Plugging the classroom in to the web: A question of resources or will?

It is now a commonplace to suggest that those universities planning to make a fortune selling and or delivering courses over the Internet have aspirations beyond their capabilities. This mismatch of aspiration and ability is as much a function of the vagaries of the market as it is of organisational dissonance. Management sees efficiency, effectiveness, mass education and other attractive indices of low cost, high return programs. They expect students to flock to online education, even be prepared to pay good money for it, without making any more demands than they did with print based education. There are even proposals about for responses to email to be dealt with by computers. The workers see online education as an opportunity to deliver high quality courses to off campus students.

What the workers realise is what management often refuses to see: that online education puts back into distance education what early forms of print based learning took out - the intense experience of communication in learning. As might be expected, students see the intense learning experience of the classroom, the immediacy of the library and the availability of other campus based resources delivered online, anywhere, anytime, on or off campus. Moreover, placing programs online occurs in an environment where the pace of technological change itself would be a challenge without anything else. Online education, then, is increasingly a site of contestation between a number of sometimes competing, and distressingly frequent incompatibilities. Resolution of these difficulties will not be easy.

I believe that there a number of things that can be done to overcome some of these problems. First, I think we need to remove the amateurism from those areas in our organisations where this is possible and affordable. Put bluntly, we need to develop sensible business plans, preferably by experts rather than by aging academics whose closest brush with the world of high finance is their yearly trip to their tax accountant. Moreover, I believe that management and some workers are stuck in the old marketing paradigm: build a better mouse trap and customers will beat a path to your door. Don't bother to consult the customers about the mouse trap, because we already know what they need. And so on. We talk about students as clients and then behaved in our own organisations as if we were monopolies whose clients would buy anything we produce. This is not so. Secondly, we need to advance realistic assessments of the developmental costs for online courses. So much of this is currently hidden within the salaries of academics employed to do other things as well.

Thirdly, we need to recognise the limits of the competition model of marketing higher education (there has been some progress in this area). Put simply, rather than just compete with other institutions, we should recognise that selling online education to our domestic and international markets to improve both the market base for education and the market share for online education is in everyone's interests (as those involved in e-commerce have realised and responded accordingly). Lastly, we should recognise that what will sustain online education is the quality of the product. Students are repeated enjoined to regard education as a product to be chosen on the basis of convenience, desirable employment outcomes and quality. And quality, in the end, does not just mean the whiz bang factor. It means carefully considered and prepared learning programs that meet their needs for content learning and generic skills.