I. Elaine Allen, PhD | Jeff Seaman, PhD
Co-Directors, The Babson Survey Research Group
Babson College
Babson Park, MA 02457-9985
January 2013
From DSC:
In this series of periodic postings re: experimentation (see here and here), this week’s Consumers Electronics Show prompts me to think about different types of experiments, prompting such questions as:
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Some relevant items on this include:
Flingo reveals Samba, a first of its kind dual interactive TV and second screen platform — from pandodaily.com byasdf
Excerpt:
This week at CES in Las Vegas (the Consumer Electronics Show), San Francisco-based Flingo will release the latest version of its platform, dubbed Samba, aimed at changing this. Samba will make four-year-old Flingo one of the first to offer a combined Interactive TV and Second Screen experience.
“We saw a surge of Smart TV and tablet adoption in 2012, but realized that a seamless TV experience across all screens was missing,” says Flingo co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin, formerly of BitTorrent. “Samba will blur the lines between linear television and the Web.”
Flingo is unique in that it uses video, not audio to identify what content is being viewed…
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Samba offers viewers the ability to actively engage with programming in real-time through their primary screen. This can take the form of polls, social conversations, recommendations, or consumption of related media. In the case of Second Screens, aka internet-connected laptops, tablets, and smartphones used simultaneously while watching TV, the company can offer an even wider array of complementary content and engagement, such as aggregated social feeds relating to live programming or an ability to watch past episodes of a live show. This can all be delivered across multiple screens, in concert.
Also see:
Also see:
Kevin Smith/Business Insider
More tangentially, but still relevant:
From DSC:
The other day, I mentioned how important it will be for institutions of higher education to increase the priority of experimentation. Clicking on the graphic below will give you an example of the kind of vision/experiment that I’m talking about.
(Though, more practically speaking, to operationalize this type of vision would actually require a series of much smaller experiments; I just wanted to present the overall vision of how these pieces might fit together).
NOTE:
This 11″x17″ image is a 10MB PDF file, so it may take some time to appear.
Feel free to right-click on the graphic in order to download/save/print the file as well.
Also relevant is this upcoming event from educause:
1/8/13 addendum resulting from a Tweet from a great colleague, Mr. Travis LaFleur (@travislafleur), UX Designer at BiggsGilmore
Why predicting online learning developments is risky but necessary — from Tony Bates
Excerpt:
Before drawing up my outlook for 2013, I want to discuss the important topic of prediction in online learning, in particular how predictions are made, and what value they may have. Nate Silver’s excellent book (references are at the end of this article) looks at prediction in a number of fields: weather forecasting (excellent up to three days, useless after eight days), economic forecasting (hopeless by both media pundits and professional economists), baseball players’ performance (pretty good and improving), earthquakes (bad for major quakes, but promising for lesser quakes), poker and a number of other areas. He also has some interesting reflections on big data as well. Unfortunately though he doesn’t discuss prediction in online learning, so I’ll try and help out with this!
Developing a MOOC-inspired course — from the User Generated Education blog by Jackie Gerstein
Excerpt:
During Fall, 2012, I developed and taught a graduate course entitled, Social Networked Learning, for the Boise State University’s Educational Technology Program. Most of the students were in-service K-12 educators. I provided an overview of the learning activities for this course in two previous blog posts.
Sample student projects from this course can be viewed at http://learni.st/users/jackiegerstein/boards/4710-social-networked-learning.
This was a new course in educational technology. As is true for many of us using educational technology in the classroom, we are experimenting with how technology can enhance the learning experiences of our students. Sometimes we have failures, often times we have successes.
Also see Jackie’s posting:
5 ways online education can keep its students honest — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
As online learning platforms like Coursera, Udacity and edX raise the stakes for students with increased partnerships with traditional universities and credit-bearing classes, here are five technologies that can help them thwart cheating.
From the January/February 2013 issue of The American Interest:
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Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
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The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a new era of creative destruction produces a merciless shakeout of those institutions that adapt and prosper from those that stall and die.
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But what happens when a limited supply of a sought-after commodity suddenly becomes unlimited? Prices fall. Yet here, on the cusp of a new era of online education, that is a financial reality that few American universities are prepared to face.
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Anyone who can access the internet—at a public library, for instance—no matter how poor or disadvantaged or isolated or uneducated he or she may be, can access the teachings of some of the greatest scholars of our time through open course portals. Technology is a great equalizer.
Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise. Few who will be affected by the changes ahead are aware of what’s coming. Severe financial contraction in the higher-ed industry is on the way, and for many this will spell hard times both financially and personally. But if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate.
* The old way:
Colleges rise as they reject — from online.wsj.com
Schools invite more applications, then use denials to boost coveted rankings
Also relevant/see:
Excerpt:
Description:
Enter up to three (3) screencast videos. Videos will be assigned a category based on the information you provide (so please be as detailed as possible!). Categories are: Education (videos with a focus on teaching and/or schools, at any level); Tutorial/Training (videos with a focus on training or tutorial content); Sales and Marketing (videos made to sell or persuade); and Wildcard (videos that don’t fit in the previous categories).
Online education: Non-profits fight back? — infographic from onlinedegrees.org
Per Muhammad Saleem:
“For years, for-profit universities have dominated the online education space, however that’s changing.”
From DSC:
Some reflections on New platform lets professors set prices for their online courses — from InsideHigherEd.com by Jeffrey R. Young
Excerpt:
Professors typically don’t worry about what price point a course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform, Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students’ e-mails.
The new service is run by StraighterLine, a company that offers online, self-paced introductory courses. Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, StraighterLine’s courses aren’t free. But tuition is lower than what traditional colleges typically charge—the company calls its pricing “ultra-affordable.” A handful of colleges accept StraighterLine courses for transfer credit.
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From DSC:
The power of online-based marketplaces. We’ve seen it in other industries. Are we now going to see more of this within higher education as the unbundling of higher education seems to be a possibility? Will there be an increased importance of professors’ individual brands? Could be.
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From DSC:
Congrats Burck & Co. on your continued innovative thinking and business models! Way to help keep a college education accessible to many!
“Mom! Check out what I did at school today!”
If you’re a parent, don’t you love to hear the excitement in your son’s or daughter’s voice when they bring home something from school that really peaked their interest? Their passions?
I woke up last night with several ideas and thoughts on how technology could help students become — and stay — engaged, while passing over more control and choice to the students in order for them to pursue their own interests and passions. The idea would enable students to efficiently gain some exposure to a variety of things to see if those things were interesting to them — perhaps opening a way for a future internship or, eventually, a career.
The device I pictured in my mind was the sort of device that I saw a while back out at Double Robotics and/or at Suitable Technologies:
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The thoughts centered on implementing a growing network of such remote-controlled, mobile, videoconferencing-based sorts of devices, that were hooked up to voice translation engines. Students could control such devices to pursue things that they wanted to know more about, such as:
For accountability — as well as for setting aside intentional time to process the information — students would update their own blogs about what they experienced, heard, and saw. They would need to include at least one image, along with the text they write about their experience. Or perhaps a brief/edited piece of digital video or audio of some of the statements that they heard that really resonated with them, or that they had further questions on. The default setting on such postings would be to be kept private, but if the teacher and the student felt that a posting could/should be made public, a quick setting could be checked to publish it out there for others to see/experience.
Real world. Engaging. Passing over more choice and control to the students so that they can pursue what they are passionate about.
Citing IT skills shortage, IBM wants to expand presence at universities — from wiredacademic.com
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
“We want to be the scale up partner of choice for these universities,” said Jim Sporher, head of IBM’s university programs. “We want to make sure they have access to technology and understand our strategy.” He also sees massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a mega-trend and will be considering ways for IBM to be part of the MOOC trend in the future, particularly as many of the MOOC providers such as Udacity and Coursera offer classes in computer science.
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As a big blue-chip progenitor of the tech industry, IBM is worth listening to in many regards. For one, corporate computing trends often filter down into the education space. The corporate world often has the money to purchase and deploy game-changing technologies. IBM sees that it also works the other way too, where computing at the university level creates new businesses and ideas that move up into the corporate realm.
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From DSC:
I wonder…will the corporations develop their own MOOCs? Their own digital “playlists” and associated exams? (i.e. that someone needs to go through and pass in order to work for them…show me what you can do.) Hmmm…
Also see:
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Also see:
From DSC:
The educational “store” part of this graphic could take several forms:
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From DSC:
I’m beginning to wonder if many of us will be moving off of Moodle, Sakai, Bb Learn, Desire2Learn, etc. to platforms and ecosystems that are being created by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Rockstar professors on “primetime” — or anytime. If that happens, you can be sure there will be teams of specialists creating and delivering the content and learning experiences.