Category: HigherEd

Creativity is the Killer App (ISTE12 concurrent session)

Chris Walsh up on stage.

Introduction

This afternoon I attended the ISTE12 workshop “Creativity is the Killer App” by Chris Walsh from New Tech Network (twitter: @fitzwalsh). Here’s the short summary:

This presentation will share practical examples of creativity in action and highlight high-tech and low-tech tools to leverage. It will rely heavily on design thinking principles currently in use by leading business, education, and non-profit organizations. In addition, participants will engage in series of simple activities that model design-thinking processes and instructional techniques to foster creativity, so that every participant is a step closer to implementing these ideas in their school.

This was mostly an informative or motivational session meant to impress upon the audience that creativity can be nurtured and developed, and that as teachers we have the ability to help the process along. The following are my key take-aways from the workshop.

Key take-aways

The most important concepts I took from this related to conditions for creativity. This gave me some things to focus on when I am designing assignments, projects, or exercises for a class.

Playfulness
We have to be happy to be creative. We have to be light and joyous and free from worry. If we aren’t, then we are stifled.
Time
We need extended time to be creative. It is real hard to be creative under a time crunch.
Exploration
We need to explore lots of ideas. We can’t edit our thinking when we’re trying to be creative — we need to go for quantity of ideas when we’re being creative, not quality.
Failure
We have to fail a lot. If we aren’t teaching our kids how to fail and showing them how to recover from that failure, then we are failing our kids. Failure is an option!
Variety
We need to have a variety of experiences in order to be creative. We need to get out and go lots of places in order to stimulate our brain to think about different things and in different ways.
Freedom
We need to have the freedom to choose different paths, to try different things, and to approach the problem from different ways. We can’t feel shut off; the more we feel that way, the more we start editing our thinking, and this is what might keep us from finding the solution that we need.
Challenge
We need real and challenging problems to work on in order to get the juices flowing.
Active
For some reason, manipulation of objects and moving around seems to help us think. Don’t stay in one place!
Constraints
A clear understanding of constraints and resources can focus on what kinds of answers will be acceptable. Without this, we can create answers for a world that doesn’t exist, and this doesn’t help anyone.
Mastery
You have to have a certain level of knowledge, skills, expertise, or mastery in order to be creative in an area. This seems to be what provides the fertile ground in which a solution can bloom.
Encouragement
Encouragement and recognition can provide much of the incentive that people need in order to keep moving forward, to keep working on a difficult problem through frustrating times.

Notes

As always, these are my notes from the session that will probably not be useful for you, but might give you a better sense for what went on during the session.

BTW, he started (before the session) with a clip from Infinite Thinking Machine (at this site). It mentioned Makerspace and Brightworks.

  1. What is creativity: “Partnership for 21st Century Schools” definitions. Fancy definitions.
  2. Types: expressive, designing/inventing, problem solving, other types as well.
  3. Creativity matters: human/social progress; Economic engine (think about Apple); expressions of value and fun, personal growth/li>
  4. Creativity is not a serendipitous accident or event.
  5. Monty Python cast and crew had a 9-5 office hours. They worked really hard.
  6. Creativity does not happen solo. He has us draw a butterfly. He teaches them how to do critique groups. He has the student repeat the process, gets better each time.
  7. Creativity is for “artists”. No. Steelcase chair. MLK words. Plaid “Bahama” shorts (had to know when to bring them back).
  8. Creativity is innate: some have it, some don’t. Again: no! What does a creative person look like? Actually, there’s no such thing. Look in a mirror.
  9. Gives an assignment: buddy-up. What is the most creative learning activity that any of us has ever experienced? Then generate some creative way to present digitally that creative learning moment. #creativelearning.
  10. Conditions for creativity: playfulness (have to be happy), time (we need extended time to be creative), exploration (need to have lots of exploration; don’t stop yourself from being creative; no censure; go for quantity), failure (we have to fail a lot; if we aren’t teaching our kids how to fail and showing them how to get to the other side, then we are failing our kids; failure is an option), variety (lots of variety; we need to get out and go lots of places; neon glow sticks aren’t fun in one color).
  11. More conditions: freedom/autonomy/choice, real challenging problems to solve; thinking with your hands; clear understanding of constraints and resources; knowledge/skill/expertise/mastery (you gotta have the knowledge and skills in order to be creativity in an area); encouragement and recognition (lots of this)
  12. Attitude: personal passion provides the spark; give yourself permission to be creative; happiness matters a lot; discipline/commitment (you have to work hard)
  13. Jerry Seinfeld: he’s creating a chain, creating volume;; discipline and commitment matter.
  14. Creativity tools: Explore (web [wikipedia; twitter; spotify], outdoors, music); cross pollination (communities [sxsw], guests, visits [other schools]); divergent thinking (storytelling, games [flux]); Design (visualization, multimedia [hyperstudio application])
  15. Can you teach creativity? Teachers (modeling openness, encourage failure); open language (could, might, possible, how else, tell us more); methods (mashups, mimicry, design thinking, tinkering, exhibitions); experience (lots of different ideas and situations); assessment (can it be measured?; probably can but not sure)
  16. He recommends Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin on why he believes schools are stealing kids dreams. Mostly because they need more playfulness and schools are trying to minimize it.

Teacher preparation with technology (ISTE12 workshop)

Introduction

The purpose of this session (here is their Web site) at ISTE12 was to introduce university faculty and teacher educators to TPACK as an organizing framework to focus modeling of technology use and preparing teachers to integrate technology in their teaching. This is an organizing framework rather than some software or whatever. Another purpose is to share models for assisting teacher educators in applying TPACK to curriculum as a tool to aid in technology integration.

There are three leaders of this session:

  • Mark Hofer from William & Mary (mark.hofer@wm.edu)
  • Teresa Foulger, Arizona State University (teresa.foulger@asu.edu)
  • Sarah McPherson from New York Institute of Technology (smcphers@nyit.edu)

TPACK is “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge.” It is the intersection of Technological knowledge, Pedagogical knowledge, and Content knowledge (subject matter). In other words:

Any use of technology needs to fit with the pedagogical style of the teacher and the content to be taught.

This is all some sort part of Microsoft’s Teacher Education Initiative whose purpose is “to teach [education educators] how to more systemically integrate technology when teaching pre-service teachers.”

Points to remember

These are three things that I took from the introductory discussion:

  • Don’t forget that some of what students need to learn is inter-disciplinary skills, and technology can be a tool to help draw the separate areas of knowledge.
  • We need to move from use of technology, integrate technology with our teaching, and now to innovate with technology. And capturing a lecture on video and playing it on some geeky player doesn’t change the fact that a lecture is a lecture. There are times that we need to move beyond the lecture, no matter how cool it might look.
  • The boundaries between art, science, creativity, design, and business are disappearing. We need to think about how we can bring them together instead of break them apart.

Exercises

The following are a series of exercises that we worked on for the last 90 minutes or so of class. It is a menu of possibilities for getting teachers to think about technology and teaching.

  • We were challenged to fit together a random pedagogy (chosen from a deck of cards containing one pedagogy each) with a random content area with a random technology (same as previous). This was a creative exercise to stretch our mind, to get us to think about unusual and unexpected combinations so that we think more broadly.
  • Mini-teach:
    • You get a technology tool, and then you are asked to come up with a scenario when that tool might be used. They have to learn the tool on their own, and then come and deliver a short lesson using that tool (on content of their own using a technology of their own).
    • The way she (Teresa) uses this approach is have a list of technology tools (see her side bar), give each student a random technology, and assigns them to learn it in an hour on their own. Just play with the tool. She asks them to design a learning experience using that tool on some content (that they choose themselves).
    • She has also done it as a poster session with faculty (before a faculty meeting).
    • Check the Innovations menu on the side of her page for all the technologies they are looking at.
    • She asks them to think about what’s the added value of the technology (e.g., a wiki); what did the technology add that could not have happened without the technology?
  • Learning activity types: With a different set of learning activities and taxonomies for a particular discipline, pair the beginning teacher with specific appropriate technologies and see how each would develop lessons based on that.
  • Universal design for learning: Start with the student, and look at a framework that addresses what we teach, and then how we teach it, and then why we teach it (or learn about it). We have to think about these all together, as an integrated whole. This process involves looking at the motivation and student’s interaction with the whole learning process; you can’t ignore their motivations when thinking about how and what to teach. You have to focus on who the students are, and what stage they’re at.

As an aside, I learned about PollEverywhere as a tool for getting input from students.

Finally some clarity surrounding the turmoil at UVA

UVA

What a week at the University of Virginia. This article at the Chronicle of Higher Education finally provides some clarity surrounding Teresa Sullivan’s abrupt departure as president. So few details had been available that it most of what I read was simply speculation surrounding very few hard facts. Now it appears that the underlying philosophical disagreement with the board and important donors had to do with Dr. Sullivan’s apparent attitude toward online education.

UVA is a history-laden university in ways that very few other higher education institutions can claim. They are, rightfully, very proud of this history and all that they stand for. Most universities are slow to move because of their size and complexity. Further, they are led by senior faculty who are by their very nature conservative — after all, they have chosen a career in which the goal is to attain a position in which they cannot be fired! Given UVA’s history, I can only imagine that these forces might be even stronger in Charlottesville.

Given all of this, the upheaval caused by the changes going on related to online learning (efforts by Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and even Michigan) has clearly shocked the campus. Some are apparently worried that they are going to be left behind, necessitating drastic changes. Others think that, as usual, measured steps are needed. Whatever the case, it can’t be the case that your position is I need to think about that. We all need to think through our position on this, to come to some decisions, and to have a strategy for addressing it now and over the next three to five years.

What is your strategy?

The future of higher education — changes are afoot

Recently, three articles provided various insights into the future of college education. The first is a call for revolution; the second describes the multiple forces acting on higher education; and the third describes many of the forces that are tugging at, if not tearing apart, the world of higher education. After reading these it would be hard for anyone to think that colleges can continue to provide the same educational experience that they have been providing for the last several decades.

Questions remain, certainly, as to what colleges should do and, also, what prospective students should do. In the following I provide a few highlights from each article, and I conclude with my thoughts about both how I think students should think about their options and how organizations should respond to these challenges.

A call for a revolution

Oh, not that kind of revolution?

Over at CNN.com, William J. Bennett recently wrote “Do we need a revolution in higher education?”. This is a thoughtful opinion piece that I encourage you to read. His basic points are as follows:

  • He describes the many cases in which “a college diploma may no longer guarantee the high potential lifetime earnings it once did.”
  • With “almost 54% of recent graduates were unemployed or underemployed,” “[a] college degree does not hold the status and significance it once did.”
  • “[E]conomic status now turns on many other things, like intellectual capital and skills training…”
  • “Many students are ill prepared for the labor market, whether by fault of their own or by colleges and universities that are out of sync with the needs of a skilled work force.”

It is clear that he thinks that colleges need to radically re-think what they do and the education that they provide.

Dueling purposes of higher education

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeff Selingo wrote a related piece titled “A college education with multiple purposes”.

What many of those in higher ed fail to realize is that as college has become more expensive, parents and students increasingly view a bachelor’s degree as a transaction. For many, education for education’s sake no longer cuts it. That doesn’t mean students shouldn’t major in French literature or philosophy, or anthropology, but institutions need to do better at connecting such academic programs to lifetime employment prospects. Otherwise, it’s going to be almost impossible to get students and parents to pay $200,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree.

At the same time, employers and politicians need to learn that if colleges provide training only for jobs that need to be filled now, those workers will probably be useless in about two years, given the rapid pace of change in most industries.

He makes a useful recommendation:

Colleges need to reframe the question when asking employers what they need. Instead of asking about the jobs they need to fill tomorrow, colleges should ask employers to describe the valuable skills of their best-performing and longest-serving employees. It’s likely the answer will be critical thinking, writing, team work, and problem solving — all attributes of a classic liberal-arts education.

Forces acting on higher education

David J. Staley and Dennis A. Trinkle, at the Educause Review Online (Jan/Feb 2011), wrote “The Changing Landscape of Higher Education”. In this article, they describe ten coming changes in college education:

Which way do I go?
  1. The increasing differentiation of higher education
  2. The transformation of the general education curriculum
  3. The faculty faces of the future
  4. The surge in global faculty and student mobility
  5. The new “invisible college”
  6. The changing “traditional” student
  7. The mounting pressure to demonstrate the value added of a college degree
  8. The revaluation of “middle-skill” jobs
  9. Higher education as a private rather than a public good
  10. Lifelong partnerships with students

These are all-encompassing changes in almost all dimensions of the industry — the students, the faculty, the value proposition, the competition, the content of the “good” (education, in this case). I highly recommend that you read this article to get a sense of the strength of these forces. Again, after reading this article and understanding the arguments that it makes, it seems impossible to me that anyone could think that higher education can continue in its daily operations in a business-as-usual basis.

Thoughts about the future

Oh, not that kind of revolution?

Each of the articles above are worthy of detailed explication, analysis, and reaction so whatever I say here is limited and leaves much uncovered. Given that, I have a few thoughts that I wish to highlight related to the future of higher education.

First, some people need time to grow up, to mature, after they finish high school. They are not ready for advanced study; they are not ready to join the work force; they are not ready to assume responsibility for their lives as citizens. Organizations (similar to the Peace Corps in a previous generation) have a great opportunity in front of them to be a training group for large groups of young adults who are transitioning into maturity but who are not interested in doing this while in college. These organizations don’t need to provide an academic environment, just one that supports their growth. Colleges have provided this environment for students of all types with the downside being that they have many students in their classrooms who are not interested in the education, only in the time away from home. The new reality will allow them to provide an education to those who are focused on the education.

Second, some people need specific knowledge and certification of that knowledge but have little desire to study other subjects. Training and certification organizations should get highly attuned to the needs of industry so that they can take these slightly more mature, more focused students and prepare them for specific jobs and careers. Later in their careers, as they advance in their companies, many young managers and entrepreneurs should be quite interested in advanced business training (whether as an MBA or otherwise, I do not know).

Third, the world has changed so that learning resources are now available to anyone connected to the Internet. Learning, not “formal education”, can occur anywhere. It can happen all throughout a lifetime, and can happen when a student is actually interested in the material. Colleges should think about how to sell their programs to these students, no matter their age or location.

Further, students should accept the idea of paying more money to gain access to world class professors in the subjects in which they are interested. It should become clear to everyone — prospective students, faculty, universities, governments, prospective employers — that the ideas and concepts within almost any class in the world is available in some articles, Web sites, and/or books somewhere. The students aren’t paying for the content, per se. The value of a class is provided in two ways: (1) the selection of topics and interpretation of the material, and (2) the interaction between the students and professor so that the student’s understanding can become more refined. A student paying for this high-priced education, no matter whether it is in person or distant, will assume that he/she will get plenty of interaction with the professor.

Finally, a person going into a career or living a “life of the mind” (such as a professor) needs the education and validation provided by a traditional education. Far fewer students need this than currently attend our colleges; many should get out of this business and redefine themselves or go out of business entirely.

The above are quite radical recommendations, asking for the complete reconstruction of the education industry. I know that, but I also have seen long-standing industries such as that for news reporting get completely blown up. I don’t see how education can avoid this fate. I ask that the education industry leadership take charge and make the needed changes proactively rather than waiting for other organizations to spring up and seize the opportunities.

Smart phones for college students

Take-over by the tech companies

Look at all of these hard-working students. Not a Facebook page in sight!

The editorial “Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?” by Michael Hiltzik (Feb 2012, Los Angeles Times) was a pull-no-punches examination of the push for educational technology by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. This quote should give you a flavor of his beliefs:

There’s certainly an important role for technology in the classroom. And the U.S. won’t benefit if students in poor neighborhoods fall further behind their middle-class or affluent peers in access to broadband Internet connectivity or computers. But mindless servility to technology for its own sake, which is what Duncan and Genachowski are promoting on behalf of self-interested companies like Apple, will make things worse, not better.

That’s because it distracts from and sucks money away from the most important goal, which is maintaining good teaching practices and employing good teachers in the classroom. What’s scary about the recent presentation by Duncan and Genachowski is that it shows that for all their supposed experience and expertise, they’ve bought snake oil. They’re simply trying to rebottle it for us as the elixir of the gods.

And here’s another one:

Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. “Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning,” Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom “does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning.”

So he clearly thinks that this whole move towards educational technologies is primarily driven by the underlying goal of profits for the technology companies themselves, as opposed to the improvement of education.

The Seton Hall smartphone story

Seton Hall University

I recently read his article (which I highly suggest you do) and then came across another piece of news in the article “Smartphones at school: Seton Hall to give freshman class free phones in new program” by Kelly Hayboer (June 2012, The Star-Ledger). She reports that, in addition to the laptop that Seton Hall is continuing to give to its incoming freshmen, the university is now going to give away Nokia Lumia 900 (a Windows smartphone). David Pogue recently wrote a positive review of the Nokia Lumia 900 (April 2012, NYTimes), so the problem certainly isn’t with the phone itself.

The usual suspects

Nokia

Things smell a little fishy once you begin to look at the companies involved. For example, after reading “Nokia plans 10,000 layoffs, cuts second-quarter outlook” by Don Reisinger (June 2012, C|Net), it becomes clear (if it wasn’t already) that Nokia is in serious financial trouble. Also, “Nokia is now the world’s second-largest cell phone company, ending a 14-year run at the top.” Nokia is clearly desperate for marketshare at essentially any cost.

Microsoft

As for Microsoft, their Windows mobile operating system (now called Windows Phone), is perennially underachieving and failing to capture marketshare. This hasn’t kept analysts from showing them the love year after year. For example (as reported in this article, but it’s everywhere on the Web), just recently IDC predicted that, although they currently have only 5.2% of the market and Apple has 20.5%, Windows Phone will surpass iOS’s market share by 2016. This doesn’t change the fact that they are still at 5.2% after over a decade of effort.

So what are the specifics of the Seton Hall give-away? According to the article:

The phones…come with a free AT&T calling plan with 300 voice minutes a month and unlimited data and domestic text messaging through December.

After December, students will be offered discounted AT&T calling plans if they want to continue using the phones to make calls and text, campus officials said. If not, they will still keep the phones and use them in class for projects, video conferencing and to connect to the campus wifi network. They must return the phones if they drop out of college.”

This doesn’t surprise me at all. The phone only retails for $99 right now, so giving the phone away (even if Seton Hall isn’t footing the bill) for the prospect of getting a certain percentage of the 1400 students to pick up the approximately $30/month data plan beginning in January seems like a reasonable plan from a business perspective.

Seton Hall’s motivation

But what about the college’s perspective? This was the most intriguing quote that I came across:

Seton Hall officials said they realize most students already have cell phones for personal use. But giving everyone equal access to the same smartphone means every student, no matter their income, can learn on the same device.

What a strange perspective! “[E]very student…can learn on the same device.” And this is good or interesting or useful…how? It would be one thing if the device in question was ubiquitous, but we’re talking about a Nokia/Windows phone device, so that’s certainly not the case.

It is a new standards-based, open, & interoperable world that we live in — the Web, Facebook app API, twitter messages, email, PDF, HTML5, PNG, MPEG4. We expect to be able to send messages and files between any devices, and to work with them on the same way on different devices. If some application isn’t available on multiple devices, then in some way it isn’t that important yet. This isn’t the old world of Microsoft Windows hegemony. As important as Apple’s iOS is, it only has 20% of the market while Android (in all its various shapes and colors and flavors) has over 60%. No one should be specializing any curriculum for any mobile device.

Maybe, somehow, SHU officials (and the supportive and encouraging Microsoft and Nokia executives behind all this) believe that faculty, knowing that every student will now (finally!) have smart phones available to them, will make sweeping changes to their classes that take advantage of the specific advantages that this phone provides.

There are so many things wrong with this line of thinking. I will try to keep my thoughts limited to a few:

  • Faculty only rarely update their classes, and certainly not for some particular technology. If they do, it will take years and, by then, the technology will have changed.
  • Faculty have spent the last 5-10 years fighting the onslaught of cell phones into their classes. Why would they somehow get excited to know that they all have school-supplied cell phones in their backpacks? (Or, more likely, hidden under their desks.)
  • Are they having a “If you build it, [they] will come” moment? Do they think that it’s a good idea to invest in a technology and then figure out what to do with it? Are you kidding me? This is what happens when people who have no understanding of faculty or technology are running the show — or when administrators let technology companies take over leadership, as Hiltzik believes.

Recommendations

Universities should support a BYOD (or BYOT) policy. As Forrester recently stated, BYOD is coming with or without IT: “IT managers concerned over the challenges BYOD presents may actually face greater concerns by ignoring BYOD than by implementing solutions to support the trend.” Some school districts are already supporting such a policy. This is in the context of a recent survey of college students that found that “40% cannot go more than 10 minutes without using some sort of digital technology and 67% cannot go more than an hour.”

Faculty should, for their own employability, begin to figure out how to live in such a world. If students have cell phones (smart or not, even though that distinction is beginning to lose its meaning), then professors should learn to figure out how to use them if they help students achieve the learning outcomes for the class. I am sure that these learning outcomes won’t rely in any way on the availability of a specific phone.

Also, think about the device in the context of the student’t life! Would they want another device to carry around just for school? I think not. Let them use their own smart phone. The classroom application of the cell phone that a faculty member would be interested in coming up with would be generally available across multiple cell phone platforms (via HTML5, MPEG4, or similar technologies). A student should be able to access the content on whatever device they have with them, whether it be a Windows Phone, an iPad, or a Samsung laptop. If some student doesn’t have a cell phone, then get an agreement with some providers (not all, but some) to provide the phones at a discount. If some phone would be helpful in a class, then the student could consider buying the discounted phone or some other phone if he/she thinks it would serve his/her purposes better.

Think about your students. Think about the faculty. Be able to describe what you want from the technology, no matter who is providing it. And then go to the technology companies with a proposal. If they can’t help you, then wait — at some point some company will be in some situation in which they’re in a weaker bargaining position and will come to some agreement that is acceptable to both parties. But, the key idea is have a plan before you go looking for a partner. Or you might end up in a situation that benefits them but not you.

Using the Doceri whiteboard app for the iPad

I recently received the Doceri Goodpoint Stylus along with my previously downloaded Doceri Remote app for the iPad and the Doceri Desktop application for my laptop. I am extremely impressed by this combination of hardware and software, so I put together a video that explains just what it is and what it’s like to use it. They have lots of good videos on their site, but I always feel better if I see some type of non-affiliated endorsement of a product than if it is strictly a corporate, official demonstration. Well, I hope this 13+ minute video fills that role for you. You’ll probably want to watch it on YouTube instead of embedded on this site.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ECOJhSNgaA]

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about this product. I will follow up as soon as I can. Thanks!

Effects of technology adoption on quality and cost

Introduction

This final post in my series related to educational technology ends on a positive note. The first post I listed some recent facts about changes in the global education system, especially related to China, and the importance of the implications for U.S. universities. In the second post for the first time I propose that the way to provide a great education at a lower cost is highly related to the concept of community:

Yes, I believe costs should go down.

Students have to feel they are part of a supportive and available educational community — as both givers and receivers of that support — as they strive toward personally relevant goals.

I also briefly described my belief in the importance of both project-based learning and involving students as both learners and teachers. The third post I analyzed in some detail the effects of using educational technologies on the time and effort spent by professors on tasks related to teaching.

In this post I make the case that using educational technology at a university should enable teaching quality to increase while associated costs decrease, possibly dramatically. Even though I am quite a big user of technology, I do not believe that simply adding technology automatically makes the education process better, or the students happier, or the professors more productive. Tom Vander Ark, in “How digital learning is boosting achievement”, lists lots of examples and studies that provide support for the following points:

  • Blended schools achieve high performance
  • Hundreds of studies of online and blended learning show efficiency
  • Technology-enabled math products have boosted achievement
  • Digital learning offers the only path to boosting achievement in this “decade of deficits”

Just as with every other industry that technology has had an effect on, it is the disruptive innovation, whatever it may be, that we have to be on the lookout for. I believe that organizations like P2PU and Coursera are only the first, tentative stabs at disruption. The big changes are yet to come.

In any case, in the meantime we need to gain experience with technology because it will be central to the educational industry whether we like it or not. The question becomes how to achieve the increases in quality and decreases in costs as we move forward. I believe it is not a question as to whether there is a place for technology in the education process — it is how to use it in ways that radically improve learning. I believe at either the personal level or the organizational level that if we wait until it is clear what needs to be done, then it will be too late. So, ready, fire, aim is the order of the day.

The following describes how I envision being able to achieve take the first steps toward achieving this end in my classes.

Increase quality

I am a firm believer in the importance of individual attention given to a student, engagement of a student in the learning process, personal relevance of educational activities, and disciplined (or rigorous) and clear communication by a student. I believe that increasing any one of these (and hopefully all of them) would mean an increase in the quality of education.

Individual attention

Yes, I believe costs should go down.

Several dimensions of the move to increased use of technology should increase the individual attention that a student receives. For many professors teaching many of his/her classes, the professor should use video to deliver lectures that explain important course concepts. An easy way to make this move is to go ahead and record the lectures the professor currently gives, and then edit them and post them in appropriate pieces. This will minimize the amount of work necessary to begin this process. The next step would be to make movies outside of a classroom setting to optimize, or at least improve, the delivery of some of that material.

No matter how it is done, delivery of basic material outside of class time makes the time during class available for either explaining more complex material or working with students individually on their problems. This would seem to be a no-brainer.

As an example, consider the class I taught 2 years ago. It was about finding Web-based information resources. At the beginning of each class I would spend about 15-20 minutes lecturing and demonstrating tools. We would then spend the next hour or so working through exercises. Students were encouraged to work together to solve their problems and to call me when they had a problem they could not solve. This generally worked fairly well; however, I believe I can make it work better in a blended format, and possibly in a purely online environment.

I believe the next step for this class is pretty obvious. Make a library of the videos explaining concepts and demonstrating systems, and then load them onto YouTube. This frees up time in class, but also drops the requirement that students attend class in order to hear my lecture. Students can ask questions over twitter (using a standard hashtag or twitter account), with other students and teaching assistants having the ability to answer questions or chime in with hints. Also, I now can make additional time per week to meet with students about their projects or help them with any other problems they might be having.

Yes, I believe costs should go down.

Student engagement

If there is one single thing that I target my efforts for, it is student engagement. Most of my efforts, thinking, theorizing, and planning are directed at ways in which I can increase it. I think the changes here are subtle, but will feel more real to those involved with the class. (Going out on a limb here, actually, simply based on some limited experience.)

One feature of the real world is that communication between two people (i.e., a conversation) is, or at least can be, private. On the other hand, it is difficult to allow hundreds (or millions) of people to eavesdrop on that conversation. This feature makes it hard for future students to take advantage of exchanges made by previous students (either one hour or one week in the past). Suppose we move all (short) student and teacher interactions to twitter. (We could also use twitter to announce longer answers that are at some particular Web address.) This would allow other students to hear, and respond to and learn from, conversations by the teacher and some other student. Do this enough and, before you know it, the student will have learned something, gotten drawn into a conversation, or will have answered another student’s question.

I think the devil is in the details here. It will take constant nudging, hints, and probably a few class points to get students moving in the right direction. However, I think the payoff is possibly huge. First, students can have more opportunities to be involved as a teacher because of the openness of the communication lines. Second, as discussed in some detail above, students can become more involved as a learner on specific problems that other students bring up. They might also find the somewhat impersonal nature of the communication to ease their fears about participating (i.e., asking and answering questions). Thus, though there is no particular big breakthrough here, I believe more opportunities for raising student engagement are always a good thing.

Relevance of activities

Though I think engagement is the most important facet, sometimes I’m not sure whether relevance isn’t more important. If not, then it’s at least a real big determinant of resulting engagement. Since I’m at least somewhat rational, this has led me to focus quite a bit on increasing the relevance of student activities.

I’m moving to a much more project-based experience for a class. Much of the benefit of moving to a project comes from allowing the student to choose the topic for the project. I strongly believe that choosing a topic leads to commitment to the project which leads to more persistent effort which leads to more learning. Pretty much every time. How could I not be interested in choosing a classroom strategy that gets more students to work harder on my class by their own personal motivation?

An ancillary benefit, but one which really helps with classroom management, is that every student having their own project topic removes many, if not most, restraints on students helping other students. It makes it much easier for me to tell the students that they can answer any question from another student — the only thing that I ask is that each student end up doing his/her own work. But if one student can help another student learn something, to teach them something that I wasn’t able to teach them, then who I am to step in the way?

Disciplined and clear communication by a student

I really hope that students think a lot about my classes.

I am a big believer in the importance of speaking and writing. I also believe that the only way to improve as a speaker or writer is to speak or write more. I also believe that different channels (face-to-face, email, twitter) require different types of communication, and have different standards and practices. The only way to get better at a specific type of communication is to engage in that type of communication. Further, the only way ultimately to be a good communicator is to have clear thinking underlying it. I just don’t believe that good communicating can happen without clear thinking. It certainly is possible to have bad communication happen even with clear thinking — that is why we have to practice and improve our communication — but having clear thoughts about a topic makes bad communication much less likely.

Having said all that, I like frequent communication from students. Moving this communication online changes the channel, so students are practicing a different type of communication. It will be much more difficult for students to get better at face-to-face communication when online, but they will be able to get better at email, twitter, blog posts, and wiki construction. I believe that these forms of communication are important now and will continue to become more important for students.

Students can only get better if they receive helpful feedback. Again, having communications occur in public, out in the open for others to see, should make it easier for others (teaching assistants and students) to give feedback. It also provides more “examinable & gradable objects” during the duration of a class. I plan on assigning blogs to write, twitter feeds to submit, comparative or analytical essays to write, and explanatory chapters to contribute. Each of these have different standards, and inviting students into the grading process should increase their understanding of what level of achievement is acceptable and of how to improve the work that has been produced.

Yes, I believe costs should go down.

Decrease costs

I addressed much of this in previous post, but the basic points to focus on are that educational technologies (1) allow a professor to substitute fixed investments for time investments that vary with the number of students and/or sections, (2) expand the influence of a professor, and (3) allow the substitution of cheaper labor for more expensive. I expand on these points below.

Substitute fixed costs for variable costs

The task of delivering a lecture now is a fixed expenditure of time and effort, independent of the number of students who are taking the class. If one professor of a six section core course is particularly expert at delivering a lecture on a specific topic, then that one lecture (given at one point in time) can be re-used for all six sections of the course, freeing up not only the professor from giving it multiple times to his/her sections but freeing also freeing up the other professor from having to give it at all while also providing the students with a better learning experience.

Expand influence of professor

The professor should now have an expanded influence; that is, he should be able to reach more students both through video lectures and other electronic communication channels. This follows pretty clearly from all the discussion above. It is also the case that easier problems can now be handled much more frequently and easily by students or teaching assistants. Why? Because the existence of the problems will be known and obvious since they are taking place in an open communication channel (e.g., twitter). If the professor has to spend less time on simple problems (a known and extensive time sink), then the professor should be able to handle more students. How many more? The only way to answer this is to experiment with larger classes and see how it works.

Substitute cheaper labor for more expensive

Finally, as classes get larger, professors and students would probably benefit from the creation of a new division of labor — a professional teaching assistant (not a student aide, but a real professional) for a particular class (e.g., a multi-section core class would be a good place to start). I actually had one of these for the project class that I taught a couple of school years ago. She handled lots of the simpler paperwork and organizational activities, freeing me up to focus on the students and their projects. Having experienced this first-hand, I can quite reliably say that she provided lots of benefits; and having had her work on the class for multiple semesters, it became clear to both of us that she was able to handle lots of tasks that freed me up in many more ways in the second year (compared with the first).

I can really see this applying in many more situations with larger classes enabled by technology. Compared to the cost of adding another professor to handle more students, the cost of hiring her to handle tasks that she could handle, and then freeing me up to work with the additional students, ended up costing the school a lot less.

Conclusion

So, that’s it — that’s my case (with some handwaving, to be sure) that using educational technology should enable teaching quality to increase while associated costs decrease. One of my underlying assumptions is that enrollments can be increased or faculty appointments can be decreased. If neither of these can happen, then the cost benefit will not be realized. However, the quality benefit should be unaffected so it seems like it would be a reasonable strategy to pursue, even in the short run.

Let me know your thoughts about my argument. Are you persuaded? What did I miss? Anything else that I should add to strengthen the argument? Let me know!

Effects of educational technology on teaching tasks

In yesterday’s article I proposed that the way to provide a great education at a lower cost is based on the concept of community:

Students have to feel they are part of a supportive and available educational community — as both givers and receivers of that support — as they strive toward personally relevant goals.

I then proposed that both project-based learning and students taking the roles of both learners and teachers are two important components of my proposal.

Today I analyze the specific tasks related to the teaching process, and then look at the effects of some educational technologies on those tasks. In the (I think) final post in this series, I will address questions that have to do with the quality of the resulting education and the relative cost of that education.

Tasks related to the teaching process

Does this bring back good memories?

Suppose your school has six sections of each core class, with each section having 80 students in it. In a traditional structure, a professor might be responsible for teaching three of those sections, so two professors would be needed for all six sections. Each professor coordinates with the other, but for his/her own sections the professor would be responsible for preparing the lectures, delivering the lectures, supervising and coordinating learning activities, communicating with the students out-of-class (either through email or office hours), monitoring any student projects and directing the teams, designing assignments and tests, and coordinating (or doing) the grading. It is assumed that, above a certain size, a professor would need assistance (in the form of a T.A. or administrative support) in order to effectively handle all of the tasks that are needed to be completed.

Do you know all of your students?

It takes a very committed faculty member to form a personal connection with 200+ students in a semester. Many times, because of prior commitments or whatnot, this is simply asking too much of the professor. In any case, let’s look at these different tasks in a bit more detail related to whether or not they are expenses that vary with the number of students or are fixed:

Preparing the lectures
Fixed. It really does not matter how many students are going to be sitting in a class — a lecture is a lecture.
Delivering the lectures
Varies with number of sections. Again, it does not matter how many students are going to be sitting in a classroom; however, if there are six different sections of the class, then it will take six times as long to deliver the lecture (if you are doing it live and in-person).
Supervising activities
Varies with number of students or number of sections. Many times a professor assigns exercises or activities for the students to complete as part of the learning or teaching process. One single professor can only supervise or provide feedback to a limited number of students.
Student communication
Varies a decreasing amount with number of students. Generally, each additional student requires a certain amount more time to handle individual requests and/or emails. As the number of students increase, the repetition among these messages begins to give some amount of scale effects because answers can be re-used. Office hours adds something of a step-wise nature to this relationship. With an increasing number of students, hours on additional days have to be set aside for those students who inevitably could not come to other hours because of their own conflicts or too many other students in line.
Monitoring projects
Varies directly with number of students. In many classes, this is where a professor’s expertise and experience will come most into play. As such, it is where his/her time can be in most demand. The result is that project work is only hesitantly given. Assigning the projects in groups can mitigate the investment, but it still can end up being quite significant.
Designing assignments
Fixed. It does not matter how many students are going to be completing an assignment. The professor must take time to design the assignment, but that time does not vary with the number of students.
Grading assignments
Varies directly with the number of students (similar comments to “monitoring projects”).

Effects of adding technologies to the mix

The educational process is moving out to the Internet

Now, let’s look at the effects on the above tasks if we add educational technologies to the mix. I’m assuming that the technologies are things like a modern CMS, Google Hangout, YouTube videos, and twitter. In addition (building on my suggestion from the previous post), I am going to assume that students take the role of teacher at times in addition to their traditional and on-going role as learner.

Preparing the lectures
Fixed. Using videos for some (or all) of the lectures will almost assuredly increase the fixed amount of time it takes to prepare for a lecture (compared with the traditional delivery model) because there are more and unfamiliar decisions to make in the design of the lecture.
Delivering the lectures
Fixed. Now, instead of being a variable expense of time, it is fixed — probably longer than one class period, but still fixed. Further, it can then be re-used multiple times, over multiple programs and multiple years if needed.
Supervising activities
Varies with number of students or number of sections, but at a lower rate per student. This is where the computerization of the activities and the availability of student-teachers (that is, students taking the role of teachers) come into play. Students who understand the activity (and who may have been blessed as being one who has reached an appropriate knowledge level) can be used to help tutor other students in the class. Teachers know better than anyone that actually teaching some material is the best way to learn about that material — why not pass along that benefit to students? Through the integration of students into the teaching role, I believe that a professor can supervise a greatly increased number of students during these activities.
Student communication
Varies a decreasing amount with number of students and, again, at a lower rate per student. With tools such as Google Hangouts (applied to office hours) and twitter (enabling asking and answering of questions by the twittersphere), I believe, again, that a professor can handle a greatly increased number of students, especially if the professor is able to create a feeling of community among the students.
Monitoring projects
Varies directly with number of students. It is definitely still the case that this is where a professor’s expertise and experience will usually come most into play. As such, it is where his/her time can be in most demand. However, I believe it is a mistake to forget the value of students who have successfully completed the class. In traditional project-based classes I have taught, I have used students who did well in my class to mentor students currently in the class. The mentors have to take a 1-credit hour class on mentoring techniques, so they get some official recognition for helping out. These mentors almost universally contribute to the success of my students. The use of these mentors definitely allowed me to more easily supervise more groups. I don’t see why moving the projects or students online would change this.
Designing assignments
Fixed. The same as before.
 
Grading assignments
Varies directly with the number of students (similar comments to “monitoring projects”). Same as above.

Benefits of adding technology

So, looking at the changes from the first scenario to the second:

  • For fixed-time activities, the time for preparing lectures will probably increase.
  • Delivering lectures changes from being a variable task to a fixed task. The benefits of this should increase as the number of students (and associated number of sections) increases.
  • Both supervising activities and student communications should take less time per student with computational support (and additional student involvement).
  • If students can be recruited to provide additional support, then both monitoring projects and grading assignments should take less per additional student when computational support is provided. Another way of saying this is that a professor should be able to indirectly monitor more projects and grade more assignments with a more computational process.

Wrap up

It appears that professors should be able to teach more students using technology than without. The questions still remain as to how quality will be affected and whether costs will go up or down. Again, I say that I plan to get to these questions in the next post. (We’ll see, huh?)

For now, what do you think about this analysis? Again, am I being too optimistic about the technologies? Am I missing some task in my analysis? Am I getting the effects of the technologies correct? Let me know what you think!

How to provide a great, lower-cost education

In this article I begin to provide answers to how I think faculty can deliver a great education to students at a lower cost than has previously been possible. What I focus on here is mainly the question of how to educational process should be structured. In my next post I will address why I think this is the right way to go, and why it would result in a great education for more students at a lower cost.

Key questions

What is your concept of education? What do you think it means to educate someone? What does it mean for students to understand a concept that you have taught them? How do you know they understand it?

Pen en papier / Pen and paper

These are the kind of questions that professors don’t think about too much. Generally, we answer them implicitly with the way that we structure courses, from class time activities to assignments to grading to tests to participation. However, it is getting harder to ignore these questions and, more precisely, it is harder to justify giving certain answers to those questions. Faculty should feel uncomfortable saying that education means lecturing for 50 minutes, taking very few questions (whether on purpose or not), and then giving a multiple choice test in which they are regurgitating “facts” mentioned in the lecture or in a book. Actually, faculty should feel very uncomfortable if this is the general answer that they give since would be very easy to replicate over distance (using technology). The problem is that lots of faculty give this answer.

The proposal

I have previously discussed how some organizations have sprung up to provide low cost learning opportunities. Yesterday, I detailed the many and varied implications to U.S.-based universities of China’s growing university system. I believe that the greatest opportunity for those of us in top U.S. universities is in figuring out how to provide a great education to more students at a lower cost. Not a good education. Not a low cost education. But a great education at a lower cost than we currently require. Now, this cost might be half of what we currently charge, and we might have to attract 3x as many students as we did previously — but that’s the move that we have to make. Further, we are definitely going to have to increase the quality of the education that we provide. Why? Because if competitors are offering a value proposition of value/cost (with cost=0), then our value has to be pretty darn good if we want our V/C ratio to be in the same ballpark.

Then the question becomes how to provide such an education at such a cost. I believe that the answer has its origins in the concept of community:

Students have to feel they are part of a supportive and available educational community — as both givers and receivers of that support — as they strive toward personally relevant goals.

I will have much more to say about this in future posts, but for now I will limit myself to three observations.

Project-based learning is one tool

First, at Edutopia, Mariko Nobori recently wrote an article “What makes project-based learning a success?” about a Texas high school that is “devoted to teaching every subject to every student through project-based learning.” 98% of their seniors graduate and all of their graduates are accepted to college. At least in these measures, the school can be said to be a success.

What does your personal network look like?

Principal Steven Zipkes, who seems to be rather key to the school’s success, emphasizes that teachers in the school focus on building relationships first, then incorporate relevance into the classroom, and finally rigor — what they refer to as the three R’s. Their concept of rigor is “a schoolwide, unwavering commitment to the design and implementation of a [project-based learning] model that includes evidence-based strategies and drives students to actively pursue knowledge.”

Students are able to work on problems that are personally relevant to them, thereby increasing their motivation. They also have to understand the concepts of the class well enough that they can apply it to an actual problem. This process of applying can bring up learning opportunities, allowing the student to gain a more nuanced and deeper understanding of the concepts being explored.

Students as both learners and teachers

The traditional model that puts students only into the role of learner and assumes that all knowledge and right answers have to come from the professor is outmoded but, more importantly, it underestimates the abilities of the students. Some students will learn some concepts more quickly than others, and it won’t always be the same students who do so. (Many times, but not always.) Take advantage of those capabilities and have students teach other students. The only way that we are going to be able to provide personalized guidance to many times more students than we currently do is to figure out how to empower students to help other students. As faculty we will have to design activities and lectures and pre-tests that teach and then embolden students to help other students, to give them the confidence to take the role, however temporarily, of teacher.

Two underlying keys

Finally, two key assumptions underlie my proposal:

  • The student must have some motivation for learning and participating. If this isn’t there at some level, then this proposal isn’t going to be some magic panacea. Professors can provide an environment where a student’s motivation can flower, but I believe the student has to bring something to the table.
  • One of a a professor’s key areas to focus on, especially during the first phases of a semester, should be toward building connections with the students and among the students. The importance of community, and the associated amount of trust that must be present for students to willingly and actively to take on the role of learning and teacher, means that these connections cannot be left up to chance. This connections would be harder to build remotely; a flipped classroom or even a blended learning environment would probably aid in their creation.

Wrap-up

At this point you should have a relatively clear picture in your mind of the general structure of classes that I think are appropriate. Remaining questions have to do with the quality of the resulting education and the relative cost of that education. These will have to wait for my following post.

For now, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Have you had any success (or failure) with this type of class? Share your experiences with us.

China’s growing university system

The U.S. has had the premier university system in the world for quite a while now. I think it’s fair to say that. And, overall, its top universities have been the envy of the world as well. Okay, that and $5 will get you a cup of coffee. What’s the likelihood that this will remain the case in the coming decade? If you think the U.S. is at least even odds to keep the status quo, then you might want to consider the following discussion.

As preamble, from data in the 2010 U.S. Census we know that the United States had 20.3 million students enrolled in some type of college in 2010, and we can guess that it will not be increasing rapidly any time soon. Sean Coughlan, in his article “Graduates – the new measure of power” at the BBC News, cited three statistics that, when taken together, tell quite a worrisome story (for those of us in a traditionally powerful large public research university, anyway):

Apollo 11 Launched Via Saturn V Rocket
  • China had about 1 million college students in 1998.
  • In the last four years, 34 million students have graduated from Chinese universities.
  • By 2020, it is projected that China will have 35.5 million students enrolled in their university system.

That kind of nearly vertical growth curve is shocking to see, and it’s clearly worrisome. Some points strike me immediately:

  • The Chinese university system is going to have to educate a lot of students. They are probably going to have to figure out — given the extreme pressure on their system from the rapidly growing number of students — how to do some type of “high volume production” approach when feasible.
  • If they can figure out how to educate their own students in that system, why wouldn’t they try to reach overseas for more students if the incremental cost of adding a student is low?
  • There’s no reason to think that they won’t work on scaling their graduate schools up and improving their quality as well.
  • They are probably going to send fewer students to the U.S. as their system’s capacity catches up to the needs of their population.
  • More students from the U.S. will go to China for their education, either undergraduate or graduate, as its economy continues to grow and its university system improves.
  • They are probably going to need more faculty than they can produce. They would probably look at bringing U.S.-based faculty (as well as other high quality systems) into their own university system.

To summarize: Fewer students enrolled in the U.S. system (which means fewer dollars). A draw on our faculty resources (which means lower quality)… which would probably mean more students (from the U.S., China, India, Europe, etc.) look elsewhere. Which means…lather, rinse, repeat.

Yes, we got trouble (right here in River City).

What did I miss? Did I go off-the-rails in my analysis? In any case, what should faculty in U.S. institutions of higher learning do? I certainly will have more on this soon but, in the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Introducing “Living & Learning Digitally”

In the fall 2012 semester at Michigan’s Ross School of Business I will be teaching “BIT330 Web-based information resources” (its official name) or, more accurately, “Living & learning digitally.” A current, evolving draft of the course Web site is now available, but understand that it may change significantly in some aspects in the next couple months.

Overview

This 3-credit course will be taught MW4-5:30pm. What is usually thought of as the course content will be delivered mostly online via pre-recorded video. Students will only infrequently need to actually attend class at the “official” time. I will have frequent online office hours via Google Hangouts. There will be lots of twitter usage, and participation will be related to the timely completion of online activities. This course has no prerequisites and is available for sophomores, juniors, & seniors.

For a previous incarnation of this course, I made this video. I will update this soon, but you should get the general idea of the class from it.

Purpose of the course

The course goal is to prepare the student for living and learning digitally. This preparation will be accomplished through academic study as well as through usage of current technologies, both well-known and under-appreciated. The following are the four basic threads running through the course:

Communicating digitally (via text)
  • One-on-one: Perhaps not shockingly, at times we will use email to communicate among ourselves. I will also use twitter to reach you, and I expect you will do the same (if you don’t already).
  • One-to-many broadcast: I will use the course twitter account to send out announcements to the class. I expect that everyone will follow this account during the semester and will (probably) have the messages forwarded to their phones.
  • Publishing: We will experience three different modes of publishing in this course:
    • Blog: As part of your weekly learning tasks, you will write short blog entries to the public course blog site. The audience for this blog is an informed college student who is not taking this course.
    • Wiki: Each student in the class will create an analyst’s report on some business & industry. The information will be gathered through the application of all the tools (see below) that we will learn about during the semester. Students will get to choose their own topic (with some guidance provided by the instructor). The creation of this report is something that student’s in previous years have enjoyed immensely.
    • Digital book: An addition to the course this year will be the production of a digital book by all the students in the class. While this has been done in other UM classes (most effectively and famously by Brian Coppola in the introductory chemistry class), I do not believe that it has been done at Ross (or in other business schools, though I may be mistaken about that). Each student will contribute a chapter (with guidance from the professor and others in the class) to a book that the public at large can use as a reference to the most powerful tools and interesting applications that we learn about in the class. We will publish the book at the end of the semester, with each contributing student getting appropriate credit. The goal will be that future classes will add to & revise this book as appropriate.
Communicating digitally (via video)
Part of the purpose of this class is to get students comfortable with communicating via video in a relatively structured setting. I believe that current UM students will be asked to go through lots of similar learning activities in the future either in their jobs or in more advanced studies. I also believe that getting a head-start on learning how to succeed in such an experience will be valuable for these students.

  • One-on-one: We will use Google Hangouts for one-on-one tutoring and Q&A when it is needed.
  • One-to-many: I will create short videos that introduce the topics and tools that we will discuss in the class; these will be lectures in front of a board, lectures with PowerPoint slides, basic talking head, or me demonstrating a Web-based (or iPad-based) tool. These videos will be available on YouTube.
  • Within small groups: For office hours I plan on being available on Google Hangout a couple of times during the week. Right now, up to 10 people can hangout together; until we find out differently, I assume that this will be sufficient.
Finding information
Almost all of the above describes the process of the class. The topic of study for the class will be how to find information on the Web that is relevant and appropriate to the question at hand (specifically, business, industry, or career related). Of course, learning to be a competent user of Google’s search tools will be a starting point for the class; however, dozens (if not hundreds) of other tools are available that a well-informed student should be aware of and know how to use. (See the list below for the types of tools that we will be investigating.)
Managing information
The big problem in search used to be finding informational resources that were relevant to a particular query. That is no longer the case. Now the problem is finding too many such resources. Today’s student (and manager) must learn how to narrow down his/her search for more appropriate information and, then, know how to manage the seemingly never-ending flow of information to his/her desktop. During the course of the semester, students will be introduced to several different tools that should help the student stay on top of his/her information inventory.

Much of the course will focus on Web-based tools, but I plan on also introducing mobile tools when appropriate.

Specific topics discussed

Again, with the understanding that this list is provisional, here are the topics and types of technologies that I currently plan on discussing and introducing:

  • Wikis
  • Blogs
  • Web search techniques (4 days)
  • Resource quality evaluation
  • RSS (2 days)
  • Blog search
  • News search
  • Twitter (2 days)
  • Automation tools (ifttt & Yahoo Pipes)
  • Image search
  • Pinterest
  • Page monitoring
  • Research tools
  • Change notification
  • Video search
  • Social search (digg, reddit)
  • Metasearch
  • Custom search engine

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for now. If you’re a UM student, you should be able to sign up for this class in the usual ways. Even if you’re not a UM student, you should be able to use much of the information on the site (and interact with me to some extent). Here are some other thoughts:

  • If you are interested in getting some insight into the development of this course, follow me on twitter at drsamoore or read my blog.
  • If you’re excited about the course:
    • If you’re a UM student, tell your friends about the course and get them to sign up.
    • Send me a public tweet (include @drsamoore anywhere in the tweet except as the first characters) describing why — and use the hashtag #bit330 when referring to the course.
    • Follow bit330 on twitter. This is the account I will use during the semester for all course-related information. Until that time I will periodically post more targeted status reports and other informational items on this account.
  • If you have questions about this course, send me an email at samoore@umich.edu. If you send me an email, put BIT330 in the subject line. (Or, of course, send me a tweet, either public or private.)
  • If you think I’m missing something that would make the course better, again, send me a public tweet describing what that “something” is.
  • Soon I will post a video that should give you some more insight into the course. Be on the lookout for an announcement within the next couple of weeks.

I hope this provides enough information to get you unnaturally excited about taking a class. I hope to hear from you soon!

Using a flipped classroom to teach a technology class

Flipping the Classroom, a recent post at Tech&Learning, excerpts a tiny portion of the book Flip Your Classroom by Jorgmann and Sams. In this excerpt Bergmann and Sams present several reasons for using this method. Before coming upon this list, I had basically decided to use this approach for the class I am developing here at Ross.

Here are the reasons that spoke most strongly to me along with my reaction to them:

Flipping helped busy students
As far as I can tell, no one is busier than the students in my classes. They have group projects in 4-5 classes, they have homework in those classes, they have clubs & sports teams & fraternities & sororities… Oh yeah, and class to go to. Having much of the material for the class online (lectures, exercises, assignments) provides an added bit of flexibility for the students (and for me, if I’m going to be truthful about it).
Flipping helps students of all abilities to excel
Students coming into any technology-related class that I teach always seem to have a huge variety of backgrounds and related skill. Some students barely need my lecture, some think they don’t need my lecture but realize later that they do (this is the group that I’m most excited about potentially reaching), and a final group knows that they need my lecture but need to listen to different parts of it at different speeds.
Flipping increases student-teacher interaction
I always enjoy working with students who want to learn. It’s easily the best part of my job. Anything that potentially increases the amount and/or quality of this part of my life is a good thing. I’m not looking to get out of having class, but I am looking to stop students from feeling like they have to come to class if they don’t want to. I have always thought of class time as the limiting resource when designing a class. I know that I only have X amount of hours for a class; the major question is “how should I spend this highly valuable time?” Well, if I can allocate more of it to working directly with students who have chosen to come to class so that they can work with me on a problem personally important to them — I can’t ask for more than that.
Flipping changes classroom management
As I have written about before, I have quite a history working with flipped-like classes so I have seen this in action. Classes run this way are so exciting, so energetic. Students get engaged with the material, with each other, and periodically with me. It is exhausting and invigorating to be a part of. I definitely did have to roam the class to periodically remind students to get back on task — they are kids, after all — but it’s nothing like having to wake the kids up who are sleeping during a lecture because of boredom.
Flipping makes your class transparent
I am very much looking forward to letting the public (parents, other professors, other students, legislators, executives) in on the exciting things we are doing in class. Just like when we published the blog for a class I taught last semester, it got the student’s attention and gave them a sense that what we were doing was “real.” It would also be great if the videos ended up getting comments and feedback from beyond our classroom walls. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Do you have any words of warning or encouragement for me? Am I being too naive about this? What do you think?

Relating the housing and education markets

In a wonderful and expansive blog post, Mark Cuban — businessman, billionaire, and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks — draws a clear and detailed analogy between the housing market bubble bursting and the current state of the higher education industry. Yes, I had heard this before but he paints a wonderfully vivid (though, of course, disturbing) picture of the economics of the situation.

His general points are as follows:

  • Too many students have loans that are too big to be easily paid back.
  • Student loans are too easy to get.
  • The end recipients of the loan money (colleges and universities) are motivated to continue raising their tuition rates because they don’t have to worry about either paying the money back or whether or not they will receive it — it’s guaranteed!
  • Borrowing money to pay for college and then hoping to earn it back in lifetime earnings is just like home buyers hoping to buy an over-priced house and then flip it in a couple of years for many thousands of dollars more. And it worked for many years…until it didn’t any more. And the effects of this bubble bursting are likely to be no less horrific than those for the housing bubble.
  • Since student debt is so high upon graduation, students are essentially forced to move back home and put almost all their money to their loan payments. Not saving for a car. Not buying a nice wardrobe for work. Not stimulating the economy and creating jobs! Making the loan payment…for years and years. Unless they can’t, and have to go into bankruptcy.

Here are words (those of Mark Cuban) that should send shivers down the spine of every business professor in a top-ranked (or even medium-ranked) school:

As an employer I want the best prepared and qualified employees. I could care less if the source of their education was accredited by a bunch of old men and women who think they know what is best for the world. I want people who can do the job. I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper.

If this sentiment were to spread, then the game would change over night. What if potential employers defined “best prepared and qualified” in a way that wasn’t necessarily equivalent to “degree from a highly ranked and accredited university”? It’t not like there aren’t alternatives out there waiting.

Let’s consider these three:

DIY U
DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education is a book by Anya Kamenetz “about the future of higher education. It’s a story about the communities of visionaries who are tackling the enormous challenges of cost, access, and quality in higher ed, using new technologies to bring us a revolution in higher learning that is affordable, accessible, and learner-centered” (from this page).
P2P University
From their home page, “IT’S ONLINE AND TOTALLY FREE. At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.”
UnCollege
Their mission is “To change the notion that university is the only path to success and to help people to thrive in an ever changing world in which it is virtually impossible for educational institutions to adapt.”

With the efforts by MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and others, professional schools (such as Michigan Ross) need to be leading the charge towards digital education. Why? Because they have the most to lose. When students routinely are asked to pay $50,000 per year while simultaneously giving up their position in the work force, the professional school better have a really good defense against any questions about their value proposition. Lots of questions need answers, or at least the possibilities need to be explored:

  • What will digital education look like?
  • How is digital education best accomplished?
  • What are the different pricing levels and education delivery models?
  • How does the blended learning model fit in all of this?
  • How can the threat of “free” (or, at least, extremely low cost) models of education be met?

In any case, standing on the sideline shouldn’t be an option. And, to be sure, the burden of worrying about this should not fall on the head of only the administrative team. Faculty, staff, and administration need to feel the urgency of this threat — the sense that something needs to be done, the feeling that the organization’s existence is being questioned, and that everyone is pulling in the same direction and working towards the same goal. Not all compensation questions and long term organizational issues can be answered before schools need to begin taking action. Faculty need to begin trying out educational delivery models with support from the school. The administration needs to come up with strategic plans for positioning themselves in the marketplace, while the faculty needs to have a sense of that direction and trust that the administration will be looking out for their best interests. If action isn’t taken soon, the range of possible actions available to schools and faculty is going to be severely limited. Act now, and figure out answers later. Everything can’t be known because the world is changing too fast. Some best guesses and assumptions have to be made.

This can only work if faculty and the administration have the sense that they are sitting on the same side of the table. What do you feel at your school? Are these two groups ready to work together?

A new teaching and technology initiative from Purdue

In this article on Purdue University’s student newspaper, Rachel Rapkin reports the following:

President France Córdova announced an initiative for college students around the world to access Purdue’s online courses. The system is called PurdueHUB-U and it includes a “blended format” class for residential students. … Through this website hub, residential students will be able to learn class content online by watching the lectures, submitting homework and taking tests. The actual class time will be used for activities, more engagement and participation.

In the article Purdue’s provost also points out that their research indicates that a blended learning model might be superior to online only or lecture only. Well, that makes sense to me, certainly. I also consider this a great way to make progress with this — conduct experiments with actual classes, learn from them, then make the technology more widely available. There are many steps before we have arrived at The Future of Education (drumroll, please!), but we’ll never get there without taking our first, tentative steps.

Delivering the right education at the right time

I have seen a lot of articles about challenges to traditional higher ed recently, and I’m not hopeful for the future of the university given the types of reactions I’m seeing from the field’s “leadership.” Here I show you a little of what I’ve been seeing and give you my take on the matters at hand.

The threat of MOOCs

Let’s consider MOOCs and the Professoriate by Kaustuv Basu at Inside Higher Ed. (This is a reflection on Tom Friedman’s very positive NYTimes article Come the revolution about MOOCs, Coursera, and online education, generally.) While it might be excused for a professor’s first reaction to the reality of online education to be defensive, by now we should be past this reaction. We should have moved on to figuring out how we can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. By the tone of this article, many professors haven’t taken that step yet. The article ends with this quote from Margaret Soltan, who was the first professor at George Washington University to offer a MOOC:

“Online is clearly inferior, even if done very well, [compared to] face-to-face education and to the social rites of growing up which college represents for many, many people,” she said.

Knowing what the customer values

This is an example of a really dangerous way of thinking. (This is where I put my “business professor” hat on…) This is a very important point:

It doesn’t matter if their product is inferior. It doesn’t matter if a bundled good (the accompanying “social rites”) increases the value of your product. If the customer wants something else, then the organization that provides that new “something else” will win out in the end.

Let’s think about early 1970’s American cars (for example, the 1971 Chrysler Imperial). Was the 1971 Honda Civic a superior car? No, but Chrysler should have been extremely worried about it. Why? Because it addressed a segment of the population whose needs weren’t being met. It provided reliable, economical transportation. It didn’t have a big trunk and it barely carried 4 passengers, but sometimes what it provided was just enough — and it was a lot less expensive.

Or, for another completely different type of example, the 2012 Ferrari FF is clearly a superior car to the 2012 Ford Taurus. But should Ford be worried about the Ferrari? Remember, the Ferrari is clearly a superior product in almost every way. Why isn’t Ford worried about losing all of their customers to Ferrari? Well, the Ferrari is astoundingly more expensive; for many customers, the Ford delivers more value for the money. It is the customer who determines the value being received — not the product itself! Ferrari definitely has a market for their product, but Ford’s product is appropriate for a much larger segment of the overall population.

For an interesting aside, note that Fiat owns Ferrari and sells a variety of cars: Fiat, Ferrari, Maserati, and Chrysler. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this allows Fiat to sell a wide variety of cars to a larger, diverse, global market than if they just sold one line of cars.

In these two examples, if it’s not clear already, traditional universities (that would be me and my organization) play the roles of Chrysler and Ferrari. We have a well-defined product that hasn’t changed much. We are faced with a lower cost, somewhat comparable product (online education in a variety of forms) that provides a different value proposition than we do. We are the high cost provider who tries to integrate all possible benefits into our value proposition. This leaves us vulnerable to the threat of competitors who are able to unbundle these benefits in a rational way.

Conclusions

This analysis leads me to a few conclusions:

  • Not all students in all meetings of all classes need the high end product. Further, let’s stop pretending that all of our classes are a high end product. Have professors recently sat in some of these huge lecture halls where a majority of students receive a majority of their education? After doing so, it would be hard to defend the position that a well-done video lecture wouldn’t provide the same (or even more) benefit in many instances. Yes, small seminars do provide a highly valuable experience. But how many students experience this (and how often) in their undergraduate education?
  • There is a legitimate reason and justification to deliver different types of products (education) at different price levels, even if the same product (some particular piece of knowledge or learning outcome) is at the core. Universities should work at creating different products for different parts of the market, some with lots of human contact, some with less human contact, or maybe some programs with blended delivery. Parts of the market clearly hunger for a lower cost product, especially when they don’t see the value of the higher cost version.
  • Universities (particularly business schools) should think about spinning off a company that provides expertise in the job hunt to young job seekers (for example) — they could then sell this to the marketplace instead of just providing it to their current students. The university could also think about doing this with other services. Why wait for other companies to unbundle your services for you? Why not do it yourself?

If universities (and the faculty they employ) want to continue to exist for another century (or even couple of decades) at anything like the scale they currently operate, then faculty and should stop trying to wish the problem away and start trying to be part of the solution. Professors should experiment with different delivery mechanisms in your own courses on a small scale. University leadership should encourage this experimentation, be willing to forgive experiments that fail (i.e., complaints from students or lower course evaluations), and set up systems for sharing the successes and failures so that everyone can get better faster.