Retention in distance learning

Also on the theme of retention the report of a small project on retention in distance education, which I worked on with Alan Tait and Daksha Patel is now available. The research was funded through a grant from the University of London Centre for Distance Education (CDE). While the core of the report is a review of the literature on retention in distance education, there is some discussion of data from three of University of London International Programmes and some suggestions for questions that course teams might want to reflect on in relation to retention in the first year of study.

Image by Pete Cannell CC0

Using data and evidence to understand retention in Scottish HE

In 2018 Alison Gilmour and I were commissioned by QAA Scotland to research how Scottish HEIs were using data and evidence in their work on retention.  I’m pleased that the report is now available on the Enhancement Themes website.

HEPI report on Widening Participation

HEPI have just published a report on benchmarking widening participation .  The report uses 2016 POLAR data from UCAS to create a GINI coefficient for each institution.  This approach is sadly well established in higher education.  It’s liked by politicians and journalists because it assigns a single number for each institution and allows the construction of league tables.  But it looks at one narrow dimension of participation and assumes that transition from school to university at 18 is the norm.

Martin Weller has written an excellent response to the report – arguing that its’ methodology specifically excludes the institutions that make the greatest efforts to support a diverse student intake.    Martin mentions that the index of multiple deprivation avoids some of the problems with POLAR.  However, he also highlights the problems of single measures that are used as a proxy for complex phenomena.  The University of the West of Scotland (UWS) and the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) provide a good example.  Both are universities that focus on widening participation.  Both are ranked low on the HEPI table but viewed through the lens of the index of multiple deprivation, the measure preferred by the Scottish Government,  UWS performs very well and UHI badly.  This is because UWS draws its students from a densely populated urban hinterland, while UHI recruits from largely rural and less densely populated areas.

Martin’s concludes by saying that

The danger is that such a report reinforces traditional notions of what constitutes a student, and study in higher education, which are at odds with the needs of many WP students. League tables always result in a loss of nuance, and this could make life more difficult for providers who seek to prioritise WP through non-traditional provision.

True for the HEPI report but also highly relevant to recent initiatives in Scotland.

 

Part-time Study

A couple of weeks ago I presented a video talk on part-time study on the Alternative University of the Air. I drew on data from the Scottish Funding Council’s 2017 report on higher education statistics.  Pulling together material for the talk reopened an interest in writing on this topic. As a first, baby step, I’ve collated my notes in the blog.

I’m thinking about trends in part-time study from a UK perspective. The introduction of high fees in England (some suggested this was the advent of parity for part-timers) and regulations that restricted flexibility and barred student with previous qualifications at an equivalent level, resulted in a huge drop in part-time student numbers, falling by 56% between 2010/11 and 2015/16.   This story is well known, although its political and policy repercussions have been limited, reflecting the marginalisation of part-time.

In regard to student fees Scotland is at the other end of the policy spectrum. Full-time higher education is free for Scottish students (and for students from the rest of the EU but not England, Wales and Northern Ireland). Part-time study continues to attract fees but at a lower level. Students earning under £25,000 are entitled to fee remission through the part-time fee grant. Nevertheless part-time higher education numbers have fallen by 27%.

The Open University, based in all four UK nations is a good example of contradictory trends. OU numbers in England have fallen since the change in the fee regime. Student numbers at the OU in Scotland are rising.   In the rest of this paper I make a preliminary dig through the Scottish data to highlight other important processes.

Student numbers at Scottish Universities are capped. Overall numbers have been stable, however, part-time numbers have fallen by 27%. (NB these figures include the Open University in Scotland where student numbers are rising.) Much of the Scotland wide drop is attributable to lower part-time recruitment at a small number of what are often characterised as ‘widening participation’ institutions. Rising demand and capped numbers resulted in a shift from recruitment to selection and full-time recruitment took the place of part-time.

Scottish colleges make an important contribution to Scottish higher education. Higher National Certificates and Higher National Diplomas occupy the first two rungs on the Scottish Credit and Qualifications framework undergraduate ladder – equivalent to years one and two of the four-year degree. Part-time student numbers in college-based higher education have also fallen. Again there has been a shift away from part-time but the drivers of this shift also include funding cuts and a massive reorganisation that has merged institutions. Bigger colleges has meant less of a local focus, less part-time options has meant less evening and weekend opening.

The fall in part-time student numbers is gendered with women disproportionately affected.

Looking at higher education data, however, fails to capture the whole picture. Part-time students tend to follow complex and non-linear pathways that include episodes of informal and formal study often at pre-HE level. Traditionally Scottish Colleges played an important role here. But college cuts, reorganisation and government guidance to focus on younger full-time students has disproportionately affected the type of short flexible provision that makes it possible. As a result the number of students in Scotland’s colleges has fallen by 40% from 379,000 in 2005/6 to 226,000 in 2014/5. Again the fall in numbers is skewed by gender with a 23% reduction in the number of men and a 41% reduction in the number of women. And it’s not just in the colleges that part-time flexible opportunities have been lost. There has also been a decline in courses offered by the Workers Education Association and local authority based Community Learning Development.

On 6 March Shirley Anne-Somerville, Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science spoke in the Scottish parliament about the report from the Widening Access Commissioner and the Scottish government’s aspirations to genuinely widen participation. Although she stressed that targets were for students of all ages part-time

Scottish Government: Shirley Anne Somerville CC BY NC 2.0

received not a single mention. Omitting part-time study from policy discourse is not new. However, its omission makes change much less likely.

In subsequent posts I want to try and dig into why part-time is so consistently marginalised.   In part there are conceptual misunderstandings. Often part-time study is treated as if it were simply full-time study slowed down. The case for part-time is frequently reduced to an argument that it’s an effective mechanism for training for employment. Part-time adult education has a rich history we need to reclaim the relevance of that history for the twenty first century.

 

 

The Alternative University of the Air

A feature of the current pensions dispute has been huge creativity from striking university staff. The neo-liberal orthodoxy that has come to characterise higher education, and which the proposed changes to pension arrangements is part of, is being held to account. Across the sector there have been ‘teach outs’ involving staff and students. Open University activists have launched The Alternative University of the Air which aims:
• To allow OU students, staff and the wider HE community access to an Alternative University of the Air
• To provide a series of snapshot ‘digital learning events’ during UCU strike dates
• To encourage OU students, staff, and the wider HE community to engage with the UCU industrial action.

The online talks are all available for viewing on the Alternative University of the Air Facebook Page. Well worth checking it out.

New developments in open educational practice

Image by Ronald Macintyre CC0

I wrote these notes to provide background to the presentation that I would have made at the RIDE 2018 conference in London were it not for the UCU pensions strike.   In the post I reflect on recent developments in Open Educational Practice (OEP) and explore their implications for Open and Distance Learning (ODL) and the potential for mainstreaming in education more widely. In doing so I draw on personal experience garnered in the course of a three-year project concerned with OEP and on a review of recent literature.

In brief

ODL and the Open Education Movement constitute separate strands within the broader landscape of ‘open’ with distinct histories and origins. Both strands rely heavily on learning technology. However, the pedagogy and practice of ODL developed prior to the growth of digital technology. Open Education in contrast has more recent roots and has grown and developed at the same time and in harness with the rapid growth of digital and mobile technologies. There are multiple points of contact between the two strands but both face challenges in developing student centred practice for a world of ubiquitous digital devices and free digital content.

Massive Open Online Courses have stimulated interest in open education but arguably they have narrowed the frame of debate over educational practice; ‘open’, ‘online’ and ‘distance’ are often conflated in ways that are less than helpful. At the same time there is a tendency to privilege technology rather than focusing on student centred pedagogy.

Recent developments suggest that the affordances of open licensing open up opportunities for innovative practice based on social and contextual use of online courses.

At more length (with references)

Open and Distance Learning has roots in the nineteenth century but is most often associated with the development and growth of Open Universities from the 1970’s onwards. The new institutions were shaped by local conditions and adopted a range of pedagogical approaches (see Peters, 2001) but also shared common features – in particular the use of a range of technologies (post, radio and television) to reduce transactional distance. Their formation and growth predates the rapid growth in digital technologies that characterises the first two decades of the 21^st century.

On the contrary the roots of Open Education are intimately linked to the digital revolution, with connections to the open source software movement. Core to Open Education is the idea of open licensing for educational materials. Such materials, snippets of resources, images, lecture notes, books or courses are known as OER – Open Educational Resources. The beginning of the Open Education movement is usually dated from 2002. This was the year that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) launched its Open Courseware programme making large amounts of the university’s educational material available online as OER; free to use, share and reversion.

ODL and OER instantiate different meanings of ‘open’ but both are associated with ‘opening up’ access to education. Over the last fifty years, the scale and reach of Open Universities has enabled large numbers, who would otherwise have been excluded, to access education (Mugridge, 1997). However, in a recent of international developments Tait (2018) notes that many of these institutions are facing real challenges in developing their mission in the 21^st century. There is also a real challenge for the Open Education movement. Advocates of OER have argued that digital technology combined with the affordances of openly licensed educational material will widen participation by breaking down barriers to access (see for example D’Antoni: 2009; Conole: 2012). There have been successes, notably the impact of Open Textbooks in the Unites States. However, the ‘promise’ of OER remains potential rather than actual

Widening participation is a critical issue for higher education systems internationally. In the UK access to higher education is highly skewed by socio-economic status. This is the case across the radically different fee regimes that currently characterise the UK system. Despite nearly two decades of policy initiatives inequality by socio-economic background is still entrenched. In the global south there is a huge gap between the demand for higher education and the number of places available for students.

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has had a significant impact on ODL, Open Education and the engagement of higher education institutions with online and distance learning. In some respects this has been positive – the numbers of academic staff involved across HE sectors has grown. Less welcome has been a focus on technological solutions and arguably the application of rather limited and traditional pedagogies. The MOOC model has tended to dominate discussions of options for online education. MOOCs are not generally openly licensed but they do enable mass participation.   However, despite large numbers of participants there is little evidence that they are widening participation. Rather they seem to be broadening choice for those who already have or have had access to higher education.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on the OEPS project from 2014 to 2017. OEPS was a cross-sector Scottish project on Open Education with a specific focus on widening participation that drew on a number of initiatives undertaken by the Open University in Scotland during the period 2010 – 2014. More details of the project can be found in the final report and in a number of papers published by project team members (Cannell: 2016; Cannell and Macintyre: 2017; Cannell, Page and Macintyre: 2016; Cannell, Macintyre and Hewitt: 2015). The project occupied a place at the intersection of ODL, Open Education and Widening Participation. It faced challenges because there is relatively little overlap or dialogue between the ODL, Open Education and Widening Participation academic or practitioner communities of practice. The remainder of this blog draws on the experience of the project team and on related examples from the wider literature. to highlight some of the ways in which it is possible to bring ideas and practice from ODL, Open Education and Widening Participation to bear on tackling issues of unequal access to higher education.

The Cape Town Declaration (2017) drew attention to the importance of developing appropriate pedagogies for using (OER) and highlighted the crucial role of Open Educational Practice (OEP). In the decade that followed notions of OEP developed from a focus on technical design to a concern with use practices. The OPAL report (2011) defined OEP as

Practices that support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path.

In the same year Ehlers (2011) extended the definition to include social interaction among users of OER suggesting that OEP comprises
… collaborative practice in which resources are shared
by making them openly available, and pedagogical practices are employed which rely on social interaction, knowledge creation, peer-learning, and shared learning practices.

The OEPS project built on these themes. Its working definition of OEP highlighted a focus on widening participation:

We think of Open Educational Practices as those educational practices that are concerned with and promote equity and openness. Our understanding of ‘open’ builds on the freedoms associated with “the 5 Rs” of OER, promoting a broader sense of open, emphasising social justice, and developing practices that open up opportunities for those distanced from education.

Over three years the project worked in partnership with a wide range of organisations. In essence it operated as a large set of interacting action research projects; working with partners to understand questions relating to OEP, working collaboratively to design new student centred approaches, testing and evaluating. Over the course of the project this resulted in the design and co-production of fifteen new open courses.

Many of the findings resonated with work done elsewhere (for example Lane: 2013, Perryman and los Arcos: 2016; Arinto: 2018).

• Barriers to engagement and success in learning online combine the institutional, dispositional and situational factors that are well known in WP practice with specific features of the online environment.
• The affordances of OER open opportunities for reusing and remixing tried and tested content. This opens up the possibility for new and effective models of curriculum development that incorporate a process of participatory design.
• Open Education has often had a technology focus – there is a strong case for reorienting on practice, pedagogy and new models of student support.
• Good design recognises student context – the medium may be online but students may be online and in face to face groups.

• In any case designing in opportunities for peer support has significant impact on retention and success.
• The affordances of open can allow the mass scale of ODL (or MOOCs) to be combined with student centred and context specific customisation.

Overall the project findings suggest that as online content becomes ubiquitous there is a strong case for developing new models of curriculum development that privilege student centred pedagogy, social interaction and context specific support. This may require rethinking the boundaries between universities and other organisations that support (potential) learners (Cannell: 2016; Tait and Mills: 2003; Beetham and Sharpe: 2013). Working across boundaries to coproduce learning materials has benefits for academic and non-academic partners and for students.

References

Arinto, P. (2018) OER and OEP towards equitable and quality education for all.

Beetham, H and Sharpe, R eds (2013) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, Routledge, New York and London

Cape Town Open Education Declaration. (2007) Cape Town Open Education Declaration: Un- locking the promise of open educational resources. 

Cannell, P. (2016) Lifelong learning and partnerships: rethinking the boundaries of the university in the digital age, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, Volume 18, Number 1, pp. 61-73(13)

Cannell, P., and Macintyre, R. (2017) Free open online resources in workplace and community settings–a case study on overcoming barriers, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, Volume 19, Number 1, pp. 111-122(12)

Cannell, P., Macintyre, R., and Hewitt, L. (2015) Widening access and OER: developing new practice, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, Volume 17, Number 1, pp. 64-72(9)

Cannell, P., Page, A. and Macintyre, R., (2016) Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS). Journal of Interactive Media in Education. 2016(1), p.12. 

Conole, G. (2012) Fostering social inclusion through open educational resources (OER). Distance Education, 33 (2) 131–134

D’Antoni, S. (2009) Editorial: Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues. Open Learning, 24(1) 3–10

Ehlers, U-D. (2011) Extending the territory: From open educational resources to open educational practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning,15(2), 1-10.

Lane, A. (2013) ‘How OER Support Lifelong Learning’. In McGreal, R, Kinuthia, W and Marshall, S (eds) (2013) Open Educational Resources: Innovation, Research and Practice, Vancouver: Commonwealth of Learning and Athabasca University.

Mugridge, I ed (1997) Founding the Open Universities: Essays in memory of G. Ram Reddy, Sterling Publishers, New Delhi

OPAL (2011). Beyond OER Shifting Focus to Open Educational Practices. OPAL Report 2011. 

Perryman, L.A. and de los Arcos, B., 2016. Women’s empowerment through openness: OER, OEP and the Sustainable Development Goals. Open Praxis, 8(2), pp.163-180 

Peters, O (2001) Learning and Teaching in distance education, Kogan Page, London

Pensions and the future of HE

Back from the OU picket line in central Edinburgh and warming up while reading an excellent post by Brendan McGeever on the Verso blog. Brendan argues that

‘The strike has the capacity to enlarge collectivism and deepen critical thinking, but it has also revealed that striking in an academic context is far from straightforward. ‘

I’ve always been dubious about distinctions between ‘bread and butter’ and ‘political’ trade unionism. But the two combine so clearly in this dispute over pensions. Replacing ‘defined benefits’ by ‘defined contributions’ puts workers at the mercy of the stock market casino and provides a further twist of the screw to an ideology that pushes responsibility on the individual. A victory for university staff would be a critical first step in halting the drive to make education simply a commodity for sale.

Image: Pete Cannell CC0

Back to the blog

Three years since  last posted on this site and it’s time to start again.  Through 2015 to the end of 2017 I was busy with the OEPS project and posting on the project blog.  The site is archived and the posts are still available at https://oepscotland.org/blog/  and you can download the final report from the project at http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/mod/page/view.php?id=132735

Tackling inequality

The Scottish Government announced details of its new Education Scotland bill.  The new legislation will include a legal requirement on Scotland’s local authorities to reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor school pupils.  A top level focus on the shameful and persistent levels of educational inequality is really welcome.  It will be interesting to see how councils will be held accountable.

There is a danger that measures are chosen that encourage initiatives that aim to meet the metric but which don’t fundamentally challenge inequality.  The recent debate in higher education about how to measure socio-economic deprivation has not been resolved.  Single measures are attractive to politicians but unlikely to adequately capture the complexity of deprivation across urban and rural settings.

OEPS forum 2

The OEPS forum that took place last week in Stirling gave lots of food for thought.  It was good to see participants from a wide range of backgrounds there although the majority were folk who are engaged to some extent with open education already.  The following day I gave a presentation at the Scottish Association for Lifelong Learning Council meeting.  In contrast those attending – mainly practitioners and policy makers in widening participation and lifelong learning were unfamiliar with OER and OEP.  Something that Laura Czerniewicz  said in her plenary presentation at the OEPS forum resonated for me at both meetings.  Our students live in a digital world and they have experience and understandings in relation to finding and using resources that don’t necessarily align with institutional expectations.  I think I would add that this applies to students of all ages and backgrounds and to the organisations that we work with in widening participation partnerships.