Monthly Feature

My summer paranoia: computers will replace teachers in higher education

August 31, 2012 By Tony Bates 21 Comments

I had a strange dream last night. I was in discussion with an editor from a publishing company about the draft of a new book I was writing. As in all dreams it wasn’t clear what was going on in the discussion but then I realised he wanted me to change what I was writing to make the case that computers can replace teachers in higher education. He told me that his CEO and a number of CEOs from other companies all thought this was the right way to go, and were trying to influence the market to accept this. I was so upset that I woke with a start.

Now you could say I shouldn’t drink tequila before going to bed, but this dream was not at all unrealistic in the light of events over the summer.

No, they really ARE trying to get you

Let’s start with xMOOCs and automated marking and peer review to get around the awkward point that one instructor cannot provide adequate feedback to thousands of students. No problem: a combination of big data collection and analysis and multiple-choice testing will solve most problems, and the ones that it won’t solve will be solved by dumb students marking less dumb students.

Then there’s the Republican Party of Texas whose election platform contains the following (p. 12):

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification, and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

(It also reads as if they oppose clarity in sentence construction, but that’s another matter.) However, if you can’t teach critical thinking skills through automated computer-based teaching, get rid of the requirement for critical thinking. Brilliant!

This was followed by the California State University system deciding to outsource online learning to a commercial publisher.

Then it turns out that the California two year college system has undergone nearly $1 billion of cuts since 2008, resulting in a waiting list of 470,000 students who cannot get into classes. Talk about creating demand for automated courses.

Still in California (do they have too much sun there?) Stanford University has just created a new Vice-Provost for Online Learning, who turns out to be a computer scientist (as are all the people heading up Coursera and Harvard/MIT’s EdX). Who needs someone with expertise in teaching for positions like this?

Lastly, in Canuckistan, the Ontario government is looking for more ‘productivity’ from the post-secondary institutions, and is asking how online learning can lead to improved productivity. In this case, that’s a good question; it’s the answers people may come up with that scare me.

Do we really need teachers in post-secondary education?

At least these developments are forcing an examination of something that most of us have taken for granted – so let’s examine it.

Here we need to look carefully at the language we use. One thing that struck me when I emigrated to North America nearly 25 years ago was that in Britain, those that delivered teaching in universities and colleges were called lecturers or professors. In North America they are called instructors. Obviously, lecturers lecture, professors profess and instructors instruct. But we talk about university or college ‘teaching’.

Now having a background in primary school (k-7) teaching, I always associated ‘instruction’ with a didactic form of teaching, where the instructor determines what content will be learned, delivers information, and the student gobbles it up and is tested on how well he or she has ‘understood’ and ‘remembered.’ This may be a fair description of a lot of post-secondary education, but in my mind it isn’t and never was ‘teaching’. To develop critical thinking skills, professors did more than lecture: they discussed and talked with students, marked assignments and gave detailed feedback. The tried to help learners learn. In other words, they taught.

Yes, this was possible 50 years ago because we had an elite system, and few students per professor. Now we have, especially in North American Tier 1 public research universities, very large classes and many students per professor (made worse in first and second year by tenured professors focusing mainly on research and graduate education). So we have fallen back almost completely on ‘instruction’ rather than on ‘teaching’ in undergraduate programs. But, given the demands of a knowledge-based society, what we need is less instruction, more teaching, and in particular a different quality of student learning.

Instruction is easier to automate than teaching

If the focus is on a didactic model of instruction, then it does become easier to automate. Choose the ‘best’, i.e. most knowledgeable, professor in the field, record their lectures, and set multiple-choice computer tests and assessment, with automated feedback, and bingo, you can teach millions with the same teacher. If you knew nothing about education, like the Republicans in Texas, this would be an ideal way of avoiding grown-up things like paying taxes or tuition fees. As they say, if you can be replaced by a computer, you should be.

However, whether this will produce graduates with the skills and knowledge needed in a knowledge-based society is another matter.

What computers find difficult in teaching

Let’s define productivity in educational terms: it’s achieving the same or better quality outcome in learning at less cost. By definition, it means doing things differently (sometimes called innovation). If we want better quality outcomes then we also need to define outcomes. I put high value on, yes, critical thinking skills, evidence-based decision-making, independent thinking, self-management of learning, responsibility, and ethics.

To successfully achieve such learning outcomes, learners either have to be incredibly self-motivated and already highly knowledgeable (i.e. already well educated), or they need an environment that supports the development not just of these outcomes, but also the development of their thinking and decision-making. This requires fostering or supporting their motivation to learn, dealing with gaps in knowledge or lack of learning skills, providing timely feedback, and above all providing guidance, criteria and direction to ensure that they meet the necessary standards to operate effectively in the real world. This is what I call teaching, and much if not all of it is difficult or impossible to automate.

It should be remembered that a very behaviourist form of computer-based learning, called ‘programmed learning’, existed before the Internet. For over 30 years computer scientists, working in the field of artificial intelligence, have been trying since then to improve on ‘programmed learning’, which failed to deal adequately with the development of cognitive thinking skills beyond the level of comprehension and memory. Despite substantial research investment over many years, AI has proved to be less than successful in the teaching domain. It is very hard to replicate the complexity of a skilled teacher who has to deal with many different variables and factors in real time. It is not just about processing speed and data management, but also about building relationships with students, making intuitive judgments, and being able to handle qualitative issues such as beliefs, values, and the personal feelings of students. Computers are not good at this (and nor are many ‘instructors’, to be fair.)

I first became excited in online learning in the late 1980s, when the Internet was being developed, because it offered the possibility of communication at a distance, a problem that was not well managed in distance education at that time. Thus the computer was not replacing the teacher, but providing teachers with tools they could use to teach even students who were remote. In the early days of the Internet, online teaching was called deliberately ‘computer-mediated communication’ or CMC, to distinguish it from programmed learning. Now the computer scientists in xMOOCs are trying to drive us back to programmed learning.

Online learning can improve productivity, but not through automation (and it ain’t going to be easy)

It’s no good cutting costs if you don’t get the desired outcome. The best example is the construction industry. Cheap construction often has expensive consequences. So we have to be sure that if we are seeking increased productivity, the outcomes are at least as good, if not better, than before the intervention.

The main ways that online learning can improve productivity are as follows:

using online learning, rather than building new campuses or physical facilities, to expand access. This option has a fairly narrow range. There has to be enough existing facilities already in place, and the increase in enrollments will need to be accompanied by changes in delivery, with a move to hybrid or fully distance learning in some courses or programs to free up facilities for the new students. This requires some fairly sophisticated juggling of classes, redesigning courses, and careful planning for it to work. It also assumes that numbers in post-secondary education need to increase;
use of shared materials, and not just open educational resources, but developing courses or programs that can be used across several institutions. However, course development constitutes only about 15-20% of online teaching costs. The big cost remains delivery.
economies in the delivery of programs by maintaining content quality through the use of tenured or research professors for the design and development and monitoring of course delivery, but reducing delivery costs through the use of well-trained online adjunct professors and automated marking where appropriate. Again, this requires some investment, particularly in training, that will to some extent offset the lower cost of adjuncts
course designs that move the work away from the instructor to the student. Examples are collaborative learning, development of self-management learning skills, problem-based learning. Even here, though, instructor presence is essential for success.

All these activities to increase productivity without losing quality require careful planning and quite a lot of training. We are not helped by a total lack of research into the costs of various modes of delivery, which means we have poor or no data as a foundation for such changes. Nevertheless, redesign of teaching and a strategic approach to online learning could lead to savings of up to 10% on the present system without a loss of quality. But there’s no silver bullet if we are to get the kinds of graduates we need in a knowledge-based society, and good teachers (as distinct from instructors) will remain critical for success.

And with the return of real students and real ‘instructors’ next week (at least in Canada), maybe reality will return and my nightmares will go away.

Questions

1. Anyone else share my paranoia? (about computers replacing computers – anything else, see a doctor)

2. Do you believe we should replace teachers (or instructors) with computers? What are your reasons?

3. Can online learning improve productivity in post-secondary education without getting rid of most instructors?

4. Can you recommend a good doctor?

Filed Under: Blogs, collaborative learning, costs and benefits, course design, creativity, critical thinking, developing intellectual skills, economic impact, innovation, learner-centered teaching, lectures, Monthly Feature, MOOCs, Motivation, open content, physical space, planning, policies and management - institutional, problem-solving, quality and quality assurance, reasoning, Strategies, planning and management, Teaching and learning, Tony's Blog, Tweets Tagged With: 2012, Blog, critical thinking, productivity, Quality, Tony Bates

What’s right and what’s wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs

August 5, 2012 By Tony Bates 53 Comments

TED Talks: Daphne Koller: What we’re learning from online education

Daphne Koller, one of the two founders of Coursera, describes some of the key features of the Coursera MOOCs, and the lessons she has learned to date about teaching and learning from these courses. The video is well worth watching, just for this.

However I’m probably going to suffer the same kind of fate of the Russian female punk band, Pussy Riot, by spitting on the altar of MOOCs, but this TED talk captures for me all that is both right and wrong about the MOOCs being promoted by the elite US universities.

Let me start by saying that I actually applaud Daphne Koller and her colleagues for developing massive open online MOOCs. Any attempt to make the knowledge of some of the world’s leading experts available to anyone free of charge is an excellent endeavour. If only it stopped there.

What I object to is the hubris and misleading claims that are evident in this TED video. As someone once said about one of Sigmund Freud’s lectures, what is new is not true, and what is true is not new.

Myth 1: MOOCs increase access to higher education in developing countries

She starts by using the example of students being trampled to death trying to get into the line for the very few places left open by the campus-based University of Johannesburg in South Africa. This is a particularly maladroit example. Yes, there is a desperate shortage of conventional university places in South Africa. But South Africa has probably the oldest distance and open teaching university in the world, UNISA, currently with over 160,000 students. Just providing not for credit open online learning from the USA will not solve South Africa’s access problems (especially as most of those seeking university places do not have home Internet access). Indeed, to suggest that Coursera is an alternative to conventional university education takes the pressure off governments such as South Africa’s to find their own, indigenous solutions to access to higher education.

If Stanford or MIT gave credit for these courses to students from South Africa who succeeded in the exams, and then awarded them full degrees, then that might be different. But these elite universities continue to treat MOOCs as a philanthropic form of continuing education, and until these institutions are willing to award credit and degrees for this type of program, we have to believe that they think that this is a second class form of education suitable only for the unwashed masses.

Myth 2: new pedagogy

Second, the teaching methods used by most of the Coursera courses so far are based on a very old and outdated behaviourist pedagogy, relying primarily on information transmission, computer marked assignments and peer assessment. Behaviourist pedagogy has its value, especially where there are right and wrong answers, facts or procedures that must be learned, or students lack higher level cognitive processing skills. In other words it works reasonably well for certain levels of training. But it is extremely difficult if not impossible to teach higher order skills of critical thinking, creative thinking, and original thinking using behaviourist pedagogy, the very skills that are needed in a knowledge-based society. (It should be noted that the ‘Canadian’ MOOCs of Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier do not suffer from this fault).

Third, and this is the most enraging part of the presentation for me, Daphne Koller talks as if she invented online learning, and that nothing was known beforehand about works and doesn’t work in online learning. So she has discovered that students learn better if they are active, so there are lots of tests and activities in the courses. It is better to break up monolithic one hour lectures into smaller, more digestible chunks. Both these strategies in fact date back to the UK Open University print packages forty years ago and it has been standard practice to incorporate such strategies in most online learning since it began on a serious scale 20 years ago.

Her comparisons are all with the weaknesses of lecture-based teaching. For this we should perhaps be thankful but again this is not new – online educators have been making this point again for over 20 years. And now Coursera is creating local or online study groups: again standard practice in other forms of online learning.

Myth 3: big data will improve teaching

One example used in the video was how computer-tracking of student activities can identify weaknesses in the teaching. The example was over 2,000 students giving the same wrong answer to a multiple choice question. In other words, Coursera is using trial and error as a form of teaching: try something, and if it doesn’t work, correct it the next time round. However, if they followed good design principles from the outset – for instance working with an instructional designer who could spot such errors or pre-testing material before it goes out to hundreds of thousands of guinea pig students – many of these ‘errors’ in teaching would be avoided in the first place. It is far, far better to avoid errors in teaching than to try to correct them afterwards: unlearning is much harder. With massive numbers of online students, the negative impact is equally massive.

Myth 4: Computers personalize learning

No, they don’t. They allow students alternative routes through material and they allow automated feedback but they do not provide a sense of being treated as an individual. This can be done in online learning, but it needs online intervention and presence in the form of discussion, encouragement, and an understanding of an individual student’s needs. The TED lecture omitted any discussion of completion rates. Again, this should not be the measure of MOOCs, but if you are going to argue that this form of teaching is superior to other forms of online learning, then discussion of completion rates becomes valid.

Daphne Koller’s final comment is telling:

‘We should spend less time at universities filling our students’ minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity … by actually talking with them.’

However, that requires the presence of a teacher, either in the class or online.

Conclusion

I am sad having to write this. Daphne Koller gave a good lecture. Even these MOOCs are valuable, because, coming from elite universities, they have woken up the media in particular, and brought online learning to the attention of the public. I believe MOOCs have great potential for higher education: but not these MOOCs. And please, is it too much to ask for a little humility? (Probably, from so-called elite institutions).

Lastly, be careful what you wish for. Underlying all this is a fundamental question: is online learning best left to computer scientists or to teachers (or even students)? I know where I stand on this. What about you?

Some other reading

See also Lloyd Armstrong’s excellent post: Coursera and MITx: sustaining or disruptive? Changing Higher Education, August 6

What should we do about MOOCs? The Board Discusses

Is online learning really cracking open the public post-secondary system?

Thoughts on the pedagogy of Coursera-style MOOCs

Qué está bien y qué está mal en el estilo MOOC- Coursera (Spanish translation):

Filed Under: accreditation, analytics, assessment, Blogs, course design, creativity, critical thinking, design of virtual learning organizations, developing intellectual skills, e-assessment and e-portfolios, evaluating courses and programs, informal/non-formal learning, international and cultural issues, knowledge-construction, learner support, learning theories, Monthly Feature, MOOCs, quality and quality assurance, Strategies, planning and management, Teaching and learning, Tony's Blog, Tweets Tagged With: 2012, Coursera, Koller, MOOCs, pedagogy, personalization

Is online learning really cracking open the public post-secondary system?

July 12, 2012 By Tony Bates 7 Comments

I suspect that I’m not the only one who has been ‘disengaged’ from the online world of online learning for the past few weeks, in my case for minor medical reasons, and in your case I hope enjoying sun, sand and socializing. So in this post I’m going to pull together a number of recent publications in the blogosphere which taken together, suggest that there are deep rumblings in North America’s public post-secondary education systems, if not outright panic in the streets. Or it may just be summer madness and too much heat. I’ll leave you to judge.

There’s a lot of reading covered, so I’ll try and cover the main points then identify some of the lessons I think we can learn from these developments.

Run, run - it's a MOOC!!! © Ferret Comic-Panel Blog 2008

Spooked by MOOCs

Whatever your reservations about MOOCs (and I have a lot, which I will come to later in this post) they are definitely causing a stir in post-secondary education. Enough in fact to unseat a university President (who was then reinstated). The prestigious and (in North American terms) ancient University of Virginia, founded by no less than Thomas Jefferson himself, got its knickers in a twist. First the Board of Governors fired the President, for what appears to be not having a strategy to respond to innovation in higher education as manifested by Stanford MOOCs and MITx. She was then reinstated a week or so later, after faculty and students rallied in her support.

It is difficult to know how much weight one should give to this bizarre episode. In fact some faculty in the University of Virginia had been teaching online for over five years, but then it turned out that this was merely recorded lectures that students could unload online. What was clear was the university had no institutional strategy for online learning – it had been left to individual professors to do what they could, obviously without much professional support. Some members of the Board of Governors (and especially the chair) clearly felt that the university should have a strategy for innovation in education.

Lesson 1: No president with an activist Board of Governors is now safe if the university does not have a clear institutional strategy for online learning. It’s now become the latest buzzword in post-secondary education.

Now what that strategy should be is less clear. Canada’s own George Siemens responded by publishing an open letter to Canadian universities, demanding that they not just join the bandwagon by signing up to Udemity, Coursera or edX as junior partners, but develop their own strategies for innovation, and in particular their own development of open online courses.Unfortunately, George is not the chairman of any university boards (at least yet), and wasn’t too clear about how these strategies for innovation would differ from those of the elite universities offering MOOCs (although we can guess – they would be more constructivist MOOCs along the design of George Siemens’ and Stephen Downes’ #Change 11.)

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia

Are MOOCs the answer?

This raises the question: are the headline-grabbing MOOCs the future, or are they just an interesting development that provides access to large numbers, but doesn’t really threaten the ‘core’ business of campus-based institutions, such as credentialling and a ‘quality’ educational experience (especially for those who can afford it).

Your guess is as good as mine on this. However, Bonnie Stewart in a very thoughtful article worries about MOOCs becoming a buzzword. She writes:

This nouvelle vague of MOOC hoopla… has been disorienting. But there’s no denying it. In major media newsspeak, it appears “MOOC” now signifies some kind of material manifestation of the “disruptive innovation” everybody’s sure is upon us but can’t quite pin down….Udacity and the xEd mega-MOOCs, with their overt emphasis on data collection and vaguely-defined business models, begin to look like trojan horses for mass-scale automation of teaching and grading. When the cavalry charge is being led by the most prestigious higher ed institutions in the market, it’s hard to assume it’ll all just blow over. Clearly, higher ed IS thinking about MOOCs.

The problem, of course, with buzzwords is that they end up empty. In this case, each new media iteration of the term “MOOC” seems to tie it more closely to the behemoth of elite power + rapid change that drives the frenzy around disruption in higher ed. ….Things fall apart, we hear from every corner. The center cannot hold…The problem with apocalyptic thinking is that it predisposes us towards simple solutions and salvation narratives, even in complex situations.

If we’re interested in being part of the conversation around the future of higher ed, we need to stop talking about MOOCs as buzzwords. We need to begin talking about the interests that determine the specific shape of particular MOOCs as they emerge. The danger of buzzwords is that they can come to feel inevitable. MOOCs are not any one thing, unless we permit them to be. MOOCs will not inherently gut faculty positions in higher ed. MOOCs do not have automation and robot grading built into their conceptual structure.

We certainly need more discussion at this level about innovation in higher education, and MOOCs in particular. We need to ask whether MOOCs are successful in anything other than reaching large numbers of learners. For instance, how should we measure the success or failure of MOOCs? Many learners do not intend to take a certificate or to complete all the work, but could MOOCs be improved so the proportion of those that do take an assessment at the end is more than the 5-10% of those that started the program, as at present? What are MOOC participants actually learning? For instance, how many would have passed the end of course exam without taking the course, since it seems many who take MOOCs already have knowledge and experience in the topic? Why not offer a challenge exam for a certificate then offer the MOOC to those that fail?

I was therefore interested to see that Udemy, one of the main platforms for delivering MOOCs, has recently totally redesigned its web site, ‘enabling students to track their progress, interact more deeply with instructors and discover new courses relevant to them:

Enhanced Course Taking Experience – enables students to take courses through a responsive full screen user interface that encourages course completion and engagement.
Robust Student-Teacher Q&A – facilitates student-instructor and student-student interactions through a powerful Quora-style question & answer experience that’s tightly integrated with each course lecture.
Progress Meter – shows how much of a course a student has completed, enabling students to pick up where they left off and stay motivated throughout the course.
Time Stamped Notes – tags students’ notes to specific times in a course video/lecture which enhances a student’s ability to review the material they are learning.
Personalized Course Discovery – recommends new courses for students based on a Netflix-style recommendation engine which leverages each student’s interests, activity on Udemy, and social data.’

As Stephen Downes commented, this is beginning to look more like a traditional LMS. This begs two deeper questions though:

why are most MOOCs ignoring 60 years of research into how students learn, and 20 years of developing best practices in online learning? This is the hubris of computer scientists designing online teaching without any knowledge of pedagogy or research in online learning.
how do you assess learning in massive online courses when the desired learning outcomes are not appropriately tested through computer or ‘robot’ marking? What kinds of learning are restricted to robot marking?

Lastly, it should be remembered that roughly 15% of all credit course enrollments in public post-secondary education institutions are already online. In Canada this means over one million course enrollments taken as a whole. Completion rates of most online courses in Canada are around 85%. These online courses individually may not reach hundreds of thousands of students, but those that follow best practices do ensure that most of the students who take such courses learn and succeed.

This is not to deny the value of MOOCs, particularly in putting pressure on existing institutions to change, but there is much room for improvement. We need to look at how we can benefit from both more conventional online learning and from MOOCss, not set one off against the other.

Lesson 2: MOOCs may be the answer – but what is the question? May there be better solutions to the question? And may such solutions exist already but are not being sufficiently supported?

System-wide change

Meanwhile, in quiet, conservative Canada, over the summer period, Glen Murray, Ontario’s Minister Training, Colleges and Universities published a bombshell of a discussion paper. First some context. Ontario’s Liberal provincial government is heavily committed to education as a driver of economic development, especially in knowledge-based industries. Ontario already has one of the most advanced post-secondary education systems in the world, with 20 universities, many of them in the top 100 world wide, and 24 two year colleges. The government wants to drive up participation in post-secondary education from the current 63% of a cohort to 70%. However, Ontario was particularly badly hit during the 2008 recession and is now facing very large budget deficits. Austerity is required over the next five years at least, so the Minister is faced with the challenge of maintaining and if possible improving the quality of the post-secondary education system, while at best not increasing spending and preferably by finding savings within the system.

So the Ministry produced a discussion paper in the ides of summer, calling on the ‘system’ to respond to a number of suggestions within the discussion paper which include:

more flexible credit transfer between institutions (Ontario is way behind most other Canadian jurisdictions in this respect: students have to negotiate individually with academic departments/professors if they wish to change universities to have their credits from their old university accepted by their new university. Often students – especially from out of province – have to start their undergraduate studies all over again if they wish to transfer.)
more recognition of prior learning and outcomes-based assessment
options for three year bachelor degrees alongside the existing four year degree programs
first and second year core and introductory courses shared across the system
year-round learning
key performance indicators/benchmarks for the sector
ways to shift the balance from research to teaching in terms of faculty support and advancement
more widespread use of technology in the classroom
more online programs (currently approximately 15% of all credit enrollments are online) and new models for course delivery
development of financial models that enable tuition fees to be reduced or at least maintained at their current level
more emphasis on entrepreneurialism and links with business and industry

For contractual reasons, I am unable to comment directly on the discussion paper, but I have invited Tom Carey to write a guest post next week in response to the Minister’s paper. However, the MInister has clearly thrown down a challenge to the institutions. It will be interesting to see how they respond.

Lesson 3: Governments are increasingly not going to accept the status quo or business as usual. In particular, if your institution doesn’t have a meaningful strategy for innovation in teaching, for improving the cost-effectiveness of the organization, and particularly a strategy for online learning, you will become increasingly vulnerable to funding cuts.

Are faculty the problem?

So far, the challenge has been directed at the senior management of institutions, who after all are responsible for strategic direction. However, as was pointed out in the discussions around the sacking and reinstatement of the President at the University of Virginia, universities are not hierarchical organizations. You have to have the faculty onside. So it was exceedingly depressing to read the Babson College/Inside Higher Education report on ‘conflicted faculty’. More than two-thirds of instructors said they believe that students currently learn less in online courses than they do in the classroom. However, the more faculty had experience of online learning, the more favourable they were towards it. John Thelin, who rate himself as an ‘old prof’, wrote very compellingly about why faculty should not fear online learning

Although the Babson results are depressing, this is not surprising. People fear the unknown. In no other profession do we throw people into the fray without any training. If the only model of teaching you have in your head is that of the classroom, and that’s how you make your living, then you are bound to defend and protect it. In the end it comes back to a leadership question. It is necessary but not sufficient to set a strategy for online learning. You need also to prepare and train faculty for such a move. This has to be part of your strategy.

It also has to be part of your strategy to ensure that decisions about online learning within your institutions are made by people with the necessary experience and knowledge. Too often AVPs responsible for learning technologies are unqualified in terms of knowing anything about either pedagogy or technology. Instructional support staff are often treated as second class citizens. Too often the AVP Academic will defer to the CIO rather than listen to her own learning technology staff. This is basically a governance issue. It means working out who should be at the table for different levels of decision-making, and making sure they have the power and responsibility to make those decisions. (For more on this, see Bates and Sangra, 2011)

Lesson 4: Prepare and train your faculty to deal with change and innovation in teaching, and in particular for teaching online

The barbarians are at the gate

Lastly, we should be aware that online learning is becoming increasingly the front line of an ideological war. Especially but not exclusively in the USA, there are strong corporate interests who see opportunities to make tons of money out of post-secondary education. It is in their interest to weaken and criticize the public education system. Thus the recent publication of the GVS Advisors report aptly named ‘Fall of the Wall’ should be given particular attention. From the executive summary:

In the words of one prominent investor, “I see more and more capital moving to the area and for two primary reasons: anytime large, broken industries exist, signiﬁcant opportunities for start-ups are created. Additionally, the millennial generation is learning in different ways, which has been driven by technology.”

This report should be compulsory reading for Ministers of Advanced Education, and the governors and senior management of post-secondary institutions. It lays out clearly the threat to the post-secondary education system, but it also has some interesting ideas that the institutions themselves could use to fight back against the growing threat of privatization. In particular, it defines interesting criteria for measuring investment in education (what it calls Return on Education or ROE):

We believe that a company or organization can only deliver true ROE if it achieves one or all of the following:

Drives down costs for learners and/or institutions
Substantially improves learning outcomes including performance on licensure or professional exams, performance on standardized tests, retention, graduation rates, learner engagement, progression to advanced degrees, college and career readiness, job placement, etc.
Increases student and/or instructor access to education
Increases the effective “capacity” of instruction and instructors thereby improving student outcomes and the professional paths of learning leaders

So here are some targets for our public institutions. Also it would be useful to make clear what is missing in this list that is also of value economically and socially that only public institutions can provide, such as the development of creative and original thinking, new knowledge, and strong social and ethical attitudes.

Lesson 5: If public institutions do not respond effectively to the challenge of change, they will eventually be swept aside by the private sector – and will deserve it.

Conclusions

First, talk about having to keep your eye on the ball. I thought I could slip away for a month in the summer when nothing is happening in post-secondary education. How wrong can you be!

Second, if even a centrist, moderate provincial government such as Ontario’s is looking for some radical changes in the post-secondary system, you can be sure that the pressure will be even greater in those with more ideologically driven state or provincial governments. So be prepared.

Third, I’m left with the question: are our public post-secondary education institutions up to the challenge? Do they see the danger, and if they do, do they have the means to address it? It will be interesting to see how the generally well run Ontario institutions respond to the Minister’s challenge.

Fourth, is all this just mid-summer madness, or are there really some major changes happening or about to happen in the public post-secondary world? To what extent will the current frenzy in the USA cross the border to the north? I ask this, because all this reminds me very strongly of the frenzy before the dot-com bust in 1999, when everyone in the USA was rushing to set up for-profit online institutions such as New York University Online and Fathom, all of which collapsed and disappeared. I suspect that this time, the drive for change has more legs. We have reached a wall in terms of the costs of the higher education system, yet demand continues to grow. Something has to give.

Lastly, what are your views on all this? have you been following the discussion? Where do you sit with regard to the need for change? Will there be a job for you when you get back from holiday!!!

Enjoy the rest of your summer!

References/further reading

Allen, I.E., et al (2012) Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education 2012 Babson College/Inside Higher Education

Kolowich, S. (2012) Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education 2012 Inside Higher Education, June 21

Kiley, K. (2012) Rebuilding Mr. Jefferson’s University Inside Higher Education, June 27

Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (2012) Strengthening Ontario’s Centres of Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge Toronto ON: Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, June 27

PRWeb (2012) Udemy launches redesigned website San Francisco Chronicle, June 27

Bennett, W. (2012) Is Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity the Future of Higher Education? CNN, July 5

GSV Advisors (2012) Fall of the Wall: Capital Flows to Education Innovation, Chicago IL: GSV Advisors, July 6

Siemens, G. (2012) An Open letter to Canadian Universities, eLearnspace, July 6

Hidary, J. (2012) The Revolution: Top 10 Disruptors of Education, Huffington Post, July 6

Stewart, B. (2012) Slouching toward Bethlehem: Unpacking the MOOC as Buzzword Inside Higher Education, July 10

Thelin, J. (2012) Professors and online learning, Inside Higher Education, July 10

Contact North (2012) Commentary: Strengthening Ontario’s Centres of Creativity, Innovation and Knowledge, Contact North Newsroom, July 10

Filed Under: Blogs, change management, costs and benefits, design of virtual learning organizations, economic impact, faculty development and training, governance, leadership, measuring institutional performance, Monthly Feature, MOOCs, planning, policies and management - institutional, quality and quality assurance, Strategies, planning and management, Tony's Blog, Tweets Tagged With: 2012, Blog, faculty development, GVS Advisors, MOOCs, Ontario, privatization, Tony Bates, University of Virginia

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 7: Design course structure and learning activities

June 26, 2012 By Tony Bates 3 Comments

In this post the importance of providing students with a structure for learning online and setting appropriate learning activities is discussed. Indeed, I will argue that this is probably the most important and yet the least understood of all the steps towards quality online learning.

This is the eighth in a series of 10 posts on designing quality online courses. The nine steps are aimed mainly at instructors who are new to online learning, or have tried online learning without much help or success. The first seven posts (which should be read before this post) are:

Nine steps to quality online learning: Introduction

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 1: Decide how you want to teach online

Nine steps to quality online-learning: Step 2: Decide on what kind of online course

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 3: Work in a Team

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 4: Build on existing resources

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 5: Master the technology

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 6: Set appropriate learning goals

A condensed version covering all the main posts in this series can be found on the Contact North web site: What you need to know about teaching online: nine key steps. (French version: Ce que le personnel enseignant doit savoir sur l’enseignment en ligne: neuf étapes clés‘)

The ten posts are also being translated into Portuguese by Professor Luis Roberto Brudna Holzle, Federal University, Brazil, available at Science Blogs: Nove passos para uma aprendizagem on-line de qualidade

Some general observations about structure in teaching

First a definition, since this is a topic that is rarely directly discussed in either face-to-face or online teaching, despite structure being one of the main factors that influences learner success.

Three dictionary definitions of structure are as follows:

1. Something made up of a number of parts that are held or put together in a particular way.

2. The way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole

3. The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity.

Teaching structure would include two critical and related elements:

the choice, breakdown and sequencing of the curriculum (content)
the deliberate organization of student activities by teacher or instructor (skills development; and assessment).

This means that in a strong teaching structure, students know exactly what they need to learn, what they are supposed to do to learn this, and when and where they are supposed to do it. In a loose structure, student activity is more open and less controlled by the teacher (although a student may independently decide to impose his or her own ‘strong’ structure on their learning). The choice of teaching structure of course has implications for the work of instructors as well as students.

In terms of the definition, ‘strong’ teaching structure is not inherently better than a ‘loose’ structure, nor inherently associated with either face-to-face or online teaching. The choice (as so often in teaching) will depend on the specific circumstances. However, I will argue that choosing the optimum or most appropriate teaching structure is critical for quality online learning, and while the optimum structures for online teaching share many common features with face-to-face teaching, in other ways they differ considerably.

The three main determinants of teaching structure are:

(a) the organizational requirements of the institution

(b) the preferred philosophy of teaching of the instructor

I will discuss each of these determinants in the following guidelines for choosing the optimum structures for quality online learning.

Institutional organizational requirements of face-to-face teaching

Although the institutional structure in face-to-face teaching is so familiar that it is often unnoticed or taken for granted, institutional requirements are in fact a major determinant of the way teaching is structured, as well as influencing both the work of teachers and the life of students. I list below some of the institutional requirements that influence the structure of face-to-face teaching:

the minimum number of years of study required for a degree
the program approval and review process
the number of credits required for a degree
the relationship between credits and contact time in the class
the length of a semester and its relationship to credit hours
instructor:student ratios
the availability of classroom or laboratory spaces
time and location of examinations.

Can you think of others?

As our campus institutions have increased in size, so have the institutional organizational requirements ‘solidified’. Without this structure it would become even more difficult to deliver consistent teaching services across the institution. Also such organizational consistency across institutions is necessary for purposes of accountability, accreditation, government funding, credit transfer, admission to graduate school, and a host of other reasons. Thus there are strong systemic reasons why these organizational requirements of face-to-face teaching are difficult if not impossible to change, at least at the institutional level.

Thus any post-secondary teacher is faced by a number of massive constraints. In particular, the curriculum needs to fit within the time ‘units’ available, such as the length of the semester and the number of credits and contact hours for a particular course. The teaching has to take into account class size and classroom availability. Students (and instructors) have to be at specific places (classrooms, examination rooms, laboratories) at specific times.

Thus despite the concept of academic freedom, the structure of face-to-face teaching is to a large extent almost predetermined by institutional and organizational requirements. I am tempted to digress to question the suitability of such structural limitations for the needs of learners in the 21st century, or to wonder whether faculty unions would accept such restrictions on academic freedom if they did not already exist, but the aim here is to identify which of these organizational constraints apply also to online learning, and which do not, because this will influence how we can structure online teaching.

Before reading the next section, you may want to go through the institutional organizational requirements listed for face-to-face teaching and identify which of these you think would also apply to online teaching and which do not. You can then compare your answers with mine below!

Institutional organizational requirements of online teaching

One obvious challenge for online learning, at least in its earliest days, was acceptance. There was (and still is) a lot of skepticism about the quality and effectiveness of online learning, especially from those that have never studied or taught online. So initially a lot of effort went into designing online learning with the same goals and structures as face-to-face teaching, to demonstrate that online teaching was ‘as good as’ face-to-face teaching (which, research suggests, it has done, and quite well).

However, this meant accepting the same course, credit and semester assumptions of face-to-face teaching. It should be noted though that as far back as 1971, the UK Open University opted for a degree program structure that was roughly equivalent in total study time to a regular, campus-based degree program, but which was nevertheless structured very differently, for instance, with full credit courses of 32 weeks’ study and half credit courses of 16 weeks’ study. One reason was to enable integrated, multi-disciplinary foundation courses. The Western Governors’ University, with its emphasis on competency-based learning, and Empire State College in New York State, with its emphasis on learning contracts for adult learners, are other examples of institutions that have different structures for teaching from the norm.

If online learning programs aim to be at least equivalent to face-to-face programs, then they are likely to adopt at least the minimum length of study for a program (e.g. four years for a bachelors degree in North America), the same number of total credits for a degree, and hence implicit in this is the same amount of study time as for face-to-face programs. Where the same structure begins to break down though is in calculating ‘contact time’, which by definition is usually the number of hours of classroom instruction. Thus a 13 week, 3 credit course is roughly equal to three hours a week of classroom time over one semester of 13 weeks.

There are lots of problems with this concept of ‘contact hours’, which nevertheless is the standard measuring unit for face-to-face teaching. Study at a post-secondary level, and particularly in universities, requires much more than just turning up to lectures. A common estimate is that for every hour of classroom time, students spend a minimum of another two hours on readings, assignments, etc. Contact hours vary enormously between disciplines, with usually arts/humanities having far less contact hours than engineering or science students, who spend a much larger proportion of time in labs. Another limitation of ‘contact hours’ is that it measures input, not output.

Nevertheless, when designing online courses, it is generally necessary to ensure that the students work at least as hard as the face-to-face students, or rather, spend the equivalent ‘notional’ time on getting a degree, otherwise the online programs will not be accepted or approved. This means structuring the course in such a way that students have the equivalent amount of work to do, whether it is online or face-to-face. However, the way that work will be distributed can very considerably between an online and a face-to-face program.

How much work is an online course?

Before decisions can be made about the best way to structure an online course, some assumption needs to be made about how much time students should expect to study on the course. We have seen that this really needs to be equivalent to what a full-time student would study. However, just taking the equivalent number of contact hours for the face-to-face version doesn’t allow for all the other time face-to-face students spend studying.

A reasonable estimate is that a three credit undergraduate course is roughly equivalent to about 8-9 hours study a week, or a total of roughly 100 hours over 13 weeks. (A full-time student then taking 10 x 3 credits a year, with five 3 credit courses per semester, would be studying between 40-45 hours a week during the two semesters, or slightly less if the studying continued over the inter-semester period.).

Now this is my guideline. You don’t have to agree with it. You may think this is too much or too little for your subject. That doesn’t matter. You decide the time. The important point though is that you have a fairly specific target of total time that should be spent on a course or program by an average student, knowing that some will reach the same standard more quickly and others more slowly. This total student study time for a particular chunk of study such as a course or program provides a limit or constraint within which you must structure the learning. It is also a good idea to make it clear to students from the start how much time each week you are expecting them to work on the course.

Since there is far more content that could be put in a course than students will have time to study, this usually means choosing the minimum amount of content for the course for it to be academically sound, while still allowing students time for activities such as individual research, assignments or project work. In general, because instructors are experts in a subject and students are not, there is a tendency for instructors to underestimate the amount of work required by a student to cover a topic. Again, an instructional designer can be useful here, providing a second opinion on student workload.

Strong or loose structure?

Another critical decision is just how much you should structure the course for the students. This will depend partly on your preferred teaching philosophy and partly on the needs of the students.

If you have a strong view of the content that must be covered in a particular course, and the sequence in which it must be presented (or if you are given a mandated curriculum by an accrediting body), then you are likely to want to provide a very strong structure, with specific topics assigned for study at particular points in the course, with student work or activities tightly linked.

If on the other hand you believe it is part of the student’s responsibility to manage and organize their study, or if you want to give students some choice about what they study and the order in which they do it, so long as they meet the learning goals for the course, then you are likely to opt for a loose structure.

This decision should also be influenced by the type of students you are teaching. If students come without independent learning skills, or know nothing about the subject area, they will need a strong structure to guide their studies, at least initially. If on the other hand they are fourth year undergraduates or graduate students with a high degree of self-management, then a looser structure may be more suitable to their needs. Another determining factor will be the number of students in your class. With large numbers of students, a strong, well defined structure will be necessary to control your workload, as loose structures require more negotiation and support for individual students.

My preference is for a strong structure for online teaching, so students are clear about what they are expected to do, and when it has to be done by, even at graduate level. The difference is that with post-graduates, I will give them more choices of what to study, and longer periods to complete more complex assignments, but I will still define clearly the desired learning outcomes in terms of skill development in particular, such as research skills or analytical thinking, and provide clear deadlines for student work, otherwise I find my workload increases dramatically.

Moving a face-to-face course online

This is the easiest way to determine the structure for an online course. The structure of the course will have already been decided to a large extent, in that the content of each week’s work is clearly defined by lecture topics. The main challenge will not be structuring the content but ensuring that students have adequate online activities (see later). Most learning management systems enable the course to be structured in units of one week, following the classroom topics. This provides a clear timetable for the students. This applies also to alternative approaches such as problem-based learning, where student activities may be broken down almost on a daily basis.

However, it is important to ensure that the face-to-face content is moved in a way that is suitable for online learning. For instance, Powerpoint slides may not fully represent what is covered in the verbal part of a lecture. This often means reorganizing or redesigning the content so that it is complete in an online version (your instructional designer should be able to help with this). At this point, you should look at the amount of work the online students will need to do in the set time period to make sure that with all the readings and activities it does not exceed the rough average weekly load you have set. It is at this point you may have to make some choices about either removing some content or activities, or making the work ‘optional.’ However, if optional it should not be assessed, and if it’s not assessed, students will quickly learn to avoid it. Doing this time analysis incidentally sometimes indicates that you’ve overloaded the face-to-face component as well.

It needs to be constantly in your mind that students studying online will almost certainly study in a more random manner than students attending classes on a regular basis. Instead of the discipline of being at a certain place at a certain time, online students still need clarity about what they are supposed to do each week or maybe over a longer time period as they move into later levels of study. What is essential is that students do not procrastinate online and hope to catch up towards the end of the course, which is often the main cause of failure in online courses (as in face-to-face classes).

We will see that defining clear activities for students is critical for success in online learning. We shall see when we discuss student activities below that there is often a trade-off to be made between content and activities if the student workload is to be kept to manageable proportions.

Designing a new online course or program

If you are offering a course or program that has not to date been offered on campus (for instance a professional or applied masters program) then you have much more scope for developing a unique structure that best fits the online environment and also the type of students that may take this kind of course (e.g. working adults).

The important point here is that the way this time is divided up does not have to be the same as for a face-to-face class, because there is no organizational need for the student to be at a particular time or place in order to get the instruction. Usually an online course will be ‘ready’ and available for release to the students before the course officially begins. Students could in theory do the course more quickly or more slowly, if they wished. Thus the instructor has more options or choices about how to structure the course and in particular about how to control the student work flow. This is particularly important if the course is being taken mainly by lifelong learners or part-time students, for instance. Indeed, it may be possible to structure a course in such a way that different students could work at different speeds. Some open universities even have continuous enrollment, so they can start and finish at different times.

Now there may be good reasons for not doing some of these things, but this will be because of pedagogical rather than institutional organizational reasons. For instance, I’m not keen on continuous enrollment, or self-paced instruction, because especially at graduate level I make heavy use of online discussion forums and online group work. I like students to work through a course at roughly the same pace, because it leads to more focused discussions, and organizing group work when students are at different points in the course is difficult if not impossible. However, in other courses, for instance a math course, self-paced instruction may make a lot of sense. We will discuss other non-traditional course structures when we discuss student activities below.

However you structure the course, though, two basic principles remain:

there must be some notional idea of how much time students should spend each week on the course;
students should be clear about what they have to do and when it needs to be done.

Learning management systems are very useful for enabling you to communicate and organize such a structure. However, it is important that you decide the structure first, then get the LMS to reflect that structure (this can be done by creating a unique web template for the course within the LMS, in collaboration with an instructional or web designer). Defaulting to the given structure in an LMS may result in a structure that does not quite fit your needs or those of the students, especially if you are able to design the course from scratch.

This course template in Moodle shows both the structure of the course (on the right) and lists student activities (bottom left)

Designing student activities

This is the most critical part of the online design process. Online students have neither the regular classroom structure or campus environment for contact with the instructor and other students nor the opportunity for spontaneous questions and discussions in a face-to-face class. Parallel activities need to be deliberately built into an online course. Regular student activities are critical for keeping students engaged and on task.

These can include:

assigned readings
simple multiple choice self-assessment tests of understanding with automated feedback, using the computer-based testing facility within the LMS,
questions regarding short paragraph answers which may be shared with other students for comparison or discussion,
formally marked and assessed monthly assignments in the form of short essays,
individual or group project work spaced over several weeks
an individual student blog or e-portfolio that enables the student to reflect on their recent learning, and which may be shared with the instructor or other students
online discussion forums, which the instructor will need to organize and monitor.

There are many other activities that instructors can devise to keep students engaged. However, all such activities need to be clearly linked to the stated learning outcomes for the course and can be seen by students as helping them prepare for any formal assessment. If learning outcomes are focused on skill development, then the activities should be designed to give students opportunities to develop or practice such skills.

These activities also need to be regularly spaced and an estimate made of the time students will need to complete the activities. In the next step we shall see that student engagement in such activities will need to be monitored by the instructor.

It is at this point where some hard decisions may need to be made about the balance between ‘content’ and ‘activities’. Online students must have enough time to do regular activities (other than just reading) once each week at least, or their risk of dropping out or failing the course will increase dramatically. In particular they will need some way of getting feedback or comments on their activities, either from the instructor or from other students, so the design of the course will have to take account of the instructors’ workload as well as the students’.

In my view, most university and college courses are overstuffed with content and not enough consideration is given to what students need to do to absorb, apply and evaluate such content. I have a very rough rule of thumb that online students should spend no more than half their time reading content, the rest being spent on interpreting, analyzing, or applying that content through the kinds of activities listed above. As students become more mature and more self-managed the proportion of time spent on activities can increase, with the students themselves being responsible for identifying appropriate content that will enable them to meet the goals and criteria laid down by the instructor. However, that is my personal view. Whatever your teaching philosophy though, there must be plenty of activities with some form of feedback for online students, or they will drop like flies on a cold winter’s day.

UBC’s ETEC 522: this is a loosely structured graduate program, in that students organize their own work around the course themes. The weekly topic structure is on the right, and the outcomes of student activities are in the main body, posted by students. Note this is not using an LMS, but WordPress, a content management system, which allows students more easily to post and organize their activities.

Conclusions

There are many other ways to ensure an appropriate structure for an online course. Some organizations for instance, such as e-College, Pearson or the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, provide a complete course ‘in a box’ for standard first and second year courses. These include an LMS site with content, objectives and activities pre-loaded, with an accompanying textbook. The content is carefully structured, with in-built student activities. The instructors’ role is mainly delivery, providing student feedback and marking where needed. These are often effective, in that students successfully complete such programs.

MOOC’s such as Stephen Downes, George Siemen’s, and Dave Cormier’s Change 11 have a loose structure, with different topics with different contributors each week, but student activities, such as blog posts or comments, are not organized by the course designers and left to the students. However, these are not credit courses, and few students work all the way through the whole MOOC, and that is not their intent. The Stanford and MIT MOOC’s on the other hand are highly structured, with student activities, but the feedback is fully automated. Less than 10% of students who start these MOOCs successfully complete it, but they too are non-credit courses.

My aim in a credit course or program is to ensure high academic quality and high completion rates. Developing an appropriate structure and learning activities is a key step to achieving quality in credit online courses

Next step

In Step 8, I will discuss the critical role that instructors play in communicating with students online, and how this can be managed within a regular faculty workload.

Questions

1. How many hours a week should a typical student spend studying a three credit course? If your answer differs from mine (8-9 hours), why?

2. If you were designing an online credit program from scratch, would you need to follow a ‘traditional’ structure of three credits over 13 weeks? If not, how would you structure such a course, and why?

3. D you think most credit courses are ‘overstuffed’ with content and do not have enough learning activities? Do we focus too much on content and not enough on skills development in higher education?

Filed Under: assessment, Blogs, course design, creativity, critical thinking, developing intellectual skills, e-assessment and e-portfolios, learning management systems, Monthly Feature, MOOCs, problem-solving, quality and quality assurance, Teaching and learning, Technology, Tony's Blog, Tweets Tagged With: 2012, Blog, course structure, learning activities, Quality, Tony Bates

Designing online learning for the 21st century

April 24, 2012 By Tony Bates 14 Comments

Quebec students demonstrating against higher tuition fees

This being the time of year when many Canadian post-secondary institutions offer faculty development opportunities, I have been busy the last two or three weeks giving lectures at the Université de Sherbrooke and Université Laval in Québec, and also at Vancouver Community College. Although the presentations have varied a little depending on the context, the main theme of my presentations has been fairly consistent.

A new paradigm for post-secondary teaching

I have been talking about how new web 2.0 technologies are beginning to change the dominant teaching model that has been around in our post-secondary institutions for the last century and a half. The slides are available as pdf files, in both English and French. Because of the size of the files (31 MB), you will need to access them by Dropbox. Please send me an e-mail and I will give you access.

I provide below a short summary of the main points. The slides provide many examples drawn mainly from post-secondary institutions in British Columbia and Ontario.

Drivers of change

I suggest that there are several forces driving change:

a move to a system of mass higher education, that results in greater diversity of the student body, larger classes, and less funding per student
consequently higher fees which in turn drive students to part-time work and hence a need for more flexibility in access (this ‘driver’ was particularly pertinent in Québec, where massive student demonstrations and strikes against proposed increases in tuition were occurring while I was speaking)
the development of a knowledge-based society with a strong demand for what might be called 21st century skills
rapid technological development and adoption outside the academy.

Despite these changes though our campus-based teaching has changed very little, mainly adding new technologies such as lecture capture to the traditional model of teaching, thus increasing costs: we’ve added GPS and stereo sound to a horse and cart, but it’s still a horse and cart. Meanwhile, distance education has rapidly advanced, and is grabbing an increasing share of the post-secondary market.

The challenge then is for campus-based teaching. What is the best way to use the campus experience when students can learn mainly online? How can we make the best of both worlds as a teacher?

21st century skills

Although I don’t like the term, it is a handy way of describing the kind of skills that need to be embedded within a discipline area, if learners are to function effectively in 21st century society. I argue that these are not generic skills but skills that need to be directly adapted and integrated within a particular knowledge domain. For instance, problem solving in medicine is different from problem-solving in business. Skills require opportunities for practice and development. The core 21st century skill is knowledge management, the ability to find, evaluate, analyse and apply information, although almost as important is independent learning. These are skills that can be taught, or perhaps more accurately, facilitated.

A small design team contracted by Volkswagen

Changing technology

I described the following changes in technologies:

LMSs are changing, moving from a ‘course in a box’ to a loose collection of tools from which an instructor chooses (see: Why learning management systems are not going away)
examples of the use of the following:

WordPress, blogs, wikis and e-portfolios for learner-generated content;
video and audio to help learners move between the concrete and abstract and back again;
open educational resources, which challenge our conception of curriculum and ownership of content; and
virtual worlds.

Features of web 2.0

learner authoring and control
collaboration and sharing
collective intelligence
low cost, adaptable software
rich media
portability and mobility

Educational implications

learners have powerful tools
personalization and individualization of learning
open access, content, services
development of knowledge management skills
a power shift from instructors to learners

A new paradigm for learning: from e-learning 1.0 to 2.0

Stephen Downes’ articulation of e-learning 2.0:

learning managed by the learner
peer-to-peer collaboration
access to open content
learning demonstrated by online multimedia assignments (e.g. e-portfolios)
development of 21st century skills

Role of instructor

Three possible roles (at least):

none (Downes; Siemens): students are autonomous/self-directed
guide on the side
in control

What kind of course? How to decide

Four deciding factors:

teaching philosophy
students you want to reach
nature of subject matter
resources available

‘Advanced’ online course design

knowledge management
open content within a learning design
student-generated multimedia content
assessment by e-portfolios

Who decides what kind of course?

instructor; program team; senior management?
decisions at program level; a progression from dependent to independent to inter-dependent learning
could we design one course/program for all types of learners in various delivery modes?
what process/mechanisms does the institution have for making these decisions?

Conclusions

we know how to teach well online; follow best practice
however, we also need to innovate: incrementally and evaluate
innovation in teaching needs to be rewarded more
systematic training of both instructors and senior administrations is essential for success

Lastly, in all the institutions I went to the audience in general agreed that:

we are not teaching in ways that fully engage learners
instructors are not fully leveraging the potential of technology for teaching
instructors are not adequately trained or skilled in using technology for teaching.

There are clear signs though that the revolution is beginning to happen: vive la révolution!

Filed Under: assessment, audio, blended learning, Blogs, blogs in learning, change management, collaborative learning, Communities of practice, course design, current state of the art, developing intellectual skills, e-assessment and e-portfolios, evaluating courses and programs, faculty development and training, futures, governance, knowledge management, learner-centered teaching, learning management systems, mobile learning, Monthly Feature, open content, personal learning environments, planning, policies and management - institutional, podcasting, problem-solving, selection of media and technologies, simulations, animations and games, Strategies, planning and management, Teaching and learning, Technology, Tony's Blog, Tweets, video, virtual worlds/Second Life, Web 2.0, wikis Tagged With: 2012, 21st century skills, Blog, course design, Laval, LMSs, Québec, Sherbrooke, Tony Btes, Vancouver Community College, VCC, Web 2.0

My summer paranoia: computers will replace teachers in higher education

What’s right and what’s wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs

Is online learning really cracking open the public post-secondary system?

Nine steps to quality online learning: Step 7: Design course structure and learning activities

Designing online learning for the 21st century

Archive

Recent Comments

R on What’s right and what’s wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs

worried wart on What’s going on at Athabasca University?

formación online on Una mirada personal sobre el uso de tecnologías digitales en la formación de docentes en los INFDs de Argentina.

Tony Bates on Discussing design models for hybrid/blended learning and the impact on the campus

Howard Davis on Discussing design models for hybrid/blended learning and the impact on the campus

Tony Bates on Discussing design models for hybrid/blended learning and the impact on the campus

Tony Bates on Discussing design models for hybrid/blended learning and the impact on the campus

Math Calculus on e-learning outlook for 2012: will it be a rough ride?

Tags

Tony’s Calendar

Events

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by Tony Bates, and all other participants in this blog, are the individual's views and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Contact North | Contact Nord.