Category: Learning

MOOCs, Motivation, and the Mass Movement toward Open Education

Curtis Bonk led a session about MOOCs at Learning 2012. His slides are available at TrainingShare (this is the direct link). His presentation must have been one of the most insanely paced sessions I have ever been to. That is a compliment by the way.

What is a MOOC? Start here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc]

Curtis’ presentation consisted of four parts.

Part I. Past Year Recap of MOOC and MOOC Leadership

MOOCs are very much in the news nowadays. For example the conversation with Bill Gates or the Holy Apostles. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice timeline and even Newt Gingrich has one. The MOOC that probably got the most attention was Stanford’s class on Artificial Intelligence. Something that I hadn’t heard of before earlier this week is the Floating University.

Daphne Koller’s TED talk was probably the thing about MOOCs that got the most play:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FvJ6jMGHU]

Curtis runs his own MOOCs too. He uses tools like Piazza and Course networking.

If you want to be a leader in the MOOC space then there are a few things you could do. Each of the following points was backed up by some news item or article:

  1. Be first
  2. Offer something novel
  3. Define brand
  4. Take risks
  5. Rethink your classes
  6. Inspire your team
  7. Form partnerships
  8. Offer incentives
  9. Set bold audacious goals
  10. Create media attention
  11. Build on strengths and niche areas
  12. Do not make rash decisions
  13. Be pro-active in addressing concerns
  14. Give something away
  15. Look way ahead
  16. Expanding marketss
  17. Ask questions

Part II. MOOC Instructor Guidelines

Next Bonk discussed a few guidelines for instructors of MOOCs:

  1. Plan and Prepare
  2. Designate Feedback Providers and Tasks
  3. Offer Ample Feedback in Week One
  4. Use Peer, Machine, Volunteer and Self-assessment
  5. Gather geographic data
  6. Use a Warm and Friendly Tone
  7. Form Groups and Social Supports
  8. Arrive early for Sync Session
  9. Allocata Ample time for Questions and Feedback
  10. Share Resources
  11. Personalize
  12. Use Polling Questions
  13. Check Chat Window for Comments and Questions
  14. Reflect After Each Session
  15. Offer Weekly Recaps and Podcasts

Part III. Type of MOOCs

We are alreading seeing a whole set of different MOOCs. His attempt at a typology is here:

  1. Alternative Admissions Systems or Hiring System MOOC
  2. Just-in-Tme Skills and Competencies MOOC
  3. Theory- or Trend-Driven MOOC
  4. Professional Development (practical) MOOC
  5. Loss Leader (dip toe in water) MOOC
  6. Experimental MOOC
  7. Have to look it up
  8. Personality MOOC
  9. Name Branding MOOC
  10. Rotating MOOC
  11. Repeatable MOOC
  12. Reusable MOOC

Part IV. Business models

This was a part that I was interested in. What are the business models behind MOOCs? How can they be sustainable? Bonk has come up with the following (incomplete list):

  1. Advertisements
  2. Small and flexible application/enrollment fee
  3. Course assessment fee
  4. Certificate fee
  5. Enhanced Course Fee
  6. Option for full university credit
  7. Company sponsored
  8. Percent of first year salary (sell companies names and contact details of high performers)
  9. Sell or Lease Courses (for example to community colleges)
  10. Share Revenues

I think he missed an important value driver: the (aggregated) data of all the participants. We already see that university are not calling MOOC participants “students” because they don’t want to have to account to FERPA and I can see universities monetizing that data quite easily as a consequence.

Some more things from Curtis

Curtis has created a set of Creative Commons licensed videos about how to teach online. Well worth a look.

His next book is is about a learning framework that he has titled: TEC-Variety:

TEC-Variety Model
TEC-Variety Model

Finally check out his book: The World is Open:

The World is Open
The World is Open

Personalizing Learning

Richard Culatta is with the US Department of Education at the Office of Educational Technology. He is an exceptional speaker and a “smart cookie”, I dig his self-deprecating style.

He kicked off by showing examples of what he calls “pencil sharpening” technology. Pencil sharpening is a metaphor for just making the same thing a little bit better without changing the paradigm. From the traditional blackboard to the digital whiteboard, from the traditional textbook to the e-book, from lectures to webinars. We should not be sharpening our pencils but instead let technology help us with the three challenges that prevent us from breaking with the one-size-fits-all methodology:

Challenge 1: We treat learners the same despite different needs and challenges. The least equitable thing we can do is treat everybody the same.
Challenge 2: We hold the schedule constant and allow the learning to vary.
Challenge 3: Student performance data comes too late to be useful.

The US government’s National Ed Tech Plan tries to address these challenges.

Culatta has made the following formula for personalized learning:

Adjusting the pace + Adjusting the learning approach + Leveraging student interests/experiences = Personalized learning

If you don’t have each of these three elements, then it isn’t personalized. This needs thinking on each of the following: learning, teaching and infrastructure.

Next he shared a set of examples. The one that stuck out for me is School of One, a concept school that creates personal curricula for its students using technology.

School of One - Learning Algorithm
School of One – Learning Algorithm

Taking a cue from this Richard suggests we should capture way more formative assessment data from our learners.

He finished by asking us all to download and read the Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics report. Allegedly a very readable introduction to the topic.

Hackathons: Innovations in Learning and Collaboration

Not just about the food
Not just about the food

Melodi Albert and Nancy McClary from Dominian Enterprises, a company with about 3400 employees, talked at Learning 2012 about how they used hackathons as a learning tool.

All of their hackathons are two-day long events. They have now organized four different ones for their developers, each focusing on a different API. One of their hackathons was focused on a product I hadn’t heard of before: the Learning Registry. The Learning Registry is:

creating a set of technical protocols as a platform for innovation by content authors and aggregators. Applications built to harness the power of harvesting and analyzing the Learning Registry data will allow educators to quickly find content specific to their unique needs. The Learning Registry will store more than traditional descriptive data (metadata)–it will also allow sharing of ratings, comments, downloads, standards alignment, etc.

Initially the hackathons were organized as a recruitment effort, but they found out that they are great learning events too: people can break out of their normal walls, they can learn from eachother and they can actually do something. It was a challenge to sell to management that developers could take two days out of their schedule to work on this, so the first one was on a (rainy) weekend. After the success it became easier to get the time. Outside of the opportunity costs these events are very cheap to run (about $75 per person for the two days).

The first hackathon was just for their own employees. Later on they opened up to the rest of the world with the code hosted on Github. They fill them up on a first- come-first-serve basis with developers, business leaders, designers and marketeers. Each of these types get their own colour, so that they are recognizable and can come together as mixed teams. The teams build something of their own choice and they present it at the end of the two days. During the two days the people are well cared for with nice food and usually some swag (e.g. a T-shirt with a logo).

There is a lot of return on investment for these events. Melodi literally said: “There isn’t any amount of money we could have paid to get the same level of learning as these events delivered”.

I think this is an interesting model to play with. Can this work in domains that aren’t about programming? Could we do a “hackathon” for developing a learning experience? I want to find out (and will start by reading this Wired article on the topic)!

Notes on the Monday Morning General Session at Masie’s Learning 2012

The first general session at Learning 2012 on Monday started with the two writers of the Webinar Manifesto (which is available for free as a Kindle e-book for the next two days and is a project by FranklinCovey). They discussed some of the seven principles of the manifesto:

  1. Connect or Die
  2. Don’t Default
  3. Shut Down the Ugly
  4. Captivate or Alienate
  5. Humanize the Screen
  6. Crack the Feedback Code
  7. Cage the Monsters
Webinar Manifesto
The Webinar Manifesto

These statements sound quite cryptic and will probably require reading the book to understand them better. Masie added that we should stop fixating on the one hour length of the webinar. If there is less content to discuss, then why not make it much shorter?

I recently tried out my own innovative way of doing an in-house webinar with 25-40 people attending. I turned it into what I termed a socratic webinar. Instead of showing slides and telling a story I created a set of rules for interaction, had four well-prepared questions and used the LiveMeeting feedback status to allow people to tell me they wanted to speak. For the first time ever I had the majorty of the participants engage in some real thinking and conversation. I am convinced most of them where not reading their email at the same time. Let me know if you are interested to hear more.

Next up was Ken Davenport. He is an innovative Broadway producer and marketeer. He sees storytelling as something that actually gets a physical response from people. The most interesting topic he and Elliott talked about was the level of detail that is put into a Broadway show. Every single part of those worlds is designed. This is something that I have advocated should also apply to the learning experiences we design. The new en-vogue term for this is that we need to become Learning Producers rather than Learning Designers. I don’t think I agree, I would probably prefer Learning Directors or Learning Architects. Davenport sees a “YouTube-ization” of American entertainment: we want our entertainment in bite-sized chunks. He is trying to get his industry to adapt to that.

Cindy D’Aoust is from the Meeting Professionals International (MPI). She talked with Elliott about the changes in the world of meetings. Meetings have a much shorter lead time than they used to have in the past. There is less focus on executional logistics (food, temperature, location) and more on what it can do for people.

Susan Cain has written the book Quiet about introverts. She has done a TED talks about the topic:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4]

Most people think that they are more extroverted than they really are. This is because we live in a society that tells us we should be extroverts. She thinks that introverts make up about one third to a half of the US population. To do good creative work you don’t just need to be collaborative, you also need to cultivate solitude. This is something we barely ever still do. In her book she talks about the “cult of openness” and she has a chapter on the problems with things like open office spaces. The most effective teams are a mix of introverts and extroverts. She believes that this is the next great diversity issue of our time. We are at the dawn of the quiet revolution: introverts are where women were in the fifties. We innately focus on the people who are the good talkers rather than look at the substance. There is some evidence that introverts are better at leading pro-active people than extroverts. This is because introverts can let pro-active people run with their ideas. Laptops and mobile phones are great devices for introverts because they allows us to communicate with hundreds or thousands of people without having to get on stage. There is a cultural dimension to this question. In Confucian societies “group harmony” is an important concept (so people “humble themselves”). This means that we sometimes get misunderstanding between people from a Confucian culture when they have to interact with people from an extrovert society. It was refreshing to have a speaker who actually likes to talk on the basis of research rather than on their own opinion. Interesting book, it is on my wishlist now.

The final speaker for the morning was Curtis Bonk who has written a book that I would have like to have written myself: The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education (he also rocks a hairstyle from a different decade). Their main topic was MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses. I have written about these quite often before, so a lot of this wasn’t new to me. An interesting part of their discussion had to do with assessment. Curtis thinks our CVs will consist of two parts in the future: one that reflects your formal and certified education, but also with a part that reflects the things you have done outside of the formal system. MOOCs have not really taken off in corporations yet. Curtis will talk about different business models around MOOCs in a session later in the day. Elliott encourages us to think of Open Learning not as something that only the weirdos do. It is not just a countercultural term.

Shifting Trends in Buying Learning

The Panel
The Panel

My first session for this second day of Learning 2012 started with a session of shifting trends in buying learning.

Masie has been involved in a survey aroud the learning market place. According to him there is an anomaly: there are more dollars to buy learning than robust providers/suppliers that can deliver to their needs.

One example is the market for Learning Management Systems (LMSs). There is an increasing frustration from members of the Learning Consortium that their LMS cannot deliver video very well. People are ready to buy technology to create, edit and deliver video, but they can’t find the right vendor to buy it from. Another area where people want to spend is Performance Support. There isn’t a perception that there is a large number of solution providers who can deliver this. Ironically content is also hard to get nowadays. There has been a drying up of content providers (all of them are very verticalized). New ways of doing assessment (e.g. badging models) are also hard to buy. Most people want to use mobile learning as an on-the-job performance support and also see it as a way to connect staff. 87% of the respondents are interested in mobile, but the percentage of companies really doing something in the space is in the teens. A similar thing can be said about social and collaborative learning.

Masie also made an argument that e-books will be very prevalent in the future. Everybody has a tablet, but there is no decent model for corporate learning e-book creation. He is pushing Adobe to start creating software that will allow people to author their own learning e-books.

All in all this means there are massive opportunities for vendors in this marketplace.

After Masie’s introduction we had a small discussion on the topic. One thing that came up was the disconnect between relatively young and agile companies with innovative solutions and the traditional procurement processes of big companies. The panel also discussed that it is often difficult to make the step from a small pilot or proof of concept to the larger implementation. Unfortunately nobody seemed to have a really sharp idea on how to solve the conundrum.