting Aula, show how things are inching in this direction.

These types of platforms aren’t the be all and end all for online learning, but if their affordances help nudge educators with little experience in online teaching towards greater communication, collaboration, feedback, and enable organic peer to peer interactions and relationship building this adds up to a much more holistic digital experience than the LMS can offer.

In times like these connections, communication, experience and community matter hugely and so it might be this type of approach that gets universities through a challenge, the like of which none are prepared for and have ever faced before.