Month: August 2014

Symphony or Cacophony? Cracking the Code of Tool Selection in MOOCs

One of the bigger struggles with modern day education is tool selection. There are so many good tools that do such similar things that everyone from instructors to CIOs are trying to figure out the secret formula for how many are too few to offer and how many are too many to manage. Some schools apply the “all your eggs in one basket” approach, forcing everything into one mega tool like Blackboard. Others advocate no restrictions, so that learners will be faced with so many tools that they get lost and confused.

Having all your eggs in one basket is nice from a bottom line perspective, but not very realistic for the world we live in since one instrument virtuoso are less in demand. However, Putting too many options in one course can overwhelm everyone from the instructor to the students to the support staff to, well… everyone with a hand in the game. A balance needs to be struck so that your diverse collection of instruments works together as a symphony but avoids the chaos of cacophony.

As we are looking at the dual layer MOOC design, the number of tools we would like to use is also ballooning. Some have been around for a while, some are newer, others are being tested out in this course. But they all seem to play a vital role, so how do we get the right amount that doesn’t overwhelm the students, but still gives them freedom to use what is most meaningful to them?

We could easily just say that all students will use Tableau, WordPress, and EdX for everything…. but that may not end up being what they will use after the class if over, and therefore end up rather useless to them.

We could also just as easily list a ton of tools and link to tutorials, but that would overwhelm many students and encourage more to drop out.

The solution is probably somewhere in the middle – where we offer enough tools to get everything accomplished in the course (assuring, of course, that we are focusing on teaching how to accomplish certain tasks over just focusing on the software) while helping learners to focus in on the tools they need at that given moment.

This is where Nicolas Cage and National Treasure comes in. Cage’s character is trying to use multiple tools to crack a code to find a treasure, basically. But in one scene there are so many possibilities out there that the clue seemed like useless blabber. Fast forward a few scenes and Cage’s figures out that the pair of older glasses would change what he saw on the piece of paper as he changed lenses:

Glasses1

Learners in the multiple pathways/dual layer MOOC will be changing technology filters as they go through the course to accomplish different tasks. There will be many more “lenses” than in the glasses pictured above, each one helping them see a different aspect of learning analytics. Our mission is to organize and tie the various technology filters together in a seamless fashion.

It would almost be nice if we could embed an UrbanSpoon slot-machine like app into the weekly/daily email communication. Learners select the layer they are in (xMOOC or cMOOC), the analytics tool for the week (Tableau, Gephi, RapidMiner, or LightSIDE), and the activity they are working on and they get a custom set of instructions for the week.

MOOC Spoon

Probably a bit beyond what we have time for, but our design will need to help learners focus on just the tools that they need for the time being.

In a general sense, the weekly flow of tools could look something like this:

dual-mooc-tools

Learners would receive the weekly update which guides them to the tools they need to focus on (even though all tools can be used as secondary if needed). The learners then use these tools to go through the zone of proximal development (ZPD) surrounding the weekly main concept. The learning analytics tools are a part of the support for traversing the ZPD. Data collection tools will collect data to guide the next weekly email, as well as student work to highlight in the same email. These weekly (or maybe even daily) communication pieces are important in keeping students in different pathways aware of everything that is happening across the class, and will hopefully even draw some into trying different pathways.

Of course, this is a simplistic look at the process. Or maybe more of a road map for design. The time consuming part will be in building a unified user experience. I’m a fan of the way ds106 created a handbook for this purpose – kind of a combination how-to and FAQ space complete with quick start guide even. They cracked the code for turning their particularly large set of lenses / tools into a symphony quite nicely, and hopefully we can do the same.

(Note: ProSolo is a toll in development that, for lack of better words, serves as a place to collect various streams of content that learners create in their own space. I have been watching the developments with Known that Jim Groom has blogged about, and I like where they are going with that. ProSolo seems to have some similarities with Known on the hub side of things. I’m not sure whether it will receive input from a POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) service.)

Theoretical Flow of Heutagogy in MOOCs

So to continue the examination of the multiple pathways MOOC (aka “dual-layer”), I want to pull back a minute and look at the overall flow of the course from a different (but familiar) perspective.

One of the ways I think we are falling flat in MOOCs (and to be honest, all forms of courses) is in the process of introducing the course and maintaining an overall vision. A colleague of mine often says “without vision, the people perish!” What this basically means if that people don’t have a good reason to get pumped up about what they are doing, they give up. Another way of looking at this is: “[insert your topic here]: So What?!?!”

Introductory sections and goals are good components to have, but they aren’t enough to bring vision to all learners (some will be self-motivated, of course). In traditional courses, the “So what?” can easily be answered with “I paid for it, its required, it helps my degree plan, so good enough!” While that is not the best vision, it usually fills the gap. So a bit of problem there, but with a stop gap. But in open classes? People need a better answer to “so what?” than that (because they can drop out with no loss) or even any answer, period.

And not because they aren’t necessarily interested or motivated. They just need some fuel to keep their self-motivation fires burning when the pressures of life press in to the time needed for self-selected course.

This is the beginning of the process of Heutagogy, which will continue into the next issue to examine.

One of the major criticisms of some college programs is that they are focusing too much on content and not enough on marketable skills. In any technology-related field, this causes problems when that content goes obsolete. For example, computer programming degrees may teach, say, “Intro to PHP” and “Advanced PHP” in the sophomore year – typically with a textbook that is already a few years old. However, three years later when those students graduate, that PHP has gone thorough several new versions, while many companies have moved on to Ruby on Rails. So the learners panic because they realize “I need a class on the new version of PHP and Ruby on Rails! But I am out of college!”

What this does is create a reliance on the instructor as knowledge dispenser and the class as “specific skill set trainer.” What is missing is teaching learners how to learn (aka heutagogy) instead of how to consume content from an expert (instructivism).

At the very beginning, computer programming college degrees should focus on teaching students how to figure out any programming language. Just look at basic concepts, theories, and then several method out there. Because different learners will be, well, different – they will need to figure out if they need Dummies books or online tutorials or to work alone or to follow an expert or whatever it means. Once they have their own process down, the rest of the program should focus on honing these self-directed learning skills by letting learners loose on whatever the language de jour is. But the classes should not be called “Advanced Java” or what ever it may be, but “Solving Advanced Problems Using New Languages” or something like that. Since changing course titles and textbooks is very difficult to accomplish quickly, just make the titlesmore open from the beginning to allow for students to pursue more up-to-date and/or relevant content. Or just go all crazy and allow for more advanced open learning.

Pulling this altogether, I would look at a theoretical flow of content like this (based on data analytics, the current topic of a the multiple pathways MOOC):

1) Give learners vision (and let the vision frame the rest of the class). Have all instructors answer the “Data Analytics: So What?” in a short video of a few minutes. And then I would say just slam the learners into group work. Have all learners answer this question before class even starts:

If someone came up to you on the streets and said “Data Analytics: So What?”, my answer would be:
a) adequate to inspiring
b) some what uncertain to non-existent

Then place all learners into groups of five with about 1-2 A’s and 304 B’s. Let those who are already a bit advanced envision the others.

2) Go through the introduction, but the first major topic should be how to identify and follow the major thought leaders and organization in Data Analytics. Once learners connect with these leaders, they have taken their first step to becoming lifelong learners about Data Analytics rather than short-term consumers of expert knowledge that need to keep coming back to the same expert fountains in order to learn and grow. We often leave this step to the end or scatter it as optional content throughout the material, but I think in today’s society this is not adequate. Start off with learning how to find the updated thought on data analytics and let learners begin to find the new ideas and products from the very beginning of class.

3) Dive into the intro material, but expand it to include teaching the basics of how to do Data Analytics in all situations, scenarios, software environments, etc. Teach learners to know how to learn for themselves what to do, not just follow the steps you provide. In data analytics, that would teach them how to analyze the data in general in any program: extracting data, visualizations, network analysis, regressors, etc. Teach them the basics of how to figure out any data analytics tool they come across.

4) Then dive into real life scenarios, problem-based learning, even student centered learning. I know that at times there will be certain functions that only one program does, so I’m not saying avoid any specific instructions. But think of it this way: portions of the specific instructions you teach your learners will be obsolete when the next version that is released. In other cases, many learners will be at an institution that requires one type of software. If you only taught them to figure out the narrative of data using Tableau, and their institution wants them to use Gephi, they may get stuck. But if they learn in general how to look at the narrative of data and then are allowed to choose the tool they use to accomplish this analysis, they might find the course much more meaningful to them as learners.

Of course, I am oversimplifying this idea and real courses will be a mixture of looking at specific functions that only exist in specific places and alongside overarching ideas that can transcend applications. The overall point I am getting at is to focus your design on teaching your learners how to learn about your topic, with the specific tools and processes as examples and case studies rather than the overall focus itself.

As for how to arrange the tools themselves, I want to look at that idea in more detail in a separate post where we will go on a treasure hunt with Nicholas Cage.

Digital Out of Body Experiences

Ever get crazy ideas about the future of technology? I was pondering some of the new technology that different groups/companies are working on, and had a crazy thought about the future of computer interfaces. It all started with thinking about computers in the 1990s. For those that remember the 1990s, there was something magical about the computers that were coming out then. It was like the displays suddenly leapt well beyond what we saw even in Science Fiction movies. I mean, you could get a decent desktop computer that looked fancier than anything on Star Wars or Star Trek, and they could play CDs, store files (remember having to save everything on a disc? How quaint), connect to other people, play rough videos, etc. You didn’t see a whole lot of that in the movies.

Today we have people working on amazing stuff. Sensors that follow your moves well enough to let you play video games. Using WiFi to see through walls. Immersive heads-up displays. We see some cool stuff in movies today, but I wonder if reality will actually move beyond our current Sci-Fi paradigms of future interfaces into something totally different.

As we increase the ability to quickly detect and map the immediate world around us through cameras, sensors, WiFi signals, sounds, etc – we will soon have the ability to create a photo-realistic digital 3-D recreation in real time. Which sounds cool in itself for, say, recording important events and then re-living them later. Throw those recordings into an immersive Occulus Rift-like helmet and its like you are back there again. But what if you had the helmet on while recording? Since your sensors probably extend a good 100 feet or more, you could realistically “pull away” and rotate the display from your body the same way you spread your fingers across a map on a smart phone to pull out. What this means is that we will probably see the ability to have realistic digital out of body experiences in our life time.

Sounds creepy, but also think of the safety implications. What if you drove this way, and since you can pull back and see around corners, you get in less accidents? You could even start driving your car like a video game with a video game joystick. Same could go for fighter pilots in battle – think of the advantage you could have to see the whole battlefield like a realistic game. Also, imagine public safety – the ability to look through a building for a bomb threat without stepping a foot inside, for instance.

Of course, there are huge privacy concerns with this idea. Would we have to invent a new paint and window films that can block these technologies in order to secure not only government buildings but our own houses? I am sure some solution will present itself.

Of course, we don’t always have to go big. Doctors could use this technology to guide miniature robots all over the human body, or even perform routine work on contagious patients from a safe distance.

Of course, I have been talking about co-located events here, but since we are talking about transferring digital information to a display, that display could technically be anywhere in the world and this “out of body” experience could be transferred over the Internet. Educationally, think of the ways we could change teaching if we could send learners anywhere we want with little physical danger. Historical sites could set up tours online – just create a protocol for streaming your sensors online and people could go all over the place in the middle of class. And not just international trips that are cost-prohibitive in real life – also think trips that are dangerous like inside a volcano or hurricane or to the bottom of the ocean.

Of course, all of this is kind of akin to floating around someplace like a digital ghost that no one can see – which is good in some situations, but not others. But what if we can combine these sensors with holographic projectors to project the virtual visitor as if they were actually there? Collaboration pretty much reaches the level of holodecks. What will that mean for classes when we have this ability? What could we learn about ourselves if we have the ability to re-watch ourselves later from an outsider’s perspective? For all of the fields that involve interaction, what would that mean to be able to replay a whole interaction? What would this mean for role play?

Its kind of creepy and interesting at the same time. But then again, back in the 90s, the idea of sharing personal pictures and personal random thoughts on Facebook was creepy and interesting also. We will see where all of this goes, but I hope people that are working on these technologies are dreaming big enough to work through the creepy and into the interesting.

The Disruption That Never Will Be in Education

Don’t get me wrong – change is coming to education, and disruption will be part of it. But all of the comparisons to the music industry are off base, because much of the “disruption caused by mp3s” narrative is a smokescreen from the music industry intended to distract from other questionable activities they are participating in. And also to quote Jim Groom: “Why are we so hell bent on disrupting everything right now?“

But let’s start with a historical look at the music industry. If you are old enough, you probably remember seeing this sticker quite often:

Home_taping_is_killing_music

When the cassette tape came out, it quickly became a cheap means for creating your own tapes at home. While people like to act like the mp3 created the “unbundling/rebundling” phenomenon, the truth is that it was the mixtape that started it. Many people like to act like all they did was make a personal favorites list from their own collection, but the truth is that most of us used the mixtape to get a bunch of songs we liked from friends so that we wouldn’t have to buy a whole album for one song. Some of us even coordinated music buying with friends and family so that we could get all the songs we wanted for the least amount of money. This led to the rise of the home taping movement along with the music industry creating several PSAs about how this movement was killing their business.

Which, of course, it obviously did not.

So the ability to unbundle and rebundle music is nothing new. Neither is the ability to get free music. The same holds true in other forms of entertainment: people that didn’t want to buy newspapers knew what coffee shops to hit at what time to get a free copy. People set up elaborate systems for trading VHS and Betamax tapes. Or they learned how to tape movies off of broadcast TV once you were allowed to pause recording during commercials. The digital revolution sped this process up and anonymized it considerably, but there were actually other factors that contributed more to the disruption that occurred in the music business. Of course, you rarely hear about these because it exposes a more questionable side to the music business. Not to mention that “home burning” is probably bigger than online piracy:

“It seems the ripping of CDs borrowed from friends and family accounts for almost as much music piracy as online file sharing anyway, which is an interesting discovery. This is something that has been rife since before online piracy music became a mainstream activity.”

Remember what happened when the music industry introduced new physical formats (vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to CD)? Everyone had to spend a ton of money upgrading to the new format, because the new format was in no way compatible to the old one. Most of us had to sit around figuring out which albums we liked the most because we could only upgrade a few. Even after the CD, the industry tried to introduce new formats like Super Audio CDs and MiniDiscs, but none of those caught on. People were still trying to upgrade to CDs and just didn’t bite. But also many people noticed that the early CDs sounded horrible when compared to the new albums recorded for CDs. Remember those first Led Zeppelin CDs? It was obvious they were just dumping old music on the new format without trying to upgrade the sound quality. They weren’t expecting this CD thing to last.

Additionally, think about how flimsy all of those physical formats were. They could break, warp, scratch, crack, stretch, and wear out easily. In addition to the massive amounts of money they made off of making consumers upgrade every few years, they also made a lot of money off of people replacing broken or worn media (even CDs wear out if you play them too much).

Mp3s and cloud storage changed this. Once you get your music digitally apart from the physical media, it can always be compatible with newer formats. Look at how many formats iTunes plays. Some new format comes out? Download the update and keep going. Mp3 player breaks? Just re-download the songs.

There was one area that the digital revolution did obviously disrupt. The one thing that home taping couldn’t deal with was the need to still buy an entire album to just get the songs you wanted. Sure, there were 45s and cassingles and even CD singles, but those just had the one hit song (and a throw away song if that). Usually three of those would equal the cost of a full album, and most hit bands would have at least three hit singles. So most of us just got the album and skipped the process of waiting for singles. MP3s did change that radically, in that you could just buy the songs you like at $1 a pop and skip the rest of the filler. Because, let’s face it, most hit albums are a few good songs that are obvious singles and a bunch of boring filler. But no record company is going to point out how little effort they put into the whole album. So yes, the mp3 did disrupt the business of tricking people into buying a full album of filler in order to get the 2-4 songs that the record company spent actual time and money on developing into hit songs.

This all points to the real disruption in the music business that the industry will never mention. Some of their more lucrative side-effect revenue streams were cut off over night (upgrading old media, replacing damaged media, and buying the full media to just enjoy a small part). These disruptions will not transfer to the education sector until someone invents a way to improve the human brain. Once we “download” education, its not permanent. We will need refreshers. We will need updates. For now at least, we can’t download the new information directly to our brains once the old goes out of date. We will need to constantly learn new information and enforce existing information, so education is still needed in some form and free online content will not change that.

So, in addition to the real music-industry disruption being something that most aren’t focusing on, we also have the issue that those at the top (record companies) are still doing well despite what they are saying. The music industry still made $16.5 billion dollars in 2013. That may be half of what they made 10 years ago, but a lot of that loss can be accounted for through the loss of the “lucrative side-effect revenue streams” I mentioned. And o you really think they laid off any corporate head honchos because of those losses? Doubtful. We do know there are less artists getting signed, less music being produced by older artists, and less newer artists clogging up the airwaves. The people at the top are still making money by squeezing more out of the people at the bottom. Look at all of the hit songs that are “featuring” guest appearances from other artists. How do you increase the sales of a hit song? Get another famous person to guest on that song and all of their fans will also buy the song. Instance 2-for-1 sales bump! Sound familiar?

https://twitter.com/gsiemens/status/491636775841198082

https://twitter.com/gsiemens/status/491633413799964672

Of course, this is not isolated to a few colleges. Faculty around the world are reporting being required to do more with less resources and support while upper level administration seems to continue to increase.

Something else to think about. Recent research is showing that people that download the most free content illegally are also the ones that buy the most legal content. Those that already have the service being offered are the main ones that are consuming the free version of it. Sound familiar? Like how most people that take MOOCs already have a college degree?

What this points to is that any disruption that the education industry would go through in common with the music industry has already happened.

So we have a few reality check factors to consider:

  • Unbundling and rebundling is nothing new and existed well before the digital revolution
  • Access to free content also existed well before the digital revolution
  • A lot of the “disruption” that occurred in the music industry is a smoke screen from the music industry itself designed to garner support for current questionable actions as well as hide questionable practices in the past.
  • Much of the actual disruption that happened due to mp3s and digital content can’t really transfer to the education industry due to the education sector being much more complex.
  • The disruptions that can transfer from the music/entertainment industry to the education industry have already happened.

All of this to say that music metaphors need to stop. Changes and disruptions are going to happen (and have been happening for a long time), but it seems we seldom see the people that have a more realistic grasp on the changes that are coming speaking at big educational conferences. This post was originally meant to be a two or three paragraph intro to a blog post called “Ask Not What Disruption Will Do To You, But What You Can Do For the Coming Disruption” – but that will have to wait until next time. We need to stop this focus on disrupting everything now based on a busted music industry model and instead ask how we can guide the changes that are coming to be beneficial for learners and faculty and not the big dogs at the top.