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Reflections on “MOOCs and online learning: An interview with Jack Welch” [Glader]

On 02/28/2013, in corporate / business world, Daniel S. Christian, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, MBA, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, real-world assignments, by Daniel Christian

MOOCs and online learning: An interview with Jack Welch  — from edudemic.com by Paul Glader

Excerpt:

WA – What do you think of this trend in Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs? Where is it going?

JW – Tom Friedman talked about it a few weeks ago (in the New York Times). It seems a little like the stigma associated with online learning, similar to online dating sites, is washing away. Every trend is going in that direction. We can give an MBA for $30,000 and you keep your job and are moving up in a company. Contrast that with leaving a job for two years and you lose $100,000 or whatever your salary is. You pay these exorbitant MBA costs for two years – $125,000. The economics are all going in the right direction for online education. It’s just as rigorous or more rigorous because you can’t just BS the classes. Everything is going in our direction. We can offer a rigorous MBA program while we make you a better leader. The theme of our school is we teach you on Tuesday and you put it into practice on Wednesday. In other MBA programs, you learn on Tuesday and, two years later, you put it to work.

From DSC:
I continue to wonder if and when corporate training and development programs/departments will shift their attention to two main things:
  • Helping employees build their own learning ecosystems — based upon each employee’s career goals, current/near-future positions, projects that they are working on, etc.
  • Creating MOOCs — and/or what MOOCs eventually morph into — for their own companies; then selecting the cream of the crop for an interview or an immediate job offer

 

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Beyond the buzz, where are MOOCs really going? [Horn & Christensen]

On 02/22/2013, in analytics, data related items, disruption, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, new business models, personalized/customized learning, by Daniel Christian

Beyond the buzz, where are MOOCs really going? — from wired.com by Michael Horn and Clayton Christensen

Excerpt:

MOOCs can be much more than marketing and edutainment. We believe they are likely to evolve into a “scale business”: one that relies on the technology and data backbone of the medium to optimize and individualize learning opportunities for millions of students.

This is very different than simply putting a video of a professor lecturing online.

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Briefing on MOOCs for the Board of Governors [Bates]

On 02/22/2013, in Canada, higher education, leadership, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, strategy, by Daniel Christian

Briefing on MOOCs for the Board of Governors  — from Tony Bates

 

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More examples of the conversation moving away from traditional higher ed

On 02/20/2013, in business side of he, changing business models, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, economics, experimentation, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, innovation, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, staying relevant, surviving, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
While I think MOOCs have a ways to go, I continue to support them because they are forcing higher ed to innovate and experiment more.  But the conversation continues to move away from traditional higher ed, as the changes — especially the prices — aren’t changing fast enough.

Besides President Obama’s repeated promptings for higher to respond and to become more cost effective — as well as his mentioning that the U.S. Government will be pursuing new methods of accreditation if the current institutions of higher ed don’t respond more significantly — here is yet another example of the conversation moving away from traditional higher ed.

I wonder…
How small/large is the window of time before traditional higher ed is moved into the “Have you driven a Ford lately?” mode…?  It seems that it’s much harder to get customers to come back once they’ve lost their trust/patience/belief/support/etc. in an organization or institution.  As Ford has shown, it can be done, but my point is that there is danger in the status quo and broken business relationships can take a long time to heal — while opening up opportunities for others to step in (such as Toyota, Honda, and others in the case of the automotive industry).

Again, we see whether in higher ed, K-12, or in the corporate world, the key thing is to learn how to build one’s own learning ecosystem.

 

 

With thanks to Stephen Downes for mentioning the item below in his presentation here.

 

MyEducationPath-Feb2013

 

MyEducationPath2-Feb2013

 

MyEducationPathDSC-Feb2013

 

 

Other examples of the conversation moving away from traditional higher ed:

  • Educating the Future: The End of Mediocrity –by Rob Bencini
    Students facing uncertain future opportunities (but very certain debt loads) may increasingly turn away from private colleges and universities that offer little more than a diploma. Instead, they’ll seek more-affordable alternatives for higher education, both real and virtual.
  • The Half-Life of a College Education — from futuristspeaker.com by Thomas Frey
    Excerpt:
    6.) Expanding number of long tails courses – In much the same way “hit” television shows attract millions of viewers while niche TV shows are proliferating, far more niche courses will be developed as traditional college gatekeepers get circumvented.

 

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Beyond voice recognition: It’s the age of intelligent systems [Savitz]

On 02/15/2013, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, emerging technologies, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, by Daniel Christian

Beyond voice recognition: It’s the age of intelligent systems — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz; with thanks to Steve Knode (steveknode.com) for posting this on his recent newsletter

Excerpt:

But the pace of innovation continues. Expect the current generation of virtual personal assistants to evolve into ubiquitous intelligent systems. These will communicate with people through voice, text, vision, touch and gestures and will factor in ambient information like location or motion to understand context, giving greater relevance of every interaction.

Here’s a look at some developments to watch in intelligent systems for 2013…

 

From DSC:
And I’ll bet they integrate into what MOOCs will morph into.

 

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MOOCs and online learning: Research roundup [Weigel]

On 02/15/2013, in disruption, game-changing environment, higher education, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, research, by Daniel Christian

MOOCResearchRoundup-Weigel-Feb2013

 

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The blurring of the lines of where middle school ends, high school ends, college ends…etc.

On 02/14/2013, in higher education, K-12 related, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, by Daniel Christian
.
Excerpt: (emphasis DSC)
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Building on the success of the Stanford Online High School (OHS), OHSx will allow middle- and high-school students everywhere to engage in real-time, seminar-based online courses without being formally enrolled in the OHS. Students who successfully complete a course through OHSx will receive a Stanford University Online High School transcript reflecting their achievement.

We are fortunate that our first course will be “Introduction to Mathematical Thinking,” by Dr. Keith Devlin, whose distinguished career includes authoring numerous textbooks as well as a recurring presence as “the Math Guy” on National Public Radio.

This course was originally designed for undergraduates considering a mathematics major in college and has been previously offered to over 70,000 students using the Coursera platform. OHSx is offering this course to advanced high school juniors and seniors. The OHSx course will incorporate Dr. Devlin’s absorbing lectures and will include additional material including regular real-time video-conference seminars should be lead by a Stanford OHSx instructor.

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Reflections on “Apple University hires another high-profile academic” [Elmer-DeWitt]

On 02/14/2013, in Apple, Daniel S. Christian, learning ecosystem, MBA, New "Amazon.com" of Higher Education, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Apple University hires another high-profile academic — from by Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Berkeley’s Morten Hansen, co-author of Jim Collins’ latest bestseller, joined in January

Excerpt:

FORTUNE — Apple University has always been something of a stealth operation. It was created as a kind of in-house MBA program by Steve Jobs, a self-taught business leader who made no secret of his distaste for conventional MBAs.

“We do want to create our own MBAs,” Jobs once said. “But in our own image.”

The idea was to somehow transfer to future generations of Apple (AAPL) executives the hard lessons he learned when he founded the company, lost the company, and brought it back to life.

He started big.

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From DSC:
Again, this brings me back to the questions/thoughts:

  • If higher ed doesn’t address its shortcomings — at least in the eyes/perspectives of employers — will corporations take matters into their own hands? Will they create their own internal universities? Perhaps in the form of MOOCs…?
  • Alternatively, they might say, “Here’s $___; we’d like to have you go through this [digital] playlist of items, then come back and show me what you can do. Then, if appropriate,  let’s talk.”

Perhaps Apple is developing their own expertise on how all this runs…? Perhaps they are a piece of what I call “The Walmart of Education”  — a piece of more peoples’ learning ecosystems.

 

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Man o’ man — if IBM’s Watson gets integrated into what MOOCs morph into!

On 02/14/2013, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, collaboration, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, future of higher education, game-changing environment, global / globalization, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, internet, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning spaces, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, New "Amazon.com" of Higher Education, online learning, online tutoring, second screen apps, smart classrooms, smart/connected TV, streams of content, ubiquitous learning, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, virtual tutoring, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Below are some reflections after seeing these items:

Image1

 

 

  • Watson supercomputer goes to college, Revenge Of The Nerds style antics imminent — not an exemplary article from geekosystem.com, but the underlying topic has enormous implications
    Excerpt:
    …the team developing Watson is sending the computer to college, where it will bone up on coursework in English and math.
    …
    While the original Watson will be staying put at the IBM research center it calls home, the hardware to run the program is being installed at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, where researchers and grad students will be spend the next three years teaching Watson all they can while also hoping to learn more about how the software learns and make it more effective.

 

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Watson-MOOCs-NewTypesCollaboration-DChristian-2-14-13

 

From DSC:
The current set of MOOCs are very powerful, but, like a bush that needs pruning, they can become unwieldy and hard to control.  Not only do the current set of MOOCs help me to see the importance of instructional design, but trying to drink from the firehose often presents problems (i.e. wading through thousands of tweets, hundreds of blog posts, etc.).  How can we still provide openness and yet provide people with better methods/tools for setting their desired level of drinking from this firehose? Tags are helpful, but for most people, they are not doing enough to filter/curate the content at this point.

Enter the technologies being developed in IBM’s Watson, Apple’s SIRI, or in Knewton’s product lines. End-user controllable setting might include:

  • Full throttle — like current form of MOOCs — thousands of tweets, hundreds of blog posts, etc.
  • IBM Watson-enabled curation/filtering only — each individual adjusts how many items they want to see in the various portions of the interface (see above); these settings control how many items and/or streams of content get presented to you

The ideas involving learning agents, artificial intelligence, intelligent tutoring, intelligent systems and more seem to get roped in here…hmm…just thinking out loud and sharing potentially-useful ideas.

 

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Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken [Shirky]

On 02/12/2013, in cost of getting a degree, disruption, experimentation, future of higher education, game-changing environment, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, New "Amazon.com" of Higher Education, student-related, by Daniel Christian

Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken — by Clay Shirky

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

This is the background to the entire conversation around higher education: Things that can’t last don’t. This is why MOOCs matter. Not because distance learning is some big new thing or because online lectures are a solution to all our problems, but because they’ve come along at a time when students and parents are willing to ask themselves, “Isn’t there some other way to do this?”

MOOCs are a lightning strike on a rotten tree. Most stories have focused on the lightning, on MOOCs as the flashy new thing. I want to talk about the tree.

…

Imagine picking a thousand students at random from among our institutions of higher education. Now imagine unpicking everyone at one of US News‘ Top 100 liberal arts colleges or universities. You’d expel anyone from the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT. Anyone from from Emory or Rice. Anyone from Vanderbilt, Clemson, Drexel. Anyone from the famously good state schools—UMass, Virginia, the California universities. After ejecting those students from your group, how many of the original thousand would be left?

About 900.

 

graphs

 

 

 

From DSC:
Houston, we have a problem.

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Game-changing reflections re: “College branding: The tipping point” [Dooley]

On 02/10/2013, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business side of he, change, changing business models, CMS/LMS, colleges, community colleges, consortiums, cost of getting a degree, creativity, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, disruption, education reform, education technology, elearning, experimentation, faculty, funding / grants, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, internet, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, marketplaces, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, multimedia, new business models, online learning, online media, online tutoring, pace of change, reinvent, staying relevant, streams of content, surviving, universities, using teams, by Daniel Christian

College branding: The tipping point — from forbes.com by Roger Dooley

Excerpt:

Change is coming to this market. While there are multiple issues of increasing importance to schools, two stand out as major game-changers.

 

From DSC:
Important notes for the boards throughout higher education to consider:

Your institution can’t increase tuition by one dime next year. If you do, you will become more and more vulnerable to being disrupted. Instead, work very hard to go in the exact opposite direction. Find ways to discount tuition by 50% or more — that is, if you want to stay in business.

Sounds like the scene in Apollo 13, doesn’t it? It is. (i.e. as Tom Hanks character is trying to get back to Earth and has very little to do it with. The engineers back in the United States are called upon to “do the impossible.”)

Some possibilities:

  • Pick your business partners and begin pooling resources and forming stronger consortia. Aim to reduce operating expenses, share the production of high-quality/interactive online courses, and create new streams of income. Experimentation will be key.
  • Work with IBM, Apple, Knewton and the like to create/integrate artificial intelligence into your LMS/CMS in order to handle 80% of the questions/learning issues. (Most likely, the future of MOOCs involves this very sort of thing.)
  • Find ways to create shorter courses/modules and offer them via online-based exchanges/marketplaces.  But something’s bothering me with this one..perhaps we won’t have the time to develop high-quality, interactive, multimedia-based courses…are things moving too fast?
  • Find ways to develop and offer subscription-based streams of content


 

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Reflections on “How NOT to design a MOOC: The disaster at Coursera and how to fix it.” [Morrison]

On 02/03/2013, in Daniel S. Christian, education technology, experimentation, innovation, instructional design, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, pace of change, user experience (UX), by Daniel Christian

How NOT to design a MOOC: The disaster at Coursera and how to fix it — from onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com by Debbie Morrison

Excerpt/update:

Note: I’m also enrolled in Coursera’s E-learning and Digital Cultures, with University of Edinburgh, which is so far excellent.  What I wrote in this post is exclusive to the course Fundamentals  of Online Education: Planning and Application.  I also completed Introduction to Sociology, through Coursera last year which was quite good.

Update:  This course is  now ‘suspended’. Participants received this email February 2,  at 4:17 pm (PST).  “We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.”

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From DSC:
There will be many more disasters I’m sure. But as with learning, failure is to be expected (some would say mandatory) and learning is messy. This is especially true when technological change and innovation are moving at ever-increasing speeds.

The questions that comes to my mind after reading this are:

  • We still need to experiment — but how do we experiment with MOOCs on a smaller scale?
  • How can we keep things manageable?
  • Can bloggers help in sharing what’s working and what’s not? (Like Debbie did.)

.

 

The pace has changed -- don't come onto the track in a Model T

 

 

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The MOOC goes to high school [Duty]

On 01/29/2013, in digital learning, game-changing environment, K-12 related, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, by Daniel Christian

The MOOC goes to high school — from blogs.edweek.org by Lisa Duty (@lisaduty1 )

Excerpt:

Last summer when Reynoldsburg City Schools connected with Udacity, the highly acclaimed provider of free university-level education, it envisioned a new model for learning with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that would come to life during, not after, high school.

MOOCs are gaining some momentum in the post-secondary arena, bringing learning opportunities that are generally free or inexpensive, to the masses. Viewed by some as shaking up higher education, and seen by others as mostly hype, MOOCs have moved into a position of public attention that is certain to endure. While that dialogue continues, some high school students and teachers at eSTEM Academy are drawing on the best of MOOCs to deepen and personalize learning .

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The University’s Dilemna [by Tim Laseter, Strategy & Business]

On 01/24/2013, in business side of he, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, disruption, emerging technologies, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, innovation, leadership, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, New "Amazon.com" of Higher Education, strategy, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

StrategyBusinessWinter2012-UniversitysDilemna

 

From DSC:
With thanks going out to Ross Dawson for his recent tweet on this.

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Pressure mounts as MOOCs force higher ed to rethink [Roscorla]

On 01/24/2013, in cost of getting a degree, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, New "Amazon.com" of Higher Education, by Daniel Christian

Pressure mounts as MOOCs force higher ed to rethink — from centerdigitaled.com by Tanya Roscorla

Excerpt:

As massively open online courses continue to gain traction, they’re proving a disruptive force in higher education.

The traditional emphasis on in-person classes has brought universities to a price point that does not look sustainable, said Adrian Sannier, senior vice president of product for Pearson eCollege.

“Maybe for the first time in a really long time, higher ed is under a tremendous amount of external scrutiny,” said Sannier, the former vice president and university technology officer at Arizona State University. “There is growing awareness that the prices charged and the rate at which the prices are growing is simply unsustainable.”

 

Also relevant/see:

  • Minding the money — from insidehighered.com by Allie Grasgreen
    One might hope that the economic recession, which formally ended in 2009, is no longer inhibiting students’ educational pursuits — or, perhaps more realistically, not as much. But an annual survey of freshmen suggests precisely the opposite: more students than ever (66.6 percent) say America’s economic condition significantly affected their choice of college — so the recession’s residual effects, at least, linger on.

 

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