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.

Black arts

We heard a lot about Generation Y today. It made me flick through the pages of Peter Sheahan's book again, reminding myself of his various insights. On page 96 he quotes Linda Botter: "What Generation Y want to know are the intangibles. How are you going to develop me?" Translating that into my speak... they want to be given ownership of the process. They want to plug and play. So I think it may be time that teachers revealed the secrets of their black arts, their pedagogies. I certainly have no problem with that... here are mine... Park 4 Types, Vectors, CLD, MOOC, and of course a test for VARK. It all fits on a side of A4 and can be grasped by a novice in about 10 minutes. Given the process, and encouraged in model thinking, and in critical thinking, and if STEM then in the scientific method, all that is left is to release them into the problem domain. They will find their own way. It's not so much about what we do, as what we are prepared to relinquish; to not do.

Gen-C MOOCism

Generation C are defined by their communities-of-interest, creativity, and connectedness. They have a connectivist pedagogy all their own. MOOC can truly be called an emergent organisation or pedagogy, "The idea of a MOOC was really a response to something that was already happening." (Cormier). MOOCism may be emergent, but the stated pedagogical principles look very like Shneiderman to me, which doesn't exactly make them new (m-Ako).

MOOC	Shneiderman
Aggregate	Collect
Remix	Relate
Repurpose	Create
Feed Forward	Donate

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.

What's MOOCology?

MOOCology is a subclass of lifelong learning. You sign up for and participate in Massively Open Online Courses not so much to study the subject, as to study the genre. Along the way you get to meet a superabundance of interesting people (players in some ethereal game), and you get to learn (or discard) a lot of fascinating stuff. But the real value (for me) is the way the genre seems to transcend, bypass, nullify, disarm and maybe eventually destroy the institution. Are we seeing a paradigm shift, or simply another technology-driven fad?