Access Denied: Off-campus, Online Learners in Irish Higher Education

Online, remote, off-campus, flexible learning is so hot right now!

When the need to cease on-campus teaching and learning activities in the face of the Covid-19 crisis became necessary the benefits of off-campus, flexible study became almost instantly and universally recognised. With little hesitation most governments and institutions sought to move to remote or online teaching and learning (I will leave the debate over which term to use to others). This is certainly the case in Ireland where it is safe to say that all higher education students are currently remote, off-campus students.

All those full-time, on-campus students joined the ranks of our existing remote/online, off-campus students who have always studied through that mode. But, these cohorts of students are not treated the same, and that is what has made some of us do a double-take at the sudden exuberant support for off-campus study. In what I am about to cover I will stick mostly to a comparison between different types of ‘first-time’ adult learner in Irish higher education.

First-time, over-23, university students studying flexibly online are treated entirely differently from first-time, over-23, full-time, on-campus students, who are defined as mature students. This is principally because those studying online are defined as part-time learners (this is not the case across the board in Ireland but is in the context where I work). This blocks these online adult learners from accessing any of the funding and access supports available to on-campus, full-time students who are over-23. The imposition of multiple barriers for these students flies in the face of stated national and international goals on bringing more adults into higher education.

To provide a contextual persona for the points made below, I am referring to a 25-year-old student on an open education/access, online, undergraduate programme named Maeve. The open access policy of the programme on which she is studying means that any student over the age of 23 may take up a place if they choose. The student pays a fee per module and may progress at their own pace within the bounds of an eight-year registration limit as this is a continuous, flexible programme. Maeve is married, has one child, and works full-time in a minimum wage job. This is the first time she has studied at higher education level and is from a lower socio-economic background, has a disability registered with the institution, and is from an identified minority group. Meave is defined as a part-time student as she is studying online/off-campus, even if she were to take 60 ECTS credits in an academic year (a full-time credit load).

Facilitator – Student assistance fund

Maeve can apply for the student assistance fund since 2017/2018 this has been made available to part-time students who are lone parents or members of defined access target groups who report that they are in financial distress. It is not clear if this funding for inclusion of part-time students in the fund will continue in the future.

Facilitator – some other minor funds and bursaries

Some other minor bursaries are available for Maeve to apply for, but again, compared to mainstreamed access to these for full-time students the access for part-time, off-campus students is funded year-to-year and may not continue into the future.

Barrier – Exclusion from ‘free-fees’ initiative

Maeve is excluded from the free-fee initiative as this only applies to full-time study and does not recognise any learning defined as part-time.

Barrier – Exclusion from SUSI student grant

As a student on a programme defined as part-time Maeve cannot be approved for a SUSI student grant.

Barrier – Exclusion from the Back to Education Allowance (BTEA)

Maeve is excluded from this allowance, which only applies where a student is taking a full-time course leading to a major award.

Barrier – Inequity in state funding model

Part-time, over-23 students who are off campus receive very limited funding in the core funding model. Springboard courses are the exception to this but this funding is specific, competitive, and limited to a fixed number of courses with the funding not guaranteed into the future.

Barrier – Exclusion from formal access programmes

As a student who is over 23 Maeve is ineligible for the DARE and HEAR access programmes.

Barrier – Inequity in access to services and supports

While institutional services and supports available to the student body are in theory available to online students the services and supports mainly operate to an ‘office-hours, weekdays’ model with full-time, on-campus students being their main users. As an online, off-campus student who is not typically on-campus during office hours, Maeve finds these services and supports largely inaccessible. As a student with a disability this lack of access to facilities etc. ‘out of hours’ clashes with the institution’s responsibility under the Disability Act 2005 and the Equal Status Act (2000-2015).

Barrier – Other support funds

For example, scholarships from Uversity explicitly say they give preference to candidates enrolling on full-time programmes.

Barrier – Student travel card (Leap)

Even the humble student travel card, if you look at the terms and conditions, is only for full-time students.

All of the supports above would be available to Maeve if she joined a programme as a full-time mature student (except entry through a formal access route), but this would not have provided the flexibility she needed to balance study with the other parts of her life.

The current world we find ourselves in, where all students are remote, off-campus students, only brings into sharper relief existing inequities in the Irish higher education system.

P.s. I was also thinking about titling this post: “If you like you then you should have put some funding on it” but maybe that’s stretching a pop culture reference a bit too much…

Working/Studying from Home in a Crisis

I want to share a post I just shared with students on our DCU Connected Humanities programmes, as it may resonate with or be useful to others on either side of the staff-student line:

The current circumstances under which we are all living are unprecedented and we are all having to adjust to a new and often difficult way of being. Even for those of us who are used to studying and/or working in our homes things are now different as, for example, our families are there, all the time, working spaces have to be shared with others, children have ridiculous demands like being fed several times a day and possibly even homeschooled, etc. On top of that, we are anxious about our own safety and that of our other loved ones during a pandemic, especially those in vulnerable categories. I just want to say that, to the greatest extent possible, enage in some self-compassion and take care of yourself during these tough times.

To that end I want to first highlight a webpage put together by DCU Student Support and Development aiming to help you get organised while at home (although I think some of you could teach that class to others!).

Second, I want to direct you to some resources from a Work Psychologist, Dr Richard MacKinnon, whose work I have personally found useful (I use the approach he advocates around productivity and psychological flexibility). He recently gave a webinar about working at home in the current crisis and the recording can be found here in this blog post. He also discussed this topic in a recent podcast, which is here. I benefited from listening to these and so I want to share them with you.

Best,

James

The Pivot to Leading a Remote Academic Team

The great-advice-on-moving-online-due-to-Covid-19 market is pretty saturated by now with great contributions on Twitter from the likes of @tonybates @slamteacher @eam0 @karencosta @Jessifer @jonbecker @ProfSallyBrown @neilmosley5 @tjoosten @LTHEchat and many, many more. I am particularly proud of the contribution coming from @DCU’s @NIDL_DCU (National Institute for Digital Learning) and our ‘Keep Teaching‘ and ‘Keep Learning‘ web pages, which I think set the right tone. It is also a good time to have a project running on how to teach online, as the Openteach project (led by @orna_farrell) gets into full swing with lots of useful resources. As the Irish Government is shutting all schools and HE Institutions from tomorrow (13-03-20) some of us here with online learning experience are helping colleagues to gear up to teach and support their students without their usual on-campus setup. But anway, I’m not here to add more to that conversation. I thought I would write about something I haven’t seen discussed already, and give some advice about how to pivot to leading remote academic teams.

Since 2010 I have led a (fantastic) remote academic team in my role as a Chair of open education, online programmes (this T&L model is described in Brunton et al. 2018). Having previously led on-campus academic programme teams I can say that these require different approaches but there are lots of transferable skills from one to the other. For all those Progrmme Chair/Directors who are about to pivot to leading an academic team whose members are now remote and distributed, my advice would be (note – I am going to talk about the technology we have here in DCU, you will have to translate to what is available in your institution):

Be gentle with the team as they transition to working remotely: as new remote workers some will be dealing with a sense of disconnection while others are dealing with the chaos of a house where they don’t have a preexisting area to work and children kicked out of school are swinging from the ceiling. It will take time for team members to find their feet in this new mode of working (remote working is a whole thing in its own right).
Provide some infrastructure to pull the team together: having a shared folder or set of folders with shared documents e.g. agenda for team meetings or shared spreadsheets used as tracking files can help give the team have a single point of focus.
You can use tools that allow for real-time, synchronous meetings, for example Zoom, to allow for team meetings or one to one meetings. Try to make sure your team have working mics and headsets so they can participate well.
You can also use asynchronous means of working with your team. I have held asynchronous team meetings where team members added comments to a Google Doc (we have Google Apps for Education) that had a detailed Agenda+brief over a specified day or two.
Be creative in how you use the tools available to you. For example, in a recent meeting where a sub-group was working on a curriculum redesign project we had a workshop detailed in a shared Google Doc and then we worked on that together (with me taking notes in the Doc) while that document was shared through Zoom.

I hope these help!

The Sweet Summer Heartache of Leading an Online Learning Programme

This post marks my return to the blogosphere after being in a preparing-for-the-new-academic-year-of-an-online-learning-programme fugue state since early August. Some of my colleagues and I have taken to referring to that August-September period as the #timeofgreatsorrow as we knuckle-down to try and get as much of the online learning materials (completing edits, updates, and design/development of new materials), assessments, VLE/LMS infrastructure updates, etc. etc. ready for the start of the year. Our philosophy is, where possible, to provide students with access to all learning materials and assessments on the first day of the academic year. Although I have been gradually working on the flow of work during the whole year, trying to move elements of work to other times of the year, I have yet to find a way around the sweet summer heartache of having to drop all research, writing and service work to focus 100% on this teaching and learning work for at least two months. It is rewarding work, but it is exhausting.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Much of what causes the #timeofgreatsorrow is the way in which our DCU Connected programmes run by my Unit (Open Education Unit) use a teaching and learning model created specifically for online, off-campus study where small teams of full-time academic staff work with larger teams of part-time, off-campus, adjunct faculty who fulfil specific teaching and learning roles (described in Brunton et al. 2018). This provides many benefits in terms of the oversight that I have over the programme and the consistency that results in terms of learning materials, assessments, student experience etc. It also allows my unit to be a lean, efficient one that can exist in an education system that does not provide the same supports to off-campus, online students that it does for their on-campus, full-time counterparts. But, during times of intensity I can become a bottle-neck for the progress as almost everything comes through me for quality checks and final sign-off. During the summer the only way to stay out of bottle-neck city and get everything done is to focus on T&L work and pull extra hours in a calculated game of chicken with both the start of the academic year and burnout.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

But, I am out from under the start of the year (in week four…), the programme looks great after the work that was done, and the students are happy (the biggest numbers we have had so far on this open access/education, online, UG psychology programme), and I am ready to figure out where I left all that research and writing work and get back into things like writing blog posts.

Onward!