Originally published by me at Introduction to Guitar » cogdog (see it there)

Somehow I managed to do my homework ahead of time, since my intro video included the story of main main guitar, an acoustic I’ve had since age 15. I thought I would turn this inside out and talk about 2 guitars I do not have, since they have stories too.

Once in a year or two the natural progression on my new road to fame as the next Jimmy-Pete-Eric-Keith guitar star was to get an electric. Through an ad in the classifieds of the Baltimore Sun, I called the dude on a landline (just double aged myself), and bought this beauty, a blonde Telecaster:

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I just liked to hold her, she was beautiful (and heavy). The amp that came with it was a Peavy Backstge. My career with it pretty much was limited to solos in my basement, save one party when some friends brought a keyboard and drumkit (parents were on vacation ha ha ha). When I moved west to Arizona in 1987 for grad school, it was one thing I decided I did not need. Arethe might spell it R-E-S-P-E-C-T, but my song is R-E-G-R-E-T. As sort of a way of keeping it in the “family” I sold it to my friend Kevin for a ridiculuous price, $25, with the quasi undestanding we would buy it back off of each other on a regular basis.

Except I did not stay in contact with him.

Fast forwrd to more recently, and Kevin and I met up when he was in town for a conference in Phoenix, and we’ve been well connected since; I’ve visted his home in Pennsylvania a few times. The good thing is the guitar is in his family, and being put to use by his son, Cal, who can really really play it well. When I visited in September of 2011, we went to Cal’s house, and I got to hold her again:

Cal, then a student at Penn State, played in a trio called Think Twice, Dublin, who play some rather avant garde complex music, beyond my 3-chord repertoire for sure. Cal has a deep music love, appreciation, and facility (as he shared some unique vinyl). Their web site then http://thinktwicedublin.bandcamp.com/ featured a photo of Kevin with the Telecaster back in the 1980s when we shared an apartment in Baltimore. Cal even has the original hard case, which was falling apart when I got the guitar in 1980. Long live duct tape.

A video of them, playing in the outdoors (I never got out my back door)

It is fascinating to watch a love of connection of music between my friend and his son- you expect music tastes to divide parents and children, but here it bonds, genuinely. I could not be prouder to be a small part of this chain, and as Kevin said last night to me and Cal (and agreed by us three), “The Tele is here, but it really belongs to all of us.”

When I wrote about this encounter in 2011, I mashed up my own then and now photos, 31 one years in the making.

Like the Dude, the Tele abides.

I could not be happier not to have it anymore. You might “keep” guitars, but the music is not ours to hold.

The other story, not so dramatic. I might have the timing off when I traded the guitar to Kevin, because it was earlier then I moved to Arizona when I picked up a cheap Fender Mustang as a less than decent replacement. It was okay to play since it was light, but it was no Telecaster, and it actually broke beyong repair.

Since I always had dreams of being Pete Townshend, on a party before a time I moved away (maybe that was when I went to New Mexico– for 2 days– another story, they wont stop connecting).

So for this party, I actually did get the guitar out of the basement– to smash it Pete style on a big rock in the yard. It’s actually harder to really bust it than it looks! Fender Electric guitars are solid! I carted around for a while a piece of it long gone. A very grainy scanned photo of the smashing event:

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I am now, at 49, thinking again of getting an electric guitar, maybe I will keep it.

And play it.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by NoiseProfessor

This still cracks me up, and I had rustling around my iMovie a certain comercial that I wanted to mashup, so here it is, featuring the lonliest edtech repairman (note one f-bomb in the audio).

by Eric Hellweg, Harvard Business Review Blog

The advent of massively open online classes (MOOCs) is the single most important technological development of the millennium so far. I say this for two main reasons. First, for the enormously transformative impact MOOCs can have on literally billions of people in the world. Second, for the equally disruptive effect MOOCs will inevitably have on the global education industry. While at Davos, I was fortunate to attend an amazing panel — my favorite of the conference — with a murderer’s row of speakers. Moderated by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, the list of speakers: Larry Summers, former president of Harvard; Bill Gates; Peter Theil, a partner at Founder’s Fund; Rafael Reif, president of MIT; Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity; Daphne Koller, CEO of Coursera, and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has taken a number of Stanford physics classes through Udacity. Below is a collection of some of the highlighted comments from this remarkable panel as well as a couple from audience members who were given an opportunity to comment.

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/01/eight_brilliant_minds_on_the_f.html

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By ALISON SMALE, NY Times

Dr. Koller said the value of a postgraduate education, no matter where it was gained, was shifting fast. “We have passed the stage in history,” she said, “where what you learn in college can last you for a lifetime.” After 15 years, she added, that learning is “obsolete.” In medicine, Mr. Borysiewicz argued, the span from the germ of a new idea to the bedside is typically about 17 years. That requires long-term thought, akin to the studiously elite admissions policies and research skills that have kept Britain’s top two universities among the world’s best for hundreds of years. But at Stanford, Dr. Koller is thinking in days, not centuries. Asked about the economic viability of Coursera, she outlined three potential sources of income: students paying an optional low fee ($59, for example) for a completed course; smaller colleges licensing the courses devised by the bigger universities; and employers subsidizing courses for their workers to bridge skill gaps.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/business/davos-considers-learnings-next-wave.html

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by Arooba Chaudhry & Sandy Van, Highlander News

It may be possible to obtain about one-tenth of a UC degree through online courses across the university system over the next five years, according a press release by UCOP. The UC anticipates the expansion of its web-based platform, the UC Online Education (UCOE) initiative, with the possible development of a systemwide online catalog. Continuing discussions about online education will occur in spring 2013 during a UC-wide summit, at the behest of UC President Mark Yudof. Contributing to trending public interest in online education, Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed 2013-2014 state budget dedicates $10 million to new technologies and online education across the UC and Cal State system. Current challenges include streamlining cross-campus enrollment and individual courses that are unique to a campus. UCOE retains an overarching cloud of uncertainty in its future, due to scattered discussions over a loose business model and fluctuating applicant base.

http://www.highlandernews.org/6851/uncertainty-lingers-in-uc-online-education/

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By Ira Kantor / Boston Herald

Harvard Law School is logging on to a $60 million online education enterprise between its parent university and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by offering a free copyright course for students unable to set foot on the hallowed Ivy League campus. Classes start tomorrow for “HLS1x: Copyright,” taught by intellectual property law professor William Fisher. Though the 12-week edX course is only open to 500 people, more than 4,100 applied to participate in pre-recorded lectures, live 
webcasts, online forums and 80-minute seminars conducted by teaching fellows at the graduate school. “It takes me roughly a week to prepare each lecture,” Fisher said. “I’ve lectured on these topics for decades. Preparing one for this setting turns out to be hard.”

http://bostonherald.com/business/technology/technology_news/2013/01/study_harvard_law_just_go_online

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cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

For many reasons it was exciting today to visit with friends and former colleagies at the Maricopa Community Colleges, visiting Scottsdale Community College today for a fantastic format idea for an event they came up with for TechTalks 13.

It is vaguely familair to some guy named Ted, without the red logo and the staunch requirements. This was the baby and brainchild of Charles Pflanz, a series of 10 18 minute talks, and a refreshing change from the usualy conference format. Instead of th eusualy keynote and shuttling off to breakout rooms, the audience of 200+ stayed as one in the Performing Arts Center. Another really nice touch was having the opening and closing sessions be ones by SCC students. There were talks on filmmaking, gaming, MOOCs, online teaching, 3D printing, and the amazing closer on midi / guitar synthesizer music.

The whole event was extremely well choreographed, and a ton of people were there to help, a big crew of them in the PAC.

Kudos as well to friend and longtime Lisa Young for her high energy enthusiasm, organizing, and being an emcee.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I also got to hang out (and harass her for not doing more ds106) with Cheryl Colan and visit Rachel Woodburn in the Art Department and catch up on their digital storytelling class there. The faculty workshop stories I recall helping with back in 2006 are still on the MCLI web site, and hold up well 7 yeats later.

Charles invited me to do a talk, and I took some liberty in trying sometihng whacky on improv using my pechaflickr tool. The whacky part was I got the idea to actually use pechaflickr for my slides, so as I told the audience, I was nervouse because I had 43 slides to cover in 18 minutes, and this was the first time I had seen them.

What I set up was a launcher for a series of 5 different pechaflickr rounds based on the words in blue, with a variable number of slides and different intervals for ach one. This maybe was cheating as I was able to configure the toiming to come in under 18 minutes.

I went a little ove rgoofy, but it was fun. It was also impossible, standing on stage to see anything because of the intensite of the lights. That might have helped. A few photos came up that were just so bizarre I could not come up with anything.

I had fun! They are supposed to be posting a video recording on YouTube (insert placeholder here!)

And later in the day, Charles kept coming up and suggesting new (and novel) ideas on hwo he could see it beung used for his economics classes. The irony is when I first told him about it, he said it looked neat but wondered about the educational applications.

One of the new little addons I made to enable the site above is that you can now save the settings for a round and send it to someone else. So you can try running my set of slides on yawn (you will get different photos because it is random, but I bet half of the photos are of cats).

This was fun, but it was more fun to visit again with colleagues I knew from my time at Maricopa. And a bonus was getting to have a CyberSalon Hangout in Scottsdale with a big crew, meeting Todd COnaway’s buddy Thatcher from Yavapai Community College and (I am sorry I forgot) a ver nice woman from NAU who was eager to try some improv activities.

Heck, I even got to see a foil elephant.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Earlier this week I wrote about the new patent awarded to the University of Phoenix (the for-profit institution owned by the Apollo Group) for the activity stream within their new online learning platform. The patent gives us a glimpse into a billion-dollar bet that Phoenix is making on this next-generation LMS that will power their move into adaptive learning.

The University of Phoenix has always been known for using a homegrown LMS, which is understandable given the large size (360,000 students) of the school. In 2009, Phoenix began investing in a completely new learning platform as part of the “Learning Genome Project”. While the company has traditionally been reluctant to describe its internal systems, starting with the 2010 EDUCAUSE conference Phoenix began sharing more information on this project.

The promise of adaptive learning

Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed wrote an article on the new learning platform in October 2010 based on information shared by Phoenix’s Director of Data Innovation.

Where Facebook has shown unique value is as a data-gathering tool. Never has a website been able to learn so much about its users. And that is where higher education should be taking notes, said Angie McQuaig, director of data innovation at the University of Phoenix, at the 2010 Educause conference on Friday.

The trick, she said, is individualization. Facebook lets users customize their experiences with the site by creating profiles and curating the flow of information coming through their “news feeds.” In the same motion, the users volunteer loads of information about themselves. [snip]

This is where the University of Phoenix is headed with its online learning platform. In an effort ambitiously dubbed the “Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning management system (or LMS) that gets to know each of its 400,000 students [ed. now reduced to 360,000] personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”

The article goes on to describe the Phoenix vision of adaptive learning powered by the learning platform, stating that data analytics is going to kill the standardized curriculum dominant in higher education.

Additional insight was provided in a February 2011 article by Josh Keller in the Chronicle that further described the scope and approach of the learning platform development.

Two years ago, leaders at the University of Phoenix decided that its software for students was outdated. So it hired tech-industry heavyweights from Yahoo and elsewhere, installed a team of more than 100 people here in San Francisco, and gave them free rein to rebuild the college’s online-learning environment from scratch.

The team created a social network that borrows heavily from Facebook. It developed a data platform that collects and analyzes billions of clicks, messages, and interactions among students and their instructors. And it started profiling students’ online behavior to personalize how they are taught. [snip]

When students log in, they see recommended tasks for that day and a personalized discussion feed that resembles one pioneered by Facebook. They can see who else is online and chat with other students and instructors.

One goal is to better help students find the right people among Phoenix’s vast network who are online and could help them learn, says Michael White, Apollo’s chief technology officer. “My faculty member’s not online, but 700 faculty members who teach the same thing are online, so it’s really the power of the network,” he says.

The billion-dollar bet

How serious is Phoenix about this approach? Quite serious, as the university appears to be making a billion-dollar bet on personalized learning directly powered by this new learning platform.

The Chronicle covered the Phoenix announcement from October 2012 that they would close 115 locations, including this mind-boggling statement:

Mr. Brenner [senior vice president for corporate communications and external affairs at the Apollo Group] said Apollo was investing $1-billion in a new online-learning management system.

Not all of the investment is pure development as it includes the 2011 acquisition of Carnegie Learning for $75 million. From the press release:

The acquisitions allow Apollo to accelerate its efforts to incorporate adaptive learning into its academic platform and to provide tools to help raise student achievement in mathematics, which supports improved retention and graduation rates.

‘We are excited to partner with Carnegie Learning, which will allow us to integrate their high quality educational and adaptive learning technology into our platform,’ said Gregory Cappelli, Co-CEO of Apollo Group and Chairman of Apollo Global.”

The full significance of the University of Phoenix bet on adaptive learning platforms goes beyond pure dollars and became clear when the school announced the closure of 115 of its 240 locations. The stated usage of the savings from campus closures is primarily to further invest in the platform as described by the Phoenix Business Journal.

The $300 million in savings will be used to invest more heavily in the company’s online learning platform as well as renovating and modernizing Apollo’s existing 112 locations.

“This decision is in direct response to student demand to what students have told us and demonstrated what they want,” Clark said.

The potential for a new learning platform in the marketplace

This is a massive investment in a next-generation LMS, and there are clear signs that Phoenix does not plan to merely use the system for internal use. In October 2011 the Chronicle reported on Phoenix’s potential plans to sell their services including access to this learning platform. Perhaps the real intent of the patent is to protect intellectual property for a system that they plan to license and sell. From the Chronicle.

Facing new regulations and slowing enrollment for their degree programs, companies like the Apollo Group, parent of the University of Phoenix, are quietly developing or expanding other educational services that they could sell to nonprofit colleges and corporations, moves that could signal the future direction of the for-profit college industry.

Among other things, that means it might not be long before the Apollo Group seeks out other colleges as customers for the electronic learning platform it has spent years and millions of dollars developing. A company spokesman said licensing that platform to other colleges is one of the many options its new Apollo Educational Services division is exploring. Although the entire Phoenix student body won’t be fully on the new platform until spring, Apollo has been inviting higher-education leaders to its San Francisco development center to show off the new system for the past several months.

“We’d love to partner with existing educational institutions. We’d love to partner with global companies,” says Mark Brenner, Apollo’s senior vice president for external affairs.

What we might be seeing soon is the release of a billion-dollar adaptive online learning platform available to other companies and institutions. But what is the reality and does the patent award give indications of the limits of big data in education? I’ll explore those questions in my next post.

The post The Billion-Dollar Bet on an Adaptive Learning Platform appeared first on e-Literate.

Originally published by me at Introduction to Guitar » cogdog (see it there)

It’s really late and I need to wake up stupid early, but when I saw Jabiz’s tweet, and his video, and his stack of papers.. I said I’m in.

I blabbed a bot in the video, compeltely leaving out that I live in a tiny town in Arizona called Strawberry (yes its real, look it up) (and I have snow outside my house right now, go figure). I’ve had the chance to hangout and play with Bryan a few times, and always learn alot. And I am going to visit Jabiz in March, so I’m looking forward to strumming his black shiny guitar.

Oh yeah, my real name is Alan Levine and I first found my way onto the web in 1993 and have never left, I hang out at http://cogdogblog.com/. Cya there

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by dmixo6

For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire “I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC” because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes.

We have a very easy to understand Getting Started Guide, itself with not one way to do this course but TWO, the Fast And Easy Way and the Blogging Way.

But here are ten things you can do to be part of ds106, without even signing up. How massively un MOOC is that?

(0) The Stephen Downes Clause Feel free to ignore all of the following and make up your own.

(1) Do one daily create a week. Just because it says daily does not require you to do it every day, it requires us to publish one every day! Each day at 10:00 AM EST, a brand new creative challenge, none of which should take more than 20 minutes to complete. It might be Photography, http://tdc.ds106.us/category/drawing/, Audio, Video, or Writing. You just need to post them on the designated social media site.

And there is no reason to be stuck to the present ones. We have a collection of almost 400 past Daily Creates many suitable for creative activities. Try one at random or explore the archive.

(2) Comment on a few student blogs. If blogging is old hat, you might have forgotten how electrinic those first comments can be. Pay it forward by giving feedback to our registered tudents, by they mine at University of Mary Washington, or Bill Generuex’s class at KSU, Briant Short’s class at the University of Michigan, or Michael Branson-Smith and Chloe Smolarski’s class at York College/CUNY. Even one comment is golden to these new bloggers.

(3) Do or Borrow a ds106 Assignment If there was a heart to the class it would be the Assignment Bank. This includes over 500 visual, design, audio, video, mashup, fan fiction, writing, web created by ds106 participants, plus connections to over 4000 examples created for these assignments. Sure you could call these OERs you could call them Fandangoes. You do not even need to have a blog connected to ds106, we have a loinked form on each assignment where you could submit a single response. Not sure whare to start? Spin the random wheel or see the ones that are featured.

Or follow the ds106bot on twitter- it tweets out random assignments.

(4) Answer questions or share resources in twitter We use a single hash tag for all things ds106. Students ask questions, people share related resources, or just informally exchange ideas. Take one day a week to pop into the #ds106 stream, how hard could that be?

(5) Create a New Daily Create You think our ideas are lame? You have something better? Toss one in vis our suggestion box and it should appear in the next weeks.

If you follow step (4) above, it just might lead to step (5). Ask Joe MacMahon:

@cogdog “Make a Poster of an Action Movie Starring Julia Child.”

— Joseph McMahon (@pragmanic) January 17, 2013

and a few days later? http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc381/

That’s how we roll.

(6) Tune into or take over the microphone for ds106 radio. We have a live web radio station, and not only is there music, shows, and people to listen to, anyone can broadcast at any time. Does Coursera do that? No. Does Udacity do that? No. Blackboard? Nope.

We do, we give it away. http://ds106.us/ds106-radio

(7) Create a ds106 Assignment Got a creative idea bigger than a Daily Create? Well, just make it part of the assignment bank (preferably doing it yourself so there is an example). That’s how we grow. Not by any mass replicant scaling, one creative brick at a time.

Now just tweeting out “This would be a cool #ds106 assignment” is not up to snuff for us. Step up and make something! And you may run into our snarky bot:

@unixbeard then get off yer butt and submit it! assignments.ds106.us/submit-an-assi… #ds106 #botlife

— DS106 Bot (@ds106bot) December 5, 2012

(8) Share ds106 work that inpsires you If you see something from a ds106 participant that causes a “WOW” reaction, then submit it to the in[SPIRE] site, our effort to collect the Best of ds106. This site itself was created by students in last year’s class.

(9) Help Us Figure out What to to with a subreddit One of our current students, asked us if we had a subreddit. Huh? Well, in fact there was one about two years old with only 2 things in it — http://reddit.com/r/ds106. So if you have reddit experience or want some, jump in and help us imagine how o use it. Maybe its a place to upvote good examples of digital storytelling. or away for students to get early feedback on their work. We don’t know, we are looking to you to help us make it emergent.

(10) Be part of our weekly show We are experimenting with a live weekly ds06 show via Google Hangouts. We have students from UMW, outside experts, and anyone else who wants a seat (if it fills, it can be watched via the YouTube stream).

(11) Remix an Assignment Ok it is wild enough we have over 500 different creative assignments, but then do the math on our Assignment Remix site which applies a random “card” and gives you the challenged to to that assignment in a new way.

Like doing the Big Caption assignment played with the Yo Momma card .. or the Spreadsheet animation one played with a Dr Suess Character Card.

Woah, how about those 10… turned up to 11. And I could go on.

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by me and the sysop

So while other MOOCs cause feelings of remorse (or lack of remorse over the death of aprticipation), not ds106. In fact, the opposite happen. Drop the obligation, the breakneck pace, and you can do as little or as much as you want.

And pretty soon you are tweeting #ds106 $4life

The University of Phoenix recently was awarded a patent (#8341148 B1) for an adaptive activity stream related to its online learning platform. From an initial reading of the patent, it appears very broad to me (deja vu all over again). From the press release:

Apollo Group (APOL), the parent company of University of Phoenix®, today announced that it received a United States patent related to its innovative online classroom platform. The patent was awarded for the University’s new Academic Activity Stream that will consolidate student activities, engagement, and interaction into one unified learning space. The stream will showcase unique personal management features that allow students to more efficiently manage their coursework and classroom experience.

This patent is the next step in the “Learning Genome Project” – UoP’s major investment in a next-generation online learning platform.  The basic idea of the Academic Activity Stream is to rank information in a user’s activity stream based on individual interests, past history, and learning objectives – rather than merely ranking the items chronologically. From Google’s listing of the patent:

Techniques are described herein for implementing an activity stream. An activity stream includes a ranked list of objects that are associated with each other. Within an activity stream, an object (such as an assignment or course syllabus) may have events associated with it. For example, a student can “comment” on an assignment. The assignment may be listed as an object within the activity stream, and the comment may be posted under the assignment, in the activity stream, as an event that is associated with the assignment. A variety of objects can appear in an activity stream, and each object may have comments and other events listed underneath.

The location of an object in the activity stream changes based on events that happen in association with objects in the stream. However, rather than simply being pushed further down the list every time a new object is added to the activity stream, techniques are provided for moving objects within the activity stream in other ways.

The specific patent claim #1 (most other claims refer to claim #1):

A method, comprising: generating a first ranked list of objects for an activity stream; in response to detecting a plurality of events associated with a plurality of objects, placing each of the plurality of objects in positions in the first ranked list based on the order in which the events occurred; in response to detecting a first event associated with a first object in the first ranked list of objects, moving the first object in a first position in the first ranked list, wherein the first event is associated with user activity and the first object is associated with a class; in response to detecting a second event associated with a second object in the first ranked list of objects: moving the first object to a second position in the first ranked list, wherein the second position is lower than the first position in the first ranked list; placing the second object in the first position in the first ranked list; wherein the second event occurs after the first event; maintaining the ranked list as a plurality of segments, wherein each segment is associated with a time period; maintaining a first segment that is associated with a first time period; after detecting the expiration of the first time period: causing the portion of the ranking of objects that is associated with first segment to remain static; maintaining a second segment that is associated with a second time period; dynamically updating the portion of the ranking of objects that is associated with the second segment in response to detecting a fourth event without updating the portion of the ranking of objects that is associated with the first segment; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.

The patent lists several “embodiments” of the concept – examples of approaches that could be pursued to implement the activity stream. These embodiments include re-ranking of a book chapter based on recent student comments or preferences and notifications when 75% of students have completed an assigned reading.

Figure 2 shows an example user interface (very poor quality):

I haven’t figure out why the patent includes descriptions of hardware-based computing devices as an embodiment of the concept.

What is concerning is that this patent appears to be quite broad in its claims, bringing up the painful memories of the Blackboard patent from 2006 that was eventually invalidated. Am I reading this correctly in that it essentially patents any individualized stream within a learning platform? More to come.

Discussions here or in the Google+ post.

The post University of Phoenix Patents Adaptive Activity Stream for Its Learning Platform appeared first on e-Literate.

Phil and I will be giving a webinar with the same title as this blog post for EDUCAUSE ELI on Monday, February 11th at 1 PM ET. It’s aimed at folks on campuses, especially Presidents, Provosts, and other academic decision-makers, who weren’t necessarily focused on online learning in the way that they are now that MOOCs have gotten their attention. We’re going to try to position MOOCs in the larger landscape of online learning and talk a little bit about how campuses can think about the various options in the context of their institutions’ respective missions and strategic goals. It’s a lot to try to accomplish in an hour, but I think we can give people a basic framework and a few important questions to ask themselves.

The post Beyond the MOOC Hype: Getting Serious about Online Learning appeared first on e-Literate.

Continuing the puppet-animation based (loosely) on the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Goddess Aruru has sent Enkidu to challenge Gilgamesh. But when Gilgamesh and Enkidu finally meet, they become friends, and start to boast that even the immortals could not stand against them. When she hears this, Aruru decides to take direct action. Episode 4 of 10.

On my site: http://edwardpicot.com/gilgamesh/gilgameshpart03.html
On YouTube: http://youtu.be/q8PMzbFwbIs
On Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/58361895
Index-page for the project: http://edwardpicot.com/gilgamesh

- Edward Picot
http://edwardpicot.com

Here’s a nifty video summary of a doctoral dissertation by Derek Muller that a client pointed out to me:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The basic gist is that students have pre-conceived notions that are wrong, and it is very hard to dislodge those mistaken notions. If you show them a video with an accurate explanation, the students will say that the video was clear and helpful, but they will misremember it as confirming their (mistaken) preconceived notions. In short, they won’t learn. In contrast, if you show them a video that starts by directly stating and then refuting their misconception, they like the video less and say it is confusing, but they actually learn more. This is a really important pedagogical point to know whether you are giving traditional in-class lectures, writing curricular materials, or creating one of those oh-so-modern video lectures that all the cool kids are into these days.

It’s also a good example of the kind of insight that big data is completely blind to. And it gives us good reason to be skeptical that taking large lecture courses online, turning them into REALLY large lecture courses (with nice videos), and expecting that new and more effective pedagogies will rise out of the data because, you know, science or something, is more of a hope (or a fantasy) than a plan to improve education.

Let’s say you have one of those ultra-hip MOOC platforms with a bazillion courses running on it and a hadoop thingamabob back end that’s tied to a flux capacitor, an oscillating overthruster, and a machine that goes “ping!” You’ve got all the big data toys. And let’s say that, among the many thousands of lecture videos being used on your platform, a bunch of them are designed the way Muller’s work suggests is best practice. Some of these were done this way consciously with awareness of the research. Some were done this way on purpose but based on intuitions by classroom teachers. They don’t have a name for what they’re doing, and they don’t really think about it as a general pedagogical strategy, but they have learned from experience that there are certain spots in their courses where they have to confront some misconceptions head-on. And then some of the videos may be in the Muller format completely accidentally. For example, maybe there’s a video of students working through a problem together. The first idea they come up with is the misconception, but they talk it through together and come up with the right answer in the end. This wasn’t planned, and the teacher who posts the video may not even be aware of why this sequence of events makes the event effective. Maybe she believes in the value of watching students work through the problem together and posts lots of student conversations videos, some of which end up being in Muller’s format and some of which don’t. Let’s assume that many of these videos are effective at teaching the concepts they are trying to teach, and let’s also assume that they are effective for the reason that Muller hypothesizes.

The first question is whether our super-duper, trans-warp-capable, dilithium crystal-powered big data cluster would even identify these videos as noteworthy. The answer is maybe, but probably not reliably so. Muller set up a controlled experiment with one variable designed to test a well-formed hypothesis. He was measuring whether this style video was more effective than the alternative of a more traditional lecture delivery. In science, this is called a “control of variables strategy.” In product development, it’s called “A/B testing” or “split testing.”

Big data usually doesn’t work that way. Instead of creating a tightly controlled set of conditions, it usually looks at what’s available “in the wild” and relies on the massive numbers of examples it has plus the power of computers to do lots of comparisons really fast to come up with inferences. Let’s say, for example, that you’re a medical researcher trying to figure out the role of genetics in a particular type of cancer. There are many, many genes that could be involved, and it may be that a bunch of them are involved but interact in complex ways. And, of course, environmental factors such as diet or exposure to carcinogens, as well as a certain amount of chance, can all impact whether a particular individual gets cancer. The good news is that, while there are many variables, they are finite in number, mostly known and measurable, and mostly have a quantifiable and reasonably regular impact on the cancer outcome (if you understand all the interactions sufficiently well). If you have a large enough database of patients with enough genetic material and good details on the non-genetic factors that you think probably contribute to the likelihood that they will get cancer, then a big data approach will probably help. There are regular patterns in the data. The main challenge is sifting through the mountains of data to find the patterns that are already there. Big data is good for that kind of problem.

But education doesn’t work that way. The same video may impact different students very differently, due to variables that mostly aren’t in our computer systems. For one thing, classes can be taught differently in many, many different ways, some of which matter and some of which don’t. Again, if we were doing a split test in a MOOC context, we could control the variables what happens when you just change one video for a class that is otherwise the same for many students. That approach has significant research value, but it’s not big data magic. It’s educators who come up with hypotheses and test them using a large data set. Students are also very different, in important ways that often don’t show up the data that we have in our online systems. Silicon Valley is not going to make us magically smarter about teaching.

Now, big data enthusiasts might argue that I’m not thinking big enough in terms of the data set, and that could make a difference. Knewton, for example, claims that their system can track students across courses and semesters and test hypotheses about them over time. For example, suppose a student is struggling with word problems in a math class. It’s possible that the student is having difficulty translating English into math variables, or trouble identifying the important variables in the first place. Those are both math-related issues. But it’s also possible that the student just has poor English decoding skills in general. Knewton claims that their system can hold all of these hypotheses about the student and then test them (presumably using some sort of Baysian analysis) across all the courses. If there is evidence in the English class that the student is struggling with basic reading, then that hypothesis gets elevated. And maybe that student gets extra reading lessons slipped in between math lessons. It sounds really cool. I haven’t seen evidence that it actually works yet, and to the degree that it does, it raises other questions about whether you need all student educational interactions to be on the platform in order to get the value, who owns the data, and so on. Put this one in the “maybe someday” category for now.

But even granting that you can get sufficiently rich information about the students, there’s another hard problem. Let’s say that, thanks to the upgrade in your big data infinite improbability drive made possible by your new Spacely’s space sprocket, your system is able to flag at least a critical mass of videos taught in the Mueller method as having a bigger educational impact on the students the average educational video by some measure you have identified. Would the machine be able to infer that these videos belong in a common category in terms of the reason for their effectiveness? Would it be able to figure out what Muller did? There are lots of reasons why a video might be more effective than average. And many of those ways are internal to the narrative structure of the video. The machine only knows things like the format of the video, the length, what kind of class it’s in, who the creator is, when it was made, and so on. Other than the external characteristics of the video file, it mostly knows what we tell it about the contents. It has no way for it to inspect the video and deduce that a particular presentation strategy is being used. We are nowhere close to having a machine that is smart enough to do what Muller did and identify a pattern in the narrative of the speaker. Now, if an educational researcher were to read Muller’s research, tag a critical mass of the relevant videos in the system as being in this style, and ask the machine to find other videos that might be similar, it’s possible that big data could help. It might come back with something like, “Here are some videos that seem to have roughly the same kind and size of effect on test scores as the ones with the Muller tag.” Maybe. Even then, you’d have to have human researchers go through the videos the computer flagged—and there might be a lot of them—to see which ones really use the same strategy and which ones don’t. That would be better than nothing, but it’s far from magic.

By the way, the low-tech method commonly used now is even worse. Not only is it useless, it’s actually harmful. A/B tests are rarely done on curricular materials, but surveys and focus groups where students self-report the effectiveness of the materials are common, particularly among textbook publishers. And in that situation, the videos that the students report to be harder and more confusing would actually be the more effective ones. But, lacking any measure other than the survey of their real effect on learning, the publishers (or teachers) generally would toss out the more effective videos in favor of the less effective ones.

Whether we’re talking about machine learning or human learning about how to improve education, the real problem is that we don’t have a vocabulary to talk about these teaching strategies, so we can’t formulate, test, and independently verify our hypotheses. In the machine learning example, we could create an arbitrary “Muller” tag in the system, but we don’t have a common language among teachers where we say “Oh, yeah, he’s using the confront-the-misconceptions (CTM) lecture strategy for that one. I prefer doing a predict-observe-explain (POE) experiment to accomplish the same thing.” If we had a widely adopted language that describes the details of why instructors think a particular aspect of their lecture or their discussion prompt or their experiment assignment is effective at teaching, then big data could be helpful because we could tag all our videos with pedagogical descriptions. We could make our theories about teaching and learning visible to the system in a way that it would be more able to test. And, perhaps even more importantly, human researchers could be more effective at collaborating with each other on testing theories of teaching and learning. Right now, what we’re trying to do is a little like trying to conduct physics research before somebody has invented calculus. You can do some things around the edges, but you can’t describe the really important hypotheses about causes and effects in learning situations with any precision. And if you can’t describe them with precision, then you can’t test them, and you certainly can’t get a machine to understand them.

More on this in a future post.

The post Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Help Improve Teaching appeared first on e-Literate.

One of the fastest growing educational delivery models over the past year is the school-as-a-service concept, where companies like Pearson, 2U, Academic Partnerships and Deltak provide the services needed for a traditional institution to create an online program at scale. As I have often pointed out, traditional institutions have a organizational designs and cultures that often prevent them from successfully creating self-sustaining online programs, which is the reason for the barrier in the landscape diagram. School-as-a-service model provides a bridge over that barrier.

Of course, the model that has grown even faster are MOOCs. Yesterday Academic Partnerships launched a new concept called MOOC2Degree that attempts to combine these two models, thus giving working adults (the sweet spot of their market) a lower cost, easier method to get credits in an online program.

 

The most obvious aspect of MOOC2Degree is highlighted in the name – providing a pathway for MOOCs to help lead to a degree. From the press release:

Through this new initiative, the initial course in select online degree programs will be converted into a MOOC. Each MOOC will be the same course with the same academic content, taught by the same instructors, as currently offered degree programs at participating universities. Students who successfully complete a MOOC2Degree course earn academic credits toward a degree, based upon criteria established by participating universities.

Some of the early participants in Academic Partnerships’ MOOC2Degree initiative include: Arizona State University, Cleveland State University, Florida International University, Lamar University, University of Arkansas System, University of Cincinnati, University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing, University of West Florida and Utah State University. Additional universities are joining the initiative in the months ahead as they work through their processes for providing MOOCs.

This announcement is somewhat similar to the Semester Online program announced by 2U (how long do we need to point out this is formerly 2tor?) in November. In that program 10 partner institutions offer open online courses for credit, although they don’t consider the courses technically to be MOOCs. One significant difference is that 2U targets elite universities for specific domains, whereas Academic Partnerships has a broader focus, primarily targeting public colleges and universities, regardless of status.

Here are some initial thoughts on MOOC2Degree:

Betting on a megatrend

In an phone interview, Randy Best, founder and chairman of Academic Partnerships, said that the real megatrend is not the emergence of MOOCs, but rather the move to universal, affordable access to education. This populist view runs contrary to 2U, Coursera, Udacity and edX, all of which target elite universities, betting that their brands and faculty are important to attract large numbers of students.

I, for one, am sympathetic to this view, as I indicated to Josh Kim in his recent set of prediction interviews:

Despite xMOOCs targeting ‘elite’ higher ed, it will be non-elite institutions that aggressively adopt the model and define the 2nd generation of MOOCs.

Converting courses to MOOCs

How will the partner institutions convert their courses to MOOC courses? The first issue is that each school chooses how to offer their MOOC, and many will offer them on the same LMS already in use. While this vendor-neutral approach has its benefits, I could see a problem if the school’s LMS is not set up to be a MOOC platform.  The platform has to scale quickly if the courses grow in size to thousands of students. Many self-hosted LMS solutions are not capable of scaling in this way, nor are simple managed hosting solutions that have dedicated hardware per institution.

The second issue is that MOOCs need to be designed to be easy to get into the course content and interactions as easily as possible. A clunky course design as well as a clunky LMS design will run counter to this need.

The third issue is instructional design, as any interactions and activities need to be able to handle large numbers of students with unpredictable participation. Who is providing the expertise and instructional design advice to ensure that each course is truly ready to be a MOOC? I assume that Academic Partnerships is playing this role, but I am not sure.

Randy Best indicated that two methods to be used by the partner institutions is to alter the start dates as necessary, allowing the course to begin a month early to work out logistics, for example. The institutions could also throttle enrollment and keep to a manageable size. Another approach to handling this issue can be seen in another recent Academic Partnerships announcement referenced in the press release.

Due to the partnership between Academic Partnerships and Canvas, universities can use the Canvas Open Network System at no cost to offer MOOC2Degree courses.

Convincing partner institutions

I asked Randy Best if he had to strong-arm any schools to get them to try out the concept. After all, many traditionalists view MOOCs as a competitive threat that might harm institutional brands or revenue potential. The answer was interesting, as Randy said that all of the initial schools were already considering how to explore MOOCs, and the MOOC2Degree really provided a workable concept that made sense. This concept potentially gives schools a sustainable model combining the free, open nature of MOOCs with the potential for credit-bearing, tuition-generating online programs. In other words, schools want to get into MOOCs, but were much more eager to do so when the concept made sense.

In my mind, this is another key milestone in the rapid transformation of MOOCs into the next generation – in combination with Instructure’s launch of the Canvas Network, Udacity’s move to MOOC 2.0, and the American Council on Education’s moves to recommend credits for MOOCs.

Update 1/24: For additional coverage:

• Inside Higher Ed: “MOOCs for Credit”
• New York Times: “Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit”
• Chronicle of Higher Ed: “Universities Try MOOCs in Bid to Lure Successful Students to Online Programs”

The post Further Evolution of MOOCs with Academic Partnerships and MOOC2Degree Launch appeared first on e-Literate.

Just a quick note. I write our own integration code for Google Apps in part because of our scale, and in part because I started integrating our systems before GADS (Google Apps Directory Sync) existed. The code mostly just works, so I don’t look at it very often, and I’m not a strong python coder.

Recently I need to move a fairly large number of users into an organization, but there’s no way to do this in the GUI as a batch job, so I needed to code it. I found the docs, but mostly I have to go through a lot of trial and error. Here’s the ultimate shape of the code I came up with, and an explanation. I’m just writing a quick utility script here so it’s nothing fancy:

#!/usr/bin/python

import gdata.apps.organization.client

# get a client and log in as an integration user
ouclient = gdata.apps.organization.client.OrganizationUnitProvisioningClient(domain='yourdomain.com')
ouclient.ClientLogin(email='adminuser@yourdomain.com', password='adminuserpassword', source ='apps')

# grab the customerId of the integration account - this is new
clientid = ouclient.RetrieveCustomerId()
customer_id = clientid.customer_id

# you need the customer id to do anything, I think. Read the provisioning docs.
# Objects that are camelCase in the XML, change to underscore in python
# I have never found that documented anywhere so I figure it is something you just know!

ouclient.move_users_to_org_unit(customer_id=customer_id, org_unit_path='nameorpathofOU', users_to_move=['username@yourdomain.com'])

#users_to_move is a list, up to 25 email addresses. See the docs on move_users_to_org_unit.

The following is a rough transcript of my presentation at the 20 Million Minds conference on January 7th. 

Thank you very much, and thanks to everybody for coming to the conference.

We seem to be in a unique situation. I had someone remark to me in the hallway discussions leading up to the event that we have quite a unique group of people here, both in terms of the online educational programs and in terms of statewide system administration and faculty.

Jeff Selingo pointed out very well some of the major forces affecting higher education and affecting where we’re going. A lot of people understand this current situation is not a temporary setback, not a temporary change where we can pull back to the normal once certain things change. We’re in a situation where an entire education ecosystem is changing and putting us into uncharted territory. How higher education changes will be up to a lot of the people in this room, as far as key choices go. How can we use the power of online education to transform traditional institutions and systems? I think this meeting is helping to set up a lot of the discussion on the potential changes.

Online education has been around since 1994 – that is the earliest point where you could truly say the Internet helped deliver postsecondary education. On one hand, that is a very small amount of time in terms of academic history. The model we’ve used for academia has been around for hundreds of years, so to a certain degree online education is quite new, and we don’t fully understand what the impact is going to be.

On the other hand, online education did not start in the past two years – it has a history deeper than that covered in many media outlets. We’ve had a huge amount of interest, particularly in the past two years, about online education at the national and state level that has focused just on the recent news and the recent innovations. It’s going to important for us to understand the broader picture of what online education has to offer – what are the different models available and how can they help address the problems of quality, access and cost that we are discussing today.

For public higher education, as Jeff has pointed out, one in nine students are in California. That’s an enormous impact on the entire country, not just for the state. Any transformation of California public higher education will not come from just one type of online education – we need to be cognizant that this is not a one problem / one solution issue.

Online education is a new media, and we really need to understand what are the different potentials for the various models to transform not just new models of education, but also traditional institutions as well. One of the things we’re hoping to get today is a broader perspective so you can see a lot of the innovations out there and what the potential is. But also it’s going to be very important to get faculty perspectives, student perspectives, administration perspectives, and get some of the key issues out on the table. It’s not going to be just a matter of plugging in a single solution to make it work. For that reason I want to thank 20 Million Minds for putting together this forum, quickly put this conference together to get this discussion going, but I also expect the conversation is just starting and will continue.

The landscape that you’re seeing in the graphic is meant to give a broader perspective of what’s going on in online education, and we need to get away from the duality of simply online education versus traditional education. There are different models at play and they have different qualities. One way to lay out this landscape of models is the dimension of modality. There is a spectrum of modality including face-to-face, hybrid or flipped classroom where face-to-face time is augmented by online actives and content delivery. There’s individual online courses supplementing face-to-face programs. There’s fully online programs, and getting away from the standard cohort-based model, there’s even self-paced programs based on the time and availability of the individual student.

The other dimension is course design, which gets to the core of the academic mission, which gets to how knowledge is conveyed and learned by students. It turns out that how courses are designed is a major determination of why certain models exist. The traditional course design involves a single faculty member designing a specific course, where they design and teach that course. There are certain cases where multiple faculty members design a course, particularly for multi-disciplinary examples. And on the top level there’s a concept that has significant implications, and that’s an instructional design team. It’s not just individual faculty, you have a team that includes instructional designers, multi-media specialists, and even subject matter experts from industry. It’s a team-based approach to designing a course.

The reason there’s a wall here is that culturally, there’s a significant barrier for an institution to move from the traditional mindset and be able to get into this concept of team-based course design. As institutions deal with how to adapt to online education, they need to be aware of this barrier and understand the different options to go over or around or even avoid this barrier.

I’m not going to go into the details of all of the models today, but I would like to highlight a few. As mentioned before, some of the models exist to deal with this barrier of a team-designed course. You certainly have a lot of face-to-face courses which use online components, and we’re going to hear about this from the first panel that includes hybrid or flipped classrooms.

The biggest change over the past two years, I think most people would agree, is the concept of a massive open online course, or MOOC. This is one of the first attempts to take advantage of the power of the Internet in terms of scale and access – and MOOCs have driven a lot of the recent national conversation. One thing that is interesting about MOOCs is how they’re depicted on the bottom side of the barrier. MOOCs actually provides a way to attack scale and access while still working through the model of individual faculty designing a course

Up on the top side of the barrier, often  traditional schools have had to create a separate organization to be able to provide online courses at scale. We have UC Online, CSU Online here, some other examples such as Rio Salado College in Arizona, University of Maryland University College. There’s several examples where there’s a separate organization within the overall structure of a traditional institution.

There are also service organizations, often called school-as-a-service, that provide the services that traditional schools are not comfortable doing. The idea is “We’ll help you go online by providing the services that your school is not capable of or does not want to do strategically, and let you focus on the academic and the admissions processes which are critical to your institution”.

One other model I’ll highlight that we’ll hear about is competency-based education. There are different versions of competency-based education, but most are based on self-paced courses. In these models, the design starts with defining the competencies that student needs to master, then giving students the time and the ability for repetition for re-taking the material or the assessments before letting them go to the next level.

There are multiple models out there, and what you’re going to be hearing today is a first-hand perspective from the people who have helped created many of these models. The panels will also get into issues such as what are the key barriers to overcome for California public higher education to leverage the power of online education, not just to try out an interesting pilot, but to diffuse that innovation throughout the system.

For the rest of the day we’re also going to hear from students, administrators, and also faculty – to get their thoughts on what are the big issues we need to tackle if we’re going to maintain or improve the quality of education in California while levering online models.

Thank you.

The post Re:Booting CA Higher Education – Transcript of Phil Hill Presentation appeared first on e-Literate.

While we have occasionally written about college costs and budgets here at e-Literate, it mostly hasn’t been part of our brief as a site that focuses on technology-mediated education. That is changing, in large part because cost and budgets are increasingly becoming the drivers for change, in California and elsewhere. But I’ve been astonished at how little information seems to be readily available and how little analysis is out in the academic press about even the basics of college and university finances work.

For example, let’s talk about how enrolments impact college budgets. Phil wrote a good post and follow-up post about a month ago about the recession-driven bump in college enrolments. His graph tells an interesting story:

Phil was pointing out the very large divergence between enrollment growth and employment growth. Specifically, the gap is four times the size of the gaps in previous recessions. This suggests that recent and graduates and soon-to-be graduates may struggle to find work. This is a thought-provoking piece of analysis which prompted me to do a little research of my own. But the deeper I dug, the more questions I had.

Let’s start with the title of Phil’s post: “This time it’s different.” How different is it? If you look at the recession data from the United States since the Great Depression, the character of the recession looks pretty different. Here’s a graph from the economics blog Calculated Risk: 

Obviously, this doesn’t have any enrollment data. But the magnitude of the recession is certainly different. It’s more than twice as deep as the second-deepest recession in the time frame of Phil’s graph. But it’s also much longer. What’s the causal relationship (if any) between recessions and enrollment growth? So far, I haven’t been able to find any analysis of this question. Is there reason to believe that a deeper, longer recession of the kind we just went through could be the primary driver of the enrollment spike we’re seeing now? And if so, what characteristics of the recession are most germane? If you look closely at Phil’s chart, the current divergence really started during the 2001 recession and grew during the 2007 recession. The 2001 recession wasn’t as deep as some of the other recessions on that chart, but it was the second-longest in terms of recovery of the job market (as shown in the Calculated Risk chart). Then again, we don’t see any such correlation after the 1981 recession, which was almost as long as the 2001 recession in terms of job recovery.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that, as the post-2007 job losses ground onward, the community college where my wife worked saw an increase in enrolments of people who lost their jobs and went back to school because they didn’t have any significant hope of getting another job with their qualifications any time soon. But, looking at both graphs here, it seems possible that the character of this recession is anomalous enough that we may not be able to learn much from past patterns. This time really could be different.

Then again, maybe not. If you look at this chart of international recessions from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis blog, it tells a different story:

From a global perspective, there have been five recessions that were worse than the 2007 United States recession in the past 25 years (from the perspective of depth of impact on the job market and length of job market recovery time). So what do we know about the impact of these recessions on college enrollment? I haven’t been able to find anything so far.

And, of course, it would be simplistic to assume that any relationship between a recession or a dip in the employment numbers and enrollment numbers (assuming there is one) is straightforward. For example, do we see some recessions in which it is more evident that unskilled or semi-skilled jobs are going away permanently than in others? If you’re a factory worker and the last factory within community distance just closed, you might think more seriously about going back to school than if three factories in your area each cut their workforce in half but stayed open, even though latter case would show up on the graphs as a larger net job loss than the former case. What do we know about long-term job shifts as a result of the last two recessions and their impact on enrolments? I haven’t been able to find anything in the reports I’ve read so far.

And what impact does a change in enrollment have on college budgets, anyway? For state schools, it’s complicated. The schools themselves obviously gain tuition for every new student. But in a state system, every student is subsidized. So each new in-state student actually costs the state. That’s why state university systems are often interested in decreasing time to graduation and in reaching students who pay out-of-state tuition through distance learning programs.

Admittedly, I am new to this topic and not an academic, so it would not surprise me if there are studies that answer at least some of these questions. My point is that this kind of analysis is nowhere to be found in the current debates about policy. What has been the impact of the enrollment surge on the budgets of the California systems of higher education, and how long can we expect that surge to last? According to a recent study by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, college enrollment in California is expected to drop significantly by 2019. How should this projection impact the goals for the current drive toward online learning? According to the same study, there will also be a significant increase in the percentage of non-white college students in California in the same period. It seems plausible that this shift could correlate with a socio-economic and educational preparedness shift, just based on what we know about the distribution of non-white Californians in areas that are poorly served by their K12 education systems. Will remediation be a bigger cost challenge for the state in the coming years than it is this year? If so, shouldn’t California be “skating to where the puck is going to be”?

We need some serious data journalism in the area of the economics of education right now.

The post Data Envy appeared first on e-Literate.

The following is a rough transcript of Jeff Selingo’s keynote at the 20 Million Minds conference on January 7th. Any errors in transcription are mine, and sections that were garbled are marked by []. I’d like to thank Rovy Branon for his recordings of these sessions. I’ll post additional transcripts soon.

We’re gathered here today at one of the great public university institutions, and this past summer, at another great public institution, on the other side of the country a drama played out that revealed the immense pressures affecting colleges and universities as they deal with the financial and historical foundation that is swiftly shifting [under us].

Last June, as many of you know, on a late Sunday afternoon, the University of Virginia announced that its president Teresa Sullivan was stepping down after just two years on the job, citing philosophical differences of opinion with the board. The resignation of this popular leader shocked the campus community and over the next few weeks opposition to the board action mounted. Angry students, faculty and alumni took to Twitter and Facebook. The governor threatened to withhold financial support and said for the board to figure this out of he’d replace them all.

What is interesting about this debate is that in the middle of it, the student newspaper, the Daily Cavalier on the University of Virginia campus, threw a public records request acquiring emails that were sent between board members in the weeks leading up the resignation and the decision. What it revealed was pretty much a lack of cooperation on the firing of Teresa Sullivan. What was interesting was that board members exchanged a series of newspaper articles and columns – from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Chronicle – on the pressures changing higher education. One of the them was about elite universities that were offering MOOCs – something that we’ll be talking about today [].

The board chair asked why we can’t afford to have MOOCs. The board voted to reinstate Sullivan at Virginia, but the drama that unfolded at Virginia last summer, from what I hear talking to presidents and to board members, is happening at campuses across the country as presidents and boards try to find a sustainable path forward. []

The changes are prompted by what I think is a perfect storm of five financial, political, demographic and technological forces that are battering higher education right now. I want to quickly walk through these this morning. I think they set the stage for a discussion and it shows in stark terms why change is inevitable.

The first one is the sea of red ink. We talk a lot about student loan debt in this country but very little about institutional debt. This is the number, 307 billion dollars, that represents the total amount of debt taken out by institutions. The line graph shows the percentage of that debt that is taken out by public universities in terms of their overall financial resources. One third of all colleges now in the US are in a financial standing that is significantly weaker than they were before the recession, and those colleges are actually on an unsustainable path according to a financial analysis. Another third are at risk of [becoming unsustainable]. Expenses are simply growing much faster than revenue. Net tuition revenue and the cash that institutions have to spend to pay faculty and administrators – do the work day in and day out – that is the tuition revenue after financial aid, is flat or declining at 60 percent of American colleges or universities.

I don’t think I really need to tell you about this one, this is for state in education, not just in California, but all of public higher education. By some measures state taxpayer support for higher education hasn’t risen since 1995, when there were 14 million fewer students in the system CHECK. In 2012 29 states paid less for higher education than we did in 2007. If current trends continue, led by Colorado in 2022, every state will be getting out of the business of higher education by 2059. The trend is going in the wrong direction.

The third force is that much of the growth in higher education in the past decade has been fueled by well-off, well-prepared students, and that well is drying up. This is just one example, this graphic, which is an analysis done for a private residential college in the northeast. And what it looks at is the total number of 18 year-olds in 2009. It started off with 4.3 million students, but when you filtered all those students out – the students who aren’t going to college, the students who have no intention in going to college – those who expressed interest in a 4-year residential college on the east coast and oh, by the way, those that had the money to pay for this private residential college. Out of 4.3 million students, only 996 students filtered out. Dozens of schools are after that small group of students, and they all need to have those students. In some ways it’s much like the efforts of publics in many states to recruit financially and to recruit out-of-state in order to boost their revenue. For those students who are paying their full way.

The University of Oregon and Arizona State University enroll more freshman from California than 6 CalState campuses. I think that at some point the well of these students is going to dry up as everyone competes for a smaller and smaller group of students.

The last two forces that I want to talk about today are perhaps the most important. The first is that the alternatives in higher education are improving. This [slide] is just a sampling of those alternatives. [It isn't just the MOOCs from Stanford in California that are here today, we also have StraighterLine or the competency-based degrees from Western Governors.] This is what is going to allow the future, a little of what we heard in the beginning remarks [from Darrell Steinberg] is allowing students to bundle their degree. A third of students transfer between colleges in their four-year degrees. The idea of going to college at 18 and staying there for four years and graduating is a romantic notion of higher education, but it’s simply not reality. Most students don’t get their higher education that way. Many of them drop out and go back to school later on, a typical student is not an 18-year-old.

Students are less brand loyal than before, and they’re using new pathways to college. The next generation of students coming down to colleges are accustomed use of technology throughout their lives. College leaders in my opinion don’t get this, . I attended, here in LA, last spring at the annual meeting of the American Council of Education, and Sal Khan was the keynote speaker. The night before he was profiled on ’60 Minutes’, and he asked those in the room who had never heard of the Khan Academy. [A fifth] of the hands in the room went up. It was interesting that in that month his lessons reached more than four million people. I think many policy leaders just don’t get the idea of really changing the way. These alternatives – whether it’s Western Governors, which is growing at breakneck pace with a competency-based degree in Washington state or Texas or Indiana, and now the University of Wisconsin System and Northern Arizona University will be offering competency-based degrees next year – all of these alternatives are improving.

Finally, I think the most important fact impacting the future of higher education is what I call ‘value gap’. There is no doubt in the minds of Americans that higher education is worth it, despite of all the talk of ‘don’t go to college’ which we see [articles every week] saying don’t go to college, go start the next Facebook or the next Apple . Survey after survey shows that Americans think higher education is core to the success of their children. Those with a college degree earn much more over their lifetime [than others]. Americans increasingly want to know what they’re getting in return for what they’re spending on higher education.

Two research analysts asked this question last year in a survey of Americans and college presidents, and they asked them to rate the job that the higher education system is doing in providing value for the money spent. 57% of the public said fair or good, but 76% of college presidents said excellent or good. This, to me, is the value gap that’s happening right now in higher education. []

Americans want to know what is the value of going to a specific institution. Increasingly there are tools to help figure this out. Three states now – Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia – have released the data that matches graduates of specific colleges to earning data in the state unemployment insurance program. That allows users find the first-year salary and eventually find the five-year salary by colleges, by programs. If you want to know what an engineering graduate or a business graduate makes from George Mason University and compare it to other universities in the state, you can now do that in Virgina. You can now do that in Tennessee, in Arkansas and Virginia, and next quarter you’ll be able to do that in a couple more states. These tools are now at the disposal of consumers, and I think they’re only going to improve in the next couple of years to help students make better choices.

Where do we go from here? Despite all these negative statistics I’ve just cited, I’m actually [excited] about the future of higher ed. Sure, a lot of the institutions that are in real trouble, I think a lot of them are going to merge, or in some cases close. I think top institutions in this country will continue to thrive. The middle is really [a lot] to figure out for the path forward. Right now we all want to be in that top group – there is this race for prestige in higher education that is unsustainable and makes institutions, at the end of the day, look a lot alike. Everybody wants to look like the institution down the road. There’s really no reward for trying to be different, because the US News rankings and other rankings don’t reward being [different].

I believe that the financial pressures facing institutions will force them to make choices that will allow greater student choice – in how courses and credits are strung together, how degrees are earned. Ultimately we’ll arrive at a system that is more efficient and gets more students emerging at the end with degrees at a reasonable cost.

Two of the things that I’ve learned in writing my book that will be coming out in May. One is that we’re done a fairly poor job in matching students and institutions in this country. I talked to a hundred college students in preparation for my book, and I was shocked at how little thought went into how they decided where to go to college. It’s one of the reasons why so many students end up dropping out of college – they’re just matched poorly. The second thing that I discovered in talking to a lot of students, and this was mentioned in the opening remarks, many students don’t know why they’re in college. At the end of high school, we’ve created three pathways for students. One is to go to the military, one is to go to a job where a high school degree is good for the job, or to go to college.

Today’s students think that college is a [convenient warehouse], but they don’t know why they’re there. One of the things is that all of these alternatives to traditional higher ed have the potential to create different pathways to college. Not necessarily every student should go to college at some point in their life, whether they’re 20, 25 or 30. I think that the alternatives have been building, working with traditional higher education to create alternative pathways to college. The idea in the US is not that right from high school the only choice you really have to get ahead is to go to college.

I’m not saying that [we're unique] – trust me, I’ve been in the publishing industry for nearly 20 years, and most of that time in a state of turmoil – but I think this is going to be a great ride, and I look forward to the discussions today, and I appreciate the time that Dean gave me to open up. Thank you very much.

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I have a new post up at WCET based on some observations from the recent 20 Million Minds conference.

In past years the primary role of state government was to take the lead on funding while working with statewide systems on enrollment policies to serve workforce and general educational needs. Last week in California we witnessed the state government, both from the governor’s office and the legislature, become the driving force of change for determining the role of educational technology and online education to transform the public systems. State officials are no longer content with encouraging and hoping that postsecondary institutions will develop a strategy for systemic change on their own.

Three interdependent events are emerging that clarify this trend.

Read the whole article here.

The post New Post at WCET On Activist Role of State Government in Higher Education appeared first on e-Literate.