Online learning is ‘the blackboard of the future’

Children in nurseries will soon be learning through Moocs (Massive Open Online Courses) as the internet revolution changes the face of learning, according to the man who first pioneered their use in higher education. Today’s two- and three-year-olds have been born with keyboards “pinned to their fingers”, Dr Anant Agarwal, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, insists. As a result, it makes sense to utilise the skills they had acquired and give them a basic start to literacy and numeracy through computer games in the kindergarten or nursery schools.

“Two- and three-year-olds love video games and they’re able to play with iPads – all they have to do is wipe their fingers over the keyboard,” he said. “That’s happening already in the home and it would be really fun for them to use those skills in the kindergarten,” Dr Agarwal, told a seminar organised by the Education Foundation, an education think-tank, during a whistlestop UK tour. His visit includes talks with MPs, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, and universities minister David Willetts on how Moocs can transform education. He was speaking amid growing scepticism over the impact that Moocs could have on higher education. In an article in Times Higher Education, Diana Laurilland, of London University’s Institute of Education, argued that unsupervised learning online was not the answer. “Free online courses that require no qualifications or fee are a wonderful idea, but not viable,” she said. Take-up of the idea in the UK had been slower than expected, academics have also argued.

However, Dr Agarwal, said a “blended” approach – combining first-time higher education students and providing additional resource material for those already at university will turn them into a success story. He has pioneered Moocs – setting up a programme through an MIT/Harvard-based company edX, of which he is president. It has now been snapped up by 1.8 million learners worldwide and offers courses which can end with the learner gaining a certificate validated by an Ivy League university in the US (MIT or Harvard) to boost career prospects.

Education, he claims, had been slow to embrace new technology. “Transportation has changed completely from the 1600s – from ox carts and carriages to rocket ships… [but] education has not changed really since the introduction of the text book. Even that – and the introduction of the blackboard in 1862 – had been controversial, as folk worried about the monks being put out of business…. The blackboard was criticised because it meant teachers had to turn their back on a class, thus threatening classroom discipline.” Education’s time has come, though, and it will be unrecognisable within 10 years, he predicts – not at the expense of lecturers’ jobs, but simply by changing the way students on degree courses learn as well as by attracting a new online audience. Dr Agarwal said research shows the average student’s attention span is six minutes and, when faced with a lengthy lecture, that goes down to only two minutes. Yet the average lecture in a UK university can last from 50 minutes to two hours.

Use of Moocs had significantly cut the number of letters sent out by universities to students in danger of falling behind, it is claimed. One university had reduced the number of such warnings to students from 50 to only two over a two-year period after the introduction of Moocs. Another saw a 41 per cent failure rate cut to nine per cent. “Our main aim is to increase access to learning,” said Dr Agarwal. He acknowledged Moocs were “slow to get on in the UK”, but added: “My message would be to try them out and, if you don’t like them, flush them down the Thames.” The Open University has led the way, he said. Some of his audience spoke of the reluctance of teachers and lecturers to embrace them and feared that OU students would now be better equipped to make use of them than others.

Dr Agarwal’s visit coincides with the OU’s second course on its new social learning platform Future Learn, which will enable students to study the moons of our solar system. “The course provides answers for those who want to know more about moons and may perhaps spark further learning of planetary science and astronomy,” said Professor Alan Rothery, who is leading the programme. Dr Agarwal concludes: “If teachers don’t embrace it [Moocs], there is no hope of going anywhere… this is the world that today’s children are being brought up in. The UK has some of the greatest universities in the world and I am interested in inviting them to join this experiment. The whole movement is less than two years old, and for those universities who have started on it, these are very, very early days.”

Deepa Singh
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Florida approves online-only public university education

Tallahassee (Reuters) – Public university students in Florida next year will be able to start working toward college degrees without actually going to college, under a law Governor Rick Scott signed on Monday in front of educators and business lobbyists. The state-run University of Florida plans to start a series of online bachelor’s degree programs next year, with $15 million start-up funds for 2014.

Until now full-time online education has just been available to elementary and high schools in the state. “This bill transforms education in Florida,” said House Speaker Will Weather ford, a Republican who has long been a proponent of “virtual learning” in public schools. “Now, we will be home to the first fully accredited, online public research university institute in the nation,” said Weatherford. “These bold higher-education reforms will help increase Florida’s global competitiveness and ensure our students have meaningful opportunities after high school.”

California and Texas are developing totally online university programs, while Illinois considered the idea and discarded it, according to a spokesman for the American Public and Land Grant Universities Association in Washington. State Senator Bill Montford, a Democrat from Tallahassee who is executive director of the Florida Association of School Superintendents, said, “I haven’t heard of any state that’s moving as aggressively as Florida can” in online education.

The online courses will cost no more than 75 percent of in-state tuition for regular classes at the University of Florida. The online university degree programs are part of an education package pushed by Scott and the state’s Republican party leadership that they say will more closely link curriculums with the needs of employers. The state’s new education law also retreats in some areas from the toughened curriculum required in 2010, the year before Scott became governor. Students can select “scholar” courses, but others can focus more on job skills and will be able to graduate without passing tougher courses in math and science.

The governor, who campaigned in 2010 on a platform of creating 700,000 jobs in seven years through a series of business-friendly tax cuts and regulatory changes, has made job-oriented education and low tuition a big part of his economic development package. Scott last year caused a stir by saying he did not want Florida’s higher education system producing anthropologists or other specialized graduates whose main job prospect is teaching others to do what they do. Before the session, he persuaded all 28 state colleges to come up with four-year bachelor’s programs costing $10,000 or less in tuition, emphasizing skills sought by employers.

Deepa Singh
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Online Education An Issue Of Profiting By Degrees

When basketball star Shaquille O’Neal belatedly earned his college degree last month, he declared, “Thank god for the Internet.” The January-February issue of Mother Jones would not doubt his sincerity, but it might well raise questions about the academic worthiness of his endeavor. It takes a hard look at campuses nationwide rushing to go online in “Digital Diplomas,” a most critical dissection of a seemingly unstoppable trend in higher education. O’Neal, who is not a subject of the cover story, left Louisiana State University early eight years ago to dunk basketballs and now earns about $20 million a year. He stands characteristically tall at the moment as the most famous online graduate of what the politically left-leaning near-monthly deems the troubling “brave new world of higher education.”

It’s estimated that more than half of the colleges and universities offer some courses over the Internet, part of a growing market in what is tagged virtual learning that, according to Merrill Lynch, could constitute a business with $7 billion in annual revenues by the year 2003. A few schools, like New Jersey’s Seton Hall University and the University of Colorado, offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees achieved entirely online. The magazine does not discount the allure of all this, but discerns growing anxiety over the possibility that commercial, not academic, considerations rule, especially as institutions see the possibility for hawking their wares for nice profits. No one disputes the ease with which the Internet can transfer information. The questions really arise as to how the actual educational experience would be altered, — especially as often-crucial face-to-face meetings with teachers become something else — and whether the nation would be headed toward a two-tiered system of on-campus and online diplomas, with the former likely to remain more prestigious and influential.

The two-tier, possibly class-based, potential may be hinted at by the belief thatonline learning would tend to draw single mothers and working parents. It is also possible that such a social reality might lead to online learning becoming more focused on lower-cost education, aimed at producing workers for low- and mid-level jobs. For sure, there are large sums of money at stake. For example, the University of Chicago has cut a deal with UNext.com, a venture of the convicted junk bond king Michael Milken, to offer partner schools what one industry publication estimated to be $20 million in royalties over five to eight years for the right to use the schools’ names to marketonline courses. The initial qualms over such an enterprise have to do with the profit incentive and how that might in some fashion dilute, and possibly pollute, a university’s mission. At minimum, it serves to sharpen a discussion that will surely become more lively as the years roll on — and Shaquille O’Neal looks back even more proudly on his online degree in general studies (assuming he hasn’t simply purchased his alma mater by then).

Quickly: In an interview with the January-February National Geographic Traveler, flamboyant Virgin Airlines chief Richard Branson says he tries to find out where anairline’s crew is staying, then books there since those spots are “reasonably priced and always a lot more fun than most typical business hotels.” He also indicates that he’s exploring the notion of Virgin Dating, so, “If you’re sitting in seat 3G and I’m in 2A, you will be able to send a message to my seat telling me you want to meet me, or one to my neighbor discreetly asking them if they will change seats.” . . . The combined Dec. 25-Jan. 1 Sports Illustrated included an homage to great rank-and-file sports fans around the land, as well as a poll of pro athletes on related matters, such as the dumbest fans (basketball’s Vancouver Grizzlies and football’s Oakland Raiders are among the losers) and best groupies (the Los Angeles Lakers’ and Miami Dolphins’, among others). It includes choicest lines they’ve heard from hecklers (“You could give aspirin a headache”) and best retort by a player (“You’d better check your wife, a ballplayer is missing”). . . . The realist photographer Helen Levitt, whose best efforts were in the 1930s and 1940s, is the subject of a lovely symposium, marked by critiques of specific shots from the likes of documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, in the winter Threepenny Review ($5, 1426 Oxford St., Berkeley, CA 94709). “Levitt’s photographs are marvelous exactly because they make mystery from fact,” writes Janna Malamud Smith in dissecting one of Levitt’s shots of graffiti, this a chalk stick figure of a woman whom one takes to be a housewife.

Deepa Singh
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Adding more people to online education equation

Adding more people to online education equation

Roger Schank is a pioneer in using computers as teaching tools, and his latest venture has reached an interesting conclusion: The best way to cut costs is to reduce automation and use more human input. The main thing to improve education, said Schank, now a professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is to do away with classes, lectures and tests. The key to effective education, he said, is to learn by doing. “Online education allows you to break away from old, outmoded methods and try new things,” he said. “That’s its main benefit.” In the 1990s, Schank and his Northwestern colleagues devised several courses that enabled businesses to train people by using computer automation. When a trainee had a question, the computer would play a video clip of an expert telling an anecdotal experience that addressed the question.

The technology was effective, but it’s more costly than online learning, which has become common on the Web. Yet most online efforts are based on classes, lectures and testing, which Schank believes are outmoded. To provide effective online learning at competitive costs, Schank has started a new company, Socratic Arts, based in Evanston, that devises curricula that immerse a student in a learning experience. If someone wants to learn how to manage an e-commerce company, for example, he must write a business plan, form a company and deal with numerous day-to-day problems that the curricula throws at him. This is done in collaboration with other students, as would happen in real life. Some communications occurs online and some doesn’t.

“If you have to write a business plan, there are many books that can help you with that,” said Schank. “We point the student to them rather than reproduce the books online. The student writes a business plan, submits it online, and then a mentor reads it and critiques it. This happens again and again as the student learns about writing a business plan. “Students collaborate with each other to solve problems. They don’t work in isolation.” University faculty can provide some individual mentoring, or experts can be recruited for specific tasks, such as helping with writing a good business plan. Computer technology helps the mentors provide students with needed individual attention.

Schank’s company is working with Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science school to develop curricula that will lead to master’s degrees. He also has been in talks with some Chicago educators about starting programs aimed at students in college and high school. “In most high schools, the seniors tend to goof off,” said Schank. “We can rearrange things so that students take care of their requirements by the end of the junior year and then spend their senior year in my curriculum learning about what they want to do in the world. “They could leave high school knowing enough to get a job directly or knowing how to get the most out of their college education.”

Deepa Singh
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Online programs navigate learning curves

If there has been any backlash against online education by traditional bricks-and-mortar universities, that notion is usually couched in words such as “confusion” and “misuse.” Confusion as to what online learning is supposed to be and how to make it effective. Misuse as in one-size-fits-all approaches for students and faculty who are neither prepared nor motivated — the proverbial mistake of trying to fit the round peg (fluid online models) into the square hole (traditional, on-ground models.)

“Many colleges and universities came to e-learning for reasons other than teaching and learning quality,” says Jeff Borden, a vice president and director of the center for online learning at Pearson, a leading education company that provides a huge array of services, including online courses. “Some saw a quick financial win. Some saw it as interesting for research. Some wanted to be ‘cutting edge’ for their marketing efforts. Others were scared as they lost on-ground enrollments and believed it was the only way to survive. “But, as e-learning has ‘grown up’ to be a viable and very real alternative for millions of students, many schools have had to catch up to efficacy,” Borden says. “Obviously, it’s a never-ending experience — we find the same to be true in face-to-face teaching and learning. But over time, more schools have figured out what works for them and/or their student population.”

For many, Borden says, the key is a blended approach.

Some schools, for example, offer classes that meet part-time online and part-time on ground. Others offer full courses online. At Chaminade University of Honolulu, where Borden is a lecturer, fully online courses make up most of the eLearning, but a hybrid model is the fastest-growing approach in general, he says. Like anything in its infancy, online learning has indeed had its growing pains. Central Michigan University (CMU), which jumped into the pool early, hit a technical wall in 2006 with Blackboard, a widely used e-learning platform, due to faster-than-expected enrollment growth, say Marnie Roestel, manager of online programs, and Kaleb Patrick, director of graduate programs. CMU updated its management systems and has kept up with enrollment since, they said, while reminding faculty to maintain academic  standards.

Northwestern University in early April announced that Courses for Semester Online, a consortium of universities in the U.S. and Europe offering a set of online courses that could be taken at any of the schools, would end this summer. Reasons included resistance by some faculty to the model and difficulty in maintaining consistency across the spectrum. “On the basis of a lot of experience, I can attest to the fact the consortia are very hard to manage,” says former Princeton University President William Bowen. “There is a great temptation for lowest-common-denominator thinking to prevail. This is a field in which you need nimbleness and the ability to test things out, to make mistakes and fix them, and I’m not convinced consortia are very good at that.” The CMU online experts say universities have been, overall, slow to embrace online education. The likely reason: They realize it isn’t easy to do right.

Students, meanwhile — especially adults in the workplace — are champing at the bit for it, statistics indicate. They want it because it fits their increasing need for higher education at their own pace, in their own space, and because it works well in a new, job-hopping environment that requires short bursts of focus on specific skills that serve career goals.  “As with any technology, it takes time as well as practice to test their capabilities and optimize their effectiveness,” says Drexel University Online President Susan Aldridge. “Online education isn’t something you do by the numbers,” Aldridge adds. “It’s an ongoing process of discovery and improvement, which is guaranteed to produce mistakes along the way. By embracing those mistakes, we are learning to navigate the roadblocks in a way that defines and leads to true success, for both our students and our faculty.”

According to the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit think tank devoted to online learning, most increases in online education are happening at two-year institutions. Pam Quinn, director of online learning for seven community colleges in Texas, says not to blame the medium. “If students are not engaged in online learning, either the courses are not designed properly or the faculty are not trained appropriately in online learning communities that support student engagement,” says Quinn, provost for the Dallas County Community College District’s LeCroy Center for Educational Telecommunications.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Web Site:-http://www.gyapti.com
Blog:- http://gyapti.blogspot.com
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com