Dear Commons Community,

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, gave the closing keynote at the Sloan-C International Conference yesterday. Funded by M.I.T. and Harvard University, edX  “aspires to reinvent education through online learning”.   Agarwal gave a good overview of edX and  where he thinks MOOC technologies are headed in the future. The presentation covered areas familiar to many in the audience who have been involved with online learning for many years. However, it was still important to get the perspective of someone who has significant resources at his disposal to develop and advance online learning technologies.

Agarwal’s most telling comments had to do with blended learning.  Like Daphne Koller (Coursera) who gave a keynote on Thursday, Agarwal was a main proponent of blended learning especially here in the United States.  My major take-away from their presentations is that MOOCs are evolving as content providers not online learning providers and that their materials will be used as needed by college faculty in a variety of ways in blended formats.

As I flew home last night, I must say that the conference was well done and stimulated a good deal of thinking on my part.  For anyone in New York City on December 6^th, I will be giving a talk entitled, Blended Learning Meets MOOCs:  Education’s Digital Future! at the CUNY IT Conference, where I will continue some of the discussion described above.

Tony

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. The suspected gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States.

A nation mourned and would never be the same!

Dear Commons Community,

Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera, addressed the attendees at the Sloan-C International Conference yesterday.  She gave a standard pitch for MOOCs as a transformative technology for education.  She described how MOOCs use online technology to provide a real course experience to students, including video content, interactive exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and rich peer-to-peer interaction around the course materials. Her major theme was that MOOCs  provide unprecedented access to education to millions of students around the world.

For me there were three telling responses to questions.

First, she commented that blended learning was likely to be the dominant modality for at least the next decade.

Second, students with remedial needs should be taught in traditional, face-to-courses where faculty can provide assistance beyond learning content.

Third, she was a bit vague in response to the pedagogical theory behind Coursera course development other than to say that staff meet every couple of weeks to discuss pedagogy.   Either she was unaware of or did not want to expand on the programmed instruction model for MOOCs which has had a long history in this country going back to B.F. Skinner.

In general, she gave a fine presentation and stimulated audience thinking about her topic.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Hal Plotkin, Senior Policy Analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, gave the keynote address yesterday to over 2,000 attendees at the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning.  There were three parts to his presentation.

First, he warmed the audience by acknowledging that the Sloan Consortium and it members were the pioneers in developing online learning as a viable modality for delivering higher education.  He commented that the Sloan community has been doing this for two decades and way before the MOOC phenomenon of the past couple of years.

Second, he shared with the audience his own personal story of being a high school “dropout” who worked in a pizza parlor in order to help support his family.  And how one day, he wrote to the local newspaper in response to an editorial on dropouts, that he did not like the term and instead was “pushed out” by life circumstances beyond his control.  He eventually completed high school and college and went on to a very successful career as a journalist and commentator.

The third part of his presentation essentially promoted the policies of President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  He reviewed aspects of the Department of Education’s Learning Powered by Technology plan, and emphasized the role of online and technology-enabled learning in meeting President Obama’s 2020 college graduation goals.  He also commented on the creation and continuous improvement of reusable open online learning resources, competency-based education, and community college initiatives.  These drew polite applause.

My view was that the first two parts of his keynote were fine but that once he started politicizing his presentation, the audience knew that there would be little room for critical analyses of the policies that he was promoting.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For those interested in gaming in K-12 education, the Review of Education Research has an article by Young et al entitled,  Our Princess Is in Another Castle, A Review of Trends in Serious Gaming for Education.  The purpose of the review was to determine whether or not the technology had reached enough of a “tipping point” in the past 30 years to support the claim that video games can enhance classroom learning.   

The title comes from the authors’ experience that “the answers we sought concerning the impact of video games on academic achievement might be addressing the wrong question and suggested that our princess might be beckoning from another castle on the distant horizon”.  As an example, the issue of definitions became apparent:

“Educators and researchers have not clearly identified and catalogued the differences between video games of various types and simulations, particularly regarding the instructional affordances of discrete game mechanics. Although the research seems to support immersive software in the medical, military, and language fields, there are few labels that assist in differentiating among the various types of available programs or the continua along which they lie. Setting criteria for gaming, including overarching narratives, engaging characters, the presence of avatars, badges, and achievement reward systems, and/or multiplayer functionality, would go far in explicitly describing what type of software is being utilized in each study. For the purposes of maintaining generalizability between content and research areas, we highly recommend that the game-based learning community investigate ways in which they may develop consistent definitions for game- and simulation-related interventions.”

The authors examined gaming applications in a number of subject areas including mathematics, history, science, and language learning. It concluded with nine substantive recommendations.  For those interested in catching up on the research on gaming, this article is an excellent place to start.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, academic leaders at San Jose State University voted yesterday overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution asking the chancellor of the California State University system to review governance at the university because of unease over the introduction of massive open online courses.

“The resolution cited “a series of conflicts over the past year” that have highlighted “communication and transparency” issues and “opened serious rifts in our shared sense of community.”

The Academic Senate passed the resolution by a vote of 38 to 2, with five abstentions, but delayed until its December meeting a vote on another measure related to the president’s push to adopt MOOCs.

“In my 24 years at SJSU—most of that time on the Senate—I have never heard such widespread and deep concern about the direction our campus has been taking,” said Kenneth B. Peter, a professor of political science, in a prepared statement provided to The Chronicle.”

More to come at the Academic Senate’s December meeting.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey ripped the national Republican Party for bad decision-making, a loss of courage, and appealing only to an aging white population.   Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s Annual CEO Council, Christie said :

“…that the GOP’s woes stem from “bad decision-making and a loss of courage.”

“…everyone down here in D.C. has failed” to lead the nation. What’s wrong with Washington, Christie said, “primarily is the people.”

“What we have in Washington now are absolutists,” said the governor, in a speech rife with the kind of zingers that helped him win reelection this month by a wide margin in Democratic-leaning New Jersey. The recent government shutdown, Christie said, “was a train wreck everybody saw coming for months.”

Christie avoided naming names, including lightning-rod conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who, like Christie, who may harbor presidential ambitions in 2016. But he attacked the Republican Party’s reliance on grassroots voters in recent elections instead of creating a “big-tent” campaign capable of appealing to growing numbers of independent and Hispanic voters.

…According to Christie, the current GOP political logic goes something like, “the better you do, the more voters you attract, the more diverse voters you attract, the worse you do?” The governor shook his head, clearly frustrated that the party hasn’t worked harder to reach out to more voters. “Our country is changing, demographically and economically. Candidates have to understand who they’re asking to lead,” he said.

Campaigns that rely solely on appealing to a shrinking base of aging, white Republican voters “aren’t working,” he said, especially on the national stage.”

Christie is on-target but I don’t think there are enough courageous Republicans who will heed his advice in the near future.  Too many  have been cowered by Tea Party maniacs.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today, Monday, November 18^th,  is “National Don’t Send Your Child to School Day” in protest against the Common Core Curriculum. The eighteenth of November is significant because this is the first day of American Education Week, and is also Revolution Day!!

While no official group is backing the protest, grassroots organizers are promoting the protest on SayNoToCommonCore.com and through social media, including the Facebook page, “National Don’t Send Your Child To School Day… November 18, 2013.”  The protest organizers are asking parents to:

“Please participate in this event and encourage everyone you know to do the same! We recommend that you keep your children out of school on November 18th and help us send a message to the federal government. We the people want evidence-based curriculum that is locally controlled and which does not require data mining our children. Instead of sending your children to school on November 18th, get your children out in public and raise awareness by educating others on the dangers of the Common Core State Standards!!!”

This is  a worthwhile cause. The U.S. Department of Education has blinders on in terms of school reform and is out of touch with parents and educators.  Its policies have been poorly conceived and poorly implemented at the expense of the children in our public schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Paul Krugman has a sobering column today entitled, A Permanent Slump, that avers that our present, mild-depression-like economy may be the new normal.  Referring to the I.M.F.  research conference and specifically to Larry Sumners:

“Spend any time around monetary officials and one word you’ll hear a lot is “normalization.” Most though not all such officials accept that now is no time to be tightfisted, that for the time being credit must be easy and interest rates low. Still, the men in dark suits look forward eagerly to the day when they can go back to their usual job, snatching away the punch bowl whenever the party gets going.

But what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?

You might imagine that speculations along these lines are the province of a radical fringe. And they are indeed radical; but fringe, not so much. A number of economists have been flirting with such thoughts for a while. And now they’ve moved into the mainstream. In fact, the case for “secular stagnation” — a persistent state in which a depressed economy is the norm, with episodes of full employment few and far between — was made forcefully recently at the most ultrarespectable of venues, the I.M.F.’s big annual research conference. And the person making that case was none other than Larry Summers. Yes, that Larry Summers.

And if Mr. Summers is right, everything respectable people have been saying about economic policy is wrong, and will keep being wrong for a long time.

Mr. Summers began with a point that should be obvious but is often missed: The financial crisis that started the Great Recession is now far behind us. Indeed, by most measures it ended more than four years ago. Yet our economy remains depressed.

He then made a related point: Before the crisis we had a huge housing and debt bubble. Yet even with this huge bubble boosting spending, the overall economy was only so-so — the job market was O.K. but not great, and the boom was never powerful enough to produce significant inflationary pressure.

Mr. Summers went on to draw a remarkable moral: We have, he suggested, an economy whose normal condition is one of inadequate demand — of at least mild depression — and which only gets anywhere close to full employment when it is being buoyed by bubbles.”

Sumners’ conclustion:

“… the crisis “is not over until it is over” — and economic reality is what it is. And what that reality appears to be right now is one in which depression rules will apply for a very long time.”

You do not have to be an economist to know but this is not good.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I am heading to Orlando today to the Sloan Consortium’s Conference – Online Learning:  A Universe of Opportunities.  Approximately 2000 people will attend the conference in person this year with several hundred more attending virtually. This conference is very strong on research.  See the piece below from the conference chair, Eric Fredericksen, for highlights.  I also have a featured session on Thursday at 10:45 am entitled, Pioneering Higher Education’s Digital Future: An Evaluation of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program.  Originally I was to give this session with Bruce Chaloux, who passed away suddenly on September 28th.

I hope to see some of you in Orlando!

Online Learning:  A Universe of Opportunities

With so many definitions and a variety of models, online learning in higher education provides a wide range of opportunities for faculty, students and institutions. Our three keynote addresses will help raise many important questions for us to consider.

What are the national trends and issues and how is the US Department of Education responding? Hal Plotkin of the U.S. Department of Education, will kick off our conference with a national perspective on online learning.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a new opportunity in online learning with the potential to impact millions of students. Daphne Koller, Stanford Professor and Co-Founder of Coursera, will share her insights about the progress and promise of Coursera in the Thursday keynote address.

A new partnership of highly respected universities are embracing online learning, including the opportunity to have a dramatic impact on traditional education. On Friday, Anant Argawal, MIT Professor and President of edX, will guide us through the development of this Harvard and MIT initiative and talk about his aspirations for edX.

The 2013 Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning is the premier forum for online learning. It is also the opportunity for all of us that are concerned with the future of online learning to come together, collaborate and share experiences. Please join us for this year’s gathering and participate in the conversations that will help us chart the future course of high-quality online education. We look forward to your contributions!