EduGeek Journal

All I can say is that I knew it all along. Jacqueline Barnes of Litmos LMS says that “our brains love learning online.” Or I guess it would be more accurate to say that research is possibly indicating that certain aspects of the online experience help us to enjoy the learning process a bit more.

A closer look at the research shows that it is not really just anything and everything about online learning that help us learn better, but specific concepts and ideas focused primarily on engagement, social presence, encouragement, and immediacy. What I don’t see in the research is any mention of long lecture capture videos, digitizing standardized tests and uploading them online, 500-slide death by PowerPoint modules, or any of the other standards that we typically see in online courses.

In other words, the bad, boring teaching concepts that have been bad, boring teaching concepts for centuries will continue to be bad, boring teaching concepts no matter how much technology we wrap around them. [ahem.... iBooks 2?]

So many times when I read about certain colleges putting “free courses” online I cringe – when all they are really doing is putting popular lecture captures online. I have tried to watch these free videos and no matter how well spoken or humorous the professor is, I just can’t sit there and watch to the end without my attention wandering.

What these recent studies don’t necessarily say directly – but they still possibly prove – is that our brains are happy when we are actively engaged in the learning process. Passively sitting there and staring at the screen for a long time? Not so much. I hate to admit it, but that is why I have never been able to get into the Khan Academy that much. If you love it – great. I just need more engagement and less “sit and stare.”

So today Apple announced some new apps that will basically make it easier and cheaper (assuming you secure a loan to buy an iPad in the first place) to create, publish, and purchase eTextbooks. Or iTextbooks? I confess I haven’t tried the tools or watched the keynote yet – just read a few reports on it.

It also seems like there is now an Apple version of an LMS app of some kind for iTunesU.

I am sure all of this looks pretty cool and works great… but is this really change or just turning the same old model education model into a sexy Hollywood version of itself?

A walled garden is still a walled garden even if it is designed by Apple. Passively reading a textbook is still passively reading a textbook even if you add in some cool swipe motions and 3-D video.

The question still remains – do we really need textbooks and LMS’s for education? Whether you like active learning, social learning, open learning, de-schooling, or any other buzzword from the fringes of education, we all realize that sitting and staring at something for hours at a time with only the occasional move/swipe of the hand is not the best way to learn something.

Sure you can add more interaction and 3-D graphics to textbooks, but we already have a tool for that in the technology world. It’s called a game. What will be the line between interactive iTextbooks and games? At some point we might just need to get over the stigma that some educators have about games and just eliminate the “textbook” category all together. Or maybe that is the path Apple has started us on.

I guess we’ll see once people dig in and start using these apps. I’m sure it will be fun… But will it be Transformers 3 or The Matrix?

• Everything from email to libraries to blogs to universities will be declared dead. Again. For the 10th year in a row.
• People will continue to call for educational reform. Ignoring, of course, the fact that education is constantly reforming and changing and that there are people out there exploring new ideas and concepts.
• “Experts” will continue to claim that the lecture model is still dominant at universities, even if they can’t quote any evidence to back this claim up. I counted up all of the courses I took in college in the early 1990s that were lecture based it came out to be less than half. I have heard from current students that, at least at this college, that number has gone way down even since then.
• Several new LMS options will be labeled “Blackboard killers.” But none will make a dent because labeling any tech a “killer” usually dooms its existence.
• Even more “experts” will claim that colleges are now irrelevant, despite the numerous studies showing that everyone from employers to future students still think they are highly relevant and necessary. Who needs facts and figures when you just want to grind an ax with a society that won’t pay English majors a seven figure salary right after graduation?
• Despite overwhelming evidence of the educational value of hybrid or fully online courses, many organizations will develop a case of amnesia and claim there isn’t any evidence. I’m looking at you, Idaho.
• All of us will suddenly remember that we haven’t logged in to Second Life in over a year and then collectedly feel guilty for letting such a great tool slip away.
• The American people will get so tired of hearing about new technology lawsuits every day that they will write really extra terse Tweets about the big companies. But of course not do anything to stop the insanity of this whole patent lawsuit mess. Really Google, Apple, Motorolla, and others… its getting old.

One of the FAQs I deal with in presentations on the future of education usually goes like this: “how can we do this and not get in trouble with FERPA?” I know that somehow the question is looking in the wrong direction, but I don’t always know exactly how to point that out.

Jim Groom gives an excellent response to the question in his post “You Can’t Spell FERPA without FEAR.” You need to read it if you have ever had to deal with the dreaded F word:

I think it is time to reclaim the FUD around FERPA and reinterpret it as it was intended: an act that encourages universities to give students more control over their own data, and by extension their own teaching and learning.

One larger thread in the conversations I have been in about the future of Apple without Steve Jobs centers on “what will the next big thing in technology be?” Jobs was responsible for so many game changers through the years that it is hard to imagine the technology world without him. But to be honest, there have been many game changers through the years from many non-Apple companies.

Will the next big thing be a fundamental re-design of a the phone as we know it? Tech crunch has an interesting article on a bendable phone that is controlled by kinetic movements as much as touch. An interesting concept even if you hate the shape (which some seem to – I kind of like it). Some think the phone will also become implanted in a pair pf glasses, with an interface that virtually floats in front of your eyes.

The bigger concept to realize is that the iPhone is not going to be the last major re-think of cell phones as we know them. Computers themselves may one day “disappear” as they become so small that we no longer notice their presence – just their interface.

I’m still thinking that 3-D printing will be a major game changer in ways that we can’t image yet. Think of how it could change online learning if you can email actual physical objects. Even face-to-face learning could be greatly enhanced by the ability to print objects. A spontaneous question from a student could be examined in a matter of minutes rather than waiting until the next day (after the teacher has had time to go home and find what is needed to answer the question).

Or will the mysterious Google X lab come up with something so crazy that we can’t even imagine the possibilities?

I still think there is also great potential in virtual worlds. At some point in the near future, some one will crack the interface issues and steep learning curve that Second Life is infamous for and we’ll have Star Trek holodecks before you know it.

The times they are a-changin’…

Last year it seemed like every new LMS company was trying to position itself as the “Facebook” of online learning. Then Facebook started to make everyone angry (or bored, or both), and we saw that idea dry up pretty quick (well, for the most part). The new catch phrase battle seems to be heating up over the words “open” and “free.” Both Pearson and Blackboard are racing to establish either part or all of their services as open and/or free.

Many people have examined the concepts of open and free to see where various companies stack up. But of course, a lot of this is hard since few people have been inside of Pearson’s OpenClass.

Pearson is lifting the veil a bit more by releasing some screen shots of their OpenClass platform (although, anyone that has been reading this site for a while or attended one of my presentations with Harriet knows that mock-ups and screen shots of ideas are pretty easy to come by). The OpenClass screen shots look nice and they look like they integrate with Google well. But to be honest, anyone that wants notifications of new Gmail messages or Google docs can just as easily install any one of a large number of extensions for Chrome or Firefox or any number of browsers. Google docs are pretty easy to embed or add users to, so I know there will be a long line of people pointing out that you can already do what these screen shots show with just a few extra steps. Busy instructors will love this, of course, because saving steps and integrating products easily is always a welcome move in their world.

What we have shaping up here is basically a “Googlized” Blackboard with probably a healthy portion of Apple-esque eas-ability of use thrown in. That is not necessarily bad – these are all welcome steps forward for the LMS.

But it still only really brings us into the 1990s. What about those instructors that don’t want to use Google services? What about those courses that use specific web tools for specific reasons based on the specifics of the field they are in?  How hard will it be to plug in embed codes or APIs from non-Google services?

It might end up being very easy. But this is still not the open I am looking for. This is also not what I would consider the iPhone moment that the LMS market needs. Whether you build a system around Blackboard’s core code or around Google, you are still building it around a specific system and you will only be able to let in what that system lets in.

The whole point behind the “New Vision LMS” was that it needs to be built from the ground up to be open to any system that you could want to plug into it. The subway terminal concept could basically be that iPhone moment, if it is designed well. It would also be the true “openness” that I am looking for.

For different reasons, many of the usual uses for the term “open” are not exactly what I am looking for when I want open. They are all great, but I still think there is more. These uses include:

• Open as in open source code. I’m a big supporter of open-source software. But you can still install open-source programs like Moodle and then clamp them down so tight that they don’t feel open to the users.
• Exportable content. You can make your LMS software open by making it easy to export classes to course cartridges and other common formats. If you design your course well from the beginning it wouldn’t be that hard to re-design it in another LMS. So easy export is nice, but not that big of deal in my experience (and this is coming from some one who has had to migrate hundreds of courses from at least four different LMS systems through the years – open export formats are nice, but not  a necessity). If you place all of your content on sites like WordPress and then link to them, exporting isn’t that hard.
• Free to Access Outside the LMS. Blackboard’s recent announcement that you will be able to make courses “open” is nice, but you still have to use the Blackboard system to design those courses. Some instructors want their content out there and free for anyone to be able to see. And there are still ways to do that inside of Blackboard and other LMS systems. In fact, I teach a course that technically works like that.

All of these are great, but to some degree we already have all of these somewhere. To me, a truly open system is one that lets you use any tool you want, and then that will be imported into the system and organized so that learners can follow each other easily. Which also means that this organized activity will be exported out in any way that students want so they can follow course activity using any tool they wish.

And of course, this system would need to scale easily from small courses of specialized learners to massive open courses.

In other words, we still need that tool that can organize Personal Learning Networks to allow learners to focus in on specific classes or assignments when they need to. But also a tool that easily integrates with other school systems (like enrollment, emergency notifications, grade tracking, etc).

That is the kind of iPhone moment I am looking for. Of course, the iPhone isn’t really what anyone would call open… so the metaphor breaks down if you look at it too closely. But I think you know what I am getting at.

The recent announcement of the partnership between Pearson and Google is certainly an interesting one. Many people have been calling for Google to get into the LMS business for years and years (although, I believe most were hoping that Google would actually design one and not just add someone else’s ideas to their Apps for Education). New ideas are always good, but we’ll have to wait to see if this new partnership actually goes anywhere.  Google, unfortunately, has a track record of being involved in great projects that go nowhere.

I still haven’t gotten to look inside of OpenClass, but I hope it is cool as the slick video they made to promote it (even though the video really shows nothing more than a bunch of buzzwords). Funny that they think the LMS is dead… even though the numbers are showing that more and more courses are going into walled gardens every year. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, LMS’s aren’t going any where for a long time. They haven’t even started declining yet.

I don’t like it either, but I can’t deny reality. Not all the time, at least.

The interesting thing I keep seeing posted over and over again is how Moodle ends up being a drain on resources – you need more people to keep it running and upgraded and all that. To me, it is weird to claim this because all the IT people I have ever talked to about Moodle rave about how easy it is to keep going. At least when compared to other systems that track things like enrollment or issues like that. What I hear most often is that if you have a modern enough IT department, the people you already have in place will be able to easily keep Moodle running.

The problems tend to come when you have to modernize your systems. In other words, that 10 year old student enrollment system is not going to work with a modern LMS. So don’t try to pin the costs of modernizing your systems on Moodle.

I also find it interesting when people talk about having to fix your own bugs in Moodle. Unlike… what competing system? In Blackboard, we discover bugs every month, and then we can’t even fix them. At least in Moodle, you have the option of fixing them. In Blackboard, you send a ticket off into Bb Tech World and hope the fix shows up in the next release. Which is usually doesn’t. So how is the ability to fix your own bugs bad when compared to this?

No program of any kind is going to be perfect, but at least try to get those downsides right :)

So, the question is: will OpenClass be the iPhone moment for the PLN? Even if I end up hating it, I still hope it is. We need something big that takes us in another direction.

I actually have three sister-in-laws that work for Pearson, so I should see if they can get me an inside scoop. I doubt it – so much of this seems to be kept under wraps and I bet most employees were kept in the dark until right before the announcement. But I did sign up to be in the know when they open it up to the public – so hopefully that will happen soon.

In my last post about re-thinking everything in online education, I don’t think I made it clear that I was thinking about a specific technological breakthrough and not an idea like “Personal Learning Environments.” Personally, I love the idea of PLEs, but in some ways the technology to make them practical just isn’t there yet. Sure, we can tinker with several tools and sites out there to make something that “works,” but at the same time we can also tinker with Blackboard to make it “work.”

Many people are just not going to flock to an idea that you have to tinker with to make it “work.” I’m seeing a growing amount of PLE burn-out out there – people just getting to the point that they can’t keep up with it all. So they run back into the LMS box. Of course, they hate the box, but don’t have time for the PLE route.

This all reminds me of how smart phones were before the iPhone came along. Certain types loved their Crackberries and Palm Pilots, but most people just avoided them and some analysts predicted that the smart phone had grown as far as it would. They were often confusing and clunky. The technology got in the way of the average user embracing them.

Then the iPhone came in and changed everything.

The iPhone came along and made the technology disappear so that people could easily embrace the functionality without a confusing user’s manual. Then other phones followed and you now have hundreds of millions using essentially the same apps to do the same things on different devices. Whether you use an iPhone or a Droid or whatever, they all have a Facebook app so that you can post any thought to Facebook wherever you are at.

I’m thinking we need an iPhone moment for PLEs. The PLE as a concept needs that game changer tech to come along and make it accessible for the masses. A game changer that will make the tech issues disappear. Something that just “works” rather than making you do all the work to get the desired effect. A game changer that will make others follow and create different flavors for different people… while at the same time forcing the Crackberries of the LMS world re-think everything to try and compete.

That’s what I am looking for the in the online educational world. There are many promising ideas out there, but nothing is quite hitting that sweet spot yet.

As many of you know, I have been trying to come up with something new. I’m not even sure what it is supposed to be. I just know I haven’t seen “it” yet. I see parts of “it” here and there, but I still just don’t know what “it” is I am looking for.

But the LMS-based mentality of online learning has got to go. Even the newest version of Blackboard still makes me feel like I am in AOL circa 1995.

I’m not necessarily talking about course design or structure. There are some great ideas out there, everything from MOOCs to information foraging are popping up all the time. The biggest hurdle for all of these great open / social / connectivistic / whatever you want to call it designs is that technology is just not there yet to make them work perfectly. You can do a lot of great things with the whole DIY mentality… but often I get the feeling there could be so much more if we could just stumble on the right technology.

I read today about Google possibly starting another ”structured web programming” language called Dart. Some are thinking that it will be just a language that solves “Googlecentric” problems.  In some ways, maybe this something that education needs – education-centric technology to solve educational problems.

Maybe not our own programming language… but that is not a bad idea either. I used to dabble with Moodle extensions, and it was always frustrating to figure out how to “trick” php and javascript into doing what I needed it to do.

I have previously discussed how Rockmelt made me wonder if we could make a similar browser for education… basically, make the LMS become a browser instead of a web silo.  That could be interesting, but kind of leaves mobile learning a bit out of the picture in some cases.

Does the technology behind EdTech need to go the app route? Does the LMS need to leave the confines of “website” and evolve into a new form of technology? I’m not sure yet.  But whatever happens, we need this new idea to meet several criteria:

• Integrated. It needs to integrate into our everyday web activities. When we have those a-ha moments on Facebook, or find a great article that would be useful for our group project, or whatever the case make be… sharing it with our class needs to be just few clicks or swipes away while we stay on the object. Not a few clicks, surf to a different site, log in, copy-and-paste, click, click, click, submit, log-out, surf back to reality.
• Open. Education is going the open route. You can’t share what is closed, and surprise… people like to share!
• Flexible. Every feature that you use on a desktop would also be available in a tablet, a smart phone, or whatever comes along next.
• Search-able and Easy To Organize. I know some would say that we could just use Facebook or Google+ for all of this. The problem with those approaches are that it is really hard to find anything older than, say, 2 hours there. With learning, you need to go back and examine what you have shared and tagged. you need to dig into it and see what else you can find. There are a hundred reasons why… but you need to be able to go back and find everything. That is tedious at best on social networking sites.

There are some interesting projects out there that I think are doing great work in many of these areas, but no one has a product (or even a DIY solution) that meets all of these criteria.

The New York Times has an interesting article on some of the new non-traditional routes to earn a college degree. Most of the ideas presented in the article are not new to readers of this blog.  But one statement stuck out to me:

“Taking a course online, by yourself, is not the same as being in a classroom with a professor who can respond to you, present different viewpoints and push you to work a problem,” Professor Neem said.

Sadly, this shows how little this professor knows about online learning. Professors can respond to you in online learning – sometimes even more often than they can in the limited time that face-to-face courses afford. Professors can present different viewpoints online (or anywhere they want for that matter), and they can push you to work a problem.

There are many benefits to face-to-face learning that online learning can’t accomplish, but unfortunately none of them are touched on this article. Fairly typical.

Of course, many of my face to face classes had professors that couldn’t be bothered to respond to me, present different viewpoints, or push me to work a problem. These are personality traits of individual instructors, not characteristics of online learning.

No wonder online learning is still in an uphill battle. Many of the “experts” that the media find have no business being interviewed in the first place.