Here are some of the articles that caught our eye recently.
Examining the potential and reality of open educational resources: the 2013 COHERE conference. “One practical step that could increase greater adoption of OERs would be some open course design templates into which OERs could be dropped, with examples, and places for instructors to add their own resources. These design templates could range from more didactic teaching somewhat similar to an open LMS (some of which exist already), to more open or more flexible designs where students find, analyse and apply open resources within an overall teaching framework. I would hope such templates would include spaces for student activity, and multimedia resources. This would take something like CoursePacker to the next level.”
Don’t Call It a Course. “In addition to the term addressing size and scope, some companies believe ‘learning experience’ signals a change in how information is transmitted to students. The shift ‘comes out of a recognition that learning is a very social activity, that it involves and requires a set of experiences that connects students to students, students to faculty, student to ideas, and that it’s not a top-down information transmission process,’ said Marie Norman, senior director of educational excellence of Acatar, which unlike edX creates small-scale online and hybrid courses.”
Foundations Attract More Scrutiny as Their Influence on Academic Grows. ” Mr. Callan agreed that, while the role of foundations is largely positive, their influence raises concerns. The Gates and Lumina Foundations are drawing attention and policy efforts to important national issues, such as American underperformance in education and the challenges associated with expanding access to higher education among underrepresented populations. Their focus on those issues is a good thing, Mr. Callan said, but ‘the question really is if they are doing it in an effective way and in a way that benefits the nation.’”
The Humbling of a Would-Be Disruptor. “The venture also proved to be a mixed experience for Altius’s 20-percent partner in Ivy Bridge, Tiffin. Over the course of the partnership, the university netted about $1.8-million in overhead and licensing fees, gained a pipeline of transfer students, and learned more about supporting students in online programs. But any windfall it might have hoped to receive, once Ivy Bridge became independently valuable as its own accredited institution, is now history.”
New HTML5 ‘First’ Publishing Approach for Education Content – a Q&A with the Pearson Standards Lead and IDPF. “Our XML-first approach to content creation allows us to process a single stream of content according to selected profiles, which can then be transformed automatically into different end products, such as a modular learning object, an LMS course module, a premium EPUB 3 book, a print book, or an international adaptation. Profile examples include Target Audience (such as a student or a teacher), Product Type (e.g., eCourse, textbook), Form Factor (e.g., mobile, tablet, PC, print), and Standard (e.g., Common Core, NCLEX). Finally, I should also note that one of our primary drivers in adopting XHTML5/EPUB 3 was that the mark-up is so close to the output. This minimizes the complexity and risk of errors associated with heavy transformation of XML source content to a styled output format.”
Why online education won’t kill your campus. “Though they may yet wreak havoc on brick and mortar institutions (particularly on expensive middle-tier liberal arts schools offering no clear route to employment), online education seems to be a ways away from becoming the terrifying disruptor many thought it would be. If anything, right now MOOCs and other online courses are augmenting current offerings rather than destroying them. As for killing the physical campus, when I floated that scenario to Ng, he didn’t jump at the idea. He said he still values the ‘coming of age experience’ provided by four-year universities, and the support system they provide. We’re still a long way from knowing exactly what MOOCs are capable of.”
5 Questions About Adaptive Learning Platforms. “My strong sense is that the next few years in edtech will be dominated by two inter-related trends:
The growing efficacy and penetration of adaptive learning platforms.
The move to data driven teaching decision making, underpinned by the growing reach and power of learning analytics.
I think that adaptive learning and learning analytics companies will challenge the role of learning management system (LMS) providers as the central hub in which we revolve our digital learning strategies.”
Amazon’s Whispersync, Reading and Higher Ed. “Whispersync increases how much reading I can do. I listen when I drive, walk, do dishes, fold laundry, run on the treadmill. I read in bed at night on my Kindle Paperwhite, and while waiting in line or in between meetings on my iPhone Kindle app. The audio and e-book formats reinforce each other. Reading and listening the synced book encourages more reading. If given the choice, all my books will be Whispersync. So what does this mean for our students? What does this mean for the books and articles that we assign in our classes? What if students are like me? What if they come to expect and want books on multiple platforms, on multiple screens, and in multiple formats?”
A Confession of Faith in Books. “I am a book person who thinks curation is important and that we should not outsource to publishers and vendors the job of deciding what books are available at my library, which is how many libraries do it now with ebook packages. I don’t even think giving students a big catalog of electronic books, saying ‘go nuts!’ while quietly paying the bill for whatever they choose to browse or download is a good plan even though it seems financially sensible. Paying $70 for a book we know someone wants is better than paying $70 for a book that may never be checked out. But I want to have books that we can share with other libraries through interlibrary loan, and I still believe in the idea that faculty and librarians should think about what to spend their limited resources on in ways that enable our curricular learning goals. Retaining some rights is nice, too.”
Coursera to Improve Access Abroad With Physical ‘Learning Hubs’. “Massive open online course provider Coursera will provide physical spaces in which to use its digital content, the company announced on Thursday. Along with five partner organizations, including the U.S. State Department, Coursera will establish “Learning Hubs” at more than 20 locations around the world, including at campuses and U.S. embassies.
Time to Change the Rules? “Sen. Lamar Alexander said during Thursday’s hearing that eliminating bureaucracy in higher education regulation is a top priority. The powerful Tennessee Republican (and former U.S. education secretary) wants to cut back on red tape that prevents colleges from experimenting with ways to cut prices and boost student learning. ‘We’ve got enough horsepower in the Senate’ to pass laws aimed at less regulation, he said. ‘The time is right.’ Alexander has pulled together a bipartisan group of three senators to mull specific proposals. They are also working with Nicholas Zeppos, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and representatives from the American Council on Education.”
The For-Profitization of Higher Education? “As schools make strategic and organizational decisions that help them become more competitive, they should look to their mission statements for guidance. Justification will come from statements like ‘help advance society’, ‘provide knowledge and learning at the highest level’, and ‘provide global access to higher education’. Operating in a less insular and more competitive environment, using technology to create efficiencies and improve student learning outcomes, and proving this through metrics will help schools adapt better to the future of higher education. The concept of ‘for-profitization of higher education’ is debatable – but using the tools we have available to us to provide a better education to more students, and advancing society in the process, is just good business sense and should be considered part of higher education’s natural evolution.”
An Interview with Steve Peha: E-books vs. Paper textbooks. “So educators, and education itself, will be faced once again with the same choice we make around all technology: ‘Is it good for kids?’ In the past, I don’t think we have a good track record of answering that question effectively, especially when the question is posed in the context of technology adoption for teaching and learning. … That’s really the upshot of all of this: we need to stop thinking that there’s an equivalency between e-books and paper books. They’re two very different things. Until we start use e-book technology to do all the things that it can do (like display interactive graphics, play videos, provide simulations), then we’re not really exploiting the advantages of the technological medium. … And I hope we’ll see—amazing and helpful expressions of technology—in e-texts in the future. In the future, we probably won’t be ‘reading’ ‘e-books’ at all. We’ll probably be using ‘apps’. That is to say that ‘books’ will function more like pieces of software than as digital texts.”