As delegates to the www2006 symposium prepare to meet in the capital, keynote speakers reveal why e-learning is vital to future prosperity. Iain S Bruce reports
THE school of tomorrow will not be at the end of your street. It will be everywhere, and getting there will only take a click of a mouse. In this vision of the future, every school will have a web portal where the pupils, parents and teaching staff will have the opportunity to interact and share information. In this virtual space, lessons will be beamed direct to anyone who wants to attend, while all the teaching materials required can be downloaded in a trice.Video conferencing will facilitate group interaction while scholars from Tokyo to Tomintoul will log on to their personalised home pages to upload course work, view their marks or receive news about the wider school community.
This is not science fiction. It is a peek at the next 10 years. Internet technology is revolutionising the way we learn, and Scotland is leading the charge.
Such is the backdrop for the www2006 international symposium, which runs from May 23 to May 26, at Edinburgh International Conference Centre. It will welcome 3000 business leaders, industrial technologists and academics to discuss the latest industry developments in what will be one of the key events that will shape the future of the world wide web.
This time they will hear a very different message from the one they heard when the symposium started 15 years ago. Then it was all about marketing and easy money. Today, it is about putting your money where your mouth is and delivering the services the market demands.
“In the 1980s the industry’s focus was on developing the technology and in the 1990s it was all about expanding as rapidly as possible on the back of one or two good ideas, but those days are gone and they’re not coming back,” says Ian Ritchie, one of the keynote speakers.
“It’s hard to make money out of innovation nowadays. What you have to do is focus upon using existing technologies to deliver the services that people need.”
Ritchie is a bit of an internet guru, having founded Office Workstations Limited (Owl), the first and largest supplier of Hypertext authoring tools for personal computers. He will tell delegates that over the next 10 years the web’s biggest buzzwords will be interactivity and education. “In its first phase, the web was a publishing medium. It wasn’t inter active, but now people demand more; they want a two-way process,” he says. “Look at what your kids are doing online with instant messaging, bulletin boards and virtual-reality games, because that’s the moment you have to capture.”
Joining Ritchie on the podium will be Cisco’s Scottish operations director Gordon Thomson. Speaking with the zeal of the converted, he will outline the a global business opportunity, which he believes Scotland is poised to grab with both hands.
“Distance leaning and e-education has to be one of the expanding markets of the near future,” he says. “Scotland is already a world leader in this field, and I can honestly say that there is not a single country that can claim to be as prepared for this as we are, but there is still work to be done.”
Thomson points to Livingston’s Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) and the Interactive University, co-founded by Ritchie, as examples of Scottish organisations that are already generating revenues from the export of education. The ISLI has become a recognised centre of excellence promoting distance learning, generating 170 international graduates from its MSc in system level integration. Every day engineers, academics and undergraduates from Beijing to Brussels work on training and development programmes delivered electronically from Scotland’s central belt. The Edinburgh-based Interactive University’s Scholar project, meanwhile, is receiving international acclaim for its delivery of instruction and support to students in India and China.
Hailed as a means to actively engage students in a manner that traditional “chalk and talk” methods simply cannot, delivering the best teaching to pupils irrespective of their location or economic status, e-learning is coming into its own. No longer simply a case of throwing dusty old course work online, the way we deliver knowledge is changing rapidly, and all of Scotland is being urged to get with the programme.
“Change has to come. It is being driven by the technology, the failure of traditional teaching methods and the audience itself,” says Ritchie. “I believe that, over the next 10 years, we will see a wholesale change in the way training and education is delivered.”
According to research compiled by Frost & Sullivan, the market for distance and online learning has grown at an annual rate of 21% over the past decade. Estimated to have a value of $2.9 billion (£1.54bn) in 2005, its growth rate is tipped to double over the next five years.
Certainly, many of the world’s major players are making huge investments in grabbing a slice of the action. Sony last week announced it is to expand in the distance learning space already estimated to generate $55m (£29.16m) turnover for the Japanese giant, promising to strengthen its ties with universities and management institutions in India, e-learning’s biggest current marketplace.
Simultaneously, HP has unveiled the work it has put in on the developmental PrintCast system, which aims to deliver printed material along with television broadcasts. Essentially a set-top box which allows educational broadcasters to send tip-sheets, illustrations and study aids direct to each viewer’s printer, it is currently being tried out by India’s education ministry.
All this activity is not the result of a punt in the dark. The world’s major players are gearing up because distance learning is already delivering results in the corporate world.
Cisco has trained several thousand of its engineers using Network Defenders, a Space Invaders-style game that teaches students the basics of network security. Players need to gather firewalls, intrusion detection systems and antivirus software, to defend their planet from alien intruders. By the end of the game, students know the basics of constructing a wireless network, before moving into a more formal classroom environment.
The company spends approximately £17,150 on each game it uses, but believes that it recoups that expense in reduced overall training costs.
This experience is mirrored at cosmetics giant L’Oréal, which recently introduced online gaming to train its junior brand managers. Since the game was introduced, participation in training among junior brand managers has risen from 25% to 88%, with 99% of eligible employees completing the course.
Such results have encouraged the growth and development of e-learning initiatives, and according to the 2006 Horizon Report recently published by California’s New Media Consortium, these will become an increasing feature of commercial and public education strategies in the years ahead.
Over the next 24 months, the non-profit think-tank expects the use of interactive online study groups and classroom-to-classroom video conferencing to become commonplace in developed national education systems. In two to three years, it believes that delivering lessons and resources over mobile phones and via computer games will rapidly be adapted as a standard teaching tool, while the next decade will also see virtual reality systems adopted to create an entertaining and immersive learning experience. Though these predictions closely match the consensus industry view, many top educators are warning against becoming too focused on the technology if it means the content is ignored. To work, they say, e-learning must put as much effort into the lessons being taught as the gizmos used to deliver them.
“Successful online learning demands a focus on the learning rather than the online part of the equation, and it is the strategies that define teaching, rather than expensive technological systems, that are the key to success,” says Paul Leng, professor of e-learning at Liverpool University.
“Programmes that do little more than use the internet as a medium for individual learning are likely to re inforce the perception of e-learning as an isolating and alienating mode of study appropriate only for lonely computer geeks.”
Scotland’s companies might be well-positioned to take advantage of the digital teaching boom, but it seems that our students are not.
SCHOOLS and colleges are not renewing their IT equipment fast enough to keep up with changing technology, according to the British Education Communications and Technology Agency (Becta). Despite progress in the availability and use of technology in education, the organisation last week published an annual review revealing that half of all schools have no policy for the replacement of workstations and finding no indications of progress in improving the sustainability and affordability of institutional infrastructure. In fact, its survey data suggests the situation may in fact be worsening.
“Policies need to catch up with the growing importance of technology to school administration and teaching,” says Becta assistant director Malcolm Hunt. “Getting IT on the agenda is as much about engaging senior managers and governors as it is about engaging teachers.”
Ritchie acknowledges that the biggest challenge to comprehensively implementing e-learning at a domestic level is not technological but political; recognising that putting in money would require the support of everyone from education ministers to teachers on the front line. He believes that these are battles which must be fought, however, and that failing to do so could prove dangerous in the long term.
“The political agenda is the biggest obstacle to seeing these ideas become a reality in our schools. They would require changes in everything from national policy to everyday teaching practices and there would naturally be some resistance to this,” he says. “Distance learning is taking off, and companies, government officials and the public alike have to face up to this and consider what it means to them. We need to start thinking about what technology can do for education and realise that in the near future, its place may not necessarily be locked up in a classroom.”
21 May 2006
http://www.sundayherald.com/55719
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