The eMM World Tour 2008
The second half of 2008 has been a busy time. A combination of work pressures and a lot of behind the scenes work on the eMM has meant I've let this blog lapse badly. At the moment I'm sitting waiting for the last keynote at the SLOAN ALN conference in Florida having given a presentation on the eMM to a US audience, and I'm getting ready to fly out this afternoon to visit the folk at NIME in Japan, sharing the eMM with Japanese colleagues.
So where is the eMM at? We've had the opportunity, working with Terry Neal and others in New Zealand, to apply the eMM to essentially all of the New Zealand polytechnics. This large data set (19 institutions) has meant that I can start doing some correlation analysis work validating assumptions about the eMM. The good news is that this work has shown that physical size, numbers of students or financial aspects don't drive eMM capability. Instead, the key factors appear to be strategic engagement (as measured by process O9) and investment in e-learning suport (as reflected by investment in staff dedicated to e-learning activities). The bad news is that I can't yet publish this analysis (although I'm working on it).
The ACODE funded pilot applying the eMM to Australasian institutions is going well and we intend to wrap up the initial work by the end of the year so we can move to a bigger project (> 20 universities) over the next two years. If we can get that data set we have a real chance to look at external validation of the eMM given the other data sets (such as the LTPF and CEQ data, as well as financial data) available in Australia.
The trip to Japan has given me the opportunity to translate some material into Japanese, and so we now have the introduction document available in Japanese. Other languages may follow.
The HEA benchmarking project seems to be drawing to an end and reports are starting to be released. The evaluators report was recently published and makes interesting reading, and the Welsh institutions are continuing their work. I'm hopeful that the next couple of years will provide opportunities to follow up on the work done and to assess the impact that the institutional projects have had.
Finally, the reason I'm here at SLOAN is in part to promote further adoption of the eMM beyond the promising start we've made at Penn State World Campus. Its clear that a major challenge is going to be the strong autonomy that faculty have in many colleges, which works against a sense that e-learning is an institutional activity. Hopefully the message of quality improvement embedded in the eMM, as well as realisation that isolated activities are not sustainable when money is tight will help, although I'm realistic that we won't ever see every college in the US going down the pathway of institutional benchmarking.