How to promote digital literacies among faculty

In the recently published NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis, Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-18, it stated (p.3) that (shock, horror) there is a need for more faculty training to improve digital media literacy ‘before being asked to teach, and for more professional development opportunities once in the profession’. More significantly, though, the report points out that:

While a lack of adequate training opportunities is a part of the challenge, ultimately a change in the mind sets of disciplines and individual faculty will be required, along with cultural shifts within institutions, before emerging tools and technologies are routinely adopted and implemented as a matter of course.

One way of changing mindsets is for academics to to find some intrinsic motivation to leverage these emerging technologies. As Belshaw argues (slide 28), the trick is to identify an area where important issues overlap with personal interest. In other words, academics will upskill because they want to rather than because they have to. In these circumstances, the efficacy of preservice training/ professional development is likely to be enhanced.

Only after faculty have become au fait with the digital literacies (slides 24-27) and what they bring to their own personal learning environment (PLE), will they be able to respond to the increasing demand for personalised learning from their students. As the Horizon report notes (p.4):

More than ever, students are using ICT and new always-connected mobiles outside of the classroom to explore subjects that personally interest them. Institutions need to leverage and promote these informal learning experiences while integrating them with on-campus learning.

This is why it is important for institutional learning management systems (LMSs) to become more open and accommodate the PLEs of learners (slide 61).

 

Why MOOCs matter

Amid all the hoo-har about MOOCs and the will-they won’t-they debate over their impact on university business models, a piece by Tom Friedman caught my eye the other day on the rise of the ‘celebrity professor’. The stimulus for the Friedman article was a conference he attended last week hosted by Harvard University and MIT where academics and administrators from these two elite US universities discussed the rise of online courses and the ramifications for residential colleges and universities. One outcome, as Inside Higher Ed reports, is that MOOCs are certainly prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before.

Friedman notes that not every academic is likely to generate a rock-star following following their entry into MOOCdom, but he issues a grave warning to the rest us mere mortal when he states:

‘The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor … When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.’

This is why MOOCs matter. I presented at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I was asked for my advice by a member of the audience on how she might go about dealing with a group of recalcitrant academics in her department who are steadfastly refusing to do anything online. My response was that, pretty soon, it may not be a decision that they get to make. As Friedman notes in his article, Harvard Business School no longer teaches entry-level accounting because there is a professor at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course is so good that Harvard students use that instead.

Mainstreaming the disruption

This slide deck I presented at a senior leadership conference at Griffith University last week.

The essence of my argument is that the higher education sector is entering a perfect storm with the problems of student indebtedness, budget deficits and graduate unemployment looming large, combining with the disruptive innovation from the non-university private sector providing what appear to be viable alternatives to a traditional university education.

The solution, I believe, is to ‘mainstream the disruption’. To sit back and continue with business as usual would be a courageous decision (to borrow from Sir Humphrey Appleby).

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.

The open education movement: What does it mean for your institution?

Image source: thechronicleherald.ca

I came across a nice post (via @catspyjamasnz) today that gathers together some of the themes I have been blogging about in recent weeks. Roland Sussex succinctly defines ‘open education’ and then goes on to contextualise what this now means in the wake of the new models of delivery that have been attracting a lot of attention of late. He refers, for example, to the founding of Udacity following the successful trial of a course in artificial intelligence delivered completely free online:

The course attracted 160,000 enrolments (roughly the total enrolment of the UK Open University) from 190 countries, and 23,000 completed it. It provided frequent feedback and tests, with two examinations (mid-semester and end-semester), all handled by software. Students who passed the course received a letter of completion. And all this was totally cost-free to the student.

The students also provided creative input. They established two large Facebook pages for course discussion and interaction, and nearly 2,000 of them translated the course materials into 44 languages. And the solutions to the very frequent quizzes, now on Youtube, provided feedback and commentary. The course designers implemented a version of problem-based learning and made it work online.

As Sussex goes on to point out, Udacity is an extension of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), where a university course is made available online to anyone free of charge, but only the paying students get feedback on assessment and certification.

The key question is whether a point will be reached where the monopoly power of formal education will be broken up because the market value of a course completed with the likes of Udacity will be equal (or close) to the value of a traditionally certified programme. As outrageous as this might sound to some, the longer educational institutions continue to resist change, the more likely it is that their service will become increasingly less valuable.

At the very least, I anticipate that some institutions will start reconsidering their business models along the lines of a ‘study now, pay later’ approach, offering MOOCs with fees being paid at the end of the course by students wishing to exercise the option of certification (assuming they believe it constitutes value for money).

The MITs of this world can continue to potter around experimenting without worrying too much about how it might impact on their ‘core business’. The same cannot be said, however, for those institutions facing competitive pressure because of funding cuts, the economic downturn, and dissatisfied clients.