ELearning as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation

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E-Learning as a Catalyst for Organizational
Transformation
Professor J C Taylor Deputy Vice Chancellor
(Academic Global Learning) University of
Southern Queensland Australia
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• Joseph Schumpeter (1934) predicted that every 50
  years or so, technological revolutions would
  cause
• "gales of creative destruction
• in which old industries would be swept away and
  replaced by new ones.

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Future Projections

• By 2005, e-learning will be the single most used
  application on the web.
• (Source Harris, Logan Lundy, Gartner
  Research, 2001).

• Corporate investment in e-learning will grow from
  US2.1 billion in 2001 to US33.4 billion in
  2005.

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The Networked WorldInternet Access Population
(millions)

• USA 185.90
• China 95.80
• Japan 77.95
• Germany 41.86
• UK 34.11
• South Korea 32.05
• Canada 20.45
• Australia 13.05
• Netherlands 10.34
• Sweden 6.12
• New Zealand 2.34

Total global population estimated at 945 million
Source Computer Industry Almanac, May 2004
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Cost-effective Access
In both developed and developing countries, the
Internet will provide the only viable
cost-effective conduit through which corporations
and institutions will be able to provide access
to ongoing educational opportunities, especially
for the continuing professional development of
working individuals.
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Driver for Change

• 'The death of distance as a determinant of the
  cost of communications will probably be the
  single most important economic force shaping
  society in the first half of the 21st century'.
• Cairncross (1997)

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Pressures for Change

• Increasingly pervasive technologies
• More sophisticated customers with rising levels
  of consumer service expectations
• Increasing levels of competition
• More emphasis on quality assurance, performance
  management, and strategic benchmarking
• Demands for continuous innovation
• Demands for higher quality of worklife.

Source D Stace D Dunphy (2001)
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Leadership Challenge
The fact that the present traditional approaches
based on conventional classroom-based teaching
and learning will not be capable of meeting the
escalating demand for higher education in the
knowledge society presents a real leadership
challenge to the higher education sector.
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The transition from the Industrial to the
Information Age was encapsulated by Dolence and
Norris (1995), who argued that to survive
organisations would need to change from rigid,
formula driven entities to organisations that
were fast, flexible and fluid.
Fast, Flexible and Fluid
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Increasing Competition
The Cambridge e-MBA
Cambridge Universitys business school joined
forces with FT Knowledge, part of the global
communications group Pearson plc, to offer this
new degree from September 2001.
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791 years ago Cambridge University passed a rule
Requiring all students to reside in the town of
Cambridge, England. In 2000 that rule was
revoked. The 800 year-old rulebook had to be
altered to make way for the universitys first
Internet-enabled program, the global e-MBA.
Fast, Flexible and Fluid?
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Thank you for your enquiry concerning the
Cambridge MBA course. We do not have on-line
learning or distance learning, we have considered
this but decided not to pursue this.Email
reply received from University of Cambridge MBA
Office on 13 March 2003.
Fast, Flexible and Fluid?
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Institutional Capacity for Change
While there is a great deal of business
literature on companies that have restructured
and re-engineered to respond to new competitive
threats and rapidly changing market conditions,
universities are generally regarded as being
stubbornly resistant to change as a result of the
typically conservative and reactionary pressures
both internal and external to the organization.
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Change Management?
In many universities the development of web-based
initiatives is not systemic, but is often the
result of random acts of innovation initiated by
risk-taking individual academics.
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Organizational Development
The implementation of education technologies
including web-based applications at USQ is
strategically planned, systematically integrated
and institutionally comprehensive.
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Enrolled Students USQ 2004

• All students 25,557
• On-campus 6,407
• Off-campus (Australia) 13,225
• Off-campus (Overseas) 5,925
• Note Students studying solely online 902

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USQs International Students 2004

• Malaysia 1,605
• Singapore 1,225
• India 562
• China 421
• Hong Kong
  396
• Taiwan 259
• Fiji 202
• South Africa 195
• Bangladesh 193
• United Arab Emirates
  172
• Canada 142
• Germany
  124
• Total, incl. students from 106 other countries
  6,843

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Leadership Challenge
Technology is the key variable making possible,
and imperative, the reinvention of the
corporation. Stace
Dunphy (2001)
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Leadership Challenge
The single greatest challenge facing managers in
the developed countries of the world is to
increase the productivity of knowledge and
service workers. Peter Drucker ( 1991).
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The GOOD System provides a simple way
to Create, Manage Re-purpose
content
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XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

Print
Web
CD
DVD
RENDITIONS

STYLE SHEET
XSL
XSL
XSL
XSL

XML
CONTENT REPOSITORY
DTD(Document Type Definition)

INPUT
XML Editor
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Managing the Variable Costs of Student
Administrative Support
Ask a question/send an email
NO
Incoming new admin question from student
USQAssist Self-service Knowledge Base
Search / Match
Previous Questions
Previous Answers
USQ staff member New Answer
Immediate admin feedback to student
YES
Trigger
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USQAssist Self-Service Knowledge Base

• Up until the 31 May 2004 the system received
• on average 16,530 hits per week
• 150,117 student visits
• 103,733 answers viewed
• 39,674 searches performed
• 4,141 questions using the Ask a
• Question facility.
• During this time, the e-CRM also managed a
  further 32,919 email queries.

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USQAssist Self-Service Knowledge Base
Student support staff also save 25 of their time
through the use of the knowledge-base for the
automatic generation of suggested answers to
email, phone and face-to-face enquiries
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Managing the Variable Costs of Academic Support
Metadata Schema Model
NO
Duty Tutor
Incoming new academic question from student
Reusable Learning Objects Database
Previous Questionsltmeta tagsgt
Search / Match
Previous Answersltmeta tagsgt
New Answer
Immediate academic feedback to student
YES
Trigger
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The PC-ePhone
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Leadership Challenge From Elite to Mass Higher
Education
In 1946 8 Australian universities teaching
about 26,000 students. In 2003 38 Australian
universities teaching about 890,000 students.
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• The problems faced by mass higher education
  today come from a system which has become mass in
  its size but remains elite in its values.
• The recent external changes of numbers,
  structures, finance, and governance have not been
  matched by appropriate internal changes of
  values, purpose and activities.

Source Wagner (1995) p.21
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Effective Organizational Structures?
The functional hierarchy and the divisional
structure became, in time, career structures
rather than effective organizational structures.
People became more concerned about their career
progression than about getting the job done
Source Stace Dunphy (2001)
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Leadership Challenge
Is there a plausible alternative organizational
structure to the traditional hierarchies of
universities that tend to promote departmental
insularity?
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New Academic Structure and Culture?
Proposed by Ostroff (1999) the horizontal
organization has the potential to generate an
academic culture which is more attuned to the
rapidly emerging competitive, consumer driven,
technologically sophisticated, complex work
environment of higher education today.
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Implementing the Horizontal Organization

• Set a direction

• Design the appropriate organizational structure

• Take steps to institutionalize the change

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The Transformation Triangle
Source Steven F. Dichter et al (1993)
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University Core Processes

• Customer Acquisition Administration
• Teaching, Learning Assessment
• Customer Contact Student Support
• Research
• Community Service
• Infrastructure Services

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From Hierarchical to Horizontal

• Use ICT to help teams reach performance
  objectives

• Measure end-of-process performance objectives

• Promote multiskilling through appropriate
  training

• Build a corporate culture of openness,
  cooperation and collaboration that focuses on
  continuous performance improvement and values
  employee empowerment, accountability and
  wellbeing

Source Ostroff (1999)
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Design Principles

• Organize self-managing teams around
  cross- functional core processes

• Appoint process owners to manage the core
  process in its entirety

• Make teams not individuals accountable for
  setting and achieving performance objectives

• Allow teams to make decisions essential to team
  performance

• Engage directly with stakeholders and customers

Source Ostroff (1999)
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Leadership Challenge
During the organizational design phase, executive
managers need to keep in mind that improved
performance, not restructuring the organization,
is the key objective. It is all too easy to turn
an organizational design process into a series of
internal turf wars.
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Leadership Challenge
Fast, flexible and fluid organizations that can
provide customized, high quality, value added
services that satisfy customer needs with speed
and accuracy at the appropriate price point , are
the only institutions that will survive and
thrive in the 21st century.
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Leadership Challenge
Is this fantasyland for universities typified
by the hierarchical, bureaucratic academic
structure in which the provision of services to
students is significantly inhibited by the
inevitable internal focus of departmentalized
thinking, personalized agendas, fragmented
objectives, overly complex procedures and
dependence on management via multiple layers of
committees that move with glacier-like momentum?
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Leadership Challenge

• Any organization hoping to survive and thrive in
  the information economy must become

• open, non-hierarchical, democratic,
• experimental, tightly networked,
  endlessly adaptable and essentially horizontal

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The institutional capacity to execute an
integrated approach to technology deployment
constitutes a considerable competitive
advantage.
Leadership Challenge
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Any new technology environment eventually
creates a totally new human environment
Marshall McLuhan
The e-Revolution
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Leadership Challenge
The greatest danger in times of turbulence, is
not the turbulence.. it is to act with
yesterdays logic.
Peter Drucker (1991)
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Fast, Flexible and Fluid?

• In 1803 the British deployed a military
  attachment to stand on the Cliffs of Dover to
  watch for Napoleon.

• It was not until 1927 that the detachment was
  disbanded.

• Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821.

Source Stace Dunphy (2001)