Evaluation and reflections on e-learning: Perspectives on challenges and recommendations for inclusive digital transformation

• In Event: A Multinational e-Learning Partnership: Coordinating New Opportunities for Student Learning Across 10 Higher Education Institutions

Proposal

To have an effective digital transition, higher education institutions need to facilitate deep and coordinated culture, workforce, and technology shifts (Grajek & Reinitz, 2019; Gobble, 2018). Such substantial shifts have been complicated by COVID-19, exposing many educational systems and institutions to more challenges in their efforts to expand quality inclusive education.
Meanwhile, there are increasing calls for evaluation to be an integral part of any e-learning initiative, particularly in the Global South where educational institutions confront multiple constraints in moving toward online education (Attwell, 2006; Reimers, 2021; 2022). Such evaluation is aimed at identifying challenges and opportunities, and ultimately, providing feedback to advance e-learning implementation for more inclusive education. Informed by García-Peñalvo’s (2021) strategic framework for inclusive and ethical e-learning, this paper discusses the overarching challenges across ten higher education institutions participating in an e-learning initiative funded by MasterCard Foundation. Based on the evaluation findings and the literature, we offer recommendations for institutions to successfully transition toward inclusive digital transformation.
Our evaluation findings show that the institutions have faced challenges at different levels in the implementation of the e-learning initiative. At the institutional level, a sheer lack of resources and inadequate infrastructure to adequately support e-learning inhibited this initiative. These infrastructure difficulties include a lack of technical competencies or ICT support staff with e-content creation skills. At the program level, challenges include courses overloaded with content, language barriers between learners and instructors, lack of appropriate contextualization of the academic content delivered, lack of opportunity for learners to implement and apply what they collectively learned, traditional lecture delivery, and overwhelming and theory-heavy content. At the individual level, the timing of the program initiatives posed a significant challenge to their learners. Timing of the classes offered, for example, conflicted with participants’ previous commitments to or primary roles within their institutions, resulting in significantly longer working hours to keep up with participants’ responsibilities.
In light of García-Peñalvo’s (2021) reference framework, most of these challenges (at the program and institutional levels) can be classified in the Infrastructure and Contents layers. Obstacles faced by the faculty and support staff tend to fall into the Educational Model layer where many individuals struggle managing time to be involved in online tasks effectively.
In this regard, the challenges identified from the evaluation of the pilot implementation are noteworthy. Nevertheless, there could be more challenges or risks that have not been fully discerned or emerged to their significance. Such challenges could be related to ethics, privacy, security, and communication issues as suggested in García-Peñalvo’s (2021) framework. Moving from face-to-face to online education requires a substantial change in organization and has implications for an inclusive and ethical e-learning ecosystem. Hence, it is important to situate the identified challenges in the broader context of efforts to address associated issues and policy related to digital transformation. Accordingly, we will offer relevant recommendations for the successful implementation and realization of the full benefits of this e-learning initiative across the partner institutions and beyond.

Author

• Hang Bich Duong, Arizona State University