What happened to e-Learning and why? A critical report on e-learning innovation has sparked debate on both sides of the issue

University Business, Nov, 2004 by Rebecca Sausner

One way academics know they're breaking new ground with their research is by the number of speaking invitations they receive after publication. Another gauge might be the level of vitriol their critics muster both in rebuttal papers, and these days, on academic listservs and bulletin boards.

By both these measures, "Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to e-learning and Why," written by Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania and William F. Massy, professor emeritus at Stanford University, has been the academic equivalent of an earthquake since its publication in June.

* "It's almost as if Bill and Bob are historians writing about how the promise of the American West, after several hundred years, turned out to consist largely of LA freeways and Las Vegas casinos," wrote Carol A. Twigg, executive director of the Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (N.Y.), in her newsletter, "The Learning MarketSpace."

* "By analogy, we feel that they have damned the truck that is taking sustenance to the hungry because the truck doesn't work well enough!" wrote John Bourne and his colleagues at Sloan-C, a consortium of institutions and organizations committed to quality online education.

* "Such a caricature of ivory tower (research). (The study) contradicts itself throughout the piece, doesn't understand its own historical perspective and lazily relies on one private sector pundit for 15 pages of criticism," wrote Stephen Cervieri, director of sales and marketing for Distance Learning Inc. (DLI).

What's all the fuss about? "Thwarted Innovation" makes the case that e-learning hasn't lived up to the hype--that growth isn't what was predicted; that the creation and adoption of learning technology has stalled; and that, despite the availability of new technology, no major changes have occurred in the way teaching happens in higher education.

Some of these points are true, for sure, given the realities of e-learning today. But, critic say, the authors are too eager to declare a bust considering the number of students enrolled in online degree programs and the multitude of successful ventures and cutting-edge experiments going on in the arena.

Thwarted, or Just Plodding?

Massy and Zemsky came up with a neat breakdown of the innovations made possible by e-learning technologies, allowing any institution to easily gauge where they are on the continuum. They posit that the first phase of integrating e-learning would be faculty embrace of course enhancement applications, like the use of PowerPoint to create lecture notes or using e-mail to contact students. Nearly all IHEs have reached this point, with only the diehards resisting these innovations.

The second phase would be the use of course management platforms, like WebCT and Blackboard. Just about everyone is here also, with about 97 percent of two- and four-year schools using some type of course management system, according to Market Data Retrieval's 2004 survey of 5,500 IHEs.

The third step, and this is where the "thwarted" in "Thwarted Innovation" comes in, would be the creation and use of subject-specific learning objects within a course, such as financial simulations in a business class, or lab simulations in a science class. Everyone acknowledges that use of these objects, such as are available from Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Training (MERLOT), is fairly rare.

The fourth stage of innovation would be the total redesign of existing courses, away from education as usual to a more interactive, learner-oriented model, that both improves learning outcomes and saves money. Despite some evidence to the contrary, Massy and Zemsky argue that this isn't happening in American IHEs.

For most of the conclusions and assumptions in the nearly 100-page-long "Thwarted Innovation," there seem to be critics. Many of the complaints about the study are definition problems that have yet to be resolved: What is e-learning vs. distance learning, vs. online education, etc.? In their paper, Massy and Zemsky aren't just talking about internet-based distance education, what Sloan-C calls asynchronous learning networks; they're also talking about the use of technology in traditional on-campus classes and corporate education environments.

"The bottom line we've come to is we're really talking past each other," says John Bourne, executive director of Sloan-C and editor of the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks.

The other major complaints center on the research methodology. Rather than survey hundreds of IHEs for their report, Massy and Zemsky instead embarked on a sort of anthropological study in which they interviewed faculty and administrators at six schools several times over a period of 15 months.

"The six schools selected for the study are not a representative sample by anyone's measure," wrote one critic on Sloan-C's listserv.

The last major tenet of the criticism--and one that Massy and Zemsky might agree with--is that it's just too soon to evaluate the success of e-learning, or dub it a bust.