The Indian International University 2017: A Retrospective

iHigherEd: A new paradigm requires new language

The infographic below (produced by OnlineUniversities.com) contains some interesting data that lends considerable weight to the argument that we are now in the midst of a major paradigm shift in the higher education space.

I was also pleased to see that there is no reference to ‘lecturer’ or ‘instructor’ (or even ‘teacher!). This is a major gripe of mine as despite the increasingly technology-enabled, learner-centric environment we work in, many of us don’t seem to be able to let go of the old terms and labels. Is it appropriate to use words like these when they connote a very different type of pedagogy?

Also, why do we persist with the ‘e’-prefix? This might have been apt in the 1990s, but e-learning just seems so passé to me. Around the time the term arose, we also used to talk about e-banking, and nowadays people just talk about doing their banking. Maybe it’s time we also just talked about learning.

The reference to ‘e-books’ is also starting to grate on me, not least because they’re not really books. When the higher education student reaches for their iPad to access their e-books, they do so to access an interactive learning community in which they are a participant, and in the process they will be contributing in the capacity of both consumer and producer of content. Does this mean they are both reader and author of the ‘book’?

The iPad and other tablet PCs are tools with the capacity to completely revolutionise education to the extent that the lexicon of terms we have used to describe learning for generations (e.g. lecturer, book, classroom — and even LMS — no longer apply.

When, as educators, we internalise this then perhaps we will truly have experienced paradigm shift.

Source: mashable.com

The ubiquity of m-learning

Image source: mobl21.com

I spoke with a group of training professionals at a large company last week and, for the first time in a long time, I found myself presenting the argument that there is more interactivity in an online class than in a face-to-face (F2F) class. I’ve had to do this on many occasions over the years, but I hadn’t realised that this question had all but disappeared off the radar.

That so few people now would venture to suggest this in the post-Web 2.0 era is testimony, perhaps, to the maturity of online learning. But it’s not just about the increasing popularity of social networking per se. The growing sophistication of handheld devices — or what we used to call ‘mobile phones’ — has added fuel to the social media fire, such that connectivity and interaction levels have reached fever pitch.

In an F2F setting, interaction will always be limited to the number of people who can talk at once. In an online setting, numerous conversations take place concurrently, more people can participate, and they participate with people they perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have participated with.

This is facilitating student engagement on a scale few educators could have dreamt of just a few years ago — myself included. I poured scorn on the idea that anyone would want to read a large amount of text from a mobile device, but then that was before iPhones and iPads, and the advent of ‘the App’. Astonishingly, Apple now claims to have 140,000 apps in the App Store, and some 40,000 of these are educational apps.

Going mobile. The Jobs factor

On the day the world learned that Steve Jobs had logged out for the final time, it is fitting to comment on one of his many legacies. It has been estimated that by 2015, more people will be accessing the Internet via mobile devices than through PCs. The video clip above estimates it will be slightly earlier in 2014 but, frankly, I’d be amazed if it takes this long.

In the education industry, the possibilities are boundless. The launch of the $35 tablet this week is as big piece of news on disruptive innovation as there is likely to be for a while, with there now being a real chance of doing something positive about the education of the rural poor in India. Just as Indians leap-frogged landlines and went straight to mobile telephony, I expect the same to happen in terms of mass mobile connectivity to the Web, with huge consequences for economic development.

Without doubt, the iPhone and the iPad have revolutionised they way we access the Internet, and I think without the Jobs ‘Apple-coolness’ factor, this may not have happened, or at least not proceeded as quickly as it might.

iThankyou Mr Jobs.

Social media is not about technology

The latest version of the Social Media Revolution by Socialnomics was uploaded to YouTube last week. Some of the statistics have been updated and there are a number of new slides. For me, the most compelling is the very first which simply reads: social media is not about technology. This is so true. I have been campaigning long and hard for several years now to drop the ‘e’ from e-learning. It’s just learning! It’s how we do things now … or at least it’s how our students do things. Social media to a digital native is as normal as pen and paper to a digital immigrant, and yet there is still resistance to the mainstreaming of social media for formal education purposes. The argument that students don’t have sufficient access to technology is starting wear a little thin. In the Sustainable Development and Competitive Advantage MBA class I delivered at Christ University in Bangalore, India, earlier this month, the students twittered about #SDCA so much, it was trending in Bangalore at one stage during the week. On the last day, without any notice, the students made videos documenting their learning outcomes, because 56 of the 57 people in the class either had video capability on their hand held device or on their laptop.