From DSC: Put yourself in the place of the conscientious/thorough learner. If you come into a course on Canvas & see Quizzes, Assignments, Discussion Boards, as well as other items listed on the Course Navigation Bar — in addition to the Modules selection — you might find yourself going to check many of those selections Every. Single. Day.
From DSC: By the way, this is whyRSS feedsandfeed aggregatorswere implemented. Have updates/content flow to the person, instead of the person wasting time trying to find what’s been updated on 100+ websites.
Current and former Google employees are forming an online program aimed at preparing students for the workforce if they’re taking time off school due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It comes as many college students defer school as universities shift learning models to mostly online amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Google execs past and present have volunteered to mentor college students on topics ranging from career trajectory to how to stand out in virtual Zoom interviews.
Along these lines, see:
Google has a plan to disrupt the college degree— from inc.com by Justin Bariso Google’s new certificate program takes only six months to complete, and will be a fraction of the cost of college. Excerpt:
Google recently made a huge announcement that could change the future of work and higher education: It’s launching a selection of professional courses that teach candidates how to perform in-demand jobs. These courses, which the company is calling Google Career Certificates, teach foundational skills that can help job-seekers immediately find employment. However, instead of taking years to finish like a traditional university degree, these courses are designed to be completed in about six months.
From DSC: Also, to see some more changes to the learning ecosystems out there, set up a Google Alert (or something similar in Feedly or via another tool) for “Learning Pods,” “Pandemic Pods,” and/or the “growth of homeschooling.” Here’s but one recent example:
Life can be very hard for autistic, gifted and special needs learners. Autistic and gifted learners often times struggle in school because they learn very differently than their peers. These special learners need a personalized approach to their education that allows them to learn in their own way at their own pace.
Many times parents and students feel as if they are the only ones like them in the world. This can often times lead to isolation and frustration. It is important for all autistic, gifted and special needs to unite in order to support one another. We are named Academic Warriors because all our students are superheroes in a world that doesn’t always understand and/or appreciate them. We help our students to become strong, independent and positive learners despite what the world may think of them.
It is the mission of Academic Warriors to help create positive learning experiences and communities throughout the United States for autistic, gifted and special needs learners. We offer online courses, programs, private school and in person events that foster an unique learning environment that promotes unity among all our students and families. We strive to create online and in person learning communities in every state that will provide educational opportunities for all families of autistic, gifted and special needs students. Together we can create a better world for the autistic, gifted and special needs learner.
From DSC: As part of a homeschooling-based situation, my wife received the following item for one of our daughters (who needs additional/personalized assistance to learn). Simultaneously, she and our daughter sent them a Michigan Exchange Box. Very cool.
I believe my wife found this out at the following group in Facebook:
Some channels out on Youtube that have to do with learning: (and by the way, according to Jane Hart’s recent Top 200 Tools for Learning, YouTube is in the #1 spot for the 5th year in a row!)
“Horse Sense Tutoring Services is a unique resource that combines the power of Equine Assisted Learning with evidence-based reading and math strategies that engage the mind, body, and emotions in learning.We use the principles of discovery, experience, movement, reflection, and connection in partnership with our horse friends.
…
Based at The Barn for Equine Learning…my program offers targeted reading, math, and basic horsemanship tutoring for students in grades K – 8. Horses become teaching and learning partners as students experience academics and social-emotional learning in a whole new way.
If you are looking for a unique tutoring and confidence-building experience for your child, PM for more information.Sessions are held outdoors and/or in an open barn setting.
(Small group field trips with an introduction to basic horsemanship skills are also available).
From DSC:
So these are just a few examples of how the learning ecosystems are changing out there! Surely, there will be more changes coming down the pike.
If one doesn’t have access to the Internet, a computer, or any such mobile technology as seen in the image above…could TV become the medium through which one could be educated during this next year of the Coronavirus situation? That is, until we can develop better and more equitable policies, plans, funding, systems, infrastructures, and connectivity for all students!
After that, could we see more televisions morph into smart/connected TVs?
Could PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other major networks collaborate with the U.S. Department of Education to help us educate all students?
A few years ago, I had hoped that Apple was going to go all-in with theirtvOS platform.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 9: Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the New Apple TV during a Special Event; 9/9/15.
Though it’s still early in the game, that really hasn’t happened to the extent that I had hoped. That said, more recently, I was encouraged to see this article from back in July:
Let’s ask the employees of PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other networks if they would be willing to work with the U.S. Department of Education to help educate ALL students! Though educational TV is not new, I’m talking about taking things to a *whole* new level.
With that in mind, I created the following graphic:
(One might ask why I used an old television in the above graphic. I was trying to get at the idea that one might not have a lot of resources to work with.)
From DSC:
Some of the following questions came to my mind recently:
In this age of the Coronavirus, how can we think differently about learning experience design (#LXD)?
How can *teams* of people come together to reimagine what learning could look like in the future? Who might be some new players at the table? More students? Artists? Actors? More animators? More technicians and people from A/V? Specialists in XR? Corporate trainers coming together with Instructional Designers from higher ed and from K-12? #learningecosystems#future
How can we better tighten up the alignment between K-12, higher ed / vocational programs, and the corporate world?
How can we make self-directed learning more prevalent (which would release an enormous amount of energy & creativity)?#heutagogy
Maybe those aren’t even the right questions…
If not, what do you think? What questions should we be asking about learning these days?
The main thing we need to remember is that this space no longer serves as an accessory to face-to-face teaching. It is now our main contact point with learners, so it needs to play different roles: communication channel, learning path, interaction platform and community space. Teachers therefore need a certain degree of freedom to design this space in the best way that suits their teaching style and philosophy as well as their course content and learning objectives.
…
What became obvious in the past months is that when it comes to teaching and learning fully online, the learning experience design aspect, including look, feel and logic of the platform from the users’ perspective- be it teachers or students-, are at least as important as the content.
From DSC: After readingJeff Young’s article re: learning engineeringand seeingthe Nudge application from Duke University...it once again occurred to me thatwe really need a standard for loading questions into a memory-refreshing application. Just like HyperText Markup Language (HTML) made the World Wide Web so successful and impactful, we need an easy-to-use standard for dumping questions into a personalized database of questions for each cloud-based learner profile.
After taking a module, you would be asked if you wanted to be reminded of / quizzed upon the key ideas presented therein. You would then receive periodic quizzes on those items. You can choose to opt-out of that learning module’s content at any time.
Such an application would help reduce the impact of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. This type of standard/feature would really help students and people in:
law schools, dental schools, medical schools, and seminaries
vocational programs
traditional undergraduate and graduate programs
K-12 systems
Homeschooling-based situations
Places of worship
Communities of practice — as well as lifelong learners
A person could invoke a quiz at any point, but would be quizzed at least once a day. If you missed a day, those questions would not be taken out of the pool of questions to ask you. If you got a question right, the time interval would be lengthened before you were asked that question again. But questions that you struggled with would be asked more frequently. This would also help interleave questions and aid in recall. Such spaced repetition would cause struggle from time to time, aiding in deeper learning.
“Existing meeting interfaces had been designed with a singular goal, to simply enable virtual conversations. How could we build a meeting interface from the ground-up that intentionally facilitates engaging, productive, and inclusive conversations?”
Thursday, July 9, 2020—In an unprecedented effort to prevent summer learning loss, Louisiana Public Broadcasting is airing 60 lessons on Eureka Math® from Great Minds, starting this week, for Grades K–5 statewide. In addition, PBS affiliate WCNY-TV in Syracuse, N.Y., partnered with Great Minds to make 172 video lessons on math, English language arts, and science available to all 330 PBS stations across the country.
Are universities going the way of CDs and cable TV? — from theatlantic.com by Michael Smith; with thanks to Homa Tavangar & Will Richardson for this resource Like the entertainment industry, colleges will need to embrace digital services in order to survive.
Similar dynamics are at play in higher education today. Universities have long been remarkably stable institutions—so stable that in 2001, by one account, they comprised an astonishing 70 of the 85 institutions in the West that have endured in recognizable form since the 1520s.
That stability has again bred overconfidence, overpricing, and an overreliance on business models tailored to a physical world. Like those entertainment executives, many of us in higher education dismiss the threats that digital technologies pose to the way we work.
Information technology transforms industries by making scarce resources plentiful, forcing customers to rethink the value of established products.
From DSC: I can’t help but hear Clayton Christenson’s voice in the following quote:
An analogous situation prevails in higher education, where access to classroom seats, faculty experts, and university diplomas have been scarce for half a millennium. When massively open online courses first appeared, making free classes available to anyone with internet access, universities reflexively dismissed the threat. At the time, MOOCs were amateuristic, low-quality, and far removed from our degree-granting programs. But over the past 10 years, the technology has improved greatly.
From DSC: The article below got me to thinking about designing learning experiences and what our learning experiences might be like in the future — especially after we start pouring much more of our innovative thinking, creativity, funding, entrepreneurship, and new R&D into technology-supported/enabled learning experiences.
LMS vs. LXP: How and why they are different — from blog.commlabindia.com by Payal Dixit LXPs are a rising trend in the L&D market. But will they replace LMSs soon? What do they offer more than an LMS? Learn more about LMS vs. LXP in this blog.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Building on the foundation of the LMS, the LXP curates and aggregates content, creates learning paths, and provides personalized learning resources.
Here are some of the key capabilities of LXPs. They:
Offer content in a Netflix-like interface, with suggestions and AI recommendations
Can host any form of content – blogs, videos, eLearning courses, and audio podcasts to name a few
Offer automated learning paths that lead to logical outcomes
Support true uncensored social learning opportunities
So, this is about the LXP and what it offers; let’s now delve into the characteristics that differentiate it from the good old LMS.
From DSC: Entities throughout the learning spectrum are going through many changes right now (i.e., people and organizations throughout K-12, higher education, vocational schools, and corporate training/L&D). If the first round of the Coronavirus continues to impact us, and then a second round comes later this year/early next year, I can easily see massive investments and interest in learning-related innovations. It will be in too many peoples’ and organizations’ interests not to.
I highlighted the bulleted points above because they are some of the components/features of theLearning from the Living [Class] Roomvision that I’ve been working on.
Below are some technologies, visuals, and ideas to supplement my reflections. They might stir the imagination of someone out there who, like me, desires to make a contribution — and who wants to make learning more accessible, personalized, fun, and engaging. Hopefully, future generations will be able to have more choice, more control over their learning — throughout their lifetimes — as they pursue their passions.
You may be familiar with Webex Assistant, the AI-powered voice assistant for work. Now known as Webex Assistant for Webex Rooms, our original digital assistant allows you to control compatible Webex Rooms devices with your voice, making it easy to join a meeting with just a few words, manage your meetings and devices from anywhere in the room, and much more.
A voice-activated assistant allows you to easily control the meeting through a set of voice commands.
Simply ask your AI-powered Webex Assistant to do things like create actions items, take notes, and even set up future meetings—with just your voice.
Your Webex Assistant will automatically transcribe the entire meeting in real-time.
With visual animation, your virtual AI assistant interacts with you and your meeting attendees during the meeting and when called upon.
From DSC:
How might these types of technologies impact online-based learning?
What new affordances might they bring to the learner’s experience?
For example, what if a listening assistant (AI) could identify some key issues/topics and then go out and grab/present some URL’s of relevant journal articles, chapters from a given textbook, blog postings, etc.? What if each student’s AI could be directed to do so independently?
From DSC: If the first wave of the Coronavirus continues — and is joined by a second wave later this year or early next year — I think a more permanent, game-changing situation is inevitable. As such, now’s the time to change the paradigms that we’ve been operating under.
It’s time to move to *a team-based approach.* To build up the set of skills an organization needs to pivot and adapt — regardless of what comes their way.
Let’s stop asking one faculty member to do it all! Consider this:
Would you fly in a plane that was engineered/designed/built by one person?
Would you drive a car that was engineered/designed/built by one person?
Would you go into brain surgery with only one other person in the operating room?
Are you, like me, amazed at the long list of people (and their specialties) who contributed to a major motion picture?!? The credits go on for several minutes — even when moving at a fast pace! Would you watch a major motion picture that was written, acted, produced, directed by — and had all of the music, special effects, and audio-related work done by — only one person?
With the move to online learning, one person can’t do it all anymore — at least not at the level that the newer generations are coming to expect. They have grown accustomed to amazing, team-based/built content and products.
Plus, newer generations are going to know and experience much more telehealth-related services…then much more telelegal-related services. They will come to experience/expect high-quality learning-related products and services that way as well. Going forward, there are too many skillsets required by the creation and production of high-quality, online-based learning — not to mention the continued hard work of staying up-to-date on the main subject matter expertise at hand.
So if the kind of perspective continues as found in this piece —SURVEY: Students say they shouldn’t have to pay full price for online classes— then colleges and universities would do well to invest money in new Research & Development efforts, in team-based content creation, and in reimagining what online-learning could act/be like. Same for the vendors out there. And faculty members would be wise to invest the time and energy it takes to be able to teach online as well as in a face-to-face setting. Not only are they more marketable once they’ve done this, but they are then also more prepared to find their place within an uncertain future.
All of this will likely be an expensive process. Also, greater collaboration will be needed within a department (as we can’t be building a course per professor) as well as between organizations. Perhaps the use of consortiums will increase…I’m not sure.
Perhaps a new platform will develop — similar to what’s contained in this vision. Such a platform will feature content that was designed and built by a team. Such a learning-related platform will offer streams of highly-relevant content — while providing continuous, affordable, up-to-date, convenient, and very well done means of staying marketable/employed.
For another paradigm shift, accreditation bodies/practices are going to have to also change, adapt, pivot, and help innovative ideas come to fruition. But that’s another posting for another day.
From DSC: This is exactly the need that I’ve been getting at here. Many people don’t have the time — and now, the $$ — to take 4 years to get a college degree. Even 2 years is too long for many people these days. They need to be able to quickly reinvent themselves. As such, we need to tap into — and contribute to — streams of content. All. The. Time.
And do so, efficiently, safely, securely — and inexpensively!
This article begins an exploration of the other major shift that is already in play and that will continue to affect our work: the phenomenon of self-directed learning. This is a trend that (like distance learning) was already underway before the pandemic, driven by a desire to reduce or eliminate the cost of formal instruction and to keep up with the speed of change itself.
… What is self-directed learning?
Let’s use the classic definition from Malcolm Knowles. Self-directed learning is a process “in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating those learning outcomes.” (See reference at the end of this article.)
