Considering MOOCs: Pros, Cons, Questions

Here are slides for a talk I’m giving to my university about issues to consider before offering MOOCs or accepting MOOCs for credit.

Considering MOOCs: Pros, Cons, Questions from Doug Holton

I also participated in a webinar about MOOCs for corporate learning, hosted by Jeanne Meister of FutureWorkPlace. A few slides related to that are at the end of the above presentation.

My last advice to both groups is that, even if you decide to not go with MOOCs today, keep a close eye on them.  MOOCs are evolving extremely rapidly, both technologically and pedagogically.  See for example these MOOCs that are pedagogically more interesting than just videos and quizzes: Passion Driven Statistics, Learning Creative Learning, and the Open Learning Design Studio MOOC I mentioned in my previous post about pedagogical issues with MOOCs.  There are also millions of dollars being invested in MOOC development, with both new and old tools evolving to accommodate the unique demands of MOOCs.  Several MOOC platforms are emerging, both free (Instructure’s Canvas.net, Blackboard’s CourseSites, Google+ Communities and Hangouts and other Google Apps) and open source (Class2Go, OpenMOOC, CourseBuilder, edX, P2PU, WordPress).

So 6 months from now, a year from now, MOOCs may look quite different.

And my first advice to everyone is: try a MOOC out for yourself.  That’s the best way to better learn about them.

What’s the “problem” with MOOCs?

In case the quotes didn’t clue you in, this post doesn’t argue against massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the ones offered by Udacity, Coursera, and edX.  I think they are very worthy ventures and will serve to progress our system of higher education. I do however agree with some criticisms of these courses, and that there is room for much more progress.  I propose an alternative model for such massive open online learning experiences, or MOOLEs, that focuses on solving “problems,” but first, here’s a sampling of some of the criticisms of MOOCs.

Criticisms of MOOCs

• Khan Academy
  • The organization is unclear and it lacks sufficient learner support.
  • The videos aren’t informed by research and theory on how people learn, and this may diminish the effectiveness of his videos.  He could make the physics videos more effective for example if he directly addressed student misconceptions in the videos.  It doesn’t appear that any of the videos ever get revised or updated.
  • Also the videos are still basically non-interactive, passively absorbed lectures. While nowhere near as effective as active learning (where students may learn twice as much and may be three times less likely to drop out than in traditional lecture-based courses), lectures do still have a place and can be more effective if given in the right contexts, such as after (not before) students have explored something on their own (via a lab experience, simulation, game, field experience, analyzing cases, etc.) and developed their own questions and a “need to know.”  See research on productive failure and a “time for telling.”
• Udacity and Coursera courses
  • These courses are clearly putting the traditional college course model online, and the problems are the same as with traditional college courses.  They are a big step above opencourseware sites, which just have notes or long recordings of class lectures online with no guidance or learning support, but as with traditional college courses, there is often a lack of active learning or effective instructional design, and a lack of interactivity or scaffolding of the learning experience for beginners.  Here are some comments from some folks who have attempted these courses (the vast majority of people drop out of these courses):
  • “the Coursera course I’m taking (AI) has longer videos (6-20 minutes) of the instructor mumbling as he draws over and over on ever increasingly confusing Powerpoint slides. Sometimes a video will have one multiple choice question, other times the video will not have any questions at all. The worst part is that only once has the video gone on to explain the question. So if a student has a problem understanding the question, they will have to resort to the forums. There’s no follow-up….Basically, the Coursera course is taught as if I was sitting in a class watching an instructor draw on a Powerpoint — the fact that it’s running in a web browser and can provide a different method of teaching seems to be lost on the instructor.”
  • “I’m going through the Coursera machine learning class right now and I have to say that the professor glosses over several details and often makes comments like “if you’re not familiar with calculus…” and “if you’re not familiar with statistics…” which caught me off guard at first.”
  • “I’m taking Model Thinking on Coursera and there are at least 2 pdf for each section (20 sections). Some of them from professor’s book, some links on the web or some scientific articles.  I even stop reading it all because it’s time consuming.”
  • “I have tried a lot of these new online courses that have been created but I still think they have missed the point, the point that khan academy got right. I don’t want to plan my life around weekly assignments. I keep getting emails about about assignment deadlines, causing unneeded anxiety which puts off the whole learning experience.”
  • “I tried, believe me I tried hard, but video is not my type. Over 20 years I’ve learnt all I know reading, surfing, browsing the web, not watching videos. I can digest/absorb/ignore a whole page of text in ten seconds instead of being forced to watch boring 10 mins videos that offer only one min of real interesting content.”
  • These all sound like the kinds of issues one would expect from traditionally designed college courses and online courses that focus more on content coverage than learning and understanding (one of the “twin sins” of course design).
• Curt Bonk’s open online Blackboard course
  • “It’s a class about retaining, motivating and engaging online students, and I’m leaving because I’m not motivated and not engaged.”
  • “First assignment included two 44-page pdf files that were expensive to print and difficult to read online”
  • “it’s the same old Blackboard” “Same threaded discussion – very 1999.”

Especially disturbing is that none of the major MOOC providers have hired anyone trained in instructional design, the learning sciences, educational technology, course design, or other educational specialties to help with the design of their courses.  They are hiring a lot of programmers and recruiting a lot of faculty, who may have various motivations for participating in these open education experiments.  To their credit though, edX, backed by $60 million from MIT and Harvard, is hiring one person to help with course development, although they only require a bachelors degree. Most instructional designers or learning scientists have a masters or PhD, partly because designing and developing effective learning experiences is a hard skill to learn and may never be confidently “mastered” in one’s lifetime (Dunning-Kruger effect aside).  Some even argue that educational research is the hardest science of all.  Another exception is the Open Learning Initiative, which does have teams of learning scientists working on their educational materials (but they are not MOOCs), resulting in much more effective, efficient, and engaging (e3) learning (students in their hybrid stats class learn more in half the time as in the regular face to face course).  But the vast majority of MOOCs, just like the vast majority of regular college courses, are completely self-designed by faculty, who are most often not trained in effective instructional design or teaching. As someone once wrote, “College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which systematic training is neither required nor provided–pizza delivery jobs come with more instruction.”  I don’t argue that faculty should not be involved in designing these courses – it is critically important that instructors have ownership of their teaching and at least be able to customize their learning materials (see 1, 2, 3), and similarly students need to have some ownership in the learning process, too (the key components of motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose).  But faculty can be aided by some training or assistance in course design, technology, and teaching and learning to develop technological, pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK).  Teaching should be treated as a design science, more like engineering than just an art or craft that we all think we can intuitively do well.

Are MOOCs a Horseless Carriage?

In the book How People Learn (which can be read free online), John Bransford shared the story of Fish is Fish.  That link goes to a video of the children’s story.  If you don’t have five minutes to watch it, the story is about a fish who befriends a tadpole.  As the tadpole matures into a frog, it ventures out onto land and brings back stories of the things it sees, such as birds and cows.  But in trying to understand those things, the fish interprets them from its own worldview.  A bird is a fish with wings, for example.  Similarly, when cars were introduced into society 100 years ago, we interpreted them from our previous experience and worldview as horseless carriages.  The question is, are MOOCs an example of imposing an existing worldview (traditional instruction, courses, and instructors) on a new medium for learning?  Is it necessary for all the ‘students’ in a MOOC to be learning the same topic at the same time (synchronous learning)?  That appears to be a common defining characteristic of all MOOCs.  Does there have to be a single, unchanging instructor?  Does it have to be a ‘course’ at all, with a finite beginning and end?  Most students forget much of what they learn once a course ends (see “Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University” for a humorous take on that).  Many topics are constantly changing and evolving (like science and engineering and technology), and one’s learning may be out of date sometimes within months, if not years, after a course ends.  Much of what we learn comes from outside the classroom anyway – what we call lifelong learning and informal learning.

MOOC or MMORPG?

Imagine a scenario sometime in the future where an employer wants to hire someone.  Maybe in the future, instead of just asking someone if they have a degree or certification in something, they will ask if someone is a member of some learning community or shares some relevant experience.  They might ask questions similar to what one might ask an MMORPG player (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), like what ‘level’ one is at or about one’s accomplishments.  Of course, something like this is already happening today.  Most employers don’t care about which courses you took or your grades.  They don’t look at transcripts.  They want to know about your experience, your beliefs, your skills and abilities, and so forth.  College degrees may (perhaps mistakenly) be used by an employer as a signal of things like intelligence level (going to a prestigious school means you probably got higher SAT or ACT scores, for example), persistence, and the quality of the instruction you have had.  But actual experience is better signaled by things such as previous jobs, internships, and perhaps in the future things like badges and portfolios can help signify skills and experience, as well, similar to the badges one collects in a game.

The question some people ask is, are MOOCs and similar ventures the future of education?  Are they going to replace degrees and courses?  Are instructors going to lose their jobs?  To me that’s like asking if horseless carriages are going to replace horses.  Maybe they will replace degrees one day, but if they do, I don’t think they’ll still be referred to as MOOCs, and perhaps not even as “courses,” just as we no longer refer to cars as horseless carriages.  And unlike horses, instructors and the profession of instruction (teaching and professors) can adapt – away from a traditional delivery of content model and perhaps toward a model of designing and refining and facilitating learning experiences, such as described in the book teaching as a design science and as already practiced at some places like Western Governors University, where there are course mentors instead of instructors.  And ultimately the existing system is not going to change much without some significant learning experiences on the part of the community of educators to gain a better understanding of their own practice and how people learn.

From MOOC to MOOLE

MOOC purists would argue that the new courses from Udacity, Coursera, and edX are indeed in the same vein as traditional modes of higher education, and not what true MOOCs are about.  The argument is that MOOCs should be about connecting learners with one another and with the content.  It is the connections that matter.  This philosophy has been variously termed or framed in terms of actor-network theory, networked learning, and connectivism.  The point of this post is not to criticize those theories or ideas, but sometimes there does not appear to be a logical connection to learning and understanding.  ”Connecting” learners to one another or exposing them to content may often not be sufficient to magically cause learning to happen or to cause significant changes in beliefs and practice.  Similarly, making content “open” isn’t sufficient to magically cause learning to happen, although it is a good first step (enabling and expanding access to learning opportunities for more people).  Also, even the original MOOCs still often had a traditional course structure with a beginning and end, all the learners learn the same topic at the same time, and the instructors are often still the “sage on the stage.”  That is not to say that networking and openness are not necessary and valuable, just perhaps not always sufficient.  As noted on the networked learning wikipedia page, Steve Fox (2002) argues that “networked learning is too often considered within the presumption of institutionalised or educationalised learning, thereby omitting awareness of the benefits that networked learning has to informal or situated learning.”  And that latter point is important for reflecting on the MOOC model.

Situated learning concerns how all learning happens in context.  Students need a reason to learn, and we shouldn’t just assume they will be able to learn something for its own sake. It explains why for example a Brazilian street kid may be a whiz at math, and a 6 year old may have hundreds of Pokemons memorized. See for example the work by James Paul Gee or Jean Lave. John Dewey said 100 years ago that we shouldn’t educate just to prepare kids for a future they know and care little about – we should educate them for today, teach them stuff that is useful and interesting to them today, and adult learners are even more skeptical of instruction that doesn’t appear to be relevant to their current work or life.

Situated learning also helps us better understand how to focus on the learning rather than the content for its own sake, because often the reason we take the time to learn something is to solve some problem we have.  One of the most popular applications of situated learning research to education is called problem-based learning (PBL).  Other examples include games or workplace learning.  But the instructional technique of problem-based learning was actually invented before the theory of situated learning was understood (similar to how many technologies are invented before the science is understood).  PBL was invented in a medical school – students were given patient cases or x-rays and asked to discuss and diagnose them, similar in a sense to an episode of House.  Problem-based learning can be applied more generally, however, to solving all kinds of real-world problems big and small.  Examples have included water purification, or community playground design, and so forth.  The problem, and the learning needed to solve that problem, are now at the center – not the content and not the instructor.  And there is not necessarily an arbitrary ‘end’ to learning, nor do students need to be working on the same thing at the same time.

In these kind of problem-based learning situations we may or may not even be talking about a course structure at all, but more broadly any real-world learning experience – MOOLEs (massive open online learning experience) instead of MOOCs.  I’m not saying that MOOCs are not MOOLEs though.

MOOLE = open education + problem-based learning

Maybe a MOOLE might be considered an example of problem-based learning, but for especially widespread and persistent problems, and for which open, online resources and communities can be of help.  It is important that people in a MOOLE have a purpose.  The goal of participating in the MOOLE is changing and improving practice in the real world.  They still have the learning communities and personal learning networks that exist in MOOCs.  MOOLEs might be more self-directed sometimes, or community-scaffolded and driven, depending on the context and problems being addressed.

Who’s the teacher in a MOOLE? Who’s the learner? What are the variables, if not time or amount of content as in traditional courses.  Can people ‘drop out’ of a MOOLE?  Is retention an important variable?  Are learning and changes in real-world practices the most important variables?  How are they measured?

Why Linux and Wikipedia are not MOOLEs, maybe

I hate introducing new labels or acronyms.  They often introduce arbitrary or unnecessary divisions and separations, where instead connections should be explored.  But this is just a thought experiment.  Is MOOLE too vague?  What are examples that seem to satisfy many of the elements of openness and solving real-world problems, but might not be the same thing as what a MOOLE describes?

The Linux development community and the community of Wikipedia contributors would seem to qualify as MOOLEs – massive, open, online learning experiences. Is there anything that would preclude them from being considered so?  Well, one issue is that these communities focus on doing and not learning. They often do not adapt to the needs of new members (over 80% of new editors on Wikipedia quit within a year), and they do not always attempt to ‘bring in the fold’ – the masses of people (the general public) who never contribute to their communities. In fact, they have several mechanisms and unaddressed hurdles in place which specifically function to exclude the majority of people from contributing to their communities.  For over 10 years Wikipedia kept in place an arcane syntax and editor, that may have had the effect of excluding many people from contributing to articles, and Linux and several other open source communities were known for “RTFM jerks.”

Can you imagine a museum, for example, which found out about some hurdle to participation and just ignored it or was even proud about the fact that it functioned to exclude a significant portion of the population?  Well, the good news is the Linux and Wikipedia communities are aware of these issues and trying to address them, but it is still a challenging effort that might have been easier to address if a culture of learning and a better understanding of learning was in place from the beginning.

MOOLEness Rubric, Checklist

As I mentioned, I am hesitant to introduce new terms or acronyms as they are are often used to exclude and separate things. The purpose here is really not to say what is and isn’t qualified to be labeled a MOOLE.  A better example of a natural perceptual quality used to group things is color. But one does not say that one particular shade of red is the ‘true red’ and anything else is ‘not red’. Instead one might speak of ‘redness,’ and the quality of being red.

Similarly, this discussion of MOOLEs is more concerned with identifying the qualities of effective lifelong learning experiences, that may happen to be facilitated by open and online resources and communities.

A rubric or checklist might help identify some things to notice.  That is beyond the scope of this post, but a few potential items might include:

• Is there a syllabus, instructor, etc.?  You are definitely looking at a course, and it may be a MOOC. But whether it is a learning and learner-centered experience might be a separate matter.
• Is there are *required* textbook you have to buy?  That kind of hurts the openness of the learning environment if some cannot purchase the book (and a significant portion of college students do not purchase the textbook for courses)
• Does the learning end?  Is that ending arbitrary?
• Are beginners and new learners/members being scaffolded and supported?  Is there a culture of respect for novices?
• Are there mechanisms for helping one another see what each other is learning or not understanding?  See research on formative assessment, for example.
• How is learning being facilitated?  See Goals and Strategies of a Problem-based Learning Facilitator for some ideas.

But essentially the point is that some MOOCs and college courses are going to continue to have problems if people create them without learning more about how people learn and how to design effective learning experiences.  I proposed creating an open course on the topic of learning and educational multimedia design a couple years ago in this chapter, but haven’t had the opportunity.  However, a group of folks will be offering a MOOC on open learning design this August.  It is described so:

Learners and educators of the 21st century are confronted with a vast wealth of open and readily available information, and the accelerated evolution of social, mobile and creative technologies. These offer learners and educators unprecedented opportunities, but also entail increasingly complex challenges. Educators may still provide access to knowledge, but now they also need to carefully craft the conditions for learners to enquire, explore, analyse, synthesise and collaboratively construct their knowledge from the variety of sources available to them. This entails a need for a shift in their role: from providers of knowledge to designers of learning. The call for such a repositioning of educators is heard from leaders in the field of TEL and resonates well with the growing culture of design-based research in Education.

In the course of this MOOC, participants will be exposed to the rationale and motivation for a learning design approach, the state of the art in the field, and the current grand challenges for research and practice. The will familiarise themselves with a variety of tools, methods and practices, and gain the skills to lead learning design initiatives in their context of practice.

New Books on Teaching, HTML5

I can’t really provide reviews for these books, I haven’t read most of them yet (they are just lying in my 10 year old amazon saved items queue), but I thought I’d share the list for future reference:

Some new Books on Teaching, Learning, Education, Faculty Development

• Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning – Tony Bates, check out his blog if you haven’t already: http://www.tonybates.ca
• Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education - a book Tony Bates mentioned in this post: why the professional development model is broken.
• See also this free e-book/pdf: Effective Practice in a Digital Age
• A Guide to Faculty Development
• See also this recent online faculty development course on developing blended learning courses: http://blended.online.ucf.edu/blendkit-course/
• And I’ve seen this faculty development book recommended as well: Teaching What You Don’t Know
• Academically Adrift – I probably don’t even need to mention this one, it’s gotten so much attention, but here is a recent discussion and summary of responses/criticisms of the book.
• The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical Steps to More Successful Teaching and Learning – formative assessment is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning environments (see also work by Paul Black).
• See also this current discussion of challenges to formative assessment
• Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology – new edition (3rd) of this standard instructional design textbook
• Informed Design of Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Enhanced Learning and Teaching
• The Systems Thinking Playbook: Exercises to Stretch and Build Learning and Systems Thinking Capabilities
• Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates
• Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology, and the New Literacies - see also this recent post on net gen skeptic with more on how the digital natives / digital immigrants distinction is dead (or at least dying).
• The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy
• The National Academies Press (which recently made all their books available in pdf form for free, including the How People Learn book and Engineering in K-12 Education), recently released some new education books:
• Learning Science Through Computer Games and Simulations - See also this just published journal article: The Learning Effects of Computer Simulations in Science Education
• Successful K-12 STEM Education:Identifying Effective Approaches in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
• A Framework for K-12 Science Education
• Single-Case Design (pdf) – how to do research with a single class, from the Department of Education What Works group

New Books on HTML5, Canvas, Javascript

Some of these aren’t out just yet

• Making Things Move in Javascript – that’s actually a link to some free tutorials – the book is not out yet
• HTML5 Canvas
• Core HTML5: Volume 1: Canvas
• Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript
• Learning HTML5 Game Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building Online Games Using Canvas, SVG, and WebGL
• HTML5 Cookbook
• Coredogs – some free online lessons/books on web development, drupal

New Books in Psychology, Technology, Design, Embodied Cognition

• Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science - see also this recent article The enactive approach: Theoretical sketches from cell to society
• The Primacy of Movement - Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
• Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average and related books such as The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us and The Age of American Unreason
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood – by James Gleick (author of Chaos)
• Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis
• Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn
• The Third Teacher – exploring ways design can transform teaching

Review of Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed

Since at least the invention of BASIC and Logo in the 1960s, people, such as Seymour Papert, have made an argument that anyone can and should learn to how to program, and even make their own software applications.  The argument is that we should think of it as a new literacy, a 4th “R” of sorts – computational thinking, or multimedia authoring, or just simply, programming.  For me, it’s about knowing more than just how to make a powerpoint presentation or a web page, for example, and learning how to make an interactive animation or game or simulation and so forth.  I’ve blogged about it before (Programming: The New Literacy) and wrote a chapter on the topic (Toward a Nation of Educoders).

The most recent work in this area is a short book by Douglas Rushkoff titled Program or Be Programmed, and it was originally a short talk (here’s the video, along with a newer video made after the book).

So I went into the book expecting to agree with most of the points.  I’ve only gotten through the beginning pages so far and I do agree with many points, but there are also some problematic ones, especially relating to Rushkoff’s ideas about education and learning (which is not the focus of the book), and philosophy of technology.

Quotes

First here are some quotes from the early part of the book to get an idea, including some relating to education:

p.7 “When human beings acquired language, we learned not justhow to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just howto use programs but how to make them.  In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead,you will either create the software or you will be the software.  It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose theformer, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization.”

p.8 “the people programmingthem take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works”

pp. 12-13 “The Axial Age invention of the twenty-two-letteralphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers,but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town squareto listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it wasbetter than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short ofthe medium’s real potential.Likewise, the invention of the printing press in theRenaissance led not to a society of writers but one of readers”

p. 13 “Computers and networks finally offer us the ability towrite. And we do write with them on our websites, blogs,and social networks. But the underlying capability of thecomputer era is actually programming—which almost none of us knows how to do.”

So far so good.  Now on education:

p. 15 “elementary school boards adopt “laptop” curriculums lessbecause they believe that they’ll teach better than because they fear their students will miss out on something if theydon’t.”

This sounds like the same argument Larry Cuban made before (see this post), that schools only get educational technology and software to be “hip” and “with the times.”

Thoughts

The book seems to not be based on any research-guided understanding of how people learn.  It’s very centered on a model of a disembodied brain controlling our behavior (see my previous post on embodied cognition), and he also seems to share Nicholas Carr’s assertion that technologies like Google are making us stupid:

“Our brains adapt to different situations.”  “The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things.”

A recent article surveyed numerous scholars and the majority of them thought Nicholas Carr was wrong – Google and similar tools are helping make us smarter.

He also completely buys into the digital natives vs. digital immigrants idea (refuted by many), including the idea that the brains of digital natives are “wired” differently:

p.32 “A brain learning on computers ends up wired differently than a brain learning on textbooks.”

Rushkoff argues that technology is a part of us and an extension of us, and yet he somehow simultaneously argues that we shouldn’t stay connected with technology:

p. 37 “She is already violating the first command by maintaining an “always on” relationship to her devices and networks.“

Rushkoff keeps mentioning the Torah and religion over and over again, and the role of technologies/media in shaping religion (sort of an extreme version of Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato and others’ ideas I guess (like most of these types of books & journalism, there are little to no citations).

He is also probably of the belief that online education is inherently inferior to face to face education (which is not the case, see these meta-analyses and other potential misconceptions about learning and technology):

pp.41-42 “But those back-and-forth exchanges are occurring at a distance. They are better than nothing—particularly for people in unique situations—but they are not a replacement for real interaction.”

Basically, I’ve seen this type of book so many times I can’t count.  It’s a book about some new X, from the perspective of some person who has never done X, doesn’t like X, or was born long before X.  X might be video games, it might be open education, it might be embodied cognition, distance learning, educational technology, open access research and scholarship, web 2.0, etc.

Does educational technology exist to make schools “hip” and placate taxpayers?

Larry Cuban argues that we only have new technologies in classrooms in order to placate (mostly non-parental) taxpayers and politicians, so that schools can seem “modern” and “with it.”  Computers and so forth are just there as a status symbol, just like an ipod/iphone, or a nice car or dress (he actually used those analogies).  I’m not really buying the argument.  First, are schools awash in new technologies?  When you visit your local school, does it seem “modern” and “with it”?  9 times out 10, I’d say not exactly, with richer private schools being the usual exception.

If this argument is correct, then why are technologies only being bought for schools now?  Why not 50 years ago, 100 years ago?  There were never TVs in every classroom, and 100 years ago there were no calls for “1 horse per child” or “1 locomotive per school” even though horses were just as much a ‘status symbol’ as computers and cell phones are supposedly today.

What’s the difference now?  What’s different about computers (and interactive whiteboards, etc.)? Maybe it’s because teachers want it, students want it, parents want it, etc.   That’s not ‘resource dependence’ (satisfying taxpayers) at all.  In fact, the more something is likely to be a status symbol, the *less* likely teachers want it in the classroom, because it distracts from learning (such as iphones, etc.).  It was when computers and laptops became a commodity, an everyday phenomenon, that they started to grow more present in the classroom.

New Books on Learning & Technology

Some recent and upcoming books that caught my eye (haven’t read them yet).

• Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities – They’ve made a copy of Chapter 10: Action Notebook available online.  “it summarizes dozens of practical steps you can take to support your community.  With checklists, tables, and questions, it takes you through the steps of stewarding technology and outlines what to keep in mind at each step.” (via Scott Leslie, EdTechPost)
• How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching -  The words “Seven” and “Smart” in the title give me pause, but I’ll check it out sometime.
• Inspired College Teaching: A Career-Long Resource for Professional Growth -  Maryellen Weimer has written a good deal in SOTL (scholarship of teaching and learning).  See this essay Positioning Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning (pdf) and her site/blog: Teaching Professor.  They have a conference next week, too.
• Next Generation Course Redesign – By some folks at the University of North Texas.
• A Guide to Faculty Development -
• Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College – This book has gotten a lot of attention elsewhere already. I will check it out, but I’m a bit skeptical of folks who base their work on charter school results, since charter schools choose the students, which can skew the results.
• The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up – I’ve liked Kieran Egan’s work, although this one sounds a bit weird, he imagines being 50 years in the future or so, and how education changed (sorry, I forgot even the summaries I’ve read, it was a few weeks ago).  See his website and Imaginative Education Group portal for more info, too.
• The Systems Thinking Playbook: Exercises to Stretch and Build Learning and Systems Thinking Capabilities – Sounded interesting
• Using and Developing Measurement Instruments in Science Education: A Rasch Modeling Approach – Probably only interesting to those developing assessment instruments like myself.
• You are Not a Gadget – Already a good bit of coverage of this elsewhere.  Has some criticisms of web 2.0, wikipedia, and the like.  From a quick skim in a bookstore I found some points I agreed with, some I did not.  I’ll try to look at it more in depth in the future.
• DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education – There’s already been a good bit of discussion about this book in many places.  I liked the perspective this excerpt from Inside Higher Education gave on college life in the 18th century, to show that yes, we have made some progress in education
  • “In a faraway colony, one in a thousand people — mostly young, rich, white men — are sent to live in isolated, rural Christian communes. Some are pious, learned, ambitious; others are unruly younger sons with no other prospects. The students spend hours every day in chapel; every few years, the entire community is seized by a several-days-long religious revival. They also get into lots of trouble. In their meager barracks they drink, gamble, and duel. They brawl, sometimes exchanging bullets, with local residents, and bother local women. Occasionally they rebel and are expelled en masse or force administrators to resign. Overseen by low-paid clergymen too deaf or infirm to control a congregation, hazed by older students, whipped for infractions of the rules, they’re treated like young boys when their contemporaries might be married with children. And, oh yes, they spend a few hours a day in rote memorization of fewer than a dozen subjects. This was the typical 18th century American college, loosely modeled on England’s Oxford and Cambridge, which date to the 13th century.”
• And finally, some upcoming or recent embodied cognition/phenomenology books: The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Mark Rowlands), Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna & Maiese), and The Extended Mind (Richard Menary).

The Effects of Technology on Students’ Learning in Math: A Meta-analysis

A colleague of mine, Dr. Qing Li of the University of Calgary, along with Dr. Xin Ma, just had an article published in the journal Educational Psychology Review titled A Meta-analysis of the Effects of Computer Technology on School Students’ Mathematics Learning.  She found “statistically significant positive effects” which were ” greater when combined with a constructivist approach to teaching than with a traditional approach to teaching.”

I first came across Dr. Li’s work last year when she published an article in the British Journal of Educational Technology titled Instructional Design and Technology Grounded in Enactivism: A Paradigm Shift? (Word doc).  She presented this past Monday at the 2010 AERA conference in a learning sciences SIG session on embodied cognition and enactivism.  Her AERA paper as well as my presentation are at this site: http://embodiedcog.wikispaces.com/ Dr. Li is actually more known for her work on cyber-bullying.  She has several papers on that topic.

Dr. Li and I are currently putting together a chapter proposal on applications of embodied cognition and enactivism to instructional technology for the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology.  I’m also hoping to submit a proposal on engineering education for that handbook.

By the way, the person who chaired my AERA session, Dr. Alan Amory, also just had an interesting theoretical article published in the journal Interactive Learning Environments titled Instructivist ideology: education technology embracing the past? From the abstract: “It is argued that against the background of a neo-managerial and market-driven global education system, the production and use of technology to support teaching and learning perpetuates hegemonic behaviorist values….The analyses show that education technologies are often designed to support masculine hegemonic behaviorist instruction practices. As an extension, education technology is used in the classroom as the object of instruction to support fundamentalist values rather than a tool to mediate knowledge construction.”

Would Dewey, Piaget, Montessori, Friere get published today?

Imagine if Jean Piaget, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, or Paulo Friere were tenure track education or psychology professors today. They would probably not get their work published in education and psychology research journals, despite being some of the most highly influential and innovative thinkers in education.

Even some contemporary people who are or have been highly influential in education largely do not publish their work in journals for the most part, including Kieran Egan, Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences), Seymour Papert, Larry Cuban, and so forth.

They primarily publish in books.

Part of the issue is that we keep research, theory, development, and practice in separate bins. Educational research journals rarely publish about theory or development or practice; Philosophy of education journals primarily publish articles about long deceased theorists; and teacher/practitioner journals and magazines rarely publish about research or theory.

If some of the above authors submitted their work to journals, they would be rejected for not having p values and effect sizes, or because they discuss new and innovative theories and practices without devoting enough attention to past philosophers or empirical findings.

Research, theory, development, and practice are not separate but equal things. Influencing and changing education for the better is not the result of any one of those in isolation. A common thread between them all is innovation. We are interested in new, innovative ideas and practices and developments to improve education, such as those created by Piaget, Dewey, Montessori… This is more of a concept from engineering or entrepreneurship than science or philosophy. One might adopt an engineering perspective on education (as Dewey did). If you compare today’s world outside of education to the world of 100 years ago, the starkest differences and advances are a result of engineering. We don’t use p values alone to judge improvement in automobiles or computers. We don’t have to cite Plato or Kant to better understand new medical technologies.

Of course engineers do research, engineers do discuss theory and philosophy (the fPET engineering & philosophy conference is this weekend), and engineering is inherently connected to development and practice. But too often educational research is disconnected from changing theory or practice, and educational philosophers don’t engage in innovative development or empirical research. The former becomes aimless and ineffectual; the latter becomes arm-chair theorizing disconnected to everyday practice. Practitioners, too, sometimes glom onto some new idea or technology that doesn’t have a basis in research or theory, or doesn’t really change or advance their practices (IWBs, or interactive whiteboards, may be a current example).  Developers sometimes recreate activities based on outmoded and less effective ideas.  That said, are K-12 and higher education teachers and developers supposed to read and apply educational research journal articles?  I don’t think so, although there is evidence for a correlation (not a causal link): engineering instructors for example who follow educational research have better student learning outcomes, but they are a tiny minority, the exception. And it’s not entirely the responsibility of practitioners. It is our job as educational researchers, theorists, and developers to always be highly connected to innovation and making educational change happen, as were Dewey and so many others. At the very least, we should be striving to communicate our work publicly with others and allowing for public feedback and criticism from practitioners, theorists, developers, and so forth. Many more people read a magazine article or even a blog post or view a youtube video than read an educational journal article or attend a conference presentation.  My AERA talk was attend by 20 people, but after posting it online over 200 people had viewed it within a few hours.  A journal article, even an open access one, I would guess at most a few hundred read (and virtually zero practitioners), whereas an innovative new software tool or instrument or curriculum may be used by hundreds or thousands more, especially when given away for free with an open license.  I and other edubloggers, #edchat’ers, youtube educators, and educoders know this phenomenon well.  Salman Khan‘s instructional videos on youtube get more views than even all of MIT’s opencourseware courses combined.  If you google ‘cognitive load theory’ you’ll get my post that is critical about it, even though I don’t do research on that topic myself, and despite decades of other published journal articles and books on the topic.   Perhaps Dewey and Friere would have had blogs or twitter accounts or Youtube channels, like Larry Cuban, Roger Schank, Richard Hake and many other less well known but nevertheless influential educational innovators do today.

Voicethread presentations on teaching & learning

Students in my advanced instructional design course (login as guest) created some narrated presentations in VoiceThread at the end of the semester.  They are on topics related to faculty development, teaching and learning, multimedia, etc.:

• Service Learning
• How People Learn framework
• Backward Design
• Threshold concepts
• Animations vs. Diagrams
• Test-Wiseness
• Multimedia learning

The end of the presentations have links to more resources, but apparently voicethread doesn’t make the URLs clickable in a slide.  Comment here and I can post the links in a clickable format.

“Supporting” Open Education

Learners need support.  That’s my overall gist from reading recent constructive criticisms of open education and open education resources (OERs) by Michael Feldstein and Tony Bates.  Dumping class lectures and notes online (which comprise the vast majority of OERs and opencourseware materials) is not very supportive of learners.  I forgot the reference, but I believe even students IN the class often don’t view the resources online if it’s just a dump of what they already heard in class.  The study I remember reading showed that students who DO view the resources had higher test scores, but that’s actually a correlation, not a causal relationship (perhaps better students viewed the resources more, or worse students got no supplemental benefit from the online lectures).  When you do post resources online, it’s better if they are designed specifically for the online learner, or to supplement face-to-face instruction, such as shown in this research article on instructor-made videos.  And of course, learners need spaces to interact, create, share, etc (wikis, blogs, whatever).  Opencourseware sites unfortunately are not interactive or participatory.  Even on Curriki you see Moodle zip exports, not actual Moodle courses you can participate in.  These sites are designed more for instructors, not learners, which is fine, although instructors are not as keen on re-using/re-mixing as we would like to believe.  I’m really encouraged to see the first really free Moodle hosting site appear: http://www.keytoschool.com/

In response to a post by Stephen Downes arguing against Michael Feldstein’s post I commented:

The kids/students that Michael is talking about (who need learning support and guidance and so forth) are not at any of those sites you linked to. They aren’t at opencourseware sites, either. Those (adults) who are at opencourseware sites are not re-using/re-mixing anything. There is no producer-consumer collapse, unfortunately.

Survey kids or the general public, and they don’t know anything about any of this stuff.

They know Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Youtube, Facebook. The last 3 are where they really interact, and Yahoo Answers is where you find many students actually learning (and yes, cheating).

Yahoo Answers is the type of ‘support’ site that Michael might be referring to, and that David Wiley has mentioned before as one of the critical services of education (he thinks can be disaggregated from the others, I think there might be problems with disaggregating education services, as we’ve seen in the programming industry).

And yes, corporations and educational institutions are providing support for learners/trainees. Even by just putting multiple learners in the same room together or in the same office as other employees you provide some support or allow them to find/offer their own support. It may be poor support, but you don’t see corporations and institutions just dumping lectures and expecting people to learn from them on their own. [I meant to say ONLY, not just.  Unfortunately for people outside the institution, that is the only thing they have access to]