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Terry Elliott

MOOCs and the Gartner Hype Cycle: A very slow tsunami | PandoDaily - 0 views

pandodaily.com/...hype-cycle-a-very-slow-tsunami

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shared by Terry Elliott on 20 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • A lot can change in a year.
  • One year later,
  • Experienced observers of technology will recognize this as a familiar stage in a cycle.
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  • The Hype Cycle is pretty straightforward. It suggests that each new technology goes through five phases: a) the Technology Trigger, b) the Peak of Inflated Expectations, c) the Trough of Disillusionment, d) the Slope of Enlightenment, and finally e) the Plateau of Productivity. (Folks, they’re consultants, they can’t help talking like that.)
  • Some questions we need to ask in terms of MOOCs are: Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle? For every example of a technology which underwent this cycle, the skeptic can quote an example of a technology which went through the Peak of Inflated Expectations and then vanished without a trace. (Insofar as anything ever vanishes without a trace — there are still obscure but intense academic conferences on Optical Computing, for example.) If we are on the cycle, in which phase are we, and how fast will the cycle unfold? How should traditional universities, and traditional academics, respond to this progress?
  • Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle?
  • Eleanor Saitta, a professional paranoid, has said: “When the Internet encounters an institution, it eviscerates it. Then it replaces it with something that looks very like the Internet.”
  • Paul Graham Raven elaborated on this remark, “This has already happened to the music industry, and it’s currently happening to journalism and publishing.
  • Clay Shirky, in perhaps the best article on the whole subject to date, is not polite: “MOOCs are a lightning strike on a rotten tree.”
  • Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen
  • published “Disrupting Class: How the internet will change the way the world learns.” This was the first time Christensen moved from analyzing past innovation to predicting a future disruption, and he left a deep impression on most readers.
  • Why wouldn’t the Internet eviscerate traditional universities? Do traditional universities have some magical protection that newspapers, music distributors, travel agents, advertising, banking, booksellers, matchmaking, photographic agencies, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and thousands of other eviscerated industries didn’t have?
  • every mainstream article on why MOOCs won’t work, and almost all of them focus on the same two flawed arguments.
  • The first is that you can’t get a high quality student-teacher or student-peer interaction on the Web.
  • if you consider that one out of every eight minutes of global online activity is currently spent on Facebook, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that the socially interactive component of traditional education is going to defend it from online offerings.
  • The second flawed argument is that MOOCs have terrible completion rates, and therefore are not effective substitutes for real education. Quoted completion rates for MOOCs courses range from 5 percent to 16 percent.
  • But does it matter?
  • A small percentage of a very large number is still a large number — when 14 percent of the 160,000 students who signed up for Udacity’s “Introduction to Programming” passed, that added up to 23,000 completions.
  • if we added up all the students who had ever completed this common freshman course, at all those universities, over their entire histories, it would be unlikely to exceed 10,000 completions. Udacity managed this in three months, with a staff of less than a dozen, and on a budget that wouldn’t get my School’s financial manager excited.
  • Nonetheless, the non-completion of the course carries almost zero cost. There was no enrolment fee; nobody relocated cities to attend; I imagine no-one left their jobs to study (in fact, we can be certain that an awful lot of people sat under their bosses’ gaze at their office workstations, looking industrious, while they studied); and neither successful nor unsuccessful students were left with crushing study loan debt. Given the massive differences in volume, cost and convenience, comparing MOOCs and traditional delivery on the single critierion of completion rates is not really meaningful.
  • Where are we on the Hype Cycle?
  • The shape of this curve suggests that we are at, or past, the peak and about to enter the trough. Problems will start to be felt in the traditional sector when the curve turns upward from the trough, although any plans to deal with it ought to be in place long before then. So, when does the storm hit us?
  • The Very Slow Tsunami
  • MOOCs vs. traditional is not a sprint race; it is a marathon. The school leavers of 2013 are not going to go the MOOCs route. They can’t. As of this writing, there is no MOOCs undergraduate degree program, and only one sort-of-MOOC Master’s degree. They are going to commit into three, four and five year academic programs, and they will be locked in to the traditional route thereafter.
  • The school leavers of 2014 are going to have some MOOCs degree options to choose from. It’s a big life decision — who’s going to jump first? Certainly not the wealthy kids, who can afford Harvard. And as we all know, the wealthy kids tend to define which are the fashionable options. The first MOOCs adopters will be the kids and families for whom “free” is a compelling argument.
  • Don’t forget, though, that within the last year we have adopted a new way of referring to this demographic: the 99 percent.
  • The kids of 2015 will not have seen any successful MOOCs graduates yet — certainly not successful in the career sense — but it will be a tempting option, and some of them will jump.
  • This is the very slow tsunami of the title — a gradual but inexorably rolling change in societal and professional attitudes, pinned at one end by the bedrock certainty that the elite institutions produce the elite people, and pulled at the other end by the growing awareness that free isn’t necessarily junk, and it’s, well, free. It will take 10 or 20 years, and be imperceptible while it happens, like boiling a frog. When did newspapers actually die? I’m not sure, but Fairfax Media made 2000 people redundant last July, so perhaps it’s a death which is still in progress.
  • Harvard and Cambridge are safe, forever,
  • For the mid-range institutions, there is probably a happy 10-year window in which they are safe and can continue in blissful ignorance.
  • Given that almost every senior university executive I have ever met has less than 10 years to go to retirement, don’t bet your life that they will take this problem seriously (we call this the “horizon problem” — an executive’s outlook extends only as far as a horizon defined by his or her retirement date, plus six months).
  • Assuming that you’re an academic and you weren’t planning to retire in the next decade, what then? There’s no simple answer to that; however, knowing that your institution is not going to die next year, but will probably become terminally ill in the next decade, should both sharpen your thoughts and give you some time to develop some strategies for co-existing with the MOOCs.
  • Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle?
Terry Elliott

Iowa state legislators mandate course-level 'continuous improvement' reporting, to mixe... - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...us-improvement-reporting-mixed

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shared by Terry Elliott on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • If teaching a 300-plus person course isn't enough work, faculty members who do so at Iowa's three public universities have new duties starting this fall. By state law, they must create and use "formative and summative assessments" and submit a plan for using those assessments to improve student learning.
  • “This is about faculty being engaged in student learning,” said Quirmbach, who prefers the plan’s “continuous improvement”
  • Others, including Joe Gorton, professor of criminology at Northern Iowa, aren't convinced. "Anyone who believes that this kind of bureaucratic micromanagement is going to improve higher education in Iowa immediately categorizes themselves as someone who does not have the first clue about the linkage between university pedagogy and student outcomes," he in an e-mail. "This is time and energy taken away from our core missions of teaching and research."
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  • The new requirement applies to courses -- not just sections -- with 300 or more students enrolled annually during the first year; 200 or more the second; and 100 or more in the third and final year of the plan's rollout. Because there are some costs associated with reporting mandates, Quirmbach said the legislature thought it would get the most “bang for its buck” by focusing on large courses.
  • Beyond a timeline for implementation and the "summative and formative" assessment stipulations, the plan is somewhat vague. That's in part to afford faculty flexibility to define their own learning outcomes and methods of measurement, whether by tests, written assignments or other means; professors -- subject matter experts -- know best what their students should be learning, Quirmbach said.
  • Not so during a departmental faculty meeting at Northern Iowa, where the plan was recently explained and "most perceived it as busywork," said Mary DeSoto, professor of psychology. 
  • Template assessment tools are being drafted by at least two of the universities to help professors new to formal reporting.
  • Planning for next semester’s new requirement is under way now at all three universities, with most taking a “train the trainer” approaching at the college or department level.
  • Karen Zunkel, director for undergraduate programs and academic quality in the provost's office at Iowa State, which will be most impacted by the plan, said faculty reaction has been mixed. Some professors have asked if the information gathered will be used for tenure and promotion decisions, she said. But she’s assured them that it’s not the goal of the legislation, and that information will be collected by course, not by instructor.
  • One of the most appealing aspects of the plan so far, she said, is that it will require instructors teaching different sections of the same course to meet, discuss and record what they want their students to learn and how they’ll measure it.
  • As for fears that information gathered will eventually be used against faculty for personnel decisions or other potentially punitive means,
  • Sheila Doyle Koppin, spokeswoman for the Board of Regents, said the board has a “longstanding commitment to specifying and measuring expected learning outcomes for all undergraduate programs.” The new requirements are not meant to hinder faculty from teaching, she said, but rather “support and enhance” that ability. Gorton disagreed. Between other required reporting at the department level and above, strategic plan planning and execution and academic programs reviews, there's increasingly little time to teach, he said. And the problem isn't unique to Iowa.
Terry Elliott

Defeating the Kobayashi Maru: Supporting Student Retention by Balancing the Needs of th... - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...n-balancing-needs-many-and-one

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shared by Terry Elliott on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • After spending months on the design and development of a new online course, applying theoretically and empirically sound instructional and community-building strategies to support student engagement and learning, Joni launched the course without a hitch. The projects were relevant, involving students in real-world activities. The instructional materials were well designed, and students were encouraged to participate in the bounded course community and the professional community of practice (PCoP). The course was a great success…or, so Joni thought. Midway through the semester, a student emailed the following: "Thank you for a great course. The materials are so useful, and the projects really have me applying what I've learned in the program. But, where are you?" What did that mean? Joni came to realize that — although appreciative of and engaged by the course materials, activities, and emphasis on community — students also craved a one-on-one, personalized relationship with her. And, that her new challenge of online course and programdesign was to balance the needs of the many with the needs of the one.
  • Identity. Students have the opportunity to interact with university representatives (professors, advisors) on a one-to-one basis. Individualization. Students have individualized interactions with university representatives, based on their specific needs and goals. Interpersonal interaction. Students' interaction with university representatives is mutual and reciprocal, with the achievement of learning and performance goals as the focus.
  • At the start of our online courses, we invite4 students to participate in a five-minute telephone conversation (see Figure 1).5 We typically receive RSVPs from two-thirds of the students. However, because we continue to extend the invitation throughout the first few weeks of the course,6 we end up talking with all but one or two students.
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  • This simple, old school strategy has made a world of difference in establishing social presence. Several benefits besides social presence and connection are: Addressing specific course-related questions Being alerted to student issues (such as a baby on the way, hectic travel schedule, family illness) Helping students determine the personal relevance of the course content and specific projects Establishing credibility as an expert in the content area and as a trustworthy source of feedback and support Establishing ongoing, one-on-one communication throughout the semester that not only enhances student engagement and retention in the course, but allows us to address individual student needs and provide individualized formative feedback more efficiently than we could using an asynchronous tool (such as a threaded discussion)Could we achieve these results as efficiently using online technologies such as a threaded discussion or traditional chat room?8 For us, after years of trying, the answer is no.
  • Of course, we have been able
  • Students in our study reported that e-mail supported their development of one-on-one relationships, something they crave — but only occasionally experience — in their online courses.
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