Two veterans of online learning will share their thoughts on the current state and the future of online learning. Chief online
learning officers face ongoing challenges growing, sustaining, and innovating online programs. Now that online learning
has entered the mainstream, what is its future? What fads will fade? What trends will be sustained? The audience will be
engaged throughout the presentation with opportunities to discuss the impact online learning has on technological
infrastructure, faculty support, course design, quality assurance / quality control, organizational structures, funding and
grants, and research. By sharing their experiences and insights into the current challenges and future state of online
learning, the presenters will discuss strategic and operational approaches to navigate current and future realities of online
learning. Credit to Dr. Darlene Williams for content on Future Opportunities and Context.
#ForOurFuture18 UL System Conference Presentation: Online Learning - Current Challenges and Future Opportunities
1. Online Learning:
Current Challenges & Future Opportunities
Presenters:
Dr. Luke Dowden
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Dr. Darlene Williams
Northwestern State University
Universities of Louisiana
For Our Future 2018
2. Meet Your Presenters
Luke Dowden, Director of Distance Learning at UL Lafayette, believes in authenticity and wants to make a
difference in people's lives by facilitating access to high quality postsecondary educational experiences. He
lives for helping people find their second chance in higher education, especially through online learning. He
is passionate about continuous improvement and is rarely satisfied with personal success because it is not
permanent. Dowden earned his Doctor of Education in Higher Education Administration from Nova
Southeastern University and is the 2014 Recipient of the Bruce N. Chaloux Award for Early Career
Excellence in Online Education.
Darlene Williams is Vice President for Technology, Innovation, and Economic Development at
Northwestern State University. Williams is the key administrator for “e” initiatives and plays a key role in
the development of business partnerships. She has been instrumental in the development of traditional
and accelerated online degrees, OER initiatives, PLA, and faculty development programs. Further, she
assists state leaders as the Chair of the Louisiana Board of Regents eLearning Task Force in the
identification of strategic objectives, innovative approaches, and best practices in eLearning. Williams
received her Ph.D. in Educational Administration, Curriculum, and Instruction from the University of
Nebraska.
3. Context
• Education undergoing radical changes
• Digital technologies today allow for wide range
of new possibilities
• Affects education across the globe
• Lifelong learning is crucial in today’s world
• New instructional formats are emerging
• Online education is the most flexible form of
learning and teaching
4. What We Know…
• Distance (online) learning continues to grow
• Institutions expanding online programs that meet the needs of today’s
students
• Public expectations / demands of higher education have changed
• The total pool of postsecondary students has been shrinking for 3 years
• Demographic shift to a student community primarily comprised of adult
and other contemporary learners
• As schools compete for students in this environment, distance learning
programs become essential to their ability to succeed
5. Online Education in the United States
Babson Survey Research 2018
Students taking at least one distance
ed courses in 2016
6.3+ million
(31% of all students)
Growing faster than in past several
years
5.6% increase
(fall 15 - fall 16)
Number of students that take all
courses online
3,003,080 (14.9%)
7. Four Groups of Challenges
1. Institution
2. Students
3. Faculty
4. Content
8. Institutional Challenges
1. Changing Leadership & Expectations
2. Varying Leadership Structures
3. Uneven levels of understanding digital learning
4. No holistic support for distance learning
5. No roadmap for how the online learner will be best served
6. Authenticating Identity / Confronting Academic Integrity
13. Student Challenges
1. Gap in Actual Experience vs. Learners’
Expectations
2. Readiness to Learn Online
3. Rules of Engagement for Participation
in Online Courses
4. Managing Multiple Roles and
Responsibilities
5. Undeveloped ability to problem solve
and self advocate within context
15. Faculty Challenges
1. Changing faculty roles
2. Time to test and refine
instructional technology
3. Transitioning from face-to-face
to blended and online
4. Time Poor / Competing
Priorities
5. Misaligned Incentive Structures
6. Use of new instructional
strategies
16. Faculty Challenges
7. Intellectual property rights for
course content
8. ADA compliance
9. Just-In-Time technical and
instructional design support for
faculty
10. Process to ensure academic
integrity in the online environment
11. Adoption of quality standards for
course content
17. Current Challenges: Content
1. Role of instructors in content development
2. Integration of multimedia in content
3. Role of instructional strategies in content selection
4. Flexibility of Content
21. Prepare for the Future of Education
Fact 1:
65 % of children entering primary school today will be employed
in jobs that do not yet exist.
Fact 2:
Nearly 9 in 10 jobs that have disappeared since 2000 were lost to
automation
World Economic Forum, 2016, The Future of Jobs
22. How to Stimulate and Sustain Innovation
How to stimulate innovation? How to sustain innovation?
• New demands on institutions
and faculty to adopt innovative
practices
• Need to address faculty
concerns from lack of time, the
difficulty of online delivery,
and the need for pedagogical
reorientation
• Need for new training and
models
• Need for appropriate tools and time
to engage in design work
• Need for guidance and technical
support
• Use of students as co-creators
• Need for community to share best
practices and build a network of
experts
• Need for commitment to quality
standards
23. Internet of Things
•Interaction between humans and computers is radically
changing
•More direct ways of interacting with high-tech devices
•On mobile devices and smartphones, learning applications
becoming more popular
•Teaching platforms allow teachers to make use of students’
personal mobile devices in classrooms to observe progress
of individual students
24. Mobile Learning
• Early innovations of mobile learning created challenges – some
still exist: redesigning learning content, risk of distraction,
technical constraints
• Mobile learning Collaborative and social opportunities can connect
the learner to the content and improve the learning experience
• Mobile learning creates way to interact with content of knowledge
on a regular basis
• The interconnection of different devices (e.g. wearables) will
increase range of possibilities –seamless multi-device applications
25. Mobile Learning Examples
“Life-logging” devices like Autographer or Narrative Clip are tiny
cameras that capture snapshots of the day and provide an edited
highlight reel of photos.
Brain-sensing headband Muse can tell you
how your class reacts to certain activities, and
which are most conducive to learning.
Microsoft HoloLens is the first self-contained,
holographic computer, enabling you to engage with your
digital content and interact with holograms in the world
around you.
26. Highly Personalized Learning
Adaptive Technology:
As computers get
better at recognizing
behavioral patterns,
tasks such as
individual task
assignments, grading
and creation of new
content could soon be
automated.
27. Big Data
• Use of Big Data in education still
in early stages
• Big data and data analysis will
be relevant for educational
providers
• Use to analyze student
performance and correlation
with material, teachers, and the
curriculum
• Acquired information could be
used to improve materials and
problematic topics
28. Big Data
• Improved student performance and
increased graduation rates could be
positive benefits
• Will likely accompany other
educational trends and become more
relevant as data is generated by these
technologies
• Example: analyzing generated data
such as page views, clickstreams and
individual results, big data could help
estimate the effectiveness of new
technologies
29. Augmented Reality
• Gaming is driving factor
• Increasing number of applications and
improving quality
• Educational content already developed
• Trend likely to continue with increase
in:
• Mobile augmented reality
• 3D images of educational content
30. Digital Teaching Platforms
• Platforms improve classroom
and curriculum management,
real time student assessment
and student-teacher
interaction
• The Bring-Your-Own-Device
(BYOD) concept offers cost
effective solutions to increase
student interaction and
collaboration inside the
classroom
31. Digital Teaching Platforms
• Allows teachers to control content and monitor student performance
via learning analytics
• Example: Google Classroom allows teachers to organize classroom
assignments and provide real time one-to-one feedback to students.
32. Behavior Pattern Recognition
• Since 1965, number of
components on processors has
doubled every two years.
• Self-driving cars such as the
Google Car trending algorithms
are used to recognize behavior.
• Algorithms could give teachers
more freedom for individual
supervision.
33. Behavior Pattern Recognition
• When analyzing patterns in learning behavior, teachers could gain insight
in their students’ progress.
• In the future, the structuring of lectures, the release of educational
sources and the assembly of potentially dynamic exercises could be
automated through algorithms.
34. Prepare for the Future of Education
“Humanics” – new learning model. Blends technical and social
skills, develops higher-order mental skills. It is the purposeful
integration of technical literacies, such as coding and data
analytics. (Aoun, 2016)
Humanics new literacies are:
1. Data literacy to manage the flow of big data,
2. Technological literacy to know how their machines work,
3. Human literacy -- the humanities, communication, and
design -- to function as a human being.
36. Thank You!
Dr. Luke Dowden
luke.dowden@louisiana.edu
Dr. Darlene Williams
darlene@nsula.edu
37. References
Allen, E., Seaman, J., Poulin, R., Straut, T. (2016, February). Online Report Card: Tracking Online Education
in the United States. Retrieved January 2018, from
https://onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/onlinereportcard.pdf
Aoun, J. E. (2017). Robot Proof. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Digital Learning Compass. (2017). Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017. Retrieved January, 2018, from
http://digitallearningcompass.org/
Management, C. F. (2015). The Future of Education. Trend Report 2015. Retrieved January 2018, from
https://issuu.com/cdtm/docs/the_future_of_education_-_cdtm_tren/2
Seaman, Julia E., Allen, I. Elaine, Seaman, Jeff. (2018). Grade Increase: Tracking Online Education in the
United States. Retrieved January 2018, from http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/
UPCEA, NASPA. (2014). Thoughts from higher education leaders: Challenges and emerging trends in online
education. Retrieved January 2018, from https://www.insidetrack.com/resources/thoughts-higher-education-
leaders-challenges-emerging-trends-consider-serving-nontraditional-learners/
