Udemy rolls out new publishing platform to help teachers create quality online courses — from techcrunch.com by Rip Empson

Excerpt:

To do so, Udemy is [yesterday] introducing a new version of its course-creation platform geared specifically towards teachers. The platform aims to bring expert and novice educators alike greater control and ownership over their online content, helping them to organize and structure that content through a curriculum editor and a more robust toolset for managing and promoting their courses.

Having experimented with different approaches to the presentation and distribution of digital ed content, specifically in regard to their effect on learning outcomes, Udemy concluded that one of the most critical components — and oft-overlooked — is a well-structured curriculum. So, the startup rebuilt its curriculum editor, which now encourages teachers to build an outline as the first step in the course creation process.

Using the new curriculum editor, teachers can drag and drop lectures and sections to organize their content into a more structured course. On top of that, considering that many of Udemy’s teachers are in fact real world experts and not those well-versed in pedagogy, the startup has re-tooled its course creation process. Once they’ve outlined their course, they are served step-by-step guidelines and best practices that touch on everything from planning to promotion.

 

 

Tagged with:  

I just wanted to thank everyone who put on — and participated in — a great 18th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning last week in Orlando, Florida! (~1600 on site attendees and ~1300 virtual attendees)

And if you’re reading this Ray Schroeder and/or Karen Vignare,
a special thanks out to you for your presentation on the MOOCs
and on the work you all have been doing for years.

Also see:

The power and potential of mobile learning [Christian]

The power and possibility of mobile learningas cross posted from evoLLLution.com (for LifeLong Learning)
Daniel S. Christian | October 2012

As I sat down to write about mobile learning, I struggled with narrowing down the scope of what I was going to attempt to address.  Which angle(s) should I take?

And then I reflected on my morning so far. I helped my daughter wake up to the sounds of a song coming from my iPhone.  She opened one eye, then the other, and soon, she was dancing around the room.  Success!

I then proceeded to listen to my iPhone as I drove my car into work – it gave me the energy I needed to start my internal engines.  (By the way, the idea of automobile-based technologies continues to grow, opening up further possibilities; but that’s a topic for another day.)

Then I caught up with a friend for coffee and he reached for his iPad.  He showed me an app for the local Art Prize competition that’s currently going on in our area.  He mentioned that if a person wasn’t in the immediately vicinity of the Art Prize event, that person could not vote on any of the pieces.  However, if the GPS-based coordinates were within the approved range, a person could use that app to:

  • Vote on which pieces of artwork that they liked
  • Find out where the artwork was located (at numerous locations on a map)
  • Learn more about the pieces themselves – what the pieces were made of, hear the artists’ thoughts on why they created what they created, etc.

So by the time I pulled up to my PC at 9:00am, I had already been positively impacted by mobile technology in several ways.  The common words and phrases that are often used to describe mobile learning and mobile technologies rang true and popped back into my mind: ubiquitous, always on, always connected, 24x7x365, convenient, etc.

As I enjoy peering into the future as well as pulse checking a variety of items, I would like to ask the following questions concerning the potential power and possibility of mobile learning as well as the relevant, emerging set of technologies that enable it:

  • Q:  What happens when the technologies behind IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri get perfected and integrated into learning-based products and services? What types of devices will be able to tap into those products and services?
    A:  IBM’s Watson beat the best human players in a game of Jeopardy and is now being used as a data analytics engine for the medical community, wading through terabytes of patient healthcare information and research data in order to determine how best to treat illnesses.  So, such technologies hold some serious promise in terms of at least addressing the lower to mid-levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. For 2012, tablets, smart phones, laptops, notebooks would be likely candidates of accessing these types of products/services. But we are just at the embryonic stages of the Smart/Connected TV, and I have it that such a device will become an important and commonly-used mechanism for accessing such cloud-based applications and services in the future.
    .
  • Q: Will students of all ages have access to their own virtual tutors so to speak? From any device at any time?
    A: Yes; this is highly likely, especially given the current (and increasing) levels of investments being made in educational technology related areas.  It’s very feasible to think that Apple, IBM, Google, Microsoft, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, or some other organization with deep pockets will develop such virtual tutoring products and services.
    .
  • Q:  What will happen when a virtual tutor is unable to resolve or address the student’s issue to the student’s satisfaction?  Will the student be able to instantly access a human tutor – with the option of keeping the existing work/issue/problem visible to the human tutor?
    A:  Yes, again…highly likely. This will open up new opportunities for faculty members, teachers, instructors, trainers, and tutors.  Getting experience in teaching online is a solid career move at this point in history.  (Also relevant will be those people creating applications and technically supporting them. An understanding of web-based videoconferencing and collaboration tools will be helpful here.)
    .
  • Q:  How will the convergence of the television, the computer, and the telephone impact what can be done with learning-based applications and experiences?
    A:  We are just beginning to see the ecosystems changing and adapting to deal with the convergence of the television, the computer, and the telephone.  The Smart/Connected TV – along with “second screen” based applications – is being driven by innovations involving the entertainment, marketing, and advertising industries.  But it’s not a stretch to think that educationally-related content will be right behind such innovative solutions.
    .
  • Q:  How will the multiple screens phenomenon affect how content can be consumed and discussed?
    A:   I created a couple of graphics along these lines that attempt to capture a potential vision here. I call it “Learning from the Living [Class] Room,” and it continues to develop in front of our eyes. We could be watching a “lecture” on a big screen and simultaneously interacting with people throughout the world on our smaller screens.

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

 

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

  • Q:  How will mobile conferencing affect what can be achieved?
    A:  Mobile-based conferencing will provide 24x7x365 opportunities for learning – and communications – to occur.  Such technologies have applications even in more traditional face-to-face classroom settings.  For a few possibilities here, see how mobile technologies are used in this vision by Intel  as well as in this vision by Corning.

 

Great vision from Intel!

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Great vision from Corning!

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  • Q:  What sort of creative doors are opened when a story can be told across a variety of “channels” and means?  And what sorts of skill sets do we need to start building – or continue to build – in order to help students find work in these emerging fields?
    A:  Create a Google Alert on transmedia and/or transmedia-based storytelling and you will get a sense of what’s happening in this arena.  There will be huge opportunity for creative, innovative folks out there!  Being versed in new media would be a solid idea if one hopes to pursue careers in these burgeoning fields. That is, building at least a rudimentary skill set of how to creatively use text, graphics, animations, digital audio, digital video, and interactive programming to deliver and obtain information would be very beneficial here.
    .
  • Q:  What types of analytics will be tracked and fed into one’s cloud-based learner profile?
    A:  It will depend upon where we want such technologies to take us.  However, think about the applications and implications of this approach if a web-based profile were used to:

    • Feed a workplace-based exchange – matching buyers and sellers of services
    • Inform a learning agent on which topics/disciplines that person wants to learn more about – helping that person obtain a highly-personalized, customized, relevant, engaging, productive learning experience with a solid ROI
    • Inform a cloud-based app on what prior knowledge one has and where to begin the “next lesson”
      .
  • Q:  Will courses become apps?  Will what we know of TV programs become apps and, if so, how will that affect what each of us can contribute to our own communities of practice?
    A:  Just as the web has enabled individuals to deliver their own podcasts, information, etc. – essentially becoming their own radio stations to a degree – the ecosystems being built up around the Smart/Connected TVs could help each of us become our own TV station. The potential is huge in terms of further developing and sharing knowledge within communities of practice.
    .
  • Q:  Will educational gaming dove-tail nicely with mobile learning and emerging technologies such as augmented reality, 3D, and connected television?
    Yes, the synergies and foundational pieces are already coming into place.
    .
  • Q:  How will the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) situation affect what can occur in the face-to-face classroom?
    A:  Students will be able to seamlessly and efficiently contribute content to the discussions in a face-to-face classroom without breaking the flow of the classroom.  An example graphic can be found here.

 

A piece of the Next Generation Smart Classroom -- Daniel Christian -- June 2012

 

The topics and potential routes that additional articles could take are almost endless.  But I think it’s safe to say that mobile, lifelong learning is here to stay.

Listed below are some recent articles and resources if you are interested in pursuing the topic of mobile learning.  I also have a section on my Learning Ecosystems blog dedicated to mobile learning.

If you are interested in what I’m calling Learning from the Living [Class] Room, you might be interested in these postings.

 

Some recent articles/resources regarding mobile learning:

 

Addendum:

 

Tagged with:  

Inter-Organizational Task Force on Online Learning: Recommendations| September 20, 2012

From DSC:
What caught my eye:

  • The new “traditional” student: the adult learner
Tagged with:  

Higher education used to be on deck, but is now at bat. [Christian]

 

From DSC:
My way of thinking about what’s happening to higher education these days borrows from the sport of baseball: Higher education used to be on deck; but now, we’re at bat.

I’ve watched as the former power brokers throughout many other industries reluctantly got out of the dugout, nervously began their warm up on deck, and then timidly moved up to bat as well. They were trying to cling to the status quo. Which didn’t work. We’ve all seen the results. There are new power brokers in those industries now. (Which is I why I assert that there is danger in the status quo — our organizations need to always be at the work of reinventing ourselves.)

If I had to pick the top 2 forces driving change throughout the higher education landscape, I would have to say the cost of obtaining a degree and technology-enabled innovation.

Control is an illusion; people will find a way.

 

 

http://edfuture.net/

 

 

Excerpt:

In countries around the world, the transition to knowledge and service economies occurring rapidly. Competitive countries are no longer only those that have an abundance of natural resources, but also those with a highly educated populace. Higher education is increasingly recognized as a vehicle for economic development [1].

University leaders are struggling to make sense of how internationalization, the current economic conditions, and new technologies will impact their systems. Educators are uncertain of the impact of open educational resources, alternative accreditation models, de-professionalization of academic positions, and increased grant competitiveness. What is role of the academy in increasing national economic competitiveness while preserving the “vital combat for lucidity” [2] that defines an open democratic society?

 

Apple TV and the transformation of web apps into tablet and TV dual screen apps — from brightcove.com by Jeremy Allaire

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Excerpts:

Importantly, designers and developers need to shed the concept that “TVs” are for rendering video, and instead think about “TVs” as large monitors on which they can render applications, content and interactivity that is supported by a touch-based tablet application.

The key concept here is that this pervasive adoption of TV monitors is the tip of the spear in creating a social computing surface in the real world.

Specifically, Apple has provided the backbone for dual screen apps, enabling:

  • Any iOS device (and OSX Mountain Lion-enabled PCs) to broadcast its screen onto a TV. Think of this as essentially a wireless HDMI output to a TV. If you haven’t played with AirPlay mirroring features in iOS and Apple TV, give it a spin, it’s a really exciting development.
  • A set of APIs and an event model for enabling applications to become “dual screen aware” (e.g. to know when a device has a TV screen it can connect to, and to handle rendering information, data and content onto both the touch screen and the TV screen).


[Jeremy listed several applications for these concepts:  Buying a house, buying a car, doctor’s office, kids edutainment, the classroom, retail electronics store, consuming news, consuming video, sales reporting, board games.]

.

Also see:

 
From DSC:
Graphically speaking — and approaching this from an educational/learning ecosystems standpoint — I call this, “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

 

 

 

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

 

 

Related item:

Online Education Grows Up, And For Now, It's Free -- from NPR.org

 

 

From DSC:
Sending a special thanks out to Dr. Kate Byerwalter,
Professor at Grand Rapids Community College for this resource!

 

Also see:

 

Higher education used to be on deck, but is now at bat. [Christian]

 

From DSC:
My way of thinking about what’s happening to higher education these days borrows from the sport of baseball:  Higher education used to be on deck; but now, we’re at bat.

I’ve watched as the former power brokers throughout many other industries reluctantly got out of the dugout, nervously began their warm up on deck, and then timidly moved up to bat as well. They were trying to cling to the status quo. Which didn’t work.  We’ve all seen the results.  There are new power brokers in those industries now.  (Which is I why I assert that there is danger in the status quo — our organizations need to always be at the work of reinventing ourselves.)

If I had to pick the top 2 forces driving change throughout the higher education landscape, I would have to say the cost of obtaining a degree and technology-enabled innovation.

Control is an illusion; people will find a way.

 


The items below reinforced my perspectives when I saw them this morning.  They inspired me to create the above graphic, something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now.


Excerpt:

Our thesis with xEducation is that the internet is happening to higher education and that successful universities of the future will be those that find ways to generate value for its many stakeholders that go beyond content provision and teaching. What exactly that value proposition is remains unclear. On the one hand, content and (recorded) lectures can easily be shared with limited costs. The internet scales content exceptionally well. The human, social, processes of learning don’t scale. Research doesn’t scale (yet). Regional and national economic value generation doesn’t scale. In these spaces where scalability does not work well, universities will likely find their new roles in society. Over the next six months, we’ll explore and test this thesis and place the discussion of higher education reform on a firmer foundation than the latest tool and popular hype.

 

From DSC:
The wetakeyourclass.com website below is very disturbing in terms of the questions it raises — though such questions and activities are certainly not limited to what occurs in the online classroom, as evidenced by The Shadow Scholar (from The Chronicle by Ed Dante) where a man confessed to writing ~5,000 scholarly papers for students, including grad students.

Questions:

  • Should the owners of this site go to jail? Or is this just capitalism gone awry? 
  • Does this business make a profit?  If so, why and what does that say?
  • Is this type of thing happening for just a handful of people out there? How would we know?  Can the turnitin.com’s of the world detect/stop this?
  • If their services are in demand, should that inform or influence any differences in the strategies or pedagogies we utilize within higher education?  Do we need to re-evaluate what’s really being achieved and not achieved? That is, if employers didn’t look to a college degree, would students come to learn anyway or would they be gone by morning?
  • What, if anything, does it say about students’ ethics?  Matters of the heart?

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WE take your class dot com -- should these people go to jail?

 

Look at some of the “services,” “benefits,” and messages being offered therein:

  • We take your online classes for you and you get an A
    Underlying message: We’ll help you get that piece of paper so you can move on to what really counts.  (Don’t worry about not knowing anything…you won’t have to prove yourself later on…and never mind about your work ethic, this is a one-time-cutting-the-corners type of decision, right? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?!)
  • Life is too short to spend on classes you have no interest in
  • Give us a deadline and we will meet it!
    Underlying message: Corporations outsource many things, why shouldn’t you?  (Never mind that learning should be your core business and should not be outsourced.)


How about you all, what are some questions that this type of thing raises in your minds?

 

Why online education has gained revolutionary momentum — from pbs.org/mediashift by Doug Ward

Excerpt:

The rush to create large, free online classes has generated anxiety at universities around the country. With finances already tight and with a surge of movement toward online learning, universities are being forced to move quickly to change centuries-old models of learning. Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years.

Many institutions have been preparing for these changes for years, building infrastructure and expertise, experimenting and recruiting, and integrating online learning into long-term strategies. Many others, especially traditional research universities, have been caught flat-footed as education has transformed around them.

This point of dramatic — and traumatic — change didn’t swoop in unannounced. Rather, it crept in like a series of streams meeting in a roiling confluence. Only by stepping back and looking in panoramic fashion can we truly understand how we’ve arrived at a point of transformation and how we might deal with it. Let’s take a look.

College may never be the same — from USA Today by Mary Beth Marklein

Excerpt:

“The industry has operated more or less along the same business model and even the same technology for hundreds of years,” says John Nelson, managing director of Moody’s Higher Education. “MOOCS represent a rapidly developing and emerging change and that is very, very rare.”

In a new report, Moody’s Investor Service calls MOOCs a “pivotal development” that has the potential to revolutionize higher education. Questions remain whether these online courses can be profitable and whether traditional colleges will award credit for them. But if successful, MOOCs could lead to lower costs for families and access to higher-quality instruction for anyone in the world who has Internet access.

 

From DSC:
MOOCs are no doubt a very important experiment within higher education today.  It’s too early to tell what the future will bring in terms of pricing, certification/accredidation, learning effectiveness, the form(s) they may take, the corporate world’s perspective on them, etc.

However, my main point that I want to make today — September 13, 2012 — is that MOOCs provide yet another example why the question of “where’s the ROI on all of this investment in technology?” should be considered a dead question — let’s put it to rest for good.   I simply can’t take that question seriously anymore.  At minimum, MOOCs provide an extremely affordable means of gaining exposure to information and ascertaining one’s interest level in that subject. At the price of higher education these days, such knowledge of what one enjoys and would like to learn more about is worth a great deal.  MOOCs rest on the foundations set by so many other investments, technological advancements and inventions, trends, platforms, devices, and the pedagogies available to us due to these other foundational pieces.

 

Mapping success: Essential elements of an effective online learning experience — from Faculty Focus by Danielle Hathcock

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

The purpose of this article is to provide an understanding of how the elements of an online course are integrated such that they form a cohesive whole that creates easy travel based upon instructor presence, appropriate feedback, and easy navigation for students.

© 2025 | Daniel Christian