NIACE Telematics Policy Group

Adult Learning in an Information Society: a Policy Discussion Paper

This is a NIACE consultative paper on the impact of new technologies (mainly computing and telecommunications) on adult learners and adult learning.

It is to be launched for consultation at the NIACE Annual Study Conference in April 1997 at Warwick, and will then be distributed for wider consultation with interested parties in education, training and the information and communication industries.

Introduction

Why this paper

Not everyone will yet have experienced it, but new technologies are changing adult learning in fundamental ways. They are changing:

participation- who has access to learning, where, when and how,

institutions- the kinds of organisation providing opportunities for adults to learn

staff - the roles of those who work in it, as teachers, tutors, managers, materials designers etc.

Most fundamentally they are changing the purposes and forms which adult learning takes, and the resources available for it.

As the national organisation for adult learners and those who work with them, NIACE needs to understand these changes, and to develop a clear view of what needs to be done, by NIACE and its members . We need to understand issues of:

policy - what action NIACE should be advocating to policymakers at national and local level

research - what those concerned with adult learning need to know more about

development - what needs to be tested and created

evaluation - what needs monitoring and evaluating

This paper aims to help us to do this by inviting interested parties - education and training providers, teachers and trainers, and those working on the development of technologies and educational material - to comment on our first analysis of the opportunities and problems, and to make suggestions about what action is needed, by NIACE and others, to ensure that adult learners benefit fully from the opportunities.

The paper is deliberately brief. We are inviting all who are interested in these issues to comment, to help us understand the issues better, to refine arguments and gather more and better evidence, in order to formulate a clearer and more detailed paper for publication within the next year.

The Context

Purposes

We believe that new technologies, and especially the coming together of computing and telecommunications technologies, offer many benefits to adult learners, but not all the potential will be developed without careful thought and intervention. Nor will the change be easy for many providers: some kinds of institution and staff roles will change radically.

We are interested in all kinds of adult learning, whatever the purpose or expected outcome. Technology makes it possible to offer opportunities in the workplace or the home, and to tailor those opportunities more precisely to the needs of those situations. It also opens important opportunities for people to learn and use the skills of citizenship, providing access to information, and opportunities to debate issues of local, national or international policy with others.

Lifelong Learning

The need for lifelong learning has been recognised by governments and policymakers across all developed societies. Individuals need to cope with the ever changing demands of work, of a changing society, and the increasing insecurity of employment, as both state and employers withdraw from paternal roles. Governments need to respond to accelerating economic, technological and social change which makes it impossible to run an efficient society if citizens have only the skills and knowledge acquired in their youth.

For individuals and societies, survival calls for more and continuing learning for all. Those who do not participate are likely to be increasingly excluded from the mainstream of society, including employment.

The Potential of the Technologies

However, traditional institutions have never had to cope with demand for education on this scale, and it is doubtful whether they could do so, even without a political climate hostile to increased expenditure on public services. If expansion is to take place it is more likely to do so in the private than the public sector, yet the private sector is not large, nor well developed to meet needs of such a scale.

In this context, the rise of new technologies can seem to offer a solution through large economies of scale, with the same programme delivered to vastly larger numbers for similar initial investment. However, this process in not simple: the technologies introduce new issues to the debate. They change the relationships between the players (learners, teachers, managers, designers, engineers, programmers, producers, publishers), and make some kinds of learning more difficult while making others better or easier. Critically they raise new kinds of access issue: some people will have easier access to some things, others will be excluded.

The Adult Dimension

Some people believe that understanding and using computing and communications technologies is an issue only for young people. There is a clear strategy for tackling it with children and young people: skills are built into the national curriculum, and most young people are far more at home with them than their parents. However, the speed of change means that older people are bound to be affected too. One has only to look at the spread, in half a decade, of such services as telephone banking or cash dispensers to see that sophisticated technologies can have a major impact on how people live. Home ownership of PCs has risen dramatically, as has use of electronic mail. Subscriptions to Internet Service Providers double every few months. We will see the same kind and speed of change in learning needs and learning technologies, increasingly, opportunities to learn will require the use of the technologies, and those who do not have some confidence in dealing with them will be excluded from mainstream learning and a wider society.

The Opportunities

It is always difficult to predict the likely impact of technological change in education, and when the technologies are so volatile and rapidly changing as telecommunications and computing this is doubly true. However, the changes listed below are already happening in the UK and in other countries, and we might expect all of them to accelerate in the next few years.

Perhaps the clearest common theme is that the technologies break down the traditional expectation that learning depends on the learner being close to a teacher and an educational institution, with its resources of materials and knowledge. These elements can now be separated in time, and /or in space. For this reason, the technologies will affect:

Access to learning / opportunities to learn can be offered at times and in places where traditional institutional delivery is impossible or uneconomic. Learners spread around the world can be brought together to learn in fields where group tuition face to face would be uneconomic, or tutors not accessible. Study need not happen in an educational institution, but can take place entirely in the home or workplace. Email, for example, enables a learner send work to a tutor (and the tutor to reply) from anywhere in the world, at any time of day or night.
Access to information / people can have access to bodies of information and knowledge on a scale not previously available even to most professional researchers. The Internet provides access to tens of millions of pages of information, and access to libraries and databases around the world.
Access to learning advice and guidance / information about learning opportunities is becoming widely available, and interactive discussion tools can be used to respond to individual or group enquiries. A variety of databases are now available allowing individuals to search for opportunities around the world as well as locally.
Interactivity / there is more opportunity for individuals to discuss their learning and share ideas with tutors and other learners. Learning materials can incorporate much more active participation, from simple multiple choice checklists to virtual reality tours and simulations. Videoconferencing can enable learners to talk to tutors as they demonstrate skills in remote locations where learners could not have access for safety or accessibility reasons.
The impact of disability / specific technologies can enable people with sensory or mobility difficulties to overcome barriers which confront them in traditional learning provision. They can also enable them to participate on equal terms, since visible disabilities cease to affect interaction with able bodied learners
Size of the education and training market / educational institutions are no longer limited to a local market, are beginning to offer opportunities to learn in overseas markets, and learners can become members of global learning groups. A growing number of Universities offer some courses entirely through combinations of satellite communication and the Internet.
Who creates knowledge and where / adult education has traditionally sought to build on the knowledge that learners bring with them, and make learners active participants in the creation of new knowledge. Technologies offer wider access to research material and the opportunity to bring together people with common interests (including both “experts” and amateurs) across time and distance.
New kinds of learning / learning in an information rich environment, without the constraints of physical buildings and timetables, can be a different kind of process, involving new kinds of relationship between teacher and learner, and between learners. Resource based learning becomes easier as more resources become available, and there is more learning from and with other learners, and from commercial and voluntary agencies, rather than from teachers. Freed of physical constraints, learners can join specialised learning communities across the world.
New kinds of institutions and systems / without a requirement for teacher and learner to meet in time or space, the role of the educational institution will change. Traditional institutions manage learning, provide materials and assess achievements but these functions may become separated from each other. Commercial software houses, for example, produce free standing educational software without offering tuition or assessment, other agencies provide assessment and accreditation without offering teaching..

None of these are fantasies: all are already taking place in the UK.

The Dangers

Applied without appropriate care, the technologies can damage the quality and range of adult learning. Some of the dangers to be avoided include:

exclusion by price / some potential learners may be unable to pay for hardware, communications and software, or the fees which are needed to cover the costs of these
exclusion by previous education / potential learners may be excluded by lack of previous education. This is already true of participation in adult learning. If access to technology becomes strongly associated with high educational levels, it may reinforce this.
exclusion by access route / technologies can offer much better access for some - notably housebound and disabled learners, and those in remote locations with unusual working patterns. However, if their development leads to the elimination of traditional forms of delivery this may penalise learners who learn better, or prefer, traditional approaches
development driven by technology: / there is a danger that development is led by enthusiasm for the leading edge of the technology rather than the needs of learners or the logic of the material to be learned. This lead to the production of poor quality learning, and can discourage others from trying to participate.
inappropriate use of technology / because of the lack of clear knowledge of what works best where and when and for whom, there is a danger that inappropriate technologies will be used, demotivating both learners and teachers
commercial pressures / the mix between private and public agencies is likely to become more complex. Commercial interests in securing a return on investment may lead to a pressure to exclude some agencies or individuals in order to maintain ownership and price
quality pressures / some of the new players in the education and training market come from an entertainment background. This can bring a new energy and imagination to the development of services and materials, but can also lead to the development and marketing of "educational” material of dubious learning value.
institutional pressure / institutions have a natural concern to remain viable, and some will seek to maintain institutional control over processes which would be more effectively provided elsewhere
age priorities / there are strong political pressures to focus attention on the learning needs of young people. If this leads to a concentration of research, development and investment on the needs of children and young people, the learning of adults may suffer.

Some Challenges

The new technologies are not necessarily an alloyed benefit, and there are a range of challenges which need to be addressed if adult learners are to derive the full potential benefits from them. Well managed, some of these may prove to be opportunities rather than threats. They include the following:

Change / the pace of change is so rapid that it is difficult and expensive to keep up with the technology itself, it is also difficult, as software becomes increasingly “intelligent”, to identify which skills need to be learned.
Expectations / developments in this field are prone to “hype”, alienating some people who see the gap between the promise and the reality, and leading others to overestimate the potential or the speed with which it can be realised. On the other hand some important development are the product of exactly this kind of imaginative leap into the “impossible”.
Content / in general hardware and software have evolved more rapidly than educational content. The commercial market is not yet stable enough to generate large scale production of content, and while public sector institutions know a great deal about it, and about how to manage teaching and learning they are not, in general, well organised to become major providers of learning material in new forms. Furthermore, does the technology change our understanding of what “content” means.
Tools for learning / there has been an explosion of new software for many purposes, but most of it has been concerned with transmission of data, video, sound etc., and with searching for information. There is less useful generic software for learning purposes, and less understanding of how technology might be used to tailor learning to individual learning styles.
Assessment / the technologies can make some forms of assessment more accessible and reliable. However, they also raise new issues about how to identify whether work has been produced by the ostensible owner. They also lend themselves to trivialising - assessing those things which are easy to assess in this way, rather than what is most important.
Cultural impact / although the technologies open opportunities for members of particular cultural and linguistic communities to talk together across great distances, many of the technologies are dominated by the English language and a set of cultural assumptions associated with a particular white middle class American view of the world. These are not all acceptable or accessible to people from other cultural backgrounds.
Confidence / most people have some awareness of the potential of technologies for learning, and of the Internet. However, most have not had hands on experience, and confidence and “technofear” remain an issue
Mapping of good practice / there is little coherent evaluative information about developments in the use of technologies in post-school learning, and no widely available frameworks to analyse or describe strategies in use. This limits the opportunity for providers and learners to learn from each other.
Commercial and property interests / because of the complex mix of public and private sector agencies in the field, there is no generally understood agreement about intellectual property rights, and the ownership of ideas and materials. This has produced a creative growth of “freeware” and “shareware” but tends to inhibit the development of good quality learning material. At the level of the educational institution there are issues about the ownership of materials developed by individual staff.
Management skills / the technologies, by changing the roles and relationships between teachers and learners, and the institution and other providers of materials, programmes or accreditation, create new management issues for which many institutions are not well equipped. The central benchmarks of institutional management - measurable numbers of students and teachers in rooms for fixed times all disappear, to be replaced by tutors, materials, designers, programmers, assessors and learning centres. We lack the management skills for a new kind of learning industry.
Charging / because the technologies change the relationships between learner and institution, they undermine the traditional notion of the “course” on which traditional models of charging were based. What will learners pay for and to whom in the future?
Funding / many of the experiments to date have been based on experimental funding, which is often more generous than that available for a continuing service, and small scale experiments do not always scale up for mass use. Furthermore, all public sector educational institutions are under great funding pressure, and unstable funding regimes do not encourage long term strategic planning and investment. Many creative initiatives depend on multiple funding through a range of partners, with the success of the whole venture vulnerable to changes in the funding of one of them. For example, a creative partnership to provide technology access and learning programmes for adults in a rural area through local primary schools can be destroyed by a rationalisation of primary education.
Changing technology / the speed of change in technology means that keeping up with hardware and software is always a losing battle. By the time any technology is accessible to the majority of the population, the leading edge has long moved on, and leading edge developers are reluctant to write material for the tools of the past. How do we maintain a balance between taking advantage of the latest opportunities, and including most of the people?
Reliability of technology / many technologies are still prone to breakdown, and many users have inadequate skills and knowlede to deal with such problems. This can be severely damaging to learners’ confidence, and lead them to abandon its use. The extent to which this is best addressed by broader basic education for learners, additional support structures, or better design of the technology is not always clear
Staff management / the introduction of technologies into post-school learning is leading to major changes in job roles for institutional staff. They may be called on to become mediators, designers, guidance workers or tutors, and often to learn things which their students already know. They may well not have up to date skills and knowledge of computing and communications technologies. Staff development needs have often been inadequately addressed, as have strategies for addressing issues of job security and mobility, intellectual property, confidence, self esteem, and status.

Development and Research Needs

There are a number of areas where research is needed to enable education and training agencies to make maximum benefit from technologies. They include: