College crackup and the online future — from bloomberg.com by Mark C. Taylor

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College Crackup

Illustration by Keith Shore

Excerpt:

In the coming decade, emerging technologies will thoroughly transform higher education. Although distance learning and computer-assisted education have been around since the 1960s, financial pressures are forcing institutions to develop aggressive online programs.

These practical considerations shouldn’t overshadow one of the most promising innovations that online education will bring: The very structure of knowledge will change.

As students mix and match courses online, pressure will increase for professors to develop classes that integrate different approaches and disciplines.

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Also see:

 

From DSC:
Creating “Innovation Labs” within each institution of higher education sounds like a good idea to me…we can experiment with things at smaller scales and see what works and what doesn’t.

Also see:
Take a lesson from Apple: A strategy to keep customers in your ecosystem — from forbes.com by Alonzo Canada

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

1.     Set focused, strategic targets.
2.     Create a portfolio of experiments. Like Apple or Mercedes Benz, once you have focused, strategic targets set, create a series of experiments.  A general rule of thumb is the 7-2-1 rule:  one experiment should be big and relatively safe.  Two experiments should be slightly more risky and moderately sized.  Then seven experiments should be highly risky and low cost. These experiments can be scaled accordingly across teams, business units, and the entire company. 3M is one of the first companies to mandate that its employees spend 20% of their time thinking up blue sky ideas beyond its current lines of business and this is how Post-It Notes were born.  Art Fry, an engineer at 3M wanted to find a better way to manage notes in his hymnal on Sundays at church.
3.    Leverage learnings to inform new experiments.

 

 

 

From DSC:
I understand that Mr. George Lucas is going to express his generosity in donating the $4.05 billion from the sale of Lucasfilm to education.

Here’s a question/idea that I’d like to put forth to Mr. Lucas (or to the United States Department of Education, or to another interested/committed party):

Would you consider using the $4+ billion gift to build an “Online Learning Dream Team?”

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Daniel Christian -- The Online Learning Dream Team - as of November 2012

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 Original image credit (before purchased/edited by DSC)
yobro10 / 123RF Stock Photo

 

 

From DSC:
What do you think? What other “players” — technologies, vendors, skillsets, etc. — should be on this team?

  • Perhaps videography?
  • Online tutoring?
  • Student academic services?
  • Animation?
  • Digital photography?

 

Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States

Excerpt:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.

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From DSC:
Another steps towards:

 

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

 

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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com

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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young

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Welcome to Star Scholar U 2

Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.

 

Excerpt:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.

Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.

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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Excerpt:

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Also see:

 

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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan

Excerpt:

The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.

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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo

Excerpt:

Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.

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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective

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How should teaching change in the age of Siri?– from MindShift

Excerpt:

 Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.

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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.

But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.

 

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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz

 

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Smart move MN

Online school iQ Academy Minnesota expands to include grades K-5, begins accepting student applications — from sacbee.com by iQ Academy Minnesota

Excerpt:

FERGUS FALLS, Minn., Nov. 2, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — iQ Academy Minnesota, an online public school program, is adding grades K-5 to its offerings and is accepting applications for new students for a second semester start.

The expansion means the innovative learning experience that iQ Academy Minnesota provides is now open to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

From DSC:
MN seems to be making some smarter moves for its viability and future — for both corporations settling there and for students moving there (or from there); glad to see they backed off the Coursera situation.

 

Tagged with:  

 

Excerpt:

Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.

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Which brings me to this graphic:

 

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Also see:

 


Some of the powerful words that, if done well, are enabled by online learning are:


Choice:

  • Of format — digital audio, digital video, text, graphics, animations, games, role playing, etc.; I can look at content from multiple angles and in multiple ways
  • Of assignment — which one works best for me? Which one interests me the most? Or if I don’t really get the assignment in one way, I can reach the learning objective in another way.

Control:

  • Of when and where I bop into my course and participate in it; it may be a brief 5-minute posting of a great and relevant article I ran across, or it may be a 3-4 hour stint
  • Of playing media — pausing, fast forwarding, rewinding, slowing down or speeding up digital video and/or digital audio

Participation:

  • I can contribute content that I created — in a variety of formats; content that I can spend some time on creating
  • I can take my time to engage in thoughtful, reflective discussions; especially helpful to those of us who don’t think very fast on our feet and need time to think about a topic and develop our responses

Communication and collaboration:

  • Between students
  • Between faculty and students

bop in

— In my mind, those are very powerful words in many peoples’ learning experiences.

 

 

 

Broadband, broadcast lines erode as TV shifts to a mobile, multiscreen media landscape — from by Joseph O’Halloran back from 2/11/2012

Excerpt:

[Q2 2012] research from online video firm Ooyala has confirmed the trend that viewers around the world are embracing mobile, multiscreen experiences for both long-form and short-form content.

The Ooyala Global Video Index Report for the second quarter of 2012 reveals that online video uptake may be rising across the world but that engagement patterns vary by country and region, with a number of global video hot spots. For example, in the UK the survey revealed that 15% of the total time spent watching online video occurs on mobile phones and tablets, while 11% of the total time spent watching online video in China occurs on tablets and smart phones.

From DSC:
Though this report summarizes data from Q2 2012, it shows the developing trends on some of the ways that people are using their devices (throughout the globe).  I will continue to watch this space  for what happens with learning-based applications; especially those apps using 2 screens.
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Also see:

Does the U.S. accreditation system discriminate against online learning? — from Tony Bates

Excerpt:

Furthermore, problems remain in both Canada and the USA if students want to start taking online courses from an institution out of state or province then use that for advancement by transferring to a local university. The answer of course is more flexible credit transfer arrangements, more flexible prior learning assessment, and challenge exams, where students can demonstrate their learning without having to work through courses they have already taken elsewhere. Even some of the more prestigious research universities in Canada are realising that they need to be more flexible if they are to attract lifelong learners, for instance. Thus it’s as much up to the institutions as the regulators to ensure there is some flexibility in the system for students taking out of state or out of province online courses.

Yes, there needs to be sensible protections against fraud and fly-by-night online operators, but too often the restrictions, regulations and barriers are steeped in practices that no longer apply in an open, knowledge-based society. Every institution should be examining the structure of its courses, its admission requirements, its arrangements for credit transfer and prior learning assessment, and its strategy for lifelong learning, if it is to be fit for purpose in the 21st century. It is not an issue just of online learning.

From DSC:
Questions I often ponder re: accreditation:

  • Who sits on accrediting boards these days? Is it not people inside the current system?
  • What responsibilities do accreditation bodies have on them to enable/support change (where appropriate)?
  • Are such accreditation bodies feeling the pressure to help colleges and universities reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant? Or are they maintaining the status quo by all means possible?
  • Whose interests are ultimately being served by the current methods of accreditation? (I hope it’s the students!)

 

Classroom of 2020: The future is very different than you think — from theglobeandmail.com by Erin Millar

Today: Find me a weather channel. Tomorrow: Find me a channel on how to learn algrebra. By Daniel Christian

 

Excerpt:

The voice control functions of the Easy Remote app are powered by the AT&T Watson? speech recognition technology using AT&T’s Speech API, which uses advanced natural language processing to recognize and understand spoken words. Also developed in AT&T Labs, AT&T Watson? speech recognition technology has been powering advanced speech services in the marketplace for many years and is now available for third-party developers to use in their own apps.

Also see:

 

 

The future of higher education: White paper  — from IBM and the American Council on Education (ACE; specifically, the ACE Fellows Program)

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

The role of higher education is to give students the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in a globally competitive world. Education isn’t just about teaching students to take tests well, but rather to create lifelong learners who can contribute to a thriving society and competitive economy.

From DSC:
We will have a very hard time creating lifelong learners if a large swath of people dislike learning in the first place.  When 20-30%+ of our youth are not even graduating from high school, I can’t help but recall a saying from one of my first coaches:

Always change a losing game. Never change a winning game.

I think that our biggest gift to students is not what they were able to get on an ACT or SAT test — though I realize how important that can be in getting into College ABC or University of XYZ (and thus hopefully helping them get started on a solid footing/career).  Rather, on a grander scale, our biggest gift to our students is that they would enjoy learning; that we could help students identify their God-given passion(s), talents, gifts, abilities — and then go develop them and use them to serve others. Everyone will benefit if they do so; and the students will know joy and purpose in their lives. These are the types of WIN-WIN situations that square up with the thinking of many economists —  “Do what you do best and everyone benefits.”

 

College is dead. Long live college! — from nation.time.com by Amanda Ripley

Excerpt:

From DSC:
Whether MOOCs make it or not, the key contribution (at least as of fall 2012) about them for me is that they are helping usher in much more innovative ways of thinking and are helping us to experiment more within higher education.
Also see:

Exemplary week paves the way for higher education online — from edcetera.rafter.com by Kirsten Winkler

Excerpt:

This week was quite telling for the changes the higher education sector is currently going through. And the direction the industry is heading towards seems obvious: online. This week, up-and-coming education startups raised money and introduced new products whereas leaders in the space had to announce cuts.

From DSC:
This reminds me of how University of Massachusetts President Emeritus Jack Wilson described online learning at last week’s Sloan-C Conference:

“Online learning is a relentless force that will not be denied. The trends are so relentless in fact, that they take students, faculty, and administrations along with them.”

 

My notes from Thursday, 10/11/12 Sloan-C presentation by Hayley Lake & Patrick Lordan from Eastern Washington University, US
The discussion board audit: How will I know what I think until I see what I say

Discussion boards / forums are great for:

  • Reading and using research to support viewpoints/perspectives
  • Writing
  • Deeper reflections
  • Communications
    • Need to get point across succinctly
    • Decide what’s important
    • Tailor language to audience
    • Be professional
  • Critical thinking
  • Student-to-student interactions – students can generate their own online community
  • Time management and study skills
  • Can be relevant to real world and draw upon students’ experiences
  • Bringing out the wall-flowers – they can come alive and really contribute in this manner
  • Thinking more meta-cognitively and growing in self-awareness

(Bearing in mind a class size of 24-30 students per class)
Except for first two weeks, did not answer each posting; instead, typically the professor looked for themes and provided a weekly recap. Straightened out any wrong understandings.

Characteristics of reflective learners

  • Curious
  • Open to criticism and different approaches
  • Honest
  • Motivated to improve

Used the idea of a Discussion board audit

  • For closure
  • For summative assessment
  • For deeper learning/reflection; richness, depth, self-evaluation
  • Based off Mark Samples’ (George Mason University) blog audit
  • Re-read all DB postings, mark them up, analyze own work; look for themes and ideas worth revisiting, assess own learning
  • Really helped students see how they had learned, changed, grown

 

 

 

Another discussion board related presentation was:
Cleaning Out the Crickets: Enhancing Faculty Presence in Online Instruction
John J. Oprandy, Ph.D., South University, College of Nursing and Public Health, Health Sciences Program Online; Savannah, GA, US

  • John presented an alternative approach to discussion board questions and assignments aimed at helping students think critically
  • Discussed the merits of this approach and how to execute it
  • DB’s targeted as one of the most important ways to teach a student online
  • In their model:
    • Professor:
      • Sets expectations up front on when going to respond and how going to respond – i.e. NOT going to respond to each person’s every posting
      • Responds to each student’s main post; students respond to 2 other students
      • Use open ended, carefully crafted questions; questions need to be more complex in nature
      • Offers substantive responses, leads/guides discussion, models good writing, offers timely responses
      • Summarizes info and adds something new
      • Asks probing follow up questions to guide the conversations/learning – “It’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together.”
      • Provides final wrap up
  • What NOT to do:
    • Provide short/trite responses, give away the answer, give feedback that better belongs in the gradebook
  • This approach requires daily interaction and participation
  • Rubrics important and must align with approach
  • Works best with smaller groups
  • Faculty liked it because they often had to think on their feet

IBM’s Watson expands commercial applications, aims to go mobile  — from singularityhub.com by Jason Dorrier

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From DSC:
This relates to what I was trying to get at with the posting on mobile learning.  I would add the word “Education” to the list of industries that the technologies encapsulated in Watson will impact in the future. Combine this with the convergence that’s enabling/building the Learning from the Living [Class] Room environment, and you have one heck of an individualized, data-driven, learning ecosystem that’s available 24 x 7 x 365 — throughout your lifetime!!!

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IBM Watson-Introduction and Future Applications

 

 


Also relevant here are some visions/graphics I created from 2012 and from 2008:


 

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

 

 

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Why couldn't these channels represent online-based courses/MOOCs? Daniel Christian - 10-17-12

 

 

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