Doug Connery e-portfolio

As I was reading through the SECTIONS model by Bates and Pool, I found it resonated with me more than the Chickering articles. I was tempted to do a critique of the SECTIONS model as even though they state that it was modified from the distance education ACTION model to fit with campus-based universities, I am not convinced it does in all aspects. In addition, the book is now almost 10 years old and many things have changed since 2003 that could justify a revised edition, either as a rewrite or an update much along the lines that Chickering did in 1996 with Ehrmann.

Student Demographics:

Bates and Pool talk about how student’s fresh out of high school need more support as they are less independent learners. He alludes to the idea that they may not be ready for full on-line technology. Third and fourth year students are more prepared as are students who come back to post-secondary after working in the workforce. From a polytechnic or college perspective most of our programs are 3 years or less so according to Bates and Pool, we can’t expect them to study entirely through the use of technology. I wonder if 10 years later, if this is still true. I remember reading somewhere that the Net generation who are great at using technology from a social networking context, do not transfer their digital native skills well out of their comfort zones into educational technology or business technology applications. I saw a presentation from Dr. Kelly Edmonds this week about challenges of blended learning. She commented that in general, students in her study who experienced blended learning for the first time, struggled with many aspects. After thinking about this, the struggles seem to be around lack of independent learning skills so Bates and Pool ‘s comments are probably still correct.

Costs:

Costing technology in education is a hair ball, and probably not a small one from a house cat! Reading through Bates and Pool illustrates this point. They talk about the costs of using technology in education including production of technology-based materials, graphics, simulations and games, purchasing and licensing software and equipment costs, however they also weave in the costs of creating content, instructional costs, copyright costs, department photocopy costs, course development costs, thus everything blends together.

Once you factor in the mode of delivery along the e-learning spectrum from a basic web site to house the course outline and a few documents to support an F-2-F delivery through the broad range of blended learning to fully online, the question is what percentage of these costs can be attributed to technology. Another factor that was only briefly touched by Bates and Pool is how to factor in non educational technology or industry specific technology. For example in a Dental Assisting program, the X-ray equipment; is it considered educational technology or industry specific technology, perhaps educational technology? What about the tools and heavy shop equipment used in a heavy duty mechanic program, is it industry specific technology because it is not electronic, maybe, but these tools are technology and are used to help teach the skills of the trade. Another blend.

Another factor is how the program is delivered. Generally speaking, programs during the day are considered grant based programs where the money to pay for the program comes from a combination of tuition and operating grants from the province. Programs and courses offered in continuing education and distance/fully online are considered earned revenue based, as the money to pay for the program comes from tuition only. They must at least break even, and should make money to go back into maintaining the program or for developing new courses or it goes into the general institute budget. To develop and deliver a new program during the day has a different costing and revenue model than earned revenue. For example, Bates and Pool talk about the unit cost/student and the cost per student over a five year period. This is all about business cases and returns on investment which applies to the earned revenue side of education more than the grant side.

The hair ball is getting pretty big so I will stop here.

Speed:

Speed is an interesting factor and Bates and Pool give a couple of perspectives; however I will introduce some more. Going back to the earned revue vs grant or daytime programming scenarios is a great example of magnitude differences in speed. Speed of implementation on the grant side is measured in and years, continuing education and continuing education is measured in months and some institutes do corporate training which is measured in weeks. So a model to design and develop a technology based grant course will not work for corporate training and will need to be simplified to meet the needs of continuing education and distance education.

How the course is designed and developed can affect the flexibility of updating. Courses developed by central technology units to support instructors can be a nightmare to maintain because the people designing (Instructional Designers) and developers of the course sites (multimedia) generally are not involved with teaching and maintaining their final products. If a course in html is turned over to an instructor who does not work in the html world (the majority), and the course needs maintenance and updating (textbook edition change, updated schedule) at the next offering, they need to draw on scarce and sometimes expensive resources to make this happen. However if the course is designed with maintenance and upkeep in mind, then the components of the course most likely to change will not be in html, it will be in a format that the instructor can easily change and upload themselves. Thus I do challenge Bates and Pool’s comments that a web site is easier to change and update than a printed text because the web site requires specialized skills over and above those required for updating printed text or information in a word document that can be uploaded to the site by the instructor.

Final thought:

I read somewhere that UBC is going to stick with WebCT/ Blackboard and move to a higher version. I wonder if UBC used the SECTIONS model to do an evaluation of their needs and vendor products before making their decision…..