I now have a deeper appreciation for the amount of time it takes educators to develop an engaging and complete curriculum.

In preparation for rolling out a new educational product and related services, my division is undergoing a fairly intensive period of training. The platform we’re developing will provide educators with a whole new way of “teaching” online. As part of our learning experience, we were each tasked with preparing a demo course using the new platform. 

Now, keep in mind that only a few individuals are actually educators. Most of us are just experimenting with functionality and learning the behavior from a technical point-of-view to allow us to better troubleshoot issues and understand various configurations. However, we asked everyone to put thought into their course. While not fully developed, they should at least have realistic structures and content. Working on this task, I realized how much effort instructors have to expend to create a fully realized course. The amount of creativity, organization and sheer time required is extraordinary.

Given a topic, there are so many directions that can be taken. Experienced educators may have a clear vision of where they want a class to go but I see even this first step being daunting for a new instructor. Once a framework is in place, the course now needs content to reinforce the set learning objectives. What works best for the course? You could throw several textbooks at a class and tell them to read them but that’s not very creative or engaging. You can mix in some media but now how do you measure understanding and encourage discussion? There are so many options and a well designed course needs the right mix of everything.

Finding and gathering content for the course can be a challenge. Using open educational resources allows for an affordable means of filling a course with interesting information but simply storing and organizing that content takes time too. In our new platform, the “Collector” proved to be a huge time-saver in this regard as it acts as a cart into which you can throw interesting bits and pieces you find on the Internet for later use in one or more courses.

Our simple practice courses will only have a tiny fraction of the organization and content required of a real course but everyone has spent a number of days on their project. I think this exercise served two purposes; learning the new product and reinforcing the idea with our staff that educators have difficult jobs and we’re in the business to make their lives easier.

The announcement of the OpenClass venture between Pearson and Google caused a buzz. It also started a conversation in education circles about the meaning of "free."

Free often means "no cost." The number of low to no cost education opportunities available today is growing.

One example is the University of the People, a tuition-free online university. A collaboration between the UN, Yale, NYU and HP, UPeople offers four undergrad degrees; an Associates and Bachelor of Business Administration and an Associates and Bachelor in Computer Science. There are nominal application and exam processing fees (based on country of residency) but the intent is to make admissions all-inclusive as possible. Their stated mission is to "ensure that no student will be denied the right to access higher education."

Another initiative starting in the Spring of 2012 is MIT's free education prototype titled MITx. This program will provide some structure to MIT's OpenCourseWare that has been available for a decade now. The virtual university will offer some certifications but NOT MIT degrees. This will prevent any dilution of the MIT brand.

An education free of cost is becoming a possibility. Of course, it's yet to be seen if these educations will lead to employment which is the ultimate goal of most students. The questions of accreditation, learning assessment and credentials will need to be resolved to allow for cultural acceptance of free, online university degrees.

Free can also mean "unbound" and this leads to a more sensitive and sometimes inflammatory discussion. Open educational resources are a trend in higher education. Publicly available and reusable content ensures that educators are not locked into any one publisher or LMS. When OpenClass was first announced, the question immediately arose as to whether courses offered in it could be moved or reused elsewhere. Also, would educators be able to use external resources or would they be locked into content from one publisher on this new platform?

Regardless of how OpenClass and other similar projects fully actualize, you have to admit that this is an exciting time in education. Technology is providing for innovation that allows educators to more effectively reach broader audiences and that can only benefit society.

This week, a few of my co-workers and myself had a grade book study session. We're in the process of dissecting the grade book options within Sakai so we have a deep understanding and can quickly troubleshoot issues. What surprised me, not being an educator, is the sheer number of grading options and the variety with which instructors want to evaluate and score various types of assessments. I falsely assumed that the way the instructors graded assignments at the university I attended was "standard."

Some institutions use a point system and later convert these to single letter grades. Others use letter grades all along, however, to calculate final grades there must be some underlying point value to allow for mathematical calculations. Some instructors want to drop one or two of the lowest scores while others offer extra credit. Now add to this whole mix the need to weight scores by individual assignment or by category; sometimes both at the same time. Each grading method requires different logic and evaluation from a computing standpoint. Once grades are calculated, each institution also has their own final grade assignment criteria. Grading is probably the most complex and involved function of any LMS.

Not only is there significant variation between institutions but now imagine translating between different countries. A website created by World Education Services gives some insight into the variety. Using their translator, you can view how grading scales around the world compare to the US. For example, in the UK you can score as low as 65/100 and still receive an "A." I hope these differences are taken into consideration when comparing the US educational system to those of other countries.

UNITED KINGDOM

Grading Scale

Scale U.S. Grade Equiv.

70-100 A

65-69 A-

60-64 B+

50-59 B

45-49 C+

40-44 C

0-39 F

For those institutions with novel or unusual grading practices, how have you met the challenge in tracking scores and completing final grade calculations?

There was a short piece on the news this morning about a school district trying to make a little extra money by including advertisements on report cards. This is different—maybe a little tacky—but it’s definitely innovative and will provide the district with an extra $30K per year for very little work and no negative impact on educators, parents or students. But how far can or should this go?

I think it’s universally recognized that we don’t spend enough on education in the US and schools are running short of funds. Equipment and materials cost more, infrastructure is crumbling and the cost of providing teachers with the most basic of benefits is sky-rocketing. I attended the Open Education Conference a few weeks back and there was much discussion on the value of open educational resources to help lower costs. Decreasing textbook expenses from hundreds of dollars down to just $50, for example, can have a big impact on operating expenses for the year. However, there is only so much that can be done to lower the cost of providing an education, so additional revenue is required.

Taxpayers within each school district and students’ parents are taking on a portion of the increase. In higher education, tuition rates are increasing faster than national healthcare costs to fill the gap. These increases, however, are beginning to push an education out of reach for a good portion of our citizens. With the recent backlash against corporations through the 99% movement, I began to think of the value of corporate sponsorship of educational institutions as a viable option for corporations to regain trust and to help with revenue shortfalls.

The concept of a company sponsoring a school or paying advertising fees isn’t new. However, what if corporations were made integral to the educational process? Could we create a culture where the quality of students graduating from their “sponsored” school becomes a matter of corporate pride, brand and identity?

For example, imagine Apple Elementary versus Microsoft Elementary. Both corporations cover ALL the expenses for the students enrolled in their schools. (I’m not advocating we “brand” the schools but this will help make my argument more clear.) Apple Elementary is turning out some of the brightest, most creative students that are going on to the top design schools and academies in the country. However, they notice that their combined science and math scores are slipping in relation to Microsoft. Microsoft starts touting this to their advantage. Apple can’t have that so they start a campaign to hire some of the best educators available and they’re willing to pay for them. The salaries are so competitive that education becomes an attractive career from both a financial and gratification perspective. It’s not difficult to see how this could continue to escalate and now add in thousands of other corporate educational entities.

I know this idea will ruffle feathers but I think it’s worth consideration. I don’t advocate requiring corporate involvement through regulation or taxation. Instead, creating the cultural expectation that they help prepare the future workforce from which they will benefit seems completely fair and even makes sense.

One of today's keynotes at Open Education Conference 2011 was one of the most avant-garde, engaging presentations I've ever seen. It was more performance art than lecture.

Jim Groom, Instructional Technology Specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, used his podium time to demonstrate the effectiveness of open and fluid learning. He showed how he experimented with a digital storytelling course that took on a life of its own.

The course uses an online live streaming station (ds106 Radio) as the base camp for the class. The self-directed and creative work of the students, however, adds such depth and richness that it's difficult to identify exactly where the course "lives" in its entirety-and that's the beauty.

Part of Groom's message was that some educators are waiting for an open educational resource "silver bullet" but, in reality, that may never materialize. Instead, he believes the tools already exist to draw students into the learning experience in new and effective ways. It just takes creativity.

One part of the talk that will stick with me was his mention of "drive by assignments." He showed that, given the right medium, students can manifest a desire to learn in sometimes unexpected ways. The example provided was a student that created a poetry exercise using their iTunes play lists. It grabbed the attention of other students to a degree that surprised even Groom.

The only downside of the presentation was that it made me bemoan the fact that I never had professors like Groom. Of course, it would have been difficult being creative with clay tablets and cuneiform.

I attended my first day of my first Open Education Conference today in Park City, Utah. What I came away with is that there are some incredibly brilliant and passionate people doing some pretty remarkable things in the way of making education more globally accessible.

One such startup, OpenStudy, was created to provide for greater access to educational materials while also focusing on the experience. The site attempts to engage learners by using online environments in which they are already immersed. Their Open Social Learning allows for easy exchange of information about topics and draws in other learners into conversations as they crowd-source answers to questions posted. There are also elements of game play with the addition of ratings and badges. The final process in the project is to collect and correlate data related to overall student success in their "real world" classes.

Another venture, OER Glue, is pretty exciting. As course creators surf the Internet for interesting content, they can "slurp" (their word, not mine) the media into the resource collector for later use in the context of a course through a simple interface. The designer has the choice of whether they snapshot the content or leave it dynamic when presented to the student to account for sites that may die over time.

Finally, there is the Open Course Library project which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Washington State Legislature. This initiative is providing for the design of platform agnostic content modules that can be created, published and shared easily by instructors. The project's first phase comes to a close on October 31, 2011 with the release of their first 42 courses.

This is a great meeting so far and it's easy to see why it generates such electricity amongst attendees. Educators are learning how to do more with less and seeing what their partners in education are positioning themselves to provide in the very near future. Things should get even more exciting in the world of education in the next five to ten years!

On a side note, I also learned that the Under Secretary of Education, Dr. Martha Kanter, shares my ENFJ personality type.

I spent the past week visiting with some customers throughout Northern and Central California. Each campus had its own unique “vibe” from relaxed and bohemian to ultra-professional and militaristic. Common amongst them all, however, were the pressures and challenges placed upon university IT staff in their efforts to provide for innovative and effective online learning programs.

Most fundamental is the consistent lack of funding and IT staff available to invest in online learning initiatives. It’s easy to forget that the individuals responsible for keeping your LMS up and running are the same people that need to maintain back office operations, student information systems, maybe even your telecom infrastructure. Unless institutions can allocate dedicated resources, both financial and human, to the maintenance of their learning platform, there will always be contention between it and what some administrators may consider “more important” systems.

The care and feeding of the online environment isn’t necessarily the most simple of the IT department’s tasks either. They need to ensure the validity and security of student information it contains, meet statutory and regulatory requirements and provide documentation to prove it, and continually monitor and ensure reasonable availability of the system. This all becomes increasingly important and more difficult as it is adapted by larger faculty populations for more critical tasks.

One such example is ensuring that what is presented to faculty and students meets the university’s selected accessibility requirements. One university is pursuing the AA rating under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The 12 guidelines it encompasses include aspects of perception, operation, understandability and robustness. Each guideline’s success criteria can be rated from A to AAA. Meeting the standard is no small feat. For example, they recommend that you provide a sign language video for any audio-only files.

Educators play an important role in the successful adaptation of a LMS and the IT professionals need to develop a strong relationship with their faculty counterparts. There will inevitably be mixed interest shown by various users. The IT department needs to please them by providing the functionality they request to move their programs forward but educators may also feel stifled by those same people as they try to ensure some consistency and stability system wide. To be truly successful and innovative and “move to the next level,” instructors need to be provided new and interesting ways of reaching their students through the LMS but time and resources make this endeavor difficult. 

With these very basic concerns always at the forefront, it’s no wonder that it takes time to move programs from usable to truly effective and engaging. From my experience this past week, it’s not for lack of desire; our educational systems simply need more resources to meet their demands.

Week four of the Change MOOC was about Collective Learning. It was moderated by Allison Littlejohn, Chair of Learning Technology at the Caledonian Academy of Scotland.

This segment has been the best organized in this MOOC so far. Run from her personal website, Littlejohn made the effort of treating this as a traditional learning platform and gave the week some structure even providing assignments as tasks.

The week focused on how we use collective knowledge to learn; particularly in the workplace. Corporations are easily moving to collective knowledge/learning environments because they're more open to any change that leads to greater efficiency. Industry needs to adapt to fast changing conditions so there's a financial incentive for workers to quickly gain and use knowledge.

Collective learning is based on:

• making connections
• consuming or using knowledge
• creating new knowledge resources
• contributing those resources back to a community

Learners work together in groups to collect learning artifacts. Individual learners position themselves in a collective knowledge space and draw from the combined pool. Through their personal observations and experience, they create new objects and contribute them back to the pool. The process continues, leading to an ever-expanding knowledge space.

For collective learning to be a success, people need to be open and participatory. Learners must have free and open access to artifacts and a learning ecosystem and be willing to "share and share alike." Sakai OAE (open academic environment) is a Learning Management System that would provide for an ideal platform for collective learning. Within organically created groups and workspaces, learners collect and share their resources and help each other discover relationships, draw conclusions and further their understanding.

It will be exciting to see how collective learning grows and evolves over the next few years as educational institutions become more open to the model and incorporate it into their traditional system.

Week 3 of the Change MOOC was devoted to studying Digital Scholarship. Led by Martin Weller of the Open University, UK and author of The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Changing Academic Practice, the content focused on the impact of emerging technologies on scholarly research.

Interesting points discussed included a general sense of contention felt within the world of research regarding the use of online tools and Web 2.0 environments. While a number of surveyed researchers admitted to using some technology to facilitate collaborative efforts, just as many saw these technologies to be a hindrance and even counter-productive or “dangerous.” The sense of danger comes from somehow losing control of information and not being able to readily vouch for the quality and integrity of information being shared.

The whole point of blogging is spontaneity – getting your ideas out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or incomplete. ‘But to a scientist, that's a tough jump to make,’ says Willard, head of Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.

[from Bloomsbury Academic Reprint of Chapter 5 from Weller’s book]

The same chapter of Weller’s book mentions the power of crowd-sourcing. I see that as being one of the most valuable research tools made possible by technology. Using the distributed nature of the Internet and the varied knowledge of its users, researchers can gather input from untapped resources. For example, just recently, gamers have been presented a challenge related to protein shaping. Called foldit, players have to fold protein molecules into specific shapes using the least amount of cellular energy. Humans’ abilities to solve puzzles and recognize patterns can still exceed raw computing power so it’s hoped the game will lead to faster solutions to research problems related topics from cancer research to biofuel engineering.

Ultimately, it is up to researchers to sift through data, validate it and develop reasonable relationships and conclusions. There will never be a replacement for a structured and vetted team. However, disregarding the potential for technology to make research efforts more effective and efficient through broader data collection seems illogical and unwarranted.

I just completed my first real week of the Change MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) which is focusing on educational technologies. This week was devoted to exploring Mobile Learning at the Open University of Malaysia and was facilitated by Dr. Zoraini Wati Abas.

In the early days of this MOOC, I find myself more focused on the delivery methods over the content. Participants are essentially given a firehouse of information and it is up to each of us to learn to drink from it. For me, trying to keep up with the exchanges over the course of the week was too much. If you don’t have a reasonable block of time you can devote to the consumption and processing of information, you’ll be steamrolled by the group. I allowed the content to build over time, then went exploring through the various learning threads that have been laid out.

Much of the content had been discussed in traditional blogs. Twitter was important as it acted as a Table of Contents for the proceedings. I really enjoyed actively using tools that I knew could enhance learning but hadn’t had a chance to use practically, such as Scribd. I found Dr. Abas’ paper on open and distance learning (ODL) particularly valuable. The findings show that SMS can be effectively used to provide “anytime, anywhere” learning.

I discovered a new aggregation site, similar to paper.ly, that I really enjoyed called Scoop.it. This website compiles Twitter content using the #Change11 hashtag and is curated by Paulo Simões.

I’m developing a fondness for really well produced info-graphics. I’ve always enjoyed them from a design and layout perspective, but now I’m appreciating how much information they can quickly convey. Another cool blogger, Zaid Ali Alsagoff, led me to a great example of an info-graphic on Online Education. From the numbers presented regarding Daily Tech usage, you can see that Dr. Abas is on the right track as students spend the most time using technology to text.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

I may not have been the ideal student this first week as I didn’t focus very intently on the content. However, I had fun and learned a few new things and isn’t that really what the whole MOOC experience is about?

(As an interesting side note, always consult your Urban Dictionary before trying to be "cool" with a blog title. I almost used "Noob" instead of "Newb" and there is a difference. Unlike a noob, a newb is someone who actually wants to get better.)