From DSC:
Whereas:

  • The Walmart of Education continues and higher ed finds itself in a game-changing environment
  • The pace of change continues to accelerate
  • Disruptive innovations continue to poke at the higher education bubble
  • There is danger in the status quo
  • We all need to constantly reinvent ourselves and our organizations in order to remain relevant…

…institutions of higher education would be wise to significantly increase the priority of experimentation on their campuses during 2013.  This might take the form of creating smaller, more nimble organizations within their overall universities or colleges, or it might be experimenting with new business models, or it might be identifying/experimenting with promising educational technologies or new pedagogies, etc.  I will have several blog postings re: experimentation — and potential things to try out — during 2013; so stay tuned.

Whether we are staff, faculty, or administration, change is coming our way in 2013.  So starting today, get involved with further innovations and experiments on your campus — don’t be a roadblock or you will likely find your institution eventually becoming irrelevant. As Steve Jobs did/believed, cannibalize your own organization before someone else does.

 

The pace has changed significantly and quickly

 

From the January/February 2013 issue of The American Interest:

 

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Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

The most important part of the college bubble story—the one we will soon be hearing much more about—concerns the impending financial collapse of numerous private colleges and universities and the likely shrinkage of many public ones. And when that bubble bursts, it will end a system of higher education that, for all of its history, has been steeped in a culture of exclusivity*. Then we’ll see the birth of something entirely new as we accept one central and unavoidable fact: The college classroom is about to go virtual.

Because recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information. The internet destroyed the livelihoods of traditional stock brokers and bonds salesmen by throwing open to everyone access to the proprietary information they used to sell. The same technology enabled bankers and financiers to develop new products and methods, but, as it turned out, the experience necessary to manage it all did not keep up. Prior to the Wall Street meltdown, it seemed absurd to think that storied financial institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers could disappear seemingly overnight. Until it happened, almost no one believed such a thing was possible. Well, get ready to see the same thing happen to a university near you, and not for entirely dissimilar reasons.

The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a new era of creative destruction produces a merciless shakeout of those institutions that adapt and prosper from those that stall and die.

But what happens when a limited supply of a sought-after commodity suddenly becomes unlimited? Prices fall. Yet here, on the cusp of a new era of online education, that is a financial reality that few American universities are prepared to face.

Anyone who can access the internet—at a public library, for instance—no matter how poor or disadvantaged or isolated or uneducated he or she may be, can access the teachings of some of the greatest scholars of our time through open course portals. Technology is a great equalizer.

Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise. Few who will be affected by the changes ahead are aware of what’s coming. Severe financial contraction in the higher-ed industry is on the way, and for many this will spell hard times both financially and personally. But if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate.

 

 


* The old way:

Colleges rise as they reject — from online.wsj.com
Schools invite more applications, then use denials to boost coveted rankings


 

 

Daniel S. Christian - Think Virtual -- April 2012

 

Also relevant/see:

From DSC:
Some reflections on New platform lets professors set prices for their online courses — from InsideHigherEd.com by Jeffrey R. Young

Excerpt:

Professors typically don’t worry about what price point a course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform, Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students’ e-mails.

The new service is run by StraighterLine, a company that offers online, self-paced introductory courses. Unlike massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, StraighterLine’s courses aren’t free. But tuition is lower than what traditional colleges typically charge—the company calls its pricing “ultra-affordable.” A handful of colleges accept StraighterLine courses for transfer credit.
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StraighterLine-ProfsDirectlyToStudents-12-12-12

 

 

From DSC:
The power of online-based marketplaces. We’ve seen it in other industries.  Are we now going to see more of this within higher education as the unbundling of higher education seems to be a possibility?  Will there be an increased importance of professors’ individual brands? Could be.

The Power of Online Exchanges

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DanielChristian-The-unbundling-of-higher-education

 

From DSC:
Congrats Burck & Co. on your continued innovative thinking and business models! Way to help keep a college education accessible to many!

 

Citing IT skills shortage, IBM wants to expand presence at universities — from wiredacademic.com

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

“We want to be the scale up partner of choice for these universities,” said Jim Sporher, head of IBM’s university programs. “We want to make sure they have access to technology and understand our strategy.”  He also sees massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a mega-trend and will be considering ways for IBM to be part of the MOOC trend in the future, particularly as many of the MOOC providers such as Udacity and Coursera offer classes in computer science.

As a big blue-chip progenitor of the tech industry, IBM is worth listening to in many regards. For one, corporate computing trends often filter down into the education space. The corporate world often has the money to purchase and deploy game-changing technologies. IBM sees that it also works the other way too, where computing at the university level creates new businesses and ideas that move up into the corporate realm.

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From DSC:
I wonder…will the corporations develop their own MOOCs?  Their own digital “playlists” and associated exams? (i.e. that someone needs to go through and pass in order to work for them…show me what you can do.)  Hmmm…

Also see:

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McKinsey and Company -- Education to Employment -- An executive summary

 

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Also see:

 

Excerpt from edSurge’s 12-4-12 newsletter:

SO HOW WAS THAT MOOC FOR YA? First come the MOOCs, then come the reviews. First out of the box: Founded just six months ago, Knollop is a Yelp-like review and discovery site for MOOCs. It boasts courses from nine MOOCs: including Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard, as well as favorites like edX, Udacity, and Coursera.

But Knollop has competition. A mere seven weeks ago, serial entrepreneur Jesse Spaulding (LunchTree, FourTonight) launched a rival site called CourseTalk. While CourseTalk features many of the same features as Knollop, it lists just 276 courses to Knollop’s 2,835.

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Virtual U. -- College of future could be come one, come all

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From DSC:
I don’t think that what we know today as “MOOCs” are anywhere’s nearly fully-baked and ready for prime time.  They will be refined, altered , and new systems/software will be further developed for them.   But the idea of reducing costs, increasing access, and experimenting sounds good to me!  As illustrated above, the idea of “Rock Star Professor” or “Super Professor” is gaining traction.   Also, note the team-based approach here.

 

 

 

Current/Future State of Higher Education — from Educause Live by George Siemens, Andy Caulkins, Malcolm Brown

Change drivers

  • Globalization
  • Commercial/entrepreneurial activity
  • Funding cuts
  • Online learning
  • Unbundling of education systems
  • Technology advancement (mobiles)
  • Employment-oriented education
  • Big data and analytics

Net Pedagogies: New Models for Teaching & Learning

  • New pedagogies emerging from:
    • Concerns about how well institutions are meeting their mission, on behalf of students they serve
    • Pressures resulting from feeling constrained within the “Iron Triangle” of costs, access, and quality
    • New technologies
  • How to balance personalization with competency-based pathways
  • How to build community among students who are geographically distant and proceeding at different rates (a different cohort dynamic taking place here)
  • Personalized learning divisions/groups
  • Innovation labs <– From DSC: This lines up nicely with my posting here

Entrepreneurship

  • Deborah Quazzo, GSV Advisors
  • Velocity of change
  • e-books up
  • 200K education apps
  • 98% of students own some sort of device
  • Coursera — 33 partners, 1.7 million students
  • 13% of students now at for-profits
  • The Bear Story
    • Readiness — freshmen often needing remediation
    • Completion rates
    • Cost
    • Career
  • Venture capital and startups increasing
  • What’s driving investment
    • Funding issues
    • Accountability
    • Technology
    • Consumer choice
  • Waves of HE innovation
  • “Traditional institutions are not standing still”
  • Higher ed arms race — online program delivery (tuition-based) / MOOC (free)
  • Growth in MOOC students — .51 in Fall 2011, 2.79 in Fall 2012; 447% growth rate
  • Need to increase learning outcomes, access, capacity, and decrease costs

Big Data & Analytics

  • Erik Duval, Simon Buckingham Shum, Caroline Haythornthwaite
  • State of learning analytics
    • Open analytics
    • Standards
    • Methods and metrics
    • Impact on learner success
    • Early risk detection
    • Common language
    • Institutional use of analytics
    • Planning and deployment of LA
    • Move from concept to application
  • Participation wall seems to be occurring 30-40% of the time into the course
  • 762 tweets, 305 links, 172 RTs, 244 Unique Twitter accounts

Leadership in Education

  • James Hilton
    • Characterizing change
    • Not a linear system often times; instead, an emergent change; not always orderly and linear
    • Unknown end point
    • Adjust as you go
    • Adjust fundamental conditions
      • 2 fundamental forces in HE
      • Commoditization
      • Unbundling
    • “Find your North Star”
  • George Mehaffy
    • Challenge and change article
    • Massive change and great uncertainty
    • Technology changes everything
    • Traditional institutions loss of control
    • Students abilities to interact and learn without mediating
    • “Outsiders” becoming players
    • Venture capital
    • Models of college changing
    • Course models
    • Data analytics
    • Cost discrepancies
    • Measuring success
    • Loss of credentialing monopoly
    • Leadership vacuum
    • Change is rapid, profound, emergent
    • We need to rethink HE leadership model
    • We need to rethink HE in many fundamental dimensions
    • Now is the time for bold, imaginative, entrepreneurial leadership

Distributed Research

  • Traditional methods of sharing research, established centuries ago
  • Need to re-imagine those methods and generate higher, faster, better outcomes from research
  • Challenges: pace, dissemination, incentive to collaborate
  • Opportunities: immediacy, openness, new/richer tools and indicators, unprecedented progress

Still some challenges in offering a MOOC-based course:

  • Skillset development
  • Getting participants orientated to the course
  • Technological glitches

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Other resources/links:


 

Taking the next step in online education with credit equivalency — from forbes.com by Daphne Koller & Andrew Ng

Excerpt:

At MOOCs like Coursera, offering web-based courses is the first step in increasing access to education for millions of people around the world.  But for many students, much of the value of taking a course is lost if that course is not helpful in allowing them to obtain a degree.  To help address this limitation, we recently announced a collaboration with American Council on Education (ACE) to begin a credit-equivalence evaluation of some courses offered on Coursera — which means that in the future, students will potentially have the opportunity to receive college transfer credit at institutions choosing to accept the ACE recommendations.  This move is well in line with the current trend to provide students with credit for prior learning (including on-the-job training) and for competency, a trend whose aim is to increase completion rate and reduce time to completion.

From DSC:
I wonder how MOOCs focused on language will go…?  It could be great to practice a language from folks all around the world — or will it be chaotic?  Different accents. Real-world speaking and listening. Real world conflict, perhaps, as well.  But it seems like there could be some effective learning going on — at least “on paper”.   I wonder, too, if 1/2 of the time folks could speak one language — and would be the students during that part of the class — while the other 1/2 of the time they speak another language — and would be the “teachers.”

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http://spanishmooc.com/

 

 

And for yet another item on innovation within higher ed! Whew!

  • Excelsior College and three California Community Colleges offer credit for professor-less MOOC — from online colleges.com by Alex Wukman
    Excerpt:
    Excelsior College has partnered with San Diego City College, San Diego Miramar College, and Santa Rosa Junior College to offer credit for a professor-less, or mechanical, massive open online course (MOOC). The course, an introduction to statistics class, is being developed by the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the online learning community OpenStudy.

College crackup and the online future — from bloomberg.com by Mark C. Taylor

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College Crackup

Illustration by Keith Shore

Excerpt:

In the coming decade, emerging technologies will thoroughly transform higher education. Although distance learning and computer-assisted education have been around since the 1960s, financial pressures are forcing institutions to develop aggressive online programs.

These practical considerations shouldn’t overshadow one of the most promising innovations that online education will bring: The very structure of knowledge will change.

As students mix and match courses online, pressure will increase for professors to develop classes that integrate different approaches and disciplines.

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asdfsadf

 

 

Also see:

 

From DSC:
Creating “Innovation Labs” within each institution of higher education sounds like a good idea to me…we can experiment with things at smaller scales and see what works and what doesn’t.

Also see:
Take a lesson from Apple: A strategy to keep customers in your ecosystem — from forbes.com by Alonzo Canada

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

1.     Set focused, strategic targets.
2.     Create a portfolio of experiments. Like Apple or Mercedes Benz, once you have focused, strategic targets set, create a series of experiments.  A general rule of thumb is the 7-2-1 rule:  one experiment should be big and relatively safe.  Two experiments should be slightly more risky and moderately sized.  Then seven experiments should be highly risky and low cost. These experiments can be scaled accordingly across teams, business units, and the entire company. 3M is one of the first companies to mandate that its employees spend 20% of their time thinking up blue sky ideas beyond its current lines of business and this is how Post-It Notes were born.  Art Fry, an engineer at 3M wanted to find a better way to manage notes in his hymnal on Sundays at church.
3.    Leverage learnings to inform new experiments.

 

 

 

Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States

Excerpt:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.

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From DSC:
Another steps towards:

 

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com

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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young

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Welcome to Star Scholar U 2

Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.

 

Excerpt:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.

Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.

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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Excerpt:

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Also see:

 

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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan

Excerpt:

The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.

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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo

Excerpt:

Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.

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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective

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How should teaching change in the age of Siri?– from MindShift

Excerpt:

 Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.

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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.

But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.

 

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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz

 

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Excerpt:

Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.

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Which brings me to this graphic:

 

asdfsadf

 

Also see:

 

Broadband, broadcast lines erode as TV shifts to a mobile, multiscreen media landscape — from by Joseph O’Halloran back from 2/11/2012

Excerpt:

[Q2 2012] research from online video firm Ooyala has confirmed the trend that viewers around the world are embracing mobile, multiscreen experiences for both long-form and short-form content.

The Ooyala Global Video Index Report for the second quarter of 2012 reveals that online video uptake may be rising across the world but that engagement patterns vary by country and region, with a number of global video hot spots. For example, in the UK the survey revealed that 15% of the total time spent watching online video occurs on mobile phones and tablets, while 11% of the total time spent watching online video in China occurs on tablets and smart phones.

From DSC:
Though this report summarizes data from Q2 2012, it shows the developing trends on some of the ways that people are using their devices (throughout the globe).  I will continue to watch this space  for what happens with learning-based applications; especially those apps using 2 screens.
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Also see:
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