News and Features

e-Learning: in the public interest?

by Adrian Snook
04 May 2005

In this article first published in e-Learning Age magazine Adrian Snook looks back at the last five years and all the effort and resources poured into publicly funded e-Learning initiatives in England. What do we have to show for it and what does the future hold for e-Learning in the English public sector?

Adrian Snook
Contents:

e-Learning five years on

Speaking at the Knowledge 2000 conference in London over five years ago, Blair said universal Internet access was going to be vital "if we are not only to avoid social divisions over the new economy but to create a knowledge economy of the future which is for everyone".

Closing the digital divide was certainly a major concern at that time. At that point half the people in the UK who were online came from the very top social groups. Almost 40 per cent were in a single age band of 15 to 25. "We have to make sure people are not excluded from this revolutionary technology," Blair pledged.

The Cabinet Office published a report, Achieving Universal Access, commissioned from consultants Booz Allen & Hamilton. This was officially launched by the Prime Minister and widely publicised by Number 10 in the spring of 2000. This itemised clear challenges to the Government and the public sector and set out specific recommendations with far reaching consequences for the development of publicly funded e-Learning initiatives. These included:

This drive towards universal access was underpinned by moves to tighten central Government targets for the provision of public services online, thereby throwing down a gauntlet to IT professionals across the public sector.

At the same time instructions were issued to the bodies charged with guiding the development of Local Government, the Police, the Health Services, Education, the Armed Forces and the organs of Central Government. Each was urged to dedicate specific effort to ensure that the optimum use could be made of e-Learning.

Just as government plans were stepping up, the dot-com boom unravelled into a messy market crash. In the circumstances hard-hit e-Learning developers, software, technology and telecommunication vendors were attracted the prospect of winning significant sums of recession-proof government cash. They began to circle the public sector e-Learning procurement notices like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

Many smaller e-Learning players were new to the labyrinthine process of selling to the public sector and most of these discovered this to be an unhappy, frustrating and expensive experience. In general the public sector likes dealing with large organisations with deep pockets, even when these are simply selling the services of third party specialists with a healthy mark-up.

The larger players, consultancies and technology giants fared far better. Whilst their genuine experience of implementing e-Learning was often frighteningly slender, these larger organisations could at least be successfully sued for significant sums if projects were to overrun or simply fail. In private, even those in charge of procurement would admit that they were already preparing themselves for trouble ahead.

At this point in the story we really need to separate the difference strands of the public sector and look at separate developments in Education, Local Government, the Police, the Health Services, the Armed Forces and Central Government.

Education

Regular readers of e-Learning Age cannot fail to have read accounts of the forensic investigations into the collapse of UK e-Universities (UKeU) on an almost month-by-month basis.

UKeU was launched with against the backdrop of the dot.com boom in 2000 with a mission to attract overseas students wishing to study online with UK universities. Unfortunately the fundamental assumptions on which the UKeU initiative was based were never revised in the light of disappointing experiences elsewhere in the e-commerce world. The first courses were delayed significantly and the project ultimately attracted just 900 students rather than the target of 5,600. UKeU also failed to attract significant private investment, despite this being a condition of government funding.

The report produced as a result of the Education and Skills Committee inquiry into the ill-fated £50m elearning project has just been published as we go to press and this will no doubt be reported extensively elsewhere.

But it would be a mistake to focus on the UKeU debacle as the only key development in relation to e-Learning within UK Education. So much more has been going on behind the scenes.

In the autumn of 2002 Diana Laurillard was appointed as Head of e-Learning Strategy Unit for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). This unit was established to develop and keep under review a coherent government strategy in the area of e-Learning, and to develop strategic relationships with key external partners in the public and private sector. Diana's appointment raised the profile of the unit and in turn led to a set of constructive changes informed by her prior experience as Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the Open University.

For the first time the Government has begun to take a serious strategic interest in UK e-Learning and the increasingly important contribution that a vibrant and healthy e-Learning sector might make. The vision outlined in the consultation document Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy successfully captured the interest of a wide range of stakeholders.

In January 2003 the then Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke officially 'cut the ribbon' for the new Curriculum Online (COL) portal.

The portal was designed to empower teachers to search, compare, select and share digital resources. The government committed £300m for the years 2003-6 to be distributed to schools as e-learning credits. The COL portal has been variously described as a showcase, a one-stop shop, and a shop window for good quality educational digital content such as websites, lesson plans, Acrobat files and CD-ROMs. The site allows teachers to search for subject material based on key stage or year and then have the results listed against the appropriate scheme of work unit.

In January 2005 it was announced that Tutors in the adult education sector were to get the opportunity to gain first-hand experience of creating e-learning materials. The Training Foundation and Ufi Limited worked together with LSC backing to launch Acce-Lerator™. This online authoring tool is now giving tutors a quick and simple way to create tailor-made courses for their learners.

e-Learning and Local Public Services

Organisations operating in Local Government, the Police and the Health Services all struggled with the same fundamental contradiction when evolving their business case for e-Learning. As regular readers of e-Learning Age will no doubt already appreciate, the implementation of e-Learning generally requires significant levels of up-front investment in enabling technology and content origination or sourcing. The goal is then to recover this investment through the reduced ongoing costs of replication and delivery; thereby enabling the organisation to reach large numbers of widely distributed personnel.

All of these types of public sector organisation were very heavily decentralised and operated their own largely inward-looking IT systems. Moreover whilst Local Authorities, Police Forces and NHS Trusts often have workforces of significant size, they are not generally distributed across very large geographical distances.

It rapidly became clear that the large-scale implementation of e-Learning inside these mainly autonomous organisations would require significant investments in enabling technology (such as server and learning management systems) to address very constrained locally based audiences. In some cases the audiences were well below the zone of economic viability. When the issue of providing learner access to IT was factored in many organisations were left with a very unattractive short-term business case.

Organisations guiding Local Government, the Police and the Health Services all devised different approaches to the problem.

Local Government

The Blair Government placed local government at the front line of e-Government by setting them the ambitious target of making 100% of their services available online by the end of 2005.

Learning Pool was a major initiative led by the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA), designed to enable every local council and their employees to create, pool and exchange e-Learning materials and other training resources. This innovative solution was designed to overcome the limited potential audience for some training topics within single authorities.

In May 2003 Emma Goss, Project Manager for the IDeA, explained the key drivers: "Improvements in IT-literacy will obviously be required to achieve e-Government targets and e-Learning can provide improved access to end-user training together with increasing familiarity with e-enabled services. An increasing volume of training will be required to support this modernisation agenda, and it is unlikely that classroom-based delivery alone will provide sufficient capacity to respond.

"We anticipate that e-Learning will underpin the process of rapid transformational change by delivering targeted training and consistent messages right across an organisation in a way that gets into peoples heads. With growing levels of Internet usage at the desktop and at access points in libraries and learning resource centres, e-Learning should also provide a greater equality of access for everyone."

Marie Purdy of Cambridgeshire County Council confirmed this analysis: "We're working closely with the IDeA, particularly around social services training where there is a big agenda to get a lot of people trained in a short space of time. It's very hard to get them all in the classroom and achieve the targets, so we're looking to e-Learning"

The Training Foundation has been working with the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government (IDeA) since 2003 to increase the number of trained e-Learning developers within Local Authorities as part of the Learning Pool initiative.

Clive Shepherd analysed the impact of Learning Pool within local authorities and went on to produce four case studies which show some of the hard-edged business benefits that have accrued.

Since going live with their service in February 2003, Learning Pool has attracted more than 60 subscribing local authorities.

Despite some impressive results the rate of take-up for Learning Pool has been constrained by reactionary attitudes amongst some Local Authority IT Managers. Whilst the concept of allowing staff to download and upload e-Learning resources via the Internet seems eminently sensible the apparent security implications were simply too frightening for some IT professionals to sanction.

Richard Grice, Assistant Director at the IDeA remains deservedly upbeat: "Our vision over the next couple of years is to support the growth in the richness of content and expertise of authors, and to help develop an informed sector that is able to exploit e-learning to the full and engage with all providers with confidence."

The Police Service

The National Centre for Applied Learning Technologies (NCALT) was established in April 2002 as partnership between Centrex and the Metropolitan Police Service, to provide e-learning and simulated operations exercises for operational police officers and civilian staff across the UK Police Service. During 2004/5 NCALT will be fully integrated into Centrex (the Central Police Training and Development Authority) whilst retaining a strategic partnership with the Metropolitan Police Service.

NCALT is based in Bedfordshire with a sister unit based at the Metropolitan Police Training School in Hendon, London. The unit is staffed by experts in the field of critical incident simulation and in e-learning.

NCALT has developed e-learning materials on a wide range of topics and has made these available to local forces across the country.

However, individual police forces have a high degree of autonomy and are often resistant to externally imposed learning solutions. As a result a great deal of excellent e-Learning development work is being done by small specialist teams located around the country.

One good example is the West Midlands Police e-Learning Unit. West Midlands is the second largest police service in the country and theirs is the first police-based e-learning unit to become accredited as a provider by the Institute of IT Training. Their team is committed to delivering quality bespoke e-training products. They actively encourage enquiries from other forces and public bodies who are seeking highly specialised e-learning services.

The NHS

In 2001 the Department of Health established a key policy target that all NHS organisations should have an e-learning strategy in place by June 2003. This arbitrary target took no account of the variable state of readiness then prevailing across the NHS, nor did it recognise that some degree of specialist knowledge is necessary for the development of an e-Learning strategy.

After a slow start NHS Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities began to explore the options for the procurement of learning management systems/virtual learning environments and enabling technology. The range of options in terms of health-services-specific e-Learning content was not inspiring, but a great deal of interest was expressed in generic management development titles from vendors like Skillsoft and NETG. Some forward thinking organisations started to think about developing their own authoring capacity.

In time it became increasingly clear to managers in the health service that where e-Learning was concerned big is beautiful. By setting aside local rivalries and working together Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities could obviously leverage better deals from vendors. Moreover by sharing resources and pooling their audiences they could also drive down the per capita cost of e-Learning through economies of scale. Alas, NHS unitary bodies are not geared to working together and progress was painfully slow.

With assistance from The Training Foundation the North West led the way. The Workforce Development Confederations of Cheshire and Merseyside, Cumbria and Lancashire and of Greater Manchester banded together to develop a common regional e-learning strategy, for adoption by their member NHS organisations. In May 2003 the three North West Workforce Development Confederations developed a helpful toolkit which subsequently helped many organisations develop their own individual strategic response.

The NHS Information Authority (NHSIA) also provided a powerful exemplar with their on-line learning solution designed to provide over 600,000 NHS staff with basic IT skills training via LearnECDL.

The concept of a National Health Service "university" was a centrepiece of the 2001 Labour Party manifesto, announced with high hopes and with great ambitions. In the autumn of 2003 NHSU was formally launched under the leadership of Bob Fryer, previously the head of an adult education college and an influential figure in trade union and Labour party affairs. The new organisation had access to significant resources and a wide remit to teach people entering health and care employment for the first time, returning to work in health and care after a break and already working in the NHS.

It is hard to overstate the sheer scale of the logistical challenge that NHSU was seeking to address in developing the skills of over 1.2m people working in the health sector. Almost from the outset the potential economies of scale offered by e-learning were seen to be an essential component in the future success of the NHSU mission.

Since NHS Trusts do not have a common IT network the most straightforward route for the central deployment of NHSU e-Learning initiatives was an Internet hosted portal. The cornerstone of the NHSU e-Learning Strategy was the Virtual Campus, an online platform and gateway designed to provide NHS staff with 24-hour access to knowledge and learning resources. Following an extensive e-learning procurement exercise IBM and LogicaCMG were short-listed for the contract for the necessary technology provision.

Alas developments at UKeU, the government's ill-fated online learning project for the higher education sector brought the future of the whole Virtual Campus development project into question at a critical moment. In July it was revealed that the £9.9m bespoke online learning platform already commissioned with public funding by UK eUniverities (UkeU) was likely to be scrapped. Searching questions about the viability of NHSU's e-Learning strategy were then asked at the highest levels. A review was carried out by Professor Keith Baker to consider whether events at UkeU carried any significant lessons for NHSU.

In August 2004 it was revealed that NHSU had decided to terminate the original Virtual Campus procurement in favour of simply purchasing a learning management system (LMS) to 'support the management, support and tracking' of students.

NHSU was left in a very vulnerable state and without a delivery mechanism for scaleable e-Learning initiatives as the government review of all NHS of Arm's Length Bodies progressed. This undoubtedly contributed to the final decision to scrap NHSU and merge it with the NHS Modernisation Agency as part of a plan to reduce the number of NHS Arm's Length Bodies.

On a far more positive note, in January 2005 The Training Foundation announced that 60% of NHS Trusts in England have now licenced access to on-line MRSA infection control awareness courses offered from the dedicated NHS portal at www.mrsa.no.com. NHS staff and contractors are now able to access their personal online infection control courses via The Training Foundation learning portal, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

The 312 NHS organisations that have licensed the courses span the full range of Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), Acute Trusts, Ambulance Trusts, Care Trusts, and Mental Health Trusts across England. Additionally NHS Professionals, the not-for-profit, in-house flexible staffing service run by the NHS for the NHS has also entered into a national licence.

The Defence Sector

Whilst CBT and e-learning applications have been deployed extensively by the Army, Navy and Air Force over the recent years these generally provide local solutions to local training requirements. To date the range and magnitude of the benefits generated by e-Learning have to date been constrained by the lack of a single coherent management and delivery system. The Defence E-Learning Delivery and Management Capability (DELDMC) is the Ministry of Defence solution designed to unlock training material from independent localised systems and make it quickly and efficiently available to the broadest possible audience across the services. The scheme is also designed to bring coherence to both the training and management information relating to an audience of some 300,000 users.

On 2 June 2004, the Minister for Defence Procurement, Lord Bach, announced that BT has the company selected for the Defence E-Learning Delivery and Management Capability (DELDMC) contract worth an estimated £25M.

Seasoned observers of public sector e-Learning will have some serious misgivings about the return-on-investment likely to be generated by any project focussed so tightly on infrastructure and systems development objectives.

The significant challenges associated with the sourcing, development and maintenance of effective content suitable for all three services do not seem to have been fully recognised. Let's hope some lessons have been learned from past events!

e-Learning in the Public Interest?

So, five years after Mr Blair's headline-grabbing announcement how far has e-Learning progressed in the English Public Sector?

Prospects for the UK e-Learning market have certainly been boosted by a recent report from Ovum. This shows that the UK reached the position of the most extensive broadband market in the G7 group of countries during third quarter of 2004. Whilst this achievement falls short of Universal Access to the Internet it still represents a major achievement for all concerned.

The pursuit of e-Learning in the Public interest has certainly proved far more problematic than many English policymakers and civil servants expected. Unnecessary mistakes were made because the painful lessons previously learned by private sector organisations were either ignored as irrelevant or simply overlooked.

The general status of the Public Sector in 2000 could broadly be characterised as one of Unconscious Incompetence. The organisations and individuals charged with planning and executing e-Learning initiatives did not generally appreciate the full scale and complexity of the challenges ahead. A number of key players simply did not possess the specialist skills and knowledge needed to make e-Learning work.

The politicians, funding bodies and managers involved with high profile failures progressed to the state of Conscious Incompetence the hard way and the taxpayer had to count the cost.

Five years later it is certainly true that many public sector organisations are now rapidly approaching Conscious Competence - the state in which good results can reliably be achieved providing concentration and special care are both exercised in good measure.

This is principally due to the largely unreported efforts of many hundreds of enthusiasts that have developed their e-Learning related skills and knowledge through programmes like the Certified e-Learning Professional (CeLP) programme. Small scale e-Learning initiatives are being developed, rolled-out and implemented almost every day across the public sector, using a wide range of learning technologies. The budgets are sometimes tiny but the benefits are tangible and are growing day by day. Inexorably, e-Learning is maturing and the confidence levels are following suit. It is the individuals behind these grass roots initiatives that are the unsung heroes of e-Learning in the Public Interest...