The future of e-education

Ross Woods, April 2006, Updated May 2007, June 2011

Online education (e-education) is dragging its feet compared to three closely parallel industries. I suggest we can forecast its development by analogy with those industries:

I suggest, however, that real change is not about new gadgets and temporary fads, which generally have a shrinking lifespan. Real  systemic change is about longer term general assumptions of whole industries.

Current industry trends

Trend One. Digital resources are increasingly being provided for free. Some are very good, even though they are increasingly expensive to develop. Some of the most popular software in some categories is still freeware. Wikipedia and Scholarpedia provide good sources of free information.

Trend Two. Paradoxically, Microsoft is still making money because people are still willing to pay high prices for the software they want.

Trend Three. Basic infrastructure costs are still going down in real terms, while bandwidth continues to rise.

Trend Four. Personal attention is increasingly costly, and labor will continue to be moved offshore to reduce costs. Perhaps this will include more high-value work, as India is currently taking. Australians are accustomed to Indian call centers asking them to switch telephone companies. Even major software companies outsource their work to India.

Trend Five. Media are converging and data is increasingly transferable between different media such as mobile telephone (especially Smartphones), Ipod, PDA, Internet, CD, etc.

Trend Six. Certified skill-sets are increasing in importance, and may soon challenge qualifications as indicators of expertise. It would not be difficult to argue that this has already happened in some specialized areas in the Australian training sector.

Trend Seven. The re-conceptualization of education is already well under way. A "college" can be increasingly virtual, becoming a kind of website rather than a kind of institution or a real "bricks and books" place.

Trend Eight. The difference between training simulations and interactive games is increasingly blurred. Simulations can be fun while still imparting valid real-world skills. (See www.twitchspeed.com)

Even so, these trends have their limits. I am not so sure that the androgogy for high-level complex learning can be fully automated; it will still need real people for some time to come.

What will the technology do?

Most of these changes are already upon us, but perhaps not yet fully exploited.

Technology will actively teach. Unlike the Internet, e-education will not just provide information. This is odd, because some of the excellent Computer Assisted Learning of the 1980s and early 1990s (mainly developed by Apple) was good at actively teaching, but has generally not been adapted for Internet use. We have to some extent regressed. For example, when I bought my first computer, all I had to do was take it home and plug it in, and the computer taught me how to use itself. Unless I missed something, that is no longer happening. Most "tutorials" now do little more than tell and perhaps show.

Collaborative systems will improve. Even though the Internet already offers an excellent means of collaboration between staff, between students and staff, and between students, it is easy to imagine that it will get better.

Costs will be fixed rather than variable. Providing e-education will increasingly become a fixed cost; that is, the provider will incur no more costs when adding more students. Presently the one-to-one demands of e-education make it rather labour intensive, but automation could generally do much more to automate admissions, fees, and student services. The ideal (probably unattainable in accredited study that needs human checks) is that an online college would keep running even if all personnel fall down dead. Some kinds of interactive, service-providing websites can already do this.

Quality systems will be built-in. Quality management and auditablity is already being built into software, making it easier to offer credit for such learning, even though for-credit study will probably remain more expensive that non-credit learning. An accreditation auditor can already do about half of an entire audit by clicking through the compliance system in the college website.

Learner expectations: some projections

People will increasingly accept e-education as the normal way to study something new, in the same way that they now treat the Internet as a normal information source.

An increasingly time-poor population will want effective learning in relatively short time-spans, sometimes for narrow, focused skill-areas and just-in-time training. But most students will use e-education like a handy-man book; they will use it simply to look up how-to information.

In fact, consumer education will take up a large part of e-educators role and development of its market image. The message will be "E-education is a preferred source of sophisticated, valuable learning, not just a handyman book." The para-message will be "You are being offered more value for your money than you are taking advantage of." To some extent, this might be a justification of prices, but it could easily be a genuine claim.

E-education is already starting to replace the classroom, but the classroom will retain a significant, valuable role for the foreseeable future. Virtual relationships won’t really replace real people soon, although they may have a major role.

Collaboration between e-education and classroom might be more productive than competition. Campus colleges are already looking for the better ways to integrate e-education with face-to-face instruction and with credit for qualifications. Nevertheless, the suggestion that an e-education could somehow be equivalent to a residential college while charging only a fraction of its fees might suggest a radical change.

It might also follow that employers will more highly value employee’s ability to learn new skills, rather than only have pre-existing skills. To some extent, this is already the case, but I think that this trend has limitations. Employers will still want new employees to be very competent in current skills before they get the job.

Change-weariness

Change-weariness will become a factor for everybody. The seems to be several factors:

The answer to change-weariness is probably very simple:

The marketscape

Non-credit studies will be an ordinary extra option to bundled with telecommunications services, such as Internet access and telephones.

Similarly, e-education lends itself to bulk marketing to institutional buyers. For example, the XYZ school system or the LMN University might buy access to e-education as an option for tens of thousands of students at a time at a very low cost per student. As a sweetener to get the contract, providers would probably want to offer buyer-specific adaptations of existing content and tailor-made new content.

That is, e-education will probably have producers, wholesalers and retailers, which is quite different from the current service industry paradigm. The continuing commodification of education will continue to be a cause of concern.

Educational institutions will become retailers of e-education. They may also produce e-education resources that they provide to other colleges to retail. Plato, a major producer of e-education products, already operates this way.

A perhaps more lucrative but more demanding group of institutional buyers are companies who want training for employees. For them, they can pay for what they want as long as it  increases profits through productivity gains, reduced costs, or greater staff adaptability.

Market image and placement in a competitive environment will be crucial. Colleges of e-education would probably want to value-add. One of the main ways to do this is by adding extra personal-contact services while trying to driving the price down. With a squeeze between higher costs and lower revenues, they will look for increasingly effective ways to use personnel for contact services. (Call centres are the horrible current trend.) Perhaps they will use fewer staff, but it might be more accurately described as a change in the nature of work for the e-education workforce. The alternative is to look for other kinds of value-adding that does not involve increasing levels of personal-contact services.

Some colleges will compete by being very good at niche markets, where they might command higher prices for more valuable specialist content.

Considering the amount of software needed, I wonder if many providers will collaborate in some way, even with competitors. This has the unfortunate side-effect that consumers could have difficulty distinguishing between providers. Consequently, providers will have to work harder to establish something unique about what they do.

Pioneers will take higher risks. Some will probably fold through their mistakes or simply by being too early into the market to get a critical mass of customers.

It is quite likely that there will be a large number of small providers (start-ups and established niche providers), some medium sized providers, and a small number of very large providers. Oversupply will decrease the value of the product and the proliferation of providers would precipitate an inevitable shake-out, with those less-well positioned being ousted.

The larger providers will be able to maintain their positions by offering a wide range of high quality easy-to-navigate content for the general population. It is essentially a high-volume, low-unit-cost business. Others could not easily assail such a market position, except by being niche providers in specialized markets.

Customer loyalty will depend mainly on a sense of community with staff and other students and perceived value for money. In particular, the latter means:

I would also add other indicators of quality and commerciality. These would greatly affect students, even though they would be largely unaware of them

The idea of e-education being a digital service competing for very large markets alongside other telecommunications, software and Internet services is a huge challenge, both in creating such a system, and in educating consumers. Done in the right way, people will go for it.