Largest Online Course Ever...

How many students can you satisfactorily teach in an online class? Well, most people would say about 20-25 students is the maximum for most online classes, but what about 160,000 students in one class? Well, that is exactly what Sebastien Thrun did in his online class at Standford University in fall 2011. As part of Standford's initiative to put Thrun's course online, he decided he would open his class to anyone anywhere in the world who wanted to take it along with the 200 or so students in his face-to-face class. Online students would cover same materials and take same exams and assessments as F2F class. Of the 160,000 students, Thrun reported 248 students passed with a perfect score. And while the completion rate was about 12 percent, his face-to-face class dropped from 200 students to 30 because students left the F2F classroom for the online version because they felt it was more intimate and better than the live classroom version. Thrun has now started a new online called Udacity and he hopes to enroll 500,000 students in his next course offering on building a search engine. Thrun feels this is portent of the future of higher education wordlwide and the demonstrable proof of the relevancy and enormous potential of online education. Read more Here.

Watch Sebastien Thrun talk about this experience Here.

eBooks Getting eConomical

The eTextbook movement just got a big push and might not be long before the hardcopy textbook market disappears from the higher education landscape in America. Inside Higher Ed reported that Internet2, a consortium of 221 colleges and universities agreed with MacGraw Hill to pilot a discount program on ebooks that could mean big savings to students and move the campus-based brick and mortar book stores one step closer to shuttering its doors. Read it Here. Basically the idea behind the consortium's strategy is that individually students can't make the book publisher reduce costs on eBooks to where they are a much better deal than hardcopies, but collectively institutions can negotiate better prices for their students and really drive this trend to market. Bottom line is that this approach is another portent of doom for the traditional textbook business in higher ed. Makes sense considering most campus bookstores are run by big box third-party book retailers these days and they are disappearing like arctic ice flows. Have you seen a Barnes and Noble bookstore or a Walden Books on the block lately? They started leaving town shortly after Tower Records.

iPads or iFads?

Interesting article from Doug Ward in the The Chronicle about the iPad. Read it Here. It really re-enforces my view of the iPad as a boutique web browsing device. Now before you accuse me of being a Luddite, hear me out. Ward is a professor at U of Kansas. He had all his students use iPads in a technology course for a semester and here's what was learned. Ward's students felt that laptops were still more functional than iPads for most of things they needed to do as students and they felt that the mobile phone is still more convenient than an iPad for the thing that they do most, which is texting. In the end the iPad became just one more piece of technology they didn’t want to lug around. According to Ward, they were frustrated by the iPad's lack of functionality (lack of a mouse, lack of a USB port, and a virtual keyboard that favors two-finger typing).

But they found the iPad was useful for reading and viewing things online which is basically what the iPad is - a presentation device. Even for reading, though, the iPad was a runnerup to the Kindle in one student's mind. She reported that if she were choosing a device for reading e-books, she’d buy a Kindle. In her mind, it is cheaper, is easier on the eyes and offers fewer distractions than an iPad.

Ward felt if you really want to make iPads useful in your course you need to create what Marc Prensky calls “Digital Native methodologies,” a term that refers to digital pedagogies amenable to the iPads limitations. In other words, Ward says you must change your assignments to match the technology you are using in your class.

So if you have a cohort or controlled setting you could give all your students iPads and develop all your course materials and activities to be delivered through the iPad and it would be enormously useful for your students. But why would you limit your educational approaches to the constraints of a piece of technology? And few schools, especially adult and continuing education providers have control over the devices their students use to access educational materials so it would be foolhardy to make the product suitable for a single device.

Furthermore, placing technology before pedagogy goes against the grain of research-based, proven methodologies for education that say you should base pedagogy on outcomes and then teaching strategies and then determine the appropriate technology to support them. You don't design education to match the latest technology; you identify the educational outcomes needed and then find an appropriate technology to meet those needs. So after selling possibly 30 million of these devices so far, the Apple iPad may still be more IFad than anything else in terms of educational value.

We Don't Need No Badges...

Maybe the banditos in Humphrey Bogart's film Treasure of the Sierra Madre didn't have any use for badges but badges are finding a following with today's 21st century adult learners . Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story on how badges are becoming the latest fad in online learning. It's sort of a new take on the old certificate programs which were more economical and time-saving than a traditional degree but provided the essential skills or learning adults needed for a particular skill or job. I think badges are a good idea for demonstrating mastery of a particular topic but colleges and universities need to be careful that the badge approach doesn't diminish the value of the more indepth and rigorous degree programs that are their bread and butter. The emergence of badges does point to the need for colleges and universities to emphasize outcomes in their programs more and more since one of the ways you will be able to differentiate the value between badges and full-blown degrees is the difference in proficiency among students who hold them. Read more at the Chronicle.

Cheaper to Go Digital

Everyone keeps wondering why online education hasn't tipped the scale in favor of ebooks over textbooks, but that tipping point may have occurred sometime in the last year according the Huffington Post. In the Education section Tom Vander Ark says that it is cheaper to give a student an ebook or tablet loaded with course reading than it is to buy a backpack full of books today; and they will definitely have more access to online content with a digital device; you connect to the Web from a hardcover right? So what are we waiting for? Read more at Huff Post here.

Online Learning Setback in Colorado

Students attending Colorado’s multiple online secondary education programs trailed their Face-to-Face classmates on nearly every academic indicator according to a recent report. From test scores to to high school graduation rates, the results of kids who participated in online programs for two years declined by double-digits in some cases. Colorado's online schools also had the highest dropout rates and lowest graduation rates in the state for the last two years. Now you could ask is it the online education or the standardized testing that is off kilter here because some parents feel their children learned and had more success in these schools despite the test scores. And remember that the online schools are usually a last resort for students who failed out of the traditional classrooms. But I think what is more telling is the way Colorado went about delivering online education to its high school students. They went with big box vendors like K-12 to provide the courses and programs. That means less ownership of the materials and the program for the teachers who need to deliver the courses to the students and definitely less professional development in online facilitation for the teachers. The teachers are still the most effective and important component of any online delivery that I have participated in or observed so far. And when there is little or no ownership of the content and insufficient development of the facilitators, you usually have poor online education. That's why I have always said that you need to develop online educators in these programs, not just online courses. Programs that I' ve helped initiate in Massachusetts focus entirely on having the teachers become online students before they ever teach an online class and we emphasize that the teachers participate in the development of the courses and truly learn best practices and standards for designing and delivering online education. This results in sustainable online education in the schools because the teachers and district own the courses and they have the skills to revise them any time they wish. The problem with dealing with vendors is once they go away you usually are left with online programs that don't have the skills nor the capacity to sustain. And in some cases the learning my be questionable as well

Read more in Education Week by clicking Here.

Who's Most Invested in Online Education

Eduventures recently released the results of a survey they did with 316 institutions from community colleges to four-year public and private institutions on how heavily invested they were in online learning and faculty training to prepare for it. And while 88% of Community Colleges and 84% of Public 4-year institutions reported being either “Engaged” or “Fully Committed” to online learning (surprising only 11 percent of the four-year publics were Fully Committed), the For-Profit four-year schools led the way with 42 percent being fully committed to online education. Faculty training and preparation was a surprise too. Most public and private four-year schools don't have comprehensive training to prepare faculty to teach online. Only ¼ of faculty at public and private four-year institutions is prepared for online instruction. Only 2.4 percent of the public four-year schools felt 90-100 percent or their faculty were prepared to teach online and 4,7 percent of the private non-profits trained 90-100 percent of the their faculty. Considering that nearly 25 percent of these institutions say they want to move between 80-100 percent of their programs online in the next three years, they have a lot of training to do.