Online universities: it's time for teachers to join the revolution

Interesting insight by the Gaurdain on the future of online education:

The past few centuries have witnessed revolutions in virtually every area of our world – health, transport, communications and genomics, to name but a few. But not in education. Until now, that is, with the advent of Moocs (massive open online courses).

Moocs are transforming education in both quality and scale. As president of edX, the only non-profit Mooc provider, I have the privilege of being part of this revolution. It's the most exciting time in education in decades.

One way Moocs have changed education is by increasing access. Moocs make education borderless, gender-blind, race-blind, class-blind and bank account-blind. Up to now, quality education – and in some cases, any higher education at all – has been the privilege of the few. Moocs have changed that. Anyone with an internet connection can have access. We hear from thousands of students, many in under-served, developing countries, about how grateful they are for this education.

Moocs are also improving the quality of education. Online learning promotes active learning, where the learner watches videos and engages in interactive exercises. At edX, our team has focused on capturing this element of online learning through an innovative user interface. Moocs and online learning also enable instant feedback through automatically graded exercises, self-paced learning through the ability to pause or rewind videos, peer learning through online discussion forums, and the application of gaming mechanisms to virtual laboratories.

But why is this transformation happening now? A confluence of factors has contributed to a perfect storm for learning. While, over a decade ago at MIT, Eric Grimson and Tomás Lozano-Pérez experimented with "interleaved" videos and online exercises in a flipped class model — in which the lecture becomes homework and class time is for practice – it took video and content distribution networks, cloud computing and social networking to produce the right environment to support the huge worldwide enrolments we see in Moocs. The old ways of funnelling a small number of privileged or lucky students into traditional higher education will go. Moocs are democratising education. We have seen teenagers who lacked top educational pedigrees obtain perfect scores in demanding online courses. Some are now getting the opportunity to pursue higher education. Through Moocs, many more talented people in the world can take part in great learning.

I do not believe online education can replace a college experience, but the days of the old ways of teaching are numbered. Students have always been critical of large lecture halls where they are talked at, and declining lecture attendance is the result. But today we see that there is deep educational value in interactive learning, both online and in the classroom. Colleges and universities are beginning to use Moocs to make blended courses where online videos replace lectures, and class time is spent interacting with the professor, teaching staff and other students. Blended courses can produce good results. Last autumn San Jose State University used course material from edX. The percentage of students required to retake the course dropped from 41% to 9%. So how many people are we reaching? We were overwhelmed by the response to our pilot course in early 2012 on circuits and electronics – 155,000 students from 162 countries signed up. This sent a clear signal that the world was ready for online education and hungry for knowledge. We now have one million students from 192 countries. Delivering knowledge to otherwise excluded populations is just part of what Mooc providers do to change education. Research is another.

EdX and its partner universities are using the data we collect throughout a class to research how students learn most effectively, and then apply that knowledge to both online learning and traditional on-campus teaching. At MIT and Harvard, researchers David Pritchard, Lori Breslow and Andrew Ho have been studying how people learn. Pritchard computes that the data from the first prototype course alone – one my colleagues and I taught on circuits and electronics – is staggering and would fill 110,000 books. We recorded every click. All 230 million of them.

Using the data we gathered, we found that more than half of our students in the circuits and electronics class started working on their homework before watching video lectures. It appears that students get more excited about learning when they try to puzzle out a problem. In such classes, we are now looking at whether professors should assign homework before the lecture, instead of after.

Another way technology has driven these revolutionary changes in education is through using artificial intelligence to help teachers effectively assess students' work. Last month we unveiled our experimental assessment tool, which combines AI assessment, peer assessment and self-assessment, to provide professors with the tools to grade open-ended questions in a massively scaled environment. We also piloted cohort technology on our platform, which is a way for instructors to divide the large discussion forums into smaller, more intimate sub-groups.

We are part of a movement that seeks to change the face of education. In April we announced that our entire learning platform would be released as an open source on 1 June, and that Stanford University, along with Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and others, would start collaborating with us to continue to improve the platform. We are looking forward to universities and developers everywhere enhancing the platform that powers our edX courses.

I love teaching. I love teaching at a university, and I love teaching anyone who has a desire to learn. Everything I knew about learning (and therefore teaching) is a moving target now. I am like a kid in a candy shop when I think about what our research will show. I look forward to being surprised. Lao Tzu said: "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." It's time for teachers to rethink learning methods. I invite everyone along for the exhilarating ride.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jun/15/university-education-online-mooc

Chalkboard vs Motherboard...:)

Self-Directed Learning

I found a good summary of what Malcom Knowles view are on SDL, many points are good to remember as I think it is important to go back and really appreciate what the pros and cons of this type of learning can entail: 

Self-direction

In its broadest meaning, ‘self-directed learning‘ describes, according to Malcolm Knowles (1975: 18) a process:

… in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes.

Knowles puts forward three immediate reasons for self-directed learning. First he argues that there is convincing evidence that people who take the initiative in learning (proactive learners) learn more things, and learn better, than do people who sit at the feet of teachers passively waiting to be taught (reactive learners). ‘They enter into learning more purposefully and with greater motivation. They also tend to retain and make use of what they learn better and longer than do the reactive learners.’ (Knowles 1975: 14)

A second immediate reason is that self-directed learning is more in tune with our natural processes of psychological development. ‘An essential aspect of maturing is developing the ability to take increasing responsibility for our own lives – to become increasingly self-directed’ (Knowles 1975: 15).

A third immediate reason is that many of the new developments in education put a heavy responsibility on the learners to take a good deal of initiative in their own learning. ‘Students entering into these programs without having learned the skills of self-directed inquiry will experience anxiety, frustration , and often failure, and so will their teachers (Knowles 1975: 15).

To this may be added a long-term reason – because of rapid changes in our understanding is no longer realistic to define the purpose of education as transmitting what is known. The main purpose of education must now to be to develop the skills of inquiry (op cit).

Malcolm Knowles’ skill was then to put the idea of self direction into packaged forms of activity that could be taken by educators and learners. He popularized these through various books and courses. His five step model involved:

1. diagnosing learning needs.

2. formulating learning needs.

3. identifying human material resources for learning.

4. choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies.

5. evaluating learning outcomes.

As Merriam and Cafferella (1991: 46) comment, this means of conceptualizing the way we learn on our own is very similar to much of the literature on planning and carrying out instruction for adults in formal institutional settings. It is represented as a linear process. From what we know of the process of reflection this is an assumption that needs treating with some care. Indeed, as we will see, there is research that indicates that adults do not necessarily follow a defined set of steps – but are far more in the hands of chance and circumstance. Like Dewey’s conception of reflection an event or phenomenon triggers a learning project. This is often associated with a change in life circumstances (such as retirement, child care, death of a close relative and so on). The changed circumstance provides the opportunity for learning, the way this is approached is dictated by the circumstances. Learning then progresses as ‘the circumstances created in one episode become the circumstances for the next logical step’ (op. cit.). Self-directed learning thus, in this view, becomes possible, when certain things cluster together to form the stimulus and the opportunity for reflection and exploration.

However, once we begin to take into account the environment in which this occurs then significant concerns arise with Malcolm Knowles’ formulation. Spear and Mocker, and Spear (1984, 1988 quoted in Merriam and Caffarella 1991: 46-8) found that ‘self-directed learners, rather than pre-planning their learning projects, tend to select a course from limited alternatives which happen to occur in their environment and which tend to structure their learning projects’. This is of fundamental importance. It is in this light that Brookfield’s (1994) question is pertinent: ‘What are the essential characteristics of a critical, rather than technical, interpretation of self-directed learning?’ Two suggest themselves:

• self-direction as the continuous exercise by the learner of authentic control over all decisions having to do with learning, and

• self-direction as the ability to gain access to, and choose from, a full range of available and appropriate resources.

Both these conditions are, he argues, as much political as they are pedagogical and they place educators who choose to use self-directed approaches in the centre of political issues and dilemma.

http://infed.org/mobi/malcolm-knowles-informal-adult-education-self-direction-and-andragogy/ 

Positive Learning Environments and Technology

I found an interesting article that states the importance of creating a "sense of place" for students that are taking online courses in order to better support and enhance the students quality of and experience of learning.   

"Just as effective face-to-face teaching and learning, online learning and teaching benefit from purposeful curriculum design in which learning purposes, learning guidelines and appropriate resources and learning activities and interactions are structured in meaningful ways. Without such guidance, individual online learners can find themselves confused, misplaced and even frustrated in terms of their lack of place-ness. Agger-Gupta (2002, p. 144) describes these emerging issues and defines some of them as “self and identity” and “relational spaces”, which require analysis in the complex world of online learning. So, although the benefits offered by flexible, technologically-rich learning contexts often outweigh the problems associated with this type of virtual learning, the confusion and disorientation sometimes felt by students during online learning experiences is real and requires purposeful consideration by online course designers. "

By having these issues in mind when creating and taking an online course will better help promote a positive learning environment for the digital student  

http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/northcote.pdf 

What is Active Learning?

Why Active Learning?

Here is another good summary about the importance of active learning in the classroom and potential barriers that may hinder learning as well as some insightful methods to overcome these obstacles.

http://www.ydae.purdue.edu/lct/hbcu/documents/Active_Learning_Creating_Excitement_in_the_Classroom.pdf

Strategies that foster Active Learning in the Classroom

The following website link has a plethora of handy ideas and strategies to better help active learning in the classroom: http://www.usciences.edu/teaching/tips/spal.shtml