Barriers to adoption of online learning systems in U.S. Higher Education - May 1, 2012

 

Excerpt from the preface:

Digital technology has already changed the way colleges and universities function, but no matter how significant those changes feel today, real transformation is just beginning. Every day, a new program in online learning is announced, and on the horizon is the promise of using new adaptive learning technologies —or what we have come to call Interactive Learning Online—to educate more students than ever before at lower cost and with similar or even better learning outcomes.

This Ithaka S+R report is the first in a series that will provide leaders in higher education insight into what has been learned from online learning efforts to date and new research to help them move forward with the development and deployment of more advanced systems in the future.

Many of the lessons in this report can readily be applied locally; that is, they will help leaders make sound decisions for their own institutions. We have also identified two critical issues that if addressed at a system-level, will lead to better outcomes for all: the need for open, shared data on student learning and performance tracked through interactive online learning systems, and the need for investment in the creation of sustainable and customizable platforms for delivering interactive online learning instruction. We hope this report will help to stimulate discussion and planning among leaders on these important topics.

 

Also see:

  • Tempering the Rise of the Machines— from insidehighered.com by Steve Kolowich
    Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
    The report, called “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education,” was co-written by Lawrence S. Bacow and William G. Bowen, the former presidents of Tufts and Princeton Universities, respectively, along with several Ithaka analysts. It was bankrolled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The report contained little advocacy one way or another; rather, the authors appeared to strive for a dispassionate analysis driven by a general sense that the rise of machine learning is inevitable and universities should be prepared. Their findings were based on interviews with senior administrators at 25 public and private, four-year and two-year colleges, including “deep dive” analyses at five of them.

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.

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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.

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*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.

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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).  

 

Smart TV — from mobile88.com by Tan Ming Sin

Excerpt:

A Smart TV is simply a device that aggregates services and displays them on a screen. Satellite channels are an example of one such service. At this point of time, different manufacturers make different Smart TVs with different services.

100 million TVs will be Internet-connected by 2016 — from latimesblogs.latimes.com by Dawn Chmielewski

Excerpt:

Big-screen TVs are displayed by Panasonic at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Internet connectivity is becoming a more important feature of TVs, a new report says.
Soon, the living room TV will become as hyper-connected as the people watching it.

A new report from researcher NPD In-Stat predicts that 100 million homes in North America and Western Europe will own television sets that blend traditional programs with Internet content by 2016. These new hybrid devices, capable of displaying interactive content related to TV shows, are a bid to hold the viewer’s attention in a device-cluttered world.

“The TV people figured out nobody’s just watching TV anymore,” said Gerry Kaufhold, NPD In-Stat’s digital entertainment research director. “They’re watching TV with a tablet or a smartphone or a laptop in their hands. They’ve completely lost control.”

New Smart TVs will create new opportunities for interactivity — from catalogs.infocommiq.com

Excerpt:

Beyond voice interaction with smart TVs, what other benefits might this new generation of televisions bring to digital signage interactivity? Perhaps, these TVs will lead to easier syncing with personal smart phones and tablets offering the public interactive takeaways from the sign. Or, they might make it possible to migrate the digital signage experience from outside the home into the living room -sort of an offshoot of the TV Everywhere concept being promoted these days by pay TV operators, such as cable TV companies.

Social TV all about sharing: Viewers using laptops, iPhone to engage online during favorite shows — from KansasCity.com by Johnny Diaz, Sun Sentinel

Excerpt:

What can I do tonight: watch TV or surf Facebook? Increasingly, people are doing both simultaneously. And checking their email. And interacting with actors or news anchors.

Patent details Apple’s ideas for universal TV remote — from PCMag.com by Angela Moscaritolo

Retro Apple TV

Gravity R&D powers personalized TV recommendations for Canadian telco — from techcrunch.com by NatashaStarkell

Americans now watch more online movies than DVDs — from by Julianne Pepitone

The 2012 Apple TV is more than just a speed bump [review] — from cultofmac.com by Alex Kahney

The television set-top box will die in 2012 — from by William Thompson

Smart TV Movie Streaming To Replace Video Disc & Blu-ray — from smarthouse.com.au by David Richards
As Samsung, Panasonic and LG get set to launch a new range of TVs in Australia that will deliver a multitude of new content services that include Foxtel, Blockbuster movies and Telstra Movies, new research suggests that consumers will exceed digital video disc and Blu-ray use by downloading movies direct to their TV.

Shift to digital television seen happening by ‘16 — from the Philippine Daily Inquirer by Paolo G. Montecillo
Industry players await decision on PH standard

Excerpt:

MANILA, Philippines—The shift to digital TV broadcasting technology in the country, which would result in better services for millions of households, can still be completed before the end of the Aquino administration, a top government official said.

Once the standard to be used for digital TV in the country is chosen with finality, the shutting off of inefficient analogue signals could take just three years, Information and Communications Technology Office (ICTO) Deputy Executive Director Monchito Ibrahim said. This is shorter than the previously projected five years.

One Screen To Rule Them All — from techcrunch.com by Jay Fulcher

Also see:

From DSC:
Arguably, Sal Kahn has become the most famous, influential educator on the planet today — his videos are watched millions of times a day now.  The question — which Eric Schmidt answers in the piece — I couldn’t help but ask was, “Why didn’t this type of innovation come from someone who was working in education at the time of their innovation?”

My thanks to Dr. Kate Byerwalter and her colleagues for passing along this resource.
The tags/associated categories for this posting point out the relevant areas covered.

 

Khan Academy: The future of education?

Also see:

  • Khan Academy: The future of education?
    (CBS News) Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other Internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.

From DSC:
A relevant graphic comes to mind with what Sal is trying to achieve with analytics:

i.e. Highly-effective diagnostic tools for the educators and trainers out there!

 

 

Pentagon: You know what’s cool? A trillion-dollar fighter — from  cnet.com by D. Terdiman

From DSC:
Cool? Seriously?! Is this where we want to spend a trillion $$?  On more instruments of death?  Geez…

Instead, I wonder what the United States could contribute to the world by building multimedia-based, high-end, interactive, engaging, personalized/customized, online-based learning materials that are expensive to build, but inexpensive to access?
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Also see:

Cap and gown learning on a shoestring budget — from timeshighereducation.co.uk by Jon Marcus

Excerpt:

With novel credentials being developed and employers seeing the value of low-cost study based on open courseware, Jon Marcus asks if the bricks-and-mortar elite will end up on the wrong side of history

 

Cap and gown learning on a shoestring budget

Credit: Paul Bateman

From DSC:
This is exactly what I was getting at with The Forthcoming Walmart of Education (2008) and it points out, again, that innovation is much faster and stronger in the online world than it is in the face-to-face world. The tools being developed to engage, track, diagnose, and adapt continue to be developed. What may have once been poo-pooed continues to pick up steam. (Christensen, Johnson, & Horn are right on track.) The trend will be towards more team-based endeavors that can be made available at a greatly reduced price. They will be multimedia-based, highly-interactive, and state-of-the-art (technically and pedagogically).

Treating Higher Ed’s ‘Cost Disease’ With Supersize Online Courses — from The Chronicle by Marc Parry

Excerpt (with emphasis from DSC):

Professors should move away from designing foundational courses in statistics, biology, or other core subjects on the basis of “intuition,” she argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with her team to put out the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively built online course materials, cheaply available to the masses.

“We’re seeing failure rates in these large introductory courses that are not acceptable to anybody,” Ms. Thille says. “There has to be a better way to get more students—irrespective of where they start—to be able to successfully complete.”

Her approach brings together faculty subject experts, learning researchers, and software engineers [from DSC — a TEAM-based approach] to build open online courses grounded in the science of how people learn. The resulting systems provide immediate feedback to students and tailor content to their skills. As students work through online modules outside class, the software builds profiles on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.

From DSC:
Such learner profiles will most likely reside in the cloud and eventually standards will be established to insert new data into these profiles. The access to view/edit these profiles will be controlled by the individual learners (hopefully!).  What if learners could selectively grant corporations access to this type of profile as their new resume?

For items concerning team-based approaches, see this recording (June 2009) as well as this collection of items.

For items concerning consortia and pooling resources, see here and here.

 

 

My notes on two presentations from the Learning Without Frontiers Conference, London, 26th January 2012:

My notes for:
Sir Ken Robinson’s talk

Practice <–>Theory <–> Policy

  • People who practice don’t often have time to get the latest and greatest information re: theory
  • Theorists don’t have much time for practice
  • Policy makers don’t know much about either 🙂

Purposes of education:

  • Economic.  Not solely, but there are economic reasons for providing education. Academic vs vocation programs – Sir Ken doesn’t subscribe to this dichotomy in educational DNA. Need new sorts of education
  • Cultural. Aim to pass on cultural genes – values, beliefs
  • Personal. The most important! In the end, education is ultimately, personal. Too much impersonal testing that students aren’t engaged in.

Key point:

  • There is everything you can do – at all levels; many of us ARE the educational system – at least for the group(s) of students that we are working with. So we can make immediate changes; and collectively this can create a revolution.

Education not linear, not monolithic. Rather, it’s a complex, adaptive system – many moving parts, like a vortex…not like an undistributed canal; more like an ocean with different forces tugging this way and that. (From DSC: I agree with what Sir Ken is saying here, but I especially agree with this particular perspective — thus the name of this blog.)

Personalization is key! Education needs to be customized to the communities where it’s taking place.

Principles

  • Curriculum – towards disciplines (skills, processes, procedures) and away from subjects
  • Teaching & Learning – dynamic; flow of knowledge; not static; forms need to tap into streams; move towards collaborative activities; active learning trumps passive learning
  • Assessment – must move from judgment to description

 


My notes (part way) for:
Jim Knight – If Steve Jobs Designed Schools

What if Steve Jobs had re-invented the education system rather the computer and consumer electronics industry?

Steve Jobs was a contradictory character, combining control freak and Zen Buddhist, and technology with design. He had a revolutionary impact on computing, animation, the music industry, printing, and publishing. Last year he and Bill Gates together expressed surprise at how little impact technology had had on schools. Jobs’s wife is an educational reformer, he was a college dropout; but what would it have been like if Steve Jobs had focused on education? What would the Jobs School be like?

How do we make an insanely great school?

  • Must go really deep to create something that’s easy to use (from DSC — I call this “Easy is hard.”) Need to de-clutter the teaching & learning environment, the curriculum, the qualifications, and the people.
  • How does it make me feel when I walk through the doorway of your school?
  • Get to choose who you want to learn with and from
  • Simple, beautiful space; flexible; social; reflective, all year round
  • More seductive, intuitive, enthralling
  • Does it inspire curiosity?
  • “Don’t need instructions”
  • Not just a school – learning doesn’t stop when school bell rings
  • 24×7 thing
  • Curriculum
  • Is there a range of things to interest everyone?
  • Need more choice; selection; more control of their learning
  • All ages
  • Enterprising
  • Creative, technical, practical…but most of all, it would be fun!

More here…


 

Blackboard launches solution to improve developmental education
Fully online courses now include built-in assessment, analytics tools

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON – February 22, 2012 – Blackboard Inc. today announced the official launch of Blackboard Developmental Education™ (Blackboard DevEd), an innovative approach aimed at improving student outcomes and increasing completion rates in an area where many institutions have struggled. The solution, which was first piloted by several institutions in the fall, now includes built-in assessment and analytics tools that enable course instructors to further personalize their instruction.

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Blackboard Developmental EducationTM (Blackboard DevEd) is a comprehensive program of blended instruction and online remedial courses designed to improve student achievement levels cost-effectively.

Early reflections from DSC:

  • First of all, my congratulations go out to Blackboard for innovating! Nice work.
  • This is another example of the innovation occurring in the online/digital learning world — yet more tools and diagnostic powers are being made available to online-based teaching and learning environments
  • This should be another shot across the bow of how institutions of higher education are training our future teachers — student teachers NEED to know how to teach online!!!
  • Too early to tell how such endeavors will affect career paths (for teachers, administrators, counselors, nurses, and such)

 

Also see:

Pearson and Knewton charge ahead with adaptive courses — from The Journal by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

“Personalized learning is a linchpin for the overall future of education,” said Greg Tobin of Pearson. “Incorporating Knewton’s technology into our MyLab/Mastering programs is leading the industry’s charge toward this new era of customized and personalized education.”

“Students generate a tremendous amount of high-stakes data that Knewton can analyze to ensure they learn in the most effective and efficient way for each. It is a new frontier in education,” added Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of Knewton.

This time its personal — from The Journal by Jennifer Demski

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Leading Through Technology
Thomas Greaves, CEO of The Greaves Group, an educational consulting firm, takes Cator’s point one step further and says that it’s doubtful personalized learning could happen–or at least, happen well–without the right technological tools in place.

“The student, using technology, is better able to personalize their learning than a teacher is,” he says. “Teachers don’t have time to sit down and study each student, each day, in each course to figure out what they’re going to do differently with them. Teacher-driven personalization ends up being very weak, with very few factors, whereas if the students are leading their personalization via technology, then their instruction can be personalized based on a hundred variables instead of one or two.”

Greaves also seems to suggest that tech-driven personalized learning will, by its very nature, enable individualized learning and that holy grail of teaching, differentiated instruction, in which a teacher adapts classroom instruction to the various needs and skill levels of each student. Historically, differentiated instruction, as a practice, has been incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to implement in a teacher-centered learning environment that is driven by a print-based curriculum. Personalized learning may finally allow individualization and differentiation to actually happen in the classroom.

Ideally, tech-driven personalization combines the best of individualized learning–self-paced, diagnostic-driven–with the ability to adapt to a student’s specific learning styles, interests, and backgrounds. Personalization could be as simple as students compensating for any gaps in their pre-existing knowledge by allowing them to unobtrusively Google unknown terms during group instruction rather than raising their hand, or as sophisticated as students entering information about themselves into a piece of software that selects digital content based on the their interests and skill levels.

From DSC:
And with shrinking budgets, class sizes could easily be rising — making it even more difficult for teachers to try and implement customized/personalized learning without some type of assistance.

We may not be there yet…but we’ll get there.  Using a historical analogy:

  • Let’s go back to the early 80’s when the personal computer was just starting to be used much and the DEC’s of the world didn’t think much of them.  But over time, as Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn pointed out in Disrupting Class, these new inventions picked up features and power, and eventually, they crushed DEC. (Seems to me I heard Kodak was going bankrupt too…)

 

 


 

 

The Promise and Potential of Personalized Digital Learning -- from Tom Vander Ark on November 4, 2011

Also see:


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A comprehensive look at the promise and potential of online learning
In our digital age, students have dramatically new learning needs and must be prepared for the idea economy of the future. In Getting Smart, well-known global education expert Tom Vander Ark examines the facets of educational innovation in the United States and abroad. Vander Ark makes a convincing case for a blend of online and onsite learning, shares inspiring stories of schools and programs that effectively offer “personal digital learning” opportunities, and discusses what we need to do to remake our schools into “smart schools.”

— Examines the innovation-driven world, discusses how to combine online and onsite learning, and reviews “smart tools” for learning
— Investigates the lives of learning professionals, outlines the new employment bargain, examines online universities and “smart schools”
— Makes the case for smart capital, advocates for policies that create better learning, studies smart cultures

Addendum on 11/29/11:

© 2024 | Daniel Christian