The Coming Wave

You might have expected that I would have opined on the e-learning and the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) phenomenon before now. After all, everybody else in Higher Education has. I feared, that I had nothing further to add, and after reading this you may be tempted to agree. The course of the emerging debate suggests to me however, that some perspective is needed and this is what I would like to provide. I will do so now by way of a preliminary excursion.

A few years ago I was undertaking some research on behalf of a large industrial organisation whose primary business was photography. An organisation that was then, and still is, undergoing a significant and painful transformation in the face of a changed technological environment to which they had failed to adapt. A senior researcher, in confessional mood, reflected: "I became aware of the possibility of digital cameras many years before they became a practical reality ... and then my mother had one. I just don't know what happened in the intermediate period."

This reflection strikes a familiar personal note, for me at least. Technology can, however far sighted you believe yourself to be, catch you unawares. Indeed, in certain cases at least, the greater your foresight the more likely you are to be surprised by the way trends unfold. Let me illustrate this by way of an example. Again some time ago, perhaps twenty years or more, I was attending a public lecture at the then Institution of Electrical Engineers. The speaker opened with a slide image that I had seen many many times before. I remarked on this to a friend sitting next to me, 'not again'. The image was sufficiently well known that it had a nickname 'the MIT rings' (due to Nicolas Negroponte). It illustrated the potential for 'digital convergence': the coming together of communications, computing and content (seen as including data networks, television, telephone). Already the point being made seemed hackneyed and obvious.

Now wind forwards. Digital convergence has arrived. It is not a technical possibility, it is an everyday fact. My children rarely, if ever, watch television  but browse video fragments and streams on the computer, I use Skype video calling, and listen to the radio on my ipad, just ordinary life. Unconverged technologies are dead or dying.

So what was I doing in the intermediate period between accepting the inevitability of digital convergence and living with the reality? Truthfully, I am not sure. Regrettably, not investing in Skype, YouTube and so on. The worrying thing is that, despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen, I discounted the consequences. Perhaps I had not fully absorbed the inevitability of the change, perhaps I attributed too much significance to the minor ebbs and currents in business, to the incidental features, to recognise the slow progress of a technological tidal wave that would sweep all before it. Or, maybe I simply lost focus.

So, after this lengthy preamble to my point: e-learning is coming and it will radically transform the educational scene. This has been said, and has been true for a very long time. The length of time we have waited for the transformation is surely longer than we anticipated but this does not diminish the certainty only the swiftness of change. The structural and cultural features of education account for the hiatus as much as the technological but structure and culture are mutable and the technology has changed.

The institutions, the offerings, the style of teaching, the nature of qualification and certification will change. This is inevitable, the die is cast. We may be unable to predict precisely the ways in which this will play out but this too does not impact on the larger fact. We may look at MOOCs and doubt the business model is robust or question the pedagogic style or worry about the dropout rate. Just as we might look at the Khan Academy and think that the production quality is too low or we might question the usability and added value of Moodle. These concerns are actually irrelevant, the current generation of MOOCs are the ripples presaging the wave. It may be easier, more comfortable or convenient, to close our eyes but this will not change things nor assist the survival of higher education as we know it. Indeed, let me bolder still, higher education 'as we know it' will not survive. Probably MOOCs will not survive either, at least in their current form, which does not, of course, mean that those that are producing them are doing the wrong thing.

So what is required? Well, like the response to any potential change in the business environment, focus and investment are critical. Probably more important are a collective acceptance of change, of its imminence, scale and inevitability, and the cultivation of the agility and innovative capacity to react quickly to precisely the forms the change takes. Learning from other analogous technologically induced changes we can expect that the 'innovation actors' will change and that business models will also be transformed. Readiness to engage in different partnerships and using different business models will be critical. Probably this means trying stuff and failing, which is surely not beyond any of us and is a pretty good antidote to complacency.