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Well, thanks very much. It's certainly a real pleasure to be here and to be able to engage
in a topic that I think is increasingly relevant in the education sector, but I think it's
starting to have some [inaudible]. And so the discussions over the next few days and
some of the resources that Kris has already shared to lead us up to this are very beneficial
I think in helping us to do exactly what Kris referenced, which is this destabilizing our
understanding of what MOOC's are and the role that they play in society. Now for some, oh,
there we go. Mac seems to have decided to freeze here. So, first, let's talk a little
bit about a context or a bit of background around MOOC's as a whole. What is it that
gives them some of the weight and the influence that they have in society currently? And there's
a variety of factors. Some of this I don't think will be new to anyone in the room here.
One of the biggest areas is, of course, the development of the e-learning sector or the
e-learning space as a whole. Quite simply, online learning at this stage is one of the
fastest growing aspects of the education sector whereas much of the traditional market, even
though, you know, in spite of the claims, university is far from dead, but the growth
has slowed in most parts of the world. There are certainly regions where year still experiencing
double digit increases in the education sector, but a big area of growth is actually in the
e-learning or online learning space, whether that's higher ed or whether that's in the
K to 12 sector. So some significant activity going on in those spaces. Also, which you've
likely seen, is the development of enrollment numbers. Students who have taken an online
course in a span of about ten years have basically from less than ten percent to now being thirty
plus percent, in some cases approaching fifty percent or more. So there's a lot of interest
in this format or this approach to learning in this environment. Now this isn't entirely
new. There are systems such as Fathom. I'm not sure, how many of you recall Fathom? OK.
So there's a few. The big lesson there, obviously, is, you know, early is as expensive as being
wrong, and so Fathom was a system that was intended to be a response to some of these
really substantial trends of going online, but the way it was deployed, the way it was
enacted didn't quite align with the pace of change that was needed in the university sector,
or put another way, university and society just wasn't quite ready for the online learning
space at that stage. Normally, I walk around, but for some reason my clicker's not working.
So I'll be tethered to the desk here. One of the biggest challenges, though, around
this is that educationally, in addition to the growth of online learning, some bit of
being a bit gun shy because there have been some failed online learning projects. Probably
the most substantial factor that is driving MOOC's, and I'll get into this a little more
detail in a few slides, but is really the growing diversity of student profiles. So
this point, we're looking at less than half the students in the US would now be classified
as full-time students, and out of all the trends out there, this is probably the most
substantial, and this was referenced by the chancellor, which is, when you go from twenty
percent university completion rates and in terms of students entering higher education,
all of a sudden you're talking sixty or seventy percent, you have a different profile of the
student and the system has to provide a different level of support. Now the difficulty around
this, though, is that in virtually every single state, you've had a [inaudible] bloodletting
since about 2008 in terms of public support for the university sector. There's really
only two systems, you can't see it here very well, but Wyoming and North Dakota are the
only two that have actually had a budget increase. Other than that, some systems are looking
at fifty plus percent reductions in public support. So that's one of the context that
is putting a lot of cost pressures on the education system. Because when state funding
reduces, where does the revenue come from? Obviously, in the form of tuition. So that's
a significant factor as well. But I'd like to make the argument, and I will pick up on
this in bits and pieces is that one of the big aspects of our educational context is
that the need for individuals and their skill sets, their ability to function in a society,
are connected with what is needed by the economy of a society. So advanced economies such as
US, Germany, many of the European Union regions, they've seen a dramatic change where interaction
and transaction jobs, which would fit, interaction jobs would be really part of the creative
sector. Transaction jobs would be part of the service sector just to use slightly different
language. They outpace and now significantly overshadow production jobs, which fifty years
ago would have been the largest component of the economy. Emerging economies, China,
India being notable, they still have close to fifty percent of their economy is driven
by more traditional transaction-oriented jobs. So quite simply an employee or a student that
graduates from higher education, in spite of the many roles that higher education plays
in society, one of those is, obviously, employment preparation or the ability, as one person
put it, to be privately happy and publically useful. And so that aspect, the employability
dimension of it is significant, which means the corporate space or the work setting now
requires employees with a different capacity of skills primarily geared towards the creative
side of the spectrum. Now, unfortunately, and this is in reference back to the previous
slide, what we've seen is the reduction in support from state levels or government funding
of education to a dramatic increase from the student perspective, and as you make your
students pay more, they alter their expectations as well in terms of what they want from the
system and how they expect to relate to the system. So we then end up with this formula
of why is it that we have MOOC's today. And I think there's a variety of factors I'll
detail this in the next slide, but we have MOOC's for primarily few reasons. One is we've
seen an enormous diversification of knowledge needs by society. Secondly, we've seen tremendous
advancement of technology and the Internet, mobile, social network, software, and so on.
As a result of that, we have students now that are very proficient, unlike when Fathom
first initiated their platform, students today have a level of technical proficiency. Technology
has achieved a level of ease of use so that anyone, you know, for example, something as
simple as the iPhones and iPads, they make easy use of technology available to the masses,
something that PC's actually never did to the same level that these devices have. And
so, indeed, they've had an enormous impact in this regard. Now the last part of this
equation is quite critical, which is that universities have been surprisingly mute or
surprisingly unprepared or perhaps completely uninterested in some of the activities going
on in this space. So we have MOOC's for these reasons. So these things combine, these factors
combine, put us into this stage where now there's a lot of attention, interest in MOOC's.
One of the challenges, though, with MOOC's is that most MOOC's today enshrine or optimize
or even instantiate the education system of the past. So MOOC's would have been a terrific
model for 1980's because of the knowledge needs that were essentially required or the
knowledge needs that were significant at that time. What, from the perspective of higher
education, the perspective of learning needs, this is actually not a good thing. This is,
I would say, a bad thing, that MOOC's create an instantiation of an education system that
I would argue is less relevant today and needs to change quite dramatically. One of the best
statements that sort of captures or summarizes this is from Karl Jaspers and the idea of
the university where he states that, "Both student and teacher are unhappy when they're
chained to curricula and syllabi." For a variety of reasons, tests, standards, and so on. In
this atmosphere where you, essentially, develop testable factual knowledge, you stifle genuine
understanding and a spirit of adventure that really required for creative or creative economy,
or put another way, any education system or an education system that fails to emulate
the characteristics of information in that era is doomed to fail. You can't fight the
dominate mode and structure of information. The way people engage, the way people create,
the way people share, you can't expect individuals outside of the classroom to socially, collaboratively
create information, to create, whether it's Wikipedia or some of the dribble that occurs
on Twitter or Facebook or whatever other spaces. You can't fight that dominate way of interacting
with and creating information to be ignored by university system, for example, and have
that university still be successful in the long run. Because the way society interacts
with information is the way business interacts with information, which is the way that the
economic structure of information is being generated. So information today is a variety
of factors, but there's just a few criteria open, distribute, scalable, generative self-organized
network and so on. MOOC's , the way they're being pictured today or being created today
aren't any of those things, but, again, this is something that I'll pick up on a little
bit later. So here's sort of the core assertion that I'm making with regard to MOOC's. What
we're seeing in higher education is essentially a complexification, and this complexification
means that learning needs are dramatic, ongoing, lifelong. We've heard this for a long time.
We're also seeing that a simple singular narrative isn't going to suffice going forward. ^M00:10:00
That this notion of, oh, we should go to university so that we get a job and live the American
Dream or have whatever vision you have and what higher education does for you. That simple
narrative, higher education simply doesn't exist anymore. So the idea of the university
is expanding, and it's diversifying, and as a consequence, what we're seeing happening
with MOOC's right now is essentially the creation or is the MOOC's addressing the shadow education
system that has already been in play partly due to the challenges economically that society
has, partly due to the fact that we're constantly learning on a constant basis. So I don't think
MOOC's are competition with the existing university system. If anything, I would like to know
this motion and consider this in whatever spiritual terms you want, but it's essentially,
you know, the university among us is this notion of the higher education system as being
more tightly integrated and more central to all domains of society rather than isolated,
standalone place that you go to for four years and have fond memories of as you age and periodically
write checks to. It's essentially university becoming much like the language and the discourse
of higher education. It's, I've never seen a period where higher education is more prominent
in, you know, PBS, ABC, "New York Times", "Times" magazine. The quality or the interest
in the higher education system in public spaces is absolutely unprecedented, from my experience
at least, and so there really is this sense that a lot of people are starting to care
about the university [inaudible]. Hearing the minister's background with the, with IMF.
I just saw this this morning on BBC where they announce that IMF is actually going to
use EdEx as open platform now to run a series of MOOC's. Why? Because they want to increase
the financial literacy or the monetary awareness of people around the world so that they're
more familiar with the work of IMF. So, again, this is just a simple example of the diversification
of knowledge needs of a society and the way in which university or MOOC's are beginning
to sort of [inaudible] that shadow economy. And with systems like the recent initiative
by Georgia Tech with AT&T and Udacity, the development of the $6,000 master's in computer
science is just one example where you're seeing companies, corporations saying, OK, we need
people with, you know, comp sci degrees. We're not getting them produced. So if you call
that by the university system, we have to become more proactive and the expectation
here is in a short period of time you'll have thousands, tens of thousands of comp sci students
that aren't in place right now. Quick example of this. I mean, I know MOOC's are quite often
critiqued for their poor completion rates, but one of the first MOOC's that was run by
EdEx or at that point it was MITEx, was MOOC on circuits, and the prof that ran this particular
MOOC ended up with, as with any MOOC, a low completion rate in this five, six percent
level I believe, but that five to six percent based on scale, he graduated more students
out of that course than he had over a forty-year career of teaching that particular course.
So you can critique the completion rates all you want, but the scale is so large that the
real question is not what's the completion rate, but it's how many people are graduating
or completing this course in contrast to who had done in the past. And, coincidentally,
I think it was a 16 year old girl from India that was one of the top performers in that
course. So these are the kinds of things that when I talk about the diversification, the
complexification of the education sector, it's really in response to some of those challenges
that perpetual, continual lifelong learning. And just to sort of hit home the fact that
these are your traditional students, this is from an Edinburgh report, University of
Edinburgh ran some analysis of what they found with their students, and only 21 percent of
the students that took this particular MOOC were what I would look at as competition with
the traditional bachelor's degree program in most universities. The vast majority of
students that participated were in the 25 to 64 year age group. This was, so these aren't
individuals who are necessarily learning to get a degree. These are individuals who are
more involved in professional learning or personal learning or personal advancement,
and that's, again, supported by this particular, you know, assessment of what level of education.
Seventy, over seventy percent of students that took this particular MOOC had a bachelor's
or a master's degree. So the level of education of students taking this, these aren't your
I just graduated from high school, now I really want to learn about some complex subject students.
So from a, the current standpoint then, MOOC's are sort of seen being the hub of change.
They're driving this change, they're getting the attention, the recognition. They're sucking
all the oxygen out of the education discussion, but essentially MOOC's are more accurately
seen I think as a node that is part of an expanding ecosystem that focuses on ed tech
innovation, emerging pedagogy and some of those challenges that are very quickly taking
hold within society, and that's reflected as well with the, this enormous explosion
of ed tech startups where the ed tech ecosystem is now really the gold rush of the startup
space. So Silicon Valleyism is happening to the ed tech space, and the Silicon Valley
philosophy is very simple. Everything is broken. We'll build it from ground up but charge you
for it, but we'll make it look like it's free. And so that's what's happening in the education
sector right now. So I was very heartened today, this morning actually to see a report
by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation that said, you know what, while we recognize
that for profit participation in the education sector is relevant and important, we don't
want to outsource core competencies to a for-profit or a private company. And a core competency,
obviously, is MOOC's and delivery of those kinds of platforms, or that type of instruction.
And in all fairness, it's the university's fault. So I'm not trying to gloss it over.
Each, you know, the MOOC's exist because universities did nothing while the Internet continued to
grow and develop and sort of the ossification of higher education became a challenge, and
it took somebody from the outside to run a series of these open courses to really draw
some attention and change the conversation, but, fortunately, systems are now saying,
what a second. There is, higher education is a societal good. It is not strictly an
economic transaction. We as a university system, as a publically-funded system, even though
publically-funded these days means, you know, you might a few percentage points of your
funding from the public. It's not what it meant in the past, but, nonetheless, publically-funded
systems see a mandate that goes beyond simply preparing students for employment. It's about
generating an equitable society and preserving a Democratic model of governance. So that
equals a consequential paper, and I hope to see more universities think along those lines,
that question do we really want to outsource our core competencies. And one of the things
that's been substantial, though, is that 2012 "New York Times" declared it the year of the
MOOC, and, fortunately, humanity is a bit like a pendulum. Actually, there was one author
I read years ago, C.S. Lewis actually said humanity is like a drunkard that gets off,
gets on a horse, falls on one side, gets back on, and then falls off the other side. And
so 2012 was the year of the MOOC. Well, now we're the year of the anti- MOOC, and so we
see a lot of criticisms around MOOC's, and I do agree, you know, this notion of the politicians
[inaudible] is quite accurate. We must do something, this is something, therefore, we
must do this. And for a lot of states and even, you know, some university presidents,
MOOC's are the, this is something that we must do. But there's a, the conversation is
becoming more nuanced. At one point, it was just MOOC's are wonderful, and now we're starting
to get down to the details and understanding what is it that MOOC's actually are, and what
is it they actually represent. So there's concern about MOOC's as threatening prof's
intellectual property because what happens with a MOOC. If it's in course air, a university
can offer it or perhaps repurpose it depending on the licensing scheme. So you may well have
given away some of your resources in the process. Or the outsourcing of public higher education
has been an argument that's increasingly gaining traction as well. That as a result of the
for-profit presence, there's a few, I mean, [inaudible] still has all the ideals of a
higher education system, and I think that's because the leaders, there are genuinely,
[inaudible] they're passionate about education and increasing access to education. Udacity
is more profit driven, and you can see with some of the contracts that they're signing
with San Jose State and other systems where they really do want a piece of the pie. I
think [inaudible] and certainly EdEx still have the ideals of higher education prevalent
in the approach that they have to their partnerships and the groups that they want to work with.
But faculty are starting to say, you know what, wait a second. Maybe this whole MOOC
thing, and it's worth noting that MOOC's, every MOOC that I'm aware of at least has
come from either the IT side of the house or the administrative side of the house. And
personally I blame no one but faculty, but I'll get onto that in a little bit. But Duke
faculty and a few other of the systems are starting to say, you know, wait a second.
I don't like how we're moving. There's too many outstanding questions. There's too much
at risk here, and we're not convinced that this is going to be a quality degree or a
quality learning experience. Similarly, Harvard profs, they are starting to say, you know
what, we want greater oversight of these MOOC's or these systems that, these cores that EdEx
is offering, you can't build a parallel education system to what we have right now. Use the
profs that are funded in this education system to undermine that education system as well.
So for about a year and a half of being surprisingly quiet and pretending that MOOC's will go away,
faculty are sort of at a point now where they're saying wait a second. I'm not comfortable
with this. And in all fairness, I'd like to emphasis that I really don't blame anyone
except faculty because it's faculty that have largely lost the narrative on MOOC's and that
have lost the narrative on innovation. ^M00:20:06 And what's happening now is faculty are starting
to push back a little bit. When someone else has framed the discussion for you, you will
always lose on logic because anything you say eventually is going to be compared to
the framework of the discussion that's been created. So the education system, the way
we understand it today is really about employment, which isn't a hundred percent accurate. Basic
research in many systems is being devalued as it's being emphasized for greater commercialization
activity, and market forces and competition drive education's future. So in many ways,
and this is cynical, but it's not entirely inaccurate, that the reason we have a crisis
in education is because we've defunded education, and as a result of defunding education, yes,
now we need to start looking at other models and other approaches to deal with education.
So it's cynical, but I don't think it's accurate. So that's the challenge from a faculty perspective
is that the conversation around MOOC's is one that really we should have owned and we
should have driven, but we didn't, and as a consequence, outsiders came along and sort
of took over the conversation. Now faculty are starting to say we'd like to actually
play in this space after all. And sort of fun, sort of wrap up the details here, the
MOOC conversation has really gone in some interesting spaces. I, you know, hyped to
death like no other concept ever has been. But, now we're starting to see some greater
clarification of what are MOOC's actually, and we're starting to realize that, you know,
that beautiful partner that we saw after we had those 12 tequila shots last night, and
you wake up in the morning and you find, oh, maybe they're not perfect after all. And so
we've seen a few examples now where MOOC's are becoming mortal, and suddenly they're
not this do everything and change everything, and so Coursera, for example, which I thought
was, I was very surprised at this transaction because I. But up until that point, Coursera
was the flag bearer for change and innovation, and all of a sudden in one fell swoop they
became a content provider to the education system. So I, maybe that's what they always
saw themselves as being, [inaudible] the problem with my image of what they were, but Coursera
and other systems, Udacity. Initially, they were going to be a brilliant move, change
the education system. Now, they're basically providing remedial education support. They
have reduced themselves to a node within the education system rather than an entire model
that changes the education system. So it's been interesting how quick. Like every morning
you wake up, and something new happened in MOOC's last night, and that changed the landscape.
So we'll see what it is tomorrow morning. But let's just step back a little bit, and
talk about what MOOC's are from a perspective of the different ways of considering change
and change models. So with some of the perhaps the snarky comments I've had about MOOC's,
I do what to emphasize two things. One, I do not think that the education system is
broken. Alright. That narrative is such a mind numbingly silly narrative that, but it's
gained traction. And so everybody will stand up. I was at South by Southwest EDU, and I
was walking down the hallway, and a group of twenty, there was small, I think it was
three 21-year-old guys walking in front of me, and they're ranting about how we can transform
education system. The education system is broken, and, you know, suddenly you start
to feel like you're old and cantankerous, right, when you say, like, come on. What do
you know about the education system a bit beyond bars and beers, but. So it's not that,
so the sense that there are people who are recipients of the education system are the
transformers of the education system, it's really the sense that we are changing for
the sake of change rather than a vision of something new and different. Years ago, I
met with, it was a Catholic priest. I did this silent retreat. I'm not Catholic, but
I, so I went to do this silent retreat where we, I had to spend time not talking, which
as you can imagine maybe a challenge, and each day for one hour, the priest would come
in, he'd light a bunch of candles, and I'd have to patiently wait, and then he would
ask a series of questions that I would respond to, and that was all the talking I could do
that day. And he made a brilliant point that's really guided my thinking in many areas of
life in one of these sessions where he said, "Never move away from something. Because if
you move away from something, you never know where you're going to end up. Always move
toward something." So never leave, you know, never break the university system. Always
create a vision for something better. Don't fight the system. Move toward a vision of
something more positive. And so that's still very much been sort of my thinking on the
university sector as well. So that's I think the challenge that a lot of the rhetoric and
the dialogue that we hear about the education sector and the need for transformation and
education is broken. My first point is, no, it's not. The education system is doing exactly
what it was made to do. What's happened isn't that the education is broken. It's that the
learning needs of society has advanced. And so now it's not the system is working great,
but it's just not aligned with the knowledge needs of society anymore. So that's point
one. Secondly, I do believe we need dramatic structural changes to higher education. I
would personally be quite pleased if the faculty and the academy would be the ones driving
that rather than externalists, but we'll see how that unfolds going forward. So we're going
to talk about two particular change models. This one is a bit of a tortured comparison,
but I'm going to make it anymore until someone stands up and says, no, you can't compare
scientific revolution with the changing university. It's completely different. But until we do
that, I'll say Kuhn emphasized this accumulation of anomalies. And so when you have a series
of anomalies that build up, they don't function within normal science. Normal science will
discard those anomalies over a period of time. What happens at a certain stage, though, is
the anomalies build up to such a level where we can't discount them with our existing research,
and so we then have something along the lines of phase changes. I don't like that other
p word. So I'm going to ignore that. And what ends up then is we end up with dramatic change.
We have an alteration of some of the core premises that we used to use to look at the
world. We have relatively new framework that accounts for those subchanges or anomalies
that we used to ignore. And I would argue again, I know it's a little tortured, but
I would argue that that's exactly where we are with higher education. We tried to make
the university bend and twist and contort to respond to all of these enormous knowledge
needs in society, and we've tried to do that we a course model, and we've tried to do that
with the research model that we have, and all of a sudden now, I think we've seen enough
anomalies accumulate that it's time to start thinking, OK, stop. Why is this system not
working the way we think it should? What do we have to do? What do we have to rethink?
And there's a variety of them. I'm not going to go into all of them, but there's a variety
of factors, whether it is the granularization of learning, namely, we are no longer course-based
learning needs in society. Whether it is the move towards competency models of education,
the use of learning analytics, the use of social participatory pedagogies. The list
goes on, but at a certain stage, you can't tweak a system enough to make it still function
for the needs of a particular context. Sometimes you just have to rethink the whole thing.
And this is what someone like Carlotta Perez, who is probably one of my favorite [inaudible],
even though she wouldn't call herself a change theorist, but she's written extensively on
when do you have enormous shifts. So the [inaudible] paradigm shifts are actually, they don't occur
as often. I mean, if you go to conferences, we have a paradigm shift roughly every week,
as often as we change our socks and underwear, but if you look at historically, they don't
happen very often. These are things that happen every century or two. And so that's one change
model where it doesn't happen as frequently as we expect it would, but a second change
model that I think is very accurate is the work of Carlotta Perez, and it's a, really
a techno-socio-economic model, but just looking at two dimensions, namely the technological
dimension. And that's that there's an installation period where you have rapid technological
growth, infrastructure is being brought into place, and then you have some type of a turning
point or a crisis, and this is where you begin to have the new system aligned with the new
technology. I'll bring a second perspective to hopefully clarify because I was a little
vague. In the 80's, there was some discussion within economics about the statement that
we have computers everywhere except in the productivity stats. And namely the emphasis
being great. No, we've got all these computers, but what are we doing better or different
or what have we gained as a consequence. And so an individual, Polly David, decided to
look at when have we had broad scale technological changes, and how did they produce some kind
of an outcome. So he actually looked at the electrification of America. So he went back,
and he looked at when the dynamo, the electrical engine was brought in. What happened to the
physical spaces, the manufacturing sector? So historically, factory, multi-story building,
central shaft powered by an engine in the basement. Belts coming off the shaft on each
floor. If a belt went down, the whole floor went down. If the engine in the basement went
down, the whole factory went down. So that was the model. All of a sudden people got,
you know, the electric engine was developed, and electricity was slowly being brought across
America. So what are these manufacturing plants do? They would take out the other engine,
and put in the dynamo or the electrical engine, and nothing changed, right. So you had this
sense that it was the installation phase, to use Perez's language. But over a period
of time, and David discovered that it was a segment of about forty years where you had
these engines being brought in, and slowly people realized, oh, this is something different,
or if you're familiar with Gibson's notion of affordances, namely, the action potential
of a particular tool. If you look at the affordances of it, it's different. So we don't need to
have a central shaft anymore because we can actually run outlets, and people plug in locally
and then the engine. So if one floor, you know, one item goes down, it doesn't kill
the whole floor. The thing still stays functional and operational. And so that's essentially
what we found is that once the installation period is there's a period where you need
structural change to fully take advantage of the new innovation. ^M00:30:04 So a quick
example then and together with Steven Downs and some work with Dave Cormier, we've run
a series of open online courses, and I just briefly want to talk about what those courses
were like and what our mindset was behind those open courses. And the perspective of
DS106, which is another course that's been run as well. I haven't been involved in it,
but a group of colleagues and friends have run this iteration, and to borrow someone
else's language, and namely when I had with Jaspers is the goal is here to unchain students,
not just students but faculty from curriculum and syllabi, and to really start focusing
on creativity. How can we make the university as an idea, as an instantiation, align with
the knowledge needs that will allow people in society to solve complex knowledge problems?
For example, SARS in 2003 is one of those examples of a complex knowledge challenge
that wasn't solved by what I would call duplication knowledge, right, where we take what somebody
knew and apply it to something new. It's what I look at as being generative knowledge where
new things are created, new ideas are developed. And so I hope I'm not being too unfair to
Coursera and EdEx. I, I think they're outstanding platforms, and I absolutely applaud the work
that's being done there, but, you know, if you have the mic, then you can bring in your
own bias. So what we did with our system, so I would say Coursera and EdEx have a perspective
of knowledge as duplication oriented. A successful course is one where your student comes to
understand what you understand, and that's why you have heavy testing, heavy quizzing,
heavy assessment because what you're really trying to do is do your student have the knowledge
profile that you yourself have. And some of the open course, [inaudible] here as well.
I mean, he's done this with Blackboard. Ray Schroeder has done this with Edumoch [phonetic].
We've done it with courses that we've offered. So there's a variety of individuals in the
academic space who have said, you know, we don't quite want to duplicate knowledge. We
do want people to get out there and create stuff, generate things, create artifacts of
understanding. Share it with others and have that become a node in their creation of new
ideas themselves. So there's just a very quick example of the software architecture that
we used. So each week, we'd start off with either short intro video or a few readings,
those kinds of things just to get the conversation started. But we didn't do assessment in the
traditional sense where it was, you know, do this quiz, and we'll grade you. What we
try to emphasize, instead, is we had expectations of students to be able to create artifacts
that reflect their understanding. These artifacts, then, and so my mindset is if you learn transparently,
you become a teacher. And so as a student interacted with a particular idea or concept,
they would create a mind map or a content map or an image or a podcast or a video or
whatever else, and that, in turn, would serve as a sense making element for another student.
So that's how it'd start off, but instead of wanting everything to happen in one set
space, we really said, look. You learn wherever you feel like learning. We really don't care
where. Hopefully, you'll have an RSS output in whatever space you learn. So whether you
learn with blogs or a learning management system or whether you use social media, social
bookmarking tools like Digo or Delicious, or whether you use Twitter or nowadays I guess
it would be Vine or Facebook or other tools. It really doesn't matter what you use. The
important thing is you own your spaces of interaction because that's your identity.
You own the space where you create your content and share your images. We don't ever want
to ever have the ability to shut down your access or to delete the artifacts that you've
created. It's this notion of a domain of one's own. And so what we did is students, when
they take a course with the software that Steven Downs has developed and that we have
improved over subsequent iterations is you share your blog or your space, wherever you
are as a person, and it's gRRShopper is the software, and so it basically harvests the
activity in all those spaces. Symbol language, query against what's there. So it will pull
in a Twitter tag for the course, it'll pull in blog articles for the course, Digo bookmarks
and so on. Run a simple filter against that, and then we generate the daily, which is a
daily e-mail that includes everything that learners have produced in a course. So a large
part of our mindset, and this is, it does make some faculty quite uncomfortable, but
a large part of our mindset is this. In the past, the education model has been one where
the faculty member is the center of the experience. You know, the spoke kind of model of the faculty
member. We've really tried to emphasize the faculty member as a node in an overall network.
And that node in an over, and, again, this reflects the diversification of knowledge
in society. It doesn't mean that that faculty member is no less consequential, but it just
means that students are bringing in resources from wherever. They're sharing Ted Talk links
now. They're going to take different MOOC's so, content from other spaces. They're using
MIT's open course where, whatever university's open course open initiative. So the faculty
member is no longer the sole provider of information. Instead, they are a critical, central node
still, but certainly not the exclusive node or the dominant node in the sense that they've
been in the past. And so you get something that looks more like a distributed network
with many participants as learners and teachers and many information sources. And that relates
I think to our view, and I am heavily influenced by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Brider's emphasis
on knowledge building and knowledge generation at all sectors of the education economy, if
you will. Which means whether a student is a K to 12 student or whether they're in higher
education, this notion that you have to be a master student or beyond before you think
like a researcher isn't accurate in the sense that anyone at any level can generate stuff.
They can run experiments. They can develop hypothesis. They can test them. Nowadays with
a mess of data, they can develop algorithms. They can use analytics tools. They, so anyone,
regardless of knowledge level or even expertise in a subject area is a potential generator
of new knowledge. And, again, I'm not, I mean, there's issues with some of these systems.
You do need control points. There's issues with system, social produced systems like
Wikipedia, but there's also ways in which the formal expert system of knowledge generation
can work well with the amateur system. You know, amateur astronomy is probably one of
the best examples of this kind of system. But, so, essentially, what I'm trying to emphasize
is that if we want higher education to become this integrated structure that touches all
aspects, you know, the university among us kind of model, if that's what we want, then
we have to stop thinking of the university as a space where we want students to duplicate
what we already know. Instead, it needs to become a space where students become creative
people and generators of new information. Again, if you go back to that chart I had
earlier about the percentage of the economy now that is production oriented, that needs
people who can duplicate stuff, now sits at under 15 percent. The vast majority of the
economy now is about people who can create things and do new things. And so what ends
up happening is from the university perspective, I'm sort of winding down with a few quick
slides here. When systems are distributed the way that our information system is in
higher education, we need alternative modes and means of integration because the key challenge
from a student perspective is, yes, you can learn everything that you need to essentially
be knowledgeable at a master's and a Ph.D. level. You can learn all of that on the Web.
The problem is it's a bloody mess, right. How do you know what's important when you
start? How do you know it's consequential? So the value of a faculty member as a guide,
working with learning designers to create an effective pathway through what is noise,
what is consequential is critical. So it, what we need, then, is a new way to think
about a large part of the education system and the role of faculty in relation to learners.
So as part of the challenge is to create something that is a new integrated whole, and an integrated
whole that goes beyond the university as an integrator of information to one that moves
to the university as a network that is laid on top of all dimensions of society. And so
just a very quick illustration of what that potentially could look like, and I won't go
into great detail with this slide here, but it's just that for education system, integration
is a key value point. Even though we learn in a variety of distributed ways, in order
for us to become knowledgeable, we have to form coherent connections between those distributed
points of information. If we don't form connections between those distributed points of information,
we essentially have isolated knowledge that, in some cases, are in conflict with each other.
So, from an education perspective, it's really about recognizing some of the key roles, whether
it's administration research, teaching, learning, curriculum, assessment, accreditation, we're
now seeing for a variety of reasons all of these are being driven by commercial interests.
And so for university leaders, the question becomes what do we need to own, and what can
we afford to outsource. What is critical that we continue to generate and create ourselves,
and what can we begin to partner with, the private sector? Because it's, you have to
start thinking that way. Again, the university is no longer a singular entity that serves
a singular narrative in society. The university is becoming this very diverse, very broad,
multi-faceted, multi-need serving system, and that requires that we begin to think strategically
about who do we work with and who do we partner with. Do we work with Embanet or Pearson in
terms of curriculum development? ^M00:40:01 Do we work with, or to we utilize open courseware
products such as MIT, OCW, and others instead? What about assessment and accreditation? You
know, university, or the, Wisconsin, for example, with their competency-based degree, which
has received a lot of recognition or attention in higher education circles, is just one example
of a potentially innovative approach to what might assessment and accreditation look like.
We can't expect in a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional world that people will still want to take
courses and only get a degree. There needs to be a way to account for lifelong, life
wide learning as well. And so, finally, we end up at this stage then where it's important
to think about what is the university as a member of society. You know, what role is
it that universities are supposed to do for us, and what is it that MOOC's are able to
do to help advance that mission rather than replace the university mission. I think in
many ways, one of the biggest roles of higher education, and I should mention. I'm with
Athabasca University now. We're a one hundred percent online system. We're publically funded
research system. So that means that we don't have a for-profit mandate, but we do everything
from bachelors' to master's through to doctoral programs. And one of the things, whenever
I'm at a campus like this, and I admittedly have a nice lake. So that you get extra points
just for that. But whenever I'm at a campus like this, there's that real vibe of social
connectivity. There's that sense of community, that sense of energy that only comes from
physical space, that only comes from people connecting and bumping into each other. So
there's this sense of social and academic connection to the university. Social and academic,
or just social connection more broadly to society. The university is an integrated structure
in society as a whole, but also there's, a key part of what the universities do is they
help to develop this acknowledged interdependence where what we are is part of a society and
part of a system, and we ourselves aren't knowledgeable as an individual entity but,
instead, it's that knowledgability through connectedness that becomes key, or, you know,
to integrate the university more deeply with the knowledge needs of society. And so I guess
where we end up, then, is this question of disrupter, savior, or distractor, and I think
it's exactly what the chancellor stated earlier is that it is all of those on different levels
and for different individuals. So for some faculty members, definitely, it is a disrupter
because I have no doubt that certain college, schools, and systems will have a reduction
of academic positions due to the development of online learning and MOOC's. So there's
a disrupter. I also think that there is an unfortunate cost focus. Online learning done
well rarely reduces costs, but, you know, nonetheless, some people still think it does.
We found, Athabasca University and any other online system that you probably interact with,
you find that in many ways it's as expensive or more expensive than, especially if you're
going to give a quality online experience. For someone, though, who is in India. I just
met with a group of students in New Delhi last year, and for them, to be able to access
courses through Coursera and through EdEx, absolutely a savior. The quality of instruction
that they receive, they're being able to hear directly from the person that literally wrote
the textbook in their field was tremendous for them, and it was a savior type of concept.
To be able to access that quality of learning is tremendous. A distractor. I think at some
levels, this is the relevant aspect of the, this triad of questions is I don't believe
MOOC's are a distractor. I believe, if anything, MOOC's help to sharpen the educational awareness
and raise the discussion of what do universities need to do in society, and what kind of a
knowledge institution are we going to need to help us address the very complex knowledge
challenge that our society faces. Everything from poverty to economic crises to changing
weather patterns to the list goes on, and I would argue that what you really need is
a distributed network university structure, not an isolated sit in a physical space system.
So on that note, I think we're going to pause and engage in questions for the next 15 or
so minutes, and if there are no questions, we will look at each other.