Dr Neil Béchervaise

NB Consulting (Australasia) Pty Ltd

Online education in the marketplace

[A brief reflection on my more recent work with online providers]
by Neil Béchervaise

The promises for Information Technology in the educational context continue to far outweigh any evidence for effective delivery. Online training programs proliferate and colourful online encyclopaedias masquerade as educational facilities. Unsophisticated attempts to represent teaching notes as learning materials provide a constant reminder of the ‘mastery learning’ materials of the seventies and several previously enthusiastic educational sites have acknowledged that they provide a ‘coaching resource’.

Leading Australian players in the online education business include the ISIS corporation’s educational wing – XSIQ and Sydney-based World School. Each has positioned itself as a national provider and each is listed in international stock exchanges. Each, on the other hand, has reduced its claims as the realities of the market has highlighted its inadequacies. Each is focused on the senior years of secondary schooling as it grapples with the demands of interactivity and the need for intensive skilled human intervention to tailor its offerings to individual student needs. World School is now effectively positioned as a coaching resource while XSIQ is regrouping to identify realistic delivery modes and internally consistent assessment procedures for an increasingly global marketplace.

The evolution of e-cademy represents an alternative vision for the e-ducation of a prospectively online nation. Their catch-cry – Our Network. Your Content – suggests a recognition of fundamental student needs for information broadcast interactively and manipulated to generate accessible learning opportunities. Despite their recognition of the problem of presenting learning opportunities online, e-cademy also appear to have accepted their role as trainers rather than educators. The education pie remains tantalisingly distanced from the demands of the e-business players.

So what is the problem? Why is the school market so difficult to crack?

Despite the lemming-like enthusiasm of some teachers for the application of computers in the classroom, there apparently remains more to education than the presentation of factual materials - no matter how colourfully or graphically they are represented. Teacher resistance to technology is as much concerned with inappropriate usage as it is with technical incapacity. While simulations of reality become increasingly realistic, their uptake seems to be forever limited by consumer recognition that virtual representation is not actually reality. In fact, the inability of the so-called e-commerce market of high profile players such as amazon.com, sausage and solution six to manipulate the internet to meet their particular needs and demands suggests that there remains more to satisfying consumer needs than technology can currently provide.

Though online educational materials have become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade, download times and server and pc RAM capacities continue to limit effective delivery. Coupled with the high costs of development and prohibitive royalty costs, copyright and intellectual property laws have become significant impediments to effective educational presentation. In consequence, most materials are heavily text-based and represent, at the consumer interface, poor-value substitutes for print materials in the hands of dynamic teachers.

Attempts to anticipate student learning needs confirm two essential features of the educational process – it is non-linear and it is highly individual. Student experience and student interestare highly variable and frequently personality dependent for any given topic - so the learning path is apparently serendipitous. In the absence of an observer, student interest cannot be monitored and potential learning pathways cannot be continuously adjusted in response to the monitoring. Attractive and even timely data provision remains an insufficient motivation for effective learning. From another field where data gathering is prolific, traffic information for a ten square kilometre section of Sydney can currently be collected at rates in excess of nine gigabytes per hour. To provide useful online traffic information to an individual motorist travelling in that section requires processing and delivering one unique set of information from that nine gigabytes. Several radio stations provide occasional news of road accidents and delays, considerably less than nine gigabytes per hour of course, which are eagerly sought by motorists in transit.

School classrooms averagely contain 30 ‘drivers’ seeking individual information from a single data source on a continuous basis for six hours a day. The data is varied according to key learning areas yet integrated to create a meaningful learning experience for each individual ‘driver’. While delivery is not as flamboyant as the technology of the videogame suggests it should be by now, the interactivity of the classroom environment appears to meet the needs of an identifiable majority of students [they are tuned in to a relevant ‘radio station’]. The same cannot yet be said of online learning platforms at local, national or international levels.

Linearity of presentation, lack of interactivity and inappropriateness of content selection remain fundamental weaknesses in the development of online educational materials. Programming still largely neglects a primary focus on the learning needs of the individual student – or of any consideration that learning styles may vary with topic, task or content base.

In essence, while the technology has become more sophisticated, attention to the learning needs (rather than the content needs) of learners has barely changed in the decade since IT was promised as a panacea for educational ills. Major technology companies working with major educational institutions are coming increasingly towards recognition of the need for mediation between the learner and the learning. The cost of the teacher as mediator is becoming the price they will pay to gain access to the educational market.

School administrators face an even greater dilemma. Having been moved to accept massive capital outlays to implement the new technology and still unable to counter entrenched resistance to change from teachers at the classroom level, they are now faced with the prospect that the technology will never meet the range of student needs promised for it. Far from facilitating the task of schools, the implementation of Information Technology has generated a new level of technical staffing to manage its own roll-out and on-going maintenance and a new level of teacher employment to maintain the more obvious accounting and publishing facilities emerging with website presence. It is impossible to see how a roll-back can be achieved in the current climate but it is equally difficult to see how effective educational returns can be made on our previous capital and intellectual expenditure.

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