The Open University of the United Kingdom

NKI, Norway

TecMinho, Portugal

The Recommendations of the CISAER project flow directly from the findings of the surveys, analyses and evaluation presented in chapter 1-9.

They should not be read in isolation from these chapters.

Among the findings on which these recommendations are based are:

• At 1.1.2000, at the conclusion of the CISAER project, there were about 1,000, 000 courses on the internet, 30,000 of which could be said to conform to a scientific definition of online education, with 22,000 of these being listed with their URLs on the TeleCampus portal, from New Brunswick, Canada, with many of these courses making didactic use of the World Wide Web (see chapter 1).

• e-Learning comprises online learning, web-based training, virtual classrooms and universities, digital collaboration, technology-assisted distance learning (see chapter 2).

• The CISAER project accepts the assertion of Prof. Dr Betty Collis that e-Learning began in 1995 when, she asserts, the World Wide Web emerged as the new "killer application" for vocational Education and Training (VET) (see chapter 2)

• In 1995-Dr Murray Goldberg of the University of British Columbia, Canada, states that he and Sesan Salari began work on the world's most visible web-training kernel called WebCT. At 5.1.2000 he states that WebCT had 5,100,000 student accounts, in more than 123,000 courses, developed by 33,000 university staff, at over 1,100 institutions in 48 countries around the world (see chapter 2).

• The CISAER project demonstrated that by 1998 WWW-based education was a mature sector of VET educational and training provision. It did this by identifying 80 world leaders in the sector, carrying out in-depth interviews with them on the theoretical and practical constructs of the sector, analysing the replies and publishing a 137 page review of the field (see chapter 3).

• In 1998 the Open University of the United Kingdom reported that 50,000 of its students were online and that they sent 70,000,000 emails, and that these were read 700,000,000 times.

• In 1999 the Open University of Hong Kong reported that it had 500,000 volumes in its electronic, online, virtual library for its distance students and that in 1999 these volumes were used 5,200,000 times by its 25,000 students.

• In March 2000, Riverdeep, the Irish e-Learning company, was floated on the Nasdaq Index in New York, with an initial capital valuation of $1,000,000,000.

• This made Irish schoolteacher, Pat McDonagh, quickly, one of Europe's richest industrialists with a personal e-Learning holding of e 1,000,000,000.

• CISCO Systems, one of the world's most influential telecommunications companies predicted, in March 2000, that more than half of all technical training, the central theme of the Leonardo da Vinci programme, would be done by e-Learning by the year 2003.

• The CISAER project has demonstrated the maturity and complexity of courses on the World Wide Web as a sector of VET provision, and showed that it is globally represented, with the European Union seriously under-represented, (especially chapters 6 and 7).

The EU training deficit and the leadership of the United States of America in this sector of VET provision is clear and the CISAER report show that web-based courses are a global phenomenon in which the European Union has grave difficulties.

The major impact that the partners would like to see from their work on the CISAER project is a revision of the European Commission's priorities for Education and Training in the period 2000-2006 in three areas:

• The 2000-2006 Framework Programme of The Directorate General for the Information Society (the former DG XIII)

• The Minerra part of the SOCRATES programme of the Directorate General for Education and Culture (the former DG XXII)

• The Leonardo da Vinci programme of the Directorate General for Education and Culture (the former DG XXII).

All of these three programmes for the period of 2000-2006 have important elements of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in training without a major focus on e-Learning.

A first step in the direction of a revision of the EU priorities in the direction suggested by the CISAER report has already been taken by the announcement in February 2000 of and initiative in e-Learning by the Commissioner for Education and Culture, Ms V Reding.

The recommendations of the CISAER project are:

Chapter 3 presents a number of strategic recommendations to politicians, administrators of educational institutions, and online educators. The recommendations, which are based on the research and information presented in this report, are discussed throughout the chapter and listed below:

1. Promote national and international harmonisation of degrees, certificates, credits, and grades to facilitate online mobility of students
2. Oppose national regulations that inhibit institutions form charging tuition fees
3. Focus on cost effective online education
4. Develop better systems for administration of online education
5. Support initiatives for training of online teachers, administrators, and instructional designers
6. Oppose regulations and attitudes that inhibit online assessment
7. Support further research on online pedagogy and didactics
8. Develop and implement strategies to reduce teacher workload.

There is a steady growth of institutions that offer online courses to students in other countries, and the analysis presents many examples of international collaboration and thinking. However, most of the global initiatives seem to be experiments and ambitions rather than main priorities. One important barrier is the problems with acceptance of foreign degrees, certificates, credits, and grades as an integral part of education and professional development. International collaboration will benefit from a harmonisation on these important issues. North American universities may have a competitive advantage compared with Europe since North American universities have a relatively long tradition of credit transfer.

Accreditation could be an important competitive advantage and several strategies could be followed to achieve the necessary accreditation. Collaboration with institutions in other countries could result in bilateral accreditation.

A country should allow its universities and colleges to charge tuition fees for web-based course. Countries that don't can hardly be competitive in the emerging global educational marketplace. Tuition fees can stimulate change, facilitate collaboration between institutions, and be an incentive for export of courses. Examples from both Germany and Sweden show that these country restrictions are perceived as a barrier for online education.

The Analysis indicates that there are few institutions that can claim that provision of web-based courses have been an economic success, if they disregard external research and development grants. At the same time, most of the web-courses have relatively low enrolment. The cost of development and maintenance could be high, and there are many examples of expensive pilot projects that experiment with high-cost, state-of-the-art technology. All this implies that it is necessary to focus much more on how online education could become more cost effective. These issues include a focus on how online courses could handle larger enrolment and in prioritising cost effective technology and development schemes.

Institutions that plan to offer large scale and professional online education need an administrative system, which is integrated with the web. A discouraging, but important observation is that a number of institutions do not use the web for administrative purposes. Many of the administrative solutions are primitive, and much could be done to improve most of the existing systems. The standard, commercial systems are continuously being improved, but they may still need much local adaptation. They may only meet some of the administrative needs, and they could place some pedagogical limitations on the courses.

Online education is a new field with little research and practical experience. Practitioners need more knowledge and experience. Initiatives to disseminate existing research, examples of good practice, and training should be supported.

Assessment systems are strong indicators of how seriously course providers value their aims. One could argue that summative assessment is such an important issue for students, teachers, and course providers that experimentation with online assessment functions is risky and hard to find support for. Two obvious challenges for online assessment are authentication of student identification and detection of plagiarised digital material. Other barriers are public and institutional regulations, traditions for physical attendance, and technical limitations. These barriers to online assessment counteract the development of online education since they support face-to-face attendance and preserve traditional education.

While summative assessment of online courses seem to be very traditional and often has a face-to-face component, formative assessment is more experimental and based on online activities.

However, there are some strategies that could improve online assessment. It is suggested that course providers should consider the following five strategies to organise and improve online assessment:

1. Consider testing the learners' ability to find and apply information, rather than to memorise and reproduce it. One possible approach to online assessment could be to focus more on the students' knowledge management abilities and less on their knowledge of the course content as Mason discussed in her book on global education:

...content-based methods of assessment are still being applied to conditions, which demand a skills-bases approach. This is undoubtedly because it is easier to design reliable assessment systems, which test, content rather than process. We have much less experience in assessing students' knowledge management abilities, the ways in which the course has transformed their thinking, and developed their skills in communicating and working with colleagues in the domain of the course content (Mason, 1998,42).

2. Consider applying assessment that does not require face-to-face sessions. It is noteworthy to observe that online assessment is not necessarily viewed as an important part of courses. But, if online courses rely on assessment in face-to-face sessions, flexibility for the students is substantially limited. For example, centralised, face-to-face examinations are not convenient for students who live far from the examination site. In comparison, assessment based on project reports and term papers are much more flexible with regard to time and space.
3. Consider including computer assessment. Computer assessment would suit online courses very well since course providers and learners have computers at their disposal. Such assessment could include simple multiple-choice assignments or more complex tutorials that monitor the students' progress. Further, computer assessment could provide immediate feedback and reduce teacher workload.
4. Consider including peer assessment. CMC could be very well suited for peer assessment because student easily can share and comment on contributions. After all, most CMC systems are developed to facilitate such collaboration. Further, by requiring peer students to take part in the process, assessment could become an integral part of their learning experience.
5. Consider using group assignments. Assessment of group assignments is likely to require less teacher workload than assessment of similar assignments prepared by individual students. Further, collaboration among online students could increase learning and result in a product of higher quality. (Paulsen 1998).

There are several distinct features that characterise online teaching techniques:

• They can conveniently utilise an overwhelming amount of online resources.
• They can facilitate collaborative learning independent of time and space.
• They can provide time to prepare and reflect on comments and contributions.
• They can facilitate on-demand access to learning activities that continue for an extended time period.
• They can provide unique opportunities to utilise discourse transcripts for analytical and reflective assignments.
• They can conveniently utilise computer-aided instruction.
• They can offer multimedia elements in presentations and demonstrations. However, for interaction among people, they still primarily rely on written communication with the inherent keyboard limitations.

These features provide teaching opportunities that can rarely be achieved in other educational environments. They could probably add a new dimension to familiar teaching techniques and also contribute to the development of a number of new, innovative teaching techniques.

A major concern arising from this research was how to keep teacher workload at an acceptable level. Hence, the following eight strategies to reduce the workload per student associated with large-scale enrolment are suggested.

1. Encourage and facilitate interaction among students. Students should be regarded as a resource for mutual learning. Services, teaching techniques, and assignment could be designed to encourage and facilitate interaction among students. Former students could become active alumni and be encouraged to participate in some interaction.
2. Automate responses. The teacher could develop a response library of often-used comments and even present this on a bulletin board for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Further, automatic responses could be designed into a course, for example as automatic email responses or self-correcting quizzes.
3. Develop a scheme to handle the demand for expedient responses. Several teachers comment that the time flexibility and the expected response time influence the nature of their workload. Therefore, one may argue that relaxing the requirements for expedient responses and allowing more flexible working hours could ease some teachers' perception of workload. However, students want expedient feedback, so co-teaching, shift work, and the use of teaching assistants may be considered as schemes to share a continuous and increasing workload among several individual teachers. All teachers should also inform the students about their online work schedule, so that the students know which days of the week and what time of the day responses from the teacher s could be expected.

Recommendations to EU Decision Makers

Scenarios

The European policies supporting the integration and use of information and communication technologies, either in enterprises, universities, schools, training centres or at home are pushing the market to react to these changes.

Traditional European Universities, either face-to-face or at a distance, are slowly moving to online education. Pilot experiences shown the use of online education as a complement to full-time students learning and as a tool for upgrading their continuous training offer.

Traditional universities need to have tools and models that help them to migrate to online education in a structured and upgrading way.

The same happens to enterprises, schools and training centres; they all need to implement changes.

In Southern Europe, most teachers live closed in a school "ghetto" facing structural constraints, fighting against difficult logistic problems and being unable to overcome inadequate curricula.

Information and communication technologies can, on the one hand be part of the possible solution to those structural problems, but on the other hand, they constitute a threat for teachers and trainers.

They must face this behaviour change, teachers can no longer be the owners of knowledge, they should be, instead, a kind of knowledge broker, guiding learners in their learning ways, throughout different paths and different contents.

The existing gap between teachers and learners is partly due to different reactions to change. Adults and youngsters learn very differently. If on the one hand, youngsters have no difficulties to be experts in games and to manipulate computer tools, on the other hand teachers, trainers and adults in general face more difficulties in those fields. This existing gap creates more vulnerable teachers.

There is then a need for training teachers, to promote the e-literacy, to implicate teachers in the process of creating an educational web culture, using other means other than the traditional ones, preventing the dangers of e-exclusion.

Exactly the same happens in the context of the training centres. Established as face to face structures, training centres are pushed to the new online environments and to the use of information and communication technologies in their training offer. Their staff, educators, technicians and trainers need to be updated.

And again the same applies to enterprises moving to virtual and online environments.

The following recommendations, addressed to politicians, managers and educational responsible parties, are based on the research results presented in Chapter 7, and will be discussed below:

4. Support migration to online education and training throughout the establishment of virtual educational organisations, namely: virtual campus, virtual training centres, virtual libraries, etc.
5. Provide support to educational staff training (how to prepare and organise "online education" in a structured way, how to put your educational resources on the web, how to interface with tutors and content providers, how to deal with technological change, etc).
6. Promote the support to emerging educational professions in innovative fields (the "educational knowledge broker", the "educational knowledge marketer", the "educational knowledge designer", etc).

 

Support migration to online education and training

There are a growing number of institutions working online. In southern Europe we have found pilot projects and experiences, but there is a lack of structured and professional virtual organisations.

In order to have a stronger expression over the web, European universities, training centres and enterprises need to acquire the knowledge to be able to migrate to structured online educational systems. Examples from Latin America, especially from Brazil show that to create a knowledge base in this field it is necessary to act with a strategic perspective, integrating international partnerships and consortiums. European organisations need to acquire information and knowledge about administrative systems to administer and manage students, teachers, technological experts, contents, pedagogical variants, assessment and evaluation dimensions.

 

Provide support to train educational staff

In order to produce changes in behaviour, massive training activity should be promoted to the staff involved in the education process.

To change the role of the educational staff training must be provided, especially in what concerns the learning process itself. That is the new role of the teacher, as tutor guiding students through learning paths, picking up the attention of the learners using effective messages, etc.

The new role of the learner, participating in the construction of its learning path, collaborating with others in order to construct common and dynamic knowledge.

The technological experts must be trained either to upgrade their educational perspectives or to upgrade technological innovations.

 

Promote the support to emerging educational professions in innovative fields

New professions related to the online education and training should be supported.

Professions related with the emerging e-marketing and knowledge fields should appear, namely the "educational knowledge broker", the "educational knowledge marketeer", the "educational knowledge designer", etc.

 

Recommendations on the use of the Web for Education and Training

7. That priming grants be available to enable institutions to develop web-based teaching programmes, particularly for the internationalisation of their market.

European educational institutions are at a disadvantage in the face of exploitation of the web compared with their North American counterparts. They need help in combating institutional conservatism and encouragement to be more innovative in their approach to teaching and learning with new technology. (See chapter 5 section entitled Institutional Readiness for Exploiting the Web).

8. That encouragement be given to the formation of partnerships as a way of taking full advantage of the Internet. These partnerships could be between universities and the corporate sector, between universities and other bodies outside Europe, or amongst European universities.

It is evident from an analysis of existing providers of web-based teaching that the formation of partnerships amongst existing and new providers is one of the defining hallmarks of the sector. In order to compete in the web-based teaching arena, Europe must encourage more of these relationships to develop. (See chapter 5 Web-Based Teaching Initiatives: A Comparison).

9. That support be provided for the continued development and implementation of communications and information technology into teaching, learning, research and associated support systems.

Selected European institutions have made significant contributions to the development and exploitation of the web for education and training. However, though the quality of these contributions is often as high as that of North American programmes, these contributions are small in overall number. The danger is that North American institutions will be able to attract the best and most lucrative market of web-based learners if European institutions do not expand their activities. (See chapter 5 the Conclusions section).

10. That research be commissioned into the market for European virtual courses, indicating cultural differences amongst potential students both within and without Europe.

One of the problems created by the cultural and linguistic differences in Europe is that the international market for non-English-based courses does not act as an incentive to develop courses on a large scale. We need to develop a greater understanding of the difficulties faced by students in taking web-based courses in their second language. (See chapter 5 section entitled Institutional Readiness for Exploiting the Web).

 

Recommendations on E-Learning as a Sector of VET Provision in the EU

11. It is recommended that the European Union make web-based training and e-Learning a major sector of vocational education and training.

There is little doubt that the World Wide Web is the most successful educational tool to have appeared in a long time. It combines and integrates text, audio and video with interaction amongst participants. It can be used on a global scale and is platform independent. While largely an asynchronous medium, it can also be used for synchronous events. It is not surprising therefore, that trainers, lecturers, distance education providers and teaching institutions at all levels are increasingly using the Web as a medium for delivery.

12. It is recommended that the European Union revise its priorities for vocational education and training in the EU in the period 2000- 2006, especially in the SOCRATES and Leonardo da Vinci programmes, giving a much greater prominence to e-Learning.

• At 1.1.2000, at the conclusion of the CISAER project, there were about 1,000, 000 courses on the internet, 30,000 of which could be said to conform to a scientific definition of online education, with 22,000 of these being listed with their URLs on the TeleCampus portal, from New Brunswick, Canada, with many of these courses making didactic use of the World Wide Web (see chapter 1).

• In 1995-Dr Murray Goldberg of the University of British Columbia, Canada, states that he and Sesan Salari began work on the world's most visible web-training kernel called WebCT. At 5.1.2000 he states that WebCT had 5,100,000 student accounts, in more than 123,000 courses, developed by 33,000 university staff, at over 1,100 institutions in 48 countries around the world (see chapter 2).

• The CISAER project demonstrated that by 1998 WWW-based education was a mature sector of VET educational and training provision. It did this by identifying 80 world leaders in the sector, carrying out in-depth interviews with them on the theoretical and practical constructs of the sector, analysing the replies and publishing a 137 page review of the field (see chapter 3).

1. Distance Education and Training in the European Union has an excellent history and excellent achievements and it is recommended that this expertise be harnessed to e-Learning and training on the World Wide Web.

Success in VET on the World Wide Web will follow the rules of distance education and training. These rules indicate separate sectors of course development procedures and student support services, which much both compliment each other for success in a World Wide Web system. Success in VET on the web will follow the rules of distance education and training.

2. Leadership in distance learning passed from the European Union to the Americas in the period 1980-2000. It is recommended that the EU move to redress this trend.

In the period 1980-2000, the technologies of the Electronic Revolution started to be used in distance learning. Rapid developments were made in group-based distance learning in the United States of America and in other parts of the world, based on satellite delivery systems. These were followed in the 1990s by the use of two-way video two-way audio videoconferencing systems for groups of students studying at a distance. In this period distance learning in Europe remained largely individual-based and not harnessed to the technologies of the Electronics Revolution.

As the satellite systems and the videoconferencing systems led seamlessly to education and training on the web, this was a major mistake.

3. It is recommended that the vocational education and training structures of the European Commission in Brussels develop a new focus in distance and online training.

E-Learning is now such an important field that the European Commission should consider a special structure for dealing with the sector of distance and virtual education and training.