Education, Technology & Business – Page 3 – insights & innovations at the intersections from Scott Moore

My favorite iPad apps for the news (part 1)

I read lots of news every day, and I have a variety of needs within the news realm. In this article I will describe what I look for in a news app, how I use those apps in my daily life, and which apps I use most often.

The following news sources are relatively expensive, but they are the gold standards of daily business news. I’m a business professor, so it’s sort of a requirement to read these. This means that I have to read The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Financial Times. Each goes about its business differently, providing a different experience for its readers. Here I’ll try to give some insight into how they differ.

These are generally great apps that make it easy to read the news. There’s also nothing to throw away afterwards.

Requirements

In addition to business, I also have interests in technology, real estate & automobiles but I’m not particularly interested in theater. This leads me to prefer a news app that both has the stories put into sections and allows me to re-order, or at least choose a subset of, those sections. In addition it has to be easy for me to save a story in some way; each application approaches this in a different way, but it has to be straight-forward. Because of the volume of news that I read, the app must also make it easy for me to scan the news quickly. Finally, I prefer it if the news story is available to the public because much of what I save is for either my students or my blog. It isn’t as useful for me if I can’t rely on the story’s general availability.

Work flow

I have found that my workflow is different than other people I know. As I am scanning the news, I periodically find a news article in which I am interested. My preferred method of saving an article for later reference involves mailing it to myself. I put a keyword of some type at the beginning of the subject line for the email; these keywords are things like “technews”, “201topics”, and “edtechbiz”. Notice that these are not real words; I don’t want random incoming messages to match my filters. I then have a filter defined in my email program that sorts incoming emails into the appropriate folders.

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal iPad app provides an experience superior to reading the paper version. I have definitely read the WSJ many more times and in more depth with the app than the paper version. On the iPad 3, it provides an absolutely beautifully rendered page. The sections are well-organized and appear consistently on specific days of the week (the middle screenshot below). Within sections, the article headlines are easily scannable and it’s easy to swipe from page to page.

App on iPad

Section menu

Daily editions

A distinguishing characteristic of this app is that it organizes the news in daily versions (notice the right screenshot above). This is in contrast to the NYTimes (as it is described below). This means that if you want to read an article from a couple of days ago, you need to bring up the Start Screen and then choose the “paper” from the day on which the article was published.

The New York Times

The New York Times is the first app I go to in the morning when I get up. I had never subscribed to this paper before it was on the iPad. Now it is my favorite news source I wouldn’t give it up easily.

My favorite feature is the re-orderable sections (see middle screenshot below; click on it to bring up a larger version). The NYTimes presents its news in a wide variety of sections, many of which I am interested in (to varying degrees) though some of which I am not. I am able to order the section list so that it lists my favorite sections at the top — Top News, Most E-mailed (highly recommended!), Business Day, Technology, Science, etc. — and puts less-frequented sections at the bottom. Only about 40% of the sections appear in the screenshot below.

App on iPad

Section menu

Integrated section

You can move from section to section by swiping up to get to the next section or down to get to the previous. Side-to-side moves between articles within a section. As with the WSJ, the slide shows that accompany the articles are simply excellent; however, I have the sense that the NYTimes carries more of these on a wider range of subjects (if only because the scope of the paper is so vast). For example, their Fashion and Real Estate slideshows are well-done and quite in-depth. The Old Gray Lady has clearly moved way beyond feeling restricted by print and accepts that digital presentation offers more options.

I really appreciate how the NYTimes organizes itself. This paper (I can’t stop calling it that; it’s like I can’t stop saying that I “dial” the phone) presents its articles within sections from newest to oldest, without any clear indication that an article appeared on a previous day other than the fact that it is furthest back within a section. Thus, if you want to find a Technology article that appeared a couple of days ago, then you should simply go to that section and swipe through the pages of that section to find the article. They are also flexible enough to put some articles within multiple sections; for example, frequently articles on Microsoft appear in both the Technology and the Business sections.

I like the fact that every month a person can access 10 articles for free. I subscribe, but I like to reference articles from this source.

Financial Times

The Financial Times is clearly my alternative news source. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t as good or thorough; it is simply the one that I go to only after I have finished reading the previous two. It is distinguished from the above two by its global focus; for example, on the screenshot below of its front page (left), you can see the Global Market Map that appears every day showing the change in a significant market benchmark in markets around the world.

The front page

Section menu

Scroll down a page

The iPad app is an HTML5 application rather than an application that you buy through Apple’s App Store. The company did a remarkable job of creating this unique app; I am surprised (I’m not sure why) at how bullet-proof it has been. You would simply never know that it is nothing more than a fancy Web page while you are using it. (To get some sense of the controversy of this technical move, read this article.)

To bring up the list of sections in this paper, you click on the name of the section at the top of the screen (just as in the WSJ). You then click on the section name you want to go to — no surprise there. FT has an organization scheme that is different still again from the previous two news sources. Similar to the WSJ, this paper is organized into editions so if you want to read an article from yesterday’s paper, you need to go to that edition.

The big difference is that each section is contained on just one page (see the right screenshot above). This can lead to lots of information being presented in one place; those who appreciate Bloomberg News would feel very comfortable on these pages. In the above screenshot I have moved to the Companies section and scrolled down the page:

In the upper left, the list of major news articles from the day are listed.
In the upper right corner is the bottom of the list of market movers from the Paris Stock Exchange.
At the bottom of the screenshot, a tabbed box shows 10 industries with each tab bringing up a separate list of articles related to that industry.
Below that box (not shown in the screenshot) are more articles in the left column, columnists in the right column, and another tabbed box at the bottom of the page containing bloggers (who, in this instance, are essentially less significant columnists as far as I can tell).

While their pages contain a lot of information, I find them to require a certain level of commitment in order to find information in the page. It tends to be easy for me to miss information that is contained within the boxes unless I take my time. The word “skim” doesn’t apply very well to FT.

Summary

I highly recommend each of these news sources. There is apparently a reason that they have the reputations that they do. However, each brings a different slant and covers a different subset of the news. Depending on what you’re interested in, one of them should be in your daily routine. I can’t tell you which one — you will have to make that choice — but each has done a great job of providing a superior experience on the iPad.

This is part 1 of my review of iPad news sources. In part 2 I will look at a series of apps that won’t lighten your digital wallet to such an extent.

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

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:

The increasing differentiation of higher education
The transformation of the general education curriculum
The faculty faces of the future
The surge in global faculty and student mobility
The new “invisible college”
The changing “traditional” student
The mounting pressure to demonstrate the value added of a college degree
The revaluation of “middle-skill” jobs
Higher education as a private rather than a public good
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

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

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

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.

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.

My favorite iPad apps for writing

I use my iPad quite frequently for writing (for example: right now). I am a highly dedicated user of the Logitech keyboard (as discussed in a previous article). I create text files in all different forms: plain text, HTML, CSS, LaTeX, and word processing. I also program in Python, PHP, and JavaScript (and lots of others, but that’s another story entirely), but I’ll mostly be writing in this post about text file creation outside of pure programming.

Requirements

What I absolutely require out of a writing app that I am going to use most of the time is an ability to easily store, access, and work with files that are not stored on the iPad. It is much too easy to have an iPad stolen (which I have had happen, though it was returned — that’s another story again) or to lose it (which is much more likely with me), so I don’t like having anything of any value (and, really, what file that you create isn’t of some value?) locked up on the iPad. My favorite way of providing this off-machine (cloud) storage is with Dropbox. The University of Michigan recently came to an agreement with Box, a company that provides a service similar to this. (Here is a comparison of Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and others as of April 2012.) For now, since I recently made a commitment to putting files on Dropbox, I’m mostly looking for Dropbox integration, but you might have a different such requirement. I simply emphasize here that you should store your files in the same way — off of the iPad and into the cloud.

Another requirement that I’m looking for is the ability to work on or offline with files. I am almost always online so it’s really the main focus but I recently took 4 cross-country flights and it definitely was something of a necessity to be able to create files while not connected to the Internet. After re-connecting, I also want the ability to change the file from storage on the iPad to storage in the cloud.

As a piece of context, I have been a loyal user of BBEdit for at least 15 years. I use it for all of the same things, and in all of the same ways, that I am requiring of my iPad writing app.I expect it to be less feature-laden but equally adept and creating text in different languages and for different purposes.

Textastic

The Textastic app has definitely become my favorite general text creation app. Look at all of the features it has:

Save files remotely to Dropbox, (s)ftp, and WebDAV.
Work directly with files stored locally on the iPad.
Code syntax highlighting for just about every language that I have ever heard of. Further, it is compatible with TextMate so that you can add your own syntax definition file if you so desire.
Has settings for font, font size, screen and text colors, line number display, tab width (and visibility), word wrap, auto correction, auto capitalization, code completion.
Integration with TextExpander.
Preview HTML as it would look in a browser.
Find and replace within the file.
File properties shows the number of lines, characters, and words.
Send file as an email attachment.

This app does all that I need and more. It starts up quickly, makes it easy to write, and saves files to all the places that I want them saved. I use it often and heavily.

PlainText

Until about 3 months ago, I would have heartily endorsed the PlainText app. It is a very stripped-down app that simply works. If you are looking for a text-editing app that integrates with Dropbox, then this app deserves serious consideration. I used it for over a year and was very happy with it. However, I have recently discovered Textastic and it just fits my needs a little better. I have not uninstalled PlainText because I am so comfortable with it. If you find that Textastic just seems like too much for you, then I definitely recommend that you give PlainText a try.

Pages

When I’m in the mood to create a more common word processing file (like that produced by Microsoft Word or Apple Pages on the Macintosh), then I head over to the Pages app. It provides a perfectly usable facsimile of the Mac Pages application on the more limited computing environment of the iPad. If I were so inclined to create such files more often, I would feel very comfortable working in this environment. Now that it provides near seamless integration with iCloud (Apple’s file storage service), it is much improved.

Notability

Notability is an extremely competent multimedia file creation application. Its primary distinguishing feature is that it enables synchronized audio recordings while you are typing into the file (as you might while taking notes during a class). Later, when you are reviewing your file, you can then click on any part of the file and hear what was being said while that part of the file was being created. This is very useful for any student.

It has many features above-and-beyond an application such as Pages or Word:

Create formatted text such as in Pages (different fonts, font colors, bullet lists, etc.).
Allows the user to freehand draw — with all the associated editing capabilities — within the document.
Insert photos with captions and text that automatically flows around the photo.
Full annotation ability with any PDF file.
Import RTF and PDF files.
Save/export files to RTF or PDF.
Save files in Dropbox, Box, iCloud, or WebDAV.
Email files as attachments.

When I am in a lecture, this is the file that I use and that I recommend anyone to use. Having the ability to listen to the words spoken in the lecture with little fuss is a feature that is easy to get used to.

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!

Yes, I love my iPad

I figured that I would just get my feelings out of the way right here at the beginning. I love my iPad. I purchased the original iPad when it first came on the market, then I passed on the iPad 2, and now I have the iPad 3. I carry it with me basically everywhere I go. I don’t have an iPhone (yet; waiting for the iPhone 5 and then it’ll be mine!). I have a 4-year-old 15″ MacBook Pro that’s just about done (and will be replaced, maybe, with anything from a 13″ Mac Air to a 15″ next generation MacBook Pro), and I have a MacPro tower with a 30″ monitor. But the iPad has become my tool of first choice. It is very light weight; it has a “so good you have to see it to really believe it” screen; the applications are abundant and very cheap; developers are working like crazy to add new capabilities every day. This is a tool that gets better — significantly better — with every passing month.

The key for me to making the iPad a key part of my working life is the Logitech Keyboard case by ZAGG. It is slightly smaller than my laptop keyboard; specifically, the Q-P row of the iPad keyboard fits in the space for the Q-O letters of my standard size MacBook Pro keyboard. I have relatively thick fingers and they fit, though just barely. But they do fit, and I type on the keyboard for hours on end.

This keyboard also acts as a case, covering and protecting the screen when it’s not in use. The iPad fits into the case with pressure and no other mechanism. I had one of these keyboards for my original iPad for 1+ years and it never failed me. And now I have had this keyboard for several months and it has been amazing. The Bluetooth connection between the iPad 3 and this keyboard has been much more reliable and stable than with the original iPad. In the couple of months that I have owned the pair, the keyboard has yet to lose a connection during the iPad sleep session; this happened at least daily with the original iPad.

With the combination of the iPad and the keyboard, I basically use the pair for everything. I read and respond to all my email. I read the newspapers in the morning. I write notes during meetings. I create and revise presentations. I show photos to my friends. I take photos and videos when I’m out. I write my blog posts. I write tweets and monitor my twitter feed. Basically, I use it for all my general purpose computing tasks.

When my family goes on vacation (4 of us), this is the only computer that we take. The WiFi picks up a good signal, and the Verizon 4G is typically faster (by a factor of 3-5x) than WiFi. Further, geographic coverage for Verizon (and even 4G) has been quite good. The apps for Netflix and Hulu allow the kids to watch the videos they want at very good resolution, and all of us can check our email, Facebook, and Twitter while we are away from home. It works great as the sole computer while on the road.

Given my heavy-duty use of this platform, and given that other people don’t use it as heavily as I do, I have to assume that others just don’t know where to begin or know about the options available to them. I can’t imagine why anyone would use a big, clunky laptop when they could use this iPad setup. So, what I’m going to do to remedy this is to write a post a couple of times a week about my favorite iPad apps. Of course, these will be written from the point of view of someone working in higher ed, but many of the tasks that I complete with the iPad are applicable to any working professional. Here are the posts that I have planned:

My favorite iPad apps for writing
My favorite iPad apps for the news (part 1)
My favorite iPad apps for reading
My favorite iPad apps for presentations
My favorite iPad apps for photos & videos
My favorite general utility iPad apps
My favorite iPad apps for watching videos
My favorite generally awesome iPad apps

If you are a new user of the iPad or someone who doesn’t use the iPad to its fullest extend (but would like to), I think you will enjoy this series of posts. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the iPad, please post them and I will do my best to address them.

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:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Cup of coffee, anyone? By Neely3d (C. Michael Neely) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

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):

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.

Trials of a new video producer

Yes, I am interested in technology, and I have quite a (long) history with it. Yes, I am interested in the use of technology in education, and I also have quite a (okay, again, long) history with it. And, yes, I am going to teach (the enrollment gods be willing) a class on living and learning digitally to business students that will be mostly online and use lots of video.

But I have not ever actually published a video using iMovie. Oops. That might be what’s referred to as a “hole in the resume.”

It is true that I have previously created a video promoting an earlier version of this class and created another series of videos explaining how to edit wikidot pages (with over 13k views! I had no idea). However, both of these were created (in ways that I only vaguely recall) with software that was cheap, difficult to use, and not that robust. I’m not even sure that I could get it to work again.

Given my plans to teach this class in this manner, I recently decided to actually test whether or not I could put together a video. I know there are other professors out there who are intrigued by where technology is going but are uncertain about the move from classroom to video, so I figured I would document these early, tentative steps. I know how to speak in front of a classroom, no problem. Delivering content over video is more complicated. There’s the content itself (essentially the same, though structured differently), then the delivery of the content into a camera (very, very different), and the assembling and publishing of that digital content. I wanted to see for myself, before I got too far into this process, just how hard or easy it is to complete that last step. If that step is too hard to take, then I would have to change my whole concept of what it means to deliver this type of class.

The following two videos are the result of that first test. The first simply tests my abilities to use iMovie to create a movie, and the second shows the current state of my production facility and the hardware I use.

Initial tests of hardware and software

This is really raw video. (Please don’t judge! I’m not performing or using my stage voice or anything. This is “testing, testing, 1, 2, 3.”) This video is the result of using my MacBook Pro, an iSight camera (since my laptop’s camera stopped working a couple of years ago), iMovie, a microphone, and a document camera. (More on all of this below.) Here is the movie; my comments follow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-E2JB7ySo width=”420″ height=”315″]

I published this in “Large” format (808×540), suitable for Apple TV, computer, and YouTube. I will have to think about this as I go along. For an iPhone, it recommends publishing at 480×320; however, some loss of detail would certainly occur.
It is simply a matter of checking a box to have iMovie automatically insert a standard transition between scenes. I used “cross-fade.”
Inserting a title (at the beginning), subtitles (before scenes), and credits (if needed at the end) couldn’t be easier. Drag and drop, then type. Done.
At 0:05 when I first appear on screen: so many things to see here.
- I have a ceiling light to the left of my head; I am going to have to change the alignment of the camera to get that to go away.
- The lighting on my face is a bit dark, and shadows are being cast across my face. (Later, I will address this.) It is hard to get this right because I have a light directly above my desk (a different ceiling light) and none in front of me. Who has a light shining on his face (but only direct light!)? Well, certainly, not me. What I had to do (for this shot; I do more later) was put a desk lamp next to the camera and behind the laptop and point it away from me so that it reflected off the wall.
- So far I like working with this microphone. It is comfortable, the ear microphone is sufficient, and the sound pick-up seems acceptable. I wanted to get a microphone because I plan on lecturing to a camera in front of a whiteboard and I figured I would need one at that time since I would be turning my head periodically away from the camera. (I will test this setup soon.)
At 0:21 the first subtitle screen appears. (I’m sure this has another name.) Again, this was super simple.
0:26: I recorded a second short clip in order to test how to handle the insertion of a second video into the movie and how transitions work. I need to remember to have at least 1 second of me staring at the camera at the beginning and ending of a clip in order to provide time for the transition to work effectively. The transitions take about 0.5 seconds off the end of a clip and blend it into the beginning of the next clip so you don’t want to be doing or saying anything at that time.
0:37: I wanted to record a clip and then insert a voice-over to see how it works. I recorded the whole clip, and then I went back and used iMovie to record the audio for the middle segment. The audio for the voice-over came out different than it did for the rest of the segment. I have no idea why because I used the same hardware and software for everything. I still have to investigate this.
At 0:53 the doc-cam makes its appearance. This was kinda tricky to setup — actually, not really to setup but more specifically to understand how to setup — but it is easy to use.
- I will have to use a more bold-faced pen if I am going to write on paper.
- Though the doc-cam has an audio pick-up, I set up the software to use the head mic that I had on.
- The doc-cam appears to be much more comfortable working in a Windows environment than a Mac environment. The software that is made available for the Mac is explicitly in beta (and it should be). It works, but it has some glitches. The major one is that it records the video in one orientation, with the top of the video being away from the base and the bottom of the video being closest to the base. The software has a button that is supposed to rotate the video, but it doesn’t really work. This ends up not being a problem (at least as far as I can tell for now) because, after the movie is saved, QuickTime can rotate the movie into the correct orientation.
- I was hoping to use this camera during live feeds, but it doesn’t appear to be a standard video feed. I can’t get my Mac to choose it as a standard video input so I can’t switch to it — it only works when it is being controlled by its own software. I will have to continue investigating this, and possibly look for another product if I can’t figure it out.
- Regardless of all the above, I think the image is pretty clear and doesn’t have a lot of the ghosting and blurring that older, school-supplied doc-cams seem to always have. I definitely would feel comfortable using this hardware in a pre-recorded segment.
1:14: I wanted to test if the selection of audio input made a difference in the recording. I definitely like the change in audio quality from the first segment (computer microphone) to this one (Bluetooth mic).

All in all, it was a successful test. I still have some issues to investigate, but it all seemed doable. Now I just have to work on my on-camera personality.

Production facility

This video shows my “production facility” (aka my basement). The video itself is somewhat of a technical test as well, since it is a combination of video off my iSight and off my first-generation Flip. (I recently was saddened to discover that my Flip HD has died after barely being used. Got a new battery and it didn’t revive it. That’s really too bad since I haven’t seen anything that approaches its combination of cost, simplicity, and quality output. I am going to have to keep my eyes open.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz0ncwpsClQ width=”420″ height=”315″]

Here’s a list of what I discuss in the video:

Apple MacBook Pro: This is a 15″ early 2008 model with 4GB of RAM running Lion 10.7.4. The main problem is that it is nearly out of hard disk space (as well as the aforementioned camera issue). I will be replacing this soon. For now it serves it purpose quite well.
iMovie: I was fairly amazed by how easy it was to get started with this. I watched their introductory video, but that’s the extent of the training that I underwent before I did any of this. I’m sure that Final Cut Pro X is a wonderful piece of software, and I’m also guessing that I will start pining for it at some time; however, for now I can see being satisfied with iMovie and its focus on ease-of-use.
Plantronics Voyager 520: This is a noise-canceling, Bluetooth, over-the-ear microphone. It is comfortable and seems to provide adequate sound quality. I will have to monitor this over time but this looks like it was a good investment.
Luna Interactive Projection Camera: As I said before, the Mac software that comes with this is a bit iffy, but the hardware seems solid. I especially like the quality of the video that it produces. The only thing that bothers me is the difficulty using it in a streaming video.
Flip Video (original): This is a solid, reliable piece of hardware. As long as it doesn’t fail (seem Flip HD experience above), I expect that I will use this for a while. I next need to test it out in a room with me in front of a whiteboard. This will have to wait for future explorations (and associated posts).

Conclusion

I’m a long-time Mac user beginning with the Mac SE/30 in 1989 all the way through my current iPad, MacBook Pro, and MacPro 12-core tower with 16GB of RAM (I run lots of computation-intensive simulations in my research) so I am comfortable working in that environment. However, “working in that environment” and “producing videos” are two completely different things.

I now have the confidence to invest a bit more time in learning specific techniques and approaches to teaching on video. I didn’t feel the urge to investigate these before because I didn’t have the confidence that I would be able to carry it off. Now I do.

I hope these videos and this blog post gives you confidence that you could get into the video production business, at least on a part-time basis. Do you have any help for me on the next steps on my learning journey? Let me know if you do.

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?

Observations from Bingham and Connor’s The New Social Learning

I am currently reading The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Connor. This book is about enabling, supporting, and boosting the learning that is going on via social means of an organization’s employees. Of course, I am more interested in doing all of this for the students in my class, but I am hopeful that I will be able to transfer some insights from one context to another. As I have started to read it, I’m getting so many ideas; in this post I list of the ones from just Chapter 1 that excite me most; the emphases below are mine. I assume that longer posts will follow on some of these individual ideas (and on some from later chapters). This is not meant to be a review or to capture the important points from the book — this is just a set of my reactions to some of their ideas at the beginning of the book.

A student’s roles in a class

From p5: “We encourage you to use this book to discover how social media tools facilitate learning, how they might be leveraged to extend and expand your interactions with colleagues, and how to use them to create something vibrant. As Chris Brogan, one of the top bloggers in the world, coauthor of Trust Agents, and author of Social Media 101 says, ‘Focus on connecting with the people, and the tools will all make sense.’ ” — When designing my upcoming class, I continue to look for tools that enable connections at the right time, but I’m also thinking of how I can get across the idea to the students that they are supposed to support each other, to teach each other, to share with each other. They have been programmed from at least elementary school (and certainly at Michigan Ross with our enforced curve) that school is a competitive experience, that if you do better, then someone else has to do worse. I will have a strong tide to swim against.

The social basis of knowledge

From p7: “At its most basic level, new social learning can result in people becoming more informed, gaining a wider perspective, and being able to make better decisions by engaging with others. It acknowledges that learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.” — It has only been in the last few years that I have come to know this! (I’m a little slow sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time.) I have come to know that knowledge is an extremely social construct, that knowing something in some sense means knowing how to work with and through other people to get something done, that if you don’t have that level of knowledge, then you don’t really know something. If it’s possible to teach a class in a way that supports a discovery of this truth, then I will be looking for that way.

Technology for social learning

Social learning isn’t new. It has been going on since humans have walked the planet. We have used technology to support the process for at least 50 years (even though that’t not what it was called at the time). — Personally, I tend to get somewhat swept up in the latest technology. (If you know me, you know that I just said the equivalent of “The sun is hot.”) But I have been around long enough to know that this is true…at some level. The technology might have supported this process before, but it was only for people with a certain skills set or for people who worked in a certain industry. The technology now seems to be available and useful to a much broader segment of the population doing a much broader range of tasks. Given this, it seems like it would be useful to get students some experience with these tools sooner rather than later.

Social learning for higher ed

Social learning technologies “move services, assets, smarts, and guidance closer to where they are needed — to people seeking answers, solving problems, overcoming uncertainty, and improving how they work.” — This captures why I think social learning technologies would be useful for my class. I am not going to have all the answers; I want students to take ownership of some of the material and learn to share their own expertise; I want students to learn to reach out to a community for answers instead of just the supposed expert (i.e., me), even though that is what they have been trained to do all of their academic lives. Once they get into the work world, they will have to learn to operate in this generally ambiguous fashion. I figure I can start the process early for them in order to give them a leg up once they get out into the real world.

Social learning in my class

On p9 the authors explain what social learning is not, and this helped me clarify my thinking related to how I would use these technologies in my class:

It’s not at odds with formal education. By setting the students up with twitter accounts (that is, those that don’t have one already), I can enable them to share and seek information formally and informally (if that distinction even makes sense any more).
It’s not a replacement for training… That’s good, because I was still planning on using training videos and in-person experiences and online exercises in the class.

Appropriate testing

On p11: “The 21st century mind is a collective mind where we access what we know in our friends’ and colleagues’ brains. Together we can be smarter and can address ever more challenging problems. What we store in our heads may not be as important as all that we can tap in our networks. Together we are better.” — Testing a student’s ability to recall facts just seems silly in today’s world. What we need to be testing is a student’s ability to solve a problem using appropriate methods. More and more, “appropriate methods” include usage of the student’s personal network. Why? Because that is how they will address problems for the rest of their lives. It is a social world, and no student will ever be an island. (Except, apparently, if they sit in a classroom.)

Sharing expertise vs. enabling collaboration

On p19: “Learning can easily occur anytime, anywhere, and in a variety of formats. It always has, but now it’s codified and easy for others to see. These new social tools can enable organizations to strike a balance between surfacing the knowledge people need and giving them the ease and freedom to learn in a healthy and open way.” — Organizations have long worked to get employees to share their expertise so that others can build upon it. It seems to me that this new model of social learning has a bit different take on this. Efforts here are focused on getting employees to collaborate in problem solving, to draw them explicitly into the process so that their expertise can be used directly. The social tools should make it easier to reach out to these people, and to establish the true nature of the need for others to see (via an ongoing open, sharing practice).

Expanding the boundaries

On p20: “Learning is what makes us more vibrant participants in a world seeking fresh perspectives, novel insights, and first-hand experiences. When shared, what we have learned mixes with what others have learned, then ripples out, transforming organizations, enterprises, ecosystems, and the society around us.” — I want to make my class as valuable as possible. I want students to share what they have learned. I want people who are not in my class to be able to get a glimpse of the wonderful experiences we have shared in the class. I want students in my future classes to build upon the works and learning of my current class so that future students can go beyond where my current students are able to go. How? That’s a topic for a future post! But I think it’s a good goal, and one that is in reach.

How and when students learn

On p20: Some researchers in learning have found that “70 percent of learning and development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving; 20 percent of the time development comes from other people through informal or formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; and 10 percent of learning and development comes from formal training.” — This might be true because formal training only takes place 10% of the time; mentoring 20% of the time, etc. Or it might be that formal training provides knowledge that is not measured by these statistics. Or, most disturbingly, it might be that formal training hasn’t been imparting knowledge that is in any way useful. That would not be a happy interpretation of the data from my perspective. My personal takeaway from this is that I try to provide students with many opportunities to create tasks that both are personally relevant to them and apply theories and frameworks from the class I am teaching. I also try to give personal feedback as much as possible and create opportunities for students to give and receive feedback among themselves (if possible for the class); I have found that both teaching other students and learning from other students also help students retain information.

Class as a context for experimenting

On p21: “The new social learning, which centers on information sharing, collaboration, and co-creation — not instruction — implies that the notion of training needs to expand.” — This is a good summary of my motivation for working on this class. It provides a context to test my theories of learning and teaching, to see which facets of these processes can work in a digital environment and which require a blended approach.

Application of knowledge as a means for remembering

On p22: “Knowledge acquired but never put to use is usually forgotten. We may act as if we care about learning something and go through the motions, but we will forget it unless it is something we want to learn and it fits how we work.” — As I have taught over the years, I have learned this again and again. (Have I mentioned that I have a thick skull?) The concept of “covering the material” is nearly a meaningless phrase. Unless a student interacts with the concept, makes it somehow personally meaningful, it will be forgotten. Just because the teacher says the words doesn’t mean that the student heard them, understood them, or will ever even remember that they were said. Design a course so that the student has time to apply the concepts in a meaningful context. It is best if the student can construct that context; otherwise, what is perceived as meaningful to the professor can end up being perceived as irrelevant or confusing by the student. Not good. The question for the professor becomes how to come up with a way of managing all these different contexts during the learning process. Again, another question for another blog post.

Conclusion

That’s it for now. (As if that wasn’t enough, huh?)

As I said, this post is in no way a summary of the book, or even of this chapter. I hope it does, in some way, encourage you to read this book for yourself; as you can tell, I feel it has been worth my time. I would love to hear your take on some of the points above. I’m struggling with a lot of concepts, and juggling lots of balls. I need some of you to help me think through all of this.

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?