Education 2.0 isn’t coming. It’s here. And the way you’re educated will be changed forever. — from bostinno.com by Dave Balter

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Sometime in late 2010, I sat down with angel investor Josh Abramowitz in NYC.  I asked him to invest in Smarterer, a business whose purpose was to validate people’s digital, social and technical skills.  What I encountered for the next hour wasn’t someone merely evaluating my specific business concept – it was an attack on the entire higher education system.

Josh argued that our higher education system was on the verge of crumbling.  Not because there weren’t marvelous educators or exceptional institutions, but because colleges and universities were charging exorbitant sums that weren’t equal to the return.  Our educators were burying our students with tremendous debt. But increasingly sophisticated learning and credentialing opportunities were emerging online, and they were free or nearly free.  And this disparity would lead to a full-fledged education revolution, he predicted.

What the Universities need to know is that what’s coming for education is something like the shift the music industry failed to see until it was too late.  Things will never be the same again.  Instead of griping about how hard it will be to tap their endowments to pay for education, they should be thinking about how to take advantage of the changes.

To save their universities, here’s the three-pronged ecosystem that every University Leader should start thinking about…

Also see:

smarterer.com -- show what you know

 

Student-loan debt tops $1 trillion — from WSJ.com by Josh Mitchell and Maya Jackson-Randall

Excerpt:

The amount Americans owe on student loans is far higher than earlier estimates and could lead some consumers to postpone buying homes, potentially slowing the housing recovery, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Total student debt outstanding appears to have surpassed $1 trillion late last year, said officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency created in the wake of the financial crisis. That would be roughly 16% higher than an estimate earlier this year by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

From DSC:
Phrases/words that come to my mind include (which many readers of this blog and my archived website will instantly recognize:

  • Reinventing ourselves
  • Staying relevant /addressing our customers’ needs
  • Innovation
  • Strategy
  • Leadership
  • Vision
  • The business side of higher ed / new business models
  • Game-changing environment
  • Disruption
  • Dangers of the status quo
  • Student-related
  • Future of higher education
  • The Walmart of Education
  • Learning from the Living Room

Addendum on 3/23/12:

 

Lifelong learning ecosystems!!! A powerful vision for our future [Daniel Christian]

From DSC:
The vision below involves:
(click on the image below to access it)
 

  • The convergence of the telephone, the television, and the computer
  • Cloud-based education stores/marketplaces/exchanges
  • Second screen devices and machine-to-machine communications
  • Social networking/learning
  • Smart classrooms/learning spaces
  • Content recognition/synchronization applications
  • Apps as “channels”
  • Web-based learner profiles
  • Video overlays
  • New business models in higher ed
  • New jobs/needs for the future
  • A new way for employers to hire highly-effective employees/contractors/consultants
  • …and more

 

Click this thumbnail image to access the larger image / vision

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Beyond the college degree, online educational badges— from the New York Times by Tamar Lewin

Excerpt:

With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses and other online programs offering informal credentials, the race is on for alternative forms of certification that would be widely accepted by employers.

By the end of this year, Mr. [David] Wiley predicted, it will become familiar to hear of people who earned alternative credentials online and got high-paying jobs at Google or other high-visibility companies.

 

When Ivory Towers Fall: The Emerging Education Marketplace — from The World Future Society by Thomas Frey

Excerpt:

Throughout history, education has been formed around the concept of “place.”  Build fancy buildings, attract world-renowned scholars, and you have a college or university.  This model works well in a culture based on teaching. Over the coming years, with our hyper-connected world, we will be shifting to a learning model.  While “place” will still matter, it will matter differently. Teaching requires experts; learning only requires coaches.  The two primary variables of time and money will drive the new education marketplace, and the four primary trend lines will involve…

Addendum 3/9/12:

Unified opens an online university for social media marketers — from TechCruch.com by Anthony Ha

 

unifiedsocial.com

Services > Unified University

The social media landscape is complex and constantly evolving, leaving top global brands and agencies with the challenge of staying on top of the latest trends and best practices. Unified University is a first of its kind – an all-encompassing training, continuing education and certification program, complete with access to the industry leading best practices knowledge base. Unified University is designed to help marketing and agency executives become experts and internal thought leaders on social strategies, platform insights, earned media measurement, and more.

Through Unified University’s comprehensive training program, a social team can get certified on the Unified Social Operating Platform and learn about the latest advances in social advertising. Certification ensures that a team is up to date on the latest options within the social web, including the benefits of advertising across social ecosystems including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon and more.

Teams learn that brands may require very different strategies to ultimately achieve similar results. Unified University assures that teams know how to strategically represent brands across all social options while delivering high quality results and maximum ROI.

From DSC:
Is this a part of the future? If higher ed doesn’t respond more forcefully, I’d say so.

Along these lines, from page 408 of the Steve Jobs book:

One of Job’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you can’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,” he said.

Innovate. Reinvent. Staying relevant. This goes for the accreditation agencies as well.

 Also see:

 

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Staying Relevant

From DSC:
This is exactly what I was getting at with The Forthcoming Walmart of Education (2008) and it points out, again, that innovation is much faster and stronger in the online world than it is in the face-to-face world. The tools being developed to engage, track, diagnose, and adapt continue to be developed. What may have once been poo-pooed continues to pick up steam. (Christensen, Johnson, & Horn are right on track.) The trend will be towards more team-based endeavors that can be made available at a greatly reduced price. They will be multimedia-based, highly-interactive, and state-of-the-art (technically and pedagogically).

Treating Higher Ed’s ‘Cost Disease’ With Supersize Online Courses — from The Chronicle by Marc Parry

Excerpt (with emphasis from DSC):

Professors should move away from designing foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the basis of “intuition,” she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.

“We’re seeing failure rates in these large introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody,” Ms. Thille says. “There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where they start—to be able to successfully complete.”

Her approach brings together faculty subject experts, learning researchers, and software engineers [from DSC — a TEAM-based approach] to build open online courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills. As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.

From DSC:
Such learner profiles will most likely reside in the cloud and eventually standards will be established to insert new data into these profiles. The access to view/edit these profiles will be controlled by the individual learners (hopefully!).  What if learners could selectively grant corporations access to this type of profile as their new resume?

For items concerning team-based approaches, see this recording (June 2009) as well as this collection of items.

For items concerning consortia and pooling resources, see here and here.

 

 

Does The Online Education Revolution Mean The Death Of The Diploma? — from fastcoexist.com by Michael Karnjanaprakor, CEO of Skillshare
As the options for self-education explode, what does a college education mean? And how can we measure what a good education is?

Excerpt:

What we’re witnessing is a bottom-up revolution in education: Learners, not institutions, are leading innovation.

From DSC:
I post this in hopes that those of us working within higher education will strive all the harder to:

  • Create innovative solutions
  • Reinvent ourselves
  • Stay relevant
  • Reduce the costs of obtaining an education

 Also see:

From DSC:
For those who don’t think that the conversation is moving outside of academia, here’s yet another example:

 

Enstitute U -- A community that educates and prepares Millennials to be valuable and actively participating members of the economy, and society at large, through apprenticeship, hyper-focused curriculum, and real-life projects that have real-life consequences.

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E[nstitute] was founded on a very simple idea: If you want to be the best, you have to learn from the best. We are creating a community that educates and prepares Millennials to be valuable and actively participating members of the economy, and society at large, through apprenticeship, hyper-focused curriculum, and real-life projects that have real-life consequences.

E[nstitute] is a two-year educational program built on an apprenticeship model that provides an alternative path to traditional post secondary education. E[nstitute] is a full-time commitment.

Also relevant:

An infographic series on the current crisis facing higher education — from educationnews.org

  • Video
  • Infographic Part I
    A breakdown re: how an economic bubble forms, expands, and bursts; a comparison of the higher ed bubble to the housing bubble, and a look at the first major contributor to college’s bubble behavior: the rising cost of tuition.
  • Infographic part II:
    Analysis of the second and third big factors in blowing up the higher ed bubble: the student loans crisis, and the unforgiving post-graduation job market.

 

 

Daniel Christian - Emerging Technologies and Trends - January 20th 2012 Presentation at Calvin College

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Daniel Christian - Emerging Technologies and Trends - January 20th 2012 Presentation at Calvin College

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From DSC:
In case it’s helpful, clicking on this link or on one of the images above will link you to a recent presentation that I did for an Interim course at Calvin College entitled, “Social Media for Business?”  As the class had already covered a lot of the topics relating to social media, my job was to focus more on some of the recent emerging trends and technologies.  I will continue to keep pulse checking on those technologies which will allow for ubiquitous, mobile (as well as from the living room), 24x7x365, multimedia-based learning.

NOTE:

  • Almost all of the images on the slides are linked up to web-based resources; so if you see something of interest, go ahead and click on that image/slide in order to learn more about that topic/article/etc.

 

 

 

Living room video calling users to surpass 16 million in 2015 — from instat.com

Excerpt:

The video calling market can be divided into three sub-markets depending on the device which is being used to make the call: PCs, Mobile, and living room (digital home) devices.  Living room video calling is a nascent market and currently has a relatively small user base. New NPD In-Stat (www.in-stat) research forecasts that total users will increase from 1.5 million in 2011 to 16.4 million in 2015. Asia Pacific will be the largest market for living room video calling by a significant margin as this is the region with the highest video calling enabled device shipments.

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From DSC:

  1. The massive convergence of the TV, the computer, and the telephone continues
  2. The current model of higher ed has run it’s course — the model is breaking down
  3. The cost of obtaining an education must decrease; new business models are and will continue to come to fruition
  4. One of those business models is what I call “The Forthcoming Walmart of Education
  5. One of the pieces of this “Walmart of Education” will involve “learning from the living room
  6. “Students” will be able to watch one device while interacting with another device (though I could also see everything happening via one device as well)
  7. Learning will likely be more interactive, multimedia-based, available 24x7x365, personalized, customized and backed up by some serious social networking/learning, analytics, artificial intelligence, learning agents, and online-based tutoring
  8. “Textbooks” will flow into the living rooms as well as to tablets, smart phones, and other devices; but they will be more like apps where updates will occur as necessary
  9. Rock-star profs are likely to emerge
  10. Anyway…”stay tuned”

 

Also see:

A Disrupted Higher-Ed System — from The Chronicle by Jeff Selingo

Excerpt:
Just look at the last month:

  • The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching free course materials posted by the university.
  • StraighterLine, which offers self-paced introductory courses online, said that it would give students access to the Collegiate Learning Assessment and other similar tests, allowing them to take results to employers or colleges to demonstrate their proficiency in certain academic areas.
  • Apple introduced three free pieces of software that allow students to download or create textbooks, and that permit instructors to create a digital curriculum in iTunesU.

 

 
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