Evacuate your ivory towers now

John  L. Hennessy, president of Stanford University, was featured in the May issue of Spectrum, the magazine of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers); he's talking to Tekla Perry about online education. As he's been instrumental in the biggest experiment in online education ever, you might want to hang on his every word. Like...

"I'm a believer in online technology in education. I think we have learned enough about this to understand that it will be transformative. It's going to change the world, and it's going to change the way we think about education." Hennessy

I won't put everything in quotation marks. Understand that these are Hennessy's words as collected in an interview by Tekla Perry...

Here are some of the main points:

Lecture hall vs video lectures

• physical presence isn't all it's cracked up to be
• the students are rewriting the rules, they...
• don't attend lectures
• do watch videos online
• know how to use the pause button
• know how to watch it 20% faster

Interactivity

• Daphne Kohler was the pioneer of this platform
• she broke her lectures into 10-minute chunks
• and had a mini-quiz inline like a checkpoint

Students like an online learning environment because

• they can balance their lives
• which reduces stress
• which is a big issue for many students

The institution and the instructors like an online learning environment because

• it makes more efficient use of an instructor's time
• automatic grading systems get resourced and developed
• throwing certain courses open showcases programmes

Two quite distinct spaces emerge

• learning
• credentialing

"If you could double the student-faculty ratio by reusing online material without reducing student learning, you could significantly reduce the cost of education." Hennessy

Potential hazards

• online education could leave many students behind
• only small minorities...
• sit in their room, read the textbook, pass
• watch everything online, never talk to anybody, pass
• anybody can be a publisher, quality issues
• can everybody distinguish quality?
• undergraduate experience should be a whole experience
• learning how to work in teams

Willingness to change

• institutions build on tradition
• but they have to be dynamic
• must not be too attached to the past
• nor too faddish
• ongoing challenge

"Online education is going to happen; it's not going to wipe everything else out, but it's going to happen. We have to embrace it." Hennessy

Read the original article here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/john-l-hennessy-risk-taker

ARRFF proves versatile

I first saw the ARRFF learning model here... http://change.mooc.ca/how.htm and I thought it was quite neat, moderately useful: (1) Aggregate (2) Remix (3) Repurpose (4) Feed Forward. But the more I've worked with it, the more it grows on me. If you're familiar with the COLLES survey (built-in in Moodle) then you'll understand me when I say I choose "Almost always" to question 5, "I think critically about how I learn". I decide to have a period of Aggregation and I don't even attempt to move on to Remix. This phase could last three days or three months. Then one day I'll take two index cards I've scribbled notes on and push them together, and I know I've moved into Remix. Like some people go into rehab, but I go into remix. Re-purpose may follow swiftly, or it may be a long time in gestation. At some point much further downstream there'll be an article, or a blog post, and I'll have Fed Forward. Some people I talk to see it as being a bit like spiral development; but for me it's pretty linear more like the weather map... it's kind of nebulous (pun intended), and it may trend north or south, but it marches resolutely from west to east. As the last idea exits right, a new system is building in the Tasman. Although I work with a lot of other models for clients, MOOC's ARRFF seems to entirely cover my own lifelong learning meta-needs.