Ohio calls on Blackboard to create statewide online learning clearinghouse — from The Journal by Dian Schaffhauser

Ohio’s Board of Regents will be working with Blackboard in developing a program to host distance learning courses in the state. Chancellor Eric Fingerhut chose Blackboard’s consulting team to build a new, statewide digital learning clearinghouse that will provide a common platform for online courses. The goal of the program is to use the courses to graduate more students, keep more of them at Ohio colleges and universities and in the state’s workforce, and attract more out of state graduates to pursue additional education and careers in Ohio.

Participating schools can both add and tap into the courses offered in the program. High school students could earn college credit through dual enrollment and Advanced Placement courses or use remediation offerings. College students could attend a wider range of courses and other options for earning credits and completing degrees more quickly. The resources are also expected to help adult learners who want to pursue training to advance or change their careers and prepare for certifications.

From DSC: This type of thing needs to occur in the classroom — communications with multiple devices, without the wires. Students need to be able to “play” their media without interrupting the flow of the classroom..without having to go up to the front of the class to figure out how to plug in their device up at the lectern.

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Daniel Christian

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Daniel S. Christian -- My vision for the Smart Classrooms of the Future

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McGraw-Hill Education: Product Manager – Student Innovations
Profession: Marketing -> Product Management

The McGraw-Hill Companies is driving the education, financial services, and business information markets through leading brands such as McGraw-Hill Education, Standard & Poor’s and J. D. Power and Associates. McGraw-Hill Education addresses virtually every aspect of the education market from pre-K through professional learning.

Using traditional materials, online learning and multimedia tools, we empower the growth of teachers, professionals and students of all ages. Our technical innovations are changing the way people learn, with e-books, online tutoring, customized course Web sites and subscription services. We are also a leading provider of reference and trade publishing for the medical, business, engineering and other professions. McGraw-Hill is investing in and committed to innovation, both in its business and in shaping the future of higher education.

The Learning Ecosystems Group is the team responsible for defining that vision of the future. We are building businesses that meet the needs of higher education students – products that can be directly marketed to students and to institutions, including our current GradeGuru product as well as the significant digital platform products in our short-term pipeline. The Learning Ecosystems Group is thus offering a unique and exciting opportunity for an experienced Product Manager in our New York City offices. The ultimate aim for this Product Manager is loosely to develop, deliver and monetize products/ services that will give students the tools they need to meet their course goals, as well as to drive the research, ideation and vision for new product(s)/ service(s) that are responsive to the needs of students.

Essential Accountabilities

  • Manage and conduct research to understand and synthesize student tasks, presenting and sharing the findings across the MHHE business.
  • Analyze market and product opportunities in the context of primary, secondary and competitive research. Continually collect, distill, and disseminate foundational research to inform product development.
  • Build prototypes and/ or wireframes to define functional requirements that can be market tested to determine and prove market potential.
  • Develop and thoroughly document/ articulate the vision and business case for the product(s) to gain buy-in from stakeholders across the organization. Clearly communicate a cohesive strategy and product road map.
  • Drive product implementation in collaboration with vendors and business analysis and design partners. Build out the detailed functional requirements and design of the initial product/ service based on research, wire-framing, prototyping, user testing, experimentation and iteration.
  • Drive the growth of the product/ service(s) over time, both in terms of the product road map/ functionally and customer base and revenues.
  • Build out the monetization plans and business model elements to drive the product to ultimate profitability, setting aggressive targets.
  • Ensure all resources are in place across the product and working in concert to achieve the ultimate success of the business, including analytical, design, technical and sales/ marketing resources as appropriate. Articulated accountabilities for team members for successful execution and delivery of the overall business objectives and targets.
  • Work in collaboration with the existing MHHE sales, marketing and strategy team for maximum productivity, efficiency and product success as well as manage customer needs in collaboration with the existing MHHE customer service group
  • Resource and lead a marketing team to drive rapid growth through a sound marketing and PR plan based on our understanding of our market segmentation motivations, our stakeholder interests, social media marketing tools, the power of PR and a grassroots, viral approach.
  • Bachelor’s degree; Master’s degree preferred
  • 8-12 years experience in related field, at least 2-3 as a lead product manager
  • Proven ability to deliver…

The future of colleges and universities -- from the spring of 2010 by futurist Thomas Frey

From Spring 2010

From DSC:

If you are even remotely connected to higher education, then you *need* to read this one!


Most certainly, not everything that Thomas Frey says will take place…but I’ll bet you he’s right on a number of accounts. Whether he’s right or not, the potential scenarios he brings up ought to give us pause to reflect on ways to respond to these situations…on ways to spot and take advantage of the various opportunities that arise (which will only happen to those organizations who are alert and looking for them).


NMC's 5 Minutes of FameThis year’s presentations included:

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Ever-changing…morphing…with new contacts…new tools…new “home bases of learning”…new jobs and responsibilities…new “places” to get information…new experiences.

As seen by Gource:

Here's what a learning ecosystem looks like to me -- visually speaking

As seen by 7 years of Flickr commits:

Here's what a learning ecosystem looks like to me -- visually  speaking

Resource from Reaction

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Technology and tomorrow's university

From DSC:
Now we need to figure out what all of this means for us…operationally speaking.

linguatv.com

Resource from kirstenwinkler.com

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Education’s Big Shift: Institutions of Learning to Learning Institutions — from Education Innovation

In their new book The Power of Pull, authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison describe what they call the “Big Shift.”

The Big Shift for Education

“Our educational institutions are grappling with the need to move from being institutions of learning to learning institutions that rapidly evolve in response to the quickly changing learning needs of students and then find ways to extend the learning process well beyond the walls and semesters that define courses today.”

Personal Implications of the Big Shift

“We discover, to our dismay, that the significant investments we made in education in the early part of our lives was just the beginning. In order to stay successful in a world of accelerating change, we need to find ways to learn faster, often in areas that we once viewed as quite peripheral to our professions.”

“What we knew yesterday—either as employees or in terms of what our institutions as a whole knows about its business—is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today.”

Shift represents a new commercial model for authoring software — from Clive Sheperd

Sandra Arnold of Mercer UK alerted me to a new authoring tool that they are using called Shift. Here’s how the vendors describe the tool on their website:

“Shift by MindMuze is more than an eLearning Authoring Tool. It is an eLearning ecosystem. It can be used to create detailed answers to frequently-asked questions, or sophisticated multimedia presentations, or even interactive tests or quizzes. Best of all, everything is online. That means collaboration is a snap, letting anyone you designate access your project to offer suggestions or make changes, and members of your team can be located anywhere in the world. Need more graphics? Push a button and our team can create some in a matter of hours. And because it is online, there is no software licensing fee, which means you do not pay a penny to develop your courses, unless you choose to ‘publish’.”

Ecosystem or not, the tool is one of a number of web-based authoring solutions allowing authors to…(rest of posting here)

shiftelearning.com

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The Wisetail Learning Ecosystem

Justin Bigart, Founder + President
Wisetail / The social side of e-learning
www.wisetail.com / www.learningecosystems.com

From DSC:
While listening to Justin, several things that he said jumped out at me:

  • Learning is social
  • Audience engagement is critical
  • The definition of what is considered training content has to evolve and should be more conversational in nature; more of this material needs to be created by the people in your organization who are interacting with your clients
  • Your audience is changing

Also:

  • Use video-based content, built around storytelling
  • Use people within your organization that are the best at that act or who model that behavior or who are the ambassadors of the concept that you are trying to relay/implement
  • Make it raw, real, unscripted
  • Use socially-aware technologies and layer that with advocacy-based / video-based training

  

This second graphic is a very similar design as my cover/entry graphic — a picture of a learning ecosystem.

  

  

Mobile Learning Conference

Thinking out loud about Connectivism — from iterating toward openness by David Wiley

The first part of commentary from David:

I’ve been reading George’s writing on the unique ideas in connectivism. Two assertions leap out at me in his list of how connectivism is different from other approaches.

First is the statement that “the same structure of learning that creates neural connections can be found in how we link ideas and in how we connect to people and information sources (emphasis DSC). One scepter to rule them all.”

This sounds almost exactly like the claim made in John Anderson and Lael Schooler’s 1991 Reflections of the Environment in Memory, which I consider one of the finest pieces of research in our field:

Availability of human memories for specific items shows reliable relationships to frequency, recency, and pattern of prior exposures to the item. These relationships have defied a systematic theoretical treatment. A number of environmental sources (New York Times, parental speech, electronic mail) are examined to show that the probability that a memory will be needed also shows reliable relationships to frequency, recency, and pattern of prior exposures. Moreover, the environmental relationships are the same as the memory relationships. It is argued that human memory has the form it does because it is adapted to these environmental relationships. Models for both the environment and human memory are described. Among the memory phenomena addressed are the practice function, the retention function, the effect of spacing of practice, and the relationship between degree of practice and retention.

From DSC:
David’s posting, George’s posting entitled,
What is the unique idea in Connectivism?”, and the comments therein create in my mind the image of a living, ever-changing, learning ecosystem…full of “nodes” that come into (and may eventually be removed from) our learning environment / sources of information.

Also from #CCK09 First Paper (Draft): ‘Positioning’ Connectivism, here are some more references regarding connectivism:

© 2024 | Daniel Christian