Education and the Economics of Inference

 If history is our guide then we go forward through the rearview mirror, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. There are many metaphors that help us make sense of the present. I like the skeuomorph, mostly because, as a practitioner of human centred design having worked on many projects involving UI, UX and behaviour change, these help orient ourselves to the present use case by mapping past grammars of action into the future. January is a fitting time to reflect on how the past informs the future. And we are at a critical junction in postsecondary education, and depending on your perspective this is either a beginning or an end. 

Education going forward will be defined by new ways of thinking that promotes better access and accessibility – using AI in teaching and learning, better credit mobility, a focus on affordable learning and open education, modular and micro-credential learning, including more effective use of physical space, and increasing the porosity between the private and public sectors. We are in the middle of redefining the business model of higher education. Here are some observations from last year that will help inform this year as eCampusOntario continues to support Digital Transformation – in Ontario and across Canada through our network of partners and Digital Campus Canada. 

Access: Accessibility

This year marks the full implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). There is a still a lot of work to be done to meet the aims of the AODA, but there has been a lot of great work on accessibility across our sector.

Last year we worked with partners to produce two excellent resources to support accessibility. 

The Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University is a global leader in accessibility. Check them out – these have many useful resources, including this one: Framework for Accessible and Equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education. This report offers great guidance on AI – it is “a practical guide to the dizzying domain of artificial intelligence within the education ecosystem, with a particular focus on the impact on equity and accessibility. AI and accessibility are beginning to have an interesting conversation.” 

We also worked with the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) on a roadmap for supporting Accessibility, Digital Transformation, and Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) – watch for this to drop soon.

Artificial Intelligence: AI

AI is a pharmakon: it is either a remedy or a poison. As such, it too is a fitting way to frame our discussion as with those described above. And AI is a resource extraction industry. It uses the raw materials of the Internet to build inference – the process by which harvested data produces meaning. Eventually the full cost of this will be apparent. But for now, beyond the hype cycles AI adoption is the big push – and education will be no exception.  Here are a couple of excellent resources on using generative AI in teaching and learning:

• York University: https://www.yorku.ca/teachingandlearning/gen-ai/  
• University of Toronto: https://ai.utoronto.ca/ 
• Contact North has a great suite of AI tools.

A credit granted anywhere is a credit granted everywhere 

Humber Polytechnic demonstrated leadership on seamless credit transfer by announcing late last year that there will be “Automatic and no fees for credit transfers and prior learning assessment and recognition starting Fall 2025.” This is a game changer for Ontario. It is the first domino to drop as Ontario continues system evolution toward a bigger focus on learners and value for money – for learners and for the system. Bottom line: Learners should be provided with “no wrong door” into the educational system that will enable credential completion across all areas of the economy. 

Affordable Learning: OER Uptake at Scale

The Ontario Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS) invested $35M in open education. As the Minister Nolan Quinn of the Ministry of Colleges and Universities said in his opening remarks at the eCampusOntario annual Teaching and Education Seminar and Showcase, OER saves students money. Our Open Library has a student savings tracker that includes an opportunity to learn how much faculty can save their students and to share an adoption.  And there is good news from across the sector: Check out this story from Trent University Open Educational Resources Pilot Project Saves Students an Estimated $390,000 in Textbook Costs. And from Fanshawe College the OER Design Studio enlists students to work and learn that saves students millions in annual costs. Both of these were supported by funding from the VLS.

Want to learn more about open education in Ontario? Check out these two recent reports:

• Brock University’s Inclusive Education Research Lab and eCampusOntario have released On a Path to Open, a new report detailing key results from a study conducted with Ontario’s publicly-supported colleges, universities, and Indigenous institutes about their capacity to support open educational practices (OEP)
• Affordable Learning, Lasting Impact: How OER and Partnerships Save Students Money, a new report detailing how Open Educational Resources (OER) are emerging as a critical tool in addressing education affordability, promoting equity, and fostering innovation across Ontario’s higher education sector.

Modular and Micro-Credential Learning

Here’s two excellent examples of leadership and the future of learning. We recently had the opportunity to visit Dario Guescini and Radha Krishnan at Seneca Polytechnic. Among other highlights they showed us the Hyflex Classroom design. This digital by design space enables full hyflex learning – it does not matter if the students are in the class or attending remotely. A significant percentage of classroom at Seneca Polytechnic are outfitted this way. They started building these during the pandemic. That’s foresight in action.

And on a recent visit to College La Cite I learned about their approach to modular curricula: all courses across all programs are modularized and translated to outcomes based learning. This gives them enormous flexibility on supporting multiple and myriad learning pathways, including the potential to create micro-credentials. This is a great example of future-focused extensibility. Again, exceptional foresight that future proofs learning design forward.

And on the topic of micro-credentials, eCampusOntario continues to support our members to align programs with local labour markets to fill specified labour market gaps.

The official Ontario upskilling platform – the Micro-Credentials Portal operated on behalf of the Ontario Government by eCampusOntario supports Ontario’s Micro-Credential Strategy. The MC Portal continues to provide members with innovative labour market tools to ensure program alignment. It is also an example of AI in action.

The AI back end of the Micro-credentials portal helps institutions assign labour market information (LMI) to their courses and programs with a click of a button. Institutions can be supported in aligning their courses/programs at scale with NAICS, NOC, and CIP data, as well as structured skills taxonomies, associated job titles, and local job market data by geographic region, to ensure local labour market alignment of programs prior to international recruitment. The AI front end provides learners with clarity on eligible programs and job market alignment and easy to use features to find the right program at the right time in their career. 

These tools can be expanded to support targeted international student recruitment. Institutions gain clarity on how their programs align with labour markets and IRCC regulations, and MCU gains clarity on the scale and scope of programs offered as part of fulfilling local labour market openings. New program development can also be supported with these data.

Please reach out if you are interested in learning more and being part of our national expansion in providing a LMI-informed upskilling platform that provides incremental new revenue to PSE institutions. 

Private:Public 

A while ago I explored some educational ratiocinations – some reasoned random thoughts (and linguistic ratios) on the future of education. The takeaway for me there is how we position the sector to address Canada’s three-legged productivity problem, which is helping employers to:

• Conduct research and innovation
• Derisk new technology adoption, and
• Engage in education and upskilling.

Postsecondary education is a primary enabler of the innovation economy. Private:public partnerships are key to realizing the benefits of both private and public investments in education. eCampusOntario supports partnerships through micro-credentials and upskilling and through research and innovation via the Ontario Collaborative Innovation Platform. 

Within this discussion we should be asking ourselves: is PSE a public or a private good?

Most working in the sector would say it is both. York University President Rhonda Lenton nicely outlines the public value of postsecondary education in supporting personal resilience, the ability to continue to learn and to use technology systematically through disruptions and career changes. Higher education is no longer a scarce resource for many. And the current no- and slow-growth economic context has made the public value of postsecondary education more diffuse and difficult to define for a generation reared in an environment that has seen reduced per capita incomes, housing expense volatility and strained public services like healthcare. Or, to put it in Nate Silver’s terms, the river is washing away the village. 

In this context, it is incumbent on us all to continue to take what is usefully learned from the past while remaking the postsecondary education system for the future. Partnerships and porosity of institutions are paramount, as is the need for new models and ways of doing things. We have pedagogical and technological debt to amortize. We can do this without mortgaging our future any further.

Our past informs the value of our credentials. Our future is meeting learners at every age and stage of life. Our present is adapting how we deliver our credentials.

At eCampusOntario, we are focused on supporting our members to leverage foresight, embrace digital transformation, drive affordable learning, all while pivoting to the new normal of supporting our learners for the future. This includes supporting the economy with reskilling, upskilling and micro-credential learning, supporting economic resiliency with international learners and local workers, and scaling digital transformation and digital by design education.

Expanding the Scope of Postsecondary Education

Where, when, with whom and what we learn is changing

Here are a handful of education trends worth watching as we embark on the new calendar year:

Digital First Design.

Today’s learners are digital first. Meeting the evolving learner needs means providing effective and high-quality digital experiences in all aspects of higher education, with programs that are career-focused and that support job-readiness.

Our postsecondary education system was designed to support learners coming from secondary school. These are now the minority of learners when you consider the system as a whole. The non-traditional student is now the norm. With Canada enjoying one of the highest tertiary education attainment rates in the OECD the majority of learners are now returning to education to upgrade skills and competencies in support of career and wider lifestyle engagement. As outlined in the (excellent) CDLRA’s 2023 Pan-Canadian Report on Digital Learning Trends in Canadian Post-Secondary Education, all learners expect greater digital by design learning options. These options render extensible learning location: online, hybrid and fully face to face – all oriented to supporting skills and competency acquisition. These options also reinforce the importance of digital transformation: using technology to empower trailblazers, improve learner experiences, strengthen resilience to sustain growth across the sector and prepare the workforce of the future to thrive.

Competency over content. 

And speaking of competencies, 2024 will mark increasing progress of competency over content. Higher education as we know it today is largely based on learning content. Vocational programs in professional faculties (medicine, law, skilled trades) focus on developing competencies, but generally speaking our model of higher education produces content experts based on programs of study (majors). The focus on skills that has arisen the past two decades has slowly disrupted this; the advent of generative AI has accelerated this disruption. In a world where Artificial Intelligence helps mobilize the widespread public availability of content (with many downsides given baked-in biases in this public content) we will see a renewed focus on competencies emerge. These competencies may well be in the effective use of AI, but themselves will be AI-proof. And by making content more context-aware, AI provides the scaffolding to support learning by doing at scale. Work integrated learning is the best fulcrum for learning competencies and legitimate peripheral participation in communities of professional practice. 

Missions not majors. 

Content knowledge is still going to be important even as we shift more to focusing on competencies. It is the operationalization of content that is key, and this will be important as we support a much greater emphasis on mission-oriented education instead of focusing on majoring in subject areas. Think learning ecosystems linked by shared values that enable learners to obtain credentials in a subject area that is defined by a social or economic purpose versus the content area itself. We already have this in the form of entrepreneurship education, where learners can stand up their own social venture or company as part of business school curricula. But it will become increasingly common, particularly as new generations of (re)learners seek to participate in addressing social, cultural and economic priorities such as climate change through social purpose and business incubation. Significantly, this trend helps to promote the increased porosity of postsecondary education institutions, for work integrated learning and research partnerships. This is part of a broader embrace of demand-driven innovation across the postsecondary environment. 

Micro- and bespoke credentials

Commensurate with an increased focus on competencies and the mission-oriented education model sketched above is the continued growth of micro-credentials, including stackable micro-credentials that cohere into larger credentials over time. This includes innovative pathways for credential completion and support for lifelong learning comprised of fast-track educational pathways in areas of critical need for the economy (healthcare, AI/ML, automotive innovation, climate change mitigation, entrepreneurship). Features of this theme include: employer partnerships; easy credit transfer and stackability of micro-credentials into degrees comprised of courses from any participating institution; newcomer credential recognition and scaffolding into Ontario credentials; digital access to a suite of supports, skills transcripts and industry engagement. À la carte curriculum journeys will enable broader engagement with education contiguous with personal career management. Providing the tools to do this will support social and economic resilience. eCampusOntario is supporting the development of AI tools that enable learners to identify competencies obtained via content-oriented credentials, figure out gaps in career mapping, and find micro-credentials to scaffold these gaps. 

Subscription models of education.

The economics of postsecondary education are under significant pressure. The mission of higher education – creating informed citizens capable of navigating increasingly complexity – is more important than ever before. 

The business model of education is evolving to meet the current and future social, economic and cultural demands of society. Some will decry focusing on the economics or using terms like business models in education, but the reality is that educational institutions must balance public funding, public missions and mandates, the need to embrace digital transformation and the reality of meeting rising costs. The trends outlined above are part of this evolution. The evolution of subscription models as applied to education will mark a significant step forward in helping institutions realize new and different models of educational delivery with revenue diversified streams.

It is fair to say that majority of people today stream music, movies and other media. I read various news sources to which I subscribe. Doing so lowers the per item cost and provides the media organizations with (relatively predictable) recurring revenue. Subscription models make sense.

Applying subscription models to education takes advantage of the evolution of micro-credentials that disaggregate learning into more discrete bits that scaffold learner engagement over time. More people need to access higher education in ways that better fit their lives with family care obligations, working, and lifestyle considerations that complicate the ability to spend 2 or 4 years dedicated to full time study. This is still important, but not the norm going forward. By providing subscriptions to education our institutions can help frame lifelong learning within current contexts and paradigms of curation and consumption while fostering affective investment in learning itself. These models are effective for companies – large and small – seeking to future proof their workforces, as well as for individual learners seeking to grown and manage their careers. Engagement of alumni networks is one simple step to realizing the value of subscription models for lifelong learning. 

Disruption, digital by design.

Education in the digital by design era is going from anywhere, any time, to everywhere, all the time. Disruption is ubiquitous. Higher education is increasingly focusing more on experiential and work integrated learning, and on more bespoke educational paths and credentials. Experiential and work integrated learning can be aided by AI that can also help us make better sense of the competencies we gain from our content-based curricula by analyzing what we learn and how the credentials we confer also infer competencies. We can help learners to make sense of what they learned, but also what they learned how to do.

Dx and Strategic Foresight: innovation you can implement.

As technological, social and contextual changes emerge higher education is embracing Digital Transformation to more fluidly engage with learners. You can learn more about how eCampusOntario supports the Six Dimensions of Digital Transformation with our Digital Transformation Guides:

• Explore digital futures: Co-design the future of education with Strategic Foresight.

• Empower digital leaders: Engage academic teams with professional development.

• Investigate digital technologies: Discover, Pilot, Review, and Adopt educational technologies.

• Find strategic partners: Build capacity with partners and access new networks.

• Expand Open Education: Adapt, Adopt, and Create Open Educational Resources.

• Develop tomorrow’s workforce: Align new programs to labour market demands.

Stop by our Strategic Foresight practice to tap into the wealth of knowledge included in the excellent series of Foresight reports: tools to support the navigation of uncertain and complex futures. 

Reach out to engage and learn with us. 

digitalcampus.ca

The Spark of Ingenuity: Empowering learners with options

The 7th annual eCampusOntario Micro-Credentials Forum – Pathways for Jobs – concluded today. Over three half days we engaged with hundreds from across Ontario, Canada and indeed the world on how micro-credentials are reshaping the face of education today. 

It was gratifying to get to spend time together as a community, to share stories, experiences and ideas; and to collaborate on a common vision for the future.

Key takeaways include:

• Empowering learners with options is an important foundational value of micro-credentials.
• Listening to learners and employers is essential to standing up relevant and timely programs. 
• There are opportunities to build on the needs of learners with stacking micro-credentials and to use these to promote further engagement.
• Providing badges and other visible ways of demonstrating completion on platforms like LinkedIn is important for promoting conspicuous contribution and employer and learner engagement. 
• Micro-credentials support a No Wrong Door approach to education: any point of access to education and pathways for career progression. 

Calls to action:

• Sectors such as the mobility industry – led by OVIN – have articulated a clear vision for the skills and competencies employers need., Educational institutions have an opportunity to meet these needs today.
• More broadly there is a need for PSE to engage with employers and partners in new, more agile ways. 
• Micro-credentials have an “iPad conundrum”: People want them but might not know what they are.

eCampusOntario is the clutch that enables many gears (employers, educators, institutions) to enact the smooth transmission of knowledge. The eCampusOntario Micro-Credentials Framework has provided the blueprint for the Canadian conception of what a micro-credential is.We have tools to construct micro-credentials, and we help broker partnerships between employers and institutions. 

We look forward to continuing to support the future of education with options for learning. 

Below is a more detailed summary:

The theme of the 2023 Micro-credentials Forum was “Pathways for Jobs.” As a frame for our discussion here are a few facts that make the focus on how micro-credentials help put people into programs and into jobs timely. 

• Canada has the second highest level of tertiary education in the OECD. 
• Highest in the G7 – 66.4% of our population has a tertiary credential.
• The majority of students entering tertiary education are mature learners. 
• The PSE system was designed for direct entry from high school. These are now the (small) minority of learners entering PSE
• These learners will continue to access tertiary education in order to reskill, upskill and pivot their personal career paths. 
• Indigenous and immigrant learners are the two growing demographics that will be seeking tertiary education
• For Indigenous learners micro-credentials are important avenues of access
• Many newcomers to Canada already possess tertiary credentials; they need fast routes to labour market participation 
• Fundamentally, Micro-credentials support agile participation in the innovation economy and our collective ability to address key challenges in the world today
• Climate change
• New technology integration
• The Intangibles economy

These are all important shifts that we are collectively responding to. These shifts all emphasize the importance of providing new forms of education, like micro-credentials, to support social, economic and cultural resilience.  

Day one featured really thoughtful presentations by Tricia Williams, PhD and Sanjeev Gill whose presentations each discussed the importance of partnerships between institutions and businesses. There was great discussion about better linking of employers and institutions and the business models of providing micro-credential continuing education, and an exemplary model of this with the RapidSkills program at Georgian College, presented by Holly Burch-Hie, Mary Johnston, and Stephannie Schlichter. eCampusOntario's Alex Hughes, PhD provided insights into the forthcoming report our Research and Foresight team is producing on learner perceptions of micro-credential wallets - stay tuned for the release of this important look into the future of digital credentials!

Our second day, held online, featured engaging presentations broadcast live from the collective studios of the eCampusOntario annual Micro-Credential Forum.

Thank you to Rowan Smith and Rebecca Jamieson from Six Nations Polytechnic for opening the day with a welcome and land acknowledgement. I greatly appreciated your opening remarks and encouraging us to open our hearts and minds to learning.  It was a great way to start the afternoon of discussions.

Thank you to the Honourable Jill Dunlop, Minister of Colleges and Universities | Collèges et Universités for opening remarks about the importance of micro-credentials and how Ontario is leading the country in supporting agile educational options for learners. The Ontario Micro-Credential Strategy is helping to ensure that Ontario remains a competitive jurisdiction – able to help people rapidly retrain and reskill for all sectors of the economy.

And thank you to Steven Murphy, PhD, ICD.D, co-chair of eCampusOntario and president of Ontario Tech University. Your remarks about how we are collectively rethinking traditional credentials and how micro-credentials work effectively with traditional credentials are timely as we realize this opportunity space.

We had excellent presentations from Raed Kadri and Amanda Sayers from the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network who talked about how they are putting in place the conditions for success across the spectrum of inputs to the automotive industry: mobility as a sector, enabled by technology and fuelled by a complex amalgam of people, ideas, raw elements and minerals and the know how and drive to excel, together. As Raed said, "allowing innovation to thrive" is essential, and by working together we will succeed.

Adam Hopkins and Ashley Maracle from First Nations Technical Institute provided excellent insights into linking traditional ways of knowing and learning to micro-credentials with their approach to learning bundles. They also talked about their approach to PLRR: Prior Learning Recognition and Renewal – what a great way to acknowledge the experiences and gifts folks bring to learning.

Allyson Pele from the Northwest Business Centre demonstrated not only that the scale of entrepreneurship in Ontario is really vast, but also the power of micro-credentials to spark ingenuity. Micro-credentials are pathways for jobs, but these are for the job makers - the entrepreneurs - as well as the job takers. Both are essential.

We ended the afternoon with a masterclass presentation from Melanie Gomez-Murphy and Michelle Mouton from TALENT™ (Ontario Tech Talent). Theirs was "a story about relationships" - a common theme in the development of partnerships and the importance of listening – to the needs of learners, to the needs of businesses, and the particular contexts in which people live and work.

Our third day of the 7th Annual Micro-Credential Forum was opened with an address by Deputy Minster Shannon Fuller from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. Deputy Fuller outlined how micro-credentials are helping people build the skills they need for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

Everyone’s path is different and the focus on providing options for learning is important. The many components to Ontario’s Micro-Credential Strategy provide needed supports for learners, institutions and partners to access education in new ways. “We all share a commitment to everyone from all walks of life,” she noted, and “PSE does not stop at the completion of a degree or diploma.” 

Empowering learners with options is an important foundational value of micro-credentials. When micro-credentials are offered online and face to face learners benefit- this helps increase participation in education and ensures that there are opportunities for all learners to build their skills.

We heard from Evan Tapper, Director of Continuing Education at OCAD University, who spoke about the importance of industry partnerships and outlined some of the challenges around objectives, priorities and timelines. Evan focused on the important context of creative entrepreneurs and those who are participating in the gig economy. This is a really important validation of the role of micro-credentials in being pathways for jobs – the spark of ingenuity for entrepreneurship. On a related note check out this recent research by Matthias Oschinski on The Skill Utilization of Gig Workers – it is some really interesting relevant research.

Jonathan Bauer and Nadine Ogborn from RRC Polytech discussed their partnership with Skip the Dishes in their discussion Micro-credentialing for Gap Training. RRC provides education and training and pathways for additional learning. They discussed what I would call the iPad conundrum: People wanted them but didn’t necessarily know what they were. 

This is a “known known” in many respects – microcredentials are a name for something people understand well – continuing and lifelong education. There are many important concepts that accrue to the use of the term micro-credentials, so marketing and communications are important to ensure we share a common understanding of what they are and their potential. 

For micro-credentials RRC focuses on assessed learning as important to defining what a micro-credentials is. This is congruent with the eCampusOntario Micro-Credentials Framework which has provided the blueprint for the Canadian conception of what a micro-credential is. Also important is their point that digital badges provide a really concrete and visible way to demonstrate completion of the micro-credential.

A few presentations focused on supporting faculty. This included Alexandre Bekhradi, Anne-Marie Cantin and Anthony Miron from the Université de Hearst who spoke about their experience on the Co-development of a micro-credential on effective supervision for internships. They provided a great network effect model for supervising internships. 

Nicole Drake and Kathryn Brillinger from Conestoga College spoke about Using Stackable Micro-Credentials for Innovative Faculty Development. Their model is a really excellent and explicit way to ensure that all faculty are able to be content experts and expert teachers. This is such an important avenue for developing our teaching talent. 

Conestoga College is a leader in offering micro-credentials, especially as it relates to faculty development. They are a great partner in our Ontario Extend program; people who complete the full Extend micro-credential gain advanced standing in the Conestoga College Certificate in Post-Secondary Teaching.

John Lewis, University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and Alexis Berolatti of BCDiploma discussed Micro-credentials: the pathway from a learner-focused experience to innovative new blockchain tools. Again, meeting the needs of learners with Relevant and Targeted content, and Funding opportunities – including OSAP eligibility and reasonably priced where not OSAP eligible – is essential. Authentic assessments that reflect workplace deliverables provides a great focus on really relevant learning. And employer endorsements of many of the micro-credentials offered

They showed how sharing micro-credentials on LinkedIn supports further pathways and conspicuous contribution of upskilling and career progression – learners are enthusiastic and positive about their learning and really good organic marketing for the programs. Alexis Berolatti reminded us that the market for micro-credentials is global. Encouraging learners to present their micro-credentials on their LinkedIn profile helps these learners, but also our institutions that offer them. Blockchain-based platforms that use the Open Badge Data Model is important for ensuring that a basic amount of information is presented in any digital portfolio. Complementary attributes further enhance the value of the presentation of a digital artefact. The value of using the blockchain to distribute your micro-credentials is that that are then verifiable, sustainable, trusted and tamper proof (eCampusOntario provide BCDiploma for our members).

The Forum closed with a panel discussing Credit Pathways and Laddering Panel: Building the Micro-credential Learning Journey and Pathways Forward, featuring ONCAT’s Adrienne Galway, John Reid from Yukon University, Sheila Leblanc from the University of Calgary, and William Gage from York University.

Discussion was excellent and focused on recognizing what learners want and what employers want. An intentional approach to design will help employers understand what the students have done and help the students articulate what they have learned. Micro-credentials can help institutions think more overtly about how they work with employers. Creating doorways to education instead of pathways (Sheila Leblanc’s point) will help reframe how we can collectively get better at becoming a more responsive educational system if we are to play a meaningful role in the professional and work force development ecosystem.

The 2023 Micro-Credential Forum was closed by Rowan Smith who noted he has had the opportunity to learn as a young person what the PSE system is becoming. Thank you again Rowan for helping us frame the event.

And that’s a wrap for this year. It was a great series of discussions. 

Thank you all for participating and thank you to the eCampusOntario team for standing up such a best-in-class discussion on the future of education.

From Digital First to Digital by Design: Education for the Post-Pandemic World

I’m truly excited to be joining eCampusOntario today. Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome to this integral organization.

The eCampusOntario team has done an amazing job of managing the pandemic pivot, led by Interim Co-Executive Directors Lena Patterson and Jamee Robinson. Their message from 3 August 2020 outlines the critical role eCampusOntario plays in the Ontario post-secondary education system, from supporting the student experience and faculty innovation in pedagogy and the use of educational technology, through to broader strategic goals such as furthering the development of micro-credentials and sector collaboration. We really are all in this together.

As we go forward we need to be mindful of the current social context. This includes the imperative to join the fight against anti-Black racism and anti-BIPOC racism, and to support Equity, Decolonization, Diversity and Inclusion in everything we do. The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated challenges for people experiencing marginalization in our society. We will seize this moment to rebuild and support an environment that prioritizes inclusion, representation and voice.

I take the helm of our organization at a time when what we do at eCampusOntario is more important than ever before. The team has done a superb job of helping the PSE sector pivot into digital first. This work will take on even more resonance as eCampusOntario leads efforts to enhance the learner experience across all campuses in Ontario.

And we should remember that while we are navigating a wholesale transformation of society, not least the post-secondary education environment, these changes are not necessarily all new. The internet has been with us for several decades. My own undergraduate learning experience in the mid-1990s included online video conferencing classes with learners from across northern British Columbia campus connection sites. This enabled learners to access courses and credentials without travelling far from their homes. These were formative experiences for me, confirming that we could take new technologies and ways of communicating and create meaningful learning and access opportunities.

Having worked in Ontario’s post-secondary education sector for the past 20 years--10 years in colleges and 10 years in universities--I am struck by the incredible opportunity before us. We can position Ontario PSE to collaborate to compete together, supporting pandemic recovery and resilience.

Following the pandemic pivot, our focus can now shift to Digital by Design. Where the pandemic forced us all to scramble to put everything online, we now have the opportunity to more mindfully and artfully design digital learning environments that support all learners. For the future of digital learning must be about options: options to facilitate learning in distributed, online environments, to scaffold face-to-face and in situ learning via mediated communities of practice, and to provide ways for learners to access microcredentials that ladder into certificates, diplomas and degrees in support of ongoing career progression.

Over the next three months, eCampusOntario will consult broadly with stakeholders as we create a new strategic plan to take us through the next 3-5 years. How can we support system transformation and stability through digital by design learning? How can we create meaningful education when face-to-face interaction is limited? How do we ensure all learners can access education and support for ongoing career and personal development?

I look forward to learning with and from our community in this process. We are interested in your thoughts, your innovations, your caveats and cautions, and the excellent research that will help guide the way. Stay tuned to hear more about ways you can get involved, including at our upcoming annual conference, being held 20-21 October 2020.

Instructional Design for Extensible Online Learning

"In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualised desire, I myself had only one desire. And that was, for everything to stop.”

Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter’s fin de siècle science fiction novel presages an approximation of where we now find ourselves. The COVID-19 crisis has led to physical distancing and isolation from social context, with a concomitant social media “exercise in status display” taking hold in some quarters.

For postsecondary education we are told that “Universities, colleges face potential budget crunch as they assess impact of COVID-19 on international student enrolment.” This is an important reminder to the fragility of the economic basis in which we operate, namely the reliance on international student recruitment to fund the enterprise.

There is some hope: “time spent in an online course would count toward the time in Canada required to earn a work permit.” This is an important development that will aid our modelling of how we emerge from the current constraints, and into the mesocosm--an experimental enclosure--that will mediate and mitigate physical distancing in the time it takes to create a COVID-19 vaccine.

Scenario modelling could use a 50% probability basis for unpacking how we will return to in situ work. That is: we have a 50% chance of returning to face-to-face learning in September. And within this, that we will have to accommodate 50% less students on campus. This latter could be because of declining enrolments or physical distancing rules.

Basically this means we don’t know, but this should not stop us from modelling out the differing types of scenarios. We should do this while standing up the learning supports to enact a more flexible, distributed learning. Because either way, more remote learning is in our collective future.

Government and health leaders are advising that the current physical distancing practices will last months. This uncertainty, coupled with the COVID-19 experience of other jurisdictions, suggests that universities and colleges need to prepare not just for the long-term impact of the current physical distancing practices, but also for shorter-term approaches to address the continued need for physical distancing and isolation. Responsible, responsive curricula development necessitates significant changes to and adaptations of curriculum delivery, such as this is feasible within our programs, and which ensures that we collectively continue to provide positive teaching and learning experiences. This can be done while supporting and protecting faculty autonomy and prioritizing effective pedagogy.

Flexible learning is an approach that blends online (synchronous; asynchronous) teaching and learning with face to face (F2F) or in situ learning. While F2F learning will not be feasible in the short to medium term, we can start to anticipate a gradual return to this as it is imperative to reifying skill and competency development.

Alex Usher offers a good take on a post-pandemic collective effort in which the sector has an opportunity to collaborate on wider online learning development. This is smart--and optimistic--thinking. More and effective cooperation will help us build a system in Canada that can ensure students are provided with the appropriate scaffolding for learning now coupled with the ongoing iteration and development of a more robust realm of learning across sectors and levels. (As an aside, the National Research Council once had a whole research unit dedicated to e-learning, including the development of technologies, metadata standards; it was disbanded in 2006 or so).

Think of this as a way to offer a seamless student experience and a single point of entry into learning capable of bridging initial engagement to learning to employment to community building through alumni. Effective online learning as a core component of the larger pedagogical support structure will help us teach the skills and competencies that our learners will put into practice. This is the essence of “extensible online learning, where the goals of skills transference are made explicit in relation to online learning, and these skills are in fact transferred into practice” (Luke et al 2009).

There are various components to consider in the migration or transition into flexible learning:

1. Determining courses and course components that can be accommodated online
This will highlight curricula strengths, and it provides an opportunity to disaggregate programs and courses into microcredentials that can be stacked in potentially creative ways to achieve learning outcomes. This disaggregation will be important for our 50-50 scenario modelling.

2. Sequencing / Flexibility to continue delivering small–group f2f learning 
A modular, flexible learning approach will not only support new modes of teaching and learning but also allow us to continue to deliver core curricula. Online components of courses can be staged or sequenced to work in conjunction with in situ learning. This extensible online learning will help us achieve learning outcomes in a staged way, and also help us stage in situ learning with less people in one place at one time as need be.

3. Matching just-in-time remedial detours to support in situ learning
Having online content readily available and accessible and shareable via a robust learning object repository will enable learners to access content when and as needed to support in situ learning.

4. Exploring integration with other curricular models and systems provincially, nationally and even internationally 
By supporting an expanded set of learning approaches and curricular options for students, there is significant opportunity to explore integration of other systems, learning objects, courses, media etc, as per Usher’s point about collaborating to compete together. eCampus Ontario's Extend is one good example of this.

5. Ensuring iterative, agile development and evaluation
Develop and deploy evaluation instruments within courses that conduct formative and summative assessment on learning outcomes, in addition to faculty and student satisfaction, for continuous quality improvement. Online learning has been around for three decades at least. This is an unprecedented opportunity to not only leverage the research and insights gained through this time, but also to conduct ongoing research and evaluation of how best to stand up flexible learning.

Doug Saunders, writing in the Globe and Mail, reminds us of another science fiction writer, William Gibson, and the premise of “The Jackpot” that underwrites Gibson’s stories: “It’s not a big bang, but rather a lethal spiral of preventable disasters abetted by incompetent leadership and economic contraction.” “But there is hope” Saunders reminds us, in that “During this crisis, and in its long recovery, it would be a terrible waste if we did not spend in ways that also make the world a cleaner and more resilient place. If we have these higher goals in mind, though, we can turn a fatal spiral into a hopeful one.”

From anytime, anywhere, to all the time, everywhere

Many years ago (2001 in fact) I read a very insightful piece by Phil Agre: Welcome to the Always-On World. This piece has been on my mind of late as the world transitions into remote work. I am reminded of something a student once said - or rather posted in an online course I was teaching back in 2003 or so (in which I was referencing the above article). We were discussing the pros and cons about online learning, and talking about the phrase being bandied about then of the Internet enabling learning anytime, anywhere. This student said online learning is more like all the time, everywhere. 

While we all realize that working from home brings its own challenges - not to mention that it has amplified issues of accessibility, access and broader digital literacy - we are all realizing that it is important to have some boundaries, mostly time-based, but habitual as well. And in many respects learning all the time everywhere is what we do anyway. It is an apt representation of what we now call experiential learning. What the Internet adds is the connection to wider communities - communities of learning, communities of interest, and communities of practice. We are all engaging in some form of "legitimate peripheral participation" in which learning happens with our peers.

For those of us in post-secondary education making a wholesale transition into more online learning, as much to enable students to salvage current semesters as to scaffold the current reality into the new normal. In making this transition we have to recognize that not everything can be taught online, but we can - and we should - leverage the wider capabilities that online learning affords in order to support skills development and digital literacy more broadly.

This means we need to engage the cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning modalities, to help learners move from head, to heart to hand - to link thinking, with doing, and to do so with care.

I've been working on updating a model of flexible learning developed via research on this topic over the past couple of decades.

Diagram showing a circular model of flexible learning, connecting the conspicuous contribution of the academic enterprise with community learning and in situ making.