McKey, Paul (1999). "The Total Student Experience" keynote presentation at ASCILITE 99, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, December 6-8, 1999.

paul.mckey@bigtree.com.au

Abstract

With the advent of online education, the Universities of the world are for the first time exposing their wares in a public space - the Internet - in direct competition and comparison to similar commercial offerings.

While the argument for the University offering as being one of 'accredited academic quality' is easy to win against its unaccredited training and professional development competitors, it is not necessarily as easy to suggest the university offering is always a better 'product'.

Universities typically have little experience selling their wares in a commercial environment where price, service and immediacy matter. It then comes as no surprise that when a mature adult learner is shopping around, universities are often being overlooked for education alternatives more in tune with the requirements of a modern lifestyle.

The Total Student Experience offers a conceptual framework for the discussion, delivery and measure of an online educational system from the student's perspective. It suggests a model with four distinct layers, which individually and collectively, effect the learner's overall satisfaction with the system. The four layers are: presentation, function, education and administration. Each has a number of key variables occurring within it.

This paper will discuss the use of this framework and the importance of the underlying assumption that the university 'product' in the online environment will be measured not only by its traditional hallmarks but also by the key elements of the medium in which it is offered. When that medium is the Internet these elements are convenience and relevance, service and value, and the antithesis of the mass production era of education - personalisation.

Introduction

If one was to do a cursory scan of universities across the world in late 1999 we could safely say that 100% are 'online', meaning they are connected to the Internet and have some sort of Web presence.

But how deep does that presence go? Are they passive information sites or are they active, integrated service and learning environments? There is currently no way of measuring or articulating the 'depth' of a university's web presence. Online learning is still too young to have developed a comprehensive yet easily understood value model and the terminology is subjective at best.

The proliferation of Learning Management Systems (LMS) running on desktop, networked computers, has allowed a number of institutions to offer subjects online to some extent. But to what extent? Instead of well articulated, homogenous, online learning strategies the majority of these are patchy initiatives using piecemeal methods to deliver uncoordinated services via the web.

Online teaching and learning is a new concept in an ever changing medium and so most online initiatives are experimental in nature. While these initiatives may throw up a few gems where we all applaud the hard-working academic who has worked unpaid to deliver quality service to online students, this does not provide what could be described as, in conventional industrial terms, 'a consistent product'. In fact the inconsistency, and inefficiency, brought about by individual lecturers having to teach themselves all the skills of the new media is marked.

It is all essentially a function of what Daniel (1999) recently referred to as the "cottage-industry model", which reflects the traditional working practices of universities, wherein the same individual does everything including teaching, providing academic support and assessment for a group of students. (Taylor, 1999)

For the online teacher add also; web designer, programmer, technician, educational technologist and so on. Add also the need in some cases to go outside an unsupportive, under-funded institution to get the desired 'quality of service' for your students and the effort to get a subject online could be considered more heroic than sensible. But are heroics enough?

Think of the student's perspective. A student will more often than not find extremes of quality in the duration of a typical degree. All students have their favourite lecturers and in a well known campus environment it is personality and expertise that is perhaps the greatest differentiator in the enjoyment and results of a class. But, what about online? Added to the above we now include both the student and the lecturer's unknown capability in a computer-technology environment, which for want of a better term we label 'computer literacy', and we now have several major unpredictable variables affecting the quality of the offering, which just don't exist to the same extreme on campus.

So when the server's down, the essay is lost or the marks are allocated to somebody else does the student really care that this lecturer taught themselves HTML from a book on the weekends using a borrowed computer?

Hence, one can only conclude that a student currently doing an online subject is more akin to the guinea pig than the learned scholar. That's OK. Many of them enjoy the pioneering method of learning that the Internet provides, and will put up with the inconsistencies. But for how long?

Online is not Campus + Web

In the past the student campus experience plus the learning environment were carefully controlled to provide optimum satisfaction on both counts. These are still the major selling points for students attending full-time study. The combination of the two, plus other factors such as branding and networks, is said to differentiate the good from the average university.

But what of the online student? Is it possible to offer a 'dial-in' student quality services, fraternity and the immediacy of the learning environment without reducing satisfaction? Yes, though current offerings fall far short of the campus equivalent. There are compelling reasons why the modern student is not on campus. Lifestyle, work/family commitments, distance and incapacitation are examples. They are not second-class students but rather adults exercising a choice of how, when and where they study.

University life is a mixture of untold tasks associated with study and dealing with the bureaucracy, but many unseen, and often impassable, barriers confront the online student trying to navigate across the virtual campus. This is possibly brought on by a business model that continually tries to develop 'online' as a new market without a corresponding increase in supporting resources.

In effect, the current applications of fourth generation Internet-based delivery tend to generate resource allocation models similar to tutorial-based on campus teaching. (Taylor 1999).

This manifests itself online in different ways such as:

• Different faculties using different software systems based on cost and available skills forcing different, presentation, functional and pedagogical interfaces across subjects;
• Educational content that is just digitised lectures/notes/distance material and makes no allowance for the interactivity of the medium;
• Administration processes that can only be completed on the 'official form' because there is no web interface to the admissions system;
• IT outages, the timing of which are influenced more by IT staff convenience than quality of service;
• Unanswered email and phone calls due to staff rostering and something called 'the weekend' which coincides with most online students' major study period;
• The inability to find one person in one place who can answer your question.

How then does this affect learning when as well as the above it is possible that an online course has "no real interaction with faculty, no real doing, no excitement"? (Schank, 1999)

Typically educational research has looked at significant variables affecting learners in the actual learning environment while ignoring external factors. Some recent lateral thinking and corresponding research has shown these "outside the system" variables can be significant. For instance research recently suggested one of the factors in a child's ability to learn and retain information and new skills was directly related to whether that child had received an adequate breakfast. This research resulted in a program which provided breakfast at the school for children in lower socio-economic groups or who were suffering some upset in their normal routine. (Swan, 1999)

Similarly if the online student has to continually battle through technicalities and 'administrivia' they are not in an optimum frame of mind for learning. Another recent study found " students' frustrations" in a "web-based course inhibited their educational opportunities" (Hara and Kling, 1999). Phipps and Merisotis (1999) have reported that "a major gap in the research is the lack of studies dedicated to measuring the effectiveness of total academic programs taught using distance learning. Virtually all of the comparative or descriptive studies focus upon individual courses".

Note 1: This failure to provide cohesive, responsive services equates to the following:

• A poor learning environment - from the student's perspective.
• Poor business - from the university's perspective.

The result is the two may not come together again! The student may go elsewhere. Schank (1999) says, "the web will open up competition in university education (and later on in secondary education) in a way that few have imagined. Web courses will undergo a transformation over time and that transformation will begin to change education (and perhaps society itself) forever".

Universities planning to go, or already going online must consider the total student experience to make their online business a success. Further, that business must be resourced accordingly.

What is the Total Student Experience?

In short the Total Student Experience is a thinking framework for considering the whole system a student interacts with, including educational, commercial and societal components, when they enter into a course of study. Education can no longer be treated as set of discrete and discontinuous tasks, which eventually create a graduate! The concept of lifelong learning and its merging with work is very real and education needs to take on a more societal-based outlook. As job becomes secondary to work many are heeding industry champions who are saying "do not get a degree in an advanced topic area. Two nights a week for a hundred years is not the way to learn a specific silo of excellence" (Morley, 1997)

What else is driving this need for new educational models? Consider these possibilities:

• Increased student mobility and choice;
• A rise in the importance of credentialism;
• The merging of work and learning;
• Ubiquitous, affordable communications systems. (McKey, 1997)

These suggestions indicate that education must be viewed in its totality. This is broader than just the institution since increasingly the university will be required to take the system to the learner, to industry, to society and to fit it in with their needs while remaining competitive.

Note 2: Let us add two commonly agreed factors that can be considered the corollary of Note 1.

• Online education opens up whole new teaching, learning and research environments and methods.
• The online education business is one of the fastest growing markets in the world today.

In "the Experience Economy" Pine and Gilmore (1999) argue that the world has passed through three dominant economies - commodities, goods and services - and is now about to enter its fourth - experiences. They say that information is not the foundation of the new economy as "information wants to be free". Only when companies constitute information "in the form of information services - or informational goods and informing experiences - do they create economic value" (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).

Hilsberg (in correspondence, 1999) would add two other factors which emerge from the above:

• That a student's time is undervalued.
• That academic content and information is overvalued

This is adding up to a very different 'value argument' for education than the previously dominant 'campus experience'. It is also saying that there is more to online learning than taking an existing model and putting it online as it just carries the baggage of the old paradigm and provides little of the advantage of the new.

So how then do we maximise the advantage of the new?

• Put the student at the centre of an innovative learning environment
• Make it customisable and personalised
• Put 100% of the functionality on the Internet
• Make it modular and interchangeable from a content perspective
• Make it mutually adaptive so the system learns from the student
• Remove technical and administrative frustration from the learning process
• Make it flexible and responsive from an administrative view
• Let it provide other products and services, of the student's choosing, over and above education
• Make this application the hub of the student's work and learning, communication and informational needs

Surprisingly enough the provision of experience is well understood when it comes to a campus student; in fact it is often the selling point. As I have already said the experience of the online student is typically a poor one. However, others on the Internet are working hard to improve this. The education and training portal sites like www.digitalthink.com etc are setting new standards of service and university students will quickly come to expect the equivalent.

The Total Student Experience - The Four Layers

We need to be pragmatic though. Online education systems are built by real people, within resource constraints. Now, one of the first tools that will help to start work on this 'ideal' system is a model, and let's not forget some terminology to describe it.

This model of an online education system has two key features:

1. it is always viewed from the top down which is from the student's perspective;
2. the layers are weighted from top to bottom based on importance (least to most).

The weighting of each layer is a nominal value to demonstrate its relative importance to the correct functioning and useability of the system. The layers are not discrete but intertwine and repeat at different levels.

Recently I have proposed that organisations go through several phases as they introduce online education (or for that matter any active web site). The four suggested levels and/or phases of publishing and interactions are:

1. Passive Publishing
2. Active Publishing
3. Limited Interaction Media Publishing
4. Fully Interactive Media Publishing

The phases are defined by the increasing interaction at the front-end (the user's perspective) and a corresponding increase in automation of functions at the back-end. (McKey, 1998)

Since mainly cost and time drive this phasing, it makes sense that institutions develop their online educational system in this way. Hence most universities have attractive websites with a highly structured navigation system that gets one down to either a third-party LMS (WebCT, Course Info, TopClass etc) or some HTML resources, but typically no integration with the administration system. That is the cosmetic interface is in place but the integration of systems is still 'work in progress'. In fact a student may need to use several discrete systems to accomplish an average day's learning tasks.

This is the inverse to the importance of each layer of the proposed model. This is also why the current online offerings are generally such a poor experience from the student's perspective. They offer much but deliver little once the surface is scratched.

Presentation

When a student enters an online education system they typically see what looks like a normal web site. This is the presentation layer, which provides the all-important 'first touch' for any prospective or enrolled student. It can define the system's image and style and may even be a deciding factor in the student's decision to study there.

Presentation must be a constant concern. Typically a graphic artist is involved in the outside or public shell of the system but the programmers tend to be left to construct the functional pages that interact with the databases etc. Wrong! Presentation and Human Interface Design is important at every level and arguably even more so when the user is interacting with the system as opposed to just browsing the top layers.

However, presentation decreases in importance over time to a general standardised level of quality that will be based on current Internet styles.

Functional

This layer is hard to put your finger on but is in fact omnipresent. If it manifests itself at all it would be called the navigation or system architecture but functionality is more than that. Functionality is best described as the steps (or tasks) in a goal based system design. Online education systems should be about getting things done, not about passively receiving information. "In the new learning marketplace, customers, employees and students are all active learners or, even more accurately, interactive learners". (Davis and Bodkin in Pine and Gilmore, 1999, p32)

The functionality may be overt, [Click Here] or covert, such as when your login not only gets you to your student home page but also gathers your assignment reminders, updates your logbook, and displays today's lesson etc. "Goals are the not same thing as tasks. A goal is an end condition, whereas a task is an intermediate process needed to achieve the goal." (Cooper, 1999). Goal based systems will evolve to a more heuristic navigation system rather than the current algorithmic systems. In other words you may achieve your goal in a number of ways depending upon the context. This allows freedom in both system design and usage.

Good functional design should be felt but not seen. The user knows it is there by a sense of satisfaction and achievement or, inversely, by getting things done with limited distraction and frustration. As with presentation, a minimum standard will quickly be expected which will be based largely on industry standards.

Education

The education layer is where we can focus on the primary teaching and learning aspects of the system. When considering the Total Student Experience though, this is not a purely pedagogical focus but rather a much broader layer that considers the lifestyle and commercial as well as the academic features of the education the student is buying. It also considers that in education "the customer is the product". (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, p163)

Below are listed just some of the issues from a student's perspective.

Material development cycles of 6-9 months are too long

Development, editing and publishing systems need to be designed and built into the workflow systems to allow short or continuous publishing cycles. This long cycle puts universities behind their commercial counterparts, particularly in the technology, legal and finance areas, who professionals are turning to for their up-to-date knowledge.

Most online material is inappropriate

The first phase of online education has unfortunately used the Internet as a more efficient means of delivering the 'knowledge brick' (a collection of print and later AV materials) of correspondence or early distance courses. This is inappropriate, as distance is almost irrelevant on the Internet, yet the reading of large volumes of text on a computer screen is still considered necessary 'education'. This 'shovelware' as it is known is tedious and doesn't use the medium.

Written content needs to be decreased with a corresponding increase in educational resources such as:

Searchable text, glossaries, ontologies, concept maps, audio, short duration (small download) video, graphics and animations, asynchronous and synchronous communications, media rich and user controllable simulations.

The result should be a more relevant mix of static and dynamic materials. The system then needs to add tools for the personalised presentation, editing, storage and general manipulation of these resources.

Figure 1 - Reduction of text with a corresponding increase in learning resources.

Material is not modular and interchangeable

The result of current educational material designed for the Internet being based on a cottage industry is that little, if any, is reusable outside the originating environment. Projects such as the Instructional Management System (IMS - http://www.imsproject.org/) and Resource Description Format (RDF) (http://www.w3c.org/) are helping define standards that will allow the interchange of educational content.

Think of educational resources as objects, each one of which can be:

• Identified - via a UUID (Universal Unique Identifier)
• Described - via meta-data
• Placed - via XML (eXtensible Markup Language )
• Formatted - via style sheets

This would then allow that resource to be shipped to any compliant system for immediate use.

Flexible delivery is not personalisation

The standardisation of the 'student' allows for the standardisation of the material (one size fits all) which lowers teaching and development costs.

Both asynchronous and synchronous communications plus Profiling should be used to build a picture of the student behind the login. This profile can be used by either the system or a tutor to provide better service and choice within the subject.

Technologies like eXtensible Markup Language (XML) being developed by the W3C (http://www.w3c.org/) allow the separation of structure from content. It also allows structure to be flexible and constructed 'on the fly'.

Similarly, while universities still hold the reins on authenticity and validity of material the student more and more wants a say in what is offered when. This will require previews of courses to avoid the effects of asymmetric information where "the consumer is not in a position to judge quality until they have experienced it. Choosing a course is an act of faith." (Moodie, 1999)

Limited choice of material

Since universities were founded in most cases on a quasi-geographic model each university continues to produce its own material despite the fact that equivalent or better material could be shipped from a specialist university across the world in a matter of minutes. This has resulted in an oversupply of high quality written academic material. Much like the text publishers, new organisations like Digital Packs (http://www.digitalpacks.com) are providing "copyright cleared articles and instructional materials that can be customised and delivered online". Yet this choice is not available to the average student.

This direction is not without criticism from people like Noble (1999) who state that "The implications of the commoditization of university instruction are two-fold in nature, those relating to the university as a site of the production of the commodities and those relating to the university as a market for them".

Teaching as a performance

With the advent of technology-assisted customisation and personalisation of material and delivery, what role does this leave the online teacher? Pine and Gilmore (1999) would have us consider that for there to be an immersive experience, which is what we hope the learning process is, then there needs to be a performance. Well known in the physical domain the importance of teaching as a performance with an active participating audience, scripts and props is becoming more common online. (Pine and Gilmore, 1999)

Administration

The Administration layer is considered the foundation layer. This layer is interpreted in a broad sense in the same way as the administration building on campus. That is, firstly it houses the power, and hence the budget (or vice versa) and therefore ultimate control over any online system of this scale. Secondly, like any organisation, it can control attitudes and innovation and can orchestrate or stifle change across the institution. The argument is that a total student experience cannot be delivered by isolated efforts in faculty but requires an organisation wide ethos to support high-level customer service to provide satisfied students. Many of the required changes cross political lines between academia and administration and have more to do with industrial relations and career advancement than education. Student-teacher ratios are just as important online. While this layer is largely invisible its effects are felt everywhere. (Schank, 1999)

Ernst, Katz and Sack in their paper titled "Organizational and Technological strategies for Higher Education in the Information age" (1999) consider that for "a number of Campus executives-and information technology (IT) professionals especially-… the operative words are transformation, restructuring, reengineering, rethinking, innovation".

This also means giving students access to their information, making systems (including the human components) fast and responsive, competing with commercial services (provide free email for life!) and embrace the concept of customer service.

A recent online article from the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that:

Notre Dame's new degree-audit system is the type of student-centered application that colleges and universities seem eager to develop as they abandon what many people now think of as an outdated "inconvenience" model of higher education. Let's face it, we made it hard for students to register or get financial aid, and we didn't feel badly about that. (Olsen, 1999)

But in parallel to systems redesign so to will the organisational work practices need to be rethought. From the student's perspective they may want what Elliott Masie has called a Learning Service Agreement (LSA) (http://www.masie.com) where certain minimum standards, services and expectations are spelt out.

Therefore, perhaps the most important task of the administration layer is to tie together the disparate forces and responsibilities of both the technology and the personnel of the three layers above. Educators shouldn't be designing data-backed websites. IT staff shouldn't be influencing academic decisions. While physical universities tend to be disjointed, their virtual interface must aim to offer a homogenous view of services to the student.

Summary

When universities go online they are entering a global market where the standards for presentation and functionality are set by all global players. While education standards are still owned by the university's power to accredit, they will be heavily influenced by quickening global trends. To compete will require rapid response to change and corresponding new attitudes in universities.

One such change is to look at online education from the student's perspective and to consider the student's experience of the education system in a holistic manner. The four layered model presented in this paper, while simplistic, allows the beginnings of a method to isolate and describe the components of the system and their relationships instead of the quite often narrow perspective of either the technology or pedagogy alone.

Conversely we could use the concept to research the total satisfaction of a system instead of trying to isolate and empirically measure the components. Evaluation of individual layers and then the system as a whole, would be a huge improvement on the current very subjective critiques of websites and the often irrelevant feature-based comparisons of software products (LMS).

Finally, online education is not necessarily a less expensive form of content delivery and student administration. While it can have substantial savings over it's bricks and mortar counterpart, these savings must be redeployed into building high quality, marketable educational environments, otherwise the student will go elsewhere for their educational experience.

References

Cooper, Alan, 1999,"The Inmates are running the Asylum", Sams, Indianapolis

Ernst, David J., Katz, Richard N., Sack John R., 1999, "Organizational and Technological Strategies for Higher Education in the Information Age", http://www.educause.edu/asp/doclib/abstract.asp?ID=pub3013

Hilsberg, Terry P, 1999, (views expressed in personal communication).

Hara, N., & Kling, R., 1999, "Students' Frustrations in a Web-based Distance Education Course: A Taboo Topic in the Discourse." http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp99_01.html

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Moodie, Gavin., 1999, "The flaws of Supply and Demand", The Australian - Higher Education, November 10 1999, p33.

Morley, Dick, 1997, "The Winners (and losers) in 15 years", National Business Bulletin, March 1997, pp. 19-21.

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Olsen "Smart Software lets Universities offer 'self service' Degree Information", The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuesday, November 9th,1999, http://chronicle.com/free/99/11/99110901t.htm

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Pine, B. Joseph & Gilmore, James, 1999, "The Experience Economy", Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Schank, Roger "The Disrespected Student - or - The need for the Virtual University" http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schank/schank_index.html

Swan, Norman, 1996 "The importance of breakfast for school children" ABC Radio National - Health Report Transcript - 21 Oct 96 (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/hstories/hr211096.htm)

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This paper was authored when Paul McKey held the position of Chief Technical Officer of NextEd Ltd