E-University developments and issues in Britain

Paul Bacsich

Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Abstract

This paper surveys the current developments towards “e-universities” (defined as Virtual Universities making substantial use of online teaching) in the United Kingdom. It is written from the standpoint of informing a European audience on activities in the UK.

1. Introduction

The paper divides into the following sections: eUniversity theory, the e-University, the University for Industry, the Open University response, developments at Oxbridge and the Old Universities, developments at the New Universities, developments in Scotland and Wales; and issues, analysis and conclusions.

2. E-University Theory

There is as yet very little theoretical analysis of e-universities. However, for this paper the author has updated some of his earlier work on Virtual Universities [4] and ongoing work on Business Models which has been presented at two workshops organised by the Telelearning Network of Centres of Excellence in Canada.

2.1. Dimensions of Virtuality

Virtuality in a university is a matter of degree, not kind. At EdMedia in Summer 1996 in Boston, a workshop on virtual universities was organised at short notice, by popular demand. In it the author proposed “five dimensions of virtuality”, and to these five was later added a sixth (at Online Educa 96):

  1. To what extent are students not physically present on campus?
  2. To what extent are staff used in non-conventional modes and contracts? (Part-timers, consultants, teleworkers, etc.)
  3. To what extent is computer and network support outsourced?
  4. To what extent has physical infrastructure begun to be reduced?
  5. To what extent has the legal and institutional strength been reduced? (By use of devolution, consortia, ad-hoc collaborations, etc.)
  6. To what extent has the degree structure begun to dissolve into ever-smaller modules studied in an ever more flexible pattern?

2.2. Business and organisational models

The other main area of current interest, especially in the UK and Canada, is that of the emerging business and organisational models for e-learning. These include outsourcing, joint ventures, and consortia of various kinds including “broker models” and University-corporate partnerships.

3. The UK e-University

The UK e-University has excited a great deal of interest in the last few months. It is to be a new consortium which will deliver university-level UK-sourced e-learning to a world-wide audience. The key reference is

Features of the business model that are being stressed are that it must be student-oriented, not provider-oriented, and have a reputation for quality, innovation, flexibility, and for cost-effectiveness.

The structure of the e-University will be a holding company collectively owned by universities in the UK, which will enter into a joint venture with corporate institutions.

The market for the e-University breaks down into the following components:

  • A postgraduate market in the UK which will include Masters degrees (MSc, MBA, etc) as well as shorter “post-experience” courses
  • A market aimed at corporate universities and global businesses
  • Targeting of selected overseas markets – individuals, companies or governments.

The e-University is planned to begin teaching students in 2002.

4. The University for Industry

However, the e-University is not the only university-like e-learning operation in the UK.

The University for Industry – – now operating under the trading name of learndirect – has been in existence for the last two years, although it started teaching students only in September 2000. In many ways it is a “Broker Model” institution: it commissions e-learning material (from colleges, universities or commercial suppliers) and then uses this to teach students.

The University for Industry is not a direct competitor to the e-University since the Ufi is on the whole oriented to students at colleges (the further education sector), not at universities (the higher education sector).

The Ufi is already evolving. It has moved offices twice already as it grows in size. (Despite being a broker model, its staff number around 200, mostly in Sheffield.) At a more strategic level, it is developing in the following three ways:

  • Moving to “bite-sized learning”, i.e. reducing the size of the modules it offers
  • Moving to “pure” e-learning (i.e. moving completely to the Web and away from the current focus on CD-ROM)
  • Worldwide strategic partnerships, not just to bring in the “best of breed” from elsewhere (as far afield as New Zealand) but also to sell courses and expertise outside the UK

5. The UK Open University

But of course the other main player affected by e-University plans is the UK Open University – see

In many ways the OU is much closer to the model of an e-university than many outside the organisation realise. For example:

  • The OU has around 130,000 students online
  • One course alone has 13,000 students online, in two cohorts per year of 6500 each
  • Several courses have enrolments of several thousand students online.

Recently, the Open University has signed an agreement with Cardean University (described later) to undertake trials and joint development of e-MBA courses.

6. Oxbridge and Old Universities

Cambridge has an alliance to develop an e-MBA; while Oxford has signed a high-profile agreement with Stanford, Princeton, and Yale to deliver courses world-wide.

A number of the research-intensive UK universities are members of Universitas 21 – these include Birmingham and Nottingham Universities. See

Another group of old universities – Leeds, Sheffield, Southampton and York – have allied themselves with four major American universities including Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison; both known for distance learning.

But perhaps the highest-profile arrangement is that Cardean University. This is an alliance sponsored by UNext Inc which includes Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia Business School, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. In the UK it includes LSE (the London School of Economics and Political Science).

Cardean has recently concluded an association arrangement with the UK Open University Business School. See

7. The New Universities

By and large, with some exceptions the new universities have been much more active in distance learning (recently including e-learning) and in campus-based e-learning. Thus it is surprising that they have not formed more alliances in order to exploit the market.

The main non-UK e-learning alliance to impact on the UK scene is the Global University Alliance. See

This is a world-wide consortium including Derby and Glamorgan Universities; as well as Breda University (Netherlands), Athabasca University (Canada, a well-known distance education provider) and others. This consortium is serviced by NextEd, a technology, systems and network provider. See

NextEd also supports some universities not in the GUA, in particular in Australia the University of Southern Queensland.

There are many other consortia in Europe with active UK involvement, but whose primary purpose as consortia is not the delivery of e-learning. These include:

  • EuroPACE – see
  • EADTU – which has as UK members the Open University and the Open Learning Foundation – see
  • EDEN – see

8. Scotland and Wales

The three main consortia in Scotland relevant to an international readership are:

  • UHI, the University of Highlands and Islands – a consortium of colleges in the north of Scotland. See
  • Scottish University for Industry – in some ways like the (English) Ufi in that its focus is on college-level learners; but unlike the Ufi in other ways, in particular it has not chosen a standard Learning Environment. See
  • Scottish Knowledge – a consortium of all 14 Scottish universities, which is delivering e-learning into the UK, US, Middle East and Far East. See

In addition to the larger ongoing consortia, there are a number of other consortia in Scotland which have been or are influential in affecting the pattern of development. One of these is the Clyde Virtual University – see – a consortium of Glasgow, Strathclyde, Paisley and Glasgow Caledonian Universities, plus the Glasgow School of Art, which developed a number of interesting e-learning offerings.

In Wales there is less activity that impinges (so far) on international issues, though Glamorgan is part of the Global University Alliance. However, mention should be made of the Welsh Digital College, an e-learning operation using new media including digital TV to deliver college-level e-learning, mostly in Welsh. See

9. Issues

The advent of e-learning, and in particular, consortia of institutions developing e-learning, raises many issues. The main issues to consider when “doing it for real” are: Learning System standards; procurement of systems to deliver and manage e-learning; change management (when not changing is no longer a viable option); costing of e-learning; and roles within the emerging consortia (including government, commercial and overseas partners).

I can cover only some of these topics in this short paper.

9.1 Procurement of Systems

I believe that there is a growing feeling of disenchantment with the traditional process of specification of systems to be developed by software development companies (such companies may be cheap but often have no track record or experience of large systems); and with the current adversarial procurement methods often used by government agencies (in the UK and EU).

The overall observation I make is that a new paradigm of procurement does not depend in detail on the functionality of the system being procured.

The two key features of my proposed “new generation” procurement model are:

  1. procurement as a “conversation” between customer and supplier business models, which iterates towards “best value” as feature inclusion/exclusion is negotiated using cost and timescale factors
  2. procurement based on generalised features rather than on (in some cases) over 100 specific features of the functionality or user interface.

I recommend concentration on just 12 features:

  1. Architectural approach of the system – including any restrictions on the content that it can deliver (e.g. mathematics, chemistry)
  2. Standards and interoperability, including compliance with current and emerging standards fora, such as IMS and CEN/ISSS; and interoperability with other types of system including student records systems and learning management systems.
  3. Life-cycle costs – thus not just purchase cost but also recurrent costs of ongoing support, software upgrades, training, etc
  4. Scalability up to the largest university scale of use (i.e. several hundred thousand users within a few years); and the “footprint” required to run the client system
  5. User interface, including compatibility with Internet browsers and other major packages that students are likely to use for word processing and email; plus user interface issues for tutors, administrators and developers
  6. Reference sites – three reference sites of most relevance to the prospective customer, with ideally, at least one of these sites a university (in the relevant country) making substantial use of the system
  7. Reliability of the system, both server and client, including any measurements of this
  8. User empowerment, including full details of how students, tutors, administrators and others can customise the system
  9. Company size and stability: if the company is wholly devoted to e-learning, then details of company sales over the last few years, and other evidence of stability; or if the company has a Division devoted to e-learning, then figures for that Division; if there are several products, a breakdown of figures to the product level; if the company is a start-up or university spin-off, then such other evidence of stability as can be supplied
  10. Ease of support (and training), including details of how user sites will acquire their training (e.g. from vendor, independent trainer, self-training material, zero training need); and details of what specialist training is needed (e.g. for tutors, administrators, course developers, systems developers)
  11. Current and proposed capability to embed new technology: new forms of networking such as wireless, mobile and fibre are emerging which will change the parameters of many systems including allowing full-motion video to be an “object” anywhere in the system; and there are also developments of non-PC devices such as palmtops and set-top boxes – in other words, how the architecture of the system and structure of the company will allow the system to encompass such technologies
  12. Current and proposed capability to embed new pedagogy under development by educational researchers, such as Virtual Labs, knowledge management, performance support and co-operative knowledge building.

9.2 Change management

However, there is no point in buying the right system if the university or consortium cannot change its ways to use the system to best advantage. Using a widespread survey of UK universities, followed up by seven case studies, Ash and Bacsich [2] identified the following barriers to deployment of e-learning:

  • Lack of training in new technologies
  • Lack of transparent tools
  • Lack of compelling pedagogical evidence to support a move to e-learning
  • Lack of standards
  • Lack of water-proof network: i.e. a highly reliable network that is “just there” – sometimes called “net tone”

Canadian work has found a similar list of barriers – see [1]. Other relevant observations are found in [3].

In follow-up work it is becoming clear that another inhibitor, more prevalent in the UK than elsewhere, is that there is little diffusion of innovators even if there is diffusion of innovation.

9.3 Costing of e-learning

This has been the subject of intensive study in the UK over the last three years. A comprehensive report by the author’s team to the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, summarised in [4], recommended that a costing system suitable for costing and planning e-learning should:

  • Be based on the business practice of Activity Based Costing
  • Operate at multiple levels – University, Department, Course and Module
  • Allow the calculation of the cost effects on additional stakeholders: students, staff (their personal time and resources) and possibly parents and employers
  • Respect the division of academic roles into Teaching, Research, and Administration
  • Use a standardised 3-phase model of course development
  • Be realistic about overheads, including supporting moves towards consumption-based models of overhead recovery and away from crude cost drivers and internal politics
  • Accept that some method of better recording of academic effort spent on the various phases of course development would be helpful to the process and to the stakeholders involved.

In our view such an approach will be necessary if e-learning consortia are to thrive, especially those joint between universities and industry.

10. Looking beyond higher education and colleges

Many new e-learning services will be delivered by consortia. Increasingly these consortia will include not just universities but also corporate and governmental players. Putting together such consortia is not easy, and there have been several failures.

Thus there are many issues for consortium-builders to discuss, including:

  • Cost principles for consortia
  • The “value added” of consortia: when they are needed and when they are not
  • The role of “conventional” institutions in consortia (i.e. those universities other than the distance teaching universities)
  • The role of funding agencies
  • The role of corporates, including the impact on academic issues such as quality
  • Adapting existing methods to produce “e-quality” principles and procedures in an era of trans-national e-learning for discriminating customers.

My recommendation is that e-university planners must widen their vision. In particular they must look at:

  • corporate universities (over 1000 are said to exist)
  • the development of e-learning in schools (such as the National Grid for Learning in the UK, Schools on the Net in Germany)
  • business models in e-business which are not yet found in universities: auctions, late availability, etc
  • models for e-learning institutions and consortia that are not found in Europe but can be found in the US, Canada, Australasia, or the Far East.

It is vitally important that Europe remains open to the wider world when building its e-university activities, if it wants to build truly world-class e-learning offerings.

References

[1] Anderson, T. and Downes, S., Models and strategies towards a Canadian on-line Education Infrastructure, University of Alberta, July 2000.

[2] Ash, C. and Bacsich, P. (1999), UK Higher Education Institutions – How Flexible, How Virtual, How Soon?, Paper presented at Online Educa 1999.

[3] Bacsich, P. (1998), Re-Engineering the Campus – the view after one year. Did the theory work?, Proceedings of the 4th Hong Kong Web symposium, 1997.

[4] Bacsich, P. (1999), Planning and Costing Virtual Universities, invitational paper presented at the Euro-Med “Tele99” conference, Tel Aviv, 1999.

A large amount of relevant material and links to other sites can be found at