AusEd: Enhancing Distance Learning with Artificial Intelligence and IS

This report examines AusEd's approach to integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance its distance learning programs. The report begins with an overview of AusEd, an Australian online education provider, its programs, organizational structure, and the role of Information Systems (IS) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in its business growth. It then explores the impact of disruptive technologies and proposes a system incorporating various AI applications, such as intelligent network teaching platforms, expert systems, and intelligent retrieval systems, to improve the learning experience. The report details the costs associated with implementing these AI projects and discusses the existing information systems, including the accounting and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. It also highlights leadership and governance strategies to overcome resistance to change and concludes with a summary of findings and recommendations for AusEd to leverage AI for enhanced business value.

Running Head: Distance Learning 0
Information Systems Strategy and Management
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Executive Summary
Information and technology (ICT) has changed the way of our living. Impact of ICT in every
field is enormous whether it is tourism, law, engineering, business, architecture, banking or
education. In today’s world, education has become the bedrock of every field. And this is
increasing the demand of education. But it is not possible for everyone to pursue higher
studies due to lot of reasons. So for them distance learning has become one of the sources to
complete their higher studies with more flexibility. In Australia, AusEd is a leading
organization of distance learning. It is providing higher education to all over the country and
its head office is located in Darwin. But advancement in technology is demanding AusEd to
upgrade and improvement in its existing course delivery techniques to sustain in the industry.
Implementation of improved ICT in AusEd will help students and learners in getting quality
education with more comfort and in a simple approach. Some of the technologies of ICT are
cloud computing, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and many more. Here, in this
paper artificial intelligence for increasing the business value of AusEd is discussed. This
report will also discuss possible leadership and governance structure needed to overcome the
resistance to change in the organization and technology.

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Contents
Executive Summary...................................................................................................................1
Overview of the organization.....................................................................................................3
Programs in Information Technology....................................................................................3
Organisational Structure.........................................................................................................3
Role of IS and ICT in Growing Business...................................................................................5
Effects of Disruptive Technology..........................................................................................6
Proposed System........................................................................................................................7
Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Distance Education...............................................7
Information System in AusEd..................................................................................................11
Leadership & Governance Method to Overcome Resistance to change..................................13
1) Education and effective Communication:........................................................................13
2) Facilitating Participation and Involvement:.....................................................................13
3) Support and Facilitation:..................................................................................................13
4) Agreement & Negotiation:...............................................................................................14
5) Co-optation & Manipulation:..........................................................................................14
Assumption and Their Effect on Distance Learning................................................................14
Conclusion................................................................................................................................15
References................................................................................................................................16

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Overview of the organization
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).
Programs in Information Technology
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.
Organisational Structure
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.

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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:
 Work stations and computers to students.
 Support staff for assisting student enquiries.
 Photocopying, printing and scanning facilities
 Multimedia and Video conferencing meeting areas.
 Tutorial rooms for group study.
 Wireless networking.

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 Social areas for students.
 Presentation areas.
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.
Role of IS and ICT in Growing Business
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).

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Effects of Disruptive Technology
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):
 Employees are not needed to take the computers everywhere as the wearables are
embedded with sensors and computer chips.
 Networks allow to work from anywhere, anytime.
 Variety of devices can be controlled with remotes using computer networks.
 Varieties of task are performed using intelligent robots and computer programs.
 Real time monitoring of sales, product and customer information.
 GPS, smartphones, microphones and earphones will allow to access online training
and education from anywhere.

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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).
Proposed System
Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Distance Education
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).
(Simulation of tutorial education intelligent network teaching platform)
So
urce: (Zhang & Liu, 2014)

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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).
(General structure of education transfer system)
Source: (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.

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(Intelligent Retrieval System based on XML and natural language processing)
Source: (Zhang & Liu, 2014)
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).

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(Physical structure of the robot remote control experiment system)
Source: (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.

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Information System in AusEd
(Operation division in Darwin)
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)