Creating Significant Learning Environments
4 Start-Ups Are Offering Free Online Courses – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
When you start to read about groups of start-ups moving into the Free Online Course space you can we assured that the online course space is about to changed significantly. It looks like the disruptive world of online learning is being disrupted.
I have been waiting for this official announcement for many months. While I was still at Abilene Christian University (ACU) early this past year I learned about this new system when ACU was informed that Perason and Google were combining forces and ACU was chosen to be a test site. At the time of this early trial the system that is now called OpenClass didn’t even have a name. Now that my colleagues at ACU are no longer bound by a non disclosure agreement I look forward to quizzing them about their experience with this new system.
Having another option to Blackboard and Moodle means we can perhaps see some true innovation in the course/learning management space. If OpenClass works as well as the rest of the Google Apps for Education suite we are all winners because the more competition there is to Blackboard (who controls over 80% of the course management space) the more choice and flexibility educators will have.
The only downside to this is the fact that OpenClass will more than likely have an initial impact on Moodle which is a free open source platform many institutions are using rather than Blackboard. While Moodle is free it really doesn’t offer much of an alternative to Blackboard because it simply mirrors Blackboards functionality and it requires a significant amount of time, effort and resources to maintain. With Google hosting OpenClass the maintenance and support issues of hosting an CMS/LMS go away.
Time will tell if OpenClass will the same postive impact on Higher Ed that Google Apps for Education have had. I know we (Concordia) will be exploring this options as soon as we can.
Blackboard Announces Collaboration With Major Textbook Publishers – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
If you hold to the notion that learning is all about pushing content to students then you will be excited to hear about Blackboard’s recently announced collaboration with the text book publishers: Cenage, Macmillan, Pearson and John Wiley & Sons.
In contrast if you believe that education needs to move from the passive educational environment of main lecture points, content dumping, rubrics, individual competition and standardized testing to an active educational environment of interactive presentations, critical and analytical thinking, collaboration and meaningful projects then this announcement will actually be viewed as an example of a market leader taking potentially disruptive innovations like online learning and electronic content and deploying them in sustaining ways. History has shown that educational institutions at all levels are too quick to jump on the band wagon and simply accept a sustaining innovation that does little to improve learning.
While companies like Blackboard attempt to hide behing labels like Learning Management Systems (LMS) their products have very little to do with learning and everything to do with course and content management. While there are exceptions on how they are used, CMS like Blackboard, Moodle and the like are primarily used for content delivery, assessment and grades assignment and general course administration. As Jeff Young points out:
For professors, the new links will make it easier to push students’ grades on online quizzes from the publishers’ e-textbook systems to the gradebook they use on the Blackboard system.
Automating testing and grade assignment is not going to do anything to improve learning and the easier we make it to use automated testing and grading the less progress we are making toward truly reforming education. Technology today offeres education so much potential, yet we struggle to move beyond 19th and 20th century thinking and methodologies.
Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) system have been around and widely used since the 60. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) was the first system that started in the 60’s and has been running at a variety of institutions up until at least 2006. How is Newton different from Plato and other original CAI systems? Lets hope that it utilizes the available computing power to provide a much higher level of perceived differentiation.
Will these systems work? As we are seeing from the cognitive research popularized by people like Daniel Pink, external motivation in a learning setting is really only useful for primarily non cognitive tasks. If you don’t want people to think but to simply memorize something then these system can work well. If you want people to really learn then the intrinsic motivators of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose must contribute significantly to your learning environment.
Enrollment in Online Courses Increases at the Highest Rate Ever – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
The Wired Campus article points to the reality that online learning is growing rapidly. The for profits like University of Phoenix, Kaplan and Capella understand this and see undergraduate online education as their “bread & butter”. Perhaps traditional Universities will start to understand this student demand and move toward meeting it. Consider the following numbers:
