Paying for Performance — from InsideHigherEd.com by Steve Kolowich

Excerpt:

Now one university is working with a major educational content company to shift some of that accountability from the institutions that enroll students in courses to the companies that supply them with educational texts and tutoring software.

5 ways to clean YouTube Videos - June 2012

.

Also see 9 ways to assess without standardized tests — by Lisa Nielsen

 

Tagged with:  

From DSC:
As Brian Crosby points out in the title of his blog — “Learning is Messy.” 

There is no silver bullet in the world of education that can be used to effectively teach everyone. In fact, if you were to get 100 instructional designers/teachers/professors/instructors/trainers in the same room, you will not be able to find anything close to a strong agreement on what constitutes the best and most effective learning theory as well as the practical implementations of applying that learning theory (even if we were to be talking about the same age range of students). In my Master’s work, I was looking for that silver bullet…but I never found one.

It is very difficult for a professor or a teacher to deliver truly personalized/customized learning to each student in their classroom:

  • How can a teacher consistently know and remember what motivates each particular student?
  • Because so much of learning depends upon prior learning, what “hooks” exist — per student — that he/she can use to hang new information on?
  • Then, what’s the most effective method of delivering the content for each particular student that might shift the content from their working memories to their long-term memories? (And in the process, do so in a way that develops a love for learning that will serve the student well over his lifetime)
  • What’s the best way to assess the learning for each student?
  • Which students cognitive loads are being eaten up due to the nervousness around being assessed?
  • What are the best methods of passing along those learnings onto the students’ future teachers’ for the students’ benefit?

In my estimation, the way we have things setup throughout most K-16 education, this is an impossible task. When there’s typically only 1-2 teachers trying to teach to 20-30 students at a time, how can this type of personalized instruction occur?

However, I believe digital learning and its surrounding tools/ecosystems hold enormous promise for delivering truly customized/personalized learning opportunities.  Such technologies will be able to learn where a student is at, how to motivate them, how fast to push them, and how they best progress through a type of content.  Such tools will provide real-time, learning-related, diagnostic dashboards for professors or teachers to leverage in order to guide and optimize a student’s education.

.

.

So I believe that the promise is there for delivering truly customized/personalized learning opportunities available 24x7x365 — even though we aren’t completely there yet.  But think of the power a teacher would have if he or she had IBM’s Watson AI-based analysis on each student at their disposal! A “guide on the side” using such diagnostic tools could be a ***potent*** ally for a student.*

As such, I see innovative approaches continuing to come to fruition that will harness the power of serious games, analytics, web-based learner profiles, and multimedia-based/interactive learning content. Eventually, a piece of this type of personalized education will enter in via the Smart/Connected TVs of our living rooms…but that’s a post I’m building out for another day in the near future.

.

*Another hope I have here is that such technologies will
enable students to identify and pursue their passions.

 


Some items that reinforced this notion for me include:


 

The key link from Bloom (1913-1999) one e-learning paper you must read plus his taxonomy of learning — an excellent item from Donald Clark Plan B (also see Donald’s archives for postings re: 50 top learning theorists)

The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring
Benjamin Bloom
University of Chicago | Northwestern University

Excerpt:
Most striking were the differences in final achievement measures under the three conditions. Using the standard deviation (sigma) or the control (conventional) class, it was typically found that the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average of the control class (the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class). The average student under mastery learning was about one standard deviation above the average of the control class(the average mastery learning student was above 84% of the students in the control class).

Two key items from EdNet Insight’s Anne Wujcik:

Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey – K-12 Students and Parents Connect the Dots with Digital Learning — from Project Tomorrow

Personalizing Learning in 2012 — The Student & Parent Point of View [infographic] — from Project Tomorrow
Excerpt from Anne’s posting:

This first report focuses on how today’s students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. That personalization centers around three student desires: including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The report share the unfiltered views of K-12 students and parents on these key trends and documents their aspirations for fully leveraging the technologies supporting these trends to transform their learning lives.

McGraw-Hill report demonstrates power of adaptive learning technology to personalize education and support needs of 21st century students — prnewsire.com
Report illustrates how personalized learning is the key to engage, retain and graduate students and prepare them for the global workforce

Excerpt:

NEW YORK, April 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — A new report released today by the McGraw-Hill Education characterizes adaptive learning technology as the lynchpin in personalizing education in today’s K-12 and higher education classrooms. According to the report, adaptive learning technology, also known as a computer-assisted smart tutor, helps teachers tailor instruction for every student in the class, effectively creating a “class of one” and significantly improving learning outcomes.

The authors highlight three of McGraw-Hill’s adaptive programs:

  • LearnSmart is the leading interactive study tool for higher education that adaptively assesses students’ skill and knowledge levels to track which topics students have mastered and which require further instruction and practice. It then adjusts the learning content based on students’ strengths and weaknesses…
  • Power of U is a revolutionary, digitally rich personalized middle school math pilot program that uses real-time assessment data to group students in ways that allow them to learn at their own pace, in their own style, using the medium that works best for them…
  • ALEKS®, one of the pioneer products to use adaptive learning technology, is a web-based assessment and learning system created by the ALEKS Corporation and exclusively distributed by McGraw-Hill Higher Education to colleges and universities.

.

From DSC:
These are the types of technologies that will make their way into courses that you can take from your Smart/Connected TV (i.e. “learning from your living room” and “The Forthcoming Walmart of Education” trends continue to develop and are moving one step closer to reality).  

 

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

 

UCSB's Art & Lectures series: Sir Ken Robinson | lynda.com interview

GoodSemester.com

 .

https://www.goodsemester.com/?p=featuretour

From DSC:

  • Tie this type of cloud-based platform in with learning analytics, new types of certifications/assessments/badges, web-based learner profiles, and the ability to continue building your own cloud over a lifetime, and you may find yourself enjoying a very powerful learning ecosystem!!!

 

 

A dangerous game — from learning with ‘e’s by Steve Wheeler

Excerpt:

This got me thinking that many of the world’s education systems are a little like the eating game of Meze. We pile the students plates high with content. Content of every kind is presented to be consumed, and the poor students don’t stand a chance. Many are overwhelmed by the amount of content they need to learn, and the pace at which they have to learn it. Even while they are struggling their way through an overburdened ‘just in case’ curriculum, still more content continues to arrive at an alarming pace. Some learners cry out for mercy, but they are still compelled to consume the content, because later, they are required to regurgitate it in an examination to obtain their grades. The examinations bear no resemblance to that which will be required of them in the real world. No wonder so many wish to leave the table early. What can teachers do to obviate this problem? Some are making a difference, reinterpreting the curriculum they are given by enabling activities and creating resources that facilitate student centred learning. Learning at one’s own pace, and in a manner that suits the individual will overcome some of the problems of overload, but more needs to be done. Things are changing, but they are changing slowly, too slowly for many people’s tastes. It’s a dangerous game we are playing in education. Isn’t it about time we stopped?

Is your Moodle “cheatable”? — from Moodle News

Excerpt:

The Rubric is available at http://jaredstein.org/cheat/ and you can check out Jared Stein’s Cheatability Factor Presentation at http://jaredstein.org/pres/cheatability/. Mr Stein works for UVU as Director of Instructional Design Services.

What the tool is getting at is the randomness of questions posed to students and what type of opportunities, if any, students have to cheat or collaborate on independent work. While most questions are straightforward there was the occasional curveball like this, “Could students find a paper on the topic just through Google? Or does the paper require individualized selection of topic, interpretation, analysis, and reflection?”  Not quite a yes/no question (but those are exactly the answer choices you have).

Tagged with:  

Cloud Learning as Universal Primary Education — from Teemu Arina

Excerpts:

The internet is lowering the transaction costs of learning. This leads to a situation where learning happens more and more in the open markets, in a distributed and decentralized manner. It is obvious that the primary interface will be based on mobile, cloud-based devices. Some principles…

There are effectively three levels of certification: 1st hand, 2nd hand and 3rd hand certification.

  • 1st hand certification is what you say you know.
    In the old world you would describe your skills in a resume and leave it to the employer to evaluate if that holds true. In the new world you can make your work and learning processes visible as it happens, demonstrating progress and increasing the believability of your 1st hand descriptions. A simple blog (a log of thoughts) makes reflection visible  and demonstrates the evolution and iteration of thinking as it happens.
  • 2nd hand certification is what others say about you.
    In the old world you would describe your references in a resume and leave it to the employer to call these references to evaluate if these people really value your work and learning. In the new world people accumulate links, likes and comments to the resources you produce on social networks. A Klout score on social media or a personal stock price based on social media activity on EmpireAvenue demonstrate your social capital through a simple metric. The question is, are you making an impact with your progress, enabling other people to build on top of your work through reflection and co-creation, or are you effectively invisible to others?
  • 3rd hand certification is what an authority says about you.
    In the old world you would get a certificate on hand to add in your resume that you have demonstrated the ability to pass a specific rat test (a school). This doesn’t necessarily mean you have mastered all the topics involved, but it demonstrates that you have been capable of passing such tests under the supervision of an authority. In the new world a single test in isolation is not enough but your ability to solve problems in connection with others.
Tagged with:  

5 ideas for responding to what kids want the nation to know about educationfrom The Innovative Educator by Lisa Nielsen

Excerpt:

In the session the focus was clear. Educators and the former principal (YAY for administrators) who attended wanted to know how we can hear the children and show them they matter, we love them, and we want to honor their unique passions, talents, interests, and abilities.  We discussed a lot of great ideas.  Here are five ways we discussed addressing what students want from education:

  1. Rather than bubbletests, measure student progress with personal success plans.
  2. Rather than report cards and transcripts allow students to showcase their learning with an authentic ePortfolio.
  3. Rather than work that only has the teacher as the audience, empower students to do real work that matters to them and has a real audience.
  4. Rather than telling students how to meet learning goals, empower them to drive their own learning as participant Deven Black explained he does (visit this link to see how).
  5. Have conversations with students about what their talents are.  You can use the videos in this article that feature students sharing stories about their talents.

“We Prepare Children to Learn How to Learn” — from Will Richardson, LynNell Hancock

Also see:

Tagged with:  
© 2024 | Daniel Christian