From DSC:
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Could we use social media/tools in order to get input from all of the constituencies of a
college or university? Such input could be used to create innovative ideas,
establish buy-in, and build future strategic direction/vision.
What would that look like? Work like?
I wasn’t sure where to put the workplace here…but certainly that is also a key piece of our future.
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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:
Also see:
Excerpt:
Forecast 3.0, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem, highlights five disruptions that will reshape learning over the next decade. New education innovations, organizations, resources, and relationships will proliferate, giving us all the opportunity to put the pieces – some long-established and some new – together in new sequences to create a diverse and evolving learning ecosystem. Education recombination promises to bolster the learning ecosystem’s resilience by helping it withstand threats and make use of possibilities.
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From DSC:
I originally saw this at GettingSmart.com — my thanks to the Getting Smart Staff for carrying a blog posting on this one — they nicely summarize the 5 disruptive forces therein:
From DSC:
“The Walmart of Education [Christian, 2008]” appears to be materializing in front of our eyes.
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Three trends in higher education that defy the status quo — from onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com by Debbie Morrison
Excerpt:
Leading educators shared their insights and innovative programs – three dominant themes emerged, 1) competency based learning, 2) personalized student learning and 3) the changing role of the instructor. Each presenter shared extensive research in an area of his or her expertise and details of an innovative educational program; programs that provide a non-traditional education that defy the status quo. The summary of the trends follow, with a ‘takeaway’ for each designed to provide readers with practical ideas for application to their own area of study or work.
Classroom of 2020: The future is very different than you think — from theglobeandmail.com by Erin Millar
Excerpt:
This is the brave new world of higher education, where students teach professors, technology enables digital note-passing and online courses enroll thousands of students. The pupil-tutor relationship has been turned on its head. A perfect storm — extreme financial constraints, a technological revolution, groundbreaking pedagogical research, and increased expectations from students facing weak job prospects — is forcing universities to reimagine their purpose. And all the while, a university education has never been more in demand from so many parts of the world.
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The future of higher education: White paper — from IBM and the American Council on Education (ACE; specifically, the ACE Fellows Program)
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
The role of higher education is to give students the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in a globally competitive world. Education isn’t just about teaching students to take tests well, but rather to create lifelong learners who can contribute to a thriving society and competitive economy.
From DSC:
We will have a very hard time creating lifelong learners if a large swath of people dislike learning in the first place. When 20-30%+ of our youth are not even graduating from high school, I can’t help but recall a saying from one of my first coaches:
Always change a losing game. Never change a winning game.
I think that our biggest gift to students is not what they were able to get on an ACT or SAT test — though I realize how important that can be in getting into College ABC or University of XYZ (and thus hopefully helping them get started on a solid footing/career). Rather, on a grander scale, our biggest gift to our students is that they would enjoy learning; that we could help students identify their God-given passion(s), talents, gifts, abilities — and then go develop them and use them to serve others. Everyone will benefit if they do so; and the students will know joy and purpose in their lives. These are the types of WIN-WIN situations that square up with the thinking of many economists — “Do what you do best and everyone benefits.”
College is dead. Long live college! — from nation.time.com by Amanda Ripley
Excerpt:
Exemplary week paves the way for higher education online — from edcetera.rafter.com by Kirsten Winkler
Excerpt:
This week was quite telling for the changes the higher education sector is currently going through. And the direction the industry is heading towards seems obvious: online. This week, up-and-coming education startups raised money and introduced new products whereas leaders in the space had to announce cuts.
From DSC:
This reminds me of how University of Massachusetts President Emeritus Jack Wilson described online learning at last week’s Sloan-C Conference:
“Online learning is a relentless force that will not be denied. The trends are so relentless in fact, that they take students, faculty, and administrations along with them.”
IBM’s Watson expands commercial applications, aims to go mobile — from singularityhub.com by Jason Dorrier
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From DSC:
This relates to what I was trying to get at with the posting on mobile learning. I would add the word “Education” to the list of industries that the technologies encapsulated in Watson will impact in the future. Combine this with the convergence that’s enabling/building the Learning from the Living [Class] Room environment, and you have one heck of an individualized, data-driven, learning ecosystem that’s available 24 x 7 x 365 — throughout your lifetime!!!
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Also relevant here are some visions/graphics I created from 2012 and from 2008:
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![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg "The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian---July-2012")
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The need for more experimentation, innovation within higher education.
By Daniel Christian for the CHFE12 MOOC
Last week, I attended the 18th Annual Sloan Consortium on Online Learning in Orlando, FL (USA). After hearing Sebastian Thrun’s excellent keynote address, I was very troubled by a couple of questions that kept arising in my mind (which I’ll get to in a minute). It turns out that Sebastian had heard Sal Kahn at a TED talk a while back, where he learned of the impact that Sal was having and the pedagogy Sal was using.
Now bear in mind that Sal was not in education. He was working in the financial services industry, putting together training-related items for his nephews/family members.
Then bear in mind that Sal Kahn has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on K-12 of any individual in recent decades – and even on institutions of higher education (in terms of professors investigating or starting to use the flipped/inverted classroom model).
Then bear in mind that Sebastian Thrun didn’t run his idea by anyone in Stanford’s administration! His email out to some folks started going viral, and within days the enrollment numbers were already in the thousands. (And at that point he got asked to drop by his Admin’s offices! 🙂 I wonder what would have happened if Sebastian would have first asked Stanford’s leadership for permission…? It may never have occurred.)
Sebastian’s and Peter Norvig’s AI course went onto graduate 23,000 people (with an initial enrollment around 160,000). Then, there’s the related Coursera organization/endeavor — again, a business that needed to be created outside of the traditional institutions of higher education.
So, recapping things:
So, the following two questions arose in my mind last week:
Any answer to these questions is troubling to me. But one plausible explanation involves leadership. Many of our leaders in higher education did not grow up with the Internet and with LANs, WANs, HTTP protocols, etc. They didn’t grow up using the tools that today’s youth are using.
As such, they don’t always appreciate the power and potential of technology. I don’t mean to point fingers and play a blame game here. That’s not the point. The point is, leaders are people with finite gifts and abilities. Like all of us, they have been shaped by their experiences and they, too, have their histories. They were moved into their positions of responsibility due to the needs of of the institutions at certain points in time. But the needs of those institutions have since changed.
The problem is, those in key leadership positions will either need to:
Blockbuster comes to mind as an organization that was once dominant, but disregarded the disruptive impact of technology and eventually had to declare bankruptcy. One can think of other examples from other industries as well (can’t we Kodak? Borders?).
Such reflections were reinforced when I read Selingo’s (2012) article from earlier today where he wrote, “It’s clear to me that the needed reforms for student financial-aid are unfortunately not going to come from higher education. Many financial-aid officials remain opposed to the model letter, as well as many other regulations.”
Like Selingo, I don’t see change coming from within the current system. I hope that I’m sorely mistaken here, but from the pulse checking I’ve been doing, the conversation seems to be continuing to move away from traditional institutions of higher education (example here and another example here). I hope that we can pick up the pace of experimentation within our organizations to find ways to lower the costs while still providing effective means of educating people.
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Selingo, J. (2012, October 15). In a Broken Student Aid System, Colleges Are Part of the Problem. In The Quick and the Ed. Retrieved from http://www.quickanded.com/2012/10/in-a-broken-student-aid-system-colleges-are-part-of-the-problem.html
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Addendum/also see:
Excerpt:
In countries around the world, the transition to knowledge and service economies occurring rapidly. Competitive countries are no longer only those that have an abundance of natural resources, but also those with a highly educated populace. Higher education is increasingly recognized as a vehicle for economic development [1].
University leaders are struggling to make sense of how internationalization, the current economic conditions, and new technologies will impact their systems. Educators are uncertain of the impact of open educational resources, alternative accreditation models, de-professionalization of academic positions, and increased grant competitiveness. What is role of the academy in increasing national economic competitiveness while preserving the “vital combat for lucidity” [2] that defines an open democratic society?
From DSC:
Sending a special thanks out to Dr. Kate Byerwalter,
Professor at Grand Rapids Community College for this resource!
Also see:
