e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Adrian Sannier

  • MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact

    As Phil mentioned in his last post, he and I had the privilege of participating in a two-day ELI webinar on MOOCs. A majority of the speakers had been involved in implementing MOOCs at their institutions in one way or another. And an interesting thing happened. Over the course of the two days, almost none of the presenters—with the exception of the ACE representative, who has a vested interest—expressed the belief that MOOCs provide equivalent learning experiences to traditional college courses. Keep in mind, these folks were believers. They were enthusiastic about MOOCs in general. But they tended to describe the value of MOOCs as reaching a different audience than the traditional matriculated college student and provide a different value. They talked about it extending the university mission. By and large, they did not talk about it as being an improvement on, or even equal to, a traditional class. Now, there were well over 400 participants, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to say that there was unanimity, about this point or any other. But the level of agreement was remarkable.

    On the other hand, there was widespread enthusiasm for using MOOCs as essentially substitutions for textbooks in classes that included instructors from the local campus. Vanderbilt created what they called a course “wrapper” around a Coursera MOOC on machine learning. Folks from Stanford talked about the notion of a “distributed flip,” i.e., a group of flipped classrooms participating together in a MOOC. And SJSU talked about using an edX course in a blended course environment on one hand, and a Udacity course with Udacity-provided “course mentors” on the other.

    The obvious conclusion is that MOOCs are more of a threat to textbook companies than they are to universities. I think that’s true, but I also think it’s an oversimplification. There is a deeper (and older) trend to boil down a course into a set of digital artifacts that can be “played” by the student at will. It’s worth taking a deeper look at that trend, where it’s going, what’s useful about it, and what’s pernicious about it. (more…)

  • The OpenClass Vision: An Example

    In my last post, I described a vision for combining elements of MOOC-like scale with a more traditional face-to-face classroom experience, as articulated by Pearson’s Adrian Sannier. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) A couple of months ago, I suggested in an interview with Josh Kim for Inside Higher Education that this is where MOOCs would go next:

    Question 6. Will MOOCs replace accredited curriculum? Why or why not?

    I don’t know how to answer this question, because I’m not convinced that we know what a MOOC is yet. Will there be massive elements that are integral to many curricula? Almost certainly, although I don’t know how much of it we will see in 2013. Will the curricula be all massive? Probably not in most cases. Will we consider the mix of massive and non-massive elements to be “MOOCs”? I don’t know.

    The problem that we have right now is that we have very few models for how this might work. So when Sannier mentioned a course called Habitable Worlds being developed by Professor Ariel Anbar and Lev Horodyskyj at Arizona State University that will eventually be brought to OpenClass to support this model, I asked to speak with Professor Anbar in order to get some specifics. The conversation shed some light not only on possibilities for the mixed model, but also on possible futures for the liberal arts and the role of the professor.

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  • OpenClass vs the MOOC

    When Pearson’s OpenClass was announced about a year and a half ago, the natural question to ask was whether it would disrupt the LMS market. But that was then and this is now. (Full disclosure: Pearson is a client of MindWires Consulting.) The more interesting question today is where OpenClass stands vis-à-vis the MOOCs. To begin with, it certainly appears that the LMS and MOOC markets may be on a collision course. But beyond that, Pearson is a content provider first and foremost. With both the content and the platform at their disposal, as well as an array of assessment tools, they certainly have all the raw materials to build MOOCs. Is that where OpenClass is going? I recently had a short conversation with Pearson’s SVP of Product, Adrian Sannier, to find out. And the answer appears to be, “Not exactly.”

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  • Why Pearson’s OpenClass Is a Big Deal

    The big buzz at EDUCAUSE last week was around OpenClass, Pearson’s new LMS entrant. Much hyped but only rarely glimpsed, speculation has been rampant about whether it is a big deal or just a gimmick. Because most people (including me) don’t have access to the product yet, the best source of information on it at the moment is Adrian Sannier, eCollege’s VP of Product. I had the good fortune to both listen to  him give a presentation on OpenClass and chat with him about it one-on-one. My conclusion is that this product could be a very big deal indeed.

    In a previous post here on e-Literate, Phil Hill characterized OpenClass as potentially disruptive. I think he’s right, but I also think this is one of those times where we have to be careful about how we use that term. Adrian Sannier is a big fan of Clayton Christensen, the man who coined the term “disruptive innovation.” If you really want to understand what OpenClass is all about, go out and read The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution very carefully.  There are very specific reasons why “free” and “easy” are the words you will hear most often from Adrian when he is speaking about the product.

    The audacity of what Pearson is attempting should not be underestimated. If they succeed, they could cause major tectonic shifts across several markets that are currently critical to higher education. Colleges and universities need to pay close attention to the kind of deal that they will be striking for themselves. Overall, I don’t think the biggest concern is whether Pearson will fail to maintain the platform as free. Rather, the more serious question is what will they be getting if they succeed.

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  • Openness: Finally, We're Getting Somewhere

    Update: The Sannier vs. Wheeler smackdown is available on video here. Microsoft Silverlight is required.

    As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with more on the way. Certainly, a critical mass of universities are recognizing the value of open standards and accepting that open source is a viable and important approach. Open access and open educational resources are coming on too, although they are much earlier in their adoption cycle. Further down the road, open governance and open business practices are looming on the horizon.

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