AusEd is an educational organization providing higher online education to the students who are willing to learn. AusEd is dedicated to provide quality digital teaching and it provides the modern learners with quality learning experiences anytime, anywhere. AusEd is a local private educational institution that provides education to learners of all age groups. It is a non-profit organization providing its learners educational opportunities to magnify their skills and knowledge without visiting the campus. AusEd enables its students to ‘be what they want to be’. AusEd’s mission is to give an opportunity to the career professionals of diverse community to transform themselves as scholar-practitioners. This will bring a positive social change in the society (Boampong & Holmberg, 2015).
AusEd is providing online program for Master’s Degree in Information Technology which furnishes understudies with a bland establishment to start quest for a quick paced, testing and dynamic vocation in the data innovation industry. Inside this program understudies think about 20 courses giving them an expansive comprehension and learning of a scope of regions in data innovation. The centre courses in this program furnish understudies with a strong establishing in the centre collection of IT information and aptitudes as characterized by the Australian Computer Society (ACS). Understudies think about one noteworthy in Networking, Application Development or IT Management.
AusEd’s study centres are located in Darwin, Broome, Port Moresby, Alice Springs, Suva and Cairns. Administrative head office of AusEd is located in Darwin. Divisional and corporate headquarters of AusEd are also in Darwin.
AusEd has three major divisions. These are: Sales, course Delivery, and Operations. Each division is operative in several locations of Australia.
Marketing and sales is done from offices located in Alice Springs, Suva and Port Moresby. Sales and marketing operations of AusEd are managed by sales division. This division also manage the agents and responsible for course promotion too.
Course materials are developed by the Course Delivery division. This division is also responsible for course delivery and running special study centres. Study centres provide online students a place to access support, access technology and resources and form study groups.
Now all the core operations of the AusEd like accounting, email and other essential services are managed by Operation Division.
Distance education programs provided by AusEd can be studied from anywhere in the world. Study Programs can be accessed through a number of means by online education students. These means include contacting lecturers, online discussion forums, special study centres, electronic library resources, and receiving all study materials online or by post (Bandalaria, 2007).
Special study centres gives a range of facilities, these are:
To enrich and provide multiple learning experiences to its students, AusEd is trying to work in partnership with businesses, industries and communities. AusEd’s aim is to provide enhanced techniques to students in their online learning procedures so that they can improve their skills and knowledge without the need of visiting education centres. AusEd is providing platform and opportunities to the people who would not or have chance to pursue higher education.
There is hardly any business, be of any kind that has not advantaged from revolution in information technology and digital technology. Today, simplest and easiest way for a business to be successful is with information systems and information technology (Business 2 Community, 2015). For the improvement in how fast people learn new topics and things, computer applications are emphasising on active learning. Recent enhancements and advances in the infrastructure of ICT (Ghavifekr & Rosdy, 2015) such as satellites, fibre optics cables and microwave transmission have made it easy to communicate and transmit information from anywhere to any place (Oliver, 2002). Technologies used for distance learning includes telephone tutoring, multimedia and hypermedia CAI, audio graphics, e-books, the World Wide Web (WWW), computer conferencing drill and practice, teleconferencing, fibre optics, video conferencing, tele-text, and videotext, the “Internet”, on-line database, call-in course- on demand, satellite, on line discussion, talk-back TV and so on (Manzoor, 2013).
Emergence of ICT has brought a huge competition among distance learning institutes (Igwe, 2012). Before emergence of ICT, distance learning was not as easy as students had to visit tutors and coaching centres to get the study materials. But ICT has changed the entire distance education system (Pavel, et al., 2015). One example of disruptive technology is ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous means being everywhere. Therefore, it has become possible to get the knowledge or education from anywhere, anytime with the help of U-computing (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016). This has increased the competition among distance learning education institutes as everyone is using latest and innovative technologies to reach to maximum population and providing them ease to pursue higher education (Smith & Brame, 2018). The advantage of competitive environment is that everyone is making use of latest technology to provide distance education to the consumers and it has improved the quality of education with easy access.
Work and work systems in organizations may be disrupted with the invention in U-computing. Here are some examples to explain how U-computing will develop competition among the organizations (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016):
Technologies of ICT are cloud computing, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning that can be used to maximise the business value of AusEd and to provide modern and easy ways of teaching (Ward & Peppard, 2002).
Intelligent network teaching platform for distance education
With the help of this technology computers adapt changes for new things and series of actions can be completed by taking an effective process to integrate the information. High-end processing capabilities are increased by adding multiple intelligent agent systems in the computers (Zhang & Liu, 2014). It will reduce the information processing time as subsystems will have mutual co-operation between them. This will improve the timeliness of the education system (Oliver, 2002).
Actions performed by intelligent agent in distance education network includes teaching information retrieval, real-time tracking of feedback information, state analysis of students and teachers and intelligent recommendation from system.
Expert System
Implementation of expert system in AusEd will save huge funds of educational website, as the expert’s teaching and thinking methods can be understood by computer, and different fields knowledge and experience of experts is summarised and analysed (Zhang & Liu, 2014).
Intelligent Retrieval System of Distance Education
Use of Intelligent retrieval system based on XML in AusEd will help the students in conducting queries using keyword and hence enhance the retrieval timeliness and accuracy.
(Intelligent Retrieval System based on XML and natural language processing)
Intelligent retrieval system has two important aspects. One is resource retrieval subsystem and other is resource pre-treatment subsystem. Resource subsystem integrates dictionary thesaurus, cable thesaurus and related thesaurus according to the needs of user; while pre-treatment subsystem integrate information and various resources through intelligent indexing result to give results to the students or questioner (Zhang & Liu, 2014).
Experiment teaching system of remote intelligent simulation
It generated a language technology and policy modelling software with observation of database integration and deliberate simulation model generation. This system will be able to replace the expert’s work, change the entire experiment and help in analysing the results of experiment to the experimenter (Zhang & Liu, 2014).
The price for incorporating artificial intelligence project proposed above for improving distance learning in AusEd depends on the work being done. To develop the above project, first step start with the discovery and analysis of business process of customers. Next step includes implementation of prototype. Software professionals design software as per the requirements of the project. This phase can cost around $25K. Third step is minimum viable product which is a real product. Cost of MVP varies from $35000-$100000. Hence total cost of 100K-300K$ is required to develop the above proposed project that will improve the distance education system in AusEd and hence enhance its business.
Two primary operational systems of AusEd that are Accounting system and the CRM are operated through server in operation division.
Accounting System at AusEd
For the accounting purposes of AusEd, it has licensed MYOB. MYOB is installed in laptops of users and personal computers. MYOB provides a wide range of products to the AusEd as cloud based, browser based or physical installation software. Features that MYOB is providing to AusEd includes student management, payroll with automatic leave calculation, access of real life time sheets for employees, management of invoices, quotes and statements, payment acceptation from invoices, track and pay expenses, calculate and track GST and many more (Anon., 2018)
Customer Relationship Management System at AusEd
CRM helps organizations in gaining and retaining customers by providing control over the sales pipeline and greater efficiency. To coordinate all of the work processes with their consumers, CRM uses a distributed information systems. SugarCRM is used in AusEd to manage customer base such as recruiting, marketing, student service, and donor outreach and alumni relations.
Externally Managed Systems
Pacific Systems Pvt Ltd manages the course delivery division externally located in Dunedin. Learning management system used in AusEd is Moodle. Facilities provided by using Moodle include online class conduction, uploading assessments and assignments and students-instructor interaction (Anon., 2018). Student can access the course resources online and communicate with the teachers. Through Moodle AusEd students can access online class, get assignments and syllabus and track up-to-date grades.
As with tremendous growth in technology, competition is increasing among all the organizations. So to make all the faculties, staffs and members of AusEd capable of learning new methods, adapt to change in technology and compete with the growing competition, it requires proper leadership and governance structure to manage the change, and the leaders who inspire their staff (Juneja, 2018). There are possibly five methods of overcoming resistance to change:
1) Education and effective Communication: It is the simplest technique for overcoming the resistance to change. Using this technique staff is educated about the changes and the benefits of the changes by using effective communication. If it is explained properly the need for change and its objective, team members will give much needed support to the management (Juneja, 2018). Two-way communication is helpful in this scenario as it will allow employees to ask their queries and oppositions related to change and therefore reduces the objections that oppose implementation of change.
2) Facilitating Participation and Involvement: Staff is involved and consulted before implementing any kind of change and a collaborative environment is set in this technique. It is a beneficial strategy as it will help in minimising the resistance to change by the involvement of staff and pursuing their involvement in the whole process (Juneja, 2018).
3) Support and Facilitation: There are number of reasons that employees fear or oppose any kind of change in the existing ways of methods or work. Changes arise many emotional challenges for the employees and they need facilitation and emotional support to handle the problems and challenges due to the changes (Juneja, 2018) and therefore a complete space should be given them to express their fear or anger related with the change.
4) Agreement & Negotiation: Here a negotiation is considered with the resistors to change. A compromise on various aspects is made in order to fulfilment the concerns of both the resistors and the management (Juneja, 2018).
5) Co-optation & Manipulation: Mangers attempt to manipulate employees by twisting, withholding or distortion of the information, so that it seems more appealing to the employees. In order to convenience the staff members, false rumours are spread across the organization so that employees accept the change (Juneja, 2018).
When one is thinking about distance learning, it is necessary to talk about the assumptions related to the distance learning. In the report we discussed the advantages of distance learning and the role of ICT in advancement of distance learning. But, it is important to consider that this concept of distance education is new and the tools of social media for academics have been available since 2007 only. Hence, it will take time to these tools to be adopted, evaluated and come into wide practise (Bates, 2011).
As distance education emphasizes on digital learning, therefore students are required to develop an understanding of digitization in order to take complete advantage of distance education (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012).
Second distance education is emerging as evolutionary technology in larger culture that wants the universities to re-design their curricula with the changing technology. This will cost heavily to institutes in implementing new technologies frequently (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012).
Last but not the least distance education is considered as an effective way for achieving higher educations but it also introduces new needs and dilemmas such as personal information management problems in order to keep updated with newly published information and filtering information.
Conclusion
In the discussion, it is examined that distance education is becoming more dependent on information and communication technology. ICT removed all the barriers in learning at a distance and thus distance education has a different nature now. Distance education has become helpful for those who cannot go to universities and are left with only choice of distance education. ICT is playing a keen role in distance learning. AusEd is one of the best distance learning organizations in Australia and with this growth in technology; it is constantly making efforts to provide quality education to the students and learners. Advancement in ICT is enhancing the knowledge of learners and educators. Educational technology in AusEd is eliminating the face to face interaction of teacher and student. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, Internet of things and machine learning are some of the technologies under ICT. In this report, it is stated that how artificial intelligence would be helpful in growing business of AusEd and providing quality and higher education to the learners. As the technology is advancing at a rapid rate, so it has become important for AusEd to implement changes in its technology to compete in the industry. This report also discusses about the leadership, governance structure and the methods that are needed to overcome the resistance to change.
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