eLearning Roadtrip

Thought You Might be Interested...

...in some of the thoughts I shared with my WCET crew today about learning analytics and lessons we can learn from Moneyball. It's an extension of my eLearning Roadtrip post on the same general topic.

I suppose this gives you an idea of what is top-of-mind for me these days. Well, that and wanting to raise the bar on online learning excellence. Simple pleasures.

If you are interested in taking a look at my WCET post, please click here. 

While there, please take a look around at what the fine folks at the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies are doing these days. If you happen to care about accelerating the adoption of learning technologies innovation in practice you might find that WCET is engaged in work that matters to you.

As a matter of fact....WCET's Annual Meeting is being held in Denver October 26-29. We will be sharing some of the preliminary results from our Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework, along with lots of other information about learning analytics and other emerging topics of interest to online learning and learning technology professionals. Might be a great time to come see what the WCET buzz is all about.

My "10 Commandments" for Online Learning

Just imagine how online learning might evolve if we ever-so-engaged online learning professionals inscribed the following "commandments" somewhere on one of our personal digital tablets:

• Thou shall provide prospective students with respectful responses to expressions of interest. Listen before you preach.
• Thou shalt not use a one-size-fits all approach to admissions. Personalize your advice.
• Thou shall use data to inform decisions. There is no excuse for not using the information we have in hand to improve programs and practices and experiences. Deal with it.
• Thou shall offer degrees and certificates offering up-to-date curricula that make your graduates competitive and relevant in todays' evolving workplace. Snap.
• Thou shall be mindful of student demographics, and consider advisement, programs and support that is relevant for interests, circumstances and motivations. Extend.
• Thou shall respect online learning faculty as knowledgeable contributors to professional practice. Respect. Let me say that again. Respect.
• Thou shall raise the bar high, for students and instructors alike. Expect big things.
• Thou shalt not subject students to "that's the way it has always been done" thinking. Unless you really believe your brand is so mighty that you can afford NOT to think about being proactive, forward thinking, and focused on student success. Stretch.
• Thou shall leverage technology in exemplary, innovative ways. Shine.
• Thou shalt not embarrass your students by being part of a cheesey institution that nobody respects. To be a school that embarasses its students is truly an abomination. Seriously. Knock it off.

 

 

 

 

 

The "Dirty Little Secret" of Online Learning

The University Professional Continuing Education Association and the Association for Continuing Higher Education recently convened a summit of education leaders to talk about the phenomenon of online learning, described in summit literature as "the biggest thing to ever hit higher education."

These days, online learning has come to the attention of presidents looking to find new student markets and to replace state dollars that many institutions have lost in recent years. These presidents see publicly traded companies running institutions like APUS and the University of Phoenix competing for student market share via online programs.  They see innovative public community colleges such as Rio Salado College and the Colorado Community College Online enrolling massive numbers of students via online programs.They see flagship institutions like the University of California - Berkeley gingerly dip their toes into the online learning space. And so they want to know what they can do about online learning, too.

Online learning has moved from margins to mission-critical, representing a higher profile in institutional strategic imperatives. This is all making continuing education professionals both happy and anxious. The cash-funded basis of operation that set them apart from their centrally funded colleagues is now, institutionally, a very good thing that central staff are being asked to emulate.

Except that maybe the cash is going to be someone else's cash. Students have turned in significant measure to non-traditional, for-profit providers of education programs and degrees for the flexible adult serving programs they offer. Hundreds and thousands of students, paying millions and millions in tuition, much of it funded through publicly sponsored financial aid programs.

It is not an exaggeration to say that public and private not-for-profit insitutions are seriously offended that publicly traded businesses have stepped into their space. They don't quite know what to do about competition. They hate that there is so much money involved. Quality is a huge concern. Loss of market share is making them nuts.  

And so there is fomenting about quality and interstate commerce, and railing against the bad actors whose recruitment techniques are evil and whose SEO investments are obscene and whose students drop out in great nunbers and default on student loans. On purpose.

Wait. Market share? Competition?

Why yes.

Here is the dirty little secret of online learning: Everyone is in online learning for the money. We are all competing for market share.

Think about it. Everyone who considers adopting online learning as a learning delivery option thinks about both extending reach AND generating revenue. We have to. Even open online learning has to figure out how to operate these days. WCET's Managing Online Education 2010 survey with the Campus Computing Project shows this very clearly.  It doesn't matter if you are a "for-profit" institution, run as a business -  or if you are a state-funded institution, focused on common good. Revenue is not the only reason for offering online programs. But it's becoming an increasingly important consideration, across the post-secondary ecosystem. 

So maybe this is a great moment to celebrate. Online learning has tipped into mainstream consciousness. Yes it has. It matters enough that people will pay for it. Let's celebrate the fact that there is demand for high quality, online learning programs. And let's all finally admit that we are ALL in it for the money, one way or another. These days, we have to be. It's the only way our programs will thrive.

OKAY?? DONE!

With that out of the way, perhaps we can quit worrying about our respective bases of institutional funding and we can ALL focus on raising the bar on quality and giving a lot more people a shot at achieving the dream of a college education. Time to own the secret that we all need to think about what it takes to pay our way and delight our stakeholders. Time to move on to things that matter.

What Learning Professionals Can Learn from "Moneyball"

Today is the premiere of "Moneyball", the long anticipated movie starring Brad Pitt. Based on the book by the same name, this is a story of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team actively leveraged player statistics as business intelligence, and how this allowed them to successfully compete against the huge payroll differentials among just about every other Major League Baseball team. In spite of the fact that they had significantly less money to pay the players they hoped to recruit, the Oakland A's developed the art of winning into a science, and changed baseball in the process.

Bucking the long accepted, "know 'em when you see 'em" approach to player recruitment used pretty much by everyone in baseball, Manager Billy Beane and his team of MBAs figured out how to use broadly available player statistics to find and recruit the highest performing prospects as reported by their statistics, not by the usual folk wisdom favored by scouts. In many cases, the statistical high performers were complete unknowns, not necessarily looking anything like the standard kind of player scouts tended to favor. By virtue of their unknown status, the A's were able to sign them at salaries the team could actually afford to pay. They were able to keep them long enough to foster talents. And while many an Oakland A team member would go on to great big huge contracts with other teams, they did so after mastering ther craft while wearing an A's uniform.

I was so captivated by the analytics possibilities from the movie buzz (yes, I know. I'm a nerd) that I went out and bought a copy of the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis at my local bookstore over the weekend. It just seemed like there are things that education types could learn about using stats as part of a decision strategy. It was a fast compelling read. I have to tell you, there are many things that those of us starting to think about using analytics to improve our practice can learn from this story.

Without spending a lot of time on the details I thought this one quote might resonate a bit with those among us who are up to our eyeballs in making the case for analytics:

"Baseball keeps copious records, and people talk about them and argue about them and think about them a great deal. Why doesn't anybody use them? Why doesn't anybody say, in the face of this contention or that, "Prove it'?"

Which of course is exactly what the A's went off and did.

Now. What if we substituted the words "postsecondary education" for "baseball"?

In education we would need be content with demonstrating tenability at a particular level of significance...but still.

There is a lot to learn here. Things like, letting evidence speak more loudly than opinions. Giving less well funded, smaller competitors a shot at a level playing field by using information as intelligence. Using the information we have at hand to help us compete and succeed.

What? Let the evidence speak for itself? Madness.

Of course, the prospect that Brad Pitt is going to (1) make statistics sexy by (2) showing a real-world example of (3) using data-driven decision-making to (4) completely transform a well respected American institution is making this little ol' quant research analyst do the happy dance.

When I Think of the Future of Online Learning

I am attending a Summit later this week. The University Professional and Continuing Educational Association and the Association for Continuing Higher Education are co-hosting a sold out invitational meeting to consider the Future of Online Learning. Many dozens of learning leaders will be in attendence. I am looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.

As a long-time online learning / elearning / distance learning / teletraining kinda gal, these kinds of events please me in an odd, parental sort of way. It is quite satisfying to see how over the past more than 25 years of grinding their way into teaching practice, learning technologies now routinely extend the reach of the traditional classroom. Online learning has tipped into mainstream consciousness, even if mainstream exceptance continues to be somewhat elusive. 

Since I DO have some skin in this online learning game, let me tell you some of the things I hope we will hear about during the next few days:

• I hope we will hear that it is time to move past online learning as a technological analog of the traditional college classroom.
• I want us to talk openly about getting serious about high quality, online learning experiences that scale.
• I want to hear how more students will have the opportunity to achieve the dream of a college education.
• I want to hear more about the $10,000 degree. Or the $5,000 degree. Either one.
• I want to hear how we will make sure that online students can quit being ashamed to say they got their degree from an online school.
• I want to revisit how adult learners demonstrate that the knowledge they have accrued outside the classroom is a legitimate part of competency certification.  
• I want to hear how the campus learning portal / LMS is being deployed in new and innovative ways, 
• I want to hear how online learning professionals are going to use descriptive, inferential and predictive analysis of de-identified student records to better predict when students might benefit from a bit of extra help to stay on academic track.
• I want to hear how institutions are going to make online learning experiences more compelling,  engaging, personalized and professionally relevant.
• I want to hear that there is room for informal collaborative learning moments in every student's program of study.
• I want to see more attention paid to interactive digital learning content - PDFs and digital textbooks, apps and learning objects - that students produce and publish.
• I want to understand how OER will sustain itself.
• I want to understand how mobility is changing the online learning game, and how social media bring real-time interpersonal interactivity to our conversations.
• I want to see the use of game mechanics and gamification extend our thinking about how to motivate and engage learners without turning games into the next generation of crappy elearning.

From everything I can see on that horizon these issues are all going to be part of the future of online learning. With respect, they are already part of the present. IMHO, it's time to make dealing with these issues part of our practice. Looking forward to what comes next.

 

WCET Receives Grant for Groundbreaking Higher Education Analytic Research

I am pleased to share the following good news.

WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, announced today that WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, has been awarded a $1,000,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund an initiative to unify student data from six U.S. institutions and demonstrate the effective use of predictive analytic methods for improving student outcomes. The goal is to identify variables that influence student retention and progression, and guide decision-making that improves postsecondary student completion in the U.S.

This grant for the Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework will aggregate data representing more than 400,000 student records from across six WCET member institutions: American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and the University of Phoenix. Each participating institution has been exploring or implementing descriptive, inferential or predictive analytics projects on their own student data; the PAR Framework expands on this work through exploration of patterns that can be derived when the six institutional datasets are considered as a single, unified sample.

The principal investigator is Phil Ice, Ed.D., American Public University System (APUS). The project will incorporate many of the best practices and award-winning predictive analytical methods for which Phil has been recognized by the Sloan Consortium and for which project partner Dr. Vernon Smith, Rio Salado College, has won the prestigious WCET Outstanding Work (WOW) award. WCET has appointed Beth Davis, WCET, to serve as the project director.

The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) is a cooperative, membership-driven, non-profit provider of solutions and services that accelerate the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education. More information about WCET’s institutional membership resources, services and common interest groups can be found on here.

eBang Theory, Say "Hey" to High Quality Online Learning That Scales

Once upon a time, equity analyst Howard Block, Ph.D. wrote a report entitled The e-Bang Theory: Education Industry Overview 1999 Illuminismo, Volume 2  (San Francisco: Banc of America Securities Equity Research, Montgomery Division, September 1999). This report is the one credited with igniting the explosion of interest in financial markets that legitimized what is known today as eLearning.

In this report, Block outlined the tenets of his theory that explained why and how investing in businesses that featured technology to facilitate online learning would probably make investors and the companies in which they invested a lot of money. 

I attended a meeting at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA just after this report was released. I still remember the electricity, the "e" in the air. Probably tells you a lot about the times that everyone devoured anything from analysts that talked about investing opportunities using web technologies and the related products and services that accompany them to market, to school and to work.

In making the case that 1999 was the time for a new model of education - elearning - to appear on the horizon, Block noted that:

• "The economy is quickly becoming dependent upon human capital, which forces all of us to increase our aptitude at managing and productively employing human capital, a task incumbent upon all of our learning systems.

• "Political initiatives are inviting more businesses inside the school house door than every before in the history of public education. these initiatives include charter school legislation and voucher programs.

• "The inexorable technological revolution continuously overhauls the workplace, thereby forcing workers to treat learning as a basic part of their job description. Technology is not only a driver for more learning but it is also an enablers of electronic learning (e-learning). The intellectual demands of the economy are outstripping our capacity to satisfy it. (Block, 1999, P.3)

(Danger, Will Robinson. We seem to have slipped through a hole in the time space continuum. Isn't this the same things we are still talking about today??)

Block went on to define elearning as the convergence of the internet and education and identified 15 unique benefits associated with it:

1. Available at any time. "It's always there!"
2. Accessible from any location "I can always get to it"
3. Multimedia content: use of audio, video, interactive chat, text, etc.
4. Accommodates individual learning styles: self-paced, asynchronous collaborative, synchronous collaborative.
5. Hyperlearning as contrasted with static text, elearning has the capacity to link with the other resources (simulations, other content, study groups, etc) that can enhance the learning experience and avoid the linear learning dictated by textbooks. The self-directed nature of elearning allows hyperlearning.
6. Blindness of the learning engagement: some learners who are inhibited in a classroom may increase engagement online
7. Learner-centered learning: The learner is not a passive participant but a proactive searcher and finder of information.
8. Modularity of presentation: The content's architecture is modular, which facilitates different construction of learning design in both design and length.
9. Manageable structure: The electronic infrastructure supports managed and measurable interactions between advisers and learners
10. Ability to measure the effectiveness of the program. eLearning software empowers administrators to track performance and measures ROI. In addition, monitoring usage by user is simpler, i.e., the number of downloads per user can be measured. This helps training managers to evaluate cost-effectiveness and provides assistance with license negotiations based on estimated use.
11. Simpler data management, The rapid rate with which new learning products are introduced and older products become obsolete creates a challenge for individuals charged with updating libraries. However, if a single version of each product is kept on a host, users get instantaneous access and updated components.
12. Cost savings: provides an efficient and cost-effective model for education
13. Revenue enhancement: provides a way for campuses to expand classroom enrollments without using bricks and mortar.
14. Greater storage capacity. The Internet has so much more capacity than most physical locations or a user's hard drive. This allows learners to access more products and lets the adviser mix and match courseware activities to fit specific needs. Learners can preview presentations of different courses prior to selecting one, or they can access a specific slide from thousands.
15. Individual education programs (IEP) can be generated from a combination of the historical record of the student's prior learning (from monitored usage) and the vast data stored on the server. As student's progress, information is delivered based on what they learned and how they've performed. For example, a student would log on to the learning server and a customized course would be generated from the content data base that knows which courses the learner took, how well she did, what her job description is, what problem is most pressing. This dimension serves to focus the curriculum on skill gaps, saving organizations both time and money. A by-product of IEPs, in our view, is increased motivation from the self-centered nature of the experience.

One has to wonder if maybe our agenda for the next gen of elearning, the Web 2.0 era, should be aimed at delivering on some of these promises that Block and the investment communities were making on our behalf as long as ten years ago. Because when I think about some of the big ideas that were shared among the participants of a fantastic think tank experience I had a few weeks ago at Rio Salado College in Tempe Arizona and what we can finally do deliver on these 15 promises described above...well, I have to say, I am excited about all the new opportunities that are startiong to emerge on the horizon.

And THAT brings me to my real subject of today's blogpost.

Imagine how excited I am that one of the hottest new emerging trends that is going to rock post-secondary education is a return to High Quality. Scalable. Online. Howard Block gave us the roadmpap more than a decade ago. And now, as we all try to figure out how to navigate in what Josh Jarrett calls "The New Normal", it seems as if High Quality, Scale and Online easily fit in the same sentence. Again.

There are  initiatives on the horizon that will challenge the way we think about our practice. Hopefully give us all some tools and techniques to think about achieving our goals in creative new ways. I have to say, when I think about where  the next waves of innovation are likely to emerge in my little slice of the education ecosystem I start getting butterflies in my stomach. Excited butterflies.  

Next stop on the journey to find high quality online learning that scales: We Go to Rio.

ID Secret Handshakes: First Round

Regardless of where you learned your craft, whether you have a graduate degree or not, whatever the market sector where you work -  there are certain things that people working in instructional design settings do that make themselves unique from, say, a web designer or a graphic artist or an LMS manager.

While the following "know 'em when you see 'em" attributes are a little bit tongue-in-cheek, these really are some of the initial things I notice when I'm sorting "real deal" IDs from the pretenders and wanna-bes. Sort of like the elimination round on a reality show:

• "Real" IDs call ourselves IDs. And we know just what we are talking about when we call ourselves that. No need to go through the loooooong explanation that ID stands for intructional design, because of course that means we have to explain what instructional design is, and we all know what a drag THAT can be.

• We all make fun of ADDIE. If you DON'T make fun of ADDIE, then other *real* IDs will make fun of you. They won't even bother to go behind your back. If you need for me to explain what ADDIE is then you are really not even eligible to be reading this blogpost.

• We've never met a learning theory we didn't like. I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing. The learning theories we love become our "colors". Let your freak flag fly high.

• "We don't need no stinkin' numbers". I know some of us are really smart number crunchers. Still. in the World o' ID, measurement is a necessary evil, we much prefer "qualitative research", and evaluation typically dismissed by saying "oh, our customers won't pay for it". As if that's really a good enough reason to not evaluate one's work.

• In our hearts we believe we are artists. We are engaged in the creative expression of new ideas and information. We want to design experiences that engage and inspire. Nobody really understands us.

• We love new technology. We love innovation. These days we really love social media and i-products. But that will change. Trust me. There's always something new and bright and shiny.
  
  
• We love to share. We love sharing more than just about anything in the entire world. We post, we present, we tweet, we blog, we write articles and books and white papers. We especially love to share our slides. Thank you for sharing.

How about you? How do you know 'em when you see 'em? What are some of your favorite techniques for cutting the good IDs out of the herd??

In Case You Missed This Part (with thnx 2 @oldaily)

Picking up a thread from yesterday...

I continue to believe that the most immediate opportunity for demonstrating the value of learning analytics in institutions and enterprises comes from mining existing pools of data in creative and thoughtful ways. But Stephen Downes was absolutely right in his April 24th critique of my post Data Change Everything. He said that the emerging learning analytics paradigms will benefit not from mining old data new ways, but in looking for better ways to collect new information.

Doing old things in new ways is an important step toward change. Transformation means doing new things in new ways.

Gamification offers one very exciting new possibility for doing just exactly that. The mobile web opens lots of data collection opportunities and there are bound to be lots more.

Just think about it.

When Learning Analytics Meet Gamification

Great minds are already at work on a very big idea: What if we morph the emerging fascination with massive N predictive learning analytics with a mechanism for collecting massive transactional behavioral data where millions and millions of subjects already willingly volunteer their input?

Learning Analytics, meet Gamification.

I don't like the term gamificiation, either. But I'm not talking about the introduction of check-ins and badges to everything. THAT is something I would much prefer to call ... playing with games. Rather, I am talking about the benefits of considering the rich massive N data source for tracking the behavioral transactions of game play. And being able to subject that big pool of data to a battery of descriptive, inferential and predictive statistical methods to identify points of loss and momentum. 

Anne Derryberry, a 2010-2011 Fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri School of Journalism, has been applying what she calls purpose-driven game design to journalism and journalism education. She has focused on games as an emerging medium and distribution channel for news-telling, particularly as a means to induce community engagement and civic participation.

Her research is also indicating ways to track and analyze behavioral transactions and player interactions of an online game to enable new ways to understand points of loss and momentum in communications- related endeavors. She's coined the term "journalytics" to describe how analytics and purpose-driven game design mesh to give journalism and news outlets the metrics they need to focus and adjust their interaction strategies.

Relevant for journalism. AND education. IMHO. Early and preliminary results. But still. We in the learning world can benefit from some of these ideas.

Anne will be quick to point out that America's Army and other MMOGs have been using game play for recruitment, community building and even into predictive performance advising and professional development guidance for a while now. She has been tracking serious games for learning, training and performance support for the past few years at her blog, I'm Serious.net. But she was fascinated at seeing if the things she saw in these game-based learning designs could be relevant in other disciplines. This past year she developed noozYou as a vehicle for testing some of her hypotheses about purpose-driven game design in journalism with Mizzou journalism students. 

She can tell you about this far, far better than I can. So I am going to suggest that you follow her on Twitter at @aderryberry and @noozYou. It's been fascinating stuff.

I WILL tell you she's been advising the Sage Road crew as we've been pushing our own predictive analytics horizons. We think this approach holds great promise and has immediate, direct positive implications for the new kinds of data collection opportunities.

I continue to believe the most immediate opportunity for demonstrating the value of learning analytics in institutions and enterprises is to mine existing pools of data in creative and thoughtful ways. But Stephen Downes was absolutely right in his April 24th critique of my post Data Change Everything. He said that some of the emerging learning analytics paradigms will benefit not from mining old data new ways, but in looking for better ways to collect new information. Here is one very exciting new possibility for doing just exactly that.