E-flections

An interesting post today from charlie beckett about why news organisations are resistant to moving into the online arena that has interesting implications for education. Charlie argues that because editors typically see online as a drain on limited resources and dont see any incentives: “All the managers could see was a threat. This Online business would drain their budgets and take audiences and staffing away from the main shows.”

The solution at a leading media producer was to  allocate specific resources for extra online budgets, and  making “all the online targets part of the main business proposition. All the Online people were placed at desks alongside their broadcast colleagues.”

This moved the organisation  “from a broadcast and Online strategy to simply having a Media Strategy”.

Do university managers see online education as a threat to established empires, rather than an inevitable and welcome opportunity to reach new audiences that a traditional face to face instution cannot attract.

A lot of the talk at the recent Blackboard Europe conference was about exactly this issue, how do we move out of the ‘e learning pocket’ and transform education from using e learning and technology in isolated clusters, and into an e-culture, where they are seamlessly integrated into everything we do.