MOOCs
Peters, M. (2013) Massive Open Online Courses and Beyond: the Revolution to Come Truthout, August 17
This is an excellent, comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of where MOOCs are going.
What Michael Peters does is to set MOOCs within ‘a wider set of socio-technological changes that might be better explained within a theory of postindustrial education focusing on social media as the new culture.‘
Turn education into a lifelong experience — from clomedia.com by Caroline Mol and Nick Van Dam MOOCs ensure development remains relevant. The future of work depends on people’s ability to build intellectual capital.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Most of the discussions about MOOCs focus on the experience and potential impact on higher education, which we will not discuss here. Rather, we will talk about their impact on the 21st century workforce and corporations. It is very exciting that, according to edX, more than 50 percent of enrollments in such courses are professionals from all over the world.
Looking at market dynamics, increasing globalization, rapid advancements in technology and the continuously changing business environment, it becomes increasingly important that people up their game and continue to invest in their development to stay relevant in the workforce.
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In addition to employing people with the right skills, corporations are looking more and more for specialized expertise in the so-called human cloud — the virtual, on-demand workforce. Success for a 21st century workforce is leaders’ ability to predict which competencies will be valued in the future and to accelerate mastery of those competencies.
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From DSC: While I might take some different viewpoints on a couple of things in the article, the importance of reinventing oneself — i.e. staying relevant — is key; and what MOOCs morph into might be a key ingredient for the corporate world.
The new learning dashboard is your personal homepage on Khan Academy. The dashboard gives you an easy way to find the best next things for you to do. It has a bunch of really cool things designed to help you learn math, and soon other subjects, really well on your own or with a coach.
From DSC: This is the type of innovation that makes online/blended learning even more powerful/useful.
The New York Times has now opened a channel at the website If This, Then That (IFTTT). For journalism hackers and tinkering readers, this is fine news.
IFTTT is elegantly useful and usefully elegant. For a variety of sites and services (Evernote! Instagram! Dropbox!), IFTTT combines “triggers” and “actions,” so that when one thing happens on one service, something else happens on another.You can say,if I take a picture on Instagram, then automatically save it to Dropbox.
From DSC: How might this concept be used in conjunction with digital playlists/learning? If I finished the XYZ module over here at U of X, then start ABC over here at ___.
Apple gears up for the video discovery wars — from fastcolabs.com by Michael Grothaus Think Apple’s Matcha.tv acquisition was about its programming guide service? You’re probably wrong. There’s a new war brewing in online video: helping users find the stuff they want.
From DSC: Instead of discovering videos only, how about discovering items along the lines of what you are trying to learn more about? i.e. Matcha.tv meets Google Alerts meets IBM’s Watson.
The Coming Big Data Education Revolution — from by Doug Guthrie Big data, not MOOCS, will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve outcomes for individual students
Excerpt (emphasis):
Don’t get me wrong, online learning will fundamentally transform higher education, bridging distances and creating access in ways that have not been possible before. But, in this arena, MOOCs are not a transformative innovation that will forever remake academia. That honor belongs to a more disruptive and far-reaching innovation – “big data.” A catchall phrase that refers to the vast numbers of data sets that are collected daily, big data promises to revolutionize online learning and, in doing so, higher education.
Big data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students. By designing a curriculum that collects data at every step of the student learning process, universities can address student needs with customized modules, assignments, feedback and learning trees in the curriculum that will promote better and richer learning.
A “Napster Moment” in Education — from news.yahoo.com Excerpt:
Digital education is like whitewater rafting. Or like the Napster era in music. The two analogies were among many that came up yesterday as panelists considered the future of technology in education at a Scientific American and Macmillan Science & Education summit on “Learning in the Digital Age,” at Google’s New York headquarters.
The MOOC Business Plan — from campustechnology.com by David Raths With millions of students taking high-quality MOOCs for free, schools and course providers are now searching for a viable business model.
Excerpt:
Name a product sold in stores for thousands of dollars that can be obtained for free online. If you’re struggling for an answer, don’t be surprised–no company would last very long under those circumstances. Yet that’s exactly the predicament in which higher education finds itself as MOOCs begin to disrupt the traditional post-secondary model. Schools are giving away what was once their most valued treasure–the intellectual property of their faculty–for nothing.
Obviously, it’s not a sustainable business model, so what’s next? Where will the money come from? While it may seem surprising, no one really seems to know. For many colleges and universities, the current environment more closely resembles a high-stakes game of musical chairs–everyone is terrified of being left without a chair when the music stops. But the game is being played by more than just schools. From a business standpoint, higher education is ripe for reinvention, and it has attracted a slew of companies–both old and new–that smell significant profit.
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For Coursera, this task is already under way. “Some business models are becoming clear,” says Andrew Ng, cofounder of the for-profit company. “Some we are confident will work; others we are still experimenting with.”
“You could have a certificate of a course completed at Duke University [NC]–that could be a valuable credential,” adds Ng. “We have projected that this alone will lead us to sustainability. In the first quarter of the signature track, we brought in $220,000, and in the second quarter, which hasn’t ended yet, we roughly doubled that amount. So we project that by itself that will make us sustainable.”
The $4 million teacher — from the Wall Street Journal by Amanda Ripley South Korea’s students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.
Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students’ online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).
“The harder I work, the more I make,” he says matter of factly. “I like that.”
David McNew/Getty Images – The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper
to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos for $250 million August 5, 2013.
Excerpt of comments:
The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.
BOULDER – Highlighting a shift toward a new model for its interactive online video platform, Boulder-based FlixMaster Inc. this week announced that it is changing its name to Rapt Media Inc.
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“When we founded FlixMaster, we set out to create the best toolset for video creators wanting to build interactive videos, and we succeeded in doing that that,” Rapt co-founder and chief executive Erika Trautman said in an email. “But as we partnered with really sophisticated companies (like HBO and Maybelline), we realized that our platform and the opportunity it posed wasbigger than just interactive video. It was about improving online communication and storytelling through interactivity of all kinds, with video as the central component.Our company had already transitioned to this bigger vision, and we wanted a name that could reflect that vision.
Additional thought from DSC: This item relates to the convergence of the television, the computer, and the telephone that I’m pulse-checking. I’m hopeful that such a convergence will provide students in the future with 24×7, highly-engaging, interactive, customized/personalized content:
Nathan Weber for The New York Times Listeners use a Bible app during a sermon at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
EDMOND, Okla. — More than 500 years after Gutenberg, the Bible is having its i-moment.
For millions of readers around the world, a wildly successful free Bible app, YouVersion, is changing how, where and when they read the Bible.
Built by LifeChurch.tv, one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced evangelical churches, YouVersion is part of what the church calls its “digital missions.” They include a platform for online church services and prepackaged worship videos that the church distributes free. A digital tithing system and an interactive children’s Bible are in the works.
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This month, the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox.
President Obama vowed Wednesday that he would soon unveil a plan to promote significant reform in higher education — with an emphasis on controlling what colleges charge students and families.
“[I]n the coming months, I will lay out an aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs, and improve value for middle-class students and their families. It is critical that we make sure that college is affordable for every single American who’s willing to work for it,” said Obama, in a speech at Knox College.
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“Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money, to keep up with costs that are going up 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for,” Obama said.
From DSC: At a $175 billion per year support for postsecondary education, if the Federal Government starts redirecting this flow of $$$…I’ll bet we’ll see some change…and rather quickly I might add.
The Walmart of Education (as predicted back in December 2008) is now here, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. To what will we change? At least one major piece of the answer to that question is that we will see the continued — but increasing — use of teams of specialists that will be commissioned to create low-cost, highly-engaging content. Though expensive to create originally, such teams will more than make their money back because of the massive number of students such “courses” will serve.
…I wanted to offer another idea that might help fund engaging, multimedia-based, online-based learning materials: (NOTE: The figures I use are not accurate, but rather, they are used for illustration purposes only.)
Let’s reallocate funds towards course development, and then let’s leverage those learning materials throughout the world!
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For students: Bring costs waaaayyyyy down and access waaayyy up!
Plus, no more defaulted loans, students could experience richer content, students wouldn’t have to wait as much on financial aid decisions. There would be fewer financial aid headaches; and the resources devoted to figuring out & processing financial aid could be reduced. The issue will be how an institution can differentiate itself in such a new world…but that issue will have to be dealt with in the future anyway.
Educators have known for 30 years that students perform better when given one-on-one tutoring and mastery learning—working on a subject until it is mastered, not just until a test is scheduled. Success also requires motivation, whether from an inner drive or from parents, mentors or peers.
Will the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) quash these success factors? Not at all. In fact, digital tools offer our best path to cost-effective, personalized learning.
I know because I have taught both ways.
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Inspired by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s comment that “learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks,” we created a course centered on the students doing things and getting frequent feedback. Our “lectures” were short (two- to six-minute) videos designed to prime the attendees for doing the next exercise. Some problems required the application of mathematical techniques described in the videos. Others were open-ended questions that gave students a chance to think on their own and then to hash out ideas in online discussion forums.
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That is why a properly designed automated intelligent tutoring system can foster learning outcomes as well as human instructors can, as Kurt van Lehn found in a 2011 meta-analysis in Educational Psychologist.
From DSC:
A potential learning scenario in the future:
“Learning Agent, go find me a MOOC (or what the MOOC will morph into) about ________.” Similar to a Google Alert, the Learning Agent returns some potential choices. I select one. .
Once there… “System, let’s begin.” I begin taking the online-based course — which is stocked full of a variety of media, some interactive, that I get to choose from for each module/item based upon my personal preferences — and the intelligent tutoring system kicks in and responses at relevant points based upon my questions, answers, responses. The system uses AI, data mining, learning analytics, to see how I’m doing. It tracks this for each student. Humans regularly review the data to begin noticing patterns and to tweak the algorithms based upon these patterns. .
If at any time I find the responses from the automated intelligent tutoring system confusing or weak, I will:
Make note of why I’m confused or disagree with the response (via an online-based form entry on the page; this feedback gets instantly sent to the Team of Specialists in charge of the “course.” They will use it to tweak the course/algorithms.)
Ask to speak with a person, at which point I am asked to choose whether my inquiry would best be handled by a Subject Matter Expert (SME) at $___/hour/request (more expensive price) or by an entry-level tutor (at a lower $___/hour/request). I then enter into a videoconference-based tutoring session with them, and they can access my records and even take over my screen (if I let them). Once I get my questions answered, I return to the course and continue.
From DSC: A twist on the above scenario would be if a cohorted group of people — not age-based — met in a physical place/room and were able to bounce ideas off of each other before anyone ante’d up for additional expenses by contacting a tutor and/or an SME. They could even share the expenses of the “call” (so-to-speak).
Let’s tackle the economics of the situation head on — and not based on theory, but on experience. When lynda.com opened in 1997, it was a physical school that taught web design. We charged $1,500 per person for a single week of instruction. In those days, the world economy was robust and people came from every continent to study with us, enabling our business to grow and thrive. It was a heady time—until 2001, when the dotcom bubble burst and people and companies lost their budgets.
It was scary to witness the sudden demise of a business model that had worked so incredibly well up until then. In response, we could have simply raised our prices, and targeted a much smaller, more elite audience, hoping to keep our doors open. Instead, we did something crazy. We closed our eyes and leapt into something that was, at that time, unproven: We put our lessons online in video format for $25 per month.
While it took a few years to make as much money as the school did, it eventually far surpassed the earning power of the brick and mortar we started with. Instead of serving 80 people or so a week at our physical school, we started serving thousands in the virtual world, and today that number is in the millions every year.
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The solution? Take the teachers who are experts and thought leaders and memorialize their lectures and materials via videos and other rich media to share those ideas broadly.Pay them royalties for this, the same as if they published a popular textbook.Leverage in-person class time for projects, collaborations, discussions, reviews, and presentations—the types of activities that are better experienced in person than online.
