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

Levels of engagement

One fundamental difference between conventional courses and a MOOC has to be the optional level of engagement. In both cases you only get out what you put in, but with conventional courses there seems to be an expectation that the student will fully engage with a view to gaining the credits (study points). In fact, with present-day funding models, joining a course to dip in but not attempt the assignments will probably be quite unpopular. With a MOOC any contribution a student makes is welcome, but lack of contribution really doesn't let anybody down (I suppose if nobody contributed it would be a bit of a flop). Like I say, you get to take away in direct proportion to what you put in.

Andrew Ng's ML-Class (Stanford, 2011) was not an example of a true MOOC

• it was massive at 70k students
• it was not open in that the subject matter was prescribed
• it was online
• it was a course

But it serves to make the point about levels of engagement... the student could engage at a Basic level (watch the videos, do the review questions) or at the Advanced level (watch the videos, do the review questions, do the assignments); and they could switch between Basic and Advanced at any time.

The way this desirable feature could be incorporated into conventional e-learning programmes would be to allow guest students to "sit in". If they enjoyed the experience, then next time around they could enrol proper.

It's like you're mountaineering: if you aspire to one day gaining the summit you might like first to be one of the team that carries the gear to base camp. You get to meet the gun climbers, you get to look at the mountain close up, and you can start to gauge your own fitness and preparedness.