Pedagogy

Disruptions: If You Announce It, They Won’t Come

Everyone thought the iPhone would flop. That same group of “everyone” also thought that Google Wave would kill email and disrupt how we communicate online.

One thing I have learned in my few years in Ed Tech is that the “everyones” are usually dead wrong. If you announce a disruption before it happens, it usually doesn’t. I would argue that something is technically not disruptive if you actually see it coming. That seems to be against the very definition of the word disruption.

So I guess Coursera jumped the shark today and did what I have predicted for a while. But as Alex Usher says in the article, “nobody ever got rich telling people that the revolution wasn’t coming.” Amen to that. For the record, I personally would like to see disruption in the higher ed field. I just don’t think the current ideas that are getting press are going to do it.

Instead, I like to look to things like University of Mary Washington’s work with Jim Groom and company.  The right Reverend Groom is often the public face of the whole movement, but he freely gives credit to many on his team. I want to ponder for a minute what the team is doing:

Domain of One’s Own. Wow. I mean – talk about massive. Look, anyone can attract hundreds of thousands of people by giving stuff away for free. I could pack dirt in plastic bags and still give away thousands if I advertise it is free. To me, the whole “M” in xMOOCs is pure gimmick because it is free. And you want to pat yourself on the back for attracting big crowds? Try starting something like Domain of One’s Own – that is massive in scope (even if few sign up for it). Everyone gets a space of their own to control their own online presence? Massive. Don’t give me free stuff that attracts thousands of sheep all to do the same cookie cutter thing. That’s not education. That is factoid distribution.

UMW Blogs. So you open your course up to anyone and you think that is the be-all-end-all to openness online? Hogwash, as they used to say. I can do that with a few clicks in Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn, or any other LMS. If you still have one controlled access point to the content, there is still a feeling of being closed in. When content creation is as open as the distribution, then that is getting closer to true openness online. Giving people a blogging platform to create content and present as they want? Yes. Sticking a bunch of videos of one star professor speaking online for everyone to watch? Not quite.

DS106. I have said it before and I will say it again: digitizing bad pedagogy is not a revolution. It is borg assimilation. Online courses should be dynamic just like the platform they utilize (the interwebs). They should be different every time they are offered, they should be open, distributive, innovative, and… well… they should be like ds106. To me, xMOOCs seem like they are just sticking the same old same old in a box that will stay the same for everyone taking them, but just open up the door for anyone that wants to come in. Sound familiar?

ThinkLab. This, to me, is the ace-in-hole that many innovators are missing. Basically, a place to experiment with new ideas. They have a 3D printer for crying out loud! I would like to see it expand to online experimentation – but so much of that is going on with the other three that it is probably not necessary. Harriet and I have been championing an experiential space to explore emerging technology in education for years now at conferences and other venues, but mostly this has been falling on deaf ears. Glad to see someone out there is actually open to the idea.

To be honest, what UMW is doing is truly the logical extension of cMOOCs – the original flavor of MOOCs that got lost in the general conversation. Which is a good thing, because I would hate to see what would have happened to cMOOCs if the “everyones” got a hold of it instead the underdogs. Or maybe xMOOCs are what happened when the “everyones” stepped in?

How Can We Let Students Know What a Class is Like Before They Take It?

What I usually end up hating most about starting a class is that you never really know anything about what the class is going to be like. At most, the instructor will tell a little bit about what they think should happen in the syllabus, but that is rare and sometimes you don’t even get to see that until you sign up and pay.

Will the course be project based? Test based? Group based? What should I expect from week to week?

Throw in this mix all of the new models for courses, from MOOCs to games to blended learning to who knows what will come next.

I have thrown out an idea to few people of creating a system of symbols that represent different aspects of courses, like how much of it is online, how much is independent, how much of it is based on different models, how synchronous it is, etc. Students could look at these symbols to get a quick look at the course to see if it matches their learning preferences or scheduling constraints or whatever.

For example, a computer with a “65” in it would symbolize 65% of the class is online, a calendar with a zero on it would mean that the class is completely asynchronous, and so on.

This wouldn’t be a rank of quality as much as it would be matching students up with a class that they feel most comfortable with. You don’t want to force a student that needs interaction to take a completely independent asynchronous course, for instance.

The problem is, every time I bring up this idea there is some kick back. It seems like anything that might be seen as “rating courses” is some kind of “no-no” in academic circles. Students have been doing that on their own way before the Internet existed, of course, but the point of a system like this is not to rate. It would be to describe.

You can leave this up to sites like ratemyprofessor.com – where there is also a “hotness” scale and a place for student to vent about how unfair it was that their copy and paste essay from Wikipedia got a zero – or you can take control of it as a university and make it constructive.

Predicting the Future is Still Difficult

Next week I will be presenting on “Online Learning Innovation: Community, Openness, and Turning Things Inside Out” at the 2012 NUTN conference with my colleague Sarrah Saraj. We will also be talking about the next 30 years of education at a panel discussion earlier in the conference. So here is what I have been thinking about the future.

A new web series on YouTube called H+ is set in a future timeline where transhumanism has gone very wrong (thank you to Katrina for getting me hooked on another show). They show some futuristic ideas on the show – computers on thin sheets of plastic, then embedded in our heads, etc. One line got me thinking:

“Didn’t you ever hack an iPhone when you were a kid?”

“Before my time pops”

Yep – someday the shiny new iPhone that will be introduced today will be an ancient museum relic that old fogeys reminisce about.

But, of course, I will still want one :)

In 1991, I was a recent high school graduate who took out a loan to “catch up” on technology. For around $2000, I bought a 13″ TV, an IBM PS/1, a phone for my room, and a subscription to this new thing called Prodigy.

If you think about it, the smart phone (iPhone or iPaf or Android or whatever for that matter) pretty much does everything those things did. They don’t really do anything new, they just combined several devices and did things we had already been doing… only better.

In fact, most people will tell you that the Internet is still just doing what the printed press did with information, the telephone did with communication, the radio did with broadcasting, and the movie did with entertainment… just in a vastly improved manner.

So “looking at the future” really needs to mean focusing in on concepts and not devices. And we will pretty much find out that these concepts will be very familiar. Our devices for utilizing these concepts will change and improve – and there is nothing wrong with liking these devices or exploring their usage.

But we need to quit spending time and money investigating the devices themselves and focus more on how we can best use them to improve how we accomplish the concepts of teaching and learning. How the iPhone 5 will change education is irrelevant. How the functions of smartphones will help us improve how we teach students or accomplish sound theoretical frameworks is a better question.

How many hundreds of times more do we need to read an article that ends with “It wasn’t the _____ itself, but how it was used that made the difference.”

Is the Problem With Traditional Education the Lecture or the Lecturer?

The Chronicle has an interesting article about how A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn’t Working. It also touches on how a techno-phobic professor is having success with standard lecture formats.

I think at some point we are going to have to realize that old methods aren’t all bad, and new methods aren’t always the saviour.

What this article shows is that anytime anything is used as a quick or easy fix for education, students lose interest. Lectures might take time to prepare, but once they are set they typically get re-used over and over again and in many easy ways they become quick and easy fixes for education in subsequent semesters.

Technology is also often used as a quick easy fix. Need engagement? Sign up for Twitter! Need connection? Create a Facebook Page! Need to confuse your school administration? Teach a MOOC!

Many professors use Twitter, Facebook, and mobile devices and still come across as the “sage on the stage.” In the same sense, many professors stand at the front and lecture and still come across as the “guide at the side.”

Like many of us know in education, it is not as much the tool or method you use as much as how you use it. Active learning can sometimes be as much about active teaching as it is about what the learners do. Passive teaching can happen with or without technology, and students won’t engage with it no matter what fancy new tech tools you use.

Make Your Brain Happy by Learning Something Online

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.”

Do MOOCs Really Matter In The Overall Picture of Education?

This morning I was pondering what impact Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) would have on the overall landscape of education. Most people involved in education that I speak to haven’t even heard of them. Many people (myself included) drop out of them before they really get started. So the question we have to wonder is: do they really matter if they aren’t going to be the next big thing in education?

Many educators certainly seem to have an obsession for searching for “the next Google” or the next “Facebook for education” or the next big thing to change the face of education.  Some think that MOOCs will be that next big thing, others think they are going nowhere.

The problem is not the with MOOC, but with the question. We don’t need one specific thing to the be THE end-all big thing for education. We have suffered too long in systems that want to have one cookie-cutter answer for everything. Want to teach an online course? Into the LMS box you. Want to blog? The LMS box has that for you, too.

I am starting to talk to more and more students that never read the syllabus of their online course. They feel the courses are becoming too similar and predictable – so why bother re-reading a cookie-cutter syllabus? If students are getting so used to online courses that they are going on cruise mode to take them, then it is time to shake things up a bit.

For most of us, the importance of the MOOC format is not the idea itself, but the fact that it represents a different way of teaching a course or idea or skill. We don’t need it to become the next big thing – we need it to become one of many new formats that online courses can be taught in.

And we need many other formats out there to spring up and gain traction. We need to offer a greater variety of formats and options, just like you see in face-to-face courses. Do you teach Science labs with the lecture method? Do you sit Art students down in the self guided labs and hope they figure out how to create art? Face-to-face courses have different formats (even though some do need to break out of the one or two they are stuck in), so online courses need to follow suit…. maybe even blaze new trails.

So even if you can’t stand MOOCs, you should at least follow their development and support their existence, or else it will be back to the cookie cutter for us all.

Fighting Predicatability in Online Learning

Over the weekend I had a conversation with a friend about online learning.  It turns out he has taken several online courses over the past few years.  He had an interesting statement that I think many in online education need to pay attention to:

“I have gotten to where I don’t need to read the syllabus anymore in online learning.  All the courses are the same”

I asked him if he was referring to the cycle of “read this, answer a discussion question, respond to other students, take a quiz, rinse, repeat.” He said that was exactly the case.

I see this a lot in online education, but to be fair it started in face-to-face courses.  So many classes you only had to find out what the dates of tests were and the rest was easy to figure out.  Some call it laziness, but it probably actually had a huge helping of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” throw in the mix.

Are discussion boards becoming the new scan-tron tests?  I realize that there is some active learning in having students answer discussion questions, but so many times the questions become so stale that what little “active” was in there gets washed away in staleness.

If you have an introductory online learning class (in other words – it is the first online course that students will take) – then I say give them something tried and true to help them get used to it.  To a degree.  For the rest of us – we need to infuse our online courses with personality and a little originality.  Try to think outside the box.  Try some new tools. or at least try to get your students to create assignments using tools they don’t normally use.

But above all, give them a reason to read the syllabus.  Oh – and then at least try to not put them to sleep while they are reading it.  Remember the K.I.S.S. method.

Confessions of a Massive Open Online Course Flunkie

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from my years spent in pursuit of a Bachelor’s in Education was really quite simple yet profound: “don’t let your class or syllabus get in the way of learning.”  Some of you might have heard of it also referred to as the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) method.  You want your students to get in to complex thinking as they are learning the topic of the course, not as they are trying to figure out what to do on the first day.

I have signed up for many Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) recently – and never completed a single one.  That is my biggest confession. Most colleagues get pretty shocked to hear that – after all, Mr. EduGeek himself would seem to be the best person to figure out a MOOC and get the most out of it.  Maybe even become a rock star in one.

But the problem is, I just don’t have time to figure out how to use one.  Yes, I will spend forever trying to figure out how to customize a WordPress app, but I won’t take the time to figure out how to participate in a MOOC.

At first, I though it was just me.  But then I found out that the people teaching the courses I never touched had to create a four minute long video explaining how to have success in a MOOC.  That is probably the first bad sign right there.  If you have to take a mini-course on how to take your course, you are probably having to focus too much on the structure and not the learning.  Even in Blackborg, the focus on figuring out the course is knowing what links to click, not what to do with the links after you know what to click.

Dave Cormier (how created the video linked to above) gives five steps on how to have success in a MOOC.  Each one of the steps needs explanation, because they don’t necessarily make sense without the explanations.  See how complex this is getting?

Of course, I was also one of those people that avoided the massive “lecture hall” courses in college.  It was just too easy to get lost in the crowd, even if you tried not to.  Being a male educator in a room full of predominately females, I saw first hand how easy it is for the minority to get lost in the mix, even if they tried not to.  Online, it is usually the minority opinion that gets lost… which is what usually happens to me in MOOCs.  You see, just because you follow and comment on other people’s work, there is no guarantee that they will follow and comment on you, ESPECIALLY if they disagree with you.  They will possibly even get mad that you aren’t stroking their ego and just ignore you (just being brutally honest here – the web is a magnet of narcissism).

My biggest confession is that I don’t see the point of a MOOC if I already have a Personal Learning Network.  I honestly don’t see the need for any type of open course once you have a PLN and have figured out Google.  But that probably also has to do me starting to question the whole concept of “open.”  It seems that “open” is now becoming synonymous with “lack of accountability.”  But that is a topic for another blog post.

To me, the advantage of taking a course is that you get to interact with the instructor or some other type of subject matter expert – and they are the ones that help you focus on what you need to be learning.  The MOOC removes this value but leaves the time lines and due dates.  So in other words, you remove the actual value of being in a course but leave the annoying part.

I know, I know – you are supposed to network with other students and they will give you the feedback and information you need.  That is all great – if you connect with a good group of people.  There is no guarantee you will connect.  And even if you do – what if they just rubber stamp whatever you say because they fear conflict? What if they really have no idea what they are talking about but think they are an expert?  You could end the class with a bunch of new knowledge that is actually worthless because you hooked up with the wrong group.  I know that in some subjects there are no wrong answers so that is not always the case – but it is a danger.  One that is less likely to exist in a traditional course.

Obviously I am focusing on worst case scenarios.  I think that the fact that I am an instructional designer by trade now I know that it is possible to design a “traditional” course that dumps the bad parts typically associated with the “sage on the stage” mentality while still incorporating the good parts of a MOOC (all while also avoiding the pitfalls of a MOOC).  In other words, a course that connects with existing PLNs instead of creating news ones.  You only have so much time after all (another confession of mine – I don’t have time to keep up with the new PLNs formed in MOOCs). The only problem is that a course like this can really only exist in a traditional college course format and not in a MOOC format.  But a lot of that has to do with the “Massive” part.

I think I also just see the MOOC as the technology-driven, socially-networked version of the cattle-herd lecture hall courses so prevalent on college campuses today.   Herding 500 students in a course is still herding 500 students in a course, even if try to put a modern technology spin on it.  Some people think that is fine.  Personally, I like things smaller and more intimate.

Teacher as Interactive Catalyst

One of my few pet peeves are people that state the obvious as if it were some kind of new revelation. Or even worse yet, try to make an entire theory or standard based off on something that should be obvious to everyone.  Recently in Ed Tech circles, an obvious statement has been making the rounds, usually posed as some huge revelation to the whole world: “the teacher should be a learner.”  Really? Next you will tell me that they should also start breathing oxygen!

Human beings need to be learners.  We need to constantly grow and expand or we just wither away.  Most teachers are learners, but some people just have to focus on the small number of bad ones that are withering away.

I also know from experience when you have a bad teacher that isn’t a learner, that aspect pretty much dominates the course. But as a teacher who is also a learner myself, I can attest that a majority of the time my students could care less that I am a learner. They would notice if i wasn’t, but since that is not the case they move on to other things that are more pressing in their minds.

What they need from me is to be present – to interact with them and be whatever they need me to be at that moment.  Yes, sometimes they need me to learn from them. That is part of the learning process – to discover something that the teacher didn’t know and share it with them. But they also need me to answer questions they don’t know – they still need the guru. They need me to give them feedback on ideas. They need me to provide tech support. They need me to offer career advice. They need a whole host of interaction with me that goes beyond learner but does not fit into the category of “teaching.” And even when they do need me to teach, I prefer to show them how to find the answers rather than just provide the answers themselves.  Usually, they like this, too.

The only word I can find for this is “interacter.”  Which is not even a real word outside of biology. But you can often interact with someone and not really bring about any real change or improvement. I think I like the word ‘catalyst’ the best – but people also probably have different takes on that word (some negative), so I have to explain what I mean.  Hence the term “interactive catalyst.”  Catalysts ultimately bring about change, and in education we can best do that by interacting and being what the students need us to be at any given point in the course.

Which, historically has always been the way you defined the word “teacher.”  But the word “teach” has gotten an unfair bad rap recently, so now we have to come up with new ways to say the same thing all over again. To me, “teacher is a learner” just doesn’t cut it.

Of course, I am not really trying to create a new theory here or give away ideas for yet another book on teaching – this is really just me finding a way to describe my objective as a teacher.

Style vs. Substance in Instructional Design

I’m pretty sure that if you care about actual learning, you have run in to the same problem I have: going to check out the latest award-winning course, program, idea, etc and then coming to the inevitable conclusion that it is pretty much junk.  Some educational awards and accolades do go to great projects… but it seems so many times the attention goes to the slickest, shiniest object in the room and  not necessarily the best.

Clark Quinn has a great blog post about his experiences in this area, which also examines the difficulty in teaching others the difference between what has true quality and what is really just whitewashing a dead, boring lesson to make it look (as we say in Texas) purty.

Sometimes it feels like people think that a good online course only involves the following steps:

  1. Take your lecture notes and edit them well to make them flow beautifully when read
  2. Transfer these edited notes to html and break it all up into decent sized chunks
  3. Slap on a discussion question and a multiple choice quiz at the end
  4. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Never mind that all these skills (editing, copy/paste, chunking, pushing buttons on a website to create things) are all things that your average high school-er can do – this is now considered high level ed tech pedagogy, right?

Um… yeah….

I wish I was only describing some neophyte professor just creating their first online course, but sadly this list pretty much describes what I have seen labeled as “high quality” instructional design by many people with graduate degrees in this stuff.  I have even heard it labeled “active learning.” (!) (?)

I guess since the student does have to read and respond to discussion posts… that counts as active?  I guess as long as they don’t fall asleep….

Now, I realize that the format listed above can work in some situations, especially if a lot of thought is put in to it. But what usually happens is that it is treated like an online course design template used for every course with components rapidly plugged in. Which in some cases might not even be bad – just not the best option that exists out there.