Niggles about NGDLEs – lessons from ELF

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Malcom Brown has responded to Tony Bates and me in an Educause guest post in which he defends the concept of the NGDLE and expands a bit on the purposes behind it. This does help to clarify the intent although, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I am quite firmly in favour of the idea, so I am already converted on the main points. I don’t mind the Lego metaphor if it works, but I do think we should concentrate more on the connections than the pieces. I also see that it is fairly agnostic to pedagogy, at least in principle. And I totally agree that we desperately need to build more flexible, assemblable systems along these lines if we are to enable effective teaching, management of the learning process and, much much more importantly, if we are to support effective learning. Something like the proposed environment (more of an ecosystem, I’d say) is crucial if we want to move on.

But…

It has been done before, over ten years ago in the form of ELF, in much more depth and detail and with large government and standards bodies supporting it, and it is important to learn the lessons of what was ultimately a failed initiative. Well – maybe not failed, but certainly severely stalled. Parts persist and have become absorbed, but the real value of it was as a model for building tools for learning, and that model is still not as widespread as it should be. The fact that the Educause initiative describes itself as ‘next generation’ is perhaps the most damning evidence of its failure.

Elves

Why ELF ‘failed’

I was not a part of nor close to the ELF project but, as an outsider, I suspect that it suffered from four major and interconnected problems:

  1. It was very technically driven and framed in the language of ICTs, not educators or learners. Requirements from educators were gathered in many ways, with workshops, working groups and a highly distributed team of experts in the UK, Australia, the US, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand (it was a very large project). Some of the central players had a very deep understanding of the pedagogical and organizational needs of not just learners but organizations that support them, and several were pioneers in personal learning environments (PLEs) that went way beyond the institution. But the focus was always on building the technical infrastructure – indeed, it had to be, in order to operationalize it. For those outside the field, who had not reflected deeply on the reasons this was necessary, it likely just seemed like a bunch of techies playing with computers. It was hard to get the message across.
  2. It was far too over-ambitious, perhaps bolstered by the large amounts of funding and support from several governments and large professional bodies. The e-learning framework was just one of several strands like e-science, e-libraries and so on, that went to make up the e-framework. After a while, it simply became the e-framework and, though conceptually wonderful, in practical terms it was attempting far too much in one fell swoop. It became so broad, complex and fuzzy that it collapsed under its own weight. It was not helped by commercial interests that were keen to keep things as proprietary and closed as they could get away with. Big players were not really on board with the idea of letting thousands of small players enter their locked-in markets, which was one of the avowed intents behind it. So, when government funding fizzled out, there was no one to take up such a huge banner. A few small flags might have been way more successful.
  3. It was too centralized (oddly, given its aggressively decentralized intent and the care taken to attempt to avoid that). With the best of intent, developers built over-engineered standards relying on web service architectures that the rest of the world was abandoning because they were too clunky, insufficiently agile and much too troublesome to implement. I am reminded, when reading many of the documents that were produced at the time, of the ISO OSI network standards of the late 80s that took decades to reach maturity through ornate webs of committees and working groups, were beautifully and carefully engineered, and that were thoroughly and completely trounced by the lighter, looser, more evolved, more distributed TCP/IP standards that are now pretty much ubiquitous. For large complex systems, evolution beats carefully designed engineering every single time.
  4. The fact that it was created by educators whose framing was entirely within the existing system meant that most of the pieces that claimed to relate to e-learning (as opposed to generic services) had nothing to do with learning at all, but were representative of institutional roles and structures: marking, grading, tracking, course management, resource management, course validation, curriculum, reporting and so on. None of this has anything to do with learning and, as I have argued on many occasions elsewhere, may often be antagonistic to learning. While there were also components that were actually about learning, they tended to be framed in the context of existing educational systems (writing lessons, creating formal portfolios, sequencing of course content, etc). Though very much built to support things like PLEs as well as institutional environments, the focus was the institution far more than the learner.

As far as I can tell, any implementation of the proposed NGDLE is going to run into exactly the same problems. Though the components described are contemporary and the odd bit of vocabulary has evolved a bit, all of them can be found in the original ELF model and the approach to achieving it seems pretty much the same. Moreover, though the proposed architecture is flexible enough to support pretty much anything – as was ELF – there is a tacit assumption that this is about education as we know it, updated to support the processes and methods that have been developed since (and often in response to) the heinous mistakes we made when we designed the LMSs that dominate education today. This is not surprising – if you ask a bunch of experts for ideas you will get their expertise, but you will not get much in the way of invention or new ideas. The methodology is therefore almost guaranteed to miss the next big thing. Those ideas may come up but they will be smoothed out in an averaging process and dissenting models will not become part of the creed. This is what I mean when I criticize it as a view from the inside.

Much better than the LMS

If implemented, a NGDLE will undoubtedly be better than any LMS, with which there are manifold problems. In the first place, LMSs are uniformly patterned on mediaeval educational systems, with all their ecclesiastic origins, power structures and rituals intact. This is crazy, and actually reinforces a lot of things we should not be doing in the first place, like courses, intimately bound assessment and accreditation, and laughably absurd attempts to exert teacher control, without the slightest consideration of the fact that pedagogies determined by the physics of spaces in which we lock doors and keep learners controlled for an hour or two at a time make no sense whatsoever in online learning. In the second place, centralized systems have to maintain an uneasy and seldom great balance between catering to every need and remaining usably simple. This inevitable leads to compromises, from small things (e.g. minor formatting annoyances in discussion forums) to the large (e.g. embedded roles or units of granularity that make everything a course). While customization options can soften this a little, centralized systems are structurally flawed by their very nature. I have discussed such things in some depth elsewhere, including both my published books. Suffice to say, the LMS shapes us in its own image, and its own image is authoritarian, teacher-controlled and archaic. So, a system that componentizes things so that we can disaggregate any or all of it, provide local control (for teachers and other learners as well as institutions and administrators) and allow creative assemblies is devoutly to be wished for. Such a system architecture can support everything from the traditional authoritarian model to the loosest of personal learning environments, and much in between.

Conclusion

NGDLE is a misnomer. We have already seen that generation come and go. But, as a broad blueprint for where we should be going and what we should be doing now, both ELF and NGDLE provide patterns that we should be using and thinking about whenever we implement online learning tools and content and, for that, I welcome it. I am particularly appreciative that NGDLE provides reinvigorated support for approaches that I have been pushing for over a decade but that ICT departments and even faculty resist implacably. It’s great to be able to point to the product of so many experts and say ‘look, I am not a crank: this is a mainstream idea’. We need a sea-change in how we think of learning technologies and such initiatives are an important part of creating the culture and ethos that lets this happen. For that I totally applaud this initiative.

In practical terms, I don’t think much of this will come from the top-down, apart from in the development of lightweight, non-prescriptive standards and the norming of the concepts behind it. Of current standards, I think TinCan is hopeful, though I am a bit concerned that it is becoming over-ornate in its emerging development. LTI is a good idea, sufficiently mature, and light enough to be usable but, again, in its new iteration it is aiming higher than might be wise. Caliper is OK but also showing signs of excessive ambition. Open Badges are great but I gather that is becoming less lightweight in its latest incarnation. We need more of such things, not more elaborate versions of them. Unfortunately, the nature of technology is that it always evolves towards increasing complexity. It would be much better if we stuck with small, working pieces and assembled those together rather than constantly embellishing good working tools. Unix provides a good model for that, with tools that have worked more or less identically for decades but that constantly gain new value in recombination.

Footnote: what became of ELF?

It is quite hard to find information about ELF today. It seems (as an outsider) that the project just ground to a halt rather than being deliberately killed. There were lots of exemplar projects, lots of hooks and plenty of small systems built that applied the idea and the standards, many of which are still in use today, but it never achieved traction. If you want to find out more, here is a small reading list:

http://www.elframework.org/ – the main site (the link to the later e-framework site leads to a broken page)

http://www.elframework.org/projects.html  – some of the relevant projects ELF incorporated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061112235250/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Altilab04-ELF.pd – good, brief overview from 2004 of what it involved and how it fitted together

 https://web.archive.org/web/20110522062036/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/AltilabServiceOrientedFrameworks.pdf  – spooky: this is about ‘Next Generation E-Learning Environments’ rather than digital ones. But, though framed in more technical language, the ideas are the same as NGDLE.

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20110621221935/http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/nontechguide2 – a slightly less technical variant (links to part 1, which explains web services for non-technical people)

See also https://web.archive.org/web/20090330220421/http://www.elframework.org/general/requirements/scenarios/Scenario%20Apparatus%20UK%205%20(manchester%20lipsig).doc and https://web.archive.org/web/20090330220553/http://www.elframework.org/general/requirements/use_cases/EcSIGusecases.zip, a set of scenarios and use cases that are eerily similar to those proposed for NGDLE.

If anyone has any information about what became of ELF, or documents that describe its demise, or details of any ongoing work, I’d be delighted to learn more!

 

 

Why so many questions?

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Athabasca River Flood

At Athabasca University, our proposed multi-million dollar investment in a student relationship management system, dubbed the ‘Student Success Centre’ (SSC), is causing quite a flood of discussion and debate among faculty and tutors at the moment. Though I do see some opportunities in this if (and only if) it is very intelligently and sensitively designed, there are massive and potentially fatal dangers in creating such a thing.  See a previous post of mine for some of my worries. I have many thoughts on the matter, but one thing strikes me as interesting enough to share more widely and, though it has a lot to do with the SSC, it also has broader implications.

Part of the justification for the SSC is that an alleged 80% of current interactions with students are about administrative rather than academic issues. I say ‘alleged’ because such things are notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy. But let’s assume that it actually is accurate.

How weird is that?

Why is it that our students (apparently) need to contact us for admin support in overwhelming numbers but actually hardly talk at all about the complicated subjects they are taking? Assuming that these 80% of interactions are not mostly to complain about things that have gone wrong (if so, an SSC is not the answer!) then it seems, on the face of it, more than a bit topsy turvy.
 
One reasonable explanation might be that our course materials are so utterly brilliant that they require little further interaction, but I am not convinced that this sufficiently explains the disparity. Students are mostly spending 100+ hours on academic work for each course whereas (I hope) at most a couple of hours are spent on administrivia. No matter how amazing our courses might be, the difference is remarkable. It is doubly remarkable when you consider that a fair number of our courses do involve at least some required level of interaction which, alone, should easily account for most if not more than all of that remaining 20%. In my own courses it is a lot more than that and I am aware of many others with very active Landing groups, Moodle forums, webinar sessions, and even the occasional visit to an immersive world.
 
It is also possible that our administrative processes are extremely opaque and ill-explained. This certainly accords with my own experience of trying to work out something as simple as how much a course would cost or the process needed to submit project work. But, if that is the case, and assuming our distance, human-free teaching works as well as we believe it does, then why can we not a) simplify the processes and b) provide equally high quality learning materials for our admin processes so that students don’t need to bother our admin staff so much? If our course materials are so great then that would seem, on the face of it, very much more cost-effective than spending millions on a system that is at least as likely to have a negative as a positive impact and that actually increases our ongoing costs considerably. It is also quite within the capabilities of our existing skillset.
 
Even so, it seems very odd to me that students can come to terms with inordinately complex subjects from philosophy to biochemistry, but that they are foiled by a simple bit of bureaucracy and need to seek human assistance. It may be hard, but it is not beyond the means of a motivated learner to discover, especially given that we are specialists in producing high quality learning materials that should make such things very clear. And in motivation, I think, lies the key.
 
 

Other people matter

Other people are wonderful things when you need to learn something, pretty much across the board. Above all they matter when there is no obvious reason that you should be interested or care about it for its own merits, and bureaucratic procedures are seldom very interesting. I have known only one person in my whole life that actually likes filling in forms (I think it is a meditative pursuit – my father felt much the same way about dishwashing and log sawing) but, for the most part, this is not a thing that excites most people.  
 
I hypothesize that our students tend to need less academic than bureaucratic help at least partly because, by and large, for the coursework they are very self-motivated people learning things that interest them whereas our bureaucracy is at most a means to an end, at worst a demotivating barrier. It would not help much to provide great teaching materials for bureaucratic procedures because 99% of students would have no intrinsic interest in learning about them, and it would have zero value to them in any future activity. Why would they bother? It is far easier to ask someone.
 
Our students actually like the challenge of facing and solving problems in their chosen subjects – in fact, that’s one of the great joys of learning. They don’t turn to tutors to discuss things because there are plenty of other ways of getting the help they need, both in course materials and elsewhere, and it is fun to overcome obstacles. The more successful ones tend to have supportive friends, families or colleagues, or are otherwise very single-minded. They tend to know why they are doing what they are doing. We don’t get many students that are not like this, at least on our self-paced courses, because either they don’t bother coming in the first place or they are among the scarily large percentage that drop out before starting (we don’t count them in our stats though, in fairness, neither to face-to-face universities).
 
But, of course, that only applies for students that do really like the process of learning and most of what they are learning, that know how to do it and/or that have existing support networks. It does not apply to those that hit very difficult or boring spots, that give up before they start, that hit busy times that mean they cannot devote the energy to the work, that need a helping hand with the process but cannot find it elsewhere, or that don’t bother even looking at a distance option at all because they do not like the isolation it (apparently) entails. For those students, other people can help a lot. Even for our own students, over half (when asked) claim that they would appreciate more human interaction. And those are the ones that have knowingly self-selected a largely isolated process and that have not already dropped out. 
 
Perhaps more worryingly, it raises concerns about the quality of the learning experience. Doing things alone means that you miss out on all the benefits of a supportive learning community. You don’t get to argue, to explain, to question, save in your own head or in formal, largely one-way, assignments. You don’t get multiple perspectives, different ways of seeing, opportunities to challenge and be challenged. You don’t get the motivation of writing for an audience of people that you care about. You don’t get people that care about you and the learning community providing support when times are hard, nor the pleasure of helping when others are in difficulty. You don’t get to compare yourself with others, the chance to reflect on how you differ and whether that is a good or bad thing. You don’t get to model behaviours or see those behaviours being modelled. These are just some of the notable benefits of traditional university systems that are relatively hard to come by in Athabasca’s traditional self-paced model (not in all courses, but in many). It’s not at all about asking questions and getting solutions. It’s about engaging in a knowledge creation process with other people. There are distinct benefits of being alone, notably in the high degree of control it brings, but a bit of interaction goes a long long way. It takes a very special kind of person to get by without that and the vast majority of our successful students (at least in undergraduate self-paced courses) are exactly that special kind of person. 
 
If it is true that only 20% of interactions are currently concerned with academic issues, that is a big reason for concern, because it means our students are missing out on an incredibly rich set of opportunities in which they can help one another as well as interact with tutors. Creating an SSC system that supports what is therefore, for those that are not happy alone (i.e. the ones we lose or never get in the first place), an impoverished experience, seems simply to ossify a process that should at least be questioned. It is not a solution to the problem – it is an exacerbation of it, further entrenching a set of approaches and methods that are inadequate for most students (the ones we don’t get or keep) in the first place.

A sustainable future?

As a university seeking sustainability we could simply continue to concentrate on addressing the needs of self-motivated, solitary students that will succeed almost no matter what we do to them, and just make the processing more cost-efficient with the SSC.  If we have enough of those students, then we will thrive for some time to come, though I can’t say it fits well with our open mission and I worry greatly about those we fail to help. If we want to get more of those self-guided students then there are lots of other things we should probably do too like dropping the whole notion of fixed-length courses (smaller chunks means the chances of hitting the motivation sweet-spot are higher) and disaggregating assessment from learning (because extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation).
 
But, if we are sticking with the idea of traditional courses, the trouble is that we are no longer almost alone in offering such things and there is a finite market of self-motivated, truly independent learners who (if they have any sense) will find cheaper alternatives that offer the same or greater value. If all we are offering is the opportunity to learn independently and a bit of credible certification at the end of it, we will wind up competing on price with institutions and businesses that have deeper coffers, cheaper staff, and less constraints. In a cut-throat price war with better funded peers, we are doomed.
 
If we are to be successful in the future then we need to make more of the human side of our teaching, not less, and that means creating richer, more direct channels to other people in this learning community, not automating methods that are designed for the era of correspondence learning. This is something that, not uncoincidentally, the Landing is supposed to help with, though it is just an exemplar and at most a piece of the puzzle – we ideally want connection to be far more deeply embedded everywhere rather than in a separate site. It is also something that current pilot implementations of the SSC are antagonistic towards, thanks mainly to equating time and effort, focusing on solving specific problems rather than human connection, failing to support technological diversity, and standing as an obstacle between people that just need to talk. It doesn’t have to be built that way. It could almost as easily vanish into the background, be seamlessly hooked into our social environments like email, Moodle and the Landing, could be an admin tool that gives support when needed but disappears when not. And there is no reason whatsoever that it needs to be used to pay tutors by the recorded minute, a bad idea that has been slung on the back of it that has no place in our culture. Though not what the pilot systems do at all, a well-designed system like this could step in or be called upon when needed, could support analytics that would be genuinely helpful, could improve management information, all without getting in the way of interaction at all. In fact, it could easily be used to enhance it, because it could make patterns of dialogue more visible and comprehensible.
 

In conclusion

At Athabasca we have some of the greatest distance educators and researchers on the planet, and that greatness rubs off on those around them. As a learning community, knowledge spreads among us and we are all elevated by it. We talk about such things in person, in meetings, via Skype, in webinars, on mailing lists, on the Landing, in pubs, in cafes, etc. And, as a result, ideas, methods and values get created, transformed and flow through our network. This makes us quite unique – as all learning communities are unique – and creates the distinctive culture and values of our university that no other university can replicate. Even when people leave, they leave traces of their ideas and values in those that remain, that get passed along for long after they have gone, become part of the rich cultural identity that defines us. It’s not mainly about our structures, processes and procedures: except when they support greater interaction, those actually get in the way much of the time. It’s about a culture and community of learning. It’s about the knowledge that flows in and through this shifting but identifiable crowd. This is a large part of what gives us our identity. It’s exactly the same kind of thing that means we can talk about (say) the Vancouver Canucks or Apple Inc as a meaningful persistent entity, even though not one of the people in the organization is the same as when it began and virtually all of its processes, locations, strategies and goals beyond the most basic have changed, likely many times. The thing is, if we hide those people behind machines and processes, separate them through opaque hierarchies, reduce the tools and opportunities for them to connect, we lose almost all of the value. The face of the organization becomes essentially the face of the designer of the machine or the process and the people are simply cogs implementing it. That’s not a good way forward, especially as there are likely quite a few better machine and process designers out there. Our people – staff and students – are the gold we need to mine, and they are also the reason we are worth saving. We need to be a university that takes the distance out of distance learning, that connects, inspires, supports and nurtures both its staff and its students. Only then will we justly be able to claim to have a success centre.