The Scariest Trends in Education.

Accountability: Whenever a politician starts talking about accountability it usually means someone besides Congress has to be held accountable for something they have no control over. This is political code for stripping educators of tenure or their right to  bargain collectively. Click here to see how this is playing out in Fairfax County Fairfax County Firing

Accountability in education is revolving around cost. The same can be said for School Choice. School choice can be subtitled; “we’re going to strip the schools in the poor neighborhood of resources because they’re lousy and give them to better schools in better neighborhoods to reward them for having wealthier, more politically active parents.” In Washington D.C. this threat led to widespread test score fraud with the architect of the sneaking out of town to avoid getting smeared with the mess she caused (D.C. Test Fraud story).

The same cost/market forces approach is behind the concept of merit pay in education. The problem is, all consumers in the education “market” are not equal. For a market approach to really produce success, consumers (parents of school-age children) have to have equal access to schools. They do not and they never will. Low-income families live in impoverished, politically impotent districts that depend on the charity of their better-off neighbors, the state, or federal government for funding.

Why not have merit pay and unions? Or merit pay and tenure? That idea never seems to come up because the real reason for discussing merit pay is to reduce costs. Period. Cheaper education is only better education if you are being taxed to pay for someone else’s kids schools. the wealthy in America do not want to pay for the education of the poor and they are working very hard to elect political factotums who are working toward an end to public education. Unthinkable? Our government is working to privatize highways, prisons, utilities, and through voucher programs and school choice, education.  Recently a New york candidate for U.S. Congress advocated ending public education.

 

Blended Content and Assignments

I have two real biases when it comes to designing content and assignments regardless of delivery mode. These biases definitely shape the kinds of experiences I encourage faculty to use in the courses I help design. They also inform or affect the courses, workshops, and seminars I design and teach myself.

First, I (as previously mentioned in this blog) believe that learning occurs as a direct result of interaction. Second, I believe that project based learning offers the best opportunity for student learning, retention, and far transfer of knowledge.

Please understand that while I acknowledge these biases and hold these beliefs dearly, I do not hold them to the exclusion of other approaches or ideas about learning. I just think these two generally for the core of a solid, pedagogically sound approach to creating meaningful instruction, especially online where a more transmissive approach loses some of its spontaneity and drama but virtue of the fact that it is recorded and id delivered in a small video player, not fortissimo in a lecture hall.

As a result, the courses I design tend toward learn by doing. For example, in the faculty development course I am currently designing, instructors will be creating their courses as the culminating “assignment”. The finished course is the final project. The components of the course, the technology integration, course plan, goals and objectives, etc. are the assignments. The “students” in this case the faculty here at GW, will be learning by doing.

Assessment is in the form of formative feedback and a course review which I perform on every course before it runs a survey we perform mid-semester, and a faculty debrief I conduct at the end of the semester. In the first review I make certain predictions about how various elements will perform and the level of effectiveness of each. During the semester, we poll faculty on about a dozen issues or factors related to their course and make suggestions if the poll turns up problems or potential problems. After the course runs, I discuss these predictions with faculty during the debrief and we see how accurate we both were in terms of how students learned and “took to” the various assignments, technologies. How effective they were. How student performance in the call compared to previous online classes and to face-to-face classes as well.

In this way, I urge the creation of courses that best leverage both new technologies and well-proven learning strategies and ensure that these approaches are both effective and practical for the faculty I support.

Death by Acquisition

Jaycut (
http://jaycut.com/
), a fine suite of cloud-based video tools is essentially dead. It looks like it died in vain.

The company was acquired by Research in Motion (RIM) in July, 2011.  CEO, Jonas Hombert announced the sale in typically vague and useless corporate double-talk,

“    The value proposition for my team and me was simply awesome: we can stay creative and we get to focus solely on developing great video editing tools, which has the potential to be used by many millions of users. Finally, we come into a context where our expertise is both valued and wanted.
     So what will happen now? Well, even though I would love to tell you about all the brand new stuff we’re working on with RIM, you know I can’t. There are still many decisions to be made, but what is certain is that you’ll soon see some really cool and creative stuff coming out of this now established Stockholm enclave of RIM.”

PC world’s Stephen Lawson wrote this on the acquisition:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/236375/rim_buys_videoediting_vendor_jaycut.html

What happens now is the product is dead. The team that developed the technology sold out, made a ton of money and a promising tool has gone the way of the dodo. The website no longer displays the Jaycut tools, does register allow new customers, and inquiries are met with  ‘Thanks for checking us out, we’ll get back to you’ language that only a three-year old would believe. The Jaycut website is a place holder.

RIM plans to integrate JayCut video editing to the PlayBook, a tablet vying for market share in the iPad universe. Unfortunately this will end the tool’s availability to educators and students and quite probably everyone else too as a four-day outage has spawned lawsuits and customer disillusion. Market share is dipping into the single digits, product margins are being squeezed, and RIM is running on cash reserves.  One analyst, quoted in the linked article above, describes the Playbook as “nothing short of a disaster.” With RIM in such dire straits, it seems likely that Jaycut died for nothing.

Why does an EdTech blogger care?

First, because a promising, cutting edge Web 2.0 tool has been mothballed and probably killed as a result. Jaycut had enormous potential for integration into the classroom in both the K-12 and higher education arenas.

Second, even if RIM survives and integrates Jaycut’s technology into its tablet platform, the technology will only be available to a very tiny fraction of users; (see an article on the Playbook’s shrinking market share here:
http://techland.time.com/2011/09/16/rim-playbook-and-smartphone-sales-tank/
) those (very few) loyal Blackberry customers who love their Playbooks. Tp provide an idea of the RIM’s limited market, RIM shipped 200,000 Playbooks last quarter, compared to the 9.25 million iPads Apple shipped over the same period (about 2%). How much longer will the Playbook survive if the trend cotinues? And if the Playbook dies, Jaybut dies along with it.

RIP Jaycut. Born 2007 – Died 2011

Thinking About Teaching

I read an interesting article by Diane Pike on the topic of how we cling to dead ideas in teaching. More accurately, how we cling to ideas proven to be ineffective; for reasons we can not articulate. For example, we know grades do not motivate learning, but that is how most faculty and institutions assess learning. The current national obsession with accountability in education, focused mainly in K-12 but creeping into an insistence that colleges focus on creating “job-ready” graduates; demonstrates this insistence on using an idea we know to be false to make current policy.

Every year faculty grumble that students are not as prepared as they were 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago. First, Pike reminds us this can not possibly be true. Such an escalating lack of college readiness would have us teaching Dick and Jane in doctoral programs by now. Second, Pike says, so what? Why not focus on where we are rather than where any one administrator, faculty member, or politician says we were or should be?

My favorite part of the article was where Pike addressed the role of technology in teaching and learning. Most edtech professionals are already in the place Pike thinks higher ed should be, but it would be nice if everyone else joined us. Pike mentions a quote from an unnamed Minnesota governor expressing a prophecy that in the near future students will be buying their education from iTunes at $199.00 a course. The idea is that technology will rescue education and make it make higher education accessible, cheap, and decentralized. It won’t. Good online courses are expensive to create and time-consuming to teach.

Using technology in face-to-face courses, Pike suggests, is probably the biggest opportunity to affect learning but largely goes unexplored. Colleges an universities hire instructional design professionals for their online programs but not to work with faculty who teach traditionally. Those faculty educate the most students. Technology in the service of pedagogy, used to expand pedagogies, is a good thing. Technology for its own sake, not so much.

Pike, as a sociologist, understands that education takes place in a socialized context, not isolated from one. Politicians have done a great job of politicizing education. Based on the comments of most elected officials, injecting themselves and their ideological outlook on the process of learning seems to be more important than actually creating opportunities for citizens to get an education.

The article can be found here, and I urge anyone interested in teaching and learning in higher education to read it.

The need for institutional vision

When plotting a strategy for creating online and/or blended learning at a college or university, a strategic, institutional vision is cricital for success. At this point in time any number of institutions; large and small, first tier research universities and for-profit technical schools; have invested in online and blended courses.

One of the main questions faculty ask, especially those not enamored of the idea of abdicating their lecturn, is; “Is this hybrid stuff as good as traditional methods?” The honest answer is; It depends. It depends on the rigor of the instrucitonal design, the quality of institutional technology infrastructure, the skill of the instructor, and the quality of the courses developed.

This brings us back to the concept of institutional vision. This is important because without vision distance education can easily become the very nightmare Luddite’s fear most.

Good hybrid courses depend on good instructional design, but without institutional support there won’t be instrucitonal designers and technologists to assist faculty with the creation and maintanence of their online and hybrid courses.

Good hybrid courses are dependent on technology infrastructure. Without a clear, vision with regards to infrastructure, incorporating rich media, 24/7 access to course materials and other mainstays of a quality hybrid environment are not possible.

Finally, good hybrid courses are dependent on the skills of the instructor. By skills i mean both pedagogical understanding of hybrid education and technology skills to create and incorporate rich media into course offerings. If faculty are going to be skilled, the institution has to invest in faculty training and development. Which means staff and resources to train faculty who are experts in their field but often have no or only rudimentary backgrounds in pedagogy.

If any of these components are missing, any hope of creating a quality hybrid environment disintegrates rapidly.

Blended Assessment of Learning

Philosophically, blended learning has more in common with online than face-to-face structure in that both online and hybrid course environments tend to be ‘designed’ with help from or consults with instructional design staff; while traditional face-to-face courses tend to be instructor designed. This is important for assessment because when course goals, learning objectives and outcomes are mapped to content and assessment during the design process, there is a higher likelihood that assessments will trend toward the authentic and away from high stakes multiple choice, short answer.

Typically, I favor courses where a significant percentage of testing is done using low stakes quizzes and discussions to account for approximately 30-40% of the final course grade, reflective writings account for another 30-40% and projects account for the rest. Generally speaking, when I develop courses I encourage faculty to use a  variety of assessments (with projects, reflection, and synthesis being given the greatest weight) if at all possible.

In some disciplines, notably mathematics, economics, and certain sciences, there is a reluctance to do this, and unfortunately I lack a level of subject matter expertise that would be useful in helping faculty create alternative assessments.

I do think using assessments other than high stakes tests has benefits in the measurement of competencies, in reducing cheating, and providing students with a clear link between their studies and their hoped for careers. My expectations for online assessments are the same as they are for face-to-face. The assessment should measure student learning in a useful, meaningful, and transparent way that allows students to understand how, why, and by what criteria they are being assessed.

I am less biased in the area of mode than in type. Online or face to face, my opinion definitely slants toward the value of project-based assessment, linking learning to authentic tasks and assessments, and avoiding assessments that are graded on either a curve or other norm.

The very concept of a grading curve runs counter to competency based education. If a student scored a 60 out of 100 on an exam and the average score is 58, changing a student’s fifty to a 77 does not mean they have mastered the material. I means, in fact, that despite the fact that they have not mastered the material, they are going to advance to the next level of the course where they will be even less prepared to do the work.

This encourages cheating by students who have no hope of actually doing the work but have now invested time, money, and effort into the curriculum and feel obliged to continue on the path.

I probably have greater expectations for online assessment because I know or feel confident that the assessment strategy tends to be thought out more completely in an online or hybrid course where an instructional designer as well as a faculty member are working on the course.

The obvious trade-offs are between auto-scored online quizzes and project-based assessments are ease of grading and other course management issues and quality of assessment as well as the authenticity of the assessment tool. I’m not certain there is a “right” balance so much as there is a need to avoid taking the easy way out. On the other hand, it does no good to have 350 students write 20 essays the instructor cannot read quickly enough to provide meaningful feedback. To this end the use of multiple low-stakes quizzes and discussions establish a baseline of learning and reduce instructor workload while projects and other more authentic tasks add instructional quality and validity of the measurement instrument.

The balance comes from mapping the assessments to content and outcomes as well as respecting student efforts and faculty responsibilities.

Formal assessment in the hybrid course I am creating will take place in graded discussions, low stakes quizzes, and a series of small projects that form component pieces of a larger, more comprehensive project. There will be very little in the way of structured informal assessment. Most of the assessment for this course will take place in the online portion of the course.

I had to ask

 

I wanted to try to add a poll. Trying to learn the features that will make the blog more interesting.

Interaction in a Blended course

• What we know about learning indicates that actual knowledge creation takes place during and as a result of interaction. Interaction, whether formal or informal,  occurs between learners and peers, learners and materials, and learners and instructors. How students create knowledge, in terms of cognitive process is similar enough that regardless of discipline, the value of student-student and student-instructor interactions is high.

• Interaction plays the same role whether it exists or not. If interaction builds knowledge, lack of interaction leads to the absence of knowledge . The less interaction that occurs, the less knowledge is created. This underscores the difficulty all universities have with the large survey or introductory level courses that involve multiple sections. Creating interactions and active learning exercises in these courses is difficult, so creating knowledge, real, useful, transferable, persistent knowledge, is difficult as well. With so many stake holders involved, making dramatic changes to how these courses are taught is risky, so often happens very slowly or not at all.

• Face to face interactions can be valuable for activities that are difficult to do (though not necessarily impossible) in an online format. Role play, oral presentations, Socratic dialogue, or activities, like the example in the reading where immediate feedback changes the context for the next exercise. I would also classify labs, tutorial sessions, demonstrations, guest lectures as face to face interactions for the purposes of this discussion.

• Online, I would use threaded discussions, reflective writing assignments (blogs) or group collaborative projects based around either text or images and video (wikis). The blended format allows students to discuss readings and other course materials in a DB before the class, so questions, problems, and issues are dealt with more effectively and efficiently in the face-to-face sessions. For example, an assigned reading is given, students are asked to identify the three crucial sections of the reading and analyze them in the light of some current event. Students post this activity to a blog and peers comment before class. As a result of reading student blogs, the instructor might realize there are wise spread misunderstandings about the meaning or value of certain materials so spends more time clarifying a concept or section of the learning materials. Some of the assessment of learner knowledge can occur prior to instruction, use those assessments to tweak the course as it goes forward and creates a kind of continual formative assessment that allows the instructor to shape in-class activities to fit the up to date realities of his students.

• Time, space, money, availability of tools, technical abilities of the learners/faculty, perceived value of the activities, and the pedagogical adventurousness of faculty are all issues that help determine the viability of robust interactions in blended courses. For example, if faculty and students do not have the use of a video conferencing tool either because one is not available or because they do not know how to use one, things like online office hours, remote tutoring, and other forms of synchronous scaffolding cannot occur. A faculty member who is unwilling to stretch the range of their own pedagogy are not going to create courses with robust interactions. Institutional valuation plays a role here too. Research and publication are the means by which faculty achieve tenure. Junior faculty on the tenure track have a huge disincentive to divert time and effort from those activities to teaching and learning. Schools hire research but sell education. Often this means the cutting edge thinkers in a field are available  to students; but it also means those same thinkers are not necessarily putting students’ needs first. All of these things can work against the creation of robust interactions in any course; but especially true for course types that faculty are unfamiliar with.

A New Voice in the Ed Tech Wilderness

Welcome to my newly created WordPress blog. I created this blog as part of Kelvin Thompson’s Blendkit 2011 open blended course created as aprt of an initiative through NGLC. While I am not shy about making myself heard in discussions, I have resisted the call to blog until now because I did not want to make the commitment to post regular comments that would make a blog worth reading.

I am breaking down now as part of this course for two reasons. First, as a course developer I feel it is part of my responsibilities to my faculty to explore the technologies they may have a need for as fully as possible; something I cannot do if I don’t use them myself. Second, selfishly I want to get as much as I can form Blendkit 2011 and in order to do that, I need to full participate in the course, including the blogging aspect. Finally, as part of a major initiative here at The George Washington University, I will be working with faculty to develop a large number; as many a 350 blended courses over the next five years; in addition to fully online offerings for the summer sessions. As that initiative grows, I hope to solicit opinions and comments from other educational technology professionals with regards to a whole range of topics and feel a blog might be the best way to test some of my ideas before I offer them to faculty.

I hope you find this blog of value.

–paul