The speakers’ programs were featured in Inside Higher Education a couple of weeks ago.

College for America @SNHU: Walking the talk, Yvonne Simon, Southern New Hampshire University
NAU: Personalized Learning, Fred Hurst, Northern Arizona University

These presentations kind of blew my mind, frankly.

I remember when Trinity started the brainstorming sessions a year ago about how to revise the common curriculum.  One of my first questions was “What is off the table?”  While the committee was advocating for open-ended brainstorming, I wanted to get them to think about the limitations on the revisions they could make within a semester, course-credit, accreditation-driven system.  My intention was to broaden their thinking to include institutional structures as well as course content. In the end, the proposal generated from a year of discussions is largely still a course-based checklist.

These two programs have thrown the semester system out the window.  Northern Arizona has devised a subscription system where students pay $2,500 every 6 months for access to the content.  They can move as quickly or as slowly as they need to, repeat modules they don’t master, choose from multiple modalities (e.g. lecture, reading, simulation, game) to complete learning modules, and test-out of areas where they have prior knowledge.  Right now, they are focusing on just a couple of programs, but one of them is liberal arts.  Within three years, they want to offer Masters degrees; Within 5, they expect to enroll 8,000 students.

My favorite part of the Southern New Hampshire University presentation is the binary rubric they will use to assess mastery.  The options are “yes” and “not yet”.  Right on!

So far, competency-based approaches seem to be the purview of online and community colleges.  I’ll have to take a closer look at the Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile in order to get a better handle on them, but my initial impression is that Trinity faculty would find them too “basic”.  The IHE article highlights one of the qualification areas.

Related articles

• Brainstorming in preparation for week two of CFHE12 (claudiascholz.wordpress.com)

Mindmap for Week two of CFHE12 – Click for interactive view, or see topics below

I spent some time this weekend updating my mindmap for the open online course on the “Current/Future State of Higher Education”. Here are some of the items I came up with for the second week’s topic, “Net pedagogies: New models of teaching and learning”.

2 Net pedagogies (Oct 15-21) New models of teaching and learning

2.1 Traditional Higher Ed
2.1.1 large lecture model
2.1.1.1 instructor role
2.1.1.1.1 sage on the stage
2.1.1.1.2 content delivery
2.1.1.1.3 evaluator (tester) of learning
2.1.1.2 student role
2.1.1.2.1 recipient of content
2.1.1.2.2 note-taker, memorizer
2.1.2 seminar model
2.1.2.1 instructor role
2.1.2.1.1 guide on the side
2.1.2.1.2 coach
2.1.2.1.3 coordinator
2.1.2.2 student role
2.1.2.2.1 participant
2.1.2.2.2 discussion leader
2.1.2.2.3 constructor of knowledge

2.2 Online Only
2.2.1 Student experience
2.2.1.1 flexibility
2.2.1.1.1 asynchronous
2.2.1.1.2 self-paced?
2.2.1.2 convenience
2.2.1.2.1 access anywhere
2.2.1.2.2 less commute time
2.2.1.2.3 amenable to schedules of part-time students
2.2.1.2.3.1 lifelong learners
2.2.1.2.3.2 working students
2.2.1.2.3.3 non-traditional students
2.2.1.2.3.4 low SES students
2.2.1.3 disadvantages
2.2.1.3.1 difficult to interact with peers
2.2.1.3.2 digital divide
2.2.1.3.2.1 internet access and speed
2.2.1.3.2.2 digital literacy of student
2.2.2 Instructor experience
2.2.2.1 not all are “digital natives”
2.2.2.2 “always on”
2.2.3 institutional aspects
2.2.3.1 reputation considerations
2.2.3.2 Human Resources
2.2.3.2.1 faculty development / training
2.2.3.2.2 instructional design
2.2.3.2.3 tech support
2.2.4 back-end / IT aspects
2.2.4.1 server and other infrastructure
2.2.4.1.1 on-site
2.2.4.1.2 contract/outsource to “cloud”
2.2.4.2 Learning/Course management system
2.2.4.3 Greater potential for assessment
2.2.4.3.1 immediate feedback
2.2.4.3.2 granular usage data
2.2.4.3.2.1 comparison across learners
2.2.4.3.2.2 comparison over time

2.3 Blended / Hybrid
2.3.1 flipped classroom
2.3.1.1 lecture at home
2.3.1.1.1 video production
2.3.1.1.1.1 length = short
2.3.1.1.1.2 engaging
2.3.1.1.1.3 integrated with assessment e.g. quizzes, exercises
2.3.1.1.2 What about reading?
2.3.1.2 make best use of face-to-face time
2.3.1.2.1 problem-solving
2.3.1.2.2 hands-on
2.3.1.2.3 skill-building
2.3.2 Developing Content
2.3.2.1 interactive homework
2.3.2.1.1 instant feedback
2.3.2.1.2 self-pacing
2.3.2.2 interactive textbooks
2.3.2.2.1 multiple paths through the material
2.3.2.2.2 search
2.3.2.2.3 hyperlinked definitions (interactive glossary)
2.3.2.2.4 links to external resources
2.3.2.2.4.1 wikipedia
2.3.2.2.4.2 primary literature

2.4 Intellectual Property issues
2.4.1 Proprietary
2.4.1.1 Subscriptions/licenses
2.4.1.2 Product as Servcie model
2.4.2 Open
2.4.2.1 OER- Open Ed. Resources
2.4.2.2 OA- Open Access publishing
2.4.2.3 FOSS- Open Source Software

Satirists at The Onion take on the ubiquitous Ted Talks.

In Time Magazine, online education entrepreneur Salman Khan writes:

Each school day, millions of students move in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 humans in the room, there is little actual interaction. This model of education is so commonplace that we have accepted it as a given. For centuries, it has been the most economical way to “educate” a large number of students. Today, however, we know about the limitations of the class lecture, so why does it remain the most common format?

Khan advocates for what has come to be known as the “flipped classroom”.  Instructors, he says, should remove the lecture to the online realm and split it into short chunks for students to watch on their own.  This allows instructors to dedicate classroom time to hands-on activities and other parts of education that require a human touch.  He highlights the example of “the humanities seminar, where any ‘information delivery’ happens outside the classroom through student reading, allowing class time to be entirely devoted to teacher-moderated discussion.”

I have to wonder about the equation of watching videos at home and reading to prepare for a class.  Reading, for me, is a much more active process than watching a video.  As a learner, when I read, I can decide which sections to scan/skim and which sections to spend extra time on.  I can annotate and highlight the text (even online texts) to mark sections I’ve chosen as important.  Even with modern tools that allow transcript-navigation and speeding-up or slowing down of playback, it’s much more difficult to pick and choose video content.  You never know if the next couple of minutes will contain the important stuff.

I also question Khan’s dismissal of lectures as educational tools.  The best face-to-face lectures are interactive.  They present a problem or assumption and, by asking questions and presenting evidence, build an argument or a solution.  A good lecture is not delivered, it unfolds.  (At least this is how I handled lectures when I was still teaching.  Perhaps this approach is more common in sociology.)  A well-crafted lecture DOES help learning.  It also models communication and rhetoric skills.  I’m not saying that that a lecture is the only way to deliver content.  I do think that a course made up entirely of lectures would be ineffective.

Videos have their uses, but the fetishizing of video is a problem for education, especially online education, today.  Shelley Wright shares why she has done away with her flipped classroom:  “If you think it’s only about the videos, then you have a really shallow definition of what this could be. The real power is when students take responsibility for their own learning.”

MOOCs in the model of Coursera, Udacity and edX have placed a great deal of emphasis on video lectures as a content delivery method.  People are drawn to MOOCs largely because they are taught by well-known professors at elite institutions.  The emphasis on the talking-head video content is part of this cult-of-personality approach to education.  The MOOC lectures I’ve viewed are delivered in a very old-fashioned recitation style.  And, I can’t help but notice that the most talked-about MOOCs are taught by men.

To be sure, video presents a powerful tool for education.  RSA has produced extraordinary animations that illuminate the content of important lectures.  The high production values of Big Think videos make even hour-long lectures engaging.  Youtube goddess Vi Hart is a master of the unfolding style of content delivery, unraveling mathematical mysteries with fast-narration and lots of manipulatives.  Even the ubiquitous TED talks offer up bite-size lectures on big ideas enhanced by images, metaphors and props.  What all of these videos have in common is the high level of rehearsal and digital production.  They make use of both technology and theater to make the videos more effective in engaging the viewers’ senses and imagination.

While MOOC videos have some nice technology wrapped around them, such as in-video quizzes on Coursera, transcript-navigation in edX and Khan Academy and the ability to speed up or slow down the videos, the production value of the videos themselves is not particularly high.  Some videos, like a few of the early Khan Academy attempts, take an purposefully unrehearsed approach, which arguably gives them an air of accessibility, as if they were narrated by a tutor sitting next to you.  Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig adopted this narrated pencast style in their Artificial Intelligence MOOC, which started the great MOOC wave of 2012.  The MOOCs that have followed (I’ve signed up for and viewed videos in half a dozen of them) are  taking an old-wine in new-bottles approach to video, recording a talking-head, or WORSE, a narrated powerpoint.  For the most part, these recordings embody the worst elements of the lecture, with the exception that they are mercifully short.

Over the last two weeks, I have been exploring online courses to learn computer programming.  This is one of my goals for the next year.  Since the Mechanical MOOC hasn’t started yet, I signed myself up for MITx 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming.  I’ve also watched the first few videos of the Coursera MOOC “An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python” offered by Rice University professors.

The MITx class videos have three elements:

- a talking head
- scribbling on powerpoint slides
- live coding in IDLE, a programming environment for Python

The talking head stuff is ok.  Dr. Grimson is cool and has a friendly face.  I think these enhance the experience, though the production value is no higher than the average vlog.

The scribbling is not very helpful, though it is an improvement over static powerpoint.  There have been occasional errors on the slides and instead of replacing the video, they have added errata below the video box, along with a copy of the slides, etc.  Not bad, not great.

The resolution of the live coding sessions is so low that you really can’t read the text.  Even worse, most of the action takes place at the bottom of the screen and is obscured by the closed captioning, which you can’t turn off, apparently.  This makes it pretty difficult to follow along.  They’ve added links to the source code so that you can view these in IDLE, but it makes the whole thing more like a podcast than video instruction.

The intro video to the class did include some production value.  They cut to a couple of video clips of a ball falling and a light being turned on (illustrations of things Dr. Grimson was talking about).  I thought these were interesting enhancements, like an apt metaphor in a good book, but that technique has not been employed at all in the subsequent lectures.

The introductory video to Rice’s Coursera MOOC offers a little more promise.  It starts with a video of the instructional team playing rock-paper-scissors.  It shows some personality and playfulness.  The video then cuts to a talking head, which is similar to the MITx course, but seems to have better image quality.  Live-coding sessions that follow are crisp and legible.  They then show an asteroid game that students will be building as their final project.  I am not interested in game design, but I think a hint at a tangible final product would be very motivating for most students.  My first impression is that the Rice videos strike a better balance between production value and accessibility to the viewer.

Except for the Rock-paper-scissors game, the Rice videos are of the talking-head or narration variety.  I think this is a rather limiting take on teaching.  It’s the sage on the (virtual) stage model.  My colleague Jenny Browne has enrolled herself in the Coursera Modern Poetry class taught by UPenn’s Al Filreis.  She reports that the course videos in that class have taken a very different approach.

When I clicked on the first video, I expected to see a talking head talking about a poem.  Instead, the “lectures”–and there is one for every poem on the syllabus–are small 10-20 minute close-readings conducted by Filreis and the course T.A.s.  These T.A. are like the smart kids in the room, and one could argue that passively watching them have a rigorous and thoughtful discussion is preferable to participating in a lame discussion inside a “real” classroom.  These bite-sized models of learning in action strike me as an element of online education that could be adapted to a PUI in a number of interesting ways.

By recording conversations about poems, Filreis highlights the humanities-seminar approach to learning.  In this approach, learning is a group process; Understanding is arrived at through an exchange of views.  Though the viewer can’t participate in this particular conversation, it serves to model this type of learning and demystifies humanities scholarship in a valuable way.

A few Google Hangouts I have viewed have a similar vibe.  Hangouts are limited to ten participants, but Hangouts on Air can be watched live by thousands.  Listening in on smart people talking is quite enlightening.  I think there is extraordinary potential for education in Hangout-like uses of video, both for synchronous (on-air) and asynchronous (watch-later) strategies.  Here’s a particularly compelling example, from Dan Lovejoy at Texas Tech University, The Online Face-to-Face Classroom.

I am indebted to a conversation with Laura Gibbs for the inspiration to write this post.

1.1 Fewer Resources
1.1.1 state budget cuts
1.1.2 endowments down
1.1.3 student ability to pay tuition

1.2 Greater competition
1.2.1 demographic changes
1.2.1.1 Colleges established during baby boom
1.2.1.2 post-WWII democratization of higher ed
1.2.2 International competition
1.2.3 Alternative Models
1.2.3.1 Online-only
1.2.3.1.1 for-profits
1.2.3.1.2 Western Governors U
1.2.3.2 Certification programs
1.2.3.2.1 CLEP
1.2.3.2.2 MOOCs
1.2.3.3 Online reputation in job-hutning
1.2.3.3.1 Github in CS; Quora
1.2.3.3.2 Badges
1.2.4 widespread availability of information
1.2.5 need to demonstrate effectiveness & value
1.2.5.1 $10,000 degree programs
1.2.5.2 assessment
1.2.5.2.1 Training faculty to measure outcomes
1.2.5.2.2 Third-party and standardized testing
1.2.5.2.3 Tracking post-graduate outcomes
1.2.5.2.4 What should we measure?

1.3 Rising costs
1.3.1 Human Resources
1.3.1.1 Salaries
1.3.1.2 Benefits
1.3.1.2.1 Health care
1.3.1.2.2 Tuition Exchange
1.3.1.3 Rise in contingent labor force
1.3.1.3.1 adjunct instructors
1.3.1.3.2 subcontracting food service, etc.
1.3.2 Library Subscriptions
1.3.2.1 proliferation of journals
1.3.2.2 corporate monopolies on academic publication
1.3.3 infrastructure costs
1.3.3.1 demands for newer buildings, finer amenities

1.4 Higher Ed & the Workforce
1.4.1 constant retraining, lifeling learning
1.4.1.1 What are our obligations to our graduates?
1.4.2 Is curriculum keeping up with workforce demands?

1.5 cultural changes
1.5.1 anti-intellectualism
1.5.2 reluctance to pay for information
1.5.3 emphasis on professions over liberal arts
1.5.4 need to be “always-on”, always connected

Duke University Commencement, 1931

I am far too busy to sign up for another MOOC!  Nevertheless, I’ve added myself to the open online course on the Current and Future State of Higher Education.

Part of the reason is that the topics are things that I might want to blog about anyway, and the course is a way of structuring and scheduling my writing.  I am not sure I will stick with it, but I’ll try to at least brainstorm about the topics and follow some of the online discussions.

Weekly Topics

1. Change pressures: What is influencing higher education? (Oct 8-14)
2. Net pedagogies: New models of teaching and learning (Oct 15-21)
3. Entrepreneurship and commercial activity in education (Oct 22-28)
4. Big data and Analytics (Oct 29-Nov 4)
5. Leadership in Education (Nov 4-11)
6. Distributed Research: new models of inquiry (Nov 12- 18)

photo credit: Duke Yearlook via photopin cc