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Many a parent and teacher has despaired over how easily young people’s attention is diverted, especially when they’re online. Stay focused! we urge them. Don’t let yourself get distracted! Our admonitions have little sway against the powerful temptations of the Internet.

Let’s encourage teenagers to discover (maybe with the help of their peers) that the freedom and autonomy they feel when they’re at the helm of their computers is in some ways an illusion, and let’s help them develop the skeptical, critical stance that would allow them to be truly autonomous users of the Internet.

Although there have been some attempts to teach students “critical thinking skills” with respect to the web, too often these programs adopt a sanctimonious tone, with all the rebellious appeal of extra-credit study hall. The history of antismoking campaigns offers a potentially more effective alternative. Granted, clicking a link or posting a status update won’t give teenagers lung cancer. But the undisciplined use of technology can waste their time, fragment their focus, and interfere with their learning. Just like their health, young people’s attention is a precious resource, and they should be empowered to resist the companies that would squander it.

But, you might say, it’s the internet. We’ve come to associate the internet as low-engagement, a drive-by experience. We take for granted that the internet offers us things that are slightly flaky, or easy. So we’re not surprised when the drop out rate is so high. Easy in, easy out.But it doesn’t have to be this way.The course was as well-designed as a real-world lecture and the teacher was qualified and engaging, but it’s not a surprise that the dropout rate was so high: As soon as education gets difficult (and useful education always gets difficult) it’s social pressure, peer pressure and our own need to fit in and achieve that often keeps us going. The typical online course provides precious little of any of these elements.

Lectures are at the heart of the last century of higher learning. A proven scholar orates in front of a class of selected students.Tests are the way institutions enforce compliance. They’re the stick.And accreditation is the carrot. Put up with the lectures and the tests and we’ll give you the certificate, the scarce piece of paper that is (supposed to be) worth far more than the effort you went through to get certified.

We’ve seen that when knowledge jobs meet the internet, they change. And now we’re seeing that online education is having trouble acting like a job as well.

Initially in many institutions the move will be crude pedagogically, with an emphasis on video recording of lectures and flipped classes, or merely increasing the amount of online learning supporting regular classes. Over time, though, as instructors get more experience in hybrid learning, get more instructional design support, and greater pressure from the administration, full course re-design will increase, but major redesigns around hybrid learning may take as long as five years in many institutions. One reason for this slow adoption of re-design is the current lack of appropriate models for hybrid learning that have been tested and evaluated; this will change though as experience grows. Best practice for hybrid learning will emerge, as it did for fully online learning.

10. Expect the unexpected: One year: 100%; Three years: 100%; Five years: 100% These are the monsters lurking in the shadows. In online learning, the only thing you can really be certain of is the uncertainty. These are Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, so by definition they are unpredictable or non-forecastable. However, there are also some known unknowns that perhaps we should discuss. (MOOCs are good examples – they were known in 2011, but the likelihood that they would take off in 2012 in the way they did was not known, at least by most pundits.) Here are some possible bogeymen to lie awake worrying about:

the privatization of post-secondary education in the USA. Many states are in dire financial trouble. Will this result in some states privatizing their public post-secondary education systems? What price would Alabama State University fetch from a commercial buyer and how would that affect the state’s finances? If some states do decide on privatization, expect online learning to increase – indeed, online learning will likely increase in financially challenged states without privatization, because, rightly or wrongly, it will be seen as cheaper; also expect federal student financial aid to take a hit in the USA as Congress grapples with the deficit. a major Internet player (Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) jumps into the online learning market, perhaps in partnership with some elite universities, and takes a major share of the for-credit online market, because of lower costs, quality content, and accreditation from elite universities (but with a different category of degree from their on-campus programs) The US Congress backs publishers and shuts down all publicly funded open educational resources; copyright legislation is tightened on US-based Internet companies making it all but impossible to use educational resources over the Internet for free major power shortages/outages, due to bad weather/a surge in energy prices/political activists (pick your reason) makes online delivery increasingly unreliable during winter quantum computing arrives at a reasonable cost and completely changes the game.

For example, what sort of education will it take for future Canadian graduates to reach their potential in a world where the pace of technological change is unlikely to slacken? If the next 15 years are anything like the last, during which we restructured how we work (Internet, mobile), communicate (smartphones), interact (Facebook, Twitter), shop (Amazon, eBay), listen to music (iTunes, iPods), plan trips (TripAdvisor, Expedia) and find information (Google, Yahoo), then literacy, numeracy, creativity, adaptability and entrepreneurship will be the name of the talent game.

Gamification is the process by which teachers use video game design principals in learning environments. The effects are increased student engagement, class wide enjoyment of academic lessons, and high levels of buy-in, even from your most reluctant learners.

Components of Gamifying the Classroom There are several aspects of video-game design that can be incorporated into the gamified classroom. Here are several:

Points: In video games, users gain points as the travel through their quests. The more time they invest in the game the more points they earn