 Good day to you all at Arhos University. I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but it's a pleasure to join you at a distance. And that's appropriate since the mission of my organization, The Commonwealth of Learning, is to help developing countries to use distance learning and technology to expand and improve education and training. By agreement with Mikkel Godst, I shall be using a well-tried combination of technology, a video to get my message to you, and then the phone to interact with you afterwards. I've sometimes given speeches with the title, Technology is the Answer, What was the Question? Form should follow function, so I shall spend some time explaining my question and how technology can answer it. At that point, I shall recall the fundamental principles of technology and show how they are indeed an answer to my question. My worry is that with the effervescent development of technology over the last many years, we are in danger of losing sight of the key principles of technology and therefore missing out on the potential of technology to provide answers to some of the big questions facing humankind. And that's why I've entitled these remarks, e-learning a cottage industry for the 21st century question mark. In the last part of the address, I shall explore what I consider to be some of the most promising aspects of e-learning in terms of the goals that I espouse. These are open educational resources, wikis, and the collaborative development of courseware, which is all exemplified in a very interesting development that we have facilitated the virtual university of small states of the Commonwealth. Let me begin with a word about the Commonwealth of Learning so that you can understand my perspective. The Commonwealth is a free association of 54 countries that are united by the values of equality, democracy, good government, peace, and the cultivation of respect and understanding between their peoples. Two thirds of the Commonwealth member states are small states with populations of less than one and a half million, and they are of special concern to us. We are an intergovernmental body created by the Commonwealth Helps of Government, and our mission is to help Commonwealth countries use a variety of technologies to expand and improve learning for development. By development, we mean a blend of the Millennium Development Goals, the Dakar Goals of Education for All, and the Commonwealth values that I alluded to earlier. So what do we actually do? We work in two areas. One sector is involved in expanding and improving formal education. The first of its four activities is open schooling, which is the use of distance learning to attack what I believe is currently the world's greatest educational challenge, namely to scale up secondary schooling. Second is teacher education, another huge challenge at a time when the world needs 10 million new teachers, not just in the developing world. Third is higher education, where we focus particularly on quality assurance for higher education involving distance learning and ICTs. And finally, there is the virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth. The other sector addresses the challenges of informal learning. Another huge global challenge is skills development for tens of millions of youngsters so that they can earn livelihoods. A particular facet of this is farming, because despite massive migration to the cities, improving the prosperity of rural farmers is key to both food security and global development. Closely allied to that is the health of people where we encourage them to use their community media to take charge of some of their own health education. And finally, in both the formal and informal sectors, we face a huge demand for training in e-learning. So that is what Kohl does, but why do we use technology in education and learning and what is our interest in e-learning? I said earlier that form should follow function so we should define ends before means. So what is the public through its governments trying to achieve in education? I often meet ministers of education and they will tell you that the challenge they face is to pursue three goals simultaneously. They want to widen access so that education can be available to all citizens who aspire to it. And worldwide, despite valiant efforts, many citizens are not achieving their aspirations for education at all levels. Second, that education must be of good quality because there is no point in widening access to education unless it makes a difference to people's thinking and to their lives generally. And third, the cost must be as low as possible. Governments and individuals never have enough money and it's wrong to make education more expensive than necessary because low cost will enable more people to take advantage of it. So the government and people want three outcomes from their education systems, access to be as wide as possible, quality to be as high as possible and cost to be as low as possible. And the nature of this challenge becomes clear when you create a triangle of vectors. With the traditional methods of face-to-face education, this triangle is an iron triangle. You want to stretch the triangle like this to give greater access, higher quality and lower cost, but you can't. Try extending access by packing more students into the classroom and you will be accused of damaging quality. Try improving quality with better learning resources and you will increase the cost. Try cutting costs and you will endanger both access and quality. This iron triangle has hindered the expansion of education throughout history and it is created in the public mind, and I expect in your minds an insidious link between quality and exclusivity. And this link still drives the admission policies of many universities, which define their quality by the people that they exclude. But today there is good news. Thanks to globalization, successive waves of technology are sweeping the world and technology can transform the iron triangle into a flexible triangle. By using technology, you can achieve wider access, higher quality and lower cost all at the same time. And this is a revolution. It has never happened before, but that is what educational technology can do if used properly. What is technology? We define it as the application of scientific and other organized knowledge to practical tasks by organizations consisting of people and machines. So it draws on non-scientific knowledge as well as applied science and technology is about practical tasks rather than theory and always involves people and their social systems. Expanding and improving education is a very practical task and people and their social systems are at the heart of it. But how does technology work? The fundamental principles of technology articulated two centuries ago by Adam Smith, our division of labor, specialization, economies of scale, and the use of communications media and machines. Before explaining how this works and exploring my worries about the development of e-learning, I shall give an example of the success of this technological revolution. I choose one that I know well, the UK Open University, and I shall cite recent figures for access, quality and cost. With 220,000 students in award bearing programs, the UKOU has clearly expanded access. And furthermore, this is not just in the UK because 60,000 of its students are overseas and then there are another million students around the world taking UKOU courses that are embedded in local programs. Many of these courses derive from the open educational resources on the UKOU's OpenLearn website. More surprising to you and more embarrassing for some of the other top universities in the UK is the UKOU's performance in national comparative assessments of teaching quality. The Open University places above Oxford where I once studied. Moreover, the government now conducts annual surveys of student satisfaction with a very large sample of students and the Open University has come top three years running. Finally, the last time costs were compared, the cost per graduate of the UKOU was between 60 and 80% of the cost of conventional universities depending on the subject that they looked at. So the Open University has achieved the technological revolution of wider access, higher quality and lower cost. It has stretched the iron triangle. And how has this been achieved? It has been done through the combination of Adam Smith's technological principles. In the category machines and ICTs, the UKOU offers a multimedia system of distance learning with strong student support. This multimedia system includes some of the world's largest deployments of e-learning. But the key issue is not e-learning or any other medium, but the focus on division of labour, specialisation and economies of scale. You could say that the OU divides the teaching and learning process into its component parts, gets different people to specialise in doing each part well and then puts it all back together again in an integrated system. And I emphasise that the UKOU is not alone in achieving this revolution. In 1996 I published a book entitled Mega Universities and Knowledge Media, Technology Strategies for Higher Education. That identified 11 distance teaching universities each with over 100,000 students. And since then these institutions have grown and multiplied. Now we are seeing the same principles applied to secondary schooling. As I described in a book that was published last month called Mega Schools, Technology and Teachers Achieving Education for All. In that case I set the threshold at 10,000 pupils because schools are normally smaller than universities even though some open schools such as India's National Institute for Open Schooling with 1.6 million pupils are very big indeed. My key point is that to operate at scale with low cost and consistent quality all such operations, independent of the learning media that they use implement the principles of division and labour and specialisation. You can usually always identify the three subsystems of administration and logistics, course development and student support. And there are of course finer divisions of labour within each subsystem. And now we get to the nub of the argument the title of this talk and the source of my anxieties. I believe that if you want to do e-learning well you must use these principles of division of labour, specialisation, economies of scale and the use of machines. But in higher education my observation is that people often do not. Indeed some say that one of the attractions of e-learning is that it does not require faculty to teach and operate in a different way. They can continue the cottage industry approach with each academic doing his or her own thing and taking care of every step in the instructional process. My fellow Vancouverite, Professor Tony Bates calls this the lone ranger approach to e-learning. Earlier I cited Adam Smith's list of the principles of technology and some of you will have recognised from that his description of the pin factory, one of the classics of economics that you can find in seconds on the web and I recommend that you read it. His basic point was that when you make pins in a factory they are a lot cheaper of more consistent quality and can be produced in higher volume than if one artisan makes them individually. I can safely assert that no one would dream of making pins individually today but this inefficient, poor quality approach persists in higher education. Worse, e-learning is often used to embed it and make higher education less cost effective than it was before because it is simply an add-on to existing practice. Now this may not matter in rich jurisdictions like North America where the monumental function of universities has always been more important than considerations of cost effectiveness and where until now at least institutions have been able to raise the fees that they charge to students faster than the cost of inflation instead of giving the student better value for money. I would love to be proved wrong and as your assignment after this conference session I beg you to send me any studies you have found that shows e-learning to have increased the overall cost effectiveness of a higher education institution. Please send them to Jay Daniel at Collorg and I will give you a free copy of the Commonwealth of Learning's Plan for 2009-2012. Now I'm not talking about those rather pointless studies that show no significant difference in learning outcomes when e-learning is compared to classroom teaching. I want to know if the overall efficiency of a college or university has been improved classrooms have been decommissioned and there has been a genuine substitution of capital that is to say technology for labour. As I said this may not matter in rich jurisdictions but it matters a lot in the places where I work where resources are scarce and access to education woefully limited. In such places the insidious link between quality, cost and exclusivity is a ball and chain holding nations back. In the final part of these remarks I shall highlight three facets or applications of e-learning that seem to be very promising in the context of scaling up learning, improving its quality and cutting its costs. The first is open educational resources. These are learning resources in digital formats that are freely available for adaptation and use by anyone. I find this notion of a global intellectual commons very exciting provided that it is not perverted into an exercise in neocolonialism. OERs are an opportunity to draw on resources from around the world not to try and impose our own materials on developing countries. And at the Commonwealth of Learning we are increasingly involved in OERs because they can contribute to our objectives of scaling up quality learning at low cost. For example, my colleague Dr. Abdulrahman Umar is deeply involved in TESA, Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa which is a consortium of 18 African universities and the UK Open University that has produced a huge range of OERs for classroom focused in-service teacher education at the primary level. And they were used by half a million African teachers last year. A second application of e-learning that we have found useful and which has made us think hard about the nature of open content is wikis. A few years ago, our cold colleague Wayne McIntosh created Wiki Educator and it very quickly attracted thousands of participants. With support from the Hewlett Foundation he used it in a very original way to train thousands of people through face-to-face and online workshops. And the deal is that teachers can learn wiki skills free provided they use those skills to contribute one lesson to the global pool of OERs. Wayne's successor, Carl, Trudy VanVik who was responsible for the policy for computing in South African schools until she joined us a few months ago. She will continue to respond to the many requests that we receive for help with policy and training in e-learning and will use the learning for content and other approaches. So let me conclude these remarks by talking about a project that brings together several aspects of our work in e-learning the virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth. Now, calling a new institution a virtual university has usually been the kiss of death. But let me stress immediately that this is not a new institution but a collaborative network that allows 32 small states to work together to create post-secondary skills-related course material in the form of OERs. And let me make a few quick points. The project was conceived by the ministers of education from the Commonwealth small states in the year 2000 in the middle of the dot-com frenzy which you will all remember. They judged that their small countries which are dotted around the globe did not have the critical mass of infrastructure or IT skills to go it alone in the e-world. So they thought that by working together as a group of small states they could become players in online learning and depend, as usual, on their bigger neighbors. So we start the development of each new subject area with a face-to-face workshop like this one that was held in Mauritius where participants from the interested countries learn a range of IT skills and begin content development that they will continue by online collaboration once they get home. And they also have the obligation when they return home to train five other colleagues in the skills that they have learned. And in this way, some 500 people in 32 small states have now acquired skills in the collaborative development of courseware online. And this has had a transformative impact on education in these small countries. To facilitate the use of its courses around the world, the Virtual University of Small States has developed a transnational qualifications framework. This does not replace national qualifications frameworks, but is more of a conversion table to help someone in, say, Samoa to see where a course originating in Trinidad and Tobago fits into their own framework. And establishing the credibility of courses within this Virtual University framework is especially important for small states because they are, sadly, a prey to the degree mills which prey on innocent students and so many people are suspicious of qualifications emanating from small states. Let me end this part by saying I'm rather proud of having produced this transnational qualifications framework because bigger groups of states have tried to produce similar frameworks but so far without success. So as a result, this framework from the small states is becoming a reference for the bigger states. Let me wrap up. What have I been saying? First, that the world's challenges of education, training and learning are too big for us to play around the edges. We need educational methods that can increase access, improve quality and cut cost all at the same time. Secondly, technology can do this if it remains true to its fundamental principles of division of labour, specialisation, economies of scale and the use of machines. Following these principles created the Industrial Revolution with the result that we take for granted that every product we want will be widely available of consistent quality and costing steadily less each year and this is also true of many services but it is not true of education although things are changing. The steady evolution of teaching and learning media incorporated into open and distance learning are finally beginning to stretch the iron triangle in the way that is needed. But I worry that e-learning which should be a wonderful addition to the toolkit of educational technology is provoking a throwback to pre-industrial times and allowing the cottage industry approach to teaching and learning to reassert itself. Please prove me wrong. Thank you very much and now I look forward to interacting with you by phone.