2021: Review of online learning in UK higher education
It’s been another significant year for online education in the UK as universities have grappled with a year of continuing twists and turns. We are still under the long and heavy cloud of the pandemic but the early days of the pivot to emergency remote teaching in the first quarter of 2020 are now well behind us.
Teaching and study in the time of the pandemic is no longer unfamiliar territory and so this past year universities have had some opportunities to think longer term about the jolt they experienced and what that means for their future.
In the UK, the vaccine rollout and the easing of restrictions prior to the end of the year and before the arrival of omicron - meant that some were emboldened in their desire to return to something approaching the teaching & study experience that existed pre-pandemic. I have heard many moans and groans within universities who feel that lessons have not been learnt and rather than this experience broadening minds in relation to what the future might look like, it has closed and hardened some.
I don’t think we should be surprised by this, the very un-nuanced dichotomy between online and face to face education has long been characterised by polarised debate. Equally, change is hard and so the idea that what you’ve known, feel comfortable with and so on, might be radically altered is hard for some to stomach. Similarly, if your institution isn’t changing conditions to support a change of teaching and study model then it may actually be easier for you to revert to what you did before.
Lastly, there are some that genuinely don’t enjoy or don’t want to teach online or have had negative experiences - it would be easy to judge those and imply that perhaps they hadn’t approached it in the correct way or that they were lesser teachers, but I think things are rarely that black and white.
Changing modes and models
One of the characteristics of more strategic thinking about the future educational experience has been lots of discussion about modality, with hybrid and blended learning models being espoused by many as what they want their education model to resemble now. Of course these modes have been around for years and years and whilst at a macro level it’s easy to define them - when it comes to what that means in real terms it can get messy and confusing.
One of the persistent failures in respect to this is not endeavouring to tackle changing the way you operate and your culture such that the new, aspired-to models of teaching and study actually have a platform to succeed. For some, that gap between where they want to be and what they need to change to make it a sustainable and successful reality will be the black hole that swallows them up. Nevertheless, it is possible to successfully change but it really depends on how you go about it.
Beyond the operationalising of a modality shift, a number of other changes or desires for change have been apparent amongst UK universities this year. The pandemic has opened up an opportunity for those who have been vocal in their desire to move away from lectures and timed in-person exams to push this through. Many institutions are now explicitly stating that synchronous time should not be used for lecturing and the traditional exam format should be abandoned. Assessment of course looms large in most formal educational experiences and alongside a desire for different forms of assessment, authentic assessment continues to be a big theme that comes up again and again.
The experience of enforced remote teaching has naturally caused people to engage with some of these aspects of learning and teaching, but institutions must be careful to avoid changes that ultimately end up being superficial.
The manifestation of ways of teaching and assessing that are ineffective or suboptimal are usually far upstream of more underlying issues, such as a lack of understanding of what we know about how people learn, or a lack of ability in the design and planning work, or a poor grasp of learning transfer and what it means for any educational experience.
Changing a teaching and study model necessitates a significant and sustained professional development effort but I wonder if most universities are actually set up to achieve this. Much has been made of Centre’s for Teaching and Learning and educational support within universities providing help during the pivot to emergency remote teaching. These sometimes neglected and peripheral entities certainly had a moment and for some this has resulted in greater organisational kudos and investment.
Some universities have started to make significant investments into educational support roles and centres and in some places there’s been some decent growth in staff numbers. Recruitment for roles focussed on inclusivity and accessibility as well as learning designer roles seem to have been prevalent this year. But what doesn’t seem to be apparent is any consideration of whether that particular model of supporting educators and education is effective, relevant and the best fit for the future.
It strikes me that now is a pertinent time to consider whether the Centre for Teaching and Learning model is actually the model to take forward into the future. But I’m yet to see anyone seriously ask this question.
What the pandemic should highlight and what the experiences of online education should tell us, is that roles that support the development, design work and teaching of educators are incredibly important, but that isn’t analogous to a confirmation of the pre-existing, largely centralised way of approaching those things.
If universities or any education provider want to change their model of teaching and study then considering what support model can effectively achieve that is a genuinely valid thing to be looking at. I fear for many though, what I’ve even questioned here will be tantamount to heresy, but this model is not new and therefore is as deserving of scrutiny and questioning as anything else.
Irrespective of that, changing the nature of the long established university educational experience has certainly been the spirit in the air this year.
New developments in online education
In terms of new offerings being made by universities this year, it’s fair to say that microcredentials continue to be a persistent aspiration, but are at risk of becoming like teenage sex - everyone is talking about it, nobody really knows how to do it and everyone thinks everyone else is doing it.
There seems to have been more traction for microcredentials through MOOC platforms and there are a handful of UK universities offering them on FutureLearn, edX and Coursera. This might suggest that approaching the development of these types of offerings almost separately from the core educational operation might be the best way to catalyse a move, at least in the short term.
This leads nicely onto considering what developments we’ve seen in relation to UK university partnerships with MOOC platforms. It has been widely documented how MOOC platforms such as Coursera, edX and FutureLearn had significant growth in learner numbers following the onset of the pandemic. This past year has seen Coursera going public and raising millions in revenue and changes at edX who have now been acquired by the 2U. No doubt there is no coincidence in these developments and they do point to a new era for platforms like these.
In terms of university involvement with these platforms, something that I’ve observed for a number of years is now becoming much more widely evident - universities are a diminishing component of the online education offered on them. Something that was observed in Dhawal Shah’s excellent end of year review on Class Central, where when speaking about Coursera he highlighted that the majority of new courses launched in 2021 were no longer from universities.
This is really symptomatic of a majority of UK universities not engaging with MOOC platforms particularly strategically or seriously. This, of course is their prerogative and some have been quite intentional in that, but a reasonable number have never really got to grips with these partnerships and their institutional journeys have been characterised by the lack of a clear destination or purpose.
Some who in the early days had comparatively well-equipped teams supporting the design and development of courses on these platforms have seen them disband or wither, and what is largely left now is broad base of UK universities that have partnerships with MOOC platforms (overwhelmingly with FutureLearn), but only a very small number that are seriously engaged with them and their platforms.
For the universities on the periphery, it should be time for them to weigh up the thousands of pounds they pay annually to maintain the partnership against the benefits and cost to do so, particularly if they have no clear strategy for the partnership. If this happens, it will be interesting to see if the numbers of university partnerships with MOOC providers, which have always been growing, start to see a decline.
It will also be interesting to observe whether we see more UK universities partnering with the likes of Coursera and edX - who have traditionally only had a small number of mostly prestigious universities partnered with them. These two major players certainly seem to have a decent tailwind behind them, whereas it’s not so clear that this is the case with the UK MOOC platform FutureLearn, who have seen significant leadership changes in recent years.
The last 18 months+ have obviously elevated online education significantly but it’s not clear the extent to which online education as something distinct from the hybridisation of a university’s campus-based offerings is being seriously and strategically considered by a majority of UK universities. Some are quite obviously focussed exclusively on their existing portfolio of programmes that were part of a largely campus-based residential model and have no appetite or bandwidth to look at anything else.
There are however others who are now starting to take online education much more seriously and I know of a number of UK universities that have recruited or are recruiting for senior leadership roles in online education. Some universities are also starting or have started setting up distinct online education arms, a move that the likes of Coventry and Kings College made several years ago. Such a move can provide a platform to get things moving more quickly as it can be untangled from some of the established university machinery. It also allows for recruitment, marketing, design etc to be customised and optimised for online education. However, setting up an online education arm in a university and growing & developing it to be sustainable and successful is not an easy business and I anticipate that there will be some missteps here.
This year, there has continued to be a growing number of UK universities partnering with Online Programme Management companies or OPMs. I would not be surprised to see a decent increase in them from the beginning of 2022 onwards, as discussions that took on greater significance due to a pandemic-induced interest in online education, become firmed up into agreed partnerships. These relationships continue to be controversial and anathema to some. However, when they work well they can offer universities the chance to make genuine moves into online education supported by teams of professionals that in some cases have greater know-how, experience, knowledge and different skill sets to those that might exist in-house.
Alongside OPMs there are now a number of similar types of companies working mainly with prestigious university brands such as Oxford University, London School of Economics (LSE), Imperial College and Cambridge University to run short online courses, something I spoke about in a blog post earlier this year.
What’s clear is that we will see more UK universities growing the amount of online and distance education offerings in the year to come, but how successful they might be in doing so remains to be seen. In the next couple of years we’ll start to see this play out and be able to better gauge the state of play.
Changes in the technology that supports online education
Whether we’ll see an evolution in the technology being used to support online education and other modalities has been something interesting to reflect upon this year. What should be clear since the pandemic, is that without the existence of a Learning Management System (LMS) and video conferencing technology, continuity of the university education experience would’ve been significantly more difficult than it was, which is saying something.
These technologies have existed in universities for many years but have often been used minimally or not at all. In fact, it would be genuinely fascinating to know how many conducted teaching via video conferencing for the very first time at the onset of the pandemic.
Both the LMS and video platforms have obviously seen increases in usage and elevation in importance. In the past year there has been evidence of a continuation of changes and it’s fair to say that whilst Moodle and Blackboard continue to be the most commonly used LMS’ in UK universities, they are gradually losing market share. They are facing stiffer competition from Canvas and Brightspace who have started to usurp them in a growing number of UK universities. There are also newer entrants such as Aula who are now being used by a few universities as their main digital platform for learning and teaching. Whilst, Insendi who are owned by Study Group continue to develop partnerships with a range of universities to use their digital learning platform.
There are potential changes afoot in a number of universities that are currently reviewing or about to start a process of reviewing their LMS, and even for those who are sticking with Blackboard there are a good number who either have, or are planning to move from Blackboard Learn to the Ultra experience. Since the pandemic these platforms have become more important to more people and so I think we will continue to see moves into the next year, and hopefully this will spur competition, drive and sense of the need to continually improve platforms that has not always been evident in the past.
What will also be interesting to observe is the video conferencing space too. Teams and Zoom are the most popular and most used in UK universities but are not products that were designed for education specifically. This has led to new products specifically focussed on education to be developed - the most notable being Engageli which has come a long way in a short time and was recently adopted by Coventry University. Might we see a purpose built education video conferencing platform that quickly outstrips the competition? Well that’s probably not likely in the next year, but what is certainly true is that video conferencing technology has never been so used and so important to the university education experience.
A year of transition
If I was to sum up this year I’d describe it as one of transition, a year in which the scramble of the pivot to emergency remote teaching was left well behind, but not one in which we’ve seen universities radically transform their educational model. Online education whilst still viewed as suboptimal for some, is now being valued and prioritised by more decision makers in higher education. This will mean more investment and more online courses and programmes being offered in the years to come, what’s less clear is how successful universities will be at that and who the winners and losers might be, only time will tell.
The next 5 years in particular will be interesting in respect to how the companies that partner with universities for online education evolve and change and what those relationships start to look like. The growth in OPM partnerships shows no sign of abating but it’s less clear what future holds for what were once classed as MOOC platforms, although a decline in university involvement with them is now evident.
Looking ahead to 2022, it seems that the early part of the year at least will see a return to the kind of restrictions that haven’t been in place for a while. This should highlight yet again, if people have forgotten, that online education is a robust and resilient mode of teaching and study and by necessity or deliberately will play an even more important role in UK higher education in the future.
