RevolutiOnline.edu

There was a star-studded round table session at the World Economic Forum at Davos last week entitled ‘RevolutiOnline.edu: Online Education Changing the World’. The session was moderated by Thomas Friedman, and the speakers included Larry Summers (former Harvard President), Bill Gates, Peter Theil (Founder’s Fund), Rafael Reif (MIT President), Sebastian Thrun (Udacity), Daphne Koller (Coursera), and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has been taking MOOCs.

The video recording runs for 68 minutes which is longer than the average attention span these days, but it is pretty compelling viewing.

Highlights for me included:

• the whole of Friedman’s interview with 12-year old Khadijah Niazi, which illustrated quite vividly how revolutionary and far-reaching the open education movement can be (the first 15 minutes or so);
• the Larry Summer’s quote (borrowed from Rudi Dornbusch) that “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you think they could” (applied to online learning) (24:30);
• the comments from Peter Theil about why students are not getting value for money in education and how this is serving to drive the disruption in the higher education space (from 30:33 to 35:00); and
• the remarks made by Bill Gates about peer-to-peer interaction and why online learning is working now when it hasn’t in the past (40:50), and the question of the ‘credential’ (41:45 to 42:05) and how, in the past, it was where you went and how long you spent there, compared with now where it is about proof you have the knowledge, independent of how you acquired it.

The comments made by Theil and Gates have consequences for all universities. Put simply, the economics of higher education has changed, and as a recent  Moody’s report highlights, not even the Ivy League is safe. The business model has to change, and those that refuse (or are slow) to change may find themselves out of business.

Online conference on assessment in the digital age

Came across an ad for this conference today on the IFETS listserv. Looks like it will be interesting if the keynotes are anything to go by. It is being organised in conjunction with the Re-engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project, a GBP1m initiative funded by the Scottish Funding Council under its e-Learning Transformation initiative. The focus is on assessment for learning in tertiary education, and there are three themes to be addressed via the keynotes, case studies and asynchronous discussions:
* Assessment and the first year experience
* Great designs for assessment
* Institutional strategies (designs) for assessment

Authentic learning environments in statistics

Often branded ‘sadistics’ by students, finding ways of engaging students to foster deep learning in statistics has always presented a challenge. The introduction of more authentic learning environments for the study of statistics within the MBA program at the Brisbane Graduate School of Business at QUT has been sufficiently successful to encourage students to opt for the follow on statistics subject! This paper to be presented at this year’s Online Learning and Teaching conference in Australia reports on the progress made.

Creating open book open web exams

I presented a paper on a methodology for authoring open book open web exams recently at the 2004 ASCILITE conference in Perth. A pdf version of my PowerPoint slides is available here.