"Perspectives on Distance Learning Trends

"Lessons Of A Virtual Timetable"

"Perspectives on Distance Learning Trends"

Feb 15th 2001 | LOS ANGELES AND SAN FRANCISCO From The Economist print edition

The market for e-learning has been slow to take off. What does that say about its future?

PEARSON, a large British media group that owns 50% of The Economist, is betting much of its future on the market for online education. Already the world's biggest "education company", Pearson plans to dominate what Marjorie Scardino, the firm's chief executive, told analysts at the end of January is a potentially vast market for electronically delivered teaching material.

There is some evidence that her strategy might be sound. In America last year, total spending on education was a whopping $800 billion, and a government initiative to install electronic links in schools (known as the E-Rate) has ensured that 95% of all state schools, and 63% of all the classrooms in them, have Internet access. Moreover, 40% of all college classes in America already use Internet resources.

The supporting evidence does not all come from America, though. In Britain, Warwick University is proposing to make it compulsory for its students to have a laptop computer from 2003; almost all of them will have Internet links. And there is plenty going on beyond the bricks and mortar. Mrs Scardino says that this year "2m people will be seeking a degree online, and outside a campus." Even in China, Tsinghua University offers classes across the country via modem.

All that these wired pupils are waiting for, Mrs Scardino hopes, is online material to be delivered to them by Pearson, or by rivals such as Vivendi, a French media and engineering group, and Kaplan, an American career-guidance company. This month, Vivendi launched education.com, a portal through which parents, teachers and children can communicate and gain electronic access to material based on the books of its Havas media subsidiary. Other firms see opportunities in supplying universities with the software and advice needed to put their lessons and administration online.

Pearson believes that it has a trump card in the competition for this market: a software company called NCS that it bought last year which supplies enterprise resource planning systems to 40% of America's schools. These systems provide a platform for delivering and administering all sorts of electronic material, but in particular they are good at delivering the educational tests that promise to be a cornerstone of the Bush administration's education reform plan, with its heavy emphasis on comparative performance and accountability.

Dot college

Belief in e-learning, as it is often called, has so far weathered the downturn in the wider dotcom world. John Chambers, the influential CEO of Cisco, which supplies much of the Internet's hardware, asserts that the scale of network traffic generated by e-learning will make today's exchange of e-mail messages look like a rounding error. But his firm's business depends on an ever-rising flood of electronic data passing over the connections which it makes for electronic networks. More disinterested voices caution against confusing the obvious need to learn computer-literacy skills with the less obvious need to learn everything else via a computer.

The market for online education can be divided into three: schools, universities and business/commercial training. Since universities are where much of the early development of the Internet took place, they might have been expected to have pushed its potential furthest. But, by and large, they have concentrated on using it as a means of extending their geographic reach, through their "extension programmes". On site, their record has been more patchy.

Consider UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles, a prime candidate for advanced electronic learning methods if ever there was one. But UCLA uses the Internet much like a big business would. And, like the average big business, itdoubts whether it has saved much money as a result. It has simply been able to do a number of things better.

The first users, says Rory Hume, the university's executive vice chancellor, were the administrative staff: "the people who buy things, and who have the power to hire and fire." Next to see the opportunities were the librarians. Only late in the day did academics realise that the university's system, now being designed as a single unit, could be used as a way to distribute information about classes and, more recently, about grading. But on-line instruction? Lots of small experiments are running on campus, but not much more. "Even when our professors put all the material on the web," says Mr Hume, "all the students still come to lectures."

Moreover, where it is happening, on-line learning is a commercial turkey. The university's extension programmes are using the Internet widely-to teach from a distance, for example, a course on hotel management. But they still lose money. An immense effort by the School of Dentistry to create an online course to educate periodontists around the world cost some $750,000 and took five years to create: again, it has been a commercial failure. "People are unwilling to subscribe online for the latest information from anywhere in the world," mourns Mr Hume. "Instead, they will go to a lecture and pay much, much more. We have an enormous revenue stream from our faculty giving lectures."

The one area where the Internet is about to save the university money is in purchasing. James Davis, who came to UCLA a few months ago to reorganise the way that it uses information technology, has been making it possible to combine online the institution's purchases of everything from computers to pencils, giving it more buying muscle.

Many of the other uses of information technology on the UCLA campus neither save money nor visibly enhance productivity. They simply raise the quality of the experience. One example is the web-sites that now exist for almost all 3,000 or so undergraduate courses. About 55-60% of them not only supply lecture notes; they also allow students to take tests online and to see their results. Another example is My.UCLA, an in-house "portal". Students can use it to search for advice, such as the entry requirements for graduate school.

Given the University of California's sprawling size, it is surprising that its nine campuses have not combined forces more, using the Internet as a bond. The main area where they have acted jointly is in setting up the California Digital Library, which drives hard bargains with the publishers of periodicals to license the use of their electronic versions. But even here, no money is saved: the university still buys paper copies. "Paper is so much more permanent than bits and bytes," explains Gloria Werner, the university'slibrarian.

The Internet has undoubtedly encouraged universities to reach out beyond their own campuses in order to offer more "distance learning", and at greater distances. The University of Phoenix, set up in 1989 to teach adults through a combination of old-fashioned distance learning and evening classes, is incorporating more and more e-learning into its courses, which are mostly taken by people with full-time jobs. But the extension of an institution's brand is not without risk. Increasing the number of students who claim to have studied there can damage a university's reputation if those students do not receive the level of teaching that the university's name was built on.

Prominent universities have therefore tended to band together for support in the early stages of exploring e-learning, and they have often launched their efforts under names other than their own, even though they have some of the strongest brands in education. The business schools of Columbia, in New York, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, Stanford in California and Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, for example, have teamed up behind Cardean University, an early effort at an online institution for tertiary education. Cardean offers complete courses, mostly in business subjects, aimed at people working full-time who want to learn in the evenings, at weekends or whenever. It plans to offer full degrees eventually.

There are more than 250 firms eager to help established universities to go online. These firms build the Internet infrastructure and manage the electronic delivery of classes. Cardean, for example, is the work of UNext, an Illinois company that grew out of Knowledge Universe, an education business started by Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, and Michael Milken, the developer of the junk bond market who spent 24 months in jail for fraud. Several prominent business schools-including Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, Fuqua at Duke University, and INSEAD, near Paris-have worked with Pensare, a company based in Sunnyvale, California, to put their material online. A host of other firms, including Blackboard, Campus Pipeline, eCollege and WebCT, offer different platforms for putting course material on the Internet and for building a student community around the material.

Some firms have decided not to be the invisible force behind the e-learning efforts of established universities, but rather to become brands known in their own right as a place for students to find courses. Sometimes these are simply portals that consolidate course information from other institutions, such as Hungry Minds. Others offer courses of their own.

Business and other vocational subjects predominate. But some hope to find an audience for less utilitarian subjects among adults who feel that they missed some education when young. Mark Taylor, a sociologist at Williams College in Massachusetts, is leading an effort to offer courses in the liberal arts. Taught by professors from top universities-most of them so far in the eastern United States, such as Wellesley, Brown and Amherst-they are marketed under the name Global Education Network (GEN). The GEN project is funded by Herbert Allen, a rich alumnus of Williams, and it does not yet offer any complete courses, merely free snippets of lectures. But it was founded on the belief that there is a potential market for vigorous online intellectual stimulation.

Boxmind, with a number of Oxford University academics on its board, is another such ambitious project. By putting "star" academics at the centre of a stage away from their home institutions, websites such as GEN and Boxmind threaten (if they take off) to raise the tension between universities and their faculty over the ownership of intellectual property. With e-learning sites offering students access to the best teachers without having to call in at their institutional home, there is a danger that the universities' academic superstars may choose to go solo.