An Ithaka S+R report, released and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlights the challenges to be overcome by institutions so that they can take advantage of online learning technologies. The report, titled ‘Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in US Higher Education,’ explores why highly interactive online systems have yet to take hold in any substantial way.
It has been observed that extraordinary pressure is mounting on colleges and universities - especially public universities - to address the ever-increasing growth in the costs of higher education and to improve student learning outcomes. Online learning holds great promise to address these issues, but requires these institutions to operate in substantially different ways.
The Ithaka report summarises and provides analysis based on the experience and impressions of senior administrators and deans from a range of institutions including research universities, small colleges and community colleges. These impressions were gathered through interviews conducted largely by Lawrence Bacow and William Bowen, Ithaka S+R senior advisors, and Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka’s president.
While this is a time of great experimentation in the use of educational technologies, with almost as many approaches as there are colleges and universities, the report highlights several challenges that are common across all sectors. First, faculty at every type of institution take great pride in their ability to select content and craft a learning process for their students; they want to have the ability to continue to customise that learning experience in an online environment. Second, while a number of institutions are capitalizing on online learning to generate net revenue by expanding their offerings to new and non-traditional students, colleges and universities generally find it very difficult to employ these technologies to reduce costs in their traditional residential curriculum.
Another barrier to the use of highly interactive online learning systems is the scale and sophistication of the effort needed to create and sustain them. It is not possible for individual institutions to develop these systems, pointing to the need for centralised development and maintenance of these platforms.
The report offers academic leaders strategies - rewarding early adopters, offering incentives, providing technical support, sharing incremental revenue, experimenting with new administrative structures - to facilitate the adoption of online learning, and suggests that these strategies be used with consideration of each institutional context.
