An Interview with Morten Flate Paulsen: Focusing on His Theory of Cooperative Freedom in Online Education

Morten Flate Paulsen is Professor of Online Education and Director of Development at NKI Distance Education in Norway. He is Doctor of Education from the Pennsylvania State University and Master of Science in Engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology.

In 1986, Paulsen became one of the very first online educators when he designed the EKKO Learning Management System and taught his first online course. Since then, he has worked continuously in the field and published a number of books, articles and reports about the topic. Paulsen's book Online Education and Learning Management Systems (www.studymentor.com) has received excellent reviews. In 1990 Paulsen established The Distance Education Online Symposium (DEOS) as the world's first online journal and discussion forum for distance education. For more information see Paulsen's homepage at http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten/

NKI (www.nki.no) was one of the very first European online colleges, and it has offered online, distance education every day since 1987. Few, if any, online colleges in the world have been longer in continuous operation.

The acronym NKI could be translated to Norwegian Knowledge Institute. It was established as a correspondence school in Norway in 1959, and its headquarters are now situated in a suburb of Oslo. During the last two decades NKI Distance Education has developed from a correspondence school to an institution applying the Internet for delivery of a large number of courses.

Today, NKI is Scandinavia's largest provider of distance education with more than 14 000 students. It is also one of Europe's absolutely largest providers of online distance education. As shown in Figure 1, about two thirds of the students are enrolled in NKI's nearly 500 online courses.

Figure 1. Active NKI students at the end of each month

Stating that cooperative learning is based on voluntary participation in a learning community, NKI has developed the following philosophy for online learning:

NKI Distance Education facilitates individual freedom within a learning community in which online students serve as mutual resources without being dependent on each other. We build on adult education principles and seek to foster benefits from both individual freedom and cooperation in online learning communities.

In my view, the most interesting and challenging pedagogical challenge in our lifetime is how we can provide online education that combines individual freedom with meaningful cooperation. I have struggled with this challenge since I first introduced my Theory of Cooperative Freedom in 1992.

My latest book is so far the most comprehensive discussion of my theory. The book is in Norwegian, but I will try to elaborate on some of the most important issues and developments in my theory in this interview.

The theory claims that adult students often seek individual flexibility and freedom. At the same time, many need or prefer group collaboration and social unity. These aims are difficult to combine. There is a tension between the urge for individual independence and the necessity to contribute in a collective learning community. Thus, cooperative learning seeks to develop virtual learning environments that allow students to have optimal individual freedom within online learning communities. Some of the pedagogical and administrative challenges with regard to accommodating both individual freedom and cooperation are explained in my 2003 article Theory of Cooperative Freedom (www.studymentor.com/studymentor/cooperative_freedom.pdf)

Cooperative learning environments could be well or poorly designed. A well-designed virtual cooperative learning environments is built on a number of means that support individual flexibility and other means that facilitate affinity to a learning community. The Theory of Cooperative Freedom is based on the following three pillars:

1. Voluntary, but attractive participation
2. Means promoting individual flexibility
3. Means promoting affinity to learning community

Learning theories can be individual, collaborative or cooperative, and online education technology can support the theories. But unfortunately, the two terms cooperative and collaborative are often used as interchangeable and not clearly distinguished.

In my theory, the terms are clearly distinguished and defined as follows:

Individual learning provides superior individual flexibility, but very limited affinity to a learning community. It has a strong position in online education delivered by institutions with a tradition in distance education.

Collaborative learning requires participation in a learning community, but limits individual flexibility. One may say that collaborative learning requires that students sink or swim together. Collaborative learning is common in online education offered by traditional face-to-face institutions.

Cooperative learning focuses on opportunities to encourage both individual flexibility and affinity to a learning community. Cooperative learning seeks to foster some benefits from individual freedom and other benefits from cooperation in online learning communities. It thrives in virtual learning environments that emphasize individual freedom within online learning communities.

The differences between the three learning theories are illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Individual, cooperative and collaborative learning environments

	Individual
	Cooperative
	Collaborative

The acronym CLIP – Cooperative Learner Information Profile evolved as a result of my deliberations on effective cooperative student catalogues. It was inspired by the acronym LIP (Learner Information Package) that is used in conjunction with the IMS standardization initiatives on accessibility .

Using CLIP, LMS systems may help students find study-buddies or learning partners that are motivated and fitting for cooperation.

Based on the learning profile concept, NKI introduced a service for Learning Partners in March 2006. The service, which is described in the article: "Learning partner - opportunities for cooperation in distance learning" (www.elearningeuropa.info/directory/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=8294&doclng=6 ), received the international Baldic Award 2006 as the most innovative distance education development in the Baltic and the Nordic countries.

The students that want Learning Partners are asked to:

1. Register their personal presentations
2. Decide who may access it by setting their preferred privacy level
3. Search for potential learning partners
4. Invite somebody to become their learning partner

In March 2007, 3550 students had registered a personal presentation and an increasing number includes a personal picture. At the same time, more than 3000 had indicated their privacy level and preference regarding having learning partners as indicated in the Table 1. About 550 of the students had found one or more learning partners.

Table 1. Student preferences regarding Learning Partners and privacy

In 1992, Rosalie Wells described gating as a pacing technique that denies students access to information before they have completed all prerequisite assignments. The acronym COG – Cooperative Gating – has evolved as a result of writing this paper. It signals that students must complete a task to get access to a cooperative resource. This could for example be used as a stimulus for motivating students to answer in-text questions. They are allowed to see what others have answered only if they provide an answer others may read.
Figure 3. Example of in-text question using cooperative gating

Yes, transparency is important for cooperative online education. In my theory, I argue that as much as possible of the general and personal information related to the learning and the learners should be available directly or indirectly to the learning community. This transparent information should include personal information about the users and statistics related to the students' use of the online tools. It should further include work students provide in online notebooks, blogs and discussion forums as well as results from quizzes, surveys, and assignments.

Transparency entails that everyone can see and are seen. It is difficult to find the correct degree of transparency. Transparency is also an important driver for improved quality. It has the following three positive effects on quality:

• Preventive quality improvement, because we are prone to provide better quality when we know that others have access to our work
• Constructive quality improvement, because we may learn from others when we have access to their work
• Reactive quality improvement, because we may receive feedback from others when they have access to our work

Transparency should reduce the amount of low quality contributions and make high quality work more accessible as paragons for others. In transparent online learning environments, poor teachers and course designers cannot easily hide their work behind closed doors.

The following are examples of information that may be transparent among online teachers:

• Average response time
• Student assessment of teacher performance
• Examples of teachers' feedback on student assignments
• The teachers' contributions in their online for a
• The teachers' personal presentations
• The courses each teacher teach
• How many students they have

One of the most strategic decisions providers of online courses need to make is whether the students' progress plans should be individual or collective. This is a decisive dilemma and challenge for cooperative learning, because its focus on individual flexibility favors individual progress plans while collective progress plans make cooperation easier. The two models are illustrated in Figure 4.

It is possible to use various schemes for progress planning as illustrated in the following three models with varying degrees of enrollment flexibility:

• Traditional universities enroll students once a year.
• Athabasca University in Canada enrolls distance education students once per month.
• NKI Distance Education enrolls students every day.

NKI's model is the only one of the three models that supports individual progress planning.
Figure 4. Individual versus collective progress plans

Tools for individual progress planning support planning and tracking of student progress in learning environments with individual pacing. Such tools could provide various progress reports and opportunities to initiate automatic and manual reminders to procrastinating students.

• Help students develop individual progress plans in courses and study programs
• Provide various progress reports allowing students, teachers and administration to detect procrastination and initiate a set of services to help student proceed
• Reduce dropout rates by improving support to and communication with procrastinating students
• Suggest potential partners for cooperation based on the database of progress plans

As shown in Figure 5, NKI has integrated tools for individual progress planning in its LMS system SESAM. All students are encouraged to register their individual progress plans, and they may change their plans whenever they like.

Figure 5. NKI's tools for individual progress planning

One challenge regarding individual progress planning is to decide how voluntary or obligatory it should be. The more students using the planning system, the more useful it is. As illustrated in Figure 6, the students' contact list would be less useful if it only showed planning information for some of the students.

Figure 6. NKI's contact list showing some progress plan information for fictitious students

NKI introduced the planning system as a completely voluntary option in May 2004, and the number of students who have registered their individual progress plans is continuously growing. In February 2005, about 2200 students had registered their plans. In March 2006 it was 3100 and in March 2007 it had grown to 4150. This is a large number of students, but it still constitutes less than 50% of the student population.

Two internal NKI surveys answered by 154 students in 2005 and 336 students in 2006 revealed that the respondents were very positive to the planning system. Both surveys showed that at least 80 percent were either very satisfied or satisfied with the system. In the qualitative responses, the system was referred to as simple and motivating. Some stated that it made planning easier and resulted in improved progression. A typical comment was: It helps me keep up a steady study progression so that I finish the work before my exam.

In a cooperative virtual learning environment, supervision of individual progress plans could be supported by the individual student, automated e-mail and SMS messages, tutors, administrators and cooperative students. The most interesting and controversial strategy is to allow students to receive information about other students' progress plans: Some students oppose strongly that other students may view their individual progress plans. One may however argue that these students may be the ones that will benefit most from having more focus on their progress plans.

Since the fall of 2004, NKI has gradually, introduced, tested and evaluated its system for supervision of individual progress plans. When students log on, they see the number of days to each of their planned submissions. If one ore more submissions are overdue, the student is reminded. The teachers receive similar information for all their students when they log on. The following example illustrates the type of information the NKI supervision system provides for teachers:

NKI is also testing, improving and contemplating good procedures to remind and encourage students who are delayed. The following means have been introduced:

• Standard e-mail reminders generated automatically and regularly by the LMS
• Tools that make it easy for teachers to send personal e-mail reminders to procrastinating students
• Tools that help administrative personnel send seasonal bulk reminders to procrastinating students
• Student access to catalogues that provide information about other students' progress plans. This provides additional incentives for maintaining up-to-date progress plans. Some students may contact and encourage peers who have problems following their plans.

The reminders must be activated in a proper sequence and with adequate intervals so that students perceive them as personal and informative, not as irksome spam. It is also necessary to purge overly overdue plans so that the users perceive the plans as real. Plans that are more than 100 days delayed seem to be more annoying than useful. Further, it is a danger that the system unintentionally exposes dropouts to public contempt.

In his 2005 master thesis, my colleague Truls Fagerberg interviewed 15 online students who studied psychology at NKI about their evaluation of NKI's online tools. He concluded that systems and tools for planning and supervision were perceived as more important than tools for collaboration and social interaction.

An internal survey, answered by 336 NKI students in 2006, revealed that the respondents were positive to the supervision system. In the survey, 25 % of the responses were very satisfied, 41 % satisfied, 22 % neutral, 4 % dissatisfied, 1 % very dissatisfied and 7 % had no opinion.

The Internet trends that are most interesting for online education today are related to social software and web 2.0. Some well-known examples of social software that are relevant for online education are blogs, wiki, RSS and social bookmarking. The most interesting characteristics of web 2.0 is the development of social networks and communities that are hugely successful since the users publish, share and refine information of mutual interest and benefit for all the community members. Some prominent examples of this are Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook.

Some online educators argue that social software and online communities will conquer Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the predominant online learning environment. They argue that Personal Learning Environments (PLE) in which students pick and utilize various social software services and online communities are more flexible and develop faster than existing LMS systems. I will however argue that few students and teachers have enough competence and resources to develop PLEs themselves. At the same time, providers of online education need the structure and administrative tools available in LMS systems to handle large-scale online education cost-effectively. Therefore the challenge is to improve the LMS systems by adapting tools and services based on the philosophy and features in social software and online communities.

Successful online education should be robust and sustainable. It is therefore of great concern that too much of the online education that has been offered so far has been transient, unsuccessful and far from sustainable. Several examples of online education initiatives that have not been robust and sustainable are described in my article Online Education Obituaries (www.studymentor.com/studymentor/Obituaries.pdf).

The article inspired the European Megatrends project, which took its name from my article A Personal View on Future Online Education (www.studymentor.com/studymentor/Future.pdf). The article argues that the current megatrend shows clearly that online education is shifting from small-scale experiments to large-scale, mainstream operation.

Online education initiatives that are not robust and sustainable might be acceptable in small-scale experiments, but not in large-scale mainstream operations. Therefore, I initiated the European Megatrends project that aims at identifying robustness and sustainability in large-scale online education.

At the project's web-site (www.nettskolen.com/in_english/megatrends/) you may read comprehensive case descriptions on NKI and more than twenty other European megaproviders of online distance education.

At the moment I'm involved with NKI's third European project on mobile learning. The project, which is headed by Ericsson, is titled "Incorporating mobile learning into mainstream education and training". The aim of the project is to develop mobile learning course content and services that will enter into the mainstream and take mobile learning from a project-based structure and into mainstream education and training. You may read more about the project at www.ericsson.com/mlearning3

This winter I edited a free, online, report titled State of the Art Report: E-learning Quality in European SMEs - an Analysis of E-learning Experiences in European Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. The report is the first report from the European ELQ-SME project. The English version of the report has been visited more than 10 000 times, and it is also available in German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Estonian versions via www.nettskolen.com/in_english/elq-sme/workpackage1.html

In the report, we focus on e-learning quality in small and medium sized enterprises. So far, e-learning has primarily been used when there are many learners involved. The reason may be quite simple; the up-front investments related to e-learning are relatively high. Therefore it is necessary to distribute e-learning investments among a relatively large number of learners. The consequence is that e-learning first and foremost has been used by individuals who enroll in generic courses in a large open market and by large enterprises with so many employees that they can afford to develop specialized e-learning internally.

Since SMEs have relatively few employees, few SMEs have much experience with e-learning. According to the EU Commission, SMEs are enterprises which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding € 50 million.

Some e-learning is, however, getting less expensive, and some e-learning models are more suited for small-scale training than others. Therefore, the report presents a variety of cases about e-learning experiences in European enterprises. The report also analyses the cases with the intention of presenting e-learning experiences that could be useful and interesting for SMEs. Therefore, the final part of the report presents a number of indicators of success and quality with regard to e-learning in SMEs.

The following e-learning advantages are especially pointed out in the case descriptions:

• Improved flexibility in time and location
• Reduced costs for travel, accommodation and seminar rooms
• Swifter and cheaper distribution of learning material
• Quicker introduction of new products due to accelerated training of many employees
• Increased sales because customers perceive e-learning as a sign of high competence
• Increased sales because e-learning could add value to the product
• Improved relations with customers and suppliers

The project partners quickly experienced that it was harder than expected to find good e-learning cases that were relevant for SMEs. It was relatively easy to find interesting cases in which employees were enrolled in commercial e-learning courses on the open market. It was also easy to find large enterprises with e-learning experiences.

Eventually we chose and developed the eighteen case descriptions that are included in the report. The cases include small enterprises, medium-sized enterprises, large enterprises and e-learning providers. They also represent a broad spectrum of enterprises with regard to business sector and country. But they all have characteristics and experiences that could be valuable for SMEs that are venturing into e-learning.

I have given three online education interviews in English that are available online.

The first one, which is about Instructional Technology and online education, is published at the InTRO web site at the Georgia State University. It is available at www.gsu.edu/~wwwitr/interviews/paulsen.htm.

The second one presented my views on online education trends and challenges as I presented them in a key note speech at Akureyri, Iceland, 31.05.02. It is available at http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten/artikler/AkureyriInterview.pdf.

The third one is a multimedia interview, which was made when I launched my book Online Education and Learning Management Systems. There, I was interviewed by the computerized voice Jane about some of the central issues in the book. The interview is available in various formats including text (pdf and Microsoft Reader), audio (MP3) and video (wmv and Mpeg). All versions are available via www.studymentor.com.

I have maintained my homepage (http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten/) for more than ten years. I'm not especially proud of the design, but it's continuously updated and I know that many online educators have found it useful.

Much of my book "Online Education and Learning Management Systems: Global E-learning in a Scandinavian Perspective" is available via www.studymentor.com. You may also find more information about NKI at www.nki.no and its online education at www.nettskolen.com

The European projects I'm involved with at the moment have the following web sites:

Megatrends: www.nettskolen.com/in_english/megatrends/
ELQ-SME: www.nettskolen.com/in_english/elq-sme
m-learning: www.ericsson.com/mlearning3

See http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/ for more information about LIP.

Published April 25, 2007