Higher education: Heading for upheaval? - College, Inc. Posted at 12:25 PM ET, 11/02/2012 Nov 02, 2012 04:25 PM EDT TheWashingtonPost (Jae C. Hong - AP) Universities are facing tough questions in an age when students anywhere can access an ever-growing catalogue of courses from top-flight professors online at no charge. Today, George Mason takes its turn wrestling with the future of higher ed. Kaplan, the for-profit higher education unit of the Washington Post Co., is a co-sponsor of the forum. The public, Selingo noted, is less sanguine about what it is getting for its tuition and tax dollars than college presidents, who Selingo said are often “tone deaf.” “We tend to overestimate the speed of change, but underestimate its depth,” said Selingo, who is working on a book called “College (Un)bound.”
He also offered a frame for thinking about online innovation that caught my eye. The first phase of online higher ed, he said, was driven by individual institutions and inherently institution-focused. The implication: Who needs a school? Peter Baskerville's answer to Online Education: Will the courses provided by organizations like Udacity, Coursera and edX remain free forever? If so, what is their business model and revenue stream. Classroom of 2020: The future is very different than you think. Imagine: you wake up at 9:23 a.m. one September morning in 2020. Your alarm failed to sound and now you’re late. But don’t fret. Your commute to school consists of carrying your laptop to the kitchen table. No need for a back-to-school outfit, as you settle in wearing pyjamas. When you load today’s lecture video you don’t see your professor; instead, a classmate appears on the screen. Your classmate uses the word “atavistic” and you pause the lecture to look it up.
After a while, your eyes wander to the window. If the above seems like a far-fetched prediction of what a classroom might be like in 2020, you’re behind the times. This is the brave new world of higher education, where students teach professors, technology enables digital note-passing and online courses enroll thousands of students. In an era when a student can access more information through her cellphone than a professor can consume in a lifetime, is the university as a physical place obsolete? Massive Open Online Courses in the Developing World. When prominent U.S. universities began offering free college classes over the Web this year, more than half of the students who signed up were from outside the United States. Consider the story of one of them: Carlos Martinez, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of El Salvador.
Last spring, Martinez enrolled in a class on electronic circuits offered by edX, the $60 million collaboration between MIT and Harvard to stream “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, over the Web. He thought it was so good that he began traveling around El Salvador to convince others to join the class and launched a blog in English to document his adventures as his country’s first “MOOC advocate.” It’s an adventure because Martinez doesn’t have the backing of his university. This fall, on his own initiative, he signed up 50 students—about one-tenth of the electrical engineering majors at his school—to take the edX circuits class.
“I’m like a carnival barker,” Martinez says. Coursera will profit from “Free” courses, competition heats up. Are MOOC’s really about FREE education? Coursera reveals how it intends to generate revenue off of “freely” available MOOC’s. In fact, many MOOC companies are launching business models where students and institutions will pay.Competition heats up between MOOC’s and traditional LMS companies. To be clear Coursera, Udacity and others are simply learning management systems bundled with high quality content. In fact “It’s an LMS [learning management system] that’s wrapped around a very high-quality course,” says Daphne Koller, a Coursera co-founder. “It’s not just the box, it’s a course in a box.” According to contract documents, Coursera will pay the universities 6 to 15 percent of revenues, which will be determined on a per-course basis and dependent upon the duration of the course, the number and quality of assessments.
So what’s the MOOC model? There are 8 possible monetization strategies that MOOC providers like Coursera, or Learning Management System providers could adopt: Paper92. Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge Stephen Downes October 16, 2006 I have a lot of mixed feelings about this paper but it is an honest and reasonably thorough outline of my views. I hope people find it interesting and rewarding. The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the thinking behind new e-learning technology, including e-portfolios and personal learning environments. Part of this thinking is centered around the theory of connectivism, which asserts that knowledge - and therefore the learning of knowledge - is distributive, that is, not located in anygiven place (and therefore not 'transferred' or 'transacted' per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a knowing community.
And another part of this thinking is centered around the new, and the newly empowered, learner, the member of the net generation, who is thinking and interacting in new ways. The Traditional Theory: Cognitivism The Argument Against Cognitivism. The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution. Somehow, recently, a lot of people have taken an interest in the broadcast of canned educational materials, and this practice — under a term that proponents and detractors have settled on, massive open online course (MOOC) — is getting a publicity surge. I know that the series of online classes offered by Stanford proved to be extraordinarily popular, leading to the foundation of Udacity and a number of other companies. But I wish people would stop getting so excited over this transitional technology. The attention drowns out two truly significant trends in progressive education: do-it-yourself labs and peer-to-peer exchanges. In the current opinion torrent, Clay Shirky treats MOOCs in a recent article, and Joseph E.
Aoun, president of Northeastern University, writes (in a Boston Globe subscription-only article) that traditional colleges will have to deal with the MOOC challenge. Two more appealing trends are already big. “I believe in everything never yet said.” Dialogue and connectivism: A new approach to understanding and promoting dialogue-rich networked learning | Ravenscroft. Dialogue and connectivism: A new approach to understanding and promoting dialogue-rich networked learning Abstract Connectivism offers a theory of learning for the digital age that is usually understood as contrasting with traditional behaviourist, cognitivist, and constructivist approaches.
This article will provide an original and significant development of this theory through arguing and demonstrating how it can benefit from social constructivist perspectives and a focus on dialogue. Similarly, I argue that we need to ask whether networked social media is, essentially, a new landscape for dialogue and therefore should be conceived and investigated based on this premise, through considering dialogue as the primary means to develop and exploit connections for learning.
Keywords Theory, Dialogue, Design, Networked Learning, Pedagogy, Dialogue Games, computer mediated communication. Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011. "The rate of growth in online enrollments is ten times that of the rate in all higher education" said study co-author I Elaine Allen, Co-Director of the Babson Survey Research Group and Professor of Statistics & Entrepreneurship at Babson College.
"While growth rates have declined somewhat from previous years, we see no evidence that a dramatic slowdown in online enrollments is on the horizon. " "There is a wide variety in rate of growth of online enrollments among different colleges and universities, and also among different programs within the same institution. For example, fully online health sciences programs show higher growth than online programs in other disciplines. " Key report findings include: Previously underwritten by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the report has been able to remain independent through the generous support of Pearson, Kaplan University, Inside Higher Ed and the Sloan Consortium. Medical school experiments with ‘flipped classroom’ teaching model.
Walk into a School of Medicine class and you likely won’t find a stern professor lecturing students in front of a projector. Instead, groups of medical students may be scattered across the room, working together on activities ranging from case studies to simulations. This “flipped classroom” approach of teaching is part of the newly formed Stanford Medical Interactive Learning Initiatives (SMILI), which emphasizes interactive learning through technology and supports faculty who are interested in developing new strategies to improve their effectiveness in classrooms as teachers.
According to Charles Prober, senior associate dean for medical education at the School of Medicine, this has led to two main changes in the classroom: the delivery of the content and how students spend their time in a classroom. “The videos give the information, and the classroom is where we put principles into practice. Prober also added that the program has been popular among students. The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course | Kop.
Stephen Downes: 'Connectivism' and Connective Knowledge. On Jan. 17 George Siemens and I will launch the third offering of our online course called 'Connectivism and Connective Knowledge' -- or CCK11. We use the term 'connectivism' to describe a network-based pedagogy. The course itself uses connectivist principles and is therefore an instantiation of the philosophy of teaching and learning we both espouse. If you're interested, you can register here: The course is a MOOC -- a massive open online course. What this means is, first, that it may be massive. Our first offering attracted 2200 people, our second about 700 people. It also means, second, that the course is free and open.
The way CCK11 is set up is that we've defined a twelve-week course of readings. What is important about a connectivist course, after all, is not the course content. Let me explain why we take this approach and what connectivism is. Of course, all this is the subject of the course. 1. 2. The next step is to draw connections. 3. What materials? 4. A Brief Guide To Understanding MOOCs. Second Thoughts on Online Education. Let the computer do the teaching. Some studies, expert opinion and cost pressures all point toward a continuing shift of education online. A major study last year, funded by the Education Department, which culled comparative research over 12 years, concluded that online learning on average beat face-to-face teaching by a modest but statistically meaningful margin. Bill Gates, whose foundation funds a lot of education programs, predicted last month that in five years much of college education will have gone online.
“The self-motivated learner will be on the Web,” Mr. Gates said, speaking at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. But recent research, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, comes to a different conclusion. The research was a head-to-head experiment, comparing the grades achieved in the same introductory economics class by students — one group online, and one in classroom lectures. Certain groups did notably worse online. Sources. Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom. Warming Up to MOOCs. [This is a guest post by Douglas H. Fisher, an associate professor of computer science and of computer engineering at Vanderbilt University.
--@jbj] In Fall 2011, Stanford announced three, free massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Two of these courses, database and machine learning, corresponded to spring 2012 courses that I would be teaching at Vanderbilt University. I recognized that I could use the lecture materials from these classes to “flip” my own classes by having students view lectures before the class meeting, which then could be used for other learning activities. Shortly after this, I had two affective impulses – an inspiration to create and post my own content online, and a hesitation at using lecture material from other faculty, and from other institutions, even when that material was very high quality.
Nonetheless, I decided that not using these high quality materials because of insecurity was silly. Return to Top. Top 3 Accredited Online Universities | Complete Your Degree Online. Revolution Hits the Universities. How online courses can form a basis for on-campus teaching. Coursera - the Key to Higher Education. Coursera offers free college courses from many top-notch universities from around the globe. Their goal is to make higher education available on a massive scale. Though there are doubtlessly as many stories as there are students, this is my story.
I never thought I would have the opportunity to experience higher education, and certainly not in such a format as Coursera offers. As an autistic woman with post traumatic stress disorder, I thought the doors to higher education were closed to me forever. Misdiagnosed as 'Emotionally Disturbed' As a child, I had difficulties in school. My parents were horrified when I was diagnosed as 'emotionally disturbed.' I spent a lot of time feeling bad about my status as a college dropout. Coursera - a free education? Not only were the courses free, but they were being offered by quality universities. Introduction to Sociology, and College Life The first class to start was Introduction to Sociology.