e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Online Education

  • Notes from Paul LeBlanc keynote address at WCET13

    Two weeks ago I attended the WCET Conference in Denver. While much smaller than EDUCAUSE and some others, I find these conferences to be great learning experiences, especially as WCET supports open dialogue between academic leaders (provosts, deans, etc), academic IT and edtech support, and industry leaders. The combination of mindsets – especially the combination of academic and technology – leads to very strategic discussions.

    This year the keynote was presented by Dr. Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, which has made quite a name for itself with the College for America (CfA) program. College for America is probably the second best-known example of competency-based education (CBE) after Western Governors University (WGU), and in fact the CfA program was the first to gain Department of Education approval using the “direct assessment” rule that completely avoids seat time. See my previous post for a primer on CBE.

    While you can see the entire keynote here (using the mediasite player), I wanted to highlight four key points that help illuminate the reality of competency-based education today. As CBE becomes more hotly debated, it is useful to have real examples to evaluate. I have very roughly paraphrased and taken notes on what I heard in the keynote on these points, not as a defense or endorsement of CfA, but as a real-world early example of CBE.

    1) Competency-based education is typically targeted at working adults (14:11 – 20:40)

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  • Competency-Based Education: An (Updated) Primer for Today’s Online Market

    There has been a significant amount of progress and interest in competency-based education, as Wisconsin has launched its Flexible Option program, federal legislators are pushing the concept, ‘patient zero’ has graduated from College for America, and resistance is emerging to the concept. I thought it might be useful to update and re-share the primer that was originally posted in August, 2012.

    I’m not an expert in the academic theory and background of outcomes and competencies, so in this post I’ll summarize the key points from various articles as they relate to the current market for online programs. Links are included for those wanting to read in more depth.

    What is Competency-Based Education?

    SPT Malan wrote in a article from 2000 about the generally-accepted origins:

    Competency-based education was introduced in America towards the end of the 1960s in reaction to concerns that students are not taught the skills they require in life after school.

    Competency-based education (CBE) is based on the broader concept of Outcomes-based education (OBE), one that is familiar to many postsecondary institutions and one that forms the basis of many current instructional design methods. OBE works backwards within a course, starting with the desired outcomes (often defined through a learning objectives taxonomy) and relevant assessments, and then moving to the learning experiences that should lead students to the outcomes. Typically there is a desire to include flexible pathways for the student to achieve the outcomes.

    OBE can be implemented in various modalities, including face-to-face, online and hybrid models.

    Competency-based education (CBE) is a narrower concept, a subset or instance of OBE, where the outcomes are more closely tied to job skills or employment needs, and the methods are typically self-paced. Again based on the Malan article, the six critical components of CBE are as follows: (more…)

  • e-Literate TV trailer from EDUCAUSE 2013

    Last week Michael announced a new project of ours called e-Literate TV. To recap, the idea is that there are new groups involved in decisions that impact ed tech and online education. Deans, provosts, presidents, boards of trustees, state legislators, and even national media are newly interested in topics with different levels of understanding and different perspectives.

    This new situation can be frustrating for e-learning professionals who have been involved in ed tech for years, but we cannot and should not wish away this new interest. Instead, there is an opportunity to develop new ways to engage the various groups in discussions about the usage of technology to enable change in education.

    This is the goal of e-Literate TV. One way we see e-Literate TV being used is by e-learning professionals sharing easy-to-consume ~10-minute videos with various stake holders as a method to enable more productive conversations. As such, all of the video segments will come with a creative commons license for easy sharing.

    What event is complete without a cool tee shirt?
    What event is complete without a cool tee shirt?

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  • Two MOOC curriculum announcements in one week

    In two apparently unrelated announcements, both MIT and Wharton announced they were moving beyond just courses and putting significant parts of their curriculum into MOOC platforms, both with identity verification. MIT is putting several undergraduate sequences online through MITx (their implementation of  edX), while Wharton business school is putting a “foundation series” of first-year courses online through Coursera.

    First the MIT news from Inside Higher Ed (see the Chronicle for additional coverage):

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will this fall package some of its online courses into more cohesive sequences, just as edX prepares to roll out certificates of completion using identity verification. Seen together, the two announcements may provide a glimpse at what the future holds for the massive open online course provider.

    The “XSeries” sequences add a new layer of structure to MITx, the institution’s section of the edX platform. The first of seven courses in the Foundations of Computer Science XSeries will be offered this fall, with one or more new courses being rolled out each semester until the fall of 2015. The Supply Chain Management XSeries, consisting of three courses, will begin in the fall of 2014. The two sequences will target undergraduates and working professionals, respectively. [snip]

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  • You know what would help MOOC articles? Getting the facts and goals right before analyzing

    Keith Devlin has an article at Huffington Post today titled “MOOC Mania Meets the Sober Reality of Education”. The premise is that the halting of the San Jose State University (SJSU) / Udacity pilot project and of SB 520 show that naive assumptions on the power of MOOCs to disrupt higher education are insufficient in reality – education is too complex. While the overall article has some good points, the very foundation of the article is flawed.

    I have written about both issues – SJSU program and SB 520 – and agree that there were flaws in both. Michael and I co-wrote a position paper for 20 Million Minds Foundation making recommendations to change and improve California legislation, and we have been critical of overly-simplistic views of higher education disruption. But authors should at least characterize the goals of each program accurately before drawing conclusions. The HuffingtonPost article has three glaring problems that undercut its entire message.

    Problem 1: Getting the explicit goals wrong

    Devlin begins:

    Politicians who saw MOOCs as a means to cut the cost of higher education are having to think again after two high-profile initiatives in California recently came to a crashing halt.

    Did politicians see “MOOCs as a means to cut the cost of higher education” in both of these programs? Let’s look at the stated goals for the SJSU program:

    This marks the first time that a broad and diverse range of students, not just matriculated students, will have access to online college classes for credit from an accredited university at a very affordable price of $150 per course, about the same as a course at the California Community Colleges.

    The pilot’s target population includes underserved groups such as high school students who will earn college credit, waitlisted students at California Community Colleges who would otherwise face out-of-state or private options, and members of the armed forces and veterans. [emphasis original]

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  • New Post at WCET: Update on California Online Initiatives

    I have a new post up at WCET with updates on the California Online Initiatives driven by state government, including today’s news that SB520 is on hold.

    The big news today is that the controversial bill seeking to allow for-credit partially-outsourced online education in California has been put on hold until at least 2014. [snip]

    On the surface, it appears that higher education insiders might have defeated state government efforts to take a leading role in online initiatives. SB520 is on hold and possibly dead, and most conditions on the additional funding have been removed.

    If you look under the surface, however, the outcome is not as clear. It turns out that the systems are in fact changing their priorities and investing in online to help matriculated students complete degrees at a lower cost, which was the original goal of state government leaders.

    There’s more information there, including news on the University of California’s and California State University’s two new online initiatives.

  • Desire2Learn’s Analytics Product Looks Very Good

    I’ve been super-busy with a consulting gig over the last few weeks and have fallen off the wagon with my blogging. This is one of the many reasons that I am grateful to have Phil as my prolific yet profound co-publisher and that we have attracted a group of terrific featured bloggers.

    Anyway, I thought I would get back to business with a long-overdue post about D2L’s learning analytics product, called “Insights.” There are several pieces to the product, but I’m going to focus on the component that they call the Student Success System. I have blogged from time to time on Purdue’s Course Signals project, (now commercialized in an offering from Elucian), as having set the bar for student retention analytics. More recently, I wrote about Blackboard’s Retention Center, which is clearly following in Purdue’s footsteps. My impression of Retention Center is that it is a reasonable Version 1 product that captures some but not all of the value of Course Signals.

    D2L’s Student Success System also follows in Purdue’s footsteps. But rather than simply playing catch-up, I would call it an incremental but meaningful improvement over Course Signals in most aspects. From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)

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