Standards to Support National Cooperation in Applying Technology to VET
1.1 Improving Access for all Clients
1.2 Producing Informed Clients
1.3 Developing Effective Client/Provider Relationships
1.4 Facilitating an Effective Training Market
1.5 Employing Appropriate and Effective Uses of Technology
2. The Role of Publicly Available and Widely Adopted Standards in Overcoming Barriers
2.1 Funding Mechanisms
2.2 Lack of Technical Infrastructure, particularly in Rural and Regional Areas
2.3 Lack of Readily Available Information on Technology
2.4 Lack of Staff Development in Appropriate Skills and a Resistance to Change
The ways in which standards, particularly those having the 'openness' qualities of Section 4.6, or those which are widely adopted, support the requirements of the VET sector or assist in overcoming barriers to the implementation of flexible delivery, are discussed below. In many cases the means by which this occurs is by increasing the value to the players in the value chain, particularly to the learner.
Current directions in flexible delivery are leading to increasing decentralisation. Training organisations are beginning to cross state and national borders in seeking and providing for individual and corporate clients. Technology is a vital factor in this development. The effectiveness of technology in education and training is impaired if different standards limit the ability of individuals and organisations to interwork.
Organisation of the VET sector varies between States and Territories, from highly centralised to quite decentralised. The present trend is towards increasing decentralisation of the system and autonomy of public as well as private providers. This is clearly congruent with policies of competition and corporatisation. In a centralised system, it is relatively easy to impose proprietary or industry standards to facilitate interworking. In a decentralised system, however, providers and agencies are free to make their own decisions about investment in technology. The necessity for interworking is not lessened by provider autonomy, and therefore standards which have clarity and wide adoption help to ensure that system-wide activities and those between groups of providers are enhanced rather than impeded. An additional complication is the fact that the dominant technology differs between States and Territories. Given the likelihood of increased cross-border activity, publicly available standards enable providers and their clients to use and gain access to technologies and to choose between the variety of technologies available. Standardisation of infrastructure communications equipment, operating systems and course creation tools unties organisational structures from the technical infrastructure.
Some technologies (such as video conferencing and satellite broadcasting) require investment on a system-wide scale; the investment can only be justified if sufficient numbers of organisations can participate in the initiative. The North Carolina Information Highway and the associated distance learning approach provides an example of a statewide initiative with a clear focus on interoperability issues, available standards and protocols. This has enabled multi-vendor engagement in developing this initiative.
When standards which have availability and clarity are used, service to clients is improved as clients need training only in a general access procedure and a delivery mechanism which can be accessed using non specialised equipment.
The issue of access is particularly important in the case of content. Publicly available standards at the content interface enable teachers and learners and, in fact, the general community, to access the best content available, or in the case of more specialist areas, specific content relevant to their needs
ANTA has identified the provision of accurate and comprehensive information as a necessity if clients are to make informed choices about training. Standards for technology are an important part of making sure that this information is accessible to clients and potential clients. It will be easier for training organisations to adopt these standards if they conform as far as possible to the practices already obtaining in the VET sector, and to the predominant standards in the various industry streams.
Client provider relationships are enhanced when the interface between them is facilitated by processes and procedures (protocols) that are known by both parties. Standards in an online situation fulfil that role by enabling both parties to access information from each other without the distraction of organising a common technical infrastructure.
National and state governments are developing a competitive structure of the vocational education and training sector to address some of the objectives above.
The institution of publicly available standards reduces the degree of vertical integration in the industry because it allows new entrants into each layer of the infrastructure. It therefore encourages investment in course creation and competition between content creators, because the range of business activity and expertise for course creation does not need to encompass technical delivery mechanisms.
The necessity of competing with each other makes it more, not less, important for training organisations to be able to work with each other, often by way of consortia. Ways in which such organisations work together include:
Publicly available standards will tend to foster cooperation between providers who may form consortia for this purpose, since they will ensure that draft materials may be circulated easily during the process of composition. They will also make it easier to incorporate material developed elsewhere when this is acquired either by purchase or through participation in cross-national consortia.
In the global competitive market for content, time to market, except for the largest multinational corporations, is an important source of competitive advantage. Publicly available standards, because they allow the partitioning of complex applications development tasks into independent modules, reduce development time and therefore time to market.
For some years it has been suggested that the electronic transmission of print material will replace the circulation of hard copy, especially between providers. This has not yet happened to nearly as great an extent as has been predicted. Nevertheless, many VET providers are keen to develop content and applications for use within Australian and elsewhere, either for direct sale overseas or to support program delivery into overseas countries. For VET to remain or become internationally competitive the underlying technology must be accessible by the broadest market, covering other course creators, teachers and students. It is therefore essential that standards which result in low cost and low training requirements are used. These are generally publicly available and widely adopted standards.
The Commonwealth government, and many state and territory governments, have seized eagerly on technology to underpin their flexible delivery policies. A number of governments are placing a high priority on the use of technologies for flexible delivery. Reasons of educational effectiveness and responsiveness to clients are generally cited for this enthusiasm. A further reason is the expectation that the use of technology, where it replaces classroom teaching, will save money.
While we hope that this paper makes it clear that technologies offer new opportunities for education and training, and a means to improve service to existing clients, we are not convinced that cost savings will necessarily result, at least in the short term. Large-scale purchase of technology is not cheap; and experience indicates that it does not replace teachers, but rather enables them to support students in different ways. A more probable scenario is that technology will enable the achievement of more educational outcomes for the same cost; so that the gain will be in value for expenditure, rather than reduction in expenditure.
A further consideration is the implication for migration paths as the technologies evolve. The use of standards with a clear process of updating means that clients will be able to choose from a range of higher level applications or communications equipment, confident that it will interface to the infrastructure which they have already installed.
The emphasis on conventional categories of expenditure in VET sector funding means that financial support for online technology to support flexible delivery is limited.
As discussed in Section 1.4 above, publicly available standards support the competitive provision of applications and communications equipment at all layers of the infrastructure. Because of their public availability they create commercial opportunities for developers to produce hardware of software to meet those standards. Because these standards reduce the barriers to entry for developers, the market becomes highly competitive as increasing numbers of suppliers enter. The resulting price reductions, as applications and communications equipment become commodity products, mean that the funding available for flexible delivery can be used most efficiently to purchase the infrastructure required.
There is a major hidden cost component which is directly addressed by the adoption of widely adopted standards. This is the cost associated with interworking itself. Where different administrations and institutes use different proprietary standards, inefficient communications and lack of coordination result in rework and administrative inefficiency. This inefficiency will drive up costs because of the necessity to employ extra resources to achieve the output required.
There are other secondary, but equally important costs determined by the choice of standards. Clearly specified, publicly available and widely adopted standards:
The purchase of proprietary products would be justified if the VET sector were a leading edge user of online technology and required the highest functionality the marketplace can offer. This is not believed to be the case at the present time. The VET sector has real resource constraints and is, in many cases, entering into the delivery of online material using communication and information technology. Furthermore many end users do not have a high degree of technology literacy. It is therefore more appropriate for the sector to accept a lower level of technological sophistication and adopt publicly available and widely adopted standards which, while not offering the ultimate degree of functionality, lower the financial and strategic risks in subsequent development of the online systems used for flexible delivery.
Clear standards with a structured evolutionary path also have the effect of reducing the range and complexity of choice and therefore the need for technical knowledge and skills on the part of VET personnel making purchasing decisions is reduced. It should be pointed out, however, that proprietary standards and products are marketed strongly by vendors, some of whom have enormous marketing resources. The marketing message in support of some proprietary products may intentionally give rise to perceptions of performance and reliability in the marketplace which may not be justified. By adopting proprietary equipment in these circumstances, a purchaser within VET may be locked into long term technology paths which are suboptimal because of a reluctance to abandon sunk costs.
When proprietary products are used, the decision to upgrade can pose complex issues of interoperability which may require a substantial degree of technical skills and resources for their resolution. The implementation of clear and available standards in information technology and communications equipment would act to alleviate the problem of the lack of appropriate skills in VET staff because the interfaces between different layers of the infrastructure are simplified and equipment in different layers can be engineered to interwork relatively easily. Available standards also enhance the capability of outsourcing the technical infrastructure implementation and operations as contract management complexity is reduced.
At the communications level, the adoption of publicly available standards consequently enables VET sector staff to focus upon their area of expertise, course creation and accreditation. That is, they are not restricted by, nor require the individual development of, delivery infrastructure as part of implementing each course.
Because mandatory and formal standards (Appendix 4) are developed via public processes, their rate of development is somewhat slower than proprietary standards. While this imposes a disadvantage in terms of functionality, it has the unintended benefit of providing a more structured and understandable development process which enables practitioners in the field to keep abreast of the standard under development.
There is a related phenomenon with published proprietary standards. When such a standards are adopted by the industry, the ability of the proprietor to make arbitrary changes is constrained by the reaction of developers working to that standard. These developers often comprise a substantial part of the proprietor's customer base. The stability that is therefore imposed on published proprietary standards assists staff learning to use the standard.
[Home page] [Copyright statement] [Feedback]
Last modified on February 26, 1998.