Video:
Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 (and beyond)---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic
education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job
market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may
teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may
award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards
is a
"microcredential."
Credential (Certificate,
Badge, License, and Apprenticeship) Count Approaches 1 Million ---
Click Here
For example, credentials for computer programming skills are becoming more
popular. Some certificates supplement college diplomas, whereas others are
earned by students who did not enroll in college.
In 2017 my Website was migrated to
the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me atrjensen@trinity.eduif
you really need to file that is missing
Social Networking for Education: The Beautiful and
the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education
uses of Twitter)
Updates will be at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads on Shared Open Courseware (OCW) from
Around the World: OKI, MIT, Rice, Berkeley, Yale, and
Other Sharing Universities (OKI. MOOCs, SMOCs, etc.)---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
In June 1997, THE Journal
published an article called “Computers
in Education: A Brief History.” That article is
still one of the most popular on our website, but — to put it mildly — a lot
has changed in ed tech since then. This is less a sequel to that article
than a companion piece that dips back into the past, traces the trends of
the present and looks to the future, all with an eye toward helping
districts find the right device for their classrooms.
When thinking about the role of technology in
education, the logical starting point is exploring why the connection
between computers and education was ever made in the first place. My
starting point is Logo, an educational programming language designed in 1967
at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) by Danny Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, MIT
professor Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. This language was a derivative
of the AI programming language LISP, and ran on the PDP-1 computers from
Digital Equipment Corp. Seymour Papert had studied with constructivist
pioneer Jean Piaget, and felt that computers could help students learn more
by constructing their own knowledge and understanding by working firsthand
with mathematical concepts, as opposed to being taught these concepts in a
more directed way.
In 1973 the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
introduced the Alto computer, designed as the world’s first personal
computer. At Xerox, Papert’s push to turn kids into programmers led to the
development of Smalltalk — the first extensible, object-oriented programming
language — under the direction of Alan Kay. Because these early computers
were captive in the research lab, local students were brought in to explore
their own designs.
Another path to educational technology began that
same year, when the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) was
started in an old warehouse in Minneapolis. Part of the state's educational
software push, the original programs were simulations designed for a
timeshare system running on a mainframe, with terminals placed in schools.
Using this system, students could take a simulated journey along the Oregon
Trail, for example, and learn about the importance of budgeting resources
and other challenges that faced the early pioneers. Another simulation let
the students run a virtual lemonade stand. Years later, the MECC software
was rewritten for early personal computers.
In the early days, educational computing was
focused on the development of higher-order thinking skills.
Drill-and-practice software only became commonplace much later, with the
release of inexpensive personal computers. By the late 1970s, personal
computers came to market and started showing up in schools. These included
the Commodore PET (1977) and Radio Shack TRS-80 (1977), among many other
systems. But the computer that ended up having the greatest impact on
schools at the time was the Apple II, also introduced in 1977. One
characteristic of the Apple II was that it used floppy disks instead of
cassette tapes for storing programs and also supported a graphical display,
albeit at a low level. The first generation of computers in schools was not
accompanied by very much software, though. The customer base was not yet big
enough to justify the investment.
The Uses of Ed Tech, Past and Present
In 1980, Robert Taylor wrote a book,
The Computer in the School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee. The
underlying idea in this book was that students could use computers in three
different ways: 1) As a tutor running simulations or math practice, for
example; 2) as a tool for tasks like word processing; or 3) as a tutee,
meaning the student teaches the computer to do something by writing a
program in Logo or BASIC. This model touches on several pedagogical models,
spanning from filling the mind with information to kindling the fire of
curiosity. Even though technologies have advanced tremendously in the
intervening years, this model still has some validity, and some contemporary
technologies are better suited for some pedagogies than others.
From Hapless to Helped
"autodidacts disadvantaged by distance" (Don't you love love alliteration as a
memory aid?) In the quotations below, contrast and compare the impact of the
interactive Internet and ebullient email on evolving education from 1858 versus
2001.
The Year 1858
When the University of London instituted correspondence courses
in 1858, the first university to do so, its students (typically expatriates in what were
then the colonies of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and South Africa), discovered
the programme by word of mouth and wrote the university to enrol. the university
then despatched, by post-and-boat, what today we would call the course outline, a set of
previous examination papers and a list of places around the world where examinations were
conducted. It left any "learning" to the hapless student, who sat the examination whenever he or she felt ready: a
truly "flexible" schedule! this was the first generation of distance
education (Tabsall and Ryan, 1999): "independent" learning for highly
motivated and resourceful autodidacts disadvantaged by
distance. (Page 71)
Yoni Ryan who wrote Chapter 5 of The Changing Faces of Virtual Education
--- http://www.col.org/virtualed/
Dr. Glen Farrell, Study Team Leader and Editor The Commonwealth of Learning
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a column on
"The 4 Properties of Powerful Teachers," and
named "personality" as one of those qualities. While recognizing that
everyone is different, and that personality isn’t necessarily something we
can control, I was attempting to identify key characteristics that most of
my best teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, had in common.
When I say "best teachers," I’m not just talking
about the ones I liked best. I mean the teachers who had the greatest
influence on me — the ones whose names I still remember to this day, even
though in some cases it’s been more than 40 years since I sat in their
classrooms. They are people I’ve tried to emulate in my own teaching.
What made them good teachers? I can’t offer any
empirical answers to that question, but I do know that personality was a key
factor in all of them. Perhaps we can measure effectiveness in the
classroom, to some extent, but how do we really determine quality? It seems
to me that we’ve been trying for years, through various evaluation metrics,
without a whole lot of success. I’ve known some bad teachers who were able
to manipulate the metrics, and some good ones whose excellence wasn’t
immediately apparent on paper.
In any case, the following observations are based
entirely on my own experiences as a student, professor, and former midlevel
administrator who has seen many good teachers (and a few bad ones) practice
their craft. My hope is that, even if this list is somewhat subjective — not
to mention incomplete — it won’t seem entirely unfamiliar.
They are good-natured.
The best teachers tend to be approachable, as opposed to sour and
forbidding. Grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic curmudgeons can sometimes
make effective teachers, too, if for no other reason than that they prepare
us for grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic bosses. I had some grouchy
teachers myself, especially in graduate school, and learning to cope with
them was a valuable experience I would not wish to deny anyone. But most of
my very best teachers were pretty easy to get along with — as long as I paid
attention in class and did my work.
They are professional without being aloof.
Most academics tend to keep students at arm’s length — the obvious message
being, "I’m your teacher, not your friend." Clearly, professionalism
requires a certain amount of boundary-setting, which can be difficult,
especially when dealing with older students, where the age gap is often not
all that wide and, under different circumstances, they might actually be
your friends. My best teachers always seemed to effortlessly walk that very
fine line between being an authority figure and being someone I felt I could
talk to. I didn’t even understand what they were doing — or how difficult it
was — until I had to do it myself years later.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In looking back at my best teachers it is very difficult to draw conclusions
about common personality traits or teaching styles. In advanced courses they
were experts in their disciplines, but in introductory courses their expertise
only needed to go so far since inspiration trumps expertise up to a point at
introductory levels.
Good teachers are almost all well-prepared for class but in advanced courses
expertise can even trump preparedness (unless the expertise is not sufficient to
prevent goof ups in class). Students who already know much of the material want
an expert who can give guidance on complicated questions.
Knowing and caring about every student personally is important but this is
not possible when there are over 100 students in each class. Those top-rated
professors on RateMyProfessor.com tend to have smaller classes ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/2014-2015-top-lists/
Sadly, the RMP top professors are often rated as easy graders. However, many of
the easier graders did not make RMP's top-teacher lists.
One way to judge "best teachers" for large classes is to sample the
approaches taken by teachers in the top-rated MOOCs --- The 50 Most Popular MOOCs of All time ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/05/learning-how-to-learn-enroll-in-the-latest-edition-of-the-most-popular-mooc.html
These teachers tend to be explain complicated things with talent and style and
preparedness. They also have outstanding learning aids such as video and
memorable slides. However, the "50 Most Popular MOOCs" are confounded by
widespread popularity of the subject matter. A top-rated MOOC professor of
finance and investing is not likely to remain top-rated when teaching accounting
and auditing MOOCs.
Free online courses changed the life of one
super-smart Mongolian teenager. His name is Battushig Myanganbayar, and four
years ago, while he was still a high-school student in Ulan Bator, he took a
massive open online course from MIT. It was one of the first they had ever
offered, about circuits and electronics, and he was one of about a hundred
and forty thousand people to take it. He not only passed, he was one of
about three hundred who got a perfect score. He was only 15 years old.
He was hailed in The New York Times and other media
outlets as a boy wonder, and soon he got accepted to the real MIT campus. It
was a feel-good story that matched the hopeful narrative about MOOCs at the
time. These free courses were touted as a way to bring top education to
underserved communities around the world. The New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman soon wrote that "Nothing has more potential to unlock a
billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems." This was the
peak of the MOOC hype.
Today, Mr. Myanganbayar remains a fan of MOOCs, but
he also has a critique of this knowledge giveaway, and he questions how much
good it’s really doing for people in the developing world.
After taking a MOOC, "What do you do?" he asks. "If
you’re just learning for the sake of the learning, the knowledge alone is
useless without the opportunity to build, or show, or to use it."
While at MIT, he has continued to take free online
courses on the side, especially those on data science to help him with
research projects that he’s worked on here. Like many students that I’ve met
at MIT, he’s focused on trying to solve real-world problems with his student
research — he helped build an electronic glove for the blind, for instance —
and that’s his main problem with how colleges have handled MOOCS.
The courses aren’t really an end, after all,
they’re a means to an end. Why don’t colleges do more to help connect
students to resources, he asks, to apply their knowledge?
Q. Do you think your work as a MOOC student made
you more hungry to experience all the unique aspects of a campus that you
can’t get by sitting at home at a computer?
A. I always try to go to office hours that
professors do because it’s one of the disadvantages of the MOOC. You learn
about things, but your questions, it’s really hard to get a good answer. You
can post it in the forum in an online course, but having a chance to meet
with the professor is an amazing thing.
After coming to MIT, the biggest thing I learned
was, as one person, no matter how good you are, you can do nothing. You need
a team or you need a group of people in order to really build the complex
and amazing thing. Just by yourself, sitting in your room and reading a
book, nothing will happen. No matter how good you are, unless you are Albert
Einstein or unless you’re a theoretical mathematician then something might
happen, but for engineers you need a team. I think that’s one of the biggest
lessons that I learned at MIT.
Q. What do you think is missing for MOOC
students, as far as support?
At PwC, our purpose is
to build trust in society and solve important problems. We think there's an
opportunity to do this by sharing our experience and expertise with anyone
who wants to learn. We’re joining forces with Coursera to create a series of
courses designed around topics that address big global issues, drawing on
the real-world knowledge and experience of PwC experts from around the globe
from multiple disciplines. Our first course is focused on data and
analytics, one of the biggest areas of opportunity to help solve problems in
an increasingly complex world.
All course materials can
be accessed at no charge.
(Those who want to take
the assessments and get a certification will pay a small charge). As
instructors, you may identify portions of the courses which you wish to
incorporate into your classes as assignments to help demonstrate concepts
you are teaching. We hope you will agree that this will be a valuable
resource. To learn more about and access Coursera, click here.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Professor Emeritus
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
David Nazarian College of Business & Economics
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
For
students looking for a broader education in business, the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
has launched an
entire MBA program through Coursera. Consisting of 18 online
courses and three capstone projects, the
iMBA program covers the subjects usually found in b-school
programs--leadership, strategy, economics, accounting, finance, etc. The
complete curriculum should take roughly 24 to 36 months to complete, and
costs less than $22,000--about 25%-33% of what an on-campus MBA program
typically runs.
Now, in
case you're wondering, the diplomas and transcripts for these programs are
granted directly by the universities themselves (e.g., the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and HEC Paris). The paperwork doesn't carry
Coursera's name. Nor does it indicate that the student completed an "online
program." In short, online students get the same transcript as bricks and
mortar students.
Finally,
all of the degree programs mentioned above are "stackable"--meaning students
can (at no cost) take an individual course offered by any of these programs.
And then they can decide later whether they want to apply to the degree
program, and, if so, retroactively apply that course towards the actual
degree. Essentially, you can try things out before making a larger
commitment.
If you
want to learn more about these programs, or submit an application, check out
the following links. We've included the deadlines for submitting
applications.
Several start-up companies are working with
universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are
starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering
their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:
A nonprofit effort run jointly by
MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.
Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add
other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the
software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone
can use it to run MOOC’s.
A for-profit company founded by two computer-science
professors from Stanford.
The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use
the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue.
More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U.
of Virginia, have joined.
Another for-profit company founded
by a Stanford computer-science professor.
The company, which works with individual professors
rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars.
Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its
courses on computer science and related fields.
A for-profit platform that lets
anyone set up a course.
The company encourages its instructors to charge a
small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors
themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many
of the courses.
Jima Ngei: “I had this unrelenting fear that this
miracle of free access might evaporate soon.”
"250 MOOCs and Counting: One Man’s Educational Journey," Chronicle of
Higher Education, April 20, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/250-MOOCsCounting-One/229397/?cid=wb
If the MOOC movement has faded, nobody told Jima
Ngei. Mr. Ngei, who lives in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, has completed and
passed 250 MOOCs, all through Coursera, since September 2012. His self-styled
education has included courses in English common law and Chinese history,
data science and Latin American culture, social epidemiology and the life of
Thomas Jefferson, to name a few. (Nikki Garcia, a spokeswoman for Coursera,
confirms that he has passed 248 courses, 83 of them with distinction, and
Mr. Ngei says he just passed two more.)
Mr. Ngei, who went to college but didn’t graduate,
says he has worked as an artist, a secretary to a tribal king, and an
occasional consultant and producer of school-management software for
elementary and secondary schools. Now unemployed, he volunteers as a
community teaching assistant for Coursera courses.
MOOCs, he says, have given him a high-quality
education that he never could have imagined, and a new outlook on life. Mr.
Ngei discussed his experiences via email with Carolyn Mooney; here is an
edited version of their conversation.
How did you happen to take your first MOOC,
and what was it?
My love for MOOCs began when I started accessing
materials from
MIT OpenCourseWare.
Then, two and a half years ago, I attended a social event and tried to join
in a conversation but discovered I could barely understand what people were
talking about. I realized I had to get re-educated fast — and soon. I also
perceived my lower socioeconomic status more glaringly than ever.
I enrolled in two edX courses: "Circuits and
Electronics" and "CS50x: Intro to Computer Science." But I couldn’t complete
either, because of the high bandwidth demands. Next I took a Udacity course,
but I found the complete absence of deadlines and social space difficult to
work with. Then I discovered Coursera and completed "Introduction to
Operations Management" and "Organizational Analysis" during the fall of
2012.
You managed to complete well over 200 MOOCs,
and you earned statements of accomplishment, which many Coursera courses
award those who meet the course requirements, for 233 of them. What inspired
you to keep going?
Taking MOOCs through Coursera was the only way I
could get a high-quality education, and I had this unrelenting fear that
this miracle of free access might evaporate soon.
Is the message that learning
from Stanford professors is not worth the price of $0?
Actually I think the message
is that for many folks who try MOOCs the work of learning is too intense and
time consuming given their lack of commitment to keeping up with the class.
Richard Campbell once
revealed to the AECM that when he tried to learn from a MOOC it was like
"trying to drink from a firehose." I dropped out of a C++ programming course
because my heart just was not in keeping up with the class. Ruth Bender
revealed to the AECM that completing a MOOC was one of the hardest things
she ever tried.
In my viewpoint MOOCs are
not a good model for introductory students where more hand holding is
generally needed. MOOCs are better suited to highly specialized advanced
courses for learners who are way above average in terms of aptitude and
prior learning.
The village of Tanjung Batu Laut seems to grow out
of a mangrove swamp on an island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. The
houses, propped up over the water on stilts, are cobbled together from old
plywood, corrugated steel, and rusted chicken wire. But walk inland and you
reach a clearing covered with an array of a hundred solar panels mounted
atop bright new metal frames. Thick cables transmit power from the panels
into a sturdy building with new doors and windows. Step inside and the heavy
humidity gives way to cool, dry air. Fluorescent lights illuminate a row of
steel cabinets holding flashing lights and computer displays.
The building is the control center for a small,
two-year-old power-generating facility that provides electricity to the
approximately 200 people in the village. Computers manage power coming from
the solar panels and from diesel generators, storing some of it in large
lead-acid batteries and dispatching the rest to meet the growing local
demand. Before the tiny plant was installed, the village had no access to
reliable electricity, though a few families had small diesel generators. Now
all the residents have virtually unlimited power 24 hours a day.
Many of the corrugated-steel roofs in the village
incongruously bear television satellite dishes. Some homes, with sagging
roofs and crude holes in the walls for windows, contain flat-screen
televisions, ceiling fans, power-hungry appliances like irons and rice
cookers, and devices that need to run day and night, like freezers. On a
Saturday afternoon this summer, kids roamed around with cool wedges of
watermelon they'd bought from Tenggiri Bawal, the owner of a tiny store
located off one of the most unstable parts of the elevated wooden walkways
that link the houses. Three days before, she'd taken delivery of a
refrigerator, where she now keeps watermelon, sodas, and other goods. Bawal
smiled as the children clustered outside her store and said, in her limited
English, "Business is good.
You can read about the early knowledge portal experiment at Columbia
University that offered great hopes by failed early on.
Fathom was one of the early on initiatives to create an academic knowledge
portal somewhat similar to Wikipedia, although Columbia and its prestigious
university partners were taking on responsibility for content rather than users.
Fathom was not a Wiki.
MOOOOOOOOC! Surely "massive open online course" has
one of the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate
playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) or the
droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word "snafu" (Situation Normal, All
Fouled Up).
I'm not a complete neophyte to online learning.
Back in 1999, I led the start-up team for Fathom, one of the earliest
knowledge networks, in partnership with Columbia University and other
institutions here and abroad, and I'm a board member of the Apollo Group. So
I was understandably curious about these MOOC's. With fond memories of a
thrilling virtual trip a dozen years ago to Ephesus, Turkey, via a
multimedia-rich, self-paced course created by a professor at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I decided to check out a MOOC for myself.
Coursera, a new company that offers free online
courses through some of the world's best-known universities, had the widest
and most impressive selection. I blocked my ears to the siren call of
science fiction, poetry, and history and opted for something sober: "Health
Policy and the Affordable Care Act." It's taught by the Emanuel brother who
isn't the Chicago mayor or the Hollywood superagent—Ezekiel Emanuel, an M.D.
and Ph.D. who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. For the next eight
weeks, I was part of a noisy, active, earnest, often contentious, and
usually interesting group of students. There didn't seem to be any way to
gauge the number enrolled, but I learned about the students from a
discussion group. There were quite a few lawyers, doctors, and other
health-care professionals. Some were struggling with personal health
disasters and wanted tools to predict how the health-care act would affect
their futures. Some were international researchers doing comparative
studies. Others were higher-education folks like me, testing the MOOC
waters.
The quality and format of the discussions were
immediate disappointments. A teaching assistant provided some adult
supervision, but too many of the postings were at the dismal level of most
anonymous Internet comments: nasty, brutish, and long. The reliance on
old-fashioned threaded message groups made it impossible to distinguish
online jerks from potential geniuses. I kept wishing for a way to break the
large group into small cohorts self-selected by background or
interests—health-care professionals, for instance, or those particularly
interested in the economics of health care. There was no way to build a
discussion, no equivalent to the hush that comes over the classroom when the
smart kid raises his or her hand.
If you believe the sage's advice that we learn much
from our teachers and colleagues but most of all from our students, MOOC's
will be far more effective when we are able to learn from one another.
Not surprisingly, enterprising MOOCsters are
already organizing themselves outside the online classroom, using
social-media tools like Google Hangouts and Facebook. In New York, students
schedule meetings in Starbucks; in Katmandu, a group relies on Meetup to get
together. Some course providers are facilitating external interaction:
Udacity has offered Global Meetup Day with Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford
University computer scientist (and Udacity co-founder) known for his course
on artificial intelligence. Coursera threw a giant barbecue in Menlo Park,
Calif., complete with volleyball and beanbag tossing.
Of course, peer learning takes you only so far: At
some point, somebody has to know something about the subject. Professor
Emanuel was a presence only in videos, but these were uniformly excellent.
The cameras caught him walking briskly around an actual lecture hall, and I
liked the presence of shadowy classmates sitting in Philadelphia, as if this
were happening in real time. The videos were pleasantly peppered with pop-up
quizzes. No embarrassment for the wrong answer, and I was ridiculously
pleased at correctly guessing that the proportion of health-care costs in
the United States that goes to prescription drugs is only 10 percent. For
those in a rush, watching at twice normal speed is sort of fun— don't you
secretly wish you could sit through some meetings at double speed?
I was a faithful student for a few weeks, until I
fell prey to my worst undergraduate habit, procrastination—only now my
excuses were far more sophisticated. I have to finish a manuscript! I have a
board meeting! I have to meet my mother's new cardiologist!
In a MOOC, nobody can hear you scream.
I might have abandoned the charming Professor
Emanuel altogether had the Supreme Court's decision to uphold President
Obama's health-care program not injected the spice of real-time action into
the discussion and refreshed my interest.
Somewhere between the videos and the readings and
the occasional dip into the discussion groups, I found myself actually
learning. I was particularly interested in how malpractice contributes to
health-care costs but was instructed by my professor that the potential
savings there amounted to mere "pencil dust." And who knew about the
proposed National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation Act of 2005,
which would have reduced the number of malpractice cases, accelerated their
resolution, and lowered costs by two-thirds?
To earn a certificate, I would have had to submit
several essays for a grade, and I stopped short of that (see excuses above).
Essays are peer-graded, and it won't surprise anybody who has ever taught
undergraduates to hear that the student evaluations can be fierce. On the
discussion boards, there was considerable discussion of grade deflation,
plagiarism, and cheating. Alas, academic sins do follow us into the land of
MOOC's, despite a nicely written honor code. Bad behavior in any classroom,
real or virtual, should be no more surprising than gambling in
Casablanca. In fact, brace yourself for a breathtaking new form of
voluntary identity sharing: Your
fake student avatar, now available for a small
fee, will take your class for you.
Looking back, I suppose Fathom was a proto-MOOC,
and I confess to some surprise that the Coursera format has evolved little
beyond our pioneering effort of a decade ago. Yet when it came time to
assess the course, I found myself rating it pretty highly, and concluded
that aside from the format, the failings were mostly mine, for lack of
focus. Like many MOOC students, I didn't completely "finish" the course.
However, the final evaluations seemed mostly enthusiastic. From the
comments, most of the students seemed to find the course long on substance:
"comprehensive," "a good balance between the law, policy, and economics,"
"rich with multiple perspectives on health-policy issues."
Now, I could have read a book or done this on my
own. But you could say the same thing about most education. A course is not
a book but a journey, led by an expert, and taken in the company of fellow
travelers on a common quest for knowledge. My MOOC had those elements,
albeit in a pretty crude form.
You'd have to live under a rock not to know that
crushing student debt, declining state support, and disruptive technologies
have made it imperative to look at new models for teaching. The competitive
landscape for higher education is changing every day. China recently
declared the goal of bringing half a million foreign students to its shores
by 2020, and is investing in programs friendly to Americans and other
international students. American MOOC's may point the way to retaining the
best students and faculty in the world, while adding the lively and
collaborative components of technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
It is true that nobody yet has a reasonable
business plan for these courses, and there is concern over completion rates
and whether colleges are "giving away the farm," as a recent MIT
alumni-magazine article put it. It is not hard to anticipate the end of free
and the start of the next stage: fee-based certificate programs built around
MOOC's. But for now, the colleges leading those efforts are making
relatively modest—and rare—investments in research and development. Their
faculty members are excited about the opportunity to experiment. Let's give
this explosion of pent-up innovation in higher education a chance to mature
before we rush to the bottom line.
Coursera continued its ambitious expansion in the
growing market for MOOC support today, announcing accords with 16 new
universities to help them produce massive open online courses — more than
doubling the company’s number of institutional partners and pushing its
course count near 200.
The new partners include the first liberal arts
college, Wesleyan University, to leap formally into the MOOC game, as well
as the first music school, the Berklee College of Music.
Coursera also announced deals with name-brand
private universities, such as Brown, Columbia, Emory and Vanderbilt
Universities; some major state institutions, such as the University of
Maryland System, the Ohio State University and the Universities of Florida,
and California at Irvine; and several international universities, such as
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and the Universities of British Columbia, London, and Melbourne.
The company already boasted the most courses and
student registrations of any MOOC providers, having registered 1.3 million
students for its courses (although far fewer have actually stuck with a
course). Andrew Ng, one of its co-founders, said Coursera will probably
double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops
recruiting new institutions.
“I think we’ll wind up with at least twice the
universities that we have now, but we’re not sure what the number is,” said
Ng in an interview.
In 2011, Gontse Nosi, a South African, was working
for an electricity company here when he heard about an unusual
opportunity—to earn a master's degree in China, paid for by the Chinese
government. He applied and was accepted to a program at the Beijing
University of Technology to study renewable energy. There was just one
problem. The program was taught entirely in Mandarin, and Mr. Nosi didn't
speak a word of it.
So for the first year of his studies, the Chinese
government arranged for him to live in the central Chinese city of Wuhan,
where he attended intensive language classes for 10 hours a day. And
although that may seem like a winding path to a degree that Mr. Nosi could
have earned at home, the added investment, he says, was worth it.
"There are Chinese businesses in South Africa now,
and South African businesses in China," he says. "Studying there will really
open doors for me when I want to find a job."
Mr. Nosi is part of a growing cadre of African
students whose pursuit of an internationally recognized university degree
has taken them not to Europe or the United States but to China. The country
hopes to become a major destination for international students, with some
293,000 currently enrolled in its universities—more than 20,000 of them from
Africa.
The figures are small but rising rapidly: As late
as 2006, African students made up only 2 percent of foreign students in
China. And nearly one-third of the scholarships given by the Chinese
government to foreign students now go to Africans. American colleges, by
contrast, have failed to raise their enrollments from Africa, which have
hovered around 36,000 since 2006, or about 5 percent of the total
international-student population.
African students are being lured to China by a free
education or low tuition (around $4,500 per year), the hope of a job with
one of the Chinese corporations scattered across Africa, or simply an escape
from overcrowded domestic universities. Whatever their motives, African
students also hold a symbolic importance for leaders both on the continent
and in China itself.
Over the past decade, China has risen to become
Africa's single largest trading partner, and its stake in the continent is
mushrooming. From 2003 to 2011, China's direct investment in Africa rose
from $100-million to $12-billion. Like Chinese-built superhighways in Kenya
or Chinese corporations mining diamonds in Zambia, drawing African students
to China offers a way for the country to shore up its diplomatic and
financial relationship with the continent.
And Chinese educational investment—whether in the
form of drawing African students to China, the building of Chinese-language
institutes across the continent, or Chinese aid to African universities—has
a special potency on a continent scarred by European colonialism. It offers
a new channel of international educational opportunity for African students,
one that sidesteps the West altogether.
"Not just the universities but the country of China
itself is a learning experience for students from my country," says Yilak
Elu, an Ethiopian who completed a master's degree in international
development at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "We go there to see how a
country can develop itself quickly." A Complicated History
Although Africans have flocked to Chinese
universities in significant numbers only in the past decade, the history of
diplomatic relations between Beijing and the continent is littered with
attempts to recruit African students.
In the 1960s, the Chinese government began to
sponsor a small cadre of international students from new postcolonial states
to foster solidarity in the so-called third world. Flush with revolution and
full of newly emerging socialist states, Africa became an obvious target for
this new educational exchange, and in 1961 the first group of 118 African
students arrived to great fanfare in Beijing.
The experience did not end well.
Blindsided by racism and isolation, 96 of the
original group of students returned to their home countries by the following
year.
China's Cultural Revolution also cut short those
first feeble exchange programs, but when the government reinstated its
scholarships for African students, in the 1970s, they began to return. In
the decades that followed, African students continued to filter into China,
drawn by the undeniable lure of a free education.
The pace quickened in the mid-2000s, when the newly
founded Forum on China-Africa Cooperation began to endorse the expansion of
Chinese government scholarships for African students as part of its bid to
improve diplomacy with the African continent. From 2000 to 2007, 12,000
African students received government scholarships to study in China. In 2009
alone, more than 4,000 African students won Chinese funds for their degrees.
And as they arrived in the country, paying students began to follow.
Many paying students come not because they are
particularly drawn to China, but because they have struggled to find
institutions to meet their needs in their home countries. And they often
steer clear of Western universities because they are wary of the cost and
the maze of immigration bureaucracy that awaits them there.
"Whatever you pay, a degree is a degree," says
Rowena Ungen, a South African student who earned her medical degree from
Shandong University. "People see that, and that's why they don't want to go
to England anymore."
And visas for most African students are far easier
to come by in China than in Europe, creating an added draw.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of the most popular languages to study on the Trinity University campus is
Chinese. This in large measure is due to student perceptions that their hiring
and promotion prospects might one day increase due to knowledge of the Chinese
languages.
Having said this, it must be recognized that over the last 200 years or more
the global language of commerce and diplomacy evolved as English. It is the most
widely taught second language around the world from Europe to Africa and Asia.
Hence, if China wants to play a larger role in educating the
world, the Chinese must consider two major strategies.
Offered in 40 different topics, MicroMasters are designed with job-seekers
in mind and are the equivalent of 25 to 50 percent of a full master’s
degree. While learning is free, paying $1,000 gets you an accreditation from
a top-tier university like MIT or Columbia. A MicroMasters can help you get
a job, or be counted as credit on a full master’s course if you want to keep
studying.
Backing from big-name employers like IBM and Walmart, and built-in integrity
mechanisms to prevent cheating, mean those online courses are wholly
different creatures from the MOOCs of four or five years ago, Mr. Agarwal
said. —
Lindsay McKenzie
We're getting close to the tail end of the
36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”
How can I tell?
First, I'm getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital
Identities. I'm second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I'm on deck
means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.
But it's also clear we're winding down because the #change11 conversation
hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns. Once there were lively
debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the
year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.
Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week
#35.
Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that
course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs
as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly
significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a
stop over the last month or two.
I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I've been?
Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?
I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm a teacher at heart. I'll put the work into
developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or
300. But as I'm preparing, I'm thinking about what it means to facilitate in
a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.
Or the internet.
As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being
increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course
and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.
The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist
learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in
format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply
dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently
direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between
learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the
facilitator.
On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend
towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of
completed learning objectives.
Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these
courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable
masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name
institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is
content-focused, not connection-focused.
If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I'd have a very different module
ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.
I've been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of
learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course
I've taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am
accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and
grading backing me in the classroom.
In the connectivist MOOC model, I don't.
There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They
won't get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they
completed anything. There's nothing specific for them to complete, unless I
design an exit goal as part of the week's activities. But that would be MY
exit goal: not theirs. They don't get to put the word MIT on their CV. And
while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect
with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold,
Pierre Levy – I'm among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in
the year's lineup. They won't even get the relational perk of engaging with
somebody famous.
Continued in article
April 29, 2012 message from Mark Lewis
This is an interview with Sebastian Thrun, formerly of
Stanford and still associated with Google. In my ideal
world, every faculty member and a large fraction of the
administration and staff would watch the last half of this
video. The first half is worth watching if you have an
interest in Google Glass, autonomous cars, or Google X
projects in general. The second half talks about his views
and what he is doing in education. He is the person who
taught an AI course online that had 160,000 students enroll
and had 23,000 students complete it. In this interview he
describes how this impacted him so much that he left his
tenured position at Stanford. The lack of personal contact
he talks about in his classroom does not apply in most
Trinity classrooms, however, a cost of $0 for something that
many students find as more personal than a large lecture
hall does have the potential to change the economics of
higher education.
Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are popular.
This much we know.
But as investors and higher ed prognosticators
squint into their crystal balls for hints of what this popularity could
portend for the rest of higher education, two crucial questions remains
largely unanswered: Who are these students, and what do they want?
Some early inquiries into this by two major MOOC
providers offer a few hints.
Coursera, a company started by two Stanford
University professors, originated with a course called Machine Learning,
which co-founder Andrew Ng taught last fall to a virtual classroom of
104,000 students. Coursera surveyed a sample of those students to find out,
among other things, their education and work backgrounds and why they
decided to take the course.
Among 14,045 students in the Machine Learning
course who responded to a demographic survey, half were professionals who
currently held jobs in the tech industry. The largest chunk, 41 percent,
said they were professionals currently working in the software industry;
another 9 percent said they were professionals working in non-software areas
of the computing and information technology industries.
Many were enrolled in some kind of traditional
postsecondary education. Nearly 20 percent were graduate students, and
another 11.6 percent were undergraduates. The remaining registrants were
either unemployed (3.5 percent), employed somewhere other than the tech
industry (2.5 percent), enrolled in a K-12 school (1 percent), or “other”
(11.5 percent).
A subset (11,686 registrants) also answered a
question about why they chose to take the course. The most common response,
given by 39 percent of the respondents, was that they were “just curious
about the topic.” Another 30.5 percent said they wanted to “sharpen the
skills” they use in their current job. The smallest proportion, 18 percent,
said they wanted to “position [themselves] for a better job.”
Udacity, another for-profit MOOC provider founded
by (erstwhile) Stanford professors, has also conducted some initial probes
into the make-up of its early registrants. While the company did not share
any data tables with Inside Higher Ed, chief executive officer David Stavens
said more than 75 percent of the students who took the company’s first
course, Artificial Intelligence, last fall were looking to “improve their
skills relevant for either current or future employment.”
That is a broad category, encompassing both
professionals and students, so it does not lend much nuance to the questions
of who the students are or what they want. And even the more detailed
breakdown of the students who registered for Ng’s Machine Learning course
cannot offer very much upon which to build a sweeping thesis on how MOOCs
might fit into the large and diverse landscape of higher education.
Coursera has since completed the first iterations
of seven additional courses and opened registration for 32 more beyond that.
Many of those courses — which cover poetry, world music, finance, and
behavioral neurology — are likely to attract different sorts of people, with
different goals, than Machine Learning did. “I'm expecting that the
demographics for some of our upcoming classes (Stats One, Soc 101,
Pharmacology, etc.) will be very different,” said Daphne Koller, one of
Coursera’s founders, in an e-mail.
Coursera, the company that provides support and Web
hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced
Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses.
The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116
courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for
the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside
Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed
from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about
385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to
60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit
through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad
reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.
Coursera continued its ambitious expansion in the
growing market for MOOC support today, announcing accords with 16 new
universities to help them produce massive open online courses — more than
doubling the company’s number of institutional partners and pushing its
course count near 200.
The new partners include the first liberal arts
college, Wesleyan University, to leap formally into the MOOC game, as well
as the first music school, the Berklee College of Music.
Coursera also announced deals with name-brand
private universities, such as Brown, Columbia, Emory and Vanderbilt
Universities; some major state institutions, such as the University of
Maryland System, the Ohio State University and the Universities of Florida,
and California at Irvine; and several international universities, such as
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and the Universities of British Columbia, London, and Melbourne.
The company already boasted the most courses and
student registrations of any MOOC providers, having registered 1.3 million
students for its courses (although far fewer have actually stuck with a
course). Andrew Ng, one of its co-founders, said Coursera will probably
double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops
recruiting new institutions.
“I think we’ll wind up with at least twice the
universities that we have now, but we’re not sure what the number is,” said
Ng in an interview.
Classroom of the Future Is Virtually Anywhere The university classroom of the future is in Janet
Duck’s dining room on East Chocolate Avenue here. There is no blackboard and no
lectern, and, most glaringly, no students. Dr. Duck teaches her classes in
Pennsylvania State University’s master’s program in business administration by
sitting for several hours each day in jeans and shag-lined slippers at her
dining table, which in soccer mom fashion is cluttered with crayon sketches by
her 6-year-old Elijah and shoulder pads for her 9-year-old Olivia’s Halloween
costume. In this homespun setting, the spirited Dr. Duck pecks at a Toshiba
laptop and posts lesson content, readings and questions for her two courses on
“managing human resources” that touch on topics like performance evaluations and
recruitment. The instructional software allows her 54 students to log on from
almost anywhere at any time and post remarkably extended responses, the
equivalent of a blog about the course. Recently, the class exchanged hard-earned
experiences about how managers deal with lackluster workers . . . It’s
instructive for a skeptic to talk to Dr. Duck’s students — online, of course.
They point out that online postings are more reasoned and detailed than
off-the-cuff classroom observations. Students learn as much from one another’s
postings, informed by the real business world, as they do from instructors, they
say. And Kevin Krull, a technology executive, pointed out that introverts
reluctant to speak up in class can strut their stuff.
Joseph Berger, "Classroom of the Future Is Virtually Anywhere," The New York
Times, October 31, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/education/31education.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Jensen Comment
There's not much new in the above article. Both online and major onsite
universities have been teaching like this for years. Most notably all-canpus
award winning Amy Dunbar has been teaching graduate tax courses from her home at
the University of Connecticut. Denny Beresford has been teaching graduate
accounting courses at the University of Georgia online for years. A quotation
from Amy Dinbar is shown below:
The Year 2001
The combination of
asynchronous and synchronous materials in the WebCT environment worked well for my
students. I felt closer to my students than I did in a
live class. When I loaded AIM and saw my students online,
I felt connected to them. Each student had an online persona that blossomed over the
semester. The use of emotions in AIM helped us create bantering communication, which
contributed to a less stressful learning environment.
At then end of the six-week
course, I was tired, but I was equally tired at the end of the live six-week course last
summer. I don’t think the online environment made my life easier, but it made it more
fun. The students appreciated the flexibility, and they liked not having to drive to
downtown Hartford for classes. Although many of my students would have preferred a live
class, they performed well in this online class. I did not attempt to statistically
compare their performance with my past live classes, but the exam distributions appear
similar to past classes. I was happy with the overall class performance.
One student concluded, “Just
reading the material without having anyone explain it to you makes it more difficult to
understand at first (at least for me). I waffled between wanting online and in person
teaching … . Ultimately I chose online because this way we can do it at our own pace
and we always have the ability to go back to where we might not have understood and do it
over.”
Thus, flexibility appears to
outweigh what to the student appears to be an easier way to learn.
From "Genesis of an Online Course"
by Amy Dunbar Amy Dunbar, August 1, 2001
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm
Online you get to know your
students' minds, not just their faces.
Harasim, L., Hiltz, S.R., Teles, L., and Turoff, M. (1995). Learning Networks: A Field
Guide to Teaching and Learning Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
As quoted at http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/tid_report.html
LARSON: You can't
get further from MIT than Singapore. Singapore from here is this way [points straight
down]. We use Internet2 for connectivity. There's no statistical difference in performance
between distance learners and classroom learners. And when there is a difference, it
favors the distance learners
"Lessons e-Learned Q&A with Richard Larson from MIT," Technology
Review, July 31, 2001 --- http://www.techreview.com/web/leo/leo073101.asp
For those of you who think distance education is going downhill, think
again. The number of students switching from traditional brick-and- mortar
classrooms to full-time virtual schools in Colorado has soared over the past
five years…
The number of students switching from traditional
brick-and- mortar classrooms to full-time virtual schools in Colorado has
soared over the past five years.
During the 2000-01 school year, the state spent
$1.08 million to educate 166 full-time cyberschool students, according to
the Colorado Department of Education. This year, the state projects spending
$23.9 million to educate 4,237 students in kindergarten through 12th grade,
state figures show.
And those figures - which do not include students
who are taking one or two online courses to supplement their classroom
education - are making officials in the state's smallest districts jittery.
Students who leave physical public schools for
online schools take their share of state funding with them.
"If I lose two kids, that's $20,000 walking
out the door," said Dave Grosche, superintendent of the Edison 54JT
School District.
Continued in the article
Update in 2005
Distant distance education Ms. Salin is part of a new wave of outsourcing to
India: the tutoring of American students. Twice a week for a month now, Ms.
Salin, who grew up speaking the Indian language Malayalam at home, has been
tutoring Daniela in English grammar, comprehension and writing. Using a
simulated whiteboard on their computers, connected by the Internet, and a
copy of Daniela's textbook in front of her, she guides the teenager through
the intricacies of nouns, adjectives and verbs.
Saritha Rai, "A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard," The
New York Times, September 7, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/education/07tutor.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1126191549-1Ydu+7CY89CpuVeaJbJ4XA
Question
How can you best publish books, including multimedia and user interactive books,
on the Web?
Note that interactive books may have quizzes and examinations where answers are
sent back for grading.
Video: Internet Real Time Communication and Collaboration (1
hour, 20 minutes) Google Wave ---
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the
web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost
instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos,
videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open
APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build
extensions that work inside waves.
Developer Preview ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
A virtual learning environment (VLE) is a software
system designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting,
as distinct from a Managed Learning Environment, (MLE) where the focus is on
management. A VLE will normally work over the Internet and provide a
collection of tools such as those for assessment (particularly of types that
can be marked automatically, such as multiple choice), communication,
uploading of content, return of students' work, peer assessment,
administration of student groups, collecting and organizing student grades,
questionnaires, tracking tools, etc. New features in these systems include
wikis, blogs, RSS and 3D virtual learning spaces.
While originally created for distance education,
VLEs are now most often used to supplement traditional face to face
classroom activities, commonly known as Blended Learning. These systems
usually run on servers, to serve the course to students Multimedia and/or
web pages.
In 'Virtually There', a book and DVD pack
distributed freely to schools by the Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning
Foundation (YHGfL), Professor Stephen Heppell writes in the foreword:
"Learning is breaking out of the narrow boxes that it was trapped in during
the 20th century; teachers' professionalism, reflection and ingenuity are
leading learning to places that genuinely excite this new generation of
connected young school students - and their teachers too. VLEs are helping
to make sure that their learning is not confined to a particular building,
or restricted to any single location or moment."
Google argues that its new Google Wave system could
replace e-mail by blending instant messaging, wikis, and image and document
sharing into one seamless communication interface. But some college
professors and administrators are more excited about Wave's potential to be
a course-management-system killer.
"Just from the initial look I think it will have
all the features (and then some) for an all-in-one software platform for the
classroom and beyond," wrote Steve Bragaw, a professor of American politics
at Sweet Briar College, on his blog last week.
Mr. Bragaw admits he hasn't used Google Wave
himself -- so far the company has only granted about 100,000 beta testers
access to the system. Each of those users is allowed to invite about eight
friends (who can each invite eight more), so the party is slowly growing
louder while many are left outside waiting behind a virtual velvet rope. But
Google has posted an hour-long video demonstration of the system that drew
quite a buzz when it was unveiled in May. That has sparked speculation of
how Wave might be used.
Greg Smith, chief technology officer at George Fox
University, did manage to snag an invitation to try Wave, and he too says it
could become a kind of online classroom.
That probably won't happen anytime soon, though.
"Wave is truly a pilot right now, and it's probably a year away from being
ready for prime time," he said, noting that Wave eats up bandwidth while it
is running. Google will probably take its time letting everyone in, he said,
so that it can work out the kinks.
And even if some professors eventually use Wave to
collaborate with students, colleges will likely continue to install
course-management systems so they know they have core systems they can count
on, said Mr. Smith.
Then again, hundreds of colleges already rely on
Google for campus e-mail and collaborative tools, through a free service the
company offers called Google Apps Education Edition. Could a move to Google
as course-management system provider be next?
The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for
more than a decade, and during that time she's written stories about
the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions
market themselves, and the demise of
the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed, was to
take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally took the
plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting
through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cy ber-classroom --
and her final grade --
in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/
All course materials (including textbooks) online;
No additional textbooks to purchase
$1,600 fee for the course and materials
Woman instructor with respectable academic
credentials and experience in course content
Instructor had good communications with students
and between students
Total of 14 quite dedicated online students in
course, most of whom were mature with full-time day jobs
30% of grade from team projects
Many unassigned online helper tutorials that were
not fully utilized by Goldie
Goldie earned a 92 (A-)
She gave a positive evaluation to the course and
would gladly take other courses if she had the time
She considered the course
to have a heavy workload
Jensen Added Comment
It wasn't mentioned, but I think Goldie took the ACC 460 course ---
Click Here
ACC 460 Government and Non-Profit Accounting
Course Description
This course covers fund accounting, budget and
control issues, revenue and expense recognition, and issues of reporting for
both government and non-profit entities.
Topics and Objectives
Environment of Government/Non-Profit Accounting
Compare and contrast governmental and proprietary accounting.
Analyze the relationship between GASB and FASB.
Analyze the relationship between a budget and a Comprehensive Annual
Financial Report (CAFR).
Determine when and how to use the modified accrual accounting
method.
Fund Accounting Part I
Distinguish between expenses and expenditures.
Explain the effect of encumbrances on a budget.
Apply the principles of fund accounting.
Determine the closing process for the fund accounting cycle.
Explain the reconciliation of government-wide financial statements
with the fund statements.
Fund Accounting Part II
Apply accounting procedures for recognizing revenues and other
financial resources.
Record interfund transfers.
Prepare fund and non-governmental accounting entries.
Prepare a financial statement for a governmental agency.
Overview of Not-for-Profit Accounting
Examine the funds for different types of not-for-profit
organizations.
Compare and contrast reporting by governmental, not-for-profit, and
proprietary organizations.
Current Issues in Government and Not-for-Profit Accounting
Analyze current issues in government and not-for-profit accounting.
1. Over-Assigning Work
2. Recording Long Video Lectures
3. Not Engaging Students in Multiple Formats of Learning
4. Being Disorganized
5. Not Engaging with Students
Trying to
"translate" a classroom course to the online environment. While
I'd argue that there's no such thing as "online pedagogy" (there's only
good pedagogy and poor pedagogy), classroom and online are different
experiences that require attention to the conditions of learning distinct
to each. Attempts to re-create the classroom learning experience,
methods, and modes to the online environment is a basic error. Teaching
online requires a "start over" in your course design, though not
necessarily a change in student learning outcomes.
Applying wrong
metrics to the online experience. For
example, many professors are wondering how to take attendance, or
figuring out what counts for attendance. Attendance is a rather archaic
and almost meaningless metric left over from the industrial age model of
schooling. A better metric is student engagement.
Becoming a talking
head. It's
bad enough students have to put up with a lot of poor classroom
lectures. Now they have to suffer through countless hours of talking
heads as professors videotape themselves "lecturing." I've been teaching
online for 22 years. I've never once used Zoom in an online course or
posted taped lectures. Forcing students to watch a taped disembodied
talking head almost guarantees student disengagement, especially
if we fail to appreciate the liability of transactional distance in
the online environment. If the content of your lecture is that
important, give your students a manuscript or your lecture notes to
study.
Posting video
lectures over seven minutes long. The
lecture method takes on a different function in the online environment.
When instructors ask me how they can video tape and post their lectures
online I ask, "Why would you want to duplicate the most maligned and
least effective teaching method and pretend the online environment is a
‘classroom’ when it offers so much greater opportunity for student
engagement?" The question to ask is, "What is the pedagogical function
of this video?" The most effective functions are: a short introduction,
an explication, or a demonstration.
Assessing the wrong
thing. I
see some schools wanting to assess whether students "like" the online
experience. What students "like" is beside the point of the educational.
A common student comment on course evaluation for online courses is, "I
would have preferred to have taken this course in the classroom." The
response is, "How do you know?" Ask those students if they learned what
the course was intended to provide, and they'll likely say, "Yes!"
Assess the right thing: evidence of student learning and achievement of
the course student learning outcomes. One can also evaluate the
effectiveness of the course design: structure, scope, flow, alignment
with program goals, etc.
Ignoring aesthetics
and design when creating an online course. Figuring
out your course should not be an assignment. Your course should be
designed so intuitively and aesthetically pleasing so the student
perceives, intuits, and understands immediately what they are seeing and
what is expected of them. Your students don't read a user manual or
instructions when playing complex video games—they can immediately
perceive what the game is about and what they are supposed to do. A
well-designed website does not provide an orientation to new visitors.
Your course should be clean, intuitive, and logical in design (and that
includes not adding anything that does not directly support the learning
outcomes).
Attempting to go
for coverage rather than depth. Many
classroom instructors fail to appreciate that because online learning
requires a higher level of student engagement, they need to reduce the
amount of coverage they usually attempt in a classroom course—-which
usually is way too much as it is. A good rule of thumb: cut the content
coverage by half and focus on student engagement that (1) helps students
achieve a learning outcomes and (2) provides evidence of learning.
Failing to ask for
help. Most
faculty members are used to the silo-oriented isolated nature of
academia. Traditionally, they develop their courses alone. At most they
may share their course syllabi with colleagues on their faculties or
departments, though more often than not they are seen mostly by the
dean, registrar, and library services. Teaching online, especially for
first time instructors, is a great opportunity to be more collaborative
in our approach to teaching. Ask for help. Experienced online
instructors, your school's instructional designers, and numerous online
teaching support groups are ready and happy to help you make your online
course the best it can be.
Mistake 1: Preferring quantity over quality
Mistake 2: Lack of planning and organization
Mistake 3: Using too many assumptions
Mistake 4: Being monotonous
Error 5: Little feedback
Jensen Comment
Nothing is more boring than watching talking heads or endless PowerPoint slides
on a computer screen or inside classrooms.
Students prefer live-action
asynchronous and even interactive videos.
Exhibit A is the hundreds of wonderful tutorials available free from Khan
Academy --- https://www.khanacademy.org/
For example sample the math videos --- https://www.khanacademy.org/math
Exhibit B is at Brigham
Young University where the first two semesters of basic accounting is taught via
asynchronous videos to students living on campus.
There are only a few times where students meet in a classroom ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Exhibit C is when I flipped
my own classrooms
In the last ten years of my 40 years of teaching full time I flipped my
classrooms. I prepared hundreds of short Camtasia videos on the most technical
parts of my accounting and AIS courses. Before class meetings students viewed
these videos over and over until they saw the light. In class I then had
students demonstrate in front of the class what they had learned. Student teams
can even make their own videos as term projects.
Camtasia videos or related
screen capture videos from other software vendors are really quite easy to make
and don't take much more time than preparing a lecture. They work best where
what you are trying to teach can be shown in successions of computer screens.
Students watch your cursor move about and listen to you explaining what is
happening --- you use a microphone to put your voice into the videos. In
Camtasia you can even make the videos interactive to keep students engaged.
Camtasia Free Trial ---
https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
Ask you campus educational technology experts about Camtasia and competing
software for preparing Camtasia-like videos.
You can use Zoom to bring your
videos into remote classrooms, although there are other ways to bring these
videos to students on and off campus.
Growing up as an
aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young
Julius Yego
was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the most
prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to succeed, he
instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic javelin thrower
Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and attempting to imitate the
fine details of his movements. Yego went on to win gold in the 2015 World
Championships in Beijing, silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and
holds the 3rd-longest javelin throw on world record. He acquired a coach
only six months before he competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a
decade after he started practicing.
Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube.
Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is
making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans
and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written
articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of
mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented,
facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise
have been lost.
Tacit
knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or
written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a
startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of
intellectual dark matter,
pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them
vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking,
dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid
problem-solving, and heart surgery.
Before video became
available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that
the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real
time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a
textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely
strong
succession problem:
if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few
apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written
books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to
centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for
decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a central authority. The
center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state
monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.
Some will object that tacit
knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of a
skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled autodidacts. It’s
true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge by directly interacting
with the object of mastery and figuring out things on their own, but this is
very difficult. True autodidacts who can invent their own techniques are
rare, but many can learn by watching and imitating.
The scarcity
of people who can truly learn from what they’re given is why the massive
open online courses of the early 2010s
didn’t work out,
with 95% of enrolled students failing to complete even a single course, and
year-on-year student retention rates below 10%. Learners who wish to acquire
tacit knowledge, but who are unable to figure things out on their own, are
therefore limited by their access to personal observation of skilled people.
Massively
available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely.
Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the
master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches
that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of
access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate
how to use multimeters
and how to
assess breaker boxes,
to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn
basic knife-handling techniques
from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has
grown
70% year-on-year.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Two days ago a replacement gasket for an Amana lower freezer door arrived (from
Amazon). When I commenced to take the old gasket off I discovered that replacing
the old gasket was going to be a bit trickier than I realized for a very old
refrigerator that came with our house when we purchased the house 15 years ago.
I had no original refrigerator manual and most likely would have to spend hours
locating the manual if I had one in the first place. So I went to YouTube and in
seconds found dozens of helper videos for replacing Amana freezer door gaskets.
I watched one of these videos and discovered how to take out 32 panel screws to
remove the inner door panel and how to heat my new gasket in a clothes dryer to
get it to shape properly for replacement.
The training needed to do the job took me less than ten minutes on YouTube.
Millions of similar training videos are available for fixing almost anything
imaginable and addressing a myriad of health issues should the need ever arise.
My point here is that YouTube makes it easy to find just-in-time training
modules in a matter of seconds.
Over the years I've occasionally written tidbits about the Monte Hall
problem. But it helps to renew my old memory on this and other technical
education issues that come up every day. First thing I went to Wikipedia ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
Then for added kicks I went to a sampling of the many YouTube modules on the
Monte Hall problem (search for Monte Hall) at
www.youtube.com
My point here is that YouTube is truly amazing for training and education
needs. It's better than Wikipedia in terms of coverage of topics like freezer
door gasket replacements or replacing the starter cord on Toro lawn mower (which
was also a problem for me this summer).
Of course YouTube now has amazing free education channels maintained by top
educators (think complete course modules for many disciplines)--- https://www.youtube.com/edu
My point here is that YouTube is evolving to a point where it's easy to lose
sight of the many wonderful ways you can learn from YouTube. It's not the
YouTube you forgot to follow closely over the last 10 years even though you used
it for specific needs quite often.
Some of the most wonderful things in life really are free. Activists seeking
to break up giant tech companies like Amazon and Google should keep one thing in
mind. Those tech companies can bring us a lot of wonderful things for free or
with ease because of the ability to cover losses in one area with profits in
another area. What would happen to the many wonderful free videos we get on
YouTube or the free or very cheap books that can be downloaded from Amazon if we
tear those companies apart?
Sure we can take all the videos about repairing freezer gaskets (so I would
have to phone for a maintenance technician) and videos of the Monte Hall problem
away from the public. And sure we can restore some shopping in malls (think
bookstores) by banning online shopping from Amazon. And we make it a lot more
expensive to file tax returns by removing all the tax helper videos from YouTube.
Jensen Comment
Arizona State University is Number 1 for the third year in a row. Among other
things are the free online undergraduate degree programs for Starbucks employees
(including part-time workers) and MBA degrees at ASU are free ---
http://college.usatoday.com/2015/10/21/arizona-state-free-mba/
But ASU innovations are much broader than the two innovations mentioned above
Jensen Comment
Technology is a tool, like most any tool, can be used and misused.
Probably it's biggest flaw is that it's not perfectly adaptive to
varying circumstances of learners and learning environments. In some
circumstances it can be overwhelming. In other circumstances it makes learning
much more effective and efficient.
In some instances it can be addictive to a fault. In other instances is can be
addictive to fantastic accomplishments.
Exhibit A is MOOC learning that experiences enormously high drop out
rates due to overwhelming learners, especially introductory learners. At the
same time MOOC learning sometimes lifts learners out of impossible situations
such as the Mongolian student who used MIT MOOCs to lift himself into MIT's
Ph.D. program.
Jensen Comment
I suspect if we try hard enough we can find all sorts of things that are
controversial when comparing online versus traditional pedagogy. This begins
with defining what "learning" means and what the purposes and goals of education
and training. What follows are the many and varied types of students and well as
alternative approaches to either online or learning education. For example a
MOOC may have 50,000 students and zero personal communications between the
teacher and students. An online tutorial can have one-on-one intense
personal communications. A traditional lecture course might have over 1,000
students or it might have less than 20 students.
In the very modern online courses students may have face-to-face
communications between themselves and with their teacher. Students may have
informal online communications that resemble in many ways online communications
inside a library or in a dorm lounge.
Thus there is a very gray zone these days between "online" versus
"traditional."
And it's very shaky to say online is more cost-efficient. Residential
campuses do shift living costs from the outside world to a campus. But after
that a traditional course can be much cheaper or much more expensive than an
online course. For example, it's often possible to have a scientific lab
experience online, but it may be costly. On the other hand when very expensive
expensive equipment is needed or very dangerous chemicals are being used, the
only alternative may be onsite. There are certainly limits to online learning.
Pilot training, for example, can be taught online, but at some point the student
has to get into a real airplane. We can think of all sorts of medical school
settings that must be onsite.
Hence when we are comparing we must be very careful regarding just what it is
we are comparing. Also these days traditional courses are hybrid with some
online learning components. And online students may have to assemble sometime
for traditional learning experiences.
In any case, I don't want to detract from your reading of the above
well-intended article, especially reading of the last portions of the article.
Question
What's the most important criteria for sustainable online programs?
Bob Jensen's Answer
In my mind the most important criteria are academic standard reputations and
sustainability if the Federal government stopped paying tuition for military
veterans. Sustainable online programs have reputation things and niches that
make them survivors. Most flagship universities (think Wisconsin and Illinois)
have online programs these days that are cash cows for the onsite programs and
would survive even without Federal money for military veterans. Such flagship
online programs are filling a variety of needs and are often taught by the same
faculty who teach on campus. Probably the most exciting new things these days
are the McDonalds new program for funding employee higher education (onsite or
online) and the Purdue takeover of Kaplan University's faltering online
programs.
Of course some online programs have non-traditional funding like Western
Governors University and programs funded by employers like Walmart, Starbucks,
etc.
3.1 Center for Law and Government
3.2 Rawlings School of Divinity
3.3 Technical Studies and Trades
3.4 Zaki Gordon Cinematic Arts Center
3.5 College of Osteopathic Medicine
3.6 School of Business
3.7 School of Aeronautics
3.8 School of Engineering
3.9 School of Music
Arizona State University (commonly referred to as
ASU or Arizona State) is a public metropolitan research university on five
campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area, and four regional learning
centers throughout Arizona, as well as 150 online programs. The 2018
university ratings by U.S. News & World Report rank ASU No. 1 among the Most
Innovative Schools in America for the third year in a row and has ranked ASU
No. 115 in National Universities with overall score of 47/100 with 83% of
student applications accepted.
ASU is one of the largest public universities by
enrollment in the U.S. It had approximately 72,000 students enrolled in fall
2017, including 59,198 undergraduate and 12,630 graduate students.] ASU's
charter, approved by the board of regents in 2014, is based on the "New
American University" model created by ASU President Michael M. Crow. It
defines ASU as "a comprehensive public research university, measured not by
whom it excludes, but rather by whom it includes and how they succeed;
advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental
responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the
communities it serves."
Liberty University, Purdue University, and ASU may well be the models of the
future for comprehensive universities.
Ask
faculty members what they think of technology in teaching, and you’ll get a
lot of seemingly contradictory opinions.
They are skeptical of online learning. But they think technology can make
them better teachers. They want more high-tech tools but prefer not to do
anything too complicated with them. They want more research on whether
technology improves learning but often rely on colleagues when figuring out
what to use.
Surveys and observations by technology experts show variations on these
views, suggesting a collective opinion veering somewhere between caution and
outright skepticism. What does it all mean? Probably that there’s a great
deal of confusion around the definitions, use, and value of technology.
That’s to be expected when even the surveyors themselves aren’t sure how
people are defining terms like hybrid or online learning. If you post your
syllabus on Canvas, does that mean you’re teaching a hybrid class? No doubt
some professors think so. Others might set the bar higher, to include a mix
of video lecture and in-person discussion. Does the term "online learning"
suggest a lack of meaningful interaction between professor and student? That
may explain why a majority of faculty members, across a number of surveys,
believe it is not as effective as face-to-face instruction.
Yet professors are
far from anti-technology. More than 70 percent of faculty members prefer
teaching that is a mixture of online and in-person, according to a recent
survey
by the Educause Center for Analysis and Research, an arm of the
higher-education-technology consortium. About half believe that online
learning leads to pedagogical breakthroughs. And many are eager to get
involved with multimedia production, educational games and simulations, and
online collaboration tools.
Jeffrey Pomerantz, a senior researcher at Educause who presented the survey
results at the group’s annual conference last week, called this mix of
skepticism and enthusiasm over digital technologies "some very weird
doublethink."
Mr.
Pomerantz says the survey, which reached more than 11,000 full- and
part-time faculty members from a range of U.S. colleges, masked a lot of
variability in the opinions. "You’re always going to have old-school
resisters and you’re always going to have early adopters," he notes.
Confusion over terminology, as well as the pace of development and adoption
of digital technologies, probably complicate faculty views, he says.
Learning management systems, for example, are now ubiquitous, deployed at
more than 99 percent of all higher-education institutions. So, he asks, does
that even count as a technology anymore? Meanwhile, he wonders whether the
term "online learning" conjures up a course devoid of classroom presence.
"And we all know how strongly faculty feel about classroom presence."
What faculty want more of, he says, are tools that lead toward a hybrid
course model, in which technology is infused into the curriculum. Multimedia
production means that you can flip your classroom. More open courseware
means you can deliver already prepared materials to your students when they
want it. "That allows you to use face-to-face time for other things," he
says. "That allows for more interactive course time."
Adding technology
to a course, or creating an online version, however, requires both resources
and support. It changes the way you teach, requires knowledge of different
products and services, and consumes a lot of time. But resources and support
are something that faculty members aren’t getting, according to another
report, "Time For Class: Lessons
for the Future of Digital Learning in Higher Education,"
which surveyed 3,500 faculty and administrators. Among administrators who
say support for faculty development is critical to implementing digital
learning on their campus, only one in four believes their college is doing
it effectively.
Another survey
on faculty attitudes toward technology, by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup,
found that fewer than half of faculty members who designed or revised an
online or blended course received professional development. There’s a
disconnect, in other words, between institutional strategy and execution.
Elusive Evidence
Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group, which produced
the "Time for Class" report, says faculty views toward technology are more
nuanced than surveys often make them appear. They understand the value and
purpose of online education, even if they prefer face-to-face, for example.
And faculty who have participated in online education are generally more
supportive of it.
Yet
there are so many digital technologies available to faculty members:
clickers, flipped classrooms, digital materials, adaptive learning
technologies. How are instructors supposed to make sense of what actually
works and master the different tools? The Babson survey also showed, for
example, a high level of dissatisfaction with digital courseware products —
which combine the delivery mechanism and the content — among faculty and
administrators.
Mr.
Pomerantz of Educause notes that faculty members say they want proof that
digital technologies will improve learning outcomes before they use them.
But that evidence often doesn’t exist. "The pace of research and the pace of
corporate R&D are so wildly different," he says, "you get new tools and
technologies coming out much faster than the evidence of their value can be
produced."
As a result, professors often rely on colleagues, including early adopters,
to figure out which tools to use, surveys show.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
About the only "law" of education technology is that one size does not fit all
in terms varying circumstances such as level of academic content. For example,
each month there are thousands of free online courses (MOOCs) available from
prestigious universities that can also be taken with fees for certificate badges
or transcript credits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
MOOCs, however, require a high level of motivation to learn and talents for
self-learning. Many "students" who enroll in MOOCs who are merely curious about
how prestigious schools teach MOOCs or are otherwise not committed to shed
blood, sweat, and tears for the hard work of learning are more apt to not
succeed in learning much from MOOCs compared to onsite campus students who take
such courses live. There are, however, enough dedicated and committed MOOC
students who comprise a growing archive of success stories such as the Mongolian
student who worked his way with MOOCs into a Ph.D. program at MIT.
The same can be said about success versus
horror stories of "flipped classrooms" where instructors rely more on learning
technologies and less on lecturing. One size just does not fit every student or
every instructor.
This special series from the team of Chronicle reporters who attended
the ASU+GSV Summit this year showcases video highlights from some of the key
speakers at the annual gathering of educators, tech entrepreneurs, and
investors.
The
edited segments, hosted by the senior writers Goldie Blumenstyk and Scott
Carlson, feature speakers including:
Jeremy Bailenson,
of Stanford University, highlighting the teaching potential of virtual
reality.
Ted Dintersmith,
an investor and financer of documentary films, contending that schools
should give students relevant skills, not just courses to pad a college
application.
Three experts on education in Finland,
sharing some of the surprising approaches that nation takes in education.
Peter Capelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania,
describes how employers have given up on an essential part of the
American-labor system: a role in training the next generation of workers.
Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San
Francisco who studies the effects of games and other physical and cognitive
challenges, says they can improve memory and multitasking, and even treat
attention-deficit disorders.
Andrew Ng, a computer scientist and co-founder of Coursera, says innovations
in artificial intelligence will both create great wealth and raise ethical
challenges if we want not just a wealthier society “but also a fairer
society.”
Ted
Dintersmith, an investor and financer of documentary films, argues that
schools should give students relevant skills, not just courses to pad a
college application.
Jeremy Bailenson, a professor at Stanford University and founding director
of its Virtual Human Interaction Lab, says the technology, in the right
circumstances, can be educationally transformative.
Navigating
today’s education landscape can be a challenge. Get on the right path with
our collection of articles as they discuss the latest higher-ed technologies
that are transforming colleges and universities.
Booklet topics include:
As Big Data Comes to
College, Officials Wrestle to Set New Ethical Norms
How For-Profit Education is
Now Embedded in Traditional Colleges
The Promise and Limits of
'Learning Analytics'
How to Prepare Professors
Who Thought They'd Never Teach Online
Technological change demands stronger
and more continuous connections between education and employment, says
Andrew Palmer. The faint outlines of such a system are now emerging
THE RECEPTION
AREA contains a segment of a decommissioned Underground train carriage,
where visitors wait to be collected. The surfaces are wood and glass. In
each room the talk is of code, web development and data science. At first
sight the London office of General Assembly looks like that of any other
tech startup. But there is one big difference: whereas most firms use
technology to sell their products online, General Assembly uses the physical
world to teach technology. Its office is also a campus. The rooms are full
of students learning and practising code, many of whom have quit their jobs
to come here. Full-time participants have paid between Ł8,000 and Ł10,000
($9,900-12,400) to learn the lingua franca of the digital economy in a
programme lasting 10-12 weeks.
General
Assembly, with campuses in 20 cities from Seattle to Sydney, has an alumni
body of around 35,000 graduates. Most of those who enroll for full-time
courses expect them to lead to new careers. The company’s curriculum is
based on conversations with employers about the skills they are critically
short of. It holds “meet and hire” events where firms can see the coding
work done by its students. Career advisers help students with their
presentation and interview techniques. General Assembly measures its success
by how many of its graduates get a paid, permanent, full-time job in their
desired field. Of its 2014-15 crop, three-quarters used the firm’s
career-advisory services, and 99% of those were hired within 180 days of
beginning their job hunt.
The company’s
founder, Jake Schwartz, was inspired to start the company by two personal
experiences: a spell of drifting after he realised that his degree from Yale
conferred no practical skills, and a two-year MBA that he felt had cost too
much time and money: “I wanted to change the return-on-investment equation
in education by bringing down the costs and providing the skills that
employers were desperate for.” In rich countries the link between learning
and earning has tended to follow a simple rule: get as much formal education
as you can early in life, and reap corresponding rewards for the rest of
your career. The literature suggests that each additional year of schooling
is associated with an 8-13% rise in hourly earnings. In the period since the
financial crisis, the costs of leaving school early have become even
clearer. In America, the unemployment rate steadily drops as you go up the
educational ladder.
Many believe that
technological change only strengthens the case for more formal education.
Jobs made up of routine tasks that are easy to automate or offshore have
been in decline. The usual flipside of that observation is that the number
of jobs requiring greater cognitive skill has been growing. The labour
market is forking, and those with college degrees will naturally shift into
the lane that leads to higher-paying jobs.
The reality seems
to be more complex. The returns to education, even for the high-skilled,
have become less clear-cut. Between 1982 and 2001 the average wages earned
by American workers with a bachelor’s degree rose by 31%, whereas those of
high-school graduates did not budge, according to the New York Federal
Reserve. But in the following 12 years the wages of college graduates fell
by more than those of their less educated peers. Meanwhile, tuition costs at
universities have been rising.
A question of
degree, and then some
The decision to
go to college still makes sense for most, but the idea of a mechanistic
relationship between education and wages has taken a knock. A recent survey
conducted by the Pew Research Centre showed that a mere 16% of Americans
think that a four-year degree course prepares students very well for a
high-paying job in the modern economy. Some of this may be a cyclical effect
of the financial crisis and its economic aftermath. Some of it may be simply
a matter of supply: as more people hold college degrees, the associated
premium goes down. But technology also seems to be complicating the picture.
A paper published in 2013 by a trio of Canadian economists,
Paul Beaudry, David Green and Benjamin Sand, questions optimistic
assumptions about demand for non-routine work. In the two decades prior to
2000, demand for cognitive skills soared as the basic infrastructure of the
IT age (computers, servers, base stations and fibre-optic cables) was being
built; now that the technology is largely in place, this demand has waned,
say the authors. They show that since 2000 the share of employment accounted
for by high-skilled jobs in America has been falling. As a result,
college-educated workers are taking on jobs that are cognitively less
demanding (see chart), displacing less educated workers.
This analysis buttresses the view that technology is already
playing havoc with employment. Skilled and unskilled workers alike are in
trouble. Those with a better education are still more likely to find work,
but there is now a fair chance that it will be unenjoyable. Those who never
made it to college face being squeezed out of the workforce altogether. This
is the argument of the techno-pessimists, exemplified by the projections of
Carl-Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of Oxford University, who in 2013
famously calculated that 47% of existing jobs in America are susceptible to
automation.
There is another, less apocalyptic possibility. James Bessen,
an economist at Boston University, has worked out the effects of automation
on specific professions and finds that since 1980 employment has been
growing faster in occupations that use computers than in those that do not.
That is because automation tends to affect tasks within an occupation rather
than wiping out jobs in their entirety. Partial automation can actually
increase demand by reducing costs: despite the introduction of the barcode
scanner in supermarkets and the ATM in banks, for example, the number of
cashiers and bank tellers has grown.
But even though technology may not destroy jobs in aggregate,
it does force change upon many people. Between 1996 and 2015 the share of
the American workforce employed in routine office jobs declined from 25.5%
to 21%, eliminating 7m jobs. According to research by Pascual Restrepo of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the 2007-08 financial
crisis made things worse: between 2007 and 2015 job openings for unskilled
routine work suffered a 55% decline relative to other jobs.
This hub provides findings from the 2016 student
study, part of the EDUCAUSE Technology Research in the Academic Community
research series. ECAR collaborated with 183 institutions to collect
responses from 71,641 undergraduate students across 25 countries about their
technology experiences. This study explores technology ownership, use
patterns, and expectations as they relate to the student experience.
Colleges and universities can use the results of this study to better engage
students in the learning process, as well as improve IT services, increase
technology-enabled productivity, prioritize strategic contributions of IT to
higher education, plan for technology shifts that impact students, and
become more technologically competitive among peer institutions.
The competency-based education (CBE) approach allows students to advance based on their ability to
master a skill or competency at their own pace regardless of environment.
This method is tailored to meet different learning abilities and can lead to
more efficient student outcomes. Learn more from the
Next Generation Learning Challenges about CBE models and grants in K-12
and higher education.
Organizations
·
CBEinfo - This site was created for schools to share lessons learned in
developing CBE programs.
Arizona State University is joining with the MOOC
provider edX in a project that it says “reimagines the freshman year” and
opens a new low-cost, low-risk path to a college degree for students
anywhere in the world.
The project, called the
Global Freshman Academy,
will offer a set of eight courses designed to fulfill
the general-education requirements of a freshman year at Arizona State at a
fraction of the cost students typically pay, and students can begin taking
courses without going through the traditional application process, the
university said in a news release on Wednesday. Because the classes are
offered as
massive open online courses, or
MOOCs, there is no limit on how many students can
enroll.
. . .
The courses to be offered through the Global
Freshman Academy are being designed and will be taught by leading scholars
at Arizona State. “These courses are developed to their rigorous standards,”
Adrian Sannier, chief academic officer for
EdPlus at ASU,
said in the release. “Course faculty are committed to ensuring their
students understand college-level material so that they can be prepared to
successfully complete college.”
Students who pass a final examination in a course
will have the option of paying a fee of no more than $200 per credit hour to
get college credit for it.
Mr. Agarwal and Mr. Crow are scheduled to formally
announce the project at a conference in Washington on Thursday.
Jensen Comments and Questions
The real test is how well these credits are accepted by other universities for
transfer credit. It probably will not be an issue for graduate school admission
since there are three more years of more traditional onsite or online credits.
But it could be a huge issue for example when a student takes the first year of
ASU MOOC credits and then tries to have these credits accepted by other
universities (such as TCU) that still resist accepting any online courses for
transfer credit.
For example, at many universities these days there are multiple sections of a
course where some sections are onsite and some are online. Often they are taught
by the same instructor. The online sections are usually as small or even smaller
than the onsite sections because online instructors often have more student
interactions such as in instant messaging not available to onsite students ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging
Answer
These are the following obvious differences between MOOC online credits and
traditional online credits.
The huge difference between the ASU MOOC year of courses and the
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School MOOC year of courses is that the
Wharton School MOOC courses are not
available for credit (and therefore are free). The ASU MOOC courses are
available for credits that will not be totally free, although they will be
available at greatly discounted prices.
MOOC courses are open to everybody in the world and have no admission
standards.
These are not intended to be equivalent to advanced placement (AP)
credits where students eventually fill in course requirements with
other more advanced courses. The ASU MOOC courses have no requirements to
earn substitute credits. Universities do vary with respect to substitution
requirements for AP credit, and many do not require taking added replacement
courses ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement
I suspect that at some universities the ASU MOOCs will be similar to AP
credits except that the competency-examination process is different.
MOOC courses generally have no limits to class size.
MOOC courses do not have prerequisites such as a MOOC calculus course or
linear algebra that has no prerequisites.
MOOC courses are generally very large such that student interactions
online with instructors and/or other students are virtually non-existent.
MOOC courses generally do not have graded writing assignments such as
term papers.
MOOC courses do not have graded homework.
MOOC courses do not have graded team projects, whereas team projects are
common in smaller traditional online courses.
MOOC courses generally do not have class attendance requirements or
class participation requirements even though they generally do have
classes. The first MOOC course ever offered was an artificial intelligence
course at Stanford University where students enrolled in the course on
campus has the option of not attending class. Some faculty feel like some
course courses should have required course attendance and course
participation.
The bottom line is that it appears that the ASU freshman year MOOC course
credits will be little more than competency-based
credits. This will be controversial since many faculty in higher
education feel like credits in general education core courses should
entail class participation, including first-year core courses. For example, at
Trinity University there is a first-year seminar that all new students take in
very small classes that require a lot of class participation in discussions of
assigned readings and the writing of term papers. I think some sections of this
seminar don't even have examinations. I did not have examinations when I taught
a section of this seminar for two years.
In traditional large lectures courses on campus students typically are broken
out into accompanying recitation sections intended for class participation and
interactions with a recitation instructor.
Jensen Note
I never anticipated competency-based credits in the first-year of college. I
think these will be wildly popular in advance-level training courses such as a
CPA examination review course in the final (fifth) year of an accounting
program. Using competency-based courses for first-year general education courses
is more controversial.
Library directors at liberal arts institutions are losing their jobs as
they clash with faculty and administrators over the future of the academic
library
Several library directors at liberal arts
institutions have lost their jobs as they clash with faculty and
administrators over how much -- and how fast -- the academic library should
change.
None of the dismissals, resignations or retirements
are identical. Some have resulted from arguments over funding; others from
debates about decision-making processes or ongoing personal strife. One
common trend, however, is that several of the library directors who have
left their jobs in recent years have done so after long-term disputes with
other groups on campus about how the academic library should change to
better serve students and faculty.
The disputes highlight the growing pains
of institutions and their members suddenly challenged to redefine themselves
after centuries of serving as gateways and gatekeepers to knowledge.
“For the entire history of libraries as
we know them -- 2,000 or 3,000 years -- we have lived in a world of
information scarcity," said Terrence J. Metz, university librarian at
Hamline University. "What’s happened in the last two decades is that’s been
turned completely on its head. Now we’re living in a world of
superabundance."
As their reasons for departing are
different, so too are the factors current and former library directors said
triggered the disagreements. In interviews with Inside Higher Ed,
the library directors pointed to the shift from print to digital library
materials, which they said is raising questions about who on campus is
best-prepared to manage access to the wealth of information available
through the internet. The financial fallout of the recent economic crisis
has only inflamed that conversation.
“To my mind, all of this hubbub is
probably exacerbated by the fact that libraries are trying to figure out
what they are and what their future is and what their role is,” said Bryn I.
Geffert, college librarian at Amherst College. “Every time you have a body
of people going through this kind of existential crisis, conflict is
inherent. As you’re trying to redefine an institution, you know there are
going to be different opinions on how that redefinition should happen.”
The most recent case, Barnard College,
presents a symbolic example of the shift from print to digital. There, the
Lehman Hall library is about to be demolished to make way for an estimated
$150 million Teaching and Learning Center. The new building means the
library’s physical collection will shrink by tens of thousands of books.
Last month, the debate about the new
space intensified when Lisa R. Norberg, dean of the Barnard Library and
academic information services, resigned. In an
article in the Columbia Daily Spectator,
faculty members were quick to jump to Norberg’s defense, saying the
administration “hobbled” and “disrespected” her.
Norberg did not respond to a request for
comment, but her case resembles others in the liberal arts library
community. As recently as this September, Patricia A. Tully, the Caleb T.
Winchester university librarian at Wesleyan University, was
fired after less than five years on the job. Tully
and Ruth S. Weissman, Wesleyan’s provost and vice president for academic
affairs, had for more than a year argued about how the library could work
with administrators, faculty members and IT staffers.
“We just seemed to have different ideas
about the role of the libraries,” Tully said then.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There's an analogy here between the rise of air power vis-a-vis infantry,
but perhaps this should not be pursued too far. Libraries are literally moving
to the clouds while old and musty books gather mold untouched in stacks on the
ground, increasingly unused by students and faculty. It's not that college
libraries failed to keep pace with technology just like infantry soldiers are
equipped with the latest in communications and ground weapons technology.
Libraries increasingly have expensive subscriptions to knowledge databases.
But as such they are becoming bases for launching students and faculty into the
clouds. Libraries increasingly give up space for student coffee shops,
multimedia conference rooms, and computer labs. Reference librarians
increasingly help students navigate in the clouds rather than in the stacks.
And thus libraries are somewhat caught in the middle of the budget disputes
over spending for more air power or more ground power. Air power will probably
keep getting increasing shares of resources relative to "books on the ground."
We must now redefine what we mean by the terms "library" and "librarian." More
importantly we need to define these terms on the basis of what sets them apart
from the rest of the resources on campus.
Of course we also need to redefine what we mean by courses in the clouds
versus courses on the ground.
Jensen Comment
Bowdoin College in Maine is perhaps the last liberal arts college that I
predicted with promote outsourcing to distance education.
Bowdoin College ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowdoin_College
Lifetime residents of Maine tend to look askance at
people who are “from away,” an epithet reserved for transplants, summer
vacationers, and college students. Such people might mean well, the thinking
goes, but ultimately they do not belong.
Bowdoin College, a 220-year-old institution in
Brunswick, Me., takes a similarly protective view of its curriculum. At a
time when online education has blurred campus borders—and institutions face
growing pressure to train students for specific jobs—Bowdoin and many other
liberal-arts colleges have held the line. When I matriculated there, a
decade ago, Bowdoin didn’t even have online course registration.
(The college finally
added it
last year.)
So it was a significant move last week when Bowdoin
decided
to offer, in the spring, a partly online course in
financial accounting led by a professor at Dartmouth College’s business
school.
As many as 50 Bowdoin students will take the
course, for credit, from the Maine campus. The Dartmouth professor, Phillip
C. Stocken, will teach largely from his post in New Hampshire, holding
weekly class sessions and office hours online. Meanwhile, an economics
professor at Bowdoin will lead weekly face-to-face sessions on its campus.
Bowdoin will pay $60,000 for the course—significantly less than it would
cost to develop a course “of this quality” from scratch, according to Scott
Hood, a spokesman.
Not surprisingly, the Dartmouth course has met with
resistance from some faculty members at Bowdoin; 21 professors voted against
the decision to offer it as a one-semester pilot.
“I am skeptical of how a course like this
reinforces the student-faculty dynamic, and remain to be convinced that it
can,” wrote Dale A. Syphers, a physics professor, in an email interview.
In the grand scheme of online education, Bowdoin’s
collaboration with Dartmouth is relatively conservative. Many traditional
institutions now offer fully online courses, and have done so for a long
time. But liberal-arts colleges, which stake their prestige on the offer of
an intimate, residential experience, have been wary of fielding courses with
significant online components, even on a trial basis—especially if those
courses are “from away.”
2U, a company that helps colleges put their
programs online, tried last year to build a coalition of elite colleges that
would develop online versions of their undergraduate courses that students
at member institutions could take for credit. But Duke University,
Vanderbilt University, and the University of Rochester all dropped out after
faculty members objected, and the remaining colleges voted to
dissolve the consortium.
Other experiments in sharing online courses among
liberal-arts colleges have produced more-encouraging results. Last year a
theater professor at Rollins College, in Florida,
taught an online course on voice and diction to
students at Hendrix College, in Arkansas. Eric Zivot, the Rollins professor,
used high-definition videoconferencing technology to hold class sessions,
where he appeared on a projection screen at the front of the Hendrix
classroom.
Only once did the professor visit his Hendrix
students in person, said Amanda Hagood, director of blended learning at the
Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium that has continued to
facilitate the exchange. When Mr. Zivot does visit, “it’s always an
underwhelming moment because the Hendrix students always feel like they
already know him,” said Ms. Hagood. “It’s not a big deal that he’s there in
person.”
Another consortium, the Associated Colleges of the
Midwest, has supported an online calculus course, led by an associate
professor at Macalester College, that is open to students at the
association’s 14 member colleges.
The eight-week course had its first run in the
summer of 2013. Sixteen students enrolled, hailing from eight colleges in
the consortium. “We were never in the same place, ever,” said Chad Topaz,
the professor. One student took the course while traveling in India, Mr.
Topaz said.
He taught the same course again this past summer.
Mr. Topaz said the course went well both times, but it is still in a
pilot phase. He said he had yet to be told whether he would be teaching it
again next summer.
Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic
education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job
market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may
teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may
award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards
is a
"microcredential."
After over thirty
years of service, the U.S. Department of Education's ERIC Clearinghouses,
and the AskERIC service, permanently closed at the end of December 2003.
ERIC is a national information system funded by the U.S. Department of
Education's Institute of Education Sciences to provide access to education
literature and resources. The Clearinghouses, stationed at various
educational institutions, provided documents and reference services on
educational topics ranging from Elementary and Early Childhood Education
to Urban and Minority Education to Adult, Career, and Vocational
Education.
Open SUNY -- through which the State University of
New York plans to take existing online programs in the 64-campus system and
to build on them, making them available for students throughout the system
-- has its first degree programs. In her annual address on the state of the
university, Chancellor Nancy Zimpher
announced the first degree programs and the
campuses that are producing them. The offerings include associate,
bachelor's and master's degrees. Two SUNY institutions -- Empire State
College and SUNY Oswego -- are each offering two programs. The others are
being offered by Broome Community College, Finger Lakes Community College,
SUNY Delhi and SUNY Stony Brook.
3.
7 Tips for School Leaders New to Twitter
Whether you have already started exploring the educational community on
Twitter or have yet to set up an account, here are some tips to help you on
your journey.
4.
What College Students Really Think About Online Courses
Education leaders and politicians often make decisions about online learning
without seeking student input. And since students are their customers,
that's a big mistake.
5.
6 Emerging Technologies in Higher Ed
The 2013 NMC Horizon Project lists six technologies that could be adopted in
colleges and universities over the next five years.
6.
Top 5 Preschool Apps for 2013
A speech-language pathologist from Baltimore City Public Schools shares her
app recommendations.
Jensen Comment
What I found is that the Internet makes me aware of knowledge that I certainly
would not have stumbled upon before the days of the Internet. Some may argue
that this is like learning a little bit about a lot of things. But I'm currently
writing a technical article invited by a journal. The Internet has most
certainly helped me drill deeper and deeper to learn more about an angel on the
head of a pin.
I saw an segment on ABC News where San Antonio has a new public library
without books.
Ray Kurzweil must encounter his share of
interviewers whose first question is: What do you hope your obituary will
say?
This is a trick question. Mr. Kurzweil famously
hopes an obituary won't be necessary. And in the event of his unexpected
demise, he is widely reported to have signed a deal to have himself frozen
so his intelligence can be revived when technology is equipped for the job.
Mr. Kurzweil is the closest thing to a Thomas
Edison of our time, an inventor known for inventing. He first came to public
attention in 1965, at age 17, appearing on Steve Allen's TV show "I've Got a
Secret" to demonstrate a homemade computer he built to compose original
music in the style of the great masters.
In the five decades since, he has invented
technologies that permeate our world. To give one example, the Web would
hardly be the store of human intelligence it has become without the flatbed
scanner and optical character recognition, allowing printed materials from
the pre-digital age to be scanned and made searchable.
If you are a musician, Mr. Kurzweil's fame is
synonymous with his line of music synthesizers (now owned by Hyundai). As
in: "We're late for the gig. Don't forget the Kurzweil."
If you are blind, his Kurzweil Reader relieved one
of your major disabilities—the inability to read printed information,
especially sensitive private information, without having to rely on somebody
else.
In January, he became an employee at Google GOOG
-0.04% . "It's my first job," he deadpans, adding after a pause, "for a
company I didn't start myself."
There is another Kurzweil, though—the one who makes
seemingly unbelievable, implausible predictions about a human transformation
just around the corner. This is the Kurzweil who tells me, as we're sitting
in the unostentatious offices of Kurzweil Technologies in Wellesley Hills,
Mass., that he thinks his chances are pretty good of living long enough to
enjoy immortality. This is the Kurzweil who, with a bit of DNA and personal
papers and photos, has made clear he intends to bring back in some fashion
his dead father.
Mr. Kurzweil's frank efforts to outwit death have
earned him an exaggerated reputation for solemnity, even caused some to
portray him as a humorless obsessive. This is wrong. Like the best
comedians, especially the best Jewish comedians, he doesn't tell you when to
laugh. Of the pushback he receives from certain theologians who insist death
is necessary and ennobling, he snarks, "Oh, death, that tragic thing? That's
really a good thing."
"People say, 'Oh, only the rich are going to have
these technologies you speak of.' And I say, 'Yeah, like cellphones.' "
To listen to Mr. Kurzweil or read his several books
(the latest: "How to Create a Mind") is to be flummoxed by a series of
forecasts that hardly seem realizable in the next 40 years. But this is
merely a flaw in my brain, he assures me. Humans are wired to expect
"linear" change from their world. They have a hard time grasping the
"accelerating, exponential" change that is the nature of information
technology.
"A kid in Africa with a smartphone is walking
around with a trillion dollars of computation circa 1970s," he says. Project
that rate forward, and everything will change dramatically in the next few
decades.
"I'm right on the cusp," he adds. "I think some of
us will make it through"—he means baby boomers, who can hope to experience
practical immortality if they hang on for another 15 years.
By then, Mr. Kurzweil expects medical technology to
be adding a year of life expectancy every year. We will start to outrun our
own deaths. And then the wonders really begin. The little computers in our
hands that now give us access to all the world's information via the Web
will become little computers in our brains giving us access to all the
world's information. Our world will become a world of near-infinite, virtual
possibilities.
How will this work? Right now, says Mr. Kurzweil,
our human brains consist of 300 million "pattern recognition" modules.
"That's a large number from one perspective, large enough for humans to
invent language and art and science and technology. But it's also very
limiting. Maybe I'd like a billion for three seconds, or 10 billion, just
the way I might need a million computers in the cloud for two seconds and
can access them through Google."
We will have vast new brainpower at our disposal;
we'll also have a vast new field in which to operate—virtual reality. "As
you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud.
The biological portion of our brain didn't go away but the nonbiological
portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically
the way we back up everything now that's digital."
"When the hardware crashes," he says of humanity's
current condition, "the software dies with it. We take that for granted as
human beings." But when most of our intelligence, experience and identity
live in cyberspace, in some sense (vital words when thinking about Kurzweil
predictions) we will become software and the hardware will be replaceable.
Which brings us to his father, a gifted musician
and composer whose early death from heart disease left a profound mark on
Mr. Kurzweil. Understand: He is not talking about growing a biological
person in a test-tube and requiring him to be Dad. "DNA is just one kind of
information," Mr. Kurzweil says. So are the documents his father left
behind, and the memories residing in the brains of friends and family. In
the virtual world that's coming, it will be possible to assemble an avatar
more like his father than his father ever was—exactly the father Mr.
Kurzweil remembers.
"My work on this project right now is to maintain
these files," he adds, referring to Dad's memorabilia.
Mr. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and went to
MIT. Looking back on his inventions, a common theme since that first music
composer has been pattern recognition—which he believes is the essence of
human thinking and the essence of the better-than-human
artificially-enhanced intelligence that we are evolving toward.
The same work now continues at Google. Last July,
Mr. Kurzweil was hunting investors for a new project. He pitched Google
co-founder Larry Page. Mr. Page's response was to ask why Mr. Kurzweil
didn't pursue his project inside Google, since Google controlled resources
that Mr. Kurzweil surely would not be able to replicate outside. "Larry was
actually more low-key and subtle than that," Mr. Kurzweil says now, "but
that's how I interpreted the pitch. And he was right."
To wit, the knowledge graph—Google's map of
billions of Web objects and concepts, and the billions of relationships
among them—would be immeasurably handy to Mr. Kurzweil's ambition to
recreate human-style pattern recognition, especially as it relates to
language, in computers. The two agreed on a one-sentence job description:
"to bring natural language understanding to Google."
Mr. Kurzweil and his Google team will be tackling a
project begun by IBM's IBM -0.72% Watson, which fed its brain by reading
Wikipedia. What Watson understood is hard to say, but—helped by brute
processing power—Watson was famously able to beat all-time "Jeopardy"
champions to intuit that, for instance, "a tiresome speech delivered by a
frothy pie topping" was a "meringue harangue."
Mr. Kurzweil's goal is to enable Google's search
engine to read, hear and understand human semantics. "The idea is to create
a system that's expert in everything it has read and make that expertise
available to the world," he says.
Mr. Kurzweil, at age 65, claims he has become just
another Googler living in San Francisco and "riding the Google bus to work
every day." But his employer also wants him to remain a "world thought
leader"—a term not so grandiose as it seems when you consider all the Davos-type
pontificators who exercise global influence without having hatched an
original thought.
What does it mean
to evolve? Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance,
greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, greater love. And
God has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite
intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, and infinite love.
Evolution does not achieve an infinite level, but as it explodes
exponentially, it certainly moves in that direction. So evolution moves
inexorably towards our conception of God. Thus the freeing of our thinking
from the severe limitations of its biological form is an essential spiritual
quest.
By the second half
of this next century, there will be no clear distinction between human and
machine intelligence. On the one hand, we will have biological brains vastly
expanded through distributed nanobot-based implants. On the other, we will
have fully nonbiological brains that are copies of human brains, albeit also
vastly extended. And we will have a myriad of other varieties of intimate
connection between human thinking and the technology it has fostered.
Ultimately,
nonbiological intelligence will dominate because it is growing at a double
exponential rate, whereas for all practical purposes biological intelligence
is at a standstill. By the end of the twenty-first century, nonbiological
thinking will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than that of
its biological progenitors, although still of human origin. It will continue
to be the human-machine civilization taking the next step in evolution.
Before the next
century is over, the Earth’s technology-creating species will merge with its
computational technology. After all, what is the difference between a human
brain enhanced a trillion fold by nanobot-based implants, and a computer
whose design is based on high resolution scans of the human brain, and then
extended a trillion-fold?
Most forecasts of
the future seem to ignore the revolutionary impact of the inevitable
emergence of computers that match and ultimately vastly exceed the
capabilities of the human brain, a development that will be no less
important than the evolution of human intelligence itself some thousands of
centuries ago.
Ray Kurzweil is the author of: the
following books and tapes:
The Age of Spiritual Machines,
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking Penguin, 1999)
The Age of Spiritual Machines (Narrated
by Alan Sklar, 1999)
and The Age of Intelligent
Machines (MIT Press, 1992).
Over the past three days,the TV show "Jeopardy!"
featured a showdown between a clever IBM computer system called Watson and
the two greatest "Jeopardy!" champions. Watson won handily. It won the
preliminary practice round, tied Monday's opening round, and won by large
margins on Tuesday and Wednesday. The point has been made: Watson can
compete at the championship level—and is making it more difficult for anyone
to argue that there are human tasks that computers will never achieve.
"Jeopardy!" involves understanding complexities of
humor, puns, metaphors, analogies, ironies and other subtleties. Elsewhere,
computers are advancing on many other fronts, from driverless cars (Google's
cars have driven 140,000 miles through California cities and towns without
human intervention) to the diagnosis of disease.
Watson runs on 90 computer servers, although it
does not go out to the Internet. When will this capability be available on
your PC? The ratio of computer price to performance is now doubling in less
than a year, so 90 servers would become the equivalent of one server in
about seven years, and the equivalent of one personal computer within a
decade. However, with the growth in cloud computing—in which supercomputer
capability is increasingly available to anyone via the Internet—Watson-like
capability will actually be available to you much sooner.
Given this, I expect Watson-like "natural language
processing" (the ability to "understand" ordinary English) to show up in
Google, Bing and other search engines over the next five years.
With computers demonstrating a basic ability to
understand human language, it's only a matter of time before they pass the
famous "Turing test," in which "chatbot" programs compete to fool human
judges into believing that they are human.
If Watson's underlying technology were applied to
the Turing test, it would likely do pretty well. Consider the annual Loebner
Prize competition, one version of the Turing test. Last year, the best
chatbot contestant fooled the human judges 25% of the time.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Watson would have to
dumb itself down in order to pass a Turing test. After all, if you were
talking to someone over instant messaging and they seemed to know every
detail of everything, you'd realize it was an artificial intelligence (AI).
A computer passing a properly designed Turing test
would be operating at human levels. I, for one, would then regard it as
human.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
But it truly is not a question of computer versus human. The beauty is that it
is a question of human with the computer as a tool --- Hal 9000 is not here yet
and probably will never be here until humans are extinct on earth and Hal is in
outer space.
However, what we are probably not anticipating is how well we will one day be
able to program creativity into the computer where eventually the computer will
create original works of art, music, opera, ballet, literature, elegant (rather
than brute-force) mathematical proofs, science experiments, aircraft designs,
chess playing strategies, and even computers not yet conceived by humans.
I suspect that credit must be given to humans who can program creativity into a
machine to a degree that it can invent things. The debate of "creativity" will
one day boil down to a chicken versus the egg question.
.
Or put another way, when God says to the Devil "make your own dirt," can the
"computer" truly create unless a human provides the "dirt?"
Fast Company issues its annual list of the most
innovative companies in education. The 2013 list includes nine companies and
one community college.
In its
annual list of top companies, the magazine broke
down the organizations that have the most impact on education. Not
surprisingly, the top three slots were filled by online course providers
that partner with universities. They earned their spots for disrupting
traditional university course delivery methods by offering classes at no
charge to students.
1. Coursera
2. Udacity
3. EdX
4. Rio Salado Community College
5. Amplify
6. GameDesk
7. Duolingo
8. InsideTrack
9. FunDza
10. ClassDojo
But while the list includes the word company, not
every organization included is a company. For example, Rio Salado Community
College in Arizona came in fourth.
Rio Salado designed a custom course management and
student services system that helps students stay on track with their
education. Through
predictive analytics, the college shows professors
which students could be at risk of dropping out and need more attention. It
also alerts professors when a student doesn't show up to class regularly or
skips an assignment. The system allows educators to recognize at-risk
students early and take action to help them.
For more information about what these companies did
to be on the list, check out
Fast Company's story.
Articles about how free online courses, or MOOCs,
could disrupt higher education dominated the headlines last year here at the
Wired Campus blog, and they were the most popular with readers as well.
Several articles about e-textbooks also topped our list of most-read
articles of 2012, highlighting what has been a time of change, and anxiety,
for colleges and universities.
Coursera and Udacity appear most frequently in this
year’s top headlines. Both offer MOOCs, or massive open online courses, and
both were founded by Stanford University computer-science professors who are
now on leave. Together, they now claim more than two million students,
though some of those sign up but never complete work in the courses.
The most popular episode of our monthly Tech
Therapy podcast highlights another anxiety among college leaders—how much
raw time all this personal technology use eats up. The podcast includes a
classic line by Freeman Hrabowski III, president of the University of
Maryland-Baltimore County, about how frequently he uses his smartphone: “I
am connected to this device for communication in the same way that I am
always connected to my mind,” he said. “I’m constantly expressing or
receiving.” Whatever he’s doing is working: Mr. Hrabowski was
named by Time
Magazine as one of the 100 most
influential people of 2012.
Google was full of surprises in 2012. It outdid
Apple easily in mobile OS features. It rolled out a whole line of Nexus
Android devices that are undeniably top notch. And it launched the Knowledge
Graph, a watershed moment between the keyword-searching past of the Web and
a future Web that understands whole concepts.
2012 was also the year that Google unified its
offerings under a single privacy policy, a move that freaked out lots of
people, but which was
totally rational from Google's perspective. If
we're going to have a data-driven future offering pervasive, free
technologies in exchange for better targeting of advertisements, we'll have
to accept that companies like Google have an eerily accurate, real-time
profile of us.
The most important Google story this year was the
launch of the
Knowledge Graph. This marked the shift from a
first-generation Google that merely indexed the words and metadata of the
Web to a next-generation Google that recognizes discrete things and the
relationships between them.
Now, when you search Google for certain kinds of
things, you get an answer or an explanation in return,
rather than a link to a Web page containing the answer. That's made possible
by Google's new semantic intelligence. Google learned how to learn
from the Web and its vast oceans of linked information, but now it's
figuring out how to put the information itself to work for its users.
Web pages are a part of it. People are also a part
of it, so Google built Google+ to get people on the Web to identify
themselves, each other and their relationships. Maps are also a part of it,
so Google can understand questions about location. The Web used to be an
index of pages, but now it just looks like the world.
Google doesn't mince words about
wanting to build the Star Trek computer -
you know, one that you can talk to - and the Knowledge Graph is the most
important component of that computer's mind.
Android: Google's
Cyborg Army
What's always been clear about Android is that
Google wants everyone to have a mobile device at all costs. By giving away
the operating system, Android has taken over the market in terms of raw
numbers.
But it hasn't always been clear whether Google
cares that everyone has a great mobile experience. That finally
came into focus in 2012. The Android 4.1 and 4.2 updates made the mobile
operating system more powerful in some ways, cleaner and simpler in others.
The pure Google mobile experience, for those without third-party cruft piled
on top of their Android devices by device manufacturers, is now a
world-class experience.
The new flagship Nexus devices are among the finest
mobile computers on the market. The Nexus 4 is a hit phone, despite its lack
of LTE connectivity, because it hits such a sweet spot of power and price.
The Nexus 7 tablet is inexpensive and solid enough to inspire confidence -
and powerful enough to keep around all day. The Nexus 10 is the only
non-Apple device as good as an iPad, period. Where the iPad is refined and
precious, the Nexus 10 is durable and hardy. It's purely a matter of
preference.
Even more amazingly, Google managed to out-design
Apple on Apple's own platform this year. Its
updated Search app adds Knowledge Graph answers
that blow Siri away. And the new apps for YouTube, Gmail, and
especially Maps have heavy Google users on iOS
breathing sighs of relief.
For Google, the point is to get as many people as
possible using Google out in the world, whether on Google's own operating
system or not.
Rebooting the Academy: 12 Tech Innovators Who Are
Transforming Campuses, tells the stories of a dozen key figures who are
changing research, teaching, and the management of colleges in this time of
technological change. The e-book features essays by each of the 12
innovators, explaining their visions in their own words and providing more
details on their projects, plus The Chronicle’s profiles of them.
Among the highlights: Salman Khan, founder of Khan
Academy, riffs on how video lectures can improve teaching; Dan Cohen, of
George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, asks whether
Google is good for the study of history; and Jim Groom, an
instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington,
argues against the very premise of the collection, noting that the best
innovations come from groups, not individual leaders.
You will receive a confirmation email immediately
after your Digital Edition order is placed allowing you to download the
e-book to any of your preferred reading devices (includes formats for the
Kindle, Nook, and iPad).
It all started early last fall. Sebastian Thrun
went a little rogue (oh the audacity!) and started offering
free online courses under Stanford’s banner to mass audiences,
with each course promising a “statement of
accomplishment” at the end. Hundreds of thousands of students signed up, and
universities everywhere took notice.
Since then we have witnessed universities and
startups scrambling fairly madly to create their own MOOCs (Massive Open
Online Courses), hoping to gain a foothold in a new area that could
eventually disrupt education in a major way. In December,
MIT announced the creation of MITx, promising
free courses and a “certificate of completion” to students worldwide.
Sebastian Thrun left Stanford to create Udacity, and another Stanford
spinoff,
Coursera, gained instant traction when it
announced in April that it had raised $16 million in venture capital and
signed partnerships with Princeton, Penn and U Michigan.
Now comes the latest news. MIT has teamed up with
its Cambridge neighbor, Harvard, to create
a new non profit venture, EDX. To date, Harvard
has barely dabbled
in open education. But it’s now throwing
$30 million behind
EDX (M.I.T. will do
the same), and together they will offer free digital courses worldwide, with
students receiving the obligatory certificate of mastery at the end. The EDX
platform will be open source, meaning it will be open to other universities.
Whether EDX will replace MITx, or sit uncomfortably beside it, we’re not
entirely sure (though it looks like it’s the former).
Classes will begin next fall. And when they do,
we’ll let you know … and, of course, we’ll add them to our massive
collection of 450 Free
Online Courses.
Online educational startup
Udacity,
with whom I had a very positive experience
while taking their CS 101 course, is
taking things a bit further by partnering with Pearson.
They’ll be using
Pearson VUE testing centers worldwide to provide
proctored final exams for some of their courses (presumably all of their
courses will be included eventually), leading to an official credential and
participation in a job placement service.
Before, students watched the videos and did
homework assignments online and then took a final exam at the end of the
semester. In the first offering of CS 101, the “grade” for the course (the
kind of certificate you got from Udacity) depended on either an average of
homework scores and the final exam or on the final exam alone. Most Udacity
courses these days just use the final exam. But the exam is untimed and
unproctored, and there’s absolutely nothing preventing academic dishonesty
apart from the integrity of the student.
That’s not a great recipe for viable credentialing.
For people like me, who want the knowledge but don’t really need the
credentials, it’s enough, and I found their CS 101 course to be exactly the
right level for what I needed to learn. But if you’re an employer, you’d
want to have something a little more trustworthy, and so this is a logical
move for Udacity. It’s also a significant step towards establishing
themselves as more than just a web site with instructional videos.
The natural question for people like me is, what
does this mean for traditional higher education? Personally, I’m not
worried, because I teach at an
institution
that provides way more than just credentialing for job
placement. That’s not to downplay the importance of credentialing or job
placement — but that sort of thing is fundamentally different than a
university education, or at least a university education that hasn’t
forsaken its mission. Higher ed is a rich and complex ecosystem, and
universities don’t really compete in the same space as providers like
Udacity even with the sort of credentialing they’re describing. In fact
there could be opportunities for useful partnerships between universities
and online providers. Udacity certainly makes use of the university
professoriate to power its content delivery.
On the other hand, Udacity’s move should be a
warning to those institutions who have moved toward a credentialing + job
placement model: Your space is being invaded by a viable competitor who can
offer the same product for much less money.
Purdue University today joined the group of
universities that have recently announced plans to experiment with online
courses aimed at a global audience.
The new effort, called PurdueHUB-U, will serve up
modular online courses with video lectures, interactive visualizations, and
tools for students to interact with their peers and the professor. The
project’s leaders hope it will improve face-to-face classes and bring in
revenue by attracting students around the world.
PurdueHUB-U grew out of a course taught this year
on Purdue’s nanoHUB, a collaborative platform for nanotechnology research.
The course, on the fundamentals of nanoelectronics, was broken into two
parts that lasted a few weeks each. It attracted 900 students from 27
countries, most of whom paid $30 for the class and a certificate of
completion. Students also had the option to turn their certificates into
continuing-education credits for an additional $195.
Timothy D. Sands, Purdue’s provost, called that
pricing model a “low outer paywall” that was much cheaper than traditional
credit-hour charges, but not quite free. He added that the project will
first focus on developing online course materials to transform the
university’s face-to-face classes. Mr. Sands said the course modules could
also be offered to Purdue alumni, allowing them to continue their education
after they graduate.
The Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects
featured here exemplify the National Science Foundation-supported
initiatives for technicians in high-technology fields of strategic
importance to the nation. Two-year college educators have leadership roles
in the projects, which test ways of improving technician education or of
improving the professional development for the faculty who teach
technicians. The projects� collaborative work with industry partners and
educators from other undergraduate institutions and secondary schools
perpetuate innovations that deliver highly-skilled technicians to
workplaces. While each ATE project has its own goals, all the projects are
part of a national effort to ensure that the technical workforce in the
United States has the capacity to compete globally.
Oh my God, she's trying to replace me with a
computer.
That's what some professors think when they hear
Candace Thille pitch the online education experiment she directs, the Open
Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.
They're wrong. But what her project does replace is
the traditional system of building and delivering introductory college
courses.
Professors should move away from designing
foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the
basis of "intuition," she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with
her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively
built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.
"We're seeing failure rates in these large
introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody," Ms. Thille says.
"There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where
they start—to be able to successfully complete."
Her approach brings together faculty subject
experts, learning researchers, and software engineers to build open online
courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems
provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills.
As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds
profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that
data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.
When Ms. Thille began this work, in 2002, the idea
was to design free online courses that would give independent novices a shot
at mastering what students learn in traditional classes. But two things
changed. One, her studies found that the online system benefits on-campus
students, allowing them to learn better and faster than their peers when the
digital environment is combined with some face-to-face instruction.
And two, colleges sank into "fiscal famine," as one
chancellor put it. Technological solutions like Ms. Thille's promise one
treatment for higher education's "cost disease"—the notion, articulated by
William G. Bowen and William J. Baumol, that the expense of labor-heavy
endeavors like classroom teaching inevitably rises faster than inflation.
For years, educational-technology innovations led
to more costs per student, says Mr. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton
University. But today we may have reached a point at which interactive
online systems could "change that equation," he argues, by enabling students
to learn just as much with less "capital and labor."
"What you've got right now is a powerful
intersection between technological change and economics," Mr. Bowen tells
The Chronicle.
Ms. Thille is, he adds, "a real evangelist in the
best sense of the word."
Nowadays rival universities want to hire her.
Venture capitalists want to market her courses. The Obama administration
wants her advice. And so many foundations want to support her work that she
must turn away some would-be backers.
But the big question is this: Can Ms. Thille get a
critical mass of people to buy in to her idea? Can she expand the Online
Learning Initiative from a tiny darling of ed-tech evangelists to something
that truly changes education? A Background in Business
Ms. Thille brings an unusual biography to the task.
The 53-year-old Californian spent 18 years in the private sector,
culminating in a plum job as a partner in a management-consulting company in
San Francisco. She earned a master's degree but not a doctorate, a gap she's
now plugging by studying toward a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
She has never taught a college course.
Ms. Thille wasn't even sure she'd make it through
her own bachelor's program, so precarious were her finances at the time. Her
family had plunged from upper middle class to struggling after her father
quit his job at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company because of his
opposition to the Vietnam War. But with jobs and scholarships, she managed
to earn a degree in sociology from Berkeley.
After college, Ms. Thille followed her fiancé to
Pittsburgh. The engagement didn't last, but her connection to the city did.
She worked as education coordinator for a rape-crisis center, training
police and hospital employees.
She eventually wound up back in California at the
consultancy, training executives and helping businesses run meetings
effectively. There she took on her first online-learning project: building a
hybrid course to teach executives how to mentor subordinates.
Ms. Thille doesn't play up this corporate-heavy
résumé as she travels the country making the case for why professors should
change how they teach. On a recent Tuesday morning, The Chronicle tagged
along as that mission brought Ms. Thille to the University of Illinois at
Chicago, where she was meeting with folks from the university and two nearby
community colleges to prepare for the development of a new pre-calculus
course.
It's one piece of a quiet but sweeping push to
develop, deploy, and test Open Learning Initiative courses at public
institutions around the country, led by an alphabet soup of education
groups.
The failure rate in such precalculus courses can be
so bad that as many as 50 percent of students need to take the class a
second time. Ms. Thille and her colleagues hope to improve on that record
while developing materials of such quality that they're used by perhaps
100,000 students each year. Facing Skepticism
But first the collaborators must learn how to build
a course as a team. As Ms. Thille fires up her PowerPoint, she faces a dozen
or so administrators and professors in Chicago. The faculty members
segregate themselves into clusters—community-college people mostly in one
group, university folks mostly in another. Some professors are learning
about the initiative in detail for the first time. There is little visible
excitement as they plunge into the project, eating muffins at uncomfortable
desks in a classroom on the sixth floor of the Soviet-looking
science-and-engineering building.
By contrast, Ms. Thille whirls with enthusiasm. She
describes Online Learning Initiative features like software that mimics
human tutors: making comments when students go awry, keeping quiet when they
perform well, and answering questions about what to do next. She discusses
the "dashboard" that tells professors how well students grasp each learning
objective. Throughout, she gives an impression of hyper-competence, like a
pupil who sits in the front row and knows the answer to every question.
But her remarks can sometimes veer into a
disorienting brew of jargon, giving the impression that she is talking about
lab subjects rather than college kids. Once she mentions "dosing" students
with a learning activity. And early on in the workshop, she faces a feisty
challenge from Chad Taylor, an assistant professor at Harper College. He
worries about what happens when students must face free-form questions,
which the computer doesn't baby them through.
"I will self-disclose myself as a skeptic of these
programs," he says. Software is "very good at prompting the students to go
step by step, and 'do this' and 'do that,' and all these bells and whistles
with hints. But the problem is, in my classroom they're not prompted step by
step."
Around the country, there's more skepticism where
that came from, Ms. Thille confides over a dinner of tuna tacos later that
day. One chief obstacle is the "not-invented-here problem." Professors are
wary of adopting courses they did not create. The Online Learning
Initiative's team-based model represents a cultural shift for a
professoriate that derives status, and pride, from individual contributions.
Then there's privacy. The beauty of OLI is that
developers can improve classes by studying data from thousands of students.
But some academics worry that colleges could use that same data to evaluate
professors—and fire those whose students fail to measure up.
Ms. Thille tells a personal story that illustrates
who could benefit if she prevails. Years ago she adopted a teenager, Cece.
The daughter of a drug user who died of AIDS, Cece was 28 days' truant from
high school when she went to live with Ms. Thille. She was so undereducated,
even the simple fractions of measuring cups eluded her. Her math teacher
told Ms. Thille that with 40 kids in class, she needed to focus on the ones
who were going to "make it."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In a way we already have something like this operating in colleges and
universities that adopt the Brigham Young University variable speed video disks
designed for learning the two basic accounting courses without meeting in
classrooms or having the usual online instruction. Applications vary of course,
and some colleges may have recitation sections where students meet to get help
and take examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Although BYU uses this no-class video pedagogy, it must be recognized that
most of the BYU students learning accounting on their own in this manner are
both exceptionally motivated and exceptionally intelligent. For schools that
adopt the pedagogies of Me. Thile or BYU, the students must be like BYU
accounting students or the pedagogy must be modified for more hand holding and
kick-butt features that could be done in various ways online or onsite.
Perhaps Ms. Thille is being somewhat naive about turf wars in universities.
Certain disciplines are able to afford a core faculty for research and
advanced-course teaching with miniscule classes because teaching large base
courses in the general education core justifies not having to shrink those
departments with almost no majors.
Where Ms. Thille's pedagogy might be more
useful is in specialty courses where its expensive to hire faculty to teach one
or two courses. For example, it's almost always difficult for accounting
departments to hire top faculty for governmental accounting courses and the
super-technical ERP courses in AIS.
A
study in Colorado has found little difference in
the learning of students in online or in-person introductory science
courses. The study tracked community college students who took science
courses online and in traditional classes, and who then went on to four-year
universities in the state. Upon transferring, the students in the two groups
performed equally well. Some science faculty members have expressed
skepticism about the ability of online students in science, due to the lack
of group laboratory opportunities, but the programs in Colorado work with
companies to provide home kits so that online students can have a lab
experience.
Jensen Comment
Firstly, note that online courses are not necessarily mass education (MOOC)
styled courses. The student-student and student-faculty interactions can be
greater online than onsite. For example, my daughter's introductory chemistry
class at the University of Texas had over 600 students. On the date of the final
examination he'd never met her and had zero control over her final grade. On the
other hand, her microbiology instructor in a graduate course at the University
of Maine became her husband over 20 years ago.
Another factor is networking. For example, Harvard Business School students
meeting face-to-face in courses bond in life-long networks that may be stronger
than for students who've never established networks via classes, dining halls,
volley ball games, softball games, rowing on the Charles River, etc. There's
more to lerning than is typically tested in competency examinations.
My point is that there are many externalities to both onsite and online
learning. And concluding that there's "little difference in learning" depends
upon what you mean by learning. The SCALE experiments at the University of
Illinois found that students having the same instructor tended to do slightly
better than onsite students. This is partly because there are fewer logistical
time wasters in online learning. The effect becomes larger for off-campus
students where commuting time (as in Mexico City) can take hours going to and
from campus.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
With the backing of Gates and Google, Khan Academy
and its free online educational videos are moving into the classroom and
across the world. Their goal: to revolutionize how we teach and learn.
Sanjay Gupta reports. Web Extras
Khan Academy: The future of education? Khan
Academy: School of the future Khan Academy in the classroom More »
(CBS News) Sal Khan is a math, science, and history
teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is
the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that
may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to
videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other
Internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his
approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta
reports.
The following script is from "Teacher to the World"
which aired on March 11, 2012. Sanjay Gupta is the correspondent. Denise
Schrier Cetta, producer. Matthew Danowski, editor.
Take a moment and remember your favorite teacher -
now imagine that teacher could reach, not 30 kids in a classroom, but
millions of students all over the world. That's exactly what Sal Khan is
doing on his website Khan Academy. With its digital lessons and simple
exercises, he's determined to transform how we learn at every level. One of
his most famous pupils, Bill Gates, says Khan -- this "teacher to the
world," is giving us all a glimpse of the future of education.
35-year-old Sal Khan may look like a bicycle
messenger, but with three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, his
errand is intensely intellectual. In his tiny office above a tea shop in
Silicon Valley, he settles in to do what he's done thousands of times
before.
[Sal Khan: We've talked a lot now about the
demand curve and consumer surplus. Now let's think about the supply curve.]
He's recording a 10-minute economics lesson. It's
so simple - all you hear is his voice and all you see is his colorful
sketches on a digital blackboard.
[Khan: In this video we are going to talk about
the law of demand.]
When Khan finishes the lecture, he uploads it to
his website - where it joins the more than 3,000 other lessons he's done. In
just a couple of years he's gone from having a few hundred pupils to more
than four million every month.
Sanjay Gupta: Has it sunk in to you that you are
probably the most watched teacher in the world now?
Khan: I, you know, I try not to say things like
that to myself. You don't want to think about it too much because it can I
think paralyze you a little bit.
[Khan: So if we get rid of the percent sign, we
move the decimal over...]
He's amassed a library of math lectures...
[Khan: 12 plus four is sixteen...]
Starting with basic addition and building all the
way through advanced calculus.
[Khan: We are taking limited delta x approach to
zero. It's the exact same thing.]
But he's not just a math wiz, he has this uncanny
ability to break down even the most complicated subjects, including physics,
biology, astronomy, history, medicine.
Gupta: How much reading do you do ahead of time?
Khan: It depends what I'm doing. If I'm doing
something that I haven't visited for a long time, you know, since high
school I'll go buy five textbooks in it. And I'll try to read every
textbook. I'll read whatever I can find on the Internet.
[Khan: Let's talk about one of the most
important biological processes...]
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Important takeaways from this video is that there are currently 40-50 million
users of Khan Academy. This has to be the future of learning technical modules,
although inspiration, learning motivation, and learning certification (e.g.,
grades) must have other sources. I might note that the video modules used in the
Khan Academy are very similar to the Camtasia Videos that I prepared to teach
technical details to my students in accounting theory and AIS ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/acct5342/
These videos may not run on Windows 7 machines because of something bad that
happened with Windows 7 ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/video/VideoCodecProblems.htm
The $50 million grant from the Gates Foundation enabled the Khan Academy to
hire some sophisticated engineers who, among other things, have written software
for tracking learning progress of users.
The most wonderful feature of the technical learning modules at the Khan
Academy is that there are thousands of them and they are all free. Students aged
10-100 can learn a vast amount of technical things if they are inspired and
motivated to do so for learning's sake. They are great supplements for courses
being taken for grades and transcripts. But they still only cover selected
disciplines in math, science, technology, and social science. The coverage is
still lacking in fields like accounting, law, and business except where
quantitative methods like statistical analysis may come into play. But the Khan
Academy is not finished adding new modules by any means.
I might add that I found some relatively advanced-level accountancy modules
at the Khan Academy such as CDO accounting and fair value accounting. But the
Khan Academy still does not come close to covering what we teach in accountancy,
auditing, tax and AIS relative what is taught in a mathematics curriculum.
I suspect it may one day become a little like YouTube where experts will add
video modules to Khan Academy. However, the postings to Khan Academy will no
doubt be subjected to quality control filters.
This is the wave of technical learning in the future. Video modules will not,
however, replace the importance of team learning, studies of complicated cases
that do not have definitive solutions (e.g., Harvard Business School Cases), and
interactions with faculty and students that inspire and motivate students to
want to learn more and more and more.
Lastly, I want to note that I don't see any way
possible not to love Sal Khan. He's an inspiration to the world.
Bob Jensen's threads on with wonderful free Khan Academy that now partners
with selected schools to provide free video tutorials that fit into curricula
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Scroll down to find tidbits on the Khan Academy
Free Math Helper Site
June 7, 2013 message from Julia
Howdy Bob,
I'm a struggling retired teacher over here putting
together my first web site. I was just wondering, if it isn't too much to
ask, could you please take a quick look at my web site and see if it meets
your standards for your Math Bookmarks area. All of my materials are free
and aligned to the core curriculum.
It has been really tough trying to get the word out
there to teachers. Everyone is so busy. Who has time? I appreciate your work
and time.
A 1,000 Thanks,
Julia Retired Middle School Math Teacher,
Mom of 3, Grandma of 4, and Tired
June 7, 2013 reply from Bob
Jensen
Hi Julia,
These should make great PDF supplements to Khan Academy videos. They must
have taken an incredible amount of time to produce.
Thank you for open sharing.
I will add your link at least in the following pages (near the Khan
Academy links). Please be patient. I may not get my revised pages down to my
Texas server until the next edition of Tidbits comes out on June 11.
In just a few short years, Salman Khan has built a free online
educational institution from scratch that has nudged major universities to
offer free self-guided courses and inspired many professors to change their
teaching methods.
His creation is called Khan Academy, and its
core is a library of thousands of 10-minute educational videos, most of them
created by Mr. Khan himself. The format is simple but feels intimate: Mr.
Khan's voice narrates as viewers watch him sketch out his thoughts on a
digital whiteboard. He made the first videos for faraway cousins who asked
for tutoring help. Encouraging feedback by others who watched the videos on
YouTube led him to start the academy as a nonprofit.
More recently Mr. Khan has begun adding what amounts to a robot tutor to
the site that can quiz visitors on their knowledge and point them to either
remedial video lessons if they fail or more-advanced video lessons if they
pass. The site issues badges and online "challenge patches" that students
can put on their Web résumés.
He guesses that the demand for his service was one inspiration for his
alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to start MITx, its
self-guided online courses that give students the option of taking
automatically graded tests to earn a certificate.
Mr. Khan also works the speaking circuit, calling on professors to move
away from a straight lecture model by assigning prerecorded lectures as
homework and using class time for more interactive exercises, or by having
students use self-paced computer systems like Khan Academy during class
while professors are available to answer questions. "It has made
universities—and I can cite examples of this—say, Why should we be giving
300-person lectures anymore?" he said in a recent interview with The
Chronicle.
Mr. Khan, now 35, has no formal training in education, though he does
have two undergraduate degrees and a master's from MIT, as well as an M.B.A.
from Harvard. He spent most of his career as a hedge-fund analyst. Mr. Khan
also has the personal endorsement of Bill Gates, as well as major financial
support from Mr. Gates's foundation. That outside-the-academy status makes
some traditional academics cool on his project.
"Sometimes I get a little frustrated when people say, Oh, they're taking
a Silicon Valley approach to education. I'm like, Yes, that's exactly right.
Silicon Valley is where the most creativity, the most open-ended, the most
pushing the envelope is happening," he says. "And Silicon Valley recognizes
more than any part of the world that we're having trouble finding students
capable of doing that."
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
In August 2004, Salman Khan agreed to help his
niece, Nadia, with her math homework. Nadia was headed into seventh grade in
New Orleans, where Khan had grown up, but she hadn't been placed in her
private school's advanced math track, which to a motivated parent these days
is a little bit like hearing your child has just been diagnosed with Lou
Gehrig's disease. In particular, Nadia was having trouble with unit
conversion, turning gallons into liters and ounces into grams.
Math was something Khan, then 28, understood. It
was one of his majors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along
with computer science and electrical engineering. He had gone on to get a
master's in computer science and electrical engineering, also at MIT, and
then an MBA from Harvard. He was working in Boston at the time for Daniel
Wohl, who ran a hedge fund called Wohl Capital Management. Khan, an analyst,
was the only employee.
Being a bit of a geek, Khan put Yahoo!'s (YHOO)
Messenger to work to help Nadia, using the Doodle function to let him
illustrate concepts for his niece as they spoke on the phone. Then he wrote
some code that generated problems she could do on a website. With Khan's
help, Nadia made it into the fast track, and her younger brothers Arman and
Ali signed on for Khan's tutoring as well. Then they brought in some of
their friends. Khan built his site out a little more, grouping the concepts
into "modules" and creating a database that would keep track of how many
problems the kids had tried and how they had fared, so he'd know how each of
his charges was progressing.
Messenger didn't make sense with multiple viewers,
so he started creating videos that he could upload to YouTube. This required
a Wacom tablet with an electronic pen, which cost about $80. The videos were
each about 10 minutes long and contained two elements: his blackboard-style
diagrams—Khan happens to be an excellent sketcher—and his voice-over
explaining things like greatest common divisors and equivalent fractions. He
posted the first video on Nov. 16, 2006; in it, he explained the basics of
least common multiples. Soon other students, not all children, were checking
out his videos, then watching them all, then sending him notes telling him
that he had saved their math careers, too.
Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has
turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure
in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan
Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last
month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by
comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each
month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition
and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in
a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit
crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He
masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April,
he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons.
His program has also spread from the homes of
online learners to classrooms around the world, to the point that, in at
least a few classrooms, it has supplanted textbooks. (Students often write
Khan that they aced a course without opening their texts, though Khan
doesn't post these notes on his site.) Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher
and Stanford University PhD candidate in education, puts it this way: "If
you're teaching math in this country right now, then there's pretty much no
way you haven't heard of Salman Khan."
Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of Khan
Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ a not-for-profit educational
organization. With the stated mission “of providing a high quality education
to anyone, anywhere”, the Academy supplies a free online collection of over
2,000 videos on mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, and economics.
In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin in
mathematics using Yahoo!’s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends
sought his tutorial, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the
tutorials on YouTube. Their popularity there and the testimonials of
appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance in 2009 and
focus on the Academy full-time.
Khan Academy’s channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
has 45+ million views so far and it’s one of YouTube’s most successful
academic partners.
In September 2010, Google announced they would be
providing the Khan Academy with $2 million to support the creation of more
courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into
the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of Project 10^100,
http://www.project10tothe100.com/.
But as someone who makes as much as a quarter of
his income from teaching college classes in any given year, and who also
spends a good amount of time speaking at conferences trying to help
professors incorporate technology and social media into their curriculum,
the view from the trenches is very different than the iPad-in-every-backpack
proponents would have you believe.
This is not to say that tech isn't changing the way
we teach and the way students learn: it most certainly is. But probably not
as fast as some people outside of higher ed think it is.
Since 2006,
Mashery has managed the APIs
for more than 100 brands such as The New York Times, Netflix, Best Buy
and Hoovers. Powering the more than 10,000 apps built upon these APIs,
Mashery enables its customers to distribute their content, data or
products to mobile devices and web mashups.
People who say
we're at the dawn of a new way of learning at the college level are
overlooking some rather significant economic and cultural hurdles. At
the same time, academic freedom means professors can choose to implement
technology a lot, a little bit or not at all into their curriculum. And
implementing it "a lot" isn't always a good thing, particularly if it
isn't used in a way that boosts learning outcomes.
We (Don't) Have
The Technology
If you were to
visit the library on the campus where I teach, you would see students
waiting to use outdated desktops in the computer labs and library,
particularly around midterms and finals week. It seems odd at first,
considering the school has a laptop requirement for all undergraduates.
That means you have to have a laptop computer when you enroll, and
presumably, as an instructor, I can require my students to bring them to
any class.
But here's the
reality: laptops break, and students can't afford replacements.
The mainstream
media has sold us a myth of college still being the place for the
ultra-elite, for kids who start compiling "brag sheets" in the fourth
grade and have parents that shell out five figures to hire a college
admissions coach.
But in
practice, most college students these days are like the ones I teach at
a four-year state college: they are, by-and-large, the first in their
family to attend college. Almost all of my students work, and many work
full-time or multiple part-time jobs. Some are parents. An increasing
number are so-called nontraditional students and are enrolling after an
extended break from education. These students often support families
and, in many case, have college-aged children who need their own
laptops.
Now factor in
that the fastest growing segment of higher education are community
colleges, which by-and-large draw kids from working class backgrounds or
cater to people who have been laid off and are trying to get trained for
a new career.
For a lot of
students, replacing a broken laptop is a choice between skipping a rent
payment or sucking it up and waiting in those long lines at the computer
lab. Asking them to shell out for an iPad on top of the laptop just
isn't feasible for many college students, and that means its going to
take longer to get everyone on board with the tech revolution in higher
ed.
Tenure Doesn't
Equal Tech Savvy
One of the
concerns among students on the campus where I teach is that the
university employs an alert system that sends them text and email
messages if there is a life-threatening emergency on campus (think
Virginia Tech in 2007). But what are they supposed to do, these students
ask, if they're in a class where the teacher bans them from using
smartphones and laptops?
Academic
freedom means professors get to run their classrooms in the way they
want, and that includes choosing the tools they use to teach. Having sat
in meetings where faculty members have threatened to file union
complaints because email means students can - GASP! - contact them at
any time, I think we're a ways off from blanket incorporation of social
media and tablet textbooks across the curriculum.
These same
professors, many of whom predate the Internet era in higher ed, never
concede that email also means fewer student visits during office hours
for simple questions, which means more time to get actual work done.
This isn't meant as a knock on them, but there are varying degrees of
enthusiasm for incorporating tech into teaching and, unlike high
schools, tech enthusiasm can't be mandated by a curriculum committee.
High School's
Chilling Effects
Career
academics are not, however, the only ones to blame. A lot of students
come to college with backward views of what social media is and what it
can accomplish. And most importantly, what is and isn't acceptable on
social media.
And why shouldn't they? They come from
schools where teachers can be reprimanded or even fired for connecting
with students on social networks. Several schools across the country are
implementing bans on teachers friending not only current students but
former students on
Facebook.
There's no easy
fix for overcoming these preexisting biases. Step one, as a professor,
is make sure you don't use Facebook for classwork: even though it's the
default social network for so many of us, there's still too much of a
creep factor in crossing that student-professor line (and, frankly, with
Facebook's ever-shifting privacy policies, even if you think you're
protected you may end up seeing stuff about your students you'd be
better off not knowing about).
But that leaves
us to decide which social network we should use with our students.
Dedicated social networks like the one being rolled out for students by
Microsoft seem like a good idea, but my own experience is that a site
students check for reasons other than school tends to produce more
frequent check-ins and a more organic discussion about classwork, which
is exactly what I want to accomplish with social media in my classes.
I tried using
Google+
last September, only to be thwarted in a freshman writing class where
some of the students were not yet 18. Google has since relaxed its age
restrictions, but the social network is still too new for students to
gravitate toward it. In my experiment, students found it confusing, or
at least less intuitive than Facebook, and I was finding most would only
use it if I mandated it.
I've had the best luck with
Twitter,
including the use of it in a film class so we can
discuss the film as we're screening it each week (for a sample, see this
storify of tweets from the class discussion of Shawshank Redmeption).
But, again, only about half of my
students will use it if I don't require it. And of the students who
start using it because I require it in my class, fewer than 10% will
continue to use it when the semester ends.
Hope On The
Horizon: The Kindle Effect
The people I
thought would be stingiest about adopting technology in their classrooms
have, in many cases, been the most willing to change. I now see a lot of
those seemingly stodgy old English professors walking around campus with
a Kindle tucked under their arm.
HETL is a professional organization dedicated to
advancing teaching and learning in higher education. It got its start on
LinkedIn with discussion groups. To participate in the discussion group, a
collegiate teacher (and now doctoral students) would have to apply. If the
applicant had 2-5 years experience teaching in higher education (and met
certain disclosure requirements on their profile), they were admitted.
LinkedIn membership is now over 10,000 and rapidly climing. I believe it is
the largest LinkedIn discussion group. Knowing me, you'd probably expect
that I'd get involved in the discussions. I have. I answered a call for
volunteers, and am now a reviewer for its publications. There are two
refereed venues. One is for commentary pieces on higher education. So far,
contributors have been well-known academics such as Dee Fink. The other is
an on-line journal.
Currently, HETL has a call out for volunteers to expand its editorial and
review boards. Information can be found at the HETL portal (http://hetl.org).
While there, you can see that an option is to join with a paid membership
($60 per year).
I really like the give and take with profs from around the world. There
were over 450 comments on a thread about whether or not to be a Facebook
friend with a student.
You can find out more information about the group from the web site:
http://hetl.org
US News Top Online Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Do not confuse this with the US News project to evaluate for-profit universities
--- a project hampered by refusal of many for-profit universiteis to provide
data
Data collection commenced on July 14, 2011, using a
password-protected online system. Drawing from its Best
Colleges universe of regionally accredited
bachelor's granting institutions, U.S.News & World Report E-mailed
surveys to the 1,765 regionally accredited institutions it determined had
offered bachelor's degree programs in 2010.
U.S. News & World Report has published its
first-ever guide to online degree programs—but distance-education leaders
looking to trumpet their high rankings may find it more difficult to brag
about how they placed than do their colleagues at residential institutions.
Unlike the magazine's annual rankings of
residential colleges, which cause consternation among many administrators
for reducing the value of each program into a single headline-friendly
number, the new guide does not provide lists based on overall program
quality; no university can claim it hosts the top online bachelor's or
online master's program. Instead, U.S. News produced "honor rolls"
highlighting colleges that consistently performed well across the ranking
criteria.
Eric Brooks, a U.S. News data research
analyst, said the breakdown of the rankings into several categories was
intentional; his team chose its categories based on areas with enough
responses to make fair comparisons.
"We're only ranking things that we felt the
response rates justified ranking this year," he said.
The rankings, which will be published today,
represent a new chapter in the 28-year history of the U.S. News
guide. The expansion was brought on by the rapid growth of online learning.
More than six million students are now taking at least one course online,
according to a recent survey of more than 2,500 academic leaders by the
Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board.
U.S. News ranked colleges with bachelor's
programs according to their performance in three categories: student
services, student engagement, and faculty credentials. For programs at the
master's level, U.S. News added a fourth category, admissions
selectivity, to produce rankings of five different disciplines: business,
nursing, education, engineering, and computer information technology.
To ensure that the inaugural rankings were
reliable, Mr. Brooks said, U.S. News developed its ranking
methodology after the survey data was collected. Doing so, he said, allowed
researchers to be fair to institutions that interpreted questions
differently.
Some distance-learning experts criticized that
technique, however, arguing that the methodology should have been
established before surveys were distributed.
Russell Poulin, deputy director of research and
analysis for the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, which
promotes online education as part of the Western Interstate Commission for
Higher Education, said that approach allowed U.S. News to ask the
wrong questions, resulting in an incomplete picture of distance-learning
programs.
"It sort of makes me feel like I don't know who won
the baseball game, but I'll give you the batting average and the number of
steals and I'll tell you who won," he said. Mr. Poulin and other critics
said any useful rankings of online programs should include information on
outcomes like retention rates, employment prospects, and debt
load—statistics, Mr. Brooks said, that few universities provided for this
first edition of the U.S. News rankings. He noted that the surveys
will evolve in future years as U.S. News learns to better tailor
its questions to the unique characteristics of online programs.
W. Andrew McCollough, associate provost for
information technology, e-learning, and distance education at the University
of Florida, said he was "delighted" to discover that his institution's
bachelor's program was among the four chosen for honor-roll inclusion. He
noted that U.S. News would have to customize its questions in the
future, since he found some of them didn't apply to online programs. He
attributed that mismatch to the wide age distribution and other diverse
demographic characteristics of the online student body.
The homogeneity that exists in many residential
programs "just doesn't exist in the distance-learning environment," he said.
Despite the survey's flaws, Mr. McCollough said, the effort to add to the
body of information about online programs is helpful for prospective
students.
Turnout for the surveys varied, from a 50 percent
response rate among nursing programs to a 75 percent response rate among
engineering programs. At for-profit institutions—which sometimes have a
reputation for guarding their data closely—cooperation was mixed, said Mr.
Brooks. Some, like the American Public University System, chose to
participate. But Kaplan University, one of the largest providers of online
education, decided to wait until the first rankings were published before
deciding whether to join in, a spokesperson for the institution said.
Though this year's rankings do not make definitive
statements about program quality, Mr. Brooks said the research team was
cautious for a reason and hopes the new guide can help students make
informed decisions about the quality of online degrees.
"We'd rather not produce something in its first
year that's headline-grabbing for the wrong reasons," he said.
'Honor Roll' From 'U.S. News' of Online Graduate Programs
in Business
Institution
Teaching
Practices and Student Engagement
Student
Services and Technology
Faculty
Credentials and Training
Admissions
Selectivity
Arizona State U., W.P. Carey School of Business
24
32
37
11
Arkansas State U.
9
21
1
36
Brandman U. (Part of the Chapman U. system)
40
24
29
n/a
Central Michigan U.
11
3
56
9
Clarkson U.
4
24
2
23
Florida Institute of Technology
43
16
23
n/a
Gardner-Webb U.
27
1
15
n/a
George Washington U.
20
9
7
n/a
Indiana U. at Bloomington, Kelley School of Business
29
19
40
3
Marist College
67
23
6
5
Quinnipiac U.
6
4
13
16
Temple U., Fox School of Business
39
8
17
34
U.
of Houston-Clear Lake
8
21
18
n/a
U.
of Mississippi
37
44
20
n/a
Source: U.S. News & World
Report
Jensen Comment
I don't know why the largest for-profit universities that generally provide more
online degrees than the above universities combined are not included in the
final outcomes. For example, the University of Phoenix alone as has over 600,000
students, most of whom are taking some or all online courses.
My guess is that most for-profit universities are not forthcoming with the
data requested by US News analysts. Note that the US News
condition that the set of online programs to be considered be regionally
accredited does not exclude many for-profit universities. For example, enter in
such for-profit names as "University of Phoenix" or "Capella University" in the
"College Search" box at
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-phoenix-20988
These universities are included in the set of eligible regionally accredited
online degree programs to be evaluated. They just did not do well in the above
"Honor Roll" of outcomes for online degree programs.
For-profit universities may have shot themselves in the foot by not providing
the evaluation data to US News for online degree program evaluation. But
there may b e reasons for this. For example, one of the big failings of most
for-profit online degree programs is in undergraduate "Admissions Selectivity."
1. Tuition and Campaigns:
The cost of higher ed will become a major campaign issue in 2012.
Candidates will have competing diagnoses for the issue, and competing plans
to make higher ed both more affordable and more available. Educational
technology and blended/online learning will receive lots of attention.
2. For-Profits and Open Education: The (welcome) surprise
of 2012 will be an existing for-profit higher ed provider making an
important and significant contribution to the open education movement.
For-profits will step up to open learning for purely practical and
self-interested reasons, namely the need to improve brand positioning and
status, but this will not matter as all lifelong learners will benefit.
3. Kindle Subscription Model: Amazon will surprise the
doubters and finally introduce an "all-you-can-read" KIndle subscription
model. The price point will be high enough ($1 dollar a day) to exclude all
but the most dedicated biblioholics, but the program will be way more
successful (in terms of people signed up and Kindle devices sold) than
Amazon could predict.
4. Media Management and Lecture Capture Tie-Up: We will
see a merger between some lecture capture company (Echo360, Panopto,
MediaSite, Tegrity) and some media management player (Kaltura, Ensemble,
ShareStream). This tie-up might be a merger, but more likely will be the
result of a purchase by a larger company (publishing or tech) or an
investment from a private equity group.
5. A LMS Data Loss Event: Someplace, somewhere, something
very bad will occur. This will be the loss of a significant number of
courses with the associated course data -- and these courses will not be
retrievable. This event will accelerate the adoption of cloud-based, LMS-as-a-service
models, as local LMS installs are at higher risk than industrial grade
distributed LMS/database cloud services.
6. China Investment: A Chinese company (backed by the
state) will make a major investment in a U.S. ed tech company and/or a
for-profit EDU provider. The Chinese higher education market is currently
huge but poor, in the future it will be both bigger and richer. China will
not be able to build enough campus-based universities to meet demand, and
will need to find methods to quickly scale postsecondary blended and online
higher ed. These will be strategic investments on the part of China.
7. Academic Library / Amazon Breakthrough: 2012 will be the
year that academic librarians and Amazon finally enter into a productive
relationship. Amazon will figure out that today's college students are
tomorrow's e-book buyers, and will finally understand that the academic
library is an incredible resource and partner.
8. Amazon Purchases: Amazon will get into the digital
textbook and digital coursepack market in a big way with a major purchase (XanEdu
or Study.net or Atavist or Inkling or some other). My money is on Amazon
also buying Netflix or Hulu, solidifying its position as the great content
aggregator and distributor of the early 21st century.
Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already
destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After
a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and
continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He's also written
books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of
Judaism, and the 1939 World's Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary
opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied
interests.
To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial
fulfillment of something he's been writing about and thinking about since
the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic
and more useful than today's. His preferred term is "lifestream." Whatever
you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.
Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is
credited in some circles for having coined the term "the cloud." But what
preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for
organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the
cybersphere.
On the desktop, he says, "The file system was
already broken in the early '90s, the hierarchical system. Namespaces were
saturated. I was sick of making up names like nsfproposal319. The file
system got too crowded and people started crowding their desktops with
icons."
On top of this complexity soon arrived the
complexity of the Web, the mass of digital objects we know today, connected
by hyperlinks but organized in a way satisfying to no one, except possibly
Google. "The current shape of the Web is the same shape as the Internet
hardware," says Mr. Gelernter. "The Internet hardware is lots of computers
wired together into a nothing-shaped cobweb. The Web itself is a lot of
websites hyperlinked together into a nothing-shaped cobweb."
The failure of the Internet to organize itself into
a more useful metaphor is precisely what needs fixing. "It is impossible to
picture the Web. It's a big fuzzy nothing. I sort of tiptoe around tiny
areas of it shining a flashlight."
We sit in his family's modest, woodsy home a few
miles north of New Haven. Because the Unabomber experience has so colored
the press's interest in him, Mr. Gelernter, in profiles, tends to come
across as grim. He's anything but grim. He's a bit of a comedian, in a
deadpan sort of way. He cites the "most talked about" part of one of his
books, but quickly adds, "not that any part was greatly talked about."
In that book, 1991's "Mirror Worlds," Mr. Gelernter
described a future in which all our activities would be mirrored on the Web.
Almost as soon as it was published he began thinking about a radical new way
to organize our digital mirror world. He started a company to pursue his
vision, but it was not well conceived and went out of business after a few
years. Today its patents, now owned by an investor group, are at the center
of a major lawsuit with Apple.
The idea, though, of lifestreams has been catching
on. A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails,
documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in
essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments,
to-do lists, etc.). Facebook, with its "wall" constantly updated with
postings by you and your friends, is a lifestream. Twitter's feed is a
lifestream. "Chatter," developed by Salesforce.com for internal use by
client companies, is a lifestream.
Mr. Gelernter believes streams are a more
intuitive, useful way to organize our digital lives, not least because, as
the past and future run off either side of our screen, at the center is
now—and now is what the Internet really is about.
Eventually business models based on streaming will
dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world's data will be presented
as a "worldstream," some of it public, most of it proprietary, available
only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users
will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their
digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream
will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.
"I can visualize the worldstream," says Mr.
Gelernter, explaining its advantages. "I know what it looks like. I know
what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream
that is a subset of the worldstream. So when I focus the stream, by doing a
search on Sam Schwartz"—a hypothetical student—"I do stream subtraction.
Everything that isn't related to Schwartz that I'm allowed to see vanishes.
And then the stream moves much more slowly. Because Sam Schwartz documents
are being added at a much slower rate than all the documents in the world.
So now I have a manageable trickle of stuff."
A stream is any stream you care to describe. "These
very simple operations, which correspond to physical intuitions, are going
to give people a much more transparent feeling about the Net. People will
understand it better, and the Net itself will support what is clearly
emerging as its most important function, which is to present relevant
information in time."
His son Daniel, a recent Yale graduate, sits in on
our interview. His apparent dual mission is to tout the inevitable triumph
of a new company the two are working on while making sure Mr. Gelernter
doesn't say anything to queer his former company's pending lawsuit against
Apple.
Mr. Gelernter himself grew up in the suburbs of New
York, visiting Brooklyn regularly where both sets of grandparents lived. He
believes America, and especially its educational system, has gone downhill
in some ways since then. He recalls a time, in the 1960s, when poets like
Robert Frost and painters like Jackson Pollock were as closely followed by
the "educated middle class" as TV celebrities are today.
Mr. Gelernter's father studied physics and became a
pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence at IBM, so growing up Mr.
Gelernter was "familiar with software and found it a comfortable topic." His
ambition, from a very early age, was to be an important painter, but at Yale
he pursued computing "as a path to supporting a family, which is a very
important obligation in Judaism. Computing in the 70s and early 80s," he
adds, "was not a path to absurd wealth. It was a path to well-paying jobs,
compared to people in the English department."
There followed happy days and nights in the
computing lab, which might have come straight from the memoirs of Bill Gates
or other computing superstars. His early work on parallel computing—in which
many computers cooperate on tasks—made him a superstar too.
His targeting by Theodore Kaczynski, living in a
shack in Montana and waging his deranged war against modernity, has been
told often enough. Mr. Gelernter was lucky to survive a mail bomb that tore
open his chest and abdomen, mangled his right hand and eye. His blood
pressure is said to have been undetectable by the time he stumbled from his
office to a Yale clinic nearby. Today the glove on his right hand, mentioned
in every media account, I learn is not a concession to those around him, but
a prosthesis. "It allows me to get some use out of the hand. It's all ripped
up and stuff, patched together."
He takes medicine for pain and visits a pain
specialist regularly, but he has come to see himself as lucky compared to
other chronic pain sufferers—able to "operate in the world, and do the
things you want to do. It could have been a lot worse," he says.
The question posed at the top was meant
whimsically. Mr. Gelernter, by any measure, is living a rich life. He has
been making paintings since childhood. Lately he has allowed his work to be
sold and next year will bring what he calls "an important event for me," his
first museum show at Yeshiva University Art Gallery. He sees his work
building on the "discoveries" of the New York abstract expressionists as
well as the flat panels of Medieval devotional art. Interestingly, he also
sees a similar new-old artistic potential in the high-definition video
display: "Since the richness of stained glass emerged in the late 12th
century, for the first time there is a new luminous art medium—a medium for
creating glowing art."
Mr. Gelernter sold his first company, Mirror Worlds
Technologies, and its intellectual property to an investor group years ago.
The buyer insisted on giving him a small stake in the outcome of its patent
lawsuits, and last year a jury handed down an eye-popping $625 million
verdict against Apple for infringing lifestream-related patents in its
Macintosh and iPhone operating systems. In April, the judge in the case
overruled the jury and tossed out the award. The matter is now under appeal.
Mr. Gelernter says the former company has no
relation to a new venture he and Daniel are working on—though Daniel is
quick to note that they will be obtaining a license for the Mirror Worlds
technology, as Apple supposedly should have done.
The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just
beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for
the Apple iPad. "We like the pad," he says. "A particular goal is to create
a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and
includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way
Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the
place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software.
They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students
at Yale." The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that
can be sold to advertisers.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Facebook
started at Harvard and branched out to other universities before conquering
the world. Facebook, which has evolved into a stream by which users tell
their own stories and read each other's stories, is "plugging a very
important gap in the cybersphere, but I don't think it's plugging it in an
elegant way," says Mr. Gelernter. "I don't think Facebook will be around
forever."
Educause and the New Media Consortium have released
the
2011 Horizon Report, an annual study of emerging
issues in technology in higher education. The issues that are seen as likely
to have great impact:
Over the next year: e-books and mobile
devices.
From two to three years out: augmented reality
and game-based learning.
From four to five years out: gesture-based
computing and learning analytics.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has created
this terrific site
which brings together many of their data sets, charts, and graphs in one
convenient location. Here visitors can look over ten different data sets,
including "Who's Online", "Online Activities", and "Daily Internet
Activities". Some of these data sets are available as Excel files, and they
will be of tremendous benefit to journalists, educators, and public policy
scholars. Visitors are encouraged to use this data for a variety of
reporting purposes and other needs, and they may also wish to click on the
"Research Toolkit" as well. Here they will find experts, additional data
sets, and survey questions from previous surveys.
Question
Why is the annual Educause Conference "weird?"
"Singapore's Newest University Is an Education Lab for Technology With
vital input from MIT—and China—an unorthodox idea takes shape, with implications
beyond the city-state's borders," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of
Higher Education, November 28, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/
Every year automakers roll out "concept" cars,
which incorporate novel design elements that may become standard years from
now. Singapore has taken the rarer step of building a concept university,
one meant to road-test the latest in teaching theory and academic features.
Singapore University of Technology and Design, now
under construction, is a big gamble for a high-tech city-state that
considers a globally competitive work force its key to national survival.
Government officials are betting more than $700-million that the new venture
will cultivate the next generation of innovators in architecture,
engineering, and information systems.
One selling point of the institution, which is to
start classes on a temporary campus in 2012, is that it is associated with
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On many renderings of the logo,
the words "Established in collaboration with MIT" appear in red letters,
suggesting that the new venture expects to replicate the prestigious U.S.
university.
But it will be anything but a carbon copy. MIT
researchers are treating Singapore's new university as an education
laboratory where they can try out new teaching methods and curriculum, some
of which may then be taken back to Cambridge.
"Our guiding philosophy has been to try to
establish something that's very distinctive," says Thomas L. Magnanti, the
Singapore institution's first president, who is a former dean of engineering
at MIT. "If we just went and decided to build a new comprehensive
university, in 20 years we may not stand out."
MIT has had mixed success in exporting its brand.
It was forced to close branch campuses of its Media Lab in Ireland and India
after only a few years of operation, after they failed to gain enough
financial support. But it has long worked well with universities in
Singapore. For years the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
has supported joint research, and MIT helps run the thriving Singapore-MIT
Gambit Game Lab to explore video-game design.
The Singapore leaders are not counting only on MIT,
though. The new university has also forged a link with a top Chinese
research institution, Zhejiang University, which will design some courses,
provide internship opportunities, and conduct joint research. Singapore is
even importing an ancient Chinese building, donated by the movie star Jackie
Chan, to remind students of Eastern design traditions.
"Singapore within the region seems to be stepping
into the deeper waters of the global-university phenomenon," says Gerard A.
Postiglione, a professor of social science at the University of Hong Kong
and director of China's Wah Ching Centre of Research on Education. He
speculates that government leaders in Singapore may hope that the
unconventional institution will spur educational innovations that can be
adopted by the nation's other universities as well.
The "design" in the new university's name does not
mean fashion design. Engineering is the focus, and "design" was used to
suggest the mission of taking on real-world problems and quickly moving
research from the lab to the marketplace.
Will this "distinctive" new university prove to be
a model for the future of education in engineering and design, or will some
of its methods prove not ready for the open road?
No Boundaries Sitting in a conference room in the
university's temporary office space on a recent afternoon, Pey Kin-Leong,
associate provost, outlines the venture's unusual model. On the wall behind
him hang blueprints of buildings that will one day rise on the future
campus.
From Day 1, students will be encouraged to apply
what they've learned to their own designs, and to find applications for the
theories they learn in class, he says.
Traditional disciplinary boundaries will be played
down. For the first three semesters, all students will go through the same
battery of courses, whether they want to end up as architects,
technology-systems managers, or mechanical engineers. That's one semester
longer for the core curriculum than at MIT.
In their junior and senior years, students will
choose one of four "pillars": architecture, engineering product development,
engineering systems, or information systems. Those will be the closest
things to majors at the new university, which won't have traditional
academic departments.
All students will be required to work in teams to
create a final design project and bring it to life.
If a team decided to design a "smart house," for
instance, an architecture student would draw the blueprints, technology
designers would plan the sensors and other electronics, and the
engineering-systems concentrators would help it all work together.
"We want our students to be able to communicate and
interact, and cut across the pillars," says Mr. Pey.
Zhejiang University is designing five elective
courses for the Singapore institution, all focused on familiarizing students
with the cultural aspects of China as an increasingly influential economic
power. Among the proposed course titles: "Business Culture and
Entrepreneurship in China," "Sustainability of Ancient Chinese Architectural
Design in the Modern World," and "History of Chinese Urban Development and
Planning."
"Because the Chinese market is huge, this is an
opportunity that we are going to give to our students," says Mr. Pey. "If we
can understand their mind-set, when our students do the design, the design
will be very appealing to people in the Chinese market."
The Singapore university will also connect its
students with internship opportunities in the United States, in China, and
at a group of major technology companies in the city-state that have agreed
to take part.
"The uniquely Singapore part is we have a chance to
expose ourselves to multicultural influences," says Mr. Pey. "We're a cross
point between East and West."
The university has already selected its first class
of students (82 said yes out of 119 who were admitted), mostly from
Singapore, some of whom delayed starting college to wait for these doors to
open. Eventually, an enrollment of 4,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduate
students is expected; the university says it will meet a government
requirement of admitting 20 to 30 percent of its students from abroad.
Government officials would not reveal the venture's
exact price tag, but Chong Tow Chong, the provost, says the government is
spending at least one billion Singapore dollars—about $771-million—to build
the campus and hire professors from around the world. Enlightened
Self-Interest Singapore chose MIT to collaborate in the new university after
reviewing bids from several major institutions in the United States and
Europe. For MIT, the draw was to upgrade its own curriculum, says Sanjay
Emani Sarma, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering who directs its role
in the collaboration.
Despite predictions that the growth of online
education would begin to level off, colleges reported the highest-ever
annual increase in online enrollment—more than 21 percent—last year,
according to a
report on an annual survey of 2,600
higher-education institutions from the Sloan Consortium and the Babson
Survey Research Group.
In fall 2009, colleges—including public, nonprofit
private, and for-profit private institutions—reported that one million more
students were enrolled in at least one Web-based course, bringing the total
number of online students to 5.6 million. That unexpected increase—which
topped the previous year’s
17-percent rise—may have been helped by higher
demand for education in a rocky economy and an uptick in the number of
colleges adopting online courses.
Although the survey found sustained interest in
online courses across all sectors, there was a spike in the number of
for-profit institutions—a 20-percent increase over last year—that said
online education is critical to their long-term strategies. However, more
public colleges than private for-profits—74.9 percent versus 60.5
percent—say it’s part of their long-term plans.
Elaine Allen, associate professor of statistics and
entrepreneurship at Babson College and co-director of the Babson Survey
Research Group, said that the disproportionate increase in the for-profit
sector may mean that online programs are becoming their “bread and butter.”
Colleges are telling themselves that “if we want to grow and have profits,
we need to be in the online sector,” she said.
Increased government scrutiny of the for-profit
sector has complicated plans for expansion online. Approximately 32 percent
of for-profit institutions—compared with about 17 percent of public
colleges—said it will be difficult to comply with
government regulations on financial aid. Those new
regulations include a pending “gainful
employment” rule that could cut off federal aid to
programs with high levels of student debt relative to what students make
after graduation—a move that could slash revenue for institutions dependent
on student-aid money. “For the first time, we saw the government regulate
financial aid and some kind of return on investment,” Ms. Allen said. “The
for-profits are feeling the pressure there.”
Administrators also continue to wrestle with the
question of quality in online education. According to the survey report,
“Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010,” 66 percent
of college administrators say that online education is the same as or better
than face-to-face classes—a slight decline from last year. Still, Ms. Allen
said it appears that more faculty members are warming up to online education
as a quality alternative to face-to-face learning and are finding new ways
to use the technology.
Ms. Allen expects Web enrollment to plateau as more
competitors—whether they are Web programs from established universities or
from new for-profit institutions—hit the market. And for-profit colleges
will probably take advantage of their more-nimble business models to expand
much more rapidly online than will their government-reliant public
competitors. As more budget cuts loom, public institutions are already
beginning to “feel competition from the for-profits,” she said.
Jensen Comment
One of the biggest issues when the West views the East, is the alleged failure
of many parts of the East to honor the West's copyrights and patents on advances
in technology and the failure to not only pay royalties but to profit from
distribution of the West's books and software and some hardware.
School districts and college campuses across the
country are trying to grab students' attention and teach them in ways they
learn best. That means they're adding social media features to learning
management systems, offering more online and blended courses, and taking
advantage of mobile devices.
Check out the top trends in learning management
systems, online learning and mobile computing identified in a 2010
Software & Information
Industry Association report released this month.
Learning management systems
In 2008, 35 percent of the K-12 schools surveyed
said they had no plans to buy a
learning management system, but lower prices and
higher federal accountability requirements will change their minds,
according to the report. And when they do change their minds, they'll be
looking for digital content and professional development to go along with
the systems.
They'll also be looking for tools including
curriculum planning and lesson management. These tools allow them to create
detailed lesson plans for individual students and assign digital curriculum
lessons to students.
In higher education, professors increasingly rely
on digital content and use social media to teach their students. They're
also adding more online classes and reducing administrative costs. As a
result, learning management systems should be incorporating rich Internet
applications, social media, user-generated content, mobile devices, Software
as a Service and business process management systems.
Faculty members expect to do a number of tasks in
learning management systems:
Post grades, access class rosters
Set up class chats to answer questions
Hold electronic office hours
Add course assignments to student calendars
Send announcements to the class
Access enhanced learning management and course
management systems
Online learning
The e-learning market has been expanding steadily,
and over the next four years, forecasters predict that K-12 online learning
will advance at a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent, while higher
education will grow at 8 percent.
In online learning, blended or hybrid classes that
combine face-to-face and online instruction are popping up, particularly in
higher education. And the expansion of
open source content on sites such as Flatworld
Knowledge, Curriki and CK12 give teachers and professors more options to
potentially save money.
Mobile devices, WiMAX technology, podcasts and
software tools allow students to learn any time, anywhere. And that
mobile computing experience is what they're
looking for.
Mobile computing
In the past two years,
netbooks have arrived on the scene, but their
sales are already growing more than 200 percent per year. K-12 schools
adopt them at a higher rate because many of them provide devices for their
students. Netbook trends include 10-inch screens, faster processors, longer
battery life and built-in wireless wide area networks.
Laptop use is still growing steadily, but not as
fast as it was previously. Laptop trends include LED backlights, backlit
keyboards, more rugged mechanical designs, larger hard drives, newer
processor designs and increased availability of 3G/4G wireless wide area
network support.
Meanwhile, tablet computers are becoming more
popular in postsecondary education, and companies are creating smartbooks
that have long battery lives of about two days.
More people view Web pages through smart phones and
cell phones than through computers. Cell phones have become widely accepted
in postsecondary education, while many K-12 districts still ban them in the
classroom.
As far as operating systems go, Microsoft Windows
leads the pack on desktop and laptop systems. But Mac OS X from Apple,
Windows Mobile, iPhone OS, Symbian, Linux and Android have entered the
mobile market.
On the connectivity side, most postsecondary
campuses have robust WiFi, but less than 30 percent of K-12 classrooms have
robust WiFi access. While WiFi has been around for more than 10 years, WiMAX is
coming on the scenes as a 4G wide area data service in the U.S. And don't
forget the cellular 3G and 4G data services for smart phones.
While these are some trends that are happening now
and in the next year or two, the report also forecasts what education
technology will look like in the future. In the next five years, the report
predicts that
cloud computing,
cell phone use and 3G and 4G data plans will
become mainstream in education.
If there were any doubts about the Obama
administration's intentions toward education technology, the
United States Department of
Education settled them Friday with the release of
the first public draft of the
National Education Technology Plan (NETP). The
114-page document reveals an intent not only to infuse technology throughout
the curriculum (and beyond), but to implement some major--sometimes
radical--changes to education itself.
The plan, titled "Transforming American Education:
Learning Powered by Technology," sets forth, in part, a manifesto for
change, questioning many of the basic structures of American education,
enumerating the principles of change that are the foundation for the plan,
and setting goals and recommendations for achieving this change.
Questioning Assumptions and Establishing
Principles
Some of the assumptions the plan questions are foundational in public
education, including age-determined grade levels, measuring achievement
through "seat time," keeping students in the same classes throughout the
year, and even keeping individual academic disciplines separate. It also,
however, seems to advocate a "more is more" approach, continuing Education
Secretary Arne Duncan's previous call for longer school days and school
weeks (spent in physical classrooms), in addition to the extension of
learning though technological means.
The draft also seems to question, at times, the
basic premise that K-12 should be limited to the confines of kindergarten
through 12th grade. The plan advocates tighter integration between K-12 and
higher education, using the phrase "K-16" on a few occasions and referencing
"K-12" generally (but not exclusively) in relation to higher education, and,
in particular, in the context of collaboration between secondary and
post-secondary institutions.
For example:
Postsecondary education institutions--community
colleges and 4-year colleges and universities--will need to partner more
closely with K-12 schools to remove barriers to postsecondary education
and put plans of their own in place to decrease dropout rates.
And elsewhere:
The Department of Education should promote
partnerships between two- and four-year postsecondary education
institutions, K-12 schools, and educational technology developers in the
private and public sectors to design programs and resources to engage
students and motivate them to graduate from high school ready for
postsecondary education. Support should start as soon as possible in
students' educational careers and intensify for students who need it.
States, districts, and schools should experiment with such resources as
online learning and online tutoring and mentoring, as well as with
participatory communities and social networks both within and across
education institutions to give students guidance and information about
their own learning progress and their opportunities for the future.
Meanwhile, the guiding principles behind NETP, as
stated in the draft, follow along these lines as well, rejecting many
current practices and favoring new approaches to everything from teaching
and assessment to the role of the federal government in education.
At the core is the principle that technology should
be the driving force behind implementation of the education plan. As stated
in the NETP draft:
The model depends on technology to provide
engaging and powerful learning content, resources, and experiences and
assessment systems that measure student achievement in more complete,
authentic and meaningful ways. Technology-based learning and assessment
systems will be pivotal in improving student learning and generating
data that can be used to continuously improve the education system at
all levels. The model depends on technology to execute collaborative
teaching strategies combined with professional learning strategies that
better prepare and enhance educators' competencies and expertise over
the course of their careers.
The model also depends on every student and
educator having Internet access devices and broadband Internet
connections and every student and educator being comfortable using them.
It depends on technology to redesign and implement processes to produce
better outcomes while achieving ever-higher levels of productivity and
efficiency across the education system.
The document also lists several other principles on
which the plan is based, including:
The education system is failing in large part
owing to a failure to engage students.
Learning experiences need to change with the
times.
Assessment needs to be more formative.
Data collected on students would be better
used if it could be shared amongst agencies.
There should be new approaches to teaching,
including collaborative teaching teams and technology-driven distance
programs.
Groundwork should be laid to make learning
resources available everywhere at all times to all students.
Industry can serve as a model for leveraging
technology.
The federal government has a larger role to
play in education than it has in the past.
Goals and Recommendations
NETP sets out goals in five broad areas: learning, assessment, teaching,
infrastructure, and productivity.And it lays out 23 recommendations to help
achieve those goals.
In the category of learning, NETP
strongly advocates a 21st century skills approach . . .
As students increasingly
learn on the go, they demand that their colleges and universities stay up to
date on the latest technology.
"Technology’s like the
golden goose, and it’s improving at this rate that’s unprecedented, but I’m
concerned that the academy will fall behind," said Adrian Sannier,
vice president, university technology officer and professor of computing studies
at Arizona State University.
That's where the 2010 Horizon Reportcomes in. The annual report of theNew Media Consortium's
Horizon Projectdescribes up and coming
technologies that college campuses will likely mainstream within the next five
years, as well as key trends they are experiencing and critical challenges that
they will face.
6 technologies to track
Time to adoption
horizon: One year or less
1.
Mobile computing
Smart phones,
netbooks,
laptopsand other devices that access the
Internet through cellular-based, portable hotspots and mobile broadband cards
have already become mainstream on many campuses.
At Georgetown University, the administration texts short messages to students,
and profesors use screen recording software to create podcasts of their lectures
that can be downloaded onto mobile phones, said Betsy Page Sigman,
a professor who teaches management information systems, databases and electronic
commerce at the university'sMcDonough School of
Business.
2.Open
content
As textbook prices have
soared over the years, educational resources have popped up online at no cost to
the students and faculty who want to use them.
Open content has had a huge impact on the way
colleges do business, said Brian Parish, the president of iData Inc,
a higher education technology consulting and software solutions firm based in
Virginia.
However, some educators resist open content because they want to protect their
intellectual property, not because they don't
like the technology.
“A lot of people want to use open content on the faculty and staff side, but
they don’t want to make their stuff open content,” Parish said.
Time to adoption horizon: Two to three years
1.
Electronic books
Consumers have already
mainstreamed electronic readers, including theKindle,
which was Amazon.com's best selling product in 2009.
Campuses have not adapted the readers as quickly, but as more academic titles
become available, they are piloting
e-books.
Eight colleges and universities are currently in the
middle of a pilot program with theKindle DX,
a larger format version of the reader that is
designed for academic texts, newspapers and journals. Those schools include
Arizona State University, Ball State University, Case Western Reserve
University, Pace University, Princeton, Reed College, Syracuse University and
the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.
And they're not the only ones. Northwest Missouri State University and Penn
State have started pilot programs with the
Sony Reader.
2.
Simple augmented reality
When Sannier was researching augmented reality eight or nine years ago, it
seemed far flung, but now it's right around the corner. Through mobile computing
and cameras, people can fuse the digital world and the physical world, which is
really cool, he said.
The technology basically allows someone to point a smart phone at an object and
find out information about it. For example, Sigman could take her smart phone to
a place with a lot of plants, hold the camera up to one of them, and find out
what kind of plant she was looking at.
Within a week of seeing a
Droid phone, university President Michael M. Crow
asked Sannier if he could create an augmented reality layer over the campus so
that people could find out what things are, what's going on inside buildings,
find their way around and really melt the walls.
“For a university president to be as in touch with an emerging trend as that, I
think it really speaks to how central technology is becoming on the academic
side,” Sannier said.
Time to adoption horizon: Four to five years
1.
Gesture-based computing
The iPhone, iPod Touch,
Nintendo Wii and other gesture-based systems have become popular in the consumer
industry because they allow users to control what the device does with their
body movements. Devices with these systems could make the Internet come alive
and "very likely lead to new kinds of teaching or training simulations that
look, feel and operate almost exactly like their real-world counterparts," the
report states.
“it’s clear that people have become more open to interacting with devices in a
lot of different ways,” Sannier said. "I think the challenge there is less
technology than it is practice.”
2.
Visual data analysis
This technology
basically combines advanced computational methods with sophisticated graphics
engines. Oftentimes when someone looks at a straight list of data, it's hard to
see the outliers, which are the points that are farther away, Sigman said. But
with visual data analysis technology, that person can put the data in a 3-D
chart that will make it easy to see where the outliers are.
2 Obstacles to overcome
While universities may
have an easier time replacing pens and notebooks with laptops, they will have a
tougher time as they integrate technologies such as gesture-based computing,
which represent a completely new way of providing information, Sannier said.
These technologies will challenge the existing university structure, and
universities need to respond to by accepting the idea that they don't have to
control or provide these technologies.
At Arizona State
University, Sannier is preparing for this switch by taking the following steps:
·Move away from directly providing the
network and allow an outside company to provide that network at a larger scale.
The university now uses Gmail and is working with
cloud computingproviders.
·Make both wired and wireless networks
easily accessible
·Integrate technology in a functional
way. The university is working with Facebook to bring one of its applications
onto the social networking
site and is also working with Google to offer Google Apps for Education to their
students, which will give them a new way to create and view material.
·Shift the focus from direct
provisioning to applying commercial technologies to the academy
1. Change the
culture
Preparing for the challenges that new technologies bring will require more than
just a change in mindset.
“The real challenge is to
change the cultureof the academy," Sannier said.
" We need some lighthouse institutions to do some amazing things with these
technologies in classrooms and change them, and then to propagate those.”
Academies can change
their culture by sharing best practices among each other and looking at how
for-profit colleges and universities are able to succeed, he said. The success
of the for-profit institutions will put competitive pressure on the universities
for possibly the first time, and that could be a powerful change agent for
universities.
2. Prepare the
faculty and staff
That's not the only change that the universities will have to make. They also
have bring their faculty and staff up to speed on the latest technologies
because students will bring devices to school and already know how to use them,
Sannier said. Parish from iData agreed.
“They expect to be able to use their mobile phone, they expect open content,
they expect to use their e-books," Parish said. "It’s the staff and the
organization of the university that needs to be prepared to provide that to
them, and that’s the real challenge.”
At Arizona State University, Sannier is focusing on making the consumer
technologies that are coming on campus easy to use instead of trying to train
people how to use them. The university is also deploying online resources that
allow people to push a button that will make the technology work.
Back at Georgetown University, Sigman plans on experimenting with any technology
that comes along, and she sees possibilities in these emerging technologies.
“What an exciting time we
live in, and what an exciting time it is for professors to be teaching," Sigman
said. "There’s just so many wonderful tools that we have at our fingertips.”
"6 Technologies to Watch in Education," heads up by Tracey Sutherland
(Executive Director of the American Accounting Association). Her link is on the
restricted-entry AAA Commons, so I will link directly to the Chronicle of Higher
Education URL.
Mobile
Computing.....................................................................................................................................
9
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Mobile
Computing in Practice
For
Further Reading
Open
Content..........................................................................................................................................
13
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
Gesture-Based Computing in Practice
For
Further Reading
Visual Data
Analysis................................................................................................................................
29
Overview
Relevance
for Teaching, Learning, or Creative Inquiry
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education
released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and
found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face
instruction.
The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A
Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students
who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average,
than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face
instruction.”
Except for one article,
on this Web site,
you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.
But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion.
I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report
showing that students in online learning environments performed worse,
there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut
down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.
I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is
due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across
the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us
working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps
students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.
We know that online learning requires devout attention on the part of both
the professor and the student -- and a collaboration between the two -- in a
different way from that of a face-to-face classroom. These critical aspects
of online education are worth particular mention:
Greater student engagement: In an
online classroom, there is no back row and nowhere for students to hide.
Every student participates in class.
Increased faculty attention: In most
online classes, the faculty’s role is focused on mentoring students and
fostering discussion. Interestingly, many faculty members choose to
teach online because they want more student interaction.
Constant access: The Internet is open
24/7, so students can share ideas and “sit in class” whenever they have
time or when an idea strikes -- whether it be the dead of night or
during lunch. Online learning occurs on the student’s time, making it
more accessible, convenient, and attainable.
At Walden University, where
I am president, we have been holding ourselves accountable for years, as
have many other online universities, regarding assessment. All universities
must ensure that students are meeting program outcomes and learning what
they need for their jobs. To that end, universities should be better able to
demonstrate -- quantitatively and qualitatively -- the employability and
success of their students and graduates.
Recently, we examined the
successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public
school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested
with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned
their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for
this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it
seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming
better teachers.
In higher education, there
is still too much debate about how we are delivering content: Is it online
education, face-to-face teaching, or hybrid instruction? It’s time for us to
stop categorizing higher education by the medium of delivery and start
focusing on its impact and outcomes.
Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that
online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the
workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without
having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study
concluded, online education can do that and much more.
But Kaplan above ignores some of the dark side aspects of distance education and
education technology in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
The biggest hurdle, in my opinion, is that if distance education is done
correctly with intensive online communications, instructors soon become burned
out. In an effort to avoid burn out, much of the learning effectiveness is lost.
Hence the distance education paradox.
I've always believed that the
role of the teacher is one of FACILITATOR. My role in the classroom is
making it EASIER for information to move from one place to another - from
point A to point B. This could be from textbook to student, it could be
from the outside world to the student, from another student to the student,
from the student him or herself to that same student AND from teacher to
student (me to them). In defining the word 'teaching', I think many people
overemphasize the last transition that I mentioned, thinking that the
primary movement of information is from them(the teacher) to the students.
In fact, it constitutes a minority of total facilitated information flow in
a college classroom. I think this misunderstanding leads many to
underestimate the value of other sources in the education process other than
themselves. Online content is just one of many alternative sources.
Unfortunately, online formats do
allow certain professors to hide behind the electronic cloak and
politely excuse themselves from the equation, which greatly hurts the
student. Also, online formats can be fertile ground for professors who lack
not only the desire to 'teach' but the ability and thus become mere
administrators versus teachers.
I would not say that out loud to the graduates of two principles of
accounting weed out courses year after year at Brigham Young
University where classes meet on relatively rare occasion for inspiration
about accountancy but not technical learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Try to tell the graduates of Stanford University’s ADEPT Masters of
Electrical Engineering program that they had an easier time of it because
the entire program was online.
There’s an interesting article entitled how researchers misconstrue
causality:
Like elaborately plumed birds … we preen and strut and display our
t-values.” That was Edward Leamer’s uncharitable description of his
profession in 1983.
“Cause and Effect: Instrumental variable help to isolate causal
relationships, but they can be taken too far,” The Economist, August
15-21, 20098 Page 68.
It is often the case that distance education courses are taught by
non-tenured instructors, and non-tenured instructors may be easier with
respect to grading than tenured faculty because they are even more in need
of strong teaching evaluations --- so as to not lose their jobs. The problem
may have nothing whatsoever to do with online versus onsite education ---
ergo misconstrued causality.
I think it’s very rewarding to look at grading in formal studies
using the same full-time faculty teaching sections of online versus onsite
students. By formal study, I mean using the same instructors, the same
materials, and essentially the same examinations. The major five-year,
multimillion dollar study that first caught my eye was the SCALE experiments
on the campus of the University of Illinois where 30 courses from various
disciplines were examined over a five year experiment.
Yes the SCALE experiments showed that some students got higher grades
online, notably B students who became A students and C students who became A
students. The online pedagogy tended to have no effect on D and F students
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
But keep in mind that in the SCALE experiments, the same instructor of a
course was grading both the online and onsite sections of the same course.
The reason was not likely to be that online sections were easier. The SCALE
experiments collected a lot of data pointing to more intense communications
with instructors and more efficient use of student’s time that is often
wasted in going to classes.
The students in the experiment were full time on campus students, such that
the confounding problems of having adult part-time students was not a factor
in the SCALE experiments of online, asynchronous learning.
A Statement About Why the SCALE Experiments Were Funded
ALN = Asynchronous Learning We are particularly interested in new
outcomes that may be possible through ALN. Asynchronous computer networks
have the potential toimprove contact with faculty,
perhaps making self-paced learning a realizable goal for some off- and
on-campus students. For example, a motivated student could progress more
rapidly toward a degree. Students who are motivated but find they cannot
keep up the pace, may be able to slow down and take longer to complete a
degree, and not just drop out in frustration. So we are interested in what
impact ALN will have on outcomes such as time-to-degree and student
retention. There are many opportunities where ALN may contribute to another
outcome: lowering the cost of education, e.g., by naturally introducing new
values for old measures such as student-faculty ratios. A different kind of
outcome for learners who are juggling work and family responsibilities,
would be to be able to earn a degree or certification at home. This latter
is a special focus for us.
Another study that I love to point to was funded by the Chronicle of
Higher Education. Read about when one of the Chronicle’s senior
editors took a Governmental Accounting Course at the University of Phoenix
during which the instructor of the course had not idea that Goldie
Blumenstyk
was assessing how difficult or how easy the course was for students in
general. I think Goldie’s audio report of her experience is still available
from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Goldie came away from the
course exhausted.
Distance Education: Stanford Center for Professional Development
Stanford University was probably the first prestigious university to offer
an online masters degree in engineering in a video program called ADEPT.
That has since been replaced by an expanded online program in professional
development that offers certificates or full masters of science degrees in
selected programs, especially engineering. The program is highly restrictive
in that employers must be members of Stanford's Corporate Education Graduate
Program. For example, to earn a masters of science degree the requirements
are as follows:
I don't think the Stanford Graduate School of Business has anything
comparable to this online professional development program. Most other top
universities in the USA now have selected online certificate and degree
programs offered in their extension programs. Go to a university of interest
and search for "extension." It's still rare to find an online doctoral
program at a top university. For-profit universities offer more online
doctoral programs, but these tend not to be accepted very well for
employment in the Academy. In fact it may be better to not mention such
doctoral degrees when seeking employment in the Academy.
The Chronicle's Goldie Blumenstyk has covered
distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she's
written stories about
the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions
market themselves, and the demise of
the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn't done, it seemed,
was to take a course from an online university. But this spring she finally
took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and
nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales
from the cy ber-classroom -- and her final grade --
in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2008 (Audio) ---
http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i40/cyber_classroom/
·All course
materials (including textbooks) online; No additional textbooks to purchase
·$1,600 fee for the
course and materials
·Woman instructor
with respectable academic credentials and experience in course content
·Instructor had
good communications with students and between students
·Total of 14 quite
dedicated online students in course, most of whom were mature with full-time
day jobs
·30% of grade from
team projects
·Many unassigned
online helper tutorials that were not fully utilized by Goldie
·Goldie earned a 92
(A-)
·She gave a
positive evaluation to the course and would gladly take other courses if she
had the time
·She considered the course to have a heavy workload
The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13,
2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering
provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of
engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers
---
http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm
Full-Length BBC Video (I had an annoying problem with buffering of this
production, but it was did not stop me from watching most of this)
"Full Documentary: The Secret Life Of Chaos," Simoleon Sense,
February 3, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/full-documentary-the-secret-life-of-chaos/
“Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images
of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there
is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now
beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question
that mankind has asked for millennia – how did we get here? In this
documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to uncover one of the great
mysteries of science – how does a universe that starts off as dust end up
with intelligent life? How does order emerge from disorder? It’s a
mindbending, counterintuitive and for many people a deeply troubling idea.
But Professor Al-Khalili reveals the science behind much of beauty and
structure in the natural world and discovers that far from it being magic or
an act of God, it is in fact an intrinsic part of the laws of physics.
Amazingly, it turns out that the mathematics of chaos can explain how and
why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern. The natural world is
full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into
complexity. From trees to clouds to humans – after watching this film you’ll
never be able to look at the world in the same way again.”
This year, spruce up your teaching toolbox with some of the top education
blogs, tweets, wikis and more, as voted on by educators in the
Edublog Awards.
On these sites, you'll be able to connect with other educators, see
what's going on in classrooms around the world and find out what technology
tools you can use in your classroom.
Best individual blog
Winner:
Free
Technology for Teachers
Google certified teacher Richard
Byrne reviews free technology resources and shows educators how they
can integrate those resources into their teaching. He also won the best
resource sharing blog award.
First Runner Up:
Kathy Schrock's
Kaffeeklatsch
Technology administrator Kathy Schrock covers ed tech tools, techniques
and tricks of the trade.
Second Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo's Websites Of The Day For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif.. He provides links to sites that help
educators teach English to non-native speakers. He also won best
resource sharing blog award.
Best individual tweeter
Winner:
web20classroom
From Winston-Salem, N.C., technology educator Steven W. Anderson
interacts with other educators by sharing links to online resources and
participating in conversations about real issues in education.
First Runner Up:
russeltarr
Russel Tarr teaches history in Toulouse, France.
Second Runner Up:
courosa
Alec Couros teaches educational technology and media in Regina,
Saskatchewan, Canada.
Best group blog
Winner:
MacMillian Dictionary Blog
As the English language constantly changes, five authors take the pulse
of the living language and share how it is used around the world.
First Runner Up:
I.N.K.:
Interesting Nonfiction for Kids
Authors and illustrators give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how
they research, write and integrate art into their books.
Second Runner Up:
SCC English
The English Department of St. Columba's College in Whitechurch, Dublin
16, Ireland posts news, poems, drama, essays, podcasts, book
recommendations and more.
Best new blog
Winner:
Kirsten Winkler
Kirsten Winkler started blogging about online education in January and
takes readers on a quest to find better education.
First Runner Up:
Look At My Happy
Rainbow
A male kindergarten teacher shares stories from his classroom in Maine.
As for the blog title, one of his students shouted, "Look at my happy
rainbow!" one day after he drew a rainbow with four or five crayons in
one hand.
Second Runner Up:
Teach
Paperless
Shelly Blake-Plock shows educators how to teach with interactive
technology and provide real-world learning opportunities for their
students.
Best class blog
Winner:
Billings Middle School Tech Class Blog From Seattle, Technology Integration Coordinator Jac de Haan shines
a spotlight on students' adventures with digital tools and discussions
about the social, political, environmental and moral impacts of
technology.
First Runner Up:
Mrs.
Yollis' Classroom Blog
Third graders from Linda Yollis' class learn and share what they're
learning on their blog.
Second Runner Up:
English With
Rosa
Rosa Fernández Sánchez helps her students from Coruńa, Galicia, Spain,
practice English.
Best student blog
Winner:
Civil War
Sallie
A Boyd's Bear named Sallie Ann travels to classrooms, museums and
battlefields to learn about the United States Civil War, and then shares
what she learns on her blog. The person who created Sallie Ann is a
student from St. Patrick School in Carlisle, Pa.
First Runner Up:
Universo
Eighteen-year-old Néstor Aluna Maceda Pacheco writes about botany from
Rio Blanco, Veracruz, México.
Second Runner Up:
Moo
A college student majoring in photography shares photos and commentary.
She also happens to be the daughter of
The
Scholastic Scribe, which earned first runner up in the best teacher
blog category.
Best resource sharing blog
Winner:
Free
Technology for Teachers
Voted the best resource sharing blog for the second straight year.
Google certified teacher Richard
Byrne reviews free technology resources and shows educators how they
can integrate those resources into their teaching. He also won the best
individual blog award.
First Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif.. He provides links to sites that help
educators teach English to non-native speakers.
Winner: "Heads
in the Cloud" from Anseo.net
This post shows how one school uses cloud computing through Google Apps
as a communication tool for the staff and board of management.
Joint First Runners Up: "This,
This, That" from Dear
Kaia and Skyelar
Three-year-old Kaia explored the desert near her home in Qatar, took
photos of what she saw and created a photo essay that she posted on her
blog. She wrote the post with her dad, teacher Jabiz Raisdana, who then
sent it out to his Twitter network.
The link made its way into the Twitter stream of technology teacher
William
Chamberlain, who asked the eighth grade students in his class to
comment on the blog post.
The story doesn't end there. The eigth-graders had some questions about
Kaia and her dad's life in Doha, Qatar, so Raisdana skyped into their
class. The students also created video comments that they sent to Kaia (read
the complete story on Raisdana's blog).
On top of that, professor John Strange from the University of South
Alabama saw the post and passed it on to the students in his educational
media class. They commented on Kaia's photo essay as well and wrote more
than 50 blog posts in response to the photo essay (read
this part of the story in Raisdana's words).
She had to pay to find out what was in the report "Techno Addicts: Young
Person Addiction to Technology, and what she found was 'poor research.'She gives her analysis in this blog post.
Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet-based discussion
Winner:
#edchat
Through Twitter, educators discuss real education issues on Tuesdays at
noon EST and 7 p.m. EST using the hashtag "edchat."
First Runner Up:
Blogworthy Tweets
English teacher Claudia Ceraso from Buenos Aires, Argentina, publishes
some of her tweets on the blog
ELT notes.
Second Runner Up:
#teachertuesday
Every Tuesday on Twitter, educators and others recommend teachers to
follow through the hashtag #teachertuesday.
Best teacher blog
Winner:
Two
Writing Teachers
Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz share their tools, ideas and experiences
with educators who teach kids how to write.
First Runner Up:
The
Scholastic Scribe
A high school journalism teacher writes about life inside and outside of
her District of Columbia classroom. She is the mother of the college
student behind
Moo, who earned first runner up in the best student blog category.
Second Runner Up:
Cool Cat
Teacher
Vicki A. Davis from Camilla, Georgia, shares her experiences with
technology as well as how students are collaborating globally through
activities including the
Flat Classroom Project.
Best librarian / library blog
Winner:
Never Ending Search
Joyce Valenza writes about technology, research, search engines and more
from Springfield Township High School in Oreland, Pa. Check out the
school's cool
virtual library.
First Runner Up:
Bright Ideas
The School Library Association of Victoria run this blog, where school
library staff can share how they use the latest research tools in their
libraries.
Second Runner Up:
Library Media Tech Musings
Gwyneth A. Jones passes on education links and resources, among other
things, with a sprinkle of snark, as she puts it.
Best educational tech support blog
Winner:
iLearn Technology
Technology teacher Kelly Tenkely wants to help teachers "fall in love
with technology the way that their students have," and she does that by
giving them ideas for how to integrate new technology into their
classrooms.
First Runner Up:
Langwitches
This blog follows Silvia Tolisano as she discovers the magic of learning
on her journey as a technology integration facilitator.
Second Runner Up:
Life Feast
Ana Maria Menezes shares what she's learning about using Internet tools
to enhance her classes and change up the daily routine for her EFL
students in Brazil.
Best elearning / corporate education blog
Winner:
MPB
Reflections — 21st Century Teaching and Learning
From Teaching Without Walls, co-owner and educational consultant
Michelle Pacansky-Brock posts her thoughts about changes in higher
education, with an emphasis on online learning.
First Runner Up:
Angela Maiers
After a 20-year career in education, Angela Maiers became an independent
consultant who focuses on literacy education, and through her blog, she
encourages teachers to be great learners.
Winner:
Xyleme Voices
Podcasts
A podcast library on the evolution of training, featuring interviews
with top industry analysts, consultants and practitioners in the field
of learning.
First Runner Up:
Musical Blogies
Ignacio Valdés posts audio and video of his students, who play music
from a secondary education institution in the Spanish principality of
Asturia.
Second Runner Up:
My Audio School
Children can download more than 150 classic books and listen to more
than 200 radio and television broadcasts on My Audio School. While this
Web site was originally designed to help dyslexic students, it can be
used for any students.
Best educational use of video / visual
Winner:
Bitácora de
Aníbal de la Torre
Aníbal de la Torre compiles short educational videos on his blog from
Palma del Rio, Cordoba, Spain.
First Runner Up:
The Longfellow Ten
Middle school students create and share stop-motion films that depict
academic terms and concepts. They're definitely not boring.
Second Runner Up:
Inanimate Alice
Through text, sound, images and games, writer Kate Pullinger and digital
artist Chris Joseph tell the story of a girl named Alice and her
imaginary digital friend, Brad. Pullinger teaches creative writing and
new media for De Montfort University in Leicester, United Kingdom.
First Runner Up:
Soar 2
New Heights
A fourth-grade class shares books and themes that they enjoy.
Second Runner Up:
HUMS3001:
Censorship and Responsibility
From the University of South Wales, the students in Ben Miller's class
on censorship and responsibility work together to build the pages in
this wikispace.
Best educational use of a social networking service
Winner:
English
Companion Ning
English teachers help each other on this network, which high school
English teacher and author Jim Burke created.
First Runner Up:
EFL Classroom
2.0
This Ning provides a space for English language teachers and students to
ask questions, share answers and find resources to help them learn.
Second Runner Up:
RSC Access and
Inclusion Ning
The Regional Support Centre for North and East Scotland allows educators
to discuss, share and join with other colleagues as they work with
learners who need additional support in higher education.
Winner:
Virtual Graduation at the University of Edinburgh
While some education students graduated at McEwan Hall in November,
other students graduated online in
Second Life. Those
students completed their Master of Science in E-learning, which is a
distance learning program.
Winner:
Karl Fisch
Karl Fisch has been teaching for 21 years and is currently director of
technology at
Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo. He was previously a middle
and high school math teacher.
First Runner Up:
Will Richardson
Will Richardson is the "learner in chief" at Connective Learning and
author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for
Classrooms.
Second Runner Up:
Larry
Ferlazzo
Larry Ferlazzo teaches English Language Learners and native English
speakers in Sacramento, Calif. On his blog, he provides links to sites
that help educators teach English to non-native speakers.
For more ways to learn online, check out these resources:
Technology is changing the way students learn. Is
it changing the way colleges teach?
Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director
of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning
Technologies Centre.
While colleges and universities have been “fairly
aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens
told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few
decades is altering our pedagogy.”
To help get colleges thinking about how they might
adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process
information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center,
have created a Web-based guide, called the
Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.
Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the
handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their
own additions.
In the its introduction, the handbook declares the
old pedagogical model—where the students draw their information primarily
from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors—dead. “Our learning and
information acquisition is a mash-up,” the authors write. “We take pieces,
add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up
with some type of pattern that symbolizes what’s happening ‘out there’ and
what it means to us.” Students are forced to develop new ways of making
sense of this flood of information fragments.
But Mr. Siemens said that colleges had been slow to
appreciate this fact. “I don’t see a lot of research coming out on what
universities might look like in the future,” he said. “If how we interact
with information and with each other fundamentally changes, it would suggest
that the institution also needs to change.”
This Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning (HETL) has been
designed as a resource for educators planning to incorporate technologies in
their teaching and learning activities.
How is education to fulfill its societal role of clarifying confusion
when tools of control over information creation and dissemination rest in
the hands of learners[3], contributing to the growing complexity and
confusion of information abundance?
Global, political, social, technological, and educational change
pressures are disrupting the traditional role (and possibly design) of
universities. Higher education faces a "re-balancing" in response to growing
points of tension along the following fault lines...
Technology is concerned with "designing aids and tools to perfect the
mind". As a means of extending the sometimes limited reach of humanity,
technology has been prominent in communication and learning. Technology has
also played a role in classrooms through the use of movies, recorded video
lectures, and overhead projectors. Emerging technology use is growing in
communication and in creating, sharing, and interacting around content.
A transition from epistemology (knowledge) to ontology (being) suggests
media and technology need to be employed to serve in the development of
learners capable of participating in complex environments.
It is not uncommon for theorists and thinkers to declare some variation
of the theme "change is the only constant". Surprisingly, in an era where
change is prominent, change itself has not been developed as a field of
study. Why do systems change? Why do entire societies move from one
governing philosophy to another? How does change occur within universities?
New literacies (based on abundance of information and the significant
changes brought about technology) are needed. Rather than conceiving
literacy as a singular concept, a multi-literacy view is warranted.
Each tool possesses multiple affordances. Blogs, for example, can be used
for personal reflection and interaction. Wikis are well suited for
collaborative work and brainstorming. Social networks tools are effective
for the formation of learning and social networks. Matching affordances of a
particular tool with learning activities is an important design and teaching
activity
Evaluating the effectiveness of technology use in teaching and learning
brings to mind Albert Einstein’s statement: "Not everything that can be
counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". When we
begin to consider the impact and effectiveness of technology in the teaching
and learning process, obvious questions arise: "How do we measure
effectiveness? Is it time spent in a classroom? Is it a function of test
scores? Is it about learning? Or understanding?"
Through a process of active experimentation, the academy’s role in
society will emerge as a prominent sensemaking and knowledge expansion
institution, reflecting of the needs of learners and society while
maintaining its role as a transformative agent in pursuit of humanity’s
highest ideals.
When doctoral student Aryn
Karpinski's unpublished study connecting students' heavy Facebook use and
lower grades was presented at the annual meeting of the American Education
Research Association in April it created a "media sensation" both in the
press and among academic blogs. Not everyone found her conclusions
convincing.
Three researchers attempted to
replicate Karpinski's findings using three datasets: (1) a large sample of
undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, (2) a
nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14– to
22–year–olds, and (3) a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14–23.
They report (in "Facebook and Academic Performance: Reconciling a Media
Sensation with Data," by Josh Pasek, Eian More, and Eszter Hargittai, FIRST
MONDAY, vol. 14, no. 5, May 4, 2009) that "[i]n none of the samples do we
find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed,
if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher
grades."
First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466]
is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original
articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is
published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois
at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward
Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA;
email:
ejv@uic.edu;
Web:
http://firstmonday.org/
"Virtual worlds as
educational spaces--with their three-dimensional landscapes and customizable
avatars--seem so similar to video games that educators may assume . . . that
students will become as motivated by virtual worlds as they are by video
games. However, these same similarities may also lead students to perceive
virtual worlds as play spaces rather than as innovative educational
environments. If students feel that learning opportunities offered in such
spaces are not valid, they are likely to feel that they are not learning."
-- Catheryn Cheal,
"Student Perceptions of a Course Taught in Second Life"
The June/July 2009 issue of
INNOVATE (vol. 5, issue 5) focuses on the theme of virtual worlds and
simulations in education. The papers reflect the maturing of the study of
virtuality in education that grew out of early discussions and the formation
of the League of Worlds, a conference whose mission is to "stimulate and
disseminate research, analysis, theory, technical and curricular
developments in the creative, educational, training-based and social use of
role-playing, simulations and virtual worlds."
The journal is available
http://innovateonline.info/ Registration is
required to access articles; registration is free.
Innovate: Journal of Online
Education [ISSN 1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is
published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services
at Nova Southeastern University.
The journal focuses on the
creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes
in academic, commercial, and governmental settings. For more information,
contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief;
email:
innovate@nova.edu;
Web:
http://innovateonline.info/
"When we contrast the
face-to-face learning environment with the online
(e-learning) environment,
nearly all assumptions about IP [intellectual property] and copyright are
called into question. Virtually all materials that contribute to e-learning
are (or can be) digitized, retained, archived, attributed and logged. This
single fact raises questions about IP [intellectual property] ownership,
responsibility, policies, and procedures that are newly on the table."
In "Intellectual Property
Policies, E-Learning, and Web 2.0:
Intersections and Open
Questions" (ECAR Research Bulletin, vol. 2009, issue 7, April 7, 2009),
Veronica Diaz discusses how online learning has necessitated revising IP
policies that were created for face-to-face instructional settings. She
notes that higher education IP policies need to go beyond the assumption
that "e-learning is contained within an institutional system" as Web 2.0
technologies and social networking expand the reach of the learning
environment.
ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for
Applied Research) "provides timely research and analysis to help higher
education leaders make better decisions about information technology. ECAR
assembles leading scholars, practitioners, researchers, and analysts to
focus on issues of critical importance to higher education, many of which
carry increasingly complicated and consequential implications." For more
information go to
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=4
The NORDIC JOURNAL OF
INFORMATION LITERACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION, published by the University of
Bergen, is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal created to encourage
"research-based development of information literacy teaching within the
educational programmes of universities and higher education colleges" and to
establish "a forum for the investigation and discussion of connections
between information literacy and general learning processes within
subject-specific contexts."
Papers in the inaugural issue
include:
"A New Conception of
Information Literacy for the Digital Environment in Higher Education" by
Sharon Markless
To provide an information
literacy (IL) framework for a virtual learning environment, the author
considered the "relevant principles of learning, the place of student
reflection when learning to be information literate, what IL in higher
education (HE) should encompass, the importance of context in developing IL,
and the influence of the digital environment, especially Web 2.0."
"Google Scholar compared to
Web of Science. A Literature Review" by Susanne Mikki
According to the author,
"Google Scholar is popular among faculty staff and students, but has been
met with scepticism by library professionals and therefore not yet
established as subject for teaching." In her paper, Mikki makes a case for
including Google Scholar as a library resource by comparing it favorably
with the more-highly-regarded Web of Science database.
Nordic Journal of Information
Literacy in Higher Education (NORIL) [ISSN 1890-5900] is published
biannually by the University of Bergen Library. For more information,
contact: Anne Sissel Vedvik Tonning, University of Bergen Library,
Psychology, Education and Health Library, PO Box 7808, N-5020 Bergen,
Norway; tel: +47 55588621; fax: +47 55884740;
email:
anne.tonning@ub.uib.no;
Web:
https://noril.uib.no/index.php/noril
DIGITAL CULTURE & EDUCATION
is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to analyzing the "impact of
digital culture on identity, education, art, society, culture and narrative
within social, political, economic, cultural and historical contexts."
Readers can interact with the authors by posting online comments on the
journal's website. Paper submissions can include scholarly reviews of books,
conferences, exhibits, games, software, and hardware.
Papers in the first issue
include:
"Revisiting Violent
Videogames Research: Game Studies Perspectives onAggression, Violence,
Immersion, Interaction, and Textual Analysis" by Kyle Kontour, University of
Colorado at Boulder
"Look at Me! Look at Me!
Self-representation and Self-exposure through Online Networks" by Kerry
Mallan, Queensland University of Technology
"Playing at Bullying: The
Postmodern Ethic of Bully (Canis Canem Edit) by Clare Bradford, Deakin
University
HELPING COMPUTER-LITERATE
STUDENTS BECOME RESEARCH-LITERATE
"While college students may
be computer-literate, they are not, as a rule, research-literate. And
there's a huge difference between the two."
In "Not Enough Time in the
Library" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, May 14, 2009), Todd Gilman,
librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial
Library, offers faculty suggestions for partnering with their campus library
staff to help their students become research-literate learners.
Some of his tips include:--
have a librarian conduct a session on effective search strategies that help
students "avoid frustration and wasted time."
-- provide an assignment that
applies what the students have learned i nthe session, one that will
"incorporate a component that challenges students to evaluate the quality of
information they find."
-- schedule library tour that
takes students beyond the study areas and into the reference and stack areas
(Online access may require a
subscription to the Chronicle.)
The Chronicle of Higher
Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly by The Chronicle of Higher
Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel:
202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033;
Web:
http://chronicle.com/
"Within our lifetimes,
technology has fundamentally changed the way we get the news, make
purchases, and communicate with others. The Internet provides a platform for
learning about and interacting with the world.
It should be no surprise that
students line up for courses that make the best use of technologies that are
so integral to their lives. It's not just the economy. It's not just the
convenience. It's the integration of technology within society that's
driving the development of online courses."
"I trained for it, I tried
it, and I'll never do it again. While online teaching may be the wave of the
future (although I desperately hope not), it is not for me. Perhaps I'm the
old dog that resists new tricks. Maybe I am a technophobe. It might be that
I'm plain old-fashioned. This much I can say with certainty: I have years of
experience successfully teaching in collegiate classrooms, and online
teaching doesn't compare."
"Recommended Reading" lists
items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found
particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and
websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to
carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in
this column.
(Draft version. Originally
published in: CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION COMPETENCIES ON THE WEB,
Hornung-Prahauser, V., and M. Luckmann, (Ed.), pp. 145-56.)
So much learning now takes place
online, including faculty office hours, study groups, and lectures.
What extra value are you going to need to offer to bring the students of the
future to your college?
Read the new report, "The College of 2020: Students," from Chronicle
Research Services.
This is the first Chronicle Research
Services report in a three-part series on what higher education will look
like in the year 2020. It is based on reviews of research and data on trends
in higher education, interviews with experts who are shaping the future of
colleges, and the results of a poll of members of a Chronicle Research
Services panel of admissions officials.
To buy the full, data-rich 50-page
report, see the links at the end of this Executive Summary. Later reports in
this series will look at college technology and facilities in 2020, and the
faculty of the future.
"A number of authors have
argued that students who are entering the higher education system have grown
up in a digital culture that has fundamentally influenced their preferences
and skills in a number of key areas related to education. It has also been
proposed that today's university staff are ill equipped to educate this new
generation of learners -- the Net Generation –- whose sophisticated use of
emerging technologies is incompatible with current teaching practice."
EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION:
A HANDBOOK OF FINDINGS FOR PRACTICE AND POLICY (Australian Learning and
Teaching Council, 2009, ISBN:
9780734040732) reports on a
collaborative project that began in 2006, between staff at the University of
Melbourne, the University of Wollongong, and Charles Sturt University. Some
of the findings of the study included:
"The rhetoric that
university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital
Immigrants is not supported."
"[E]ven though young
people's access to and use of computers and some information and
communications technologies is high, they don't necessarily want or
expect to use these technologies to support some activities, including
learning."
"The use of
publishing and information sharing tools, such as wikis, blogs and photo
sharing sites, positively impacted on many students' engagement with the
subject material, their peers and the general learning community."
"[M]any Web 2.0
technologies enable students to publicly publish and share content in
forums hosted outside their university's infrastructure. This raises
complex questions about academic integrity including issues of
authorship, ownership, attribution and acknowledgement."
The Australian Learning and
Teaching Council works with 44 Australian higher education institutions "as
a collaborative and supportive partner in change, providing access to a
network of knowledge, ideas and people." For more information, contact:
Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 4-12 Buckland St., Chippendale,
Sydney NSW 2008 Australia; tel: 02 8667 8500; fax: 02 8667 8515;
email
info@altc.edu.au;
Web:
http://www.altc.edu.au/
"The ubiquitous use of
computers in homes and schools has aided the perception that more
students are computer literate than past generations. There is a
potential 'perfect storm' manifesting between students' perceived
proficiency of computer application skills and the actual assessment of
those skills."
By administering survey and
assessment instruments to over 200 business school students, researchers
Donna M. Grant, Alisha D. Malloy, and Marianne C. Murphy compared students'
perceived proficiencies in three computer skills areas -- word processing,
presentation graphics, and spreadsheets -- with their demonstrated skills.
Their research results showed "some differences in the students' perception
of their word processing skills and actual performance, no difference in
perception and performance for their presentation skills, and a significant
difference in perception and performance for their spreadsheet skills.
The study led to a redesign of
an introductory business school course to remedy students' deficiencies.
The peer-reviewed Journal of
Information Technology Education (JITE) [ISSN 1539-3585 (online) 1547-9714
(print)] is published in print by subscription and online free of charge by
the Informing Science Institute. For more information contact: Informing
Science Institute,
131 Brookhill Court, Santa
Rosa, California 95409 USA; tel:
[Editor's note: At the time
this article was written, the JITE website and this paper were accessible;
at the time of this mailing, they are not. I have notified the JITE
webmaster of the problem in the hope that the site will soon be back
online.]
The first issue of the online
peer-reviewed JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL PEDAGOGIES [ISSN: 1941-3394],
published by the Academic and Business Research Institute, is available at
http://aabri.com/jip.html
Papers in this issue that are
related to instructional technology and e-learning include:
"Student Perceptions of How
Technology Impacts the Quality of Instruction and Learning" by Thomas
Davies, et al.
"The Effects of Self-Regulated
Learning Strategies and System Satisfaction Regarding Learner's Performance
in E-Learning Environment" by Jong-Ki Lee
"Student Performance in
Online Quizzes as a Function of Time in Undergraduate Financial Management
Courses" by Oliver Schnusenberg
"Student Satisfaction in
Web-enhanced Learning Environments" by Charles Hermans, et al.
The Academic and Business
Research Institute supports the research and publication needs of business
and education faculty. For more information about the journal, contact:
Raymond Papp, Editor;
email:
jip@aabri.com
"Just as utopic visions of
the Internet predicted an egalitarian online world where information flowed
freely and power became irrelevant, so did many proponents of online
education, who viewed online classrooms as a way to free students and
instructors from traditional power relationships . . ."
In "A Critical Examination of
Blackboard's E–Learning Environment"
(FIRST MONDAY, vol. 14, no. 6,
June 1, 2009), Stephanie J. Coopman, professor at San Jose State University,
identifies the ways that the Blackboard 8.0 and Blackboard CE6 platforms
"both constrain and facilitate instructor–student and student–student
interaction." She argues that while the systems have improved the
instructor's ability to track and measure student activity, this "creates a
dangerously decontextualized, essentialized image of a class in which levels
of 'participation' stand in for evidence of learning having taken place.
Students are treated not as
learners, as partners in an educational enterprise, but as users."
First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466]
is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original
articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is
published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois
at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward
Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email:
ejv@uic.edu; Web:
Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has
just published the 4th version of the "Google Book Search Bibliography." "It
primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal,
library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are
provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including
e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories." The
bibliography is available at
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/gbsb/gbsb.htm
Links to Bailey's other
extensive publications, including "Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography" and the "Open Access Webliography," are available at
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/
"Recommended Reading" lists
items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found
particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and
websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to
carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in
this column.
OASIS: Open Access Scholarly
Information Sourcebook By Alma Swan and Leslie Chan
http://www.openoasis.org/
"OASIS aims
to provide an authoritative 'sourcebook' on Open Access, covering the
concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The
site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with
links to diverse additional resources and case studies."
The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing
work of the
New
Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a
long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and
describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching,
learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused
organizations. The 2009 Horizon Report is the sixth annual report in the
series. The report is produced again in 2009 as a collaboration between the
New Media Consortium and the
EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE
program.
Each edition of the Horizon Report introduces six
emerging technologies or practices that are likely to enter mainstream use
in learning-focused organizations within three adoption horizons over the
next one to five years. Challenges and trends that will shape the way we
work in academia over the same time frame are also presented. Over the six
years of the NMC’s Horizon Project, more than 200 leaders in the fields of
business, industry, and education have contributed to an ongoing primary
research effort that draws on a comprehensive body of published resources,
current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC and ELI
communities to identify technologies and practices that are either beginning
to appear on campuses, or likely to be adopted in the coming years. Through
a close examination of these sources, and informed by their own
distinguished perspectives, the 2009 Advisory Board has considered the broad
landscape of emerging technology and its intersection with the academic
world as they worked to select the six topics described in these pages. The
precise research methodology is detailed in a special section following the
body of the report.
The format of the Horizon Report reflects the focus
of the Horizon Project, which centers on the applications of emerging
technologies to teaching, learning, research, and creative expression. Each
topic opens with an overview to introduce the concept or technology involved
and follows with a discussion of the particular relevance of the topic to
education or creativity. Examples of how the technology is being — or could
be — applied to those activities are given. Each description is followed by
an annotated list of additional examples and readings which expand on the
discussion in the Report, as well as a link to the list of tagged resources
collected by the Advisory Board and other interested parties during the
process of researching the topic areas. Many of the examples under each area
feature the innovative work of NMC and ELI member institutions.
More services will be running on cellphones or
handheld computers, and more devices will be able to broadcast their
location to others, says a new report from Educause's Learning Initiative
and the New Media Consortium.
The "2009 Horizon Report," the latest edition of
the annual list of technology trends to watch in education, is compiled
based on news reports, research studies, and interviews with experts.
Topping the list of hot technologies are smart
phones and other mobile devices. The authors noted that smart phones can now
run third-party applications, which could revolutionize how such devices are
used in education by consolidating numerous teaching, learning, and
administrative tools into devices that fit into the palms of students'
hands.
Another top trend identified in the report is cloud
computing, which refers to Web-based applications and services. Such
services, many of which are free, will allow campus users to access more
tools and information at a lower cost—although it may make users
increasingly dependent on their hosts, the report says.
The prevalence of electronics that have
"geo-locators"—that is, that are capable of knowing where they are—could
have important applications for field research, specifically with regard to
tracking the movement of animal populations or mapping data sets to study
weather, migration, or urban development patterns, the report says.
Similarly, “smart” objects—which are aware not only of their locations but
of themselves and their environment—are already used in some libraries for
tracking and tagging materials and may have analogous applications across a
number of academic disciplines.
Though the Internet has proved to be a helpful
resource for many students and professors, the sheer volume of its content
can make finding relevant information a tedious chore at times. According to
the report, the personal Web—i.e., widgets and services that help connect
individual users to the Web-based information relevant to them—will allow
students, professors, and administrators to use the Web more efficiently.
In a similar vein, semantic-aware applications will
emerge to allow students to use one of the Internet’s more popular
features—Web search—more efficiently, the authors predict. Semantic-aware
applications refer to technology designed to analyze the meaning of phrases
typed into search boxes, rather than just the keywords. Beyond search
technology, the report says that semantic-aware applications may eventually
help researchers organize and present their findings in ways that more
easily describe conceptual relationships among collected data.
Last week, the American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members
calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely
claiming that we work to undermine copyright.*
Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses –
plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use
to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights.
Without copyright, these tools don’t work. Artists and record labels that
want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like
noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses.
Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should
absolutely not use CC licenses.
Many musicians, including acts like
Nine Inch Nails,
Beastie Boys,
Youssou N’Dour,
Tone,
Curt Smith,
David Byrne,
Radiohead,
Yunyu,
Kristin Hersh, and
Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to
share with the public. These musicians aren’t looking to stop making money
from their music. In fact, many of the artists who use CC licenses are also
members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. That’s how we first heard
about this smear campaign – many musicians that support Creative Commons
received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a
donation to Creative Commons.
If you are similarly angered by ASCAP’s deceptive
tactics, I’m hoping that you can help us by
donating to Creative Commons – and sending a
message – at this critical time. We don’t have lobbyists on the payroll, but
with your support we can continue working hard on behalf of creators and
consumers alike.
Sincerely,
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
The top five challenges were selected by a
combination of focus groups, surveys of interested professionals,
face-to-face brainstorming, and a final vote. The challenges are:
1. Creating learning environments that promote
active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge
creation.
2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual —
among students and faculty members.
3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners.
4. Encouraging faculty members to adopt, and innovate with, new technology
for teaching and learning.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era
of budget cuts.
Educause officials say they will now begin
soliciting a volunteers to collaborate on solutions for each challenge using
the
project’s wiki.
-----Original Message-----
From: Carolyn Kotlas [mailto:kotlas@email.unc.edu]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 2:54 PM
To: Jensen, Robert
TL INFOBITS September 2008 No. 27
ISSN: 1931-3144
About INFOBITS
INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning division. Each month the
ITS-TL's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of
information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and
provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators.
Virtual Worlds in Higher Education Instruction
Games and Learning
Distance Learning
Journal Archives Now Online
Carolina Conversations
Recommended Reading
EDITOR'S NOTE: Normally, Infobits does not focus on a
single topic or theme, However, the recently-published abundance of papers,
reports, and articles on using games or virtual worlds for teaching and learning
has prompted me to devote most of this issue to these resources.
"Clearly there is a large and growing group of
educators who believe that many good things, many very good things, are
connected with virtual worlds. There are also still staunch critics yelling
about what is wrong with virtual worlds. With many people engaging in this
robust conversation today, it would be a great disservice to both the local
and the global community not to have more institutions participating in the
discussion."
-- A. J. Kelton, "Virtual Worlds? 'Outlook
Good'"
The theme of the September/October 2008 issue of
EDUCAUSE REVIEW is learning in virtual worlds. In "Higher Education as Virtual
Conversation" Sarah Robbins-Bell explains how "using [virtual worlds] requires a
shift in thinking and an adjustment in pedagogical methods that will embrace the
community, the fluid identity, and the participation--indeed, the increased
conversation--that virtual spaces can provide."
Cynthia M. Calongne ("Educational Frontiers: Learning in
a Virtual World") draws on the experience of teaching nine university courses
using Second Life to discuss what is required for success in this teaching
environment.
In "Drawing a Roadmap: Barriers and Challenges to
Designing the Ideal Virtual World for Higher Education," Chris Johnson provides
a "roadmap for designing an 'ideal' virtual world for higher education, pointing
decision-makers in a general direction for implementing virtual worlds and
noting various barriers along the way."
EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619], a bimonthly print
magazine that explores developments in information technology and education, is
published by EDUCAUSE (http://www.educause.edu/
). Articles from current and back issues of EDUCAUSE Review are available on the
Web at
http//www.educause.edu/pub/er /
See also:
"B-Schools in Second Life: It's More Than Just Fun and Games; It's the
Confluence of Playing, Learning, and Working," By Vivek Bhatnagar, THE SLOAN-C
VIEW, vol. 7, no. 8, September 2008---
http://www.sloanconsortium.org/viewarticle_SL
"The Mean Business of Second Life: Teaching
Entrepreneurship, Technology and e-Commerce in Immersive Environments," By Brian
Mennecke, Lesya M. Hassall, and Janea Triplett, JOURNAL OF ONLINE LEARNING AND
TEACHING, vol. 4, no. 3, September 2008
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol4no3/hassall_0908.htm
JOURNAL OF VIRTUAL WORLDS RESEARCH ---
http://jvwresearch.org/
This new open access, peer-reviewed publication, hosted by the Texas Digital
Library consortium (http://jvwresearch.org/) is a "transdisciplinary journal
that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the
many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research."
The theme for volume 2, number 1, to be published in March 2009, will be
"Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in 3-D Virtual Worlds."
The theme of both Fall 2008 issues of COMPUTERS AND
COMPOSITION and COMPUTERS AND COMPOSITION ONLINE is "Reading Games: Composition,
Literacy, and Video Gaming" -- "a look at the computer and video gaming industry
and its influence on our literacy practices. Articles include a variety of
interesting topics, from encouraging reflective gaming/play, to adapting games
for writing courses, to writing in World of Warcraft, to collaborative writing
in Alternate Reality Games, and more." Although the theme is the same for both
publications, there is no overlap in their contents.
Computers and Composition: An International Journal
[ISSN: 8755-46150] is a refereed online journal hosted at Ohio State University
and "devoted to exploring the use of computers in composition classes, programs,
and scholarly projects. It provides teachers and scholars a forum for discussing
issues connected to computer use." While all papers are available online only by
subscription, your institution may provide access through Elsevier's
ScienceDirect eSelect (
http://www.sciencedirect.com/ ); check with your campus library for
availability. For more information and to access current and back issues, go to
http://computersandcomposition.osu.edu/
Computers and Composition Online is the companion
journal to Computers and Composition. Current and back issues are available at
no cost at
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/
The Pew Research Center recently reported that
"virtually all American teens [97% of teens ages 12-17] play computer, console,
or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a
significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement."
"Although it shares some text and findings with the
Teens, Games, and Civics report, it provides a more detailed discussion of
the relevant research on civics and gaming. In addition, this report
discusses the policy and research implications of these findings for those
interested in better understanding and promoting civic engagement through
video games."
"Literacy through Gaming: The Influence of Videogames on
the Writings of High School Freshman Males," By Immaculee Harushimana , JOURNAL
OF LITERACY AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 9, no. 2, August 2008, pp. 35-56 ---
http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/volume10/harushimana.pdf
"While videogames often evoke concerns among
parents, politicians, and educators, they pervade the lives of the youth in
today's world and constitute a major component of the 'new literacy studies'
field. In an era when young generations are digital-friendly and video game
savvy, the role of video gaming in children and adolescents' cognitive
development must not be overlooked. Educating today's generation of learners
requires an understanding of the new digital environment into which they
were born."
DISTANCE LEARNING JOURNAL ARCHIVES NOW ONLINE
The complete archives (1986-2008) of THE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION are now
online and searchable at
http://www.jofde.ca/
Papers in the current issue include:
"Disciplinary Differences in E-learning Instructional
Design, " By Glenn Gordon Smith, Ana T. Torres-Ayala, and Allen J. Heindel
"Teacher and Student Behaviors in Face-to-Face and
Online Courses: Dealing With Complex Concepts, " By C. E. (Betty) Cragg,
Jean Dunning, and Jaqueline Ellis
"The Effect of Peer Collaboration and Collaborative
Learning on Self-efficacy and Persistence in a Learner-paced Continuous Intake
Model," By Bruno Poellhuber, Martine Chomienne, Thierry Karsenti, The Journal of
Distance Education [ISSN: 1916-6818 (online), ISSN: 0830-0445 (print)] is an
"international publication of the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE)
[that] aims to promote and encourage Canadian scholarly work in distance
education and provide a forum for the dissemination of international
scholarship." For more information, contact: British Columbia Institute of
Technology, Learning & Teaching Centre, 3700 Willingdon Ave., Burnaby, BC,
Canada V5G 3H2; tel: 604-454-2280; fax: 604-431-7267; email:
journalofde@gmail.com ; Web:
http://www.jofde.ca/
Carolina Conversations, launched in September 2008, is a
series of live interviews with members of the UNC-Chapel Hill community
conducted in the virtual world, Second Life. Guests will discuss their work and
interests and will also respond to questions from the Second Life audience
attending in-world. The next interview will be on October 7, 2008. For more
information, to get the SLurl, or to view videos of past conversations, go to
http://its.unc.edu/tl/conversations/
Carolina Conversations is sponsored by UNC-Chapel Hill
Information Technology Services' Teaching and Learning division, the group that
publishes TL INFOBITS.
RECOMMENDED READING
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that
Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including
books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your
recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
"Generally speaking, even those who are most
gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a belief that
education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with making things
lodge in the minds of students--this even though the disparagement of the
role of memory in education by professional educators now goes back at least
three generations, long before computers were ever thought of as educational
tools. That, by the way, should lessen our astonishment, if not our dismay,
at the extent to which the educational establishment, instead of viewing
these developments with alarm, is adapting its understanding of what
education is to the new realities of how the new generation of 'netizens'
actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying to adapt the kids to
unchanging standards of scholarship and learning."
Editor's note: The article "Is Google Making Us
Stupid?" mentioned in Bowman's article was the June 2008 Infobits "Recommended
Reading"
suggestion (http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/bitjun08.php#7
).
Generally speaking, even those
who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a
belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with
making things lodge in the minds of students--this even though the
disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators
now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever
thought of as educational tools. That, by the way, should lessen our
astonishment, if not our dismay, at the extent to which the educational
establishment, instead of viewing these developments with alarm, is adapting
its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new
generation of 'netizens' actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying
to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.
Jensen Comment
Yikes! When I'm looking for an answer to most anything I now turn first to
Wikipedia and then Google. I guess James Bowman put me in my place. However,
being retired I'm no longer corrupting the minds of students (at least not apart
from my Website and blogs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
I would counter Bowman by saying that Stupid is as Stupid does. Stupid "does"
the following: Stupid accepts a single source for an answer. Except when
the answer seems self evident, a scholar will seek verification from other
references. However, a lot of things are "self evident" to Stupid.
There is a serious issue that sweat accompanied with answer searching aids in
the memory of what is learned ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
But must we sweat to find every answer in life? There is also the maxim that we
learn best from our mistakes. Bloggers are constantly being made aware of their
mistakes. This is one of the scholarly benefits of blogging ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"In contrast to earlier e-learning approaches that
simply replicated traditional models, the Web 2.0 movement with its
associated array of social software tools offers opportunities to move away
from the last century's highly centralized, industrial model of learning and
toward individual learner empowerment through designs that focus on
collaborative, networked interaction"
-- McLoughlin and Lee, "Future Learning Landscapes"
The future of learning is theme of the June/July
2008 issue of INNOVATE. Articles include:
"Future Learning Landscapes: Transforming Pedagogy
through Social
Software" by Catherine McLoughlin and Mark J. W.
Lee
"McLoughlin and Lee posit that future learning
environments must capitalize on the potential of Web 2.0 by combining social
software tools with connectivist pedagogical models."
"Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum" by
Dave Cormier
"In the rhizomatic model, knowledge is negotiated,
and the learning experience is a social as well as a personal knowledge
creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises."
"A Singular Vision for a Disparate Future:
Technology Adoption Patterns
in Higher Learning Through 2035" by Robert G.
Henshaw
Henshaw "examines factors likely to influence
technology adoption within U.S. higher education over the next 30 years and
their impact on education providers and consumers." [Editor's note: the
author of this paper is my colleague at UNC-Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and
Learning division.]
Registration is required to access articles;
registration is free.
Innovate: Journal of Online Education [ISSN
1552-3233], an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, is published
bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova
Southeastern University.
The journal focuses on the creative use of
information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic,
commercial, and governmental settings.
For more information, contact James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief;
email: innovate@nova.edu ;
Web:
How open access and interactive Web 2.0
applications are changing the learning environment is focus of the latest
issue of ELEARNING PAPERS.
The papers' authors consider the impact of these
technologies both on individual learners and the institutions that
facilitate the learning process. Papers include:
"Web 2.0 and New Learning Paradigms" by Antonio
Bartolome
"This article is sceptic about the current changes
at eLearning institutions and businesses, but points out some of the changes
that will take place outside their courses and programmes."
"Universities and Web 2.0: Institutional
Challenges" by Juan Freire
"Teachers, researchers and students started some
years ago to use social software tools, but in few cases these experiences
have allowed any scaling from the individual to the institutional level. The
promises and potential of web 2.0 in universities need an adequate strategy
for their development which has to confront the bottlenecks and fears common
in these institutions, which could explain the lack of adaptation."
"Is the world open?" by Richard Straub
"The rise of social networking sites, virtual
worlds, blogs, wikis and 3D Internet give us a first idea of the potential
of the 'interactive and collaborative web' dubbed Web 2.0. Now we have the
infrastructure and tools to operate in new ways in open systems. While many
of the thoughts about openness and the need for more open social systems
have been around for some time, this new infrastructure and new tools
accelerate the movement."
eLearning Papers [ISSN 1887-1542] is an open access
journal created as part of the elearningeuropa.info portal. The portal is
"an initiative of the European Commission to promote the use of multimedia
technologies and Internet at the service of education and training."
For more information, contact: eLearning Papers,
P.A.U. Education, C/ Muntaner 262, 3rd, 08021 Barcelona, Spain; email:
"Critical theory designates a philosophy and a
research methodology that focuses on the interrelated issues of technology,
politics and social change. Despite its emphasis on technology, critical
theory arguably remains underutilized in areas of practical research that
lie at the confluence of social, political and technological concerns, such
as the study of the use of the usability of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) or of their use in educational institutions."
In "Critical Theory: Ideology Critique and the
Myths of E-Learning"
(UBIQUITY, vol. 9, no. 22, June 3-9, 2008), Norm
Friesen uses critical theory to de-mystify three claims of e-learning:
Ubiquity [ISSN 1530-2180] is a free, Web-based
publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to
fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to
the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology,
practices, and paradigms of the IT profession." For more information,
contact: Ubiquity, email:
ubiquity@acm.org ;
Web:
At first, just a handful of employees at
Sanmina-SCI (SANM) began using Google Apps (GOOG) for tasks like e-mail,
document creation, and appointment scheduling. Now, just six months later,
almost 1,000 employees of the electronics manufacturing company go online to
use Google Apps in place of the comparable Microsoft (MSFT) tools. "We have
project teams working on a global basis and to help them collaborate
effectively, we use Google Apps," says Manesh Patel, chief information
officer of Sanmina-SCI, a company with $10.7 billion in annual revenue. In
the next three years, the number of Google Apps users may rise to 10,000, or
about 25% of the total, Patel estimates.
San Jose (Calif.)-based Sanmina and Google are at
the forefront of a fundamental shift in the way companies obtain software
and computing capacity. A host of providers including Amazon (AMZN),
Salesforce.com (CRM), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft are helping
corporate clients use the Internet to tap into everything from extra server
space to software that helps manage customer relationships. Assigning these
computing tasks to some remote location—rather than, say, a desktop
computer, handheld machine, or a company's own servers—is referred to
collectively as cloud computing (BusinessWeek, 4/24/08), and it's catching
on across Corporate America.
The term "cloud computing" encompasses many areas
of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method
pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer
avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server
capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing
services have in common, though, is that they're all delivered over the
Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.
A Sea Change in Computing Some analysts say cloud
computing represents a sea change in the way computing is done in
corporations. Merrill Lynch (MER) estimates that within the next five years,
the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion. In a
May 2008 report, Merrill Lynch estimated that 12% of the worldwide software
market would go to the cloud in that period.
Those vendors that can adjust their product lines
to meet the needs of large cloud computing providers stand to profit.
Companies like IBM, Dell (DELL), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), for instance,
are moving aggressively in this direction. On Aug. 1, IBM said it would
spend $360 million to build a cloud computing data center in Research
Triangle Park, N.C., bringing to nine its total of cloud computing centers
worldwide. Dell is also targeting this market. The computer marker supplies
products to some of the largest cloud computing providers and Web 2.0
companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo (YHOO). "We
created a whole new business just to build custom products for those
customers," Dell CEO Michael Dell says.
Mobile broadband, collaborative Web technologies,
and mashups will all significantly impact education over the next five
years, along with "grassroots" video, collective intelligence, and "social
operating systems." This according to a new report released last week by the
New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, the 2008 Horizon
Report.
The report focuses on the six key technology areas
that the researchers identified as likely to have a major impact on "the
choices of learning-focused organizations within the next five years,"
broken down into the technologies that will have an impact in the near term,
those that are in the early stages of adoption, and those that are a bit
further out on the horizon.
In the near term--that is, in the timeframe of
about a year or less--the technologies that will have a significant impact
on education include grassroots video and collaborative Web technologies.
Grassroots video is, simply, user-generated video created on inexpensive
consumer electronics devices and edited and encoded using free or
inexpensive consumer- or prosumer-grade NLEs. Internet-based services
supporting the sharing of these videos have allowed institutions to mingle
their content with consumer content and "will fuel rapid growth among
learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the
viewers are," according to the report. The second near-term trend,
collaborative Web technology, is already in wide use in education at all
levels. The complete report (see link below) provides further details.
In the mid-term, mobile broadband and data mashups
will make their mark on education. Mashups, according to the report, will
largely impact the way education institutions represent information. "While
most current examples are focused on the integration of maps with a variety
of data," the report said, "it is not difficult to picture broad educational
and scholarly applications for mashups." Mobile broadband too is in the
early stages of adoption for educational purposes, from project-based
learning activities to virtual field trips.
Further down the road, according to the report,
come "collective intelligence" and "social operating systems." Collective
intelligence includes wikis and community tagging. A social operating system
is "the essential ingredient of next generation social networking" and "will
support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit
connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use
them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know,"
according to the report. The time to adoption for these last two will be
four to five years, the report said.
New Media Consortium (NMC) is an "international 501(c)3 not-for-profit
consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations,
and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of
new media and new technologies." For more information, go to
http://www.nmc.org/
The annual Horizon Report
describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon
Project, a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and
describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching,
learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. The
2008 Horizon Report, the fifth in this annual series, is produced as
a collaboration between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI),
an EDUCAUSE program.
The main sections of the report
describe six emerging technologies or practices that will likely enter
mainstream use in learning-focused organizations within three adoption
horizons over the next one to five years. Also highlighted are a set of
challenges and trends that will influence our choices in the same time
frames. The project draws on an ongoing primary research effort that has
distilled the viewpoints of more than 175 Advisory Board members in the
fields of business, industry, and education into the six topics presented
here; drawn on an extensive array of published resources, current research,
and practice; and made extensive use of the expertise of the NMC and ELI
communities. (The precise research methodology is detailed in the final
section.) Many of the examples under each area feature the innovative work
of NMC and ELI member institutions.
The format of the Horizon Report
reflects the focus of the Horizon Project, which centers on the
applications of emerging technologies to teaching, learning, and creative
expression. Each topic opens with an overview to introduce the concept or
technology involved and follows with a discussion of the particular
relevance of the topic to education or creativity. Examples of how the
technology is being—or could be—applied to those activities are given. Each
description is followed by an annotated list of additional examples and
readings which expand on the discussion in the Report, as well as a
link to the list of tagged resources collected by the Advisory Board and
other interested parties during the process of researching the topic areas.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Key Emerging Technologies
The technologies featured in the 2008 Horizon
Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the
Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their entrance into
mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative applications. The first
adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of entry within the next year; the
second, within two to three years; and the third, within four to five years.
The two technologies placed on the first adoption horizon in this edition,
grassroots video and collaboration webs, are already in use on
many campuses. Examples of these are not difficult to find. Applications of
mobile broadband and data mashups, both on the mid-term
horizon, are evident in organizations at the leading edge of technology
adoption, and are beginning to appear at many institutions. Educational uses
of the two topics on the far-term horizon, collective intelligence
and social operating systems, are understandably rarer; however,
there are examples in the worlds of commerce, industry and entertainment
that hint at coming use in academia within four to five years.
Each profiled technology is described
in detail in the body of the report, including a discussion of what it is
and why it is relevant to teaching, learning, and creative expression.
Specific examples are listed there for each of the six topics, consistent
with the level of adoption at the time the report was written (December
2007). Taken as a set, our research indicates that all six of these
technologies will significantly impact the choices of learning-focused
organizations within the next five years.
Grassroots Video. Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using
inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free
software. Video sharin sites continue to grow at some of the most prodigious
rates on the Internet; it is very common now to find news clips, tutorials,
and informative videos listed alongside the music videos and the raft
of personal content that dominated these sites when they first appeared.
What used to be difficult and expensive, and often required special servers
and content distribution networks, now has become something anyone can do
easily for almost nothing. Hosting services handle encoding, infrastructure,
searching, and more, leaving only the content for the producer to worry
about. Custom branding has allowed institutions to even have their own
special presence within these networks, and will fuel rapid growth among
learning-focused organizations who want their content to be where the
viewers are.
Collaboration Webs.
Collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized
expertise. The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and
free, and require no installation. Colleagues simply open their web browsers
and they are able to edit group documents, hold online meetings, swap
information and data, and collaborate in any number of ways without ever
leaving their desks. Open programming interfaces allow users to author tools
that they need and easily tailor them to their requirements, then share them
with others.
Mobile Broadband.
Each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured1— or a
new phone for every six people on the planet. In this market, innovation is
unfolding at an unprecedented pace. Capabilities are increasing rapidly, and
prices are becoming ever more affordable. Indeed, mobiles are quickly
becoming the most affordable portable platform for staying networked on the
go. New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access
almost any Internet content—content that can be delivered over either a
broadband cellular network or a local wireless network.
Data Mashups.
Mashups—custom applications where combinations of data from different
sources are “mashed up” into a single tool— offer new ways to look at and
interact with datasets. The availability of large amounts of data (from
search patterns, say, or real estate sales or Flickr photo tags) is
converging with the development of open programming interfaces for social
networking, mapping, and other tools. This in turn is opening the doors to
hundreds of data mashups that will transform the way we understand and
represent information.
Collective Intelligence.
The kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of
people is collective intelligence. In the coming years, we will see
educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced
in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit
collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of
numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over
time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively
obtained. Data mashups will tap into information generated by collective
intelligence to expand our understanding of ourselves and the
technologically-mediated world we inhabit.
Social Operating Systems.
The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social
operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network
around people, rather than around content. This simple conceptual shift
promises profound implications for the academy, and for the ways in which we
think about knowledge and learning. Social operating systems will support
whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit
connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use
them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know. As
might be expected when studying emerging phenomena over time, some of these
topics are related to, or outgrowths of, ones featured in previous editions
of the Horizon Report.
Grassroots video (2008), for
example, reflects the evolution of user-created content (2007); it has
been singled out this year because it has emerged as a distinct set of
technologies in common use that has broad application to teaching,
learning, and creative expression.
Similarly, we have followed mobile
devices with interest for the past several years. In 2006, multimedia
capture was the key factor; mobiles became prolific recording devices for
video, audio, and still imagery. Personal content storehouses were the focus
of mobile in 2007; calendars, contact databases, photo and music
collections, and more began to be increasingly and commonly stored on mobile
devices over the past year. Now for 2008, we are seeing the effect of new
displays and increased access to web content taking these devices by storm.
Nonetheless, while there are abundant examples of personal and professional
uses for mobiles, educational content delivery via mobile devices is still
in the early stages. The expectation is that advances in technology over the
next twelve to eighteen months will remove the last barriers to access and
bring mobiles truly into the mainstream for education.
Critical Challenges
The Horizon Project Advisory Board
annually identifies critical challenges facing learning organizations over
the five-year time period covered by this report, drawing them from a
careful analysis of current events, papers, articles, and similar sources.
The challenges ranked as most likely to have a significant impact on
teaching, learning, and creativity in the coming years appear below, in the
order of importance assigned them by the Advisory Board.
Significant shifts in scholarship,
research, creative expression, and learning have created a need for
innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy. This challenge
has evolved over the past year and is a crucial one for teaching and
learning. As the gap grows between new scholarship and old, leadership
and innovation are needed at all levels of the academy—from students to
faculty to staff and administrative leadership. It is critical that the
academic community as a whole embraces the potential of technologies and
practices like those described in this report. Experimentation must be
encouraged and supported by policy; in order for that to happen,
scholars, researchers, and teachers must demonstrate its value by taking
advantage of opportunities for collaboration and interdisciplinary work.
Higher education is facing a
growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and
personal devices. This challenge is even more true today than it was a
year ago. As new devices like the Apple iPhone and the LG Electronics
Voyager are released that make content almost as easy to access and view
on a mobile as on a computer, the demand for mobile content will
continue to grow. Recent infrastructure changes have resulted in
increased access areas for mobile devices, and there are clear
applications of mobile technology for public safety, education, and
entertainment. This is more than merely an expectation to provide
content: this is an opportunity for higher education to reach its
constituents wherever they may be.
The renewed emphasis on
collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop
new forms of interaction and assessment. Collaborative experiences in
virtual worlds are easy to find today compared to a year ago, when this
challenge was first described. The results are encouraging, but more
work is needed on the assessment side before the full potential of these
kinds of activities can be realized. Issues like ownership of
collaborative work and certification of authorship present difficulties
for evaluation. Further development of social networking and other
collaborative tools will continue to facilitate this kind of work, and
opportunities for interaction will only increase; the challenge faced by
the educational community is to seize those opportunities and develop
effective ways to measure academic progress as it happens.
The academy is faced with a need
to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological
literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s
tools. Webbased tools are rapidly becoming the standard, both in
education and in the workplace. Technologically mediated communication
is the norm. Fluency in information, visual, and technological literacy
is of vital importance, yet these literacies are not formally taught to
most students. We need new and expanded definitions of these literacies
that are based on mastering underlying concepts rather than on
specialized skill sets, and we need to develop and establish methods for
teaching and evaluating these critical literacies at all levels of
education. The challenge is to develop curricula and assessment rubrics
that address not only traditional capabilities like developing an
argument over the course of a long paper, but also how to apply those
competencies to other forms of communication such as short digital
videos, blogs, or photo essays.
These challenges are a reflection of
the impact of new practices and technologies on our lives. They are
indicative of the changing nature of the way we communicate, access
information, and connect with peers and colleagues. Taken together, they
provide a framing perspective with which to consider the potential impacts
of the six technologies and practices described in this edition of the
Horizon Report.
Significant Trends
Each year the Horizon Advisory Board
also researches, identifies and ranks key trends affecting the areas of
teaching, learning, and creative expression. The Board reviews current
articles, interviews, papers, and published research to discover emerging or
continuing trends. The trends are ranked according to how significant an
impact they are likely to have on education in the next five years.
A new year has brought new publications that
contemplate the future effects of technologies on education. Three of these
documents are presented here.
In "How Technology Will Shape Our Future: Three
Views of the Twenty-First Century" (ECAR Research Bulletin, Issue 2, 2008),
Thomas L. Franke "explores three of the most compelling views of our
longer-term future, the role of technology in those possible futures, and
the impact these alternative futures might have on higher education. The
alternatives range from a future of extreme constraint and possible collapse
. . . to one of unprecedented abundance, where most of the current work of
higher education will be automated. . . ."
ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research)
"provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make
better decisions about information technology. ECAR assembles leading
scholars, practitioners, researchers, and analysts to focus on issues of
critical importance to higher education, many of which carry increasingly
complicated and consequential implications." For more information go to
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=4.
According to Robert Kuhn (2000), an expert in brain
research, few people understand the complexity of that change. Technology is
creating new thinking that is "at once creative and innovative, volatile and
turbulent" and "nothing less than a shift in worldview." The change in
mental process has been brought about because "(1) information is freely
available, and therefore interdisciplinary ideas and cross-cultural
communication are widely accessible; (2) time is compressed, and therefore
reflection is condensed and decision-making is compacted; (3) individuals
are empowered, and therefore private choice and reach are strengthened and
one person can have the presence of an institution" (sec: Concluding
Remarks).
If we consider thinking as both individual
(internal) and social (external), as Rupert Wegerif (2000) suggests, then "[t]echnology,
in various forms from language to the internet, carries the external form of
thinking. Technology therefore has a role to play through supporting
improved social thinking (e.g. providing systems to mediate decision making
and collective reasoning) and also through providing tools to help
individuals externalize their thinking and so to shape their own social
worlds" (p. 15).
The new tools for communication that have become
part of the 21st century no doubt contribute to thinking. Thus, in a debate
on effectiveness or on implementation of a particular tool, we must also
consider the potential for creativity, innovation, volatility, and
turbulence that Kuhn (2000) indicates.
Without
incorporating technology into every aspect of its
activities, no organization can expect to achieve results in
this increasingly digital world. Yet education is dead last
in technology use compared with all major industrial
sectors, and that has to change in order for schools to meet
the challenges of 21st century learning--this according to a
paper released Monday by the State Education Technology
Directors Association (SETDA), the International Society for
Technology in Education (ISTE), and the Partnership for 21st
Century Skills at the SETDA Leadership Summit and Education
Forum in Washington, DC.
"How will we
create the schools America needs to remain competitive?" the
paper asks. "For more than a generation, the nation has
engaged in a monumental effort to improve student
achievement. We've made progress, but we're not even close
to where we need to be."
The paper,
Maximizing the Impact: the Pivotal Role of Technology in
a 21st Century Education System, calls on education
leaders to incorporate technology comprehensively in school
systems in the United States to boost 21st century skills,
support innovative teaching and learning, and create "robust
education support systems."
The paper
reported that there are two major conceptual obstacles
preventing schools from taking full advantage of technology
as a catalyst for improvements in teaching and learning: a
narrow approach to the use of technology and an unfounded
assumption that technology is already being used widely in
schools in a comprehensive and effective manner.
According to
the paper:
To
overcome these obstacles, our nation's education system
must join the ranks of competitive U.S. industries that
have made technology an indispensable part of their
operations and reaped the benefits of their actions.
This report is a call to action to integrate technology
as a fundamental building block into education in three
broad areas:
1. Use technology comprehensively to develop proficiency
in 21st century skills. Knowledge of core
content is necessary, but no longer sufficient, for
success in a competitive world. Even if all students
mastered core academic subjects, they still would be
woefully underprepared to succeed in postsecondary
institutions and workplaces, which increasingly value
people who can use their knowledge to communicate,
collaborate, analyze, create, innovate, and solve
problems. Used comprehensively, technology helps
students develop 21st century skills.
2. Use technology
comprehensively to support innovative
teaching and learning. To keep
pace with a changing world, schools need
to offer more rigorous, relevant and
engaging opportunities for students to
learn--and to apply their knowledge and
skills in meaningful ways. Used
comprehensively, technology supports
new, research-based approaches and
promising practices in teaching and
learning.
The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, released November 13,
2006, for the first time offers a close look at distance education, offering
provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher levels of
engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their on-campus peers ---
http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2006_Annual_Report/index.cfm
The 2006
National Survey of Student Engagement, released
today, for the first time offers a close look at distance education,
offering provocative new data suggesting that e-learners report higher
levels of engagement, satisfaction and academic challenge than their
on-campus peers.
Beyond the numbers, however, what institutions
choose to do with the data promises to attract extra attention to this
year’s report.
NSSE is one of the few standardized measures of
academic outcomes that most officials across a wide range of higher
education institutions agree offers something of value.Yet NSSE does not
release institution-specific data, leaving it to colleges to choose whether
to publicize their numbers.
Colleges are under mounting pressure, however, to
show in concrete, measurable ways that they are successfully educating
students, fueled in part by the recent release of the
report from the
Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education,
which emphasizes the need for the development of
comparable measures of student learning. In the commission’s report and in
college-led efforts to heed the commission’s call,
NSSE has been embraced as one way to do that. In this climate, will a
greater number of colleges embrace transparency and release their results?
Anywhere between one-quarter and one-third of the
institutions participating in NSSE choose to release some data, said George
Kuh, NSSE’s director and a professor of higher education at Indiana
University at Bloomington. But that number includes not only those
institutions that release all of the data, but also those that pick and
choose the statistics they’d like to share.
In the “Looking Ahead” section that concluded the
2006 report, the authors note that NSSE can “contribute to the higher
education improvement and accountability agenda,” teaming with institutions
to experiment with appropriate ways to publicize their NSSE data and
developing common templates for colleges to use. The report cautions that
the data released for accountability purposes should be accompanied by other
indicators of student success, including persistence and graduation rates,
degree/certificate completion rates and measurements of post-college
endeavors.
“Has this become a kind of a watershed moment when
everybody’s reporting? No. But I think what will happen as a result of the
Commission on the Future of Higher Ed, Secretary (Margaret) Spelling’s
workgroup, is that there is now more interest in figuring out how to do
this,” Kuh said.
Charles Miller, chairman of the Spellings
commission, said he understands that NSSE’s pledge not to release
institutional data has encouraged colleges to participate — helping the
survey, first introduced in 1999, get off the ground and gain wide
acceptance. But Miller said he thinks that at this point, any college that
chooses to participate in NSSE should make its data public.
“Ultimately, the duty of the colleges that take
public funds is to make that kind of data public. It’s not a secret that the
people in the academy ought to have. What’s the purpose of it if it’s just
for the academy? What about the people who want to get the most for their
money?”
Participating public colleges are already obliged
to provide the data upon request, but Miller said private institutions,
which also rely heavily on public financial aid funds, should share that
obligation.
Kuh said that some colleges’ reluctance to
publicize the data stems from a number of factors, the primary reason being
that they are not satisfied with the results and feel they might reflect
poorly on the institution.
In addition, some college officials fear that the
information, if publicized, may be misused, even conflated to create a
rankings system. Furthermore, sharing the data would represent a shift in
the cultural paradigm at some institutions used to keeping sensitive data to
themselves, Kuh said.
“The great thing about NSSE and other measures like
it is that it comes so close to the core of what colleges and universities
are about — teaching and learning. This is some of the most sensitive
information that we have about colleges and universities,” Kuh said.
But Miller said the fact that the data get right to
the heart of the matter is precisely why it should be publicized. “It
measures what students get while they’re at school, right? If it does that,
what’s the fear of publishing it?” Miller asked. “If someone would say,
‘It’s too hard to interpret,’ then that’s an insult to the public.” And if
colleges are afraid of what their numbers would suggest, they shouldn’t
participate in NSSE at all, Miller said.
However, Douglas Bennett, president of Earlham
College in Indiana and chair of NSSE’s National Advisory Board, affirmed
NSSE’s commitment to opening survey participation to all institutions
without imposing any pressure that they should make their institutional
results public. “As chair of the NSSE board, we believe strongly that
institutions own their own data and what they do with it is up to them.
There are a variety of considerations institutions are going to take into
account as to whether or not they share their NSSE data,” Bennett said.
However, as president of Earlham, which releases
all of its NSSE data and even releases its accreditation reports, Bennett
said he thinks colleges, even private institutions, have a professional and
moral obligation to demonstrate their effectiveness in response to
accountability demands — through NSSE or another means a college might deem
appropriate.
This Year’s Survey
The 2006 NSSE survey, which is based on data from
260,000 randomly-selected first-year and senior students at 523 four-year
institutions(NSSE’s companion survey, the
Community College Survey of
Student Engagement, focuses on two-year colleges)
looks much more deeply than previous iterations of the survey did into the
performance of online students.
Distance learning students outperform or perform on
par with on-campus students on measures including level of academic
challenge; student-faculty interaction; enriching educational experiences;
and higher-order, integrative and reflective learning; and gains in
practical competence, personal and social development, and general
education. They demonstrate lower levels of engagement when it comes to
active and collaborative learning.
Karen Miller, a professor of education at the
University of Louisville who studies online learning, said the results
showing higher or equal levels of engagement among distance learning
students make sense: “If you imagine yourself as an undergraduate in a
fairly large class, you can sit in that class and feign engagement. You can
nod and make eye contact; your mind can be a million miles away. But when
you’re online, you’ve got to respond, you’ve got to key in your comments on
the discussion board, you’ve got to take part in the group activities.
Plus, Miller added, typing is a more complex
psycho-motor skill than speaking, requiring extra reflection. “You see what
you have said, right in front of your eyes, and if you realize it’s kind of
half-baked you can go back and correct it before you post it.”
Also, said Kuh, most of the distance learners
surveyed were over the age of 25. “Seventy percent of them are adult
learners. These folks are more focused; they’re better able to manage their
time and so forth,” said Kuh, who added that many of the concerns
surrounding distance education focus on traditional-aged students who may
not have mastered their time management skills.
Among other results from the 2006 NSSE survey:
Those students who come to college less
well-prepared academically or from historically underrepresented groups
tend to benefit from
engagement in educationally purposeful
activities even more than their peers do.
First-year and senior students spend an
average of about 13 to 14 hours per week preparing for classes, much
less than what faculty members say is needed.
Student engagement is positively correlated to
grades and persistence between the first and second year of college.
New students study fewer hours during their
first year than they expected to when starting college.
First-year students at research universities
are more likely than students at other types of institutions to
participate in a learning community.
First-year students at liberal arts colleges
participate in class discussions more often and view their faculty more
positively than do students at other institutions.
Seniors at master’s level colleges and
universities give class presentations and work with their peers on
problems in class more than students at other types of institutions do.
In the popular imagination,
chess isn't like a spelling bee or
Trivial Pursuit, a competition to
see who can hold the most facts in
memory and consult them quickly. In
chess, as in the arts and sciences,
there is plenty of room for beauty,
subtlety, and deep originality.
Chess requires brilliant thinking,
supposedly the one feat that would
be--forever--beyond the reach of any
computer. But for a decade, human
beings have had to live with the
fact that one of our species' most
celebrated intellectual summits--the
title of world chess champion--has
to be shared with a machine, Deep
Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in a
highly publicized match in 1997. How
could this be? What lessons could be
gleaned from this shocking upset?
Did we learn that machines could
actually think as well as the
smartest of us, or had chess been
exposed as not such a deep game
after all?
The following years saw two other
human-machine chess matches that
stand out: a hard-fought draw
between Vladimir Kramnik and Deep
Fritz in Bahrain in 2002 and a draw
between Kasparov and Deep Junior in
New York in 2003, in a series of
games that the New York City Sports
Commission called "the first World
Chess Championship sanctioned by
both the Fédération Internationale
des Échecs (FIDE), the international
governing body of chess, and the
International Computer Game
Association (ICGA)."
The verdict that computers are the
equal of human beings in chess could
hardly be more official, which makes
the caviling all the more pathetic.
The excuses sometimes take this
form: "Yes, but machines don't play
chess the way human beings play
chess!" Or sometimes this: "What the
machines do isn't
really
playing chess at all." Well, then,
what would
be really playing chess?
This is not a
trivial question. The best computer
chess is well nigh indistinguishable
from the best human chess, except
for one thing:
computers
don't know
when to accept a draw. Computers--at
least currently existing
computers--can't be bored or
embarrassed, or anxious about losing
the respect of the other players,
and these are aspects of life that
human competitors always have to
contend with, and sometimes even
exploit, in their games. Offering or
accepting a draw, or resigning, is
the one decision that opens the
hermetically sealed world of chess
to the real world, in which life is
short and there are things more
important than chess to think about.
This boundary crossing can be
simulated with an arbitrary rule, or
by allowing the computer's handlers
to step in. Human players often try
to intimidate or embarrass their
human opponents, but this is like
the covert pushing and shoving that
goes on in soccer matches. The
imperviousness of computers to this
sort of gamesmanship means that if
you beat them at all, you have to
beat them fair and square--and isn't
that just what Kasparov and Kramnik
were unable to do?
Yes, but so
what? Silicon machines can now play
chess better than any protein
machines can. Big deal. This calm
and reasonable reaction, however, is
hard for most people to sustain.
They don't like the idea that their
brains are protein machines. When
Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997,
many commentators were tempted to
insist that its brute-force search
methods were
entirely unlike the exploratory
processes that Kasparov used when he
conjured up his chess moves. But
that is simply not so. Kasparov's
brain is made of organic materials
and has an architecture notably
unlike that of Deep Blue, but it is
still, so far as we know, a
massively parallel
search
engine
that has an
outstanding array of heuristic
pruning techniques that keep it from
wasting time on unlikely branches.
True, there's no doubt that investment in research and development has a different profile in the two cases; Kasparov has methods of extracting good design principles from past games, so that he can recognize, and decide to ignore, huge portions of the branching tree of possible game continuations that Deep Blue had to canvass seriatim. Kasparov's reliance on this "insight" meant that the shape of his search trees--all the nodes explicitly evaluated--no doubt differed dramatically from the shape of Deep Blue's, but this did not constitute an entirely different means of choosing a move. Whenever Deep Blue's exhaustive searches closed off a type of avenue that it had some means of recognizing, it could reuse that research whenever appropriate, just like Kasparov. Much of this analytical work had been done for Deep Blue by its designers, but Kasparov had likewise benefited from hundreds of thousands of person-years of chess exploration transmitted to him by players, coaches, and books.
It is interesting in this regard to contemplate the suggestion made by Bobby Fischer, who has proposed to restore the game of chess to its intended rational purity by requiring that the major pieces be randomly placed in the back row at the start of each game (randomly, but in mirror image for black and white, with a white-square bishop and a black-square bishop, and the king between the rooks). Fischer Random Chess would render the mountain of memorized openings almost entirely obsolete, for humans and machines alike, since they would come into play much less than 1 percent of the time. The chess player would be thrown back onto fundamental principles; one would have to do more of the hard design work in real time. It is far from clear whether this change in rules would benefit human beings or computers more. It depends on which type of chess player is relying most heavily on what is, in effect, rote memory.
Is Facebook the New MySpace? MySpace has an impressive lead today, but things
can change quickly in the fluid world of mass-market social networking sites.
Just ask Friendster. First Friendster was everybody's favorite social
networking site. Then Friendster fell out of vogue--precipitously--and people
stopped going there. In its place, MySpace became the darling of the Web.
MySpace provided not only a free place to host your own online identity, but a
full set of tools for meeting and interacting with others. Now everybody is
talking about Facebook, which fits the same description, but in a very different
way. Will Facebook become the next MySpace? I think so, and here's why.
Mark Sullivan, PC World via The Washington Post, July 20, 2007
---
Click Here
"Even if research shows that a particular
technology supports a certain kind of learning, this research may not reveal
the implications of implementing it. Without appropriate infrastructure or
adequate provisions of services (policy); without the facility or ability of
teachers to integrate it into their teaching practice (academics); without
sufficient support from technologists and/or educational technologists
(support staff), the likelihood of the particular technology or software
being educationally effective is questionable."
The current issue (vol. 19, no. 1, 2007) of the
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY presents a selection of papers
from the Conference Technology and Change in Educational Practice which was
held at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, London in October
2005.
The papers cover three areas: "methodological
frameworks, proposing new ways of structuring effective research; empirical
studies, illustrating the ways in which technology impacts the working roles
and practices in Higher Education; and new ways of conceptualising
technologies for education."
Papers include:
"A Framework for Conceptualising the Impact of
Technology on Teaching and Learning"
by Sara Price and Martin Oliver, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of
Education
"New and Changing Teacher Roles in Higher Education
in a Digital Age"
by Jo Dugstad Wake, Olga Dysthe, and Stig Mjelstad, University of Bergen
"Academic Use of Digital Resources: Disciplinary
Differences and the Issue of Progression Revisited"
by Bob Kemp, Lancaster University, and Chris Jones, Open University
"The Role of Blogs In Studying the Discourse and
Social Practices of Mathematics Teachers"
by Katerina Makri and Chronis Kynigos, University of Athens
The Journal of Educational Technology and Society
[ISSN 1436-4522]is a peer-reviewed, quarterly publication that "seeks
academic articles on the issues affecting the developers of educational
systems and educators who implement and manage such systems." Current and
back issues are available at
http://www.ifets.info/. The
journal is published by the International Forum of Educational Technology &
Society. For more information, see
http://ifets.ieee.org/.
Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college
in Fall 2005?
More students are taking online college courses than
ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept
of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest
association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . .
‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online
More students are taking online college courses
than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the
concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s
largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online
education.
Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one
online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term,
the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in
2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above
the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased
each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.
The report, a joint partnership between the group
and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent
of the content is delivered via the Internet.
The Sloan Survey of Online Learning,
“Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,”
shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say
that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or
superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that
e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.”
Both numbers are up from a year ago.
Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is
administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of
Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges
and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to
for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack
of survey responses from those institutions.)
Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk
of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70
percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served
by face-to-face programs.
What stands out is the number of faculty who still
don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic
leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of
online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady
throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least
accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the
programs.
Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson
associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers
are striking.
“As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We
didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said.
“It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were
students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”
Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass
Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said
nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach
face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill
in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in
class).
She said she isn’t surprised to see data
illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because
her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students
are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university
this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.
“Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their
degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.
The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of
students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half
are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through
doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.
Nearly all institutions with total enrollments
exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds
of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the
smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report
notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment
totals and not looking to expand into the online market.
The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be
involved in online learning.
“Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little
more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a
senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges.
The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of
online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that
some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting.
Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.
Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that
issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time
and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real
time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t
differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said
she plans to include that in next year’s edition.
Few survey respondents said acceptance of online
degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal
arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.
One reason why might be what I have seen. The
in residence accounting students that I talk with take online classes
here because they are EASY and do not take much work. This would be very
popular with students but not generally so with faculty.
John
November 10, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi John,
Then there is a quality control problem whereever this is a fact. It
would be a travesty if any respected college had two or more categories of
academic standards or faculty assignments.
Variations in academic standards have long been a problem between
part-time versus full-time faculty, although grade inflation can be higher
or lower among part-time faculty. In one instance, it’s the tenure-track
faculty who give higher grades because they're often more worried about
student evaluations. At the opposite extreme it is part-time faculty who
give higher grades for many reasons that we can think of if we think about
it.
One thing that I'm dead certain about is that highly motivated students
tend to do better in online courses ceteris paribus. Reasons are mainly that
time is used more efficiently in getting to class (no wasted time driving or
walking to class), less wasted time getting teammates together on team
projects, and fewer reasons for missing class.
My opinions on learning advantages of E-Learning were heavily influenced
by the most extensive and respected study of online versus onsite learning
experiments in the SCALE experiments
using full-time resident students at the University of Illinois ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
In the SCALE experiments cutting across 30 disciplines, it was generally
found that motivated students learned better online then their onsite
counterparts having the same instructors. However, there was no significant
impact on students who got low grades in online versus onsite treatment
groups.
I think the main problem with faculty is that online teaching tends to
burn out instructors more frequently than onsite instructors. This was also
evident in the SCALE experiments. When done correctly, online courses are
more communication intent between instructors and faculty. Also, online
learning takes more preparation time if it is done correctly.
My hero for online learning is still Amy Dunbar who
maintains high standards for everything:
Also why many times it is not done 'right'. Not
done right they do not get the same education. Students generally do not
complain about getting 'less for their money'. Since we do not do online
classes in department the ones the students are taking are the university
required general education and our students in particular are not unhappy
with being shortchanged in that area as they frequently would have preferred
none anyway.
This has not exactly been a season of peace, love
and harmony on the higher education technology landscape. A
patent fight has broken out among major developers
of course management systems. Academic publishers and university officials
are warring over
open access to federally sponsored research. And
textbook makers are taking a pounding for — among other things — the ways in
which digital enhancements are running up the prices of their products.
In that context, many may be heartened by the
announcement later today at the Educause meeting in Dallas that three dozen
academic publishers, providers of learning management software, and others
have agreed on a common, open standard that will make it possible to move
digital content into and out of widely divergent online education systems
without expensive and time consuming reengineering. The agreement by the
diverse group of publishers and software companies, who compete intensely
with one another, is being heralded as an important breakthrough that could
expand the array of digital content available to professors and students and
make it easier for colleges to switch among makers of learning systems.
Of course, that’s only if the new standard, known
as the
“Common Cartridge,” becomes widely adopted, which
is always the question with developments deemed to be potential
technological advances.
Many observers believe this one has promise,
especially because so many of the key players have been involved in it.
Working through the IMS Global Learning Consortium, leading publishers like
Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill Education and course-management system
makers such as
Blackboard,
ANGEL Learning
and open-source
Sakai have worked to
develop the technical specifications for the common cartridge, and all of
them have vowed to begin incorporating the new standard into their products
by next spring — except Blackboard, which says it will do so eventually, but
has not set a timeline for when.
What exactly is the Common Cartridge? In lay terms,
it is a set of specifications and standards, commonly agreed to by an IMS
working group, that would allow digitally produced content — supplements to
textbooks such as assessments or secondary readings, say, or
faculty-produced course add-ons like discussion groups — to “play,” or
appear, the same in any course management system, from proprietary ones like
Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn to open source systems like Moodle and
Sakai.
“It is essentially a common ‘container,’ so you can
import it and load it and have it look similar when you get it inside” your
local course system, says Ray Henderson, chief products officer at ANGEL,
who helped conceive of the idea when he was president of the digital
publishing unit at Pearson.
The Common Cartridge approach is designed to deal
with two major issues: (1) the significant cost and time that publishers now
must spend (or others, if the costs are passed along) to produce the
material they produce for multiple, differing learning management systems,
and (2) the inability to move courses produced in one course platform to
another, which makes it difficult for professors to move their courses from
one college to another and for campuses to consider switching course
management providers.
The clearest and surest upside of the new standard,
most observers agree, is that it could help lower publishers’ production
costs and, in turn, allow them to focus their energies on producing more and
better content. David O’Connor, senior vice president for product
development at Pearson Education’s core technology group, says his company
and other major publishers spend “many hundreds of thousands of dollars a
year effectively moving content around” so that ancillary material for
textbooks can work in multiple course management systems.
Because Blackboard and Web CT together own in the
neighborhood of 75 percent of the course management market, Pearson and
other publishers produce virtually all of their materials to work in those
proprietary systems. Materials are typically produced on demand for smaller
players like ANGEL, Desire2Learn and Sakai, and it is even harder to find
usable materials for colleges’ homemade systems. While big publishers such
as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have sizable media groups that can, when they
choose to, spend what’s necessary to modify digital content for selected
textbooks, “small publishers often have to say no,” O’Connor says. As a
result, “there are just fewer options for people who aren’t using Blackboard
and WebCT, and more hurdles to getting it.”
Supporters hope that adoption of the common
cartridge will allow publishers to spend less time and money adapting one
textbook’s digital content for multiple course platforms and more time
producing more and better content. “This should have the result of
broadening choice in content to institutions,” says Catherine Burdt, an
analyst at Eduventures, an education research firm. “Colleges would no
longer be limited to the content that’s supported by their LMS platform, but
could now go out and choose the best content that aligns with what’s
happening in their curriculum.”
Less clear is how successful the effort will be at
improving the portability of course materials from one learning management
system to another. If all the major providers introduce “export capability,”
there is significant promise, says Michael Feldstein, who writes the blog
e-Literate and is
assistant director of the State University of New York Learning Network.
“This has the potential to be one of the most important standards to come
out in a while, particularly for faculty,” says Feldstein, who notes that
his comments here represent his own views, not SUNY’s. “It would become much
easier for them to take rich course content and course designs and migrate
them from one system to another with far less pain.”
But while easier transferability would obviously
benefit the smaller players in the course management market — and ANGEL and
Sakai plan to announce today that their systems will soon allow professors
to create Common Cartridges for export out of their systems — such a system
would only take off if the dominant player in the market, the combined
Blackboard/WebCT, eventually does the same. “I’m not sure how excited
Blackboard would be about making it easier for faculty to migrate out of
their product and into one of their competitors,” says Feldstein.
Chris Vento, senior vice president of technology
and product development at Blackboard, was a leading proponent of the IMS
Common Cartridge concept when he was a leading official at WebCT before last
year’s merger. In an interview, he acknowledged the question lots of others
are asking: “What’s in it for Blackboard? Why wouldn’t you just lock up the
format and force everybody to use it?” His answer, he says, is that by
helping the entire industry, he says, the project cannot help but benefit
its biggest player, too.
“This will enable publishers to really do the best
job of producing their content, making it richer and better for students and
faculty, and more lucrative for publishers from the business perspective,”
says Vento. “Anything we can do to enable that content to be built, and more
of it and better quality, the more lucrative it is eventually for us.”
Blackboard is fully behind the project, Vento says.
Having endorsed the Common Cartridge charter, Blackboard has also committed
to incorporating the new standard into its products, and that Blackboard
intends to make export of course materials possible out of its platform.
“Exactly how that maps to our product roadmap has not been finalized,” he
said, “but in the end, we’re all going to have to do this. It’s just a
question of when.” There will, he says, “be a lot of pressures to do this.”
That pressure is likely to be intensified because
of the public relations pounding Blackboard has taken among many in the
academic technology world because of its attempt to patent technology that
many people believe is fundamental to e-learning systems. O’Connor of
Pearson says he believes Blackboard could benefit from its involvement in
the Common Cartridge movement by being seen “as the dominant player, to be
someone supporting openness in the community.” He adds: “There is an
opportunity for them to mend some of the damage from the patent issue.”
Like virtually all technological advances — or
would-be ones — Common Cartridge’s success will ultimately rise and fall,
says Burdt of Eduventures, on whether Blackboard and others embrace it.
“Everything comes down to adoption,” she says. “The challenge with every
standard is the adoption model. Some are out the door too early. Some evolve
too early and are eclipsed by substitutes. For others, suppliers decide not
to support it for various reasons.”
Those behind the Common Cartridge believe it’s off
to a good start with the large number of disparate parties not only involved
in creating it, but already committing to incorporate it into their
offerings.
Yet even as they launch this standard, some of them
are already looking ahead to the next challenge. While the Common Cartridge,
if widely adopted, will allow for easier movement of digital course
materials into and out of course management systems, it does not ensure that
users will be able to do the same thing with third-party e-learning tools
(like subject-specific tutoring modules) that are not part of course
management systems, or with the next generation of tools that may emerge
down the road. For that, the same parties would have to reach a similar
agreement on a standard for “tool interoperability,” which is next on the
IMS agenda.
“This is only one step,” Pearson’s O’Connor says of
the Common Cartridge. But it is, he says, an important one.
Questions
What are the most significant changes expected in higher education by the Year
2025?
What major universities are now experimenting on the leading edge of such
changes?
Answers Answer 1 --- Cluster
and Grid Computing! The first test linked Caltech, Fermilab,
UC San Diego, the University of Florida, and the University of Wisconsin
Also Google Cloud Computing
What's Microsoft been up to in grid/distributed
computing? The company's not talking, but we've ferreted out some interesting
details about the hush-hush "Bigtop" project. Our sources say it
involves loosely coupled machines, and perhaps even a new version of Windows.
Read our story for more details on what "Bigtop"
could be, and when to expect it.
Jim Lauderback, What's New from Ziff Davis, December 30, 2004
From Syllabus News on September 24, 2002
Stanford Online Press Gets 'Clustering' Software
Stanford's HighWire Press, an online publisher of
scientific and medical publications for researchers and institutions, has
licensed "clustering" software that will allow it to organize its
content into easy-to-navigate clusters for end-users. HighWire licensed the
Clustering Engine and Enterprise Publisher from Vivisimo, Inc. to organize
search results and publish larger document subsets on its master site.
HighWire will offer the products to its own publishing customers for use on
their journal websites. "HighWire Press now has 13 million online
articles, so researchers need tools to reduce, refine, and tunnel into search
results," said John Sack, director of HighWire. The new software, he
added, "will help liberate readers from the need to make overly specific
queries. Instead, they can recognize interesting topic clusters and drill down
from there, in the `I know it when I see it' style."
Note especially how technology forecasts have changed since the turn of the
21st Century. Back in 2002 Gartner foresaw the explosion of grid and cluster
computing but die not seem to foresee the explosion in mobile computing. Now all
that has changed somewhat at least.
One
good way to gauge a new technology's degree of acceptance is to observe
whether it has moved out of the laboratory and onto store shelves -- from
science to commerce. According to that measure, grid computing is just coming
of age.
Often called the next
big thing in global Internet technology, grid computing employs clusters of
locally or remotely networked machines to work on specific computational
projects.
One well-known
example of grid computing -- sometimes called distributed or clustered
computing -- is the ongoing SETI
(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project, in which thousands of
users are sharing their unused processor cycles to help search for signs of
"rational" signals from outer space.
Grid computing
traditionally has been useful to researchers working on scientific or
technical problems -- much like the SETI project -- that require a great
number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.
But while this
technology was once exclusively the province of academics in fields like
biomedicine and weather forecasting, it has recently been making a strong
foray into potentially lucrative e-commerce sectors. Although clustering has
been used for several years as a load-balancing technique by server
hardware manufacturers, grid computing now seems to be coming of age for other
applications as well.
"Grid computing
has advanced to the point now that there are products out there like Sun's
Grid Engine Enterprise Edition," Aberdeen
Group analyst Bill Claybrook told NewsFactor.
Much like a
load-balancing server cluster, Sun's Grid Engine software lets organizations
create networked grids to share resources on a wider scale and to allocate
processing resources according to department priorities.
Essentially, grids
are built from clusters of computer servers joined together over a local area
network (LAN) or over the Internet.
While several grids
that run over the Internet -- like the SETI project -- have been built with
proprietary software, there are several development tools that can facilitate
the growth and adoption of grid computing.
One of those tools is
Globus, a research and development
project focused on helping software developers apply the grid concept.
The Globus toolkit,
the group's primary offering, is a set of components that can be used to
develop grid applications. For each component in the toolkit, Globus provides
an API (application programmer interface) for use by software developers.
Research scientists
historically have been attracted to grid computing because it uses the power
of idle computers to work on difficult computational problems.
Proponents of grid
computing say the technology will enable universities and research
institutions to share their supercomputers, servers and storage capacity,
allowing them to perform massive calculations quickly and relatively cheaply.
In line with those
expectations, HP recently announced that a 9.2-teraflop supercomputer
soon will be connected to the Department of Energy's Science Grid. When
installed, it will be the largest supercomputer attached to a grid anywhere in
the world, according to the company.
Until now, the
problem with grid computing has been a lack of common software for developers
to work with, largely because grids rely on Internet-based software.
In an effort to spur
broader adoption of grids, the National Science
Foundation established the US$12.1 million Middleware
Initiative last year, and the agency has recently released software and other
tools designed to make working on grids easier for scientists and engineers.
"Scientists are
now sharing data and instrumentation on an unprecedented scale, and other
geographically distributed groups are beginning to work together in ways that
were previously impossible," according to the Grid Research Integration
Deployment and Support Center.
In a real-world
example of grid computing, IBM (NYSE: IBM)
and Butterfly.net announced in May that they would soon release a computing
grid for the video game industry. Butterfly.net spent two years building the
grid, which distributes games across a network of server
farms using IBM e-business infrastructure technology.
Massively multiplayer
games (MMGs) historically have been run on mirrored servers that essentially
duplicate copies of the MMG universe to balance user loads.
While this technique
is designed to reduce latency for all users -- so that each set of servers
behaves responsively to user actions -- the mirroring technique limits the
number of players who can participate at one time in the same game universe.
When load balances
increase, the typical MMG response has been to add more servers, copy the game
universe and spill the extra load into that new copy.
Now, however,
Butterfly.net's grid technology provides "cross-server sentinels"
that supports the interaction of millions of players in one world, with server
boundaries invisible to players. According to the company, the extension of
grid computing to the gaming world lets game developers support a limitless
number of users in their MMGs.
Companies are lining
up to jump on the Butterfly bandwagon. This week, for example, software
development site CollabNet announced it will work with Butterfly.net to
develop an online environment that lets game developers test their games.
"IBM's been
extremely busy on a number of fronts in grid, in terms of investing resources
and winning new partners and customers," IBM spokesperson Jim Larkin told
NewsFactor.
"Butterfly is
one of the key examples thus far of how IBM has worked with another company to
help develop a computing grid that is in the commercial arena," Larkin
said. "It's a clear example of how grid is taking hold of an
industry."
Computer scientists in three states -- West Virginia,
North Carolina, and Colorado -- are each combining their technology resources
into separate computer grids that will give researchers, universities, private
companies and citizens access to powerful supercomputers.
The project designers say these information aqueducts
will encourage business development, accelerate scientific research, and
improve the efficiency of government.
"Grid computing will provide 1,000 times more
business opportunities than what we see over the Internet today," says
Wolfgang Gentzsch, managing director of grid computing and networking services
at MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC.
MCNC is spearheading North Carolina's statewide grid
development that currently includes seven universities including North
Carolina State, Duke, and the University of North Carolina.
The North Carolina project -- which has a goal to
link 180 institutions -- is encouraging business development through its Start
Up Grid Initiative, which allows fledgling companies to plug into the grid for
up to nine months free of charge and afterwards at discounted rates, Gentzsch
says.
Because raising capital and acquiring technology
takes up most of a new company's time, "Startups usually only get to
spend 10 percent of their time executing their idea," says Gentzch, who
has launched seven companies.
According to a 2003 report by Robert Cohen, a Fellow
at the Economic Strategy Institute, North Carolina's grid could create 24,000
jobs and boost the state's output by $10.1 billion by 2010 if effectively
implemented.
Before statewide grids can become a realit, the
software used to share and manage resources needs to be improved to include
more standard communication protocols. Gentzsch says the expected release of
version 4.0 of the open source Globus Toolkit, which he estimates is used by
90 percent of grid projects, will greatly simplify connecting computers to the
grid.
Securing a location's computing resources so that
only specified resources are made available for sharing is a significant
challenge, Gentzsch says. To protect data files, institutions must
"encrypt everything," and configure the grid network so that
"the CPU cycles are separated from the disk resources."
Gentzsch estimates that advanced computing resource
utilization is just 25 percent, and grid computing could increase the
efficiency to 75 percent.
The next big thing to transform the Internet is
likely to come from work going on with the grid. The grid is an infrastructure
that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic
collections of people, institutions, and resources.
It may be useful to recall that the birth of the Web
came from a desire to share research papers among large numbers of particle
physicists doing “big science” at CERN, the Swiss research center. Tim
Berners-Lee’s vision has changed all our lives. In the world of
international science, its impact has been staggering. Recognizing this, the
Joint Information Systems Council (JISC), the UK analog of the National
Science Foundation, has embarked on a Ł98 million project called the Core
e-Science Programme, managed by the Engineering and Physical Science Research
Council (EPSRC) on behalf of the UK Research Councils. The e-Science project
proposes to connect scientists with expensive remote facilities, teraflop
computers, and information resources stored in dedicated databases. Add to
these resources higher level services such as workflow, transactions, data
mining, and knowledge discovery, and you begin to glimpse what’s envisioned.
The grid is the architecture proposed to make this a reality.
What kinds of research are we talking about?
Everything from particle physics (what goes around comes around) to basic
medical investigation. For example, our understanding of even basic human
physiology remains terribly limited. We don’t know how multiple parameters
interact over time in fundamental processes like heart rate, blood pressure,
and other cardiovascular indicators. Imagine if 100,000 people volunteered to
wear real-time monitoring devices so that their daily metabolic functions were
recorded and analyzed in real time. The volume of data is enormous but
that’s just the beginning. We would want to compare how the data relate to
the activities of the people as they went about their daily lives. In the end,
predicting the likelihood of an impending physical problem becomes a potential
reality. Just like the work underway to provide predictive intervention for
the replacement of computing hardware, you can imagine high risk heart
patients wearing proactive monitors that page them to head for a cardiac care
unit because the data indicate a potential problem in the next 24 hours. Today
it may seem like science fiction, but with research using the grid, it’s
emerging into possible science fact.
This may seem far a field from the classroom. How far
it is remains to be seen of course, but there are people working today on
applying the potential of the grid to learning management or virtual learning
environments. Better descriptions about teaching processes and the learning
objects needed, along with work on metadata for educational objects, are
underway. So stay tuned for more about the “next big thing” in future
columns.
One simple
question. That's all it took for Christophe Bisciglia to bewilder confident
job applicants at Google (GOOG). Bisciglia, an angular 27-year-old senior
software engineer with long wavy hair, wanted to see if these undergrads
were ready to think like Googlers. "Tell me," he'd say, "what would you do
if you had 1,000 times more data?"
What a strange
idea. If they returned to their school projects and were foolish enough to
cram formulas with a thousand times more details about shopping or maps
or—heaven forbid—with video files, they'd slow their college servers to a
crawl.
At that point in
the interview, Bisciglia would explain his question. To thrive at Google, he
told them, they would have to learn to work—and to dream—on a vastly larger
scale. He described Google's globe-spanning network of computers. Yes, they
answered search queries instantly. But together they also blitzed through
mountains of data, looking for answers or intelligence faster than any
machine on earth. Most of this hardware wasn't on the Google campus. It was
just out there, somewhere on earth, whirring away in big refrigerated data
centers. Folks at Google called it "the cloud." And one challenge of
programming at Google was to leverage that cloud—to push it to do things
that would overwhelm lesser machines. New hires at Google, Bisciglia says,
usually take a few months to get used to this scale. "Then one day, you see
someone suggest a wild job that needs a few thousand machines, and you say:
Hey, he gets it.'"
What recruits
needed, Bisciglia eventually decided, was advance training. So one autumn
day a year ago, when he ran into Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt between
meetings, he floated an idea. He would use his 20% time, the allotment
Googlers have for independent projects, to launch a course. It would
introduce students at his alma mater, the University of Washington, to
programming at the scale of a cloud. Call it Google 101. Schmidt liked the
plan. Over the following months, Bisciglia's Google 101 would evolve and
grow. It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM (IBM),
announced in October, to plug universities around the world into Google-like
computing clouds.
As this concept
spreads, it promises to expand Google's footprint in industry far beyond
search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research
and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a
sense, the world's primary computer.
"I had originally
thought [Bisciglia] was going to work on education, which was fine," Schmidt
says late one recent afternoon at Google headquarters. "Nine months later,
he comes out with this new [cloud] strategy, which was completely
unexpected." The idea, as it developed, was to deliver to students,
researchers, and entrepreneurs the immense power of Google-style computing,
either via Google's machines or others offering the same service.
What is Google's
cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1
million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in
our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies
of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers
to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional
supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die,
usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them
with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost
like a living thing.
A move towards
clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most
basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a
century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and
bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities. Google executives
had long envisioned and prepared for this change. Cloud computing, with
Google's machinery at the very center, fit neatly into the company's grand
vision, established a decade ago by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "to
organize the world's information and make it universally accessible."
Bisciglia's idea opened a pathway toward this future. "Maybe he had it in
his brain and didn't tell me," Schmidt says. "I didn't realize he was going
to try to change the way computer scientists thought about computing. That's
a much more ambitious goal."
"Grid computing was the reserve of 'big science'
five years ago," says Catlett, "But in five years, it will be
completely pedestrian. I was working on a Cray Supercomputer in 1985, and my
laptop would blow it away now!"
That's for the future. In the meantime, Grids are
currently deploying among Fortune 2000 companies to deal with everything from
batch analysis of financial data, trend analysis of point-of-sale data, and
design, engineering and manufacture automation. Oh, and collaboration as well.
This last may seem a surprising tangent to the pure
processing power that grids typically deliver, but collaboration and data
analysis are two sides of the same logistical coin. Engineers or scientists
are increasingly collaborating on projects and testing their theories across
the same grid. They are also dealing with terabytes of data.
It's one of the moves that makes integration with Web
services so obvious to grid gurus, like IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of
technology strategy.
"Grid computing is really the natural evolution
of the Internet. This is really looking at the Internet, with all its promise
of universal connectivity and reach, and making it work far better by bringing
the qualities of service that people are used to in enterprise computing, and
... (what) we all have gotten used to in utilities like electricity (and the)
telephone."
Ultimately, then, the grid could provide computing
power on a utility model for consumers or one-off projects or simply as a
means to outsource processing.
Nonetheless, big science will still be a major part
of the grid's future. A case in point is the TeraGrid, which goes live next
spring and is set to steal the No. 2 spot from IBM's ASCI White in the world
supercomputer rankings.
"The Earth Simulator is essentially a big
computer grid," Catlett says. "A bunch of computers put in a grid to
get the power. It's a short step from putting supercomputers in a grid across
the room to doing it across the country, or across the world."
When completed, the TeraGrid will include 13.6
teraflops of Linux Cluster computing power distributed at the four TeraGrid
sites, capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes of data. It
will be connected through a network 40 Gbps, which will become a 50 to 80 Gbps
network or 16 times faster than today's fastest research network.
It will be used for National Science
Foundation-sponsored projects and commercial applications.
So where will it all end? Nowhere in sight, that's
for sure.
"We have the genome sequence and now we're
working on the protein folding, and it won't be long before the life sciences
are looking at whole life systems," Baird says. "The nature of grid
computing is going to allow for bigger and bigger science applications. As
long as we keep on putting out more power, people will design better
applications for it."
There will be one paradigm shift that may be noticed
only for what's missing: the end of technology.
"We're entering the post-technology age where
users will be able to get on with what they want to do without worrying about
making the technology work," IBM's Hawk says.
"It used to be cool to change your own oil. Now
it's not. Soon people won't have to worry about the technology. Grid computing
is what will make that happen."
IT is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina,
the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another
conference audience what her new grand vision of “adaptive” information
technology is about. It has something to do with “Darwinian reference
architectures”, she suggests, and also with “modularising” and “integrating”,
as well as with lots of “enabling” and “processes”. IBM, HP's arch
rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls “on-demand
computing”. Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of “seamless computing”. Other
vendors prefer “ubiquitous”, “autonomous” or “utility” computing.
Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes “organic”. Gartner, a rival, opts
for “real-time”.
Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the
world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover
something that is so profound and yet so hard to name. What is certainly
monumental, reckons Pip Coburn, an analyst at UBS, is the hype, which
concerns, he says, “stuff that doesn't work yet”. Frank Gens at IDC,
another tech consultancy, quips that, in 2004 at least, “utility”
computing is actually “futility” computing.
Yet as a long-term vision for computing, what the
likes of IBM, Microsoft and HP (and Oracle, Sun, etc) are peddling is
plausible. The question is, how long will it take? Some day, firms will indeed
stop maintaining huge, complex and expensive computer systems that often sit
idle and cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and customers.
Instead, they will outsource their computing to specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and
pay for it as they use it, just as they now pay for their electricity, gas and
water. As with such traditional utilities, the complexity of the
supply-systems will be entirely hidden from users.
ER meets the Matrix The potential for a computing
infrastructure such as this to boost efficiency—and even to save lives—is
impressive. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an in-house guru at IBM, pictures an
ambulance delivering an unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors
go online and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies, etc),
which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on the other side of
the world. They upload their scans of the patient on to the network and crunch
the data with the processing power of thousands of remote computers—not just
the little machine which is all that the hospital itself can nowadays afford.
For its nuts and bolts, this vision relies on two
unglamorous technologies. The first is “web services”—software that
resides in a big shared “server” computer and can be found and used by
applications on other servers, even ones far away and belonging to different
organisations. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital would be getting the patient's
info from his home clinic through such a web service.
The second technology is “grid computing”. This
involves the sharing of processing power. The best-known example is a “search
for extra-terrestrial intelligence” project called SETI@home, overseen by
the University of California at Berkeley. Nearly 5m people in 226 countries
have downloaded a screensaver that makes their computer available, whenever it
is sitting idle, to process radio signals gathered from outer space. The aim
is to find a pattern that may be from aliens. Mr Wladawsky-Berger's hospital
would similarly crunch patient-data using the internet, or grid, as if it were
a single, giant virtual microprocessor, but for a more earth-bound purpose.
Both technologies have made great strides recently.
Web services, for instance, need common standards and protocols. Some basic
standards already exist—awkward acronyms such as XML, SOAP and WSDL provide
a rudimentary grammar to let computers talk to each other. But the sticking
point, says Phillip Merrick, boss of webMethods, one of the pioneers in the
field, has been the many other fiddly but necessary protocols for security,
transaction certification, and so on. A breakthrough occurred in October, when
the two superpowers, IBM and Microsoft, simply got up on a stage together and
declared what protocols they will use. Dubbed “WS splat” by the geeks,
this ought to speed up the adoption of web services.
Web services are currently most visible in the
business model of so-called application service providers. These are firms
that offer to host software applications and databases for customers for a
monthly fee—an analogy would be for firms to do their e-mailing via Yahoo!
or their buying via eBay. The most successful is Salesforce.com, a San
Francisco firm that, as the name says, specialises in software for managing
customer information and marketing leads. It says that it was poaching so much
business from a more traditional seller of customer-relations software, Siebel
Systems, that Siebel had to adopt the model itself. In October, Siebel teamed
up with IBM and now also offers its software as a service over the internet.
Nonetheless, this particular form of web services is
overhyped, says Rahul Sood of Tech Strategy Partners, a consultancy in Silicon
Valley. Such services appeal mostly to small businesses and firms that do not
need to customise their applications very much. For the grander vision—the
on-demand, adaptive, seamless, ubiquitous, organic sort—a lot more needs to
happen.
At the core of the vision is flexibility—a firm
must be able to make its operating costs, and therefore its computing and
information costs, totally variable so that they go up and down with business
volumes. Firms can improve cost flexibility today, says Mr Sood, but only if
they stick with one vendor, such as IBM, or if they make only one of their
many computing functions (data storage, say) flexible. But for computing to be
bought and sold as a utility, firms must be able to switch vendors, to do it
for all their computing functions, and with meter-based pricing. All of this
will take a few more years to get right.
This is the
story of how a whimsical invention of the 1960s helped spawn the computer
industry as we know it. Video games have influenced the way children live and
play, forever altered the entertainment industry, and even affected the way wars
are fought. See how it all began and find out what it means for the future.
When recruiting teens for college and/or
particular careers such as accounting, here's one of the competitive tools that
we have not successfully exploited.This
type of thing is also being successfully employed in recruiting and training,
but does not seem to have widespread success in educational institutions.
Question
What has become the most successful and most controversial recruiting tool of
the U.S. Army?
Answer
I viewed the
answer to the first question of television.
I watched this while eating breakfast on March 31.
CBS News on March 30, 2004 proclaimed that an Internet game has become a major
recruitment tool. The game that is especially successful is called America's
Army. The official version of this game is at http://www.americasarmy.com/
The soldiers are
real. But they're also actors, staging scenes for the Army's latest war game.
It's a video game
created by the U.S. Army to win over the hearts and minds of American
teenagers.
And, as CBS News
Correspondent Jim Acosta reports, judging by these faces, mission
accomplished.
Game player Rob
Calcagni believes the game is going to work on a lot of guys his age.
"Definitely,
because it's a fun game," says Calcagni.
The game,
"America's Army" has become such an overnight hit, the Army staged a
tournament in New York. Recruiters were waiting at the door.
"This is a
fantastic recruiting opportunity," says Lt. Col. John Gillette. "We
would like to sign up as many as possible. We are looking for five to
ten."
One of these teens
enlisted after playing the game, the other two are thinking about it, which is
exactly what the creator of "America's Army" had in mind.
"We look at all
the things that the Army is doing that is under the control of the Army that
captures people's attention and the game is number one," says the game's
creator Col. Casey Wardynksi.
America's Army has
surpassed even the Pentagon's expectations. It's now the number one online
action game in the country. The Army hasn't seen a recruiting tool this
effective since "Be all that you can be."
But psychology
professor Brad Bushman of the University of Michigan, a critic of violent
video games, complains "America's Army" isn't real enough.
"War is not a
game," he says.
"The video game
does provide a sanitized view of violence," says Bushman. "For
example, when you shoot someone or when you are shot you see a puff of blood;
you don't see anyone suffering or writhing in pain."
"Kids aren't
stupid," says Wardynski. "They know if they come into the army there
is a reason that we have rifles and tanks and all that stuff."
The players insist
they understand the meaning of "game over."
"If you are
going to join the Army, you know the risk," says one gamer, Bart
Koscinski. "In this game you might die like eight times in like 15
minutes. In real life people know what they are getting themselves into."
New editions of
"America's Army" are now being developed for home video game systems
-- a move that will deploy even more young cyber-soldiers to the military's
virtual battlefield.
Welcome to the web's
largest resource of professionally-written articles and news about military
combat simulations and strategy games. Our archives of news and articles span
the golden age of this category of games from January of 1996 to February of
2003.
There
have been many changes in the past twenty years in the implementation of
simulation and computer games, including game
development, usage in fixed locations, and event-based experiences both in the
civilian and commercial spaces. This paper
examines each of these three areas individually in order to predict their
likely future developments. It then evaluates the
dynamic potential for the military that lies at the crossroads where these
trends are merging, and relates their interaction
to the growing popularity of the online computer gaming experience.
Although
far from a complete study, this paper aims to add to the discussion of these
industry trends.
The
paper proposes that there is a strong benefit to the military for recruiting,
pre-training, and training of active duty members
through the combination of :
·
Choosing, building, or modifying effective combat simulation games for
military use.
·
Operating computer game competitions with significant military presence –
similar to the air shows of
today
– for event-based and location-based computer gaming competitions
·
Using the combined venues of (a) online gaming competitions, (b)
location-based game centers, and (c)
large
scale gaming competitions
·
Operating under the sports model of Leagues (by appropriate military warfare
specialty for each League)
and
further dividing the Leagues into competing Divisions.
By
reaching out in this way to a wider spectrum of possibilities for including
the cyber entertainment culture, the military
will, we predict, experience benefits in recruiting, pre-training, and
training, making further use of the compelling
attraction of computer games that has been demonstrated by games’ recent
rise to a predominant role for military age
people in our society.
Computer games—which
entertain millions of U.S. teenagers—are beginning to breathe fresh life
into military recruiting and training.
Earlier this year,
for example, the U.S. Army launched a new computer game—called “America’s
Army”—over the Internet.
Aimed at encouraging
teens to join up, it enables players to experience both basic and advanced
training, join a combat unit and fight in a variety of environments, including
arctic Alaska, upstate New York and a third-world city.
Players can fire on a
rifle range, run an obstacle course, attend sniper school, train in urban
combat and parachute from a C-17 transport.
The game accurately
depicts military equipment, training and the real-life movements of soldiers,
said Lt. Col. George Juntiff, Army liaison officer to the Modeling, Virtual
Environment and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, Calif., which developed the game.
“America’s Army”
features sound effects by moviemaker George Lucas’ company, SkyWalker, and
Dolby Digital Sound. In addition, sound effects from the movie “Terminator
II” were provided at no charge.
The game is getting
considerable attention. During its first two weeks, more than a million
Americans downloaded the game for free, Juntiff said.
“That’s an
enormous number,” he said. “It’s the largest release in computer game
history.”
Even more people are
likely to acquire the game starting in October, Juntiff said, when the Army
was scheduled to begin distributing it as a free CD set to a target audience
over the age of 13. The developers plan to upgrade the game every month to
attract new players, he said.
Actually, “America’s
Army” consists of two separate games—”Soldiers,” a role-player based
on Army values, and “Operations,” a shooter game that takes players on
combat missions. It was developed and distributed at a cost of $7.5 million by
MOVES and the U.S. Military Academy’s Office of Economic and Manpower
Analysis at West Point, N.Y.
The computer game is
a “very cost-effective” way to reach potential recruits, especially
compared to television advertising, said Maj. Chris Chambers, OEMA deputy
director. “It is also a more detailed means of showing the American people
what we do.”
The game also puts
the Army in a positive light, said Juntiff. “It lets people know the Army is
high-tech. It’s not what they see in the movies.”
The game, in
addition, raises ethical issues, Juntiff said. “The game sets rules of
engagement, and if you violate those rules, you pay the price.”
Once they enlist,
recruits, these days, can expect to encounter computer games throughout their
military training, said Michael R. Macedonia, senior scientist for the U.S.
Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), headquartered
in Orlando, Fla. Even well-known commercial games have been adapted for
military use, he told National Defense.
That process began,
he said, in the 1980s, when the Army modified the Atari tank battle game, “Battlezone,”
to let it have gunner controls similar to those of a Bradley Infantry Fighting
Vehicle. The idea, he explained, was to enhance the eye-hand coordination of
armor crews.
Then, in the
mid-1990s, the Marines edited the commercial version of the three-dimensional
game “Doom” to create “Marine Doom,” to help train four-man fire teams
in urban combat.
More recently, the
Army’s Soldier Systems Center, in Natick, Mass., has commissioned the games
developer, Novalogic, of Calabasas, Calif., to modify the popular Delta Force
2 game to help familiarize soldiers with the service’s experimental Land
Warrior system.
The Land Warrior
system includes a self-
contained computer
and radio unit, a global-positioning receiver, a helmet-mounted liquid-
character display and
a modular weapons array that adds thermal and video sights and laser ranging
to the standard M-4 carbine and M-16A2 rifle.
A customized version
of another computer game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, is issued to all Navy
student pilots and undergraduates enrolled in Naval Reserve Officer Training
Courses at 65 colleges around the nation. The office of the Chief of Naval
Education and Training has installed the software at the Naval Air Station in
Corpus Christi, Texas, and plans to install it at two other bases in Florida.
LB&B Associates,
of Columbia, Md., has modified the game engine from author Tom Clancy’s
best-selling computer game, “Rainbow Six Rogue Spear,” to train U.S.
combat troops in urban warfare. The game—marketed by Ubi Soft Entertainment,
of San Francisco—is based one of Clancy’s military novels.
The new version—which
is still being developed—will not be used to improve marksmanship, but to
sharpen decision-making skills at the small-unit level, said Michael S.
Bradshaw, LB&B’s Systems Division manager. LB&B has completed a
proof-of-concept version, which “worked brilliantly,” Bradshaw said. The
project, he explained, has been turned over to the Institute for Creative
Technology for final development.
EDUCAUSE is making available online, at no cost,
THE INTERNET AND THE UNIVERSITY: FORUM 2004. The book is a collection of
papers from the Forum's 2004 Aspen Symposium. The papers cover three areas:
technology and globalization, technology and scholarship, and technology and
the brain. The book is available in PDF format at
http://www.educause.edu/apps/forum/iuf04.asp .
The Forum on the Internet and the University "seeks
to understand how the Internet and new learning media can improve the
quality and condition of learning, as well as the opportunities and risks
created by rapid technological innovation and economic change."
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission
is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of
information technology. The current membership comprises more than 1,900
colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200
corporations, with 15,000 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder,
CO, and Washington, DC. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at http://www.educause.edu/.
In August the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
at Wabash College launched the Academic Commons -- a website offering "a
forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in
liberal arts education." In addition to publishing essays and reviews and
showcasing innovative projects, the site also offers the Developer's Kit, an
area for sharing project descriptions and pieces of code, and LoLa Exchange,
which shares high-quality learning objects. The Academic Commons is
available at
http://www.academiccommons.org/ .
The mission of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal
Arts at Wabash College is "to explore, test, and promote liberal arts
education . . . [and] to ensure that the nature and value of liberal arts
education is widely understood and to reestablish the central place of the
liberal arts in higher education."
The July 2005 issue of CIT Infobits presented a
roundup of articles on computer games as learning tools ("Games Children
Play,"
http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul05.html#4 ).
For more on this topic, see the special issue of INNOVATE (vol. 1, issue 6,
August/September 2005) which is devoted to the "role of video game
technology in current and future educational settings." Papers include:
"What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video
Game Look Like?" by J. P. Gee, Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Changing the Game: What Happens When Video Games
Enter the Classroom?" by Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor of Educational
Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Game-Informed Learning: Applying Computer Game
Processes to Higher Education" by Michael Begg, David Dewhurst, and Hamish
Macleod, University of Edinburgh
Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly,
peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of
Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal
focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance
educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings.
Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends,
and participate in open forums. For more information, contact James L.
Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate;
email: innovate@nova.edu ; Web:
http://www.innovateonline.info/ .
Important Distance
Education Site The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.aln.org/
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations
continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to their own
distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life,
accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety
of disciplines.
Internet Study Predicts Aptitude Will Drive Class
Composition
A sweeping survey of nearly 1,300 technology experts
and scholars on the future of the Internet has concluded - not surprisingly -
that the Internet would reach into and influence every corner of American life
over the next 10 years. The study, released under the auspices of Elon
University and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, paints a picture
of a digital future that enhances the lives of many but which also contains
some worrisome notes.
For instance, over half of the respondents predicted
the Internet would spawn "a new age of creativity" and that formal
education would incorporate more online classes, with students grouped by
interests and skills, rather than by age. At the same time, two-thirds
predicted a devastating attack on the country's network infrastructure would
occur or in the next 10 years, and that government and business surveillance
would rise dramatically.
TechKnowLogia
is an international online journal that provides policy makers, strategists,
practitioners and technologists at the local, national and global levels with a
strategic forum to:
Explore the vital role of
different information technologies (print, audio, visual and digital) in the
development of human and knowledge capital;
Share policies, strategies,
experiences and tools in harnessing technologies for knowledge
dissemination, effective learning, and efficient education services;
Review the latest systems and
products of technologies of today, and peek into the world of tomorrow; and
Exchange information about
resources, knowledge networks and centers of expertise.
Do Technologies
Enhance Learning?
Brain Research,
Learning and Technology
Technologies
at Work for: Critical Thinking, Science Instruction, Teaching
Practices, etc...
Interactive TV as
an Educational Tool
Complexity of
Integrating ICTs into Curriculum & Exams
Corporations are starting to salivate over grid computing's potential for
massive storage and processing power. Its creators -- tech and science geeks --
look forward to a new era --- http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57231,00.html
For years, connecting university and research-center supercomputers so they
could share resources simply wasn't feasible. New standards are changing that
and opening the door to new research possibilities --- http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57265,00.html
Answer 2 --- The
Intellectual Supermarket as Conceived Today by
Fathom (Columbia University and its Fathom Partners)
Higher education
requires a new model, one that can operate alongside the old model but that will
expand the capacity and explode the boundaries of the industry with its new
assumptions:
Higher education can
be accessed directly by any individual, without the intermediary of an
institution. Supported by technology, higher education can achieve
society's long-term goal of population-wide, universal access.
The demand for
educational programming will far exceed the capacity of current
institutions. Designers of educational programs are unlikely to know
the characteristics of the learners who will be accessing their material.
Educational
programming will be of a more general nature--modularized and accessible to
a general audience, much as is television.
In the context of
lifelong learning, individuals will seek education intermittently, as
somewhat unrelated "events," over a much longer timeframe
than is commonly associated even with part-time degree work. The
learner's objectives are likely to be situationally defined by personal or
professional knowledge needs.
Attracted by this
potential market, and enabled by the lower barriers to entry, new providers
will enter the market--providers from outside the current educational
system.
The value of a brand
name will be determined by the value to the learner as much as it will be by
a third party that seeks certification.
As a result,
radically new ways of assessing and "certifying" learning outcomes
will be needed.
The Supermarket
Analogy
By contrast with the
assumptions of the current system--a very orderly context in which quality has
been tightly controlled--the proposed assumptions for the new model may appear
to lead to a chaotic mix of undisciplined entrepreneurial efforts. To
examine whether this new model might be a future worth pursuing, we need a
radical analogy for the higher education industry. The analogy should be
consistent with the new assumptions and should also raise provocative questions
about possible future scenarios. An unlikely possibility can offer
insights and images for exploring this new territory: the food-retailing
industry--in particular, the supermarket. Nine characteristics of the
supermarket yield a provocative comparison with higher education:
Most products in the
supermarket can be characterized as commodities: there is a minimum standard
of quality the product must meet in order to be fit for sale; beyond that
minimum, competition occurs on the basis of price and of perceived
differences in quality. Profit margins on individual products are very
small; profits are generated by volume of sales.
The supermarket
manager and the customer are always looking for better-tasting, cheaper,
more-nutritious goods yielding larger profit margins.
The supermarket
represents the quintessential example of the movement from full-service to
self-service. The customer chooses the fruit, weighs the fruit,
packages the fruit, and then takes the fruit to the check-out line to pay.
The supermarket does
not take responsibility for the quality of the customer's diet or overall
physical or financial health. The supermarket offers a fantastic array
of goods, but it is up to the customer to make order from that array and to
select items that form some sort of coherent diet or meal plan.
The supermarket
tailors its product line to the geographic area it serves, but generally it
offers both low- and high-end products.
The customer's
safety and capacity for judgment are supported by related regulation and
markets: (a) the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and state departments of
health, which oversee the food supply from point of origin through
processing and packaging to store delivery and purchase; (b) labeling, which
details the nutritional value of foods on packaged goods as required by law;
and (c) nutrition, food, and diet consumer education, which is supplied
through a variety of media, including schools, public programming, and
private publishing groups such as hospitals and for-profit publications on
diet and health.
Consumers can turn
to a range of services for more personalized attention, from health spas to
personal nutritional advisors, books and magazines, or simply restaurants.
Brand names,
including supermarket brands, are related to quality and are supported by
both research and advertising. They are evaluated by independent
consumer groups, although not systematically.
Food producers and
processors are, for the most part, independent of the distribution system in
the United States. The "system" that has brought Campbell's
Chicken Noodle Soup into supermarkets for almost one hundred years is held
together by buyer-supplier market relationships.
The power of the
supermarket analogy is revealed more fully when undergraduate education and
lifelong learning skills are considered separately from graduate education or
professional certification. Undergraduate education as presently offered
in the United States is a commodity. The larger higher education
institutions opened up access and kept costs (and therefore tuition) down by
creating lecture courses that could accommodate many students at one time.
Even when these lecture courses are broken down into recitation sessions or when
these institutions hire more faculty to offer smaller classes, the basic
curriculum remains the same. This is "mass education"--higher
education in the manner of Henry Ford. There are certain minimum standards
that must be met; however, beyond those, students are choosing on the basis of
price and perceived differences in brand names. Separating undergraduate
education into its two primary components--general education and the major--and
then applying the perspective of the supermarket analogy leads to some startling
conclusions about possible transformations of the production and distribution
system for higher education at the undergraduate level.
To this I might add the increasing movement for colleges and
universities to offer certificate programs in addition to traditional
degree programs. In Fall 2002, the graduate school of business at
the University of Rochester commenced a six-course certificate program
to complement its two-year MBA program. Major universities such as
Stanford University, Columbia University, and Carnegie-Mellon are now
trading on their prestige names to rake in hundreds of millions of
dollars in training programs, especially in computer science,
engineering, and information technology training courses.
Virtually all of the top business schools have executive development
certificate programs both onsite and online.
By the Year 2025, traditional degree programs may account for less
than ten percent of the revenues of major universities who become part
of the trend for education as well as training certificates. The
"traditional one-size fits all" bachelor, masters, and PhD
degrees will fade in importance as resumes of the future will be built
upon education achievement certificates in humanities, science, and the
professions.
Top Ten Emerging Technologies
According to CFO Magazine
No one has been more wrong about
computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything
about the actual possibility-space that computers have created
indicates they are not the beginning of authority but its end. In the
process of connecting everything to everything, computers elevate the
power of the small player. They make room for the different, and they
reward small innovations. Instead of enforcing uniformity, they
promote heterogeneity and autonomy. Instead of sucking the soul from
human bodies, turning computer users into an army of dull colons,
networked computers --- by reflecting the networked nature of our
brains --- encourage the humanism of their users. Because they have
taken on the flexibility, adaptability, and self-connecting governance
of organic systems, we become more human, not less so, when we use
them.
Birkerts, S. (1994). “The electric hive: two views,” Readings,
May, 17-25.
Consolidation
of educational institutions (universities will
merge)
States
will tend to bring its several university entities
together · Super state consortia will emerge · There
will be a “career university sector” with
For
profit universities
Virtual
Universities (associated or not with existing ones)
·
New
copyright policies, royalties for distance learning a la
the sale of a book
Faculty
that develop a course will have royalties rights to
it
Universities
will have the right, without paying royalties, to use
these courses either locally or in any extended
activities
Organizations
will have to emerge to take education to the outer limits
of current civilization
The
economics are such that the incremental cost of
providing usage over broadband of highly sophisticated
learning materials is very small
Consequently
once packages are assembled, and their production is
very expensive, their marginal cost of utilization is
close to zero
Consequently
model will emerge from free to free for ‘used
materials’, to name your price, to pay over your
professional career
Content
pricing models as currently evolving over the net and
e commerce will also rule education
Some
states may decided to develop or acquire educational
content and make it available for free
Alternate
professor’s career will emerge
Tenure
will become less common
A
large number of faculty will emerge as supporting
faculty for modules prepared and delivered from
elsewhere
Pedagogic
Extensive
usage of distance methods to ‘extend the classroom’
even in traditional courses
Usage
of mixed extended medium with many tools
Change
in the nature of faculty control
Less
prep time
Modularized
content re-used in different modules
Different
delivery approaches
Separation
of content and delivery
The
best deliverers are not the best content
preparers
Substantive
investment in packaging the modules (that will go into
several courses) ·
Link
between courses and content for courses will be
broken
Package
and offer content resources in varying sizes and
depths in unlimited combinations
Publishers
are moving now to build large databases of content on
the Web
These
databases of content are attractive portals for
discipline knowledge ·
The
nature of assessment will substantially change from block
tests to micro testing and learning diagnostic tools that
dynamically change the students tasks based on the
measurement of their progress thru the distance learning
materials
There
will be tremendous demand for the development of both
intelligent learning assessment tools (e.g. devices
that can read an open ended exam answer, comment on it
and assess it) and information / knowledge structure
along which atoms of knowledge can be measured and
learning modules re-required for students.
Tools
Teaching
and learning management software systems will be linked to
their back office administrative systems
Web
course management tool
Student
tracking and collaboration tools
An
entire suite of learning aids, personal bots will
emerge
Personal
digital assistants
Summarizers,
finders, connectors, learners
The
wide gulf between students and practitioners will be
narrowed by education coming to the desktop and practicing
experts made available for testimonials, examples, actual
observation of behavior through broadband methods
For
example a lesson about geology and oil exploration may
bring students to visually observe man at work on oil
platforms, or drilling, or analyzing data, etc.
For
example, while discussing strategy for dot.com
companies the CEO’s of these companies can be
brought in through broadband to state their views or
video prepared showing facilities, products, customers
buying, etc..
Translation
automation will allow for substantial expansion of content
markets.
Language
will continue to be a barrier for ubiquitous education
· Physical libraries will be transformed into study
areas for students in residential colleges (much
reduced in number) while enormous digital libraries
with most books also encompassing video and audio and
collaboration settings will be made available for
students everywhere
Faculty
Highly
more specialized researchers and content developers will
complement each other
Subsidy
for research thru blind funding of faculty salaries will
become more difficult once legislators realize that much
of the delivery will come form elsewhere
Environment
Tools
for teaching and learning will become as portable and
ubiquitous as papers and books are today
Teaching
and learning anywhere any time
A
larger percentage of content will age rapidly
Alternate
models for paying for education will evolve with less of
government subsidies and more on the desk training paid by
employers
Students
will be savvy consumers with substantive amount of
choice
Increased
level of student activism
Degrees
may be obtained with a much increased level of
institutional mix (courses from multiple
universities)
Learning
is moving off campus: to the home, the workplace, the
field, or wherever the learner is
Students
will pick up and piece together certifications, skill
sets, and knowledge sets
You can read about the early knowledge portal experiment at
Columbia University that offered great hopes by failed early
on.
Fathom was one of the early on initiatives to create an
academic knowledge portal somewhat similar to Wikipedia,
although Columbia and its prestigious university partners
were taking on responsibility for content rather than users.
Fathom was not a Wiki.
MOOOOOOOOC! Surely "massive open online course" has one of
the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate
playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious
Oracle) or the droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word
"snafu" (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up).
I'm
not a complete neophyte to online learning. Back in 1999, I
led the start-up team for Fathom, one of the earliest
knowledge networks, in partnership with Columbia University
and other institutions here and abroad, and I'm a board
member of the Apollo Group. So I was understandably curious
about these MOOC's. With fond memories of a thrilling
virtual trip a dozen years ago to Ephesus, Turkey, via a
multimedia-rich, self-paced course created by a professor at
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I decided to check
out a MOOC for myself.
Coursera, a new company that offers free online courses
through some of the world's best-known universities, had the
widest and most impressive selection. I blocked my ears to
the siren call of science fiction, poetry, and history and
opted for something sober: "Health Policy and the Affordable
Care Act." It's taught by the Emanuel brother who isn't the
Chicago mayor or the Hollywood superagent—Ezekiel Emanuel,
an M.D. and Ph.D. who teaches at the University of
Pennsylvania. For the next eight weeks, I was part of a
noisy, active, earnest, often contentious, and usually
interesting group of students. There didn't seem to be any
way to gauge the number enrolled, but I learned about the
students from a discussion group. There were quite a few
lawyers, doctors, and other health-care professionals. Some
were struggling with personal health disasters and wanted
tools to predict how the health-care act would affect their
futures. Some were international researchers doing
comparative studies. Others were higher-education folks like
me, testing the MOOC waters.
The
quality and format of the discussions were immediate
disappointments. A teaching assistant provided some adult
supervision, but too many of the postings were at the dismal
level of most anonymous Internet comments: nasty, brutish,
and long. The reliance on old-fashioned threaded message
groups made it impossible to distinguish online jerks from
potential geniuses. I kept wishing for a way to break the
large group into small cohorts self-selected by background
or interests—health-care professionals, for instance, or
those particularly interested in the economics of health
care. There was no way to build a discussion, no equivalent
to the hush that comes over the classroom when the smart kid
raises his or her hand.
If
you believe the sage's advice that we learn much from our
teachers and colleagues but most of all from our students,
MOOC's will be far more effective when we are able to learn
from one another.
Not
surprisingly, enterprising MOOCsters are already organizing
themselves outside the online classroom, using social-media
tools like Google Hangouts and Facebook. In New York,
students schedule meetings in Starbucks; in Katmandu, a
group relies on Meetup to get together. Some course
providers are facilitating external interaction: Udacity has
offered Global Meetup Day with Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford
University computer scientist (and Udacity co-founder) known
for his course on artificial intelligence. Coursera threw a
giant barbecue in Menlo Park, Calif., complete with
volleyball and beanbag tossing.
Of
course, peer learning takes you only so far: At some point,
somebody has to know something about the subject. Professor
Emanuel was a presence only in videos, but these were
uniformly excellent. The cameras caught him walking briskly
around an actual lecture hall, and I liked the presence of
shadowy classmates sitting in Philadelphia, as if this were
happening in real time. The videos were pleasantly peppered
with pop-up quizzes. No embarrassment for the wrong answer,
and I was ridiculously pleased at correctly guessing that
the proportion of health-care costs in the United States
that goes to prescription drugs is only 10 percent. For
those in a rush, watching at twice normal speed is sort of
fun— don't you secretly wish you could sit through some
meetings at double speed?
I
was a faithful student for a few weeks, until I fell prey to
my worst undergraduate habit, procrastination—only now my
excuses were far more sophisticated. I have to finish a
manuscript! I have a board meeting! I have to meet my
mother's new cardiologist!
In
a MOOC, nobody can hear you scream.
I
might have abandoned the charming Professor Emanuel
altogether had the Supreme Court's decision to uphold
President Obama's health-care program not injected the spice
of real-time action into the discussion and refreshed my
interest.
Somewhere between the videos and the readings and the
occasional dip into the discussion groups, I found myself
actually learning. I was particularly interested in how
malpractice contributes to health-care costs but was
instructed by my professor that the potential savings there
amounted to mere "pencil dust." And who knew about the
proposed National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation
Act of 2005, which would have reduced the number of
malpractice cases, accelerated their resolution, and lowered
costs by two-thirds?
To earn a certificate, I would have
had to submit several essays for a grade, and I stopped
short of that (see excuses above). Essays are peer-graded,
and it won't surprise anybody who has ever taught
undergraduates to hear that the student evaluations can be
fierce. On the discussion boards, there was considerable
discussion of grade deflation, plagiarism, and cheating.
Alas, academic sins do follow us into the land of MOOC's,
despite a nicely written honor code. Bad behavior in any
classroom, real or virtual, should be no more surprising
than gambling in Casablanca. In fact, brace
yourself for a breathtaking new form of voluntary identity
sharing: Your
fake student avatar, now available
for a small fee, will take your class for you.
Looking back, I suppose Fathom was a proto-MOOC, and I
confess to some surprise that the Coursera format has
evolved little beyond our pioneering effort of a decade ago.
Yet when it came time to assess the course, I found myself
rating it pretty highly, and concluded that aside from the
format, the failings were mostly mine, for lack of focus.
Like many MOOC students, I didn't completely "finish" the
course. However, the final evaluations seemed mostly
enthusiastic. From the comments, most of the students seemed
to find the course long on substance: "comprehensive," "a
good balance between the law, policy, and economics," "rich
with multiple perspectives on health-policy issues."
Now, I could have read a book or done this on my own. But
you could say the same thing about most education. A course
is not a book but a journey, led by an expert, and taken in
the company of fellow travelers on a common quest for
knowledge. My MOOC had those elements, albeit in a pretty
crude form.
You'd have to live under a rock not to know that crushing
student debt, declining state support, and disruptive
technologies have made it imperative to look at new models
for teaching. The competitive landscape for higher education
is changing every day. China recently declared the goal of
bringing half a million foreign students to its shores by
2020, and is investing in programs friendly to Americans and
other international students. American MOOC's may point the
way to retaining the best students and faculty in the world,
while adding the lively and collaborative components of
technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
It
is true that nobody yet has a reasonable business plan for
these courses, and there is concern over completion rates
and whether colleges are "giving away the farm," as a recent
MIT alumni-magazine article put it. It is not hard to
anticipate the end of free and the start of the next stage:
fee-based certificate programs built around MOOC's. But for
now, the colleges leading those efforts are making
relatively modest—and rare—investments in research and
development. Their faculty members are excited about the
opportunity to experiment. Let's give this explosion of
pent-up innovation in higher education a chance to mature
before we rush to the bottom line.
A Weblog (which is sometimes written as "web log" or "weblog") is a Web site
of personal or non-commercial origin that uses a dated log format that is
updated on a daily or very frequent basis with new information about a
particular subject or range of subjects. The information can be written by
the site owner, gleaned from other Web sites or other sources, or
contributed by users. A
Web log often has the quality of being a kind of "log of our times" from a
particular point-of-view. Generally, Weblogs are devoted to one or several
subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in general, can be
thought of as developing commentaries, individual or collective on their
particular themes. A Weblog may consist of the recorded ideas of an
individual (a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone.
Most of the latter are moderated discussions.
Listing of Accounting Blogs Among the millions of Web logs permeating the
Internet, there are some by and for accountants worth checking out. This article
includes an Accounting Blog List that you can download, bookmark or print.
Eva M. Lang, "Accountants Who Blog," SmartPros, July 2005 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x49035.xml
Bloggers will love TagCloud
Now, many bloggers are turning to a new service called
TagCloud that lets them cherry-pick articles in RSS feeds by key
words -- or tags -- that appear in those feeds. The blogger selects the RSS
feeds he or she wants to use, and also selects tags. When a reader clicks on a
tag, a list of links to articles from the feeds containing the chosen keyword
appears. The larger the tag appears onscreen, the more articles are listed.
Daniel Terdiman, "RSS Service Eases Bloggers' Pain," Wired News, June 27, 2005
---
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67989,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_8
Weblog software use grows daily
-- but bloggers abandon sites and launch new ones as frequently as J.Lo goes
through boyfriends. Which makes taking an accurate blog count tricky ---
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54740,00.html
Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and
32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life
Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping has become an important
supplement to a business's online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on
a personal level -- and keep them visiting a company's Web site regularly.
Riva Richmond, "Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back," The Wall Street
Journal, March 1, 2005; Page B8 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110963746474866537,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
What Blogs Cost American
Business, Ad Age What Blogs Cost American Business In 2005,
Employees Will Waste 551,000 Work Years Reading ThemBy Bradley Johnson LOS
ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent
of 551,000 years reading blogs. About 35 million workers -- one in four people
in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the
work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age's analysis. Time spent
in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3
million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- bloggers essentially take a daily...
Bradley Johnson, "What Blogs Cost American Business, Ad Age, October 25,
2005 --- http://adage.com/news.cms?newsId=46494#
How do
we come up with our 50 best? Short answer: we take your
suggestions, probe friends and colleagues about their favorite
online haunts and then surf like mad. This year's finalists are
a mix of newcomers, new discoveries and veterans that have
learned some new tricks
Blog Navigation Software Blog Navigator is a new program that makes it
easy to read blogs on the Internet. It integrates into various blog search
engines and can automatically determine RSS feeds from within properly coded
websites.
Blog Navigator 1.2
http://www.stardock.com/products/blognavigator/
It's easy to start your own
blog. Jim Mahar's great blog was set up at
http://www.blogger.com/start You too can set one up for free like Jim had done.
There are many other alternatives other than blogger.com for setting up a free
blog. See below.
Microsoft will open a free
consumer blogging service, its latest attempt to attract more users to its MSN
online service and away from rivals such as Google.
Question
A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new
media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher
Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year.
What is that word?
I would
like some advice on what news aggregator to use for RSS feeds. I read the
BusinessWeek Online article on blogs this morning, and it piqued my interest
You're invited you to join BW Online's new MBA Blog
feature as a guest blogger
STORY TOOLS Printer-Friendly Version E-Mail This
Story
Our upcoming MBA Blog feature is an online
community where you can interact and share your pursuits of an MBA, job search,
life as a grad student, and much more. Whether you want to create your own web
log online, exchange advice, or launch a professional network - come join our
MBA Blog ---
http://mbablogs.businessweek.com/
The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is
RSS, or Really Simple
Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software
originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs,
or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could
subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant
items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together
the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called
"aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But
that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them. Business Week, April 22, 2005 --- ,
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/
"Controversy at Warp Speed," by
Jeffrey Selingo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2005, Page
A27
The deluge of messages left Mr. Corrigan wondering
how so many people had found out about such a small skirmish on his campus. So
his assistant poked around on the Web and discovered that six days after the
protest, a liberal blog (http://sf.indymedia.org) run by the
San FranciscoIndependentMediaCenter
had posted an article headlined "Defend Free Speech Rights at
San FranciscoState
University" that included Mr. Corrigan's e-mail
address.
It was not the first time that Mr. Corrigan has
been electronically inundated after a campus incident. Three years ago he
received 3,000 e-mail messages after a pro-Israel rally was held at the
university.
EVERYONE HAS A BEEF
Conflicts on campus are nothing new, of course.
But colleges today are no longer viewed as ivory towers. Institutions of all
sizes and types are under greater scrutiny than ever before from lawmakers,
parents, taxpayers, students, alumni, and especially political partisans.
Empowered by their position or by the fact that they sign the tuition checks,
they do not hesitate to use any available forum to complain about what is
happening at a particular institution.
In this Internet age, information travels quickly
and easily, and colleges have become more transparent, says Collin G. Brooke, an
assistant professor of writing at Syracuse University, who studies the
intersection between rhetoric and technology. Many universities' Web sites list
the e-mail addresses of every employee, from the president on down, enabling
unencumbered access to all of them.
"That was not possible 10 years ago," Mr. Brooke
says. "Maybe I'd go to a library, find a college catalog, and get an address.
Then I'd have to write a letter. Now it's easy to whip off a couple of
sentences in an e-mail when it takes only a few seconds to find that person's
address." Continued in article
Student Blogs
"What Your College Kid Is Really
Up To," by Steven Levy, Time Magazine, December 13, 2004, Page 12
Aaron Swartz was nervous when I went to interview him. I know this is not
because he told me, but because he said so on his student blog a few days
afterward. Swartz is one of millions of people who mainstream an
Internet-based Weblog that allows one to punch in daily experiences as
easily as banging out diary entries with a word processor. Swartz says the
blog is meant to help him remember his experiences during an important time
for him --- freshman year at Stanford. But this opens up a window to the
rest of us.
Microsoft Corp. today will open a free consumer "blogging" service, its
latest attempt to attract more users to its MSN online service and away from
rivals such as Google Inc.
Called MSN Spaces, the service will allow consumers to create Web logs, or
blogs, that include pictures, music and text. Blogs are personal Web sites
and opinion journals that have gained popularity in recent years. Early
blogs focused largely on technology and politics, but millions of computer
users have now at least experimented with the form.
If you're an information junkie, you've probably discovered the appeal of
reading weblogs, those online journals that mix commentary with links to
related sites. Obsessive blog creators scour the Internet for interesting
tidbits in news stories, announcements and even other blogs, culling the
best and posting links. A good blog is like the friend who always points out
the best stories in the newspaper.
More and more, though, the growth of blogs is increasing rather than
reducing information overload. By some estimates, the number of blogs out
there is nearing three million. It isn't just amateurs either: Start-up
media companies are creating blogs, too. Gawker, for example, publishes the
gadgets journal Gizmodo (
www.gizmodo.com ) and Wonkette (
www.wonkette.com ),
devoted to inside-the-Beltway gossip.
To help juggle all those blogs, I've started playing around with a
relatively new phenomenon called a newsreader. Rather than forcing you to
jump from one blog to another to keep up with new entries, newsreaders bring
together the latest postings from your favorite blogs in a single place.
That's possible because many blogs now publish their entries as news
"feeds." These are Web formats that make it easy for a newsreader program
(or another Web site) to grab and manipulate individual postings. For a blog
publisher, it's like sending out entries on a news wire service. To tell
whether a site offers a news feed, look for a small icon labeled "RSS" or
"Atom."
I've tested a number of popular newsreaders. At their best, they give you a
customized online newspaper that tracks the blogs you're interested in. But
using them is only worthwhile if you're willing to invest some time upfront
getting organized.
Newsreaders come in several varieties. One is a
stand-alone software program you install on your PC. In that category,
FeedDemon ($29.95 from Bradbury Software) is especially powerful, with
extensive options for customizing the way news feeds appear on your screen.
Other newsreaders integrate news feeds into
your e-mail on the theory that mail has become the catchall information
center for many users. NewsGator ($29 from NewsGator Technologies) pulls
feeds into Microsoft Outlook, while Oddpost (www.oddpost.com)
combines blog feeds with an excellent Web-based e-mail service for $30 a
year. For Mac users, Apple just announced it will include newsreader
functions in the next version of its Safari Web browser -- a sign of how
important the news-feed approach is becoming.
Overall, I had the best experience with a
service called Bloglines, and I recommend it, especially for beginners.
Bloglines (www.bloglines.com)
works as a Web service, which means there's no software to install and you
can catch up with your blogs from any Web browser. You're no longer tied to
the bookmarks on a particular PC, so you can check postings from home, work
or on the road. The service is also free. Mark Fletcher, CEO of Trustic
Inc., which operates Bloglines, tells me the site will use unobtrusive
Google-style ads to bring in revenue.
After starting an account, you enter the blogs
you want to track. When you visit Bloglines, your blog list will appear on
the left side of the screen, along with a notation telling the number of new
postings since your last visit; clicking on a blog pulls the new postings
into a right-side window. The beauty of this is that you don't waste time
visiting blogs that haven't posted new entries.
Of course, it's all pointless without
interesting blogs to read. The best way to find great blogs is to follow
your curiosity, tracking back links on blogs you visit. Here are a few to
get you started:
GENERAL INTEREST:
Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net)
is one of the Web's most established blogs, and one of its most popular,
too. By "general interest," I mean of general interest to your average
Internet-obsessed technophile. The focus isn't explicitly on technology, but
expect it to skew in that direction -- over a recent week, posting topics
included robots, comic books and a cool-looking electric plug.
ECONOMICS:
EconLog (econlog.econlib.org)
offers a thoughtful and eclectic diary of economics, tackling both newsy
developments (the real-estate market, taxes) and theory. It also includes a
list of other good economics blogs -- there are more than you might think.
GADGETS:
Engadget (www.engadget.com)
can be counted on for a good half-dozen or more news morsels each day on
digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones and more. When it isn't the first
to stumble across something good, it isn't shy about linking to another blog
with an interesting post, so it's usually pretty up to date.
POLITICS:
WatchBlog (www.watchblog.com)
has stuck with an interesting concept for more than a year now. It's
actually three blogs in one: separate side-by-side journals tracking news on
the 2004 elections from the perspective of Democrats, Republicans and
independents.
TECHNOLOGY:
Lessig Blog (www.lessig.org/blog).
OK, this one's about politics too. More specifically, it covers the
intersection between regulation and technology. Its author, Stanford law
professor and author Lawrence Lessig, weighs in on copyright, privacy and
other challenging topics in high-tech society.
Blogging we
will, blogging we will go! In Iran? So what would a really interesting and
exciting piece of qualitative research on blogging look like? And how would it
get around the problems of overfamiliarity with the phenomenon (on the one hand)
and blogospheric navel-gazing (on the other)? To get an answer, it isn’t
necessary to speculate. Just read “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging: On Language,
Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan,” by Alireza Doostdar, which appears
in the current issue of American Anthropologist. A scanned copy is
available here. The author is now working at the Center for Middle Eastern
Studies at Harvard University, where he will start work on his Ph.D. in social
anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. “Weblogestan” is an Iranian online
slang term for the realm of Persian-language blogs. (The time has definitely
come for it to be adapted, and adopted, into Anglophone usage.) Over the last
two years, Western journalists have looked at blogging as part of the political
and cultural ferment in Iran — treating it, predictably enough, as a simple
manifestation of the yearning for a more open society. Doostdar complicates this
picture by looking at what we might call the borders of Veblogestan (to employ a
closer transliteration of the term, as used specifically to name Iranian
blogging). In an unpublished manuscript he sent me last week, Doostdar provides
a quick overview of the region’s population: “There are roughly 65,000 active
blogs in Veblogestan,” he writes, “making Persian the fourth language for blogs
after English, Portugese, and French. The topics for blog entries include
everything from personal diaries, expressions of spirituality, and works of
experimental poetry and fiction to film criticism, sports commentary, social
critique, and of course political analysis. Some bloggers focus on only one of
these topics throughout the life of their blogs, while others write about a
different topic in every new entry, or even deal with multiple topics within a
single entry.”
Scott McLemee , "Travels in Weblogestan," Inside Higher Ed, March 29,
2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/03/29/mclemee
Top
Executives Are Finding Great Advantages to Using and Running Blogs
Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of
Sun Microsystems, has recently criticized statements by Intel
executives, mused that IBM might buy Novell, and complained about a CNET.com
article—all by writing a blog on a Sun website.
Yep, blogs—which are a way to post text to a website—have found their way
into business. Schwartz is the highest-ranking executive yet to embrace the
new medium, which is burgeoning globally. About 35,000 people read his blog
(http://blogs.sun.com) in
a typical month, including customers, employees, and
competitors. Schwartz encourages all Sun's 32,000 employees to blog, though
only about 100 are doing it so far. But they include at least three senior
managers other than Schwartz as well as development engineers and marketers.
The company's most popular blogger is a marketer known as
MaryMaryQuiteContrary. Her blog ranges from rhapsodies about "proxy-based
aspect-oriented programming" to musings about her desire to become a
first-grade class mother. Says Schwartz: "I don't have the advertising
budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on
handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers,
just by taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message
out to a fanatic readership." He adds, "Blogs are no more mandated at Sun
than e-mail. But I have a hard time seeing how a manager can be effective
without both."
Over at
Microsoft, some 1,000 employees blog, says a spokesman, though no top
executives do. Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most prominent blogger, says via
e-mail that "I often link to bloggers who are not friendly to Microsoft.
They know I'm listening, and that alone improves relationships." Other tech
companies with company blogs include Yahoo, Google, Intuit, and Monster.com.
Even Maytag has a blog.
But businesses are learning—sometimes the hard way—that this new medium has
pitfalls. David Farrell, Sun's chief compliance officer, notes that the
company will soon require employees to agree to specific guidelines before
starting blogs. Companies are also worried about unflattering portrayals and
leaks. Last year a Microsoft contract employee posted a photo of the company
receiving a dockful of Apple computers; he was promptly fired. A Harvard
administrator and a software developer at Friendster were also recently
fired after personal blog postings. (Microsoft, Harvard, and Friendster
declined to comment.)
But some managers find that even more important than writing blogs is
reading them. During a recent conference for Microsoft software developers,
top company executives huddled backstage reading up-to-the-minute blogs
written by the audience to get a sense of how their messages were being
received.
While most people agree on Web logs' value for promoting student expression and
critical thinking in schools, there's no consensus on the amount of control over
access and content that educators should exercise. Blogs may become more of an
issue in college courses when and if students begin to keep Weblogs of day to
day classes, teacher evaluations, and course content.
First graders at Magnolia Elementary School
used a Web log earlier this year to describe their dream playgrounds. Monkey
bars were heartily endorsed, and live animals and bumper cars also made the
cut.
Students in a handful of other classes at the
Joppa, Md., school also used blogs, some trading riddles about book
characters with peers at a school in Michigan.
Now, county administrators have frozen the use
of blogs in the classroom amid concerns about oversight of what students
might post online. Michael Lackner, a teacher who jump-started blog use at
Magnolia last year, is optimistic that a technological fix will be found.
But the school's experience highlights some of
the issues that educators and parents face as blogs -- simple Web sites that
follow a diary-like format -- gain entry into the nation's classrooms. While
most agree on blogs' value for promoting student expression, critical
thinking and exchange, there's no consensus on the amount of control over
access and content that educators should exercise. As blogging spreads, it
could revive debates over student expression similar to those that have
cropped up around school newspapers.
The issues surrounding blogging and related
technology in the classroom are "pretty much uncharted," says Will
Richardson, an educational-blogging advocate and supervisor of instructional
technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in
Flemington, N.J.
The use of blogs in schools remains limited but
is growing, as scattered programs piloted by tech-savvy educators generate
buzz and followers. Teachers are attracted to blogging for some of the same
reasons blog use has exploded among techies, political commentators and
would-be pundits. Blogs are cheap, thanks to free or inexpensive software
packages and services -- Hunterdon, for example, pays just $499 a year for
software to run hundreds of student blogs. And their simple format makes
them easy to set up. Using tools from Six Apart Ltd.,
Google Inc. and others, consumers can create a blog in less than 10
minutes and post messages to it over the Web or by e-mail. By some
estimates, five million or more Americans already have created their own
blogs, with some prominent bloggers even influencing the news and political
agendas.
Students in Mr. Richardson's high-school
journalism classes, for example, never turn in hard copies of their
homework. They post all assignments to individual blogs. Their blogs also
notify them when other students complete writing assignments, so they can
read and comment on them.
Meredith Fear, 17 years old, has created two
blogs for classes taught by Mr. Richardson. The 12th grader says posting her
work online for others to see motivated her to do better and increased her
parents' involvement in her education. "I don't often get a chance to talk
with her about school, so having the opportunity to check her blog and see
what she was up to was a great way for me to keep up on things," says
Jonathan Fear, Meredith's father. He adds that was one factor in overcoming
his wife's original concerns that ill-intentioned outsiders could see
Meredith's writings through the blog.
Recognizing such worries, some teachers at
Hunterdon protect blogs with passwords so only they and their students can
see them, particularly for creative-writing classes for which the subject
matter is more likely to be personal. There are other blogging precautions:
Parents have to sign releases giving permission, and only students' first
names are used online. Mr. Richardson says the school has hosted more than
500 student blogs in the past three years without incident.
Mr. Richardson is planning a session with
parents later this fall to teach them about the technology and set up blogs
and Web-text feeds so they can gain access to a broader range of information
from teachers and see what their children are up to. "Kids like it. And I
can see more enhanced learning on their part," Mr. Richardson says.
At Magnolia, teachers were happy with their
classroom blogging and had plans to expand it this school year. But Harford
County public school officials notified them this summer that such projects
appeared to fall afoul of policies regulating student communication. In
particular, they were concerned that students and others could post comments
to the blogs before they were reviewed by a teacher.
"What we want to see is a Web log where a
teacher has final control, acts as a filter for any postings or comments,"
says Janey Mayo, technology coordinator for Harford County Public Schools.
"We're trying to be very cautious with this because we're working with
kids." School administrators also want to see further research on whether
blogging has educational value at the elementary-school level, but so far
haven't found any.
Mr. Lackner believes there is potentially a
quick technical fix to the problem: A blogging service could add a function
that would forward any online comments to a teacher for review before
posting them.
According to David Huffaker
(in "The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the
Classroom," FIRST MONDAY, vol. 9, no. 6, June 2004), "blogs can be an
important addition to educational technology initiatives because they
promote literacy through storytelling, allow collaborative learning, provide
anytime–anywhere access, and remain fungible across academic disciplines."
In support of his position, Huffaker provides several examples of blogs
being used in classroom settings. The paper is available online at
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_6/huffaker/index.html.
First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466]
is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original
articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is
published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois
at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward
Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box
87636, Chicago
IL60680-0636USA; email:
ejv@uic.edu; Web:
http://firstmonday.dk/.
-----
Suzanne Cadwell and Chuck
Gray of the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill's Center for
Instructional Technology have compiled two feature comparison tables that
describe three blogging services and four blogging applications.
Blogging Services Feature
Comparison
Using a blogging service
generally doesn't require any software other than a web browser. Users have
no administrative control over the software itself, but have some control
over a blog's organization and appearance. Depending on the particular
service, blogs can be hosted either on the service’s servers or on the
server of one’s choice (e.g.,
www.unc.edu). Users purchasing a paid account with a service typically
will have no banner ads on their blogs, more features at their disposal, and
better customer support from the service. The Blogging Services Feature
Comparison chart is available
http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/services/.
Blogging Applications
Comparison
Downloadable blogging
applications require the user to have access to server space (e.g.,
www.unc.edu). Most of these applications are comprised of CGI scripts
that must be installed and configured in a user’s cgi-bin folder. Although
they are packaged with detailed instructions, applications can be difficult
to install, prohibitively so for the novice. Blogging applications afford
users fine-grained control over their blogs, and most applications are
open-source or freeware. The Blogging Applications Comparison chart is
available at
http://www.unc.edu/cit/blogs/blogcomparison/applications/.
Question
What services are available to help you create a blog?
Online Web logs, or blogs, have long been a bastion of techy types, those
prone to political rants, and assorted gossips. But now they're making
inroads among families who want to keep up on each other's doings.
Blogs are personal Web sites where you can post things, including photos,
stories and links to other cool stuff online. They resemble a journal, with
information arranged chronologically based on when you post it. The simple
form is a major virtue -- you don't have to think too hard about how to
organize your blog.
I've used a variety of Web sites in recent years to share photos of my
children with their grandparents and other family far way. Lately, I've
wondered if it wouldn't be better to put photos, digital videos and other
links I want to share with my family on one Web site, making it easier to
manage and access them from afar.
With this in mind, I've been testing three of the most popular blogging
services, which are available free or for a small monthly fee.
Blogger, a free service from Google at www.blogger.com, promises you can
create a blog in "three easy steps." After selecting a user name and
password, I chose a name and a custom Web address. Then I selected a graphic
look -- "Dots," a simple design with a touch of fun that seemed right for a
family site -- from 12 attractive templates. After that, Blogger created my
blog. Within a few minutes, I was able to put a short text message on the
site and have Blogger send e-mails to alert my wife and father of the blog's
existence.
Blogger, like the other services, lets you further customize the
organization and look of your site and put several types of information on
it. Sending text to the blog is as easy as sending an e-mail. (In fact,
Blogger and the other services I tested even let me post text to my blog
using standard e-mail.) A Blogger button on Google's toolbar software, which
must be downloaded and activated separately, offers the useful option of
posting links to other Web sites on your blog as you surf the Web. Another
nice feature lets you designate friends or family members who can post to
the main blog.
To put photos on any blog hosted by Blogger, you have to download another
free software package from Picasa called Hello. Hello blocks connections to
computers operating behind what's known as a proxy server, which is a pretty
typical corporate configuration. As a result, I couldn't upload photos from
my work PC, though I was able to do so from home.
Blogger lacks some advanced features other services offer. But its main
shortcoming is that it doesn't let you protect your site by requiring
visitors to use a password to enter. I don't want strangers to look at
photos of my kids or search notes I'm writing for family members. A Google
spokeswoman declined to comment on any plans for such a feature, citing
restrictions related to the company's planned initial public offering.
TypePad from Six Apart, at www.typepad.com, provides a higher-powered
service for creating blogs that does let you password protect your site. You
can also upload a broader range of files, including video clips. But the
tradeoff is a level of complexity that is unnecessarily frustrating.
The company offers three monthly subscription rates starting at $4.95. It
costs $8.95 a month for the version that allows you to create photo albums,
a feature that I consider essential for a family blog. Albums allow you to
avoid filling up the main blog site with strings of photos. If you choose to
password protect your blog, though, TypePad won't let you link your blog
directly to photo albums. It's a surprising shortcoming, and Six Apart
doesn't disclose it on its site. Its support staff gave me complicated
instructions for another way to make such a link, but they never worked for
me.
Six Apart Chief Executive Mena Trott says the photo-album-linking problem is
a bug the company is working to fix. She acknowledges that parts of the
service could be easier to use, and says improvements will be made. She also
says that in practice Six Apart lets most users exceed the company's miserly
limits on blog storage space, which are 100 megabytes for the $8.95-a-month
plan.
AOL's Journals service, which requires an AOL subscription, is about as
simple to use as Blogger. It allows you to restrict public access to your
blog and provides nice albums for grouping photos. If you do decide to
restrict access, your visitors will have to register with AOL. That
registration is free, though, and many people already have an AOL "screen
name" because they use the company's instant messaging service.
But other advanced features, such as the button in Blogger for easy linking
to Web sites, are missing. In addition, the layout templates aren't nearly
as attractive graphically as Blogger's and TypePad's. AOL says it's working
on all of these issues, and expects to add a Web linking button and phase
out the registration requirement later this year.
I'm not completely satisfied with Journals, and I would be happy to use
Blogger or TypePad if they manage to work out their issues with photo albums
and passwords. In the meantime, though, I've chosen AOL's Journals to create
my family blog.
"WEBLOGS COME TO THE CLASSROOM,"
by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2003,
Page 33
They get used to supplement courses in writing, marketing, economics, and
other subjects
Increasingly, private life is a public matter. That seems especially true
in the phenomenon known as blogging. Weblogs, or blogs, are used by scores
of online memoirists, editorialists, exhibitionists, and navel gazers, who
post their daily thoughts on Web sites for all to read.
Now professors are starting to incorporate blogs into courses. The
potential for reaching an audience, they say, reshapes the way students
approach writing assignments, journal entries, and online discussions.
Valerie M. Smith, an assistant professor of English at Quinnipiac
University, is among the first faculty members there to use blogs. She sets
one up for each of her creative-writing students at the beginning of the
semester. The students are to add a new entry every Sunday at noon. Then
they read their peers' blogs and comment on them. Parents or friends also
occasionally read the blogs.
Blogging "raises issues with audience," Ms. Smith says, adding that the
innovation has raised the quality of students' writing;
"They aren't just writing for me, which makes them think in terms of
crafting their work for a bigger audience. It gives them a bigger stake in
what they are writing."
A Weblog can be public or available only to people selected by the blogger.
Many blogs serve as virtual loudspeakers or soapboxes. Howard Dean, a
Democratic presidential contender, has used a blog to debate and discuss
issues with voters. Some blogs have even earned their authors minor fame.
An Iraqi man--known only by a pseudonym, Salaam Pax--captured attention
around the world when he used his blog to document daily life in Baghdad as
American troops advanced on the city.
In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now
identified as weblogs (so named by
Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of
Infosift, began compiling a list
of "other sites like his" as he found them in his travels around the web. In
November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron
published the list on Camworld, and
others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for
inclusion on the list. Jesse's 'page
of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning
of 1999.
Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on
Cameron's list, and most interested people did.
Peter Merholz announced in early 1999
that he was going to pronounce it 'wee-blog' and inevitably this was
shortened to 'blog' with the weblog editor referred to as a 'blogger.'
At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began
publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it
became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of
all the new ones that were appearing. Cameron's list grew so large that he
began including only weblogs he actually followed himself. Other webloggers
did the same. In early 1999 Brigitte
Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the
Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated
all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated
entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since
the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available,
Brig's inclusive definition prevailed.
This rapid growth continued steadily until July 1999 when
Pitas, the first free
build-your-own-weblog tool launched, and suddenly there were hundreds. In
August, Pyra released
Blogger, and
Groksoup launched, and with the ease
that these web-based tools provided, the bandwagon-jumping turned into an
explosion. Late in 1999 software developer Dave Winer introduced
Edit This Page, and Jeff A.
Campbell launched Velocinews. All of these services are free, and all of
them are designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly
and easily.
The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique
proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs
could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A
weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after
working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours
every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web
enthusiasts.
Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links
both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they
feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the
editor's commentary. An editor with some expertise in a field might
demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain
facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue
at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the
piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an
irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey
all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the
link (making them, as Halcyon
pointed out to me, pioneers in the art and craft of
microcontent).
Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space
in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer;
longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.
These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The
web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages
slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling,
the most stupid, the most compelling.
But this type of weblog is important for another reason, I think. In Douglas
Rushkoff's Media Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the
Immediast Underground is quoted
as saying, "Media is a corporate possession...You cannot participate in the
media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step
is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is
passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is
public in its orientation."
By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web
user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out
articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts,
alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in
the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every
day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested
interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual
reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully
understand.
Weblog editors sometimes contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with an
article on a related subject; each article, considered in the light of the
other, may take on additional meaning, or even draw the reader to
conclusions contrary to the implicit aim of each. It would be too much to
call this type of weblog "independent media," but clearly their editors,
engaged in seeking out and evaluating the "facts" that are presented to us
each day, resemble the public that Ruggerio speaks of. By writing a few
lines each day, weblog editors begin to redefine media as a public,
participatory endeavor
But then personal sites went from being static collections of bad poetry and
award banners to constantly updated snippets of commentary, photography,
sounds, bad poetry, and links. The popularity of this format grew (for a
good primer on where weblogs came from and how they evolved, try Rebecca
Blood's
Weblogs: A History and Perspective), and people started building
applications to simplify the process of maintaining a content-heavy personal
site.
These applications have grown in number and sophistication over the years,
and with some major upgrades appearing over the past few months (Blogger
Pro, Movable Type 2.0, Radio UserLand 8.0), I thought the time was nigh to
talk about what they do, why you might care, which one would best suit your
needs, and how they can keep you company on those long, lonely nights, so
empty since you were abandoned for someone who could write Perl scripts.
Weblogs continue to grow in popularity, no doubt in part to their immediacy.
Denizens of the Internet enjoy the opportunity to drop by and catch an
up-to-the-minute account on their favorite blog. However, nothing is more
frustrating than encountering a cobwebbed blog that hasn't been updated in
weeks. To remedy such situations, this site offers a minute-by-minute
account of over 50,000 weblogs. It doesn't get fresher than this! For
utility's sake, the site offers a tiny java applet that sits on your desktop
and continually refreshes, keeping the weblogs whirring. You can also stop
by the most popular blogs to see what kind of content is piquing the
interest of others. Whether you're a neophyte or veteran blogger, you're
sure to find an intriguing site or two to scour.
Some time ago, Glenn Reynolds
hardly qualified as plankton on the punditry food chain. The 41-year-old law
professor at the University of Tennessee would pen the occasional op-ed for the
L.A. Times, but his name was unfamiliar to even the most fanatical news junkie.
All that began to change on Aug. 5 of last year, when Reynolds acquired the
software to create a "Weblog," or "blog." A blog is an easily updated Web site
that works as an online daybook, consisting of links to interesting items on the
Web, spur-of-the-moment observations and real-time reports on whatever captures
the blogger's attention. Reynold's original goal was to post witty observations
on news events, but after September 11, he began providing links to fascinating
articles and accounts of the crisis, and soon his site, called InstaPundit, drew
thousands of readers--and kept growing. He now gets more than 70,000 page views
a day (he figures this means 23,000 real people). Working at his two-year-old
$400 computer, he posts dozens of items and links a day, and answers hundreds of
e-mails. PR flacks call him to cadge coverage. And he's living a pundit's
dream by being frequently cited--not just by fellow bloggers, but by media
bigfeet. He's blogged his way into the game.
Some say the game itself has
changed. InstaPundit is a pivotal site in what is known as the Blogosphere, a
burgeoning samizdat of self-starters who attempt to provide in the
aggregate an alternate media universe. The putative advantage is that this one
is run not by editors paid by corporate giants, but unbespoken
outsiders--impassioned lefties and righties, fine-print-reading wonks, indignant
cranks and salt-'o-the-earth eyewitnesses to the "real" life that the
self-absorbed media often miss. Hard-core bloggers, with a giddy fever not
heard of since the Internet bubble popped, are even predicting that the
Blogosphere is on a trajectory to eclipse the death-star-like dome of Big
Media. One blog avatar, Dave Winer (who probably would be saying this even if
he didn't run a company that sold blogging software), has formally wagered that
by 2007, more readers will get news from blogs than from The New York Times.
Taking him up on the bet is Martin Nisenholtz, head of the Time's digital
operations.
My guess is that Nisenholtz
wins. Blogs are a terrific addition to the media universe. But they pose no
threat to the established order.
Mobile weblogging, or moblogging,
is the latest trend in the world of blogs. New software allows users to update
their weblogs remotely with cell phones and other handheld devices ---
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,57431,00.html
The meteoric rise of weblogging is one of the most unexpected technology
stories of the past year, and much like the commentary that populates these
ever-changing digital diaries, the story of blogging keeps evolving.
One recent trend is "moblogging," or mobile weblogging. New tools like
Manywhere Moblogger,
Wapblog and
FoneBlog allow
bloggers to post information about the minutiae of their lives from
anywhere, not just from a PC.
The newest of these tools,
Kablog, lets users
update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and other handheld devices
like wireless PDAs.
Kablog works on any device running Java 2 Platform Micro Edition, or
J2ME, a version of Java for mobile
devices. Those devices include cell phones running the Symbian operating
system, many Sprint PCS phones, the Blackberry from RIM, and many Palm
handhelds running OS 3.5, such as Handspring's
Treo.
Todd Courtois, creator of Kablog, offers the program for free as shareware
and says that word-of-mouth has already generated several thousand downloads
in the short time it has been available.
What distinguishes Kablog from other moblogging software is that it does not
use e-mail or text messaging for updating weblogs. Other programs such as
FoneBlog enable users to e-mail posts from a cell phone or PDA to a server,
which uploads the entry onto a site. Kablog lets those who use
Movable Type as their weblogging
software log directly onto their sites for updating.
The Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota has created "Into
the Blogsphere," a website to explore the "discursive, visual, social, and
other communicative features of weblogs." Educators and faculty can post,
comment upon, and critique essays covering such areas as mass communication,
pedagogy, and virtual community. The website is located at
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
For more information on
weblogs in academe, see also:
Eric Rasmusen (Economics,
IndianaUniversity) has a homepage
at http://www.rasmusen.org/
His business and economics blog is at
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/
In particular he focuses on conservative versus liberal economics and
politics
Gerald (Jerry) Trites
(Accounting, AIS) has a homepage at
http://www.zorba.ca/
He runs an e-Business blog at
http://www.zorba.ca/blog.html
His site is a great source for updates on research studies in e-Business
... Weird is
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Anybody can go slogging,
but it is most common among teenagers Thomas Claburn discusses the new
concept of "slogging,"
or slanderous blogging, about someone you know or wish you didn't. In my
youth, we used to call this "gossip," and the cardinal rule was never to put
anything in writing for fear our ill-tempered musings would be forever
etched in stone and, worse, overheard or seen by the person being dissed.
But getting "caught" by the subject is apparently the entire point of
slogging, as I understand it. I would have thought in our overlitigated
society that the voice of reason (if not politeness and/or basic human
decency) would trump that of nastiness, but I would have been wrong. InformationWeek Newsletter, August 31, 2005
THE ROLE
OF EMOTION IN THE DISTANCE EDUCATION EXPERIENCE
"Presence, a
sense of 'being there,' is critical to the success of designing, teaching,
and learning at a distance using both synchronous and asynchronous (blended)
technologies. Emotions, behavior, and cognition are components of the way
presence is perceived and experienced and are essential for explaining the
ways we consciously and unconsciously perceive and experience distance
education." Rosemary Lehman, Distance Education Specialist Manager at the
University of Wisconsin-Extension, explores the idea that understanding the
part emotion plays in teaching and learning "can help instruct us in
effective teaching, instructional design, and learning via technology." Her
paper, "The Role of Emotion in Creating Instructor and Learner Presence in
the Distance Education Experience" (JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE AFFECTIVE LEARNING,
vol. 2, no. 2, 2006), is available online at
http://www.jcal.emory.edu/viewarticle.php?id=45
Journal of
Cognitive Affective Learning (JCAL) [ISSN: 1549-6953] is a peer-reviewed,
open-access journal published twice a year by Oxford College of Emory
University. To access current and back issues go to
http://www.jcal.emory.edu/ . For more information,
contact: Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, c/o Prof. Ken Carter,
Oxford College of Emory University, 100 Hamill Street, Oxford, GA 30054 USA;
tel: 770-784-8439; fax: 770-784-8408;
email: kenneth.carter@emory.edu
USING BLOGGER TO
GET STARTED WITH E-LEARNING
In "Using
Blogger to Get Teachers Started with E-Learning" (FORTNIGHTLY MAILING, May
25, 2006), Keith Burnett discusses how "[s]imple class blogs can be used to
post summaries of key points, exercises, links to Web pages of value, and to
provide a sense of continuity and encourage engagement with the material."
He includes a link to an online blogging tutorial and to examples of how
some instructors are using blogs in their classes. The article is online at
http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/05/using_blogger_t.html
Fortnightly
Mailing, focused on online learning, is published every two weeks by Seb
Schmoller, an e-learning consultant. Current and back issues are available
at http://www.schmoller.net/mailings/index.pl. For more information,
contact: Seb Schmoller 312 Albert Road, Sheffield, S8 9RD, UK; tel: 0114
2586899; fax: 0709 2208443;
email:
seb@schmoller.net
Web:
http://www.schmoller.net/
BOOKS VS.
BLOGS
"Why would I
write a book and wait a year or more to see my writing in print, when I can
blog and get my words out there immediately?" In "Books, Blogs & Style"
(CITES & INSIGHTS, vol. 6, no. 7, May 2006), Walt Crawford, both a book
author and a blogger, considers the different niches and purposes of the two
communication media. The essay is online at
http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ6i7.pdf
Cites &
Insights: Crawford at Large [ISSN 1534-0937], a free online journal of
libraries, policy, technology, and media, is self-published monthly by Walt
Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, Inc. Current and
back issues are at available on the Web at
http://cites.boisestate.edu/ . For more information contact: Walt
Crawford, The Research Libraries Group, Inc., 2029 Stierlin Ct., Suite 100,
Mountain View, CA 94043-4684 USA; tel: 650-691-2227;
Web:
http://waltcrawford.name/
Answer 4 --- Serious Learning Applications of Video
Games
Question
Have video game technologies changed learning styles? I
might add that this may also be true of women past their teens since there is
now a larger target market for these women vis-ŕ-vis young males who are often
thought of in relation to game addiction.
Answer
In the next edition of New Bookmarks, I address how serious educators are
predicting that video-style games will become a leading pedagogy for learning in
the near future.
A new industry poll reveals that more women than
teen boys are behind video game consoles. The poll also finds that lacking a
better alternative, adult women prefer war themes over the light 'n' fluffy doll
games now offered. Wired News, August 27, 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,60204,00.html
In
"Next-Generation: Educational Technology versus the Lecture" (EDUCAUSE
REVIEW, vol. 38, no. 4, July/August 2003, pp. 12-16, 18, 20-2), Joel
Foreman, professor in George Mason University English Department, proposes a
"fringe idea" with the potential to revolutionize the educational
system. He believes that "large lecture courses may someday be replaced
by the kind of immersive digital environments that have been popularized by
the videogame industry. Viewed in this light the advanced videogame appears
to be a next-generation educational technology waiting to take its place in
academe."
Foreman illustrates
his idea with a hypothetical Psychology 101 course that uses an immersive
environment to engage students in "learning through performance."
Using the videogame model, students would progress through several
"levels" of the course as they build upon their knowledge of the
material and meet the course's learning goals. The article is online at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0340.pdf.
EDUCAUSE
Review [ISSN 1527-6619], a bimonthly print magazine that explores
developments in information technology and education, is published by
EDUCAUSE, 1150 18th Street, NW, Suite 1010, Washington, DC 20036 USA; tel:
202-872-4200; fax: 202-872-4318; email: info@educause.edu; Web: http://www.educause.edu/.
Articles from current and back issues of EDUCAUSE Review are available on
the Web at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/.
Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in
Learning Technologies at Harvard University, predicts that "shared
graphical environments like those in the multi-user Internet games Everques or
Asheron's Call" will be the learning environments of the future.
Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT's Games to Teach Project, leads an effort to
"demonstrate gaming's still largely unrealized pedagogical potentials"
and to explore "how games might enrich the instruction...at the advanced
placement high school and early college levels." And Randy Hinrichs,
Group Program Manager for Learning Science and Technology at Microsoft Research,
claims that game technology (among other innovations) "will move us away
from classrooms, lectures, test taking, and note taking into fun, immersive
interactive learning environments."
These pronouncements are based on some
incontestable facts. First, the world is now populated by hundreds of
millions of game-playing devices. Second, the videogame market,
approximately $10 billion in 2002, continues to grow rapidly and to motivate the
push for increasingly sophisticated and powerful interactive technologies.
As in other areas of IT development, these technologies are maturing and
converging in novel and unexpected ways. Text-based MUDs (Multi-User
Dungeons) and MOOs (MUDs Object-Oriented) have evolved into massive multiplayer
online communities such as Ultima and The Sims On-line, in which hundreds of
thousands of players can simultaneously interact in graphically rendered
immersive worlds. And previously standalone game devices, such as Sony
PlayStation2 and Microsoft X box, are now Web-enabled for geo-distributed
multiplayer engagements. Imagine that all of these networked "play
stations" are "learning stations," and you can begin to sense an
instructional revolution waiting to happen.
Still, some might argue that higher education
students already have networked learning stations in the form of the Web-enabled
PC. What value is added by a game-based "learning
station"? The major difference is that game technologies routinely
provide visualizations whose pictorial dynamism and sophistication previously
required a supercomputer to produce. These visualizations, best referred
to as immersive worlds, can bring a student into and through any
environment that can be imagined. Instead of learning about a subject by
listening to a lecture or by processing page-based alphanumerics (i.e.,
reading), students can enter and explore a screen-based simulated world that is
the next-best thing to reality.
Continued in the article.
"Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?" by Scott Carson, The
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 15, 2003, Page A31
Educators say the virtual worlds of video games help students think more
broadly.
"People ought to use Grand Theft Auto in the classroom to think about
values and ideology," James Gee a distinguished professor of education at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison says. "There are lots of things
people could learn from games."
This isn't the talk of a hobbyist or an eccentric, but of a serious scholar
who is taking a lead in an emerging field. Mr. Gee thinks that video
games--even those like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in which players run around
and blast Nazis--hold the key to salvaging American education. His
argument was recently delivered in a compact book: What Video Games Have to
Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan).
Although Mr. Gee's colleagues suggested that he was wasting his time when he
started looking into video games, in the past two years he has found that he is
part of a new and growing academic field. "In the time that I was
writing my book, the interest in games in academe went way up," Mr. Gee
says. "It's clear that by accident, I had entered an area where a
wave of interest was coming up--and is still coming up."
New conferences and essays dedicated to games appear all the time.
Respected scholars, like Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discuss the cultural value of video games
in the popular press. And graduate students and professors are designing
games for use in the classroom.
Despite the swell of interest, Mr. Gee and others say the academic study of
video games is still controversial. While some scholars embrace research
on the games, others are recoiling.
Celia Pearce is the associate director of the Game Culture and Technology Lab
at the University of California at Irvine, where two years ago the faculty
rejected a proposal for a minor in game design. A professor on the
committee that made the decision called the idea of a video-games minor
"prurient," she says.
She finds it "baffling" that schools these days use
a "pre-information-society model" in teaching. "Kids are
playing games when they are not in school. They are going from this
digital environment into the classroom, and they're suddenly in
Dickens." Teachers and professors don't know what games are, or how
to use them to their own advantage, she says. "At the worst they fear
games, and at the best they are completely ignorant of them."
Until a few years ago, Mr. Gee was himself clueless about
video games. He became interested in the subject as he watched his son,
then 6 years old, play a game called Pajama Sam. Mr. Gee wondered what a
game for adults would be like. So he bought a game called The New
Adventures of the Time Machine, which was loosely based on the work of H. G.
Wells.
"I was floored by how long and how difficult it
was," he says, sitting in his office, one wall of which is now covered with
posters of video-game characters. He realized that the gaming industry
makes more money than Hollywood, which means that millions of people are
plunking down substantial amounts for games that take on average 50 to 100 hours
to complete--roughly the amount of time spent in semester of college
courses. "Some young person is going to spend $50 on this, yet they
won't take 50 minutes to learn algebra," he says. "I wanted to
know why."
He says that game manufacturers deal with compelling paradox
from which educators can learn.
Games have to be challenging enough to entertain, yet easy
enough to solve--or at least easy enough for the player to feel like he or she
is making progress. "To me, that was the challenge schools
face," he says. "I wanted to see why these game designers are
better at that."
September 8, 2003 message from Jon
Entine
-----Original
Message-----
From: Jon Entine [mailto:runjonrun@earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2003 11:11 AM
Subject: Research audit on "Body Shop" available
For anyone studying
or teaching The Body Shop, I've posted on my website my internal 48-page audit
of the company, which I've previously only provided by email.
It's an extremely
detailed account of the practices of this company. It analyzes Body Shop over
a range of areas including its environmental practices, its marketing and
ethics, its franchise relations, corporate governance, product quality, etc.
It's based on more than 100 interviews, most of them recorded (and available
for fact checking).
It was first written
in 1996 and has been updated slightly. A lot of it deals with the historical
practices of the company, such as Anita Roddick's brazen stealing of the
concept, name, logo, and products from the original Body Shop, the one founded
in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1970 that Roddick visited, then ripped off
without attribution, then lied about. The report is very revealing about the
character of Roddick and the sad, dysfunctional, ethically-challenged
multi-national corporation she has created and continues to oversee.
The backgrounder was
prepared when Body Shop's lawyers (Lovell White Durrant...Robert Maxwell's ex
corporate swat team) and its PR team (Hill & Knowlton ... The tobacco
lobbyist PR firm) were hired to counter articles by me, New Consumer in
England, In These Times, Stephen Corry of Survival International, and other
progressives who published fact-based accounts of the ethical dysfunctionality
of this company.
Please feel free to
use it in your research.
Regards,
-- Jon Entine
Miami University
6255 So. Clippinger Dr.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45243 (
513) 527-4385 [FAX] 527-4386 http://www.jonentine.com
This report presents data on distance education at
postsecondary institutions. NCES used the Postsecondary Education Quick
Information System (PEQIS) to provide current national estimates on distance
education at 2-year and 4-year Title IV-eligible, degree-granting institutions.
Distance education was defined for this study as education or training courses
delivered to remote (off-campus) sites via audio, video (live or prerecorded),
or computer technologies, including both synchronous (i.e., simultaneous) and
asynchronous (i.e., not simultaneous) instruction. Data were collected on a
variety of topics related to distance education, including the number and
proportion of institutions offering distance education courses during the 2000–2001
12-month academic year, distance education enrollments and course offerings,
distance education degree and certificate programs, distance education
technologies, participation in distance education consortia, accommodations in
distance education courses for students with disabilities, distance education
program goals, and factors that keep institutions from starting or expanding
distance education offerings.
Introduction
This study, conducted through the National Center for
Education Statistics (NCES) Postsecondary Education Quick Information System (PEQIS),
was designed to provide current national estimates on distance education at
2-year and 4-year Title IV-eligible, degree-granting institutions. Distance
education was defined for this study as education or training courses
delivered to remote (off-campus) sites via audio, video (live or prerecorded),
or computer technologies, including both synchronous (i.e., simultaneous) and
asynchronous (i.e., not simultaneous) instruction.
Key Findings
The PEQIS survey provides national estimates for the
2000–2001 academic year on the number and proportion of institutions
offering distance education courses, distance education enrollments and course
offerings, degree and certificate programs, distance education technologies,
participation in distance education consortia, accommodations for students wit
h disabilities, distance education program goals, and factors institutions
identify as keeping them from starting or expanding distance education
offerings.
The American Federation of Teachers publication, AFT
ON CAMPUS, is running a series of articles on distance education trends.
In "Trends in Distance Education"
(September 2003, http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/sept03/technology.html
) Thomas J. Kriger, State University of New York, writes about how
"critics of asynchronous courses and programs within higher education
have recently found unexpected support in the corporate sector." Learners
in corporations are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with online-only
classes. This is leading to the creation of "blended learning" --
courses that combine "face-to-face teaching with software and Web-based
teaching." Such courses also allow faculty to retain greater control in
their distance classes.
The October 2003 issue continues the theme with
"Making the Pedagogical Case for Blended Learning" by Cynthia
Villanti, assistant professor of humanities at Mohawk Valley Community
College, New York ( http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/oct03/technology.html
). She presents five primary pedagogical arguments for blended, or hybrid,
courses. These arguments include: -- enabling a balance between
faculty-centered and student-centered models; -- enabling faculty and students
to develop a strong sense of classroom community both online and in person; --
allowing for both the "reflectiveness of asynchronous communication and
the immediacy of spoken communication;" -- helping to alleviate faculty
concerns about academic dishonesty and plagiarism.
NEW RESOURCE ON ELEARNING AND COURSE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
This month, SYLLABUS magazine began a new, free email
publication, CMS REVIEW: A RESOURCE ON ELEARNING AND COURSE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS. This bi-monthly newsletter will provide information, analysis, case
studies, and technical tips on course management systems (CMS) in higher
education. To subscribe, go to http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=2978
Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by
101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311
USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/
. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges,
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for more information.
Wow.
I think we may have a glimpse into the future of text books with this one.
It is the new Introduction to Corporate Finance by William Megginson
and Scott Smart.
From videos for most topics, to interviews, to
powerpoint, to a student study guide, to excel help...just a total
integration of a text and a web site! Well done!
At St. Bonaventure we have adopted the text for the
fall semester and the book actually has made me excited to be teaching an
introductory course! It is that good!!
BTW Before I get accused of selling out, let me say
I get zero for this plug. I have met each author at conferences but do not
really know either of them. And like any first edition book there may be
some errors, but that said, this is the future of college text books!
Computer science is not only a comparatively young
field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in
academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the
“universal machine” in the late 1930’s — the idea that a computer in theory
could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including
the human brain — all that remained to be done was mere engineering.
The more generous perspective today is that decades
of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed, storage and networking,
along with the development of increasingly clever software, have brought
computing into science, business and culture in ways that were barely
imagined years ago. The quantitative changes delivered through smart
engineering opened the door to qualitative changes.
Computing changes what can be seen, simulated and
done. So in science, computing makes it possible to simulate climate change
and unravel the human genome. In business, low-cost computing, the Internet
and digital communications are transforming the global economy. In culture,
the artifacts of computing include the iPod, YouTube and computer-animated
movies.
What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in
Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading
advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s
chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium
“2016.”
Computer scientists from academia and companies
like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital
imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks
touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the
sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will
loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.
Richard M. Karp, a professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, gave a talk whose title seemed esoteric: “The
Algorithmic Nature of Scientific Theories.”
Yet he presented a fundamental explanation for why
computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp
himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer
science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a
step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both
mathematics and computer science.
“Algorithms are small but beautiful,” Dr. Karp
observed. And algorithms are good at describing dynamic processes, while
scientific formulas or equations are more suited to static phenomena.
Increasingly, scientific research seeks to understand dynamic processes, and
computer science, he said, is the systematic study of algorithms.
Biology, Dr. Karp said, is now understood as an
information science. And scientists seek to describe biological processes,
like protein production, as algorithms. “In other words, nature is
computing,” he said.
Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor
at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been
analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley
Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in
the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not
direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter
only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six —
hence, the term “six degrees of separation.”
But with the rise of the Internet, social networks
and technology networks are becoming inextricably linked, so that behavior
in social networks can be tracked on a scale never before possible.
“We’re really witnessing a revolution in
measurement,” Dr. Kleinberg said.
The new social-and-technology networks that can be
studied include e-mail patterns, buying recommendations on commercial Web
sites like Amazon, messages and postings on community sites like MySpace and
Facebook, and the diffusion of news, opinions, fads, urban myths, products
and services over the Internet. Why do some online communities thrive, while
others decline and perish? What forces or characteristics determine success?
Can they be captured in a computing algorithm?
Social networking research promises a rich trove
for marketers and politicians, as well as sociologists, economists,
anthropologists, psychologists and educators.
“This is the introduction of computing and
algorithmic processes into the social sciences in a big way,” Dr. Kleinberg
said, “and we’re just at the beginning.”
But having a powerful new tool of tracking the
online behavior of groups and individuals also raises serious privacy
issues. That became apparent this summer when AOL inadvertently released Web
search logs of 650,000 users.
Future trends in computer imaging and storage will
make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a
microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life. The potential
for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking. Rick Rashid, a
computer scientist and head of Microsoft’s research labs, noted that he
would like to see a recording of the first steps of his grown son, or listen
to a conversation he had with his father many years ago. “I’d like some of
that back,” he said. “In the future, that will be possible.”
But clearly, the technology could also enable a
surveillance society. “We’ll have the capability, and it will be up to
society to determine how we use it,” Dr. Rashid said. “Society will
determine that, not scientists.”
Jensen Comment
Both Liberty University and SNHU astound the education world with the way they
boomed in enrollments. However, each boomed to over 100,000 students in
different ways.
Technological change demands stronger
and more continuous connections between education and employment, says
Andrew Palmer. The faint outlines of such a system are now emerging
THE RECEPTION
AREA contains a segment of a decommissioned Underground train carriage,
where visitors wait to be collected. The surfaces are wood and glass. In
each room the talk is of code, web development and data science. At first
sight the London office of General Assembly looks like that of any other
tech startup. But there is one big difference: whereas most firms use
technology to sell their products online, General Assembly uses the physical
world to teach technology. Its office is also a campus. The rooms are full
of students learning and practising code, many of whom have quit their jobs
to come here. Full-time participants have paid between Ł8,000 and Ł10,000
($9,900-12,400) to learn the lingua franca of the digital economy in a
programme lasting 10-12 weeks.
General
Assembly, with campuses in 20 cities from Seattle to Sydney, has an alumni
body of around 35,000 graduates. Most of those who enroll for full-time
courses expect them to lead to new careers. The company’s curriculum is
based on conversations with employers about the skills they are critically
short of. It holds “meet and hire” events where firms can see the coding
work done by its students. Career advisers help students with their
presentation and interview techniques. General Assembly measures its success
by how many of its graduates get a paid, permanent, full-time job in their
desired field. Of its 2014-15 crop, three-quarters used the firm’s
career-advisory services, and 99% of those were hired within 180 days of
beginning their job hunt.
The company’s
founder, Jake Schwartz, was inspired to start the company by two personal
experiences: a spell of drifting after he realised that his degree from Yale
conferred no practical skills, and a two-year MBA that he felt had cost too
much time and money: “I wanted to change the return-on-investment equation
in education by bringing down the costs and providing the skills that
employers were desperate for.” In rich countries the link between learning
and earning has tended to follow a simple rule: get as much formal education
as you can early in life, and reap corresponding rewards for the rest of
your career. The literature suggests that each additional year of schooling
is associated with an 8-13% rise in hourly earnings. In the period since the
financial crisis, the costs of leaving school early have become even
clearer. In America, the unemployment rate steadily drops as you go up the
educational ladder.
Many believe that
technological change only strengthens the case for more formal education.
Jobs made up of routine tasks that are easy to automate or offshore have
been in decline. The usual flipside of that observation is that the number
of jobs requiring greater cognitive skill has been growing. The labour
market is forking, and those with college degrees will naturally shift into
the lane that leads to higher-paying jobs.
The reality seems
to be more complex. The returns to education, even for the high-skilled,
have become less clear-cut. Between 1982 and 2001 the average wages earned
by American workers with a bachelor’s degree rose by 31%, whereas those of
high-school graduates did not budge, according to the New York Federal
Reserve. But in the following 12 years the wages of college graduates fell
by more than those of their less educated peers. Meanwhile, tuition costs at
universities have been rising.
A question of
degree, and then some
The decision to
go to college still makes sense for most, but the idea of a mechanistic
relationship between education and wages has taken a knock. A recent survey
conducted by the Pew Research Centre showed that a mere 16% of Americans
think that a four-year degree course prepares students very well for a
high-paying job in the modern economy. Some of this may be a cyclical effect
of the financial crisis and its economic aftermath. Some of it may be simply
a matter of supply: as more people hold college degrees, the associated
premium goes down. But technology also seems to be complicating the picture.
A paper published in 2013 by a trio of Canadian economists,
Paul Beaudry, David Green and Benjamin Sand, questions optimistic
assumptions about demand for non-routine work. In the two decades prior to
2000, demand for cognitive skills soared as the basic infrastructure of the
IT age (computers, servers, base stations and fibre-optic cables) was being
built; now that the technology is largely in place, this demand has waned,
say the authors. They show that since 2000 the share of employment accounted
for by high-skilled jobs in America has been falling. As a result,
college-educated workers are taking on jobs that are cognitively less
demanding (see chart), displacing less educated workers.
This analysis buttresses the view that technology is already
playing havoc with employment. Skilled and unskilled workers alike are in
trouble. Those with a better education are still more likely to find work,
but there is now a fair chance that it will be unenjoyable. Those who never
made it to college face being squeezed out of the workforce altogether. This
is the argument of the techno-pessimists, exemplified by the projections of
Carl-Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of Oxford University, who in 2013
famously calculated that 47% of existing jobs in America are susceptible to
automation.
There is another, less apocalyptic possibility. James Bessen,
an economist at Boston University, has worked out the effects of automation
on specific professions and finds that since 1980 employment has been
growing faster in occupations that use computers than in those that do not.
That is because automation tends to affect tasks within an occupation rather
than wiping out jobs in their entirety. Partial automation can actually
increase demand by reducing costs: despite the introduction of the barcode
scanner in supermarkets and the ATM in banks, for example, the number of
cashiers and bank tellers has grown.
But even though technology may not destroy jobs in aggregate,
it does force change upon many people. Between 1996 and 2015 the share of
the American workforce employed in routine office jobs declined from 25.5%
to 21%, eliminating 7m jobs. According to research by Pascual Restrepo of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the 2007-08 financial
crisis made things worse: between 2007 and 2015 job openings for unskilled
routine work suffered a 55% decline relative to other jobs.
Open SUNY -- through which the State University of
New York plans to take existing online programs in the 64-campus system and
to build on them, making them available for students throughout the system
-- has its first degree programs. In her annual address on the state of the
university, Chancellor Nancy Zimpher
announced the first degree programs and the
campuses that are producing them. The offerings include associate,
bachelor's and master's degrees. Two SUNY institutions -- Empire State
College and SUNY Oswego -- are each offering two programs. The others are
being offered by Broome Community College, Finger Lakes Community College,
SUNY Delhi and SUNY Stony Brook.
Fast Company issues its annual list of the most
innovative companies in education. The 2013 list includes nine companies and
one community college.
In its
annual list of top companies, the magazine broke
down the organizations that have the most impact on education. Not
surprisingly, the top three slots were filled by online course providers
that partner with universities. They earned their spots for disrupting
traditional university course delivery methods by offering classes at no
charge to students.
1. Coursera
2. Udacity
3. EdX
4. Rio Salado Community College
5. Amplify
6. GameDesk
7. Duolingo
8. InsideTrack
9. FunDza
10. ClassDojo
But while the list includes the word company, not
every organization included is a company. For example, Rio Salado Community
College in Arizona came in fourth.
Rio Salado designed a custom course management and
student services system that helps students stay on track with their
education. Through
predictive analytics, the college shows professors
which students could be at risk of dropping out and need more attention. It
also alerts professors when a student doesn't show up to class regularly or
skips an assignment. The system allows educators to recognize at-risk
students early and take action to help them.
For more information about what these companies did
to be on the list, check out
Fast Company's story.
Community colleges reported an 18 percent increase
in distance education enrollments in a 2007 survey released this weekend at
the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges, in
Philadelphia.
The survey on community colleges and distance
education is an annual project of the Instructional Technology Council, an
affiliate of the AACC. The survey is based on the responses of 154 community
colleges, selected to provide a representational sample of all community
colleges. Last year’s survey found community colleges reporting an increase
in distance education enrollments of 15 percent.
This year’s survey suggests that distance education
has probably not peaked at community colleges. First there is evidence that
the colleges aren’t just offering a few courses online, but entire programs.
Sixty-four percent of institutions reported offering at least one online
degree — defined as one where at least 70 percent of the courses may be
completed online. Second, colleges reported that they aren’t yet meeting
demand. Seventy percent indicated that student demand exceeds their online
offerings.
The top
challenge reported by colleges in terms of dealing with
students in distance education was that they do not fill out
course evaluations. In previous surveys, this has not been
higher than the fifth greatest challenge. This year’s survey
saw a five percentage point increase — to 45 percent — in
the share of colleges reporting that they charge an extra
fee for distance education courses.
Training
professors has been a top issue for institutions offering
distance education. Of those in the survey of community
colleges, 71 percent required participation (up from 67
percent a year ago and 57 percent the year before). Of those
requiring training, 60 percent require more than eight
hours.
Several of
the written responses some colleges submitted suggested
frustration with professors. One such comment (included
anonymously in the report) said: “Vocal conservative faculty
members with little computer experience can stymie efforts
to change when expressing a conviction that student learning
outcomes can only be achieved in a face-to-face classroom —
even though they have no idea what can be accomplished in a
well-designed distance education course.” Another response
said that: “Our biggest challenge is getting faculty to
participate in our training sessions. We understand their
time is limited, but we need to be able to show them the new
tools available....”
In last
year’s survey, 84 percent of institutions said that they
were customers of either Blackboard or WebCT (now a part of
Blackboard), but 31 percent reported that they were
considering a shift in course management platforms. This
year’s survey suggests that some of them did so. The
percentage of colleges reporting that they use Blackboard or
WebCT fell to 77 percent. Moodle showed the largest gains in
the market — increasing from 4 to 10 percent of the market —
while Angel and Desire2Learn also showed gains.
The survey
also provides an update on the status of many technology
services for students, showing steady increases in the
percentage of community colleges with various technologies
and programs.
Status of
Services for Online Students at Community Colleges
Update on the Roaring Online
Nonprofit Western Governors University (WGU) founded in
1997 by the governors of 19 states A competency-based university where instructors don't assign the grades ---
grades are based upon competency testing
WGU does not admit foreign students
WGU now has over 30,000 students from sponsoring states for this nonprofit,
private university
Western Governors
University Texas, where I am chancellor, is not an easy institution to
describe to your mother—or even your hip sister. It just doesn't fit the
profile of most traditional universities, even the newer for-profit and
online ones. It brings the work of a national, online, nonprofit university
into a state, and it embraces a competency-based education model that is
rarely found on an institutionwide level.
Even for seasoned
educators, WGU Texas feels different. And in a year that has seen flat or
declining enrollments at many traditional colleges, reports critical of
for-profit institutions, and continuing debate over the perils and promise
of online learning, our story, and our growth, has been unique. As we hit
our one-year anniversary, it's worth taking a few moments to reflect on the
ups, downs, challenges, and champions of this newest state model. I'd offer
three key reflections on lessons we've learned:
Building a
strong foundation. Western Governors was founded as a private,
multistate online university 15 years ago by governors of Western states.
Texas is only the third state model within the system, following WGU Indiana
and WGU Washington. Before our opening, leaders of Western Governors took
time to make sure the idea of this state university made sense for Texas.
The intent was to add high-quality, affordable capacity to the state's
higher-education system, particularly for adult learners, and to localize it
for Texans and their employers.
This outpost was
poised to "go big" in one of the biggest of states, offering more than 50
bachelor's and master's degrees in high-demand fields in business,
education, information technology, and health professions. WGU's
online-learning model allows students to progress by demonstrating what they
know and can do rather than by logging time in class accumulating credit
hours.
In meetings across
the state, the idea of WGU Texas gained the support of the state's
political, legislative, and higher-education leaders, as well as the Texas
Workforce Commission and the Texas Association of Community Colleges.
Rushing to roll out was not the goal; entering the education ecosystem with
solid support of the model was.
I came on board as
chancellor in December 2011. Having served on WGU's Board of Trustees for
six years, I knew the model, and having graduated from and worked for the
University of Texas at Austin, I knew Texas.
In the past six
months, we have hired key staff and faculty, formed a state advisory board,
opened a main office and training center in downtown Austin, launched our
first wave of student outreach, begun working with employers in different
metro regions, and started connecting online and on the ground with
students. After absorbing WGU's 1,600 existing Texas students, WGU Texas
grew by more than 60 percent in this first year, entering August 2012 with
more than 3,000 students.
In about eight
weeks, we'll hold our first commencement in Austin, celebrating the
graduation of more than 400 students. We're moving quickly now, but it's the
firm foundation of outreach, support, and systems that served us well as we
took on the next two challenges:
Confronting
conflation. WGU Texas is laser-focused on a student population that
is typically underserved. We see ourselves as a good fit for adult learners
who need an affordable, quality, and flexible learning model, particularly
working students who want to attend full time. We are especially focused on
the more than three million Texans who have some college and no
credential—students like Jason Franklin, a striving adult learner in a
high-demand IT field who had gone as far as he could in his career without a
degree. He earned a bachelor's and a master's degree through Western
Governors, and is now working on a master's degree from WGU Texas.
We'd like to help
these students reach their goals and get on a solid career and
lifelong-learning path.
However, in
offering a new model like ours, you quickly find the conflation problem a
challenge. Some assume that you're trying to compete for the
fresh-from-high-school graduates who want a campus experience. Others assume
that because you're online, you must be a for-profit university. Still
others put all online education programs in the same bucket, not
distinguishing at all between a traditional model online and a deeply
personalized, competency-based learning model.
Fighting conflation
by clearly differentiating and properly positioning our university has been
essential. We've had to be clear—and to repeat often—that our approach is
designed for adult learners who have some college and work experience. We're
absolutely OK with telling prospective students, partner colleges, and
state-policy leaders that for 18- to 20-year-olds looking to embark on their
first college experience, we are probably not the right fit. In fact,
first-time freshmen make up less than 5 percent of our student population.
The for-profit
conflation has been even more interesting. Many people assume that any
online university is for-profit. We are not. And even when we assure them
that our nonprofit status keeps us deeply committed to low tuition—we have a
flat-rate, six-month-term tuition averaging less than $3,000 for full-time
students, which our national parent WGU has not raised for four years—they
have a hard time getting their minds around it.
Others are sure we
are nothing more than an online version of the traditional model, relying
entirely on adjunct faculty. When we explain our history, learning model,
and reliance on full-time faculty members who specialize in either mentoring
or subject matter, it takes some time. But once people embrace the idea of a
personal faculty mentor who takes a student from first contact to crossing
the graduation stage, they warm quickly to the model.
Synching
with the state's needs. While forming the foundation and fighting
conflation are important, I'd say the key to WGU's state-model successes is
the commitment to synching with the economic, educational, and student
ecosystem of the state.
On the economic
level, we've been able to work directly with employers eager to support our
university, advance our competency-centered model, and hire our graduates.
Educationally we have been fortunate to have smart and strategic partners
that have guided our entry into the state. For example, our Finish to Go
Further transfer program, in partnership with the Texas community-college
association, motivates students to complete their associate degrees before
transferring. This strategy supports the goal of the Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board of significantly improving postsecondary access and
success in Texas.
Jensen Comment
WGU is neither a traditional university nor a MOOC. It started as an experiment
to deliver a quality education without having the 19 states have to build and/or
maintain physical campuses to deliver college education to more students.
Admittedly, one of the main incentives was to expand learning opportunities
without paying for the enormous costs of building and maintaining campuses. WGU
was mostly an outreach program for non-traditional students who for one reason
or another are unable to attend onsite campuses. But the primary goal of WGU was
not and still is not confined to adult education.
WGU is not intended to take over onsite
campus education alternatives. The founders of WGU are well aware that living
and learning on an onsite campus brings many important components to education
and maturation and socialization that WGU cannot offer online. For example,
young students on campus enter a new phase of life living outside the homes and
daily oversight of their parents. But the transition is less abrupt than living
on the mean streets of real life. Students meet face-to-face on campus and are
highly likely to become married or live with students they are attracted to on
campus. Campus students can participate in athletics, music performances,
theatre performances, dorm life, chapel life, etc.
But WGU is not a MOOC where 100,000
anonymous students may be taking an online course. Instead, WGU courses are
relatively small with intimate communications 24/7 with instructors and other
students in most of the courses. In many ways the learning communications may be
much closer online in WGU than on campus at the University of Texas where
classrooms often hold hundreds of students taking a course.
There are some types of learning
that can take place in live classrooms that are almost impossible online.
For example, an onsite case analysis class (Harvard style) takes on a life of
its own that case instructors cannot anticipate before class. Students are
forced to speak out in front of other students. A student's unexpected idea may
change the direction of the entire case discussion for the remainder of the
class. I cannot imagine teaching many Harvard Business School cases online even
though there are ways to draw out innovative ideas and discussions online.
Physical presence is part and parcel to teaching many HBS cases.
Competency-based grading has
advantages and disadvantages.
Competency-based grading removes incentives to brown nose instructors for better
grades. It's unforgiving for lazy and unmotivated students. But these advantages
can also be disadvantages. Some students become more motivated by hoping that
their instructors will reward effort as well as performance. At unexpected
points in life those rewards for effort may come at critical times just before a
student is apt to give up and look for a full time McJob.
Some students are apt to become
extremely bored learning about Shakespeare or Mozart. But in attempting to
please instructors with added effort, the students may actually discover at some
unexpected point something wonderful about Shakespeare or Mozart. Mathematics in
particular is one of those subjects that can be a complete turn off until
suddenly a light clicks and student discovers that math is not only interesting
--- math can be easier once you hit a key point in the mathematics learning
process. This definitely happened with me, and the light did not shine for me
until I started a doctoral program. Quite suddenly I loved mathematics and made
it the central component of my five years of full-time doctoral studies at
Stanford University.
Thus WGU and the University of Texas
should not be considered competitors. They are different alternatives that have
some of the same goals (such as competency in learning content) and some
different goals (such as living with other students and participating in
extracurricular activities).
I wish WGU well and hope it thrives
alongside the traditional state-supported campuses. WGU in some ways was a
precursor to MOOC education, but WGU is not a MOOC in the sense that classes are
small and can be highly interactive with other students and with instructor. In
a MOOC, students have to be more motivated to learn on their own and master the
material without much outside help from other students or instructors.
There are many ways to teach and many
ways to learn. WGU found its niche. There's no one-size-fits-all to living and
learning.
The Next Thing in For-Profit
Education: Bourgeoisie (Elite) versus Proletariat (Commoner) For-Profit
Universities
Both alternatives onsite or online, however, are more expensive than traditional
public universities like the University of Texas for in-state students
Minerva, however, wants to serve top-of-the-line student prospects at lower
costs than prestigious private universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford
Elite American
universities maintain their prestige by turning away a huge percentage of
applicants every year. And the education entrepreneur Ben Nelson sees an
opportunity in this demand for top-flight education: He wants to reach
talented students across the world and to build a new university that could
remake the image of Ivy League education.
Mr. Nelson, founder
of a start-up called the Minerva Project, believes the minuscule acceptance
rates at prestigious institutions leave some college-bound students without
a place where they can pursue a blue-ribbon degree. So his for-profit
enterprise seeks to satisfy that demand by offering a rigorous online
education to the brightest students around the world who slip through the
cracks of highly selective admissions cycles.
Mr. Nelson said his
company, which is calling itself “the first elite American university to be
launched in a century,” will disregard the barriers that might put the Ivy
League beyond the reach of qualified applicants.
“We don’t care
about geography, we don’t care about how wealthy you are, we don’t care if
you’re able to donate or have donated in the past, or legacy or where your
ancestors went to school,” he said. “We really just want to equalize the
playing field.”
The start-up, based
in San Francisco, plans to do so by charging tuition rates “well under half”
of those at traditional top-tier institutions, Mr. Nelson said. The new
university is seeking accreditation, Mr. Nelson added, and will welcome its
first class in 2014. Though he did not specify how big he expects Minerva’s
student body to be, Mr. Nelson said his goal is to make sure no qualified
students “get rejected because we say we’re full.” He added that he expects
Minerva to be “far better represented internationally than a typical
American university.”
The company can
afford to charge cheaper tuition, Mr. Nelson said, in part because it
expects incoming students to have already mastered the material that makes
up everyday introductory courses. For instance, Minerva may offer Applied
Economic Theory instead of Economics 101, he said.
“What we expect to
teach is how you apply and synthesize that information and how you do
something with it,” Mr. Nelson said.
To create these
advanced courses, Minerva will break down the role of professor into two
distinct jobs instead of simply poaching faculty members from other
universities. The company will award monetary prizes to “distinguished
teachers among great research faculty,” Mr. Nelson said, who will team up
with crews to videotape lectures and craft innovative courses when they are
not teaching at their home institutions. (Mr. Nelson declined to elaborate
on the size of the prizes.)
Minerva will then
hire a second group of instructors to deliver the material. Mr. Nelson
called them “preceptors,” who will typically be young graduates of doctoral
programs—they will lead class discussions online, hold office hours, and
grade assignments.
After its students
graduate, Mr. Nelson said the university plans to help alumni connect with
their peers to create businesses, do research, and find jobs.
“The Minerva
education isn’t just about getting your four-year degree and then going to
work for Goldman Sachs and crossing your fingers and hoping you’ll do really
well,” he said. “It’s actually playing an active role in facilitating your
success afterwards.”
Mr. Nelson’s
challenge to the Ivy League is already flush with cash: The prominent
Silicon Valley investment firm Benchmark Capital has pumped $25-million into
Minerva’s coffers—the firm’s richest seed-stage investment ever.
And the company has
attracted some high-profile advisers. Lawrence H. Summers, the former U.S.
treasury secretary and Harvard University president emeritus, is the chair
of Minerva’s advisory board, which includes Bob Kerrey, the U.S. Senate
candidate from Nebraska who is a former president of the New School, among
other education luminaries.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are enormous hurdles that Minerva must leap over before its graduates
compete with graduates of the Ivy League. Among the major hurdles are the
thousands and thousands of Ivy League alumni. Many of those alumni are now in
positions of hiring power, and these executives are not totally unbiased.
Executives of Wall Street firms, for example, have their favorite places to
recruit new employees, and these favorite places are typically their alma
maters.
For example, one of the main reasons
many applicants apply to the Harvard Business School or the Stanford Graduate
School of Business at MBA or doctoral level is have access to the tremendous
alumni networking systems of the HBS or GSB. It will take many years for elitist
startups like Minerva to establish competing alumni networks.
There are other hurdles --- especially
accreditation issues. For example, the AACSB just does not accredit for-profit
universities in North America. This has been a tremendous barrier to for-profit
university success in accounting, finance, and business degree programs.
I think Mike Milken and the Welches
(Jack and Suzie) had something like Minerva elitism in mind when they
established their "prestigious" online business universities, but thus far none
of these elitist efforts have been very successful. Failing to get AACSB
accreditation and alumni networking of note have taken their toll on Mike, Jack,
and Suzie. Donald Trump's Trump University was a loser from get go.
John Zogby, president & CEO
of the polling company Zogby International, says that American students are
quickly warming up to the idea of taking classes online, just as consumers
have taken to the idea of renting movies via Netflix and buying microbrewed
beer.
In a new book by Mr. Zogby released today, he said
that polls show a sharp increase in acceptance of online education in the
past year. For more on the story, see
a free
article in today’s Chronicle.
National surveys show that a majority
of Americans think online universities offer a lower quality of
education than do traditional institutions. But a prominent pollster,
John Zogby, says in a book being released today that it won't be long
before American society takes to distance education as warmly as it has
embraced game-changing innovations like microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and
"the simple miracle of Netflix."
The factor that will close that
"enthusiasm gap" is the growing use of distance education by
well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way
We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream
(Random House).
The book, which is based on Zogby
International polls and other studies, also touches on public attitudes
toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and international
affairs, and on what men and women really do want from each other. Mr.
Zogby says polls detect signs of society's emerging resistance to big
institutions, and its de-emphasis on things and places. "We're
redefining geography and space," he says—and a widening acceptance of
online education is part of the trend.
Today there is still a "cultural lag"
between the public's desire for flexible ways to take college courses
and what the most-established players offer, Mr. Zogby said in an
interview with The Chronicle on Monday. "There's a sense that
those who define the standard haven't caught on yet," he said.
But Mr. Zogby writes that polling by
his organization shows that attitudes about online education are
changing fast. His polling also points to other challenges that colleges
will face as they race to serve a worldwise generation of
18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls "First Globals."
In one 2007 poll of more 5,000 adults,
Zogby International found that 30 percent of respondents were taking or
had taken an online course, and another 50 percent said they would
consider taking one. He says the numbers might skew a little high
because this poll was conducted online and the definition of an online
course was broad, including certificate programs or training modules
offered by employers.
Only 27 percent of respondents agreed
that "online universities and colleges provide the same quality of
education" as traditional institutions. Among those 18 to 24 years old,
only 23 percent agreed.
An even greater proportion of those
polled said it was their perception that employers and academic
professionals thought more highly of traditional institutions than
online ones.
Rapid Shift in Attitude
Yet in another national poll in
December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45 percent of the 1,004
adults surveyed believed "an online class carries the same value as a
traditional-classroom class," and 43 percent of 1,545 chief executives
and small-business owners agreed that a degree earned by distance
learning "is as credible" as one from a traditional campus-based
program.
Mr. Zogby said that differing
attitudes in two polls within a year show that "the gap was closing"—and
he said that wasn't as surprising as it might seem. As with changing
perceptions about other cultural phenomena, "these paradigm shifts
really are moving at lightning speed."
That, says Mr. Zogby, is why he writes
about online universities in a chapter—"Dematerializing the
Paradigm"—that discusses the rise of car-sharing companies like Flexcar
(now merged with Zipcar), the emergence of Internet blogs as a source of
news and information, and the popularity of microbrewed beer.
And while it may be true that
microbrews and Zipcars, at least, are still very much niche products,
Mr. Zogby says they are signs of transcendent change—just like the
distance-education courses that are being offered by more and more
institutions across the country. "When you add up all the niche
products, it's a market unto itself," he says.
In the book, Mr. Zogby also highlights
the emerging influence of the First Globals, whom his book calls "the
most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history."
First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant and internationally
aware.
It is these First Globals, he writes,
who are shaping what he says is nothing short of a "fundamental
reorientation of the American character away from wanton consumption and
toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources."
Higher education, he said in the
interview, needs to take notice and adapt. These days, he said, students
are much more likely to have experienced other cultures firsthand,
either as tourists or because they have immigrated from someplace else.
Whether college for them is a traditional complex of buildings or an
interactive online message board, said Mr. Zogby, "there is a different
student on campus."
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education are at the following sites:
"How to Be an Online
Student and Survive in the Attempt," by Maria
José Vińas, Chronicle of Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 11, 2008 ---
Click Here
The lives of many online college students are not
easy. They have to combine jobs, house chores, family life and, on top of
all that, do some actual studying. To help online students cope with this
burden, a blog sponsored by Western Governors University offers survival
tips.
The Online Student Survival
Guide, a program that kicked off in May, is meant
to give online students tips on adjusting to online learning and staying
motivated throughout the courses, while balancing life and school. Following
the famous Latin maxim “mens sana in corpore sano”, the bloggers also write
posts on healthy eating—not only for the online students, but for their
families, too.
"Attrition rates for classes taught through
distance education are 10- 20% higher than classes taught in a face-to-face
setting. . . . Finding ways to decrease attrition in distance education
classes and programs is critical both from an economical and quality
viewpoint. High attrition rates have a negative economic impact on
universities."
In "Strategies to Engage Online Students and Reduce
Attrition Rates" (THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATORS ONLINE, vol. 4, no. 2, July
2007), the authors provide a review of the literature to determine methods
for "engaging students with the goals of enhancing the learning process and
reducing attrition rates." Their research identified four major strategies:
-- student integration and engagement
Includes "faculty-initiated contact via phone
calls, pre-course orientations, informal online chats, and online student
services."
-- learner-centered approach
Faculty "need to get to know their students and
assess each student's pre-existing knowledge, cultural perspectives, and
comfort level with technology."
-- learning communities
"[S]trong feelings of community may not only
increase persistence in courses, but may also increase the flow of
information among all learners, availability of support, commitment to group
goals, cooperation among members and satisfaction with group efforts."
-- accessibility to online student services.
Services might include "assessments, educational
counseling, administrative process such as registration, technical support,
study skills assistance, career counseling, library services, students'
rights and responsibilities, and governance."
The Journal of Educators Online (JEO) [ISSN
1547-500X ]is an online,
double-blind, refereed journal by and for instructors, administrators,
policy-makers, staff, students, and those interested in the development,
delivery, and management of online courses in the Arts, Business, Education,
Engineering, Medicine, and Sciences. For more information, contact JEO, 500
University Drive, Dothan, Alabama 36303 USA; tel: 334-983-6556, ext. 1-356;
fax: 334-983-6322; Web:
http://www.thejeo.com/ .
Jensen Comment
Attrition rates are high because online students are often adults with heavy
commitments to family and jobs. Initially they think they are going to have time
for a course, but then the course becomes too demanding and/or unexpected things
happen in their lives such as computer crashes, a change in job demands (such as
more travel), family illness, marital troubles, etc. Sometimes online students
initially believe the myth that online courses are easier than onsite courses
and, therefore, take less time. About the only time saved is the logistical time
waster of commuting to and from a classroom site.
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education are at the following sites:
More students than ever are taking courses online,
but that doesn’t mean the growth will continue indefinitely. That’s the
takeaway from the Sloan Foundation’s latest survey, conducted with the
Babson Survey Research Group, of colleges’ online course offerings.
With
results from nearly 4,500 institutions of all types, the
report,
“Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning”,
found that in fall 2006, nearly 3.5
million students — or 19.8 percent of total postsecondary
enrollments — took at least one course online. That’s a
9.7-percent increase over the previous year, but growth has
been slowing significantly: last year, the jump was 36.5
percent.
But compared to
the growth rate for enrollment overall (1.3 percent), the
report notes, the online sector is still rapidly expanding.
Most of that expansion is happening where online classes are
already being offered.
“The number
of new institutions entering the online learning arena had
definitely slowed [by last fall]; most institutions that
plan to offer online education are now doing so,” the
report’s authors wrote.
The
institutions surveyed seem to believe that the most
important reason for offering online courses is to improve
student access, while the top cited obstacles to more
widespread online offerings are student’ discipline or study
habits, followed by faculty acceptance.
The survey
focuses solely on what it classifies as “online” courses:
those offering 80 percent or more of their content over the
Internet. As a result, trends in so-called “blended” or
“hybrid” courses, in which students occasionally meet in
person with their professors while also receiving
considerable instruction online, are not covered in the
report.
The
importance of online courses varies widely depending on the
type of institution. Public universities, for example, view
online education as much more critical to their long-term
strategies than private or even for-profit institutions. And
not surprisingly, two-year colleges have shown the most
growth, accounting for a full half of online enrollments
over the past five years:
Four-Year
Growth in Students Taking at Least One Online Course
Enrollment, Fall 2002
Enrollment, Fall 2006
Increase
Compound Annual Growth Rate
Doctoral/Research
258,489
566,725
308,236
21.7%
Master’s
335,703
686,337
350,634
19.6%
Baccalaureate
130,677
170,754
40,077
6.9%
Community colleges
806,391
1,904,296
1,097,905
24.0%
Specialized
71,710
160,268
88,558
22.3%
The
importance to online strategies is broken down in the
following chart:
% Saying
Online Education Is Critical to Their Institutions’
Long-Term Strategy
Public
Private Nonprofit
Private For-Profit
Fall 2002
66.1%
34.0%
34.6%
Fall 2003
65.4%
36.6%
62.1%
Fall 2004
74.7%
43.8%
48.6%
Fall 2005
71.7%
46.9%
54.9%
Fall 2006
74.1%
48.6%
49.5%
Even if
online growth can’t go on at this pace forever, most
institutions still see room for increasing enrollments:
% Saying
They Expect Online Enrollments to Increase
Doctoral/Research
Master’s
Baccalaureate
Associate’s
Specialized
Expecting increase
87.5%
84.0%
75.6%
87.8%
75.3%
Tables
From “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online
Learning”
The study
also found that most growth was expected at institutions
that are the most “engaged” — that is, “currently have
online offerings and believe that online is critical to the
long-term strategy of their organization. These
institutions, however, have not yet included online
education in their formal strategic plan.”
In theory, distance education is supposed to open up
an era when all students have a range of options not limited by geography. But
a new report from Eduventures finds that most
distance students enroll at distance programs run by institutions in their own
geographic regions, and that more than a third of these students take online
courses offered by an institution within a 50-mile radius. Inside Higher Ed, March 28, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/28/qt
More and more prestigious universities are sharing course material and
lecture videos, but MIT was the first major universities to make course
materials from most of its courses freely available online ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
MIT now has most of its entire curriculum of course materials in all
disciplines available free to the world as open courseware. This includes
the Sloan School of Business Courses ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) has formally
partnered with three organizations that are translating MIT OCW course
materials into Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional
Chinese ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/Translations.htm
Question
What is the most popular download course at MIT?
Answer: According to ABC News last week it's the Introduction to Electrical
Engineering Course.
If you want to try something quite different, you might consider some
online business and accounting courses from the University of Toyota ---
http://www2.itt-tech.edu/st/onlineprograms/ (These are not free).
Mr. Reif and
Anant Agarwal, director of the Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would start this spring — perhaps with
just one course — but would expand to include many more courses, as
OpenCourseWare has done. [...]
The M.I.T.x
classes, he said, will have online discussions and forums where students
can ask questions and, often, have them answered by others in the class.
While access to
the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable”
charge, not yet determined, for a credential.
“I think for
someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something,
but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The
most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly
state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”
The official FAQ reveals a couple of additional
points. First, the content of MITx courses will be free — which seems to
imply that MITx course content will be different than OCW course content,
and not just a certification layer on top of existing resources — and you’ll
only pay money for the certificate. Second, there will be no admissions
process. If you want a course, you just take it and then pay for the
credentialing if you feel like you’re up to it.
I think this last
point about having no admissions process may be the most significant piece
of MITx. It seems to represent a complete shift from the traditional way of
providing access to higher education. As far as I can tell, there will not
even be a system of checking prerequisites for MITx courses. If that’s so,
then if you feel you can step into, say, an Algorithms class and keep up
with the material and demonstrate your mastery, then nobody at MIT will care
if you haven’t had the right courses in basic programming, data structures,
discrete math, or whatever. MIT is basically saying, we won’t be picky about
who we let take these courses — if you can afford it and live up to our
standards, we’re happy to credential you.
Of course there are
a lot of questions about MITx that are yet to be answered. What is the
“modest fee” they plan to charge, and is it really affordable? How exactly
will the credentialing process work? (It’s interesting that the
certification will be handled by a non-profit organization to be formed
within MIT. Is this a kind of outsourcing of grading?) How will one
“demonstrate mastery” and what will MITx define as “mastery” in courses that
are not strictly skills-based? Will there eventually be a full enough slate
of courses offered to make the whole system compelling for learners? And
perhaps most importantly, what will employers, graduate schools, and even
undergraduate institutions make of applicants who come in with some of these
MITx certifications? Without external buy-in, MITx will likely be just
another continuing education program like hundreds of others.
We’ll hear a
lot more about this in the future, but for now this seems to have the
potential to be genuinely disruptive in higher education. What do you think?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which
pioneered the idea of making course materials free online --
today announced a major expansion of the idea,
with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among
students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to
students who have no connection to MIT.
MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by
Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning.
The first course through MITx is expected this
spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge
what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a
credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute
MIT credit. The university also plans to continue
MIT OpenCourseWare,
the program through which it makes course materials
available online.
An
FAQ from MIT offers
more details on the new program.
While MIT has been widely praised for
OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open"
educational movement has shifted to programs like the
Khan Academy (through
which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and
an initiative at Stanford University that makes
courses available -- courses for which some German universities are
providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some
of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that
some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in
OpenCourseWare.
Distance Education.org or DistanceEducation.Org is a Great Helper Site
Ben Pheiffer in San Antonio forwarded this link to a terrific listing (with
pricing estimates) of online training and education degree programs and courses
from respectable universities ---
http://www.distance-education.org/Courses/
Both graduate and undergraduate degree programs are listed as well as training
courses (some free).
"MIT's Management School Shares
Teaching Materials (Cases) Online," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 27, 2009 ---
Click Here
Though some
business schools charge for the “case studies” they develop as teaching
aids, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today that it is
making a set of teaching materials available free online.
The announcement
comes eight years after MIT created its OpenCourseWare project, which makes
instructional materials for courses available online for free.
What distinguishes
the new site, according to JoAnne Yates, deputy dean for programs, is that
whereas OpenCourseWare allows visitors to browse a linear series of
resources and notes for a specific course, the management-school’s site
allows them to search for specific “teaching artifacts”—e.g., case studies
or simulation models—that might be applied to any number of courses. Those
artifacts will be searchable by concept or business problem, like
sustainability.
Jensen Comment
MIT actually shares materials from hundreds of courses. The materials are
entirely free online. Although other universities are now more sharing with
videos of all course lectures online, MIT spearheaded the Open Knowledge
Initiative that led to such open sharing.
Turns
out, the
American University online program
is somewhat of a hybrid. While the university marketed that
first course, about terrorism and the legal system, to all
sorts of groups in an effort to gauge outside interest, all
but two of the 27 students who took the class were its own.
Many of the students were away from Washington for the
summer, living abroad or at home
“The most
important information we’ve gathered is that our distance
learning courses are most attractive to our own students,”
Ettle said. “Students know they can use credits toward a
degree, whereas some students [outside] might be unsure how
they could use the credits.”
As distance
education continues to evolve, American’s model will likely
become more common, according to Diana Oblinger, vice
president for Educause, the nonprofit group that deals with
technology issues in higher education.
“It makes
absolute sense,” Oblinger said. “Both institutions and
students are concerned about the time-to-degree. If you can
take a course while you are away and when it’s convenient,
that helps you progress toward graduation. From an
institution’s perspective, why allow your student to take
someone else’s course?”
This summer,
American is offering 25 online courses, none of which are
longer than seven weeks. The condensed schedule works well
for students who are either amidst or have just finished
study abroad programs or summer jobs and want to extend
their stays away from campus while earning credits, Ettle
said. It’s also popular with students who take on
internships during the year and want to go to school in the
summer without having a full course load.
American
provides incentives for those who are part of the distance
learning program. Starting several summers ago, the
university began giving professors whose online course
proposals were accepted a $2,500 course development grant.
Summer teaching at American isn’t a substitute for teaching
an academic year course, and the additional compensation is
only monetary incentive to teach in the summer online.
Students receive a discounted rate on summer distance
courses, and the price hasn’t changed in four years. A
three-credit course costs $2,200, which is about 30 percent
cheaper than a graduate course and about 25 percent cheaper
than an undergraduate course, Ettle said.
There are
other obvious cost savings: Students don’t have to pay for
campus housing, and the university frees up space for other
uses. The overhead cost of running a distance education
course is also significantly less than it is for a normal
classroom-based course, Ettle said.
“We’re
utilizing our facilities more efficiently,” she said. “We
want repeat customers — it’s good for them and it’s good for
us.”
Still,
American limits students to two distance courses per summer
to prevent those who are working or studying elsewhere from
overloading their schedules. The university places no
limits, though, on the number of summers a student can take
an online course.
Oblinger said it’s becoming more common for a university to
either
require or strongly suggest that
its students take an online course as a way to prepare them
for how learning often takes place in the workplace.
Continued in article
Updates 2006
Open Sharing Catching on Outside the United States Britain’s Open University today formally begins its
effort to put its course materials and other content online for all the world to
use. With its effort,
OpenLearn, which is
expected to cost $10.6 million and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation, the university joins
Massachusetts Institute of Technologyand
institutions in several other countries in trying to put tools for learning
within the reach of otherwise difficult to reach populations. Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2006
Soaring Popularity of E-Learning Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college
in Fall 2005?
More students are taking online college courses than
ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the concept
of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s largest
association of organizations and institutions focused on online education . . .
‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online
More students are taking online college courses
than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren’t warming up to the
concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the country’s
largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online
education.
Roughly 3.2 million students took at least one
online course from a degree-granting institution during the fall 2005 term,
the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the number who reported doing so in
2002, the first year the group collected data, and more than 800,000 above
the 2004 total. While the number of online course participants has increased
each year, the rate of growth slowed from 2003 to 2004.
The report, a joint partnership between the group
and the College Board, defines online courses as those in which 80 percent
of the content is delivered via the Internet.
The Sloan Survey of Online Learning,
“Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,”
shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say
that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or
superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that
e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.”
Both numbers are up from a year ago.
Researchers at the Sloan Consortium, which is
administered through Babson College and Franklin W. Olin College of
Engineering, received responses from officials at more than 2,200 colleges
and universities across the country. (The report makes few references to
for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part because of a lack
of survey responses from those institutions.)
Much of the report is hardly surprising. The bulk
of online students are adult or “nontraditional” learners, and more than 70
percent of those surveyed said online education reaches students not served
by face-to-face programs.
What stands out is the number of faculty who still
don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool. Only about one in four academic
leaders said that their faculty members “accept the value and legitimacy of
online education,” the survey shows. That number has remained steady
throughout the four surveys. Private nonprofit colleges were the least
accepting — about one in five faculty members reported seeing value in the
programs.
Elaine Allen, co-author of the report and a Babson
associate professor of statistics and entrepreneurship, said those numbers
are striking.
“As a faculty member, I read that response as, ‘We
didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said.
“It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in lectures for an hour when we were
students, but there’s a paradigm shift in how people learn.”
Barbara Macaulay, chief academic officer at UMass
Online, which offers programs through the University of Massachusetts, said
nearly all faculty members teaching the online classes there also teach
face-to-face courses, enabling them to see where an online class could fill
in the gap (for instance, serving a student who is hesitant to speak up in
class).
She said she isn’t surprised to see data
illustrating the growing popularity of online courses with students, because
her program has seen rapid growth in the last year. Roughly 24,000 students
are enrolled in online degree and certificate courses through the university
this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year ago, she said.
“Undergraduates see it as a way to complete their
degrees — it gives them more flexibility,” Macaulay said.
The Sloan report shows that about 80 percent of
students taking online courses are at the undergraduate level. About half
are taking online courses through community colleges and 13 percent through
doctoral and research universities, according to the survey.
Nearly all institutions with total enrollments
exceeding 15,000 students have some online offerings, and about two-thirds
of them have fully online programs, compared with about one in six at the
smallest institutions (those with 1,500 students or fewer), the report
notes. Allen said private nonprofit colleges are often set in enrollment
totals and not looking to expand into the online market.
The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be
involved in online learning.
“Our institutions tend to embrace changes a little
more readily and try different pedagogical styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a
senior research associate at the American Association of Community Colleges.
The report cites a few barriers to what it calls the “widespread adoption of
online learning,” chief among them the concern among college officials that
some of their students lack the discipline to succeed in an online setting.
Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents defined that as a barrier.
Allen, the report’s co-author, said she thinks that
issue arises mostly in classes in which work can be turned in at any time
and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If you are holding class in real
time, there tends to be less attrition,” she said. The report doesn’t
differentiate between the live and non-live online courses, but Allen said
she plans to include that in next year’s edition.
Few survey respondents said acceptance of online
degrees by potential employers was a critical barrier — although liberal
arts college officials were more apt to see it as an issue.
Distant distance education Ms. Salin is part of a new wave of outsourcing to
India: the tutoring of American students. Twice a week for a month now, Ms.
Salin, who grew up speaking the Indian language Malayalam at home, has been
tutoring Daniela in English grammar, comprehension and writing. Using a
simulated whiteboard on their computers, connected by the Internet, and a
copy of Daniela's textbook in front of her, she guides the teenager through
the intricacies of nouns, adjectives and verbs.
Saritha Rai, "A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard," The
New York Times, September 7, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/education/07tutor.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1126191549-1Ydu+7CY89CpuVeaJbJ4XA
As the distance learning market continues to grow,
state agencies charged with regulating the industry continue to operate in a
“fragmented environment,” according to a report presented Thursday at the
2006 Education Industry Finance & Investment Summit,
in Washington.
One of the main questions these agencies must
consider is what constitutes an institution having a “physical presence” in
their state. In other words, what is an appropriate test to determine
whether regulation is needed?
More than 80 percent of agencies that are included
in the report said that they use some sort of “physical presence” test. But
few agree on how to define the word “presence,” in part because there are so
many elements to consider.
STATISTICS ON
THE STATE OF EDUCATION, U.S. AND WORLDWIDE
The Sloan
Consortium's "Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning," a
report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education, is "aimed
at answering some of the fundamental questions about the nature and extent
of online education." These questions include:
-- How many
students are learning online?
-- Where has the
growth in online learning occurred?
-- What are the
prospects for future online enrollment growth?
-- What are the
barriers to widespread adoption of online education?
The Sloan
Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations
committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality,
scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own
distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life,
accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide
variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation. For more information, see
http://www.sloan-c.org/
. . . .
Each year, since
2001, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
publishes the "Education at a Glance" report, an "annual round-up of data
and analysis on education, providing a rich, comparable and up-to-date array
of indicators on education systems in the OECD's 30 member countries and in
a number of partner economies." Main areas covered in the reports are:
The OECD's
mission is "to help its member countries to achieve sustainable economic
growth and employment and to raise the standard of living in member
countries while maintaining financial stability -- all this in order to
contribute to the development of the world economy." As one of the world's
largest publishers in the fields of economics and public policy, OECD
monitors, analyzes, and forecasts economic developments and social changes
in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, and taxation. For more
information contact: OECD, 2 rue Andre Pascal, F-75775, Paris Cedex 16
France; tel: +33 1.45.24.82.00; fax: +33 1.45.24.85.00; email:
webmaster@oecd.org ; Web:
http://www.oecd.org
RECOMMENDED
READING
"Recommended
Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits
readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books,
articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your
recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this
column.
Journalist
Richard Poynder writes on information technology and online rights issues.
In a series of interviews he speaks with leading advocates in the open
source movement. One of his recent interviews was with Peter Suber, a
leading proponent of the open access movement and author of SPARC Open
Access Newsletter and Open Access News. (Suber's SPARC OPEN ACCESS
NEWSLETTER is available at
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
)
USC Enters the Picture
Not too long ago, officials at the University of Southern
California’s education school approached Katzman about endowing a chair in
educational entrepreneurship. Katzman laughed out loud, he admits, about the
idea of a chair in “entrepreneurship” housed at an education school, given the
reputation of teacher training academies as innovation backwaters. But
Gallagher, who has sought to remake the Rossier school since becoming dean at
USC in 2000, ultimately sold Katzman on her vision of an innovative education
school, noting among other things that she had eliminated both its Ph.D. and
Ed.D. programs, refashioned the Ed.D. and re-established a tiny Ph.D. program,
and wiped out the college’s undergraduate teacher education program in favor of
its master’s program. “We’re not afraid as a faculty to make decisions that are
innovative, that we think can solve specific problems, even if no one else is
doing them,” Gallagher says. One of those “problems,” she notes, is the “sense
of urgency about coming up with innovative solutions to the shortage of teachers
in high-need schools.”
Doug Lederman, "Online Learning, Upscale (and Scaled Up)," Inside
Higher Ed, September 12, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/12/2tor
Jensen Comment
This article also deals with the controversy of for-profit higher education.
John Zogby,
president & CEO of the polling company Zogby
International, says that American students are quickly warming up to the
idea of taking classes online, just as consumers have taken to the idea of
renting movies via Netflix and buying microbrewed beer.
In a new book
by Mr. Zogby released today, he said that polls show a sharp increase in
acceptance of online education in the past year. For more on the story, see
a free article in today’s Chronicle.
National
surveys show that a majority of Americans think online universities
offer a lower quality of education than do traditional institutions. But
a prominent pollster, John Zogby, says in a book being released today
that it won't be long before American society takes to distance
education as warmly as it has embraced game-changing innovations like
microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and "the simple miracle of Netflix."
The factor that
will close that "enthusiasm gap" is the growing use of distance
education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the
book, The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the
American Dream (Random House).
The book, which
is based on Zogby International polls and other studies, also touches on
public attitudes toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and
international affairs, and on what men and women really do want from
each other. Mr. Zogby says polls detect signs of society's emerging
resistance to big institutions, and its de-emphasis on things and
places. "We're redefining geography and space," he says—and a widening
acceptance of online education is part of the trend.
Today there is
still a "cultural lag" between the public's desire for flexible ways to
take college courses and what the most-established players offer, Mr.
Zogby said in an interview with The Chronicle on Monday. "There's
a sense that those who define the standard haven't caught on yet," he
said.
But Mr. Zogby
writes that polling by his organization shows that attitudes about
online education are changing fast. His polling also points to other
challenges that colleges will face as they race to serve a worldwise
generation of 18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls "First Globals."
In one 2007
poll of more 5,000 adults, Zogby International found that 30 percent of
respondents were taking or had taken an online course, and another 50
percent said they would consider taking one. He says the numbers might
skew a little high because this poll was conducted online and the
definition of an online course was broad, including certificate programs
or training modules offered by employers.
Only 27 percent
of respondents agreed that "online universities and colleges provide the
same quality of education" as traditional institutions. Among those 18
to 24 years old, only 23 percent agreed.
An even greater
proportion of those polled said it was their perception that employers
and academic professionals thought more highly of traditional
institutions than online ones.
Rapid Shift in Attitude
Yet in another
national poll in December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45
percent of the 1,004 adults surveyed believed "an online class carries
the same value as a traditional-classroom class," and 43 percent of
1,545 chief executives and small-business owners agreed that a degree
earned by distance learning "is as credible" as one from a traditional
campus-based program.
Mr. Zogby said
that differing attitudes in two polls within a year show that "the gap
was closing"—and he said that wasn't as surprising as it might seem. As
with changing perceptions about other cultural phenomena, "these
paradigm shifts really are moving at lightning speed."
That, says Mr.
Zogby, is why he writes about online universities in a
chapter—"Dematerializing the Paradigm"—that discusses the rise of
car-sharing companies like Flexcar (now merged with Zipcar), the
emergence of Internet blogs as a source of news and information, and the
popularity of microbrewed beer.
And while it
may be true that microbrews and Zipcars, at least, are still very much
niche products, Mr. Zogby says they are signs of transcendent
change—just like the distance-education courses that are being offered
by more and more institutions across the country. "When you add up all
the niche products, it's a market unto itself," he says.
In the book,
Mr. Zogby also highlights the emerging influence of the First Globals,
whom his book calls "the most outward-looking and accepting generation
in American history." First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant
and internationally aware.
It is these
First Globals, he writes, who are shaping what he says is nothing short
of a "fundamental reorientation of the American character away from
wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of
limited resources."
Higher
education, he said in the interview, needs to take notice and adapt.
These days, he said, students are much more likely to have experienced
other cultures firsthand, either as tourists or because they have
immigrated from someplace else. Whether college for them is a
traditional complex of buildings or an interactive online message board,
said Mr. Zogby, "there is a different student on campus."
Bob Jensen's threads on distance
education are at the following two sites:
Soaring Popularity of E-Learning
Among Students But Not Faculty
How many U.S. students took at least on online course from a legitimate college
in Fall 2005?
More students
are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty
still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national
survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and institutions
focused on online education . . . ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front of a
computer screen,’ Elia Powers, "Growing Popularity of E-Learning, Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/online
More students are
taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty
still aren’t warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a
national survey from the country’s largest association of organizations and
institutions focused on online education.
Roughly 3.2 million
students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution
during the fall 2005 term, the Sloan Consortium said. That’s double the
number who reported doing so in 2002, the first year the group collected
data, and more than 800,000 above the 2004 total. While the number of online
course participants has increased each year, the rate of growth slowed from
2003 to 2004.
The report, a joint
partnership between the group and the College Board, defines online courses
as those in which 80 percent of the content is delivered via the Internet.
The Sloan
Survey of Online Learning,
“Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006,”
shows that 62 percent of chief academic officers say
that the learning outcomes in online education are now “as good as or
superior to face-to-face instruction,” and nearly 6 in 10 agree that
e-learning is “critical to the long-term strategy of their institution.”
Both numbers are up from a year ago.
Researchers at the
Sloan Consortium, which is administered through Babson College and Franklin
W. Olin College of Engineering, received responses from officials at more
than 2,200 colleges and universities across the country. (The report makes
few references to for-profit colleges, a force in the online market, in part
because of a lack of survey responses from those institutions.)
Much of the report
is hardly surprising. The bulk of online students are adult or
“nontraditional” learners, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said
online education reaches students not served by face-to-face programs.
What stands out is
the number of faculty who still don’t see e-learning as a valuable tool.
Only about one in four academic leaders said that their faculty members
“accept the value and legitimacy of online education,” the survey shows.
That number has remained steady throughout the four surveys. Private
nonprofit colleges were the least accepting — about one in five faculty
members reported seeing value in the programs.
Elaine Allen,
co-author of the report and a Babson associate professor of statistics and
entrepreneurship, said those numbers are striking.
“As a faculty
member, I read that response as, ‘We didn’t become faculty to sit in front
of a computer screen,’ ” Allen said. “It’s a very hard adjustment. We sat in
lectures for an hour when we were students, but there’s a paradigm shift in
how people learn.”
Barbara Macaulay,
chief academic officer at UMass Online, which offers programs through the
University of Massachusetts, said nearly all faculty members teaching the
online classes there also teach face-to-face courses, enabling them to see
where an online class could fill in the gap (for instance, serving a student
who is hesitant to speak up in class).
She said she isn’t
surprised to see data illustrating the growing popularity of online courses
with students, because her program has seen rapid growth in the last year.
Roughly 24,000 students are enrolled in online degree and certificate
courses through the university this fall — a 23 percent increase from a year
ago, she said.
“Undergraduates see
it as a way to complete their degrees — it gives them more flexibility,”
Macaulay said.
The Sloan report
shows that about 80 percent of students taking online courses are at the
undergraduate level. About half are taking online courses through community
colleges and 13 percent through doctoral and research universities,
according to the survey.
Nearly all
institutions with total enrollments exceeding 15,000 students have some
online offerings, and about two-thirds of them have fully online programs,
compared with about one in six at the smallest institutions (those with
1,500 students or fewer), the report notes. Allen said private nonprofit
colleges are often set in enrollment totals and not looking to expand into
the online market.
The report indicates that two-year colleges are particularly willing to be
involved in online learning.
“Our institutions
tend to embrace changes a little more readily and try different pedagogical
styles,” said Kent Phillippe, a senior research associate at the American
Association of Community Colleges. The report cites a few barriers to what
it calls the “widespread adoption of online learning,” chief among them the
concern among college officials that some of their students lack the
discipline to succeed in an online setting. Nearly two-thirds of survey
respondents defined that as a barrier.
Allen, the report’s
co-author, said she thinks that issue arises mostly in classes in which work
can be turned in at any time and lectures can be accessed at all hours. “If
you are holding class in real time, there tends to be less attrition,” she
said. The report doesn’t differentiate between the live and non-live online
courses, but Allen said she plans to include that in next year’s edition.
Few survey
respondents said acceptance of online degrees by potential employers was a
critical barrier — although liberal arts college officials were more apt to
see it as an issue.
Preparation for Lifelong Learning
It’s becoming more common for a
university to either
require or strongly suggest that its students take online courses as a way
to prepare them for lifelong learning and job training which are both becoming
increasingly online.
"Making the Grade: Online Education in the United
States, 2006" is the fourth annual report on the state of online learning in
U.S. higher education conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group and the
Sloan Consortium. The report, based on responses from over 2,200 colleges and
universities, addresses these questions:
-- Has the growth of online enrollments begun to
plateau?
-- Who is learning online?
-- What types of institutions have online offerings?
-- Have perceptions of quality changed for online
offerings?
-- What are the barriers to widespread adoption of
online education?
The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of
institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations
continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs
according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a
part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any
time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.
For a related
article, see:
"The Invisible
Professor and the Future of Virtual Faculty"
By Martha C. Sammons, Wright State University, and Stephen Ruth, George
Mason University
"Although the online teaching continues to grow in
popularity, it places greater demands on faculty than traditional courses. The
Sloan report found that this problem exists at all levels of postsecondary
education, from doctoral-granting institutions to community colleges. A
significant number of full-time professors are thus understandably reluctant to
participate in distance learning, and faculty questions about online teaching
continue. Traditional professors are disappearing from online classrooms as
distance learning has altered their roles and responsibilities, as well as their
professional status, job security, workload, rewards, and intellectual freedom.
This article delineates some of the most significant challenges and suggests
that distance learning has created new questions about the future of virtual
faculty."
The 2007 Horizon Report is a collaboration between
the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative that "seeks to
identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on
teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education."
Some key trends that the report calls attention to
include
-- Increasing globalization is changing the way we
work, collaborate, and communicate.
-- Information literacy increasingly should not be
considered a given.
-- Academic review and faculty rewards are
increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
-- The notions of collective intelligence and mass
amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship.
-- Students' views of what is and what is not
technology are increasingly different from those of faculty.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an "international
501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities,
museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the
exploration and use of new media and new technologies."
For more information, go to http://www.nmc.org/.
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) is a
"strategic initiative of EDUCAUSE. While EDUCAUSE serves those interested in
advancing higher education through technology, ELI specifically explores
innovative technologies and practices that advance learning." For more
information, go to
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?Section_ID=86.
In "If the Academic Library Ceased to Exist, Would We
Have to Invent It?" (EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 42, no. 1, January/February 2007, pp.
6-7) Lynn Scott Cochrane argues that "if college and university libraries and
librarians didn't exist, we would certainly have to invent—better yet,
re-invent—them." The article is available at
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0714.asp
Each year the Sloan
Consortium (Sloan-C) conducts an annual survey on the state of U.S. higher
education online learning. This year, the Consortium published its first
annual special edition, "Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United
States, 2005 - Southern Edition." Some of the findings reported include:
"Online learning is
thriving in the southern states. The patterns of growth and acceptance of
online education among the 16 southern states in this report are very
similar to that observed for the national sample, with one clear difference:
online learning has made greater inroads in the southern states than in the
nation as a whole."
"[S]chools are
offering a large number of online courses, and there is great diversity in
the courses and programs being offered:
-- Sixty-two
percent of southern schools offering graduate face-to-face courses also
offer graduate courses online.
-- Sixty-eight
percent of southern schools offering undergraduate face-to-face courses
also offer undergraduate courses online."
"Staffing for
online courses does not come at the expense of core faculty. Institutions
use about the same mixture of core and adjunct faculty to staff their online
courses as they do for their face-to-face courses. Instead of more adjunct
faculty teaching online courses, the opposite is found; overall, there is a
slightly greater use of core faculty for teaching online than for
face-to-face."
Sloan-C is a
consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning
organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their
online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that
education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for
anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is
funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information go to
http://www.aln.org/
Barbara gave me permission to post the following message on March 15, 2006
My reply follows her message.
Professor Jensen:
I need your help in working with regulators who are
uncomfortable with online education.
I am currently on the faculty at the University of
Dallas in Irving, Texas and I abruptly learned yesterday that the Texas
State Board of Public Accountancy distinguishes online and on campus
offering of ethics courses that it approves as counting for students to meet
CPA candidacy requirements. Since my school offers its ethics course in both
modes, I am suddenly faced with making a case to the TSBPA in one week's
time to avoid rejection of the online version of the University of Dallas
course.
I have included in this email the "story" as I
understand it that explains my situation. It isn't a story about accounting
or ethics, it is a story about online education.
I would like to talk to you tomorrow because of
your expertise in distance education and involvement in the profession. In
addition, I am building a portfolio of materials this week for the Board
meeting in Austin March 22-23 to make a case for their approval (or at least
not rejection) of the online version of the ethics course that the Board
already accepts in its on campus version. I want to include compelling
research-based material demonstrating the value of online learning, and I
don't have time to begin that literature survey myself. In addition, I want
to be able to present preliminary results from reviewers of the University
of Dallas course about the course's merit in presentation of the content in
an online delivery.
Thank you for any assistance that you can give me.
Barbara W. Scofield
Associate Professor of Accounting
University of Dallas
1845 E Northgate Irving, TX 75062
972-721-5034 scofield@gsm.udallas.edu
A statement of the University of Dallas and Texas
State Board of Public Accountancy and Online Learning
The TSBPA approved the University of Dallas ethics
program in 2004. The course that was approved was a long-standing course,
required in several different graduate programs, called Business Ethics. The
course was regularly taught on campus (since 1995) and online (since 2001).
The application for approval of the ethics course
did not ask for information about whether the class was on campus or online
and the syllabus that was submitted happened to be the syllabus of an on
campus section. The TSBPA's position (via Donna Hiller) is that the Board
intended to approve only the on campus version of the course, and that the
Board inferred it was an on campus course because the sample syllabus that
was submitted was an on campus course.
Therefore the TSBPA (via Donna Hiller) is requiring
that University of Dallas students who took the online version of the ethics
course retake the exact same course in its on campus format. While the TSBPA
(via Donna Hiller) has indicated that the online course cannot at this time
be approved and its scheduled offering in the summer will not provide
students with an approved course, Donna Hiller, at my request, has indicated
that she will take this issue to the Board for their decision next week at
the Executive Board Meeting on March 22 and the Board Meeting on March 23.
There are two issues:
1. Treatment of students who were relying on
communication from the Board at the time they took the class that could
reasonably have been interpreted to confer approval of both the online and
on campus sections of the ethics course.
2. Status of the upcoming summer online ethics
class.
My priority is establishing the status of the
upcoming summer online ethics class. The Board has indicated through its
pilot program with the University of Texas at Dallas that there is a place
for online ethics classes in the preparation of CPA candidates. The
University of Dallas is interested in providing the TSBPA with any
information or assessment necessary to meet the needs of the Board to
understand the online ethics class at the University of Dallas. Although not
currently privy to the Board specific concerns about online courses, the
University of Dallas believes that it can demonstrate sufficient credibility
for the course because of the following factors:
A. The content of the online course is the same as
the on campus course. Content comparison can be provided. B. The
instructional methods of the online course involve intense
student-to-student, instructor-to-student, and student-to-content
interaction at a level equivalent to an on campus course. Empirical
information about interaction in the course can be provided.
C. The instructor for the course is superbly
qualified and a long-standing ethics instructor and distance learning
instructor. The vita of the instructor can be provided.
D. There are processes for course assessment in
place that regularly prompt the review of this course and these assessments
can be provided to the board along with comparisons with the on campus
assessments.
E. The University of Dallas will seek to coordinate
with the work done by the University of Texas at Dallas to provide
information at least equivalent to that provided by the University of Texas
at Dallas and to meet at a minimum the tentative criteria for online
learning that UT Dallas has been empowered to recommend to the TSBPA.
Contact with the University of Texas at Dallas has been initiated.
When the online ethics course is granted a path to
approval by the Board, I am also interested in addressing the issue of TSBPA
approval of students who took the class between the original ethics course
approval date and March 13, 2006, the date that the University of Dallas
became aware of the TSBPA intent (through Donna Hiller) that the TSBPA
distinguished online and on campus ethics classes.
The University of Dallas believes that the online
class in fact provided these students with a course that completely
fulfilled the general intent of the Board for education in ethics, since it
is the same course as the approved on campus course (see above). The
decision on the extent of commitment of the Board to students who relied on
the Board's approval letter may be a legal issue of some sort that is
outside of the current decision-making of the Board, but I want the Board
take the opportunity to consider that the reasonableness of the students'
position and the students' actual preparation in ethics suggest that there
should also be a path created to approval of online ethics courses taken at
the University of Dallas during this prior time period. The currently
proposed remedy of a requirement for students to retake the very same course
on campus that students have already taken online appears excessively costly
to Texans and the profession of accounting by delaying the entry of
otherwise qualified individuals into public accountancy. High cost is
justified when the concomitant benefits are also high. However, the benefit
to Texans and the accounting profession from students who retake the ethics
course seems to exist only in meeting the requirements of regulations that
all parties diligently sought to meet in the first place and not in
producing any actual additional learning experiences.
A reply to her from Bob Jensen
Hi
Barbara,
May I
share your questions and my responses in the next edition of New
Bookmarks? This might be helpful to your efforts when others become
informed. I will be in my office every day except for March 17. My phone
number is 210-999-7347. However, I can probably be more helpful via
email.
As
discouraging as it may seem, if students know what is expected of them
and must demonstrate what they have learned, pedagogy does not seem to
matter. It can be online or onsite. It can be lecture or cases. It can
be no teaching at all if there are talented and motivated students who
are given great learning materials. This is called the well-known “No
Significant Difference” phenomenon ---
http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/
I think
you should stress that insisting upon onsite courses is discriminatory
against potential students whose life circumstances make it difficult or
impossible to attend regular classes on campus.
I think
you should make the case that online education is just like onsite
education in the sense that learning depends on the quality and
motivations of the students, faculty, and university that sets the
employment and curriculum standards for quality. The issue is not onsite
versus online. The issue is quality of effort.
The most
prestigious schools like Harvard and Stanford and Notre Dame have a
large number of credit and non-credit courses online. Entire accounting
undergraduate and graduate degree programs are available online from
such quality schools as the University of Wisconsin and the University
of Maryland. See my guide to online training and education programs is
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Anticipate and deal with the main arguments against online education.
The typical argument is that onsite students have more learning
interactions with themselves and with the instructor. This is absolutely
false if the distance education course is designed to promote online
interactions that do a better job of getting into each others’ heads.
Online courses become superior to onsite courses.
Amy
Dunbar teaches intensely interactive online courses with Instant
Messaging. See Dunbar, A. 2004. “Genesis of an Online Course.” Issues in
Accounting Education (2004),19 (3):321-343.
ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a descriptive and evaluative analysis of the
transformation of a face-to-face graduate tax accounting course to an
online course. One hundred fifteen students completed the compressed
six-week class in 2001 and 2002 using WebCT, classroom environment
software that facilitates the creation of web-based educational
environments. The paper provides a description of the required
technology tools and the class conduct. The students used a combination
of asynchronous and synchronous learning methods that allowed them to
complete the coursework on a self-determined schedule, subject to
semi-weekly quiz constraints. The course material was presented in
content pages with links to Excel® problems, Flash examples, audio and
video files, and self-tests. Students worked the quizzes and then met in
their groups in a chat room to resolve differences in answers. Student
surveys indicated satisfaction with the learning methods.
I might
add that Amy is a veteran world class instructor both onsite and online.
She’s achieved all-university awards for onsite teaching in at least
three major universities. This gives her the credentials to judge how
well her online courses compare with her outstanding onsite courses.
The
argument that students cannot be properly assessed for learning online
is more problematic. Clearly it is easier to prevent cheating with
onsite examinations. But there are ways of dealing with this problem.
My best example of an online graduate program that is extremely
difficult is the Chartered Accountant School of Business (CASB) masters
program for all of Western Canada. Students are required to take some
onsite testing even though this is an online degree program. And CASB
does a great job with ethics online. I was engaged to formally assess
this program and came away extremely impressed. My main contact there is
Don Carter
carter@casb.com . If you are really serious about this, I would
invite Don to come down and make a presentation to the Board. Don will
convince them of the superiority of online education.
I think a
lot of the argument against distance education comes from faculty
fearful of one day having to teach online. First there is the fear of
change. Second there is the genuine fear that is entirely justified ---
if online teaching is done well it is more work and strain than onsite
teaching. The strain comes from increased hours of communication with
each and every student.
Probably
the most general argument in favor of onsite education is that students
living on campus have the social interactions and maturity development
outside of class. This is most certainly a valid argument. However, when
it comes to issues of learning of course content, online education can
be as good as or generally better than onsite classes. Students in
online programs are often older and more mature such that the on-campus
advantages decline in their situations. Online students generally have
more life, love, and work experiences already under their belts. And
besides, you’re only talking about ethics courses rather than an entire
undergraduate or graduate education.
I think
if you deal with the learning interaction and assessment issues that you
can make a strong case for distance education. There are some “dark
side” arguments that you should probably avoid. But if you care to read
about them, go to
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Bob, as a director and teacher in a graduate
accounting program that is exclusively online, I want to thank you for your
support and eloquent defense of online education. Unfortunately, Texas's
predisposition against online teaching also shows up in its education
requirements for sitting for the CPA exam. Of the 30 required upper division
accounting credits, at least 15 must "result from physical attendance at
classes meeting regularly on the campus" (quote from the Texas State Board
of Public Accountancy website at www.tsbpa.state.tx.us/eq1.htm)
Cynically speaking, it seems the state of Texas
wants to be sure its classrooms are occupied.
Barbara, best of luck with your testimony.
Bruce Lubich
Program Director,
Accounting Graduate School of Management and Technology
University of Maryland University College
At my school,
Bowling Green, student credits for on-line accounting majors classes are
never approved by the department chair. He says that you can't trust the
schools that are offering these. When told that some very reputable
schools are offering the courses, he still says no because when the
testing process is done on-line or not in the physical presence of the
professor the grades simply can't be trusted.
David Albrecht
March 16, 2006 reply from Bob
Jensen
Hi David,
One tack against a luddites
like that is to propose a compromise that virtually accepts all transfer
credits from AACSB-accredited universities. It's difficult to argue that
standards vary between online and onsite courses in a given program
accredited by the AACSB. I seriously doubt that the faculty in that
program would allow a double academic standard.
In fact, on transcripts it is
often impossible to distinguish online from onsite credits from a
respected universities, especially when the same course is offered
online and onsite (i.e., merely in different sections).
You might explain to your
department chair that he's probably been accepting online transfer
credits for some time. The University of North Texas and other major
universities now offer online courses to full-time resident students who
live on campus. Some students and instructors find this to be a better
approach to learning.
And you ask him why Bowling
Green's assessment rigor is not widely known to be vastly superior to
online courses from nearly all major universities that now offer
distance education courses and even total degree programs, including
schools like the Fuqua Graduate School at Duke, Stanford University
(especially computer science and engineering online courses that bring
in over $100 million per year), the University of Maryland, the
University of Wisconsin, the University of Texas, Texas Tech, and even,
gasp, The Ohio State University.
You might tell your department
chair that by not offering some online alternatives, Bowling Green is
not getting the most out of its students. The University of Illinois
conducted a major study that found that students performed better in
online versus onsite courses when matched pair sections took the same
examinations.
And then you might top it off
by asking your department chair how he justifies denying credit for
Bowling Green's own distance education courses ---
http://adultlearnerservices.bgsu.edu/index.php?x=opportunities
The following is a quotation from the above Bowling Green site:
*****************************
The advancement of computer technology has
provided a wealth of new opportunities for learning. Distance
education is one example of technology’s ability to expand our
horizons and gain from new experiences. BGSU offers many distance
education courses and two baccalaureate degree completion programs
online.
The
Advanced Technological Education Degree Program is designed for
individuals who have completed a two-year applied associate’s
degree. The Bachelor of Liberal Studies Degree Program is ideal for
students with previous college credit who would like flexibility in
course selection while completing a liberal education program.
Count me in the
camp that just isn't that concerned about online cheating. Perhaps that
is because my students are graduate students and my online exams are
open-book, timed exams, and a different version is presented to each
student (much like a driver's license exam). In my end-of-semester
survey, I ask whether students are concerned about cheating, and on
occasion, I get one who is. But generally the response is no.
The UConn
accounting department was just reviewed by the AACSB, and they were
impressed by our MSA online program. They commented that they now
believed that an online MSA program was possible. I am convinced that
the people who are opposed to online education are unwilling to invest
the time to see how online education is implemented. Sure there will be
bad examples, but there are bad examples of face to face (FTF) teaching.
How many profs do you know who simply read powerpoint slides to a
sleeping class?! Last semester, I received the School of Business
graduate teaching award even though I teach only online classes. I
believe that the factor that really matters is that the students know
you care about whether they are learning. A prof who cares interacts
with students. You can do that online as well as FTF.
Do I miss FTF
teaching -- you bet I do. But once I focused on what the student really
needs to learn, I realized, much to my dismay, interacting FTF with
Dunbar was not a necessary condition.
To resolve this
issue and make me more comfortable with the grade a student earns, I
have all my online exams proctored. I schedule weekends (placing them in
the schedule of classes) and it is mandatory that they take the exams
during this weekend period (Fir/Sat) at our computing center. It is my
policy that if they can't take the paced exams during those periods,
then the class is not one that they can participate in. This is no
different from having different times that courses are offered. They
have to make a choice in that situation, also, as to which time will
best serve their needs.
March 16, 2006
reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Our model is
similar to Carol Flowers. Our on-line MBA program requires an in-person
meeting for four hours at the beginning of every semester, to let the
students and professor get to know each other personally, followed by
the distance-ed portion, concluding with another four-hour in- person
session for the final examination or other assessment. The students all
congregate at the Sheraton at Dulles airport, have dinner together
Friday night, spend Saturday morning taking the final for their previous
class, and spend Saturday afternoon being introduced to their next
class. They do this between every semester. So far, the on- line group
has outperformed (very slightly, and not statistically significant due
to small sample sizes) the face-to-face counterparts being used as our
control groups. We believe the outperformance might have an inherent
self- selection bias since the distance-learners are usually
professionals, whereas many of our face-to-face students are full-time
students and generally a bit younger and more immature.
My personal
on-line course consists of exactly the same readings as my F2F class,
and exactly the same lectures (recorded using Tegrity) provided on CD
and watched asynchronously, followed by on-line synchronous discussion
sessions (2-3 hours per week) where I call on random students asking
questions about the readings, lectures, etc., and engaging in lively
discussion. I prepare some interesting cases and application dilemmas
(mostly adapted from real world scenarios) and introduce dilemmas, gray
areas, controversy (you expected maybe peace and quiet from David
Fordham?!), and other thought-provoking issues for discussion. I have
almost perfect attendance in the on-line synchronous because the
students really find the discussions engaging. Surprisingly, I have no
problem with freeloaders who don't read or watch the recorded lectures.
My major student assessment vehicle is an individual policy manual,
supplemented by the in-person exam. Since each student's manual
organization, layout, approach, and perspective is so very different
from the others, cheating is almost out of the question. And the
in-person exam is conducted almost like the CISP or old CPA exams...
total quiet, no talking, no leaving the room, nothing but a pencil, etc.
And finally,
no, you can't tell the difference on our student's transcript as to
whether they took the on-line or in-person MBA. They look identical on
the transcript.
We've not yet
had any problem with anyone "rejecting" our credential that I'm aware
of.
Regarding our
own acceptance of transfer credit, we make the student provide evidence
of the quality of each course (not the degree) before we exempt or
accept credit. We do not distinguish between on-line or F2F -- nor do we
automatically accept a course based on institution reputation. We have
on many occasions rejected AACSB- accredited institution courses (on a
course-by-course basis) because our investigation showed that the course
coverage or rigor was not up to the standard we required. (The only
"blanket" exception that we make is for certain familiar Virginia
community college courses in the liberal studies where history has shown
that the college and coursework reliably meets the standards -- every
other course has to be accepted on a course-by-course basis.)
I just shared a platform with Amy Dunbar in a
workshop presented at Mercer University on November 9, 2001. I am amazed at what
both Amy and her husband (John) are accomplishing with online teaching of income tax and
tax research.
Although they are teaching as full-time faculty at
the University of Connecticut, both Amy and her husband, John, teach online courses
from their house. In practice, they don't have to go to the campus except to check
mail, perform service activities, and work face-to-face with colleagues and students when
needed. In theory, they could move to a California beach
house or a cabin on top of a Colorado mountain and still teach all their courses for the
University of Connecticut. I should note that the students in this online
University of Connecticut program are adult learners who almost all have current jobs in
the Hartford community. Amy teaches all her courses online, and John teaches a
summer course online. Both professors teach taxation.
Amy won an all-university teaching technology
award from the University of Connecticut. This is just another of her many
all-university teaching awards from the University of Texas in San Antonio, the University
of Iowa, and the University of Connecticut. She has this rare ability of being rated
perfect by virtually any student no matter what grade she assigns, even a failing
grade. Amy's homepage is at http://www.sba.uconn.edu/users/ADunbar/Dunbaru.htm
I don't have John's teaching evaluation scores
(I'm told they're excellent), but you can read Amy's teaching evaluation scores on the
last page (Exhibit 5) of the document at http://www.sba.uconn.edu/users/adunbar/genesis_of_an_online_course.pdf
(Note that the highest possible rating is 10.00 in this University of Connecticut
evaluation form.
One of the fastest growing segments of the communication industry is the area
of Instant Messaging, where people can set up "buddy lists" on their
computer and have real time text conversations with friends or colleagues. The
problem until now has been how to capture the corporate benefits of Instant
Messaging without spending the resources to ensure the security of the
communication. Enter Microsoft. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/97256
A highlight for me at the November 6-7, 1998
AICPA Accounting Educators Conference was a presentation by Sharon Lightner
from San Diego State University and Linard Nadig
from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. This presentation followed a
ceremony presenting Professors Lightner and Nadig with the $1,000 AICPA Collaboration Award
prize.
Each year, the members of the EDUCAUSE Evolving
Technologies Committee identify and research the evolving technologies
that are having the most direct impact on higher education institutions.
The committee members choose the relevant topics, write white papers,
and present their findings at the EDUCAUSE annual conference.
Education experts often
wonder whether bestseller status among college courses might provide
lessons about educational markets and planning, just as popularity
shapes entertainment and cultural products. Such speculation has grown
with the advent of online education. Some argue that by making the most
popular courses virtual, colleges can slash costs, helping to pay for
low enrollment courses.
The alternative has been
to raise revenues for low-enrollment courses by adding enrollment. This
“add seats” approach has become more attractive in the new world of
online education. Which alternative makes more sense for colleges
considering online versions of some courses?
Cost-cutting
advocates suggest that great efficiencies may result from delivering
online a small set of popular undergraduate courses. Courses such as
Chemistry 101 or Introduction to European History would have large
enrollments and “basic” curricula. These popular courses illustrate the
“80-20 rule” — 20 percent of a resource typically generates 80 percent
of the possible benefits. Popular courses may not even constitute 20
percent of the catalogue’s contents, yet they often represent 80 percent
of enrollments. If that 80 percent can be served through automated,
virtual means, that should release tremendous savings, offsetting the
cost of courses that don’t lend themselves as easily or cheaply to
virtual delivery.
Message from Richard Reams on May 8, 2002
(NPR = National Public Radio)
Hi Bob.
The May 7 “Soundprint”
program on NPR was about technology in education, including a story about on-line
education with a focus on Phoenix University and Temple.
The second segment was on
Training College faculty in using technology.
Online University
Just recently the world was abuzz with the possibilities of the internet in education. On
one end the classroom became a technology lab, with veteran teachers scrambling to learn
new fangled tools. On the other end, soothsayers touted the age of the virtual classroom.
No longer would one need to trudge to a distant classroom, the web would bring it to you.
Smoke and mirrors or reality? Find out on Soundprint.
Click
Here for College
Remember the dot-com craze? Then perhaps you recollect the mad dash by universities and
others to ring in the virtual university. The bubble may have burst but is the online
university just another bad idea? Some say yes but others say no. But before you sign up
for that virtual course, click along with Producer Richard Paul as he investigates the
state of the online university.
Classroom
Cool: Training Teachers in Using Technology
Faced with the challenge of improving student performance, many schools turned to the
widespread use of computers and the Internet. The trend has caught many veteran teachers
unawares. Now they have to make use of the latest technology, while in their hearts they
remain uncomfortable with the new wave. Though hard data is lacking on whether classroom
high tech helps students learn, teachers feel the hot breath of urgency to adapt. Veteran
teacher and producer Bill Drummond explores the rush to get America's teachers wired.
Dropout rates are down and test scores are up. Students are
engaged in learning and their self-esteem is soaring. So what's really going on within the
classroom walls of the country's top wired schools? By Leslie Bennetts
Linda Peters provides a frank overview of the various factors underlying student
perceptions of online learning. Such perceptions, she observes, are not only informed by
the student's individual situation (varying levels of computer access, for instance) but
also by the student's individual characteristics: the student's proficiency with
computers, the student's desire for interpersonal contact, or the student's ability to
remain self-motivated ---
We expect higher attrition rates from both
learners in taking degrees in commuting programs and most online programs. The major
reason is that prior to enrolling for a course or program, people tend to me more
optimistic about how they can manage their time between a full-time job and family
obligations. After enrolling, unforseen disasters do arise such as family illnesses,
job assignments out of town, car breakdowns, computer breakdowns, job loss or change, etc.
The problem of online MBA attrition at West Texas
A&M University is discussed in "Assessing Enrollment and Attrition Rates for the
Online MBA," by Neil Terry, T.H.E. Journal, February 2001, pp. 65-69 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3299.cfm
Follow-up experiments also showed that West Texas
A&M's online students did not perform as well as onsite students on examinations.
Important
Distance Education Site The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.aln.org/
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning
organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth according to
their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of
everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time,
in a wide variety of disciplines.
Assessment Issues, Case Studies, and Research ---
Detail File
The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About
Technologies in Education --- Detail File
Probably the most successful use of video is the Adept program at Stanford
University where engineering students can get an entire Masters of
Engineering degree almost entirely from video courses
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/cnc9838/cnc9838.html
Stanford University shook up the stuffy Ivy League and other prestigious schools such
as Oxford and Cambridge when it demonstrated to the world that its online training
programs and its online Masters of Engineering (ADEPT) asynchronous learning degree
program became enormous cash cows with nearly infinite growth potentials relative to
relatively fixed-size onsite programs. In a few short years, revenues from online
programs in engineering and computer science exploded to over $100 million per year.
The combined present value of the Stanford University logo and the logos of other
highly prestigious universities are worth trillions. Any prestigious university that
ignores online growth opportunities is probably wasting billions of dollars of potential
cash flow from its logo.
Virtually all universities of highest prestige and name recognition are realizing this
and now offer a vast array of online training and education courses directly or in
partnership with corporations and government agencies seeking the mark of distinction on
diplomas.
Example 2 --- University of Wisconsin --- http://webct.wisc.edu/
Over 100,000 Registered Online Students in The University of Wisconsin System of
State-Supported Universities
Having a long history of extension programs largely aimed at part-time adult learners,
it made a lot of sense for the UW System to try to train and educate
adult learners and other learners who were not likely to become onsite students.
The UW System is typical of many other large state-supported universities that have an
established adult learning infrastructure and a long history of interactive television
courses delivered to remote sites within the state. Online Internet courses were a
logical extension and in many instances a cost-efficient extension relative to televised
delivery.
Example 3 --- Harvard University
In light of new online learning technologies, Harvard University changed its
long-standing residency requirement in anticipation of expanding markets for
"mid-career professionals" according to Harvard University President Lawrence H.
Summers, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2002, Page 4. Harvard has various
distance education programs, including those in the Harvard Business School that currently
cost over $4 million per year to maintain.
Example 4
From Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends on July 2, 2002
Babson Blends Online, Onsite MBA Program
Babson College said it will launch in Jan. a
"fast track" MBA program that integrates traditional onsite
classroom instruction with distance learning components. The program
will enable students to obtain an MBA in 27 months, and is designed for
executives struggling to balance work and personal demands in an
economic recession. Intel Corp. sponsored the program as a complement to
its corporate education package, and has modeled it with 33 employees.
The blended MBA program calls for students to attend monthly two
and-a-half days of face-to-face sessions with Babson's faculty on campus
in Wellesley. During the rest of the time, students will take part in
Internet-based distance learning sessions with their professors and
access interactive multimedia course content.
Some universities view online technologies as a tremendous opportunity to expand
training and education courses into foreign countries. One such effort was
undertaken by the College of Business Administration at Texas A&M University in
partnership with Monterrey Tech in Mexico. For example, Professor John Parnell at
Texas A&M has been delivering a course for several semesters in which students in
Mexico City take the online course in their homes. However, once each month the
students meet face-to-face on a weekend when Dr. Parnell travels to Mexico City to hold
live classes and administer examinations.
You probably won't have much difficulty making a guess as to what many students say is
the major reason they prefer online courses to onsite courses in Mexico City?
The University of Phoenix became the largest private university in the world.
Growth came largely from adult learning onsite programs in urban centers across the U.S.
and Canada.
The popular CBS television show called Sixty Minutes ran a feature on the growth
and future of the newer online training and education programs at the University of
Phoenix. You can download this video from http://online.uophx.edu/onl_nav_2.asp#
The University of Phoenix contends that online success in education depends upon
intense communications day-to-day between instructors and students. This, in turn,
means that online classes must be relatively small and synchronized in terms of
assignments and projects.
Example 7 --- Partnerships
Lucrative partnerships between universities and corporations seeking to train and educate
employees.
The highly successful Global Executive MBA Program at Duke University (formerly called
GEMBA) where corporations from around the world pay nearly $100,000 for one or two
employees to earn a prestigious online MBA degree --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html
UNext Corporation has an exclusive partnership with General Motors Corporation that
provides online executive training and education programs to 88,000 GM managers. GM
pays the fees. See http://www.unext.com/
Army University Access Online --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/index.html
This five-year $453 million initiative was completed by the consulting division of
PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Twenty-four colleges are delivering training and
education courses online through the U.S. Army's e-learning portal. There are
programs for varying levels of accomplishment, including specialty certificates,
associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and masters degrees. All courses are free to
soldiers. By 2003, there is planned capacity is for 80,000 online students.
The PwC Program Director is Jill Kidwell --- http://www.adec.edu/earmyu/kidwell.html
Army Online University attracted 12,000 students
during its first year of operation. It plans to double its capacity and add 10,000
more students in 2002. It is funded by the U.S. Army for all full time soldiers to
take non-credit and credit courses from selected major universities. The consulting
arm of the accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers manages the entire system.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has a program for online training and education for
all IRS employees. The IRS pays the fees for all employees. The IRS online accounting classes will be served up from
Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60881-2001May7.html
Deere & Company has an exclusive partnership with Indiana University to provide an
online MBA program for Deere employees. Deere pays the fees. See "Deere
& Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For Online MBA
Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html
The University of Georgia partnered with the consulting division of PwC to deliver a
totally online MBA degree. The program is only taken by PwC employees. PwC
paid the development and delivery fees. See http://www.coe.uga.edu./coenews/2000/UGAusnews.htm
Elite Research University Online Degrees?
"Somebody is going to figure out how to deliver online education for
credit and for degrees in the quality sector—i.e., in the elite sector,"
said Christopher Edley Jr., dean at Berkeley's law school and the plan's
most prominent advocate. "I think it ought to be us—not MIT, not
Columbia, not Caltech, certainly not Stanford."
Jensen Comment
Actually Stanford introduced one of the highest quality Master of
Engineering online programs in history, the ADEPT Program ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Search for the word ADEPT at the above site. The ADEPT video
approach, however is only suited to highly talented and highly motivated
students. I doubt that the ADEPT program is suited for online students
in general.
Online
education is booming, but not at elite universities—at least not when it
comes to courses for credit.
Leaders at the
University of California want to break that mold. This fall they hope to
put $5-million to $6-million into a pilot project that could clear the
way for the system to offer online undergraduate degrees and push
distance learning further into the mainstream.
The vision is
UC's most ambitious—and controversial—effort to reshape itself after
cuts in public financial support have left the esteemed system in
crisis.
Supporters of
the plan believe online degrees will make money, expand the number of
California students who can enroll, and re-establish the system's
reputation as an innovator.
"Somebody is
going to figure out how to deliver online education for credit and for
degrees in the quality sector—i.e., in the elite sector," said
Christopher Edley Jr., dean at Berkeley's law school and the plan's most
prominent advocate. "I think it ought to be us—not MIT, not Columbia,
not Caltech, certainly not Stanford."
But UC's
ambitions face a series of obstacles. The system has been slow to adopt
online instruction despite its deep connections to Silicon Valley.
Professors hold unusually tight control over the curriculum, and many
consider online education a poor substitute for direct classroom
contact. As a result, courses could take years to gain approval.
The University
of California's decision to begin its effort with a pilot research
project has also raised eyebrows. The goal is to determine whether
online courses can be delivered at selective-research-university
standards.
Yet plenty of
universities have offered online options for years, and more than 4.6
million students were taking at least one online course during the
fall-2008 term, notes A. Frank Mayadas, a senior adviser at the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation who is considered one of the fathers of online
learning.
"It's like
doing experiments to see if the car is really better than the horse in
1925, when everyone else is out there driving cars," he said.
If the project
stumbles, it could dilute UC's brand and worsen already testy relations
between professors and the system's president, Mark G. Yudof.
As the system
studies whether it can offer quality classes online, the bigger question
might be this: Is California's flagship university system innovative
enough to pull online off?
Going Big The
proposal comes at a key moment for the University of California system,
which is in the midst of a wrenching internal discussion about how best
to adapt to reduced state support over the long term. Measures to
weather its immediate financial crisis, such as reduced enrollment,
furloughs for staff and faculty members, and sharply rising tuition, are
seen as either temporary or unsustainable.
Administrators
hope the online plan will ultimately expand revenue and access for
students at the same time. But the plan starts with a relatively modest
experiment that aims to create online versions of roughly 25 high-demand
lower-level "gateway courses." A preliminary list includes such staples
as Calculus 1 and Freshman Composition.
UC hopes to put
out a request for proposals in the fall, says Daniel Greenstein, vice
provost for academic planning, programs, and coordination. Professors
will compete for grants to build the classes, deliver them to students,
and participate in evaluating them. Courses might be taught as soon as
2011. So, for a current undergraduate, that could mean the option to
choose between online and face-to-face versions of, say, Psychology 1.
The university
plans to spend about $250,000 on each course. It hopes to raise the
money from external sources like foundations or major donors. Nobody
will be required to participate—"that's death," Mr. Greenstein said—and
faculty committees at each campus will need to approve each course.
Building a
collection of online classes could help alleviate bottlenecks and speed
up students' paths to graduation. But supporters hope to use the pilot
program to persuade faculty members to back a far-reaching expansion of
online instruction that would offer associate degrees entirely online,
and, ultimately, a bachelor's degree.
Mr. Edley
believes demand for degrees would be "basically unlimited." In a
wide-ranging speech at Berkeley last month, Mr. Edley, who is also a top
adviser to Mr. Yudof, described how thousands of new students would
bring new money to the system and support the hiring of faculty members.
In the long term, he said, online degrees could accomplish something
bigger: the democratization of access to elite education.
"In a way it's
kind of radical—it's kind of destabilizing the mechanisms by which we
produce the elite in our society," he told a packed room of staff and
faculty members. "If suddenly you're letting a lot of people get access
to elite credentials, it's going to be interesting."
'Pie in the
Sky' But even as Mr. Edley spoke, several audience members whispered
their disapproval. His eagerness to reshape the university is seen by
many faculty members as either naďve or dangerous.
Mr. Edley
acknowledges that he gets under people's skin: "I'm not good at doing
the faculty politics thing. ... So much of what I'm trying to do they
get in the way of."
Suzanne Guerlac,
a professor of French at Berkeley, found Mr. Edley's talk "infuriating."
Offering full online degrees would undermine the quality of
undergraduate instruction, she said, by reducing the opportunity for
students to learn directly from research faculty members.
"It's access to
what?" asked Ms. Guerlac. "It's not access to UC, and that's got to be
made clear."
Kristie A.
Boering, an associate professor of chemistry who chairs Berkeley's
course-approval committee, said she supported the pilot project. But she
rejected arguments from Mr. Edley and others that faculty members are
moving too slowly. Claims that online courses could reap profits or
match the quality of existing lecture courses must be carefully weighed,
she said.
"Anybody who
has at least a college degree is going to say, Let's look at the facts.
Let's be a little skeptical here," she said. "Because that's a little
pie-in-the-sky."
Existing
research into the strength of online programs cannot simply be applied
to UC, she added, objecting to an oft-cited 2009 U.S. Education
Department analysis that reported that "on average, students in online
learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face
instruction."
"I'm sorry:
I've read that report. It's statistically fuzzy, and there's only
something like four courses from a research university," she said. "I
don't think that's relevant for us."
But there's
also strong enthusiasm among some professors in the system, including
those who have taught its existing online classes. One potential benefit
is that having online classes could enable the system to use its
resources more effectively, freeing up time for faculty research, said
Keith R. Williams, a senior lecturer in exercise biology at the Davis
campus and chair of the UC Academic Senate's committee on educational
policy, who stressed that he was speaking as a faculty member, not on
behalf of the Senate. "We're supportive, from the faculty perspective,
of looking into this in a more detailed way," he said.
A National
Context While the University of California plans and looks, other public
universities have already acted. At the University of Central Florida,
for example, more than half of the 53,500 students already take at least
one online course each year. Pennsylvania State University, the
University of Texas, and the University of Massachusetts all enroll
large numbers of online students.
UC itself
enrolls tens of thousands of students online each year, but its campuses
have mostly limited those courses to graduate and extension programs
that fully enrolled undergraduates do not typically take for credit.
"Pretty pathetic," is how Mr. Mayadas described California's online
efforts. "The UC system has been a zilch."
But the
system's proposed focus on for-credit courses for undergraduates
actually stands out when compared with other leading institutions like
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. Both have
attracted attention for making their course materials available free
online, but neither institution offers credit to people who study those
materials.
Mr. Mayadas
praised UC's online move as a positive step that will "put some heat on
the other top universities to re-evaluate what they have or have not
done."
Over all, the
"quality sector" in higher education has failed "to take its
responsibility seriously to expand itself to meet the national need,"
Mr. Greenstein said, dismissing elites' online offerings as "eye candy."
Jensen Comments
The above article suggests that online programs make more money than onsite
programs. This is not universally true, but it can be true. The University
of Wisconsin at Milwaukee charges more for online courses than equivalent
onsite courses because online courses have become a cash cow for UWM. The
reasons, however, are sometimes dubious. Online courses are often taught
with relatively cheap adjunct specialists whereas onsite courses might be
taught with more expensive full-time faculty.
Also the above article ignores the
fact that prestigious universities like the University of Wisconsin,
University of Illinois, and University of Maryland have already been
offering accredited and highly respected undergraduate and masters degrees
in online programs for years. They purportedly impose the same academic
standards on online programs vis-a-vis onsite programs. Adjunct
instructors with proper supervision need not necessarily be easy graders.
In fact they may be more responsive to grading instructions than full-time
faculty quavering in fear of teaching evaluations in their bid for tenure
and promotions.
Who's
Succeeding in Online Education?
The most respected online programs at this point in time seem to be embedded
in large university systems that have huge onsite extension programs as well
as online alternatives. Two noteworthy systems in this regard are the
enormous University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas extension
programs. Under the initial leadership of Jack Wilson, UMass Online
thrives with hundreds of online courses. I think Open University in the
U.K. is the largest public university in the world. Open University has
online as well as onsite programs. The University of Phoenix continues to be
the largest private university in the world in terms of student enrollments.
I still do not put it and Open University in the same class as the
University of Wisconsin, however, because I'm dubious of any university that
relies mostly on part-time faculty.
I wonder if the day will come when
we see contrasting advertisements:
"A UC Berkeley Accounting PhD online in 5-6 Years Full Time"
"A Capella Accounting PhD online in 2 Years Full Time and no comprehensive
examinations"
Capella University is one of the
better for-profit online universities in the world. --- http://www.capella.edu/
Students with no business
studies background (other than a basic accounting course) can complete
the program in 2.5 years part time or slightly less than 2 years
full-time.
The the Capella accounting PhD
curriculum is more like an MBA curriculum and is totally unlike any
other accounting PhD program in North America. There are relatively few
accounting courses and much less focus on research skills.
There are no comprehensive or
oral examinations. The only requirements 120 quarter credits, including
credits to be paid for a dissertation
I'm still trying to learn
whether there is access to any kind of research library or the expensive
financial databases that are required for other North American
accounting doctoral programs..
Even in lean
times, the $400 billion business of higher education is booming. Nowhere
is this more true than in one of the fastest-growing -- and most
controversial -- sectors of the industry: for-profit colleges and
universities that cater to non-traditional students, often confer
degrees over the Internet, and, along the way, successfully capture
billions of federal financial aid dollars.
In
College, Inc., correspondent
Martin Smith investigates the promise and
explosive growth of the for-profit higher education industry. Through
interviews with school executives, government officials, admissions
counselors, former students and industry observers, this film explores
the tension between the industry --which says it's helping an
underserved student population obtain a quality education and marketable
job skills -- and critics who charge the for-profits with churning out
worthless degrees that leave students with a mountain of debt.
At the center
of it all stands a vulnerable population of potential students, often
working adults eager for a university degree to move up the career
ladder. FRONTLINE talks to a former staffer at a California-based
for-profit university who says she was under pressure to sign up growing
numbers of new students. "I didn't realize just how many students we
were expected to recruit," says the former enrollment counselor. "They
used to tell us, you know, 'Dig deep. Get to their pain. Get to what's
bothering them. So, that way, you can convince them that a college
degree is going to solve all their problems.'"
Graduates of
another for-profit school -- a college nursing program in California --
tell FRONTLINE that they received their diplomas without ever setting
foot in a hospital. Graduates at other for-profit schools report being
unable to find a job, or make their student loan payments, because their
degree was perceived to be of little worth by prospective employers. One
woman who enrolled in a for-profit doctorate program in Dallas later
learned that the school never acquired the proper accreditation she
would need to get the job she trained for. She is now sinking in over
$200,000 in student debt.
The
biggest player in the for-profit sector is the University of Phoenix --
now the largest college in the US with total enrollment approaching half
a million students. Its revenues of almost $4 billion last year, up 25
percent from 2008, have made it a darling of Wall Street. Former top
executive of the University of Phoenix
Mark DeFusco told FRONTLINE how the company's
business-approach to higher education has paid off: "If you think about
any business in America, what business would give up two months of
business -- just essentially close down?" he asks. "[At the University
of Phoenix], people go to school all year round. We start classes every
five weeks. We built campuses by a freeway because we figured that's
where the people were."
"The
education system that was created hundreds of years ago needs to
change," says
Michael Clifford, a major education
entrepreneur who speaks with FRONTLINE. Clifford, a former musician who
never attended college, purchases struggling traditional colleges and
turns them into for-profit companies. "The big opportunity," he says,
"is the inefficiencies of some of the state systems, and the ability to
transform schools and academic programs to better meet the needs of the
people that need jobs."
"From a
business perspective, it's a great story," says
Jeffrey Silber, a senior analyst at BMO
Capital Markets, the investment banking arm of the Bank of Montreal.
"You're serving a market that's been traditionally underserved. ... And
it's a very profitable business -- it generates a lot of free cash
flow."
And the cash
cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government.
Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit
schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But
Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the
students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from
for-profit schools, leading to serious questions about one of the key
pillars of the profit degree college movement: that their degrees help
students boost their earning power. This is a subject of increasing
concern to the Obama administration, which, last month, remade the
federal student loan program, and is now proposing changes that may make
it harder for the for-profit colleges to qualify.
"One of the
ideas the Department of Education has put out there is that in order for
a college to be eligible to receive money from student loans, it
actually has to show that the education it's providing has enough value
in the job market so that students can pay their loans back," says Kevin
Carey of the Washington think tank Education Sector. "Now, the
for-profit colleges, I think this makes them very nervous," Carey says.
"They're worried because they know that many of their members are
charging a lot of money; that many of their members have students who
are defaulting en masse after they graduate. They're afraid that this
rule will cut them out of the program. But in many ways, that's the
point."
FRONTLINE also
finds that the regulators that oversee university accreditation are
looking closer at the for-profits and, in some cases, threatening to
withdraw the required accreditation that keeps them eligible for federal
student loans. "We've elevated the scrutiny tremendously," says Dr.
Sylvia Manning, president of the Higher Learning Commission, which
accredits many post-secondary institutions. "It is really inappropriate
for accreditation to be purchased the way a taxi license can be
purchased. ...When we see any problematic institution being acquired and
being changed we put it on a short leash."
Also note the comments that
follow the above text.
Interesting
program. I saw the first half of it and was not surprised by anything,
other than the volume of students. For example, enrollment at University
of Phoenix is 500,000. Compare that to Arizona State's four campuses
with maybe 60,000 to 70,000. The huge computer rooms dedicated to online
learning were fascinating too. We've come a long way from the Oxford don
sitting in his wood paneled office, quoting Aristotle, and dispensing
wisdom to students one at a time. The evolution: From the pursuit of
truth to technical training to cash on the barrelhead. One question
about the traditional university though -- When they eliminate the cash
flow from big time football, will they then be able to criticize the
dash for cash by the educational entrepreneurs?
Paul Bjorklund,
CPA
Bjorklund Consulting, Ltd.
Flagstaff, Arizona
New Markets for Colleges and Universities
Questions:
Will the most prestigious universities in the world commence to offer more
onsite non-credit and certificate programs that (possibly) accompany their
distance training, certificate, and preparatory programs?
What's new at the University of Rochester in terms of onsite
revenue-generating programs?
Answer:
In previous editions of New Bookmarks, I have stressed that the
most profitable distance education programs are those non-credit or
certificate courses. Degree programs often struggle for a number of
reasons, not the least of which are as follows:
Difficulty obtaining a
sufficient number of fully qualified applicants for a degree program,
especially in costly private colleges and corporate programs.
Difficulty in attracting and
keeping degree program students online due to the long-term time
commitment for part-time students in a complete degree program.
Difficulty in maintaining
academic standards (grading) online.
Difficulty of attracting
instructors in online degree programs due to intensive online
communications with students and the need for online students to
communicate outside the working day, especially at night and on a
Saturday or Sunday. Students bent on getting “A”
grades can hound instructors to death.
Difficulty in getting online
degree programs accredited.
Now it appears that in order to expand
into more profitable markets, colleges and universities will be moving into
onsite as well as online non-credit and certificate courses and programs.
Example:
News Flash (received July 24, 2002 by mail) from The William E. Simon Graduate
School of Business Administration at the University of Rochester (one of the top graduate schools in the United States) --- http://www.simon.rochester.edu/main/default.asp
Rochester,
New York--July 17, 2002--In
fall 2002, the University of Rochester's William E. Simon Graduate
School of Business Administration will introduce a Certificate Program
with five areas of concentration: Financial Analysis, Electronic
Commerce Strategies, Health Sciences Management, Service Management and
The Design of Effective Organizations. The program will offer busy
professionals who want to broaden their knowledge or retool their skills
the opportunity to study at a world-class business school without
committing to a full M.B.A. program.
According to
the Simon School, participants will take courses from the existing
M.B.A. curriculum, taught by the School's internationally renowned
faculty, and learn alongside top business students from around the
world. The programs, which can be completed in as little as one
year of part-time study, are targeted at professionals who want to
enhance their current performance or gain cutting-edge knowledge to
change or advance their careers.
"This
certificate is going to give you knowledge that you can put to work
right away," said Stacey R. Kole, Simon's associate dean for M.B.A.
Programs and associate professor of economics and management.
"From a perspective of time and money, it's a relatively
inexpensive way to get very high-quality training of a targeted
nature."
If a
Certificate Program participant decides to go on and earn an M.B.A. or
M.S. degree at Simon, the credits are fully transferable.
"That's one of the big pluses of this program," said Kole.
"If you want to continue with an M.B.A. and your grades are good
enough, you're a quarter of the way done."
Participants in
Simon's Certificate Program must complete five or six designated M.B.A.
courses, each of which are offered one night a week over a 10-week
period. The curriculum can be spread out over as long as three
years.
The Certificate
Program differs from the Simon School's Part-Time M.B.A. Program by
allowing students to take fewer courses (five or six courses compared to
20 courses for part-time M.B.A. students), while focusing on a specific
area of interest rather than pursuing a broader M.B.A. management
degree. Students who wish to continue their education upon
completing the Certificate Program will have the option to matriculate
into the part-time or full-time M.B.A. or M.S. program, provided they
maintain a 3.0 cumulative average and meet other admissions criteria.
Some Parts of the Corporate Online Distance Learning Business Model Are Thriving
The LRN Center's business model is to provide legal and ethics training
courses online to corporations, law firms, and other organizations who
generally pay for employees to take courses in law and ethics. For
example, Dow Chemical contracted with LRN to train 50,000 employees.
LRN has similar contracts with many other
corporations around the world.I
learned about the LRN Center from W. Michael Hoffman, the Director of the
Bentley College Center for Ethics. Dr. Hoffman writes course modules
for LRN in the field of ethics. After the recent corporate scandals,
LRN's prospects for the future are very bright indeed.
LRN Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC)™
is the Web-based system that sets the standard for workplace ethics,
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and Analysis, LRN KnowledgeBank®, proactive law services and much more.
See how LRN is redefining the practice of law with innovation,
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LRN® , The Legal Knowledge Company
TM has been the country's leading purveyor
of expert legal knowledge since 1994, with products that include
sophisticated legal research and analysis for lawyers, databases of
legal memoranda and other materials for corporate law departments and
law firms, Web-based ethics and legal compliance education for corporate
employees, ethics and compliance consulting, and proactive law services.
The LRN mission is to bring expertise and
innovation to the creation, management and dissemination of knowledge
that helps make a critical difference to businesses, lawyers and their
clients. To accomplish this, LRN has built itself on a firm foundation
of expertise. We feature a network of more than 1,700 of the world's
finest legal minds, organized into more than 3,000 substantive areas of
the law and expertly managed by our own team of highly experienced
lawyers. Together, our research network and management team bring
expertise to every step in the creation, capture and distribution of
legal knowledge products. Our services include:
LRN
KnowledgeEnvironment — an integrated platform for sharing
and disseminating knowledge on an enterprise-wide basis. Fully
customizable for our clients, this resource facilitates
communications within the legal department and helps provide the
entire enterprise with the legal and ethics knowledge it needs.
LRN
Legal Compliance and Ethics Center (LCEC) — the first
entirely Web-based platform designed to deliver customized legal
education and training in workplace ethics and legal compliance to
employees' desktops
LRN
Ethics and Consulting Services — by combining LRN
expertise with a network of ethics professionals, we help our
customers develop, refine and maximize the value in their ethics and
compliance programs.
LRN
Knowledge Platform — the solution for bringing the entire
legal team, including outside counsel, together on one platform for
sharing critical legal knowledge. Every team member can access
research, contracts and every other document from any computer with
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LRN
KnowledgeBank — the legal knowledge management system that
combines LRN's expert legal research and analysis, the resources of
in-house attorneys and the work product of outside counsel into a
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Successful companies all over the world have
grasped the power of LRN's expert-driven approach and used it to their
advantage. Contact us to learn about how we can put our resources to
work to meet your company's business challenges.
UNext also seems to be adopting the online business training model in a
big way. One of the first major contracts obtained by UNext was a
contract to educate and train over 90,000 employees of General Motors
Corporation. You can read more about what is happening at UNext at http://www.unext.com/
Thomson Enterprise Learning Takes Cardean
University to Large Businesses Worldwide
Many of the top colleges and universities are experimenting with various
new programs for alumni. For example, Stanford University's Graduate School of
Business Alumni have the following new options:
Alumni can sit in a "Virtual Skydeck" that allows them to see and listen to
visiting speakers, sit in on selected classes, participate in Brown Bag Lunches, and
listen to student panels discuss topics of broad interest --- http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/alumni/lifelonglearning/inside
It is possible to save enormous amounts of money using online versus onsite education
delivery. But to save enormous amounts of money, the circumstances probably must be
highly unique in which students can succeed with very little communication and human
interaction in every course.
One such unique situation is the ADEPT online Masters of Engineering degree program at
Stanford University. The students are mature and are all graduates in engineering or
science from top colleges in the world. The students are generally highly motivated
since a Stanford masters degree greatly improves their career opportunities, especially in
economic downturns where competition for jobs becomes more intense. Most
importantly, the students are all extremely intelligent since Stanford can be highly
selective regarding admittance into the ADEPT program.
The unique type of student described above allows ADEPT program to rely upon a video
pedagogy where students to proceed at their own paces with very little demanded in the way
of instructor supervision and communication. It's the
day-to-day instructional communication and supervision that comprise most of the cost of
online training and education. Online programs that minimize this cost
will probably make money as long as sufficient numbers of students are willing to pay the
fees for the online course materials and the prestige of the course transcripts.
UNext Corporation is not a low-cost training and education venture and is not yet a
profitable venture. However, UNext adopted a strategy that seeks to combine
education prestige with lower cost delivery. One of its headline programs entailed
partnering with five prestigious universities (Stanford, Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon,
Columbia, and the London School of Economics) to develop and continue to own and monitor
15 courses for an Executive MBA degree. Each course's transcripts will carry the
logo of the university that "owns" that course. However, each course will
be delivered by specially-trained instructors who hire out at much lower rates than
faculty from prestigious schools that developed the courses. In some cases the UNext
instructors have doctoral degrees, but in many cases these instructors are highly trained
specialists who do not have doctorates. These instructors perform the labor
intensive day-to-day communication and supervision duties. The prestigious
universities who "own" the courses, however, must monitor education standards in
the courses since the names of those universities will appear on the course transcripts.
All that glitters is not gold in terms of cost savings and profits from distance
education. Many of the startup ventures are having difficulty changing faculty
attitudes and attracting paying students. To me this is not surprising since faculty
by nature are suspicious beings, and most potential customers of distance education are
not yet adequately connected to the Web. David Noble, however, sees the early
failings of many ventures as ominous warnings that distance education is by nature
inferior and over-hyped by profit mongers.
And now, in the year 2001, these latest academic entrepreneurs of
distance education have begun to encounter the same sobering reality earlier confronted by
UCLA and THEN, namely, that all that glitters is not gold. Columbia University's
high-profile, for-profit venture Fathom is reported to be "having difficulty
attracting both customers and outside investors" compelling the institution to put up
an additional $10 million - on top of its original investment of $18.7 million - just to
keep the thing afloat. According to Sarah Carr's report in the Chronicle of Higher
Education, Columbia's administrators remain behind the venture whether or not it makes
money.
Howevermuch it might enable administrators to restructure the
institutions of higher education to their advantage vis a vis the professoriate, the
investment in online education is no guarantee of increased revenues. "Reality is
setting in among many distance education administrators", Carr reports. "They
are realizing that putting programs online doesn't necessarily bring riches".
Ironically, among those now preaching this new-found wisdom is none other than John
Kobara, the UCLA vice chancellor who left the university to run Arkatov's company, which
was founded upon the expectation of such riches. "The expectations were that online
courses would be a new revenue source and something that colleges had to look into",
Kobara remembered. "Today", he told Carr, "[chancellors and presidents] are
going back and asking some important and tough questions, such as: 'Are we making any
money off of it?' 'Can we even pay for it?' 'Have we estimated the full costs?'"
Barely eight years after Lapiner and his UCLA colleagues first caught the fool's gold
fever, Kobara mused aloud, "I don't think anybody has wild notions that it is going
to be the most important revenue source".
David F. Noble, "Fools Gold" --- http://communication.ucsd.edu/DL/ddm5.html
Example 1 --- Railroad Companies Versus Transportation Companies
In
the middle of the 20th Century, just after World War II, the railroad industry was in
pretty good shape. Passenger trains were nearly always full going from
coast-to-coast. The freight business was highly lucrative.
New opportunities arose (especially airplanes and freight trucks) into which railroad
companies could have diversified. But the railroads decided that they were in the
business of hauling people and freight on steel rails rather than in newer
'transportation" alternatives.
And what happened? Airlines, automobiles, and buses stole the entire passenger
market from the railroads in the United States (except for urban commuter lines) and about
the only long-haul passenger service had to be subsidized and run by the Federal
Government. Even the commuter lines lost huge market shares to automobiles.
Many colleges and universities are now facing the question of whether they are to
remain only onsite (railroad) educational institutions or whether they will enter into
distance education (transportation) missions. Some colleges that have quality living
accommodations and reputations as onsite campuses for full-time students will probably
survive long into the future just like some railroad companies continue to hall freight
and make money. However, those colleges have minimal growth potential vis-a-vis
colleges that expand into distance education.
Example 2 --- The Learning Curve Thing
Even colleges currently resisting all opportunities for expanding into distance
education nevertheless find it utterly stupid not to embrace newer educational
technologies. Their new students are arriving on campus with technology skills that
they want to expand upon while in college. College graduates must have technology
skills for admissions to graduate schools and employment careers.
Faculty must have technology skills if they are to help their students improve in
technology skills. And faculty soon discover that technology skills do not come
easily. They increasingly are making demands upon their institutions to provide
hardware, software, and technicians who can help in education technologies.
Colleges behind in the technology learning curve are now scrambling to catch up in
terms of electronic classrooms, instructional support services, course delivery shells
such as Blackboard and WebCT, laptop computers for students and faculty, wireless
networking, etc.
Having progressed upward on the learning curve, taking on a mission of distance
education becomes more of a possibility. Faculty who increasingly rely upon chat
rooms, discussion boards, virtual classrooms and other utilities in WebCT or Blackboard
catch on to the fact that they could be doing the same things for distant students that
they are doing for campus residents. The opportunities for grant money and/or
release time to develop a distance education course are no longer as frightening when
faculty progress further and further along the technology learning curve. Improved
performances of technology-savvy students add more incentives.
Motivations to Show the
World How To Do It Right
(Duke University Decides to
Be in the Education Business Rather Than Merely the Classroom Business)
"THE HOTTEST CAMPUS ON THE
INTERNET Duke's pricey online B-school program is winning raves from students and
rivals," Business Week, October 27, 1997 --- http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549015.htm
Update: The Duke MBA --- Global Executive
MBA Program (formerly called GEMBA) --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/gemba/index.html
As of Fall Semester 2001, there have been over 600 graduates from over 38 nations.
In terms of enthusiasm and alumni giving, this program is a real winner for Duke
University.
The Duke MBA - Global Executive
is every bit as academically demanding as Duke's other two MBA programs. Global Executive
uses the same faculty base, the same rigorous grading standards, and provides the same
Duke degree. However, the content has been adjusted to include more global issues and
strategies to serve a participant population that has far more global management
experience.
Like most other Executive MBA
programs, the Global Executive program is a lock-step curriculum, meaning that all
students take all courses. The courses are targeted at general managers who have or will
soon assume global responsibilities. The program is designed for those who want to enhance
their career path within their existing company.
International Residencies:
International residencies are an important ingredient in a global MBA program as they add
to the value and richness of the classroom component by providing various lenses (social,
economic, cultural, etc.) through which to view various economies and systems. Instead of
simply studying about an economy, Fuqua provides an experiential component which adds
value to the learning experience ...
Global Student body: Unlike
traditional Executive MBA programs which usually have a regional draw, the flexibility of
Global Executive accommodates a student body from around the globe. Not only are the
students diverse geographically, but they are also diverse in the types of global
management experiences that they bring to the classroom.
For the class entering in May
2001, tuition is $95,000. Tuition includes all educational expenses, a state-of-the-art
laptop computer, portable printer, academic books and other class materials, and lodging
and meals during the five residential sessions. The tuition does not include travel to and
from the residential sites.
Update: Duke's Online
Cross-Continent MBA --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/cc/cc_home.html
In Fall Semester 2001, there were 220 students tied into two distance education centers
(in Durham, N.C. and in Frankfurt) for the Cross-Continent MBA program.
While in Germany in the Summer of 2001, I had
dinner with Tom Keller, former Dean of Duke's Fuqua School of Business and Dean of Duke's
Cross-Continent MBA Program. Tom spent two years in the Frankfort headquarters of
Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program. This program is quite different from the online
Global Executive MBA Program, although both are asynchronous online programs and used some
overlapping course materials.
The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program allows high-potential
managers to earn an internationally-focused MBA degree from Duke University in less than
two years, utilizing a format that minimizes the disruption of careers and family life. It
is designed for individuals with three to nine years professional work experience.
The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program will contain course work
with a global emphasis in the subject areas of Management, Marketing, Operations,
Economics, Finance, Accounting, Strategy and Decision Sciences.
Students will complete 11 core courses, four elective courses and
one integrative capstone course to earn their MBA degree. Two courses will be completed
during each of the eight terms of the program. Depending upon their choice of electives,
students may choose to complete the one-week residency requirements for their sixth and
seventh terms at either Fuqua School of Business location in North America or Europe.
The two classes - one on each continent - will be brought even
closer together through a transfer requirement built into the program. During the third
term, half of the class from Europe will attend the North American residential session and
vice versa. In the fourth term, the other half of each class trades locations for one week
of residential learning. After the transfer residencies, the students resume their
coursework using the same Internet mediated learning methods as before, but with global
virtual teams that have now met in a face-to-face setting
World-Class Resources
When you're linked to Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, you're connected to a
world of resources residing on a network with robust bandwidth capabilities. Duke MBA
students have secure access to the Duke and Fuqua business library databases as well as a
network of Duke faculty and outside experts.
World-Wide Content Delivery
The virtual classroom can take on many different forms. Here, a faculty member prepares a
macroeconomics lecture for distribution via CD ROM and/or the Internet. Students will
download this lecture in a given week of study and follow up with discussion and team
projects.
Bulletin Board Discussion
Rich threads of conversation occur during this asynchronous mode of communication.
Professors and guest lecturers can moderate the discussion to keep learning focused.
Real-Time Chat Session
Occurs between students and classmates as well as faculty. Here, a student in Europe
discusses an assignment with a professor in the United States.
Because It is the Thing to
Do for the Betterment of All People on Earth
Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) of MIT and Other Leading
Universities
Like other members of the Internet2
initiative, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) wanted to enhance its research and
educational power by joining the consortium of U.S. universities linked to the
ultra-high-speed network. But as a major university just miles from the Mexican border, it
also wanted to play a role in linking Internet2 to a similar effort in Mexico and, from
there, to Central America.
UTEP is one of only 30 Internet2 gigaPOP sites, which
allows it to serve as an Internet2 host for other institutions. To encourage scholarly and
cultural exchanges with Mexico, as well as to provide access to the latest technology in
both countries, UTEP built a high-speed, point-to-point wireless network. The network
spans about five miles from El Paso to Mexico’s Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez
(UACJ). UACJ is a member of a Mexican initiative to develop a high-speed network
compatible with Internet2.
"Computer algorithms process the images and extract information
from them to give the user information about what they are looking
at," said Nikolaos Bourbakis, professor at Wright State
University's College of Engineering
and Computer Science in Dayton, Ohio.
Users can program iCare to feed them
information continuously or only when prompted by a question, such as
"What is directly in front of me?" or "Who just walked
into the room?"
So far, iCare's greatest talent is its ability
to translate type into spoken words. The iCare-Reader translates text
into a synthesized voice using optical character recognition software
and other software that compensates for different lighting conditions
and orientations.
David Paul, one of two blind computer science
students at Arizona State University,
or ASU, who tested the system, said speed is one of the system's
greatest assets. "It's as fast as a sighted person could read a
book -- this is one of the phenomenal things about it."
The iCare-Reader not only enables blind people
to choose any book from the library shelf, but also allows them to check
out a restaurant menu, the size marked on a shirt tag or the label on a
soup can.
The reader doesn't translate handwritten text
well yet, but the team is still working on it.
ICare also lets the blind or visually impaired
persons navigate websites previously only accessible with a mouse.
Screen-reader software, such as Jaws,
can translate information on a computer screen to spoken word. But this
is only useful if users are able to get to the pages they are interested
in.
"The way a blind person navigates around
the screen is with the keyboard, but there are some sites that don't
work so well with keyboard alone and have some mouse-driven
applications," said Terri Hedgpeth, disability research specialist
at ASU. "But a blind person can't tell where the mouse cursor is,
so (he or she) can't access these sites."
To overcome this problem, the ASU team
developed another facet of the system, called the iCare-Assistant, that
works with Blackboard, software
designed to manage university course material.
"We have developed a software interface
that bridges the screen-reader software and Blackboard through keyboard
shortcuts that get you into these areas," Hedgpeth said.
Learning-challenged students in Ohio are using
wearable computers that are helping the kids be more independent and confident.
Jeremy Rossiter was not able to
speak when he first entered Lisa Zverloff's class for the multiple-handicapped. The
third-grader, who is autistic, communicated by hitting and biting. But with the help of a
wearable computer, Jeremy learned to mimic, then utter, words and small phrases.
His success story propelled
Xybernaut, the manufacturer of the wearable computer, into a new market.
Xybernaut is more known for
supplying computers to telecommunications companies and the military. The devices are used
for maintenance purposes in locations where carrying a laptop is not possible, such as
manholes and the tops of telephone poles.
Credit Zverloff, a teacher at
Erwine Middle School in Akron, Ohio, with bringing wearables into the classroom. Her
experience led to the product launch of the XyberKids wearable computers in March.
Zverloff says the durable,
touch-screen portable computers have made her students more independent and confident.
Some kids use it all day; others use it for specific activities. Several students are able
to fully participate in mainstream classrooms while using the devices.
It all started with a cold call
to Xybernaut.
Zverloff's fiance, Eric Van
Raepenbusch, a special education teacher at Turkeyfoot Elementary, owned stock in the
company and suggested she call them.
On the phone, she convinced a
nearby sales representative to meet with her and Jeremy -- even though the company's
initial response was along the lines of, "But ma'am, we don't use (the computers) for
people with disabilities," Zverloff said.
Jeremy eventually tried the
device and "he wouldn't put it down," Zverloff said. "That's the only proof
I need. He didn't bite me, scratch me, pinch me –- this is a positive thing."
The device cost $9,000, but the
company agreed to loan the device to Zverloff, a first-year teacher at the time, to see
how Jeremy progressed.
She replaced the belt –-
made for an adult -- with a bookbag so Jeremy would be able to carry the 6-pound, 8.4-inch
touch screen, hard drive and battery. The device runs on the Windows operating system.
When Jeremy touched different
pictures on the screen, a computer-generated voice dictated what the item was. He
responded better to the digitized voice because the output is the same volume and tone
every time, she said.
"After repeated mimicking of
the computer, he then started mimicking the teacher, then he started putting utterances
together," Zverloff said. "A three-word utterance is an amazing thing for
someone who's only been speaking for two months."
Zverloff also discovered that
Jeremy was learning to spell and read.
When she showed him pictures of
different animals, he started typing the words and used the voice output. He regularly
took the wearable to lunch and on field trips to help him communicate outside the
classroom.
"At the end of the year, he
was reading words and sentences on a first-grade level," she said.
Researchers are developing
similar devices at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information
(CSLI).
Susan Spencer is
designing online economics courses for San Antonio College (SAC). All
online courses at SAC must be accessible by hearing and sight impaired
students. Susan will discuss her innovative ideas in designing economics
courses that can be delivered online to blind students.
Susan is an
associate professor of Economics at San Antonio College. She has an MA
from Washington University, a BA in Economics from the University of
Missouri at Columbia and has worked at the Federal Reserve Board and
Bureau of Labor and Statistics in Washington, DC. In San Antonio, she has
taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and owned and managed
Flexware Systems, Inc. a computer software/consulting company.
Susan
Spencer's Presentation File Download:
Susan's
presentation file is not yet available. It will be here soon.
In spite of the successes noted above, most attempts to offer online training and
education programs by corporations, private universities, and state-supported colleges and
universities have either failed or struggle on with negative net cash flows from the
online operations.
Aside from the success story at the University of Phoenix, it appears that reputation
and prestige of a university are necessary but not sufficient conditions for high success
in online programs. Online programs at Carnegie-Mellon University, Columbia
University, Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, University
of Michigan, and other top-name schools have attracted students who want those logos on
their transcripts. The is the main reason why many corporations partner with those
particular schools for training and education courses. This "prestige
criterion" makes it very difficult for startup education companies or colleges with
less prestigious names to expand markets with Internet courses.
Many new online programs have failed to attract sufficient numbers of tuition-paying
students to break even on the cost of developing and delivering those
programs.
Some like the online teacher education program at McGill University have ceased
operations. California Virtual University never got off the ground.
National Technologica University fell on hard times with poor timing and sold out
to Sylvan Learning Systems.
Some programs struggle on with miniscule classes while supporting operations with
outside funding or funding diverted from onsite training and education programs.
Monterrey Tech (which is to Mexico what MIT is to the US), has a multimillion dollar
distance education program. The main campus
has a 12-story glass tower (a beautiful building indeed) equipped with production and
delivery equipment that constitutes one of two main transmitting facilities of the
Monterrey Tech Virtual University --- the University that delivers courses daily to
29 campuses, 1,272 sites in Mexico, and 159 sites in 10 Latin and South American
Countries. Although this is one of the most successful distance education
programs in the world, the number one problem still remains in finding more qualified
students who are both willing and able to pay the fees. See http://www.ruv.itesm.mx/
Even in established universities that offer fully-accredited degree programs, expanding
the market through online programs has been a hard struggle. The University of
Washington found that even free-course promotions did not attract large numbers of
students. http://www.outreach.washington.edu/about/releases/20010521freecourse.asp
The Fathom program largely run by Columbia University finds that many of its free
courses have sparse enrollments. See http://www.fathom.com/
Links to ventures that became financial disasters are given in the following document:
The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About
Technologies in Education --- Detail File
The Bright Side
The bottom line seems to be that for many universities seeking
to expand markets with online programs, the best solution to date entails partnering with
corporations or government agencies who both pay the fees and promote the programs among
their employees.
For urban areas such as Mexico City locked in traffic jams,
online education appears to have glowing prospects.
Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, it will
probably be more difficult for some foreign students to become students on campuses of
developed nations such as the U.S. and the U.K. Online education has bright
prospects of reaching those students.
Open share initiatives such as the new open share program in
which MIT will make learning materials from virtually all of its courses available for
free online, will greatly expand learning opportunities for nearly all people in the
world.
Quality and Extent of Online Education in the United States
Fast Company issues its annual list of the most
innovative companies in education. The 2013 list includes nine companies and
one community college.
In its
annual list of top companies, the magazine broke
down the organizations that have the most impact on education. Not
surprisingly, the top three slots were filled by online course providers
that partner with universities. They earned their spots for disrupting
traditional university course delivery methods by offering classes at no
charge to students.
1. Coursera
2. Udacity
3. EdX
4. Rio Salado Community College
5. Amplify
6. GameDesk
7. Duolingo
8. InsideTrack
9. FunDza
10. ClassDojo
But while the list includes the word company, not
every organization included is a company. For example, Rio Salado Community
College in Arizona came in fourth.
Rio Salado designed a custom course management and
student services system that helps students stay on track with their
education. Through
predictive analytics, the college shows professors
which students could be at risk of dropping out and need more attention. It
also alerts professors when a student doesn't show up to class regularly or
skips an assignment. The system allows educators to recognize at-risk
students early and take action to help them.
For more information about what these companies did
to be on the list, check out
Fast Company's story.
Educating the Net Generation Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger,
Editors
Chapter 1: Introduction by Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE,
and James Oblinger, North Carolina State University
Chapter 2: Is It Age or IT: First Steps Toward
Understanding the Net Generation by Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE, and James
Oblinger, North Carolina State University
Chapter 3: Technology and Learning Expectations of
the Net Generation by Greg Roberts, University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown
Chapter 4: Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not
Just the Cool New Thing by Ben McNeely, North Carolina State University
Chapter 5: The Student’s Perspective by Carie
Windham, North Carolina State University
Chapter 6: Preparing the Academy of Today for the
Learner of Tomorrow by Joel Hartman, Patsy Moskal, and Chuck Dziuban,
University of Central Florida
• Introduction • Generations and Technology
• Emerging Pattern s
• Assessing the Generations in Online Learning
• Learning Engagement, Interaction Value, and Enhanced Learning in the
Generation s
• Responding to Result s
• Excellent Teaching
• Conclusion • Endnote s
• Further Reading
• About the Authors
Chapter 7: Convenience, Communications, and
Control: How Students Use Technology by Robert Kvavik, ECAR and University
of Minnesota
The (Department of Education Report in
March 2014) report says that American colleges now
offer 17,374 online programs altogether, 29 percent of which are master’s-degree
programs, with bachelor’s and certificate programs making up 23 percent each.
Business and management programs are the most popular, at 29 percent of the
total, followed by health and medicine programs (16 percent), education programs
(14 percent), and information technology and computers (10 percent) ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-there-may-be-fewer-online-programs-than-you-think/51163?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The
State University of New York
(SUNY) has formally introduced a new online program
that allows students to access courses, degrees, professors and academic
resources from any of SUNY's 64 campuses. Open SUNY, as it's called, is a
mix-and-match service that offers access to 400 "online-enabled" degrees,
12,000 course sections and eight full degrees. The system's expectation is
that people from inside and outside the state will attend courses, including
international students.
Students can use the program to start a degree,
finish a degree or just take a single course. The
Open SUNY Navigator allows a potential
student to specify what type of program he or she wants in categories such
as entirely online or hybrid, synchronous or asynchronous, experiential,
accelerated and so on — and the navigation tool provides potential online
offerings to fit the criteria.
"Open SUNY will provide our students with the
nation's leading online learning experience, drawing on the power of SUNY to
expand access, improve completion, and prepare more students for success,"
said Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. "In addition to these new, fully-online
degree programs, Open SUNY will take every online course we offer at every
SUNY campus...and make them easy to find and accessible for every SUNY
student and prospective learners around the globe."
Along with providing a central application through
which to locate course offerings, SUNY is offering Open SUNY+, which adds
additional layers of support for online students and instructors. Specific
additions include a 24/7 help desk for technical support, a "concierge"
service to act as a single source for getting all program questions
answered, and extended hour tutoring services. Faculty will have access to
training programs and online forums where they can broaden their knowledge
about developing effective online courses or share best practices.
Eight Open SUNY+ degree programs debuting this
month were chosen based on a number of factors, including student interest,
accreditation, and their capacity to meet current and future workforce
demand throughout New York State.
"We are proud of our collaboration and success in
serving a qualified student population that may not otherwise be able to
pursue a degree in electrical engineering," said Stony Brook President
Samuel Stanley Jr. "We are joining forces with our colleagues at
Binghamton University
and the
University
at Buffalo to make a difference. We look forward
to implementation of Open SUNY. This is truly an exciting time to be
involved in higher education in New York State."
The top flagship state universities in the USA are under increasing pressures
from their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including
undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees.
The question is whether the most prestigious private universities like Stanford
and Harvard will join in the competition.
Richard Lyons, the dean of University of
California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has a dire forecast for
business education: “Half of the business schools in this country could be
out of business in 10 years—or five,” he says.
The threat, says Lyons, is that more top MBA
programs will start to offer degrees online. That will imperil the
industry’s business model. For most business schools, students pursuing
part-time and executive MBAs generate crucial revenue. Those programs,
geared toward working professionals, will soon have to compete with elite
online alternatives for the same population.
. . .
Online MBA programs aren’t siphoning choice
students from campuses yet, says Ash Soni, executive associate dean at
Indiana University’s
Kelley School of Business. Kelley ranks 15th on
Bloomberg Businessweek’s list of full-time programs and was an
early player in online MBAs. The school draws students from across the
country, but it is more likely to compete with online MBA programs offered
by the University of North Carolina’s
Kenan-Flagler Business School and Arizona State’s
Carey School of Business. Says Soni: “If you’re a
dean from a regional school and you’re asking, ‘Are these online guys
tapping into my space?’ The answer is: maybe in the future, but not yet.”
Michael Desiderio, the executive director of the
Executive MBA Council, says change is coming, but his group isn’t panicking.
“We’re not saying it’s a threat or this is the end of the EMBA space,” he
says. “It’s stimulating a discussion: How do we adapt to continue to serve a
population that has changing needs?”
Online education is sure to shift the ways schools
compete for students. For-profit MBA programs such as DeVry’s
Keller School of Management have been the early
losers as more traditional universities go online, says Robert Lytle, a
partner in the education practice at consultancy Parthenon Group. That trend
could extend to lower-ranked schools as the big-name brands follow.
When Lytle talks to directors at schools who are
debating the merits of online learning, he tells them to stop dallying and
start building programs. “Once you get out of the top tier of schools,
you’re either already online, on your way there, or dead in the water,” he
says. It isn’t clear which online models will be most successful, but many
schools are feeling pressure to get on board. When Villanova School of
Business announced a new
online MBA program earlier this year, Dean Patrick
Maggitti said there has never been a more uncertain time in higher
education. “I think it’s smart strategy to be looking at options in this
market.”
Jensen Comment --- Where I Disagree
Firstly, this is not so much a threat to undergraduate business schools, because
most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs do not
even offer undergraduate business degrees. It's not likely that Harvard and
Stanford and the London Business School will commence to offer undergraduate
business degrees online.
Secondly, this is not so much a threat to masters of accounting programs,
because most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs
do not even offer masters of accounting degrees and do not have enough
accounting courses to meet the minimal requirements to take the CPA examination
in most states. . It's not likely that Harvard and Stanford and the London
Business School will commence to offer masters of accounting degrees online.
Thirdly, this is not so much of a threat even at the MBA level to
universities who admit graduate students with lower admissions credentials. The
US News Top MBA programs currently pick off the cream of the crop in
terms of GMAT and gpa credentials. The top flagship state universities like the
the Haas School at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University
of Illinois pick off the top students who cannot afford prestigious private
universities. By the time all these universities skim the cream of the crop the
second-tier public and private universities struggle with more marginal students
applying for MBA programs.
It would be both dangerous and sad if the very top MBA programs introduced
lower admissions standards for online programs vis-a-vis on-campus
programs. In order to maintain the highest standards the most prestigious
universities will have to cater to the highest quality foreign students and
herein lies a huge problem. Some nations like China are notorious for fraud and
cheating on admissions credentials like the GMAT. In Russia such credentials are
for sale to the highest bidders.
The name of the game in business education is placement of graduates.
Prestigious university MBA programs are at the top of the heap in terms of
placement largely because of their successful alumni and strong alumni networks
that actively seek MBA graduates from their alma maters. This will not work as
well for online programs, especially since many of the online graduates of
prestigious university online programs will live outside the USA.
However, top flagship state universities are under increasing pressures from
their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including
undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees.
This is already happening as is reflected in the following rankings of online
programs by US News:
Who are these students taking free first-year MOOC courses from Wharton?
Some are college professors who adding what they learn in MOOCs to the courses
they themselves teach. Most MOOCs, by the way, are advanced courses on highly
specialized topics like the literature of both famous and obscure writers.
Others are basic courses that contribute to career advancement.
For example, the business school at Penn, Wharton, now offers its core
MBA courses as free MOOCs. Some students who intently take these courses are
seeking to get into Wharton and other prestigious MBA programs.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT
scores to get into prestigious MBA programs and to do better in those
programs once admitted so that they too can tap those six-figure starting
salaries of graduates from prestigious MBA Programs.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT
scores to obtain better financial aid packages for further graduate study.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to perform
better on the job and thereby get better performance evaluations and raises.
It all started early
last fall. Sebastian Thrun went a little rogue (oh the audacity!) and
started offering
free online courses under Stanford’s banner to mass audiences,
with each course promising a “statement of
accomplishment” at the end. Hundreds of thousands of students signed up, and
universities everywhere took notice.
Since then we have
witnessed universities and startups scrambling fairly madly to create their
own MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), hoping to gain a foothold in a new
area that could eventually disrupt education in a major way. In December,
MIT announced the creation of MITx, promising
free courses and a “certificate of completion” to students worldwide.
Sebastian Thrun left Stanford to create Udacity, and another Stanford
spinoff,
Coursera, gained instant traction when it
announced in April that it had raised $16 million in venture capital and
signed partnerships with Princeton, Penn and U Michigan.
Now comes the latest
news. MIT has teamed up with its Cambridge neighbor, Harvard, to create
a new non profit venture, EDX. To date, Harvard
has barely dabbled
in open education. But it’s now throwing
$30 million behind
EDX (M.I.T. will do
the same), and together they will offer free digital courses worldwide, with
students receiving the obligatory certificate of mastery at the end. The EDX
platform will be open source, meaning it will be open to other universities.
Whether EDX will replace MITx, or sit uncomfortably beside it, we’re not
entirely sure (though it looks like it’s the former).
Classes will begin
next fall. And when they do, we’ll let you know … and, of course, we’ll add
them to our massive collection of 450 Free
Online Courses.
The University of
Illinois Global Campus, a multimillion-dollar distance-learning project, is
up and running. For its March-April 2009 term, it has enrolled 366 students.
Getting to this
point, though, has looked a little like the dot-com start-up bubble of the
late 1990s. Hundreds of Internet-related companies were launched with overly
ambitious goals, only to later face cutbacks and other struggles to stay
alive. Most crashed anyway. Some observers now say the Global Campus must
try to avoid the same fate of churning through a large initial investment
while attracting too few customers.
The project,
planned about four years ago, was designed to complement existing online
programs offered by individual Illinois-system campuses at Urbana-Champaign,
Springfield, and Chicago. Those programs primarily serve current students as
an addition to their on-campus course work. The Global Campus, in contrast,
seeks to reach the adult learner off campus, who is often seeking a more
focused, career-related certification or degree, such as completing a B.S.
in nursing.
Online education
has proved popular with institutions, students, and employers across the
United States, with opportunities and enrollment growing. According to the
Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit organization focused on online learning, the
fall 2007 term saw 3.9 million students enroll in at least one online
course, many at for-profit institutions like DeVry University and the
University of Phoenix.
That growing
popularity, says David J. Gray, chief executive of UMassOnline, the
online-learning arm of the University of Massachusetts system, is part of
the Global Campus's problem. The Illinois program, he says, is "fighting
uphill in a market that's a lot more uphill."
The slope didn't
seem as steep in the fall of 2005, when Chester S. Gardner, then the
university's vice president for academic affairs, led a committee to
investigate ideas for the future of online education at Illinois. That
resulted in a proposal and business plan presented to the Board of Trustees
the next year. The system's "existing online programs were not structured
for adult learners," says Mr. Gardner, who is now leading the Global Campus.
The program was
formally established in March 2007. The university initially financed it
with $1.5-million of general revenue. The program started teaching its first
12 students in 2008.
Now, Mr. Gardner
says, the Global Campus has a budget of approximately $9.4-million for the
2008-9 fiscal year. Approximately $1-million of that comes from the state,
he says, and the remaining money comes from various grants, tuition, and
loans from the Board of Trustees.
The trustees'
investment has produced heavy involvement, Mr. Gardner says. "They're acting
like venture capitalists," he notes, adding that "they're certainly doing
their job of holding my feet to the fire."
This year the 366
Global Campus students are enrolled in five different degree and four
different certificate programs; Mr. Gardner expects the number of students
to rise to around 500 by May.
Those numbers put
the program on a much slower track than earlier, sunnier estimates of 9,000
students enrolled by 2012. Mr. Gardner says the 9,000 figure came from his
2007 budget request to the trustees and was not precise. "We had no direct
experience upon which to base our projections," he says.
Now, Mr.
Gardner says, he has more realistic figures. Once 1,650 students are
enrolled, the monthly income from tuition will equal monthly expenses, on
average. His current projections show the Global Campus reaching that point
of stability by the 2011 fiscal year.
STATISTICS ON THE STATE OF EDUCATION, U.S. AND
WORLDWIDE
The Sloan Consortium's "Online Nation: Five Years
of Growth in Online Learning," a report on the state of online learning in
U.S. higher education, is "aimed at answering some of the fundamental
questions about the nature and extent of online education." These questions
include:
-- How many students are learning online?
-- Where has the growth in online learning
occurred?
-- What are the prospects for future online
enrollment growth?
-- What are the barriers to widespread adoption of
online education?
The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of
institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations
continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs
according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a
part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at
any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see
http://www.sloan-c.org/
. . . .
Each year, since 2001, the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes the "Education at a
Glance" report, an "annual round-up of data and analysis on education,
providing a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on education
systems in the OECD's 30 member countries and in a number of partner
economies." Main areas covered in the reports are:
The OECD's mission is "to help its member countries
to achieve sustainable economic growth and employment and to raise the
standard of living in member countries while maintaining financial stability
-- all this in order to contribute to the development of the world economy."
As one of the world's largest publishers in the fields of economics and
public policy, OECD monitors, analyzes, and forecasts economic developments
and social changes in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, and
taxation. For more information contact: OECD, 2 rue Andre Pascal, F-75775,
Paris Cedex 16 France; tel: +33 1.45.24.82.00; fax: +33 1.45.24.85.00;
email: webmaster@oecd.org ;
Web: http://www.oecd.org
RECOMMENDED
READING
"Recommended
Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits
readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books,
articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your
recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this
column.
Journalist
Richard Poynder writes on information technology and online rights issues.
In a series of interviews he speaks with leading advocates in the open
source movement. One of his recent interviews was with Peter Suber, a
leading proponent of the open access movement and author of SPARC Open
Access Newsletter and Open Access News. (Suber's SPARC OPEN ACCESS
NEWSLETTER is available at
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
)
The relevant public policy question is this---Does
distance learning "work" in the sense that students experience as least as
much success when they utilize distance learning modes as compared to when
they pursue conventional bricks and mortar education? The answer to this
question is a critical in determining whether burgeoning distance learning
programs are cost-effective investments, either for students, or for
governments.
Of course, it is difficult to measure the
"learning" in distance learning, not the least because distance learning
courses now span nearly every academic discipline. Hence, most large sample
evaluative studies utilize students’ grades as an imperfect proxy for
learning. That approach is followed in the study reported here, as well.
A recent review of research in distance education
reported that 1,419 articles and abstracts appeared in major distance
education journals and as dissertations during the 1990-1999 period (Berge
and Mrozowski, 2001). More than one hundred of these studies focused upon
various measures of student success (such as grades, subsequent academic
success, and persistence) in distance learning courses. Several asked the
specific question addressed in this paper: Why do some students do better
than others, at least as measured by the grade they receive in their
distance learning course? A profusion of contradictory answers has emanated
from these studies (Berge and Mrozowski, 2001; Machtmes and Asher, 2000). It
is not yet clear how important to individual student success are factors
such as the student’s characteristics (age, ethnic background, gender,
academic background, etc.). However, other than knowing that experienced
faculty are more effective than less experienced faculty (Machtmes and
Asher, 2000), we know even less about how important the characteristics of
distance learning faculty are to student success, particularly where
televised, interactive distance learning is concerned.
Perhaps the only truly strong conclusion emerging
from previous empirical studies of distance learning is the oft cited "no
significant difference" finding (Saba, 2000). Indeed, an entire web site,
http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference, exists that reports 355
such "no significant difference" studies. Yet, without quarreling with such
studies, they do not tell us why some students achieve better grades than
others when they utilize distance learning.
Several studies have suggested that student
learning styles and receptivity to distance learning influence student
success (see Taplin and Jegede, 2001, for a short survey). Unfortunately, as
Maushak et. al. (2001) point out, these intuitively sensible findings are
not yet highly useful, because they are not based upon large sample, control
group evidence that relates recognizable student learning styles to student
performance. Studies that rely upon "conversation and discourse analysis"
(Chen and Willits, 1999, provide a representative example) and interviews
with students are helpful, yet are sufficiently anecdotal that they are
unlikely to lead us to scientifically based conclusions about what works and
what does not.
This paper moves us several steps forward in terms
of our knowledge by means of a very large distance education sample (76,866
individual student observations) and an invaluable control group of students
who took the identical course at the same time from the same instructor, but
did so "in person" in a conventional "bricks and mortar" location. The
results indicate that gender, age, ethnic background, distance learning
experience, experience with the institution providing the instruction, and
measures of academic aptitude and previous academic success are
statistically significant determinants of student success. Similarly,
faculty characteristics such as gender, age, ethnic background, and
educational background are statistically significant predictors of student
success, though not necessarily in the manner one might hypothesize.
"Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of Online Education in
the United States, 2003 and 2004," The Sloan Consortium --- http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/survey.asp
Entering the Mainstream: The Quality and Extent of
Online Education in the United States, 2003 and 2004 represents the second
annual study of the state of online education in U.S. Higher Education. This
year’s study, like last year’s, is aimed at answering some of the
fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education. Supported
by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based on responses from over 1,100
colleges and universities, this year’s study addresses the following key
questions:
-- Will online enrollments continue their
rapid growth?
Background:
Last year’s study, Sizing the Opportunity: The Quality and Extent
of Online Education in the United States, 2002 and 2003 found that
over 1.6 million students were studying online in the fall of 2002,
and that schools expected that number to grow substantially by the
fall of 2003. The nearly 20% growth rate expected in online
enrollments far exceeds the overall rate of growth for the entire
higher education student population. Would this very optimistic
projection be realized, or would schools begin to see a plateau in
their online enrollments?
The evidence:
The online enrollment projections have been realized, and there is
no evidence that enrollments have reached a plateau. Online
enrollments continue to grow at rates faster than for the overall
student body, and schools expect the rate of growth to further
increase:
Over 1.9 million students were studying
online in the fall of 2003. Schools expect the number of online
students to grow to over 2.6 million by the fall of 2004. Schools
expect online enrollment growth to accelerate — the expected
average growth rate for online students for 2004 is 24.8%, up from
19.8% in 2003. Overall, schools were pretty accurate in predicting
enrollment growth — last year’s predicted online enrollment for
2003 was 1,920,734; this year’s number from the survey is
1,971,397.
-- Are students as satisfied with online
courses as they are with face-to-face instruction?
Background:
Schools face the “if you build it will they come?” question: If
they offer online courses and students are not satisfied with them,
they will not enroll. Do academic leaders, those responsible for the
institutions meeting their enrollment goals, believe that students
are as satisfied with their online offerings as with their
face-to-face instruction?
The evidence:
Schools that offer online courses believe that their online students
are at least as satisfied as those taking their face-to-face
offerings:
40.7% of schools offering online courses
agree that “students are at least as satisfied” with their
online courses, 56.2% are neutral and only 3.1% disagree. Medium and
large schools strongly agree (with less than 3% disagreeing). The
smallest schools (under 1,500 enrollments) are the least positive,
but even they have only 5.4% disagreeing compared to 32.9% agreeing.
Doctoral/Research, Masters, and Associates schools are very
positive, Specialized and Baccalaureate schools only slightly less
so.
-- What role do schools see online
learning playing in their long-term strategy?
Background:
In order for online learning to enter the mainstream of American
higher education, schools must believe in its importance and be
willing to embrace it as part of their long-term institutional
strategies. Will online learning be seen as a niche among higher
education, or will schools see it as an important component of their
future evolution?
The evidence:
Schools believe that online learning is critical to their long term
strategy. We asked if “Online education is critical to the
long-term strategy” of the school. Every group with the exception
of Baccalaureate schools agrees with this statement. Public and
large schools were extremely strong in their opinions (only 3%
disagreeing):
The majority of all schools (53.6%) agree
that online education is critical to their long-term strategy. Among
public and private for-profit institutions almost two-thirds (over
65% in both cases) agree. The larger the institution, the more
likely it believes that online education is critical.
Doctoral/Research, Masters, and Associates schools are very
positive, Specialized schools slightly less positive, and
Baccalaureate schools slightly negative.
-- What about the quality of online
offerings: do schools continue to believe that it measures up?
Background:
One of the earliest perceptions about online learning was that it was of lower
quality than face-to-face instruction. The evidence from last year’s study
showed academic leaders did not agree with this assessment. When asked to
compare learning outcomes in online courses with those for face-to-face
instruction, academic leaders put the two on very close terms, and expected the
online offerings to continue to get better relative to the face-to-face option.
Given the continued growth in the number of students online and the pressure
that this growth brings in maintaining quality, do academic leaders still
believe in the quality of online offerings?
The evidence:
Schools continue to believe that online learning is just as good as
being there:
A majority of academic leaders believe that
online learning quality is already equal to or superior to
face-to-face instruction. Three quarters of academic leaders at
public colleges and universities believe that online learning
quality is equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction. The
larger the school, the more positive the view of the relative
quality of online learning compared to face-to-face instruction.
Three quarters of all academic leaders believe that online learning
quality will be equal to or superior to face-to-face instruction in
three years.
Zoom (stylized as zoom)
is a videotelephonyproprietary
software program developed by Zoom
Video Communications. The free plan provides a video
chatting service that allows up to 100 concurrent participants, with a
40-minute time restriction. Users have the option to upgrade by subscribing to
a paid plan. The highest plan supports up to 1,000 concurrent participants
for meetings lasting up to 30 hours.[2]
Several start-up companies are working with
universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are
starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering
their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:
A nonprofit effort run jointly by
MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.
Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add
other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the
software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone
can use it to run MOOC’s.
A for-profit company founded by two computer-science
professors from Stanford.
The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use
the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue.
More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U.
of Virginia, have joined.
Another for-profit company founded
by a Stanford computer-science professor.
The company, which works with individual professors
rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars.
Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its
courses on computer science and related fields.
A for-profit platform that lets
anyone set up a course.
The company encourages its instructors to charge a
small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors
themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many
of the courses.
Coursera continued its ambitious expansion in the
growing market for MOOC support today, announcing accords with 16 new
universities to help them produce massive open online courses — more than
doubling the company’s number of institutional partners and pushing its
course count near 200.
The new partners include the first liberal arts
college, Wesleyan University, to leap formally into the MOOC game, as well
as the first music school, the Berklee College of Music.
Coursera also announced deals with name-brand
private universities, such as Brown, Columbia, Emory and Vanderbilt
Universities; some major state institutions, such as the University of
Maryland System, the Ohio State University and the Universities of Florida,
and California at Irvine; and several international universities, such as
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and the Universities of British Columbia, London, and Melbourne.
The company already boasted the most courses and
student registrations of any MOOC providers, having registered 1.3 million
students for its courses (although far fewer have actually stuck with a
course). Andrew Ng, one of its co-founders, said Coursera will probably
double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops
recruiting new institutions.
“I think we’ll wind up with at least twice the
universities that we have now, but we’re not sure what the number is,” said
Ng in an interview.
We're getting close to the tail end of the
36-week-long experiment called #change11, or “the mother of all MOOCs.”
How can I tell?
First, I'm getting ready to facilitate my week, exploring Digital
Identities. I'm second-last in the lineup, so the fact that I'm on deck
means the whole undertaking is drawing to a close.
But it's also clear we're winding down because the #change11 conversation
hubs have begun to resemble, uh, ghost-towns. Once there were lively
debates and intense exchanges. As the winter wore into the spring of the
year, though, the tumbleweeds began to tickle.
Note to self: next time you facilitate a MOOC module, pick Week #2, not Week
#35.
Any course that runs from September through May requires stamina. When that
course is voluntary on the part of both learners and facilitators, and runs
as a series of totally separate modules, the drop-off can be fairly
significant. Erm, even my own participation as a student has crawled to a
stop over the last month or two.
I find myself wondering if the other learners will be keener than I've been?
Am I going to throw a MOOC and have nobody show up?
I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm a teacher at heart. I'll put the work into
developing my one-week course whether there are going to be 3 students or
300. But as I'm preparing, I'm thinking about what it means to facilitate in
a truly social, networked, voluntary environment like #change11.
Or the internet.
As the awareness of the MOOC experiment grows, the term is being
increasingly applied to grand-scale enterprises like the Stanford AI course
and MITx. While heady, this blurs some very important distinctions.
The MOOC model from which #change11 originates was built on the connectivist
learning theory of George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Highly social in
format, these courses tend to be experimental, non-linear, and deeply
dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently
direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between
learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the
facilitator.
On the other hand, the MOOC models offered by the big universities tend
towards formalized curricula, content delivery, and verification of
completed learning objectives.
Far more embedded in traditional paradigms of knowledge and teaching, these
courses only harness the connectivity of social media insofar as they enable
masses of people to link themselves to the prestige of a big-name
institution. They offer discussion boards, but their purpose is
content-focused, not connection-focused.
If I were teaching in an MITx-style course, I'd have a very different module
ahead of me, one far more familiar to me as a higher ed instructor.
I've been teaching for eighteen years. I profess to be in favour of
learner-centered classrooms. But until this MOOC module, every single course
I've taught has on some level obliged the students to be there. I am
accustomed to having the institutional powers of status, credentialism, and
grading backing me in the classroom.
In the connectivist MOOC model, I don't.
There is no bonus for learners who participate in my week of #change11. They
won't get a badge at the end, and there is no certification announcing they
completed anything. There's nothing specific for them to complete, unless I
design an exit goal as part of the week's activities. But that would be MY
exit goal: not theirs. They don't get to put the word MIT on their CV. And
while some weeks of the #change11 MOOC have allowed participants to connect
with leaders in the learning and technologies field – Howard Rheingold,
Pierre Levy – I'm among the less well-known of the 30-plus facilitators in
the year's lineup. They won't even get the relational perk of engaging with
somebody famous.
Continued in article
April 29, 2012 message from Mark Lewis
This is an interview with Sebastian Thrun, formerly of
Stanford and still associated with Google. In my ideal
world, every faculty member and a large fraction of the
administration and staff would watch the last half of this
video. The first half is worth watching if you have an
interest in Google Glass, autonomous cars, or Google X
projects in general. The second half talks about his views
and what he is doing in education. He is the person who
taught an AI course online that had 160,000 students enroll
and had 23,000 students complete it. In this interview he
describes how this impacted him so much that he left his
tenured position at Stanford. The lack of personal contact
he talks about in his classroom does not apply in most
Trinity classrooms, however, a cost of $0 for something that
many students find as more personal than a large lecture
hall does have the potential to change the economics of
higher education.
Educating the Net Generation Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger,
Editors
Chapter 1: Introduction by Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE,
and James Oblinger, North Carolina State University
Chapter 2: Is It Age or IT: First Steps Toward
Understanding the Net Generation by Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE, and James
Oblinger, North Carolina State University
Chapter 3: Technology and Learning Expectations of
the Net Generation by Greg Roberts, University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown
Chapter 4: Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not
Just the Cool New Thing by Ben McNeely, North Carolina State University
Chapter 5: The Student’s Perspective by Carie
Windham, North Carolina State University
Chapter 6: Preparing the Academy of Today for the
Learner of Tomorrow by Joel Hartman, Patsy Moskal, and Chuck Dziuban,
University of Central Florida
• Introduction • Generations and Technology
• Emerging Pattern s
• Assessing the Generations in Online Learning
• Learning Engagement, Interaction Value, and Enhanced Learning in the
Generation s
• Responding to Result s
• Excellent Teaching
• Conclusion • Endnote s
• Further Reading
• About the Authors
Chapter 7: Convenience, Communications, and
Control: How Students Use Technology by Robert Kvavik, ECAR and University
of Minnesota
"Just when we thought we had e-learning all figured
out, it's changing again. After years of experimentation and the irrational
exuberance that characterized the late 1990s, we find our views of
e-learning more sober and realistic." In "What Lies Beyond E-Learning?"
(LEARNING CIRCUITS, March 2006), Marc J. Rosenberg suggests that over the
next few years we will see six transformations in the field of e-learning:
1. E-learning will become more than "e-training."
2. E-learning will move to the workplace.
3. Blended learning will be redefined.
4. E-learning will be less course-centric and more
knowledge-centric.
5. E-learning will adapt differently to different
levels of mastery.
From U.K.'s Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University
of Bristol
Social Science Information Gateway
http://sosig.esrc.bris.ac.uk/
WHAT LEADS TO ACHIEVING SUCCESS IN DISTANCE
EDUCATION?
"Achieving Success in Internet-Supported
Learning in Higher Education," released February 1, 2005, reports on the
study of distance education conducted by the Alliance for Higher Education
Competitiveness (A-HEC). A-HEC surveyed 21 colleges and universities to
"uncover best practices in achieving success with the use of the Internet
in higher education." Some of the questions asked by the study included:
"Why do institutions move online? Are there
particular conditions under which e-Learning will be successful?"
"What is the role of leadership and by whom?
What level of investment or commitment is necessary for success?"
"How do institutions evaluate and measure
success?"
"What are the most important and successful
factors for student support and faculty support?"
"Where do institutions get stuck? What are the
key challenges?"
The complete report is available online, at no cost,
at http://www.a-hec.org/e-learning_study.html.
The "core focus" of the nonprofit Alliance
for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) "is on communicating how
higher education leaders are creating positive change by crystallizing their
mission, offering more effective academic programs, defining their role in
society, and putting in place balanced accountability measures." For more
information, go to http://www.a-hec.org/ .
Individual membership in A-HEC is free.
Last year, the media conglomerate Pearson
controlled a shade over 1 percent of the market for learning management
systems (LMS) among traditional colleges, according to the Campus
Computing Project.
This year, Pearson is
taking aim at the other 99 percent.
In a move that could shake the e-learning
industry, the company today
unveiled a new learning management system that
colleges will be able to use for free, without having to pay any of the
licensing or maintenance costs normally associated with the technology.
Pearson’s new platform, called
OpenClass, is only in beta phase; the company does
not expect to take over the LMS market overnight. But by moving to turn the
learning management platform into a free commodity — like campus e-mail has
become for many institutions — Pearson is striking at the foundation of an
industry that currently bills colleges for hundreds of millions per year.
“I think that the announcement really marks
another, and important, nail in the coffin of the proprietary
last-generation learning management system,” says Lev Gonick, CIO of Case
Western Reserve University.
By providing complimentary customer support and
cloud-based hosting, OpenClass purports to underprice even the nominally
free open-source platforms that recently have been
gaining ground in the LMS market.
Hundreds of colleges have defected from Blackboard
-- whose full-service, proprietary platform has ruled the market for more
than a decade -- in favor of open-source alternatives that cost nothing to
license. But while the source code for these systems is free, colleges have
had to pay developers to modify the code and keep the system stable.
OpenClass can be used “absolutely for free,” says
Adrian Sannier, senior vice president of product at Pearson. “No licensing
costs, no costs for maintenance, and no costs for hosting. So this is a freehttp://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm
r offer than Moodle is. It’s a freer offer than any other in the space.”
Outflanking the Market
Pearson, which sells a variety of higher-education
products and services, including textbooks, e-tutoring software and online
courseware, has had
success selling its own proprietary learning
management system, LearningStudio (formerly known as eCollege), to
for-profit colleges. But the company has made fewer inroads with the much
larger nonprofit sector. With OpenClass, Sannier says Pearson is taking aim
at “traditional institutions around the country where professors are the
ones making the decisions about what’s happening in their classrooms” — a
demographic that has long been Blackboard’s stronghold.
“Our intention is to serve every corner of that
instructor-choice marketplace,” says Sannier.
Pearson says it is taking a strategic cue from
Google, which offers its cloud-based e-mail and applications suite to
colleges for free in an effort to secure “mind share” among the students and
professors who use it. Like Google with its Apps for Education — with which
Pearson has partnered for its beta launch — the media conglomerate is hoping
to use OpenClass as a loss leader that points students and professors toward
those products that the company’s higher ed division sees as the future of
its bottom line: e-textbooks, e-tutoring software, and other “digital
content” products.
In "PCs in the Classroom & Open Book Exams" (UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 9,
March 15-22, 2005), Evan Golub asks and supplies some answers to questions
regarding open-book/open-note exams. When classroom computer use is allowed
and encouraged, how can instructors secure the open-book exam environment?
How can cheating be minimized when students are allowed Internet access
during open-book exams? Golub's suggested solutions are available online at
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html
Ubiquity is a free, Web-based publication of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to fostering critical
analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature,
constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology, practices, and
paradigms of the IT profession." For more information, contact: Ubiquity,
email: ubiquity@acm.org ; Web:
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/
For more information on the ACM, contact: ACM, One Astor Plaza, 1515
Broadway, New York, NY 10036, USA; tel: 800-342-6626 or 212-626-0500; Web:
http://www.acm.org/
NEW EDUCAUSE E-BOOK ON THE NET GENERATION
EDUCATING THE NET GENERATION, a new EDUCAUSE
e-book of essays edited by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger,
"explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as
teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and
curriculum." Essays include: "Technology and Learning Expectations of the
Net Generation;" "Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not Just the Cool New
Thing;" "Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations;" "Faculty
Development for the Net Generation;" and "Net Generation Students and
Libraries." The entire book is available online at no cost at
http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/
.
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission
is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of
information technology. For more information, contact: Educause, 4772 Walnut
Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax:
303-440-0461; email:
info@educause.edu; Web:
http://www.educause.edu/
See also:
GROWING UP DIGITAL: THE RISE OF THE NET GENERATION
by Don Tapscott McGraw-Hill, 1999; ISBN: 0-07-063361-4
http://www.growingupdigital.com/
EFFECTIVE E-LEARNING DESIGN
"The unpredictability of the student context and
the mediated relationship with the student require careful attention by the
educational designer to details which might otherwise be managed by the
teacher at the time of instruction." In "Elements of Effective e-Learning
Design" (INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH IN OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING,
March 2005) Andrew R. Brown and Bradley D. Voltz cover six elements of
effective design that can help create effective e-learning delivery. Drawing
upon examples from The Le@rning Federation, an initiative of state and
federal governments of Australia and New Zealand, they discuss lesson
planning, instructional design, creative writing, and software
specification. The paper is available online at
http://www.irrodl.org/content/v6.1/brown_voltz.html
International Review of Research in Open and
Distance Learning (IRRODL) [ISSN 1492-3831] is a free, refereed ejournal
published by Athabasca University - Canada's Open University. For more
information, contact Paula Smith, IRRODL Managing Editor; tel: 780-675-6810;
fax: 780-675-672; email:
irrodl@athabascau.ca
; Web:
http://www.irrodl.org/
The Le@rning Federation (TLF) is an "initiative
designed to create online curriculum materials and the necessary
infrastructure to ensure that teachers and students in Australia and New
Zealand can use these materials to widen and enhance their learning
experiences in the classroom." For more information, see
http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/
RECOMMENDED READING
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to
carolyn_kotlas@unc.ed u for possible
inclusion in this column.
Author Clark Aldrich recommends his new book:
LEARNING BY DOING: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO
SIMULATIONS, COMPUTER GAMES, AND PEDAGOGY IN E-LEARNING AND OTHER
EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES Wiley, April 2005 ISBN: 0-7879-7735-7 hardcover
$60.00 (US)
Description from Wiley website:
"Designed for learning professionals and drawing on
both game creators and instructional designers, Learning by Doing explains
how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of
educational simulation for the right situation. It covers simple approaches
that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer
games and flight simulators. The book role models content as well, written
accessibly with humor, precision, interactivity, and lots of pictures. Many
will also find it a useful tool to improve communication between themselves
and their customers, employees, sponsors, and colleagues."
Aldrich is also author of SIMULATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF LEARNING: AN
INNOVATIVE (AND PERHAPS REVOLUTIONARY) APPROACH TO E-LEARNING. See
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0787969621.html
for more information or to request an evaluation copy of this title.
Answer:
"Putting a Faculty on Distance Education Programs, by William H. Riffee, Syllabus,
February 2003, Page 13
At a Glance: Hybrid
Distance Learning
Hybrid Distance
Learning: A distance learning program using both electronic
delivery and local facilitators or mentors to coach, counsel, and
support students
Ideal
Student/Facilitator Ratio: Approximately 12:1
Facilitator Traits:
Teaching skills, clinical experience, time availability,
compatible philosophy
Facilitator Training:
Training at host university, shadowing current faculty member,
telephone conferences, annual training updates
Compensation: Level
based on current salary for such a professional in the region
where they are located
Quote:
"Traditionally, distance education has been developed as
stand-alone Web-based programs with little interaction between
faculty and students other than through electronic means. The
University of Florida has found that the addition of the
facilitator/mentor faculty has brought a new dimension to
distance-based programs, one that has improved overall quality.
The additional academic experiences available to our distance
education students have put a now-familiar face on our distance
education programs."—Bill Riffee
"The B-School at
Company X," by: Sharon Shinn, BizEd from the AACSB, May/June 2004,
pp. 32-37 (not free online)
Corporate
universities are focused, committed to employee education, and here to stay.
Traditional business schools must learn how to work with them in creative and
productive partnerships.
About
ten years ago, when corporate universities were exploding onto the scene,
sentiment was deeply divided between fear that such institutions would rob
business schools of all their students and conviction that corporate
universities would be a brief and passing phase. It turns out that
neither expectation was true. Today's corporate university is an
entrenched part of the business landscape, working hard to satisfy both its
students and the CEOs of its parent organizations by providing targeted
education that can demonstrably improve performance in the workplace.
Today's corporate university also draws heavily on the expertise of
traditional four-year universities--and some people believe that broader and
stronger partnerships between schools and businesses will shape the future of
company-based education.
While
the phrase "corporate university" has been used to mean everything
from a revamped training department to a degree-granting branch of a major
corporation, it's possible to come up with a more exact description. One
good definition comes courtesy of Mark Allen, director of executive education
at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University,
Culver City, California, and co-author of The Corporate University Handbook.
He believes a corporate university must be a strategic tool that helps
the parent organization achieve its mission through educational activities.
What's key, he stresses, is that whatever training or learning is involved be
tied directly to the strategic mission of the company.
In other
words, nobody goes to Corporate U just to kill a few hours. Such a
school offers learning with a purpose--improving a specific employee's
performance in a specific area of the job in a way that's measurable.
THE
CORPORATE GOALS
Corporate
universities exist to fulfill four main goals: to teach topics like leadership
and communication to executives; to standardize skills and knowledge for
certain jobs within the company; to help the company as a whole develop a
unified culture; and to develop strong networks among employees.
Developing
"soft skills" is something corporate universities do very well, says
Mike Morrison, dean of associate education and development at University of
Toyota in Torrance, California. "Part of it is, we have to,"
he says. "Once people are in the work environment, they see that
the work world is very relational. Problem-solving skills, creativity
and innovation are in much higher demand, and the ability to self-design work
is critical."
Also
critical is the ability to provide mission-specific education with instant
relevance. Tom Doyle, director of Menlo Worldwide's Menlo University in
Dayton, Ohio, says, "Each of our courses is aligned with the strategic
products, services, or value propositions that we take to the marketplace.
There are no electives. You don't have to have a physical education unit
to get through."
Just as
important to many corporations is that their universities help them create a
single image of the company or a standardized protocol. Sometimes, as
with Menlo University, the school is a consolidation of a disparate collection
of training programs that used to be centered in different departments or
physical locations.
"Principles for Building Success
in Online Education, by Jacqueline Moloney and Steven Tello, Syllabus, February
2003, pp. 15-17 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7252
As higher education
adminstrators, we faced numerous challenges beginning in 1996 when we launched
our online efforts at UMass-Lowell. Which courses or programs to migrate, what
faculty to involve, and which platform to use are just a few of the many
complex decisions that institutions must confront in building online programs.
To help others, we've created a rubric that covers five strategic areas of
decision making:
Selection of
courses and programs
Faculty
development, support, and incentives
Technology and
infrastructure
Redesign of
student services
Program and course
evaluation
A set of four
operating principles that evolved with the success of our program exist as
important guides:
Adhere to your
campus mission
Use traditional
academic structures and faculty to accelerate the development of online
education
Start small, build
incrementally, and think scalability
Build learning
communities that push the limits of new technology
Principles in
Action
Consistent with the principles above, UMass-Lowell's online education program
started very small, with a handful of pioneering faculty. Like many public
universities, we were trying to identify new markets that could bring needed
revenues to the campus and expand access to our programs. Therefore, the
online program was initiated through the Division of Continuing, Corporate and
Distance Education (CCDE) to address those campus needs. As a self-supporting
organization, CCDE was to identify strategies that would generate sufficient
revenues to cover program development and delivery costs. Working through
decisions by employing the principles previously outlined, we were able to
overcome the obstacles that often inhibit the growth of online education.
The online program at
UMass-Lowell now offers six full degree programs and enrolls approximately
6,000 per year. It is one of the largest online programs in New England and is
a major contributor to UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts
system-wide effort to provide online education. The program at Lowell is
entirely self-supporting and returns significant revenues to the campus that
seed continuous growth. Below, we examine some of our formative decisions in
the five strategic areas, and consider the operating principles that guided
our choices.
Yes it was live chat (synchronous) using voice (which
also had a text chat box). In s particular class we would meet every other
week in the evening around 7/8. I think they lasted 1 hr to 1 1/2 hr (I can
not recall exactly). I took two classes a semester so I would attend two live
chats for every two weeks. The instructors would coordinate to ensure they
would not plan the class for the same evening. In addition to the live chat,
we also used another program that I just can not remember the name of it (I
think it might have been called Placeware). It was really neat because it
looked like an auditorium and you were a little character (or may I say a
colored dot). You could raise your hand, ask a question, type text, etc. We
would use the chat program where he would talk as he conducted the
presentation in the other program. If you had a question you would raise your
hand & then use the live chat to talk. The program was starting to get
more advanced as I graduated.
The Master's of Accounting program that I went
through (as I understand it from the professor I had) was one of the first to
go online for this particular program. I was in the first graduating class
which started April of 2000 and completed September 2001. I attended Nova
Southeastern University in Florida. ( http://emacc.huizenga.nova.edu/
)
I know that some feel that live chat (synchronous)
might not work due to time zones and some feel that the text works just as
well. From my personal experience and opinion I feel that a Master's program
in "Accounting" needs more than just text written but interaction
between your fellow classmates too. I feel it was more productive because it
is like you are sitting in a class listening to the instructor and you have
the opportunity to ask a question by typing in the box & then the
instructor sees it & answers it with his voice. Additionally, you cover
much more subject area than you can with a text chat. It really worked well.
Again, these are my opinions and each person has his
own. This is what makes us unique.
Laurie
-----Original Message-----
Subject: Re: peer evaluation of a web-based course
Laurie:
When you say "live" chat, are you
referring to the chats in which all students come together at the same time
(synchronous)? I tried to initiate this type of chat in my online class and
found students's schedules to be an issue.
Has anyone tried putting students into groups to do
synchronous chatting about assignments? How did this work for your class?
Lauretta A. Cooper, MBA, CPA
Delaware Technical & Community College Terry Campus
In September 2003, Bonnie B. Mullinix
and David McCurry provide a helpful road map for online education—-in the form
of an annotated "webliography" of resource centers, professional
organizations, and other sites that promote the discussion and development of
technology-enhanced teaching and learning environments --- http://64.124.14.173/default.asp?show=article&id=1002
Bonk, C. J., Cummings, J. A., Hara,
N., Fischler, R. B., & Lee, S. M. (2000). A ten level web integration
continuum for higher education: New resources, activities, partners, courses,
and markets. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://php.indiana.edu/~cjbonk/paper/edmdia99.html
Carlén, U. (2002, November).
Typology of online learning communities. Paper presented at the
NetLearning2002 conference, Ronneby, Sweden. Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://www.learnloop.org/olc/typologyOLC.pdf
Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S.
C. (1996, October). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever.
American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 3-6. Retrieved August 30,
2003, from http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/seven.html
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding
media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Stammen, R. M. (2001, January). Basic
understandings for developing learning media for the classroom and beyond.
Learning Technology, 3(1). Retrieved August 30, 2003, from http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/january2001/#18
Testa, A. M. (2000). Seven principles
for good practice in teaching and technology. In R. Cole (Ed.), Issues in
web-based pedagogy: A critical primer (pp. 237-245). Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press.
What Micro-Market
Segment is Right for Your Institution?
What is the state of
distance learning and online learning in higher education today? It is in a
state of evolution and development. The best strategy for traditional
non-profit institutions may be to develop a “micro-market segment” in
distance learning that is right for your institution. A possible strategy
follows:
Do what you are
now doing, but do it with effective use of the technologies. This means
“sticking close” to your areas of expertise, but developing faculty
and student experience at using online and distance technologies
effectively.
Select or identify
a program of study that expresses and embodies your institution’s
mission. Then plan how to invest resources, time, and expertise in making
that program and its experiences available in both Web-enhanced online and
outreach modes.
Reach out to
students who have similar learning and career needs as your current
students, but fewer hours per week to study.
Expand your
geographic reach to those similar students—whether it is by 30, 300, or
3,000 miles.
Pilot and test
your outreach capability by special events and programs for your existing
students, to your alumni, and to corporate and professionals as
appropriate.
Determine if you
need help in administration of distance/remote students, marketing to and
finding these students.
Education, and
particularly e-learning, is a huge growth market for the foreseeable future.
Depending on where you want to be, you and your institution will be a part of
it. Online and distance learning may not be a silver bullet, but it might be
one way for your institution to be reach out and provide valuable learning
experiences, enriching your on-campus students as well as serving more remote
and part-time students. “Focus and Extend”—focus on your expertise and
extend out to similar students who can now reach you via the Internet.
Use great care in
selecting online graduate degrees. Many are frauds. Some are legitimate,
especially is selected areas of study such as masters and doctorates in education,
information technology, and business
Sylvan's video content for the
Wharton School, , Johns Hopkins University (medical), and the USC Marshall School of
Business,
Training
Credential/Certification
Degree Credits
Undergraduate Degrees
Graduate Degrees
Multiple University Partnerships
Sometimes these
partnerships are for dedicated programs. For example Florida State University and
the Jacksonville Community College partnered to deliver training and education courses for
the U.S. Internal Revenue Service
The Haas School of
Business at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan Business
School, and the Darden School at the University of Virginia will offer each other's
students online classes specializing in e-business.
Example:
Virtually all universities in the University of Wisconsin system are cooperating of
delivery on selected online degree programs.
Florida State University contracted to develop courses for Open University
JEBNET: Jesuit
colleges team up to offer onsite and online programs http://www.jebnet.org/
(Includes an MBA program in China.)
General Electric U.
Sun Microsystems U.
Sears University
Motorola Univ.
There are many
fraudulent degree programs. Buyer beware. In additon to online graduate
degrees given by reputable corporations like Motorola, there are some respected graduate
degrees.Those listed below are not frauds.
Revenue and Accreditation Hurdles Facing
Corporate Universities
One thing that just does not seem to work is a
university commenced by a major publishing house. McGraw-Hill World University was
virtually stillborn at the date of birth as a degree-granting institution. It
evolved into McGraw-Hill Online Learning ( http://www.mhonlinelearning.com/
) that does offer some interactive training materials, but the original concept of an
online university ( having distance education courses for college credit) is dead and
buried. Powerful companies like Microsoft Corporation started up and then abandoned
going it alone in establishing new online universities.
The last venturesome publishing company to start
a university and fight to get it accredited is now giving up on the idea of having its own
virtual university --- http://www.harcourthighered.com/index.html
Harcourt Higher Education University was purchased by a huge publishing conglomerate
called Thompson Learning See http://www.thomsonlearning.com/harcourt/ .
Thomson had high hopes, but soon faced the reality that it is probably impossible to
compete with established universities in training and education markets.
The Thomson Corporation has
announced that it will not continue to operate Harcourt Higher Education: An Online
College as an independent degree-granting institution. Harcourt Higher Education will
close on August 27, 2001. The closing is the result of a change of ownership, which
occurred on July 13, 2001, when the Thomson Corporation purchased the online college from
Harcourt General, Inc.
From Syllabus e-News on August 7, 2001
Online College to Close Doors
Harcourt Higher Education, which
launched an online for-profit college in Massachusetts last year, is closing the school's
virtual doors Sept. 28. Remaining students will have their credentials reviewed by the
U.S. Open University, the American affiliate of the Open University in England.
We can only speculate as to the complex reasons
why publishing companies start up degree-granting virtual universities and subsequently
abandon efforts provide credit courses and degrees online.
Enormous Revenue Shortfall (Forecast of 20,000 students in the first year;
Reality turned up 20 students)
"E-COLLEGES FLUNK OUT," By: Elisabeth
Goodridge, Information Week, August 6, 2001, Page 10
College students
appear to prefer classroom instruction over online offerings.
Print and online
media company Thomson Corp. said last week it plans to close its recently acquired,
for-profit online university, Harcourt Higher Education. Harcourt opened with much
fanfare a year ago, projecting 20,000 enrollees within five years, but only 20 to 30
students have been attending.
Facing problems from
accreditation to funding, online universities have been struggling mightily--in stark
contrast to the success of the overall E-learning market. A possible solution?
E-learning expert Elliott Masie predicts "more and more creative partnerships between
traditional universities and online ones."
Roosters Guarding the Hen House
Publishing houses failed to gain accreditations. I suspect that major reason is that
the AACSB and other accrediting bodies have made it virtually impossible for corporations
to obtain accreditation for startup learning corporations that are not partnered with
established colleges and universities. In the U.S., a handful of corporations have
received regional accreditation (e.g., The University of Phoenix and Jones International
Corporation), but these were established and had a history of granting degrees prior to
seeking accreditation. In business higher education, business corporations face a
nearly impossible hurdle of achieving business school accreditation ( see http://businessmajors.about.com/library/weekly/aa050499.htm
) since respected accrediting bodies are totally controlled by the present educational
institutions (usually established business school deans who behave like roosters guarding
the hen house). Special accrediting bodies for online programs have sprung up, but
these have not achieved sufficient prestige vis-ŕ-vis established accrediting
bodies.
All About Accreditation:A brief overview of what you really need to know about accreditation, including GAAP
(Generally Accepted Accrediting Practices). Yes, there really are fake accrediting
agencies, and yes some disreputable schools do lie. This simple set of rules tells how to
sort out truth from fiction. (The acronym is, of course, borrowed from the field of
accounting. GAAP standards are the highest to which accountants can be held, and we feel
that accreditation should be viewed as equally serious.)
GAAP-Approved Accrediting
Agencies:A listing of all recognized accrediting agencies, national,
regional, and professional, with links that will allow you to check out schools.
Agencies Not Recognized
Under GAAP:A list of agencies that have been claimed as accreditors by a
number of schools, some totally phony, some well-intentioned but not recognized.
FAQs: Some
simple questions and answers about accreditation and, especially, unaccredited schools.
Question:
Is lack of accreditation the main reason why corporate universities such as McGraw-Hill
World University, Harcourt Higher Education University, Microsoft University, and other
corporations have failed in their attempts to compete with established universities?
Bob Jensen's Answer:
Although the minimum accreditation (necessary for transferring of credits to other
colleges) is a very important cause of failure in the first few years of
attempting to attract online students, it is not the main cause of failure. Many
(most) of the courses available online were training courses for which college credit
transfer is not an issue.
Why did the University of Wisconsin (U of W) swell with over 100,000 registered
online students while Harcourt Higher Education University (HHWU) struggled to get 20
registered?
Let me begin to answer my own question with two questions. If you want to take an
online training or education course from your house in Wisconsin's town of Appleton, would
you prefer to pay more much more for the course from HHWU than a low-priced tuition for
Wisconsin residents at the U of W. If you were a resident of Algona, Iowa and the
price was the same for the course whether you registered at HHWU or U of W, would you
choose U of W? My guess is that in both cases, students would choose U of W, because
the University of Wisconsin has a long-term tradition for quality and is likely to be more
easily recognized for quality on the students' transcripts.
Why can the University of Wisconsin offer a much larger curriculum than corporate
universities?
The University of Wisconsin had a huge infrastructure for distance education long before
the age of the Internet. Televised distance education across the state has been in
place for over 30 years. Extension courses have been given around the entire State
of Wisconsin for many decades. The University of Wisconsin's information technology
system is already in place at a cost of millions upon millions of dollars. There are
tremendous economies of scale for the University of Wisconsin to offer a huge online
curriculum for training and education vis-ŕ-vis a startup corporate university starting
from virtually scratch.
What target market feels more closely attached to the University of Wisconsin than
some startup corporate university?
The answer is obvious. It's the enormous market comprised of alumni and families of
alumni from every college and university in the University of Wisconsin system of
state-supported schools.
What if a famous business firm such as Microsoft Corporation or Accenture (formerly
Andersen Consulting) elected to offer a prestigious combination of executive training and
education to only upper-level management in major international corporations? What
are the problems in targeting to business executives?
This target market is already carved out by alumni of elite schools such as Stanford,
Harvard, Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, London School of Economics, Duke, University
of Michigan, University of Texas, and the other universities repeatedly ranked among the
top 50 business schools in the nation. Business executives are more often than not
snobs when it comes to universities in the peer set of "their" alma
maters. Logos of top universities are worth billions in the rising executive onsite
and online training and education market. UNext Corporation recognized this, and
this is the reason why the its first major step in developing an online executive
education program was to partner with five of the leading business schools in the world.
Why does one corporate university, The
University of Phoenix, prosper when others fail or limp along with costs exceeding
revenues?
The University of Phoenix is the world's largest private university. The reason for
its success is largely due to a tradition of quality since 1976. This does not mean
that quality has always been high for every course over decades of operation, but each
year this school seems to grow and offer better and better courses. Since most of
its revenues still come from onsite courses, it is not clear that the school would prosper
if it became solely an online university. The school is probably further along on
the learning curve than most other schools in terms of adult learners. It offers a
large number of very dedicated and experienced full-time and part-time faculty. It
understands the importance of small classes and close communications between students and
other students and instructors. It seems to fill a niche that traditional colleges
and universities have overlooked.
What major corporation signed with a major state university to receive online MBA
degrees in finance?
"Deere & Company Turns to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business For
Online MBA Degrees in Finance," Yahoo Press Release, October 8, 2001 --- http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011008/cgm034_1.html
Due to increasing student enrollment, teacher retirements, and
class size reduction, California faces a crucial shortage of elementary school teachers,
which is expected to intensify over the next ten years. In response to the problem, the
Cali-fornia State University is now offering an opportunity for undergraduates to earn
their liberal studies degree through Liberal Studies Online, an online degree completion
program for individuals working toward a California teaching credential. Administered
through CSU Chico, online courses will originate from the Chico campus and CSU Sacramento.
The first online courses will be available beginning fall 2001.
US Military --- Over 4,000 training and education courses from a variety of sources,
including US Air University.
The U.S. IRS offers Internet education opportunities. IRS employees who want to get
ahead in the organization are heading back to the classroom - 21st century style. College
level courses in accounting, finance, tax law, and other business subjects will be
available on the Internet to IRS employees. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/46816/101
Dedicated degree programs within universities such as the Ernst&Young masters
programs and the PwC masters of accounting or masters of assurance services programs at
various universities and the PwC MBA program at the University of Georgia.
Certification Examination Review Courses such as CPA review courses
InstantKnowledge.com integrates
the worlds of technology and education to help you study.
Our scholars create high quality,
peer-reviewed educational materials, the first of which is the series of literary
KnowledgeNotes now available on our site. Along with our technology partners, our team is
developing Seek.Find. Seek.Find. will be a searchable database that gives you twenty-four
hour access to over a million journal articles and textbooks.
Knowledge Portals
The many knowledge portals that are springing up like wildfire. These databases
contain vast databases of knowledge that can be accessed either for free or for fees
ranging from cheap to very expensive. ---http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm
Prestige Logo and Ranking for
Quality in Such Surveys as the U.S. News
Rankings
Highly important
in attracting top onsite and online students.
Extremely
important for attracting top students and partnerings with business firms and
government.
For example, the nearly $100,000
tuition for Duke's Virtual MBA is paid by corporate partners who pay to send one or more
students per year.
For example, firms such as E&Y and PwC pay millions to have high
ranking universities offer degree programs dedicated to their employees.
Alumni Base and Power Within
Business Firms and Government
Important when
attracting new students such as children of alumni
Highly increased if alumni work actively to promote online training
and education programs of their alma maters
Comparative Advantage
Year 2000
Importance
Year 2020
Importance
Reputation for high quality
preparatory, training, and education of minority students, handicapped students, and
religious-affiliated students
Highly important
in attracting and retaining onsite and online students
Extremely
important for attracting top students and partnerings with business firms and government.
For example, the IRS will be paying millions to Jacksonville Community
College to provide online accounting training and education courses to virtually all IRS
employees, many of whom are minorities.
Gallaudet University for the hearing impaired has a reputation for
dealing with the special needs for the hearing impaired.
Brigham Young University is the flagship university for the Mormon
Church.
Residential and Athletic
Participation Infrastructure
on Campus
Highly Important
for Onsite Students
Highly Important
for Onsite Students,
but there will be new developments in eDorms (University of
Maryland)
Geographic Location
Very important to
virtually all onsite resident and commuting students within a region
Greatly diminished except as an
attraction to full-time resident students (e.g., the attraction of the mountains, the
ocean, the urban attractions, foreign travel, etc.) HDTV may restore some
importance to geography since TV stations broadcast locally.
Comparative Advantage
Year 2000
Importance
Year 2020
Importance
Language
Very important to
all onsite and online students
Greatly diminished as language choices increase for online
students.
For example, language students may
interact online and in teleconferencing with foreign businesses, cafes, schools, and
homes.
Webcam shopping for a dress in Paris.
Financial Endowment
Very important for
all onsite and online programs
Highly important
for physical plant and onsite programs. For online programs, equity capital markets will be more important
Comparative Advantage
Year 2000
Importance
Year 2020
Importance
Full-Line Curriculum
Very important for
onsite programs and less important for online programs
Greatly diminished importance as highly specialized online programs
begin to supplement both online and onsite curricula
Research Reputation
Very important for
attracting top faculty and funding
Greatly diminished importance as online programs begin to provide
better compensation packages and lifestyle choices to work at home where home happens to
be located
Some corporate providers are partnering with colleges and universities
and providing their own, possibly competing, programs. For example, Ernst &
Young created Intellinex for delivering its own training and
education programs and partnered with Notre Dame University and the University of Virginia
to deliver masters of accounting education to newly hired graduates in E&Y.
For its consulting division, PwC built a training campus in Tampa and
contracted with the University of Georgia to deliver an online MBA program to PwC
employees.
Despite Popularity, Researcher Finds Not Everyone Can
Successfully Learn Through Online Courses PhysOrg, February 25, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news123168113.html
Since the
1990s, online courses have provided an opportunity for busy adults to
continue their education by completing courses in the comfort of their own
homes. However, this may not be the best solution for everyone. A researcher
at the University of Missouri has found some students may find success in
these types of courses more easily than others.
Shawna L. Strickland, clinical assistant professor
in the MU School of Health Professions, studied the demographics and
personality types of distance learners.
“Correlations between learning styles and success
in distance education have shown to be inconclusive,” Strickland said.
“However, one common theme reappears: the successful traits of a distance
learner are similar to the successful traits of an adult learner in
traditional educational settings.”
With a mere 30 percent of distance learners
actually completing their courses, learning more about the characteristics
of these students would help educators structure online courses to be as
beneficial as possible. Considering the lack of institutional support and
isolation involved in the nature of online courses, success in these courses
requires a person that is determined and responsible, Strickland said.
“The success of distance learning is dependent on
communication among the learner, his or her peers and the instructor,”
Strickland said. “To encourage success in distance learning, it is necessary
to evaluate each individual’s needs on a case-by-case basis.”
One trait that aids in distance learning is related
to personality type. Strickland found those with quiet, introverted
personalities are more likely to feel comfortable with online learning
courses. Shy individuals have a tendency to be uninvolved in the typical
classroom setting. Online courses allow them to complete work on their own
with a degree of anonymity.
“Distance learning allows the learner to overcome
traditional barriers to learning such as location, disabilities, time
constraints and familial obligations,” Strickland said. “However, not every
learner will be successful in a distance learning environment.”
The study – “Understanding Successful
Characteristics of Adult Learners” – was published in the most recent
edition of Respiratory Care Education Annual.
Jensen Comment
The source of this publication is rather unusual and surprising ---
Respiratory Care Education Annual.
Bob Jensen's threads on asynchronous learning include the following links:
Walter S. Baer
Senior Policy Analyst
RAND Corporation
American higher education faces formidable challenges caused by
changing student demographics, severe financial constraints, and lingering institutional
rigidities. (See Footnote 1) At the same time, increased demands are being placed on
higher education to provide greater student access to education, better undergraduate
programs, and increased productivity. To address both sets of issues, institutions of
higher education are turning to new communications and information technologies that
promise to increase access, improve the quality of instruction, and (perhaps) control
costs.
The use of older technologies for distance learning in
post-secondary education (See Footnote 2) has already been shown to be cost-effective in
such diverse settings as the Open University in the United Kingdom, four-year and
community colleges in the United States, satellite-delivered video courses for engineers
and other professionals, and corporate and military training. Now the Internet is being
proposed as the preferred technology to improve instruction, increase access, and raise
productivity in higher education. (See Footnote 3) College and university instructors now
routinely post their syllabi and course readings to the World Wide Web. A few use lectures
and other instructional materials available on the Web in their own courses. A growing
number of schools offer at least some extension or degree- credit courses over the
Internet. And more ambitious plans are in various stages of preparation or early
implementation --- plans for entire virtual universities that use the Internet to
reach geographically dispersed students.
Two distinct models guide current efforts to make use of the
Internet in higher education. The first approach seeks to improve existing forms and structures of post-secondary
instruction --- to create "better, faster, cheaper" versions of today's courses
and curricula by means of the Internet. This model emphasizes building an on-campus
information infrastructure that provides (or will provide) high-speed Internet
connectivity to all students, faculty, administrators, and staff. Faculty then can use
this infrastructure to improve and supplement traditional courses and degree programs.
Library holdings can be digitized and made available both on-and off-campus. (See Footnote
4). Administrative processes can be speeded up and simplified. And although the focus
remains on on-campus instruction, this new information infrastructure can facilitate
distance learning for many categories of nontraditional, off-campus students. While this
model of Internet use in higher education requires many changes among faculty, student,
and administrative roles and functions, it keeps most
existing institutional structures and faculty roles intact.
A different, more radical, model envisions the Internet as instrumental to a fundamental change in the
processes and organizational structure of post- secondary teaching and learning. According
to this view, the Internet can transform higher education into student-centered learning rather than institution- and faculty-centered instruction. It can allow agile institutions --- old and new --- to
leapfrog existing academic structures and establish direct links to post-secondary
students. It can encourage new collaborative arrangements between academic institutions
and for-profit entrepreneurs and permit these partnerships to extend their reach
nationally and internationally. It can accommodate student demand for post-secondary
education in new ways that are basically campus-independent. If the markets for
post-secondary education evolve in this manner, the Internet may well threaten existing
institutions of higher education much more than it will support them. Taking this view,
celebrated management consultant and social commentator Peter Drucker recently
remarked: "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. .
. . The college won't survive as a residential institution."
"THE HOTTEST CAMPUS ON THE INTERNET Duke's pricey online B-school program is
winning raves from students and rivals," Business Week, October 27, 1997 --- http://www.businessweek.com/1997/42/b3549015.htm
The Duke MBA - Global Executive
is every bit as academically demanding as Duke's other two MBA programs. Global Executive
uses the same faculty base, the same rigorous grading standards, and provides the same
Duke degree. However, the content has been adjusted to include more global issues and
strategies to serve a participant population that has far more global management
experience.
Like most other Executive MBA
programs, the Global Executive program is a lock-step curriculum, meaning that all
students take all courses. The courses are targeted at general managers who have or will
soon assume global responsibilities. The program is designed for those who want to enhance
their career path within their existing company.
International Residencies:
International residencies are an important ingredient in a global MBA program as they add
to the value and richness of the classroom component by providing various lenses (social,
economic, cultural, etc.) through which to view various economies and systems. Instead of
simply studying about an economy, Fuqua provides an experiential component which adds
value to the learning experience ...
Global Student body: Unlike
traditional Executive MBA programs which usually have a regional draw, the flexibility of
Global Executive accommodates a student body from around the globe. Not only are the
students diverse geographically, but they are also diverse in the types of global
management experiences that they bring to the classroom.
For the class entering in May 2001, tuition is $95,000. Tuition
includes all educational expenses, a state-of-the-art laptop computer, portable printer,
academic books and other class materials, and lodging and meals during the five
residential sessions. The tuition does not include travel to and from the residential
sites.
Cross-Continent MBA --- --- http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/admin/cc/cc_home.html Following on the heels of its Global MBA online success, Duke introduced a second
online program called the Cross-Continent MBA and located its headquarters in
Frankfurt. While in Germany in the Summer of
2001, I had dinner with Tom Keller, former Dean of Duke's Fuqua School of Business and
Dean of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program. Tom spent two years in the Frankfort
headquarters of Duke's Cross-Continent MBA Program. This program is quite different
from the online Global Executive MBA Program, although both are asynchronous online
programs and used some overlapping course materials.
The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program allows high-potential
managers to earn an internationally-focused MBA degree from Duke University in less than
two years, utilizing a format that minimizes the disruption of careers and family life. It
is designed for individuals with three to nine years professional work experience.
The Duke MBA - Cross Continent program will contain course work
with a global emphasis in the subject areas of Management, Marketing, Operations,
Economics, Finance, Accounting, Strategy and Decision Sciences.
Students will complete 11 core courses, four elective courses and
one integrative capstone course to earn their MBA degree. Two courses will be completed
during each of the eight terms of the program. Depending upon their choice of electives,
students may choose to complete the one-week residency requirements for their sixth and
seventh terms at either Fuqua School of Business location in North America or Europe.
The two classes - one on each continent - will be brought even
closer together through a transfer requirement built into the program. During the third
term, half of the class from Europe will attend the North American residential session and
vice versa. In the fourth term, the other half of each class trades locations for one week
of residential learning. After the transfer residencies, the students resume their
coursework using the same Internet mediated learning methods as before, but with global
virtual teams that have now met in a face-to-face setting
World-Class Resources
When you're linked to Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, you're connected to a
world of resources residing on a network with robust bandwidth capabilities. Duke MBA
students have secure access to the Duke and Fuqua business library databases as well as a
network of Duke faculty and outside experts.
World-Wide Content Delivery
The virtual classroom can take on many different forms. Here, a faculty member prepares a
macroeconomics lecture for distribution via CD ROM and/or the Internet. Students will
download this lecture in a given week of study and follow up with discussion and team
projects.
Bulletin Board Discussion
Rich threads of conversation occur during this asynchronous mode of communication.
Professors and guest lecturers can moderate the discussion to keep learning focused.
Real-Time Chat Session
Occurs between students and classmates as well as faculty. Here, a student in Europe
discusses an assignment with a professor in the United States.
USC Enters the Picture
Not too long ago, officials at the University of Southern
California’s education school approached Katzman about endowing a chair in
educational entrepreneurship. Katzman laughed out loud, he admits, about the
idea of a chair in “entrepreneurship” housed at an education school, given the
reputation of teacher training academies as innovation backwaters. But
Gallagher, who has sought to remake the Rossier school since becoming dean at
USC in 2000, ultimately sold Katzman on her vision of an innovative education
school, noting among other things that she had eliminated both its Ph.D. and
Ed.D. programs, refashioned the Ed.D. and re-established a tiny Ph.D. program,
and wiped out the college’s undergraduate teacher education program in favor of
its master’s program. “We’re not afraid as a faculty to make decisions that are
innovative, that we think can solve specific problems, even if no one else is
doing them,” Gallagher says. One of those “problems,” she notes, is the “sense
of urgency about coming up with innovative solutions to the shortage of teachers
in high-need schools.”
Doug Lederman, "Online Learning, Upscale (and Scaled Up)," Inside
Higher Ed, September 12, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/12/2tor Jensen Comment
This article also deals with the controversy of for-profit higher education.
A Distance Education
Partnership Between the University of Akron and Kent State University
"Schools collaborate to create Online Learning," Syllabus, February
2003, pp. 21-33 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7259
Two of Ohio's largest
universities are teaming to create a collaborative online learning system that
will dramatically expand their teaching and research opportunities, while
reducing information technology costs. A 20-minute drive apart, these
universities have combined enrollments of 60,000, with more than 400 programs
and 1,400 faculty members. The University of Akron (UA) and Kent State
University (KSU) are using WebCT's academic enterprise system, WebCT Vista, to
create a "shared services model" for online learning. This model for
online learning will allow the two universities to share technology, course
content, research, and faculty, which could ultimately serve other Ohio
universities and the K-12 community.
Especially beneficial
for large, multi-institution deployments, WebCT Vista is an eLearning platform
that includes a broad range of course development and delivery, content
management, and learning information management capabilities. These are all
supported by an extensible, enterprise-class architecture. WebCT Vista gives
institutions of higher education first-time access to aggregate student
learning data at the institutional level, extending the capacity for colleges
and universities to access and strategically leverage learning information
beyond an individual classroom.
Stretching Resources
Currently, UA and KSU are in the process of Web-enhancing classroom courses
that they have in common with interactive exercises, threaded discussion
groups, chats, and virtual-classroom activities. The universities also hope to
create pure distance learning courses, in which all activities take place over
the Internet. The intent is to improve education and research, and to stretch
scarce resources. Dr. Rosemary DuMont, Associate VP of Academic Technology
Services for KSU, explains, "UA and KSU began this initiative because of
concern about student success. Both universities are extremely
student-focused. WebCT Vista provides research data for making decisions in
the future regarding student retention." Over the next five years, UA and
KSU could predictably save over one million dollars in software and hardware
costs. The long-term goal is for UA and KSU to become a national eLearning
provider by taking the shared services model to Internet2, a high-performance
network that connects 200 universities. This could generate additional revenue
and prestige for both universities.
Mike Giannone,
Communications Officer at UA, says, "We will be able to develop an
eLearning curriculum for any given program by splitting, rather than
duplicating the effort. This collaboration will broaden students' exposure to
programs they might otherwise miss, while exposing faculty to research and
best practices from an expanded group of peers. It offers students at both
schools more choices in the classes they take, and where and how they will
take them. The two universities will also share grants, content, and the
ability to analyze a combined pool of learning data collected by WebCT
Vista." Dr. Paul L. Gaston, provost of KSU, exclaims, "We are
excited to be able to offer an even broader range of educational opportunities
to our students through this collaboration! We already share academic
programs, so sharing online resources is a natural next step."
Collaborative
Teaching and Research Shared services between UA and KSU are the brain child
of Dr. Thomas Gaylord, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at UA. His
vision initially created the project and continues to drive it. Dr. Gaylord
explains, "The greatest paradigm shift for education is occurring now—it
is a wonderful enlightenment. It is time to re-define what our students are;
what our faculties are; what constitutes accredibility, and so forth.
Partnerships are the ‘right' thing to do. For example, why do numerous
individual universities produce Algebra I online … when collaboration makes
sense? The University of Akron and Kent State University will have educational
advantages over other universities in the region with probably the single,
most important educational technology tool for enhancing their long-range
instructional vitalities in the coming years." Because of the strategic
impact of eLearning on both institutions, UA President, Dr. Luis M. Proenza
and KSU President, Dr. Carol A. Cartwright, came together, with Dr. Gaylord,
Dr. DuMont, and others, to drive this collaboration. Under the direction of
Dr. Gaylord and Dr. DuMont, the two universities have installed a new
high-speed fiber optic line, "GigaMAN," to connect their information
technology systems and act as a bridge for collaborative teaching and
research. Dr. Terry L Hickey, Senior Vice President and Provost at UA,
explains, "In addition to partnering with Kent State, we eventually
envision offering a shared resource for other northeastern Ohio schools as
well as the private sector
The concept of knowledge trails was really exciting, and I am
sorry that the effort had to be abandoned at Fathom. Due to cash flow
losses, Columbia University pulled the plug on Fathom. But an older
Knowledge Trails illustration indicates how exciting this could have been.
Ninth House Network™, the leading broadband
e-learning environment for organizational development, today announced the launch of its
new corporate web site at www.NinthHouse.com . The
new web site, which highlights Ninth House Network’s e-learning solutions, features a
comprehensive e-learning resource center available to the general public, providing tools,
information, white papers, relevant articles and related links that help further the
understanding of the role that e-learning plays in organizational transformation.
The Ninth House Network web site features insight from
leading business minds on a wide range of topics, including change management, building
successful alliances and partnerships, team building, building community, management,
innovation and customer service. Using a combination of streaming video, readable
interviews, interactive web casts and related articles and books, Ninth House Network
provides visitor access to business leaders such as Tom Peters, Ken Blanchard, Larraine
Segil, Peter Senge and Clifton Taulbert.
Jensen Comment
Although these are not all of the "top" scholarships, these are very important
scholarships for students to consider. I consider the top scholarships to
include the full-ride scholarships offered by virtually all universities such as
the Ivy League schools' full-ride scholarships for low income students that
cover tuition, room, board, and other incidentals. A small wave of scholarships
is commencing to form for free medical school education at NYU and Cornell.
There's also a difference between learning versus transcript credits and
badges/certifications. Thousands of MOOC courses provide free learning to
anybody from the most prestigious universities in the world. However, earning
transcript or certification credit requires some form of verification of what
students learn, and verification requires fees in most instances. But the
learning itself is free ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
This
section should be read by all professionals in higher education. It brings us up to
date on trends in distance education both in private corporations and traditional colleges
and universities. It is a great source for updating my threads and road show on such
topics at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
There is to much in this Special Report to summarize in one module of New
Bookmarks. The Table of Contents is as follows:
The Reality
Big money is pouring into the business of education. But it's
too soon to tell whether there will be any payoff.
The Old College Try
Traditional universities are taking to the Net with a wide
range of strategies.
Business Plan
A look at all the different ways companies hope to make money
from online education.
Something Ventured
Venture capitalists have dramatically increased their
investments in e-learning.
Off Campus
Private virtual universities challenge many of the assumptions
long held by educators. Their own challenge: survival.
New Chapter
Libraries aren't going away. But they are going to be very
different.
Teaching Old Dogs
Traditional academic publishers are scrambling to adapt to the
online world.
Spanish Lessons
An entrepreneur wants to bring U.S. universities to Spaniards
-- in their own language.
Expelled!
The future of e-commerce will no doubt be littered with failed
education companies.
A New Language
Companies that teach English in Asia see their business
quickly being transformed by the Web.
Going Mobile
A Dutch university aims to teach students on the run,
developing, in conjunction with several companies, Europe's first common wireless standard
geared toward education applications.
Like Clockwork
Switzerland is putting the Internet to work to relieve crowded
universities and improve teaching practices -- both while keeping down costs.
Tools of the Future
Thanks to technology, K-12 will never look the same. Companies
are plying a host of new offerings -- from hardware and interactive software to
Internet-related tools -- to schools.
His Own Story
Novelist Reynolds Price talks about teaching, writing and the
literary merits of e-mail.
The Leisure Class
Online instruction gives people the chance to learn just about
anything, from the comfort of their own home. Anybody want to be a beekeeper?
Tales Out of School
Online classes can be tough to find, hard to sign up for --
and a bore once you get there.
All Dressed Up...
Schools may find they have the computer equipment, but no way
to use it. Here's how one school and a networking firm found an answer. Do's and Don'ts Of
Web Classes How can first-time Web students succeed in the world of online education? See
a list of tips to embrace and pitfalls to avoid.
Working Out Online Kinks
Fettes College plans to start broadcasting live and recorded
classroom lectures over the Internet to paid subscribers by year's end. Will it succeed?
WSJ.com Discussions: Universities Online
What was your online learning experience like? Can the online
campus ever replace the real one? What improvements are needed? Join an online discussion.
Future Learning
What do you think the classroom of the future will look like?
How can educators, parents and students make the best use of new technology? Join an
online discussion.
The Education Business
Can online education companies be profitable and educate
students at the same time? Which companies do you think will prosper in the online
education field? Join an online discussion.
No Substitute
The Internet does not change everything. Some of the world's
foremost thinkers ponder the intersection of technology and education.
The Downside
Why some critics give Web-based education less-than-stellar
grades.
Campus Connected
What will college look like in the not-so-distant future?
Crookston, Minn., provides an early glimpse.
The Federal Case
Sen. Kerrey and Rep. Isakson reflect on the
government's role in fostering e-learning.
A few selected quotations are shown below:
Entrepreneurs and investors have jumped into the world of online
education, pumping some $6 billion into the sector since 1990 -- almost half of it since
1999.
The knowledge-enterprise industry now measures some $735 billion,
which includes spending on a host of things, such as textbooks, software and services,
according to Merrill Lynch. Analysts there expect the online component of that to grow to
$25.3 billion by 2003 from $3.6 billion in 1999. Within that, domestic online corporate
learning is expected to grow fastest: from $1.1 billion in 1999 to $11.4 billion in 2003
-- a compounded annual growth rate of 79%. Two other key sectors --
kindergarten-through-12th grade and higher education -- anticipate annual growth rates of
over 50%.
Consider what's happening at Westview High School in Poway,
Calif. This time next year, classrooms there will be stocked with computers, and a
wireless network will allow students to access the Internet through their laptops from
anywhere on school grounds. In addition, hand-held devices will be ubiquitous, as will
virtual classrooms, so students can log on to the Internet for assignments and participate
in chat rooms with students from other schools across the globe
The potential for the K-12 e-learning market is huge, analysts
say (shown in millions)
Segment
Current Market
Potential Market
Content
$20
$4,000
E-commerce
175
657,000
Infrastructure
1,000
7,000
Supplemental services
10
5,000
What schools and parents spend on education, versus their total
online spending, in billions
Education Products/Services
Online Spending 1999
Online Spending 2003*
Schools
$70.00
$0.075
$2.00
Parents
7.00
0.050
0.75
*estimates
Sources: Merrill Lynch estimates; International Data Corp.
Their strategies are as varied as the schools. Some institutions,
such as Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, have formed partnerships
with e-learning companies like UNext.com (www.unext.com) of Deerfield, Ill., or Pensare
Inc., based in Los Altos, Calif., to bring their courses and professors online. Others
have decided to go it alone, developing and offering their own online courses. Some
schools, including New York University and Cornell University, have spun off their
e-learning programs as for-profit ventures.
With the economic slowdown and the venture-capital spigot turned
off, the question now is a simple one: Can these marriages of conventional education and
e-commerce survive? Can these for-profit arms actually turn a profit? And if so, at what
price?
"If you have a good product and figure out how to market it
and deliver it, then you should be significantly competitive in the marketplace,"
says Michael Goldstein, head of the educational-institutions practice at Dow Lohnes &
Albertson, a law firm in Washington, D.C. "That will be difficult to do, and there
are no clear models yet in the marketplace."
Consider Fathom.com (www.fathom.com). Launched last year with a
$20 million investment from Columbia, Fathom offers a mixture of free information --
articles, reference works and links to other sites -- and access to for-fee online
courses, all aimed at the "lifelong learner." (Fathom takes a cut of the fee as
its payment.) On the handsomely designed site, a surfer can search among about 600 online
courses offered by a variety of schools, including the University of Washington and
Michigan State University.
Surfers can also follow "knowledge trails" -- a series
of related links on such topics as arts and architecture, business and finance or science
and engineering, among others.
Here's a safe-and-steady business plan. The nation's for-profit
higher-education companies have been around for years, and they are nothing like a typical
football-obsessed college. Students who enroll in these institutions care about one thing:
classes. They are in their mid-30s. They don't want frat parties. They want better jobs.
These schools read the want ads closely, and they respond by offering courses in subjects
such as finance, management, nursing and information technology.
In this business model, student tuition fees are the primary
revenue source. The beauty of this for investors is that the students are locked into a
series of courses over an extended period, giving the companies a reliable income stream.
These companies "know where their revenues are coming from
way in advance," says Jay Tracey, chief investment officer at Berger Funds. In an
unsteady stock market, he says, "predictability and visibility become more important
to investors than the rate of growth." The Denver mutual-fund concern has invested in
DeVry Inc. (www.devry.com), a for-profit degree-granting enterprise, as well as
SmartForce, in corporate training.
The largest private (and accredited) institution of higher
education:
To get investors to pay more attention to its Internet business,
Apollo Group Inc. ( www.apollogroup.com ), a Phoenix-based education holding company, issued
a tracking stock last year for its University of Phoenix Online unit, which has served
students over the Web for more than a decade. While some tracking stocks haven't fared
well, this one did. Thanks largely to the fact that it's a proven, profitable business in
a sea of Internet red ink, the IPO finished the year at more than double its September
initial offering price of $14. And the parent company's stock jumped 145% for the year.
In the offline world, Apollo operates sites around the country to
conduct classes, often in rented facilities. Classes are held mostly at night, so students
can attend after work. When students "enroll in a degree program, we are counting on
them taking five or six courses or more -- so that's a repeat-revenue model for us,"
says Terri Heddegard, an Apollo vice president.
Apollo says the online unit's enrollment has surged to 19,000
students, up 65% from a year earlier, out of a total of 83,000 students in all forums
including physical class sites. The online students take classes at home, using e-mail and
Web message boards to work on group projects. The online-class tuition cost runs $400 to
$495 a credit, about 20% more expensive than tuition for the brick-and-mortar classes,
Apollo says.
For the fiscal first quarter, ended Nov. 30, the online
institution reported net income of $5.6 million, or six cents a share, on revenue of $34
million. Including results from its online arm, Apollo posted profit of $25 million, or 38
cents a share, on revenue of $177 million for the same period.
Khan Academy and YouTube Channels offer free tutorials. Learners can cherry
pick topics and watch basic and advanced learning videos that vary in length
form a few minutes to longer but usually much less than an hour for each module.
These were never intended to be anything more than self-learning alternatives
for highly motivated students. Some leading universities like the University of
Wisconsin now over limited choices for taking competency examinations for
college credit, but the distance between a few learning videos and college
credit is a very long distance indeed.
Fee-based and free distance education training
and education alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Many employers will pay all or part of the fees, including Starbucks, Wal-Mart,
McDonalds, etc. For example, Starbucks will pay Arizona State University tuition
even for part-time employees. McDonalds will pay tuition for onsite as well as
online courses.
Free MOOCs and other high-quality online learning
alternatives (there may be fees for certificates and transcript credits but the
MOOC learning is free for thousands of courses from prestigious universities
around the world) ---
Scroll down this document
Question
What's the most important criteria for sustainable online programs?
Bob Jensen's Answer
In my mind the most important criteria are academic standard reputations and
sustainability if the Federal government stopped paying tuition for military
veterans. Sustainable online programs have reputation things and niches that
make them survivors. Most flagship universities (think Wisconsin and Illinois)
have online programs these days that are cash cows for the onsite programs and
would survive even without Federal money for military veterans. Such flagship
online programs are filling a variety of needs and are often taught by the same
faculty who teach on campus. Probably the most exciting new things these days
are the McDonalds new program for funding employee higher education (onsite or
online) and the Purdue takeover of Kaplan University's faltering online
programs.
Of course some online programs have non-traditional funding like Western
Governors University and programs funded by employers like Walmart, Starbucks,
etc.
3.1 Center for Law and Government
3.2 Rawlings School of Divinity
3.3 Technical Studies and Trades
3.4 Zaki Gordon Cinematic Arts Center
3.5 College of Osteopathic Medicine
3.6 School of Business
3.7 School of Aeronautics
3.8 School of Engineering
3.9 School of Music
Arizona State University (commonly referred to as
ASU or Arizona State) is a public metropolitan research university on five
campuses across the Phoenix metropolitan area, and four regional learning
centers throughout Arizona, as well as 150 online programs. The 2018
university ratings by U.S. News & World Report rank ASU No. 1 among the Most
Innovative Schools in America for the third year in a row and has ranked ASU
No. 115 in National Universities with overall score of 47/100 with 83% of
student applications accepted.
ASU is one of the largest public universities by
enrollment in the U.S. It had approximately 72,000 students enrolled in fall
2017, including 59,198 undergraduate and 12,630 graduate students.] ASU's
charter, approved by the board of regents in 2014, is based on the "New
American University" model created by ASU President Michael M. Crow. It
defines ASU as "a comprehensive public research university, measured not by
whom it excludes, but rather by whom it includes and how they succeed;
advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental
responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the
communities it serves."
Liberty University, Purdue University, and ASU may well be the models of the
future for comprehensive universities.
From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on July 20, 2015
YouTube advertisers increase 40% in year--- Top brands eager to reach millennial
consumers have boosted the number of advertisers on Google Inc.’s
video site by 40% in the past year, the Financial Times reports. YouTube
also said advertisers from the top 100 brands based on a ranking by
Interbrand were spending 60% more than last year.
Jensen Comment
This reveals the changing times in free communication, marketing, entertainment,
education, and training --- yes free education and training. YouTube is playing
a huge role in education and training as major universities and training
companies now have YouTube channels for a vast amount of training and education
videos.
But featured channels are almost a miniscule part of what you can learn on
YouTube. For example, you can learn how to operate or trouble shoot almost any
device in the market by searching YouTube in a clever way. You can learn how to
do virtually anything in Excel via YouTube. You can learn how to analyze
financial statements and prepare tax returns on YouTube. In fact there is very
little that you cannot learn from YouTube.
My problem with YouTube learning is that it is less efficient than first
trying other sources, especially Wikipedia. You can efficiently scan millions of
Wikipedia modules with word searches and in many instances their table of
contents. For example, compare searches of the "Capital Asset Pricing Model" in
Wikipedia versus YouTube. Learning about the CAPM from YouTube takes much more
time than learning about this model from Wikipedia.
Code.org (computer sciencighties, Perl excels at
processing text, and developers like it because it's powerful and flexible.
It was once famously described as "the duct tape of the web," because it's
really great at holding websites together, but it's not the most elegant
language. Perl: Originally developed by a NASA engineer in the late
eighties, Perl excels at processing text, and developers like it because
it's powerful and flexible. It was once famously described as "the duct tape
of the web," because it's really great at holding websites together, but
it's not the most elegant language. Wikimedia Commons
. . .
C:
One of the oldest programming languages still in common use, C was created
in the early 1970s. In 1978, the language's legendary and still widely read
manual, the 800-page "The C Programming Language," saw print for the first
time. C: One of the oldest programming languages still in common use, C was
created in the early 1970s. In 1978, the language's legendary and still
widely read manual, the 800-page "The C Programming Language," saw print for
the first time. Flickr
. . .
Objective-C:
The original C programming language was so influential that it inspired a
lot of similarly named successors, all of which took their inspiration from
the original but added features from other languages. Objective-C has grown
in popularity as the standard language to build iPhone apps, though Apple's
been pushing its own Swift language, too. Objective-C: The original C
programming language was so influential that it inspired a lot of similarly
named successors, all of which took their inspiration from the original but
added features from other languages. Objective-C has grown in popularity as
the standard language to build iPhone apps, though Apple's been pushing its
own Swift language, too. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
. . .
JavaScript:
This is a super-popular programming language primarily used in web apps. But
it doesn't have much to do with Java besides the name. JavaScript runs a lot
of the modern web, but it also catches a lot of flak for slowing browsers
down and sometimes exposing users to security vulnerabilities. JavaScript:
This is a super-popular programming language primarily used in web apps. But
it doesn't have much to do with Java besides the name. JavaScript runs a lot
of the modern web, but it also catches a lot of flak for slowing browsers
down and sometimes exposing users to security vulnerabilities. Dmitry
Baranovskiy via Flickr
. . .
Visual Basic:
Microsoft's Visual Basic (and its successor, Visual Basic .NET) tries to
make programming easier with a graphical element that lets you change
portions of a program by dragging and dropping. It's old, and some think
it's lacking features next to other languages, but with Microsoft's backing,
it's still got its users out there. Visual Basic: Microsoft's Visual Basic
(and its successor, Visual Basic .NET) tries to make programming easier with
a graphical element that lets you change portions of a program by dragging
and dropping. It's old, and some think it's lacking features next to other
languages, but with Microsoft's backing, it's still got its users out there.
Wikimedia Commons
Python:
This language traces back to 1989, and is loved by its fans for its highly
readable code. Many programmers suggest it's the easiest language to get
started with. Python: This language traces back to 1989, and is loved by its
fans for its highly readable code. Many programmers suggest it's the easiest
language to get started with. Flickr/nyuhuhuu CSS: Short for "Cascading
Style Sheets," CSS is a programming language to design the format and layout
of a website. A lot of website menus and mobile app menus are written with
CSS, in conjunction with JavaScript and garden-variety HTML.
CSS:
Short for "Cascading Style Sheets," CSS is a programming language to design
the format and layout of a website. A lot of website menus and mobile app
menus are written with CSS, in conjunction with JavaScript and
garden-variety HTML. Wikimedia Commons
. . .
R:
This is the programming language of choice for statisticians and anybody
doing data analysis. Google has gone on record as a big fan of R, for the
power it gives to its mathematicians.
As officials at Ohio State University worked on
improving their program offerings, they encountered one need over and over:
more people who can manipulate and make sense of data.
They heard it
from the Obama administration, and from consultants like McKinsey & Company,
which in 2011 projected
that the United States could face a shortage of as many as 190,000 people
with those skills by 2018. They heard it from business leaders, who
described having to retrain new hires to make them versatile data
scientists.
But when they
looked at Ohio State’s offerings, they found expertise scattered across
campus. There was no unified undergraduate pipeline for producing the
workers that companies wanted, says Christopher M. Hans, an associate
professor in the department of statistics. In response, Hans and a professor
of computer science, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, joined with other colleagues
to start an interdisciplinary undergraduate major in data analytics. The
major, which began in
2014, now enrolls 104 students, with 165 additional "pre-majors" chipping
away at the prerequisites they must take before formal admission to the
program.
Ohio State is one of numerous universities jostling to plant their flags in
the increasingly crowded data-science-education landscape. The growth of new
data sources and data-analysis techniques, the abundance of jobs, the "big
data" media hype — all propel the trend.
At the graduate level, nearly 200 analytics and data-science programs have
sprung up over the past decade, according to figures
compiled
by Michael Rappa of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina
State University. It may be "the biggest and fastest-growing new graduate
degree in the U.S. in a generation," he wrote in an email.
Among the latest to jump on the bandwagon is Harvard University, which this
fall will welcome students into a new master’s program in data science. More
than 1,300 people applied for what will probably be 40 to 45 slots, says
Daniel S. Weinstock, who oversees the admissions process. Each will pay
about $75,000 in tuition for the three-semester program, which does not
offer financial aid.
If the past is
a guide, those students might anticipate earning more than $100,000 upon
graduation. That’s about the average annual salary for new graduates of a
related five-year-old master’s program
in computational science and engineering, Weinstock says. The decision to
start a new program, he says, was "partially a response to sort of wanting
to have something that had ‘data science’ in the name, frankly."
Harvard: Introduction to Computer Science
Columbia: Machine Learning for Data Science and Analytics
Columbia: Artificial Intelligence
Princeton: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
Dartmouth: C Programming: Advanced Data Types
Harvard: Statistical Inference and Modeling for High-throughput
Experiments
University of Pennsylvania: A Crash Course in Causality: Inferring
Causal Effects from Observational Data
31 Courses in Computer Science
74 Courses in Accounting, Finance, Management, Marketing, and Other
Business Courses
69 Courses in Humanities
66 Courses in the Social Sciences
21 Courses in Art and Design
27 Courses in Health and Medicine
21 Courses in Data Science
18 Courses in Education and Teaching
13 Courses in Mathematics
26 Courses in Science
18 Courses in Engineering
05 Courses in Personal Development
07 Courses in Programming
Note that the courses are free, but there's a fee for certificates or
transcript credits (it costs more to validate what you learned)
Bob Jensen's links to thousands of free courses from other prestigious
universities around the world ---
Continue scrolling down
Jensen
Comment
Engineering is about solving problems
Accountancy is about creating problems
I'm being
serious here. When I became CPA in 1963 there were something like 540 paragraphs
of standards that had to be intently studied (yeah memorized in large part). The
CPA exam was narrow and deep.
In the 21st
Century there are hundreds of thousands of paragraphs of accountancy standards.
The CPA Exam is now shallow and wide.
Why the
exponential increase in the number of accountancy standards and tax laws?
I'm serious
now!
The reason is that so many accountants (and sometimes lawyers) are paid to write
increasingly complex contracts to get around existing standards. Then standard
setters (FASB. IASB. government agencies, and the courts) create revised or new
standards to plug the loopholes --- around and around we go.
My point is
that engineers get paid to solve problems, mostly problems created in nature.
Accountants
get paid to create problems by inventing ways to circumvent standards and laws.
That's how what the Codification Database created by the FASB becomes
exponentially larger with each passing week. That's how a relatively simple USA
tax code became a monster that nobody can possibly understand in fine detail.
When I
retired after 40 years of being on the faculties of four universities I was paid
(many think overpaid) to teach how to account for enormously complicated
contracts (think derivative financial instruments) that did not exist when I
became a Ph.D./CPA. Many of those contracts (like interest rate swaps) were
invented to keep debt and related financial risks off balance sheets. The
enormously complex FAS 133 (USA) and IAS 39 (international) standards were then
created to put derivative financial contracts on balance sheets.
And scientists thought they had a monopoly on the teaching of evolution.
PS
I should add that although many accountants get paid to help write contracts for
getting around accounting standards and tax laws, the
overwhelming majority of accountants get paid to enforce adherence to standards
and laws.
Most engineers also get paid to enforce adherence to standards and laws while
solving problems.
A few weeks ago I signed up for my first Coursera course – Introduction to
Probability and Data, and today I was informed that I had successfully
passed the course.
The course is part of a five-course Certificate, Statistics with R
Specialization (R is a computer language focused on statistical analysis);
The other four courses are:
·
Inferential Statistics
·
Linear Regression and Modeling
·
Bayesian Statistics
·
Statistics with R Capstone
I came away quite impressed with the course and the Coursera platform.
The courses are taught by faculty at Duke University and use high-quality
videos to explain the course concepts. There is also an online textbook
(free) that can be used with the course.
The first course was broken down into five, one-week modules, with quizzes
at the end of each module as well as a computer project. To move onto the
next module, you need to pass the quiz and the computer assignment.
It was nice taking the course at my own pace; when I had time, whether it
was early in the morning or later in the day, the course was always there
for me to work on. If I had a busy week, I could take some time away from
Coursera and focus on my other responsibilities. In fact, if you fall
behind, you can reset the deadline to a future date so that you are not
stressed by the deadline.
One of the features I liked was the occasional motivational message posted
to your account.
The first message popped up almost instantly when I signed up for the
course:
·
Learners who start within an hour of enrolling complete 28% more items than
the average learner. Take less than 4 minutes to get started now and watch
the first lecture!
How could I ignore such a statement; it was a course in stats, and it was
using stats to encourage me to strike while the iron is hot, and I did.
I received another message as I was about to take one of the end of module
quizzes:
·
Only 45% of learners pass this exam on their first try. Though difficult,
it’s a great way to build and apply your new skills. (Based
on data from 18.4k learners)
Again, how could I ignore such a challenge, and it made me study a little
bit extra so that I could be part of the 45%
One other message I received related to the final project. The final project
required the student to come up with three of their own research questions
related to a large data file compiled by the U.S.Government.
I had been breezing along in the course, a little bit ahead of schedule, and
then I encountered the final, which was a bit more challenging than I
expected. I kept putting it off, and then I started seeing messages like the
following:
·
You’ve already completed 89% of your course! Reset your deadlines so you can
finish, the rest!
I decided to follow the recommendation, and reset my deadline so that I
could give myself ample time to complete the module.
A unique part of the course is that the final project is peer-reviewed, by
other students who have completed the course. In addition, as part of the
final project, I had to evaluate three student projects.
The project was a good way to tie together some of the course concepts and
to enhance my R capability.
The course has had over 127,000 students take the course, with a 4.7 (out of
5.0) rating, based on nearly 3,000 ratings. Not too shabby!
Continued in article
Coursera Has Both Free and Fee-Based Courses from Prestigious Universities
--- https://www.coursera.org/
Udemy.com is an online
learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults.[2] Unlike academic
MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a
platform for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to
the public, either at no charge or for a tuition fee.[3] Udemy provides
tools which enable users to create a course, promote it and earn money from
student tuition charges.
No Udemy courses are
currently credentialed for college credit; students take courses largely as
a means of improving job-related skills.[3] Some courses generate credit
toward technical certification. Udemy has made a special effort to attract
corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their
company.[4] For example, PayPal has used the service to train its employees
to write Node.js code.[5]
By establishing themselves as a place where so much
content is available free, he said, providers like edX have to work
extremely hard to get customers to pay.
Jensen Comment
MOOCs themselves have enormous economies of scale where it costs
not much more to deliver a MOOC course to a million
students than it does to a hundred online students.
edX moves in for some MOOCs to provide a costly service with fewer economies of
scale --- evaluating what each student has learned for purposes of assigning a
"grade" for a certificate or for college transcript credit. Thousands and
thousands of MOOCs courses from prestigious universities around the world are
usually free for students, but certificates and credits
are not free.
Perhaps most retired professors would've loved to carry on teaching beyond
when they retired. But many, like me, grew weary of the grading process that is
increasingly contentious between teachers and students. MOOC teachers normally
only grade their onsite students and leave it to companies like edX to do the
grading and some other course activities for online students.
And MOOC courses are seldom easy for students. A professor friend who took a
MOOC claims taking a MOOC is "like drinking from a high-pressure fire
hose." The most successful MOOC courses are usually advanced courses rather than
basic courses where students often need more hand holding.
By definition there are no
admission standards to take a MOOC and admission is free, although fees may be
charged for recognition (badges, completion credentials, or college credits)
that have added academic standards. In general, MOOCs are video windows into
advanced courses filmed live across the curriculum at prestigious universities.
Although some universities provide MOOCs for introductory courses (undergraduate
or graduate) MOOCs are not well suited to introductory students who need more
hand holding and personalized supervision that are seldom, if ever, available in
a MOOC taken by a "massive" number of students. At the Wharton Business School
at the University of Pennsylvania introductory courses in the first-year MBA
core can be taken for free as MOOCs. Students who are planning to go into MBA
programs around the world often take these MOOCs in preparation when they will
later be taking similar courses in accounting, finance, management, marketing,
etc. for credit.
Whereas the Wharton Business
School offers core MBA courses as MOOCs, other programs have distance education
courses that are not MOOCs because of fees and
admission standards. For example, the Harvard Business School has an extension
program for pre-MBA courses that are relatively expensive and capped regarding
course size with competitive admission standards. Bob Jensen's threads on these
and other free-based distance education courses are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
When one of the first
massive open online courses appeared at Stanford University, 160,000
students enrolled. It was 2011, and fewer than 10 MOOCs existed worldwide.
It has been four years since
then, and according to a new report, the cumulative number of MOOCs has
reached nearly 4,000.
Compiled earlier this month
by Dhawal Shah, founder of the MOOC aggregator Class Central, the report
summarizes data on MOOCs from the past four years. And the data show that
even as the MOOC hype has started to die down, interest hasn’t tapered off.
The cumulative number of
MOOCs didn’t break 100 until the end of 2012. But by the end of 2013 that
number had grown to over 800. And today the number of registered MOOC
students added in 2015 is nearly equal to the last three years combined.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Note the graph showing that the cumulative number of MOOCs to date is nearly
4,000 course, most of which are courses from prestigious universities like
MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Rice, etc. Although MOOCs are free by
definition they cannot usually be taken for transcript credit unless a fee
is paid for competency-based testing. The two largest credit providers are
Coursera and EdX. One of the more noted MOOCs available is from Arizona
State University where the entire first year of courses can be taken for
credit.
Noncredit credentials
(badges) for a fee are also available for most MOOCs that demonstrate
completion of a MOOC and sometimes a level of competency that might be
recognized by employers even though they do not qualify for transcript
college credit.
Teaching an online course that 49,000 students have signed up for
presents an unprecedented challenge when it comes to an important aspect of
instruction: knowing your audience.
I could see from my course "dashboard" in Coursera that the students
hailed from 190 countries, with 6 percent from India, 31 percent from the
United States, and so on, but these numbers only took me so far. I wondered
which places had lots of students earning a passing grade? Which places had
students who were really engaged with the course?
Since I’m a cartographer, it made sense to make some maps.
. . .
These examples show that the geography of MOOC students goes far beyond
basic reporting that X percent of students came from country Y. When we
drill down to explore things like gender balance and engagement, we start to
see major differences around the world. What we need now are ways to
incorporate this type of analysis into practice while teaching a course, so
that we can make smart interventions to encourage participation and improve
outcomes.
I love teaching in the MOOC realm — it has advantages and possibilities
that just aren’t there in other forms of teaching — but what we’ve seen in
this work helps us understand that we’ve got a long way to go yet in terms
of making a MOOC work for everyone around the world.
Massive open online courses,
or MOOCs, are popular. This much we know.
But as investors and higher
ed prognosticators squint into their crystal balls for hints of what this
popularity could portend for the rest of higher education, two crucial
questions remains largely unanswered: Who are these students, and what do
they want?
Some early inquiries into
this by two major MOOC providers offer a few hints.
Coursera, a company started
by two Stanford University professors, originated with a course called
Machine Learning, which co-founder Andrew Ng taught last fall to a virtual
classroom of 104,000 students. Coursera surveyed a sample of those students
to find out, among other things, their education and work backgrounds and
why they decided to take the course.
Among 14,045 students in the
Machine Learning course who responded to a demographic survey, half were
professionals who currently held jobs in the tech industry. The largest
chunk, 41 percent, said they were professionals currently working in the
software industry; another 9 percent said they were professionals working in
non-software areas of the computing and information technology industries.
Many were enrolled in some
kind of traditional postsecondary education. Nearly 20 percent were graduate
students, and another 11.6 percent were undergraduates. The remaining
registrants were either unemployed (3.5 percent), employed somewhere other
than the tech industry (2.5 percent), enrolled in a K-12 school (1 percent),
or “other” (11.5 percent).
A subset (11,686
registrants) also answered a question about why they chose to take the
course. The most common response, given by 39 percent of the respondents,
was that they were “just curious about the topic.” Another 30.5 percent said
they wanted to “sharpen the skills” they use in their current job. The
smallest proportion, 18 percent, said they wanted to “position [themselves]
for a better job.”
Udacity, another for-profit
MOOC provider founded by (erstwhile) Stanford professors, has also conducted
some initial probes into the make-up of its early registrants. While the
company did not share any data tables with Inside Higher Ed, chief executive
officer David Stavens said more than 75 percent of the students who took the
company’s first course, Artificial Intelligence, last fall were looking to
“improve their skills relevant for either current or future employment.”
That is a broad category,
encompassing both professionals and students, so it does not lend much
nuance to the questions of who the students are or what they want. And even
the more detailed breakdown of the students who registered for Ng’s Machine
Learning course cannot offer very much upon which to build a sweeping thesis
on how MOOCs might fit into the large and diverse landscape of higher
education.
Coursera has since completed
the first iterations of seven additional courses and opened registration for
32 more beyond that. Many of those courses — which cover poetry, world
music, finance, and behavioral neurology — are likely to attract different
sorts of people, with different goals, than Machine Learning did. “I'm
expecting that the demographics for some of our upcoming classes (Stats One,
Soc 101, Pharmacology, etc.) will be very different,” said Daphne Koller,
one of Coursera’s founders, in an e-mail.
Coursera, the company that provides support and Web
hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced
Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses.
The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116
courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for
the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside
Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed
from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about
385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to
60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit
through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad
reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.
Jensen Comment
Technology is a tool, like most any tool, can be used and misused.
Probably it's biggest flaw is that it's not perfectly adaptive to
varying circumstances of learners and learning environments. In some
circumstances it can be overwhelming. In other circumstances it makes learning
much more effective and efficient.
In some instances it can be addictive to a fault. In other instances is can be
addictive to fantastic accomplishments.
Exhibit A is MOOC learning that experiences enormously high drop out
rates due to overwhelming learners, especially introductory learners. At the
same time MOOC learning sometimes lifts learners out of impossible situations
such as the Mongolian student who used MIT MOOCs to lift himself into MIT's
Ph.D. program.
Science Unplugged provides hundreds of short video answers to a wide range
of questions from “What is a Higgs Particle?” to “What happens to time near
a black hole?”
Take classes designed by prestigious scientists from leading research
universities. The materials can generally be covered in a few hours.
Students can earn World Science U certification upon successful class
completion.
Short courses, suitable for a broad spectrum of learners, typically require
two to three weeks to complete and have no homework or exams.
University courses are university-level offerings that typically require
eight to ten weeks to complete. Students work at their own pace and can earn
World Science U certification upon successful course completion.
Jensen Comment
Registration is free and certificates are available to students who earn enough
points in a course. However, no college credits are available for these courses.
This Problem Never Occurred to Me Until Now
If you make a product of service free to the public should you be required to
make very expensive investments to
accommodate disabled people get your free product or service?
While the university
has not made a final decision, she said, it may not be able to afford
complying with the Justice Department's recommendations on how to make the
online material accessible.
"In many cases the
requirements proposed by the department would require the university to
implement extremely expensive measures to continue to make these resources
available to the public for free," she
wrote. "We believe that in a time of substantial budget deficits and
shrinking state financial support, our first obligation is to use our
limited resources to support our enrolled students. Therefore, we must
strongly consider the unenviable option of whether to remove content from
public access."
The announcement
added that Berkeley hoped to avoid that path through additional discussions
with the Justice Department.
The material in
question involves courses provided by Berkeley through the edX platform for
massive open online courses, and videos on YouTube and iTunes U.
The Department of
Justice found that much of this online material is in violation of the
Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires colleges to make their
offerings accessible to people with disabilities.
The department
investigation followed complaints by two individuals who are deaf -- one of
them a faculty member at Gallaudet University and one at its school for
elementary and secondary school students. Both said that they are unable to
use Berkeley online material because it has not been formatted for use by
people with hearing disabilities.
Berkeley released
the Justice Department letter
finding the university in violation of ADA. The letter outlined numerous
concerns not only about issues related to those who are deaf but also those
who have visual disabilities:
Many videos do not
have captions.
Many videos lack "an
alternative way to access images or visual information (e.g., graphs,
charts, animations, or urls on slides), such as audio description,
alternative text, PDF files, or Word documents.)
Many documents
"associated with online courses were inaccessible to individuals with vision
disabilities who use screen readers because the document was not formatted
properly."
Some videos that had
automatically generated captions were 'inaccurate and incomplete."
The review of online material
involved 16 MOOCs available in March and April of 2015 and another 10 in
January of this year. The Justice Department also based its analysis on
reviews of 543 videos on Berkeley's YouTube channel, and on 99 lectures in
27 courses on iTunes University.
Jensen Comment
This is more than just a MOOC problem. It's an enormous problem for distance
education in general as well as onsite traditional education where course
learning materials do not be ADA standards.
In fact those of us involved in blogging and the social media are undoubtedly
providing free material that is not ADA compliant.
Will the government eventually shut us down?
One way around this problem is probably to provide
non-compliant free learning material in other nations that do not have such
onerous ADA standards.
Of course in USA courses such learning materials could not be required in
courses. The question is whether it can even be recommended in free courses.
Jensen Comment
Why don't we remove all the books from the electronic libraries (think millions
of books now available free from Google) that the blind cannot read?
For on-campus students the university can invest in what it
takes to accommodate students with disabilities. This can be very costly such as
paying a signing expert to be in a seminar when there is one deaf student in the
classroom. But for off-campus students it can be so costly as to make an online
course too prohibitive to offer and requiring that all videos have captioning.
There are many technologies to help disabled students
(including the blind, deaf, and learning-challenged). The issue becomes whether
it's the university's responsibility to pay the tab in every instance ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
In my estimation having to remove such a massive amount of
learning material (much of it free) from pubic view punishes everybody for the
special needs of a relatively few number of potential learners.
A new lawsuit accuses Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology of failing to provide closed
captioning in online teaching materials, in violation of federal
antidiscrimination laws, The New York Times reports. The lawsuits were filed
by the National Association of the Deaf, and seek an injunction requiring
that closed captioning be provided for all online materials.
Both colleges provide extensive educational
resources free online, including through their membership in edX, which
offers dozens of MOOCs to students around the world.
Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed a federal
class action against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violate
antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their
online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.
The program is the latest
company-and-college partnership
that takes cues from the Starbucks College Achievement Plan —
a program,
created in 2014, that allows employees of the coffee-shop chain to take
online classes at Arizona State University while continuing to work at the
company.
But
there’s a key difference between the JetBlue program and many other
partnerships in the Starbucks-Arizona State model.
Most of the programs either reimburse tuition costs or offer discounts,
requiring employees to foot at least some of the bill for their courses. But
JetBlue employees won’t pay anything upfront: The company will cover the
full cost of an associate degree.
To
earn a bachelor’s degree, however, students would have to cover the $3,500
capstone course at Thomas Edison State, either out of pocket or through a
scholarship.
In
August the company started a pilot version of the program with 200 employees
with at least two years’ seniority and with at least 16 credits from an
accredited college or university already in hand.
Bonny W. Simi, president of the subsidiary JetBlue Technology Ventures, says
that employees had long asked for tuition reimbursement, but that the
company wanted to go a step further and foot the whole bill.
‘Success Coaches’ Are Assigned
As interest grows
in the
unbundling of higher education— the use of just
the learning material from the college experience — Ms. Simi says the
JetBlue program was made possible by the flexibility and affordability of
competency-based education.
"We’ve mapped out degrees so that it’s basically higher ed but stripped away
are the cafeterias, the football team, the big campuses, the dorm, and
everything," says Ms. Simi, who oversees the program. "It’s just the class."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are other free or highly subsidized college programs paid for by employers
such as the huge Wal-Mart program with American Public University, but the
Starbucks and JetBlue programs have the most prestigious diplomas in my opinion.
Following Starbucks employee education benefits with Arizona State
University,
Anthem Blue Cross offers education benefits with the University of Southern New
Hampshire
Of course there are thousands of free online education
and training courses available from prestigious universities such as Stanford,
MIT, and top Ivy League universities. But transcript credits are not free for
students who want credits for MOOCs on their transcripts. Of course prices are
much lower than onsite attendance credits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Added Jensen Comment
What I think is the most interesting trend in what might be termed
competency-based courses and degrees is the lowering of the bar on admissions
standards. Virtually anybody can take these newer online cheaper and/or
subsidized courses with grades awarded on the basis of competency examinations
while taking the courses. In comparison, students admitted on site to
universities like Harvard and Stanford and Arizona State University face higher
admission standards. But with grade inflation in virtually all on-site campuses
(now having median grades of A-) the standards for competency are much lower, in
my viewpoint, than the competency-based online courses
via MOOCs that dare not become shams with grade inflation.
The bottom line is that the competency standard for Harvard University and
Stanford University is being admitted to study on campus. The competency
standard for getting transcript credit for their MOOC courses is . . . er . . .
er . . . demonstrated competency in the subject matter.
If you want to make a Harvard University onsite
student or an ASU onsite student wet his pants make him accept the online
competency-based tests for the course he just received an A or B grade in from
his professor on campus.
Arizona State University is now under enormous
pressure not to make the corporate-subsidized online degrees truly
competency-based and not grade-inflated shams.
Question
Does anybody else see the moral hazard in this?
Jensen Comment
What if all you have to do for a free college diploma is major is show that, for
six months, you applied for jobs and even had some interviews where you turned
up drunk to show off your toe nail fungus, nose boogers, body odor, and butt
crack --- all for the purpose of having all your tuition cost forgiven. When you
get your college cost refund you can then sober up as well as afford Jublia, a
nose trimmer, a hot shower, and a dark blue suit.
The problem of course is that it's a waste of time
to major in a tough degree program like software engineering and not do your
best to get top grades. In some of those majors you might even get a job offer
with toe nail fungus, nose boogers, body odor, and butt crack provided you
got top grades. My guess is that if prospective employers report to Udacity that
you showed up drunk for interviews you may not get a tuition refund. Hence you
may not get the refund you anticipated if you were a good student.
Students with bad grades probably wasted their time trying to get their
degrees and refunds.
The sad thing is that history, physical education, and journalism majors are
not even afforded the opportunity to get tuition refunds.
Is Udacity taking on a huge risk apart from the moral hazard that may only be
exploited by a very small number of students. Of course there's risk of a sudden
economic recession where almost all jobs become scarce. But what saves Udacity
relative to Grinnell is that the marginal cost of each diploma is less due to
many things that cost accounting students know very well --- think CPV
(cost-profit-volume) analysis.
This Udacity model is a bit like an insurance model. Sure there will be some
losses for the percentage of graduates who do not find jobs within six months
following graduation. Suppose that is 25%. The tuition refund cost to Udacity
is offset by the premium (above the normal tuition cost) paid by 75% of the
students who paid for the added "insurance" of a tuition refund if they did not
land jobs. I'm sure Udacity worries marginally about toe nail fungus, nose
boogers, body odors, and butt cracks, but that's
just an insurance pricing risk factor since most of the graduates in
theparticular majors allowed for this program will get high grades and
jobs. Note that the Udacity courses are really MOOCs from prestigious
universities. Udacity also has a reputation for tough testing such that students
who do graduate know quite a lot about course content.
JIME is a peer reviewed open
access online journal in educational technology that focuses on the
implications and use of digital media in education. It aims to foster a
multidisciplinary and intellectually rigorous debate on both the theory and
practice of interactive media in education. JIME was launched in September,
1996.
JIME is planning some exciting
special collections in the forthcoming year so we are not currently
accepting other submissions. The forthcoming special collections that we
are planning are: on the themes of Open Education (submissions now closed-
see below); Mobile Learning and Designing for Learning.
NOTE: JIME is planning
some exciting special issues so we are
currently not seeking unsolicited papers and will only be considering
papers that are related to our advertised special issues. Please look out
for future calls for papers.
Is the message that learning
from Stanford professors is not worth the price of $0?
Actually I think the message
is that for many folks who try MOOCs the work of learning is too intense and
time consuming given their lack of commitment to keeping up with the class.
Richard Campbell once
revealed to the AECM that when he tried to learn from a MOOC it was like
"trying to drink from a firehose." I dropped out of a C++ programming course
because my heart just was not in keeping up with the class. Ruth Bender
revealed to the AECM that completing a MOOC was one of the hardest things
she ever tried.
In my viewpoint MOOCs are
not good modeld for introductory students where more hand holding is
generally needed. MOOCs are better suited to highly specialized advanced
courses for learners who are way above average in terms of aptitude and
prior learning.
A Master List of 1,150 Free Courses From Top Universities: 35,000 Hours of
Audio/Video Lectures ---
During these summer months, we’ve been busy
rummaging around the internet and adding new courses to our big list of Free
Online Courses, which now features
1,150 courses from top universities. Let’s give you the quick overview: The
list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford,
Yale,
MIT,
Oxford
and
Harvard.
Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube,
iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime,
anywhere, on your computer or smart phone. We didn’t do a precise
calculation, but there’s probably about 35,000 hours of free audio & video
lectures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time.
Here are some highlights from the complete list of Free
Online Courses. We’ve added a few
unconventional/vintage courses in the mix just to keep things interesting.
Jensen Comment
Many of the links provided are not for free courses. For example, there are
such links as the link to the Penn State University Online Accounting
Programs (undergraduate and graduate) that are not free.
The online learning platform Lynda.com
has set an early tone for the ed-tech venture capital
and equity market in 2015 with a $186 million investment. The private equity
company TPG Capital led the investment, while firms Accel Partners, Meritech Capital
Partners and Spectrum Equity -- as well as some of Lynda.com's earlier
investors -- also participated. Lynda.com
charges users between $250 to $375 a year to access content hosted on the
platform, and will use the investment for
acquisitions and growth, the company said in a
press release.
Lynda.com has became a huge learning site with over 500 instructors ---
http://www.lynda.com/
Jensen Comment
Because of the high price for each student (in addition to textbook prices) I
would look first to see if there are good free tutorials for what you need such
as in the tens of thousands of tutorials in hundreds of learning channels now on
YouTube, the thousands of free tutorials at the Khan Academy, and the hundreds
of thousands of free learning tutorials linked at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu
Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”
Free online textbooks, cases, and tutorials in accounting, finance,
economics, and statistics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Warning:
Free textbooks are usually not updated often if at all. This is more problematic
in some disciplines (e.g., accounting and tax rule changes) than other
disciplines like mathematics, statistics, and languages
The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement,
almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that
the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty
were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the
Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review
some of the course materials, but not take the class. And not just a few
classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT
curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all
fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years.
Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive
director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress
towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500
MIT courses had been posted on the Web. Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and
Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718
In the
first week on the Web, the OCW site received more than 13 million visits from
users, about 52 percent from outside of the United States. The OCW team also
processed more than 2,000 e-mails in those first days, more than 75 percent of
them supportive of the project. The remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical
questions, inquiries about specific course offerings, and questions about
content. Less than 2 percent of those e-mails were negative. "Open Access to World-Class Knowledge," by Anne H.
Margulies, Syllabus, March 2003, pp. 16-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7360
SAKAI
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
A grant was made to the University of Michigan,
for use by the SAKAI consortium to support the development of an open source,
feature-rich course management system for higher education. Participating
institutions have agreed to place the new learning management system into
production when the system is completed.
The University of Michigan, Indiana University,
Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the
uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their
enormous investments in educational software to create an integrated set of
open source tools for the benefit of higher education. The new open source
software, known as SAKAI, aims to draw the “best-of-breed” from among
existing open source course management systems and related tools: uPortal,
CHEF, Stellar, Encore, Course Tools, Navigo Assessment, OnCourse, OneStart,
Eden Workflow, and Courseworks.
MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) produced a
comprehensive framework for course management systems rather than a production
system. The SAKAI effort is the logical next step: the creation of a
comprehensive course management system and an underlying portal framework that
draw from existing efforts and integrate the finest available modules and
approaches.
The goal is an economically sustainable approach to
high quality open source learning software for higher education. The approach
promises to overcome two main barriers that have consistently impeded such
collaborative efforts: (1) unique local architectures, including heterogeneous
software, software interoperability requirements between systems, and diverse
user interfaces that hinder the portability of software among institutions;
and (2) timing differences in institutional funding and mobilization that
reduce synergy and result in fragmented, often incomplete offerings and weak
interoperability.
This consortium hopes to overcome these barriers by
relying on OKI service definitions that integrate otherwise heterogeneous
local architectures and enable the mobility of software. In addition, the
advanced course management system will use as its core-building block an
upgraded version of the Foundation-supported and highly successful uPortal
software (Version 3), a powerful, open source portal environment that will
integrate a portal specification needed for tool interoperability. The
institutions are also committed to the “synchronization of institutional
clocks,” essentially rolling out the new applications on the same schedule
to maximize the synergy of the effort.
In concert with the development effort, SAKAI is
creating a partners program that invites other institutions to contribute
$10,000 per year for three years. Partner institutions will experiment with
production versions of the software in 2004 and 2005 and investigate
sustainability options. They will receive early access to project information;
early code releases for the SAKAI framework, portal, services, and tools;
invitations to partner meetings; and technical training workshops.
Contributions from an expected minimum of 20 institutions will support a
community development staff member to coordinate partner activities, a
developer to interact with partner technical staff, another staff member to
coordinate documentation, a support staff member to respond to inquiries, and
an administrative staff member to coordinate partner activities and facilitate
responses.
Continued in article
Before reading the tidbits below you may want to watch a video on the
Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic
education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job
market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may
teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may
award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards
is a "microcredential."
Employers say they are sick of encountering new
college graduates who lack job skills. And colleges are sick of hearing that
their young alumni aren’t employable.
Could a new experiment to design employer-approved
"badges" leave everyone a little less frustrated?
Employers and a diverse set of more than a
half-dozen universities in the Washington area are about to find out,
through a project that they hope will become a national model for
workplace badges.
The effort builds on the burgeoning national
movement for badges and other forms of "microcredentials." It also pricks
at much broader questions about the purpose and value of a college degree in
an era when nearly nine out of 10 students say their top reason for going to
college is to get a good job.
The "21st Century Skills Badging Challenge" kicks
off with a meeting on Thursday. For the next nine months, teams from the
universities, along with employers and outside experts, will try to pinpoint
the elements that underlie skills like leadership, effective storytelling,
and the entrepreneurial mind-set. They’ll then try to find ways to assess
students’ proficiency in those elements and identify outside organizations
to validate those skills with badges that carry weight with employers.
The badges are meant to incorporate the traits most
sought by employers, often referred to as "the four C’s": critical thinking,
communication, creativity, and collaboration.
"We want this to become currency on the job
market," says Kathleen deLaski, founder of the
Education Design Lab,
a nonprofit consulting organization that is coordinating the project.
No organizations have yet been selected or agreed
to provide validations. But design-challenge participants say there’s a
clear vision: Perhaps an organization like
TED issues a badge in storytelling. Or a company
like
Pixar, or
IDEO, the design and consulting firm, offers a
badge in creativity.
If those badges gain national acceptance, Ms.
deLaski says, they could bring more employment opportunities to students at
non-elite colleges, which rarely attract the same attention from recruiters
as the Ivies, other selective private colleges, or public flagships. "I’m
most excited about it as an access tool," she says.
‘Celebrating’ and ‘Translating’
The very idea of badges may suggest that the
college degree itself isn’t so valuable—at least not to employers.
Badge backers prefer a different perspective. They
say there’s room for both badges and degrees. And if anything, the changing
job market demands both.
Through their diplomas and transcripts, "students
try to signal, and they have the means to signal, their academic
accomplishments," says Angel Cabrera, president of George Mason University,
which is involved in the project. "They just don’t have the same alternative
for the other skills that employers say they want."
Nor is the badging effort a step toward
vocationalizing the college degree, participants say. As Ms. deLaski puts
it: "It’s celebrating what you learn in the academic setting and translating
it for the work force."
Yet as she and others acknowledge, badges by
themselves won’t necessarily satisfy employers who now think graduates don’t
cut it.
That’s clear from how employer organizations that
may work on the project regard badges. "We’re presuming that there is an
additional skill set that needs to be taught," says Michael Caplin,
president of the Tysons Partnership, a Northern Virginia
economic-development organization. "It’s not just a packaging issue."
In other words, while a move toward badges could
require colleges to rethink what they teach, it would certainly cause them
to re-examine how they teach it. At least some university partners in the
badging venture say they’re on board with that.
"Some of what we should be doing is reimagining
some disciplinary content," says Randall Bass, vice provost for education at
Georgetown University, another participant in the project.
Mr. Bass, who also oversees the
"Designing the Future(s) of the University"
project at Georgetown, says many smart curricular changes that are worth
pursuing, no matter what, could also lend themselves to the goals of the
badging effort. (At the master’s-degree level, for example, Georgetown has
already begun offering a one-credit courses in grant writing.)
"We should make academic work more like work," with
team-based approaches, peer learning, and iterative exercises, he says.
"People would be ready for the work force as well as getting an engagement
with intellectual ideas."
Employers’ gripes about recent college graduates
are often hard to pin down. "It depends on who’s doing the whining," Mr.
Bass quips. (The critique he does eventually summarize—that employers feel
"they’re not getting students who are used to working"—is a common one.)
Where Graduates Fall Short
So one of the first challenges for the badging
exercise is to better understand exactly what employers want and whether
colleges are able to provide it—or whether they’re already doing so.
After all, notes Mr. Bass, many believe that
colleges should produce job-ready graduates simply by teaching students to
be agile thinkers who can adapt if their existing careers disappear. "That’s
why I think ‘employers complain, dot dot dot,’ needs to be parsed," he says.
Mr. Caplin says his organization plans to poll its
members to better understand where they see college graduates as falling
short.
Today, we are proud
to announce the launch of
Professional Certificate
programs, the latest offering to further our mission to increase access to
education that today’s global, connected learner demands.
Professional Certificate programs are a series of in-demand courses designed
to build or advance critical skills for a specific career. Created by
industry leaders and top universities, Professional Certificate programs
help develop the skills and actionable knowledge needed for today’s top jobs
through a flexible and affordable online learning experience.
Offered in exciting fields, like digital marketing, virtual reality and data
science, edX Professional Certificates are endorsed by corporations,
including HSBC, GitHub and The North Face, and recognized for real
career relevancy.
Meeting the Needs of Today’s Learner
After surveying our learners, we recognized that there was a need and desire
for career-focused, professional content programs that deliver meaningful
and impactful job-related results. Professional Certificate programs were
developed to match this demand, offering programs that focus on skills, job
competencies and professional development from the world’s top universities
and industry leaders. Shorter in length compared to MicroMasters® programs,
usually 2-6 months long, Professional Certificate programs allow you to
quickly gain the skills you need to advance your career or position yourself
for a new job.
Providing Expertise Valued by Employers
Professional Certificate programs are tailored for specific jobs and
particular career paths, offering skills-based education in the fields where
today’s employers are seeking top talent. After completing a Professional
Certificate program, you can be confident that you have gained the
actionable knowledge you will need to make a powerful impact on an
organization. You can demonstrate this skillset to employers by including
your Professional Certificate on a resume, CV or LinkedIn profile to
showcase your achievement and stand out from the crowd.
Adding Immediate Pathways to Advance Careers
As an innovator in
education, edX is always exploring how to further our mission to expand
access to and improve the quality of learning. We launched the
MicroMasters
initiative in September 2016, and it marked a new and exciting step toward
furthering this mission. MicroMasters programs were developed to bridge the
gap between education and corporations, providing learners with the
opportunity to begin down a path of advanced study through a credential with
a pathway to credit.
Professional Certificate programs, which mark the next innovative step in
our mission, are typically shorter than MicroMasters programs and are
designed to provide learners with a more immediate path to reskill or
upskill quickly in order to advance their career or position themselves for
a new job.
15 New Professional Certificate Programs
I’m
thrilled to share with you 15 Professional Certificate programs from 13
universities and companies across the globe! Explore the new program
offerings in the most in-demand fields and gain the skills you need to stand
out in your field today.
Continued in article
Massive Open (meaning free) Online Course (MOOC) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
Students may have to pay for certificates, badges, or transcript credits. Badges
and credits entail competency testing.
MOOCs probably would not have gotten off the ground if thousands of these
courses were not provided by the most prestigious universities in the world.
To some people in higher education, "MOOC" has
become a punch line. The initial hype around so-called massive open online
courses was so intense — promising a "tsunami" of change, according to
one New York Times columnist, and a
shuttering of most traditional colleges, according to
one
of the trend’s pioneers — that the reality was
doomed to fall short.
"In some ways MOOCs have become the love child of a
relationship that we regret," says George Siemens, an academic-technology
expert at the University of Texas at Arlington who coined the term while
teaching an experimental online course seven years ago. "You don’t even say
it without someone rolling their eyes."
Despite the eye rolls, MOOCs haven’t gone away. A
growing number of colleges offer them — more than 400 institutions,
including 22 of the top 25 most selective universities, according to
Class Central,
a blog that tracks MOOCs. Venture-capital firms have
thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into companies making or supporting
the free courses.
So what are the lasting effects of MOOCs, according
to those who help spark this revolution?
Perhaps the biggest legacy of free online courses
is unintended: increased pressure on colleges to spend more money on
teaching. Colleges spend $39,000 to $325,000 for each MOOC they make,
according to an analysis last week in
eCampus News. And many colleges are building new
infrastructure to help produce the courses, hiring instructional designers
or putting up studio facilities.
A commitment to creating MOOCs also can have
consequences for overall enrollment. Prospective students now sometimes peek
at MOOCs as they shop for colleges, and they can see the difference between
a good course and a lackluster one. In that way, the courses function like
Amazon’s "look inside the book" feature, which lets customers read free
samples of books before they buy.
Viewed in a certain light, MOOCs may end up raising
the cost of higher education, as colleges enter a new arms race to improve
their support systems for teaching.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Many
higher-education experts argue that such spending on improving teaching is
long overdue, and that today’s digital-native students demand new styles of
instruction. "Universities ignored the early wave of innovation in education
— at least the larger ones did," says Mr. Siemens.
He also argues that focusing on cost and efficiency
is the wrong way for nonprofit colleges to evaluate their efforts to improve
teaching. Teaching, after all, is full of intangibles, and it’s linked to
academe’s mission to turn out responsible citizens. "The experiment will
have failed if we talk in terms of management, in terms of efficiency,
instead of advancing the ability of everyone to learn," he argues.
In talking with a handful of MOOC pioneers like Mr.
Siemens, here are some other key lessons from the first few years of
experimentation.
MOOCs Can Serve a New — and Growing — Demographic
of Students
Sebastian Thrun is the MOOC pioneer who once
predicted that many colleges would soon go out of business. Since then he
has recanted, and shifted his company, Udacity, to serve working adults in
highly technical fields that change faster than traditional colleges can
spin out new programs. "We’re discovering that there are a huge number of
willing and eager lifelong learners that are underserved," he says.
He calls what those students need "upskilling," and
Udacity now offers several short online programs, called "nanodegrees," to
offer those skills. He sees the goal of Udacity’s courses as very different
from the goals of the courses he used to teach at Stanford University. "We
don’t need to make people’s IQ go from 100 to 200," he says. "We don’t help
develop values, we don’t form character. We just give you the tools to form
skills."
Coursera, another company that produces MOOCs, has
recently added a series of short "microdegree" programs that seem to emulate
that approach — though the company offers liberal-arts courses as well.
"Over 50 percent of our learners are people who are working adults and are
looking to get a step up in their career," says Daphne Koller, a co-founder
of Coursera. "The skills that they need today didn’t even exist 15 years
ago."
Seen in that way, MOOCs are an update of
traditional colleges’ extension programs.
MOOCs Are Driving Better Research Into Teaching
Anant Agarwal, the head of edX, a nonprofit MOOC
provider that was created by Harvard and MIT, is fond of repeating key
catchphrases to promote MOOCs. These days he often calls the technology
platform his team is building to offer the free courses "a particle
accelerator for learning."
The metaphor attempts to cast colleges’ investment
in MOOCs as an investment in infrastructure rather than simply throwing
money into a smattering of teaching experiments. His rhetorical gesture also
highlights the size of the effort; he points out that edX has taught more
than three and a half million students.
Jensen Comment
This is a big deal in so far as it's an MBA degree from one of the top MBA
programs in the USA and "might" eventually have no admission standards and
no limit on the number of students who can enroll worldwide. Although non-credit
MOOCs are generally open to all and free, this diploma-granting MBA program is
not free.
I hesitate to call this a for-credit MOOC since it is not truly open-sourced
to the masses for diplomas/badges. It is an open source MOOC for non-credit.
One question that remains in my mind is whether the transcript of graduating
students will distinguish between onsite graduates versus unline MOOC graduates
who complete the full online MBA program.
There will be endless debates among faculty about competency-based academic
standards versus academic standards that add some additional criteria to grades
such as class participation (online or site) and case method courses that are
popular in nearly all MBA programs, particularly business policy capstone
courses.
The program is the latest in a string of
high-profile experiments in using free MOOCs as part of cut-rate degree
programs. Just last month Arizona State University announced a MOOC-based
equivalent of the first year of a bachelor’s degree for about $6,000. And
Illinois modeled its program on a $7,000 computer-science master’s degree
offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology in partnership with Udacity,
another MOOC provider.
One unusual aspect of the Illinois plan is that
students would be able to earn smaller certifications each time they
finished three courses, an idea leaders call "stackable credentials." In
that way, if students stopped early, they might still have a lighter-weight
credential to show potential employers.
"Unlike a degree, which is this binary, zero-one
thing, students are getting benefit at every step along the way," said
Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera.
Students taking one-off courses would not be
eligible for federal financial aid, though, unless they were officially
enrolled in the degree program, because of a quirk of federal student-aid
rules. Essentially the rules do not allow students to receive aid for prior
knowledge, so courses taken before officially enrolling would not be
eligible.
The program is starting small — only 200 students
will be admitted in its pilot phase.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The ultimate test will be the reaction of potential employers to this and other
for-credit MOOC programs. My guess is that there will be no distinction between
high gpa achievers. It would be entirely self-defeating if Coursera allows the
online credits to have lower academic standards. My hunch is that A grades will
be very tough to achieve in this online degree/badge program.
The Massachusetts Institute
of Technology will next year launch the first of what could be several
pilots to determine if pieces of what it has provided face-to-face can be
delivered through massive open online courses.
The institute on Wednesday
announced an alternative path for students to enroll in its supply chain
management program and earn a master’s of engineering in logistics degree.
Instead of students being required to move to Cambridge, Mass., for the
duration of the 10-month program, MIT will offer half of the program through
MOOCs, saving students tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.
Learners who complete the
MOOCs but can’t afford or simply aren’t interested in finishing the degree
won’t walk away empty-handed. MIT will offer those learners a new
microcredential, called a MicroMaster’s, and is working with other
organizations that offer supply chain management programs to ensure they
will accept the credential toward degree completion.
Arizona State University is joining with the MOOC
provider edX in a project that it says “reimagines the freshman year” and
opens a new low-cost, low-risk path to a college degree for students
anywhere in the world.
The project, called the
Global Freshman Academy,
will offer a set of eight courses designed to fulfill
the general-education requirements of a freshman year at Arizona State at a
fraction of the cost students typically pay, and students can begin taking
courses without going through the traditional application process, the
university said in a news release on Wednesday. Because the classes are
offered as
massive open online courses, or
MOOCs, there is no limit on how many students can
enroll.
. . .
The courses to be offered through the Global
Freshman Academy are being designed and will be taught by leading scholars
at Arizona State. “These courses are developed to their rigorous standards,”
Adrian Sannier, chief academic officer for
EdPlus at ASU,
said in the release. “Course faculty are committed to ensuring their
students understand college-level material so that they can be prepared to
successfully complete college.”
Students who pass a final examination in a course
will have the option of paying a fee of no more than $200 per credit hour to
get college credit for it.
Mr. Agarwal and Mr. Crow are scheduled to formally
announce the project at a conference in Washington on Thursday.
Jensen Comments and Questions
The real test is how well these credits are accepted by other universities for
transfer credit. It probably will not be an issue for graduate school admission
since there are three more years of more traditional onsite or online credits.
But it could be a huge issue for example when a student takes the first year of
ASU MOOC credits and then tries to have these credits accepted by other
universities (such as TCU) that still resist accepting any online courses for
transfer credit.
For example, at many universities these days there are multiple sections of a
course where some sections are onsite and some are online. Often they are taught
by the same instructor. The online sections are usually as small or even smaller
than the onsite sections because online instructors often have more student
interactions such as in instant messaging not available to onsite students ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging
Answer
These are the following obvious differences between MOOC online credits and
traditional online credits.
The huge difference between the ASU MOOC year of courses and the
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School MOOC year of courses is that the
Wharton School MOOC courses are not
available for credit (and therefore are free). The ASU MOOC courses are
available for credits that will not be totally free, although they will be
available at greatly discounted prices.
MOOC courses are open to everybody in the world and have no admission
standards.
These are not intended to be equivalent to advanced placement (AP)
credits where students eventually fill in course requirements with
other more advanced courses. The ASU MOOC courses have no requirements to
earn substitute credits. Universities do vary with respect to substitution
requirements for AP credit, and many do not require taking added replacement
courses ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement
I suspect that at some universities the ASU MOOCs will be similar to AP
credits except that the competency-examination process is different.
MOOC courses generally have no limits to class size.
MOOC courses do not have prerequisites such as a MOOC calculus course or
linear algebra that has no prerequisites.
MOOC courses are generally very large such that student interactions
online with instructors and/or other students are virtually non-existent.
MOOC courses generally do not have graded writing assignments such as
term papers.
MOOC courses do not have graded homework.
MOOC courses do not have graded team projects, whereas team projects are
common in smaller traditional online courses.
MOOC courses generally do not have class attendance requirements or
class participation requirements even though they generally do have
classes. The first MOOC course ever offered was an artificial intelligence
course at Stanford University where students enrolled in the course on
campus has the option of not attending class. Some faculty feel like some
course courses should have required course attendance and course
participation.
The bottom line is that it appears that the ASU freshman year MOOC course
credits will be little more than competency-based
credits. This will be controversial since many faculty in higher
education feel like credits in general education core courses should
entail class participation, including first-year core courses. For example, at
Trinity University there is a first-year seminar that all new students take in
very small classes that require a lot of class participation in discussions of
assigned readings and the writing of term papers. I think some sections of this
seminar don't even have examinations. I did not have examinations when I taught
a section of this seminar for two years.
In traditional large lectures courses on campus students typically are broken
out into accompanying recitation sections intended for class participation and
interactions with a recitation instructor.
Jensen Note
I never anticipated competency-based credits in the first-year of college. I
think these will be wildly popular in advanced-level training courses such as a
CPA examination review course in the final (fifth) year of an accounting
program. Using competency-based courses for first-year general education courses
is more controversial.
After I made a comment following this article at the Chronicle's Website,
somebody else (from Colorado) made the following comment:
Inside HigherEd has an article on this subject that
reports ASU does not intend to indicate if a course was taken via MOOC on
the transcript. Other institutions will have no way of knowing the delivery
modality, and although ASU offers assurances that the courses will be the
same, they haven't figured out how they will assess learning outcomes in the
MOOC courses.
In contrast, classroom discussions, debates, and
case studies tend to emphasize analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Students
are typically asked to offer a critique or assessment, identify bias,
present a judgment, or advance a novel interpretation.
Performance-based assessment offers a valuable
alternative (or supplement) to the standard forms of student
evaluation. Performance-based assessment requires students to solve a
real-world problem or to create perform, or produce something with
real-world application. It allows an instructor to assess how well students
are able to use essential skills and knowledge, think critically and
analytically, or develop a project. It also offers a measure of the depth
and breadth of a student’s proficiencies.
Performance-based assessment can, in certain
instances, simply be an example of what Bloom’s Taxonomy calls
application. Thus, a student or a team might be asked to apply knowledge and
skills to a particular task or problem.
But performance-based assessment can move beyond
Bloom’s Taxonomy when students are engaged in a project that requires them
to display creativity and that results in an outcome, project, or
performance that is genuinely new. The more sophisticated performance
assessments involve research, planning, design, development, implementation,
presentation, and, in the case of team-based projects, collaboration.
If performance-based assessments are to be fair,
valid, and reliable, it is essential that there is an explicit rubric that
lays out the criteria for evaluation in advance. It is also helpful to ask
students to keep a log or journal to document the project’s development and
record their reflections on the developmental process.
The most commonly used assessments – the midterm
and final or the term paper – have an unpleasant consequence. Reliance on a
small number of high stakes assessments encourages too many students to
coast through the semester and to pull all-nighters when their grade is on
the line. This may inadvertently encourage a party culture.
In stark contrast, performance-based assessment
offers a way to ensure that evaluation is truly a learning experience, one
that engages students and that measures the full range of their knowledge
and proficiencies.
Steven Mintz is Executive Director of the University of Texas System's
Institute for Transformational Learning and Professor of History at the
University of Texas at Austin. Harvard University Press will publish his
latest book, The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood, next
month.
Arizona State University is joining with the MOOC
provider edX in a project that it says “reimagines the freshman year” and
opens a new low-cost, low-risk path to a college degree for students
anywhere in the world.
The project, called the
Global Freshman Academy,
will offer a set of eight courses designed to fulfill
the general-education requirements of a freshman year at Arizona State at a
fraction of the cost students typically pay, and students can begin taking
courses without going through the traditional application process, the
university said in a news release on Wednesday. Because the classes are
offered as
massive open online courses, or
MOOCs, there is no limit on how many students can
enroll.
. . .
The courses to be offered through the Global
Freshman Academy are being designed and will be taught by leading scholars
at Arizona State. “These courses are developed to their rigorous standards,”
Adrian Sannier, chief academic officer for
EdPlus at ASU,
said in the release. “Course faculty are committed to ensuring their
students understand college-level material so that they can be prepared to
successfully complete college.”
Students who pass a final examination in a course
will have the option of paying a fee of no more than $200 per credit hour to
get college credit for it.
Mr. Agarwal and Mr. Crow are scheduled to formally
announce the project at a conference in Washington on Thursday.
Jensen Comments and Questions
The real test is how well these credits are accepted by other universities for
transfer credit. It probably will not be an issue for graduate school admission
since there are three more years of more traditional onsite or online credits.
But it could be a huge issue for example when a student takes the first year of
ASU MOOC credits and then tries to have these credits accepted by other
universities (such as TCU) that still resist accepting any online courses for
transfer credit.
For example, at many universities these days there are multiple sections of a
course where some sections are onsite and some are online. Often they are taught
by the same instructor. The online sections are usually as small or even smaller
than the onsite sections because online instructors often have more student
interactions such as in instant messaging not available to onsite students ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging
Answer
These are the following obvious differences between MOOC online credits and
traditional online credits.
The huge difference between the ASU MOOC year of courses and the
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School MOOC year of courses is that the
Wharton School MOOC courses are not
available for credit (and therefore are free). The ASU MOOC courses are
available for credits that will not be totally free, although they will be
available at greatly discounted prices.
MOOC courses are open to everybody in the world and have no admission
standards.
These are not intended to be equivalent to advanced placement (AP)
credits where students eventually fill in course requirements with
other more advanced courses. The ASU MOOC courses have no requirements to
earn substitute credits. Universities do vary with respect to substitution
requirements for AP credit, and many do not require taking added replacement
courses ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement
I suspect that at some universities the ASU MOOCs will be similar to AP
credits except that the competency-examination process is different.
MOOC courses generally have no limits to class size.
MOOC courses do not have prerequisites such as a MOOC calculus course or
linear algebra that has no prerequisites.
MOOC courses are generally very large such that student interactions
online with instructors and/or other students are virtually non-existent.
MOOC courses generally do not have graded writing assignments such as
term papers.
MOOC courses do not have graded homework.
MOOC courses do not have graded team projects, whereas team projects are
common in smaller traditional online courses.
MOOC courses generally do not have class attendance requirements or
class participation requirements even though they generally do have
classes. The first MOOC course ever offered was an artificial intelligence
course at Stanford University where students enrolled in the course on
campus has the option of not attending class. Some faculty feel like some
course courses should have required course attendance and course
participation.
The bottom line is that it appears that the ASU freshman year MOOC course
credits will be little more than competency-based
credits. This will be controversial since many faculty in higher
education feel like credits in general education core courses should
entail class participation, including first-year core courses. For example, at
Trinity University there is a first-year seminar that all new students take in
very small classes that require a lot of class participation in discussions of
assigned readings and the writing of term papers. I think some sections of this
seminar don't even have examinations. I did not have examinations when I taught
a section of this seminar for two years.
In traditional large lectures courses on campus students typically are broken
out into accompanying recitation sections intended for class participation and
interactions with a recitation instructor.
Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng is widely considered
a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Along with Daphne Koller,
he is the co-founder of Coursera, the massive open online course (MOOC)
platform, in April 2012. In just a little more than three years, Coursera
has over nine million users enrolled in 750 courses from more than a hundred
institutions worldwide. Ng taught at Stanford University and is the director
of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. He works on deep learning
algorithms, which Ng says are loosely inspired by how the brain learns. He
worked on one of the most ambitious artificial intelligence systems at
Google called Google Brain. The system analyzed millions of photos taken
from YouTube videos and learned to recognize objects, including human and
cat faces, without additional human guidance.
Continued in article
You may want to paste this article in your personal archives before it
disappears from the Web.
How Business Higher Education and Training are Changing
A wide array of players are entering the executive
education and corporate training market and here are some recent
developments:
McKinsey, one of the top strategy
consultancies in the world, recently launched
McKinsey
Academy. This new platform uses McKinsey
consultants to teach and give feedback, social learning and group-based
projects, and adaptive learning and game mechanics to help companies
develop their internal talent. Courses include Business Strategy,
Mastering Challenging Conversations, and McKinsey’s Approach to Problem
Solving, among others.
Udemy for
Business offers companies a way to “train your
employees better, faster, and more efficiently than ever before” by
offering courses in programming, web design, digital marketing and
business skills, among others. Client companies include many of the
multinationals that business school executive education units covet.
LinkedIn recently acquired Lynda.com, an
online learning company known for content focusing on creative skills –
and now moving into business topics – as part of LinkedIn's strategy to
become a professional development network.
Skillshare
is “a learning community for creators” and offers a series of online
courses to students who pay $10/month for unlimited access to courses
taught by practitioners. Skillshare, launched late last year, now has
over 750,000 students and courses range from Email Marketing,
Entrepreneurship, and Photography to Visual Storytelling and Getting
Started in Hand Lettering. Companies can purchase an enterprise license
and many of Silicon Valley’s rising stars are clients.
Coursera offers
Wharton’s Business Foundation series of four
courses (Marketing, Financial Accounting, Operations Management, and
Corporate Finance). Through Coursera’s Signature Track, students can
earn a specialization certificate for $595 and completing all four
courses plus a capstone project.
“There are over
10,000 business schools in the world so when you start thinking about that
group from 1,000 to 10,000, I think curated MOOC content and better ways of
credentialing students is going to be a heck of a threat to a lot of those
players.”
Jensen Comment
I think there's increasing accountability required in both the education and
training markets. In particular, for-profit-universities of questionable quality
are hurting badly or shutting down entirely. Innovative programs more closely
tied to respected traditional universities (think Coursera) or top private
sector companies like McKinsey and Cisco are rising up.
Scenarios of Higher Education for Year 2020 ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gU3FjxY2uQ
The above great video, among other things, discusses how "badges" of academic
education and training accomplishment may become more important in the job
market than tradition transcript credits awarded by colleges. Universities may
teach the courses (such as free MOOCs) whereas private sector companies may
award the "badges" or "credits" or "certificates." The new term for such awards
is a
"microcredential."
After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper
class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important
role in its future. But what will that role be?
Recently, conversations about "elite" online
education has revolved around the free online courses, aka
MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of
other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon
became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to
academic credit at the institutions offering them (or
anywhere else).
So how exactly does online education figure into
the future of elite higher education? Judging by what we’ve seen so far, the
answer can be divided into three parts.
1. Free online courses for everyone.
MOOCs are the McMansions of online higher education
— capacious, impressive-looking, and easy to supply to the masses once
professors have drawn up the blueprints.
Families who want to work with the architects
directly are not opting for a sequence of free online courses instead of an
exclusive residential program that ends with a degree. Even if the MOOCs
lose money, wealthier universities can afford to take a hit — especially if
it means increasing their visibility in valuable overseas markets.
Despite their
flagging hype, MOOCs remain
very popular. Top institutions will probably
continue to build them.
2. Paid online courses for professional
graduate programs.
Yale University recently
unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring
physician’s assistants, offered through its medical school. The program will
also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of the academic coursework will be
delivered online. It is the second program Yale has created along these
lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree in nursing, which the
university announced in 2011.
Degrees in fields like health care and teaching are
in high demand, and many lesser-known players have grabbed big chunks of
that market online by assuring prospective students that they can go back to
school without upending their lives. Yale is not alone in its effort to
claim its slice of the pie; graduate schools at the Johns Hopkins
University, Georgetown University, the University of California at Berkeley,
and others have also started offering online versions of their professional
master’s programs.
Online does not fundamentally threaten the appeal
of professional programs, where the "student experience" is not as
sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll are
working adults who already went through dorm life and student organizations
and late-night philosophical chats with future members of their wedding
parties. They are now mainly interested in learning a trade.
3. Online components in face-to-face
undergraduate courses.
In November 2012, a consortium of 10 prestigious
colleges
announced that they would collaborate with 2U, an
online "enabler" company, to build fully online
courses that undergraduates could take for credit. The stigma on virtual
learning had faded enough that administrators at those colleges — Duke
University, Emory University, Washington University in St. Louis, and others
— were willing to give it a shot.
A year and a half later, the consortium was
kaput. The faculty at Duke
nixed the partnership with 2U. Other colleges went
ahead with the experiment, but quickly came to a verdict: Thanks, but no
thanks.
That does not mean online education has no role to
play in undergraduate courses. This spring, Bowdoin College is offering a
partially online course in financial accounting, taught remotely by a
professor at Dartmouth College’s business school. (The Maine college is
supplementing those online sessions with weekly meetings on campus, led by a
member its own faculty.)
Selective outsourcing could become a trend at top
colleges that want to add (or license) specialized courses without hiring
new professors.
Jensen Comment
There may be a difference between the most prestigious highly endowed
universities and other universities to the extent that distance education
courses are used as cash cows. For example, at the University of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee students pay more for an online section of a course than they do for
an onsite section of that same course possibly taught by the same instructor. If
the online course is taught by a low-paid adjunct instructor the online course
may even cost less to deliver.
Thus online courses that are priced higher become cash cows as well as
serving a wider set of prospective students. Pricing of goods and services
generally takes demand functions and price elasticity into account. Often there
is more demand from part-time students for online courses, and universities may
fill online sections with higher prices (hence low elasticity).
Most MOOCs are college courses
that comprise part of the curriculum at a university,
usually a leading university. The typical MOOC is the filmed
version of a complete live course on campus where onsite
students get credits for taking the course in a campus
classroom.
Online MOOC viewers usually watch the videos of an onsite
course and may even get together in online learning teams,
but viewers typically do not pay for or receive transcript
credit unless they take competency examinations that are
usually not administered by the MOOC professors. Prestigious
universities created EdX and Udacity for purposes of
competency testing and granting of transcript credits.
Most Webinars are much shorter
training modules conducted live that were never intended to
provide college course credits. They may be replayed as videos,
but viewers can usually ask questions online and interact with
the Webinar leaders only when the Webinar was first filmed.
Business firms like KPMG usually provide Webinars. Webinars are
not commonly provided by colleges and universities. Typically
Webinars are intended for employees, customers, or clients, but
these Webinars may be shared freely with college faculty and
students worldwide. Organizations like the FASB also conduct
Webinars bit do not offer MOOCs. Webinars may also be conducted
for continuing education (CEP) credits.
Contrary to popular belief, the typical
MOOC is not an introductory course in a discipline. More commonly a
MOOC is an advanced specialty course in a college. For example,
MOOCs are available on the writings of great poets but not
introductory courses how to write compositions or poems. There are
exceptions of course and often the most popular MOOCs are less
advanced such as an introductory MOOC in social psychology versus an
advanced MOOC on memory and metacognition.
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of MOOC courses available online from
prestigious universities --- See Below
Coursera /kɔərsˈɛrə/ is a for-profit educational
technology company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and
Daphne Koller from Stanford University that offers massive open online
courses (MOOCs). Coursera works with universities to make some of their
courses available online, and offers courses in physics, engineering,
humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business,
computer science, and other subjects. Coursera has an official mobile app
for iOS and Android. As of October 2014,
Coursera has 10 million users in 839 courses from 114 institutions.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Note that by definition MOOCs are free
courses generally served up by prestigious or other highly respected
universities that usually serve up videos of live courses on campus to the world
in general. MOOC leaders in this regard have been MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Penn,
and other prestigious universities with tens of billions of dollars invested in
endowments that give these wealthy universities financial flexibility in
developing new ways to serve the public.
When students seek some type of transcript "credits" for MOOCs the "credits"
are usually not free since these entail some types of competency hurdles such as
examinations or, at a minimum, proof of participation. The "credits" are not
usually granted by the universities like Stanford providing the MOOCs.
Instead credits, certificates, badges or whatever are provided by private sector
companies like Coursera, Udacity, etc.
Sometimes Coursera contracts with a college wanting to give its students
credits for taking another university's MOOC such as the now infamous instance
when more than half of San Jose State University students in a particular MOOC
course did not pass a Coursera-administered final examination.
"What Are MOOCs Good For? Online courses
may not be changing colleges as their boosters claimed they would, but they can
prove valuable in surprising ways," by Justin Pope, MIT's Technology
Review, December 15, 2014 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/review/533406/what-are-moocs-good-for/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141215
The following describes how a company, Coursera, long involved with the
history of MOOCs, is moving toward non-traditional "credits" or
"microcredentials" in a business model that it now envisions for itself as a
for-profit company. Also note that MOOCs are still free for participants not
seeking any type of microcredential.
And the business model described below probably won't apply to thousands of
MOOCs in art, literature, history, etc. It may apply to subsets of business and
technology MOOCs, but that alone does not mean the MOOCs are no longer free for
students who are not seeking microcredentials. They involve payments for the "microcredentials"
awarded for demonstrated competencies. However these will be defined in the
future --- not necessarily traditional college transcript credits. A better term
might be "badges of competency." But these will probably be called
microcredentials.
Whether or not these newer types of microcredentials are successful
depends a great deal on the job market.
If employers begin to rely upon them, in addition to an applicant's traditional
college transcript, then Coursera's new business model may take off. This makes
it essential that Coursera carefully control the academic standards for their
newer types of "credits" or "badges."
Massive open online course providers such
as Coursera have long pointed to the benefits of the data collected by the
platforms, saying it will help colleges and universities understand how
students learn online. Now Coursera’s data is telling the company that
learners are particularly interested in business administration and
technology courses to boost their career prospects -- and that they want to
take MOOCs at their own pace.
As a result, Coursera will this year
offer more course sequences, more on-demand content and more partnerships
with the private sector.
Asked if Coursera is closer to
identifying a business model, CEO Rick Levin said, “I think we have one. I
think this is it.”
Since its founding in 2012, Coursera has
raised millions of dollars in venture capital
while searching for a business model. Many questioned if the
company's original premise -- open access to the world's top professors --
could lead to profits, but with the introduction of a verified certificate
option, Coursera
began to make money
in 2013. By that October, the company had earned its first million.
In the latest evolutionary step for its
MOOCs, Coursera on Wednesday
announced a series of capstone projects developed
by its university partners in cooperation with companies such as Instagram,
Google and Shazam. The projects will serve as the final challenge for
learners enrolled in certain Specializations -- sequences of related courses
in topics such as cybersecurity, data mining and entrepreneurship that
Coursera
introduced last year. (The company initially
considered working with Academic Partnerships before both companies created
their version of Specializations.)
The announcement is another investment
by Coursera in the belief that adult learners, years removed from formal
education, are increasingly seeking microcredentials -- bits of knowledge to
update or refresh old skills. Based on the results from the past year, Levin
said, interest in such credentials is "palpable." He described bundling
courses together into Specializations and charging for a certificate as “the
most successful of our product introductions." Compared to when the
sequences were offered as individual courses, he said, enrollment has “more
than doubled” and the share of learners who pay for the certificate has
increased “by a factor of two to four.”
“I think people see the value of the
credential as even more significant if you take a coherent sequence,” Levin
said. “The other measure of effectiveness is manifest in what you’re seeing
here: company interest in these longer sequences.”
Specializations generally cost a few
hundred dollars to complete, with each individual course in the sequence
costing $29 to $49, but Coursera is still searching for the optimal course
length. This week, for example, learners in the Fundamentals of Computing
Specialization were surprised to find its three courses had been split into
six courses, raising the cost of the entire sequence from $196 to $343.
Levin called it a glitch, saying learners will pay the price they initially
agreed to.
The partnerships are producing some
interesting pairings. In the Specialization created by faculty members at
the University of California at San Diego, learners will “design new social
experiences” in their capstone project, and the best proposals will receive
feedback from Michel "Mike" Krieger, cofounder of Instagram. In the
Entrepreneurship Specialization out of the University of Maryland at College
Park, select learners will receive an opportunity to interview with the
accelerator program 500 Startups.
As those examples suggest, the benefits
of the companies’ involvement mostly apply to top performers, and some are
more hypothetical than others. For example, in a capstone project created by
Maryland and Vanderbilt University faculty, learners will develop mobile
cloud computing applications for a chance to win tablets provided by Google.
“The best apps may be considered to be featured in the Google Play Store,”
according to a Coursera press release.
Anne M. Trumbore, director of online
learning initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School,
said the capstone projects are an “experiment.” The business school, which
will offer a Specialization sequence in business foundations, has partnered
with the online marketplace Snapdeal and the music identification app
Shazam, two companies either founded or run by Wharton alumni.
“There’s not a sense of certainty about
what the students are going to produce or how the companies are going to use
it,” Trumbore said. “Snapdeal and Shazam will look at the top projects
graded highest by peers and trained staff. What the companies do after that
is really up to them. We have no idea. We’re casting this pebble into the
pond.”
Regardless of the companies' plans,
Trumbore said, the business school will waive the application fee for the
top 15 learners in the Specialization and provide scholarship money to those
that matriculate by going through that pipeline.
“The data’s great, but the larger
incentive for Wharton is to discover who’s out there,” Trumbore said.
Levin suggested the partnering companies
may also be able to use the Specializations as a recruitment tool. “From a
company point of view, they like the idea of being involved with educators
in their fields,” he said. “More specifically, I think some of the companies
are actually hoping that by acknowledging high-performing students in a
couple of these capstone projects they can spot potential talent in
different areas of the world.”
While Coursera rolled out its first
Specializations last year, Levin said, it also rewrote the code powering the
platform to be able to offer more self-paced, on-demand courses. Its MOOCs
had until last fall followed a cohort model, which Levin said could be
“frustrating” to learners when they came across an interesting MOOC but were
unable to enroll. After Coursera piloted an on-demand delivery method last
fall, the total number of such courses has now reached 47. Later this year,
there will be “several hundred,” he said.
“Having the courses self-paced means
learners have a much higher likelihood of finishing,” Levin said. “The idea
is to advantage learners by giving them more flexibility.”
Some MOOC instructors would rather have
rigidity than flexibility, however. Levin said some faculty members have
expressed skepticism about offering on-demand courses, preferring the
tighter schedule of a cohort-based model.
Whether it comes to paid Specializations
versus free individual courses or on-demand versus cohort-based course
delivery, Levin said, Coursera can support both. “Will we develop more
Specializations? Yes. Will we depreciate single courses? No,” he said. “We
don’t want to discourage the wider adoption of MOOCs.”
Jensen Comment
I don't advise MOOC courses for "students" who do not have some prerequisites in
the subject matter. For example, the first MOOC course ever invented was filmed
live in an artificial intelligence course for computer science majors at
Stanford University. These students were not first year students who had never
taken computer science courses.
Interestingly students in that course were given the option of attending live
classes or MOOC classes. After several weeks the majority of students opted for
the MOOC classes. Of course at Stanford the students were graded on assignments
and examinations since they were getting course credit.
Of-campus MOOC students were not given an option to receive course credit.
They just learned on their own. There are now options in some MOOC courses to
take competency-based examinations for credit, although these usually do not
involve the course instructors and are not free like the courses themselves.
MOOC courses themselves by definition are free, unlike most other distance
education courses.
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology have released a set of open-source visualization tools for
working with a rich trove of data from more than a million people registered
for 17 of the two institutions’ massive open online courses, which are
offered through their edX platform.
The tools let users see and work with “near
real-time” information about course registrants—minus personally identifying
details—from 193 countries. A Harvard news release says the tools “showcase
the potential promise” of data generated by MOOCs. The aggregated data sets
that the tools use can be also downloaded.
The suite of tools, named Insights, was created by Sergiy
Nesterko, a research fellow in HarvardX, the university’s
instructional-technology office, and Daniel Seaton, a postdoctoral research
fellow at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. Mr. Nesterko said the tools “can
help to guide instruction while courses are running and deepen our
understanding of the impact of courses after they are complete.”
The Harvard tools are
here, while those for MIT are
here.
Jensen Comment on Coursera
Enter the search term for accounting and note the free accounting courses
from the University of Illinois, University of California at Irvine, Penn
(Wharton), and the University of West Virginia
Jensen Comment
The Wharton School shocked the world when it commenced to provide
free (non-credit) MOOCs of its actual MBA core courses. Aside from
curiosity seekers and business faculty around the world wondering
how the prestigious Wharton School teaches its core courses, many of
the students taking these MOOCs are prospective MBA students who
want to get an edge before entering MBA programs of their choice ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/moocs-upend-traditional-business-education/
Although Harvard provides hundreds of MOOCs in various
disciplines, the Harvard Business School has not been providing
MOOCs. Now the HBS is proposing a pre-MBA distance education program
with a relatively low fee that may also shake up the MBA world.
Since it is not free and has admission standards it cannot be called
a MOOC.
This article gives a very short summary of each first-year course in
the Harvard MBA Program
FRC is the “accounting” class at HBS. We did also
learn accounting mechanics, but we also learned a lot about motivation and
compensation.
My favorite was the idea of “span of
accountability” — what an employee is responsible for vs. “span of
control” — what the employee can dictate based on their job. For instance, a
PM has a lot of accountability (shipping the product), but relatively little
control (no direct reports).
When an employee has more accountability than
control, this is considered an “entrepreneurial gap.” It’s typically created
via an incentive system that encourages the employee to go beyond their span
of control. The key thing is to get the incentive system right. What
behaviors will it encourage? What levers can employees pull to move the
metric?
Before I wanted to hire smart people and pay them
“fairly.” Now I want to hire smart people, and give them an entrepreneurial
gap with an incentive system that works well for them and for the company.
It’s more fair that way.
Jensen Comment
Students usually do not go into a MBA program to become specialists like CPAs.
MBA programs such as the Harvard MBA program do not offer enough specialty
courses to sit for licensing examinations such as those in accounting,
information technology, computer science, internal auditing, fraud examination,
etc. MBA programs are very general, and the best two-year programs are designed
for students who did not take business courses as undergraduates.
My point is that when studying things like accountancy at the HBS the
curriculum ignores most of the gory technical details. Students do not go to the
HBS to become professional accountants and accounting firms do not recruit
accountants at prestigious MBA universities unless those universities also have
other tracks for accounting majors such as the accounting major track at
Cornell.
Note that the following are not MOOCs since they are not free and enrollment
is competitive
"Harvard Business School hopes to fundamentally change online education with
its new $1,500 pre-MBA program," by Richard Feloni, Business Insider,
February 27, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-business-school-hbx-1500-online-program-2015-2
This week, Harvard Business School launched an
innovative new online education program to the public that it thinks is so
far ahead of free online courses that it's worthy of a $1,500 price tag.
The 11-week pre-MBA program called CORe accepts
about 500 students and is taught in the school's signature case-study
method. The first official session started on Feb. 25, and applications are
open for spring and summer sessions.
CORe is the flagship offering from HBS's new
digital platform,
HBX, which aims to
become a full-fledged branch of the school rather than a place to dump video
recordings of classroom lectures.
CORe is made up of three courses —
economics for managers, business analytics, and
financial accounting — and primarily
targets young professionals with liberal arts backgrounds who aspire to rise
to management or are considering getting an MBA.
Students who pass the program receive a certificate
that carries the weight of one from HBS's executive education program.
HBX chair Bharat Anand tells Business Insider that
most online course offerings are still in their infancy, where long video
lectures posted alongside multiple choice questions is the norm.
Conversely, HBX CORe is built on a proprietary
platform that uses the case-study technique that distinguishes HBS. "This
has some very interesting and exciting potential for education," Anand says.
It started as a way to find an online tool to
address the "non trivial" 20% to 30% of students accepted to HBS's MBA
program who lacked the necessary background in "the language of business":
accounting, economics, and data analysis. These students always had access
to a two-week primer before matriculating in the fall, but Anand says the
short time was insufficient for achieving a thorough understanding, and
traveling to HBS's campus before the school year officially starts could be
an inconvenience for many students.
This week, Harvard Business School
launched an innovative new online education program to the
public that it thinks is so far ahead of free online courses
that it's worthy of a $1,500 price tag.
The 11-week pre-MBA program called CORe
accepts about 500 students and is taught in the school's
signature case-study method. The first official session started
on Feb. 25, and applications are open for spring and summer
sessions.
CORe is the flagship offering from
HBS's new digital platform,
HBX,
which aims to become a full-fledged branch of the school rather
than a place to dump video recordings of classroom lectures.
CORe is made up of three courses —
economics for managers, business
analytics, and financial accounting
— and primarily targets young professionals with liberal arts
backgrounds who aspire to rise to management or are considering
getting an MBA.
Students who pass the program receive a
certificate that carries the weight of one from HBS's executive
education program.
HBX chair Bharat Anand tells Business
Insider that most online course offerings are still in their
infancy, where long video lectures posted alongside multiple
choice questions is the norm.
Conversely, HBX CORe is built on a
proprietary platform that uses the case-study technique that
distinguishes HBS. "This has some very interesting and exciting
potential for education," Anand says.
It started as a way to find an online
tool to address the "non trivial" 20% to 30% of students
accepted to HBS's MBA program who lacked the necessary
background in "the language of business": accounting, economics,
and data analysis. These students always had access to a
two-week primer before matriculating in the fall, but Anand says
the short time was insufficient for achieving a thorough
understanding, and traveling to HBS's campus before the school
year officially starts could be an inconvenience for many
students.
Jensen Comment
The Wharton set of free MOOCs will probably be a better choice for
students wanting to learn a wider spectrum of business knowledge
that includes things like marketing and finance that Harvard's
pre-MBA program will not offer, at least not initially.
But there are advantages of Harvard's pre-MBA distance education
program relative to MOOCs. Firstly, there's the prestige of being
one of only 500 admitted to the program. Secondly, there will be
more student-to-student learning interactions in Harvard's fee-based
program. Unlike the HBS MBA program itself I doubt if there are
writing assignments and examinations that are graded by faculty.
Given the low price and limited enrollments, I suspect that this
pre-MBA program is not (at least not yet) intended to be a cash cow
program relative to the massive cash cow MBA program and Executive
MBA programs at the HBS.
Most MOOCs are college courses
that comprise part of the curriculum at a university,
usually a leading university. The typical MOOC is the filmed
version of a complete live course on campus where onsite
students get credits for taking the course in a campus
classroom.
Online MOOC viewers usually watch the videos of an onsite
course and may even get together in online learning teams,
but viewers typically do not pay for or receive transcript
credit unless they take competency examinations that are
usually not administered by the MOOC professors. Prestigious
universities created EdX and Udacity for purposes of
competency testing and granting of transcript credits.
Most Webinars are much shorter
training modules conducted live that were never intended to
provide college course credits. They may be replayed as videos,
but viewers can usually ask questions online and interact with
the Webinar leaders only when the Webinar was first filmed.
Business firms like KPMG usually provide Webinars. Webinars are
not commonly provided by colleges and universities. Typically
Webinars are intended for employees, customers, or clients, but
these Webinars may be shared freely with college faculty and
students worldwide. Organizations like the FASB also conduct
Webinars bit do not offer MOOCs. Webinars may also be conducted
for continuing education (CEP) credits.
Contrary to popular belief, the typical
MOOC is not an introductory course in a discipline. More commonly a
MOOC is an advanced specialty course in a college. For example,
MOOCs are available on the writings of great poets but not
introductory courses how to write compositions or poems. There are
exceptions of course and often the most popular MOOCs are less
advanced such as an introductory MOOC in social psychology versus an
advanced MOOC on memory and metacognition.
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of free MOOCs from
prestigious universities around the world --- See Below
Distance Education Fee-Based Courses are Not MOOCs
Bob Jensen's threads on tens of thousands
of fee-based distance education and training courses that usually have
assignments, examinations, interactions with instructors, and associate,
undergraduate, or graduate degree credits ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
Such fee-based courses and online degrees are now offered (selectively)
by the majority of colleges ranging from community colleges to Ivy
League universities. It's common for universities to have multiple
sections of a course where some sections are onsite and some are online.
No distinction is usually made on a transcript if the course is taken
onsite or online such that it becomes very difficult to enforce a policy
of not offering transfer credit for a distance education course,
especially a distance education course from a leading university like
the University of Wisconsin or the University of Texas.
Thus it becomes somewhat of a joke when the
Texas Society of CPAs limits (for CPA candidates) the number of accounting
courses that can be taken online when leading universities do not reveal on
a transcript whether a course was taken online versus onsite. The key should
be the academic reputation of the university rather than how the course was
taken from a leading university.
I'm still skeptical of online doctoral
programs, because I think an on-campus experience is extremely important to
preparing doctoral students for reaching and research. Having said this,
there are some respectable online doctoral programs such as a Ph.D. in
pharmacy from the University of Colorado.
In my viewpoint, however, there are no respectable Ph.D. programs in
accounting --- period! There probably can and will be such USA programs in
the future, but I think they will have to begin at the top such as an online
doctoral program from an accounting program ranked in the Top 10 accounting
degree programs by US News.
Yeah! I'm a biased snob when it comes to online doctoral programs
And I am aware that one of the Pathways Commission initiatives is to
experiment with newer types of Ph.D. programs in accountancy. But these
should probably be more along the lines of onsite clinical Ph.D. programs
rather than online Ph.D. programs.
And yes it is possible to conduct clinical research in accounting much like
clinical research has become the most important type of research in medical
schools --- but certainly not doctoral programs in accountancy. Ant that's a
shame!
Despite a host of questions about the staying power
of MOOCs, more free megacourses are starting this month than ever before.
Here are some highlights.
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”
There are now
nearly 7,000 accounting education videos on YouTube, most of which are in very
basic accounting.
But there are nearly 150 videos in advanced accounting. There are nearly
70 videos on XBRL
A new MOOC initiative from the University of
Wisconsin–Madison ties the topics to communities in the state of Wisconsin
and gives residents an opportunity to meet in person.
Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Provost and Vice
Chancellor for Academic Affairs; Jeffrey S. Russell, Vice Provost for
Lifelong Learning and Dean, Division of Continuing Studies; Linda A. Jorn,
Associate Vice Provost of Learning Technologies and Division of Information
Technology (DoIT) Director of Academic Technology; and Joshua H. Morrill,
Evaluator, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Imagine a massive open online course (MOOC) that
doesn't feel so massive; one that's intimately tied to a region, with
opportunities for meaningful face-to-face encounters in community settings.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison will offer six such courses in its
latest round of massive open online courses
for 2015–16. One course
will invite those interested in climate change to attend discussions
throughout Wisconsin, thanks to partnerships with 21 public libraries.
Another course, focused on hunting and conservation, features an event with
hunters and chefs in the southern Wisconsin city of Baraboo.
UW–Madison began its experiment with massive open
online courses in 2013. Hosted on Coursera, the
four courses
in our first phase reached about 135,000 learners from 141 countries and all
50 states.1 Despite reservations about MOOCs in academic circles,2
university leaders believe these courses have a part to play in our future,
tying them to a larger push for institutional change called
Educational Innovation:
an attempt to prepare students and communities for the 21st century. In
launching a second phase of MOOCs, we're thinking more carefully about our
audiences so we can use the platform to engage with people in both Wisconsin
and the world.
Our phase-one MOOCs focused on topics of general
interest, such as human evolution and financial markets. For phase two,
however, the topics are more strongly associated with the state of
Wisconsin. Five of the six new MOOCs have an environmental theme,
acknowledging that Wisconsin—home of "A Sand County Almanac" author Aldo
Leopold and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson—is a cradle of the conservation
movement.3 Continuing this legacy, our faculty and staff will
offer courses on such topics as Leopold's Land Ethic and changing climate in
the Great Lakes region.
Through MOOCs, we will invite citizens from around
the globe to engage in discussions on some of the most important issues of
our time. But even more important, we will extend this invitation to people
in Baraboo, for example (see below), along with other state residents. In
this way, we can offer a UW–Madison experience to Wisconsin citizens who
might not otherwise feel connected to the university.
Knowing Our Audience
UW–Madison's phase-one MOOCs gave faculty members a
chance to explore new ways of teaching, research, and outreach, supported by
a project team that could provide strategic planning, online course
development, and evaluation. This initial offering consisted of four
courses: "Video Games and Learning," "Markets with Frictions," "Human
Evolution: Past and Future," and "Globalizing Higher Education and Research
for the 'Knowledge Economy.'"
The MOOCs were faculty-centered, following a
traditional classroom model. Instructors shared their expertise with an
audience of learners—albeit widely scattered learners who, rather than
raising their hands in a classroom, watched instructional videos, engaged in
activities relevant to their day-to-day lives, and typed their questions in
discussion forums.
We approached phase one as an experiment in which
we could learn by doing. We hoped to:
Develop standards for a quality MOOC
Document the needs of faculty, learners, and
support staff
Evaluate the learning-platform requirements
The experiment succeeded from the institution's
standpoint. We learned how to design MOOCs and serve a more diverse
audience. The participating faculty explored new ways of teaching and
expressed satisfaction with the results.
More significantly, we learned about the people who
signed up for our MOOCS. We conducted a pre-MOOC survey, a mid-MOOC survey,
and a post-MOOC survey that collected perceptual, attitudinal, and
demographic information. The
surveys
showed that phase-one MOOC participants fell into three overlapping
motivational segments.
General interest: people who
wanted to find out what a MOOC was like, were interested in a topic, and
sought a connection with like-minded participants.
Career: people who wanted to
prepare for a job or enhance existing job skills.
Educational: students and
teachers who were interested in a MOOC's content for their own research
and classes.
Participants could have multiple motivations (see
table 1). Nearly all participants fell into the General Interest category,
but the Career and Educational categories were more mutually exclusive.
A few years ago, the most
enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these “massive open online
courses” stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher education.
Their interactive technology promised to deliver top-tier teaching from
institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, not just to a few hundred
students in a lecture hall on ivy-draped campuses, but free via the Internet
to thousands or even millions around the world. At long last, there appeared
to be a solution to the problem of “scaling up” higher education: if it were
delivered more efficiently, the relentless cost increases might finally be
rolled back. Some wondered whether MOOCs would merely transform the existing
system or blow it up entirely. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, cofounder
of the MOOC provider Udacity,
predicted that in 50
years, 10 institutions would be responsible for delivering higher education.
Then came the backlash. A high-profile experiment
to use MOOCs at San Jose State University foundered. Faculty there and at
other institutions rushing to incorporate MOOCs began pushing back,
rejecting the notion that online courses could replace the nuanced work of
professors in classrooms. The tiny completion rates for most MOOCs drew
increasing attention. Thrun himself became disillusioned, and he lowered
Udacity’s ambitions from educating the masses to providing corporate
training.
But all the while, a great age of experimentation
has been developing. Although some on-campus trials have gone nowhere,
others have shown
modest success (including a later iteration
at San Jose State). In 2013, Georgia Tech
announced a first-of-its-kind
all-MOOC master’s program in computer science
that, at $6,600, would cost just a fraction as much as its on-campus
counterpart. About 1,400 students have enrolled. It’s not clear how well
such programs can be replicated in other fields, or whether the job market
will reward graduates with this particular Georgia Tech degree. But the
program offers evidence that MOOCs can expand access and reduce costs in
some corners of higher education.
Meanwhile, options for online courses continue to
multiply, especially for curious people who aren’t necessarily seeking a
credential. For-profit Coursera and edX, the nonprofit consortium led by
Harvard and MIT, are up to nearly 13 million users and more than 1,200
courses between them.
Khan Academy, which began as a series of YouTube
videos, is making online instruction a more widely used tool in classrooms
around the world.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I always hate to see the Khan Academy, YouTube Channels, MOOCs, and Distance
Education for fees and credits mingled together in the same article. MOOCs are
usually filmed versions of live courses at prestigious universities. They are
free by definition, although fees might be charged by third parties for taking
competency examinations for credits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Distance education courses are usually fee-based online courses for credit.
In many instances at major universities some sections of courses are taught live
on campus and others are taught live online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
Khan Academy and YouTube Channels offer free tutorials. Learners can cherry
pick topics and watch basic and advanced learning videos that vary in length
form a few minutes to longer but usually much less than an hour for each module.
These were never intended to be anything more than self-learning alternatives
for highly motivated students. Some leading universities like the University of
Wisconsin now over limited choices for taking competency examinations for
college credit, but the distance between a few learning videos and college
credit is a very long distance indeed.
More than 100
colleges have set up channels on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/edu Many
universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers a whopping 583
Search for words like “accounting”
For Members of the American Accounting Association
One of the best sessions at the AAA's 2014 Annual Meetings was the the session
7.02 The Impact of MOOCs and Online Courses on Accounting... A video of this entire session is now available to AAA members ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/4a2206f6ab
There were three panelists including a leading technical speaker from EdX and a
professor who teaches accounting in Wharton's MOOCs of virtually all of its MBA
core courses (for free to the world).
The speakers are outstanding, but the videos do not show the PowerPoint screens.
This is a bit frustrating, but the speakers generally described what was on each
PowerPoint slide.
AAA members who did not attend the above session really missed what was one
of the best technical sessions at the 2014 Annual Meetings.
Other videos of sessions are linked at
http://commons.aaahq.org/hives/8d320fc4aa/summary
I also highly recommend watching the video of Jimmy Wales' Plenary Session.
Jimmy is the founder and CEO of Wikipedia. Wikipedia for most of us is the most
important site in the world for instant learning from an unbelievable number of
crowd-sourced encyclopedia modules. When I say unbelievable I mean an
UNBELIEVABLE number of topics covered in over 200 languages. Nearly five million
of these topics are in English. Jimmy reported that Wikipedia has over 500
million visitors per month. The population of the USA is only about 300 million
people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales and
Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger[10]
coined
its name,[11]
a
portmanteau of wiki (from the
Hawaiian
word for "quick")[12]
and
encyclopedia. Although Wikipedia's content was initially
only in English, it quickly became
multilingual, through the launch of versions in different languages. All
versions of Wikipedia are similar, but important differences exist in
content and in editing practices. The
English Wikipedia is now one of more than 200 Wikipedias, but remains
the largest one, with
over 4.6 million articles. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page
views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.[13]
Wikipedia has more than 22 million accounts, out of which there were over
73,000 active editors globally as of May 2014.[2]
Studies tend to show that Wikipedia's accuracy is similar to Encyclopedia
Britannica, with Wikipedia being much larger. However, critics have worried
that
Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias, and that its
group dynamics hinder its goals. Most
academics,
historians,
teachers and
journalists reject Wikipedia as a reliable source of information for
being a mixture of truths, half truths, and some falsehoods,[14]
and that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is notoriously
subject to manipulation and spin.[15]
Wikipedia's
Consensus and
Undue Weight policies have been repeatedly criticised by prominent
scholarly sources for undermining
freedom of thought and leading to false beliefs based on incomplete
information.[16][17][18][19]
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One of the great sources for accuracy arises when professors assign graduate
students to correct and otherwise improve Wikipedia modules. One of the most
important uses of Wikipedia is for people seeking to learn about medical
ailments, treatments, and medications. Among the
great happenings in Wikipedia is the truly active role medical schools play in
perfecting these medical modules since errors and misleading statements in those
modules can be particularly damaging to hundreds of millions of users of those
modules.
Of course, users of any encyclopedia or most any other academic source must
always remain skeptical. The hired editors must spend an undue amount of time on
controversial topics, particularly political topics. These editors often warn
people to be skeptical when encountering particular modules. These editors also
resist allowing the public to delete criticisms that in the eyes of editors are
justified. Virtually all of the 73,000+ editors do not want Wikipedia to become
too much of a public relations database. I applaud them for their dedication and
hard work.
Until now I always thought that free MOOCs from prestigious universities were
intended for "students" who are already highly motivated and highly educated
unless they are simply curiosity seekers who cherry pick parts of the course
that interest them and don't have to ever demonstrate what they learned or did
not learn in the MOOC course.
Some MOOC skeptics believe that the only students
fit to learn in massive open online courses are those who are already well
educated. Without coaching and the support system of a traditional program,
the thinking goes, ill-prepared students will not learn a thing.
Not so, according to researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The researchers analyzed data from a physics course
that MIT offered on the edX platform in the summer of 2013. They found that
students who had spent significant time on the course showed evidence of
learning no matter what their educational background.
“There was no evidence that cohorts with low
initial ability learned less than the other cohorts,” wrote the researchers
in a
paper published this month by The
International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning.
Not only that, but the MOOC students learned at a
similar rate as did MIT students who had taken the on-campus version of a
similar course. That finding surprised the researchers because the on-campus
MIT students studied together in small groups for four hours every week and
had regular access to their professors and other campus resources.
“This certainly should allay concerns that
less-well-prepared students cannot learn in MOOCs,” the researchers wrote.
But that’s not to say that the less-well-prepared
students did well. Many of them scored significantly lower than did students
with more schooling. Some would have earned failing grades.
The point is that even the students who got bad
grades in the course came away knowing more than they did at the outset,
says David E. Pritchard, a researcher on the study, and that their progress
matched that of their better-prepared classmates over the same period.
“If they stuck it out,” says Mr. Pritchard, “they
learned.”
Jensen Comment
The first MOOC ever broadcast free to the world was an artificial intelligence
course in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. The lectures
were filmed live in class. Students on campus who signed up for the course for
credit were given a choice of either going to class or watching the MOOC videos
(over and over). Over half of those on campus students elected not to go to
class. Of course for credit they had to do the course assignments and take the
examinations alongside students who opted to go to class. Research on the
differences in grades for students who attended class versus those who studied
the videos was not possible, because students who attended class could also
study the videos after class. Both groups of students could also have private
sessions with instructors via email and office hours.
Of course there are some types of courses where in-class participation is
essential to learning in the course. For example, in a Socratic-method course or
case-method course where the instructor lets the students serendipitously teach
each other, the onsite classes would probably be less meaningful if students
could choose not to participate in live classes on campus.
There are distance education technologies for letting remote students
participate in class discussions, but I don't think most MOOCs make use of this
type of remote feedback. A MOOC course may have thousands or tens of thousands
of students signed up for the course. It's impossible to allow each and every
student to participate in class discussions among all students in the course.
I still don't have much hope for unmotivated students who learn from MOOCs.
There is hope for turning on unmotivated students who take onsite campus courses
or online distance education courses with lots of interaction between students
and instructors.
Jensen Comment
Wharton's Financial Accounting course is in the Top 12
Also note that those that argue you can't teach public speaking online are
apparently wrong, although I don't see why they are wrong.
The moving forces behind MOOCs have been MIT, Harvard, and Stanford.
MIT and Harvard have the most MOOC offerings, but none of them made the Top 12.
However, the rankings below are considered "professional" courses, and the
graduate business schools at MIT, Harvard, and Stanford are not, to my
knowledge, serving up MOOC courses. The Wharton School at Penn, however, is
serving up the core courses in the first year of Wharton's two-year MBA program.
Two of those courses are in the Top 12 below.
Reasons for taking MOOCs are many and varied. I think many students who
enroll for the free Wharton core business courses are preparing to do better in
their forthcoming MBA programs wherever those are to be taken around the globe.
Most students probably take free MOOCs in general out of curiosity of how
popular courses at prestigious universities are taught. Some professors take
MOOCs just to see how the content of courses is handled by a well-known teacher.
There are for-credit distance education
courses available from most major universities these days. These, however, are
not free due, in part, to the costs of assigning grades for credit. Bob Jensen's
threads on fee-based distance education training and education alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
Among all recent inventions that have to do with
MOOCs, the Georgia Institute of Technology’s online master’s program in
computer science may have the best chance of changing how much students pay
for a traditional degree.
The
program, which started last winter, pairs MOOC-like
course videos and assessments with a support system of course assistants who
work directly with students. The goal is to create a low-cost master’s
degree that is nonetheless "just as rigorous" as the on-campus
equivalent—producing graduates who are "just as good," to quote one of the
new program’s cheerleaders, President Obama. The price: less than $7,000 for
the three-year program, a small fraction of the cost of the traditional
program.
It’s too early yet for a graduating class. But
researchers at Georgia Tech and Harvard University have studied the students
who have enrolled in the program, in an effort to figure out "where the
demand is coming from and what it’s substituting for educationally," says
Joshua S. Goodman, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard.
By understanding what kinds of students are drawn
to the new program, Mr. Goodman and his fellow researchers think they can
begin to understand what competitors it might threaten.
Here is what they found out about those students:
How They Are Different
The enrollees are numerous. The
online program this year got as many applications as Georgia Tech’s
traditional program did during two recent semesters. But while the
traditional program accepted only about 15 percent of its applicants, the
online program accepted 50 percent, enrolling about 1,800 in its first year.
That might not qualify as large in light of the 50,000-students-per-course
figures often quoted in reference to MOOCs, but it does make the online
program three times as large as the largest traditional master’s programs in
computer science, according to the researchers.
They’re older (and they already have jobs).
The people enrolling in the online program are 35 years old, on average, and
are far more likely to report that they are working rather than studying
full time. (The average age of the students in Georgia Tech’s traditional
program is 24, with only half indicating that they are employed.) That
should not surprise anyone who has even a passing familiarity with online
education. Online programs have pitched themselves to adults who are
tethered to work and family, and who want to earn degrees without
rearranging their lives around a course schedule.
They’re from the United States.
Online education is supposed to make geographic borders matter less. But
this online master’s program has drawn 80 percent of its students from
within the country. By contrast, in the traditional program, 75 percent of
the students are foreign, mostly from India and China.
Most of them did not study computer science
in college. In the traditional graduate program, 62 percent of
students have completed an undergraduate major in computer science. That is
true of only 40 percent of the online students. The percentage of
undergraduate engineering majors, 27 percent, remained constant.
How They Are Similar
They’re good at school. Unlike San
Jose State University’s MOOC-related pilot program, which
tried and failed to help underperforming students,
Georgia Tech’s online program appeals to students with a proven academic
track record, specifically those who earned bachelor’s degrees with a
grade-point average of 3.0 or higher. (The university told The Chronicle
last year that its first group of applicants averaged a 3.58 GPA—about the
same as the students in the traditional program.) They seem to be doing well
so far: Courses held last spring and summer saw pass rates of about 88
percent, according to the university.
They’re mostly men. The online
program had a lower rate of female applicants than the traditional program
did, but there were precious few in either pool: 14 percent and 25 percent,
respectively. Among American applicants, the rates were similar: 13 percent
and 16 percent.
Over all, the first enrollees in Georgia Tech’s
MOOC-like master’s program fit the profile of students who are applying to
online graduate programs at institutions across the country.
In a new research paper, Christian Terwiesch,
professor of operations and information management at Wharton, and Karl
Ulrich, vice dean of innovation at the school, examine the impact that
massive open online courses (MOOCs) will have on business schools and MBA
programs. In their study — titled, “Will Video Kill the Classroom Star? The
Threat and Opportunity of MOOCs for Full-time MBA Programs” — they identify
three possible scenarios that business schools face not just as a result of
MOOCs, but also because of the technology embedded in them. In an interview
with Knowledge@Wharton, Terwiesch and Ulrich discuss their findings.
An edited transcript of the interview appears
below.
Knowledge@Wharton: Christian, perhaps you could
start us off by describing the main findings or takeaways from your
research?
Terwiesch: Let me preface what we’re going to
discuss about business schools by saying that Karl and I have been in the
business school world for many, many years. We love this institution, and we
really want to make sure that we find a sustainable path forward for
business schools.
Continued in article
Question
What accounting courses are available on a listing of 1,000 free courses from
prestigious universities?
Note that advanced accounting is not covered nearly as well as philosophy,
ethics, computer science, literature, history, etc.
Most MOOC, EdX, MITx, and Harvardx courses sign ups are only available on
designated schedules. The best approach is to go to an elite university
Website and look for links to free online courses.
Jensen Comment
This may be terrific, but in general I do not recommend MOOCs for introductory
courses in any discipline. MOOCs tend to work better for learners who have some
expertice alread on a given topic and are seeking fine tuning at an advanced
level.
There may be no more distinguished lecture series
in the arts than
Harvard’s Norton lectures,
named for celebrated professor, president, and editor of the
Harvard Classics, Charles Eliot Norton. Since
1925, the Norton Professorship in Poetry—taken broadly to mean “poetic
expression in language, music, or fine arts”—has gone to one respected
artist per year, who then delivers a series of six talks during their
tenure. We’ve previously featured Norton lectures from
1967-68 by Jorge Luis Borges and
1972-73 by Leonard Bernstein. Today we bring you
the first three lectures from this year’s
Norton Professor of Poetry, Herbie Hancock.
Hancock delivers his fifth lecture today (perhaps even as you read this) and
his sixth and final on Monday, March 31. The glories of Youtube mean we
don’t have to wait around for transcript publication or DVDs, though perhaps
they’re on the way as well.
The choice of Herbie Hancock as this year’s Norton
Professor of Poetry seems an overdue affirmation of one of the country’s
greatest artistic innovators of its most unique of cultural forms. The first
jazz composer and musician—and the first African American—to hold the
professorship, Hancock brings an eclectic perspective to the post. His
topic: “The Ethics of Jazz.” Given his emergence on the world stage as part
of Miles Davis’ 1964-68 Second Great Quartet, his first lecture (top) is
aptly titled “The Wisdom of Miles Davis.” Given his swerve into jazz fusion,
synth-jazz and
electro in the 70s
and 80s, following Davis’ Bitches Brew revolution, his second (below)
is called “Breaking the Rules.”
They may be a little late to the MOOC party, but
two newly-launched European open course platforms might still be able to
carve out a niche.
Coursera and edX, the two main players in the US at
this point, have been up and running for almost 18 months. And although both
ventures have a long list of international partners, the rising cost of
higher education is building interest in MOOCs in Europe and the UK. The
founders of new European platforms – Future
Learn in the UK, and
iversity in
Germany — are betting they can still make headway in an increasingly crowded
market.
A subsidiary of the British
Open University,
Future Learn
is in its beta stage, but it’s already boasting
partnerships
with universities across Britain, Ireland, and
Australia. And come this November, it will be rolling out
courses
across multiple disciplines. Take for example:
Meanwhile Berlin-based startup
iversity
recently relaunched itself as a MOOC platform. This
week, iversity’s first six courses begin. Four are in German and two are in
English: Contemporary
Architecture and
Dark Matter in Galaxies. A total of 115,000
students are currently enrolled.
Future Learn and iversity both seem to be aimed at
audiences who are relatively new to the MOOC concept. Both sites take care
to explain what MOOCs are in very simple terms—which may be a smart strategy
for businesses setting out to convince Europe and Britain that the MOOC
trend is for real.
The nonprofit online-learning organization edX will
work with Facebook and two other companies to provide free, localized
education to students in Rwanda on “affordable” smart phones,
Facebook and
edX said on Monday.
edX, a provider of massive open online courses that
was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, will help create a mobile teaching app that is integrated with
Facebook and “optimized for a low-bandwidth environment.” As part of the
program, called SocialEDU, edX will also work with the Rwandan government to
adapt materials for a pilot course.
Anant Agarwal, edX’s president, said in a written
statement: “Improving global access to high-quality education has been a key
edX goal from Day 1. Nearly half of our two million students come from
developing countries, with 10 percent from Africa. In partnering with
Facebook on this innovative pilot, we hope to learn how we can take this
concept to the world.”
Also participating in the program are Nokia, the
device manufacturer, and the service provider Airtel, which “will provide
free education data for everyone in Rwanda who participates in the program
for one year.”
What is a paradox? More importantly, what is infinity?
These concepts can
blow one's mind in the best way possible and they are the subject of this
course at MIT. Offered up as part of that august institution's Open
CourseWare initiative, this semester long course was first offered in
spring 2013 by Professor Agustin Rayo. In short, the course "explores
different kinds of infinity; the paradoxes of set theory; the reduction of
arithmetic to logic…." On the site, visitors can download the syllabus,
the course calendar, the readings, and look over the lecture slides. The
Readings area contains some lovely pieces, including "The Paradoxes of Time
Travel" and "The Eleatic Hangover Cure.
Dartmouth College said on Thursday that
it had joined edX, the massive open online course
provider established by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Dartmouth will offer its first MOOC this fall, and three more
are planned, but the university did not say in what disciplines.
At a meeting in November, members of the nonprofit
edX consortium discussed a possible expansion of the group, in part because
it is currently too small to offer as many courses as there appears to be
demand for. Including Dartmouth, the consortium has
31 members.
When it comes to measuring the success of an
education program, the bottom line is often the completion rate. How many
students are finishing their studies and walking away with a credential?
But that is not the right way to judge massive open
online courses, according to researchers at Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Course certification rates are
misleading and counterproductive indicators of the impact and potential of
open online courses,” write the researchers in the
first of a series of working papers on MOOCs
offered by the two universities. (The Harvard papers can be found
here, the MIT papers
here.)
Released on Tuesday, the papers make good on a
pledge by Harvard and MIT in 2012, when the universities teamed up to create
edX, a nonprofit provider of massive open online courses. At the time, the
presidents of the two universities said their foray into online instruction
would include a major research project aimed at learning more about online
courses, especially the kind that they and other exclusive universities had
started making available free.
The papers released on Tuesday draw on data from 17
MOOCs offered by Harvard and MIT in 2012 and 2013. A number of academics
have begun studying aspects of the MOOC phenomenon, but few academic papers
have been published so far.
The first of the working papers, which was written
jointly by researchers at both universities,
provides an overview of the data from those 17 MOOCs. Some findings:
841,687 people registered for the 17 MOOCs
from Harvard and MIT.
5 percent of all registrants earned a
certificate of completion.
35 percent never viewed any of the course
materials.
54 percent of those who “explored” at least
half of the course content earned a certificate of completion.
66 percent of all registrants already held a
bachelor’s degree or higher.
74 percent of those who earned a certificate
of completion held a bachelor’s degree or higher.
29 percent of all registrants were female.
3 percent of all registrants were from
underdeveloped countries.
Some of these findings reinforce what others
have already observed about MOOCs: Few of those
who sign up for a course end up completing it. Most MOOC students already
hold traditional degrees. Students who sign up for MOOCs are overwhelmingly
male.
But looking at percentages such as the ones listed
above is a bad way to try to understand MOOCs, the researchers told The
Chronicle in an interview.
Completion rates make sense as a metric for
assessing conventional college courses, said Andrew Dean Ho, an associate
professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and director of the
university’s MOOC research. In a conventional course, the goals are
generally consistent and well understood: Students want to complete the
course and, eventually, earn a credential. The instructors want the same
thing.
A MOOC is more of a blank canvas, said Mr. Ho. Some
students who register for MOOCs have no intention of completing, and some
instructors do not emphasize completion as a priority. Success and failure
take many forms.
“It’s reaching a completely different set of
students, with different intentions, perhaps, and different ways of seeing
the instructors and the content of the course,” said Isaac Chuang, a
professor of physics, electrical engineering, and computer science at MIT.
In future studies, the researchers hope to classify
registrants according to their reasons for taking a MOOC, “so we can judge
the impact of these courses in terms of what students expected to get out of
them,” Mr. Ho said.
In the meantime, the Harvard and MIT researchers
said they hoped the new studies would help people understand that technology
and scale are not the only things that distinguish MOOCs from other kinds of
higher education.
Jensen Comment
I don't think MOOCs work well for students new to higher education unless they
are both talented and highly motivated. Most MOOCs are aimed at mature students
who already know the basics underlying a relatively advanced-level MOOC free
course. Most MOOCs are advanced specialization courses or narrow-topic courses
like the first MOOC from the University of Iowa --- a MOOC on the writings of
Walt Whitman.
MOOCs, or massive open online courses, are quickly
becoming technology darlings. Companies like Coursera, Udacity, edX and
others provide college-caliber online courses taught by professors from the
most prestigious universities. Millions of students interested in pursuing
inexpensive post-secondary education can take classes on anything from
nutritional health to machine learning—right from the comfort of their own
home.
It’s not just about learning new skills.
"Graduates" of these classes can receive paid course certificates or
accreditation, which is always great to showcase on LinkedIn. Some
organizations, like Udacity, have even partnered with universities to create
entirely MOOC-based degrees.
I registered for a five-week course on Coursera,
Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Comparing Theory And Practice.
I’m interested in global politics and how the
definition and scope of terrorism has changed since September 11, 2001, and
since the topic was equally intriguing and different from the tech community
I’m knee-deep in, I figured this class would provide a good introduction to
massive open online courses.
The course was available under Coursera’s
“Signature Track” program, so I paid $49 to
receive a certificate of completion when I passed the
class. It was a waste of $49.
I failed my first MOOC.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. When I first signed
up, I took it very seriously.
MOOCs Are Not A Substitute For College
I’ve argued, and still believe, the
traditional university lecture is dead. As online
education programs skyrocket in popularity, brick-and-mortar universities
are embracing aspects of the online college lecture, like interactive videos
and online discussion forums.
The difference is, MOOC professors are teaching
thousands of students—hundreds
of thousands in some cases—thus eliminating the
intimacy of one-on-one interactions that are so beneficial in most offline
classroom settings.
My Coursera professor,
Edwin Bakker from Leiden University in the Netherlands, taught
the course via video lectures. He provided great insight, paired it with
interesting required readings, and led Google Hangouts throughout the
course, though only a handful of students were able to participate. Time
zone differences and limited space ultimately resulted in a select few
students receiving the opportunity to participate in this more intimate
online setting.
Furthermore, the MOOC system for reviewing and
grading submitted material is still imperfect. Granted, automatically-graded
quizzes make it easy to keep track of one's marks, and instructors or
teaching assistants are good at providing feedback through discussion forums
or otherwise, but assignments that required me to submit essays or complex
answers beyond multiple-choice questions weren't graded by the
instructor—which, in my case, turned out to be detrimental to the overall
class experience.
You Just Can’t Trust The Internet
In my entire college career, I never failed a
class. I pulled all-nighters to study for tests and write essays, and all
the work I put in eventually paid off. My Coursera class was a totally
different story.
I'll admit it: I had minimal motivation. Sure, I
didn’t want to waste $49, but I certainly didn’t stay up all night finishing
a 600-word essay—the goal of receiving a course completion certificate just
wasn't appealing enough.
Students on the Signature Track were required to
submit two essays and pass multiple quizzes. The quizzes were easy—we were
given multiple attempts to get a perfect score—but the essays were a
different story. Since the professor was unable to grade them himself, each
student was subject to peer reviews—five of them. And each review impacted
your grade.
Students were given a rubric to follow, and the
graders would base their assessment off that. To pass, we needed to get 60%
on each essay—this would account for 30% of the final grade.
I failed my first essay. All but one reviewer gave
me a failing grade, for reasons unknown.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Although MOOCs are not generally a good substitute for onsite (campus) or online
(distance education) college, they may become more so do to price and ease of
access. A writer of any age on a ranch in northern Montana can take a free Walth
Whitman MOOC from the University of Iowa or a Shakespeare course from Harvard.
As respected universities like the University of Wisconsin and the University of
Akron offer competency-based credits for college diplomas, MOOC students can
combine their MOOC learning with other learning to obtain college credits
without setting foot on a college camp;us.
Increasingly new ways are being invented for subsets of MOOC students to
interact with each other on MOOC assignments and help seeking.
Last year I agreed to teach a public-speaking MOOC
on the Coursera platform. I wasn’t a MOOC advocate, but I believe that the
study of speech and rhetoric benefits individuals and society as a whole. I
routinely offer speech workshops for civic and professional groups around
Washington State. A MOOC on public speaking would allow me to run a speech
workshop on a global scale.
I developed the course subsequent to the open
letter sent by San Jose State’s philosophy department to Michael Sandel, the
Harvard philosophy professor who teaches a MOOC on justice. The San Jose
professors
rejected their university’s attempt to use
Sandel’s course, JusticeX, because, in their words, “there is no pedagogical
problem in our department that JusticeX solves.” They saw the massive open
online course as subverting their own efforts to teach their students.
I certainly didn’t want my MOOC to be regarded as
similarly invasive. I wanted to design a course that might be a useful
resource for other public-speaking teachers, without having to worry that my
class was eliminating jobs. I decided that my course would not offer any
credit or certificate of completion.
Instead of thinking of this MOOC as a class in
which I had to grade students, I viewed it as educational broadcasting, akin
to a PBS show with interactive elements and a sense of community. I
structured it like my for-credit course, but in the MOOC the assignments
were optional. If participants wanted feedback, they could record and upload
videos of their speeches, and receive evaluations through Coursera’s
peer-review system.
Most of the people who signed up for my course had
no need for college credit or completion certificates anyway. Both pre- and
post-course surveys showed that more than 70 percent of the participants
already held college degrees, with around 50 percent having advanced or
professional degrees. Moreover, while U.S. residents made up the largest
group, they were only 24 percent of the total enrollment. The story of my
MOOC wasn’t one of currently enrolled U.S. students turning to the online
course to augment or replace college classes, but midcareer professionals
from around the world looking to sharpen their intellectual and oratorical
skills.
The benefits of this educational-broadcasting model
quickly became apparent. I was able to provide structure to the assignments,
but the content of the presentations (usually a matter of close concern in
live speech classes) was open. Instead of trying to find topics that people
from the 160 countries in my course could speak on comfortably, I was able
to simply throw open the doors and ask people to adapt their individual
interests to a universal audience. If certification had been a goal, such
flexibility would have been a challenge rather than an opportunity, since
the variety of speeches would have made it impossible to hold them to a
single standard.
This is not to suggest that I simply dumped content
online and walked away. Just as in a live course, I carefully plotted the
student experience and monitored it through the online discussion forums.
I don’t know how many people completed the course.
Of the 120,000 who signed up, about half actually started when the content
was made available. By week three, we’d dropped to 20,000, and later to
around 9,000. Yet the course remains open to those initial 120,000, and
despite its “ending” in August, I still see new discussion-forum posts from
students who are early in the course. In that sense, students didn’t drop
out; some are simply taking a 10-week course on a 30-week (or longer)
timeline.
Of the thousands of active participants, relatively
few recorded and uploaded speeches. Were this a campus course, I would wring
my hands about dropout rates and low participation. But viewed as an
educational broadcast, the course was a success. People came to the material
as they needed and wanted. Thousands returned week after week to learn about
and discuss public speaking, but they never submitted a speech to the class.
The gap in activity seems to show that the course material was useful
regardless of whether individuals did the assignments.
G.P. (Bud) Peterson, president of the Georgia
Institute of Technology, is determined not to become the next casualty of a
failed MOOC experiment.
Mr. Peterson saw what happened at San Jose State
University earlier this year: An experiment with Udacity, a company that
specializes in massive open online courses, turned into an embarrassment for
Mohammad H. Qayoumi, San Jose State’s president, after its first run, in the
spring semester, produced
underwhelming results.
Georgia Tech is taking precautions to make sure
its own high-profile experiment with Udacity does
not meet a similar fate. The experiment is a fully online master’s program
in computer science that Georgia Tech professors will teach on the Udacity
platform with help from “course assistants” hired by the company.
Mr. Peterson refuses to even call the Udacity
collaboration an experiment. “This is a pilot,” he said in an interview with
The Chronicle. “Experiments fail. I’m doing everything I can to
make sure this does not fail.”
Georgia Tech’s cautious approach starts with
enrolling students who are likely to succeed. One of the variables that sank
San Jose State’s initial experiment with Udacity last spring was including
at-risk students in the experimental trials. Courses offered to a broader
mix of students during the summer, however,
had better
outcomes—possibly because more than half of them
already held college degrees.
Georgia Tech’s experiment plays it relatively safe.
Because it involves a master’s program, the students will have already
earned undergraduate degrees, and many of them already have jobs in the
industry. And the students who were admitted have an average undergraduate
GPA of 3.58.
The inaugural class is also neither massive nor
open. The program has admitted 401 students—360 men, 41 women—out of 2,300
candidates. Those who decide to enroll will begin classes on January 15,
according to Jason Maderer, a spokesman.
With exacting admissions criteria and an entering
class in the low hundreds, Georgia Tech’s collaboration with Udacity seems
less like a MOOC than many existing online graduate programs. Other than the
low tuition—set at $6,600, a fraction of the price of the university’s
face-to-face program—the difference is that these students will have the
same experience as the program eventually hopes to deliver to thousands of
students at once, said Mr. Peterson.
If 250 students end up enrolling, he said, the
university will “approach those 250 as though they’re 2,500.”
“We believe this model is scalable,” he added.
In any case, the Georgia Tech president made it
clear that he was doing all he could to make sure the Udacity pilot got off
on the right foot. Mr. Peterson alluded to the beating his university took
in the press last winter after it was
forced to abort a dysfunctional MOOC—one about online-course design, no
less—after it had started. When it comes to experiments, “being first is
important,” he said. But that knife cuts both ways.
Davidson College has teamed up with the College
Board and edX, the nonprofit provider of massive open online courses, to
create online teaching modules for high-school students taking Advanced
Placement courses in calculus, macroeconomics, and physics, The New York
Times reported. Davidson faculty members and teachers at high schools near
the college, the article said, are using College Board data to determine
what AP topics high-school students have the most trouble with, and then
designing video lessons and assignments to help students better understand
the concepts involved.
Jensen Comment
This is to be expected since most MOOC courses to date are highly specialized
(e.g., readings of obscure poets or C++ software coding) in relatively advanced
courses. The first MOOC course, a course from computer scientists at Stanford,
was a technical course in artificial intelligence. The MOOC model is not
really a good model for introductory learners who typically need more hand
holding. This does not mean that distance education is not suitable for hand
holding --- in many ways online learning is more suited to hand holding since
instructors may be instantly available 10 hours a day via instant messaging in
distance education courses having less than 25 students. But MOOC courses with
24,615 students are not conducive to hand holding of any one of those 24,615
students enrolled in the course.
The problem for students needing hand holding is
that class sizes must be small onsite or online for hand holding. Small classes
generally mean fees. MOOCs are free to date because prestigious universities are
willing to tap endowment funds to pay for the relatively low cost for each of
24,615 students per course. If students want transcript credits for taking MOOC
courses, fees kick in for the competency-based examination and grading services.
"The Gates Effect The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent
$472-million (so far) on higher education. Why many in academe are not writing
thank-you notes," by Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Beckie Supiano.
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Gates-Effect/140323/
Jensen Comment
This is a long article filled with more opinion than fact. One suspects that
faculty unions had the major impact.
Obviously, distance education with large or small classes and
competency-based examinations are poor choices for the learning challenged and
unmotivated learners that need more hand holding and inspiration to learn.
On the other had, the article assumes ipso facto that traditional colleges
are doing a great job educating. The fact of the matter is that the best thing
traditional colleges are doing best is inflating grades for lazy students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
The other misleading thing thing about the article is that competency-based
testing leads to watered down courses. The fact of the matter is that many
traditional teachers would shake in their boots if their grade-inflated pampered
students had to take competency based examinations --- which is why students
tend do quite poorly on the MCAT competency-based examinations for medical
school after getting mostly A grades in their science courses. This is aspiring
teachers do so poorly on teacher certification examinations that are hardly
rocket science.
This is mostly a paranoia article patting the status quo in higher education
a pat on the back. If Bill Gates wants better reviews in the Chronicle he should
simply give the money to the AAUP.
France is encouraging its universities to build
massive open online courses—in French, naturally—with edX’s open-source
platform, the nonprofit organization announced on Thursday.
The move is part of a push by France’s Ministry of
Higher Education and Research to increase the country’s online offerings.
This year the ministry opened a “digital university,” called
France Université Numerique, which it hopes will
serve as an online clearinghouse for MOOCs offered by various French
universities. The first courses will begin early next year.
EdX, which was founded by Harvard University and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently made the source code for
its popular MOOC platform available free. Stanford University, for example,
has
begun using the OpenEdX platform to power some of
its online courses.
France is the first country to adopt OpenEdX at a
ministerial level, said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. The French digital
university will be independent of edX, but the French government might pay
edX for support services, he said.
European universities have recently been scrambling
to board the MOOC bandwagon. Some, including France’s École Normale
Supérieure, have signed on with Coursera, a MOOC company based in Silicon
Valley that this year has put an emphasis on translating its courses into
other languages.
Permanently housed in the
Literature section of our collection of 750
Free
Online Courses, Invitation to World Literature features the
following lectures:
A Stanford University spinoff and the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching plan to announce a partnership on
Tuesday to expand the distribution of online remedial-mathematics courses
that so far have tripled students' success rates in half the time.
More than 60 percent of students entering community
college require at least one remedial-math course before they can progress
to credit-bearing courses. Fewer than a third of those students complete it,
according to the foundation.
Over the past two years, the Carnegie Foundation
has been trying to improve those numbers through a remedial-math program
involving more than 40 community colleges and universities in at least 10
states.
Statway and Quantway, which together make up
Carnegie's Pathways Program, have allowed students to complete in one year
remedial-math sequences that used to take two years.
A Carnegie spokeswoman said that 17 percent of
remedial-math students in the colleges that make up the Statway network
historically have achieved math credit within three years, but 49 percent of
those in the Statway program did so within a single year. Results were
similar with the Quantway program.
The program's director and a senior managing
partner at Carnegie, Bernadine Chuck Fong, said in an e-mail on Monday that
NovoEd's focus on "student-centered, collaborative learning and pedagogy"
meshed with the foundation's collaborative strategies.
A Focus on
Collaborative Learning
Amin Saberi, co-founder and chief executive officer
of NovoEd, agreed. "By combining forces, we can scale up the curriculum and
address this national challenge head-on," he said, also in an interview on
Monday. He is on leave from Stanford, where he is an associate professor of
management science and engineering.
NovoEd started in January 2013 as an in-house
program at Stanford called Venture Lab. Its massive open online courses have
reached about 500,000 people in more than 150 countries, Mr. Saberi said.
NovoEd differs from Coursera and Udacity, two MOOC
spinoffs that were also started by Stanford professors, in its focus on
collaborative learning, Mr. Saberi said.
In NovoEd courses, students are typically assigned
to groups of four to seven, based on their experiences and locations, to
work on problems and projects together. They're also encouraged to discuss
roadblocks they've faced in their own learning and how they've overcome the
obstacles.
In the courses, students rate one another as team
members, which gives them incentives to be active participants.
Mr. Saberi said the approach the partnership will
take, which includes studying in contexts that are relevant to students, is
particularly effective with first-generation and underprepared students who
often struggle in online courses. Remedial-math students might, for
instance, study how a 20-percent interest rate on a credit card adds up over
time.
In the second of a series of papers challenging
optimistic assumptions about massive open online courses, a coalition of
faculty-advocacy organizations asserts that online instruction “isn’t saving
money—and may actually be costing students and colleges more,” but that
“snappy slogans, massive amounts of corporate money, and a great deal of
wishful thinking have created a bandwagon mentality that is hard to resist.”
The paper,
“The ‘Promises’ of
Online Higher Education: Reducing Costs,” was
released by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, whose backers
include a number of faculty unions. Drawing on news articles and
public-opinion surveys, it says that while the business model supporting
MOOCs is “still a work in progress,” the trend is to offer courses free but
charge for “a degree or a certificate or anything from the MOOC that carries
real value.”
Merely having taken one of the courses, the
paper says, is “virtually valueless in the marketplace.”
“The bottom line for students? The push for more
online courses has not made higher education cheaper for them. The promise
has always been that it will—but that day always seems to be in the future,”
the paper says.
“Udacity gets the intellectual content for a
master’s program of 20 courses at an upfront cost of $400,000,” the paper
says. “It borrows Georgia Tech’s reputation as its own, at a huge discount
(no training of graduate students, no support for labs, no decades of
accumulated know-how through which Georgia Tech earned its reputation). It
acquires these courses for a proprietary platform: Georgia Tech cannot offer
these OMS CS courses, created by its own faculty, to a competing
distributor.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This is a classic study on how to mislead with statistics. The study does not
give credit to the fact that the MOOC effort commenced by Stanford that fits
totally within the Open Knowledge Initiative of MIT and other prestigious
universities was intended not to save money.
By definition, a MOOC is free to anybody in the world and does not have
prerequisites or admission standards. Anybody can take a MOOC free of charge by
the very definition of a MOOC. The prestigious universities offering such
courses intended these courses to give the world access to course materials and
some of the top teaching professors of the world.
There are adaptations like SMOCs, Future Learn, and Iversity that are
intended to become massive (10,000+ plus students) distance education courses
that are not MOOCs. And there are options to pay for transcript credits for some
MOOCs but this entails paying fees for competency-based examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Firstly, in my opinion the universities with hundreds of billions of dollars
in endowments given from rich sources that took advantages of tax deductions
when contributing to those endowment funds can well afford to offer some free
MOOCs. Were not talking in the case of Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Texas, etc.
about stealing tuition money paid by on-campus students and taxpayers to benefit
the poor people who take MOOCs. The universities offering free MOOCs can afford
to pay the costs from endowment funds ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Second, what I find as inconsistent is that the same professors, often union activists, arguing that: "Merely having
taken one of the (MOOC) courses, the paper says, is “virtually valueless in the
marketplace," have not conducted any meaningful study of how many
students who intently completed MOOCs are using the knowledge gained. If they
did they would find some teachers who benefitted when taking licensure
examinations to become teachers. If they did they would find many college
professors who added what they learned in MOOCs to the courses they themselves
teach. Most MOOCs, by the way, are advanced courses on highly specialized topics
like the literature of both famous and obscure writers. Otherss are basic
courses that contribute to career advancement.
For example, the business school at Penn, Wharton, now offers its core
MBA courses as free MOOCs. Some students who intently take these courses are
seeking to get into Wharton and other prestigious MBA programs.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT
scores to get into prestigious MBA programs and to do better in those
programs once admitted so that they too can tap those six-figure starting
salaries of graduates from prestigious MBA Programs.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT
scores to obtain better financial aid packages for further graduate study.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to perform
better on the job and thereby get better performance evaluations and raises.
Third, the above study ignores what universities save by having their
students take some off-campus free offerings. For example, the Khan Academy is
now partnering with various colleges that require free Khan Academy modules as
part of the curriculum. Those colleges do not have to hire as many instructors
like math instructors to meet the needs of students both at the introductory and
advanced levels of mathematics.
The study confuses free MOOCs with fee-based distance education. For example,
Harvard University offers many MOOCs as a free public service to the world. The
Harvard Business School, however, will soon offer expensive distance education
MBA courses because of enormous anticipated profits from those courses.
Fourth, if Georgia Tech is losing money on its online engineering degree it's
not necessarily a bad thing. Georgia Tech loses money on its on-campus
engineering degrees that require taxpayer subsidies to survive. Why are taxpayer
subsidies for Georgia Tech's online engineering degrees any worse in in
principle? An argument might be made that there is more justification since
taxpayers do not also have to subsidize room and board fees.
I have one word for the self-serving study cited above that contends;
"Merely having taken one of the (MOOC) courses, the
paper says, is “virtually valueless in the marketplace,"
My word for such an assertion is --- BARF!
Of course this not mean that there are not tremendous problems with MOOCs.
One of the problems is that most of them are advanced courses, thereby shutting
out introductory students.
Another problem is that most students sign up for MOOCs out of curiosity
without the intent, time, and ability to successfully complete the courses with
heavy sweat that is usually necessary for serious learning.. MOOCs probably
would pass the benefit-cost tests for these casual students, but the prestigious
universities are intending to make opportunities available to those students who
will successfully complete the courses for financial and other educational
benefits in their lives. These are courses they could never afford at on-campus
student prices.
Massive open online courses are not currently
cannibalizing tuition-based programs at top business schools, according to
an enthusiastic
report from the
University of Pennsylvania. Rather, MOOCs could become a recruiting tool for
tapping new pools of potential students.
Business schools that offer MOOCs should also
figure out how to charge the many students who sign up for the online
courses without intending to complete them, write the authors of the report.
The report looks at data and survey responses from
students in nine MOOCs offered by Penn’s Wharton School. The researchers
found that 78 percent of the students were from outside the United States,
and 35 percent of the U.S. residents taking the business MOOCs were
foreign-born. Among the Americans, 19 percent were members of
underrepresented minority groups, compared with 11 percent among M.B.A.
students as a whole.
“Our data suggest that, at least at present, MOOCs
run by elite business schools primarily attract students for whom
traditional business-school offerings are out of reach,” write the authors.
Rather than undermine the existing business model,
MOOCs may help Wharton and other business schools recruit outside the normal
pipelines, the researchers speculate. “These three groups—students from
outside the United States, especially developing countries, foreign-born
Americans, and underrepresented American minorities—are students that
business schools are trying to attract,” they write.
The Penn report also reiterates a point that has
become a refrain among researchers looking at free online courses:
Completion rates are poor metrics for judging the success of a MOOC because
the goals of students who register for such courses vary. Indeed, only 5
percent of the registrants in Penn’s business MOOCs finished their courses,
and those who completed were “disproportionately male, well-educated,
employed,” and from countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development; also, American students “tend to be white.” But a mere 43
percent of students who were surveyed said that obtaining a certificate of
completion was important to them.
Based on the apparently diverse motivations of
people who sign up for MOOCs, the Penn researchers offer some business
advice to institutions offering them: Find ways to charge students who have
no plans to complete their MOOCs.
“Business schools must bear this in mind and move
away from a business model of charging for certificates of completion,” the
authors advise. “Instead, they must tailor offerings to the goals of these
learners, whatever they may be.”
Penn, which has released several reports (not
all of them flattering) based on data from its
MOOCs, was an early institutional partner with Coursera, the largest MOOC
company. The university also
owns a stake in the
company. Penn’s provost, Vincent Price, is
listed as a member of Coursera’s advisory
board.
The top flagship state universities in the USA are under increasing pressures
from their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including
undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees.
The question is whether the most prestigious private universities like Stanford
and Harvard will join in the competition.
Richard Lyons, the dean of University of
California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has a dire forecast for
business education: “Half of the business schools in this country could be
out of business in 10 years—or five,” he says.
The threat, says Lyons, is that more top MBA
programs will start to offer degrees online. That will imperil the
industry’s business model. For most business schools, students pursuing
part-time and executive MBAs generate crucial revenue. Those programs,
geared toward working professionals, will soon have to compete with elite
online alternatives for the same population.
. . .
Online MBA programs aren’t siphoning choice
students from campuses yet, says Ash Soni, executive associate dean at
Indiana University’s
Kelley School of Business. Kelley ranks 15th on
Bloomberg Businessweek’s list of full-time programs and was an
early player in online MBAs. The school draws students from across the
country, but it is more likely to compete with online MBA programs offered
by the University of North Carolina’s
Kenan-Flagler Business School and Arizona State’s
Carey School of Business. Says Soni: “If you’re a
dean from a regional school and you’re asking, ‘Are these online guys
tapping into my space?’ The answer is: maybe in the future, but not yet.”
Michael Desiderio, the executive director of the
Executive MBA Council, says change is coming, but his group isn’t panicking.
“We’re not saying it’s a threat or this is the end of the EMBA space,” he
says. “It’s stimulating a discussion: How do we adapt to continue to serve a
population that has changing needs?”
Online education is sure to shift the ways schools
compete for students. For-profit MBA programs such as DeVry’s
Keller School of Management have been the early
losers as more traditional universities go online, says Robert Lytle, a
partner in the education practice at consultancy Parthenon Group. That trend
could extend to lower-ranked schools as the big-name brands follow.
When Lytle talks to directors at schools who are
debating the merits of online learning, he tells them to stop dallying and
start building programs. “Once you get out of the top tier of schools,
you’re either already online, on your way there, or dead in the water,” he
says. It isn’t clear which online models will be most successful, but many
schools are feeling pressure to get on board. When Villanova School of
Business announced a new
online MBA program earlier this year, Dean Patrick
Maggitti said there has never been a more uncertain time in higher
education. “I think it’s smart strategy to be looking at options in this
market.”
Jensen Comment --- Where I Disagree
Firstly, this is not so much a threat to undergraduate business schools, because
most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs do not
even offer undergraduate business degrees. It's not likely that Harvard and
Stanford and the London Business School will commence to offer undergraduate
business degrees online.
Secondly, this is not so much a threat to masters of accounting programs,
because most of the prestigious and highly ranked universities with MBA programs
do not even offer masters of accounting degrees and do not have enough
accounting courses to meet the minimal requirements to take the CPA examination
in most states. . It's not likely that Harvard and Stanford and the London
Business School will commence to offer masters of accounting degrees online.
Thirdly, this is not so much of a threat even at the MBA level to
universities who admit graduate students with lower admissions credentials. The
US News Top MBA programs currently pick off the cream of the crop in
terms of GMAT and gpa credentials. The top flagship state universities like the
the Haas School at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University
of Illinois pick off the top students who cannot afford prestigious private
universities. By the time all these universities skim the cream of the crop the
second-tier public and private universities struggle with more marginal students
applying for MBA programs.
It would be both dangerous and sad if the very top MBA programs introduced
lower admissions standards for online programs vis-a-vis on-campus
programs. In order to maintain the highest standards the most prestigious
universities will have to cater to the highest quality foreign students and
herein lies a huge problem. Some nations like China are notorious for fraud and
cheating on admissions credentials like the GMAT. In Russia such credentials are
for sale to the highest bidders.
The name of the game in business education is placement of graduates.
Prestigious university MBA programs are at the top of the heap in terms of
placement largely because of their successful alumni and strong alumni networks
that actively seek MBA graduates from their alma maters. This will not work as
well for online programs, especially since many of the online graduates of
prestigious university online programs will live outside the USA.
However, top flagship state universities are under increasing pressures from
their legislators to offer more an more business degrees online, including
undergraduate business degrees, masters of accounting degrees, and MBA degrees.
This is already happening as is reflected in the following rankings of online
programs by US News:
Who are these students taking free first-year MOOC courses from Wharton?
Some are college professors who adding what they learn in MOOCs to the courses
they themselves teach. Most MOOCs, by the way, are advanced courses on highly
specialized topics like the literature of both famous and obscure writers.
Others are basic courses that contribute to career advancement.
For example, the business school at Penn, Wharton, now offers its core
MBA courses as free MOOCs. Some students who intently take these courses are
seeking to get into Wharton and other prestigious MBA programs.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT
scores to get into prestigious MBA programs and to do better in those
programs once admitted so that they too can tap those six-figure starting
salaries of graduates from prestigious MBA Programs.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to raise GMAT
scores to obtain better financial aid packages for further graduate study.
Sometimes the purposes of taking free Wharton MOOCs are to perform
better on the job and thereby get better performance evaluations and raises.
MOOC companies are hardly universities unto
themselves, but now a provider wants to move beyond offering one-off
courses.
MITx, a division of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology that offers courses on the nonprofit edX’s platform,
announced on Tuesday that it would soon offer
special certificates to students who completed a prescribed sequence of
massive open online courses from MIT. The sequences will be called XSeries.
MIT plans to offer its first XSeries sequence,
Foundations of Computer Science, beginning this fall. The computer-science
series will consist of seven courses that together “will cover content
equivalent to two to four traditional residential courses and take between
six months and two years to complete,” according to a news release.
EdX is working with SoftwareSecure, a major player
in the
online-proctoring industry, to make sure that
students who pass each course in an XSeries are who they say they are and
aren’t cheating. The fee for a proctored final examination is roughly $100
per course, meaning students who aim to earn XSeries certificates can expect
to pay about $700 each, said Anant Agarwal, president of edX.
The
failure of MOOCs to penetrate the traditional
system of credits and degrees has made the fate of “alternative credentials”
like XSeries certificates more interesting.
The Stanford
Graduate School of Business is getting into the
MOOC game. Its first foray into the market for “massive open online courses”
is focused on retirement finance and pension policy and will be launched
Oct. 14.
“We’re living in a time when more and more people
are responsible for their own retirement,” says Ranga Jayaraman, associate
dean and chief information officer at the Stanford B-school. “Yet many find
their retirement is not secure.”
Joshua Rauh, the professor who developed the
eight-week course,
will cover topics such as how much people should save
for retirement, stocks and mutual funds, and the impact of public policy
debates on retirement and pensions. The course, to be offered on the NovoEd
platform, will differentiate itself with high-quality video content and
navigation tools that will allow students to review topics that are of the
most interest to them, he adds.
In addition to the 45-minute video lectures broken
down into segments of five to seven minutes, the course includes quizzes,
assignments, and an interactive forum moderated by Stanford GSB alumni,
according to Stanford’s Sept. 17 announcement.
Students will form teams to complete a final
“capstone” project, and representatives from the top five teams will go to
campus and present their projects to a panel of experts and faculty in
January 2014. Stanford and the Hoover Institution will foot the bill for
travel expenses.
Based on participation in MOOCs offered by other
schools at Stanford, GSB expects tens of thousands to sign up, says
Jayaraman.
Getting a
Wharton MBA involves taking off from work for two
years, moving to Philadelphia, and spending about $200,000 on tuition and
expenses. Now, with the addition of three new courses on the online learning
platform Coursera, you can get much of the course content for free.
While you won’t get the full Wharton on-campus
experience—or an internship, career services, or alumni network, for that
matter—the new courses in financial accounting, marketing, and corporate
finance duplicate much of what you would learn during your first year at the
elite business school, says Don Huesman, managing director of the innovation
group at Wharton.
A fourth course in operations management that’s
been offered since September rounds out the “foundation
series.” Along with five existing electives, which
include courses on sports business and health care, the new offerings make
it possible to learn much of what students in Wharton’s full-time MBA
program learn, and from the same professors. All nine courses are massive
open online courses, or MOOCs, expected to attract students from around the
world.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The 2013 graduating MBA class had more females than males.
The Wharton MBA Program is nearly always ranked in the Top Five by US
News.
Jensen Comment
I remember that in K-12 school students traded papers and checked answers. Now
we're coming full circle in distance education in the 21st Century. But there's
a huge difference between grading answers for work done in a classroom versus
work done remotely by distance education students. For example, an algebra or
calculus problem solved in class has controls on cheating when each student is
observed by other students and a teacher. Remotely, what is to prevent a student
from having Wolfram Alpha solve an algebra or calculus problem? --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/
But when a MOOC or SMOC has over 10,000 students I have difficulty imagining
how cheating can be controlled unless students are required to take examinations
under observation of a trusted person like the village vicar or a K-12 teacher
who is being paid to observe a student taking a MOOC or SMOC examination. Having
many such vicars or teachers attest to the integrity of the examination is both
expensive and not aperfect solution. But it sounds much better to me than having
remote students grading each other without being able to observe the examination
process.
The CrowdGrader software sounds like a great idea when students are willing
to help each other. I don't buy into this tool for assigning transcript grades.
It's too late for the 2013 EDUCAUSE event on MOOCs, but Many of the EDUCAUSE
resources are still available
Events
EDUCAUSE
Sprint 2013, July 30–August 1. During this free, online progam we
explored the theme of Beyond MOOCs: Is IT Creating a New, Connected
Age? Each day the community shared thoughts and ideas through webinars,
articles, videos, and online discussions on the daily topics.
Looking for more sessions on MOOCs? check out our other
event recordings on the topic.
Additional MOOC Resources
Copyright Challenges in a MOOC Environment, EDUCAUSE Brief, July
2013. This brief explores the intersection of copyright and the scale
and delivery of MOOCs highlights the enduring tensions between academic
freedom, institutional autonomy, and copyright law in higher education.
To gain insight into the copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders,
EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs, university general counsel, provosts,
copyright experts, and other higher education associations.
Learning and the MOOC, this is a list of
MOOC related resources gathered by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.
Learning and the Massive Open Online Course: A Report on the ELI Focus
Session, ELI White Paper, May 2013. This report is a synthesis of
the key ideas, themes, and concepts that emerged. This report also
includes links to supporting focus session materials, recordings, and
resources. It represents a harvesting of the key elements that we, as a
teaching and learning community, need to keep in mind as we explore this
new model of learning.
The
MOOC
Research Initiative (MRI) is funded by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a set of investments intended
to explore the potential of MOOCs to extend access to postsecondary
credentials through more personalized, more affordable pathways.
The Pedagodgy of MOOCs, May 11, 2013. This
Paul Stacy blog posting provides a brief history of MOOCs, the early
success in Canada and the author's own pedagogical recommendations for
MOOCs.
What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs,” EDUCAUSE, December
2012. This brief discusses how MOOCs work, their value proposition,
issues to consider, and who the key players are in this arena.
The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education, EDUCAUSE
Review Online (January/February 2013),A turning
pointwill occur in the higher education model when a
MOOC-based program of study leads to a degree from an accredited
institution — a trend that has already begun to develop.
General copyright issues for Coursera/MOOC courses,
Penn Libraries created a copyright resource page for schools using the
MOOC Coursera platform. This page provides an overview of special
copyright considerations when using Coursera.
Online Courses Look for a Business Model,
Wall Street Journal, January 2013. MOOC providers, Udacity,
Coursera and edX, seek to generate revenue while they continue to
experiment with open platforms.
Massive Open Online Courses as Drivers for Change,
CNI Fall Meeting, December 2012. Speaker Lynne O'Brien discusses Duke
University's partnership with Coursera, and their experiments with
massive open online courses (MOOCs)
MOOCs: The Coming Revolution?, EDUCAUSE 2012 Annual Conference. This
November 2012 session informs viewers about Coursera and the impact it
is having on online education and altering pedagogy, provides insights
into how and why one university joined that partnership.
The Year of the MOOC, New York Times,
November 2, 2012. MOOCs have been around in one form or another for a
few years as collaborative tech oriented learning events, but this is
the year everyone wants in.
Challenge and Change,” EDUCAUSE Review (September/October
2012). Author George Mehaffy discusses various aspects of innovative
disruption facing higher education including MOOCs.
A True History of the MOOC,” September 26,
2012. In this webinar panel presentation delivered to Future of
Education through Blackboard Collaborate, host Steve Hargadon discusses
the "true history" of the MOOC. It’s also available in
mp3.
The MOOC Guide. This resource offers
an online history of the development of the MOOC as well as a
description of its major elements.
Reviews
for Open Online Courses is a Yelp like
review system from CourseTalk for students to share their experiences
with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).
MOOCs of Interest
Current/Future State of Higher Education 2012.
Eleven organizations, including EDUCAUSE, have come together to provide
a course that will evaluate the change pressures that face universities
and help universities prepare for the future state of higher education.
There may be no more distinguished lecture series
in the arts than
Harvard’s Norton lectures,
named for celebrated professor, president, and editor of the
Harvard Classics, Charles Eliot Norton. Since
1925, the Norton Professorship in Poetry—taken broadly to mean “poetic
expression in language, music, or fine arts”—has gone to one respected
artist per year, who then delivers a series of six talks during their
tenure. We’ve previously featured Norton lectures from
1967-68 by Jorge Luis Borges and
1972-73 by Leonard Bernstein. Today we bring you
the first three lectures from this year’s
Norton Professor of Poetry, Herbie Hancock.
Hancock delivers his fifth lecture today (perhaps even as you read this) and
his sixth and final on Monday, March 31. The glories of Youtube mean we
don’t have to wait around for transcript publication or DVDs, though perhaps
they’re on the way as well.
The choice of Herbie Hancock as this year’s Norton
Professor of Poetry seems an overdue affirmation of one of the country’s
greatest artistic innovators of its most unique of cultural forms. The first
jazz composer and musician—and the first African American—to hold the
professorship, Hancock brings an eclectic perspective to the post. His
topic: “The Ethics of Jazz.” Given his emergence on the world stage as part
of Miles Davis’ 1964-68 Second Great Quartet, his first lecture (top) is
aptly titled “The Wisdom of Miles Davis.” Given his swerve into jazz fusion,
synth-jazz and
electro in the 70s
and 80s, following Davis’ Bitches Brew revolution, his second (below)
is called “Breaking the Rules.”
Coursera has won powerful allies in higher
education by persuading them that it plans to behave more like a university
than an investor-backed Silicon Valley company.
Now Coursera has taken another step to bolster its
academic bona fides. The company announced on Monday that it had hired
Richard C. Levin, who led Yale University as president for 20 years, to
serve as its chief executive.
Mr. Levin, an economist who stepped down last year,
spent the later years of his presidency cultivating relationships overseas,
notably with China and its universities. Mr. Levin also led a controversial
effort to create a liberal-arts college in Singapore, Yale-NUS College.
Continued in article
Online Courses Look for a Business Model,
Wall Street Journal, January 2013. MOOC providers, Udacity,
Coursera and edX, seek to generate revenue while they continue to
experiment with open platforms.
Jensen Comment
By definition, MOOCs are free although some companies and universities may
charge for certificates or transcript credits. Transcript credits entail
standards for academic performance such as term papers and competency-based
examinations. Usually the MOOC instructors do not get involved in assigning
grades except for their own students on campus. MOOCs are often videos filmed in
class that are made available without charge to anybody in the world.
There are various platforms for delivering MOOCs, including Coursera and edX
used by Harvard and MIT. There are also other competitors.
What is surprising is the number of MOOCs available from prestigious
universities.
Added Jensen Comment
I don't advise MOOC courses for "students" who do not have some prerequisites in
the subject matter. For example, the first MOOC course ever invented was filmed
live in an artificial intelligence course for computer science majors at
Stanford University. These students were not first year students who had never
taken computer science courses.
Interestingly students in that course were given the option of attending live
classes or MOOC classes. After several weeks the majority of students opted for
the MOOC classes. Of course at Stanford the students were graded on assignments
and examinations since they were getting course credit.
Of-campus MOOC students were not given an option to receive course credit.
They just learned on their own. There are now options in some MOOC courses to
take competency-based examinations for credit, although these usually do not
involve the course instructors and are not free like the courses themselves.
MOOC courses themselves by definition are free, unlike most other distance
education courses.
An Anecdote: Once Upon a Time When Live Lectures Were Wasted Time on
the Stanford University Campus
Live synchronous lectures are often wastes of time for students, especially
when the subject matter is very technical with precise right and wrong answers.
Fast-learning students who prepared before class daydream because they already
know the lecture material. Slow-learners who are not prepared for class daydream
because the lecture is over their heads. They learn asynchronously after class
by memorizing the textbook and course handouts. Bob Jensen's threads on
asynchronous learning are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Sometimes, however, synchronous live classes are not wastes of time for
students, especially Socratic-method classes on rhetorical issues having no
precise right and wrong answers such as Socratic questions concerning President
Obama's plan for the future of higher education in the USA. Of course some might
argue that Socratic-method classes are not really lectures, but I will ignore
this issue for the moment because even synchronous Socratic-method courses
captured on video can be studied asynchronously over and over after class.
The Purpose of This Tidbit
The purpose of this tidbit is to review an anecdote embedded in a plenary
session by Jeffry Selingo at the August 2013 Annual Meetings of the American
Accounting Association (AAA) in Anaheim. I did not attend those meetings,
but I was able to view Selingo's presentation on the wonderful and very
professional video at
http://commons.aaahq.org/posts/36ef3fc3f3
Only AAA members may view this video. However, I suspect the anecdote in
question is probably reported in Mr. Selingo's new book: College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for
Students
Jeffrey Salingo is a full-time Editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education
An Anecdote Embedded in the Presentation of Jeffrey Selingo
Once upon a time two gifted professors in the Computer Science
Department at Stanford University dreamed up the idea that they would video
each lecture in the course they normally deliver live to about 300 students
each year on campus. The idea was then to provide these videos freely to the
world as a Web course. The subject matter in the course was Artificial
Intelligence.
When Stanford administrators got wind of this idea they had some serious
discussions with these two professors concerning presenting an entire course
free to the world, a course that Stanford students pay a high price for to
attend live on campus. The two professors were eventually given the green
light to offer this Web course provided there were no certificates of
completion, no examinations or grading, and no transcript credit given to
students who completed the Web course. The most that students who completed
the course could get was a letter of congratulations for completing the Web
course.
The Birth of the MOOC
Given some publicity about the course, especially in the Chronicle of
Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, the two professors
anticipated about 1,000 students (mostly curiosity seekers) would sign up
for the Web course. They received a shock when over 160,000 students from
over 100 nations signed up for the Web course. This was the birth of MOOC
courses that now are available free on over 1,000 specialized topics
from mostly highly prestigious universities around the world.
MOOC stands for a "Massive Open Online Course." By definition a MOOC course
must be free of charge without any restrictions on who can take the Web
course. Some MOOC providers now charge a small amount for students who
additionally want an official certificate of attendance. Students may
sometimes, but not always, elect to pay considerably more to take written or
oral competency examinations of the subject matter for transcript credit.
However, institutions vary as to what if any MOOC credits they will accept
for degree programs. MOOC credits have a long way to go before being
accepted by universities other than universities who are delivering the MOOC
credits. They are gaining ground since some highly respected universiteis
like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Akron are now giving
competency-based examinations and course credits to students who have not
taken any particular courses.
Only about 35,000 students completed Stanford's MOOC course which
is a miserable completion rate that is common in nearly all MOOC courses.
Virtually all MOOC courses to date have been intense and difficult to
master. Curiosity seekers soon discover that to really focus on a MOOC
course it will take a lot of time and concentrated self-study. Richard
Campbell reported that he signed up for a MOOC and soon thereafter dropped
out. He reported that learning from that MOOC was like drinking from a
high-pressure fire hose. Others, even professors, who finished taking the
courses reported being totally exhausted.
Most MOOC courses are not typical of smaller-sized online education
courses that are seldom free (i.e., online but not open-shared) and have
much more frequent and often intense communications between an instructor
and each of the students in the online class. Really dedicated and highly
professional distance education teachers like tax professor Amy Dunbar at
the University of Connecticut make themselves available to their online
students ten hours a day via instant messaging ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/002cpe/Dunbar2002.htm
Secondly, most distance education courses these days have student-to-student
communications, chat rooms, and even team projects. There have been some
experimental MOOC courses where teams of students have been formed to
monitor the progress of each team member, but these are still very
experimental at this point in time in the evolution of MOOCs.
The first really interesting part of this anecdote about the first MOOC
course is that about 300 students taking the course live for credit on
Stanford's campus were given the option of attending all live classes or
viewing the MOOC videos of those classes or both. Eventually, about 90%
of those 300 students stopped attending the live classes. Of course they
still had to take the examinations and do whatever else was required for
transcript grades.
The second really interesting part of this anecdote is that all 300
students that term taking the course for grades did significantly better
when the MOOC choice was available to them --- better relative to prior
semesters when the course was taught without having a MOOC option.
It is not clear that the course videos of live classes would have been
as good if there were no live students in the classroom. Although 90% of the
students eventually stopped attending class, it's important to note that the
instructors still faced live students face-to-face in every class. They
could ask questions and have some interactive feedback. The videos may not
have been as good if the professors faced totally empty classrooms. The same
thing happens with live television performers like Johnny Carson who
performed better with live audiences
Jensen Comment
This Stanford anecdote performance outcome is consistent with the much more
formalized SCALE experiments that were conducted years ago for 30 undergraduate
courses across five years at the University of Illinois. In that experiment
resident full-time students were divided between those that took only live
sections versus those that took online sections from the same instructors using
the same assignments and examinations in those sections of each course. In the
SCALE experiments there was a higher proportion of A-grade outcomes in the
online sections. More C students tended to become B students in the online
sections. Unmotivated D and F students tended to be poor students whether onsite
or online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois
One has to be very cautious when making extrapolations from either the
Stanford MOOC anecdote or the SCALE experiments. The improvements in learning
due to online teaching in the SCALE experiments varied by course. Also the
professors teaching those courses tended to be very enthused about the potential
of online learning at a time when there was very little online learning in the
world. It may well be that these professors had more intense communications with
their online students than is normally the case these days for distance
education courses in general. Instant messaging had not yet been invented for
the SCALE experiments such that most of the online communication was via regular
email. Course instructors had to spend a lot of time adapting onsite learning
materials for online learning.
The improvements in learning in the above Stanford anecdote are harder to
explain.
Stanford's first Artificial Intelligence online MOOC was not a distance
education course with communications between the professors and their online
students. In general, MOOC courses are no tests of what we think of as good
distance education courses because MOOC courses have so many more students
making such communications impractical. Remember the first letter in the MOOC
acronym stands for "Massive."
One thing about a MOOC video is that it can be repeated over and over and
over until slower learning students master the technical explanations in the
video. This appears to be the main comparative advantage in the 2,000+ technical
video modules available from the Khan Academy. This is also a comparative
advantage in MOOC courses since the quality videos can be repeated over and over
and over 24/7.
We may also question how well the 35,000 students who completed Stanford's
MOOC Artificial Intelligence course would've performed on competency-based
examinations. In doing so we should probably factor out those online "students"
who were also themselves artificial intelligence experts (e.g., computer science
professors) who were taking the MOOC simply out of curiosity on how this subject
matter is taught at Stanford. We would expect those experts to pass a
competency-based examination before they took this MOOC course.
Among the remaining students who completed the course, I surmise that over
90% would've failed the course if they took the same competency-based
examinations as the 300 on-campus students who received grades for the course on
their transcripts. For most students the grade on a transcript is the primary
motivator for time and sweat devoted to a course. We would expect passage rates
to increase if students intended to take competency-based examinations (oral or
written) and understood what was to be required in terms of learning in the MOOC
course.
The Unsolved Mystery of the Stanford MOOC Anecdote
The unsolved mystery of this anecdote is why the 300 students on campus who were
taking this Artificial Intelligence course for a grade on a transcript tended to
do better when the MOOC option was available versus when the only option was to
attend live lectures. Those that dropped out of live classes and viewed the MOOC
classes could have done worse --- which many educators would've expected when
students can no longer ask their questions in a live class..
Keep in mind that this is only the outcome for one course in one semester. My
hunch, however, is that it would be the same for virtually all live courses
where a MOOC option is also made available on a voluntary basis. I assume that
the synchronous in-class experience in each MOOC course can be viewed over and
over and over asynchronously on video.
By the way, individual top students in a course tend to rank the same under
order under various pedagogy alternatives for that course. This became known as
the famous "No-Significant-Differences Hypothesis" in the literature of teaching
and learning for motivated students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#AssessmentIssues
I think pedagogy matters more to students with low motivation and/or learning
disorders.
Sometimes traditionalist educators who have not studied the
"No-Significant-Differences Hypothesis" research tend to make statements
inconsistent with that research --- especially when putting down online
education. Nobody argues that onsite education, especially among students who
live and learn on campus, is not usually better than online education,
especially in some performance courses like music, speech, and theater. But much
of the advantages of onsite education comes from the learning and maturing that
takes place on campus outside the classrooms.
In his plenary address, Jeffry Selingo points out that less than 20% of USA
higher education students live and learn on campus. For them the costs of this
on-campus living and learning keeps outpacing inflation. And the living in
learning experience varies greatly. Living and learning at Trinity University
where nearly all students live on campus and never have a course with more than
40 students is entirely different than living and learning at the University of
Texas where one dormitory complex (Jestor Hall) is so huge it has two zip codes
and students frequently sit in classrooms holding more than 500 students.
I don't think President Obama is focusing on the 20% nearly as much as he's
focusing on the 80% who need lower cost and higher quality education
alternatives. He wants that 80% to have access to the best teachers in the world
when possible. His main problem lies in how to motivate that 80% to want to
learn (even from the world's best subject matter experts) and to bring those
least prepared for college up to speed. The present model for the 80% in higher
education is pretty much a failure. Our K-12 schools vary more, but for most of
the urban K-12 schools and it's pretty much a gangland horror story.
The University of Texas Gives Birth to the SMOC Based Upon Online
Extensions Enormous Lecture Sections in Basic Psychology
Unlike a MOOC this is not a free non-credit course --- currently costing $550
online for three credits and
Enrollment is capped at 10,000 students per course
Anyone can enroll in the course -- as long as they can
foot the $550 registration fee and can make themselves available at 6 p.m.
central standard time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Registration is handled
online at a
separate site, and students who finish the course
earn three transferable credit hours. In comparison, full-time resident
students (taking the course live on campus) pay
$2,059 (out-of-state students pay $7,137) for three credit hours in the
College of Liberal Arts, but there is no out-of-state premium charged for
the SMOC.
Two University of Texas at Austin psychology
professors will Thursday night take the stage for the fall semester’s first
session of Introduction to Psychology. Their audience will consist of a
production crew and their equipment. In their years of working together, the
professors’ research has shown their students benefit from computer-based
learning to the point where they don’t even need to be physically present in
the classroom.
Just don’t call it a MOOC. The university styles
the class as the world’s first synchronous massive online course, or SMOC
(pronounced “smock”), where the professors broadcast their lectures live to
the about 1,500 students enrolled.
“I think we were influenced predominantly by this
mix of Jon Stewart and 'The View' or Jay Leno,” said James W. Pennebaker,
chair of the department of psychology at UT-Austin.
The course is the result of almost a decade of
research into how students learn. After teaching separate 500-student
sections of the introductory course, Pennebaker and fellow psychology
professor Samuel Gosling decided to schedule the sections back-to-back. The
professors then began experimenting with adaptive learning, requiring
students bring a laptop to class so they could take multiple-choice tests
and receive instant feedback. Gosling and Pennebaker then built group chats
that randomly paired five or six students together for in-class discussions.
Last year, they moved one of the two sections of the course online. And with
this change, the class will be taught exclusively online.
"More and more, we have been integrating a sort of
research element,” Gosling said. “Everything the students do, we learn
about, and we learn about it so we can find out what works. They’re guinea
pigs and we’re guinea pigs.”
As more and more of the coursework continued to
shift toward digital, the data showed a clear trend: Not only were students
in the online section performing the equivalent of half a letter grade
better than those physically in attendance, but taking the class online also
slashed the achievement gap between upper, middle and lower-middle class
students in half, from about one letter grade to less than half of a letter
grade.
“We are changing the way students are approaching
the class and the way they study,” Pennebaker said.
Anyone can enroll in the course -- as long as they
can foot the $550 registration fee and can make themselves available at 6
p.m. central standard time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Registration is
handled online at a separate site, and students who finish the course earn
three transferable credit hours. In comparison, full-time resident students
pay $2,059 (out-of-state students pay $7,137) for three credit hours in the
College of Liberal Arts, but there is no out-of-state premium charged for
the SMOC.
Goslin and Pennebaker said they have set an upper
limit of 10,000 students, but managing a course of this size “shakes a big
bureaucracy to its knees,” Pennebaker said. Between lecturers, audiovisual
professionals, teacher’s assistants, online mentors and programmers, the
number of people associated with teaching one class has ballooned to more
than 125.
“No human can do more than one of these a year,”
Pennebaker said. “It has been the hardest I’ve ever worked in my entire
life.”
In that sense, running the course as a traditional
MOOC would be more efficient, but Gosling said, “I think it wouldn’t be this
class.” As the two professors prepared for what Gosling called “the largest
leap we’ve taken,” they agreed to sacrifice some of that efficiency to
maintain some elements of a classroom setting.
“The cons of a MOOC is that you take away a sense
of intimacy, a sense of community, a sense of a simultaneous, synchronous
experience,” Gosling said.
To ensure that students don’t treat the class as a
static broadcast, the class will be split into smaller pods monitored by
former students, who essentially work as online TAs. The pods will remain
static throughout the semester, giving students a core group of classmates
to chat with during the lectures. And should a student be confused about the
content of a lecture, Pennebaker said, “a blue light comes on and we’ll say,
‘We have a question out there in T.V. land.’ ”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It is not yet clear how SMOCs will be viewed by President Obama, but given their
cheap price for credits from a prestigious university it appears that he will
lavish praise on universities that offer SMOCs for credit in comparison with
universities that offer only MOOCs for non-credit or MOOCs for credit from
for-profit corporations that offer competency-based examinations to accompany
MOOC courses.
The Texas State University System on Thursday
announced a
"Freshman Year for Free" program in which students
could earn a full year of credit through massive open online courses offered
by edX and coordinated by a new nonprofit called the
Modern States Education
Alliance. The only costs to students would be
either Advanced Placement or College Level Examination Program tests, which
would be passed after completing various MOOCs. Appropriate scores would be
required on the tests to receive credit from Texas State campuses.
Jensen Comment
One unmentioned concern is transferability of these credits to other colleges
and universities such as nonprofit colleges and out-of-state universities.
Times are changing with respect to transferability of distance education,
including MOOC credits, but we are not yet all in synch.
By definition learning on MOOCs is free. However, most MOOCs charge fees for
certificates and college credits. This Texas MOOC program is similar in this
regard.
One reason MOOCs are generally advanced courses is that MOOCs do not work as
well on introductory courses where students are more diverse in terms of
scholastic aptitude and motivation. Introductory students typically require more
personal attention either online or onsite. For example, an online distance
education course with 20 students can and generally does have intense daily
email communications between teachers and students. MOOCs are generally enormous
in size with little or no private communications between teachers and students.
Bob Jensen's threads on thousands of free MOOCs that are mostly advanced
courses for motivated scholars available from prestigious universities in the
Ivy League (especially MIT and Wharton), Stanford, Rice, etc. ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Several days ago the
President proposed that the federal government create a rating system
("scorecards”) beginning in 2015 to rank colleges by such metrics as
tuition, percentage of low-income
students, graduation rates, alumni earnings, and debt of graduates. Federal
financial aid to students, currently running at $150 billion a year, would
be allocated on the basis of the ratings, though this part of the proposal
would require legislation; the other parts the President can effectuate
without congressional action. For a good summary of the program, see Dylan
Matthews, “Everything You Need to Know About Obama’s Higher Ed Plan,”
Wonkblog, Aug. 22, 2013,
www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/22/everything-you-need-to-know-about-obamas-higher-ed-plan/.
There are of course
college rating systems already, such as that of U.S. News & World Report.
A federal rating system would probably have somewhat greater credibility;
and if it became the basis for allocation of federal financial aid, the
system would have far greater effect on college choice, given that more than
80 percent of college students receive federal financial aid.
Multi-factor rating
systems have an obvious, and very serious, problem: weighting. It is almost
certainly the case that the factors in the proposed “scorecard” don’t have
the same importance to an intelligent choice of which colleges to apply to.
Worse, there is unlikely to be agreement on which factors are the most
important and so should be given the greatest weight—and how much more
weight than the other factors. That won’t matter a great deal as long as the
ratings just guide college
choice, for then parents and their kids will give whatever weight they want
to the various factors. But the ratings will matter greatly—and influence
that choice—if Congress allows them to be used to govern the allocation of
federal financial aid to students.
To evaluate the
President’s proposal, we need to step back and consider what ails our
higher-education system. It is helpful to note the affinity between its
rather doleful situation and that of our health care system. The top
institutions in both systems provide world-class quality of service, mainly
to children of the affluent and nearaffluent—the top tier of American
universities and colleges is generally considered tops in the world. Both
systems provide indifferent quality at the bottom, the bottom-tier
universities and colleges being worse than the bottom-tier hospitals and
clinics. Both systems are very expensive, with much of the tab picked up by
the taxpayer—both are very expensive in part because of poor quality control
by the federal government. The government is not a very competent financier,
in major part because it is buffeted by interest groups wielding formidable
political power.
The Administration’s
Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is an enormously ambitious, almost
incomprehensibly complex, effort to improve medical care and at the same
time reduce the rate of growth of the nation’s medical expenditures. The
President’s new higher-education proposal is much less ambitious, especially
if one sets to one side the part that requires congressional approval—the
part about keying federal financial aid to universities and colleges to how
well they perform on the “scorecard.” It is worth analysis, of course, but
can be relegated to secondary concern on the pragmatic ground that
congressional approval appears to lie far in the future.
The Presidente’s
proposed ratings do identify characteristics of colleges and universities
that parents and their high-school children should consider in deciding
whether (and where) to apply to college. True, most of the information is
available already, but not (so far as I know) in a compact, readily readable
and comprehensible form, amd of course missing the imprimatur of the federal
government. The Wall Street Journal in an editorial yesterday
(August 24) scoffed at the supposition that the government can pick
“winners.” But that isn’t the purpose of the ratings. The purpose is to
provide accurate, readable information for the relevant consuming public,
and so understood seems perfectly appropriate. The “picking winners”
criticism will become more apt if and when Congress authorizes the
allocation of federal financial aid on the basis of the ratings.
But I do think the
scorecard even when viewed purely as an information device can be
criticized. For example, while I can see why the percentage of low-income
students in a college would be an appropriate factor to consider in
allocating federal aid, I don’t see its relevance to the choice of a college
by would-be applicants. Tuition, on the other hand, is a relevant factor,
obviously, but is disclosed up front by any college or university to which
one applies. Alumni earnings sound relevant, but the problem is
that they necessarily are backward looking. They are the record of
experiences of previous students, and may reflect characteristics of the
college or of the job market that have changed since those generations of
students graduated. The amount of debt of graduates is similarly an
ambiguous signal to a prospective applicant. If the debt of graduates of a
particular institution is above average, this may reflect career choices or
excessive optimism, things for which the college may bear only limited, if
any, responsibility. The factor is included in the scorecard I assume
because of a belief that some colleges lure students by obfuscating the
financial obligations that a student who applies for financial aid will be
taking on. I think this belief is correct but I don’t know how much
of the indebtedness of graduates it is responsible for.
Jensen Caution
Don't treat distance education courses and MOOC courses as synonyms. President
Obama is suggesting priority for distance education courses and online degree
programs that are neither free nor "massive" in size. Smaller distance education
courses can have intense communications between students and an instructor plus
intense communications between students in a course (including team projects).
Grading in these distance education courses is very similar to onsite course
grading.
MOOCs present an entire new dimension to student communications and grading.
I don't think President Obama was thinking in terms of MOOCs in his latest
proposal. However, MOOCs are on the horizon, especially for very specialized
courses that colleges cannot afford to teach on campus. Credit in such courses
may be given on the basis of competency testing.
Developing online classes and other nontraditional
teaching approaches could earn colleges money under new federal financing
priorities
proposed on Thursday by President Obama.
More colleges should be encouraged “to embrace
innovative new ways to prepare our students for a 21st-century economy and
maintain a high level of quality without breaking the bank,” the president
said in a
speech at the University at Buffalo, part of the
State University of New York.
The financial rewards for such innovation would be
part of a larger retooling of financing priorities, Mr. Obama said.
Under his proposal, the Department of Education
would have two years to create a college-rating system to help students and
their parents determine the value of an institution. Criteria would include
graduation rates, graduates’ competitiveness in the work force, and their
debt load upon graduation, among others.
As one example of innovation in online learning
that meets students’ needs, Mr. Obama cited an
online master’s program in computer science at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. The program will make its debut in January
and cost a fraction of a traditional on-campus degree.
In a speech at Knox College last month, President
Obama said he would "shake up higher education" with an "aggressive
strategy" aimed at making college more affordable.
On Thursday, the president embarks on a two-state,
three-campus tour where he'll lay out what he has in mind. In a
letter sent to his supporters this week, he
promises "real reforms that would bring lasting change."
"Just tinkering around the edges won't be enough,"
he says in the letter. "To create a better bargain for the middle class, we
have to fundamentally rethink about how higher education is paid for in this
country."
The plan, he continues, "won't be popular with
everyone—including some who've made higher education their business—but it's
past time that more of our colleges work better for the students they exist
to serve."
But it's hard to see how the president will tackle
two of the root causes of tuition growth: labor costs and state budget cuts.
Despite productivity gains, and a move toward self-guided,
"competency-based" learning, higher-education remains an industry that's
highly dependent on skilled labor. At the same time, many states have
slashed their spending on higher-education, forcing public colleges to raise
tuition to cover costs.
Taking Colleges
to Task
Over the past year-and-a-half, Mr. Obama has become
a frequent critic of colleges, taking them to task over rising tuition and
warning that the government won't continue to pour money into an
"undisciplined system." He has threatened to withhold some federal aid from
colleges that fail to hold down tuition growth, and has proposed grants for
states and colleges that adopt cost-saving measures.
So far, those ideas have fallen flat, largely
because of federal budget constraints. The president has had better luck
increasing aid to students and making debt more manageable, through expanded
income-based repayment options and lower interest rates on student loans.
His administration has also made information about
college costs and student debt more transparent, through the use of an
online College Scorecard and a standardized financial-aid award letter, or
"shopping sheet."
This week's college tour is the latest in a string
of campaign-style events the White House is using to promote its economic
policies in the run-up to debates in Congress over the federal budget and
the debt ceiling. It includes stops on Thursday and Friday at two State
University of New York campuses—the University at Buffalo and Binghamton
University—and at Lackawanna College, in Scranton, Pa.
Details of the president's proposals aren't yet
available, but some observers expect Mr. Obama to recycle a plan that would
tie some money from the campus-based aid programs to efforts to rein in
tuition growth, and to repeat his call for a "Race to the Top"-style grant
program for colleges and states that take steps to control costs.
He might also propose an expansion of his signature
Pay-as-You-Earn student-loan repayment plan, or declare use of the
financial-aid shopping sheet mandatory for all colleges.
To address state budget cuts, he might propose
requiring states to sustain their spending on higher education to receive
certain federal funds. But past maintenance-of-effort provisions haven't
proven particularly effective, and some members of Congress oppose their
expansion. Tackling labor costs would be even trickier.
"When it comes down to it, there's not all that
much the president can do, besides using the bully pulpit" to exhort states
and colleges to do more, said Daniel T. Madzelan, a longtime Education
Department official who retired last year. "It just comes down to the price
of labor."
From Benefactor
to Critic
During his first years in office, President Obama
focused on expanding student aid, pushing for increases in the maximum Pell
Grant and the creation of a more generous tuition tax credit. Those changes
helped make college more affordable for current students, but they didn't do
anything to slow tuition growth, and skeptics say they may have even fueled
it.
In 2010, the administration turned its attention to
for-profit colleges, proposing to cut off federal student aid to
institutions where borrowers struggle to repay their debt. The resulting
"gainful employment" regulation was overturned by the courts, and the
Education Department is opening negotiations to rewrite the rule this fall.
But it was not until 2012, in his State of the
Union address, that the president began to apply pressure to all of higher
education, putting colleges "on notice" that his administration would not
continue to subsidize
"skyrocketing tuition."
"If you can't stop tuition from going up, the
funding you get from taxpayers will go down," he said.
Three days later, in a speech
at the University of Michigan, he issued a
"blueprint for keeping college affordable,"
repeating proposals to shift more money from the campus-based student-aid
programs to colleges that "do their fair share to keep tuition affordable,"
and create new incentive programs for colleges and states. The plan also
included a call for the
College Scorecard that would provide families with
"essential information" for choosing a college, including data on
institutions' costs, graduation rates, and the potential earnings of
graduates.
He returned to those themes in his 2013 State of
the Union address, calling on colleges to
"do their part to keep costs down," and urging
Congress to consider "affordability and value" when awarding federal aid. In
a
policy plan that accompanied the speech, he
suggested incorporating measures of value and affordability into the
existing accreditation system or establishing a new, alternative system of
accreditation "based on performance and results."
Sidestepping
Congress
Getting Congress to agree to any of those ideas
will be difficult, given budget realities and competing priorities—not to
mention the partisan gridlock currently gripping Washington. Recognizing
this, Mr. Obama has vowed to use the powers of his office to get things
done.
Continued in article
It's troubling enough to study one university's
financial reports. It's a nightmare to compare universities.
"So You Want to Examine Your University's Financial Reports?" by Charles
Schwartz, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Examine-Your/130672/
The University of Texas System released data
Thursday designed to help the system's regents gauge the productivity of
faculty members, The Texas Tribune
reported -- one part of
an accountability push that has concerned many
professors and troubled some lawmakers. The massive spreadsheet -- which
system officials insisted was raw and unverified, and should be treated as a
draft -- contained numerous data points about all individual professors,
including their total compensation, tenure status, total course enrollments,
and information about research awards. A similar effort this spring at Texas
A&M University -- also undertaken in response to pressure from Gov. Rick
Perry --
created a stir there.
Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of
Professors (including discussions of the Texas A&M cost allocation study) ---
See below
San Jose State University’s
experiment with online video lectures featuring
professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—by way of edX, the
nonprofit provider of massive open online courses—produced some promising
early results. In the fall of 2012, students in two traditional sections of
an introductory electrical-engineering course earned passing grades at rates
of 57 percent and 74 percent, respectively. In an experimental third
section, which was “flipped” to incorporate the MIT videos, the pass rate
was 95 percent.
So what’s happened since? San Jose State has
remained in the spotlight, but interest in the outcomes of a second and a
third trial has taken a back seat to
big-picture
battles over the role of outside content providers
in technology-intensive classrooms.
The university has not released data from last
year’s experiments with the MIT content. But slides from a presentation that
edX’s president, Anant Agarwal, gave to edX members at a private conference
in November showed the outcome of the second trial, which happened in the
spring of 2013, edX said.
The spring trial also involved three sections of
the introductory electrical-engineering course, one of which used edX
content. In the traditional sections, students passed at rates of 79 percent
and 82 percent, according to the slides. In the experimental section, the
pass rate was 87 percent.
The experimental section hewed much more closely to
the MIT professors’ syllabus in the spring of 2013 than it had in the fall
of 2012. Instead of using the edX videos only when they complemented his own
syllabus,
Khosrow Ghadiri, the adjunct instructor who taught
that section, adopted the entire edX course.
“We adopted the content of MIT, which covered more
material,” Mr. Ghadiri told The Chronicle this week. It was sort of
like an accelerated version of the traditional San Jose State course, he
said.
What to make of the numbers from the spring trial?
The pass rates in the traditional sections were higher in the spring than
they had been in the fall—79 percent and 82 percent, versus 57 percent and
74 percent—but that could have been simple statistical variation. In both
trials, the samples were quite small. And, as before, the effects of
“flipping” the classroom to include more collaboration with instructors and
classmates cannot be separated from the effects of using the edX platform or
the MIT lectures.
There could also have been selection bias. In the
spring, the university’s course catalog distinguished between the
traditional and experimental sections. In the fall, no difference had been
mentioned in the course listings. Spring students may have opted into the
section they thought would suit them best.
Not all students noticed those distinctions,
though. Mr. Ghadiri said that 11 students had stopped showing up for class
once they realized that they had signed up for the MIT version of the
course. They all failed the course as a result. Without them, Mr. Ghadiri
said, the pass rate in the experimental section would have been the same in
the spring as it had been in the fall—95 percent.
In any case, Mr. Ghadiri said, the pass rates of
the spring-2013 trial should not be compared with those of the fall-2012
trial. Why? Because the students learned different material and took
different examinations. In the fall, the instructor used the MIT content to
help teach his own syllabus. In the spring, he used the MIT professor’s
content and the MIT professor’s learning objectives. “It’s no longer apples
to apples,” said Mr. Ghadiri.
After putting its high-profile online-learning
experiment
on hold for the fall semester, San Jose State
University
said on Tuesday that it would resume offering
three online courses next spring in conjunction with Udacity, one of the
three big providers of massive open online courses.
The courses—”Elementary Statistics,” “Introduction
to Programming,” and “General Psychology”—are among five with which the
university has
tested whether teaching methods and technology that
Udacity developed for MOOCs could be useful in more-conventional courses
offered for university credit. Two mathematics courses that were offered
last spring are not being reprised.
The three courses will be offered for credit to
strictly limited numbers of San Jose State students and others in the
California State University system, the university said. The courses will
also be offered to all comers through Udacity’s website, but completing the
courses will earn those students only Udacity certificates.
The university said that Udacity had made its
content “open and free” to the San Jose State faculty members overseeing the
classes and that the company would “receive no payments or revenue from this
arrangement.”
San Jose State’s online-learning tests began last
spring in an arrangement promoted by the university’s president, Mohammad H.
Qayoumi, as well as by Udacity’s chief executive and co-founder, Sebastian
Thrun, and California’s governor, Jerry Brown.
Initial results, however, were decidedly mixed,
leading the university to hold off offering courses this fall, although it
went ahead with courses it had already promised to offer during the summer.
Jensen Comment
I don't think this is ethical. It strikes another blow at bookstores near campus
that are already struggling to compete with Amazon and other online vendors. It
also gives an unfair edge to Amazon vis-a-vis other online vendors. It
also hints of kickbacks.
MOOC Performance Improves With a Different Mix of Students
Earlier this year, it looked as if a high-profile
online-education experiment at San Jose State University had gone on the
rocks. In the first courses the university ran with technology from Udacity,
the online-learning company, students’ grades were, frankly, dismal.
But now the pilot program appears to be back on
course, buoyed by encouraging data from this summer’s trials, in which the
university offered tweaked versions of the same courses to a much different
mix of students.
In the spring, the university adapted three courses
for Udacity’s platform and offered them to small groups of online students
for credit. The idea was to test whether Udacity’s technology and teaching
methods, which the company originally developed for its massive open online
courses, could be useful in a more conventional online setting.
But the pass rates in all three Udacity-powered
courses trailed far behind the rates in comparable face-to-face courses at
San Jose State. The university
decided not to offer any trial courses through
Udacity in the fall.
The trials that had been planned for the summer
went forward, however, with tweaked versions of the same three courses, plus
two others. The results have been more promising. Pass rates in each of the
three repeated courses leaped upward, approaching and sometimes exceeding
the pass rates in the face-to-face sections.
For example, in the spring trial, only 25 percent
of the students taking the “Udacified” version of a statistics course earned
a C grade or higher; in the summer trial, 73 percent made at least a C. Only
students in the adapted version of an entry-level mathematics course
continued to lag well behind those in the face-to-face version on the San
Jose State campus.
The results come with an important caveat: Unlike
the spring trials, which drew on San Jose State undergraduates as well as
underprivileged high-school students, the summer trials were open to anybody
who wanted to register.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Sebastian
Thrun, the founder of Udacity, said that half the students in the summer
trials already held bachelor’s degrees and 20 percent had advanced degrees.
In general, the summer students were older, with more work experience and
higher levels of educational attainment. Given the difference in
populations, trying to compare the pass rates for the spring and summer
trials is probably not a particularly profitable exercise.
Jensen Comment
With nationwide median grades being around A- in live classrooms, it may well be
that students just fear that the same loose grading standards will not be
applied to competency-based grading in a MOOC --- http://www.gradeinflation.com/
There may also be problems transferring these MOOC credits to other
universities. There are many universities who do not allow transfer credit for
distance education courses in general, although this is somewhat hard to enforce
when major universities do not distinguish (on transcripts) what sections of
courses were taken onsite versus online. In may instances students have a choice
as to whether to take onsite sections or online sections of the same course. But
when all sections are only available via distance education other universities
may deny transfer credits. In accountancy, some state societies of CPAs, such as
in Texas, limit the number of distance education courses allowed for permission
to take the CPA examination.
Also it could be that this MOOC alternative just was not publicized enough to
reach its potential market.
Anyone who cares about America's shortage of
computer-science experts should cheer the recent news out of Georgia Tech.
The Atlanta university is making major waves in business and higher
education with its May 14 announcement that the college will offer the first
online master's degree in computer science—and that the degree can be had
for a quarter of the cost of a typical on-campus degree. Many other
universities are experimenting with open online courses, or MOOCs, but
Georgia Tech's move raises the bar significantly by offering full credit in
a graduate program.
It comes just in time. A shortfall of
computer-science graduates is a constant refrain in Silicon Valley, and by
2020 some one million high-tech job openings will remain unfilled, according
to the Commerce Department.
That's why Georgia Tech's online degree, powered by
Udacity, is such a game-changer. For the same $7,000 a year that New York
City spends per student on school buses, you can now get a master's from one
of the most well-respected programs in the country. Moore's Law says these
fees should drop to $1,000 by 2020—a boon for students and for the economy.
Sadly, MOOCs are not without controversy. Consider
what happened at San Jose State after the university last fall ran a test
course in electrical engineering paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation. Students who worked with online content passed at a higher rate
than classroom-only students, 91% to 60%. The course was so successful that
the school's president decided to expand online courses, including
humanities, which will also be rolled out to other California State
universities.
You'd think professors would welcome these positive
changes for students. Some teachers across the country are, however
cautiously, embracing the MOOC model. But plenty of professors smell a
threat to their livelihood. In an April 29 open letter to the university,
San Jose State philosophy professors wrote: "Let's not kid ourselves;
administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with
cheap online education."
In April, an Amherst faculty committee decided
against online courses, since they apparently run afoul of the school's
mission of "learning through close colloquy." As it happens, Amherst
professors rank seventh in salary of top liberal arts colleges, pulling in
$137,700. And at Duke, where my son is a student, a faculty council at the
school's arts and sciences college voted 16 to 14 against granting
graduation credits for taking a Duke MOOC. By the way, Duke professors'
average salary is $180,200.
I have nothing against teachers—or even high
salaries, if the teachers are worth it. But half of recent college graduates
don't have jobs or don't use their degree in the jobs they find. Since 1990,
the cost of college has increased at four times the rate of inflation.
Student loans are clocking in at $1 trillion.
Something's got to give. Education is going to
change, the question is how and when. Think about it: Today's job
market—whether you're designing new drugs, fracking for oil, writing mobile
apps or marketing Pop Chips—requires graduates who can think strategically
in real time, have strong cognitive skills, see patterns, work in groups and
know their way around highly visual virtual environments. This is the same
generation that grew up playing online games like Call of Duty and World of
Warcraft, but who are almost never asked to use their online skills in any
classroom.
MOOCs will inevitably come to K-12 education too.
Everyone knows great public school teachers. But we also all know the
tenured type who has been mailing it in for years. Parents spend sleepless
nights trying to rearrange schedules to get out of Mr. Bleh's fourth-period
math class. Online education is about taking the "best in class" teachers
and scaling them to thousands or millions of students rather than 25-30 at a
time.
The union-dominated teaching corps can be expected
to be just as hostile as college professors to moving K-12 to MOOCs. But a
certain financial incentive will exist nonetheless. I noted this in a talk
recently at an education conference where the audience was filled with
people who create education software and services.
I began by pointing out that in 2011 only 7.9% of
11th graders in Chicago public schools tested "college ready." That's
failure, and it's worse when you realize how much money is wasted on these
abysmal results. Chicago's 23,290 teachers—who make an average salary of
$74,839, triple U.S. per capita income and 50% more than median U.S.
household income—cost Chicago taxpayers $1.75 billion out of the city's
$5.11 billion budget.
Why not forget the teachers and issue all 404,151
students an iPad or Android tablet? At a cost of $161 million, that's less
than 10% of the expense of paying teachers' salaries. Add online software,
tutors and a $2,000 graduation bonus, and you still don't come close to the
cost of teachers. You can't possibly do worse than a 7.9% college readiness
level.
Ruth Bender, Ph.D. is an accounting professor in
the United Kingdom
June 17, 2013 message from Ruth Bender
I did the MOOC ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior’ from Dan
Ariely at Duke (it uses Coursera). I registered just to see what it
was like, with no expectation of doing the work. I ended up doing
all of the video lectures, all of the required readings, many of the
optional readings, some of the optional videos, all of the tests,
the written assignment, peer-reviews of others’ assignments… I even
spent time swotting for the final exam! And when I got my
certificate, even though it is covered in disclaimers (they can’t
know that I really am the one who did the work) I felt a real sense
of achievement.
On the other hand, I also started a Strategy course, and lasted only
one lecture.
And I have just started a Finance course, but am struggling with it
as it’s a bit tedious. (Not sure how much of that relates to the
fact that I understand the time value of money, and how much of it
is due to style, with a presenter speaking to camera for long
periods.)
I wrote down, for Cranfield colleagues, some features of the Ariely
course. Here they are.
1.A lot of time had been spent getting this right. They
reckoned, about 3000 hours. The videos are very professional.
The cartoon drawings that accompany them every so often are
quite nice as a (relevant) distraction.
2.As well as Dan Ariely, they had two teaching assistants
on the course to answer queries.
3.I didn’t use the discussion for a or the live hangouts.
I don’t know about the hangouts, but I did occasionally browse
the discussion for a to see how they were being used. They
seemed quite active. Likewise, I didn’t participate in the
course Wiki but it did seem active.
4.There was a survey done before at the start of the course
and at the start of every single week. The surveys covered
attitudes, to the course and the subjects covered. (This is a
psychology course, after all.)
5.A final exercise, voluntary that I am not joining, is to
write a group essay on the course.
6.The videos ranged from 5 minutes to over 20. The
readings ranged from 1-2 pages through to academic working
papers of about 40 pages.
7.There are two tests each week – on the videos, and on the
readings. You can re-sit the tests up to 15 times
8.The closing exam was closed-book. People were selling
revision notes, and also providing them for free. Some very
complex mind maps here – this was unexpected and very
interesting.
9.A lot of interaction with Dan, including the weekly Q&A
video.
Overall, I think it was a success because the material was
interesting, and because it was presented really well. They kept my
interest with short-ish videos, and with quizzes. Ariely is an
entertaining presenter. In order to get a grade you had to
peer-review at least 3 other people’s written assignments. I ended
up reading 11, just because I wanted to see the standard. A couple
were dire, but most were high.
Hope this helps. Happy to give more information if you like.
I'm a struggling retired teacher over here
putting together my first web site. I was just wondering, if it
isn't too much to ask, could you please take a quick look at my web
site and see if it meets your standards for your Math Bookmarks
area. All of my materials are free and aligned to the core
curriculum.
It has been really tough trying to get the
word out there to teachers. Everyone is so busy. Who has time? I
appreciate your work and time.
A 1,000 Thanks,
Julia Retired Middle School Math Teacher,
Mom of 3, Grandma of 4, and Tired
June 7, 2013 reply from
Bob Jensen
Hi Julia,
These should make great PDF supplements to Khan Academy videos.
They must have taken an incredible amount of time to produce.
Thank you for open sharing.
I will add your link at least in the following pages (near the
Khan Academy links). Please be patient. I may not get my revised
pages down to my Texas server until the next edition of Tidbits
comes out on June 11.
Fast Company issues its annual list of the most
innovative companies in education. The 2013 list includes nine companies and
one community college.
In its
annual list of top companies, the magazine broke
down the organizations that have the most impact on education. Not
surprisingly, the top three slots were filled by online course providers
that partner with universities. They earned their spots for disrupting
traditional university course delivery methods by offering classes at no
charge to students.
1. Coursera
2. Udacity
3. EdX
4. Rio Salado Community College
5. Amplify
6. GameDesk
7. Duolingo
8. InsideTrack
9. FunDza
10. ClassDojo
But while the list includes the word company, not
every organization included is a company. For example, Rio Salado Community
College in Arizona came in fourth.
Rio Salado designed a custom course management and
student services system that helps students stay on track with their
education. Through
predictive analytics, the college shows professors
which students could be at risk of dropping out and need more attention. It
also alerts professors when a student doesn't show up to class regularly or
skips an assignment. The system allows educators to recognize at-risk
students early and take action to help them.
For more information about what these companies did
to be on the list, check out
Fast Company's story.
In 1937, as she lay ill in bed, Annie Oakes
Huntington, a writer living in Maine, thought of ways to spend her
time. She confided in a letter: “The radio has been a source of unfailing
diversion this winter. I expect to enter all the courses at Harvard to be
broadcasted.” Huntington was joining in an educational experiment sweeping
the country in the 1920s and 30s: massive open on-air courses.
As educators contemplate the MOOCs of our
day—massive open online courses—they would do well to consider how
earlier generations dealt with technology-enhanced education.
We are not the first generation to believe that
technology can transcend distance and erode ignorance. Nearly a century ago,
educators were convinced that radio held that same potential. The number of
radios in the United States increased from six or seven thousand to 10
million between 1921 and 1928. Many universities explored the possibility of
broadcasting courses across the country and allowing anyone to enroll. Some
onlookers believed those courses would transform higher education and
eliminate lecture halls and seminar rooms. One observer noted, “The nation
has become the new campus,” while another celebrated the “‘University of the
Air,’ whose campus is the ether of the earth, whose audience waits for
learning, learning, learning.”
By 1922, New York University had established a
radio station, through which “virtually all the subjects of the university
[would] be sent out.” Eventually a multitude of universities, including
Columbia, Harvard, Kansas State, Ohio State, NYU, Purdue, Tufts, and the
Universities of Akron, Arkansas, California, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa,
Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Utah, offered radio courses.
Subjects ranged from Browning’s poems to engineering, agriculture to
fashion.
While each institution ran its courses differently,
there were commonalities. Often, students registered by mail and received a
syllabus by return mail. Some then mailed in assignments to the faculty.
Several universities offered credit.
Hopes ran high that these courses might spread
knowledge more democratically—that they would, in the words of one
commentator, make the “’backwoods,’ and all that the word connotes … dwindle
if … not entirely disappear as an element in our civilization.” By offering
education to people from all walks of life, radio would reduce rural
populations’ isolation and mitigate class differences.
Yet gradually problems emerged, and doubts spread
that on-air courses would ever fully replace traditional colleges. First was
the issue of attrition. Like most modern-day courses taught at a distance,
completion rates were disappointing. Of those enrolled in one course, only
half took exams. There were reports that listeners’ interest in erudition
often competed with the temptations of entertainment. Listeners might tune
into a lecture occasionally, but not with the regularity or dedication
ardent advocates predicted.
Some also complained that the learning was
passive. In 1924, the journalist Bruce Bliven skeptically asked: “Is radio
to become a chief arm of education? Will the classroom be abolished, and
the child of the future be stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as
he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket?”
Answering his own question, Bliven wrote, “A good mind … must be built, not
stuffed. … Radio, of course, faces squarely against this whole tide.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge was that radio did
not offer opportunities for social interaction in the way that traditional
courses did. A sociologist noted in 1927, “There are certain fundamental
things in man’s nature that tend to show us that broadcasting cannot …
supersede the theater, the concert, … or the lecture hall.” He continued,
“Broadcasting has hardly any gregarious or association appeals.”
Finally, even when students endured the isolation
and passivity of this new mode of learning, conquered the temptations of
popular radio programs, and finished a course, it wasn’t clear what that
meant. Students in Kansas State’s radio classes received certificates
verifying they had participated in “the college of the air,” but these were
not the same as real diplomas. Other colleges tried to make the classes
count for university credit: Between 1923 and 1940, 13 institutions offered
courses for credit, and nearly 10,000 students enrolled. But a mere 17
percent actually received credit, and by the 1940-41 academic year, there
was only one radio course in the United States for which a student could
earn credit—and nobody enrolled in it.
Decades later, as we contemplate MOOCs, much of
this sounds familiar. In discussions of radio courses in the 1920s and 30s,
and in the euphoria over online courses today, university administrators,
along with journalists, gush about the potential of technology to extend the
geographic reach of the university, even while acknowledging MOOCs’
experimental nature, the lack of a way to monetize them, and the need to
build in greater interaction between lecturer and audience.
Admittedly, the past is not the present, and the
“college of the air” is not a MOOC. MOOCs offer more possibilities for
interaction than radio did. Yet while participants in MOOCs report a good
deal of interaction among students, they report little to no communication
with their professors—unsurprising, given the student-faculty ratio. And
like radio, MOOCs still can’t offer the level of sociability or one-on-one
interactions that brick-and-mortar classes do. (Even regular online courses
don’t do that very well: Our cash-strapped, time-pressed students confide
that while online classes are convenient, they still prefer to take courses
in a classroom, with a professor, on our campus.)
The problem of what MOOCs add up remains. While
some universities have promised to accept them for credit, in the long term,
we may find, as proponents of radio did, that the courses play at best a
minor role in helping students earn degrees.
Finally, MOOCs, like radio courses of the 20s, face
competition from temptations less present in the traditional classroom. Many
radio listeners resolved to “attend” courses, only to have those resolutions
undermined by the distractions of easy listening. When there is no
instructor physically present, attrition and inattention abound.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Arguably, visual learning is the most efficient way of learning --- all those
important charts, tables, pictures, cartoons, animations, and videos. Radio
leaves out this important dimension of MOOCs and the differences between modern
MOOCs and radio learning can be dramatic. Sight impaired learners in general
have to work much harder to learn.
Radio is good for background and filling dead learning space. People can
drive buggies and cars while listening to the radio. Audio books are important
for some types of learners. But ultimately, radio cannot compare with multimedia
for learning efficiency.
Of course radio learning and visual learning need not be mutually exclusive.
Radio courses could have textbooks 100 years ago. Today radio courses can have
multimedia computer supplements for times when the learner is not preoccupied
with such things as driving a vehicle and child care and surgeries.
My wife, a former surgical nurse, tells me surgical teams often listen to the
radio during surgeries. More common than not, my dentists have radio or even
television sets running while they work on my teeth.
From the Scout Report on March 22, 2013
Massive open online courses move ahead amid support and controversy
MOOCs — they’re getting a lot of hype, in part
because they promise so much, and in part because you hear about
students signing up for these courses in massive numbers. 60,000 signed
up for Duke’s Introduction to Astronomy on Coursera. 28,500 registered
for Introduction to Solid State Chemistry on edX. Impressive figures, to
be sure. But then the shine comes off a little when you consider that
3.5% and 1.7% of students completed these courses respectively. That’s
according to a
Visualization of MOOC Completion Rates
assembled by educational researcher
Katy Jordan,
using publicly available data. According to her
research, MOOCs have generated 50,000 enrollments on average, with the
typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around
7.5%, or 3,700 completions per 50,000
enrollments. If you click the image above, you can see interactive data
points for 27 courses.
Right now, universities are producing MOOCs
left and right, and it’s great deal for you, the students. (See
our list of 300 MOOCs.)
But I’ve been around universities long enough to know one thing — they
don’t shell out this much cash lightly. Nor do professors sink 100 hours
into creating courses that don’t count toward their required teaching
load. We’re in a honeymoon period, and, before it’s over, the raw number
of students completing a course will need to go up — way up. Remember,
the MOOC is free. But it’s the finishers who will
pay for certificates and
get placed into jobs for a fee. In short, it’s
the finishers who will create the major revenue streams that MOOC
creators and providers are relying on.
Jensen Comment
The above article brought to mind all the many, many books I checked out from
libraries or purchased that I must honestly say I did not finish. Unless there
are incentives to read to the end, we're a society of waders who stick our feet
into the waters without becoming fully submerged. A better phrase might be
"curiosity dabblers."
I think that signing up for a MOOC course in most instances is motivated by
curiosity much like checking out a book from the library just to "check it out."
The reasons we don't finish a book or a MOOC are many and varied.
For many of us leisure reading is motivated by little else other than
curiosity and leisure entertainment. Finishing a book or MOOC is not a
burning goal in life unless we are facing a competency-based examination
covering the entire book or MOOC.
Most of us underestimate how busy we will become before we finish a book
or a MOOC.
Most of us have to be very selective about where we devote our big sweat
concentrations in learning. Great learning, like great exercise/sex, cannot
be attained without deep, deep concentration and heavy sweating. Little bits
are fine and fun, but the great finishes take lots of sweat.
Most of us are easily bored.
Most of us are easily disappointed.
Most of us end our flight and get back home without quite finishing the
book that occupied our time while traveling.
Most of us in our senior years doze off without props/pokes to stay
awake. Reading is bad enough. Operas, long sermons, and lectures are deadly.
So are long drives --- which is why I prefer that Erika take the wheel when
our destination is more than 30 miles. She likes driving. I've always hated
driving like I hate other wastes of time. In my entire life I would never
have opted for a job that had a long commute. Traffic jams and long lines in
general drive me nuts.
How can a nonprofit organization that gives away
courses bring in enough revenue to at least cover its costs?
That's the dilemma facing edX, a project led by
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is
bringing in a growing number of high-profile
university partners to offer massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
Two other major providers of MOOCs, Coursera and
Udacity, are for-profit companies. While edX has cast itself as the more
contemplative, academically oriented player in the field, it remains under
pressure to generate revenue.
"Even though we are a nonprofit, we have to become
self-sustaining," said Anant Agarwal, president of edX. And developing MOOCs,
especially ones that aspire to emulate the quality and rigor of traditional
courses at top universities, is expensive. Harvard and MIT made an initial
investment of $30-million each last year to
start the edX effort.
Legal documents, obtained by The Chronicle
from edX, shed some light on how edX plans to make money and compensate its
university partners.
According to Mr. Agarwal, edX offers its university
affiliates a choice of two partnership models. Both models give universities
the opportunity to make money from their edX MOOCs—but only after edX gets
paid.
The first, called the "university self-service
model," essentially allows a participating university to use edX's platform
as a free learning-management system for a course on the condition that part
of any revenue generated by the course flow to edX.
The courses developed under that model will be
created by "individual faculty members without course-production assistance
from edX," and will be branded separately in the edX catalog as "edge"
courses until they pass a quality-review process, according to a standard
agreement provided to The Chronicle by edX.
Once a self-service course goes live on the edX Web
site, edX will collect the first $50,000 generated by the course, or $10,000
for each recurring course. The organization and the university partner will
each get 50 percent of all revenue beyond that threshold.
The second model, called the "edX-supported model,"
casts the organization in the role of consultant and design partner,
offering "production assistance" to universities for their MOOCs. The
organization charges a base rate of $250,000 for each new course, plus
$50,000 for each time a course is offered for an additional term, according
to the standard agreement.
Although the edX-supported model requires cash
upfront, the potential returns for the university are high if a course ends
up making money. As with the self-service model, edX lays claim to the first
$50,000 of revenue for a new course, or $10,000 for a recurring one. But
after that, the university gets 70 percent of any additional revenue.
The university partners can choose which model they
want to use on a course-by-course basis, and every 12 months they have the
opportunity to switch from one to the other. "If it's more in the
university's interest to switch models, then edX will recommend that they do
that," said Mr. Agarwal.
Both edX models offer higher shares to universities
than agreements with Coursera do, but only once edX has collected its
minimum payment. Coursera offers universities 6 percent to 15 percent of the
gross revenue generated by each of their MOOCs on its platform, as well as
20 percent of the profits generated by the "aggregate set of courses
provided by the university."
There is no minimum payment to Coursera—meaning
universities are guaranteed a cut of any revenue for their MOOCs on Coursera,
even if the company offers a smaller piece of the pie than edX does.
Revenue Still a
Puzzle
The details of edX's financial arrangements do not
answer the crucial question of how the MOOCs will make money in the first
place—and, in edX's case, whether courses that do make money will make
enough that universities will see a cut.
The organization is still "in start-up mode," said
Mr. Agarwal. "We don't quite know what the key source of revenue will be."
Potential moneymaking strategies include deals with
outside companies—such as publishers that are looking to sell their products
to the many students who register for MOOCs, or employers looking to recruit
the most impressive students.
"EdX will be entitled to all net profits from
agreements with third parties not directly related to College/UniversityX
courses," the standard agreement stipulates, "including, for example, book
sales on the site, proctoring services, and any sitewide employee-recruiting
services."
That is another key difference separating edX from
Coursera, which counts those third-party deals as part of the revenue
generated by the courses. Daphne Koller, one of Coursera's founders, said
that all profits associated with a course on that platform "are shared back
with the university that provided the course."
Supporters of newly proposed legislation in
California hope to reduce the number of students shut out of key courses by
forging an unprecedented partnership between traditional public colleges and
online-education upstarts. But on Wednesday specific details of how the deal
would work were hard to pin down.
Senate Bill 520, sponsored by State Sen. Darrell
Steinberg, a Democrat who is president pro tem of the Senate, calls for
establishing a statewide platform through which students who have trouble
getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved
online courses offered by providers outside the state's higher-education
system. If the bill is passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov.
Jerry Brown, a Democrat, state colleges and universities could be compelled
to accept credits earned in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, bringing
the controversial courses into the mainstream faster than even their
proponents had predicted.
But right now SB 520 is just a two-page "spot
bill," a legislative placeholder to be amended with details later. And for
those concerned about the consequences of a sudden embrace of a relatively
new enterprise such as MOOCs, the devil may be in those details. Who will
approve the courses? What role will faculty members really have? Will
student financial aid apply to paid online courses? How will the revenue
collected by the companies benefit the colleges? The students?
At a news conference announcing the bill, Mr.
Steinberg acknowledged that such a bold move could be expected to cause
"some fear, and sometimes some upset." He took pains to emphasize that the
legislation "does not represent a shift in funding priority" for higher
education in California, and is not intended to introduce "a substitution
for campus-based instruction."
"This is about helping students," he said. "We
would be making a big mistake if we did not take advantage of the
technological advances in our state" to do so.
Students may stand to gain, as does California, if
Mr. Steinberg's legislation helps more college graduates join the work
force. MOOCs and the companies that offer them stand to gain enormously as
well. But right now, no one knows for sure what will happen.
The Class Crunch
Everyone involved in state higher education in
California agrees that access to classes is a problem. Declining state
support has led to cutbacks in the number of course sections offered, just
as student demand has risen. For example, more than 472,000 of the 2.4
million students enrolled in the California Community Colleges last fall
were put on a waiting list for a course that was already full.
The community-college system's chancellor, Brice W.
Harris, was one of several state higher-education officials who lauded Mr.
Steinberg's attempt to deal with the class crunch. "Anything that increases
the opportunity to access higher education in California after the last four
years that we've had rationing of education is a good thing," he said.
The language of the measure, as currently written,
outlines a platform that would apply to all three state systems: the
University of California, California State University, and the community
colleges. A nine-member faculty council established last year to oversee
open-source digital textbooks would come up with a list of the 50
lower-level courses that students most need to fulfill general-education
requirements—courses that are, as Mr. Steinberg put it, "identified as the
most difficult for a student to get a seat." The council would then review
and approve which online courses would be allowed to fulfill the requirement
and count for credit as conferred by state institutions.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Beyond what you read in these articles there are enormous ramifications that
perhaps legislators have not yet considered. For example, onsite hearing and
vision impaired students are now provided human assistants at university expense
in many universities. For example, a signing expert may sit in front of the
classroom and sign every lecture and video presentations for hearing impaired
students in the class. It seems a bit unreasonable to expect the college
providing a MOOC course to have to pay for such assistance anywhere in the state
or in the world.
Variations in quality might lead to new filters. For example, when applying
for the Ph.D. program in physics at Cal. Tech., all applicants in the future
might be required to take competency-based admissions tests. Similarly,
engineering, IT, finance, and marketing graduates might required to take
competency-based tests when applying for jobs. This may be a good thing in many
respects, but it might also become yet another barrier for minority candidates
who do better performing in class than in formidable written or oral
examinations.
In New York State, for example, when the teacher licensing examinations were
failing over half the minority education graduates, it became a huge
discouragement for minorities to major in education. Similarly, the difficulty
of the CPA examination discourages minority students from majoring in
accounting.
The State University of New York’s Board of
Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use
prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open
online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less
money.
The plan calls for “new and expanded online
programs” that “include options for time-shortened degree completion.” In
particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning
assessment programs offered by SUNY’s Empire State College.
The system will also push its top faculty members
to build MOOCs designed so that certain students who do well in the courses
might be eligible for SUNY credit.
Ultimately, the system wants to add 100,000
enrollments within three years, according to a
news release.
Even before the SUNY announcement, it had already
been a big week for nontraditional models for awarding college credit. The
U.S. Education Department on Monday
said it had no problem with spending federal
student aid on college programs that give credit based on “competency,” not
the number of hours students spend in class.
Empire State College’s prior-learning assessment
programs operate on a similar principle. Students who can demonstrate that
they have acquired certain skills can get college credit, even if they did
not acquire those skills in a college classroom.
The new SUNY effort will aim to copy the Empire
State model across the system, said Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor.
“This resolution opens the door to assurances to
our students that this kind of prior-learning assessment will be available
eventually on all our campuses,” said Ms. Zimpher in an interview.
SUNY is just the latest state system to use novel
teaching and assessment methods to deal with the problem of enrolling, and
graduating, more students.
Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington
have enlisted
Western Governors University, a nonprofit online
institution that uses the “competency” method, to help working adults in
those states earn degrees.
Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin are building programs aimed at helping
their own adult students redeem their on-the-job skills and knowledge for
credit toward degrees. And California
may soon use MOOCs to deal with overcrowding in
some courses at its public colleges and universities.
Continued in article
"College Degree, No Class Time Required
University of Wisconsin to Offer a Bachelor's to Students Who Take Online
Competency Tests About What They Know," by Caroline Porter, The Wall
Street Journal, January 24, 2013 --- "
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323301104578255992379228564.html
Thank you Ramesh Fernando for the heads up.
David Lando plans to
start working toward a diploma from the University of Wisconsin this
fall, but he doesn't intend to set foot on campus or even take a single
online course offered by the school's well-regarded faculty.
Instead, he will sit
through hours of testing at his home computer in Milwaukee under a new
program that promises to award a bachelor's degree based on
knowledge—not just class time or credits.
"I have all kinds of
credits all over God's green earth, but I'm using this to finish it all
off," said the 41-year-old computer consultant, who has an associate
degree in information technology but never finished his bachelor's in
psychology.
Colleges and
universities are rushing to offer free online classes known as "massive
open online courses," or MOOCs. But so far, no one has figured out a way
to stitch these classes together into a bachelor's degree.
Now, educators in
Wisconsin are offering a possible solution by decoupling the learning
part of education from student assessment and degree-granting.
Wisconsin
officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple,
competency-based bachelor's degrees from a public university system.
Officials encourage students to complete their education independently
through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts
by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.
Continued in article
*******************
Scroll down this message for instructions on how to break the Chronicle's pay
wall for this article:
For many colleges, it isn't easy to figure out
how—or whether—to award academic credit for learning that occurs outside the
classroom. But as institutions look to raise completion rates, be more
responsive to the needs of adult learners, and deal with pressing questions
about competencies and cost, solving the prior-learning puzzle has taken on
new urgency.
With that challenge in mind, the University of
Akron next month will roll out a new tutorial-based program aimed at helping
more students earn credit for course material they've already mastered.
"Save money and graduate early," promises the Web site for
Express to Success,
as Akron's new program is called.
The university has long offered students the option
to request for-credit examinations in subjects they've studied elsewhere,
but the tests weren't always available and many students weren't aware of
the policy. The new tutorials are designed to give students a chance to
refresh their knowledge in certain areas before deciding whether to take the
tests.
"Test-prep tutorials" will be offered this summer
in mathematics, statistics, sociology, psychology, and communications. They
will include 10 hours of instruction, cost $100 each, and be taught by
graduate assistants. The university at first will offer the tutorials in
nine courses—including introductory sociology and psychology—and may expand
the offerings if they're successful.
The first tutorials, in "College Algebra,"
"Statistics for Everyday Life," and "Introduction to Public Speaking," are
scheduled to begin on May 20; the corresponding exams are in late May and
early June.
William M. Sherman, Akron's senior vice president,
provost, and chief operating officer, says Express to Success is a "small
first step" that enables the university to offer "credentialing" for
learning regardless of where it happens.
"In this day and age, learning happens anytime,
anywhere, potentially all the time through any one of a number of
methods—experiencing a museum, what you pick up and read or listen to in a
library, what you learn on the Web, what you might learn in a massive open
online course," Mr. Sherman says. The hope, he says, is that the tutorials
will make the university's credit-by-exam options more appealing to more
students.
University officials stress that students may
pursue one of three paths after completing a tutorial. If students are
confident in their mastery of the subject matter, they may take the exam for
credit. If they have doubts, they may enroll in the affiliated course the
next time it's offered at the university, and apply the $100 tutorial fee
toward that course's tuition. Or, students may walk away and take neither
the course nor the exam. The test itself, which costs $30 per credit hour,
carries a risk: The grade earned on the exam is the grade that will appear
on a student's transcript.
William T. Lyons, the university's acting assistant
dean, is overseeing the project. He says many students feel that they've
already learned the subject matter that would be taught in a university
class but that their grasp of it is rusty. "They really need a refresher,"
says Mr. Lyons, who is also a professor of political science at Akron. The
point of the tutorials, he says, is: "Do I want to try credit-by-exam or
not?"
A Blended
Approach
Akron's approach appears to be unusual. Like bridge
programs, challenge exams, and the College Level Examination Program, known
as CLEP, Express to Success aims to address the gray area where prior
learning and academic credit meet. And it comes at a time of turbulent
debate over higher education's pricing structures and its attitudes toward
learning outside the classroom.
Chari A. Leader Kelley, of the Council for Adult
and Experiential Learning, says Akron's efforts strike her as
"student-centric" and "affordable." The program's attempts to make more
students aware of the university's existing for-credit exam options, she
adds, reflect a growing interest among some colleges to find ways for
students to leverage their prior knowledge in certain areas. That enthusiasm
is particularly prevalent, she says, among colleges looking to improve their
completion rates, or those with large adult-learner populations—or both.
What appears to set the Akron program apart, says
Ms. Leader Kelley, who is the council's vice president for
LearningCounts.org,
an online prior-learning-assessment service, is its
blend of tactics. It uses exams that are unique to the University of
Akron—all but one of the nine for-credit exams are identical to the final
comprehensive exams offered in the affiliated university courses—along with
a preparatory approach typically associated with national for-credit exams
like CLEP. (But in Akron's case, she points out, the prep work has a bonus:
face time with teachers.)
That institutional stamp, though, could be a
limitation for some students who need to transfer the credits to another
college. So says Burck Smith, the chief executive and founder of
StraighterLine, a company that offers online introductory college courses at
low prices. (The University of Akron was a
partner with StraighterLine until 2011, when
university officials said they would instead pursue an internal strategy for
online learning.)
Jensen Comment
This is identical to obtaining AP credit on the basis of simply taking an AP
examination. The difference is that the option will be available for some
advanced as well as basic courses. AP credit is generally limited to basic
courses.
It reminds me of the an option the University of Chicago offered in the
1900s. Students could take course final examinations for course credit without
having to attend the classes in the course.
Note that I am a subscriber to the electronic version of the Chronicle of
Higher Education. I can't recall the price of a password, but it ain't
cheap.
Just for kicks I tried the same approach that I now use to break through the
WSJ pay wall by pasting the exact title of the WSJ article into Google Advanced
Search "All the words" search box ---
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Look for the wsj.com link in that search listing.
For the Chronicle of Higher Education, getting free access is slightly
different.
Go to Google Advanced Search and paste in the title of the Chronicle's
article in the "All the words" search box ---
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
The look for the silobreaker.com link.
Khan Academy, the site that
features free educational videos and resources for use by anybody, has
just added a personal tutor capability that helps students figure out
where to start their lessons and to know when they truly understand the
concepts.
The "learning flow," as it's referred to by Founder Sal Khan
in
a video about the new functionality, is currently available for
math; additional subjects will be added "soon."
Khan Academy, the site that
features free educational videos and resources for use by anybody, has
just added a personal tutor capability that helps students figure out
where to start their lessons and to know when they truly understand the
concepts.
The "learning flow," as it's referred to by Founder Sal Khan
in
a video about the new functionality, is currently available for
math; additional subjects will be added "soon."
Khan Academy, the site that
features free educational videos and resources for use by anybody, has
just added a personal tutor capability that helps students figure out
where to start their lessons and to know when they truly understand the
concepts.
The "learning flow," as it's referred to by Founder Sal Khan
in
a video about the new functionality, is currently available for
math; additional subjects will be added "soon."
Khan Academy, the site that
features free educational videos and resources for use by anybody, has
just added a personal tutor capability that helps students figure out
where to start their lessons and to know when they truly understand the
concepts.
The "learning flow," as it's referred to by Founder Sal Khan
in
a video about the new functionality, is currently available for
math; additional subjects will be added "soon."
Khan Academy, the site that
features free educational videos and resources for use by anybody, has
just added a personal tutor capability that helps students figure out
where to start their lessons and to know when they truly understand the
concepts.
The "learning flow," as it's referred to by Founder Sal Khan
in
a video about the new functionality, is currently available for
math; additional subjects will be added "soon."
Khan Academy, the site that features free
educational videos and resources for use by anybody, has just added a
personal tutor capability that helps students figure out where to start
their lessons and to know when they truly understand the concepts.
Dave (Coffey) sent me a tweet alerting me to
this whitepaper published by the
Pacific
Research Institute, a free-market think tank based
in San Francisco. “Look at page 14,” Dave said. I did, and found that I was
being used as a prime example of a Khan Skeptic. Actually I am the last in a
list of skeptics whose skepticism the authors attempt to dispatch. I’m in
good company, as
Keith
Devlin is the first on that list and
Veritasium’s Derek Muller is in there as well.
The whitepaper itself seems to advocate a position
that schools would be more effective, and students better served, if they
were more free from government involvement — more free to innovate and
reform themselves, with a flipped classroom approach being the foremost
example of reform. I actually do not disagree with this idea.
I am on record as being pro-school choice, and I
am firmly right-libertarian on basically every political issue — although I
loathe the dehumanizing influence of politics and choose not to discuss this
here on the blog, or anywhere else — so in terms of the motivations of the
authors, I don’t really have any big issues.
What I do have issues with is the
single-minded insistence in this paper that Khan Academy is the exact same
thing as the flipped classroom. Throughout, the authors can’t seem to decide
whether they are advocating “Khan-like” approaches to school or the Khan
Academy itself. Competitors to the Khan Academy,
of which there are a a
growing number, are never mentioned — which is a
strange thing to say about a whitepaper from a pro-free-market organization
— and any suggestion that Khan Academy itself might be improved upon is
dismissed as “ivory tower pontificating”, especially if the criticism comes
from actual educators who, of course, are too steeped in the establishment
to have any good ideas.
I have little to no interest in rekindling the Khan
Debates of last summer and getting “You’re just jealous of Khan’s success”,
etc. comments multiple times. But since my name was brought up in this
whitepaper, I thought it would be appropriate to respond.
The section on Khan’s critics starts on page 10
with the sentence: “There is an old saying that no good deed goes
unpunished, and so it is with Khan Academy.” This should let you know what
you are in for. The entire section is worth reading in its entirety,
especially if you’ve been thinking you need more straw-man arguments in your
life, but I will focus on the part where I show up on page 14.
However, Talbert says the Khan Academy can
never replace an actual class on mathematics. The program does not offer
a live teacher or human interaction. He further argues that the Khan
Academy does not have a real curriculum for effectively teaching
students.H
The third point is not entirely right. What I
actually said was (emphases in the original):
[KA] is not a coherent curriculum of study that
engages students at all the cognitive levels at which they need to be
engaged. It’s OK that it’s not these things. […] Khan
Academy is a great resource for the niche in which it was designed
to work. But when you try to extend it out of that niche — as Bill
Gates and others would very much like to do — all kinds of things go
wrong.
My point in the original post was about KA trying
to be a curriculum — a complete one-stop educational resource. The
whitepaper authors, instead, think I am talking about having a
curriculum. The difference is more than merely semantic. My daughter’s
elementary school has a curriculum — a focused course of study that
is implemented by the teachers in the school. But the school itself is just
an organization. It would be absurd to say that her elementary school is
a curriculum.
Khan Academy wants to be a curriculum, and
therein lies the problem. The authors of the whitepaper seem to pick up on
this and offer, in Khan’s defense, the suggestion that Khan never said he
wants to be a complete educational resource:
Khan never says that he wants to replace actual
classes on mathematics. He simply wants to restructure them so that
students are able to advance at their own pace and receive more
individualized assistance. By advocating a switch to a flipped-classroom
model, he wants to enhance teacher interaction with students, not
minimize it.
Khan is using the money [from donations
from Google, etc.] to transform the academy from his own personal
YouTube channel into an educational nonprofit with Silicon Valley
start-up DNA. The goal: to create a complete educational
approach–with video lectures, online exercises, badges to reward student
progress, an analytics dashboard for teachers to track that progress and
more–that can be integrated into existing classrooms or serve as a
stand-alone virtual school for anyone wanting to learn something new.
I find it hard to square this very public statement
of KA’s goals with what the authors of the whitepaper want those goals to
be, unless Khan has backpedalled from this ambition since July.
Jensen Comment
The Chronicle's Robert Talbert has always be skeptical about the value added of
Khan Academy to learning. He's now proposing a formal and convoluted testing
scheme to measure the learning benefits on a sample of 300 students.
My first reaction is to think of the types of the tens of thousands of
students in high school or college that are viewing the Khan Academy video
tutorials for free. These students tend to be the most in need of help, most
often those who are dumbfounded by mathematics We would not expect a high
learning success rate among say half of those students, so it would not be
surprising if formal statistical tests pointed to lack of success among a large
proportion of students, many of whom probably did not concentrate intently on
the tutorials or even finish the tutorials.
But what about the others who did benefit from the videos? If almost half
really benefited greatly by overcoming their fears of learning math and
incremental mastering of the tutorial topics the Khan Academy would be an
amazing success story. As long as we can point to thousands who claim to have
been helped and return to view other modules, then this alone is success enough.
As far as competency testing, there are far easier test designs. One would be
before (pre) and after (post) tests for sampled students completing tutorials.
The samples must be random, however, since its possible that students who are
being paid to participate in the testing cheated on pretests in order to bias
the testing outcomes.
A survey approach to studying this problem would be to survey instructors who
are integrating Khan Academy videos into their courses. What are their opinions
regarding the value of the KA tutorials in their courses?
Sometimes anecdotal evidence is better than absurd and complex statistical
designs that require 90% of the students to show great learning benefits to
conclude that the Khan Academy is a worthwhile endeavor.
February 12, 2013 reply from Steve Covello
Let's take a broader look at the what is meant by
"help". In Dr. Brenda Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology, she portrays a
model of human cognitive movement in time and space, with "stopping points"
at intervals where "one's sense runs out". Given the infinite possibilities
for one's sense to run out at any point in the process of solving a problem
(or a stream of problems), it is impossible that any one solution framed as
"help" could account for the global population of needs. So let's take KA
off the hook as a total solution for anything.
Dervin's model describes how a resource or
information produces a "help", or a state that permits someone to either
understand their situation better or to continue forward in their cognitive
movement. Here is a list of "helps" (Dervin, 2006) that complete the
statement, "Because of this resource, I ..." :
Got the picture/ideas
Got directions
Got hows, methods
Got connected
Got support
Got human togetherness
Got centered
Got started, motivated
Kept going, made progress
Journeying got easier
Got control
Reached goals
Got resources
Got rest, relaxation, escape
Got/felt pleasure
So, if we judge KA and ask whether it "helps", you
have to account for the nature of typical stopping points (users' entry
points, or rationale for seeking resources) and the character of the "help"
that users obtained from it. It is conceivable that even though KA is
unidimensional in its design and execution, it is still useful for a large
population of users **if they say it helps them either understand their
situation better or to continue move forward.**
If we are to research KA's value to education, I
propose that we determine in what ways users find it useful, per Dervin's
user-based criteria.
LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world
today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me
incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in
global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more
people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a
job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a
billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has
more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive
open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes
of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like
Coursera and Udacity.
¶
Last May
I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the
Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it
opened.Two weeks
ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them.When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking
38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities.Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses
from 33 universities, including eight international ones.
¶ Anant
Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence lab, is now
president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard are jointly
building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around
the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. intro class on circuits.
“That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year
history,” he said.
Yes, only a small percentage
complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and
upper classes of their societies, but I am convinced that within five years
these platforms will reach a much broader demographic.Imagine how this might change U.S.foreign aid.For relatively
little money, the U.S.could rent space in an
Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite
Internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any
Egyptian who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in the
world, subtitled in Arabic.
¶ YOU just
have to hear the stories told by the pioneers in this industry to appreciate
its revolutionary potential. One of Koller’s favorites is about “Daniel,” a
17-year-old with autism who communicates mainly by computer. He took an
online modern poetry class from Penn. He and his parents wrote that the
combination of rigorous academic curriculum, which requires Daniel to stay
on task, and the online learning system that does not strain his social
skills, attention deficits or force him to look anyone in the eye, enable
him to better manage his autism. Koller shared a letter from Daniel, in
which he wrote: “Please tell Coursera and Penn my story. I am a 17-year-old
boy emerging from autism. I can’t yet sit still in a classroom so [your
course] was my first real course ever. During the course, I had to keep pace
with the class, which is unheard-of in special ed. Now I know I can benefit
from having to work hard and enjoy being in sync with the world.”
¶ One member
of the Coursera team who recently took a Coursera course on sustainability
told me that it was so much more interesting than a similar course he had
taken as an undergrad. The online course included students from all over the
world, from different climates, incomes levels and geographies, and, as a
result, “the discussions that happened in that course were so much more
valuable and interesting than with people of similar geography and income
level” in a typical American college.
During the past decade, the distribution of content
over the Internet and its consumption on computers and mobile devices has
disrupted several industries -- newspapers, book publishing, music and
films, among others. Now education joins that list, thanks to the emergence
of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. These courses, which are offered
for free to tens of thousands of students, cover topics ranging from
artificial intelligence and computer science to music and poetry
appreciation. As millions of students around the world flock to participate
in MOOCs, universities are being compelled to rethink what it means to teach
and to learn in a networked, globally connected world. During the past 18
months, many educational institutions have initiated or joined ventures that
can help them explore, experiment in and gradually understand this
phenomenon.
Among the most active MOOC providers today is
Coursera, a start-up that offers some 200 online courses to 1.5 million
students. It does so by providing a technical platform to 33 educational
institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania. Other MOOC
initiatives include Udacity, which originated at Stanford, and edX, a
venture of Harvard and MIT. How do MOOCs deal with the challenge of scale
posed by the massive numbers of students they attract? How do they retain
and evaluate their students? How can they monetize their free content?
Knowledge@Wharton posed these questions and more to Daphne Koller,
co-founder of Coursera, during her recent campus visit.
Video
Continued in article
"College Degree, No Class Time Required University of Wisconsin to Offer a
Bachelor's to Students Who Take Online Competency Tests About What They Know,"
by Caroline Porter, The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2013 --- "
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323301104578255992379228564.html
Thank you Ramesh Fernando for the heads up.
David Lando plans to start working toward a diploma
from the University of Wisconsin this fall, but he doesn't intend to set
foot on campus or even take a single online course offered by the school's
well-regarded faculty.
Instead, he will sit through hours of testing at
his home computer in Milwaukee under a new program that promises to award a
bachelor's degree based on knowledge—not just class time or credits.
"I have all kinds of credits all over God's green
earth, but I'm using this to finish it all off," said the 41-year-old
computer consultant, who has an associate degree in information technology
but never finished his bachelor's in psychology.
Colleges and universities are rushing to offer free
online classes known as "massive open online courses," or MOOCs. But so far,
no one has figured out a way to stitch these classes together into a
bachelor's degree.
Now, educators in Wisconsin are offering a possible
solution by decoupling the learning part of education from student
assessment and degree-granting.
Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as
the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor's degrees from a
public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their
education independently through online courses, which have grown in
popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.
No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin
program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.
Elsewhere, some schools offer competency-based
credits or associate degrees in areas such as nursing and business, while
Northern Arizona University plans a similar program that would offer
bachelor's degrees for a flat fee, said spokesman Eric Dieterle. But no
other state system is offering competency-based bachelor's degrees on a
systemwide basis.
Wisconsin's Flexible Option program is "quite
visionary," said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on
Education, an education policy and lobbying group that represents some 1,800
accredited colleges and universities.
In Wisconsin, officials say that about 20% of adult
residents have some college credits but lack a degree. Given that a growing
number of jobs require a degree, the new program appeals to potential
students who lack the time or resources to go back to school full time.
"It is a big new idea in a system like ours, and it
is part of the way the ground is shifting under us in higher education,"
said Kevin Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin System, which
runs the state's 26 public-university campuses.
Under the Flexible Option, assessment tests and
related online courses are being written by faculty who normally teach the
related subject-area classes, Mr. Reilly said.
Officials plan to launch the full program this
fall, with bachelor's degrees in subjects including information technology
and diagnostic imaging, plus master's and bachelor's degrees for registered
nurses. Faculty are working on writing those tests now.
The charges for the tests and related online
courses haven't been set. But university officials said the Flexible Option
should be "significantly less expensive" than full-time resident tuition,
which averages about $6,900 a year at Wisconsin's four-year campuses.
The Wisconsin system isn't focusing on the
potential cost savings the program may offer it but instead "the university
and the state are doing this to strengthen the state work force," said
university spokesman David Giroux.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media-studies professor at
the University of Virginia who has written about the future of universities,
called the program a "worthy experiment" but warned that school officials
"need to make sure degree plans are not watered down."
Some faculty at the school echoed the concern,
since the degree will be indistinguishable from those issued by the
University of Wisconsin the traditional way. "There has got to be very
rigorous documentation that it lives up to the quality of that name," said
Mark Cook, an animal-sciences professor and chairman of the university
committee for the faculty senate at the Madison campus.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has championed the
idea, in part because he left college in his senior year for a job
opportunity and never finished his degree. He said he hoped to use the
Flexible Degree option himself.
"I think it is one more way to get your degree. I
don't see it as replacing things," Mr. Walker said
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
If competency based learning is to be offered in this manner, I think the
pretense that this is equivalent to a traditional undergraduate degree should be
dropped. An undergraduate diploma traditionally maps to a curriculum that
includes some courses that just cannot be examined with competency-based testing
proposed in this article. This includes speech courses where students must stand
in front of audiences to perform and be evaluated. This includes case courses
where the student's oral contributions to oral discussions of a case,
discussions that take on serendipitous tracks and student interactions.
Science laboratories and many other courses entail use of onsite equipment,
chemicals, etc. Some physical education courses entail individual and team
performances. Music courses often entail performances on musical instruments or
singing before critics. Education courses often entail live teaching and other
interactions with K-12 students.
In between we have online universities that still make students take courses
and interact with instructors and other students by email, chat rooms, etc. A
few like Western Governors University even have course grades based on
competency-based testing. But WGU only offers certain majors that do not entail
onsite laboratory experiences and other onsite experiences. In the 19th Century
the University of Chicago allowed students to take final examinations in some
courses without attending any classes. But this did not apply to all types
of courses available on campus.
The day will probably come where there are no undergraduate or graduate
degrees. Students will instead have transcript records of their graded
performances onsite and online. But that day has not yet arrived. The above
University of Wisconsin alternative to obtaining an undergraduate diploma must
be severely limited in terms of the total curriculum available onsite at state
university campuses in Wisconsin.
The above University of Wisconsin alternative to obtaining an online diploma
cuts out important parts of online learning in a course where students
frequently interact with instructors and other students enrolled in class.
California officials will today announce a program in
which San Jose State University and Udacity, a provider of massive open
online courses, to create online courses in remedial algebra, college-level
algebra, and introductory statistics,
The New York Times reported. The courses will
be offered to San Jose State and community college students. In the pilot
stage, only 300 students will be enrolled, but the effort is seen as a way
to potentially reach large numbers of students in a state where many public
colleges and universities don't have room for eligible students.
A consortium of 10 top-tier universities will soon
offer fully online, credit-bearing undergraduate courses through a
partnership with 2U, a company that facilitates online learning.
Any students enrolled at an “undergraduate
experience anywhere in the world” will be eligible to take the courses,
according to Chip Paucek, the CEO of 2U, which until recently was called
2tor. The first courses are slated to make their debut in the fall.
After a year in which the top universities in the
world have clambered to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) for no
credit, this new project marks yet another turning point in online
education. It is the first known example of top universities offering fully
online, credit-bearing courses to undergraduates who are not actually
enrolled at the institutions that are offering them.
“We want to be part of the experiment, and we feel
that the time is right,” says J. Lynn Zimmerman, senior vice provost for
undergraduate and continuing education at Emory University, which will be
part of the consortium.
“I don’t think the idea of offering credit online
is, anymore at least, such a strange one,” says Ed Macias, the provost at
Washington University in St. Louis, another member. “I think the issue
everybody is facing is how to do it.”
The elite-branded, massive courses now being rolled
out through Coursera and edX have set the stage for the 2U consortium, but
the online courses from the consortium will not be MOOCs. The idea is to
replicate not only the content and assessment mechanisms of traditional
courses, but also the social intimacy.
Like 2U’s existing credit-bearing graduate programs
— at Georgetown University, the University of Southern California and
elsewhere — the new undergraduate courses will include a mix of recorded
lectures and online course materials and live, instructor-led, video-based
discussion sections. The sections will aim to mimic a seminar-like
environment where students can look their classmates and instructors in the
face and engage with them directly.
There will be selective admissions criteria for
each course, and the students who enroll will have to pay. The universities,
not the company, will set the admissions criteria for each course, says
Jeremy Johnson, president of undergraduate programs at 2U.
Same with prices. In some cases students may pay
roughly market rate. Duke University, for example, does not calculate its
tuition on a credit-hour basis, but the price of taking one of its 2U
courses will probably work out to about the equivalent of an on-campus
course, says Peter Lange, the provost. (At Duke, that is about $5,500 per
course.) Lange and others say the details of pricing have not been set.
In return 2U and its partners are promising a
high-touch virtual classroom experience that approaches, if not equals, the
social and intellectual rigor of a typical course at Duke or any of the
company’s other partners. And upon completion the students will receive the
equivalent number of credits — with the institution’s seal of approval. The
company and the universities will share any revenue that comes from the
project.
In addition to Duke, Emory and Washington
University, the institutions currently on board as of today’s announcement
are Brandeis University, Northwestern University, the Universities of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, and Rochester, Vanderbilt University,
and Wake Forest University.
2U says it plans to add “a handful” of partners
prior to the formal opening next fall. But ultimately the extent of the
consortium’s growth, like the admissions standards and the prices, will be
the purview of a governing body within the consortium itself, according to
Johnson. And he expects them to keep selective company.
“This is really intended to be a consortium of
like-minded institutions that have a similar approach to academic integrity
and rigor,” he says. “They intend for it to be small. I can’t imagine it
growing to any more than two or two-and-a-half times its current size.”
Something else that will be left in the hands of
individual universities is how the availability of credit-bearing online
courses could affect under-enrolled courses on their local campuses.
Several of 2U’s institutional partners say they
expect their own students to take online courses from other universities in
the consortium — particularly if the timing of an offering does not jibe
with a student’s own schedule. The official name for the consortium is
Semester Online, which emphasizes the parallels to study-abroad programs.
Students “will be able to work, travel, participate in off-campus research
programs or manage personal commitments that in the past would have meant
putting their studies on hold,” says a news release.
At the same time, the slate of online courses could
also make it easier for some members to farm out certain low-demand courses
to peer schools.
“We’ve definitely had faculty members ask about
that,” says Johnson. “My understanding, from the existing consortium
members, is that is not their intent,” he adds. “But I couldn’t say one way
or another whether that is or is not going to happen.”
One way many institutions are planning to use the
consortium is as a research project. Keith E. Whitfield, the vice provost
for academic affairs at Duke, has been appointed to head a new task force on
assessing the university's new online ventures -- including both the 2U
courses and the MOOCs that Duke is offering through Coursera.
The mouse-click data logged by 2U’s online platform
will generate rich data sets from which Duke’s task force — which draws
heavily from Whitfield’s own psychology and neuroscience department — hopes
to learn more than the university ever has about how its students learn,
according to the vice provost.
For example, “Is there a minimum amount of time on
task, or time reviewing course materials, where people were able to do well
on the assessments?” he says. “Which resources work best? Are there things
that work in the online world and not in class? … And what are the things in
a traditional class that we can’t repeat online?”
Although they are not designed to achieve the scale
of MOOCs, if successful the Semester Online courses could allow their home
institutions to gradually expand their enrollments, and tuition revenue,
without having to buy new property and build new buildings. And although the
first courses will be taught by regular professors at the universities, the
faculty that might eventually be hired to teach online "would not have to be
hired in the same mode or set of expectations" as are those who typically
teach on campus, says Zimmerman.
Open
online courses—massive
or otherwise—are revolutionizing
higher education by making learning more and more
accessible.
Carnegie Mellon University has taken
online
courses to another level,
offering virtual classroom environments based on deep
research into how adults learn.
The courses are free. Carnegie Mellon’s
Open
Learning Initiative currently
offers 15 courses through a platform that provides
targeted progress feedback to students.
The
program doesn’t offer course credit or certificates but
the courses are sophisticated. CMU spent anywhere from
$500,000 to $1 million for each course to write the
software, which includes a course builder program for
instructors and a system of feedback loops that send
student learning data to the instructor, the student and
the course design team.
More
than 10,000 students enrolled in OLI courses last year.
So far CMU promotes OLI courses as supplementary to
traditional classroom instruction. But the courses are
certainly rich enough to be enjoyed by anyone. They’re
mostly in the sciences but include a few language and
social science classes too.
A
study in Colorado has found little difference in
the learning of students in online or in-person introductory science
courses. The study tracked community college students who took science
courses online and in traditional classes, and who then went on to four-year
universities in the state. Upon transferring, the students in the two groups
performed equally well. Some science faculty members have expressed
skepticism about the ability of online students in science, due to the lack
of group laboratory opportunities, but the programs in Colorado work with
companies to provide home kits so that online students can have a lab
experience.
Jensen Comment
Firstly, note that online courses are not necessarily mass education (MOOC)
styled courses. The student-student and student-faculty interactions can be
greater online than onsite. For example, my daughter's introductory chemistry
class at the University of Texas had over 600 students. On the date of the final
examination he'd never met her and had zero control over her final grade. On the
other hand, her microbiology instructor in a graduate course at the University
of Maine became her husband over 20 years ago.
Another factor is networking. For example, Harvard Business School students
meeting face-to-face in courses bond in life-long networks that may be stronger
than for students who've never established networks via classes, dining halls,
volley ball games, softball games, rowing on the Charles River, etc. There's
more to lerning than is typically tested in competency examinations.
My point is that there are many externalities to both onsite and online
learning. And concluding that there's "little difference in learning" depends
upon what you mean by learning. The SCALE experiments at the University of
Illinois found that students having the same instructor tended to do slightly
better than onsite students. This is partly because there are fewer logistical
time wasters in online learning. The effect becomes larger for off-campus
students where commuting time (as in Mexico City) can take hours going to and
from campus.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm
Since MIT and Harvard
started edX, their joint experiment with free online courses, the venture
has attracted enormous attention for opening the ivory tower to the world.
But in the process, the world will become part of
an expensive and ambitious experiment testing some of the most
interesting—and difficult—questions in digital education.
Can community-college students benefit from a new
form of hybrid learning, based on a mix of local instruction and edX
content? Can colleges tap alumni as teaching volunteers? Can labs be
reinvented in the style of online video games?
EdX and its collaborators are developing tools and
teaching models to answer those questions. And they view the project as a
means to study even deeper problems, like understanding how people
forget—and creating strategies to prevent it.
"It's a live laboratory for studying how people
learn, how the mind works, and how to improve education, both residential
and online," says Piotr Mitros, edX's chief scientist.
That laboratory remains a work in progress. When a
Chronicle reporter visited edX's offices here, in a low-slung brick
building on the edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus,
the front entrance lacked even a sign, and staffers had engineered a
conference table and bookcase from empty cardboard boxes. But with a
$60-million investment announced in May and seven courses going live this
fall, things are kicking into high gear. What follows, based on interviews
with more than a dozen people affiliated with edX, is a closer look at what
that could mean for students, scholars, and other colleges.
Engaging Alumni in New Ways
Robert C. Miller had a problem.
His students were writing so much code that the
teaching staff lacked time to read it all and give fast feedback. So Mr.
Miller, an MIT associate professor who teaches software engineering and
human-computer interaction, decided to try a new tactic: crowdsourcing. His
work may help solve a challenge facing massive online courses: how to
provide human feedback to thousands of students.
Under Mr. Miller's model, Web-based software called
Caesar breaks homework submissions into chunks. A mix of teaching staff,
fellow students, and alumni volunteers evaluates the code, which is also
automatically tested by a computer. Students then revise and resubmit their
work. The human review is essential, Mr. Miller explains, because people can
detect things that computers can't, like hidden bugs or poor design.
"The future of online grading is going to be a mix
of automated approaches ... and human eyeballs," says Mr. Miller. The class
that has deployed Caesar is expected to go on edX as it expands.
His project is one of several that highlight how
technology can tap the altruism—and self-interest—of graduates. MIT alumni
"are strongly motivated to find great programming talent," Mr. Miller says.
By helping to review code, they could both spot that talent and expose
students to their companies. Caesar, used on the campus for the past year,
has attracted MIT graduates working at companies like Facebook and Google.
Across the Charles River, at Harvard's School of
Public Health, E. Francis Cook Jr. and Marcello Pagano are working on a
similar idea. The veteran professors will teach a class on epidemiology and
biostatistics this fall, one of Harvard's first on edX. Details are still
being worked out, but they hope to entice alumni to participate, possibly by
moderating online forums or, for those based abroad, leading discussions for
local students. Mr. Cook sees those graduates as an "untapped resource."
"We draw people into this program who want to
improve the health of the world," he says. "I'm hoping we'll get a huge
buy-in from our alums."
Reinventing Hybrid Teaching
In March, Tony Hyun Kim moved to the Mongolian
capital of Ulan Bator, where he spent three months teaching high-school
students a spinoff of the first edX course. The adventure made the young MIT
graduate one of the first to blend edX's content with face-to-face teaching.
His hybrid model is one that many American students may experience as edX
presses one of its toughest goals: to reimagine campus learning.
On his own initiative, Mr. Kim brought over lab
gear and mentored about 20 teenagers through the circuits-and-electronics
class, which is based on a course normally taken by MIT sophomores. The edX
version features video snippets and interactive exercises, and Mr. Kim used
the free online content to teach in a style known as the "flipped
classroom." Students watched edX content at home. At school, Mr. Kim spent
hours each day reviewing material and apprenticing them through labs and
problems.
The results were remarkable. Roughly 12 students
earned certificates of completion. One 15-year-old, Battushig, aced the
course, one of 320 students worldwide to do so. EdX ended up hiring Mr. Kim,
who hopes to start a related project at the university level in Mongolia.
EdX is now preparing a bigger experiment that is
expected to test the flipped-classroom model at a community college,
combining MOOC content with campus instruction. Two-year colleges have
struggled with insufficient funds and large demand; they also have "trouble
attracting top talent and teachers," says Anant Agarwal, who taught the
circuits class and is president of edX. The question is how MOOC's might
help community colleges, and how the courses would have to change to work
for their students.
"MOOC's have yet to prove their value from an
educational perspective," says Josh Jarrett, of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which backs the community-college project. "We currently know
very little about how much learning is happening within MOOC's, particularly
for novice learners."
Gamifying Labs
As edX tries fresh teaching models, it's also
engaging the math muscle of MIT to push the boundaries of simulations.
When MIT students take the circuits class, they sit
at a lab workbench and build with tools. Lab equipment can cost a fortune:
An oscilloscope may run $20,000.
Offering a comparable experience online is an
engineering challenge. It must be fast, sufficiently open-ended, and simple
enough to use without consulting "telephone-book-size manuals," as Mr.
Agarwal puts it. Mr. Agarwal, a former director of MIT's Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has worked on this problem for
years. "To me, the big hurdle to online learning was, How do we mimic the
lab experience?"
Wellesley College Joins edX Effort for Free Online
Courses
The women’s college in Massachusetts is the first
liberal-arts institution to join edX, the consortium offering free online
courses that was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. The group’s other partners include the University
of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas system, which joined
in October.
The village of Tanjung Batu Laut seems to grow out
of a mangrove swamp on an island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. The
houses, propped up over the water on stilts, are cobbled together from old
plywood, corrugated steel, and rusted chicken wire. But walk inland and you
reach a clearing covered with an array of a hundred solar panels mounted
atop bright new metal frames. Thick cables transmit power from the panels
into a sturdy building with new doors and windows. Step inside and the heavy
humidity gives way to cool, dry air. Fluorescent lights illuminate a row of
steel cabinets holding flashing lights and computer displays.
The building is the control center for a small,
two-year-old power-generating facility that provides electricity to the
approximately 200 people in the village. Computers manage power coming from
the solar panels and from diesel generators, storing some of it in large
lead-acid batteries and dispatching the rest to meet the growing local
demand. Before the tiny plant was installed, the village had no access to
reliable electricity, though a few families had small diesel generators. Now
all the residents have virtually unlimited power 24 hours a day.
Many of the corrugated-steel roofs in the village
incongruously bear television satellite dishes. Some homes, with sagging
roofs and crude holes in the walls for windows, contain flat-screen
televisions, ceiling fans, power-hungry appliances like irons and rice
cookers, and devices that need to run day and night, like freezers. On a
Saturday afternoon this summer, kids roamed around with cool wedges of
watermelon they'd bought from Tenggiri Bawal, the owner of a tiny store
located off one of the most unstable parts of the elevated wooden walkways
that link the houses. Three days before, she'd taken delivery of a
refrigerator, where she now keeps watermelon, sodas, and other goods. Bawal
smiled as the children clustered outside her store and said, in her limited
English, "Business is good.
With this news, the University of Texas System
becomes the first university system to throw in its hat with edX, a
not-for-profit enterprise started by Harvard and MIT in May 2012. By
partnering with edX, the University of Texas' nine campuses and six health
institutions will develop massively open online courses (MOOCs). These
courses allow anyone around the world to participate, draw large numbers of
students and do not charge participants to take the course.
"Our partnership with edX will help us provide that
high-quality education, make it more efficient, make it more accessible and
make us more affordable," said Gene Powell, Board of Regents chairman.
The university system decided to offer massively
open online courses to provide maximum options to students, said system
Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa. Current students and alumni — as well as
anyone else who wants to — will be able to take courses from edX
institutions. These institutions include MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley and the
University of Texas System. While they won't get credit for the course, they
will get a grade and a certificate of completion from that campus if they
finish.
"We wanted to join the world of MOOCs, and we felt
that if we joined with edX, we'd leapfrog into a great orbit of excellence,"
Cigarroa said.
But this isn't something the university system
jumped on overnight. Nineteen months ago, the Board of Regents created two
task forces to improve the system's excellence, access and affordability of
higher education. One of these task forces looked into blended and online
learning. As a result of its research, blended and online learning made it
into the chancellor's framework, and the Institute for Transformational
Learning was created.
"Higher education is at a crossroads," said Steve
Mintz, executive director of the Institute for Transformational Learning in
the University of Texas System. "But by leveraging new technologies, we can
enhance student learning, we can accelerate graduation, and we can hold down
the cost of higher ed."
EdX, Coursera and Udacity all provide platforms for
these types of courses. But the University of Texas System chose edX for a
number of reasons, Cigarroa said:
The organization aligns with the mission and
vision of the Institute for Transformational Learning;
The system protects the intellectual property
of faculty and the university;
Faculty can modify and contribute to the
course development;
The system has access to the platform's
foundation code.
Existing online course partnerships with other
organizations including Academic Partnerships can continue as well. And this
will be more of a partner relationship with edX rather than a vendor
relationship.
The chancellor stressed that the massively open
online courses will be of high quality and will be offered along with
existing blended and online learning options the system already has for its
students. In fact, some of the massively open online courses can be offered
in a blended format on campus. In these classes, students would watch
recorded lectures and participate in the forums, but also have in-class
discussions and one-on-one time with professors.
A dozen more universities have signed partnerships
with Coursera, a company that provides hosting services for massively open
online courses (MOOCs), the company announced today. Coursera’s new partners
include
the University of Virginia, whose highly
publicized
administrative ballyhoo last month made it the
epicenter of the debate over how traditional universities should adapt to
the rise of online education in general and MOOCs in particular.
In addition to U.Va.,
Coursera
will also be serving as a platform for open online
courses from the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, École
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (in Switzerland), Georgia Institute of
Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, and the Universities
of California at San Francisco, Edinburgh (U.K.), Illinois, Toronto and
Washington.
Sticking to
its theme of hosting “elite” MOOCs, Coursera plans
to adapt the most highly reputed parts of each new partner’s curriculum --
medicine and public health courses from UCSF and Johns Hopkins, biology and
life sciences courses from Duke, business and software courses from
Washington, and so on. Those institutions join Princeton University,
Stanford University, and the University of Michigan and University of
Pennsylvania as Coursera partners.
Coursera continued its ambitious expansion in the
growing market for MOOC support today, announcing accords with 16 new
universities to help them produce massive open online courses — more than
doubling the company’s number of institutional partners and pushing its
course count near 200.
The new partners include the first liberal arts
college, Wesleyan University, to leap formally into the MOOC game, as well
as the first music school, the Berklee College of Music.
Coursera also announced deals with name-brand
private universities, such as Brown, Columbia, Emory and Vanderbilt
Universities; some major state institutions, such as the University of
Maryland System, the Ohio State University and the Universities of Florida,
and California at Irvine; and several international universities, such as
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and the Universities of British Columbia, London, and Melbourne.
The company already boasted the most courses and
student registrations of any MOOC providers, having registered 1.3 million
students for its courses (although far fewer have actually stuck with a
course). Andrew Ng, one of its co-founders, said Coursera will probably
double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops
recruiting new institutions.
“I think we’ll wind up with at least twice the
universities that we have now, but we’re not sure what the number is,” said
Ng in an interview.
Yesterday Stanford
announced the appointment of Computer scientist
John Mitchell as new vice provost for Online Learning. According to the
article this is only part of a larger initiative that aims to prepare the
university towards the requirements and potential of the 21st century.
The creation of the Office of the Vice Provost for
Online Learning (VPOL) is also a commitment to bring new teaching and
learning methods to Stanford students around the globe. It is planned as a
laboratory for Stanford and its teachers, providing leadership and
information monitoring the evolution of online learning over the next years.
Stanford sees technology also as a mean to widen
its reach and attract and teach students no matter where they are.
In order to bring more and more of its courses
online, Stanford Online will focus on involving faculty in new teaching and
learning methods and supporting course production and online delivery during
the coming academic year.
Stanford already found great success in online
learning through their partnership with Coursera, an online learning
platform founded by two Stanford professors on leave. The courses have
attracted hundreds of thousands of online students in the past year.
A redesigned website of Stanford Online will be
launched on September 21st, making it easy for students to search and find
online courses and information for everyone else interested in the
development of the VPOL and its initiatives.
Of course, the main problem to solve will be the
accreditation of the online courses besides the recent teething problems of
low quality and plagiaris.
It all started early last fall. Sebastian Thrun
went a little rogue (oh the audacity!) and started offering
free online courses under Stanford’s banner to mass audiences,
with each course promising a “statement of
accomplishment” at the end. Hundreds of thousands of students signed up, and
universities everywhere took notice.
Since then we have witnessed universities and
startups scrambling fairly madly to create their own MOOCs (Massive Open
Online Courses), hoping to gain a foothold in a new area that could
eventually disrupt education in a major way. In December,
MIT announced the creation of MITx, promising
free courses and a “certificate of completion” to students worldwide.
Sebastian Thrun left Stanford to create Udacity, and another Stanford
spinoff,
Coursera, gained instant traction when it
announced in April that it had raised $16 million in venture capital and
signed partnerships with Princeton, Penn and U Michigan.
Now comes the latest news. MIT has teamed up with
its Cambridge neighbor, Harvard, to create
a new non profit venture, EDX. To date, Harvard
has barely dabbled
in open education. But it’s now throwing
$30 million behind
EDX (M.I.T. will do
the same), and together they will offer free digital courses worldwide, with
students receiving the obligatory certificate of mastery at the end. The EDX
platform will be open source, meaning it will be open to other universities.
Whether EDX will replace MITx, or sit uncomfortably beside it, we’re not
entirely sure (though it looks like it’s the former).
Classes will begin next fall. And when they do,
we’ll let you know … and, of course, we’ll add them to our massive
collection of 450 Free
Online Courses.
Two software companies that sell course-management
systems, Blackboard and Instructure, have entered the race to provide free
online courses for the masses.
On Thursday both companies plan to announce
partnerships with universities that will use their software to teach massive
open online courses, or MOOC’s. The companies hope to pull in their own
college clients to compete with online-education players like Udacity and
Coursera.
Instructure has released a new platform called
Canvas Network, which allows colleges and universities that already use the
company’s learning-management system to offer free courses. A dozen
institutions have already agreed to deliver courses on the platform,
including Brown University and the University of Washington.
The courses, which will begin in January, are a
“response to the MOOC phenomenon that’s been going on,” said Josh Coates,
chief executive of Instructure. The courses—20 of them, for starters—will
cover a wide range of topics, including one on college algebra and another
on gender in comic books that will be co-taught by Stan Lee, who helped
create Spider-Man and other characters.
“EdX and Coursera and some of the other MOOC
platforms are quite exclusive,” Mr. Coates said. “They only allow Ivy League
schools or research institutions to participate. We see this as a
democratization of MOOC’s—we want to allow anybody to participate in online
learning, and we also want them to do it their way.”
Some universities using Canvas have expressed
interest in charging tuition for the online courses in the future or
offering course credit for them, Mr. Coates said. The company may also
expand the new Canvas Network into secondary education.
Though Blackboard’s CourseSites platform has been
available for more than a year to individual instructors interested in
putting their courses online free, the company planned to announce on
Thursday that three universities had decided to designate Blackboard as
their “default option” for MOOC’s.
Unlike Instructure, Blackboard allows any
university to offer MOOC’s on its platform, even if the institutions are not
Blackboard clients. Arizona State University, the State University of New
York’s Buffalo State College, and the University of Illinois at Springfield
chose Blackboard after considering other MOOC providers.
Instructors may be drawn toward teaching MOOC’s on
those platforms rather than Udacity or Coursera because they are already
familiar with the companies’ course-management software.
Because the Springfield campus has used Blackboard
for years, instructors will be able to teach MOOC’s more comfortably, said
Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning and director of
the Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service. “There are plenty of
challenges with MOOC’s, aside from just the technical challenges,” he said.
“The different languages, the different cultures, serving thousands of
students at a time—this platform allows us to focus our energies on those
things instead.”
But some universities may decide instead to
experiment to see which platform works best for them. The University of
Washington and Brown University already offer MOOC’s through Coursera.
Continued in article
An Absolute Must Read for Educators
One of the most exciting things I took away from the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings in
San Francisco is a hard copy handout entitled "Expanding Your Classroom with
Video Technology and Social Media," by Mark Holtzblatt and Norbert Tschakert.
Mark later sent me a copy of this handout and permission to serve it up to you
at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/Video-Expanding_Your_Classroom_CTLA_2010.pdf
This is an exciting listing to over 100 video clips and full-feature videos
that might be excellent resources for your courses, for your research, and for
your scholarship in general. Included are videos on resources and useful tips
for video projects as well as free online communication tools.
My thanks to Professors Holtzblatt and Tschakert for this tremendous body of
work that they are now sharing with us
Video: Open Education for an Open World
45-minute Video from the Long-Time President of MIT ---
http://18.9.60.136/video/816
Jensen Comment
The bad news is that MITx Certificates are in no way equivalent to MIT course
credits. The good news is that there is open admission, free course video and
other materials used in on-campus courses, and some prestige associated MIT's
sponsorship of the MITx Certificate program. The MITx is an outreach program to
students who really want to put the time and effort into learning on their own
from outstanding materials provided by MIT. Only a small percentage of MITx
students around the world may actually master the tough learning materials, but
their numbers may dominate.
The first prototype MITx course is “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics." If
only a small percentage of MITx Certificate recipients superbly master this
course, it could well be far more students than the total number of on-campus
students who superbly master this course this term.
April 29, 2012 message from Mark Lewis
This is an interview with
Sebastian Thrun, formerly of Stanford and still associated with Google.
In my ideal world, every faculty member and a large fraction of the
administration and staff would watch the last half of this video. The
first half is worth watching if you have an interest in Google Glass,
autonomous cars, or Google X projects in general. The second half talks
about his views and what he is doing in education. He is the person who
taught an AI course online that had 160,000 students enroll and had
23,000 students complete it. In this interview he describes how this
impacted him so much that he left his tenured position at Stanford. The
lack of personal contact he talks about in his classroom does not apply
in most Trinity classrooms, however, a cost of $0 for something that
many students find as more personal than a large lecture hall does have
the potential to change the economics of higher education.
You can read about the early knowledge portal experiment at Columbia
University that offered great hopes by failed early on.
Fathom was one of the early on initiatives to create an academic knowledge
portal somewhat similar to Wikipedia, although Columbia and its prestigious
university partners were taking on responsibility for content rather than users.
Fathom was not a Wiki.
MOOOOOOOOC! Surely "massive open online course" has
one of the ugliest acronyms of recent years, lacking the deliberate
playfulness of Yahoo (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) or the
droll shoulder shrug suggested by the word "snafu" (Situation Normal, All
Fouled Up).
I'm not a complete neophyte to online learning.
Back in 1999, I led the start-up team for Fathom, one of the earliest
knowledge networks, in partnership with Columbia University and other
institutions here and abroad, and I'm a board member of the Apollo Group. So
I was understandably curious about these MOOC's. With fond memories of a
thrilling virtual trip a dozen years ago to Ephesus, Turkey, via a
multimedia-rich, self-paced course created by a professor at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor, I decided to check out a MOOC for myself.
Coursera, a new company that offers free online
courses through some of the world's best-known universities, had the widest
and most impressive selection. I blocked my ears to the siren call of
science fiction, poetry, and history and opted for something sober: "Health
Policy and the Affordable Care Act." It's taught by the Emanuel brother who
isn't the Chicago mayor or the Hollywood superagent—Ezekiel Emanuel, an M.D.
and Ph.D. who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. For the next eight
weeks, I was part of a noisy, active, earnest, often contentious, and
usually interesting group of students. There didn't seem to be any way to
gauge the number enrolled, but I learned about the students from a
discussion group. There were quite a few lawyers, doctors, and other
health-care professionals. Some were struggling with personal health
disasters and wanted tools to predict how the health-care act would affect
their futures. Some were international researchers doing comparative
studies. Others were higher-education folks like me, testing the MOOC
waters.
The quality and format of the discussions were
immediate disappointments. A teaching assistant provided some adult
supervision, but too many of the postings were at the dismal level of most
anonymous Internet comments: nasty, brutish, and long. The reliance on
old-fashioned threaded message groups made it impossible to distinguish
online jerks from potential geniuses. I kept wishing for a way to break the
large group into small cohorts self-selected by background or
interests—health-care professionals, for instance, or those particularly
interested in the economics of health care. There was no way to build a
discussion, no equivalent to the hush that comes over the classroom when the
smart kid raises his or her hand.
If you believe the sage's advice that we learn much
from our teachers and colleagues but most of all from our students, MOOC's
will be far more effective when we are able to learn from one another.
Not surprisingly, enterprising MOOCsters are
already organizing themselves outside the online classroom, using
social-media tools like Google Hangouts and Facebook. In New York, students
schedule meetings in Starbucks; in Katmandu, a group relies on Meetup to get
together. Some course providers are facilitating external interaction:
Udacity has offered Global Meetup Day with Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford
University computer scientist (and Udacity co-founder) known for his course
on artificial intelligence. Coursera threw a giant barbecue in Menlo Park,
Calif., complete with volleyball and beanbag tossing.
Of course, peer learning takes you only so far: At
some point, somebody has to know something about the subject. Professor
Emanuel was a presence only in videos, but these were uniformly excellent.
The cameras caught him walking briskly around an actual lecture hall, and I
liked the presence of shadowy classmates sitting in Philadelphia, as if this
were happening in real time. The videos were pleasantly peppered with pop-up
quizzes. No embarrassment for the wrong answer, and I was ridiculously
pleased at correctly guessing that the proportion of health-care costs in
the United States that goes to prescription drugs is only 10 percent. For
those in a rush, watching at twice normal speed is sort of fun— don't you
secretly wish you could sit through some meetings at double speed?
I was a faithful student for a few weeks, until I
fell prey to my worst undergraduate habit, procrastination—only now my
excuses were far more sophisticated. I have to finish a manuscript! I have a
board meeting! I have to meet my mother's new cardiologist!
In a MOOC, nobody can hear you scream.
I might have abandoned the charming Professor
Emanuel altogether had the Supreme Court's decision to uphold President
Obama's health-care program not injected the spice of real-time action into
the discussion and refreshed my interest.
Somewhere between the videos and the readings and
the occasional dip into the discussion groups, I found myself actually
learning. I was particularly interested in how malpractice contributes to
health-care costs but was instructed by my professor that the potential
savings there amounted to mere "pencil dust." And who knew about the
proposed National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation Act of 2005,
which would have reduced the number of malpractice cases, accelerated their
resolution, and lowered costs by two-thirds?
To earn a certificate, I would have had to submit
several essays for a grade, and I stopped short of that (see excuses above).
Essays are peer-graded, and it won't surprise anybody who has ever taught
undergraduates to hear that the student evaluations can be fierce. On the
discussion boards, there was considerable discussion of grade deflation,
plagiarism, and cheating. Alas, academic sins do follow us into the land of
MOOC's, despite a nicely written honor code. Bad behavior in any classroom,
real or virtual, should be no more surprising than gambling in
Casablanca. In fact, brace yourself for a breathtaking new form of
voluntary identity sharing: Your
fake student avatar, now available for a small
fee, will take your class for you.
Looking back, I suppose Fathom was a proto-MOOC,
and I confess to some surprise that the Coursera format has evolved little
beyond our pioneering effort of a decade ago. Yet when it came time to
assess the course, I found myself rating it pretty highly, and concluded
that aside from the format, the failings were mostly mine, for lack of
focus. Like many MOOC students, I didn't completely "finish" the course.
However, the final evaluations seemed mostly enthusiastic. From the
comments, most of the students seemed to find the course long on substance:
"comprehensive," "a good balance between the law, policy, and economics,"
"rich with multiple perspectives on health-policy issues."
Now, I could have read a book or done this on my
own. But you could say the same thing about most education. A course is not
a book but a journey, led by an expert, and taken in the company of fellow
travelers on a common quest for knowledge. My MOOC had those elements,
albeit in a pretty crude form.
You'd have to live under a rock not to know that
crushing student debt, declining state support, and disruptive technologies
have made it imperative to look at new models for teaching. The competitive
landscape for higher education is changing every day. China recently
declared the goal of bringing half a million foreign students to its shores
by 2020, and is investing in programs friendly to Americans and other
international students. American MOOC's may point the way to retaining the
best students and faculty in the world, while adding the lively and
collaborative components of technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
It is true that nobody yet has a reasonable
business plan for these courses, and there is concern over completion rates
and whether colleges are "giving away the farm," as a recent MIT
alumni-magazine article put it. It is not hard to anticipate the end of free
and the start of the next stage: fee-based certificate programs built around
MOOC's. But for now, the colleges leading those efforts are making
relatively modest—and rare—investments in research and development. Their
faculty members are excited about the opportunity to experiment. Let's give
this explosion of pent-up innovation in higher education a chance to mature
before we rush to the bottom line.
Continued in article
Following Starbucks employee education benefits with Arizona State
University,
Anthem Blue Cross offers education benefits with the University of Southern New
Hampshire
A great year for open education got even better with the launch of Marginal
Revolution University. Founded by Tyler
Cowen and Alex
Tabarrok, two econ professors at George Mason University, MRUniversitypromises
to deliver free, interactive courses in the economics space. And they’re
getting started with a course on
Development
Economics, a subdiscipline that explores why some countries grow rich
and others remain poor. In short, issues that have real meaning for everyday
people worldwide.
1. The product is free, and we offer more material in less time.
2. Most of our videos are short, so you can view and listen between
tasks, rather than needing to schedule time for them. The average video
is five minutes, twenty-eight seconds long. When needed, more videos
are used to explain complex topics.
3. No talking heads and no long, boring lectures. We have tried to
reconceptualize every aspect of the educational experience to be
friendly to the on-line world.
4. It is low bandwidth and mobile-friendly. No ads.
5. We offer tests and quizzes.
6. We have plans to subtitle the videos in major languages. Our
reach will be global, and in doing so we are building upon the global
emphasis of our home institution, George Mason University.
7. We invite users to submit content.
8. It is a flexible learning module. It is not a “MOOC”
per se, although it can be used to create a MOOC, namely a massive, open
on-line course.
9. It is designed to grow rapidly and flexibly, absorbing new content
in modular fashion — note the beehive structure to our logo. But we are
starting with plenty of material.
10. We are pleased to announce that our first course will begin on
October 1.
Bookmark MRUniversity
and look out for its curriculum to expand. In the meantime, you can find
more courses in the
Economics section of our big list of 530
Free
Courses Online.
I’ve just uploaded the first 8 lectures in my Behavioral Finance class
for 2012. The first few lectures are very similar to last year’s, but the
content changes substantially by about lecture 5 when I start to focus more
on Schumpeter’s approach to endogenous money ---
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/09/23/behavioral-finance-lectures/
A couple of weeks ago, while discussing the
announcement of the Harvard / MIT edX initiative, I included a brief recap
of what’s been happening over the last six months in the land of Massively
Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), which began as follows:
Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of
well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment
by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses,
online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the
professor saying so.
Later than day, I received an email titled “error
in your blog” from a person who works in communications for Stanford, which
I’m reprinting with permission. The person said:
Students who did well did not receive a
certificate. Neither Stanford nor the professors issued a certificate.
All students who completed the courses received a letter from the
professor saying that they had completed the course. And that’s it.
This is telling. I used the word “certificate”
deliberately, because “letter” seemed inadequate. A letter is a vehicle for
interpersonal correspondence, e.g. “Dear Mom, I am having fun at camp this
summer, please send cookies,” or “Dear Sir, we regret to inform you that
your manuscript does not meet our standards for publication.” A certificate
is a document describing some kind of important characteristic of the
bearer, as attested by the issuer. A college diploma is a kind of
certificate, as is a teaching certificate issued by a state licensing board,
as were the old-fashioned “letters of introduction” people once used to
facilitate business and social interactions. As is, I would argue, the
document that students received upon completing the Stanford MOOC in
question. Here it is:
Continued in article
Update on the Roaring Online Nonprofit Western Governors University (WGU)
founded in 1997 by the governors of 19 states A competency-based university where instructors don't assign the grades ---
grades are based upon competency testing
WGU does not admit foreign students
WGU now has over 30,000 students from sponsoring states for this nonprofit,
private university
Western Governors University Texas, where I am
chancellor, is not an easy institution to describe to your mother—or even
your hip sister. It just doesn't fit the profile of most traditional
universities, even the newer for-profit and online ones. It brings the work
of a national, online, nonprofit university into a state, and it embraces a
competency-based education model that is rarely found on an institutionwide
level.
Even for seasoned educators, WGU Texas feels
different. And in a year that has seen flat or declining enrollments at many
traditional colleges, reports critical of for-profit institutions, and
continuing debate over the perils and promise of online learning, our story,
and our growth, has been unique. As we hit our one-year anniversary, it's
worth taking a few moments to reflect on the ups, downs, challenges, and
champions of this newest state model. I'd offer three key reflections on
lessons we've learned:
Building a strong foundation.
Western Governors was founded as a private, multistate online university 15
years ago by governors of Western states. Texas is only the third state
model within the system, following WGU Indiana and WGU Washington. Before
our opening, leaders of Western Governors took time to make sure the idea of
this state university made sense for Texas. The intent was to add
high-quality, affordable capacity to the state's higher-education system,
particularly for adult learners, and to localize it for Texans and their
employers.
This outpost was poised to "go big" in one of the
biggest of states, offering more than 50 bachelor's and master's degrees in
high-demand fields in business, education, information technology, and
health professions. WGU's online-learning model allows students to progress
by demonstrating what they know and can do rather than by logging time in
class accumulating credit hours.
In meetings across the state, the idea of WGU Texas
gained the support of the state's political, legislative, and
higher-education leaders, as well as the Texas Workforce Commission and the
Texas Association of Community Colleges. Rushing to roll out was not the
goal; entering the education ecosystem with solid support of the model was.
I came on board as chancellor in December 2011.
Having served on WGU's Board of Trustees for six years, I knew the model,
and having graduated from and worked for the University of Texas at Austin,
I knew Texas.
In the past six months, we have hired key staff and
faculty, formed a state advisory board, opened a main office and training
center in downtown Austin, launched our first wave of student outreach,
begun working with employers in different metro regions, and started
connecting online and on the ground with students. After absorbing WGU's
1,600 existing Texas students, WGU Texas grew by more than 60 percent in
this first year, entering August 2012 with more than 3,000 students.
In about eight weeks, we'll hold our first
commencement in Austin, celebrating the graduation of more than 400
students. We're moving quickly now, but it's the firm foundation of
outreach, support, and systems that served us well as we took on the next
two challenges:
Confronting conflation. WGU Texas
is laser-focused on a student population that is typically underserved. We
see ourselves as a good fit for adult learners who need an affordable,
quality, and flexible learning model, particularly working students who want
to attend full time. We are especially focused on the more than three
million Texans who have some college and no credential—students like Jason
Franklin, a striving adult learner in a high-demand IT field who had gone as
far as he could in his career without a degree. He earned a bachelor's and a
master's degree through Western Governors, and is now working on a master's
degree from WGU Texas.
We'd like to help these students reach their goals
and get on a solid career and lifelong-learning path.
However, in offering a new model like ours, you
quickly find the conflation problem a challenge. Some assume that you're
trying to compete for the fresh-from-high-school graduates who want a campus
experience. Others assume that because you're online, you must be a
for-profit university. Still others put all online education programs in the
same bucket, not distinguishing at all between a traditional model online
and a deeply personalized, competency-based learning model.
Fighting conflation by clearly differentiating and
properly positioning our university has been essential. We've had to be
clear—and to repeat often—that our approach is designed for adult learners
who have some college and work experience. We're absolutely OK with telling
prospective students, partner colleges, and state-policy leaders that for
18- to 20-year-olds looking to embark on their first college experience, we
are probably not the right fit. In fact, first-time freshmen make up less
than 5 percent of our student population.
The for-profit conflation has been even more
interesting. Many people assume that any online university is for-profit. We
are not. And even when we assure them that our nonprofit status keeps us
deeply committed to low tuition—we have a flat-rate, six-month-term tuition
averaging less than $3,000 for full-time students, which our national parent
WGU has not raised for four years—they have a hard time getting their minds
around it.
Others are sure we are nothing more than an online
version of the traditional model, relying entirely on adjunct faculty. When
we explain our history, learning model, and reliance on full-time faculty
members who specialize in either mentoring or subject matter, it takes some
time. But once people embrace the idea of a personal faculty mentor who
takes a student from first contact to crossing the graduation stage, they
warm quickly to the model.
Synching with the state's needs.
While forming the foundation and fighting conflation are important, I'd say
the key to WGU's state-model successes is the commitment to synching with
the economic, educational, and student ecosystem of the state.
On the economic level, we've been able to work
directly with employers eager to support our university, advance our
competency-centered model, and hire our graduates. Educationally we have
been fortunate to have smart and strategic partners that have guided our
entry into the state. For example, our Finish to Go Further transfer
program, in partnership with the Texas community-college association,
motivates students to complete their associate degrees before transferring.
This strategy supports the goal of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating
Board of significantly improving postsecondary access and success in Texas.
Jensen Comment
WGU is neither a traditional university nor a MOOC. It started as an experiment
to deliver a quality education without having the 19 states have to build and/or
maintain physical campuses to deliver college education to more students.
Admittedly, one of the main incentives was to expand learning opportunities
without paying for the enormous costs of building and maintaining campuses. WGU
was mostly an outreach program for non-traditional students who for one reason
or another are unable to attend onsite campuses. But the primary goal of WGU was
not and still is not confined to adult education.
WGU is not intended to take over onsite campus education alternatives. The
founders of WGU are well aware that living and learning on an onsite campus
brings many important components to education and maturation and socialization
that WGU cannot offer online. For example, young students on campus enter a new
phase of life living outside the homes and daily oversight of their parents. But
the transition is less abrupt than living on the mean streets of real life.
Students meet face-to-face on campus and are highly likely to become married or
live with students they are attracted to on campus. Campus students can
participate in athletics, music performances, theatre performances, dorm life,
chapel life, etc.
But WGU is not a MOOC where 100,000 anonymous students may be taking an
online course. Instead, WGU courses are relatively small with intimate
communications 24/7 with instructors and other students in most of the courses.
In many ways the learning communications may be much closer online in WGU than
on campus at the University of Texas where classrooms often hold hundreds of
students taking a course.
There are some types of learning that can take place in live classrooms
that are almost impossible online.
For example, an onsite case analysis class (Harvard style) takes on a life of
its own that case instructors cannot anticipate before class. Students are
forced to speak out in front of other students. A student's unexpected idea may
change the direction of the entire case discussion for the remainder of the
class. I cannot imagine teaching many Harvard Business School cases online even
though there are ways to draw out innovative ideas and discussions online.
Physical presence is part and parcel to teaching many HBS cases.
Competency-based grading has advantages and disadvantages.
Competency-based grading removes incentives to brown nose instructors for better
grades. It's unforgiving for lazy and unmotivated students. But these advantages
can also be disadvantages. Some students become more motivated by hoping that
their instructors will reward effort as well as performance. At unexpected
points in life those rewards for effort may come at critical times just before a
student is apt to give up and look for a full time McJob.
Some students are apt to become extremely bored learning about Shakespeare or
Mozart. But in attempting to please instructors with added effort, the students
may actually discover at some unexpected point something wonderful about
Shakespeare or Mozart. Mathematics in particular is one of those subjects that
can be a complete turn off until suddenly a light clicks and student discovers
that math is not only interesting --- math can be easier once you hit a key
point in the mathematics learning process. This definitely happened with me, and
the light did not shine for me until I started a doctoral program. Quite
suddenly I loved mathematics and made it the central component of my five years
of full-time doctoral studies at Stanford University.
Thus WGU and the University of Texas should not be considered competitors.
They are different alternatives that have some of the same goals (such as
competency in learning content) and some different goals (such as living with
other students and participating in extracurricular activities).
I wish WGU well and hope it thrives alongside the traditional state-supported
campuses. WGU in some ways was a precursor to MOOC education, but WGU is not a
MOOC in the sense that classes are small and can be highly interactive with
other students and with instructor. In a MOOC, students have to be more
motivated to learn on their own and master the material without much outside
help from other students or instructors.
There are many ways to teach and many ways to learn. WGU found its niche.
There's no one-size-fits-all to living and learning.
(Conclusion)
Some of the most interesting work begins in the academy but grows beyond it.
"Scale" is not an academic value—but it should be. Most measures of prestige
in higher education are based on exclusivity; the more prestigious the
college, the larger the percentage of applicants it turns away. Consider the
nonprofit Khan Academy, with its library of more than 3,000 education videos
and materials, where I finally learned just a little about calculus. In the
last 18 months, Khan had 41 million visits in the United States alone. It is
using the vast data from that audience to improve its platform and grow
still larger. TED, the nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, just launched
TED-Ed, which uses university faculty from around the world to create
compelling videos on everything from "How Vast Is the Universe?" to "How
Pandemics Spread." Call it Khan Academy for grown-ups. The Stanford
University professor Sebastian Thrun's free course in artificial
intelligence drew 160,000 students in more than 190 countries. No surprise,
the venture capitalists have come a-calling, and they are backing
educational startups like Udemy and Udacity.
All of those are signposts to a future where
competency-based credentials may someday compete with a degree.
At this point, if you are affiliated with an Ivy
League institution, you'll be tempted to guffaw, harrumph, and otherwise
dismiss the idea that anyone would ever abandon your institution for such
ridiculous new pathways to learning. You're probably right. Most
institutions are not so lucky. How long will it take for change to affect
higher education in major ways? Just my crystal ball, but I would expect
that institutions without significant endowments will be forced to change by
2020. By 2025, the places left untouched will be few and far between.
Here's the saddest fact of all: It is those leading
private institutions that should be using their endowments and moral
authority to invest in new solutions and to proselytize for experimentation
and change, motivated not by survival but by the privilege of securing the
future of American higher education.
The stakes are high. "So let me put colleges and
universities on notice," President Obama said in his recent State of the
Union address. "If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get
from taxpayers will go down." Because of the academy's inability to police
itself and improve graduation rates, and because student debt is an
expedient political issue, the Obama administration recently threatened to
tie colleges' eligibility for campus-based aid programs to institutions'
success in improving affordability and value for students.
Whether the president's threat is fair or not, it
will not transform higher education. Change only happens on the ground.
Despite all the reasons to be gloomy, however, there is room for optimism.
The American university, the place where new ideas are born and lives are
transformed, will eventually focus that lens of innovation upon itself. It's
just a matter of time.
Jensen Comment
This a long and important article for all educators to carefully read. Onsite
colleges have always served many purposes, but one purpose they never served is
to be knowledge fueling stations where students go to fill their tanks. At best
colleges put a shot glass of fuel in a tanks with unknown capacities.
Students go to an onsite college for many reasons other than to put fuel in
their knowledge tanks. The go to live and work in relatively safe transitional
environments between home and the mean streets. They go to mature, socialize, to
mate, drink, laugh, leap over hurdles societies place in front of career paths,
etc. The problem in the United States is that college onsite living and
education have become relatively expensive luxuries. Students must now make more
painful decisions as to how much to impoverish their parents and how deeply go
into debt.
I have a granddaughter 22 years old majoring in pharmacy (six year program).
She will pay off her student loans before she's 50 years old if she's lucky.
Some older students who've not been able to pay off their loans are becoming
worried that the Social Security Administration will garnish their retirement
Social Security monthly payments for unpaid student loans.
We've always known that colleges are not necessary places for learning and
scholarship. Until 43 years ago (when the Internet was born) private and public
libraries were pretty darn necessary for scholarship. Now the Internet provides
access to most known knowledge of the world. But becoming a scholar on the
Internet is relatively inefficient and overwhelming without the aid of
distillers of knowledge, which is where onsite and online college courses can
greatly add to efficiency of learning.
But college courses can be terribly disappointing as distillers of knowledge.
For one thing, grade inflation disgracefully watered down the amount of real
fuel in that shot glass of knowledge provided in a college course ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Grades rather than learning became the tickets to careers and graduate schools,
thereby, leading to street-smart cheating taking over for real learning
perspiration ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
When 80% of Harvard's graduating class graduates cum laude, we no
longer identify which graduates are were the best scholars in their class.
Soon those graduates from Harvard, Florida A&M University, Capella
University, and those who learned on their own from free courses, video
lectures, and course materials on the Web will all face some sort of common
examinations (written and oral) of their competencies in specialties.
Competency testing will be the great leveler much like licensure examinations
such as the Bar Exam, the CPA exam, the CFA exam, etc. are graded on the basis
of what you know rather than where you learned what you know. It won't really
matter whether you paid a fortune to learn Bessel Functions onsite at MIT or for
free from the MITx online certificate program ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Jensen Comment
The bad news is that MITx Certificates are in no way equivalent to MIT course
credits. The good news is that there is open admission, free course video and
other materials used in on-campus courses, and some prestige associated MIT's
sponsorship of the MITx Certificate program. The MITx is an outreach program to
students who really want to put the time and effort into learning on their own
from outstanding materials provided by MIT. Only a small percentage of MITx
students around the world may actually master the tough learning materials, but
their numbers may dominate.
The first prototype MITx course is “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics." If
only a small percentage of MITx Certificate recipients superbly master this
course, it could well be far more students than the total number of on-campus
students who superbly master this course this term.
If ramen noodle sales spike at the start of every
semester, here’s one possible reason: textbooks can cost as much as a class
itself; materials for an introductory physics course can easily top $300.
Cost-conscious students can of course save money
with used or online books and recoup some of their cash come buyback time.
Still, it’s a steep price for most 18-year-olds.
But soon, introductory physics texts will have a
new competitor, developed at Rice University. A free online physics book,
peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers’ offerings, will
debut next month through the non-profit publisher
OpenStax College.
Using Rice’s
Connexions
platform, OpenStax will offer free course
materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to
classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90
million in the next five years if the books capture 10 percent of the
national market. OpenStax is funded by grants from the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million
Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation.
Traditional publishers are quick to note that the
new offerings will face competition. J. Bruce Hildebrand, executive
director for higher education of the Association of American Publishers,
said any textbook’s use is ultimately determined by its academic value.
“Free would appear to be difficult to compete with,” Hildebrand said. “The
issue always, however, is the quality of the materials and whether they
enable students to learn, pass their course and get their degree. Nothing
else really counts.”
In the past, open-source materials have failed to
gain traction among some professors; their accuracy could be difficult to
confirm because they hadn't been peer-reviewed, and supplementary materials
were often nonexistent or lacking because they weren't organized for
large-scale use.
OpenStax believes it addressed those concerns with
its new books, subjecting the texts to peer review and partnering with
for-profit companies to offer supplementary materials for a cost.
Whether the books are used at Rice is up to each
professor, but several colleges and universities – “in the low 10s” said
Connexions founder and director Richard Baraniuk – have already signed on
for the first batch of texts. Baraniuk sees a quality product with the
potential to defray a student’s total cost and increase access to higher
education and expects more colleges to integrate the books as word spreads.
While open-source materials are nothing new, a
series of free self-contained textbooks designed to compete head-to-head
with major publishers is. Instructors building a class with open-source
materials now must assemble modules from several different places and verify
each lesson’s usefulness and accuracy.
The new textbooks eliminate much of that work,
which Baraniuk thinks will be make the free materials more palatable to
professors who have been reluctant to adopt open-source lessons. In the next
five years, OpenStax hopes to have free books for 20 of the most common
college courses.
OpenStax used its grant money to hire experts to
develop each textbook and then had their work peer reviewed. The process has
taken more than 18 months and will go live next month with sociology and
physics books. The only cost to users comes if an instructor decides to use
supplementary material from a for-profit company OpenStax partners with,
such as Sapling Learning.
Two introductory biology texts, one for majors and
another for nonmajors, are slated to go online in the fall along with an
anatomy and physiology book. Students and professors will be able to
download PDF versions on their computers or access the information on a
mobile device. Paper editions will be sold for the cost of printing. The
600-page, full-color sociology book is expected to sell for $30 for those
who want a print version -- those content with digital will pay nothing.
Leading introductory sociology texts routinely cost between $60 and $120
new.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
These open source textbooks work best in disciplines that are not being
constantly updated with updates --- like mathematics. However, the textbooks
available to date for OpenStax include such introductory textbooks as biology
which changes more quickly than introductory mathematics.
In accounting, intermediate accounting is particularly problematic even with
for-profit publishing houses as new domestic and international accounting
standards and implementation guides keep coming forth on a weekly basis.
I have a directory for free textbooks in various academic disciplines,
including accountancy and finance. Many of these were previous hot selling books
that were dropped when publishers merged and thinned out their product lines
after the mergers (giving copyrights to authors whose books were dropped)
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
But I find it increasingly difficult for me to recommend some of those free
books because there is no economic incentives for authors to keep updating free
textbooks and supplements (like answer books and text banks) when the textbooks
are free.
Ambitious instructors may be better off scouring for course materials from
prestigious universities. These course materials are more likely to be updated
relative to older free textbooks ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Next Thing in For-Profit Education: Bourgeoisie (Elite) versus
Proletariat (Commoner) For-Profit Universities
Both alternatives onsite or online, however, are more expensive than traditional
public universities like the University of Texas for in-state students
Minerva, however, wants to serve top-of-the-line student prospects at lower
costs than prestigious private universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford
Elite American universities maintain their prestige
by turning away a huge percentage of applicants every year. And the
education entrepreneur Ben Nelson sees an opportunity in this demand for
top-flight education: He wants to reach talented students across the world
and to build a new university that could remake the image of Ivy League
education.
Mr. Nelson, founder of a start-up called the
Minerva Project, believes the minuscule acceptance rates at prestigious
institutions leave some college-bound students without a place where they
can pursue a blue-ribbon degree. So his for-profit enterprise seeks to
satisfy that demand by offering a rigorous online education to the brightest
students around the world who slip through the cracks of highly selective
admissions cycles.
Mr. Nelson said his company, which is calling
itself “the first elite American university to be launched in a century,”
will disregard the barriers that might put the Ivy League beyond the reach
of qualified applicants.
“We don’t care about geography, we don’t care about
how wealthy you are, we don’t care if you’re able to donate or have donated
in the past, or legacy or where your ancestors went to school,” he said. “We
really just want to equalize the playing field.”
The start-up, based in San Francisco, plans to do
so by charging tuition rates “well under half” of those at traditional
top-tier institutions, Mr. Nelson said. The new university is seeking
accreditation, Mr. Nelson added, and will welcome its first class in 2014.
Though he did not specify how big he expects Minerva’s student body to be,
Mr. Nelson said his goal is to make sure no qualified students “get rejected
because we say we’re full.” He added that he expects Minerva to be “far
better represented internationally than a typical American university.”
The company can afford to charge cheaper tuition,
Mr. Nelson said, in part because it expects incoming students to have
already mastered the material that makes up everyday introductory courses.
For instance, Minerva may offer Applied Economic Theory instead of Economics
101, he said.
“What we expect to teach is how you apply and
synthesize that information and how you do something with it,” Mr. Nelson
said.
To create these advanced courses, Minerva will
break down the role of professor into two distinct jobs instead of simply
poaching faculty members from other universities. The company will award
monetary prizes to “distinguished teachers among great research faculty,”
Mr. Nelson said, who will team up with crews to videotape lectures and craft
innovative courses when they are not teaching at their home institutions.
(Mr. Nelson declined to elaborate on the size of the prizes.)
Minerva will then hire a second group of
instructors to deliver the material. Mr. Nelson called them “preceptors,”
who will typically be young graduates of doctoral programs—they will lead
class discussions online, hold office hours, and grade assignments.
After its students graduate, Mr. Nelson said the
university plans to help alumni connect with their peers to create
businesses, do research, and find jobs.
“The Minerva education isn’t just about getting
your four-year degree and then going to work for Goldman Sachs and crossing
your fingers and hoping you’ll do really well,” he said. “It’s actually
playing an active role in facilitating your success afterwards.”
Mr. Nelson’s challenge to the Ivy League is already
flush with cash: The prominent Silicon Valley investment firm Benchmark
Capital has pumped $25-million into Minerva’s coffers—the firm’s richest
seed-stage investment ever.
And the company has attracted some high-profile
advisers. Lawrence H. Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary and
Harvard University president emeritus, is the chair of Minerva’s advisory
board, which includes Bob Kerrey, the U.S. Senate candidate from Nebraska
who is a former president of the New School, among other education
luminaries.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are enormous hurdles that Minerva must leap over before its graduates
compete with graduates of the Ivy League. Among the major hurdles are the
thousands and thousands of Ivy League alumni. Many of those alumni are now in
positions of hiring power, and these executives are not totally unbiased.
Executives of Wall Street firms, for example, have their favorite places to
recruit new employees, and these favorite places are typically their alma
maters.
For example, one of the main reasons many applicants apply to the Harvard
Business School or the Stanford Graduate School of Business at MBA or doctoral
level is have access to the tremendous alumni networking systems of the HBS or
GSB. It will take many years for elitist startups like Minerva to establish
competing alumni networks.
There are other hurdles --- especially accreditation issues. For example, the
AACSB just does not accredit for-profit universities in North America. This has
been a tremendous barrier to for-profit university success in accounting,
finance, and business degree programs.
I think Mike Milken and the Welches (Jack and Suzie) had something like
Minerva elitism in mind when they established their "prestigious" online
business universities, but thus far none of these elitist efforts have been very
successful. Failing to get AACSB accreditation and alumni networking of note
have taken their toll on Mike, Jack, and Suzie. Donald Trump's Trump University
was a loser from get go.
My worry about book and other free textbooks in general is how often they are
completely updated. The Global Text download of the 8th edition was last revised
in 2006, and this is 2012. In that period of time there have been some changes
in managerial accounting such as Lean Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/LeanAccountingMain.htm
The Edwards, Hermanson, and Ivancevich book does not mention Lean Accounting to
my knowledge.
Actually, I worry more about the updates for financial accounting textbooks
than updates of managerial accounting textbooks, because the FASB and IASB are
grinding out changes weekly with some things that need to be put into revised
editions of financial accounting textbooks as soon as possible. Similar problems
arise with auditing textbooks. It's virtually impossible to have a long-term tax
textbook that's not updated at least annually is some way.
A huge problem with free or almost-free textbooks that pay no royalties to
authors is that the authors have fewer incentives to slave over revisions
vis-ŕ-vis commercial textbooks that are paying tens of thousands of dollars to
successful authors year after year after year.
A second huge problem is some popular supplements available from commercial
publishers are not available from free or almost-free servers. These supplements
include test banks, videos, and software.
Teachers who use their own handouts in place of a textbook have some of the
same problems with updates. For example, think of all the financial accounting
handouts (including problems and cases) that must be revised when the new joint
standards ore issued on leases and revenue recognition. Professors buried in
teaching duties and research for new knowledge really have to struggle to go
back over 800 pages of student handouts to constantly update these handouts. My
advice is to find a very current revised textbook and reduce the handouts to a
more manageable 300 pages or less. Of course the "handouts" can now be digital.
There are course certain courses for which there are no good textbooks
available for major modules of the course. I never found a good accounting
theory textbook that I though was suitable for my accounting theory course. My
students accordingly got 800 pages of my handouts ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/acct5341.htm
Incidentally, most free textbooks were once high-priced commercial textbooks
dropped by publishing companies that gave the copyrights back to the authors.
These textbooks were dropped in the past two decades largely due to publishing
company mergers and acquisitions. When Publisher A and Publisher B have
competing textbooks that are virtually identical when A and B are merged a
decision is usually made to drop one of the textbooks even though it has been
somewhat profitable before the merger. I have a number of relatively close
friends that experienced this type of copyright return including Phil Cooley who
had his successful basic finance textbook copyright returned in one of these
publishing house mergers.
The Game Changer
More on Porsches
versus
Volkswagens versus
Competency Based Learning
Bringing Low Cost Education and Training to the Masses Both a 1950 VW bug and a 1950 Porsche can be driven from Munich to Berlin. A
Porsche (MIT degree) can make the trip faster, more comfortable (the VW didn't
even have a heater), and safer on the autobahn. But the VW can
achieve the same goal at a lower cost to own and drive.
As fate would have it, the day after I wrote about Hitler's Volkswagen versus
Porsche analogy with meeting higher education needs of the masses at very low
cost, the following article appeared the next day of February 3. Ryan Craig and
I went about make the same point from two different angles.
Part of my February 2, 2012 message read as follows:
. . .
But the MITx design is not yet a Volkswagen since MIT provides high
quality lectures, videos, and course materials without yet setting academic
standards. MIT is instead passing along the academic standard setting to the
stakeholders. For example, when an engineering student at Texas A&M
graduates with a 3.96 grade average, the Texas A&M system has designed and
implemented the academic quality controls. In the MITx certificate program,
the quality controls must be designed by the employers or graduate school
admissions officers not part of the Texas A&M system..
My earlier example is that a student in the MITx program may learn a
great deal about Bessel functions ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_functions
But obtaining a MITx certificate for completing a Bessel function module
says absolutely nothing about whether the certificate holder really mastered
Bessel functions. It's up to employers and graduate school admissions
officers to introduce filters to test the certificate holder's mastery of
the subject.
I hope that one day the MITx program will also have
competency-based testing of its MITx
certificate holders --- that would be the second
stage of a free MITx Volkswagen model.
Bob Jensen
For all the hubbub about massive online classes
offered by elite universities, the real
potential game-changer in higher education is competency-based learning. Ryan Craig. February 3, 2012
Over the past few weeks, the news media has been
abuzz over two developments in higher education that some in the chattering
class foretell as the beginning of the end of degree programs.
First,
MIT announced that it would extend its successful
OpenCourseWare initiative and offer certificates to students who complete
courses. Like OpenCourseWare, which has provided free access to learning
materials from 2,100 courses since 2002 (and which, with more than 100
million unique visitors, has helped launch the open education movement),
MITx will allow students to access content for free. But students who wish
to receive a certificate will be
charged a modest fee for the requisite
assessments. The kicker is that the certificate will not be issued under the
name MIT. According to the University: “MIT plans to create a
not-for-profit body within the institute that will offer certificate for
online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to
avoid confusion.”
Then, Sebastian Thrun, an adjunct professor of
computer science at Stanford who invited the world to attend his fall
semester artificial intelligence course and who ended up with 160,000 online
students, announced
he had decided to stop teaching at Stanford and direct
all his teaching activities through Udacity, a start-up he co-founded that
will offer online courses from leading professors to millions of students.
Udacity’s first course is on building a search engine and will teach
students with no programming experience how to build their own Google in
seven weeks. Thrun hopes 500,000 students will enroll. He called the
experience of reaching so many students life-changing: “Having done this, I
can’t teach at Stanford again. I feel there’s a red pill and a blue pill.
And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture
your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”
Just as the Web 2.0 boom is recapitulating much of
the excitement and extravagance of the dot-com boom, we get the funny sense
we’ve seen this movie before. Take a look at this excerpt from a dot-com
era New York Times article with the headline
“Boola Boola, E-Commerce Comes to The Quad,” which
anticipates Professor Thrun’s announcement by 12 years:
"We always thought
our new competition was going to be 'Microsoft University,' " the president
of an elite eastern university ruefully remarked to a visitor over dinner
recently. ''We were wrong. Our competition is our own faculty.'' Welcome to
the ivory tower in the dot.com age, where
commerce and competition have set up shop… Distance learning sells the
knowledge inside a professor's head directly to a global on-line audience.
That means that, just by doing what he does every day, a teacher potentially
could grow rich instructing a class consisting of a million students signed
up by the Internet-based educational firm that marketed the course and
handles the payments. ''Faculty are dreaming of returns that are probably
multiples of their lifetime net worth,'' said Kim Clark, dean of the Harvard
Business School. ''They are doing things like saying, 'This technology
allows someone who is used to teaching 100 students to teach a million
students.' And they are running numbers and imagining, 'Gee, what if
everyone paid $10 to listen to my lecture?' ''
It was a heady time, and many in higher education
really believed the hype that brand-name institutions would grow to hundreds
of thousands of students and that “rock star” faculty would get rich
teaching millions of students online. Twelve years later, the only
universities with hundreds of thousands of students are private-sector
institutions whose brands were dreamed up by marketers in the past 30 years,
and the only educator who has become a rock star through the Internet is in
K-12, not higher education (more on him in a moment). So what happened?
The currency of higher education is degrees because
degrees are the sine qua non of professional, white-collar,
high-paying jobs. The difference between not having a degree and having a
degree is hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings. So what
happened is that Professor Thrun’s antecedents like Arthur Miller, the
Harvard Law professor, found that while they might offer courses, faculty
cannot offer degrees. And their brand-name institutions have continued to
prioritize avoiding “confusion” over extending access. Even MIT, the most
forward-thinking of the lot, will ensure its new offering cannot possibly be
construed as an MIT degree.
The noise emanating from these recent announcements
boils down to this: when the chattering class meets Professor Thrun, it’s
love at first sight. The notion that they might take a Stanford course for
free recalls their youthful days at similar elite universities. But of
course, these educational romantics already have degrees. And when Udacity
begins charging even modest fees for its courses, Professor Thrun may find
this group resistant to paying for lifelong learning.
On the other hand, you have the much, much larger
group of non-elites who need a degree. The United States, once the global
leader in the number of 25-34 year-olds with college degrees, now ranks
12th, while more than half of U.S. employers have trouble filling job
openings because they cannot find qualified workers. The outsized importance
of the degree itself over the university granting the degree or the faculty
member teaching the course is the simplest explanation for the explosion in
enrollment at private-sector universities.
As a result, the notion that certificates or
“badges” might displace degrees in any meaningful timeframe is incorrect.
Even in developing economies, where there is truly a hunger for knowledge in
any form and where the degree may not yet be as central to the evaluation of
prospective employees, the wage premium from a bachelor’s degree is even
higher: 124 percent in Mexico, 171 percent in Brazil and 200 percent in
China, compared with a mere 62 percent in the U.S. Degrees are definitely
not disappearing; they’re not even in decline.
***
There are two important respects, however, in which
this movie is different. The first must be credited to the first online
“rock star” educator: Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. If you haven’t
had the pleasure of watching a Khan video, you haven’t missed much in the
way of the simulations, animations and expensive special effects many
dot-com pundits predicted would dominate online learning. A Khan video is
short, just a few minutes, and teaches a single concept. It does so by
showing Khan’s hand on the whiteboard while you hear his narration – an
approach that is especially effective for math. Professor Thrun’s online
course builds on Khan’s innovation, and the resulting andragogy is
remarkable.
With regard to the more important innovation,
here’s what Professor Thrun had to say in his announcement:
We really set up our
students for failure. We don’t help students to become smart. I started
realizing that grades are the failure of the education system. [When
students don’t earn good grades, it means] educators have failed to bring
students to A+ levels. So rather than grading students, my task was to make
students successful. So it couldn’t be about harsh, difficult questions.
We changed the course so the questions were still hard, but students could
attempt them multiple times. And when they finally got them right, they
would get their A+. And it was much better. That really made me think
about the education system as a whole. Salman Khan has this wonderful
story. When you learn to ride a bicycle, and you fail to learn to ride a
bicycle, you don’t stop learning to ride the bicycle, give the person a D,
and then move on to a unicycle. You keep training them as long as it
takes. And then they can ride a bicycle. Today, when someone fails, we
don’t take time to make them a strong student. We give them a C or a D,
move them to the next class. Then they’re branded a loser, and they’re set
up for failure. This medium has the potential to change all that.
So when Anant Agarwal, one of the leaders of the
MITx effort, notes that “human productivity has gone up dramatically in the
past several decades due to the Internet and computing technologies, but
amazingly enough the way we do education is not very different from the way
we did it a thousand years ago,” the major advance he has in mind is not
rock star professors lecturing to millions, but rather that the online
medium lends itself perfectly to a competency-based approach.
The shift from “clock hours” or “seat time” to
competency-based learning is just around the corner and much more
fundamental to higher education than the explosion of online delivery
itself. Awarding credits and degrees based on assessed competencies will
significantly reduce time to completion and therefore increase completion
rates and return on investment. More important, it ensures that students
actually have mastered the set of competencies represented by the degree
they have earned. Though not without significant challenges, this approach
has the potential to revolutionize degree programs and all of higher
education from within. That’s the real Wonderland adventure. And we don’t
need to take a pill to find it.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Perhaps a better analogy than a Volkswagen versus a Porsche would be where a MIT
jumbo jet takes off in the evening from Differential Equations in the USA bound
for Bessel Functions, Germany. Passengers in First Class get live MIT professors
and one-on-one help in preparation for landing. Passengers in the economy
section are only given videos of the MIT professors and the MITx free course
handout materials. Beyond that the economy class passengers are on their own.
MIT professors keep first class passengers attentive whenever there's a hint
of a passenger falling asleep or day dreaming. They also require interactive
feedback. Back in the economy section 95% of the passengers grow bored and doze
off around midnight. But the others are even more driven than the first class
passengers to pass through customs at Bessel Functions.
Upon arrival each passenger is given a competency examination in Bessel
functions. Passage rates are 80% (24 passengers) for first class passengers and
5% (50 passengers) for economy class passengers. Those that fail must return to
the USA.
The point is that, in spite of having much higher failure rates, there are
many more MITx graduates passing through Bessel Functions competency
examinations than MIT graduates who paid for luxuries of live lectures and
interactive communications with their instructors.
The problem with MITx low cost (economy class) fares is that students that
are not highly motivated fail the competency examinations. Those students needed
first class live classes or online interactive inspirations and prodding to
learn.
The enormous problem with Professor Obama's drive to bring low cost education
to the masses is that there is such a high proportion of students who want top
grades without the scholastic blood, sweat, and tears it takes to attain
scholastic competency . These are the couch potatoes and the hard workers
dragged down by other duties (such as tending to two toddlers at their feet and
a baby in their arms) who are driven to learn but just have other duties and
priorities.
MIT is doing wonders with its MITx certificate program for intelligent and
highly motivated students. But MIT has not yet offered help to those students
not even motivated to bleed, perspire, and cry over college algebra, spelling,
and grammar.
Mr. Reif and Anant Agarwal, director of the
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said M.I.T.x would
start this spring — perhaps with just one course — but would expand to
include many more courses, as OpenCourseWare has done. [...]
The M.I.T.x classes, he said, will have online
discussions and forums where students can ask questions and, often, have
them answered by others in the class.
While access to the software will be free,
there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined,
for a credential.
“I think for someone to feel they’re earning
something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it
extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that
it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by
M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”
The official FAQ reveals a couple of additional
points. First, the content of MITx courses will be free — which seems to
imply that MITx course content will be different than OCW course content,
and not just a certification layer on top of existing resources — and you’ll
only pay money for the certificate. Second, there will be no admissions
process. If you want a course, you just take it and then pay for the
credentialing if you feel like you’re up to it.
I think this last point about having no admissions
process may be the most significant piece of MITx. It seems to represent a
complete shift from the traditional way of providing access to higher
education. As far as I can tell, there will not even be a system of checking
prerequisites for MITx courses. If that’s so, then if you feel you can step
into, say, an Algorithms class and keep up with the material and demonstrate
your mastery, then nobody at MIT will care if you haven’t had the right
courses in basic programming, data structures, discrete math, or whatever.
MIT is basically saying, we won’t be picky about who we let take these
courses — if you can afford it and live up to our standards, we’re happy to
credential you.
Of course there are a lot of questions about MITx
that are yet to be answered. What is the “modest fee” they plan to charge,
and is it really affordable? How exactly will the credentialing process
work? (It’s interesting that the certification will be handled by a
non-profit organization to be formed within MIT. Is this a kind of
outsourcing of grading?) How will one “demonstrate mastery” and what will
MITx define as “mastery” in courses that are not strictly skills-based? Will
there eventually be a full enough slate of courses offered to make the whole
system compelling for learners? And perhaps most importantly, what will
employers, graduate schools, and even undergraduate institutions make of
applicants who come in with some of these MITx certifications? Without
external buy-in, MITx will likely be just another continuing education
program like hundreds of others.
We’ll hear a lot more about this in the future, but
for now this seems to have the potential to be genuinely disruptive in
higher education. What do you think?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which
pioneered the idea of making course materials free online --
today announced a major expansion of the idea,
with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among
students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to
students who have no connection to MIT.
MIT is also starting a major initiative -- led by
Provost L. Rafael Reif -- to study online teaching and learning.
The first course through MITx is expected this
spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge
what it calls "a modest fee" for the assessment that would lead to a
credential. The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute
MIT credit. The university also plans to continue
MIT OpenCourseWare,
the program through which it makes course materials
available online.
An
FAQ from MIT offers
more details on the new program.
While MIT has been widely praised for
OpenCourseWare, much of the attention in the last year from the "open"
educational movement has shifted to programs like the
Khan Academy (through
which there is direct instruction provided, if not yet assessment) and
an initiative at Stanford University that makes
courses available -- courses for which some German universities are
providing academic credit. The new initiative would appear to provide some
of the features (instruction such as offered by Khan, and certification that
some are creating for the Stanford courses) that have been lacking in
OpenCourseWare.
The
recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute
of Technology would give certificates around free online course materials
has fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new kinds
of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT’s new service will
work, and what it means for traditional college programs.
On Monday The Chronicle posed some of
those questions to two leaders of the new project: L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s
provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They stressed that the new project,
called MITx, will be run separately from the institute’s longstanding effort
to put materials from its traditional courses online. That project, called
OpenCourseWare, will continue just as before, while MITx will focus on
creating new courses designed to be delivered entirely online. All MITx
materials will be free, but those who want a certificate after passing a
series of online tests will have to pay a “modest fee.”
Q. I understand you held a forum late last
month for professors at MIT to ask questions about the MITx effort. What
were the hottest questions at that meeting?
Mr. Agarwal: There were a few good
questions. One was, How will you offer courses that involve more of a soft
touch? More of humanities, where it may not be as clear how to grade
answers?
Mr. Reif: One particular faculty
member said, How do I negotiate with my department head to get some time to
be doing this? Another one is, Well, you want MIT to give you a certificate,
how do we know who the learner is? How do we certify that?
Q. That is a question I’ve heard on some
blogs. How do you know that a person is who they say they are online? What
is your answer to that?
Mr. Agarwal: I could give a speech
on this question. … In the very short term students will have to pledge an
honor code that says that they’ll do the work honestly and things like that.
In the medium term our plan is to work with testing companies that offer
testing sites around the world, where they can do an identity check and they
can also proctor tests and exams for us. For the longer term we have quite a
few ideas, and I would say these are in the so-called R&D phase, in terms of
how we can electronically check to see if the student is who they say they
are, and this would use some combination of face recognition and other forms
of technique, and also it could involve various forms of activity
recognition.
Q. You refer to what’s being given by MITx
as a certificate. But there’s also this
trend of educational badges,
such as an effort by Mozilla, the people who make the Firefox Web browser,
to build a framework to issue such badges. Is MIT planning to use that badge
platform to offer these certificates?
Mr. Agarwal: There are a lot of
experiments around the Web as far as various ways of badging and various
ways of giving points. Some sites call them “karma points.” Khan Academy has
a way of giving badges to students who offer various levels of answering
questions and things like that. Clearly this is a movement that is happening
in our whole business. And we clearly want to leverage some of these ideas.
But fundamentally at the end of the day we have to give a certificate with a
grade that says the student took this course and here’s how they did—here’s
their grade and we will give it to them. … But there are many, many ways the
Internet is evolving to include some kind of badging and point systems, so
we will certainly try to leverage these things. And that’s a work in
progress.
Q. So there will be letter grades?
Mr. Agarwal: Correct.
Q. So you’ve said you will release your
learning software for free under an open-source license. Are you already
hearing from institutions that are going to take you up on that?
Mr. Agarwal: Yes, I think there’s
a lot of interest. Our plan is to make the software available online, and
there has been a lot of interest from a lot of sources. Many universities
and other school systems have been thinking about making more of their
content available online, and if they can find an open platform to go with I
think that will be very interesting for a lot of people.
Q. If you can get this low-cost
certificate, could this be an alternative to the $40,000-plus per year
tuition of MIT for enough people that this will really shake up higher
education? That may not threaten MIT, but could it threaten and even force
some colleges to close if they have to compete with a nearly free
certificate from your online institution?
Mr. Reif: First of all this is not
a degree, this is a certificate that MITx is providing. The second important
point is it’s a completely different educational environment. The real
question is, What do employers want? I think that for a while MITx or
activities like MITx—and there is quite a bit of buzz going on around things
like that—will augment the education students get in college today. It’s not
intended to replace it. But of course one can think of, “What if in a few
years, I only take two MITx-like courses for free and that’s enough to get
me a job?” Well, let’s see how well all this is received and how well or how
badly the traditional college model gets threatened.
In my personal view, I think the best education
that can be provided is that in a college environment. There are many things
that you cannot teach very well online. Let me give you, for instance, an
example of something that is important: ethics and integrity and things like
that. You walk on the MIT campus and by taking a course with Anant Agarwal
and meeting him and other professors like him you get the sense of ethics
and integrity. Is it easy to transfer that online in a community? Maybe it
is, but it’s going to take a bit of research to figure out how to do that.
Robert Garland, a professor of classics at Colgate
University, is not accustomed to discussing Greek religion with the lifeless
lens of his MacBook’s built-in video camera. But that was how Garland spent
Wednesday afternoon: in his home study, recording lectures on his laptop in
20-minute chunks.
Garland, a novice to online teaching, says it is
difficult to think of these solitary sessions as lectures. “I think of them
more as chats,” he says. To keep things interesting, he delivers some of
them in the second person, as if instructing a time-traveling tourist in
ancient Greece how to pray, how to please the gods, how to upset the gods,
and so on. Garland’s gear is lo-fi: just the laptop, which he owns, and a
microphone mailed to him by Udemy, the company that roped him into this.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/24/stanford-open-course-instructors-spin-profit-company
, a company that allows anyone to create and sell courses through its online
platform, has announced a new area of its site, called The Faculty Project,
devoted to courses by professors at a number of top institutions, such as
Colgate, Duke University, Stanford University, Northwestern University,
Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and
Vassar College. While Udemy is a for-profit enterprise, the Faculty Project
courses will be free.
The goal is to “elevate the brand,” according to
Gagan Biyani, Udemy’s president and co-founder. The company says it has no
immediate plans to monetize the Faculty Project, and would never do so
without the input and permission of its faculty contributors.
The inaugural Faculty Project courses include many
humanities electives normally reserved for small classrooms of
undergraduates. Among them: “Elixir: A History of Water and Humans,” “Select
Classics in Russian Literature” and “The Cognitive Neuroscience of
Mindfulness.” Garland and the project’s other professorial recruits are
developing, pro bono, mini-lecture-based versions of courses they offer on
their home campuses. Udemy says it does not require the professors to
relinquish ownership of the courses.
There are no caps on course enrollment. “It could
be 10 people, it could be 100, it could be 1,000,” says Ben Ho, the Vassar
College economics professor who is teaching the course on water and humans.
But as far as interactivity, Udemy’s Faculty Project is more akin to Yale
Open Courses -- where users can watch lectures and consult syllabuses for
free -- than to Udacity, the venture
launched this week by a team of former Stanford
academics, which aspires to administer quizzes and grade its anticipated
droves of students, which may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
“It’s certainly not a ‘course’ in the sense that
people will send me essays — I hope,” says Garland. But he did say he is
open to corresponding with students who take his Greek religion course, so
long as it does not interfere with his on-campus duties. Ho says he might
try to set up and moderate discussion groups online for students of his
water course. “This is more just informational lectures,” he says, but “I
will be answering questions and will encourage people to ask questions.”
Distance Education.org or DistanceEducation.Org is a Great Helper Site
Ben Pheiffer in San Antonio forwarded this link to a terrific listing (with
pricing estimates) of online training and education degree programs and courses
from respectable universities ---
http://www.distance-education.org/Courses/
Both graduate and undergraduate degree programs are listed as well as training
courses (some free).
You can now get free e-books on iTunes U. Apple announced today that
Oxford, Rice, and the Open University have all added digital books to the
lectures and other materials traditionally available on the popular
educational-content platform.
"New at iTunes U: Free E-Books," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education,
October 29, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-at-itunes-u-free-e-books/27957?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
350 Free Online Courses from Top Universities ---
http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses
Note that students may often take the courses for learning purposes, but without
a grading process there is no transcript credit.
Starting in January and February 2012, Stanford will offer seven new
courses, and they’re all open for enrollment today. Here’s the new list (and
don’t forget to browse through our collection of 400
Free
Online Courses):
If you use a learning
management system you can import course materials for an entire course.
Course files are available for download in two formats on the SBCTC
Connexions page. We are grateful to Connexions for helping us share these
courses with the world.
Please note: Human Anatomy &
Physiology I/II will be available soon.
The OpenScout Tool Library is a social network of
individuals and collectives who are developing or using learning resources
and want to share their stories and resources from different countries.
The OpenScout Tool Library is currently hosting the activities of the
COLEARN community of research in collaborative learning and educational
technologies in the Portuguese language. This group is run by Alexandra
Okada (The Open University UK) and consists of learners, educators and
researchers from academic institutions in Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Their
interests focus on collaborative participation through social media,
colearning (collaborative open learning) using Open Educational Resources (OER),
Social Media and Web 2.0 research. There are 26 research groups from
Brazilian and Portugal universities - 115 people currently registered in the
Tool Library.
At the moment, this community is developing a book project called "Web 2.0:
Open Educational Resources in Learning and Professional Development". From
January to February 2012, three workshops will be run in the Tool Library
for improving OER skills: image, presentation and audio/visual material.
These collaborative activities and workshops aim at engaging people in
developing their skills and discussing concepts as well as preparing
themselves to be OER users who are able to produce, remix and share open
resources and open ideas.
The movement to make research freely available got
a high-profile boost this week with the news that Princeton University’s
faculty has
unanimously adopted an open-access policy. “The
principle of open access is consistent with the fundamental purposes of
scholarship,” said the faculty advisory committee that proposed the
resolution.
The decision puts the university in line with
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a growing
number of other institutions with policies that encourage or require
researchers to post open copies of their articles, usually in an
institutional repository. Unpublished drafts, books, lecture notes, etc.,
are not included in the Princeton policy, which gives the university a
“nonexclusive right” to make copies of its faculty’s scholarly journal
articles publicly available.
“Both the library and members of the faculty,
principally in the sciences, have been thinking for some time that we would
like to take a concrete step toward making the publications of our
extraordinary faculty freely available to a much larger audience and not
restricted to those who can afford to pay journal subscription fees,” said
Karin Trainer, Princeton’s university librarian. She said they had
encountered “no resistance at all” to the idea among faculty members.
The new mandate permits professors to post copies
of articles online in “not-for-a-fee venues,” including personal and
university Web sites. The faculty advisory committee that recommended the
policy said that it will keep faculty members “from giving away all
their rights when they publish in a journal.”
The National Autonomous University of Mexico,
better known as UNAM, has said it will make virtually all of its
publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the
Internet over the next few years—a move that some academics speculated could
push other universities in the region to follow suit.
Campus officials at UNAM, Mexico's largest
university, said the program, known as All of UNAM Online, could double or
triple the institution's 3.5 million publicly available Web pages, as the
largest collection of its kind in Latin America.
They also said it was key to UNAM's social mission
as a public institution: providing educational resources to populations
usually underrepresented in the university system—really, to anyone who
desires access to them.
"As the national university, we must assume a
national mission and give back to society what we are doing with its
financial support," said Imanol Ordorika, a professor of social sciences and
education at UNAM and a key force behind the effort. "That means providing
open access and being accountable and transparent."
Mr. Ordorika said the university has set no
specific goal as to how many Web pages will be made available or a fixed
budget for bringing the endeavor to fruition.
But he said it would include all magazines and
periodicals published by UNAM, and, if negotiations with outside publishers
went well, all research published by UNAM employees.
He also said the university would provide online
access to all theses and dissertations as well as materials for its
approximately 300 undergraduate and graduate courses.
Experts from outside Mexico said those two
components alone would make the venture a milestone in the region.
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More than 400 colleges and universities have set up
channels on YouTube as part of the YouTube EDU section of the popular video
site, but university officials admit they are still experimenting with the
service and learning what types of videos resonate with off-campus
audiences.
With data provided by YouTube, The Chronicle has
determined the 10 most popular videos on YouTube EDU of the 2010-11 academic
year (from June 2010 to June 2011). Some college officials stress that
popularity is not always their main goal—because many colleges upload
lectures and study materials designed for those enrolled in the courses.
Still, the list gives a sense of the variety of videos colleges post and
their impact.
Star-studded commencement speeches seem to be the
best way for colleges to draw viewers. Four graduation videos made it onto
the top-10 list, and three of the four featured high-profile celebrity
speakers: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Conan O’Brien. According to
YouTube officials, searches on the site for the phrase “commencement speech”
have increased eightfold since 2008.
But the biggest hit of the year focused on a
graduating student rather than a star speaker. UC Berkeley’s video,
“Paralyzed student, Austin Whitney, walks at graduation,” topped the list,
with over 471,000 views. The clip shows Mr. Whitney, a graduating senior who
was paralyzed from the waist down before entering college, walking to
receive his diploma, aided by a mechanized exoskeleton that UC Berkeley
engineers designed for him.
Robotics videos were also crowd pleasers this year.
The University of Pennsylvania’s baseball-pitching machine earned it a spot
in the top 10, and the University of Chicago made it on the list twice for
gadget-themed clips. The first, the “Universal Gripper,” displays a device
researchers developed that can grip and move nearly any object regardless of
shape or size. The other video investigates how the mechanized
book-retrieval system in the university’s newly constructed library works.
Jeremy Manier, the university’s news director, attributed the library
video’s success to the fact that it could engage several Web communities:
those concerned with libraries and the future of print; architecture
enthusiasts; and techies. “It tells a good story and it’s got robots,” he
said, adding jocularly that “robots rule the Internet.”
No traditional lectures made the list. The closest
thing to a lecture is an MIT physics “module”—a 20-minute explanatory video
by Walter H.G. Lewin, a professor of physics at the institute. It explains
the physics behind a familiar dilemma: Which will make you more wet, walking
or running in the rain?
Other academic lectures have proven quite popular,
though: A Harvard University lecture series on the philosophy of justice has
accumulated more than 1.6 million views since it was uploaded in September
2009.
Although other individual lectures may not receive
a high number of hits, a growing number of colleges are posting them. Some
universities, such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, have begun posting all
of the recorded lectures from selected courses, allowing viewers from around
the world to tune in and see what goes on in their classrooms. By
broadcasting their lectures, they “broaden the window of access” to their
resources, said Ben Hubbard, the manager of UC Berkeley’s YouTube EDU
channel. Through feedback from students and spikes in viewership during
midterms and exams, Mr. Hubbard has inferred that the channel is actually
being used as a study tool. However, he said, “We know that we haven’t had
just students logging in 120 million times. We know we’re serving the
public.”
It can be difficult to determine the factors that
lead a college video to go viral, and many college-news offices and
technology departments are still experimenting with ways to take full
advantage of their presence on YouTube. Angela Y. Lin, EDU’s manager at
YouTube, says the service provides “resources for all of our partners
regarding how to optimize their channels,” including statistics on user
views, as well as suggestions such as adding metadata, creating playlists,
and tagging keywords.
But the success of a video is ultimately determined
by the whims of The Crowd. “There is a certain mystery or alchemy about what
captures the public’s minds,” said Dan Mogulof, a UC Berkeley spokesman.
“There are common themes and variables that can increase the chance of
something becoming popular, but it’s not a simple formula.”
Continued in article
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
In August 2004, Salman Khan agreed to help his
niece, Nadia, with her math homework. Nadia was headed into seventh grade in
New Orleans, where Khan had grown up, but she hadn't been placed in her
private school's advanced math track, which to a motivated parent these days
is a little bit like hearing your child has just been diagnosed with Lou
Gehrig's disease. In particular, Nadia was having trouble with unit
conversion, turning gallons into liters and ounces into grams.
Math was something Khan, then 28, understood. It
was one of his majors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along
with computer science and electrical engineering. He had gone on to get a
master's in computer science and electrical engineering, also at MIT, and
then an MBA from Harvard. He was working in Boston at the time for Daniel
Wohl, who ran a hedge fund called Wohl Capital Management. Khan, an analyst,
was the only employee.
Being a bit of a geek, Khan put Yahoo!'s (YHOO)
Messenger to work to help Nadia, using the Doodle function to let him
illustrate concepts for his niece as they spoke on the phone. Then he wrote
some code that generated problems she could do on a website. With Khan's
help, Nadia made it into the fast track, and her younger brothers Arman and
Ali signed on for Khan's tutoring as well. Then they brought in some of
their friends. Khan built his site out a little more, grouping the concepts
into "modules" and creating a database that would keep track of how many
problems the kids had tried and how they had fared, so he'd know how each of
his charges was progressing.
Messenger didn't make sense with multiple viewers,
so he started creating videos that he could upload to YouTube. This required
a Wacom tablet with an electronic pen, which cost about $80. The videos were
each about 10 minutes long and contained two elements: his blackboard-style
diagrams—Khan happens to be an excellent sketcher—and his voice-over
explaining things like greatest common divisors and equivalent fractions. He
posted the first video on Nov. 16, 2006; in it, he explained the basics of
least common multiples. Soon other students, not all children, were checking
out his videos, then watching them all, then sending him notes telling him
that he had saved their math careers, too.
Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has
turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure
in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan
Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last
month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by
comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each
month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition
and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in
a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit
crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He
masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April,
he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons.
His program has also spread from the homes of
online learners to classrooms around the world, to the point that, in at
least a few classrooms, it has supplanted textbooks. (Students often write
Khan that they aced a course without opening their texts, though Khan
doesn't post these notes on his site.) Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher
and Stanford University PhD candidate in education, puts it this way: "If
you're teaching math in this country right now, then there's pretty much no
way you haven't heard of Salman Khan."
Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of Khan
Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/ a not-for-profit educational
organization. With the stated mission “of providing a high quality education
to anyone, anywhere”, the Academy supplies a free online collection of over
2,000 videos on mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry,
astronomy, and economics.
In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin in
mathematics using Yahoo!’s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends
sought his tutorial, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the
tutorials on YouTube. Their popularity there and the testimonials of
appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance in 2009 and
focus on the Academy full-time.
Khan Academy’s channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
has 45+ million views so far and it’s one of YouTube’s most successful
academic partners.
In September 2010, Google announced they would be
providing the Khan Academy with $2 million to support the creation of more
courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into
the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of Project 10^100,
http://www.project10tothe100.com/.
I spent much of last week attending the
2011 meeting of
Educause, an event devoted to information
technology in higher education.
Educause (the organization)
describes itself as a “nonprofit
association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the
intelligent use of information technology.” The annual meeting features
sessions and workshops but also an enormous exhibit hall where various
vendors promote their products, software and hardware alike. As
Jason and I wrote last year,
there is a great deal of money at stake in this
particular market. However much your average faculty member–or
administrator, or educational technology staff member–may support free and
open source software or the open educational resources movement, you’re not
very likely to see much about those things in the exhibit hall (though you
might hear a good bit about them in individual sessions and workshops).
As much as I enjoyed seeing the
Start-Up Alley at this year’s Educause I would also love to see a
section devoted to free and open source tools, just to get some of the
spirit of what’s going on in many of the sessions and
workshops elsewhere in the convention center into the exhibit hall. Yes, I
know that exhibitors pay to be able to stake out their position in the
exhibit hall. Still, when I came across
the Endnote booth I wanted to see a booth devoted
to
Zotero, the comparable
research tool developed
by the Center for History and
New Media that is not only awesome but also free
of charge. I longed to see a
Moodle booth next to
the space devoted to Blackboard. How many people attending Educause, I
wonder, have perhaps heard of a free and open-source product like
WordPress (about which
we’ve written a great deal here at ProfHacker) but
have never seen how easy it is to install and run? What kind of an impact
would it make on campus purchasing decisions if these tools were given more
prominence at meetings like Educause? I don’t claim to know the best way to
make that happen (or to persuade everyone to think that doing so would be a
good idea), but it’s what’s been on my mind the last several days.
I’ve often heard it said “Well, the software may be
free, but you’ll have to pay people to maintain it.” And to that my response
is, “We already employ those people. They currently spend their
time maintaining the commercial software our campuses have purchased. It’s
not going to increase our costs to eliminate the money we spend on
that commercial software.” I’d like to see more campuses open to the idea of
experimentation: don’t abandon your commercial LMS, but allow faculty to try
out other possibilities. (And how about we stop referring to this sort of
experimentation as
faculty “going rogue” and start referring to it as
faculty exercising academic freedom? We choose our own texts, we design our
own assignments, we construct our own syllabi, and we should be able to
choose our own educational technology, no?) Students won’t be as confused by
the resulting diversity of interfaces as is often feared. They do just fine
having to learn how to use different databases in the library or different
information resources out there on the Web. If enough faculty and students
find that they prefer free and open source tools to the ones you’ve been
paying for… then maybe you should stop paying.
A university press in China appears to be selling
transcripts of Yale University’s free online courses in a new volume,
sparking complaints from Yale officials. Under the terms of the course
giveaway, called Open
Yale Courses, others cannot profit from the material.
Shaanxi Normal University Press recently published
the compilation of five Yale open courses, according to a post today on a
Yale Alumni Magazine blog. The book
reportedly lifted largely from Chinese subtitles translated by a nonprofit
group called YYeT, though that group insists it was not involved in the
publication, whose author is listed as Wu Han.
Foundations and universities have spent a fortune
producing freely available online course materials. This week a new book,
Unlocking the Gates (Princeton University Press), takes stock of
that movement by focusing on some of its most high-profile players and their
online successes and failures.
The author, Taylor Walsh, is a research analyst
with Ithaka S+R, the research division of the nonprofit Ithaka consulting
group, which supported the project together with the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation. The Chronicle asked Ms. Walsh to discuss what
she had learned about the online ventures of MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and
other universities.
Interview continued in article
Jensen Comment
I'm a long-term persistent advocate of open sharing of knowledge. But don't be
confused by the phrase "give away courses online." That does not equate to "give
away college credits online." The prestigious universities that share parts of
courses or all of courses, including lecture videos and teaching notes, are not
grading users of those materials and giving away transcript credits. Those
materials are available for self-study and for use by faculty in other colleges.
In my opinion one of the main reasons these prestigious universities like MIT
give so much away is truly altruistic and perhaps a bit snobbish in that these
universities feel they can fill in knowledge gaps and aid instructors of other
colleges. There is also a feeling that if eager students study these course
materials in advance of actually taking the courses for credit that they will
better understand the courses that are eventually taken.
Lastly there is an element of "knowledge for knowledge sake." If a retired
accounting professor really wants to study history or literature just for the
hell of it, these open sharing courses are terrific.
Note that various prestigious universities now have free channels on YouTube.
This week, MIT’s
OpenCourseWare project launched OCW
Scholar, a new series of courses “designed for
independent learners who have few additional resources available to them.”
To date, MIT has given students access to isolated materials from MIT
courses. Now, with this new initiative, lifelong learners can work with a
more rounded set of resources.
OWC
Scholar takes video lectures, homework problems,
problem solving videos, simulations, readings, etc., and stitches them into
a structured curriculum. Perfect for the self-disciplined student.
Below we have listed
the first five courses in the
OWC
Scholar collection. (They’re entirely free.) Fast
forward three years and you will find 20 courses online,
says MIT. All will be
added to our big list of
Free
Online Courses.
Dartmouth College’s
Tuck School of Business is transforming the way it
teaches many of its MBA core classes, delivering portions of them online via
video lectures, and using online quizzes and discussion boards. About a
dozen Tuck professors are participating in the effort, using videos to teach
introductory material in classes such as Managerial Economics, Statistics
for Managers, Corporate Finance, and Operations Management, the school said.
Beyond the core classes, the school has experimented with using videos for
two of its elective courses: Retail Pricing and Service Operations.
Tuck Dean Paul Danos, who spearheaded the pilot
program this school year, says he got the idea after doing an online
tutorial with his granddaughter on
Khan Academy,
the nonprofit education website that offers thousands of free YouTube-based
lessons.
“I was doing the lesson with her and I thought, Why
can’t we do something similar to the Khan Academy?” says Danos. “I told
professors anything you can put up on a whiteboard should be put up in
advance so you can have more time in the classroom for conversation and
face-to-face interaction.”
Praveen Kopalle, a Tuck marketing professor who
teaches the Statistics for Managers course, a required class for first-year
students, was the first professor who participated in the project. Kopalle
liked the idea of exposing students to some of the concepts in class before
they step into the lecture hall, he said. He also thought it would be
especially helpful for the school’s international students and those who
have not studied statistics before, as they could review the material at
their own pace.
For his introductory statistics course this fall,
Kopalle produced nine videos using a tablet and Camtasia screen recording
software, and he distributed them to students before the term started.
Students don’t see his face during the video but hear his voice while he
explains the concepts on the tablet, which functions as an online
whiteboard. He asks students to study the video pertaining to the lesson
he’s teaching before coming to class. He also asks them to take an online
quiz where they can see instantly if they’d mastered the concepts; the quiz
counts toward their class participation grade, he said. If students have
questions about the material, they can post a comment on an online
discussion board and receive an answer from either Kopalle or a fellow
student.
The videos have proved to be a success so far; in a
survey of 134 first-year MBA students who took Kopalle’s class this fall,
about 80 percent of students said they found the videos to be a useful part
of their overall class experience and liked the technology, while 72 percent
said it improved the way they learned the material. It also has proved to be
a useful tool for Kopalle, who can monitor which of his 270 students took
the quizzes, what scores they received, and how much time they spent
watching the videos.
“It gives me lots of diagnostic information that I
can then link to class preparation,” he said. “The classroom experience is
much richer because of the experience, because we can dig deeper into the
material.”
Professors from other schools are beginning to
experiment with online courses, with some making them available to the
public. Back in February, we wrote about how several professors from top
MBA programs were participating in
The Faculty Project, a website that allows
professors to upload free courses and supplementary course materials, as
well as interact with students.
For now, Tuck’s videos are only available to
students, but the school is “discussing whether to make the course material
public,” said Christopher Huston, Tuck’s digital specialist, in an e-mail.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
At Dartmouth's Tuck School and nearly all top MBA programs, most classes are not
lectures. Instead they are case discussions where the true test of a top case
teacher is to resist lecturing or even giving out his/her opinions as to the
"best answers." Indeed many of the excellent cases used in these schools have no
known "best answers."
My question then is how to video a case class before it
actually meets?
The Brunel Lecture Series on Complex
Systems, presented by MIT's Engineering Systems Division (ESD), was made
possible by funds assembled and underwritten by Frank P. Davidson, convener
of the Channel Tunnel Study Group (1957). It was this group's design,
accomplished by agreement with Bechtel Corporation, Brown & Root, Inc. and
Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc. in 1959, that formed the basis of the subsea
railway link now in service between England and France.
The 21st Century is about Engineering, Systems, and Society (2005)
by Dr. A. Richard Newton
Dean of the College of Engineering at University of California at Berkeley;
Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering; Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences
The Columbia Tragedy: System-Level Issues for Engineering (2003)
by Sheila Widnall
Member, Columbia Accident Investigation Board
Member, National Women's Hall of Fame
Institute Professor, Professor of Aeronautics, Astronautics, and Engineering
Systems, Engineering Systems Division, Massachusetts Institute of Technology View on MIT
World
Simple Systems and Other Myths (2001)
by Norman R. Augustine
Former President, CEO, and Chairman and Current Chairman, Executive
Committee, Lockheed Martin Corporatio
There are many newer 64-bit Windows 7 computers that will
not playback videos compressed on computers
such as my 32-bit Windows XP computer. Give your 64-bit computer a test. The
most popular video I ever produced is my 133ex05a.wmv
video that's still being downloaded by thousands of security analysts and
auditors. Even before I purchased a new computer I was getting complaints that
this video would not play on 64-bit Windows 7 computers.
Playback problems are also arising in videos created by millions of people
other than me, especially Camtasia videos produced on 32-bit computers. The
trouble is that Microsoft's set of codecs embedded in Windows 7 leaves out some
important codecs in earlier versions of Windows.Many high level tech support
groups still don't know how to solve this problem. For example, two days ago
three Level 2 experts in the Dell Technical Support Division did not have a clue
on how to solve the problem. Even though the video above would not run on my
various video players such as Windows Media Player, VLC Player, Realtime, and
Quicktime, Dell Level 2 technicians suggested I try three other players. None of
these players corrected my problem.
Codec ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec
Warning: There are many outfits on the Web that offer free or fee downloads of
codecs. Don't trust any of them unless somebody you really trust informs you
that these downloads are safe. Many of codec downloads carry malware malicious
code that will put such things as Trojan horse viruses into your computer. One
outfit even claims to playback virtually all videos without using a codec. I
don't trust this company enough to even try its download. Quite a few people
have downloaded the K-Lite Codec Pack, but my Sophos Security blocker would not
allow this download. Friends who have the K-Lite does tell me that they still
can't run many older videos in 64-bit machines that will run in 32-bit
computers.
To make a long story short, a technical support expert named Ian at
California State University in San Bernardino proposed a solution to the problem
at the behest of my good friend and education technology expert Professor Rick
Lillie.
On Thanksgiving Day Rick sent the following recommendation:
The problem is specifically an audio codec that did
not come with Windows 7. Ian found a trustworthy place which provides that
particular codec:
http://www.voiceage.com/acelp_eval_eula.php
Trinity University requires that I honor a relatively tough Cisco Systems
security barrier called Sophos if I want to run my files on servers at Trinity.
The VoiceAge download mentioned above not only passed through my Sophos barrier,
unlike the K-Lite Codec Pack, the download took place in the blink of an eye.
Now old videos play wonderfully on my new 64-bit Windows 7 laptop from Dell.
However, this is a limited solution in that users around the world who do not
know about this solution or an equivalent solution will either not be able to
run many old videos or they will be clogging my email box. I am asking that all
of you inform your tech support group about this solution. I informed the Dell
Support Group.
A better solution for my hundreds of videos still being served up on the Web
would take weeks of my time. Windows 7 OS 64-bit computers will play my huge
uncompressed avi files that I store in my barn. It is out of the question to
serve up enormous avi files that can be compressed into files that save over 90%
of of storage and transmission size. However, I did experiment with
recompressing a couple of avi files on my 64-bit machine. These files will
playback in wmv, rm, swf, and mov formats using only Windows 7 codecs. But at
this stage of my life I don't want to spend weeks of my time solving a problem
that Microsoft could solve with little cost or trouble.
Why compress raw avi videos into compressed wmv, mov, mpg, rm, scf, or
some other compressed versions?
Enormous Alternatives for Free Education
Open Courseware's Free Online Lectures and Courses ---
http://ocwconsortium.org/courses
An OpenCourseWare(OCW) is a free and open digital
publication of high quality university‐level educational materials. These
materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning
materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.
OCW Consortium members from all over the world are
publishing OCW in a variety of formats, subjects, and languages. Here are
some ways to find OCW.
Using our specialized search engine, you can search
for courses amongst all OCW Consortium members who are currently publishing
a course feed. You can begin by using the quick search form in the left
side of the page, or go directly to the
Advanced Course Search page.
Not all OCW sites are publishing courses in a
format compatible with our search index. To see the entire list of OCW
sites of members,
visit this directory.
For example, search on the term "accounting" without the quote marks at
http://ocwconsortium.org/courses/search You will get some false positives, but most are right on!
Accounting educators are not noted for being the most open sharing members of
the academy.
Hundreds of colleges have set up channels on YouTube
---
http://www.youtube.com/edu Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers over 500
Also just go to YouTube itself and search on the such words as "Intermediate
Accounting" or "XBRL" to find individual courses and tutorials.
This class introduces students to
the interdisciplinary nature of
21st-century engineering projects
with three threads of learning: a
technical toolkit, a social science
toolkit, and a methodology for
problem-based learning. Students
encounter the social, political,
economic, and technological
challenges of engineering practice
by participating in real engineering
projects with faculty and industry;
this semester's major project
focuses on the engineering and
economics of solar cells. Student
teams will create prototypes and
mixed media reports with exercises
in project planning, analysis,
design, optimization, demonstration,
reporting and team building.
1,400+ Open Sharing "Tutorials" On YouTube from a Harvard Business School
Graduate
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
The most popular educator on YouTube does not have
a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all
of his lectures from a bedroom closet.
This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit
his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture
videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way
to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online
phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed
educational system.
"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things
the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.
The resulting videos don't look or feel like
typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional
colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these
lectures are short—about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see
only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his
digital sketchpad software as he narrates.
The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of
whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a
PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views,
making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other
traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube's
education section.
Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan
Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches
every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006.
Now he records one to five lectures per day.
He started with subject matter he knows best—math
and engineering, which he studied as an undergraduate at MIT. But lately he
has added history lectures about the French Revolution and biology lectures
on "Embryonic Stem Cells" and "Introduction to Cellular Respiration."
If Mr. Khan is unfamiliar with a subject he wants
to teach, he gives himself a crash course first. In a recent talk he
explained how he prepared for his lecture on entropy: "I took two weeks off
and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and everyone I could
talk to and I said, Let's go have a glass of wine about entropy. After about
two weeks it clicked in my brain, and I said, now I'm willing to make a
video about entropy."
Some critics have blogged that this learn-as-you-go
approach is no way to run an educational project—and they worry that the
videos may contain errors or lead students astray.
But to Mr. Khan, occasional mistakes are part of
his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the
process better, he argues. Sometimes they correct him in comments on his
YouTube videos, and he says this makes students more engaged with the
material. "Sometimes when it's a little rough, it's going to be a better
product than when you overprepare," he says.
The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of
higher-education's most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make
the best teachers; that hourlong lectures are the best way to relate
material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Mr. Khan argues
that his little lectures disprove all of that.
Watching his videos highlights how little the Web
has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges
simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as
effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years
ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their
informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of
multimedia.
The Khan Academy raises the question: What if
colleges could be retooled with new technologies in mind?
College From Scratch Mr. Khan is not the only one
asking that question these days.
Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York
University and a popular Internet guru, recently challenged his more than
50,000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise:
"If you were going to create a college from
scratch, what would you do?"
Bursts of creativity quickly Twittered in, and Mr.
Shirky collected and organized the responses on a Web site. The resulting
visions are either dreams of an education future or nightmares, depending on
your viewpoint:
All students should be required to teach as well,
said @djstrouse. Limit tenure to eight years, argued @jakewk. Have every
high-school senior take a year before college to work in some kind of
service project away from his or her hometown, said @alicebarr. Some
Twittering brainstormers even named their fictional campuses. One was called
FailureCollege, where every grade is an F to desensitize students to failure
and encourage creativity. Another was dubbed LifeCollege, where only life
lessons are taught.
When I caught up with Mr. Shirky recently, he
described the overall tone of the responses as "bloody-minded." Did that
surprise him?
"I was surprised—by the range of responses, but
also partly by the heat of the responses," he said. "People were mad when
they think about the gap between what is possible and what happened in their
own educations."
Mr. Shirky declined to endorse any of the Twitter
models or to offer his prediction of how soon or how much colleges will
change. But he did argue that higher education is ripe for revolution.
For him the biggest question is not whether a new
high-tech model of higher education will emerge, but whether the alternative
will come from inside traditional higher education or from some new upstart.
Voting With Their Checkbooks Lately, several
prominent technology entrepreneurs have taken an interest in Mr. Khan's
model and have made generous contributions to the academy, which is now a
nonprofit entity.
Mr. Khan said that several people he had never met
have made $10,000 contributions. And last month, Ann and John Doerr,
well-known venture capitalists, gave $100,000, making it possible for Mr.
Khan to give himself a small salary for the academy so he can spend less of
his time doing consulting projects to pay his mortgage. Over all, he said,
he's collected about $150,000 in donations and makes $2,000 a month from ads
on his Web site.
I called up one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief
executive of 37signals, a hip business-services company, who recently gave
an undisclosed amount to Khan Academy, to find out what the attraction was.
"The next bubble to burst is higher education," he
said. "It's too expensive for people—there's no reason why parents should
have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that
there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching."
No one I talked to saw Khan Academy as an
alternative to traditional colleges (for one thing, it doesn't grant
degrees). When I called a couple of students who posted enthusiastic posts
to Facebook, they said they saw it as a helpful supplement to the classroom
experience.
Mr. Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into
a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding
self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have
watched certain videos and passed related tests. "This could be the DNA for
a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching
videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building
robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever," he said.
The Khan Academy is a concrete answer to Mr.
Shirky's challenge to create a school from scratch, and it's an example of
something new in the education landscape that wasn't possible before. And it
serves as a reminder to be less reverent about those long-held assumptions.
Khan Academy Home Page ---
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This site lists the course categories (none for accounting)
Although Khan Academy has many general education tutorials and quite a few
things in economics and finance, I could not find much on accounting. One
strength of the site seems to be in mathematics. There is also a category on
Valuation and Investing which might be useful for personal finance.
Sharing Professor of the Year
Susan V. Crosson at Santa Fe College is one of the most sharing professors in
all of accounting education.
Her extensive free videos are tremendous.
I would be very grateful if you would look at my
new website
http://auditeducation.info . The site contains
articles, cases, classroom exercises, videos and academic research related
to financial statement auditing. I’d appreciate suggestions for improving
the site and publicizing it.
Paul M. Clikeman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Accounting
Robins School of Business
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173
October 12, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
I welcome this exciting new site containing resources for auditing and
the history of auditing. It selectively links to some of the best articles
on an array of auditing topics, including auditing history.
http://auditeducation.info
With more than 250 lectures from some of the
world’s leading professors, The Teaching Company provides the opportunity to
learn from great teachers who are true experts in their fields. Bill offers
recommendations for some of the courses that he has enjoyed the most.
Great Lectures from The Teaching Company ---
http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?ID=24
The Teaching
Company is adding lectures at quite a fast rate. I used to be able to say I
had seen almost all of their science courses but they have added new offerings
faster than I can watch them in the past year.
I am watching
Thinking about Capitalism by Jerry Muller right now which is excellent but
mostly for people who want to know the history of economics. The genius of Adam
Smith was really unbelievable – he foresaw a lot of the things we still argue
about today.
I have not watched
Economics 3rd Edition by Timothy Taylor but he is such a good teacher I
might want to watch it.
In the science realm the best is probably
Physics in Your Life by Richard Wolfson. He explains everything very clearly
and his description of how semiconductor chips work is the best I have ever
seen.
Another great hard-core course is
Understanding the Universe by Alex Filippenko. It is a total of 48 hours and
is more in depth than most people need, but if you want to understand astronomy,
there is no better way to learn it.
There is a six hour course called
Earth’s Changing Climate, also by Richard Wolfson, that I recommend to
people who want to learn about the science of climate change.
In medicine there are two that I like a lot. One is
The Human Body: How We Fail, How We Heal by Anthony Goodman. He explains the
different diseases that people get and the progress we have made on how to treat
them. The other is
Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process by Francis Colavita. He takes
all the senses and explains how they work and how they change over time.
They have a category called
“High School.” I watched the
Chemistry course to see if my son would like it but it ended up being a good
review of the topic for me.
Our School paper is exploring how open
source textbooks might lower the costs for
students, and when they interviewed me, I
thought more broadly about how open source
communities support all of the members in
the community - and I considered whether the
AAACommons is actually the foundation for an
"open source" community of Accounting
Professors... what do you think? Would you
use an open source textbook? Write one?
More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/edu
Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers over 500
Hopefully other major graduate schools will follow the open sharing
"IDEALS" of the University of Illinois
"Electronic Deposit of Dissertations and Theses a Success!" Issues in
Scholarly Communication Blog at the University of Illinois, Vebruary 1, 2010
---
http://www.library.illinois.edu/blog/scholcomm/
Electronic Deposit of Dissertations
and Theses a Success!
As many of you know, the U of Illinois Graduate
College, in collaboration with
IDEALS,
offered optional Electronic Thesis and Dissertation
(ETD) deposit to the entire campus for December graduation. IDEALS
implemented a system called Vireo that was developed by the Texas Digital
Library to manage this process.
This pilot was a enormous success - of the 262
total deposits, 223 were through the ETD system - 85%!
Students had three access options:
- 62% chose to make their dissertation or thesis openly available
immediately;
- 22% chose to limit access to the University of Illinois for two years; and
- 16% chose to limit access completely for two years.
We're happy to announce that all electronic theses
and dissertations deposited during this period are available now in
IDEALS.
All ETD's (except those under a patent hold) can be found in the
Dissertations and Theses community within IDEALS:
http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/5131.
Due to electronic deposit we have been able to make
available the December deposits before the August and October deposits
(which are all in paper) have even been processed!
Each dissertation or thesis is also mapped to a
Department or College level collection. For example:
Within the next month or so, we will also be
releasing an update to
IDEALS
that will allow you to search by department or adviser
(or other committee member).
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Special thanks go to Tim Donohue, Bill Ingram, Nicholas Riley (our technical
GA), Steve McCauley (the IDEALS GA), Merinda Hensley, and, of course, our
colleagues at the Graduate College - Rebecca Bryant and Mark Zulauf - for
making this a smooth and straightforward process.
PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and
videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free
lectures online.
Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes
thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael
Sandel’s take on calculating happiness in a lecture called “How to Measure
Pleasure,” and a discussion by a Northeastern University professor, Nicholas
Daniloff, about the difficulties of reporting in Russia in a lecture called
“Of Spies and Spokesmen: The Challenge of Journalism in Russia.”
Lecture 1: Free to Choose / Who Owns Me?
About: Libertarians believe the ideal state is a
society with minimal governmental interference. Sandel introduces Robert
Nozick, a libertarian philosopher, who argues that individuals have the
fundamental right to choose how they want to live their own lives.
Government shouldn’t have the power to enact laws that protect people from
themselves (seat belt laws), to enact laws that force a moral value on
society, or enact laws that redistribute income from the rich to the poor.
Sandel uses the examples of Bill Gates and Michael Jordan to explain
Nozick’s theory that redistributive taxation is a form of forced labor.
Online Scholarship: Make a DASH for Harvard
Harvard's leadership in open access to scholarship took a
significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital
Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More
than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of
the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly
works in DASH.
Harvard University Library, September 1, 2009 ---
http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0901.html
In his work as a professor, Stephen Downes used to
feel that he was helping those who least needed it. His students at places
like the University of Alberta already had a leg up in life and could afford
the tuition.
So when a colleague suggested they co-teach an
online class in learning theory at the University of Manitoba, in 2008, Mr.
Downes welcomed the chance to expand that privileged club. The idea: Why not
invite the rest of world to join the 25 students who were taking the course
for credit?
Over 2,300 people showed up.
They didn't get credit, but they didn't get a bill,
either. In an experiment that could point to a more open future for
e-learning, Mr. Downes and George Siemens attracted about 1,200 noncredit
participants last year. They expect another big turnout the next class, in
January.
The Downes-Siemens course has become a landmark in
the small but growing push toward "open teaching." Universities such as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology have offered free educational
materials online for years, but the new breed of open teachers—at the
University of Florida, Brigham Young University, and the University of
Regina, among other places—is now giving away the learning experience, too.
"We have to get away from this whole idea that
universities own learning," says Alec V. Couros, who teaches his own open
class as an associate professor of education at Regina, in Saskatchewan.
"They own education in some sense. But they don't own learning."
Openness proponents contend that distance education
often isolates students behind password-protected gates. By unlatching those
barriers, professors like Mr. Couros are inventing a way of learning online
that feels less like a digital copy of face-to-face classes and more like
the open, social, connected Web of blogs, wikis, and Twitter. It can expose
students to a far broader network than they would encounter discussing their
lessons with a small group of graduate students.
Some open professors are finding, though, that
exposure brings its own challenges. Like disruptive jerks who inject
themselves into your class. Or a loss of privacy that some students find
jarring.
Still, the concept is spreading. The classes have
even spawned a new name: Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. In February,
Wendy K. Drexler, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida who
studied with Mr. Siemens and Mr. Downes, will help lead a new would-be MOOC
about technology and learning. Ms. Drexler calls their course, which she
took for credit as a high-school teacher, one of the most valuable learning
experiences of her life.
She found herself interacting mostly with
participants who weren't taking the course for credit. Corporate
instructional designers, other classroom teachers, consultants: The chance
to engage with so many different people on a focused topic, she says, was
"mind-boggling."
Openness vs. Control But the difficult questions
remain.
Start with privacy. How do professors protect
students who feel uncomfortable—or unsafe—communicating in a classroom on
the open Web? How do they deal with learning content that isn't licensed for
open use? What about informal students who want course credit?
And, most basically, if professors offer the masses
a chance to pull up a virtual seat in class, how do they make sure the crowd
behaves?
Dave Cormier, who co-taught a 700-person open class
with Mr. Siemens this year, says he shut off registration because a couple
of people had clearly signed up to spam students.
In the class taught by Mr. Downes, a research
officer at National Research Council Canada, and Mr. Siemens, a researcher
and strategist with the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at
Athabasca University, one woman joined simply to attack the concept of the
course, Mr. Downes recalls. She slammed the forum like a "one-woman posting
machine," accusing the teachers of being pretentious unqualified
technocommunists.
"The minute you open this up to anybody in the
world to participate, you are giving up a considerable amount of control—and
just going with the adventure," Ms. Drexler says. "Not everybody is
comfortable doing that."
The Students' View But she learned to love it. It's
a feeling shared by some other open-course alumni, both students and
professors, whose glowing descriptions can make these happenings sound like
digital Woodstocks for the educational-technology set.
Not that everything was revolutionary. As a
for-credit student, Ms. Drexler jumped through some of the usual hoops:
papers, final project, weekly readings (though those were posted openly on a
wiki). What was different was the radically decentralized, "kids in control"
environment.
Instead of restricting posts to a closed discussion
forum in a system like Blackboard, the class left students free to debate
anywhere. Some used Moodle, an open-source course-management system. Others
preferred blogs, Twitter, or Ning. In the virtual world Second Life,
students built two Spanish-language sites. Some even got together
face-to-face to discuss the material.
"This is a very different way to learn," Ms.
Drexler says. "I as a learner had to take responsibility. I had to take
control of that learning process way more than I've had to do in any
traditional type of course, whether it's face-to-face or online."
Instructors, for their part, curated rather than
dictated the discussion. Each day they e-mailed a newsletter highlighting
key points. While 2,300 people got the newsletter, a far smaller group,
perhaps 150, actively participated in the course. Only those taking the
course for credit had their work evaluated, although in smaller open courses
at least one faculty member has volunteered to grade work by nonpaying
students.
Much like the founders of Napster shredded the
notion of an album, allowing users to remix songs however they pleased, Mr.
Siemens is hacking the format of a class.
"It's a construct that is necessary in a physical
world," he says. "But it's not a construct that's necessary in a digital
world."
The course-hacking did have frustrating elements,
though. Users were flooding Moodle at first. More than 1,000 messages were
posted to the Introductions forum by 560 participants, according to one of
the multiple research papers that emerged from the course, "The Ideals and
Reality of Participating in a MOOC."
What's more, the course design "allowed for
disruptive trolling behavior in the forums to go unchecked," the researchers
found. "This made some participants feel 'unsafe' in the forums and caused
them to retreat to their blogs."
Future of Open Teaching The question is whether
open teaching has a future beyond early adapters. Distance educators who
haven't taken the plunge yet are interested, but also cautious.
Like many institutions, the University of
California at Irvine publishes free online learning materials, such as
lecture slides and syllabi. But Gary W. Matkin, dean of continuing
education, says he can see inviting outsiders to participate in an online
course only if they did so in a separate space.
Partly, he says, it's about student privacy. But
it's also about setting a learning context for paying students, meaning what
they see and how their education is structured. If instructors don't control
that context, he says, "they're in some sense abdicating their
responsibilities to their own students."
Social Networking for Education: The Beautiful and
the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses
of Twitter)
Updates will be at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Last week, the American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members
calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely
claiming that we work to undermine copyright.*
Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses –
plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can use
to offer certain usage rights to the public, while reserving other rights.
Without copyright, these tools don’t work. Artists and record labels that
want to make their music available to the public for certain uses, like
noncommercial sharing or remixing, should consider using CC licenses.
Artists and labels that want to reserve all of their copyright rights should
absolutely not use CC licenses.
Many musicians, including acts like
Nine Inch Nails,
Beastie Boys,
Youssou N’Dour,
Tone,
Curt Smith,
David Byrne,
Radiohead,
Yunyu,
Kristin Hersh, and
Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to
share with the public. These musicians aren’t looking to stop making money
from their music. In fact, many of the artists who use CC licenses are also
members of collecting societies, including ASCAP. That’s how we first heard
about this smear campaign – many musicians that support Creative Commons
received the email and forwarded it to us. Some of them even included a
donation to Creative Commons.
If you are similarly angered by ASCAP’s deceptive
tactics, I’m hoping that you can help us by
donating to Creative Commons – and sending a
message – at this critical time. We don’t have lobbyists on the payroll, but
with your support we can continue working hard on behalf of creators and
consumers alike.
Sincerely,
Eric Steuer
Creative Director, Creative Commons
Logan Stark's classmates scramble for courses with
professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California
Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the
San Luis Obispo campus, he didn't need to sweat getting the best.
It was practically guaranteed.
That's because much of the class was built by
national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It's a hybrid of online
and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at
midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated
cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and
software engineers.
By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture
hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest
lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they
need the most help.
Mr. Stark's class is one of about 300 around the
world to use online course material—both the content and the software that
delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning
Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar
online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping
community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a
free library available to colleges nationwide.
The administration has released only vague
statements about the plan. But Chronicle interviews with a senior Education
Department official and others whose ideas have informed the emerging policy
suggest how colleges might use these courses—and how Carnegie Mellon,
repeatedly cited by officials, might offer a model for the effort.
The government would pay to develop these "open"
classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls
at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway
popularized by the OpenCourseWare project's free publication of 1,900
courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide
have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about
$10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says
Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.
The result is a "huge population of students," he
says, "that aren't being served."
Experts see huge potential in serving those
students with open courses: To help them explore careers. To give them
confidence before returning to school. To improve retention once they get
there. To lower the cost of a degree. To spur alternative ways of awarding
credit. And to guarantee standards "whether you are in a more impoverished,
underserved, or remote area of the country," says Curtis J. Bonk, a
professor in the department of instructional- systems technology at Indiana
University and author of the new book The World is Open.
The plan coincides with Mr. Obama's goal for the
United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the
world by 2020. But Marshall S. (Mike) Smith, senior counselor to Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan, feels that won't happen simply by moving middle-
and high-school students further through the system. Higher education also
needs to rope in older students who never went beyond high school, or who
abandoned college before finishing a degree, he says.
"The opportunity to attract those people would be
greatly enhanced by having a bunch of really good courses that they could
work on in the evenings," Mr. Smith says, so they could "try out the idea of
getting course credit for them—and get hooked."
Mr. Smith, a veteran of the Clinton- and Carter-era
Education Departments, is an open-education evangelist who recently returned
to government after serving as education-program director for the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The California foundation has funneled more
than $80-million into making digital resources like textbooks and lecture
videos freely available on the Web.
Mr. Smith has bigger ambitions still. In January he
published an article in the journal Science laying out the dream of "a
21st-century library" composed of Web-based open courses for high-school and
college students. The courses would be laced with multimedia features and
personalized with feedback from computer programs that track student
performance. The language coming out of the White House and Education
Department today echoes some of the concepts in Mr. Smith's article.
But his article also stacked up the challenges and
mixed incentives that the controversial free-knowledge movement must
surmount.
Working against open access are "financial
concerns, authors' fears of exposing mediocre content, the weight of
traditional practice, and legitimate reasons for protecting intellectual
property," he wrote. "Some publishers and professional academic
organizations believe they have a lot to lose" as open educational resources
grow more popular.
In an hourlong interview with The Chronicle, Mr.
Smith focused on many of the details facing the administration as it tries
to create an open-course clearinghouse and navigates delicate,
still-unanswered questions about what role the government would play in
financing and disseminating its contents.
One big question: Who would get the money?
A possible answer, which is not specified in a
House of Representatives bill that includes the online proposal, could be an
outside laboratory-and-research organization that would receive a block of
government money and parcel it out into competitive grants for course
development, and then make sure the courses were updated. A community
college could house the project, Mr. Smith says. So could a consortium of
community colleges, a university, or a nongovernmental group.
The courses created would reach students through
multiple devices, such as computers, handheld devices, and e-book readers
like Kindles. They would be modular, and therefore easily updated. Both
nonprofit and for-profit entities could compete for the money to build them.
"New Carnegie Mellon U. Project Will Build Online Community-College
Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
Carnegie Mellon University is expanding its open
online-learning efforts with
a new project focused on community colleges.
The Community College Open Learning Initiative is
the second wave of an educational experiment that
gained attention recently from the Obama administration.
Carnegie Mellon's work has given about 300 classrooms
around the world access to software-enhanced, college-level online-course
material in subjects like biology and statistics. These digital environments
track students’ progress, give them feedback, and tip off professors about
where students are struggling so the instructors can make better use of
class time.
Now Carnegie Mellon plans to work with a consortium
of community colleges to set up four "high gatekeeper" courses, defined as
classes that have poor success rates but are important to getting degrees.
The goal is to raise completion rates by 25 percent in those courses. The
courses will be team-designed by community-college faculty experts,
scientists who study how people learn, human-computer-interaction
specialists, and software engineers.
Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning
Initiative, said the community-college project had secured $4.5-million.
Multiple foundations are backing the effort, but Ms. Thille declined to
identify all of them. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has supported
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative since 2002.
When the Open Learning Initiative began, the idea
was to offer students outside Carnegie Mellon online courses that gave them
a shot at learning the same information a traditional course would convey,
but without an instructor. Researchers have also studied a hybrid mode,
meaning online teaching combined with some classroom time, though less than
in a traditional course. Results showed that students in the hybrid course
"successfully learned as much material in half the time," according to an
overview of the Community College Open Learning Initiative proposal that was
provided to The Chronicle.
The community-college project intends to use the
hybrid style.
Because of work and family responsibilities,
community-college students' schedules are often less flexible than those of
students in residential four-year colleges, Ms. Thille said. Blended
learning gives community-college students more flexibility, she said, and it
has the potential to keep them in classes they might otherwise have to drop
"because life got in the way."
The new project involves partnerships with a
variety of associations and state systems in North Carolina, West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Washington. The proposal calls for reaching 40
community-college partners within three years.
YouTube Video Lectures for Your Very Own to Keep and to
Hold and to Love
Note that most of these are entire courses!
YouTube began testing a new feature that
lets
users download videos posted to the site from
partner institutions — including colleges — rather than just watching the
videos in a streaming format. That means people can grab lectures from Duke
and Stanford Universities and several institutions in the University of
California system to watch any time, with or without an Internet connection.
YouTube partners have the option of charging users
for such downloads, but all the universities have offered to make their
lecture videos free instead, using
Creative Commons licenses that restrict usage to
non-commercial purposes and prohibit derivative work.
Some universities already allow users to download
lectures through campus Web sites or through Apple’s iTunesU using Creative
Commons licenses. But Obadiah Greenberg, a strategic-partner manager at
YouTube, said in an interview this week that the site’s new feature would
allow an even larger audience to take advantage of such content.
Scott Stocker, director of Web communications for
Stanford, said the university had made audio and video content available for
download through Apple’s iTunesU since 2007. But Mr. Stocker said that
iTunesU and YouTube attract different audiences: Users of iTunesU generally
search out content to download to their devices, while YouTube users stumble
upon content through videos embedded on blogs or links shared among friends.
Mr. Stocker said Stanford had no plans to charge
money for its video downloads, since the university sees giving away
lectures as part of its educational mission.
Other YouTube partners participating in the test
include a weekly Web
show hosted by Dan Brown of Lincoln, Neb., and
Khan Academy, a
non-profit organization that offers video lectures on subjects like physics
and finance for 99 cents per download.
We are always looking for ways to
make it easier for you to find, watch, and share videos. Many of you have
told us that you wanted to take your favorite videos offline. So we've
started working with a few partners who want their videos shared universally
and even enjoyed away from an Internet connection.
Many video creators on YouTube want their work to be seen far and wide. They
don't mind sharing their work, provided that they get the proper credit.
Using
Creative Commons licenses, we're giving our
partners and community more choices to make that happen. Creative Commons
licenses permit people to reuse downloaded content under certain conditions.
We're also testing an option that gives video owners the ability to permit
downloading of their videos from YouTube. Partners could choose to offer
their video downloads for free or for a small fee paid through
Google Checkout. Partners can set prices and
decide which license they want to attach to the downloaded video files (for
more info on the types of licenses, take a look
here).
For example, universities use YouTube to share lectures and research with an
ever-expanding audience. In an effort to promote the sharing of information,
we are testing free downloads of YouTube videos from
Stanford,
Duke,
UC Berkeley,
UCLA, and
UCTV(broadcasting programs from throughout
the UC system). YouTube users who are traveling or teachers who want to show
these videos in classrooms with limited or no connectivity should find this
particularly useful.
A small number of other YouTube partners, including
khanacademy,
householdhacker and
pogobat, are also participating in this test
as an additional distribution and revenue-generating tool.
So how do these downloads work? The video watch pages of the participating
partners link to the download option below the left-hand corner of the
video. To help you keep track of the videos you have previously purchased,
we have created a new
"My Purchases" tab
under "My Videos."
If you are a partner who is interested in participating, you can find out
more about the test and enter your information
here.
Please do share your feedback with us by joining the discussion
here.
The university has drawn from departments and
programs across campus and uploaded videos of classes, faculty interviews,
panel discussions, seminars and other events in order to showcase the
breadth and caliber of academic offerings at Stanford. By launching a
channel on YouTube—the leading online video community that allows people to
discover, watch and share originally created videos—the university is
building upon its efforts to provide online access to free educational
content for the Stanford community and greater public.
Other universities (notably UC Berkeley) beat Stanford to YouTube. You can
find the links to many of them by scrolling down this document you are now
reading.
How a Student Laid Up With a Broken Back Learned From Free Open Sharing
Ivy League Courses
The big issue is how to get transcript credit for his
accomplishments?
The Year 1858
When the University of London instituted
correspondence courses in 1858, the first university to do so, its students
(typically expatriates in what were then the colonies of Australia, Canada,
India, New Zealand, and South Africa), discovered the programme by word of
mouth and wrote the university to enrol. the university then despatched, by
post-and-boat, what today we would call the course outline, a set of
previous examination papers and a list of places around the world where
examinations were conducted. It left any "learning" to the
hapless student, who
sat the examination whenever he or she felt ready: a truly "flexible"
schedule! this was the first generation of distance education (Tabsall and
Ryan, 1999): "independent" learning for highly motivated and resourceful
autodidacts disadvantaged by distance.
(Page 71)
Yoni Ryan who wrote Chapter 5 of The Changing Faces of Virtual
Education ---
http://www.col.org/virtualed/
Dr. Glen Farrell, Study Team Leader and Editor
The Commonwealth of Learning
Of course students paid for correspondence courses and they got credit (often
they took exams proctored by the village vicar. In days of old, the University
of Chicago granted credit via onsite examination --- students did not have to
attend courses but had to pay for college degrees earned via examinations. In
modern times we usually insist that even online students do more for course
credits than merely passing examinations. Examples of other work that's graded
include term papers and team projects. which, of course, can be required of
online students in addition to examinations that might be administered at test
sites like Sylvan testing sites or community colleges that administer
examinations for major universities.
In modern times, countless courses are available online, often from very
prestigious universities for credit for students admitted to online programs.
Courses from prestigious universities are also free to anybody in the world, but
these almost never award degree credits since examinations and projects are not
administered and graded. For links to many of the prestigious university course
materials, videos lectures, and complete courses go to
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
One Business Model from Harvard
The Harvard Business School has a basic accounting course that can be purchased
and administered online by other colleges. Of course the credits granted are
from College X and not Harvard such that College X must provide instructors for
coordinating the course and administering the examinations and projects.
Financial Accounting: An Introductory Online Course by David F. Hawkins, Paul M.
Healy, Michael Sartor Publication date: Nov 04, 2005. Prod. #: 105708-HTM-ENG
http://harvardbusiness.org/product/financial-accounting-an-introductory-online-course/an/105708-HTM-ENG?Ntt=Basic+Accounting
He was on a hang glider, and he slammed the ground
hard on his chin. Recovery from surgery on his broken back left the
39-year-old high-school dropout with time for college courses.
From a recliner, the drugged-up crash victim tried
to keep his brain from turning to mush by watching a free
introductory-biology course put online by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Hooked, he moved on to lectures about Cormac McCarthy's novel
Blood Meridian from an English course at Yale. Then he bought Paradise Lost.
A success for college-made free online
courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment
company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those
classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college
credential.
"Do I put that I got a 343 out of 350 on my GED
test at age 16?" he says, throwing up his hands. "I have nothing else to
put."
Related ContentCountries Offer Different Takes to
Open Online Learning Students Find Free Online Lectures Better Than What
They're Paying For Table: How 4 Colleges Support Free Online Courses Video:
A Family Man Dabbles in Ivy-League Learning Enlarge Photo Stan Godlewski At
Yale U., technicians record John Geanakoplos, a professor of economics,
giving a lecture that will be available free online. Stan Godlewski At Yale
U., technicians record John Geanakoplos, a professor of economics, giving a
lecture that will be available free online. Enlarge Photo John Zeedick
Steven Ziegler cooking dinner at home with his family. John Zeedick Steven
Ziegler cooking dinner at home with his family. Colleges, too, are grappling
with the limits of this global online movement. Enthusiasts think open
courses have the potential to uplift a nation of Zieglers by helping them
piece together cheaper degrees from multiple institutions. But some worry
that universities' projects may stall, because the recession and
disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult
question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your
"free" content?
"With the economic downturn, I think it will be a
couple of years before Yale or other institutions are likely to be able to
make substantial investments in building out a digital course catalog," says
Linda K. Lorimer, vice president and secretary at Yale, which is publishing
a 36-class, greatest-hits-style video set called Open Yale Courses. Over the
long term, she argues, such work will flourish.
Maybe. But Utah State University recently
mothballed its OpenCourseWare venture after running out of money from the
state and from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has financed
much of the open-content movement. Utah State had published a mix of lecture
notes, syllabi, audio and video recordings from more than 80 courses, a
collection thought to be the country's second-largest behind the pioneering,
1,940-class MIT OpenCourseWare project. The program needed only $120,000 a
year to survive. But the economy was so bad that neither the university nor
the state Legislature would pony up more money for a project whose mission
basically amounted to blessing the globe with free course materials.
'Dead by 2012' More free programs may run aground.
So argues David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man, who set up the Utah
venture and is now an associate professor of instructional psychology and
technology at Brigham Young University. A newspaper once likened him to
Nostradamus for claiming that universities risked irrelevance by 2020. The
education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW
initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit,"
he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."
In other words: Nice knowing you, MIT
OpenCourseWare. So long, Open Yale Courses.
"I think the economics of open courseware the way
we've been doing it for the last almost decade have been sort of wrong," Mr.
Wiley tells The Chronicle. Projects aimed for "the world," not
bread-and-butter clientele like alumni and students. "Because it's not
connected to any of our core constituencies, those programs haven't been
funded with core funding. And so, in a climate where the economy gets bad
and foundation funding slows, then that's a critical juncture for the
movement."
Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director of
MIT's OpenCourseWare, chuckles at the 2012 prediction and chides Mr. Wiley
as someone who "specializes in provocative statements." But ventures around
the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's
fund raising ŕ la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to
core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.
For elite universities, the sustainability struggle
points to a paradox of opening access. If they do grant credentials, perhaps
even a certificate, could that dilute their brands?
"Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some
as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see
what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for
risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core
undergraduate courses," says Roger C. Schonfeld, research manager at Ithaka
S+R, a nonprofit group focused on technology in higher education that is
studying online courseware.
The answer may be that elites won't have to. Others
can.
Ever since MIT made its curriculum freely available
online, its philanthropic feat has become a global trend. Colleges compete
to add new classes to the Web's ever-growing free catalog. The result is a
world where content and credentials no longer need to come from the same
source. A freshman at Podunk U. can study with the world's top professors on
YouTube. And within the emerging megalibrary of videos and syllabi and
multimedia classes—a library of perhaps 10,000 courses—proponents see the
building blocks of cheaper college options for self-teachers like Mr.
Ziegler.
The Great Unbundling How? When open-education
advocates like MIT's Mr. Carson peer into their crystal balls, the images
they see often hinge on one idea: the unbundling of higher education.
The Great Higher Education Unbundling notion is
over a decade old. It's picked up buzz lately, though, as media commentators
compare the Internet's threat to college "conglomerates" with the way Web
sites like Craigslist clawed apart the traditional functions of newspapers.
Now take a university like MIT, where students pay
about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning
experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped
off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr.
Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will
emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's
Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia
courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no
professor required.
"And then, ultimately, I think there will be
increasing opportunities in the digital space for certification as well,"
Mr. Carson says. "And that those three things will be able to be flexibly
combined by savvy learners, to achieve their educational goals at relatively
low cost."
And social life? Don't we need college to tailgate
and mate?
"Social life we'll just forget about because
there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go
to university to have a social life anymore."
Genre-Benders If the paragraphs you just read
triggered an it'll-never-happen snort, take a look at what futurists like
Mr. Wiley are trying—today—on the margins of academe.
In August a global group of graduate students and
professors went live with an online book-club-like experiment that layers
the flesh of human contact on the bones of free content. At Peer 2 Peer
University, course organizers act more like party hosts than traditional
professors. Students are expected to essentially teach one another, and
themselves.
In September a separate institution started that
also exploits free online materials and peer teaching. At University of the
People, 179 first-term freshmen are already taking part in a project that
bills itself as the world's first nonprofit, tuition-free, online
university.
These Harvard Business School videos are not free online, but it may be
possible to download them free from your campus library. This is how students
and faculty at Trinity University download these HBS videos:
December 23, 2009 message from Chris Nolan (Trinity University Reference
Librarian)
“Business Source Complete from EBSCO now includes a
business video collection with 55 videos from the Harvard Business School
Faculty Seminar Series. The series features engaging video lectures from
renowned professors and experts at the Harvard Business School. All lectures
are captured from executive education programs, and offer groundbreaking
ideas, insightful research, and practical advice on management issues. The
videos contain a table of contents allowing the selection of a specific
topic. Most lectures provide a transcript in PDF format.”
One can search for the videos in the Business
Source Complete database, but I've constructed a search link that will take
you directly to the videos:
http://tinyurl.com/EBSCOhbsvideos . Since these videos are part of our
paid subscription, they may be used in class, linked on course pages, etc.
Chris
Exercising Imagination with Professor Mike Kearl Sociology Professor Mike Kearl at Trinity University was an early pioneer in
academic Website quality and content. Each year the site gets better and better.
It is one of the most popular academic sites in the world --- http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/
Thirty years
ago columnist Lewis Lapham made the following observation:
There no longer
exists a theater of ideas in which artists or philosophers can perform
the acts of the intellectual or moral imagination. In nineteenth-century
England Charles Darwin could expect On The Origin of Species to
be read by Charles Dickens as well as by Disraeli and the vicar in the
shires who collected flies and water beetles. Dickens and Disraeli and
the vicar could assume that Mr. Darwin might chance to read their own
observations. But in the United States in 1979 what novelist can expect
his work to be read by a biochemist, a Presidential candidate, or a
director of corporations; what physicist can expect his work to be
noticed, much less understood, in the New York literary salons? ("A
Juggernaut of Words," Harper's Magazine, June 1979: pp. 12-13).
Conditions have
hardly improved three decades later. Now in the supposed "Information Age"
six out of ten American households do not purchase a single book and
one-half of American adults do not read one. Forty-three years ago in 1965
when the Gallup
Organization asked young people if they read a
daily newspaper, 67 percent said yes; in 2006, according to the
NORC
General Social Survey, only 11 percent of those
18-24 answered affirmatively. And yet "they" say we are saturated with
informational overload!
I am most
interested in the potential of this cyberspace medium to inform and to
generate discourse, to enhance
information literacy, and to truly be a "theater
of ideas." This site features commentary, data analyses (hey, we've become a
"factoid" culture), occasional essays, as well as the requisite links, put
together for courses taught by myself and my colleagues.
If you do give feedback on one of the message pads
scattered across these pages and wish a reply, please include your e-mail
address.
A New (free) Famous Professor Lecture Video Site: But Is it Legal?
The free videos are at
http://www.academicearth.org/ Note that it is not a .com site.
A new
company called Academic Earth
offers free online videos of lectures from
some of the world’s most renowned scholars teaching at leading
universities. The company has simply grabbed the videos off the
universities’ own Web sites and plans to offer tools to students
who want to talk about the content — along with a chance to
grade the quality of the lectures.
Richard Ludlow, the
company’s CEO and founder, said in an
interview today that it is allowed to republish the videos
because they were released by the universities under Creative
Commons licenses. Those licenses allow outside entities, even
for-profit ones, to reuse the materials, provided that those
entities do not use the materials for commercial purposes. Mr.
Ludlow says that his company will not place any advertising on
Web pages that contain university videos, though he hopes to
expand the site in the future to include sections where videos
from other sources are shown with advertising.
“Our business
model is that we’re not going to make a dime off of any of the
Creative Commons materials — we’re very respectful of the
licenses,” said Mr. Ludlow. “As we integrate commercial content,
then on those pages we’ll be offering commercials.”
The Academic
Earth site notes that it features lectures from Harvard,
Princeton, Stanford, and Yale Universities, as well as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of
California at Berkeley. The company has no connection to the
universities, however. Mr. Ludlow does plan to meet this week
with officials from MIT to talk about
its plans.
How do the
universities feel about the company republishing their lectures?
“I haven’t
looked at his example enough to give you a definite answer,”
said Steve Carson, external relations director for
MIT’s Opencourseware project, which
publishes free materials from the institute’s courses, including
complete videos from some 30 courses. “It might be OK—as long as
the use adheres to the terms and conditions on our site, we
encourage the material to be redistributed for educational
purposes.” He said the company was “doing the right thing” by
reaching out to MIT and meeting with
university officials about the company’s services.
“Our focus is
on being a content distributor,” said Mr. Carson. “They’re
putting interactive services around it — it could be very
complementary to what we’re doing.”
Gila
Reinstein, a spokesperson for Yale, said, “It’s not OK to do
anything for profit with the materials.” She said that she had
not heard of Academic Earth but that she would check with the
university’s lawyers about the site. “If it’s nonprofit, we’re
thrilled,” she said. “If it’s meant to be something else, we
probably will not be happy.”
Mr. Ludlow
points out that some of the colleges and universities use more
open Creative Commons licenses than others.
MIT and Yale allow “derivative use” of their content,
meaning that the company can cut the lectures into various
sections, based on topics, he said. Berkeley does not allow such
derivative use, nor does Stanford for some of its courses, he
added.
So far the
site’s main service, other than bringing together lectures from
various universities, is to let visitors rate the lectures,
giving them a letter grade from A to F. When the company first
posted the lectures to its site a few months ago, the grades
were all set to a default of B. Some quickly moved to A-plus
grades, while one Harvard lecture got an F-plus.
The above article is followed by an interesting list of comments:
My first
question is, where is the Creative Commons license on
Academic Earth’s site? One of the terms on the CC licenses
used by many of the university sites (e.g.,
MIT’s Opencourseware) is that
those who create derivative works “share alike.” Couldn’t
the Academic Earth site as a whole be seen as a derivative
work?
— R. Davis
Feb 2, 06:34 PM
I am not a
lawyer, but I do not believe that Mr. Ludlow understands
what is meant by “commercial use.” He is running a
for-profit business, therefore his use is commercial and it
violates the Creative Commons Licesnse that has this
exclusion.
— Ron Heasley
Feb 2, 06:50 PM
Hi R. Davis
– The license for each lecture appears on the page for that
lecture, and license for full courses appear on the course
page. Check out any video on the site and you’ll see the
license below a link to the video’s creator. This appears to
the right of the video title and professor name.
— Richard
Ludlow Feb 2, 06:55 PM
Interesting… the grades seem like they’ll help highlight the
best content. I haven’t seen that on other
OCW sites.
— K. Thacker
Feb 2, 07:09 PM
Since the
lectures themselves are presented without advertisement,
doesn’t that fully adhere to the Creative Commons License?
Also, since the
videos are being used solely for educational purposes,
doesn’t that completely fall in line with the goals of the
educational institutions?
— Joseph Dooley
Feb 2, 07:16 PM
i was
unable to find any of these advertisements or commercial
activity, so i can’t comment on the legal implications, but
i do hope this site stays up because it seems like a great
educational resource for those who can’t afford a
$40,000/year tuition bill.
— Aaron Feb
2, 07:22 PM
I think
it’s important to emphasize the fact that this website is
delivering high quality educational content for free, and
it’s extremely user friendly.
The simple
format and centralized approach is particularly important in
that it makes the material far more accessible for the vast
majority of people who do not know that it exists on
university sites.
In essence,
by trying to appeal to a broad audience, the site has the
potential to deliver really crucial educational content to
people who wouldn’t be able to access it otherwise.
Rather than
needing to search around multiple university websites to
find the content that I’m looking for, I can go to Academic
Earth and get all the material in one place, easily
searchable, etc.
I think it’s
a pretty damn cool project.
— Jerry G.
Feb 2, 07:35 PM
Their
business model is on shaky ground if its foundation is based
on twisting the spirit of Creative Commons licensing.
I appreciate
what the founders are trying to do, but they really need to
work on that before they can expect instructors and
institutions to seriously consider using their service.
— Jacob
Richards Feb 2, 07:35 PM
What I find
amusing is that if Academic Earth is a “for-profit” entity,
why are they using the .org extension? In bigger terms, I
think it’s ludicrous that Mr. Ludlow feels he can profit off
of Creative Commons content. Doubt he’ll be in business very
long.
— Kory Feb
2, 11:04 PM
This
strikes me as potentially problematic from the faculty
perspective, as well as the general CC issues mentioned
above. It is one thing to agree to have your content sent
out to the world within the context of your university’s
distribution system. It is another to have it aggregated by
a third party for profit—even if the profits are only
through indirect means. I wonder what kinds of permissions
the institutions actually got from the instructors, and
whether they’ll be surprised by this development. Granted
that the university retains some sense of “ownership” over
instances of faculty speech that occur as lectures, and so
therefore feels justified in this type of sharing as a
community service; however, I suspect the faculty and
institutions alike will feel the ground has shifted beneath
them once again with this new profit wrinkle. If somebody is
going to profit from these lectures, why not the faculty
themselves? Or the institutions? Can a licensing scheme be
far behind?
— VS Feb 2,
11:30 PM
YouTube and
iTunes also share Creative Commons content, and they are
clearly part of for-profit organizations. Should we be angry
at them too? Or are they examples of how you can share some
content commercially and other non-commercially?
From the look
at this beta site, it appears that Mr. Ludlow has the
potential to bring the OCW
movement to a much larger mainstream audience.
— G. Wilson
Feb 2, 11:39 PM
PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and
books by academic philosophers. We monitor journals in many areas of philosophy, as
well as archives and personal pages. We also accept articles directly from
users, who can provide links or upload copies. Some features require that you
sign in first, but creating an account is easy and free --- http://philpapers.org/
Jensen Comment
Some of the submissions to this site are not available elsewhere. Chronicle of Higher Education review on June 2, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3803&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
This site puts the talents and knowledge
of philosophers at the service of the general public. Send in a
question that you think might be related to philosophy and we
will do our best to respond to it. To date, there have been 1375
questions posted and 1834 responses.
Community College Open-Textbook Project Gets Under Way
Especially note the open sharing sources being used
The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a
member meeting in California," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher
Education, April 29, 2008 ---
Click Here
At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will
start reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility,
and sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review
four providers of free online educational resources:
Connexions, run by
Rice University;
Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will
begin
offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California’s
UC College Prep Online,
which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the
Community
College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by
the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for
Innovation in the Community College.
The open-textbook project was paid for by a $530,000 grant to the Foothill-De
Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
It appears that David Wiley’s move to
Brigham Young University has already resulted in progress
towards opening the university’s content. Long-time pioneer and
academic of open education, Wiley
reports that
BYU’s Independent Study has launched
its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with six Creative Commons
licensed courses under
CC BY NC-SA.
“The pilot includes three
university-level courses and three high school-level courses
(BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for
credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for
credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete -
that is, they are the full courses as delivered online
without the need of additional textbooks or other materials
(only graded assessments have been removed).”
The most interesting thing about this
pilot is that it “is part of a dissertation study to measure the
impact of OCW courses on paying enrollments.” So far, “the
results are very positive - 85 of the 3500 people who visited
the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses… if
this pattern remains stable, then BYU IS OCW will be financially
self-sustainable with the ability to add and update a number of
new courses to the collection each year, indefinitely, should
they so choose.” Echoing Wiley, that is an exciting prospect. We
look forward to seeing these results develop, in addition to
other inquiries into the sustainability of general OER
initiatives in the future…
You may view, use, and reuse all materials in the Open
CourseWare courses. Please note that Open CourseWare courses do
not provide the opportunity to submit assessments for credit,
interact with faculty, or receive credit or a certificate upon
completion. BYU Independent Study provides these courses as a
community service under a Creative Commons license. The course
materials are freely available for you to use, download, modify
and share as long as you do not sell the products you derive
from them. If you alter, transform, or build upon the courses,
you may distribute your work only using licensing terms the same
as or similar to the
Creative Commons Atribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.
The University of Kansas Versus the Publishers of Expensive Research
Journals The
University of Kansas is becoming the first public
university -- following moves by all or parts of institutions such as Harvard
and Stanford Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- to
make all faculty journal articles available free in digital form. Chancellor
Robert Hemenway proposed the policy, which was endorsed by the Faculty Senate.
The articles will be placed in KU ScholarWorks, a digital repository. Open
access advocates see the creation of such repositories as a way to spread
knowledge at a time that many journal subscriptions are too expensive for many
academic institutions or individuals. Inside Higher Ed, June 29, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/29/qt#202186
Jensen Comment
If you look under the index for accounting or business, go to
"School of Business." I found the database to be quite deficient in
published accounting research papers by members of the University of
Kansas accounting faculty. It does not, for example, contain
Accounting Review publications of Michael Ettredge. I suspect it
will be better with working papers before they are published than it
is with copyrighted articles after publication.
This incoming open-sharing tide really puts pressure on universities that
sponsor expensive research journals!
And what will
SSRN do if the research is open shared by the authors' own universities?
Will SSRN develop a two-tier pricing system where open access research papers
are free but not those from universities that have not yet signed on to open
access? Open-access advocates predicted that the
movelast February by Harvard University’s Faculty
of Arts and Sciences and, later, by
its Law School to require
free online access to all faculty members’ scholarly articles would prompt other
universities to adopt similar policies. The movement has not exactly snowballed,
but another institution did just join in.Last week Stanford University’s
School of Education revealed that it would require
faculty members to allow the university to place their published articles in a
free online database.The school’s faculty passed a
motion unanimously — just as Harvard’s two
faculties had — on June 10. A faculty member and open-access advocate,
John Willinsky,made the policy public last week at
the
International Conference on Electronic Publishing,
in Toronto. A
videoof his presentation is available.
Lila Guterman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2008 ---
http://snipurl.com/stanfordopenshare [chronicle_com]
The real test of open access in accounting will be what happens with the
Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) if the University of Chicago signs on
to this trend of open access.
Still a tougher test will be the leading journal policy (like that of The
Accounting Review) that articles that it charges for in print and
electronically "must not be published elsewhere."
Are we eventually going to get free access to research of leading accounting
research journals because of this open-sharing tide in leading research
universities?
Note that the Harvard Business School has not, to my knowledge, bought into
the open sharing declarations of its sister Faculty of Arts and Sciences and
brother at the Harvard Law School. Could it be because of the profitability of
the Harvard Business Review current issues and archives?
Distance Education.org or DistanceEducation.Org is a Great Helper Site
Ben Pheiffer in San Antonio forwarded this link to a terrific listing (with
pricing estimates) of online training and education degree programs and courses
from respectable universities ---
http://www.distance-education.org/Courses/
Both graduate and undergraduate degree programs are listed
as well as training courses (some free).
Although youtube has a huge "market share", the
quality of videos are degraded by the compression techniques that they use.
Below is a link to a demo of another, better-quality site.
Thank you for the Viddler link. I looked into this a bit and discovered
that Viddler is more for the short home movies. As you know as well or
better than me, video file compression is essential to making online video
work well, especially since online video is beginning to clog the Internet.
If I were an Internet czar I would ban uncompressed video.
Internet Gridlock Video is clogging the Internet Video downloads are sucking up bandwidth at an
unprecedented rate. A short magazine article might take six minutes to read
online. Watching "The Evolution of Dance" also takes six minutes--but it
requires you to download 100 times as much data. "The Evolution of Dance"
alone has sent the equivalent of 250,000 DVDs' worth of data across the
Internet.
"Internet Gridlock Video is clogging the Internet.: How we choose to unclog
it will have far-reaching implications," by Larry Hardesty, MIT's
Technology Review, July/August 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20919/?nlid=1172&a=f
Uncompressed Viddler videos only run for
a max of about a minute. This makes Viddler unsuitable for training and
education tutorials and full lectures relative to YouTube where videos in mpg compression
can run up to ten minutes each video we upload. YouTube also lets colleges
put up entire lectures from universities. For example, one of UC Berkeley's
YouTube lectures in physics that runs 1.25 hours is at
http://snipurl.com/ucp01
[www_youtube_com]
It would be absurd to put entire courses or even longer tutorials up in
uncompressed video. Compression of a video can save upwards of 90% of the
file space required for storage and uploading and downloading ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HelpersVideos.htm#Video
File size is limited on Viddler to 500 Mb in contrast to YouTube’s one Gb
limit (usually uploaded in mpg compression) which gives about 10 minutes of
viewing at 640 x 480 resolution on YouTube for the general public. UC.
Universities like UC Berkeley that put lots of free courses on YouTube must
be making special arrangements to have file sizes of 10 GB or more per
lesson.
The allowed video time on Viddler is just not good for tutorials. By way
of illustration, compare the following tutorials in math and especially
compare the image quality versus the running time versus the loading time:
You can view YouTube videos in full screen mode using one button on the
bottom left. Viddler videos can also be viewed in full screen by first
clicking on the menu button on the bottom left and then choosing the full
screen option
The only way to increase the
intellectual property value of your identity is to give it away. "Face Value," by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed, February
18, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/18/fister
Here’s the
interesting paradox: The only way to increase the
intellectual property value of your identity is to give it
away. That’s the only way it can be shared, linked to and
recognized by others. Trading a little personal information
for a public platform, whether for personal expression or
self-promotion (or both), seems a fair exchange.
Does this sound
eerily familiar? It should.
As
scholars, our ideas gain value as we make them public, and
we have been historically myopic about the consequences of
trading the rights to our ideas for access to distribution
channels. This unexamined practice put us all over a barrel
when publishers required the academy to ransom those ideas
back through prohibitively expensive journal subscriptions
for libraries. The personal advancement attached to making
our ideas public only added to the problem;
more publications translated into
higher prestige. There was just too much stuff for libraries
to buy back, and not enough budget. The
Open Access movement is on track
to significantly change the “terms of service” when it comes
to scholarly communication. Though the battle’s far from
over, we’ve made
real
progress.
"Within the academic community there remains a
sizable proportion of sceptics who question the value of some of the tools
and approaches and perhaps an even greater proportion who are unaware of the
full range of technological enhancements in current use. Amongst senior
managers there is a concern that it is often difficult to quantify the
returns achieved on the investment in such technologies. . . . JISC infoNet,
the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and The Higher Education
Academy were presented with the challenge of trying to make some kind of
sense of the diversity of current e-learning practice across the sector and
to seek out evidence that technology-enhanced learning is delivering
tangible benefits for learners, teachers and institutions."
The summary of the project is presented in the
recently-published report, "Exploring Tangible Benefits of e-Learning: Does
Investment Yield Interest?" Some benefits were hard to measure and quantify,
and the case studies were limited to only sixteen institutions. However,
according to the study, there appears to be "clear evidence" of many good
returns on investment in e-learning. These include improved student pass
rates, improved student retention, and benefits for learners with special
needs.
JISC infoNet, a service of the Joint Information
Systems Committee, "aims to be the UK's leading advisory service for
managers in the post-compulsory education sector promoting the effective
strategic planning, implementation and management of information and
learning technology." For more information, go to
Association for Learning Technology (ALT), formed
in 1993, is "the leading UK body bringing together practitioners,
researchers, and policy makers in learning technology." For more
information, go to
The mission of The Higher Education Academy, owned
by two UK higher education organizations (Universities UK and GuildHE), is
to "help institutions, discipline groups, and all staff to provide the best
possible learning experience for their students." For more information, go
to
INFORMATION SEARCHING BEHAVIOR OF "GOOGLE
GENERATION" STUDENTS
The British Library and the Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned a study "to identify how the
specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or
pre-school years (the 'Google generation'), are likely to access and
interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time." How this group
uses the Internet for information and research has implications for both
instructors and librarians. Some of the group's characteristics revealed in
the study conclude that:
--they "have a poor understanding of their
information needs and thus
find it difficult to develop effective search
strategies"
-- they "have unsophisticated mental maps of what
the internet is,
often failing to appreciate that it is a collection
of
networked resources from different providers"
-- they "find it difficult to assess the relevance
of the materials
presented and often print off pages with no more
than a
perfunctory glance at them"
A number of popular myths about the Google
generation were explored, with the researchers concluding that many
popularly-held beliefs about the generation are, in fact, not substantiated
by the research.
The study's report "Information Behaviour of the
Researcher of the Future" (January 2008) is available at
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is a strategic advisory
committee working on behalf of the funding bodies for further and higher
education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. For more
information on JISC, see
PUBLISHING POLICIES FOR FACULTY AUTHORS AND OPEN
ACCESS
"[O]n February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step. The faculty voted
to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of
their scholarly articles to the university's digital repository and that
faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university
to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has
waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted
to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the
default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University."
The SPARC/Science Commons White Paper "Open Doors
and Open Minds: What Faculty Authors Can Do to Ensure Open Access to Their
Work Through Their Institution" (April 2008) describes Harvard's policy and
provides a plan of action for other institutions contemplating similar
policies to extend access to faculty publications. The paper is available at
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition, is "an international alliance of academic and research
libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system.
Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a
catalyst for change. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of
new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of
scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries." For more
information, contact: SPARC, 21 Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC
20036 USA; tel: 202-296-2296; fax 202-872-0884; email:
"[T]he blurring of leisure and learning has
corroded the respect that is necessary to commence a scholarly journey."
In "Learning to Leisure? Failure, Flame, Blame,
Shame, Homophobia and Other Everyday Practices in Online Education" (JOURNAL
OF LITERACY AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 9, no. 1, April 2008, pp. 36-61), Juliet
Eve and Tara Brabazon "map a singular teaching hypothesis: when using
platforms most frequently positioned in leisure-based environments, such as
the iPod, text messaging, and discussion fora, there are institutional and
ideological blockages to creating a successful learning experience and
scholarly environment." From their in-class experimentation and the work of
other researchers, they observed that the "user-generated content 'movement'
-- including Flickr, wikimedia, blogs, podcasting, MySpace, Facebook and
YouTube -- has provided a channel and venue for the emotive excesses of
grievance, hostility and insolence against teachers, students and
education." The paper is available at
The Journal of Literacy and Technology [ISSN:
1535-0975] is an online peer-reviewed international academic journal
"exploring the complex relationship between literacy and technology in
educational, workplace, public, and individual spheres." For more
information, contact The Journal of Literacy & Technology, Florida Atlantic
University, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, 777 Glades Road,
Boca Raton, FL 33431 USA; tel: 561-297-2623; fax: 561-297-2615; Web:
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been
recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly
interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published
by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu
for possible inclusion in this column.
Shakespeare's Global Globe, conceived by Michael Witmore an associate
professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, is "a web resource that
provides an instantaneous visualization of all self-reporting readers of
Shakespeare on the planet, viewable by region, genre and play. Upon arrival
at the site, visitors are asked to indicate which Shakespeare play they are
currently reading and where they are on the planet. The site then locates
that reader and play at a particular point on the globe, which remains
illuminated for two weeks. Site visitors can also explore what other readers
of Shakespeare are doing in different cities, regions or continents using a
range of display options."
I am wondering if you know of any websites where I can gain access
to watch camtasia-style (or narrated powerpoints) videos/lectures of
upper level accounting instruction?
My Dean asked me to look into creating an asynchronous,
distance/hybrid accounting program. I want to get an idea of what is
out there. I think the classes I need are:
AIS Cost Intermediate 1 and 2 Tax Auditing Advanced GNP or NFP Any
other advanced accounting, like advanced cost.
Thank you,
XXXXX
March 11, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Firstly, I would begin with the asynchronous way basic accounting is
taught at BYU almost entirely with variable-speed videos even to
resident students living on campus ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
BYU sells these video CDs to the public at a reasonable price.
Next I would enter a number of search terms into YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/
Examples include:
Accounting Information Systems
Accounting Ethics
Intermediate accounting
Advanced accounting
Governmental accounting
Hedge accounting
Cost Accounting
Managerial Accounting
Fair Value Accounting
Auditing
SAP or ERP
XBRL
I suggest you contact my good friend Amy Dunbar about how she uses
Camtasia videos in her online tax courses --- Amy.Dunbar@business.uconn.edu
In the future U.S. accounting programs will be building in more and
more IFRS. Here there’s a heck of a lot of free educational material
available ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#IFRSlearning
There are some good cases available, especially from the Big Four.
There is also a lot of free XBRL material, including some good
videos --- http://www.xbrl.org/Home/
Click on “Education and Training”
The AICPA has a library of both fee and free videos ---
http://www.aicpa.org/
Enter the search term “video”
Other organizations have some deals on videos for courses, including
the IIA, Certified Fraud Examiners, etc.
There’s a ton of free material on ethics and fraud.
"MIT's Management School Shares Teaching Materials (Cases) Online,"
by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27,
2009 --- Click Here
Though some business schools charge for the “case studies” they
develop as teaching aids, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
announced today that it is making a set of teaching materials
available free online.
The announcement comes eight years after MIT created its
OpenCourseWare project, which makes instructional materials for
courses available online for free.
I forgot to mention the AAA Commons where there’s now a great deal
of available, including syllabi, tutorials, course materials,
videos, and textbook recommendations ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
Soon many of the AAA Commons pages will be available to the world in
general and not just AAA members. Among other things this makes the
resources available to all of your students
More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/edu
Many universities offer over 100 videos, whereas Stanford offers
over 500
MIT's Video Lecture Search
Engine: Watch the video at ---
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one
of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy
academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and
direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public
detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the
university's
OpenCourseWareinitiative. The search engine
leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other
institutions to
convert
audio
into text and make it searchable.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
This project explores ways to enable
educators and students to more effectively disseminate audio and video
recordings of academic lecture material. To do this, we are developing
technologies such as automatic speech recognition and language processing to
help transcribe, annotate, structure, and even summarize audio-visual
materials to help people search and explore these kind of data more easily.
Our particular focus has been on recorded lectures that are being made
available via initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare and MITWorld, in order
to improve their accessibility to students or anyone interesting in learning
from these educational materials.
The results of our research are being
showcased in two different ways. In addition to the lecture browser shown
here, we are also developing a a web-based spoken lecture processing server
that allows users to upload audio files for automatic transcription and
indexing. To help the speech recognizer, users can provide their own
supplemental text files, such as journal articles, book chapters, etc.,
which can be used to adapt the language model and vocabulary of the system.
Jensen Comment
For example, choose the category "Business and Economics" and then type in
"Marginal Cost"
I could not find anything under "Accounting" or "Tax"
This is a better science and engineering browser
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics
professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an
international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute
created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. Professor Lewin’s videotaped
physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who
stuff his e-mail in-box with praise. “Through your inspiring video lectures i
have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,”
a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently. Sara Rimer, The New York Times,
December 19, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19physics.html
Jensen Comment
Find links to free video lectures from leading
universities below.
Virtually all MIT faculty research papers will now be free online (but
there's a catch highlighted in red below)
Many teaching materials are also available on MIT's Open Source Web Site
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is known
for its ambitious effort to give away its course materials free online, and
now the university is giving away its research, too.
Last week MIT’s
professors voted unanimously to adopt a policy stating that all faculty
members will deposit their scholarly research papers in a free, online
university repository (in addition to sending them to scholarly journals),
in an effort to expand access to the university’s scholarship. The policy is
modeled on one
adopted last year by
Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
At MIT, like at Harvard,
professors can opt out of the policy if, for instance, a journal their paper
is accepted to does not allow free publication of articles.
Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at
Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly
publishing, said the move was a sign of growing momentum for open-access
policies. “It’s a strong signal that these measures have faculty support,”
he said. “The more momentum there is for open access, the more it looks like
a mainstream idea,” he added. “There’s no doubt that it started out as a
fringe idea.”
He said there were now about 30 colleges and
universities around the world that have adopted similar open-access policies
for their research, and he pointed to
a list of such
policies maintained by ePrints, a company that
makes open-access archiving software. Most of those institutions are in
Europe, and many of the U.S. colleges that have jumped in have adopted
policies only in a school or department.
In the past, some publishers have expressed concern
about university open-access policies — especially some scholarly societies
that publish journals and worry about whether giving away articles will
undermine their ability to keep their publishing efforts afloat.
Jensen Comment
One might conclude that only rejects get published free, but that would be
neither fair nor accurate. Some winners may get published early on as working
papers before they get accepted by a journal that does not open share. Also,
some researchers who totally support open sharing may refuse to submit research
papers to journals that will not allow the MIT professors to open share on the
MIT server.
As a nerd, my bias is towards
paper-and-ink books, and while I do indeed use information technology,
asking a coherent question about how any of it works is evidently beyond me.
A geek, by contrast, knows source code....has strong opinions about source
code....can talk to other geeks about source code, and at some length. (One
imagines them doing so via high-pitched clicking noises.) My wife
understands network protocols. I think that Network Protocols would be a
pretty good name for a retro-‘90s dance band.
This is more than a matter of temperament.
It is a cultural difference that makes a difference. The nerd/geek divide
manifested itself at the recent meeting of the Association of American
University Presses, for example. Most people in scholarly publishing are
nerds. But they feel like people now want them to become geeks, and this is
not an expectation likely to yield happiness.
Christopher M. Kelty’s Two Bits: The
Cultural Significance of Free Software, just published in
dead-tree format by Duke University Press, might
help foster understanding between the tribes.
The book itself is available for free
online. (The author also
contributes to the popular academic group-blog
Savage Minds.)
Kelty, an assistant professor of
anthropology at Rice University, has done years of fieldwork among geeks,
but Two Bits is not really a work of ethnography. Instead of
describing geek life at the level of everyday experience or identity-shaping
rituals, Kelty digs into the history and broader implications of one core
element of geek identity and activity: the question of “open source” or
“free” software. Those terms are loaded, and not quite equivalent, even if
the nuance tends to be lost on outsiders. At issue, in either case, is not
just the availability to users of particular programs, but full access to
their inner workings – so that geeks can tinker, experiment, and invent new
uses.
The expression “Free Software,” as Kelty
capitalizes it, has overtones of a social movement, for which openness and
transparency are values that can be embedded in technology itself, and then
spread throughout institutions that use it. By contrast, the slightly older
usage “open source” tends to be used when the element of openness is seen as
a “development methodology” that is pragmatically useful without necessarily
having major consequences. Both terms have been around since 1998. The fact
that they are identical in reference yet point to a substantial difference
of perspective is important. “It was in 1998-99,” writes Kelty, “that geeks
came to recognize that they were all doing the same thing and, almost
immediately, to argue about it.”
A group of seven technical universities in India
have teamed up to create a free YouTube library of engineering courses.
There are more than 50 courses online already—with all of the lectures
delivered in English.
The
Open Culture blog notes that the collection rivals
that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which for years has been
creating free collections of its course materials. “Suddenly
MIT is not the only tech powerhouse getting into
the business of providing free educational resources,” says the blog’s
author Dan Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s
continuing-studies program. The project is called the National Programme on
Technology Enhanced Learning, and it is a joint effort of campuses of the
Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.
MIT’s collection
features far more courses—about 1,800 of them. But many of
MIT’s course Web sites provide only written
lecture notes, rather than video recordings of lectures.
So far the most popular lecture in the Indian
YouTube collection is one on basic electronics, which has been viewed more
than 32,000 times.
Socrato,
a Massacusetts-based company, is offering a free,
crowd-sourced test-prep service online,
TechCrunch reports. Educators can upload sample
test questions and study guides in various formats, and students can then
use them for practice at home.
The site currently has test-prep questions for
national academic standardized tests (SAT,
GRE, LSAT, etc.), as
well as for the U.S. citizenship test and individual course exams. In an
upcoming release, Socrato will “be able to track how students deliberate on
questions by analyzing which answers they cross off first,” TechCrunch says.
Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content The concept of aggregating, sharing, and
collaboratively enriching free educational materials over the Internet has been
emerging over the past several years. The movement has been led by faculty
members and content specialists who believe that making lesson plans, training
modules and full courses freely available can help improve teaching and make
educational resources more dynamic through a cross-pollination of ideas and
expertise. The Hewlett Foundation-funded OpenCourseWare initiative and the
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education’s
OER
Commons offer a glimpse of the potential for
open content in higher education.
Lesa Petrides, Inside Higher Ed, February 26, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/26/petrides
Why Free Internet Magazine and Newspaper
Articles are Making a Comeback After the Wall Street Journal decides
to stop charging for content, Wired magazine editor Chris
Andersen argues that "free" works best in a consumer-driven society. NPR, March 15, 2008 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87877988
North Carolina Student Wins Open-Access Video Contest A library group that promotes open access to scholarly
data
today announced
the winners of a contest that had students producing short
videos that advocate sharing of ideas and information. Habib Yazdi, a senior at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won first place for this video
called "Share." The first runner-up was a video by Tommy McCauley and Max
Silver, of Carleton College, titled "Pri Vetai: Private Eye." And the second
runner-up was "An Open Access Manifesto," by Romel Espinel and Josh Hardro of
the Pratt Institute. Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2008
---
Click Here
CiteULike social networking for scholarly citations At first glance, it seems like a nerdier version of
Facebook. There’s the profile picture, the list of interests, the space for your
Web site. Most of the members have Ph.D.’s, though, and instead of posting party
invites or YouTube videos, their “Recent Activity” is full of academic papers
and scholarly treatises. Welcome to
CiteULike, a social bookmarking tool that
allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links — in this case,
citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal
link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in
Governmental Politics.” It’s a sort of “del.icio.us
for academics,” said Kevin Emamy, a representative for the site’s London-based
holding company, Oversity Ltd. It started out as a personal Web project in 2004
and grew organically by word of mouth. Today, it has some 70,000 registered
users and a million page views a month, he said.
"Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones," by Andy Guess, Inside
Higher Ed, January 31, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/31/citeulike
Update on Free Open Sharing of
Knowledge by Colleges and Universities
"Professors on YouTube, Take 2," by Jeffrey R. Young , Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 29, 2008 ---
Click Here
Since writing about how
professors are finding celebrity on YouTube, several people
wrote in to point us to other efforts to offer lecture videos
online. So here are a couple of more, with some updates on what
they are up to:
* Research Channel: This
non-profit consortium of colleges and universities broadcasts
video of campus lectures and presentations in a variety of
formats. Its largest reach comes from its satellite and cable-TV
channel, which reaches more than 30-million homes in the U.S.
But the group has long had
a Web presence as well, and its leaders say the online
audience is growing rapidly. Amy Philipson, executive director
of Research Channel, says to look for the channel to offer its
videos on YouTube soon. And she says they've recently set up a
page on iTunesU, the educational section of Apple's iTunes
Store.
* UChannel: Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs runs this
Web-video network that pulls together audio and video
recordings of campus talks. The effort
started back in 2005. Donna M. Liu, director for strategic
initiatives for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, says that
UChannel was on YouTube long before the University of
California at Berkeley set up its channel there. And the group
even offers a
Facebook application that pops lecture videos into your
online social profile.
* DoFlick: On a much,
much smaller scale, recent graduates of the University of
Maryland at College Park set up
this site featuring instructional videos about science and
engineering. One of the founders, Luis Corzo, says the site is
getting about 5,000 to 10,000 visits per month. One of the stars
of the site so far is Richard E. Berg, a professor of practice
at College Park who
produces videos of physics demonstrations.
Finally, I produced a
short video report with footage from some of lectures
featured in my previous article. What's your favorite lecture
video online?
Harvard U. Students Support Open Access for Student Theses A Harvard
University student group Harvard College Free Culture, has created a freely
accessible Web site for seniors’ theses, according to a
staff editorial last week in the campus newspaper,
The Harvard Crimson. Students voluntarily post their theses to the Web site. The
editorial announced its support for the project, saying it “should help students
find models for senior theses as they enter the daunting process” of writing
their own theses. The paper also stated that the project fits well with the open
access plan recently adopted by the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2008 ---
Click here
This also makes Harvard seniors models for judging how well top students
write as seniors in college. How well are your students doing in comparison?
Teach Philosopy 101 ---
http://www.teachphilosophy101.org/ This site presents strategies and resources for
faculty members and
graduate assistants who are teaching Introduction to
Philosophy courses; it also includes material of interest to college faculty
generally. The
missionof TΦ101 is to provide free, user-friendly
resources to the academic community. All of the materials are provided on an
open source license. You may also
print as many copies as you wish (please print in
landscape). TΦ101 carries no advertising. I am deeply indebted to
Villanova University
for all of the support that has made this project possible.
John Immerwahr, Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University
This site puts the talents and knowledge
of philosophers at the service of the general public. Send in a
question that you think might be related to philosophy and we
will do our best to respond to it. To date, there have been 1375
questions posted and 1834 responses.
What if scholarly books were peer
reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected
peer reviewers?
That's the question being posed by an unusual
experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a
popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit
group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.
The idea took shape when Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an
assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San
Diego, was talking with his editor at the press about peer reviewers for the
book he was finishing, The book, with the not-so-playful title Expressive
Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies,
examines the importance of using both software design and traditional
media-studies methods in the study of video games.
One group of reviewers jumped to his mind: "I
immediately thought, you know it's the people on Grand Text Auto."
The blog, which takes
its moniker from the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto, is run by
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin and five colleagues. It offers an academic take on
interactive fiction and video games.
Inviting More Critics
The blog is read by many of the same
scholars he sees at academic conferences, and also attracts readers from the
video-game industry and teenagers who are hard-core video-game players. At
its peak, the blog has had more than 200,000 visitors per month, he says.
"This is the community whose response I want, not
just the small circle of academics," Mr. Wardrip-Fruin says.
So he called up the folks at the Institute for the
Future of the Book, who developed CommentPress, a tool for adding digital
margin notes to blogs (The
Chronicle, September 28, 2007). Would they
help out? He wondered if he could post sections of his book on Grand Text
Auto and allow readers, using CommentPress, to add critiques right in the
margins.
The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd.
Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional
reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some
expertise.
The institute, an unusual academic center run by
the University of Southern California but based in Brooklyn, N.Y., was game.
So was Mr. Wardrip-Fruin's editor at MIT Press, Doug Sery, but with one
important caveat. He insisted on running the manuscript through the
traditional peer-review process as well. "We are a peer-review press—we're
always going to want to have an honest peer review," says Mr. Sery, senior
editor for new media and game studies. "The reputation of MIT Press, or any
good academic press, is based on a peer-review model."
So the experiment will provide a side-by-side
comparison of reviewing—old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls
the new method "blog-based peer review."
Each day he will post a new chunk of his draft to
the blog, and readers will be invited to comment. That should open the
floodgates of input, possibly generating thousands of responses by the time
all 300-plus pages of the book are posted. "My plan is to respond to
everything that seems substantial," says the author.
The institute is modifying its CommentPress
software for the project, with the help of a $10,000 grant from San Diego's
Academic Senate, to create a version that bloggers can more easily add to
their existing academic blogs.
A Cautious Look Forward
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin's friends have
warned him that sorting through all those comments will take over his life,
or at least take far more time than he expects. "It's been said to me enough
times by people who are not just naysayers that it is in the back of my
mind," he acknowledges. Still, the book's review process "will pale in
comparison to the work of writing it."
He expects the blog-based review to be more helpful
than the traditional peer review because of the variety of voices
contributing. "I am dead certain it will make the book better," he says.
Mr. Sery isn't so sure. "I don't know how this
general peer review is going to help," the editor says, except maybe to
catch small errors that have slipped through the cracks. Traditional peer
review involves carefully chosen experts in the same subject area, who can
point to big-picture issues as well as nitpick details. He bets that the
blog reviews might merely spark flame wars or other unhelpful arguments
about minor points. "I'm curious to see what kind of comments we get back,"
he says.
That probably "depends on what you're writing
about," says Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for
Networked Information, a group that supports the use of technology in
scholarly communication. "If, God help you, you're writing about current
religious or political issues, you're going to get a lot of people with
agendas who aren't interested in having a rational discussion. Some of them
are just psychos."
Even without flame wars, Mr. Sery equates the blog
review with the kind of informal sharing of drafts that many academics do
with close friends. It's useful, but it's still not formal peer review, he
argues. Carefully choosing reviewers "really allows for the expression of
their ideas on the book," he says. Scholars can say with authority, for
instance, that a book just isn't worth publishing.
Ben Vershbow, editorial director at the Institute
for the Future of the Book, concedes that comments on blogs are unlikely to
fully replace peer review. But he says academic blogging can play a role in
the publishing process.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This is one of those experiments that is impossible to extrapolate. Blog
comments are totally voluntary and impulsive such that blog comments are going
to be highly variable with respect to topics, errors in the original document,
and extent of the readership in the blog. Few blog activists are going to give
time and attention to reviews that are not going to be widely read.
Peer reviews are likely to be less impulsive since the
reviewer generally agrees ahead of time to conduct a review. But they are more
variable than blog comments. The reason is that peer reviewers spend less time
reviewing manuscripts that are outliers (i.e., those that are so good that there
are few recommendations for change or those that are so bad that there's little
hope for a future positive recommendation to publish). More time may be spend on
manuscripts that need a lot of repair but have high hopes.
The main problem with peer reviews is that there are so few
reviewers. Much depends upon which two or three reviewers are assigned to review
the manuscript. Three reviewers' garbage may be another three reviewers'
treasure. Another problem is that peer reviews are seldom published in the name
of the anonymous reviewers. Blog commentators generally do so in their own names
and get some reputation enhancement among their blog peers, especially if their
are praiseworthy replies on the blog to the blog review. Anonymous reviewers get
little incremental reputation enhancement for their unpublished reviews.
Still another problem with peer reviews is that editors and
their hand picked reviewers may be a biased subset of a scholarly community.
Others in the community may be shut out, which is now a raging problem in
academic accountancy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
University offerings at the
dedicated YouTube channel include peace and conflict studies, bioengineering
courses, and a science class titled "Physics for Future Presidents."
"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life:
academics, events and athletics," said vice provost for undergraduate
education Christina Maslach.
The University plans to continually add videos to the channel, which
officially launched Wednesday with about nine full courses consisting of
approximately 40 lectures each.
Berkeley lays claim to being the first university to offer full courses on
popular video-sharing website YouTube, which is based in Northern
California.
The university began online broadcasts, called "webcasts," of its own in
2001 and last year began making audio "podcasts" available for download at
Apple's iTunes online store.
"We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on
YouTube," said Ben Hubbard, who co-manages the university's webcast program.
"I think the whole open content movement is in keeping with what we are as a
public institution, we really believe at our core that making this available
to the public is truly important."
UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses
available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can
view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from
bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future
Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial
offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available
on YouTube.
View the Playlist Here ---
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
There is a link to the most viewed videos (with star ratings) at the above page.
On October 4, 2007 I could not find any accounting, finance, or economics
videos at the UC Berkeley site. There were six courses that popped up for
"Business."
Nearly all prestigious universities now offer some form of open sharing of
course materials, the most noteworthy of which is MIT. Yale, however, has some
of the finest lectures on video ---
http://www.yale.edu/opa/download/VLP_QuestionsAnswers.pdf
FORA.tv (video and podcasts) brings together content from the Hoover
Institution, the Global Philanthropy Forum, the World Affairs Council, the
American Jewish Committee, and dozens of other organizations ---
http://www.fora.tv/
MIT's Video Lecture Search
Engine: Watch the video at ---
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one
of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy
academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and
direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public
detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the
university's
OpenCourseWareinitiative. The search engine
leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other
institutions to
convert
audio
into text and make it searchable.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Big Think
made a splash when it hit the Web last month. After
all, the site boasts hundreds of video clips of intellectual celebrities
talking about pressing issues, has the former president of Harvard as one of
its investors, and got plenty of glowing press coverage (including a mention
in
The Chronicle, of
course).
But when T. Mills Kelly, an associate professor of
history and art history at George Mason University, took a close look at the
site, he says he felt like he was visiting a ghost town. “There’s virtually
no discussion going on — hardly anybody has participated in ways that were
anticipated,” he says in the latest issue of the
Digital Campus podcast,
where he is a host, along with two colleagues.
Continued in article
Copyright Restrictions on Open Sharing/Source Learning Materials
These are only my opinions, and they should not be taken as legal advice Just because something can be accessed online does not mean it is an open
sharing item. Generally online items are like library books that can be accessed
by the public but have copyright restrictions copying and uses other than
personal reading. If online learning materials are billed as "open sharing," or
"open source" (as
in the case of OCW materials at MIT) chances are that they can be used in
total or in part for educational purposes in other open sharing materials if
proper credits are given. In commercial materials such as books and course
videos, there is vulnerability for lawsuit by the copyright owners. In my
personal opinion, I think a lot depends upon how central the copyrighted
material is to the purchased material. If use is incidental and credits are
fully proper, then the risks of lawsuit are less than when the copyrighted
material becomes more featured in the material. In any case, it is good advice
to seek permission from copyright owners if the use is for some for-profit
purpose. This probably includes online or onsite courses for which fees are
charged to take the course. The dreaded DMCA is somewhat vague on open sharing
materials, but open sharing does not mean that copyright owners have abandoned
all rights. You can read more about the dreaded DMCA at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Since the term "open source" is rooted in computer software, the term is a
bit cloudy when it comes to text and multimedia learning materials. You can read
more about open sharing and copyrights at the following sites:
How to Excerpt Open Courseware Video, Compress It, and Serve it Up to
Students
Suppose that a very long video lecture is available as open courseware for
proper use in other learning materials. An instructor may only want to use parts
of this lecture in another course or supplemental tutorials for a course.
Searching a long video is tedious and time consuming. A better approach is to
make audio or video excerpts of portions of the long lecture.
Homemade video tutorial (very basic) on how to record
streaming audio on your PC ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPHSDOyj5f8
Note the passing reference to a free sound recorder called Audacity ---
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Note that if you are watching a lecture video that's pretty much a talking head,
it saves a lot, I mean a LOT, of file space to only capture the audio.
This might, for example, work very well when capturing parts of the many
UC Berkeley, YouTube, Yale, or Harvard video lectures ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Just in case source streams disappear from the Internet, I suggest capturing
what's important to you and saving to external media such as a CD or DVD disk.
Capturing also allows you to only capture what is relevant to you or your
students without having to spend a lot of time waiting for the good parts.
If the video open sharing video is a file, you might be able to download the
video file and then edit the file using something like the Producer Module in
Camtasia Studio ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/enhance.asp
However, in most instances open sharing videos are streaming (using the term
loosely here) videos for which there is no file to download. In that case the
video must be captured in total or in part by software designed for such
purposes. The software I like for video capturing is called Camtasia Recorder ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/record.asp
Also see
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/education.asp
This is cheaper alternative than many more specialized products for streaming
video capture. You can download my PowerPoint file about Camtasia at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/EdTech/PowerPoint/
Links to examples are given in this slide show.
When you capture streaming media as an avi file it has the advantage in that
you can edit the movie and delete parts you do not want using software like
Camtasia Producer ---
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/enhance.asp
You can also add interaction "skip to" buttons, quiz questions/answers, survey
questions, etc.
But captured avi files are generally enormous and cannot be stored
efficiently anywhere. After you've excerpted and edited the captured video as an
avi file it is almost always necessary to compress it into a wmv, mov, rm, scf,
flv, or some related option such as the compression options available in
Camtasia Producer. There is not generally a noticeable quality degradation in
the compressed versions. However, it is not possible, at least in Camtasia, to
alter the compressed version without recapturing it as an avi file.
After you have your compressed file such as a wmv you will need to get it to
your students. Chances are that your Blackboard, WebCT, or Web server does not
give you enough capacity to serve up a lot of video, including space-saving
compressed video. The next best thing is to either distribute your video to
students on CD or DVD disks or to send it to them over the Internet.
Anybody knows about any training course(s) on accounting technology or
internet accounting (or similar subject) provided during the summer of
2007. Please advise.
By the end of the year all MIT's course materials will be available,
which is probably the most extensive freely open knowledge initiative (OKI)
in the entire world.
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) has formally
partnered with three organizations that are translating MIT OCW course
materials into Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional
Chinese ---
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/Translations.htm
Question
What is the most popular download course at MIT?
Answer: According to ABC News last week it's the Introduction to Electrical
Engineering Course.
If you want to try something quite different, you might consider some
online business and accounting courses from the University of Toyota ---
http://www2.itt-tech.edu/st/onlineprograms/ (These are not free).
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is making
freely available to high-school students and teachers a collection of material
in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The material is available
on a new Web site,
an offshoot of its popular OpenCourseWare effortto put lecture notes and other information about every
course online. The Chronicle of Higher Education ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2573/mit-offers-learning-materials-to-high-schools
Jensen Comment
It's a shame that the Sloan School at MIT has not yet made accounting and
business materials available for high schools. The bookkeeping, clerical, and
boring-drudge portrayal of accountants in the nation's high schools is viewed as
one of the most serious problems of the accountancy profession. In this MIT
offshoot of OCW, the Sloan School could do a lot to help Dan Deines, the AICPA,
and the AAA --- See the Taylor Report summary on Page 5 of
http://aaahq.org/pubs/AEN/2007/Fall2007.pdf
26 Nobel Laureates Support Open Access to NIH and Other Government Funded
Studies
Twenty-six US Nobel laureates in science have
written an open letter to Congress calling for an OA mandate at the NIH (July 8,
2007). This is actually their second such letter. The first letter (PDF), signed
by 25 Nobel laureates, was sent on August 26, 2004.
"26 Nobel Laureates Support Open Access Mandate at NIH," The University of
Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog, July 13, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
Open Sharing Catching on Outside the United States Britain’s Open University today formally begins its
effort to put its course materials and other content online for all the world to
use. With its effort,
OpenLearn, which is expected to cost $10.6
million and is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the
university joinsMassachusetts Institute
of Technologyand institutions in several other
countries in trying to put tools for learning within the reach of otherwise
difficult to reach populations. Inside Higher Ed, October 25, 2006
University of Massachusetts (Boston) Free OpenCourseWare ---
http://ocw.umb.edu/
In 2008 there were courses in the following disciplines:
Biology
Counseling and School Psychology
History
Mathematics
Nursing and Health Science
Political Science
Psychology
Special Education
Stevan Harnad
has created a summary of the universities, university
departments, and funding agencies that are requiring their
authors to make their research available in an open access mode.
See his blog entry, "Pit-Bulls
vs. Petitions: A Historic Time for Open Access"
on the blog Open Access Archivangelism.
You'll notice that Europe is ahead of the U.S. in this activity,
though the U.S. will catch up if several important U.S. funder
mandates are passed.
University / Departments mandating Open Access:
AUSTRALIA
inst-mandate Queensland U. Technol
AUSTRALIA inst-mandate U. Tasmania
EUROPE inst-mandate Eur Org Nuc Res (CERN)
INDIA inst-mandate Nat Inst Tech Rourkela
INDIA inst-mandate Bharathidasan U
PORTUGAL inst-mandate U. Minho
SWITZERLAND inst-mandate U. Zurich
AUSTRALIA dept-mandate U. Tasmania Sch Comp
FRANCE dept-mandate Lab Psych Neurosci Cog
UNITED KINGDOM dept-mandate U Southampton Dept ECS
UNITED KINGDOM dept-mandate Brunel U Sch Info Sys Comp Maths
Funding
agencies that are requiring their authors to make their
publications available to all:
AUSTRALIA
funder-mandate Australian Res Cncl (ARC)
AUSTRALIA funder-mandate National Health and Medical Res
Cncl (NHMRC)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Arthritis Res Foundation
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Biotech Bio Sci Res Cncl (BBSRC)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Chief Sci Off (Scottish Exec
Health)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Economic and Social Res Cncl (ESRC)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Medical Res Cncl (MRC)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate National Environmental Res
Cncl (NERC)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Particle Phys & Astron Res
Cncl (PPARC)
UNITED KINGDOM funder-mandate Wellcome Trust
In
addition, there are several proposals that will mandate Open
Access that are working their way through the agencies:
CANADA proposed
funder-mandate Can Insts Health Res (CIHR)
EUROPE proposed funder-mandate European Res Advisory Board (EURAB)
EUROPE proposed funder-mandate European Res Cncl (ERC)
EUROPE proposed funder-mandate European Commission
UNITED STATES proposed funder-mandate Fed Res Pub Access Act
(FRPAA)
UNITED STATES proposed funder-mandate Nat Insts Health (NIH)
On Tuesday,
Yale University announced that it would be
starting a version of an open access online tool for those seeking to gain
from its courses. But the basis of the Yale effort will be video of actual
courses — every lecture of the course, to be combined with selected class
materials. The money behind the Yale effort is coming from the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was an early backer of MIT’s project, and
which sees the Yale project as a way to take the open course idea to the
next level.
“We want to add another dimension to open
courseware,” said Catherine Casserly, a program officer at Hewlett. She said
that video components used at MIT and elsewhere have been very popular with
people all over the world. “We’re trying to make that bridge” to the
audience for high quality American education, she said. Casserly said that
Yale’s initiative — starting with seven courses this year, with plans to
grow quickly — was the first open courseware effort based on lecture videos.
“We hope to see this spread to other universities,” she said.
Richard Baraniuk, founder of Connexions, said he
viewed Yale’s announcement as “a very positive development.” While projects
at Rice and MIT “have been opening up access to educational materials and
syllabi, the Yale project is opening up access to even more of the student
experience, namely the in-class lecture environment,” he said.
Yale officials said that they view that in-class
environment as crucial and so wanted to build their open courseware model
around it. “Education is built on direct interaction, and face to face is
ideal,” said Diana E.E. Kleiner, a professor of the history of art and
classics who is directing the project. “That’s how we intend to teach on our
campus, but also recognize that this kind of participation is not always
possible, and many around the world could benefit from greater access to
this kind of information we provide.
“Universities and colleges are the best keepers of
that kind of information in the world, but it can be locked in a kind of
vault” because only so many people can attend a given institution, or enroll
in a given course, she said.
Kleiner said that Yale officers were “very
admiring” of the model built by MIT, and she praised MIT as well for sharing
extensive information about how its program was designed. But she said that
Yale believes that course lectures “are the core content,” and need to be
central. “We’re following in MIT’s footprints, but really taking a new
step,” she said.
Modern
poetry, as well as introductory courses in physics, psychology, and
political science, are four of seven classes from Yale U. that the
institution put
online today. Not only are the courses free for
anyone who is interested, but they are as close to being there as online
technology allows.
“These are
gavel-to-gavel presentations,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, told
The Chronicle. “We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think
that’s what makes this different.” Lectures can be downloaded and run in
streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each
lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and
other materials.
Diana E.E. Kleiner,
a professor of the history of art and classics and director of the project,
which is called Open Yale Courses, said in a written statement that the
project’s leaders “wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture
as if they were sitting in the classroom.”
The courses
available are:
• Astronomy
160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, with Professor Charles
Bailyn.
• English 310:
Modern Poetry, with Professor Langdon Hammer.
• Philosophy
176: Death, with Professor Shelly Kagan.
• Physics 200:
Fundamentals of Physics, with Professor Ramamurti Shankar.
• Political
Science 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Professor Steven
B. Smith.
• Psychology
110: Introduction to Psychology, with Professor Paul Bloom.
• Religious
Studies 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), with
Professor Christine Hayes.
The project also
has international connections, with Open Yale Courses lectures broadcast
over Chinese television and a satellite network in India. The lectures will
also be available at 300 libraries and universities throughout the world,
via a U.S. State Department project called American Corners.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford
University, and other institutions are old hands now at taking course
material from the classroom and lab and putting it online for learners
anywhere to use. Yale University may be the first to reverse the process,
using its Open
Yale Courses as the basis for an
old-fashioned
book series.
This month, Yale University Press released the
first batch of paperbacks based on lecture courses featured in the
online-learning program. Priced at $18 and available in e-format too, the
books are meant to expand the audience for the course material even further,
according to Diana E.E. Kleiner. A professor of art history and classics at
Yale, Ms. Kleiner is the founding project director of Open Yale Courses.
“It may seem counterintuitive for a digital project
to move into books and e-books, because these are a much more conventional
way of publishing,” she says. But the Open Yale Courses are about “reaching
out in every way that we could.” That includes posting audio and video
versions online (via Yale’s Web site, YouTube, and iTunes), and providing
transcripts and now book versions of the lectures.
Having transcripts of their lectures to work with
gives faculty authors a jump-start. “It was incomparably the easiest book I
have ever written,” says Shelly Kagan, a Yale professor of philosophy whose
lecture course on death has become one of the Open Yale program’s most
popular offerings. “I just started with the transcripts and treated that as
a first draft.” The book that resulted, also called
Death, has already been
reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
Other books have taken him 10 years, Mr. Kagan
says. This one took only a few months. Talk to him in detail about the
process, though, and it’s clear he put a lot of fresh labor into the
project, in addition to the years of work that went into creating the
lectures in the first place.
Even very good lectures contain grammatical
mistakes, jokes or asides, or physical cues that don’t work on the page, and
other unfelicities that might distract or annoy a reader. Mr. Kagan polished
those away and restructured some of the discussion so that it followed a
more logical order. He changed some descriptive details.
He preserved the freewheeling, more personal style
he uses in the lecture hall. “Although I changed the setting, and some of
the examples, cleaned up the grammar, moved points around, and so forth and
so on, I tried very hard to keep the conversational tone from the lectures,”
he says. ” The subject matter is heavy—I am talking about death, after
all—but I don’t think we have to discuss it in a ponderous, inaccessible,
‘academic’ fashion.”
He doubts he would have turned his lectures on
death into a book at all without the transcripts and the feedback from
people outside Yale “suggesting there’s a hunger for this stuff.” Since his
lectures went online, he’s heard from people all over the world. He’s even
become a kind of philosopher-guru in China, where volunteers created
Mandarin subtitles for his videotaped lectures.
“I’ve just had the most amazing experiences with
it,” he says of his participation in Open Yale. “I get e-mails from people
in all walks of life, from literally all corners of the globe.” Some want to
engage him in philosophical debate; others share stories about their own
grappling with life-and-death issues. In many cases, “people were striking a
deeply personal note,” he says. “The whole range of it has been humbling and
gratifying.”
Laura Davulis, associate editor for history and
large digital projects at the Yale press, edits the series. Because the
authors are so steeped in their material, and because the idea is to
preserve the original spirit of the lectures, “I definitely have a lighter
hand” in editing, she says. “My role is really more guidance in terms of how
to take material that’s spoken and turn it into something that’s appropriate
for a reading audience but still has that friendliness and accessibility of
sitting in a course and listening to the lecture.”
The books in the series aren’t peer-reviewed as
outside manuscripts would normally be, according to Ms. Davulis, but they’re
approved by the press’s acquisitions panel and its faculty committee.
Although the series is aimed at readers beyond Yale, it makes for a nice
on-campus partnership between Yale’s press and the online-education project.
“One of the things we wanted to play up was the Yale connection,” she says.
MIT's Video Lecture Search
Engine: Watch the video at ---
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one
of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy
academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and
direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public
detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the
university's
OpenCourseWareinitiative. The search engine
leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other
institutions to
convert
audio
into text and make it searchable.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
The word moodle is an acronym for "modular object-oriented dynamic
learning environment", which is quite a mouthful. What Scout Report readers
should know is that Moodle 1.7 is a tremendously helpful opens-source
e-learning platform. With Moodle, educators can create a wide range of
online courses with features that include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis,
chat rooms, and surveys. On the Moodle website, visitors can also learn
about other features and read about recent updates to the program. This
application is compatible with computers running Windows 98 and newer or Mac
OS X and newer.
Over the past few years, a number of colleges and
universities have created initiatives to place some of their course
materials online for the general public. MIT was one of the first to do so,
and Berkeley has also started to offer a number of webcasts and podcasts of
select courses on this website.
Drawing on the strengths of the Berkeley Multimedia
Research Center, they have begun to place some of these excellent materials
on this site. On their well-designed homepage, visitors can either look at
an archive of course webcasts and podcasts or take a gander at the archived
webcasts that feature prominent speakers who have visited the campus. The
events archive dates back to a January 2002 appearance by Bill Clinton, and
includes dozens of interesting talks and lectures. Visitors can learn about
each event in the information section, and for some, they have the option to
download the audio portion of each event. The course section is equally
delightful, as visitors can view webcasts here, and also download podcasts.
The range of courses here is quite broad, and includes lectures on general
chemistry, wildlife ecology, and surprise, surprise: foundations of American
cyberculture. Finally, visitors can also subscribe to event and course
podcasts.
Carnegie-Mellon University joins the open sharing initiative
A collection of "cognitively informed," openly
available and free online courses and course materials that enact instruction
for an entire course in an online format.
Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University ---
http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index.html
The October/November 2006 issue (vol. 3, issue 1)
of INNOVATE is devoted to open source and the "potential of open source
software and related trends to transform educational practice." Papers
include:
"Getting Open Source Software into Schools:
Strategies and Challenges" by Gary Hepburn and Jan Buley
"Looking Toward the Future: A Case Study of Open
Source Software in the Humanities" by Harvey Quamen
"Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open
Educational Knowledge Sharing" by Toru Iiyoshi, Cheryl Richardson, and Owen
McGrath
Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly,
peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of
Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal
focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance
educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings.
Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends,
and participate in open forums. For more information, contact: James L.
Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate; email:
innovate@nova.edu ; Web:
http://www.innovateonline.info/ .
"Electronic Publishing in the Humanities: Task Force Report,"
University of Illinois Blog Issues in Scholarly Communication, April
The Joint Task Force on Electronic Publishing of
the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute
of America (AIA) has submitted its
final report to the boards of the two societies.
This document has been submitted to the Board of Directors of the APA and
the Governing Board of the AIA for their consideration.
The APA Board of Directors formulated the following
guidance for the Task Force:
The Task Force will have as its charge the
analysis of particular issues associated with the burgeoning area of
electronic publishing, including peer refereeing, freedom of
information, intellectual property protection, storage and retrieval of
data and whatever other concerns it may identify. Our precedent is the
Association's Committee on Computer operations which, during its active
life, made many valuable contributions, some of which have had lasting
influence upon techniques utilized in our research.
From the
Executive Summary, the following are the main
points of the Report:
Invest in
cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, as a matter
of strategic priority.
Implementation: Determine the amount and efficacy of funding that now
goes to support developing cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social
sciences from all sources; through annual meetings and ongoing
consultation, coordinate the goals this funding aims to achieve; and aim
to increase both funding and coordination over the next five years,
including commercial investments that are articulated with the
educational community's agenda.
Develop
public and institutional policies that foster openness and access.
Implementation: The leadership of the humanities and social sciences
should develop, adopt, and advocate for public and institutional polices
that foster openness and access.
Promote
cooperation between the public and private sectors.
Implementation: A private foundation, a federal funding agency, an
Internet business, and one or more university partners should cosponsor
recurring annual summits to explore new models for commercial/nonprofit
partnerships and to discuss opportunities for the focused creation of
digital resources with high educational value and high public impact.
Cultivate
leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the humanities
and social sciences.
Implementation: Increase federal and foundation funding to one or more
scholarly organizations in the area of humanities and social science
computing so that they can work with member organizations of the
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and others to establish
priorities for cyberinfrastructure development, raise awareness of
research and partnership opportunities among scholars, and coordinate
the evolution of research products from basic to applied.
Encourage
digital scholarship.
Implementation: Federal funding agencies and private foundations should
establish programs that develop and support expertise in digital
humanities and social sciences, from short-term workshops to
postdoctoral and research fellowships to the cultivation of
appropriately trained computer professionals. The ACLS should encourage
discussion among its member societies in developing recommendations with
respect to evaluating digital scholarship in tenure and promotion
decisions.
Establish
national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits
cyberinfrastructure.
Implementation: Universities and university consortia should develop new
and support existing humanities and social science computing centers.
These centers should provide for advanced training and research and
curate collections of unique materials.
Develop and
maintain open standards and robust tools.
Implementation: University consortia such as the Committee on
Institutional Cooperation should license software such as SourceForge,
an enterprise-grade solution for managing and optimizing distributed
development, and make it available to open-source developers in academic
institutions. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the Institute of Museum
and Library Services (IMLS) should support the development, maintenance,
and coordination of community-based standards such as the Text Encoding
Initiative, Encoded Archival Description, Metadata Encoding and
Transmission Standard, and Visual Resources Data Standards. The National
Science Foundation (NSF), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the IMLS, and
other funding agencies should support the development of tools for the
analysis of digital content.
Create
extensive and reusable digital collections.
Implementation: Extensive and reusable digital collections are at the
core of the humanities and social science cyberinfrastructure. Scholars
must be engaged in the development of these collections. National
centers with a focus on particular methods or disciplines can organize a
certain amount of scholar-driven digitization. Library organizations and
libraries should sponsor discipline-based focus groups to discuss
priorities with respect to digitization. When priorities are
established, these should be relayed to the organizers of annual
meetings on commercial and nonprofit partnerships, and they should be
considered in the distribution of grant funds by federal agencies and
private foundations. Funding to support the maintenance and coordination
of standards will improve the reusability of digital collections. The
NEA, NEH, and IMLS should work together to promote collaboration and
skills development—through conferences, workshops, and/or grant
programs—for the creation, management, preservation, and presentation of
reusable digital collections, objects, and products.
Finally, in
light of these requirements and in order to realize the promise of
cyberinfrastructure for research and education, the Commission calls for
specific investments—not just of money but also of leadership— from
scholars and scholarly societies; librarians, archivists, and curators;
university provosts and university presses; the commercial sector;
government; and private foundations.
I spend about a third of my workday blogging.
Thanks to the miracle of online advertising, that increases my income by 1%.
I balance that by hoping no one asks me why I do it.
As with most of my life decisions, my impulse to
blog was a puzzling little soup of miscellaneous causes that bubbled and
simmered until one day I noticed I was doing something. I figured I needed a
rationalization in case anyone asked. My rationalization for blogging was
especially hard to concoct. I was giving away my product for free and hoping
something good came of it.
I did have a few "artist" reasons for blogging.
After 18 years of writing "Dilbert" comics, I was itching to slip the leash
and just once write "turd" without getting an email from my editor. It might
not seem like a big deal to you, but when you aren't allowed to write in the
way you talk, it's like using the wrong end of the shovel to pick up, for
example, a turd.
Over time, I noticed something unexpected and
wonderful was happening with the blog. I had an army of volunteer editors,
and they never slept. The readers were changing the course of my writing in
real time. I would post my thoughts on a topic, and the masses told me what
they thought of the day's offering without holding anything back. Often
they'd correct my grammar or facts and I'd fix it in minutes. They were in
turns brutal and encouraging. They wanted more posts on some topics and less
of others. It was like the old marketing saying, "Your customers tell you
what business you're in."
At some point I realized we were collectively
writing a book, or at least the guts of one. I compiled the most popular
(mostly the funniest) posts and pitched it to a publisher. I got a
six-figure advance, and picked a title indirectly suggested by my legion of
accidental collaborators: "Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!"
As part of the book deal, my publisher asked me to
delete the parts of my blog archive that would be included in the book. The
archives didn't get much traffic, so I didn't think much about deleting
them. This turned out to be a major blunder in the "how people think"
category.
A surprising number of my readers were personally
offended that I would remove material from the Internet that had once been
free, even after they read it. It was as if I had broken into their homes
and ripped the books off their shelves. They felt violated. And boy, I heard
about it.
Some left negative reviews on Amazon.com to protest
my crass commercialization. While no one has given the book a bad review for
its content, a full half of the people who comment trash it for having once
been free, as if that somehow mattered to the people who only read books on
paper. In the end, the bad feeling I caused by not giving away my material
for free forever will have a negative impact on book sales.
I've had mixed results with giving away content on
the Internet. I was the first syndicated cartoonist to offer a comic on the
Internet without charge (www.dilbert.com). That gave a huge boost to the
newspaper sales and licensing. The ad income was good too. Giving away the
"Dilbert" comic for free continues to work well, although it cannibalizes my
reprint book sales to some extent, and a fast-growing percentage of readers
bypass the online ads with widgets, unauthorized RSS feeds and other
workarounds.
A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put
the entire text of my book, "God's Debris," on the Internet for free, after
sales of the hard copy and its sequel, "The Religion War" slowed. My hope
was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel.
According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it
because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for
free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market
value for my work at zero. Oops.
So I've been watching with great interest as the
band "Radiohead" pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on
the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to
pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks
now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That's
when the market value of music will approach zero.
That's my guess. Free is more complicated than
you'd think.
Mr. Adams is the creator of "Dilbert" and author of "Stick to Drawing
Comics, Monkey-Brain!" (Portfolio, 2007).
Wikipedia:
time-saver for students, bane of professors everywhere.
Or is it?
If
there’s one place where scholars should be able to question
assumptions about the use of technology in the classroom
(and outside of it), it’s the
annual Educause conference,
which wrapped up on Friday in Seattle. At a
morning session featuring a
professor and a specialist in learning technology from the
University of Washington at Bothell, presenters showed how
Wikipedia —
often viewed warily by educators
who worry that students too readily accept unverifiable
information they find online — can be marshaled as a central
component of a course’s syllabus rather than viewed as a
resource to be banned or reluctantly tolerated.
That’s
what
Martha Groom, a professor at the
university’s
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
program, tried to do for the first time last fall by
requiring term papers to be submitted to the popular,
user-edited online encyclopedia. The project comes at a time
when instructors and administrators
continue to debate the boundaries of certain technologies
within the classroom and how to adapt
to students’ existing online habits.
At first
glance, a college term paper and a Wikipedia entry appear to
have little in common. Term papers are intended for an
“extremely limited audience, namely, me,” as Groom pointed
out, they have little impact outside of the classroom and
are constrained to a specific “time” and “place” in the
world of ink-on-paper documents. “That is not a very good
model of scholarship, to say that anything you produce
[belongs] in this tiny space,” she said.
On the other
hand, shared, public online documents have characteristics
in common with parts of the academic review process. “The
shift to thinking about placing the term paper as a
Wikipedia encyclopedia entry allows for another level of
peer review,” Groom said. Such entries have references and
citations; allow for a process of repeated, continual
editing; and encourage collaborations between authors.
They also
reach a much wider audience, through the Wikipedia site and
search engines. “How do you motivate students to do their
best work?” she asked — implying that the answer lies in the
possibility of others viewing it. The public nature of
Wikipedia content also means that, in theory, students would
be less likely to reuse others’ material as their own.
“[The
Wikipedia guidelines] very clearly state that ... the onus
is on you, not on them, so you’ll be the one who catches
anything if you [post] any copyrighted material,” said
Andreas Brockhaus, the manager of learning technologies at
the university.
Groom’s
first attempt at incorporating Wikipedia into a class came
in the fall of 2006, when she required her students to make
a major revision to an existing article or to create one of
their own, with a minimum of 1,500 words, for 60 percent of
the grade. The assignment, for her course on environmental
history and globalization, encompassed an initial proposal,
a first draft, revisions and peer review, after which
students would post the final article to the Web site. For
the next semester, and after student feedback, Groom decided
to lower the weight of the assignment (to 40 percent of the
grade) and have students work in groups.
She
first required her students to complete Wikipedia’s
online tutorial, which takes users
through the basic steps of creating an account, editing
articles and participating in discussions. But learning how
to use Wikipedia didn’t necessarily pose the biggest
obstacle. Some students, used to sustaining arguments in
papers and essays, had trouble adapting to the Wikipedia
style, Brockhaus said.
“How
do you write for an encyclopedia?” he asked, referring to
the site’s consensus-based model that values a neutral tone
over strict balance and places and emphasis on non-original,
verifiable sources. For example, an article on
evolution wouldn’t grant equal
space to intelligent design because of existing scientific
and scholarly agreement. (Not coincidentally, this is the
standard used by most academics in their scholarship and
teaching.)
Not used to
being edited on the fly by people they’ve never met, some
students might also have felt uneasy about another feature
inherent to Wikipedia’s design: constant revisions by
regular contributors. Brockhaus suggested that was part of
the experience, and that students posting material to the
site would have to stop viewing their work as “sacrosanct.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The good news is that students are less likely to cheat if their writing is
going to be easily available for anybody in the world to read. The bad news is
that students who do plagiarize are likely to be caught, and getting caught
becomes an embarrassment to the instructor and the college in addition to
humiliating the student.
But the most good news in accountancy is that these assignments will add to
the dearth, especially relative to finance, of good accountancy modules in
Wikipedia. Accountants have sadly neglected to write Wikipedia entries and to
write comments on existing entries. I once submitted some modules. The Wikipedia
Editor wrote back, with courtesy, explaining that Wikipedia could not become my
Website. My submissions were just too long and involved for Wikipedia.
Please try it yourself today. Wikipedia entries and edits to existing entries
can be typed directly in your Web browser (probably Internet Explorer or Mozilla
Firefox) and do not require any other software. It's easy and fun.
A quick
look at two familiar Web sites will demonstrate that
academic libraries now play a vital role in how students and
faculty find and gather information via the Web as well as
in the stacks. Both Johns Hopkins University and the
University of Maryland offer a full range of online library
services, from catalogs (formerly known as “card catalogs")
to research help to DRUM — the
Digital Repository at Maryland,
which provides a permanent online address for computer files
and eliminates the need to attach them to e-mail messages.
The Julia Rogers Library at Goucher College subscribes to
services that provide students with access to over 22,000
online titles, while Baltimore City Community College’s
library gives students technology support and online access
to research materials.
The volume
of information available on the Web has led some students to
believe that if a resource can’t be found online, it doesn’t
exist. This mistaken idea, coupled with concerns about the
reliability of information on the Web and the potential for
plagiarism from online sources, has led faculty and
librarians to team up to teach information literacy skills.
Nationwide, higher education institutions have
developed information literacy instruction
to help students understand how to
find and evaluate information online and in print — more
bang for their tuition buck! Many colleges and universities
even provide “personal trainers,” so students can work with
librarians one on one, or with a group project team to brush
up on the best databases for a particular class or
assignment.
Technology
training helps students succeed in class, but also prepares
them for future careers. Information literacy is critical to
a competitive work force, and information-literate people
know how to find accurate, useful information that will help
them through family, medical or job crises.
Partners
in education
College and
research librarians are partners with professors in
educating students, offering new perspectives, developing
curriculums and facilitating research projects, and they
lead the library world in digitization efforts and online
reference.
Our nation’s
college and research libraries are constantly finding new
ways to better serve students, faculty and staff, online and
in person. More than 90 percent of college students now
visit the online library from home.
Yet use of
the nation’s physical academic libraries and their
collections grew from more than 880 million library visits
in 2002 to more than a billion in 2004, according to the
most recent data from the National Center on Education
Statistics — an increase of more than 14 percent.
Circulation of library materials in the same period was up
by 6 percent, to more than 200 million items.
In short, if
the classroom is the first stop in the learning experience,
the library is the next, and great libraries continue to be
a key to a great education.
How It Works ---
http://snurl.com/BookSearch
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book
feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages
to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying
books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match
your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on
every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as
running an Amazon.com search.
CiteBase
Citebase is a trial service that allows researchers
to search across free, full-text research literature
ePrint archives, with results ranked according to
criteria such as citation impact.
Gateway to ePrints
A listing of ePrint servers and open access
repository search tools.
Google Scholar
A search tool for scholarly citations and abstracts,
many of which link to full text articles, book
chapters, working papers and other forms of
scholarly publishing. It includes content from many
open access journals and repositories.
OAIster
A search tool for cross-archive searching of more
than 540 separate digital collections and archives,
including arXiv, CiteBase, ANU ePrints, ePrintsUQ,
and others.
Scirus
A search tool for online journals and Web sites in
the sciences.
Social scientists and business scholars often use SSRN (not free) ---
http://www.ssrn.com/
If you have access to a college library, most colleges generally have
paid subscriptions to enormous scholarly literature databases that are not
available freely online. Serious scholars obtain access to these vast
literature databases.
". . . the crisis in the scholarly communication
system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens
our academic faculty's ability to do world-class research. With current
technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools
necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to
change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to
scholarly articles."
Paul G. Haschak's webliography provides resources
to help effect this change. "Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication
-- Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access
Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations,
Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items -- A Webliography" (E-JASL,
vol. 7, no. 1, spring 2006) is available online at
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n01/haschak_p01.htm
E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and
Special Librarianship [ISSN 1704-8532] is an independent, professional,
refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in
the areas of academic and special librarianship. E-JASL is published by the
Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP), Athabasca,
Canada. For more information, contact: Paul Haschak, Executive Editor, Board
President, and Founder, Linus A. Sims Memorial Library, Southeastern
Louisiana University, Hammond, LA USA;
email: phaschak@selu.edu
Web:
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/
Few
projects in academe have attracted the attention and praise
in recent years of
OpenCourseWare, a program in which
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is making all of
its course materials available online — free — for anyone to
use.
In the four years since MIT launched
the effort,
use of the courseware has
skyrocketed, and several other universities have created
similar programs, assembling material from their own
courses.
With
less fanfare than MIT, Rice University has also been
promoting a model for free, shared information that could be
used by faculty members and students anywhere in the world.
But the Rice program —
Connexions
— is different in key respects. It is assembling material
from professors (and high school teachers) from anywhere, it
is offering free software tools in addition to course
materials, and it is trying to reshape the way academe uses
both peer review and publishing. The project also has hopes
of becoming a major curricular tool at community colleges.
“I was
just frustrated with the status quo,” says
Richard G. Baraniuk, in explaining
how he started Connexions in 1999. “Peer review is severely
broken. Publishing takes too long and then books are too
expensive,” he says. “This is about cutting out the
middlemen and truly making information free.”
“I was just
frustrated with the status quo,” says Richard G. Baraniuk,
in explaining how he started Connexions in 1999. “Peer
review is severely broken. Publishing takes too long and
then books are too expensive,” he says. “This is about
cutting out the middlemen and truly making information
free.”
Baraniuk is
a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice,
so many of the initial modules (which can either be
materials for a course, a lecture or any other
organizational unit) were in engineering and were submitted
by Rice professors. But as Connexions has grown (from 200
modules in its second year to 2,300), it has attracted
content in many disciplines and from many scholars.
There are
materials for courses on art history, birds, business and
graphic design. Offerings are particularly strong in music.
And participating professors come from institutions
including Cornell, Indiana State and Ohio State
Universities, and the Universities of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and Wisconsin at Madison. Professors from
outside the United States have also started to use the site
— it offers materials from the Norwegian University of
Science and Technology and the University of Cambridge.
Use of
the materials has grown steadily — in May, more than 350,000
individuals used the site at some point, a mix of professors
and students, about half of them on return visits.
Continued in article
Question
How popular are these open sharing sites?
The recent decision by MIT to post the
information from all its 2,000 courses free to the Web has generated
tremendous excitement online, with more than 42 million hits recorded in
the first month, according to MIT statistics 1.
The project, entitled OpenCourseWare, was
initiated by MIT professors and funded by $11 million in grants from two
foundations. As of March, 2004, 700 courses, encompassing all five
schools and two-thirds of the faculty on the Cambridge, Massachusetts
campus, have been added to the site (ocw.mit.edu).
The project did not start as an effort to
populate the information commons. On the contrary, in 1999, Robert
Brown, MIT's provost, asked a faculty committee to study the idea for an
online for-profit equivalent to the physical school.
However, after researching the issue, the
faculty committee concluded that a profit-making venture was not viable,
suggesting instead that the university and its faculty make its course
material available for free online 2.
As reported by Charles Vest 2, the university's
president, the OpenCourseWare initiative has had impacts both inside and
outside the university. Within MIT, professors have begun using one
another's materials to supplement their own teaching efforts, and are
discovering interdisciplinary connections that could lead to new
innovations inside the institution. Outside the university, MIT alumni,
interested individuals, and other educators from around the world are
using the courseware as a means to keep current in their fields and as
models for new courses and curriculum.
The effort has generated interest in other
areas, particularly among Intellectual Property legal commentators, who
questioned the relationship between faculty-generated course notes and
university property rights 3. Given the fact that the project is
faculty-initiated and voluntary, intellectual property issues in the
curricular area between the university and professors have not yet come
to a head at MIT. However, the project has had to navigate the murky
waters of copyright in other respects, particularly with regard to the
negotiation for permissions with other information providers 4.
Nevertheless, the project still leaves open the
question of the relative information rights of professors and
universities.
In addition, it raises broader questions of the
roles both of professional disciplines and the institutional structures
developed to support them in a technological world in which traditional
boundaries between information transformation, production, and
dissemination are under strain. The following attempts to lay out some
of the relevant issues, focusing particularly on the role of the
university in an online world.
A Brief Look at the University in Society
Lying at the center of questions about
university and academic information ownership is a deeply contested
vision of the role of both scholarship and the institutions designed to
support research. Do scholars labor primarily as individual authors and
inventors, or are they members of what Enlightenment scholars termed a
res publica, loosely defined as a republic of ideas operating beyond
institutional and political boundaries? Are universities places of
sanctuary for ideas, separated from the marketplace, or information
dissemination institutions situated squarely in the market?
In her book "Who Owns Academic Work?," Corynne
McSherry 5 traces the history of modern American universities and makes
a strong case that these questions are largely unanswerable, because
they assume a stability in self-conception that is historically missing.
She argues that medieval universities and guilds were primarily
envisioned as mechanisms for monopoly control over ideas, with the
former focusing on professional control and the latter on control over
invention. With the coming of the Enlightenment, voluntary academic
societies sought to break down university monopolies on knowledge,
constructing a meritocracy based on open communication and communal
enquiry, and existing in cooperation with the growing commercial
marketplace. At the institutional level, nineteenth-century German
conceptions of the university, based on Kant's ideas in Conflict of the
Faculties, envisioned the university as a place apart from the
marketplace, yet poised to provide knowledge based on reason to
political rulers. In the United States, German models of scholarly
independence blended with the British tradition of liberal arts and
informed citizenship, leading to a tension between disinterested
scholarship and community. This admixture was further complicated by the
presence of private schools funded through religious and other
associations sitting cheek-and-jowl to land-grant public universities,
developed to provide practical assistance in the development of new
agricultural and mechanical techniques.
By the twentieth century, the split between
theoretical and practical knowledge within universities was
institutionalized through a separation of faculties of arts and science
from engineering and professional school. At the same time, the
continued compartmentalization of knowledge into disciplines supported
the rise of self-contained academic communities with different standards
of scholarship and practice.
To support the engagement of the university in
the marketplace, during the 1920's several American universities,
particularly those with large engineering components, inaugurated small
offices dedicated to technology transfer, particularly the processing of
patent applications for professors. However, in a major shift, the end
of the Second World War saw a major increase in government grant
programs for basic research, insulating the academy from a necessity to
rely on private funding sources and enhancing the traditional notion of
universities as the preferred site for basic objective research separate
from the commercial marketplace. At the same time, a greater integration
of the university into public life occurred, with the provision of GI
Bill grants to returning members of the military. University enrollments
doubled during the next 15 years, doubling again within another 8 years.
By the 1990s, the position of universities
within society began to shift again. Federal funding for research
slowed, along with other public financing sources. Pressure developed to
seek private financing through partnerships with foundations and
corporations. Universities undertook attempts at more aggressive
management of intellectual assets, often bringing them into conflict
with academic communities. The rise of the Internet signaled the
potential for developing new resource streams through the development of
online courses and degrees, but no one was sure where the dividing line
stood between individual and institutional ownership of course
materials.
Academic publishing, long a backwater in the
publishing industry, showed strong growth and consolidation as
publishers embraced electronic dissemination and new models of product
bundling.
Educators who do not choose to freely share their course materials may
try to sell them to other educators online ---
http://teacherspayteachers.com/
And now we can harness the internet's strengths in
order to bypass the educational publishing conglomerates and help
ourselves. Here, we will pay each other for our teaching materials and
evaluate one another's work with ratings and comments.
As sellers,
creative teachers will get credit and income for their ideas.
As buyers, teachers
will save huge amounts of time and use the best teacher-created,
teacher-tested practical materials available.
And the real winners will
be our students. They deserve what our best can create -- you can post
and find it here. Teachers paying teachers, an idea whose time has come.
Entrepreneur and former public school teacher
Paul Edelman has created Teacherspayteachers.com, an website where
teachers can sell lesson plans that they have created. Sellers pay an
annual fee, set their own prices, and 15% of each sale goes to Edelman.
Currently, almost all of the lesson plans cover K-12-level subjects, but
the site already includes some university-level materials covering math,
history, and criminology. To view the site's lesson plan collection, go
to
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/
Jensen Comment
Capitalist that I am, I think there are too many externalities connected with
education materials. I encourage that more consideration be given to free
open-sharing of course materials.
The June 2006 issue of FIRST MONDAY features selected
papers from "FM10 Openness: Code, Science, and Content," a conference held in
May and sponsored by First Monday journal, the University of Illinois at Chicago
University Library, and the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation
and Technology (MERIT). The theme of the conference was open access (in
journals, communities, and science) and open source. Links to the online papers,
along with citations to those not available online, are available at
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/
First Monday [ISSN 1396-0466] is an online,
peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the
Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in
cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For
more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO
Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA;
email:
ejv@uic.edu ;
Web:
http://firstmonday.dk/
A survey of 400 academic
journal publishers done by the Association of Learned and Professional
Society Publishers found that:
* 90 percent of the
journals are now available online
* A fifth of the publishers are experimenting with open access journals
* 40 percent of publishers use previous print subscriptions as the base
for pricing for bundles
* Most publishers make agreements for either one year or three years
* 91 percent of publishers make back volumes available online; 20
percent charge for access to back volumes
* 42 percent have established formal arrangements for the long-term
preservation of their journals
* 83 percent require authors to transfer copyright in their articles to
the publisher
Can History Be Open
Source?
Roy Rosenzweig, a
history professor at George Mason University and colleague of the
institute, recently published a very good article on Wikipedia from the
perspective of a historian.
"Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the
Future of the Past" as a historian's
analysis complements the discussion from the important but different
lens of journalists and scientists. Therefore, Rosenzweig focuses on,
not just factual accuracy, but also the quality of prose and the
historical context of entry subjects. He begins with in depth overview
of how Wikipedia was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and
describes their previous attempts to create a free online encyclopedia.
Wales and Sanger's first attempt at a vetted resource, called Nupedia,
sheds light on how from the very beginning of the project, vetting and
reliability of authorship were at the forefront of the creators.
Rosenzweig adds to a
growing body of research trying to determine the accuracy of Wikipedia,
in his comparative analysis of it with other online history references,
along similar lines of the Nature study. He compares entries in
Wikipedia with Microsoft's online resource Encarta and American National
Biography Online out of the Oxford University Press and the American
Council of Learned Societies. Where Encarta is for a mass audience,
American National Biography Online is a more specialized history
resource. Rosenzweig takes a sample of 52 entries from the 18,000 found
in ANBO and compares them with entries in Encarta and Wikipeida. In
coverage, Wikipedia contain more of from the sample than Encarta.
Although the length of the articles didn't reach the level of ANBO,
Wikipedia articles were more lengthy than the entries than Encarta.
Further, in terms of accuracy, Wikipedia and Encarta seem basically on
par with each other, which confirms a similar conclusion (although
debated) that the Nature study reached in its comparison of Wikipedia
and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The discussion gets more
interesting when Rosenzweig discusses the effect of collaborative
writing in more qualitative ways.
The Asian ambitious efforts on open courseware
September 9, 2005 message from Marc Jelitto
[marc.jelitto@fernuni-hagen.de]
Bravo MIT: In the spirit of sharing in
the academy: Just proves once again that givers get in return The gist is that four years into what was originally to
be a 10-year, $100 million project, MIT has put nearly 1,000 of its 1,800
courses online, and is on track to finish the work of building the site by 2008
at a cost of $35 million. (The university is just beginning the work of
estimating the costs of sustaining the OpenCourseWare project in a “steady
state” once the buildout is finished, but expects, once the foundation money
dries up, to absorb most of the annual costs in as its regular budget.) The site
gets about 400,000 unique visits each month, or about 20,000 a day. The
individual course pages contain items commonly available on other universities’
sites like syllabi and calendars, but also more unusual features like videotaped
lectures, laboratory simulations, lecture notes (either provided by the
instructor or taken by staff members of OpenCourseWare) and even exams —
sometimes with answers. MIT “scrubs” the material to make sure that it either
complies with its Creative Commons intellectual property license or is removed
from the site.The university’s project has spawned sites in
Spain and
China
that are providing native language versions of some MIT courses (with a third,
still unendorsed by MIT, beginning in Taiwan, and another expected to be
announced in Japan next month).
Scott Jaschik, "Spreading the Wealth," Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2005
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/07/mit
Faculty
participation in the MIT venture is voluntary, but about
two-thirds of MIT professors have their courses online now.
By offering to do much of the work for professors, the
OpenCourseWare effort has managed to limit the time faculty
members typically spend on getting materials for a course
online to under five hours.
And peer
pressure is building, Margulies says, not just to
participate, but to bolster the look and content of their
courses. “There has been a wholesale improvement of the
materials,” she says. Some of that movement is driven by
faculty members’ “own competitive pride of looking at what
their colleagues are doing,” she said, and some results from
other sources. “Students are asking faculty members why
their courses aren’t up.”
Margulies
gushes, and almost blushes, when she reads some of the ways
users of the site have described it in e-mail messages to
the OpenCourseWare staff: “Eighth wonder of the world,”
“coolest thing on the Internet,” “worthy of the Nobel Peace
Prize,” “like falling in love.”
“We’ve heard
all of those hundreds of times,” Margulies says. “Well,
except for ‘like falling in love’ — we’ve only gotten that
one once. We’re a bit concerned about that person.”
Reminiscent of the kids in the
back of the car on your family's vacation, the persistent question about this
technology (Learning Management Systems seems to be, "Are we there
yet?"
Ira Fuchs, "Learning Management Systems," Syllabus, July/August
2004 --- http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=9675
Question
If you know what OKI is, do you also know what SAKAI
stands for?
Answer
OKI stands for the Open Knowledge Initiative and DSpace spearheaded by MIT in
conjunction with various leading universities (See below)
The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement,
almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that
the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty
were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the
Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review
some of the course materials, but not take the class. And not just a few
classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT
curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all
fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years.
Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive
director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress
towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500
MIT courses had been posted on the Web. Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and
Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718
In the
first week on the Web, the OCW site received more than 13 million visits from
users, about 52 percent from outside of the United States. The OCW team also
processed more than 2,000 e-mails in those first days, more than 75 percent of
them supportive of the project. The remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical
questions, inquiries about specific course offerings, and questions about
content. Less than 2 percent of those e-mails were negative. "Open Access to World-Class Knowledge," by Anne H.
Margulies, Syllabus, March 2003, pp. 16-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7360
SAKAI
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
A grant was made to the University of Michigan,
for use by the SAKAI consortium to support the development of an open source,
feature-rich course management system for higher education. Participating
institutions have agreed to place the new learning management system into
production when the system is completed.
The University of Michigan, Indiana University,
Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the
uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their
enormous investments in educational software to create an integrated set of
open source tools for the benefit of higher education. The new open source
software, known as SAKAI, aims to draw the “best-of-breed” from among
existing open source course management systems and related tools: uPortal,
CHEF, Stellar, Encore, Course Tools, Navigo Assessment, OnCourse, OneStart,
Eden Workflow, and Courseworks.
MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) produced a
comprehensive framework for course management systems rather than a production
system. The SAKAI effort is the logical next step: the creation of a
comprehensive course management system and an underlying portal framework that
draw from existing efforts and integrate the finest available modules and
approaches.
The goal is an economically sustainable approach to
high quality open source learning software for higher education. The approach
promises to overcome two main barriers that have consistently impeded such
collaborative efforts: (1) unique local architectures, including heterogeneous
software, software interoperability requirements between systems, and diverse
user interfaces that hinder the portability of software among institutions;
and (2) timing differences in institutional funding and mobilization that
reduce synergy and result in fragmented, often incomplete offerings and weak
interoperability.
This consortium hopes to overcome these barriers by
relying on OKI service definitions that integrate otherwise heterogeneous
local architectures and enable the mobility of software. In addition, the
advanced course management system will use as its core-building block an
upgraded version of the Foundation-supported and highly successful uPortal
software (Version 3), a powerful, open source portal environment that will
integrate a portal specification needed for tool interoperability. The
institutions are also committed to the “synchronization of institutional
clocks,” essentially rolling out the new applications on the same schedule
to maximize the synergy of the effort.
In concert with the development effort, SAKAI is
creating a partners program that invites other institutions to contribute
$10,000 per year for three years. Partner institutions will experiment with
production versions of the software in 2004 and 2005 and investigate
sustainability options. They will receive early access to project information;
early code releases for the SAKAI framework, portal, services, and tools;
invitations to partner meetings; and technical training workshops.
Contributions from an expected minimum of 20 institutions will support a
community development staff member to coordinate partner activities, a
developer to interact with partner technical staff, another staff member to
coordinate documentation, a support staff member to respond to inquiries, and
an administrative staff member to coordinate partner activities and facilitate
responses.
Continued in article
MIT's DSpace Explained In 1978, Loren Kohnfelder invented digital certificates
while working on his MIT undergraduate thesis. Today, digital certificates are
widely used to distribute the public keys that are the basis of the Internet's
encryption system. This is important stuff! But when I tried to find an online
copy of Kohnfelder's 1978 manuscript, I came up blank. According to the MIT
Libraries' catalog, there were just two copies in the system: a microfiche
somewhere in Barker Engineering Library, and a "noncirculating" copy in the
Institute Archives . . . DSpace is a long-term, searchable digital archive. It
creates unchanging URLs for stored materials and automatically backs up one
institution's archives to another's. Today, DSpace is being used by 79
institutions, with more on the way. But as my little story about Kohnfelder's
thesis demonstrates, archiving data is only half the problem. In order to be
useful, archives must also enable researchers to find what they are looking for.
Sending e-mail to the author worked for me, but it's not a good solution for the
masses. Long-term funding is another problem that DSpace needs to solve. "The
libraries are seeking ways of stabilizing support for DSpace to make it easier
to sustain as it gets bigger over time," says MacKenzie Smith, the Libraries'
associate director for technology. Today, development on the DSpace system is
funded by short-term grants. That's great for doing research, but it's not a
good model for a facility that's destined to be the long-term memory of the
Institute's research output. Says Smith: "We need to know how to support an
operation like this in very lean times."
Simson Garfinkel, "MIT's DSpace Explained," MIT's Technology Review, July
2005 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/feature_mit.asp?trk=nl
Critics of Strauss accuse him of
being elitist, illiberalist and anti-democratic. Shadia Drury, in Leo
Strauss and the American Right (1999), argues that Strauss inculcated an
elitist strain in American political leaders linked to imperialist
militarism, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury argues that
Strauss teaches that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power
is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell
them what's good for them." Nicholas Xenos similarly argues that Strauss was
"an anti-democrat in a fundamental sense, a true reactionary. According to
Xenos, "Strauss was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous,
pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of
authoritarian rule, of pure fascism."
Strauss has also been criticized
by some conservatives. According to Claes Ryn, the "new Jacobinism" of the
"neoconservative" philosophy, a philosophy that Ryn controversially
attributes to Strauss, is not "new, it is the rhetoric of Saint-Just and
Trotsky that the philosophically impoverished American Right has taken over
with mindless alacrity. Republican operators and think tanks apparently
believe they can carry the electorate by appealing to yesterday’s leftist
clichés.
Noam Chomsky has argued that
Strauss's theory is a form of Leninism, in which society should be led by a
group of elite vanguards, whose job is to protect liberal society against
the dangers of excessive individualism, and creating inspiring myths to make
the masses believe that they are fighting against anti-democratic and
anti-liberal forces. Daniel Bell, in his Marxian socialism in the United
States wrote: "the consequence of the theory of the vanguard party and its
relation to the masses is a system of "two truths," the consilia evangelica,
or special ethics endowed for those whose lives are so dedicated to the
revolutionary ends, and another truth for the masses. Out of this belief
grew Lenin's famous admonition—one can lie, steal, or cheat, for the cause
itself has a higher truth."
Journalists, such as Seymour
Hersh, have opined that Strauss endorsed noble lies, "myths used by
political leaders seeking to maintain a cohesive society".[32][33] In The
City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that
are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's
land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately and
that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Open Culture <mail@openculture.com>
Date: Mon, May 23, 2011 at 8:28 AM
Subject: Leo Strauss: 15 Political Philosophy Courses Online
To: rjensen@trinity.edu
In 1949, Leo
Strauss, the German-Jewish emigré, landed at The
University of Chicago, where he spent decades teaching
and writing on political philosophy, especially the
political thought of the Ancients. Strauss’ thinking
skewed conservative, and if he was sometimes
controversial while alive, he has become only more so in
death (1973). Nowadays he’s considered
rightly or wrongly the “intellectual godfather of the
neo-conservative political movement,” it not an
“intellectual force behind the Bush administration’s
plan to invade Iraq.” Although Strauss commented
occasionally on contemporary politics (Harper’s
has more on that), he spent most of his time working
through major philosophical texts, and through his
commentaries, developing his own philosophical
positions, which were generally hostile to the
Enlightenment project and modern
individualism/liberalism.
More seminars will be coming online. For now, we have
catalogued all 15 existing seminars in the Philosophy
section of our big collection of 375 Free
Online Courses.
Thanks goes to DIY
Scholar for unearthing these seminars.
Starving the Beast: Using Tax Policy and
Governmental Budgeting to Drive Social Policy
Amy M. Hageman,
Vicky Arnold, and
Steve G. Sutton
Accounting and the Public Interest 9(1),
10 (2009) (29 pages)
Abstract Full Text: [
PDF (218 kB) ]
STARVING THE BEAST:
USING TAX POLICY AND GOVERNMENTAL BUDGETING TO DRIVE SOCIAL POLICY
ABSTRACT
This study explores the
philosophical and theoretical bases underlying U.S. tax and social
policy for over 25 years in order to develop a comprehensive framework
from which to evaluate the intended and actual effects on wealth
distribution and social policy overall. The framework provides a basis
for understanding the overarching social agenda of neoconservative
leadership as it advocates what has become known as Starve the Beast (STB). The
STB strategy focuses on altering taxation structures in order to
facilitate desired reallocations in government budgets to effect change
in social policy. This study explores the roots of STB beginning with
the political philosophy of Leo Strauss, followed by the adaptation of
Strauss’s philosophy by Irving Kristol (the godfather of neoconservatism)
in establishing the basic tenets of neoconservative political theory,
and the marriage of neoconservatism with supply-side economics to
increase popular support. Through this anthropological study, 11
propositions evolve during the development of a comprehensive view of a
complex social policy underlying STB strategies designed to promote
wealth retention, less progressive tax rate structures, less spending on
social programs, and greater national focus on defense, security, and
patriotism. The resulting framework has implications for future tax
policy research, as well as enhancing our understanding of the influence
of the neoconservative movement on the greater accounting environment.
Steve
G. Sutton KPMG Professor & Ph.D. Program
Coordinator
Dixon School of Accounting, University of Central Florida
A Free Content and Free and Open Courseware
implementation strategy for the University of the Western Cape
Tertiary institutions the world over are
recognizing the value of freely sharing educational curricula and content,
collaborating in their further development and extension, and doing so under
the umbrella of free and unrestricted access to knowledge. The word “free”
in this case refers to liberty, not to absence of price, although absence of
direct price is a common side-benefit of liberty, just as it is in the
software arena.
One of the more mature programs in this area is the
Open Courseware Initiative (OCI) run by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) in the USA, but many other institutions have similar
initiatives and many more are now creating open courseware initiatives of
their own.
UWC has been invited to join a global consortium of
institutions involved in OCI, membership of which has no fees or
requirements other than a commitment to OCI principles. Since the notion of
Open Content features in our Integrated Information Strategy and our
E-Learning Strategy, and UWC is widely known and respected for its work in
Free and Open Source Software, the time is opportune for us to create this
implementation strategy and to use it to build a UWC OCI-type of initiative.
The emphasis in philosophy of Free Content is on
social good through promoting collaborative development and the adaptation
and expansion of content whereas the philosophy of Open Content is access
while protecting the author’s wishes to restrict access or usage to certain
conditions. All Free Content is Open Content, but not all Open Content is
Free Content.
Open Courseware: Open Content that is arranged in
Courses and made available in a structured manner via the Internet. All Free
Courseware is Open Courseware, but not all Open Courseware is Free
Courseware.
The toolbox includes functions to compute the
present or future value of cash flows at regular or irregular time intervals
with equal or unequal payments:
fvfix,
fvvar,
pvfix, and
pvvar. The -fix functions
assume equal cash flows at regular intervals, while the -var
functions allow irregular cash flows at irregular periods.
Now compute the net present value of the sample
income stream for which you computed the internal rate of return. This
exercise also serves as a check on that calculation because the net present
value of a cash stream at its internal rate of return should be zero.
Jensen Comment
Even if you do not have the MatLab Toolbox installed, you can program the
illustrations in Excel.
From one of the leading law school advocates of open sharing
Many of Eben Moglen's papers on patents and copyrights can be downloaded from
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/
My good friend John Howland, a professor of computer science, recommends
these particular papers for starters:
Professor Moglen runs a blog called "Freedom
Now" at
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/blog
Entries are relatively infrequent and date back to April 2000
There are also a few links to audio and video presentations.
OKI focused on this framework and the delivery of a
proof of concept, meaning a system or a pair of systems that could demonstrate
this interoperability. And that’s in fact what MIT and Stanford achieved.
S: So OKI focused on the framework… how does the
Sakai project build on that?
IHF: The Sakai project starts out where OKI left off
by taking the architecture and the OSIDs [Open Services Interface Definitions]
and fusing them with the best of breed development—learning management
system development—from four major institutions: Stanford, MIT, Indiana
University, and the University of Michigan. The purpose is to create a
world-class production-ready system that will be open, extensible, and
scalable. And, further, a very important aspect of Sakai is that the four
institutions have agreed, in writing, as a condition of the grant, that they
will bring this new system into production on each of their campuses at the
same time, approximately a year from now. The goal is really nothing less than
delivering an LMS that colleges and universities can use and extend with
modules written at other schools, at their own school, or licensed from
commercial vendors.
S: Do you think learning management systems will be
considered a core technology for colleges and universities going forward? And
will open, interoperable systems prevail and be in common use? Are we there
yet?
IHF:I think learning management systems are a core
technology already, and that fact is, I think, both good and bad. It’s good
because learning management systems have helped the faculty and students
enormously. They make course information and content available on the Web, and
at the same time improve communication among students and faculty. But because
the LMS is already so important to the functioning of many schools, it’s
going to be hard to move away from the proprietary systems they may be running
today and to begin using open, collaboratively developed and maintained
systems. I think open systems are going to prevail, but it’s going to take
time.
S: So, in a sense, we’re not really there yet…What
are some of the steps that could move all of this forward?
IHF: That’s true, we’re not there yet. But Sakai
is about to deliver a beta release. The concept is to leverage the work of
many, many institutions to ultimately build a system that most, if not all,
institutions will want to run. But that’s not the case yet. Today, you have
a plethora of choices among learning management systems. There are sites on
the Web listing dozens of them. But for institutions seeking to move away from
their current LMS, there is a cost to change. The cost comes in many forms,
not the least of which is that people grow accustomed to an interface. And
often they’ve converted content to be used in that system. So whatever we
come up with is going to have to account for and minimize those costs of
change.
One way to minimize them is, for example, in the case
of the user interface, to have what are commonly known as skins. These are
modifiable user interfaces that are selectable by an institution, or sometimes
even by the end user, to make the system look the way they want it to look. We’re
also going to need to have tools to facilitate the transformation of content
from one system to another, to export it and then import it into another
system. So we’re going to have to do what we can to minimize the cost of
converting from one system to another.
S: Is interoperability among installed systems a key
goal for OKI?
IHF: Absolutely, that’s what OKI is all about. The
basis for all of this is to have a set of standards, of common interfaces,
APIs or OSIDs. I think this is the right time, because people have learned,
first of all, that it’s too expensive to try to develop it all on their own.
Even the biggest institutions—such as Michigan, the Indiana University,
Stanford, and MIT—have decided that building and maintaining these complex
systems on their own just doesn’t make sense any more. At the same time, the
notable, visible success of some of the open source projects—the big ones
like Linux, Apache, or MySQL—have proven that it’s possible to develop
something in the open and get people to commit to maintain and enhance the
software.
Perhaps the most important fact to remember is that
the industry we represent, higher education, is unique in our willingness to
collaborate and to share our labors, such as we have in this IT space. There
are a lot of smart people in each of these institutions, and if we can harness
them behind the same projects and use a set of standards, starting off with a
good base piece of software such as I think Sakai will deliver, then we can do
wonders.
S: What about standards for metadata? Is that
something to consider along with the interface standards?
IHF: Sure it is, and that is something, of course,
that the library community has been working on for a long time. What did
someone once say?: “The wonderful thing about standards is there are always
so many to choose from…” And we do have many metadata standards. But I
think that they will converge, at least in limited domains. When it comes to
learning object repositories, it’s going to lead to a set of metadata
schema, metadata standards that will not satisfy everyone—that’s probably
impossible—but will be good enough. Many of the Mellon-funded projects—OCW,
Sakai, LionShare at Penn State, Chandler—are all trying to converge on a
common standard for metadata.
S: Will learning management systems change
significantly in the next few years? Have they been on the right track, and
are they flexible enough to be used universally?
IHF: Learning management systems have come a long
way, but there’s still much that can be done to improve usability in
particular, especially to make it easier to publish or create new material. It
still takes too much expertise to create attractive materials from the notes,
images, and programs that faculty use to teach a course. The proliferation of
learning management systems suggests that no one system is sufficiently
feature-rich, or adequately flexible and extensible enough to meet everyone’s
needs or even most institutions’ requirements. But I hope to see that change
in the next couple of years with the advent of Sakai.
The proliferation of learning management systems
suggests that no one system is sufficiently feature-rich, or adequately
flexible and extensible enough to meet everyone’s needs or even most
institutions’ requirements.
S: Are new development tools needed?
IHF: Yes, I think we need authoring tools that lower
the effort threshold dramatically for faculty to take digitized materials and
create something esthetically pleasing as well as effective for their teaching
purposes. There are tools, but we have to make sure that they are going to be
compatible with all of the other pieces that we’re putting together based on
standards. Of course, they’re not yet very compatible, but how could they
be? They were built at some point in the past when people weren’t worried
about that.
S: What are the pieces needed so that learning
management systems can become more easily or better integrated with other
parts of the campus information system, either on the academic or on the
administrative side?
IHF: We need the middleware layer that translates the
standards, such as the OSIDs, for the actual campus infrastructures. For
example, OKI defines a set of OSIDs for authentication and authorization, and
we want developers to be able to use those OSIDs, so that the systems will be
interoperable. However, just about every campus has some authentication system
already in place, whether it’s User ID/Password, or Kerberos, or Shibboleth.
So there needs to be code which translates the calls that use the OSIDs, to
the actual campus mechanisms. This is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. Why
create the middleware unless developers are using the standards? Why should
developers use the standards unless the systems they are writing for have
implemented the necessary middleware? But I think it’s going to happen.
S: How do portals fit in with all of this?
IHF: There’s another project, which was funded by
the Mellon Foundation at almost the same time as OKI that has been very, very
successful—that’s uPortal. It’s in use at scores of institutions now. It
is the primary enterprise portal at those institutions. So when you ask the
question about how to make it easier to integrate the LMS with other parts of
the campus information system, I think uPortal is going to play an important
role—and Sakai is built on top of uPortal.
S: Will libraries become better integrated with the
LMS?
IHF: I think they must become better integrated
in-so-far as making it as transparent as possible to the end user—faculty or
the student—as to where the information used by the LMS is coming from or
how to search for it. And that’s a significant challenge since there are
many potential sources for the data used in an LMS. A course can use data from
online publishers, from the campus library, from another library, from the
campus repository, or even from the faculty member’s local or server-based
files. With the emergence of peer-to-peer tools, such as LionShare, the data
could even come from the personal machines of individuals throughout the
world. Somehow we need to make all of this distributed information available
in the learning management system without the user having to learn so many
different interfaces.
There are many of MIT's shared course materials (syllabi,
lecture notes, etc.) that are available free on line in virtually all academic
disciplines covered at MIT --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
There are quite a few new and updated courses in the database.
Knowledge
Wants to Be Openly Shared: One Day We Will Beat the Selfishness Out of
Academe
"DSpace partners led by MIT have bet the farm." (See
Below)
Why do some
leading universities openly share knowledge while a few other leading
universities go so far as to claim property rights over the notes students take
in courses? Why do some share instructor course notes, software, and
research papers without charge whereas others charge for every word written by a
faculty member?
My really good friends in the
Computer Science Department invited me to dinner on March 2 with our Phi Beta
Kappa Visiting Scholar Hal Abelson from MIT --- http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/%7Ehal/hal.html
The following are more-or-less footnotes to the above home page (note the free
video lectures):
Everyone interested in university education should read Edwin Land's
1957 speech Generation
of Greatness.
An on-line
version of Structure and Interpreration of Computer Programs,
and also a complete series of video
lectures, made in 1986, of Gerry Sussman and me teaching the course.
Hal Abelson is
professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a fellow of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is winner of several
teaching awards, including the IEEE's Booth Education Award, cited for his
contributions to the teaching of undergraduate computer science. His research at
the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory focuses on "amorphous
computing," an effort to create programming technologies that can harness
the power of the new computing substrates emerging from advances in
microfabrication and molecular biology. He is also engaged in the interaction of
law, policy, and technology as they relate to societal tensions sparked by the
growth of the Internet, and is active in projects at MIT and elsewhere to help
bolster our intellectual commons.
A founding
director of the Free Software Foundation and of Creative Commons, he serves as a
consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He is co-director of the
MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology and co-head of MIT's
Council on Educational Technology.
Professor Abelson is one of the
founding fathers of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI/OCW) and DSpace knowledge
sharing databases that are probably the leading programs for free and open
sharing of knowledge and education materials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement,
almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that
the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty
were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the
Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review
some of the course materials, but not take the class. And not just a few
classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT
curriculum—everything in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all
fields, totalling some 2000 courses—available over the next few years.
Speaking at the November 2003 EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive
director of the OCW project, announced that MIT has made significant progress
towards this goal: as of fall 2003, the resources for some 500
MIT courses had been posted on the Web. Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and
Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718
In the
first week on the Web, the OCW site received more than 13 million visits from
users, about 52 percent from outside of the United States. The OCW team also
processed more than 2,000 e-mails in those first days, more than 75 percent of
them supportive of the project. The remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical
questions, inquiries about specific course offerings, and questions about
content. Less than 2 percent of those e-mails were negative. "Open Access to World-Class Knowledge," by Anne H.
Margulies, Syllabus, March 2003, pp. 16-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7360
In another program for storage and
sharing of knowledge, Professor Abelson and his colleagues have persuaded
leading universities to participate in another program called DSpace or the
Self-Managing Library. The participating universities now include such
giants as Stanford University, University of Chicago, and other leading research
universities of the world --- https://hpds1.mit.edu/index.jsp
All these
can be subsumed by the biggest issue that does not seem to be more than a blip
on the land grant radar, the highly visible trend called institutional
repositories. For example, the DSpace project is
building an institutional repository for public use,
aiming at posting as much of their content as possible. Extension services and
land grants routinely post free, online content, but the DSpace
partners led by MIT have bet the farm. Will
the extension service create institutional repositories too? How far do the
land grants go? DSpace, Merlot, and other 'open content' efforts cannot help
but appear as paradigmatic land grant projects. But we're apparently not at
the table.
Student
Derivatives and Course Notes: The Gray Zone of Knowledge Sharing
"In
the meantime, University of California faculty generally own their
copyright-protected property (see the UC Policy on Copyright Ownership, August
19, 1992) and, if concerned about notes being distributed on the web, have
rights to stop it." (See below)
First, the October 1, 1999, issue of The Chronicle
for Higher Education contains an article entitled "Putting Class Notes on
the Web: Are Companies Stealing Lectures?" Interestingly, one of the
companies discussed in the article is also the one prompting the current round
of complaints - StudentU.com. If you do not have access to The Chronicle in
your office you may wish to borrow this issue from a colleague. The article,
while not going into depth on the legal issues involved, makes clear that many
institutions of higher education across the nation are facing this same
problem.
The issue of making individual student notes
available to others is not new to the University of California, of course.
Here at Davis ASUCD has provided the "Classical Notes" service to
UCD students for some time, but authorization has not been a complaint as
note-takers are required to obtain the written permission of the instructor.
In 1969 a UCLA instructor sued a commercial publisher for hiring a student to
take notes for publication without the instructor’s permission, and the
court held that such action was a violation of the California common law
copyright (California Civil Code 980 et. seq.) as well as an invasion of
privacy, and both enjoined the company from continuing while ordering
compensatory and punitive damages. (Williams v. Weisser (1969) 273 C.A.2d
726.) This settled the issue in California at the time.
However, the world-wide web and the value of
E-commerce have brought the problem back to California in the last few years,
likely because the individuals (often students) who are starting these
nationwide companies are not aware of state laws, instead operating under the
assumption that the federal copyright law governs all. I believe it is helpful
to understand how federal law does not clearly protect instructors in this
situation. Federal copyright protection of the rights to make copies, make
derivative works, distribute, perform publicly, and display, applies to
"original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression,
from which they can be perceived, reproduced or otherwise communicated, either
directly or with the aid of a machine or device." (17 USCA section 102.)
Although the federal law was written long before the Internet was conceived,
its application is no different whether applied to paper class notes or the
Internet version posting of them.
Certainly, no one will dispute that federal law
creates a copyright interest in the instructor’s written/printed lecture
notes, to the extent they are original work. If an instructor is reading or
reciting from his/her lecture notes, he/she is exercising his/her performance
rights under copyright law, and a duplication of that performance by taking
notes so accurate as to allow a repeat performance would be a copyright
violation. However, most instructors do not lecture so precisely from their
notes, although portions such as a poem or critical passage may be read. If
the words being said in a lecture are not otherwise "fixed" the
public performance does not of itself constitute publication (17 USCA section
101, definition of publication), so does not trigger federal copyright
protection. Even if it did, in a federal court case that looked at the
applicability of copyright to course lectures, the court held that most
statements made in a lecture can be categorized as facts or ideas that do not
belong to anyone, neither of which is copyrightable. (University of Florida v.
KPB, Inc (d.b.a. "A Notes"), 89 F.3d 773; 1196 U.S. LEXIS 18778
(11th Cir. 1996)).
The argument being made by the web-based services,
however, is that even if the lecture is protected by copyright under federal
law, each note-taker is merely writing down his/her perceptions of the
instructor’s exercise of his/her copyrights. Rather than violating the
existing copyright, the note-taker is creating a new original work of
authorship fixed in a tangible medium, and, as the author, can exercise any of
the rights provided by federal copyright law, including transferring ownership
to a note-distribution service. The services have been very careful not to
duplicate class handouts or syllabi, which would clearly be a copyright
violation. The merit of this argument has not been tested in court. One
response to this might be that the note-taker is creating a derivative work
rather than a new work. However, if so, every college student who takes notes
is creating a derivative work without express authorization of the instructor,
leading some campus attorneys to advise instructors to begin expressly
authorizing notes made for personal use to differentiate notes for personal
use from notes for sale.
Fortunately, we don’t have to get into this can of
federal worms so long as the California common law copyright continues to be
good law and is not preempted by federal law to the contrary. In
the meantime, UC faculty generally own their copyright-protected property
(see the UC Policy on
Copyright Ownership, August 19, 1992) and, if concerned about notes being
distributed on the web, have rights to stop it. Since an ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure, instructors can announce at the first class, and put
in every syllabus, on their course web-sites, and in/on any other
teacher-student communication, a statement to the effect of:
Copyright (author’s name) (year). All
federal and state copyrights reserved for all original material presented in
this course through any medium, including lecture or print. Individuals are
prohibited from being paid for taking, selling, or otherwise transferring
for value, personal class notes made during this course to any entity
without the express written permission of (author). In addition to
legal sanctions, students found in violation of these prohibitions may be
subject to University disciplinary action.
The OCW (Open Courseware) announcement,
almost three years ago, was open for easy inference. MIT officials insisted that
the university was not offering online courses to students; rather, MIT faculty
were putting their course materials—syllabi and supporting resources—on the
Web for others to use. In other words, one could see the syllabus and review
some of the course materials, but not take the class. And not just a few
classes. OCW’s announced goal is to make the complete MIT curriculum—everything
in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, across all fields, totalling some
2000 courses—available over the next few years. Speaking at the November 2003
EDUCAUSE Conference, Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW project,
announced that MIT has made significant progress towards this goal: as of fall
2003, the resources for some 500 MIT
courses had been posted on the Web. Kenneth C. Green, "Curricular Reform, Conspiracy, and
Philanthropy," Syllabus, January 2004, Page 27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8718
OKI and OCW: Free sharing of
courseware from MIT, Stanford, and other colleges and universities.
"CourseWork: An Online Problem Set and Quizzing Tool," by Charles Kerns, Scott
Stocker, and Evonne Schaeffer, Syllabus, June 2001, 27-29. I don't think the
article is available online, although archived table of contents for the June edition is
at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/magazine.asp?month=6&year=2001
A Web-based learning support tool
that helps faculty assess student understanding will soon be a component of the Open
Knowledge infrastructure under the development at Stanford, MIT, and other universities.
THE OPEN
KNOWLEDGE INITIATIVE (OKI)
MIT, along with its principal partner
Stanford University, has launched The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), an ambitious
project to develop a modular, easy-to-use, Web-based teaching environment for assembling,
delivering, and accessing educational resources and activities. The initiative
emerged from the realization that our institutions were repeatedly building specialized
Web applications that shared common requirements for enterprise data and services.
Existing commercial products still require extensive customization to integrate into
student information, authentication, and authorization systems, and related data
stores. Faculty using these tools frequently complain that while sometimes helpful,
they require extra effort, forcing them to impose their style of teaching upon the rigidly
structured course system format. And changing the color of the screen or shape of
the buttons isn't the level of customization that really supports different pedagogical
approaches.
What is OKI?
OKI is about tools, a system, and a
community. It is not a new browser, document editor, or pre-packaged content. OKI
tools are the elements that enable basic teaching on the Web and that support specialized
discipline-specific needs, pedagogical methods, or group logistics.
OKI is being developed with careful
attention to IMS, SCORM, AICC, Dublin Core, and related standards
efforts. In keeping with another recently announced MIT project, the
OpenCourseWare Initiative (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/ocw-facts.html)
which will make content from MIT courses available on the Web for free, OKI
is based on an open source licensing model (there are no proprietary
components). It allows the tools, no matter who creates them, to:
Save information about learners, subjects, and
teaching methods in the same format
Share information
Access other systems like the library, the
registrar, and authentication and authorization systems
Extend the system; anyone can add new features and
new tools.
OKI is being built by institutions that
have dealt with large open systems in academic settings. Besides MIT and
Stanford, core initial collaborating institutions include the Dartmouth College, North
Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of
Wisconsin.
Recalling the vitality and success of another
open source effort, the development of the Linux operating system, OKI hopes to
build a community of developers, teachers, educational technologists, librarians, and
researchers who will collaborate to continually improve and extend the OKI learning
management system. OKI is committed to working with its partners and early
adopters to establish a dynamic open source framework for continued development, support,
and training.
Getting Involved
Information about the progress of OKI can
be found on the OKI Web site: http://web.mit.edu/oki . For updates subscribe
to the list oki-announce@mit.edu using the form
on the OKI Web site. If you'd like to contribute more directly to this
effort, e-mail oki-suggest@mit.edu.
Most business disciplines seem to be cooperating in this sharing effort
except for accounting. I can't find any shared course materials from
financial accounting professors. However, there are two accounting courses:
WebCT Demonstrates Support for Open Knowledge
Standards
Course management system firm WebCT said last week it
had successfully prototyped an application using the Open Knowledge Initiative
(OKI) Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) to support interoperability
among higher education applications. In the demo, the WebCT Vista academic
enterprise system automatically synchronized calendars with Microsoft Outlook
using the OKI authentication and scheduling OSIDs, or APIs, to exchange data.
This would enable both calendars to be simultaneously updated by updating one.
The OKI aims to encourage local innovations that can
be shared across campuses and facilitate the use of new technologies without
destabilizing the overall environment.
Update September 2003
MIT's Open Source is becoming a huge academic
sharing success
From Ho Chi Minh City to Nashville, Tennessee, students are flocking to MIT's
new program that posts about 2,000 classes on the Web, for free. Meet the global
geeks getting an MIT education, open-source style. See MIT Everywhere, Wired
Magazine, September 2003 --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html
Every lecture, every handout,
every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT
education, open source-style.
Update March 17, 2003
MIT OpenCourseWare (Open Knowledge Initiative OKI and DSpace) Shares Lessons
from Pilot Project.
A student in Johannesburg, South Africa. An educator
in Wiesbaden, Germany. Ethiopian refugees trying to finish an engineering
education cut short by civil war. These are just a few of the people who have
tapped the potential of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, a two-year-old effort to make available original
course materials from all five of MIT's schools to students around the world.
Started by an MIT faculty committee charged with
providing guidance on how MIT should position itself in the distance and
eLearning environment, the OCW project supports the university's interest in
contributing to the "shared intellectual commons" in higher
education. "OpenCourseWare combines two things: traditional openness and
outreach, and the democratizing influence of American education, with the
ability of the Web to make vast amounts of information instantly
available," says MIT President Charles M. Vest.
On Sept. 30, 2002, the pilot site of OCW was
launched. It offers users the opportunity to see and use course materials from
50 MIT subjects, representing 20 individual academic disciplines and MIT's
schools of Architecture, Science, Engineering, the Sloan School of Management,
and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
In the first week on the Web, the OCW site
received more than 13 million visits from users, about 52 percent from outside
of the United States. The OCW team also processed more than 2,000 e-mails in
those first days, more than 75 percent of them supportive of the project. The
remaining 25 percent were a mix of technical questions, inquiries about
specific course offerings, and questions about content. Less than 2 percent of
those e-mails were negative.
Govert van Drimmelen, a university student in
Johannesburg, South Africa, found the video lectures of MIT Professor Gil
Strang, in Course 18.06: Linear Algebra, compelling. "I have watched some
of the video lectures from mathematics course 18.06. The lectures are
wonderful and having these available over the Internet from South Africa is a
great privilege," Van Drimmelen wrote the OCW team by e-mail.
"Please continue with this excellent project and accept my sincere thanks
for the efforts. Making the quality education of MIT more broadly available
will be a valued contribution to global education."
Dorothee Gaile, an educator and trainer of teachers
in Wiesbaden, Germany, wrote that as OCW continued to add more subjects, it
would become a remarkable resource for educators around the world. "As a
teacher of English at both high school and University of Applied Science level
in Germany, I very much appreciate having free access to the tremendous amount
of knowledge MIT is currently putting on the Web. Congratulations on this idea
and a warm thank you."
And Timothy Choe, a volunteer with an organization
called Project Detour in Africa, immediately recognized OCW's potential in
developing countries: "I recently spent time with a group of Ethiopian
refugees, living in Kenya, who will benefit greatly from this initiative. They
are students in Project Detour, an effort initiated to encourage their
continuing education while living in a country where they are not granted
access to the educational system. Many are Ethiopian-trained engineers, whose
academic pursuits were cut short by political turmoil. Just thought you might
appreciate another example of how this initiative will benefit the world's
community of knowledge seekers."
In people like these, OCW found its intended
audience—educators from around the world who can adapt the course materials
and learning objects embedded in online lecture notes into their own pedagogy,
and self-learners who will be able to draw on the materials for self-study or
supplementary use.
"I read about your initiative in the NY Times
online and have to say this is one of the most exciting applications of the
Internet to date," wrote Charles Bello. Based in Nigeria, Bello is the
Web master for www.clickafrique.com, an African Web portal. "I look
forward to taking advantage of this opportunity to ‘take a dip' in MIT's
enormous reservoir of human intellect."
Building a Sustainable Platform
For the pilot phase, the pages were built using what Cecilia d'Oliveira, OCW's
Technology Director, calls "brute-force HTML." Using Web content
editors such as Macromedia Inc.'s DreamWeaver, a team of programmers from MIT
and consulting firm Sapient Corp. built and designed the first 32 subjects.
Over the course of summer 2002, templates were developed, sign-off was secured
from faculty, and the site was prepared for the pilot release.
With course materials from 18 more subjects added to
the site in December 2002, the total number of HTML pages supporting the
initial 50 subjects rose to more than 2,000, together with more than 10,000
supporting files including PDFs of lecture notes, images, and video
simulations.
The production model used for the pilot is not
scalable for what by 2007 is estimated to be more than 2,000 individual MIT
subjects published. Indeed, the OCW goals are not going to be achieved
overnight: An aggressive timeline calls for about 500 subjects to be published
by September 2003, and then 500 each year there after until the course
materials from virtually all of MIT's subjects—undergraduate and
graduate—are available to the world.
This first year of the OCW pilot is called the
"Discover/ Build" mode, where the focus is on developing the
technology, process, and organization to sustain OCW over the long term as an
organization. Over the course of the next two years, the team hopes to be able
to provide the entire curriculum track for certain MIT subject areas.
The project will take a big leap forward in April
2003 with the implementation of a content management system, which will manage
the Web pages and embed learning objects. The content management system will
also:
Create templates that support
subject/section/component hierarchy
Manage content items (PDFs, images, simulations,
tools), not just pages
Offer a workflow configurable by subject,
parallel, and possibly nested, inherited
Tag content for search-ability
Maintain a robust, flexible, scalable technical
architecture
Track copyright status and information on content
items
Publish the OCW Web site
Tracking copyright status will be vital to the
long-term success of OCW. During the pilot phase, we assembled a "SWAT
team" of attorneys, graphic artists, researchers, and photo image
specialists who were charged with obtaining copyright and intellectual
property clearances for all the charts, quotes, images, and other items that
were embedded in the lecture notes that MIT professors had been using for
years.
It was an arduous process, but it has paid off. There
has not been a single copyright or intellectual property infringement claim
filed against OCW. The copyright permissions process was slow and
labor-intensive, but I am confident we have developed a strong set of
alternative strategies for acquisition of copyrighted content as the project
moves toward publishing hundreds of courses in the coming years.
Reaction at Home
The faculty experience with OCW has been positive. Many professors who were
once skeptics are now ready to participate. The project is particularly useful
for courses involving intersecting disciplines. For example, while faculty
often do not have time to explore the research of peers who might be right
down the hall, one faculty member, Paul Sclavounos, has been contacted by
another researcher at MIT who wants to explore cross-disciplinary work.
Where did that professor discover Sclavounos' work?
On the site for Sclavounos' ocean engineering subject, Course 13.022: Surface
Waves and their Interaction With Floating Bodies.
"This initiative is particularly valuable for
courses covering emerging new areas of knowledge, as well as intersecting
disciplines," says Jonathan A. King, an MIT professor of molecular
biology. "Having spent many years developing a course on protein folding
that served the needs of biochemists, chemists, chemical engineers, and
computational biologists, I am delighted that this work will be made available
to a far broader audience."
Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor of linguistics,
serves on the OCW Faculty Advisory Board and has two subjects on the current
site: Course 24.946: Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language and
CMS.930/21F.034: Media, Education, and the Marketplace, a cross-listed course
that explores a broad range of issues on new media and learning.
"OCW reflects the idea that, as scholars and
teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our
research and teaching," Miyagawa explains. "While MIT may be better
known for our research, with OCW, we wish to showcase the quality of our
teaching."
The OCW team hopes this will be the first of many
open courseware initiatives. "This is about something bigger than
MIT," states president Vest. "I hope other universities will see us
as educational leaders in this arena, and we very much hope that
OpenCourseWare will draw other universities to do the same. We would be
delighted if—over time—we have a World Wide Web of knowledge that raises
the quality of learning—and ultimately, the quality of life—around the
globe."
Update January 25, 2003
Question:
Where can I check to see if MIT has some open share course materials in my
discipline?
THE SELF-MANAGING LIBRARY Software prevents scholarly schisms The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Hewlett-Packard have implemented
a new, Web-accessible system for storing, indexing, and disseminating the
university's intellectual property. DSpace is an electronic, open source
platform for storage and retrieval that lets MIT maintain its own virtual
library of digitally rendered material. http://news.intelligententerprise.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eKcK0EWPTi0C3p0Bp8Z0At
Update on January 1, 2003
Progress on the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI)
Welcome to DSpace,
a newly developed digital repository created to capture, distribute and
preserve the intellectual output of MIT.
As a joint project of MIT Libraries and the
Hewlett-Packard Company, DSpace provides stable long-term storage needed to
house the digital products of MIT faculty and researchers.
For the user: DSpace enables easy remote
access and the ability to read and search DSpace items from one location:
the World Wide Web.
For the contributor: DSpace offers the
advantages of digital distribution and long-term preservation for a
variety of formats including text, audio, video, images, datasets and
more. Authors can store their digital works in collections that are
maintained by MIT communities.
For the institution: DSpace offers the
opportunity to provide access to all the research of the institution
through one interface. The repository is organized to accommodate the
varying policy and workflow issues inherent in a multi-disciplinary
environment. Submission workflow and access policies can be customized to
adhere closely to each community's needs.
While MIT's OpenCourseWare
(OCW) project isn't quite a free education, it is a new approach to the open
sharing of knowledge over the Internet.
Launched two weeks ago, anyone with an Internet
connection and a Web browser can access the syllabus, assignments, exams and
answers, reference materials and, in some cases, video lectures of MIT
courses.
First announced in 2001, the idea behind OCW is to
make course materials used in almost all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate
subjects available online, free of charge, to users anywhere in the world,
according to Jon Paul Potts, spokesman for the OCW project.
Potts said the goal of the project is to advance
technology-enhanced education at MIT and to serve as a model for university
dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.
However, Potts said, MIT isn't putting its current
semester course offerings online; rather, it is putting up course offerings
from previous terms.
There are 32 MIT courses in 17 disciplines available
on the Web, including Introduction to Experimental Biology, Problems of
Philosophy, Linear Algebra and Macroeconomics Theory II.
Potts said MIT plans to put most of the materials
from its 2,000 courses online by the 2006-07 academic year.
He said OCW will allow faculty from other
institutions and other people to observe teaching methods and resources used
by MIT's faculty. "This is not distance learning," Potts said.
"The goal is to provide the content that supports an education."
Since the site went live, more than 130,000 users
from around the world, including Africa, Algeria, Canada, Finland and Latvia,
have accessed the site, and 1,700 of them have sent e-mails offering comments
about the site, Potts said.
Currently, individual course sites and the course
materials for the pilot phase of OCW use HTML. The course sites are static Web
pages, he said, but they use a number of additional formats, including PDF
files, Java Applets and video files.
Potts said OCW is still working on the technology
infrastructure and studying other potential platforms to determine what the
project will use in the long term. He said OCW is intended to be built using a
full-featured content management and publication production system.
The initial phase of the project, which cost $11
million, was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Many educators,
including me, have misinterpreted the concept of OpenCourseWare (OCW) as envisioned by MIT
and some other major universities.
On April 4, 2001, Charles Vest,
president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced the beginning of the
OpenCourseWare project (OCW) in a press conference that was simultaneously Web cast.
“As president of MIT, I have come to expect top-level innovative and intellectually
entrepreneurial ideas from the MIT community.... I have to tell you that we went into this
expecting that something creative, cutting-edge, and challenging would emerge. And,
frankly, we also expected that it would be something based on a revenue-producing
model—a project or program that took into account the power of the Internet and its
potential for new applications in education. OpenCourseWare is not exactly what I had
expected.” Frankly, neither did anyone else.
What is OCW?
Since its inception, OCW has been
misunderstood. The academic world has seen one or another online degree program or
commercial venture stake a claim to its part of cyberspace. OCW is not about online degree
programs. It isn’t even about online courses for which students can audit or enroll.
That’s what it isn’t. What, then, is it?
OCW is a process—not a set
of classes. This process is intended to make the MIT course materials that are used in the
teaching of almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available free online to any
user in the world.
The goal of OCW is to provide the
content that supports an MIT education. Ultimately, the OCW Web resource will host the
materials for more than 2,000 classes taught at MIT, presented with a coherent interface
that will include sophisticated search algorithms to explore additional concepts,
pedagogies, and related attributes across the site as well as within a course.
The OCW announcement elicited
varied reactions. Many wondered how this effort differs from any number of instances where
universities have made their course Web sites available to the public, all or in part. The
more cynical expressed admiration for the public relations success. The announcement made
the front page of the New York Times, but skeptics asserted that OCW would be nothing more
than a traditional Web site dressed up with a new acronym. But the elegance is in its
simplicity. The closer one looks, the more one sees.
Still, an important and often
overlooked implication of OCW is another aspect of what it is not—it is emphatically
not an MIT education. This has been emphasized by Vest and other spokespeople for the
initiative, but it bears repeating. It is the firm tenant of OCW that the core of an MIT
education is the interaction between students and faculty in an environment that invites
and supports inquiry and questioning. OCW makes no claim or effort to encapsulate this on
the Web.
Competing Demands
Even given the support generally
garnered on the MIT campus, some obstacles must be overcome if OCW is to be successfully
implemented and maintained.
• Time. The prospect of
putting up the content of some 2,000 courses in the next 10 years is daunting for anyone,
even on a campus like MIT. This is all the more challenging given the one thing faculty
members have least available—time. The enthusiasm and commitment toward the project
is tempered by the uncertainty surrounding the level of effort faculty will be required to
invest to make content suitable for OCW.
Teaching and research remain
prime concerns for faculty throughout institutions of higher education nationwide and
abroad. A project like this must not add significantly to the workload of already
challenged faculty members, nor can it detract from their current commitments. A research
question for such an effort is therefore: How can we assemble and distribute content with
minimal faculty involvement?
• Reusable learning objects.
A corollary to the time-constrained faculty member is the requirement that learning
objects created for a course must be found suitable for other purposes, such as
OCW.
Faculty members cannot be expected to create content twice, once for teaching and again
for presentation to the broader academic public. Thus, a second objective for the project
is understanding the requirements for transformation of learning objects from their
in-class instructional use to their representation as meaningful content for those
interacting out of the context of the faculty/student/course/setting intersection.
• Production process.
Putting together a Web site for a course is, despite current technologies to assist site
designers, a significant effort. Currently, trade-offs are made in order to achieve some
degree of scalability in the various systems used to aggregate content for teaching. For
example, learning management systems may provide a limited suite of templates with
form-based content uploading, designed to distribute the labor required to ingest and
position the content within the site’s framework. The trade-off is often restricted
pedagogical flexibility and relatively basic, cosmetic design choices for the reduction in
the effort needed to auto-generate large numbers of course “shells.” A project
such as that undertaken by OCW must incorporate new opportunities to achieve scalability
for content development while not entirely sacrificing individuality in site design.
Courseware as Product
The higher education community
has become subject to a new force in recent years. The trend has been referred to as
“education as a good” (Schlais, 2001), describing the increasing trend toward
the privatization of knowledge. Colleges and universities, in his view, are becoming more
and more like vendors to students, who perceive themselves as customers of college
education services. During the bloom of online distance education—curtailed only
recently by the general economic recession—competition for students among
universities led to increasing costs. Revenues were sought to replace declining public
subsidies and to support competitive consumerism. Not-for-profit subsidiaries of
traditional colleges, for-profit private universities, and corporations emerged, seeking
to gain a larger share in what seemed an infinitely expanding demand for anywhere, anytime
learning.
The privatization of knowledge
has many manifestations. One is the frightening rise in the cost of scholarly journals.
The pattern is familiar to anyone working in the academy. Schlais describes the conundrum
like this: “A faculty member spends years of her life learning, researching,
thinking, organizing, teaching, and writing. Her university invests substantially during
this process. She publishes the fruits of her labor in a highly respected journal. And
finally her library buys a subscription to the journal, sometimes costing in the tens of
thousands of dollars per year.” Something is amiss, and our library colleagues have
been painfully aware of it for years.
Copyright and legal
interpretations deepen the concern. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and
the General Agreement on Trade in Services, education is an international commodity. In
the United States, compliance with the WTO agreements was accomplished in part by the
enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Jessica Litman described the
relevance of these changes in her book, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual
Property on the Internet (2001):
“1. The use of digital
works, including viewing, reading, listening, transporting, etc., requires a reproduction
of the original of the work in a computer’s memory. 2. Copyright statutes give clear
and exclusive control over reproduction (as defined above) to the copyright holder. 3. For
each use of the copyrighted material, that is, each viewing, listening, transfer, the user
needs to have the statutory privilege of the copyright holder.”
Faculty members at MIT, as well
as other universities, are concerned that their intellectual property may be locked away
from their peers, as well as potential students, behind proprietary barriers.
Participating in OCW is a proactive statement that “reflects the idea that, as
scholars and teachers, we wish to share freely the knowledge we generate through our
research and teaching” (Miyagawa, 2001). As Vest noted, “OpenCourseWare looks
counterintuitive in a market-driven world.” Indeed.
A New Model of Scholarly
Sharing?
OCW is often thought of as the
educational content equivalent to the open source software movement. The analogy is
appealing and reflective of many, but not all, of its goals. Taking a closer look at what
constitutes open source software might help.
Using CourseWork, instructors and TAs can set up a course Web site that
displays announcements, on-line readings, a dynamic syllabus and schedule,
on-line assignments and quizzes, a discussion forum for students, and a
grade book. CourseWork is designed both for faculty with little Web
experience, who can use CourseWork to develop their Web site quickly, and
for expert Web-users, who can use it to organize complex, Web-based
materials and link them to Web communication tools.
The CourseWork source code is free and open, and can be downloaded
from this site for any organization to use and modify to their own
needs. You will need your own staff to install and manage the system, but
the code is free and open.
Academic Computing developed CourseWork as part of the Open Knowledge
Initiative. In this two-year project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, a consortium of universities led by MIT are collaborating to
build the next generation of teaching and learning tools.
•MIT
• Stanford University
• North Carolina State University
• University of Michigan
• University of Wisconsin
• University of Pennsylvania
• Dartmouth College
• Cambridge University
• Harvard • University of Washington
• Others
Carnegie Mellon University
Princeton
UCB/LA
Johns Hopkins
George Washington University
None seem to have progressed as far as MIT in terms of sharing actual
course materials across multiple disciplines on campus --- http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Underpinning the
current open-source courseware and knowledgeware movement in higher education
and elsewhere is a belief in the advantages to be gained through the open
development and exchange of ideas. For this discussion, open-source
development falls into two categories: (1) open-source knowledgeware
development (the tools); and (2) open-source courseware development (the
content). MIT's partnership with Stanford on the Open Knowledge
Initiative ( http://web.mit.edu/oki/
) is an example of a project designed to develop a learning management system,
or open-source knowledgeware--Web-based tools for storing, retrieving, and
disseminating educational resources and activities. In contrast,
projects such as MIT's OpenCourseWare effort ( http://web.mit.edu/ocw/
), which aims to make instructional materials available free on the Web, and
the MERLOT project ( http://www.merlot.org/Home.po
), which endeavors to place on the Web knowledge objects that have been
evaluated for quality, represent variations on an open-source
courseware-development process.
Open-source software
development has traditions that date to the beginnings of the Internet nearly
thirty years ago. According to Eric S. Raymond, recent technical and
market forces have drawn open-source software out of its niche role in
Internet development to a larger role in defining the computing infrastructure
of the twenty-first century. Raymond also suggests that the idea of
open-source development is pursued and sustained by "people who proudly
call themselves 'hackers'--not as the term is now abused by journalists to
mean a computer criminal, but in its true and original sense of an enthusiast,
an artist, a tinkerer, a problem solver, an expert."1
Even among such rugged individualists as these, most abide by certain
principles of good practice in development and an unwritten code of ethical
development and dissemination behavior.
Similarly, many
faculty who have developed course materials for the Web have done so in an
open-source environment. Frequently, faculty have shared
technology-enhanced materials informally with colleagues, tailoring the
material for each learning situation and improving on materials in the
exchange. The MERLOT project has sought, with some success, to build on
faculty values that prize open exchanges and the peer review of materials.
Extending these values to a Web-based teaching environment, faculty from
across the nation are participating in MERLOT by creating digitized knowledge
objects (modularized materials that can be used in teaching and learning),
peer-reviewing them, and storing them in a searchable repository that is
organized by content areas and is easily accessible for use in teaching.
Like the software-development enthusiasts in the "hacker" community,
most faculty abide by certain principles of good practice and an unwritten
code of ethics. Whether or not projects like MERLOT are long- or
short-term phenomena, it is likely that faculty will continue in the long term
to devise their own teaching materials, with and without technology, and to
seek trusted colleagues' advice in the process. Such practices are a
historic tenet of academic culture.
MIT's OpenCourseWare
(OCW) project underscores this tenet. Phillip Long notes that OCW is
often viewed as "the educational content equivalent to the open-source
software movement." Long explains that the application of
open-source principles has one intent: "to allow people to read, improve,
adapt or modify, fix, redistribute, and use open-source software."
He adds, "The definition recognizes that improvements to complex code are
made exponentially faster if more people can look at it and lend their
intellectual input toward making it work better."2
And so it is with OCW. In aiming for an ideal of open scholarship and
free access to course materials and resources online, OCW formalizes the
historic process of collegial interaction and review for a new age. The
technologies employed in this open-educational content process serve at once
as catalysts and tools for expanding access to information in many new forms
and for encouraging broad participation in the process.
The Open Knowledge
Initiative (OKI), which provides the tools that underpin OCW, is a more direct
application of the same open-source principles. OKI developers are
seeking to create a flexible, scalable knowledge management system that allows
for innovative contributions from users in an advanced learning arena.
OKI includes collaborating institutions such as Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth
College, North Carolina State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and
the University of Wisconsin, Madison. These developers are taking aim at
improving the technology-assisted teaching environment by providing tools that
are modular and easy to use. So when faculty, staff, or students seek to
access, deliver, rearrange, or reassemble information, they can do so with the
flexibility and customization required to support many approaches to teaching
and to learning.3
Working in either of
these open-source environments (tools or content) has several benefits for
higher education institutions. First, doing so results in products that
supplement and compete in healthy ways with proprietary products, either in
the learning management systems arena (knowledgeware) or in the publishing
world (courseware). Second, working in these environments encourages the
use of standards so that users, whether institutions needing knowledgeware or
individual faculty needing courseware, can adapt products to particular needs.
Finally, participation also creates and nurtures expertise in knowledgeware
and courseware development in the academy, complementing commercial efforts
and providing alternative models and materials.
1Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and
Open-Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Cambridge, Mass.: O'Reilly,
1999), xii.
Blackboard Announces Adoption Strategy for 'OKI'
Specifications
Blackboard recently announced a broad strategy to adopt industry
standard API's (Application Program Interfaces) from the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative
within the Blackboard e-Education Suite. Blackboard's Building Blocks open architecture
will base future releases on key OKI specifications, enabling a broader variety of third
party applications to work with Blackboard. The announcement is expected to help
accelerate OKI's status as an industry standard in the higher education market. Through
their relationship as common mem- bers of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Blackboard
and OKI institutional partners are working together with other IMS members to help define
the next generation of interoperability standards for educational technology. For more
information on the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative, visit http://web.mit.edu/ok
Type 1
Accrediting agencies of the government or sanctioned by the government (for example the
American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) has a government sanction) Accreditation is a tough issue
that I have not researched fully. I suspect that the main accreditation process must use
one of the Federally-approved agencies. You can see a listing at http://ifap.ed.gov/85256508006391d1/005fd53d0d39dd4285256508006391ed/852565a7005d473f85256675004fbec9?OpenDocument
Type 2
Accrediting agencies that carry the logo of prestige (for example, training courses that
have Microsoft certification)
Type 3
Accrediting agencies that start with neither a prestige logo nor government blessing but
attempt to build a reputation through standards and membership. For example, a
relatively popular accrediting agency called Association of Collegiate Business Schools
and Programs (ACBSP) is a Type 3 agency at http://www.acbsp.org/.
"The process of composing texts in a world full of
new media technologies requires us to reconfigure teaching and learning in
remarkably innovative and, perhaps, ungrammatical ways."
In "Re-Inventing the Possibilities: Academic
Literacy & New Media"
(FIBRECULTURE JOURNAL, issue 10, 2007), Cheryl Ball
and Ryan Moeller present a webtext that both discusses and "demonstrates the
possibilities of using new media to teach students critical literacy skills
applicable to the 21st century." The authors express their perspectives as
"converging narratives," sometimes speaking individually, sometimes
together, and providing the reader visual cues in the text. The paper is
available at
Fibreculture Journal [ISSN 1449-1443] is a
peer-reviewed international journal that "explores the issues and ideas of
concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social
formations." For more information, contact: Dr. Andrew Murphie, School of
Media and Communications, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of
New South Wales, Sydney 2052 Australia;
"In the past, it was useful to equate scholarly
communication with the publication of monographs and journals, a process
that could be clearly distinguished from other communication practices
employed by scholars.
The substantial expense, organized effort, and
prolonged production and distribution process all readily distinguished
communication involving tangible publications. These historic distinctions
are now substantially blurred. As most forms of communication become
untethered from the production of physical artifacts, some of the
terminology of scholarly communication has been stretched to adapt. At the
same time, publishing itself has become a term of much fuzziness." In "Talk
About Talking About New Models of Scholarly Communication" (JOURNAL OF
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING, vol. 11, no. 1, Winter 2008), Karla L. Hahn considers
some "dangers" that could impede creation of new scholarly communication
systems, including:
"Too many believe that change can wait."
"Focusing on the publishing market can become
myopic."
"Scholarly communication cannot be considered
somehow distinct
from the research process."
Hahn, Director of the Office of Scholarly
Communications at the Association of Research Libraries, argues that greater
dialogue is needed between scholars and researchers and the library
community that supports them. She proposes questions to get the conversation
started.
Some include:
"Who has access to the scholarly communication
system and
scholarly publications?"
"What do quality and value mean in the Internet
age?"
"What is the right balance between the market and
the gift
economy that underpins all research and scholarly
publishing?"
"What are appropriate roles of research
institutions in
supporting change in scholarly communication and
providing
publishing infrastructure and dissemination
capabilities?"
The Journal of Electronic Publishing [ISSN
1080-2711] is "a forum for research and discussion about contemporary
publishing practices, and the impact of those practices upon users. . . . [C]ontributors
and readers are publishers, scholars, librarians, journalists,students,
technologists, attorneys, retailers, and others with an interest in the
methods and means of contemporary publishing." For more information,
contact: University of Michigan Library, Scholarly
Publishing Office, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1104 USA;
email:
To celebrate its 500th issue, the editor of
LEARNING TRENDS newsletter invited readers to share their thoughts about how
the delivery of training and education has changed over the past ten years
and what trends they see as a result of new technologies and pedagogies. The
issue is available at
Each year since 2001, MIT's TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has
published a list of ten emerging technologies -- those "most likely to alter
industries, fields of research, and even the way we live." Some in the area
of information technology include:
-- Modeling Surprise
"Definition: Surprise modeling combines data mining
and machine learning to help people do a better job of anticipating and
coping with unusual events."
"Impact: Although research in the field is
preliminary, surprise modeling could aid decision makers in a wide range of
domains, such as traffic management, preventive medicine, military planning,
politics, business, and finance."
-- Offline Web Applications
"Definition: Offline Web applications, developed
using Web technologies such as HTML and Flash, can take advantage of the
resources of a user's computer as well as those of the Internet."
"Impact: Developers can quickly and cheaply build
full-fledged desktop applications that are usable in a broad range of
devices and operating systems."
-- Reality Mining
"Definition: Personal reality mining infers human
relationships and behavior by applying data-mining algorithms to information
collected by cell-phone sensors that can measure location, physical
activity, and more."
"Impact: Models generated by analyzing data from
both individuals and groups could enable automated security settings, smart
personal assistants, and monitoring of personal and community health."
Technology Review [ISSN 1099-274X] is published six times a year by
Technology Review, Inc., a Massachusetts Institute of Technology enterprise.
For more information, contact Technology Review, One Main Street, 7th Floor,
Cambridge, MA 02142 USA; tel: 617-475-8000; fax: 617-475-8042; Web:
"Accessible Technology: A Guide for Educators,"
Published by Microsoft, "provides information about accessibility and
accessible technology resources to help educators worldwide ensure that all
students have equal access to learning with technology." The document
includes accessibility fact sheets, tutorials, demo, videos, and other
training materials that may be used for non-profit educational and training
purposes. The 48-page guide is in MS Word format and can be downloaded at
Stop the presses: Today’s college students are using
more technology than ever.
That may
not be the most surprising finding from a
report released last week by the
Educause Center for Applied Research, the analytical arm of
the nonprofit group that promotes effective technology use
in higher education. But it certainly provides a jumping-off
point for an investigation into how students use information
technology in college and how it can be harnessed to improve
the learning experience.
In at least one
central respect, proponents of technology in the classroom
are on to something: Most students (60.9 percent) believe it
improves their learning.
The changes
in technological habits aren’t revolutionary per se, as the
authors point out; rather, students are making
“evolutionary” gains in access to the Internet for everyday
uses, inside the classroom and out. Perhaps the most visible
of these changes is the continuing increase in the
proportion of students with laptops, which has grown to 73.7
percent of respondents (while an almost-total 98.4 percent
own a computer of some kind). More surprisingly, over half
of laptop owners don’t bring them to class at all, with
about a quarter carrying them to lectures at least once a
week.
The amount
of time spent on the Internet also shows no sign of abating,
with an average of about 18 hours a week, for any purpose —
and, on the extreme end, some 6.6 percent of respondents
(mostly male) saying they spend more than a full-time job’s
worth of 40 hours online a week. Most students use
broadband, more are on wireless connections, and “smart
phones” — all-in-one communications and personal data
assistants — are also on the rise, with 12 percent owning
one.
What they’re
doing when they’re online is also changing somewhat, with
the rise of Facebook and other social networking sites as
the clearest trend this year (to 80.3 percent from 72.3
percent in 2006), along with streaming video and course
management software, which 46.1 percent of respondents said
they use several times a week or more (compared with 39.6
percent in 2006).
The authors
of the study, which surveyed 27,864 students at 103 two- and
four-year colleges and universities, note that most
undergraduates today are “digital natives” who have grown up
immersed in technology in some form. But the “millennials”
aren’t necessarily ready to cast off the yoke of human
interaction and learn solely within virtual 3-D environments
wired directly to the brain. The study finds “themes of
skepticism and moderation alongside enthusiasm,” such that
59 percent preferred a “moderate rather than extensive use
of IT in courses.”
Instead,
students appear to segment different modes of communication
for different purposes. E-mail, Web sites, message boards
and Blackboard? Viable ways of connecting with professors
and peers. Same for chat, instant messaging, Facebook and
text messages? Not necessarily, the authors write, because
students may “want to protect these tools’ personal nature.”
“They’re
using social networking sites like crazy, but they don’t
necessarily think those have a place in the classroom,” said
Gail Salaway, one of the primary authors and a fellow at
ECAR.
In short, as
students become more and more connected to each other
through various online mediums, they’re also becoming more
untethered, with laptops and smart phones keeping them
physically apart. As a result, the “emerging Web 2.0
paradigm” of “immersive environments” and dynamic
information promise (or threaten?) to upend traditional
pedagogies and even the way students learn, the authors
conclude.
That could
mean that some professors might have to play catch-up,
according to the report, “The ECAR Study of Undergraduate
Students and Information Technology, 2007″ — a sentiment
also indicated by some of the students in answers to the
survey’s open-ended questions.
How IT
Affects Learning
The epigraph
to the report’s sixth chapter, from a student’s written
comments, goes a long way toward summarizing what the
authors say is the place of technology in the college
setting today: “IT is not a good substitute for good
teaching. Good teachers are good with or without IT and
students learn a great deal from them. Poor teachers are
poor with or without IT and students learn little from
them.”
Seventy percent of the students polled said information
technology helps them do research, a finding that is not
surprising in light of the continuing popularity of Google
and Wikipedia among undergraduates (sometimes
to the consternation of their professors).
But that finding also encompasses
online library research and article databases.
When it
comes to engagement, however, responses are more mixed.
About two-fifths of students said they were more engaged
with courses that had IT components, while a fifth disagreed
and the rest didn’t say either way.
So
technology’s utility in the classroom comes down to how it
is used. The question, then, is: How can educators adapt
their teaching methods to emerging technologies? And should
they?
Skeptics
might point out that even students themselves are ambivalent
when it comes to using the Internet and other digital tools
for class, as the survey highlights. But the study’s
introduction, written by Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, suggests what professors can expect
from digital natives’ evolving modes of learning, what he
calls “neomillennial learning styles.”
As new
methods of interacting with information become more
ubiquitous, he suggests, citing Second Life-type virtual
immersion environments as an example, students will grow up
with different expectations and preferences for acquiring
knowledge and skills. The implication is less of an emphasis
on the “sage on the stage” and a linear acquisition process
focusing on a “single best source,” focusing instead on
“active learning” that comes from synthesizing information
from multiple types of media.
Noting that
traditional ways of thinking and learning are undergoing a
“sea change,” Dede encourages a fusion of new and old. But
what form that will take, exactly, is not addressed directly
in the report.
The problem
with predicting the future of learning, suggests Toru
Iiyoshi, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, is that some educators “are against
the idea of technology itself transforming their teaching
and student learning.” Rather than fit it in with their
current methods, he said, they should take the opposite
approach.
Encouraging
them to “start thinking from different perspectives, how
they can teach better or improve student learning is, I
think, very important,” he said.
A College
That Embraces IT
What does a
learning environment that embraces new technologies look
like? It’s not clear, but it might resemble a classroom at
the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham,
Mass. The institution, which opened in 2002, found itself
having to start from scratch in every way possible,
including in its design of an information architecture. The
person in charge of that project was Joanne Kossuth, the
chief information officer and vice president for development
at the college.
Kossuth, who
helped implement the Educause study at Olin, said the
college is somewhat unusual in that its engineering focus
and small classes encourage innovation and collaboration
among its students. Where some institutions have had to
scramble to adapt to evolving technological needs, Olin did
it all at once — from the ground up. The result is a much
more integrated, forward-looking approach to IT.
The
college has a 24/7 laptop loan program, which allows
students to be in constant communication with each other and
helps encourage them to work together on projects, so that
“you’ll see students that go out and use things like
Google Docs,”
editing online in real time, she said.
Freshmen
come in to the college already well acquainted with social
networking and used to course management software, mainly
because of its increasing use in high school, Kossuth said.
They use a campus-hosted wiki to find rides. They work with
administrators to improve software offerings. In other
words, the students are at the cutting edge, while some
faculty are working to catch up.
“I’m a firm
believer that the students that are up and coming are the
ones that are driving the adoption, because they’re coming
with a set of expectations,” Kossuth explained.
Still, in
this tech-savvy environment, some face-to-face interaction
is still preferred. At the help desk, she said, proposals
for chat and text messaging services met with skepticism
because students preferred to e-mail or come in themselves.
In general, the ECAR report found a number of negative
comments about help desks’ effectiveness, suggesting their
importance to a smooth IT operation.
Other
Findings
The report
also highlighted a number of gaps and trends through
longitudinal comparisons of the past three years’ worth of
survey data:
Leisure
devices, such as handheld video and music players (read:
iPods), have transcended the gender gap. Where there
used to be a difference between males’ and females’
ownership of the players just two years ago, the gap has
disappeared, with 83.1 percent of 18- to 19-year-olds
owning one.
Engineering and business students use more technology,
especially for spreadsheets and graphics editing, and
males are more likely to spend more extreme amounts of
time online.
The
report also finds challenges in addressing skills gaps
for using spreadsheets and CMS software, highlighting
the need for colleges to provide instructional
technology to bring students up to speed.
Next year,
for the first time, the ECAR survey will additionally focus
on a specific aspect of IT. The first topic: social
networking.
ENCOURAGING FACULTY ADOPTION OF TECHNOLOGY FOR
TEACHING
"Some universities, some faculty, and even some
students have increased their personal wealth by asserting ownership of the
intellectual property created at the university. For many faculty, however,
this new entrepreneurial orientation runs deeply counter to traditions of
education and public service. Past campus debates about aspects of this
cultural shift have created an environment of distrust and rancor." In a
recent article Brian C. Donohue and Linda Howe-Steiger express their belief
that this distrust has "spilled over into faculty attitudes toward the
use of digital technologies for teaching" causing faculty to reject these
technologies. This situation can be remedied if institutions "create
incentives for faculty that balance public service goals with professional and
entrepreneurial rewards, clarify ownership and usage rights of intellectual
property generated by and for teaching, and generate additional funding for
curriculum development at universities (possibly through tax credits)."
They expand upon how to accomplish this in "Faculty and Administrators
Collaborating for E-Learning Courseware" (EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY, vol. 28,
no. 1, 2005, pp. 20-32). The article is available online, at no cost, at http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm05/eqm0513.asp
.
EDUCAUSE Quarterly, The IT Practitioner's Journal
[ISSN 1528-5324] is published by EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206,
Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA. Current and past issues are available online at
http://www.educause.edu/eq/ .
I am a data analyst with
the Federal Government, recently assigned a project to integrate our
accounting codes with XBRL accounting codes, primarily for the quarterly
reporting of banking financial information.
For the past few weeks,
i've been searching the WEB looking for educational materials that will
help us map, rollup and orr olldown the data that we recieve from the
banks that we regulate, to the more generic XBRL accounting codes.
Basically, i'm hoping to
provide my team members with the tools to help them make more informed
decisions on how to classify accounting codes and capture their findings
for further review and discussion.
To my suprise there isn't
the wealth of accounting information that i thought there would be on
the WEB, but i am very relieved to have found Bob Jensen's site and in
particular an article which refers to the kind of information gathering
approaches that i'm hoping
to discover!
Here is the brief on
that article:
"Using Hypertext in Instructional Material: Helping Students Link
Accounting Concept Knowledge to Case Applications," by Dickie Crandall
and Fred Phillips, Issues in Accounting Education, May 2002, pp. 163-184
---
We studied whether
instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with
sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students
to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case
situations.
Results from a laboratory
experiment indicated that students who learned from such
hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply
concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from
instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the
concept-case application hyperlinks.
Results also indicated that
the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in
instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were
self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors,
but only when students had generated appropriate links.
Could anyone be so kind as
to please suggest other references, articles or tools that will help us
better understand and classify the broad range of accounting
terminologies and methodologies please?
For more information
on XBRL, here is the XBRL link:
http://xbrl.org
Thanks very much!
Bob Kennelly
OFHEO
June 19, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Bob,
You may find the following documents of related interest:
Extendible Adaptive Hypermedia Courseware: Integrating Different Courses
and Web Material Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Publisher: Springer Berlin /
Heidelberg ISSN: 0302-9743 Subject: Computer Science Volume 1892 / 2000
Title: Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems: International
Conference, AH 2000, Trento, Italy, August 2000. Proceedings Editors: P.
Brusilovsky, O. Stock, C. Strapparava (Eds.) ---
Click Here
"Concept, Knowledge, and Thought," G. C. Oden, Annual Review of
Psychology Vol. 38: 203-227 (Volume publication date January 1987) ---
Click Here
"A Framework for Organization and Representation of Concept Knowledge in
Autonomous Agents," by Paul Davidsson, Department of Computer Science,
University of Lund, Box 118, S–221 00 Lund, Sweden email:
Paul.Davidsson@dna.lth.se
"Active concept learning for image retrieval in dynamic databases," by
Dong, A. Bhanu, B. Center for Res. in Intelligent Syst., California Univ.,
Riverside, CA, USA; This paper appears in: Computer Vision, 2003.
Proceedings. Ninth IEEE International Conference on Publication Date: 13-16
Oct. 2003 On page(s): 90- 95 vol.1 ISSN: ISBN: 0-7695-1950-4 ---
Click Here
"Types and qualities of knowledge," by Ton de Jong, Monica G.M.
Ferguson-Hessler, Educational Psychologist 1996, Vol. 31, No. 2,
Pages 105-113 ---
Click Here
Human evolution presents a puzzle.
Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000
years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a
planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once
"progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life
and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world,
culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest.
Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big
brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place
half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were
made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of
years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then
suddenly—bang!—culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then,
why there?
The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed
from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion
that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural
change of a population is the amount of interaction between
individuals. Even as it explains very old patterns in
prehistory, this idea holds out hope that the human race will
prosper mightily in the years ahead—because ideas are having sex
with each other as never before.
The more scientists discover, the
bigger the evolution puzzle has become. Tool-making itself has
now been pushed back at least two million years, and modern tool
kits emerged very gradually over 300,000 years in Africa.
Meanwhile, Neanderthals are now known to have had brains that
were bigger than ours and to have inherited the same genetic
mutations that facilitate speech as us. Yet, despite surviving
until 30,000 years ago, they hardly invented any new tools, let
alone farms, cities and toothpaste. The Neanderthals prove that
it is quite possible to be intelligent and imaginative human
beings (they buried their dead) yet not experience cultural and
economic progress.
Scientists have so far been looking for
the answer to this riddle in the wrong place: inside human
heads. Most have been expecting to find a sort of neural or
genetic breakthrough that sparked a "big bang of human
consciousness," an auspicious mutation so that people could
speak, think or plan better, setting the human race on the path
to continuous and exponential innovation.
But the sophistication of the modern
world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination. It is
a collective enterprise. Nobody—literally nobody—knows how to
make the pencil on my desk (as the economist Leonard Read once
pointed out), let alone the computer on which I am writing. The
knowledge of how to design, mine, fell, extract, synthesize,
combine, manufacture and market these things is fragmented among
thousands, sometimes millions of heads. Once human progress
started, it was no longer limited by the size of human brains.
Intelligence became collective and cumulative.
In the modern world, innovation is a
collective enterprise that relies on exchange. As Brian Arthur
argues in his book "The Nature of Technology," nearly all
technologies are combinations of other technologies and new
ideas come from swapping things and thoughts. (My favorite
example is the camera pill—invented after a conversation between
a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer.) We tend to
forget that trade and urbanization are the grand stimuli to
invention, far more important than governments, money or
individual genius. It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed
cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam,
London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places
where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as
well-endowed collective brains.
Trade also gave way to centralized
institutions. Around 5,200 years ago, Uruk, in southern
Mesopotamia, was probably the first city the world had ever
seen, housing more than 50,000 people within its six miles of
wall. Uruk, its agriculture made prosperous by sophisticated
irrigation canals, was home to the first class of middlemen,
trade intermediaries.
As with traders ever since,
increasingly it came to look like tribute as Uruk merchants'
dwellings were plonked amid the rural settlements of the trading
partners in the hills. A cooperative trade network seems to have
turned into something more like colonialism. Tax and even
slavery began to rear their ugly heads. Thus was set the pattern
that would endure for the next 6,000 years—merchants make
wealth; chiefs nationalize it.
Agriculture was invented where people
were already living in dense trading societies. The oldest
farming settlements of all in what is now Syria and Jordan are
situated at oases where trade routes crossed, as proved by finds
of obsidian (volcanic glass) tools from Cappadocia. When farmers
first colonized Greek islands 9,000 years ago they relied on
imported tools and exported produce from the very start. Trade
came before—and stimulated—farming.
Go even further back and you find the
same thing. The explosion of new technologies for hunting and
gathering in western Asia around 45,000 years ago, often called
the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred in an area with an
especially dense population of hunter-gatherers—with a bigger
collective brain. Long before the ancestors of modern people
first set foot outside Africa, there was cultural progress
within Africa itself, but it had a strangely intermittent,
ephemeral quality: There would be flowerings of new tool kits
and new ways of life, which then faded again.
Recently at Pinnacle Point in South
Africa, Curtis Marean of Arizona State University found evidence
of seafood-eating people who made sophisticated "bladelet" stone
tools, with small blades less than 10 millimeters wide, and who
used ochre pigments to decorate themselves (implying symbolic
behavior) as long as 164,000 years ago. They disappeared, but a
similar complex culture re-emerged around 80,000 years ago at
Blombos cave nearby. Adam Powell of University College, London,
and his colleagues have recently modeled human populations and
concluded that these flowerings are caused by transiently dense
populations: "Variation in regional subpopulation density and/or
migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural
skill accumulation."
The notion that exchange stimulated
innovation by bringing together different ideas has a close
parallel in biological evolution. The Darwinian process by which
creatures change depends crucially on sexual reproduction, which
brings together mutations from different lineages. Without sex,
the best mutations defeat the second best, which then get lost
to posterity. With sex, they come together and join the same
team. So sex makes evolution a collective and cumulative process
in which any individual can draw on the gene pool of the whole
species. And when it comes to gene pools, the species with gene
lakes generally do better than the ones with gene ponds—hence
the vulnerability of island species to competition with
continental ones.
It is precisely the same in cultural
evolution. Trade is to culture as sex is to biology. Exchange
makes cultural change collective and cumulative. It becomes
possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not
just in your neighborhood. The rate of cultural and economic
progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.
Dense populations don't produce
innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings,
because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of
different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even
among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human
takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain
itself made possible by the invention of exchange.
Once human beings started swapping
things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in
which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective
knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange
encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product
or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The
story of the human race has been a gradual spread of
specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of
getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more
diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is
poverty.
This theory neatly explains why some
parts of the world lagged behind in their rate of cultural
evolution after the Upper Paleolithic takeoff. Australia, though
it was colonized by modern people 20,000 years earlier than most
of Europe, saw comparatively slow change in technology and never
experienced the transition to farming. This might have been
because its dry and erratic climate never allowed
hunter-gatherers to reach high enough densities of interaction
to indulge in more than a little specialization.
Where population falls or is
fragmented, cultural evolution may actually regress. A telling
example comes from Tasmania, where people who had been making
bone tools, clothing and fishing equipment for 25,000 years
gradually gave these up after being isolated by rising sea
levels 10,000 years ago. Joe Henrich of the University of
British Columbia argues that the population of 4,000 Tasmanians
on the island constituted too small a collective brain to
sustain, let alone improve, the existing technology.
Tierra del Fuego, in a similar climatic
and demographic position, experienced no such technological
regress because its people remained in trading contact with the
mainland of South America across a much narrower strait
throughout the prehistoric period. In effect, they had access to
a continental collective brain.
Further proof that exchange and
collective intelligence are the key to human progress comes from
Neanderthal remains. Almost all Neanderthal tools are found
close to their likely site of origin: they did not trade. In the
southern Caucasus, argues Daniel Adler of the University of
Connecticut, it is the "development and maintenance of larger
social networks, rather than technological innovations or
increased hunting prowess, that distinguish modern humans from
Neanderthals."
The oldest evidence for human trade
comes from roughly 80,000 to 120,000 years ago, when shell beads
in Algeria and obsidian tools in Ethiopia began to move more
than 100 miles from the sea and from a particular volcano
respectively. (In recent centuries stone tools moved such
distances in Australia by trade rather than by migration.) This
first stirring of trade was the most momentous innovation of the
human species, because it led to the invention of invention. Why
it happened in Africa remains a puzzle, but Steve Kuhn and Mary
Stiner of the University of Arizona have argued that for some
reason only Africans had invented a sexual division of labor
between male hunters and female gatherers—the most basic of all
trades.
There's a cheery modern lesson in this
theory about ancient events. Given that progress is inexorable,
cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and
specialize, then globalization and the Internet are bound to
ensure furious economic progress in the coming century—despite
the usual setbacks from recessions, wars, spendthrift
governments and natural disasters.
The process of cumulative innovation
that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by
three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in
little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And
things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container
shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.
Yesterday, President Bush signed into law the
Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 (H.R.
2764), which includes a provision directing the
National Institutes of Health to provide the public with open online access
to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S.
government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.
Readers may recall that the NIH's existing public
access policy was implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005. With the
enactment of this new law, researchers will be required to deposit
electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into
PubMed Central,
the National Library of Medicine's online repository,
no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.
Many leading scientists, patient advocates,
librarians, and others had lobbied for years to make research funded by tax
dollars accessible to the public. This new mandate now will provide
unfettered access to scientific findings for everyone seeking them.
The popular notion of a new
graduate entering "the real world" points to the fact that we commonly view
academia and the corporate environment as two disparate, almost polarized communities. The
perception may be that universities focus on theory while businesses concentrate on
practice. And to combine the two—to influence academic curriculum on behalf of
corporate needs—has traditionally been frowned upon as a corruption of pure academic
purpose.
This is not to say that higher
education has ignored the corporate community. Colleges and universities have long offered
corporate training programs and customized courses. However, corporate offerings and
traditional degree programs have fallen into two distinct categories, usually considered
to be very separate: the graduate degree program, typically thought of as the more
rigorous education experience designed exclusively by academics, and the executive
education program, a shorter-term, not-for-credit alternative intended to serve the
corporation’s needs.
Now, due in large part to the
maturing nature and growing acceptance of distance learning, the wall that once stood
between business and academia is beginning to crumble. Over the past few years, we’ve
begun to see a blending of executive education and graduate degree programs. The result is
a new model for professional education: the corporate-customized graduate degree program.
The Babson College Experience
In 2000, Babson College opened
the doors of Babson Interactive, a school dedicated to applying e-learning to innovative
management education programs. The goal was to create an e-learning/faceto- face hybrid
that is both responsive to the needs of businesses and culminates in a degree from an
established brick-andmortar university.
When I was first hired by Babson
College, I held the titles of dean of the Babson School of Executive Education and dean of
its Graduate School of Business. My responsibilities included overseeing Babson’s MBA
programs and executive education courses at the same time. As I stepped into the position
of CEO of Babson Interactive, I relinquished my role as dean of the Graduate School but
retained my title and responsibilities as dean of Executive Education. It was clear from
the start that e-learning offered high potential for an entirely new type of executive
education, and that Babson Interactive was the place where we would explore the
possibilities.
Babson had been watching the
development of e-learning from the sidelines for quite some time before opening Babson
Interactive. At first we were, frankly, not very interested. For the most part, the
technologies appeared underdeveloped and unproven. We had great concern that the initial
technology was not robust enough to provide the kind of insight and judgment building that
we felt a good graduate program should offer.
In the past few years, however,
we’ve seen the technology improve and have observed other institutions implement very
successful e-learning programs. I now believe that a blended degree program—one that
incorporates both elearning and face-to-face instruction— offers an education
experience that can, in fact, be superior to the traditional classroom experience. The key
is in the proper balancing of these two learning modes.
A number of corporations have
come to Babson Interactive. In one example, Babson, along with Cenquest, an e-learning
company with expertise in creating online courses, developed a oneof- a-kind
company-customized MBA degree program for Intel Corp. By combining the foundational and
theoretical knowledge included in a Babson graduate degree with the strategic intent of
the company, the program provided Intel with a completely new employee education option.
The customization of the
curriculum took several forms. The Intel team offered input into the class electives. They
also provided real work projects to be used as examples and incorporated into the
coursework. Through e-learning technology, Intel executives, partners, and even customers
could be included as guest lecturers.
ROI and Student Benefits
Corporations have long viewed
companyreimbursed education as a standard employee benefit alongside health care and bonus
programs. U.S. businesses spend $58 billion annually on employee education. And in a
market where there is always fierce competition for top employees, offering quality
education programs is seen as essential to hiring and retaining the best and brightest.
Unfortunately, the
return-on-investment for company-reimbursed degree programs has been less than easy to
quantify. Corporations have had little influence over the schools being attended, much
less the programs being offered and the curriculum being taught. Aside from reimbursement
contingencies based on keeping a certain grade point average, businesses have had limited
input into the nature of their employee’s for-credit education experience. The
programs are typically funded more upon faith and hope then on real data showing that
employees will learn skills that will increase their overall value to the company.
Perhaps a larger irony to these
programs is that while they are seen as a necessary tool for hiring and retaining
employees, they often have an opposite effect. It is not unusual for a company to pay for
an employee’s graduate education only to have that employee leave once the degree is
obtained. In such cases, the reimbursement program often becomes a company-sponsored
training ground for its competition.
Since the programs at Babson
Interactive are designed to increase an employee’s value to the company, chances are
far better that graduates will continue their careers at the company once their degree is
completed. And since employees work and study with other employees from various corporate
locations, managers see the learning experience as providing a rare opportunity to build
valuable employee relationships across company campuses.
Lessons Learned
In the final analysis, there is a
real learning curve involved in maximizing both the instructional and business models for
this type of program. Still, it is clear that corporate education is heading in a new
direction. Companies like Intel are looking to this new corporate education model to
provide higher quality assurances and overall increased value. By combining a traditional
graduate degree curriculum with content tailored to the needs of a company, customized
degree programs offer unprecedented benefits to both the employee and employer and stand
to ultimately redefine the relationship between academia and the "real world."
Wireless Audio and Video Knowledge Portals --- BeVocal
Judith Boettcher in Syllabus, June 1999, 18-24 Judith Boettcher
is affiliated with CREN. She predicts the following scenarios (which appear to be heavily
in line with the emerging WGU programs mentioned above):
1. A "career university" sector
will be in place (with important partnerships of major corporations with prestige
universities).
2. Most higher education institutions, perhaps 60 percent, will
have teaching and learning management software systems linked
to their back office administration systems.
3. New career universities will focus on certifications,
modular degrees, and skill sets.
4. The link between courses and
content for courses will be broken.
5. Faculty work and roles will make a dramatic shift toward specialization (with less stress upon one person being responsible
for the learning material in an entire course).
(Outsourcing Academics http://www.outsourcing-academics.com/
)
Will Universities Be Relics? What Happens When an Irresistible Force
Meets an Immovable Object? John W. Hibbs
Peter Drucker predicts that, in 30 years,
the traditional university will be nothing more than a relic. Should we listen or laugh? Hibbs examines Drucker's prophesy
in the light of other unbelievable events, including the rapid transformation of the
Soviet Union "from an invincible Evil Empire into just another meek door-knocker at
International Monetary Fund headquarters." Given the mobility and cost concerns of
today's students, as well as the growing tendency of employers to evaluate job-seekers'
competencies rather than their institutional affiliations, Hibbs
agrees that the brick-and-mortar university is doomed to extinction.
Building a Faculty
Development Institute: A Case Study
Research and Evaluation Needs
for Distance Education: A Delphi Study
Needs, Concerns and Practices
of Online Instructors
Tutor and Site Facilitator
Roles in Wired Class: A Web-Based Learning Environment
The Globalization of Open and
Flexible Learning: Considerations for Planners and Managers
Question
What is the University of California's XLab?
Answer
From Syllabus News on July 27, 2004
Berkeley X-Lab to Test Social Science Theories in
Biz-World
The University of California at Berkeley Haas School
of Business has opened the XLab –- short for Experimental Social Sciences
Laboratory –- a high-tech facility to help economists, political scientists,
and other social scientists test their theories to find whether they can be
applied to real world problems in business and management.
Xlab is a part of the university’s Haas School of
Business and uses the latest wireless and notebook computer technology. The
facility, which can accommodate up to 40 participants as experimental
subjects. consists of 50 battery-powered, wireless laptops that can be easily
moved on mobile carts.
In one recent study, XLab director John Morgan, an
economist and Haas School associate professor, used the facility to find out
what produces greater revenue for sellers when a company is put up for sale -
asking for payment in shares of stock, or in cash. The test supported the
theory that shares bring in more revenue for the seller in a bidding contest.
"This idea comes from the economics literature, but it hasn't really made
its way out of the ivory tower," said Morgan. "With XLab, we assess
whether the theory works in practice and whether it will have a big strategic
payoff in the marketplace."
New York — December 11, 2000 — Intellinex LLC,
one of the largest providers of eLearning solutions, has completed the previously
announced acquisition of Teach.com, a leading provider of online PC and business skills
training courseware. The acquisition of Teach.com furthers Intellinex's growth as a
one-stop provider of eLearning solutions.
Teach.com offers scalable technology and off-the-shelf
courseware including an extensive library of Web-delivered personal computer and business
skills training and support courseware and the SmartTrainer(R) content delivery platform,
a proprietary 32-bit, browser-based engine.
Including sales from Teach.com, Intellinex is targeting
revenue of over $100 million in the first 12 months of operation. In 1999, Teach.com had
$6.5 million in revenue. Its customers include General Electric, AT&T, Dell Computer,
Sun Microsystems, Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical and the Internal Revenue Service.
Intellinex's customers include Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly and Ernst & Young.
"The completion of this acquisition strengthens
Intellinex's position as a one-stop provider of corporate learning solutions in the
rapidly growing global eLearning market," said Intellinex Chairman and CEO Michael
Powers. "The acquisition of Teach.com enhances our product line and our ability to
provide the highest quality products and services for our customers."
This was the first acquisition for Intellinex.
Teach.com's 90 employees at facilities in Elk Grove Village, Ill. and Golden, Colo. have
joined Intellinex and are expected to play an important role in supporting its future
growth. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.
About Intellinex Intellinex is one of the largest
providers of customized eLearning solutions that deliver and transform the value of
knowledge for companies and their customers. A new stand-alone business of Ernst &
Young LLP, Intellinex integrates innovative technology, flexible content and learning
services to help clients work smarter. The 500 employees of Intellinex are dedicated to
providing eLearning products and services that are second to none to organizations around
the world. Visit us at www.intellinex.com.
Intellinex refers to Intellinex LLC, an eLearning
venture of Ernst & Young LLP. Ernst & Young refers to the U.S. firm of Ernst &
Young LLP and other members of the global Ernst & Young organization.
A Major Reference: Higher
Education in an Era of Digital Competition Edited by D.E. Hanna (Madison, WI:
Atwood Publishing, IBN 1-891859-32-3, 2000, pp. 73-74
Using the Internet’s sphere of influence, one small college
is making an impact on the education of students in Belarus, a country that has achieved
only limited structural reform since its independence from the former Soviet Union.
Despite the country’s economic isolation from the West, Belarusian institutions are
reaching across traditional boundaries to forge new collaborative relationships.
Emerging national consciousness in the Newly Independent States
(NIS) of Europe has produced dramatic alterations in business, politics, economics,
technology, and culture, requiring innovative educational methodologies that better match
the needs of these countries in transition. In 1996, in response to these challenges,
Bryant College spearheaded the Collaborative Learning at a Distance (CLD) program between
Bryant and Belarus. This comprehensive joint venture is an excellent model for using
Internet technologies to advance collaborative learning, communication competencies, and
policy making.
In implementing the CLD Program, we encountered many
philosophical, logistical, and technical challenges. Two distinctly different Belarusian
institutions, the Information Technologies Center (ITC) of the National Academy of
Sciences of Belarus and the European Humanities University (EHU), bridged political
boundaries to create a close working relationship between a state (government-owned) and
non-state (private) institution. The shared enthusiasm of the ITC and EHU for the CLD
Program enabled them to overcome their political differences.
A Non-Hierarchical Approach
The program uses a non-hierarchical model, emphasizing
reciprocal, interactive learning across national and academic boundaries (see figure). It
is based on our belief that learning is a collaborative process and that we learn better
when we teach each other and learn in multiple ways. Our Internet-based CLD Program
focuses on a small-scale, personalized interactive learning experience, which directly
involves the teacher/mentor, student/learner, and all other stakeholders in the process.
This non-heirarchical pedagogical approach is relatively
unfamiliar to university educators in the NIS. A history of centralized education and
strong governmental control over curricula has resulted in a teaching environment that
does not encourage the interactive exchange of ideas between faculty and students. At a
time when funding for educational innovation in the NIS has been curtailed,
cost-effective, collaborative distance learning projects can help address the problem of
dwindling educational resources and compensate for the legacy of 70 years of communism.
Fostering Collaboration
Collaborative projects—including seminars for scientists and
engineers who worked for the Soviet defense industry, distance learning courses, and the
development of environmental policy initiatives with the National Academy of Sciences of
Belarus—have been led by scholars representing diverse academic disciplines. These
projects have utilized a wide array of information technologies, including International
Virtual Roundtable Discussions via e-mail, seminars on Web site construction, Microsoft
NetMeeting conferencing between the U.S. and Belarus, software training and development,
and the use of the Internet to promote collaborative learning across diverse cultural and
political boundaries. (The entire CLD Program is available at
http://web.bryant.edu/~history/new/course.htm).
Using these technologies, faculty, students, and entrepreneurs in
the U.S. and Belarus have formed strong ties. Faculty exchanges have permitted
collaborators to teach at participating universities, conduct research, present training
programs, lead trade missions, and deliver papers at international conferences. On-site
visits, ranging in length from six days to six months, have played a critical role in our
ability to develop trusting relationships and set the CLD Program in motion. We have
learned that even sophisticated distance learning technologies cannot replace the power
and intensity of human interactions.
Student-centered, collaborative group projects, standard on
American campuses, are virtually unheard of in Belarus. The introduction of divergent
points of view on controversial topics into classroom discussions is also largely absent.
In fact, the educational system of Belarus, including all curricula issues, continues to
be tightly controlled by the state. Still, the CLD Program’s use of Internet
technologies has had a powerfully democratizing influence on Belarusian learners who have
participated in this project.
Technology-enabled interactions between students from different
cultures and with different expertise and skill sets have presented challenges. For
instance, American students display an almost casual approach to e-mail correspondence,
often failing to use proper punctuation or sentence structure. By contrast, Belarusians
take particular care in constructing well-written messages, exacerbating the time
constraints caused by limited computer laboratory access. Mentors in both countries
encouraged collaborative techniques for negotiating these barriers to communication.
History professor David Lux noted that crucial pedagogical issues
arose during the initial offering of his course, “The History of American
Technology.” Viewing the course as an experiment to field-test technological and
pedagogical issues associated with distance learning, Lux observed that cultural
differences significantly affected how students approached the course. Belarusian students
“proved voracious in their willingness to digest readings and engage in very
sophisticated dialogue about the meaning and content of what they were reading.” Yet,
Lux concluded that “the collaborative learning, student-project features of the
course,” so popular with Bryant students, did not initially “translate
meaningfully” into the educational culture of Belarus. With guidance and examples
from Bryant faculty and students, however, Belarusian students gradually came to
appreciate the value of collaborative projects.
In the course, “Cultures and Economies in Transition in the
Post Soviet Era,” Professors Judy Barrett Litoff and Joseph Ilacqua described a high
level of energy by students representing diverse countries. Heated debates often ensued as
students tackled the difficult challenge of understanding societies in transition.
However, their shared experiences as students helped them to negotiate their diverse
perspectives. For example, during the Kosovo crisis in the spring of 1999, spirited e-mail
exchanges of conflicting student perspectives took place. These discussions demonstrated
the value of exploring cross-cultural and comparative political differences in order to
better understand complex global problems.
Belarusian students enrolled in “Environmental Policy:
Technology, Business & Government,” a course offered by Professor Gaytha
Langlois, lacked a basic understanding of the governmental infrastructure necessary to
implement well-designed environmental policy initiatives. Even Bryant students were poorly
informed about how policies are actualized in the U.S., but in Belarus, the differences in
governmental structure and practices further complicated this problem. The process of
acquainting Belarusian students with the roles that government and non-governmental
organizations play in crafting environmental and business policy has proved to be more
cumbersome than expected. Through the use of structured International Virtual Roundtable
Discussions, the ability of government and non-governmental organizations to formulate
environmental policies became clearer.
Technical Considerations
Time differences, Internet delays, and the technological
realities of Belarus presented challenges that limited the use of complex distance
learning technologies. Consequently, we designed a relatively inexpensive and modest
program. Since access to the Web in Belarus is often slow and unpredictable, we have
provided CD-ROM versions of the CLD Web site to Belarusian students. CD-ROMs that are run
on computers connected to the Web provide students with full entry to the CLD courses,
including the ability to access hyperlinks. In addition, through the cooperation of
information technology specialists at Bryant and EHU, a mirror Web site has been
established to enhance connectivity.
Because of the seven-hour time difference between the east coast
of the United States and Belarus, and because Belarusian students have limited access to
e-mail and depend primarily on under-equipped (by U.S. standards) university computer
laboratories for electronic communication, synchronous and asynchronous e-mail
communication between the United States and Belarus has proved to be more difficult than
we had originally anticipated. U.S. students are routinely assigned personal university
e-mail addresses, but as a rule Belarusian students are rarely provided one. Even when
students are assigned e-mail addresses, however, they often discover that access to
university computer laboratories is limited to 2-3 hours a week. To encourage synchronous
e-mail communication with students, Bryant faculty have adopted e-mail office hours
between 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. in Belarus). By choosing
these e-mail office hours, we are able to avoid the busy use of the Internet in Belarus
during the mid- and late afternoon.
The most useful and successful distance learning technique that
we have introduced is the International Virtual Roundtable Discussion (IVRD) via e-mail.
This tool, utilizing the Internet to promote cross-cultural and comparative perspectives,
has been incorporated into all CLD courses and has been enthusiastically embraced by
learners. The IVRD features structured discussions that avoid the pitfalls of unmoderated
chat rooms, yet it encourages learners to share informed opinions about specified topics
that often result in lively exchanges of viewpoints.
On occasion, we utilize Microsoft’s NetMeeting program to
provide live, two-way, global “see and talk” communication over the Internet.
The Microsoft NetMeeting program, standard on new computers, uses simple computer
accessories, including microphone, speakers, headset, and small video camera, that cost
about $100. This inexpensive technology, although dependent upon a relatively new computer
(about $1,000), replaces the high costs of long-distance telephone charges and video
conferencing. Although two-way video and audio communications are exciting and hold great
promise, they frequently require users to have great patience and perseverance in order to
make them work properly.
"The Duke Law & Technology Review (DLTR) is an
online legal publication that focuses on the evolving intersection of law
and technology. This area of study draws on a number of legal specialties:
intellectual property, business law, free speech and privacy,
telecommunications, and criminal law -- each of which is undergoing
doctrinal and practical changes as a result of new and emerging
technologies. DLTR strives to be a 'review' in the classic sense of the
word. We examine new developments, synthesize them around larger theoretical
issues, and critically examine the implications. We also review and
consolidate recent cases, proposed bills, and administrative policies."
"However, DLTR is unique among its sister journals
at Duke, and indeed among all law journals. Unlike traditional journals,
which focus primarily on lengthy scholarly articles, DLTR focuses on short,
direct, and accessible pieces, called issue briefs or 'iBriefs.' In fact,
the goal of an iBrief is to provide cutting edge legal insight both to
lawyers and to non-legal professionals. In addition, DLTR strives to be the
first legal publication to address breaking issues. To that end, we publish
on the first and fifteenth of every month during the school year (September
until April) and less frequently during the summer."
Duke Law & Technology Review is available free of
charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet.
Jensen and Sandlin Book entitled Electronic
Teaching and Learning: Trends in Adapting to Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Networks in Higher
Education
(both the 1994 and 1997 Updated Versions)
The
List:
OCL-Master-Elementary
Algebra-MATH9X
— R. Davis Feb 2, 06:34 PM
— Ron Heasley Feb 2, 06:50 PM
— Richard Ludlow Feb 2, 06:55 PM
— K. Thacker Feb 2, 07:09 PM
Also, since the videos are being used solely for educational purposes, doesn’t that completely fall in line with the goals of the educational institutions?
— Joseph Dooley Feb 2, 07:16 PM
— Aaron Feb 2, 07:22 PM
The simple format and centralized approach is particularly important in that it makes the material far more accessible for the vast majority of people who do not know that it exists on university sites.
In essence, by trying to appeal to a broad audience, the site has the potential to deliver really crucial educational content to people who wouldn’t be able to access it otherwise.
Rather than needing to search around multiple university websites to find the content that I’m looking for, I can go to Academic Earth and get all the material in one place, easily searchable, etc.
I think it’s a pretty damn cool project.
— Jerry G. Feb 2, 07:35 PM
I appreciate what the founders are trying to do, but they really need to work on that before they can expect instructors and institutions to seriously consider using their service.
— Jacob Richards Feb 2, 07:35 PM
— Kory Feb 2, 11:04 PM
— VS Feb 2, 11:30 PM
From the look at this beta site, it appears that Mr. Ludlow has the potential to bring the OCW movement to a much larger mainstream audience.
— G. Wilson Feb 2, 11:39 PM