Online Learning: A Manifesto — from hybridpedagogy.com by Jesse Stommel

What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online. There is no productive place in this conversation for exclusivity or anti-intellectualism. Those of us talking about digital pedagogy and digital humanities need to be engaging thoughtfully in discussions about online learning and open education. Those of us in higher ed. need to be engaging thoughtfully with K-12 teachers and administrators. And it’s especially important that we open our discussions of the future of education to students, who should both participate in and help to build their own learning spaces. Pedagogy needs to be at the center of all these discussions.

I have no interest in debating the whether of online learning. That bird has most assuredly flown. What I’d like to do here is outline a pedagogy of online learning — not best practices, but points of departure to encourage a diversity of pedagogies.

 

Khan Academy founder proposes a new type of college — from chronicle.com by Alisha Azevedo

The One World Schoolhouse

Excerpt:

Salman Khan’s dream college looks very different from the typical four-year institution.

The founder of Khan Academy, a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.

 

Will Richmond on Top 2013 TV Trends [from Videomind by Greg Franzese]

Will Richmond on Top 2013 TV Trends -- from Videomind by Greg Franzese -- 11-29-2012

 

From DSC:
I continue to watch this space as the foundations are being put into place for what I’m calling, “Learning from the Living [Class] Room.”

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Learning from the living room -- a component of our future learning ecosystems -- by Daniel S. Christian, June 2012

 

An innovative, sharp concept for a potential Apple TV

An à la carte Apple TV concept integrates Siri, FaceTime, and cable/satellite providers (Gallery) — from 9to5mac.com by Jordan Kahn

Example “screenshots” from this concept:

Apple TV Concept - Nov 2012

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Also see:

 

From DSC:
This relates to what I’m calling “Learning from the Living [Class] Room”

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The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

 

Connected learning: The Power Of Social Learning Models — from teachthought.com

Excerpt:

Connected Learning “is an answer to three key shifts as society evolves from the industrial age of the 20th century and its one-size-fits-all factory approach to educating youth to a 21st century networked society.”

1) A shift from education to learning. Education is what institutions do, learning is what people do. Digital media enable learning anywhere, anytime; formal learning must also be mobile and just-in-time.

2) A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. Learning happens best when it is rich in social connections, especially when it is peer-based and organized around learners’ interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.

3) A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are one node of many on a young person’s network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.

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From DSC:
This reminds me of the animated video that I recently ran across at remixteaching.com entitled, “I, Pencil”:

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If that’s what’s involved with creating a pencil, what does the family tree look like for creating the Internet?!

The education giant adapts — from MIT Technology Review by Jessica Leber
Pearson is the world’s largest book publisher. Now it wants to be a one-stop shop for digital education.

Excerpt:

Pearson pulled this off with a decade-long string of acquisitions that helped it shift its emphasis from selling books to selling education services. The London-based company styles itself as the “world’s leading learning company,” even if that learning isn’t delivered through traditional books. These days, Pearson is more like an IT department for classrooms and schools. It sells technology infrastructure, software, and consulting services to schools—services that in turn help deliver the vast stock of textbook content Pearson owns. The company says its revenue from online content and services will surpass those of the traditional publishing business this year.

From DSC:
I congratulate Pearson on reinventing itself.  The words of Steve Jobs ring in my mind…something about cannibalizing one’s business before someone else does it for you.  Several other words and phrases come to my mind after seeing the above article — that regular readers of this blog and my archived website will instantly recognize:

  • Dangers of the status quo
  • Staying relevant
  • Survival
  • Disruption/change
  • New business models
  • Game-changing environment
  • Using teams of specialists

Also relevant here/see:

 

Virtual U. -- College of future could be come one, come all

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From DSC:
I don’t think that what we know today as “MOOCs” are anywhere’s nearly fully-baked and ready for prime time.  They will be refined, altered , and new systems/software will be further developed for them.   But the idea of reducing costs, increasing access, and experimenting sounds good to me!  As illustrated above, the idea of “Rock Star Professor” or “Super Professor” is gaining traction.   Also, note the team-based approach here.

 

 

 

 

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Excerpt:

As part of the ongoing Babson Survey Research Group’s online learning reports, we have asked institutional academic leaders questions on their knowledge, use and opinion of OER as part of the 2009 – 2011 surveys.  In addition, we have conducted surveys asking faculty in higher education and academic technology administrators their opinions of these resources.  Finally, our survey of faculty on their use of social media also asked for faculty opinions on OER.  This report contains the results from all these data collection efforts.

Tagged with:  

Current/Future State of Higher Education — from Educause Live by George Siemens, Andy Caulkins, Malcolm Brown

Change drivers

  • Globalization
  • Commercial/entrepreneurial activity
  • Funding cuts
  • Online learning
  • Unbundling of education systems
  • Technology advancement (mobiles)
  • Employment-oriented education
  • Big data and analytics

Net Pedagogies: New Models for Teaching & Learning

  • New pedagogies emerging from:
    • Concerns about how well institutions are meeting their mission, on behalf of students they serve
    • Pressures resulting from feeling constrained within the “Iron Triangle” of costs, access, and quality
    • New technologies
  • How to balance personalization with competency-based pathways
  • How to build community among students who are geographically distant and proceeding at different rates (a different cohort dynamic taking place here)
  • Personalized learning divisions/groups
  • Innovation labs <– From DSC: This lines up nicely with my posting here

Entrepreneurship

  • Deborah Quazzo, GSV Advisors
  • Velocity of change
  • e-books up
  • 200K education apps
  • 98% of students own some sort of device
  • Coursera — 33 partners, 1.7 million students
  • 13% of students now at for-profits
  • The Bear Story
    • Readiness — freshmen often needing remediation
    • Completion rates
    • Cost
    • Career
  • Venture capital and startups increasing
  • What’s driving investment
    • Funding issues
    • Accountability
    • Technology
    • Consumer choice
  • Waves of HE innovation
  • “Traditional institutions are not standing still”
  • Higher ed arms race — online program delivery (tuition-based) / MOOC (free)
  • Growth in MOOC students — .51 in Fall 2011, 2.79 in Fall 2012; 447% growth rate
  • Need to increase learning outcomes, access, capacity, and decrease costs

Big Data & Analytics

  • Erik Duval, Simon Buckingham Shum, Caroline Haythornthwaite
  • State of learning analytics
    • Open analytics
    • Standards
    • Methods and metrics
    • Impact on learner success
    • Early risk detection
    • Common language
    • Institutional use of analytics
    • Planning and deployment of LA
    • Move from concept to application
  • Participation wall seems to be occurring 30-40% of the time into the course
  • 762 tweets, 305 links, 172 RTs, 244 Unique Twitter accounts

Leadership in Education

  • James Hilton
    • Characterizing change
    • Not a linear system often times; instead, an emergent change; not always orderly and linear
    • Unknown end point
    • Adjust as you go
    • Adjust fundamental conditions
      • 2 fundamental forces in HE
      • Commoditization
      • Unbundling
    • “Find your North Star”
  • George Mehaffy
    • Challenge and change article
    • Massive change and great uncertainty
    • Technology changes everything
    • Traditional institutions loss of control
    • Students abilities to interact and learn without mediating
    • “Outsiders” becoming players
    • Venture capital
    • Models of college changing
    • Course models
    • Data analytics
    • Cost discrepancies
    • Measuring success
    • Loss of credentialing monopoly
    • Leadership vacuum
    • Change is rapid, profound, emergent
    • We need to rethink HE leadership model
    • We need to rethink HE in many fundamental dimensions
    • Now is the time for bold, imaginative, entrepreneurial leadership

Distributed Research

  • Traditional methods of sharing research, established centuries ago
  • Need to re-imagine those methods and generate higher, faster, better outcomes from research
  • Challenges: pace, dissemination, incentive to collaborate
  • Opportunities: immediacy, openness, new/richer tools and indicators, unprecedented progress

Still some challenges in offering a MOOC-based course:

  • Skillset development
  • Getting participants orientated to the course
  • Technological glitches

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Other resources/links:


 

16 flipped learning uses in K-12 and college classrooms — from educationdive.com by Roger Riddell

Excerpt:

Flipped classrooms require educators to reconstruct traditional classrooms by sending lectures home and providing more face-to-face time at school, but elementary- through university-level instructors are finding good reasons to try them out.

Frequently traced back to Colorado teachers Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, who were quick to experiment with posting videos online in 2008, the flipped classroom concept is small, simple and has shown positive results. The general idea is that students work at their own pace, receiving lectures at home via online video or podcasts and then devoting class time to more in-depth discussion and traditional “homework.”

Here are 16 examples of flipped learning at all levels nationwide and abroad:

 

Dept. of Ed. taps online learning startup Knewton for at-risk youth program — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
The U.S. Department of Education has announced that it will partner with online learning startup Knewton and publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for a program aimed at helping millions of at-risk youth transition to traditional schools and prepare for the workforce.

Also see:

New frontier for scaling up online classes: Credit – from the New York Times and the Associated Press

Also see:

Degreed wants to jailbreak the college degree — from techcrunch.com by Rip Empson

Excerpt:

One new San Francisco startup, Degreed, is on a mission to “jailbreak the degree” and give learners a new form of academic credentialing. The startup’s free service essentially scores and validates a host of different learning inputs, whether they be from formal institutions, like the University of California, or informal platforms like Khan, Lynda.com, iTunesU, Coursera and so on.

Taking the next step in online education with credit equivalency — from forbes.com by Daphne Koller & Andrew Ng

Excerpt:

At MOOCs like Coursera, offering web-based courses is the first step in increasing access to education for millions of people around the world.  But for many students, much of the value of taking a course is lost if that course is not helpful in allowing them to obtain a degree.  To help address this limitation, we recently announced a collaboration with American Council on Education (ACE) to begin a credit-equivalence evaluation of some courses offered on Coursera — which means that in the future, students will potentially have the opportunity to receive college transfer credit at institutions choosing to accept the ACE recommendations.  This move is well in line with the current trend to provide students with credit for prior learning (including on-the-job training) and for competency, a trend whose aim is to increase completion rate and reduce time to completion.

Six ways to get your online students participating in the course — from facultyfocus.com by Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti

Excerpt:

Have you ever worried about the level of participation in your online courses? Perhaps you have difficulty encouraging students to interact with one another, or maybe you find student responses to be perfunctory. Surely there must be a way to encourage the kinds of participation that really supports learning.

During a recent online seminar titled Improve Participation to Enhance Learning in Online Courses, Joan Thormann, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Technology in Education at Lesley University and author of The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Designing and Teaching Online Courses, shared six techniques for encouraging interactions that boost learning in an online class.

© 2025 | Daniel Christian