When it was originally founded, the Open University mission was in part to take Higher Education to the people other HEI's couldn't reach - from the start, our mission was a one of widening particpation. In recent years, widening participation has become a matter of general concern across the HE sector as a whole, as well as focussing attention even within the OU (internal readers can check out the Centre for Widening Particpation, for example).
Faced with this competition for attracting students from various minority (and even majority) groups, I wonder if there is another target group for widening participation that is emerging as a result of lifelong learning inititatives.
To step back for a minute, one of the aims of widening participation is to make Higher Education available to people who, for whatever reason, haven't had the opportunity or encouragement to benefit from it.
So what's the potentially missing group? How about lifelong learners who would benefit from a continued relationship with Higher Education throughout their lifetime. What I'm thinking of here are people who need - or would just like - to either maintain current awareness in, or benefit from enrichment of, a particular subject area, source a continual programme of knowledge or skills updating (either work or leisure related) or even (!) learn about new subject areas.
(Note that there is a difference in kind between learners who are graduates compared with students who are new to HE - the level of their study skills (graduates should require less study skills training!) so perhaps invoking this audience as a candidate for WP is not really appropriate...)
There are post-undergraduate options available to learners , of course - second degrees, higher (Masters level) degrees and CPD (Continuing Professional Development) courses (here's the OU scheme, for example), of which the CPD courses are perhaps the most suited to lifelong learning.
But what I have in mind is more of a subscription model to learning, akin to subscribing to a news feed. For example, several OU courses are exploring the use of course team blogs in part for enrichment of courses. This is not something that has been a major feature of standalone OU courses to date, but it is something that is in the air at the moment. One of the opportunities that arises from enrichment (and news related) topics in a course blog is that they are meaningful to a wider audience, such as the course alumni. So for students who are actually interested in the subject matter of the courses they have done, what I'd like to imagine is that they maintain their feed subscriptions when they finish the course (and pehaps graduate with a feedrool/blogroll that incorporates feeds from at least some of the courses they have studied).
This model - that gettting students to subscribe to a course feed - is part of a longer play that extends way beyond the time the student actually spends on a particular course. And this in turn should perhaps make us question how we would want students to subscribe to feeds when they first start a course:
- if the feed is delivered seemlessly in a course area of the VLE, why would students take a subscription away at the end of the course?
- if the feed is delivered seemlessly to a personal area of the VLE, with automatic subscription to the feed when the student starts the course, but requires them to unsubscribe when they no longer want it (and perhaps they aren't allowed to unsubscribe till they finish/withdraw form the course?;-) then why would they take the feed away when they graduate? (Perhaps we'd give then an OPML file when they leave?)
- if the students have to subscribe to the feed in a personal feedreader, outside the VLE, most won't...
As well as maintaining a relationship with its own graduates, I wonder too how an HEI might go about pitching for the lifelong learners who graduated from elsewhere, but for whom consuming top-up, or even just enrichment, educational materials represents just another part of their everday media consumption habit.
For example, think of a degree programme as like a TV season (i.e. a bunch of related programming that a channel hopes will retain it's audeince). How do channels (i.e. HEIs) a) retain audience; and b) steal audience from other channels?
Posting on The changing media business model, Forrester's Charlene Li observes:
But what I think best typifies News.com's unique approach is their "Extra" section. It started as "More News From Around The Web" where the editors selected top stories from other sites. It's evolved into a place where you can read about tech stories from all around the Web, even if CNET's News.com isn't covering it. So there's an article wireless technology from Business 2.0, and a story on Steve Ballmer's comments on Vista includes a link to the News.com story, as well as links to stories from competitors like TechNewsWorld, PCWorld, and Wired News.That's akin to The New York Times linking to the New York Post, The San Francisco Chronicle linking to The San Jose Mercury News, and dare I say it, Forrester linking to Jupiter or Gartner! But if you take the social computing view that as a publisher, you can't serve ALL of the needs of your customer yourself, then the best that you should do is to be the FIRST source of information for your audience. In that way, News.com ensures that although it may not be the ONLY source of technology news, it has a fighting chance of filtering and aggregating that news for its audience better than anyone else.
Hmm...so we need compelling content, and we need to be willing to link outside.
Is the Open Content Initiative a candidate for this I wonder? I guess that very much depends on the extent to which they develop the social portal aspect of it...
Posted by ajh59 at May 23, 2006 10:36 AM