By Donald Marron, Christian Science Monitor

Former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun has already taught a class of 160,000. Now he’s aiming to teach 500,000 students. Sound impossible? Well, he’s already taught a class of 160,000 students. As Felix Salmon recounts: Thrun told the story of his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, which ran from October to December last year. It started as a way of putting his Stanford course online — he was going to teach the whole thing, for free, to anybody in the world who wanted it. With quizzes and grades and a final certificate, in parallel with the in-person course he was giving his Stanford undergrad students. He sent out one email to announce the class, and from that one email there was ultimately an enrollment of 160,000 students.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2012/0127/Can-one-professor-teach-500-000-students-at-once

by the College Network

Carla A. Downing, gives an example of implementing pedagogical and andragogal theory at the 16th Annual Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning in November, 2010 in her presentation “The Importance of Pedagogy and Andragogy.” Dr. Downing, using herself as an example, provides additional insight into how incorporating pedagogical and antragogical theory can increase the quality of discourse in student-student and student-instructor discussions and how students can move up Bloom’s taxonomy to mastery of concepts.

http://youtu.be/ykc70tYMgqw

By Audrey Watters, Inside Higher Ed

The Open Badges Project is a recognition that “learning looks very different today than traditionally imagined. Legitimate and interest-driven learning is occurring through a multitude of channels outside of formal education, and yet much of that learning does not “count” in today’s world. Mozilla is responsible for the design of the technical infrastructure of the badge ecosystem. This means, no surprise coming from Mozilla, that the technology is open-source (documentation, source code). Of course, making an open source and openly accessible system like this flies in the face of the proprietary systems that currently control those “real-world results like jobs or formal credit” — namely, universities. The proposed Open Badges Project challenges not just certification, but also assessment. What does it mean that anyone can issue any sort of badge? Does a badge offer a better representation of skills or competencies than having a formal degree? If so, when? Will these badges be meaningful — to students, to schools, to employers? Will they be accepted? If so, by whom?

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/how-will-mozillas-open-badges-project-affect-higher-ed

By Michael Feldstein

David Wiley writes:

You have to admit that some of the things the publishers are working on are both cooler and better than almost everything that currently exists in the OER space. Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? We’ve narrowed the entire field of OER down to CMU OLI, Khan Academy, and possibly Thrun’s new stuff. Now, can you think of one of these three that openly licenses their assessments and the engines they run them on? No.

Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen.

Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk. Much has been written about 2012 being “the year of OER.” Let’s hope it’s not the year OER peaks. We need brains, energy, and funding on the next gen OER/OAR problem NOW. [Emphasis added.]

I have long argued that for-profit companies are neither the mortal enemies nor the white knights of education. In this particular case, given the heavy lift involved in funding this sort of effort relative to the resources available in the academic and philanthropic communities—and David is in a position to know—I think it is important to think about for-profit entities in roles that are potentially cooperative with rather than in opposition to OERs. We should be asking the following questions:

• What sort of commercial ventures could prosper in an ecosystem where quality educational resources are abundant and free rather than scarce and expensive?
• Specifically, what sorts of ventures could make money ethically by adding real value in the context of abundant and free educational resources?
• What are the barriers preventing those ventures (either existing or yet-to-be-formed) from helping to create such an ecosystem?
• Who are the right people and what are the right institutions to forge the relationships that could foster such an ecosystem?

Possibly related posts:

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OER Funding: Ask the Right Questions by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

By Michael Feldstein

Scott Leslie has a good post up ruminating on the moving target of open textbooks which reminded me that I have long intended to write a follow-up to an exchange that he, I, and Rob Abel had in the comments section of a post a I wrote a while back. Scott lamented that the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges was releasing its open course content in IMS Common Cartridge format, which seemed to him to be not so easily accessible or universally usable as one might like. I wrote in response,

Fundamentally, I don’t believe in cartridges. I don’t believe in forking a copy of a digital resource and stuffing it into another system. It’s bad for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the implementation challenges that Scott ran into with Moodle (although it’s fair to say that some LMSs handle CC import better than others). Common Cartridge made more sense 5 or 10 years ago, but it’s late to the game and is ultimately destined to be eclipsed by in-place APIs, including but not limited to IMS LTI. (By the way, I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea to let Google own our integration API either.)

Unsurprisingly, Rob Abel, as CEO of the IMS, took issue:

If there is agreement that CC helps with the issue of content in an LMS then, well in your scenario the content is inside the publisher “LMS” (or equivalent).

Can I tailor it? Can I put things in there – like a syllabus – and get it out? If I’m the student and I create something in there can I get it out? Can I mix and match with other publisher materials? Can I archive that mixing for next term? Can I share what I did with my faculty peers who might want to learn from it? Can I create assessments in there and then use them somewhere else or just put them somewhere so that I can use them in the future?

Common Cartridge – or something like it – helps solve those issues. Fits right into the topic of openness. But, most importantly, in the digital education age we need to make digital education easy for the faculty and the students. Otherwise there won’t be a digital education age 

Perhaps a mixture of OER and publisher proprietary stuff might be a solution. IMHO, some stuff needs to be tailored, remixed, moved in, and moved out. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a publisher platform or an LMS. Faculty want their stuff. Students want their stuff. Publishers need to help them, not thwart them.

I said that the binary choice Rob was offering up wasn’t the right one and promised to elaborate in a future post. Here, at last, is that response.

Let me start by reviewing an argument that I have made here before, which is that there should only ever be one copy of a learning resource except under very limited and specific circumstances. In this era of iframes, you can embed content pretty much wherever you want. By keeping the single canonical copy at one URL and surfacing it where it is needed (as opposed to copying it), you both maintain access to the most updated version from the authoritative source and preserve the ability to do in-depth usage and learning analytics. Who is using this content to learn what in which contexts? If you have a thousand copies of the same resource floating around, you can’t effectively aggregate this data (especially if you don’t know whether or how the content has been altered in those copies). There are only two circumstances under which it makes sense to make a second copy of a web-based learning resource: (1) you want to cache it locally for access in offline or bandwidth-constrained environments, or (2) you deliberately intend to fork the content and create a new version of it. And the first case should be addressed as a caching problem rather than a copying problem.

We have a number of formats today that are designed to take web-based resources and organize them for a particular type of consumption. Common Cartridge is one such format. It provides the content wrapped in metadata so the LMS knows where to put it. EPUB and the .ibooks derivative are other examples; they pull together disparate web-native resources into a book-like sequence and user experience. That’s fine. I have no problem with it. My problem is when those resources are copied and stored locally for no good reason. If you want to use one of these formats as a metadata wrapper to surface the remotely stored content within a context and user experience that makes it most useful, then yay. Use iframes or some similar technology and wrap them in the metadata you need. But don’t make local copies of the resources unless you have good reason to do so.

I would argue that efforts like the one by Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges should make the OER content available in canonical copies on their servers as plain old web pages and then provide cartridges that include pointers to those copies. Since one of the values of OERs is being able to remix, then maybe Common Cartridge should be extended to include an option to pull down the remote resource for local editing, constrained by the particular machine-readable license of that remote content. (I actually have an idea that would allow remixing but still maintain the “chain of custody” to the original resource for the purpose of learning analytics, but that’s another post for another time.) But the decision to download should be a deliberate one, not a default one, and all resources should be available on the naked web and not locked up by default in some metadata container that you have to crack open if you want access to the content.

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2. Sakai 3: The Benefits of 'Everything is Content' One of the more radical departures that Sakai 3 makes...
3. Separating Content from Presentation for Pedagogy and Reusability A post on the OpenACS discussion board clued me in...
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5. e-Portfolios and Personal Content Management–Rip, Mix, Burn Last week I had the pleasure of spending most of...

When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

by Bruce Johnson, Online College Courses

The use of technology to enable the learning process already seems cutting edge; however, what makes online education even more exciting is that advances are continually being made that may improve the online learning experience. Some of the latest technological trends have already been implemented and are evident in many schools – while other potential new technological tools are still under development. The 2011 Horizon Report pinpointed six trends that are likely to have the most impact for online courses over the next five years. These include e-textbooks, mobile learning, augmented reality, game-based learning, gesture-based computing, and learning analytics.

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2012/01/27/emerging-tech-trends-for-online-courses/

by CNN

Computers have long had a place in many classrooms, but what about learning online completely? The number of full time online K-12 students is growing. An estimated quarter of a million students in kindergarten through 12th grade were enrolled in full-time online schools last year, a 25 percent increase over the previous year.

http://www.kypost.com/dpp/news/national/online-education-for-k-12-students-is-growing1327775597677

by Justin Fritz, the Wall Street Daily

The online learning landscape is changing at a rapid pace, thanks to new platforms that allow students to take full, quality courses online. Take Apple’s iTunes U, for instance. Then there are websites like Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare and Coursera. Similar to iTunes U, these websites offer courses ranging from Introduction to French and Developmental Psychology, to Computer Graphics and Game Theory. What’s great about these platforms is that you’re not learning from someone with zero credibility. In fact, many courses are taught by professors from institutions like Stanford and MIT (in the case of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, all the material is by MIT’s faculty). Not to mention, they’re free. So anyone with an internet connection can take Ivy League-level courses without accumulating massive student loan debt. Which is one reason a Stanford professor is ditching his tenure and starting up an online university of his own.

http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2012/01/27/the-coming-paradigm-shift-in-higher-education/

Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, February 3, 2012. Dave Cormier writes about Rhizomes and uncertainty. "The rhizome is uncertainty. That doesn’t mean it ‘isn’t’. It has no start and no ending. It is complex… and as such, it resists definition. As a model for learning, it resists ‘core principles’ or ‘final outcomes’. It is an ongoing process of growing, of surprise and of change." Martin Weller comments on this model in relation to the way experts are able to remember detailed aspects of their experience; "experts don't know they do this, but it's a by-product, or rather a means, of expertise." All very well, but "if it's unintentional, undirectional, informal and accidental then is there much we as educators can say about it other than 'that's interesting'?" I think that's a fallacy - I think that our inability to 'manage' something doesn't mean we have nothing useful to say about it. [Link] [Comment]

Phil Hill, e-Literate, February 3, 2012. "We are going," writes Phil Hill, "from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market." The difference between an LMS and a learning platform is that the latter "does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS)." Definitely have a look at the article for a number of links to examples. "Another trend that is becoming apparent is that many of the new offerings are not attempting to fully replace the legacy LMS, at least all at once." [Link] [Comment]

Dave Ferguson, Dave's Whiteboard, February 3, 2012. A topic that really interests me is expertise. How do we become 'expert' and what does it look like? Dave Ferguson takes a look at what was arguably expert performance, Chesley Sullenberger's "successful ditching" of a passenger aircraft in the Hudson River (which maps to another topic that really interests me, flight). What's interesting is that there was no training specific to low-altitude engine loss and no time to consult the ditching checklest en route to the river. So expertise does not consist of 'training for that' but rather learning that can be applied in rtandom situatrions. Sullenberger says, "one way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal." [Link] [Comment]

David Wiley, iterating toward openness, February 3, 2012. Before we get a little overly exuberant about the ascendence of OERs, writes David Wiley, we need to look at what's happening in the education technology space. "Can you name a single OER project that does assessment at all (and I don’t mean PDFs of quizzes)? Can you name one that does diagnostic assessment or handles mastery in any meaningful way? ... Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers." The crux, says Wiley, is that if it took $100 million to get to where we are in OER, how much will it take to get to that next level?

Of course, the skill set required to make OERs is completely different from the skill set required to make educational software. Thus were is virtually no overlap between the OER community and, say, projects like OSCATS (Open Source Computerized Adaptive Testing System), Concerto, or even the older IRT-Computerized Adaptive Testing, to name a few. So I think the work is being done in the community, but most such work, it forms its own community, and doesn't evolve out of an existing community. But I don't want to downplay Wiley's point - it is absolutely essential that we look at the next generation of opnline learning, and not merely at replicating textbooks online. [Link] [Comment]

Jonathan Gray, Weblog, February 3, 2012. Jonathan Gray writes, "A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain... the project has secured some funding from JISC, who champion digital technology for use in higher education in the UK... The project will develop an open source platform called TEXTUS, which will enable users to create, manage and interact with collections of texts." Related: read the full-text comments from Occupy Philosophy: Chad Kautzer, Charles Mills, Darrell Moore, Annika Theim, and Jennifer Uleman. [Link] [Comment]

Rebecca Davis, NITLE Logo National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, February 3, 2012. I would never have though this would be an issue, but apparently "a recurring motif along the lines that coding (markup and programming) is so difficult that undergraduates trained in the humanities cannot learn it quickly or successfully." I must be a polymath then, having spent time coding pretty much through the whole of my philosophy undergrad. Or maybe the motif is just wrong. "The skills most humanities majors have mastered as part of their academic training, such as formulating research questions and reading critically, carry over easily and naturally into the world of humanities computing." And vice versa. [Link] [Comment]

By Phil Hill

Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months.

• CourseKit was released as a free learning platform targeted at faculty adoption.
• Apple’s iTunesU app was announced alongside the iBooks / Author textbook offering, extending iTunesU as an iPad-based learning platform.
• Facebook made a move within its higher education roots, starting a pilot program with Groups for Universities.

In my post from last summer, I characterized the changes we were starting to see, but with all of the recent changes, I think it would be useful to extend the first two trends mentioned.

The question is, what will the LMS market that is emerging from these changes look like?  No one can know for sure what will happen over the next 3 – 5 years, but I do think there are some key trends that are worth understanding.

• The market is more competitive, with more options, than it has been for years.  Instructure is a real player that has shown that it can win against established LMS vendors with big wins in Utah and at Auburn.  LoudCloud has new clients at CEC, Grand Canyon U and an unreported win at a public state university.  BrainHoney won at BYU.  Pearson LearningStudio has major wins at Arizona State and Columbia online programs.  Desire2Learn has roughly doubled in size in the past year.  Moodle and Sakai, including through providers such as MoodleRooms and rSmart and Unicon, continue their impressive wins in the market.

• Related to the above, there is a trend towards software as a service (SaaS) models for new LMS solutions.  The SaaS model offers some compelling advantages in terms of deployment time and ability to mine and report transactional data that might not be possible with other approaches.  SaaS is not a panacea, but this is a growing trend in the LMS market.

The trend towards SaaS could perhaps more accurately be described as the default model now for new offerings. In the LMS market from just short two years ago, the default model was enterprise LMS. The only exception was Pearson’s LearningStudio (the artist formerly known as eCollege.com). Today, every single new offering mentioned above is SaaS-based. Apple’s iTunesU app is a mobile app, but the content is served from a behind-the-scenes SaaS platform.

Perhaps more significantly – there has not been a new enterprise LMS created since around 2004. Yes, each legacy LMS provider has major new releases available, but the one exception you could argue is that Sakai 3 is a new LMS and not just an upgrade from Sakai 2. Other than this exception, every new LMS solution to enter the market in the past two years has been based on a learning platform. I doubt we will see any more enterprise LMS solutions created given the cost-benefits of creating SaaS offerings.

Another trend that is becoming apparent is that many of the new offerings are not attempting to fully replace the legacy LMS, at least all at once. Rather than competing with all of the possible features that are typical in enterprise LMS solutions, the new platforms appear to target specific institutional problems and offer only the features needed. Perhaps inspired by Apple’s success in offering elegant solutions at the expense of offering all the features, or perhaps inspired by Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation model, the new learning platform providers are perfectly willing to say ‘no – we just don’t offer this feature or that feature’.

My colleague Jim Ritchey has written about the changes that SaaS models are starting to have in the higher education ERP market, put in context of the Datatel+SGHE merger. His key point:

Therefore the challenge for the vendors is how to get the ERP, with its slow development and implementation cycles, to provide the solutions to the new needs of the institution.

In the LMS market, the new answer to this question – how to adapt and respond to new institutional needs – appears to be based on learning platforms.

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Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Nicola, One Change a Day, February 3, 2012. Creative Thinking by Joanna Maxwell is a short but beautifully presented slide show outlining four major steps to cultivating your creativity. It is also sport-on -- these are tips I use on a daily basis and which have served me remarkably well:
- be curious
- make connections
- challenge yourself
- cultivate your ideas
[Link] [Comment]

By CAROL HEARD, Post Searchlight

Tucked away in a newly-renovated building of Bainbridge College’s main campus is a center devoted to supporting instruction at the college — but not the type of instruction from yesteryear. The Center for Teaching Excellence, which is located in a recently renovated building that used to house the Continuing Education Division on the main campus, is developing and supporting teaching excellence in all BC courses, but here in the early days of its existence, is devoting much of its resources to improving online learning.

http://www.thepostsearchlight.com/2012/01/27/teaching-excellence-goes-online-at-bc/

By: Mary Bart, Faculty Focus

College course work is meant to be challenging. The content and the vocabulary used are often unfamiliar to many students. For at-risk learners, the challenges are even greater. In some cases, these students have physical or learning disabilities that create accessibility issues, other times the challenges may be the result of the fact that they’re an international student, have anxiety issues, or a strong learning style preference that runs counter to the instructor’s style. For all of these reasons and more, today’s student body is a highly diverse group with many different learning challenges, often manifesting in problems with notetaking and listening comprehension. All of this creates what Keith Bain calls an “accessibility imperative.” And although there are many legal obligations that institutions must satisfy with regards to accessibility, Bain says recording and transcribing lectures can improve retention and success for all types of students.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/multimedia-lectures-tools-for-improving-accessibility-and-learning/

By Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. “There’s a gold mine of data that hasn’t been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact,” says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea. Interest in altmetrics is on the rise, but it’s not quite right to call it a movement. The approach could better be described as a sprawling constellation of projects and like-minded people working at research institutions, libraries, and publishers.

http://chronicle.com/article/As-Scholarship-Goes-Digital/130482/

John T. Spencer, Education Rethink, February 2, 2012. When I read a statement like "we are more than algorithms" two things come to my mind:
- it depends on what you mean by "we", and
- it depends on what you mean by "algorithms"
Because, after all, an algorithm is, broadly construed a process or mechanism for doing something. Now if by that you mean 'a set of rules', then I agree, we are more than that. But if you mean by 'we' that there is some aspect of our comprehension that is by definition not representable through some process or mechanism, then I disagree. Simply setting the iPod down and jamming instead is the unthinking response. It's easy and glib to say 'we are more than algorithms' but in fact there are (or are going to be) algorithms that comprehend the innovative, the improvisational and the messy. And we can learn them. And we can become virtuosos - with or without the iPod. [Link] [Comment]