strategy

Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem

On 06/20/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, algorithms, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning, business, career development, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, credentialing, curriculum, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, distance education, education, education reform, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, learning ecosystem, learning from the living [class] room, learning hubs, Lifelong learning, passions, platforms, professional development, reinvent, society, staying relevant, strategy, streams of content, student-related, surviving, teaching & learning, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, vision, Walmart of Education --> New Amazon.com of Higher Education, web-based collaboration, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem — from edu2030.agorize.com
How might we empower people to design their own learning journeys so they can lead purposeful and economically stable lives?

Excerpts:

The problem
Technology is rapidly transforming the way we live, learn, and work. Entirely new jobs are emerging as others are lost to automation. People are living longer, yet switching jobs more often. These dramatic shifts call for a reimagining of the way we prepare for work and life—specifically, how we learn new skills and adapt to a changing economic landscape.

The changes ahead are likely to hurt most those who can least afford to manage them: low-income and first generation learners already ill-served by our existing postsecondary education system. Our current system stifles economic mobility and widens income and achievement gaps; we must act now to ensure that we have an educational ecosystem flexible and fair enough to help all people live purposeful and economically stable lives. And if we are to design solutions proportionate to this problem, new technologies must be called on to scale approaches that reach the millions of vulnerable people across the country.

The challenge
How might we empower people to design their own learning journeys so they can lead purposeful and economically stable lives?

The Challenge—Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem—seeks bold ideas for how our postsecondary education system could be reimagined to foster equity and encourage learner agency and resilience. We seek specific pilots to move us toward a future in which all learners can achieve economic stability and lead purposeful lives. This Challenge invites participants to articulate a vision and then design pilot projects for a future ecosystem that has the following characteristics:

Expands access: The educational system must ensure that all people—including low-income learners who are disproportionately underserved by the current higher education system—can leverage education to live meaningful and economically stable lives.

Draws on a broad postsecondary ecosystem: While college and universities play a vital role in educating students, there is a much larger ecosystem in which students learn. This ecosystem includes non-traditional “classes” or alternative learning providers, such as MOOCs, bootcamps, and online courses as well as on-the-job training and informal learning. Our future learning system must value the learning that happens in many different environments and enable seamless transitions between learning, work, and life.

From DSC:
This is where I could see a vision similar to Learning from the Living [Class] Room come into play. It would provide a highly affordable, accessible platform, that would offer more choice, and more control to learners of all ages. It would be available 24×7 and would be a platform that supports lifelong learning. It would combine a variety of AI-enabled functionalities with human expertise, teaching, training, motivation, and creativity.

It could be that what comes out of this challenge will lay the groundwork for a future, massive new learning platform.

Also see:

Office of Edtech Wants Help Making Sense of All Those Higher Ed Providers — from edsurge.com by Sydney Johnson

“Retrieval practice” is a learning strategy where we focus on getting information out. Through the act of retrieval, or calling information to mind, our memory for that information is strengthened and forgetting is less likely to occur. Retrieval practice is a powerful tool for improving learning without more technology, money, or class time.

On this website (and in our free Retrieval Practice Guide), we discuss how to use retrieval practice to improve learning. Established by nearly 100 years of research, retrieval practice is a simple and powerful technique to transform teaching and learning.

In order to improve learning, we must approach it through a new lens – let’s focus not on getting information “in,” but on getting information “out.”

What is retrieval practice?
Retrieval practice is a strategy in which bringing information to mind enhances and boosts learning. Deliberately recalling information forces us to pull our knowledge “out” and examine what we know.

For instance, recalling an answer to a science question improves learning to a greater extent than looking up the answer in a textbook. And having to actually recall and write down an answer to a flashcard improves learning more than thinking that you know the answer and flipping the card over prematurely.

Often, we think we’ve learned some piece of information, but we come to realize we struggle when we try to recall the answer. It’s precisely this “struggle” or challenge that improves our memory and learning – by trying to recall information, we exercise or strengthen our memory, and we can also identify gaps in our learning.

Note that cognitive scientists used to refer to retrieval practice as “the testing effect.” Prior research examined the fascinating finding that tests (or short quizzes) dramatically improve learning. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that more than simply tests and quizzes improve learning: flashcards, practice problems, writing prompts, etc. are also powerful tools for improving learning.

Whether this powerful strategy is called retrieval practice or the testing effect, it is important to keep in mind that the act of pulling information “out” from our minds dramatically improves learning, not the tests themselves. In other words retrieval is the active process we engage in to boost learning; tests and quizzes are merely methods to promote retrieval.

Also on that site:

Learn more about this valuable book with our:

Summaries of each chapter in Make it Stick
Sketchnotes by Krystyna Gadd and Mary Kemper
Recommended research articles by leading experts

Also on that site:

Excerpt from the Interleaved Mathematics Practice guide (on page 8 of 13):

Interleaved practice gives students a chance to choose a strategy.
When practice problems are arranged so that consecutive problems cannot be solved by the same strategy, students are forced to choose a strategy on the basis of the problem itself. This gives students a chance to both choose and use a strategy.

…

Interleaved practice works.
In several randomized control studies, students who received mostly interleaved practice scored higher on a final test than did students who received mostly blocked practice.

From DSC:
Speaking of resources regarding learning…why don’t we have posters in all of our schools, colleges, community colleges, universities, vocational training centers, etc. that talk about the most effective strategies to learn about new things?

Incumbents Strike Back: Insights from the Global C-suite Study [IBM Institute for Business Value]

On 04/20/2018, in 21st century, business, corporate / business world, future, global / globalization, IBM, ideas, innovation, leadership, platforms, reinvent, staying relevant, strategy, surviving, vision, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Incumbents Strike Back: Insights from the Global C-suite Study — by the IBM Institute for Business Value

Excerpts:

Dancing with disruption
Incumbents hit their stride
We explore the forces at play in shaping the current competitive environment, the opportunities emerging, and how a balance between stability and dynamism favors the Reinventors.

Trust in the journey
The path to personalization
Here we show how the Reinventors as design thinkers are testing their assumptions and re-orienting their organizations to engage their customers and create bonds based on trust.

Orchestrating the future
The pull of platform business models
This section reveals the step change in capability that occurs as organizations scale their partner networks in new ways. We chart how organizations will need to reconsider their value propositions and allocation of resources to own or participate in platforms.

Innovation in motion
Agility for the enterprise
We delineate how leaders are liberating their employees to experiment and innovate, get up close to customers and thrive in an ever-evolving ecosystem of dynamic teams and partnerships.

12 bad communication habits to break in IT [Rudder]

On 04/18/2018, in business, change, collaboration, communications, corporate / business world, IT in HE, listening, strategy, Using teams, workplace, by Daniel Christian

12 bad communication habits to break in IT — from enterprisersproject.com by Carla Rudder
Do you start conversations on the wrong note? Deliver the right message at the wrong time? CIOs share the communication traps that hold individuals and teams back

Excerpt:

Time and time again, CIOs and IT leaders tell us that communication is key to driving great business results. Whether IT leaders are grappling with digital transformation, trying to improve DevOps results, or leading IT culture change, communication often becomes a make-or-break factor in their ability to succeed.

But, like other “soft skills” and emotional intelligence competencies, communication skills aren’t easy to master. And over time, many people fall into bad communication habits that never get repaired.

We asked business and IT leaders to share some of the worst communication practices that hold individuals and teams back. If you are working on increasing transparency between IT and other teams, consider this your checklist for what NOT to do. Also, if you’re a rising IT leader who wants to shine in the eyes of the CIO, listen up…

Transforming the Postsecondary Professional Education Experience — from by Mary Grush & Thomas Finholt

Excerpt:

So, among other factors currently influencing change, those are the predominate ones. I’ll sum it up this way: The tried-and-true residential model has worked so far, but a number of factors are forcing transformation: emerging technologies, new expectations about when learning will occur in a student’s lifespan, and the introduction of a whole new population of students that had never been imagined before.
…
Grush: What are your latest efforts or experiments in new professional education offerings that you see as part of this transformation? When did you make a start and what impacts do you see so far?
Finholt: The biggest transformation for us to date has been our entry into the MOOC space. That movement began with a few small trials, but it’s now rapidly expanding and may include, ultimately, full degree offerings. I would describe our period of experimentation with MOOCs to have started in 2013, gaining especially significant momentum in the past two years. Over the next couple of years, our efforts will expand even more dramatically, if we elect to offer fully online degrees. As a measure of the magnitude of impact of MOOCs so far, one of our MOOC specializations in the Python programming language is among the most popular offerings on Coursera — I believe that it has reached more than a million learners at this point. A significant fraction of those learners have opted to sit for an exam to get a certificate in Python programming.

One is, as announced at the March 6th Coursera meeting, that we have joined in a partnership with Coursera and the University of Michigan’s Office of Academic Innovation to design and get approved, a brand-new online master’s degree in Applied Data Science.

From DSC:
Mary and Thomas’ solid article reminds me of a graphic I put together a while back:

“The process of obtaining postgraduate credentials is becoming something that one works on over the entire span of one’s career… Working professionals will have an array of punctuated intervals, if you will — periods of time when they work intensively to update their credentials.” (source)

Better Brainstorming [Gregersen; hbr.org]

On 04/07/2018, in creativity, ideas, innovation, leadership, organizational change, pedagogy, productivity / tips and tricks, psychology, strategy, vision, by Daniel Christian

Better Brainstorming — from hbr.org by Hal Gregersen

Excerpt:

Brainstorming for questions, not answers, wasn’t something I’d tried before.
…
Underlying the approach is a broader recognition that fresh questions often beget novel—even transformative—insights. Consider this example from the field of psychology: Before 1998 virtually all well-trained psychologists focused on attacking the roots of mental disorders and deficits, on the assumption that well-being came down to the absence of those negative conditions. But then Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association, and he reframed things for his colleagues. What if, he asked in a speech at the APA’s annual meeting, well-being is just as driven by the presence of certain positive conditions—keys to flourishing that could be recognized, measured, and cultivated? With that question, the positive psychology movement was born.
…

Brainstorming for questions rather than answers makes it easier to push past cognitive biases and venture into uncharted territory.

…
The methodology I’ve developed is essentially a process for recasting problems in valuable new ways. It helps people adopt a more creative habit of thinking and, when they’re looking for breakthroughs, gives them a sense of control. There’s actually something they can do other than sit and wait for a bolt from the blue. Here, I’ll describe how and why this approach works. You can use it anytime you (in a group or individually) are feeling stuck or trying to imagine new possibilities. And if you make it a regular practice in your organization, it can foster a stronger culture of collective problem solving and truth seeking.

DC: What can higher ed learn from this? “Big corporations — giant retailers & health insurance companies — are teaming up to become your doctor.”

On 04/07/2018, in colleges, corporate / business world, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, disruption, financial aid, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, health, higher education, ideas, learning from the living [class] room, new business models, strategy, universities, Walmart of Education --> New Amazon.com of Higher Education, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
What can higher ed learn from this? Eventually, people will seek alternatives if what’s being offered isn’t acceptable to them anymore.

The Disappearing Doctor: How Mega-Mergers Are Changing the Business of Medical Care — from nytimes.com by Reed Ableson and Julie Creswell
Big corporations — giant retailers and health insurance companies — are teaming up to become your doctor.

Excerpt:

Is the doctor in?

In this new medical age of urgent care centers and retail clinics, that’s not a simple question. Nor does it have a simple answer, as primary care doctors become increasingly scarce.

“You call the doctor’s office to book an appointment,” said Matt Feit, a 45-year-old screenwriter in Los Angeles who visited an urgent care center eight times last year. “They’re only open Monday through Friday from these hours to those hours, and, generally, they’re not the hours I’m free or I have to take time off from my job.

“I can go just about anytime to urgent care,” he continued, “and my co-pay is exactly the same as if I went to my primary doctor.”

That’s one reason big players like CVS Health, the drugstore chain, and most recently Walmart, the giant retailer, are eyeing deals with Aetna and Humana, respectively, to use their stores to deliver medical care.

People are flocking to retail clinics and urgent care centers in strip malls or shopping centers, where simple health needs can usually be tended to by health professionals like nurse practitioners or physician assistants much more cheaply than in a doctor’s office. Some 12,000 are already scattered across the country, according to Merchant Medicine, a consulting firm.

From MIT Technology Review on 4-2-2018

*Only* 14 percent of the world has to worry about robots taking their jobs. Yay?
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has released a major report analyzing the impact of automation on jobs in 32 countries.

Clashing views: In 2016, the OECD said only 9 percent of US and worldwide jobs face a “high degree of automobility.” That was a contradiction of one of the most widely cited reports on jobs and automation, by Oxford researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, who in 2013 said that 47 percent of US jobs were at high risk of being consumed by automation.

What’s new: The OECD’s latest report says that across the countries analyzed, 14 percent of jobs are highly automatable, meaning they have over a 70 percent likelihood of automation. In the US, the study concludes that 10 percent of jobs will likely be lost to automation. An additional 32 percent of global jobs will be transformed and require significant worker retraining.

The big “but”: As the gap between the OECD report and Frey and Osborne’s estimates illustrate, predictions like these aren’t known for their accuracy. In fact, when we compiled all of the studies we could on the subject, we found there are about as many predictions as there are experts.

Also see:

Automation, skills use and training — from oecd-ilibrary.org by Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini

Excerpts:

Here are the study’s key findings.
Across the 32 countries, close to one in two jobs are likely to be significantly affected by automation, based on the tasks they involve. But the degree of risk varies.
…
The variance in automatability across countries is large: 33% of all jobs in Slovakia are highly automatable, while this is only the case with 6% of the jobs in Norway.
…
The cross-country variation in automatability, contrary to expectations, is better explained by the differences in the organisation of job tasks within economic sectors, than by the differences in the sectoral structure of economies.
…
There are upside and downside risks to the figures obtained in this paper. On the upside, it is important to keep in mind that these estimates refer to technological possibilities, abstracting from the speed of diffusion and likelihood of adoption of such technologies….But there are risks on the downside too. First, the estimates are based on the fact that, given the current state of knowledge, tasks related to social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and perception and manipulation cannot be automated. However, progress is being made very rapidly, particularly in the latter two categories.
…
Most importantly, the risk of automation is not distributed equally among workers. Automation is found to mainly affect jobs in the manufacturing industry and agriculture, although a number of service sectors, such as postal and courier services, land transport and food services are also found to be highly automatable.
…
Overall, despite recurrent arguments that automation may start to adversely affect selected highly skilled occupations, this prediction is not supported by the Frey and Osborne (2013) framework of engineering bottlenecks used in this study. If anything, Artificial Intelligence puts more low-skilled jobs at risk than previous waves of technological progress…
…

A striking novel finding is that the risk of automation is the highest among teenage jobs. The relationship between automation and age is U-shaped, but the peak in automatability among youth jobs is far more pronounced than the peak among senior workers.

…
This unequal distribution of the risk of automation raises the stakes involved in policies to prepare workers for the new job requirements. In this context, adult learning is a crucial policy instrument for the re-training and up-skilling of workers whose jobs are being affected by technology. Unfortunately, evidence from this study suggests that a lot needs to be done to facilitate participation by the groups most affected by automation.
…
An analysis of German data suggests that training is used to move to jobs at lower risk of automation.

“Blockchain: Is it Good for Education?” [virtuallyinspired.org] + other relevant resources

On 03/30/2018, in accreditation, adult learning, Blockchain, business side of he, career development, change, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, corporate universities / corporate training, credentialing, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, face-to-face, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, IBM, ideas, innovation, learning, learning ecosystem, learning from the living [class] room, Lifelong learning, MBA, Microlearning, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, platforms, professional development, project-based learning, society, strategy, student-related, tools, universities, vendors, vision, Walmart of Education --> New Amazon.com of Higher Education, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Blockchain: Is it Good for Education? — from virtuallyinspired.org

Excerpt:

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a public ledger type database made up of records called blocks that are linked together like a chain. It is a shared unchallengeable ledger for recording the history of transactions. Here, the ledger records the history of academic accomplishments. An education ledger (blockchain) could store academic information such as degrees, diplomas, tests etc. It could be kind of digital transcript.

A Few Potential Applications of Blockchain

Learning Credentials Repository – A blockchain database of credentials and achievements can be a secure online repository. Digitized records/blocks replace paper copies for sharing proof of learning and can be easily accessible and tracked. Blockchain can make it easy to access all of your academic accomplishments in a digitized and ultra-secure way. Each record is a block. Your records would be chained together and new credentials will be added as you go throughout your lifetime of learning.
Lifelong Learning Building Blocks – Informal learning activities could be captured, validated and stored in addition to formal learning accomplishments. This can be as simple as noting a watched video or completed online lesson. We’re already seeing some universities using blockchain with badges, credits, and qualifications.
Authenticating Credentials – Institutions, recruiting firms or employers can easily access and verify credentials. No more gathering of papers or trying to digitize to share. Blocks are digital “learning” records and come in multilingual format eliminating the painstaking task of translation.

What’s more, with diploma mills and fake credentials causing havoc for institutions and employers, blockchain solves the issue by providing protection from fraud. It has two-step authentication and spreads blocks across numerous computer nodes. It would take hitting over 51% of computers to falsify a block.

Sony and IBM have partnered and filed patents to develop a blockchain educational platform that can house student data, their performance reports and other information related to their academic records. Some universities have created their own platforms.

Also see:

Blockchain in Education — from by Alexander Grech and Anthony F. Camilleri

Context
Blockchain technology is forecast to disrupt any field of activity that is founded on timestamped record-keeping of titles of ownership. Within education, activities likely to be disrupted by blockchain technology include the award of qualifications, licensing and accreditation, management of student records, intellectual property management and payments.

Key Advantages of Blockchain Technology
From a social perspective, blockchain technology offers significant possibilities beyond those currently available. In particular, moving records to the blockchain can allow for:

Self-sovereignty, i.e. for users to identify themselves while at the same time maintaining control over the storage and management of their personal data;
Trust, i.e. for a technical infrastructure that gives people enough confidence in its operations to carry through with transactions such as payments or the issue of certificates;
Transparency & Provenance, i.e. for users to conduct transactions in knowledge that each party has the capacity to enter into that transaction;
Immutability, i.e. for records to be written and stored permanently, without thepossibility of modification;
Disintermediation, i.e. the removal of the need for a central controlling authority to manage transactions or keep records;
Collaboration, i.e. the ability of parties to transact directly with each other without the need for mediating third parties.

Sony wants to digitize education records using the blockchain

“The Changing Landscape of Online Education: A Deeper Dive” [Quality Matters & Eduventures Research]

On 03/28/2018, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, change, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, digital learning, distance education, higher education, instructional design, leadership, online learning, organizational change, strategy, teaching & learning, teaching online, universities, vision, by Daniel Christian

The Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE)

QM and Eduventures have teamed up to conduct a multi-year study to examine the changing landscape of online education, provide results to those who can use them and help those involved with online education place their institution within a broader context and possibly influence strategic decisions and organizational changes. Please complete the form on this page to gain access to the 2018 CHLOE 2 Report.

The third iteration of CHLOE is scheduled for April 2018 and focuses on in-depth coverage of issues such as governance of online programs, blended learning and the influence of subject matter on the design and delivery of online programs. If you are a Chief Online Officer and wish to participate in the next CHLOE Survey, or if you wish to nominate the COO at your institution, please contact QM’s Manager of Research & Development Barbra Burch.

Date Published: Tue, 03/27/2018

Also see:

Online Learning’s Complex, Fractured Landscape — from insidehighered.com by Doug Lederman — references new report from Quality Matters & Eduventures Research entitled “The Changing Landscape of Online Education: A Deeper Dive”
Survey of chief online officers shows enormous variation in how colleges define and structure digital education, in terms of pricing, program structure and use of instructional design.

Excerpt:

A new survey of those who oversee online learning programs at their institutions reveals significant diversity in the online education landscape, from differences in colleges’ strategic goals in going online to how they structure and price their programs and how much they require/encourage faculty members to work with professional designers to craft their courses.

The report, “The Changing Landscape of Online Education: A Deeper Dive,” is the second such report from Quality Matters and Eduventures Research, leading them to dub it CHLOE2. (Inside Higher Ed and “Inside Digital Learning” covered last year’s report here and here.) One hundred eighty-two senior officials responsible for online education at their institutions responded to the survey (up from 104 last year), drawn roughly equivalently from four-year private, four-year public and two-year public colleges.

The survey explores a wide range of topics and issues, related to the administrative structure of online offerings, the economics of their programs and the role of instructional designers. Among the most interesting findings:

Learning Ecosystems

Incumbents Strike Back: Insights from the Global C-suite Study [IBM Institute for Business Value]

12 bad communication habits to break in IT [Rudder]

Better Brainstorming [Gregersen; hbr.org]

DC: What can higher ed learn from this? “Big corporations — giant retailers & health insurance companies — are teaming up to become your doctor.”

“The Changing Landscape of Online Education: A Deeper Dive” [Quality Matters & Eduventures Research]

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