Ed tech – not just for schools

Much focus on education technology and innovation revolves around its application in the halls of academia and institutions of higher learning. But the reach of educational technologies extends well beyond school walls.

Professional education and on-the-job training are two areas where education technology has been having a steady and significant effect. Online professional certification programs are not new, and many corporations have been employing innovative educational technologies for corporate training for several years now. For example, Udacity offers “nanodegrees” in a variety of tech-related fields, and large corporations offer on-demand training courses through their Learning Management Systems (LMS).

Both Udacity's nanodegrees and corporate LMS systems drastically reduce the costs associated with education. In Udacity’s case, students can take a series of courses on a single topic and receive a marketable credential. This training, while not free, costs much less than a full degree in the same field but might be just as valuable given that Udacity partners with the potential employers themselves (Google, Facebook, and AT&T, just to name a few) to create the courses. As for corporate LMS systems, enabling employees to take training when they have downtime rather than requiring them to attend training at a specific place and time is certainly a boost to productivity. Moreover, the on-demand training can also be just-in-time training, reducing times between when training is received and when knowledge and skills are implemented on the job.

In my own work experience as an instructional designer of corporate training, I have also worked to implement blended learning solutions for clients. My work has involved developing web-based training (WBT) and instructor-led training (ILT) for clients based on their content, audience, and learning objectives. This blended approach requires learners first to take the web-based training for foundational knowledge before attending the instructor-led training, which focuses on practice exercises and job-specific scenarios with an expert instructor. In many ways, the blended learning approach of WBTs and ILTs is similar to what is taking place in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institutions: our approach to corporate training is essentially the same concept used in flipped classroom models in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education.

These examples provide evidence that educational technologies and innovation are not limited to academic settings. While they might not receive as much attention in the academic literature, professional certifications and corporate training are two additional areas where technology and innovation are affecting learning, with more such areas likely to be identified as technology continues to advance.

Blending learning

So what's the deal with blended learning?

Blended learning replaces at least some traditional classroom instruction with digital content, for example watching recorded lectures or presentations individually and then working together to answer questions or practice skills. It might be thought of as a midway point between MOOCs and traditional classroom learning.

At its best, blended learning harnesses many of the benefits of MOOCs while avoiding some of its challenges. In practice, blended learning is a way to bring technology into the classroom while taking full advantage of the benefits of having trained educators on hand to help when students have questions or need additional assistance.

Given the wide nature of this definition of blended learning, it’s hard to determine when and where blended learning occurs. Technology has been creeping into the classroom for a long time. Recorded lectures and presentations are not new.

Perhaps one distinguishing attribute of today’s blended learning is that it can be self-paced and individualized. In modern connected classrooms, as well as at home, students can access on-demand content and complete it at their own speed, rewinding, skipping ahead, slowing down, and speeding up content as needed.

One type of blended learning is the flipped classroom, where students watch recorded lectures and content at home and work on “homework” exercises in the classroom. While the flipped classroom is just one blended learning approach, it has received considerable attention in the academic literature and from educators. Classroom flipping has been billed as an innovative approach in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary classroom settings.

At its best, blended learning strategies have the potential to individualize education to each learner and help students where they need it most. But blended learning is not without its critics. The Washington Post recently reproduced an article written by Phil McRae of the University of Alberta who was critical of the approach. He finds that

“Many myths, when viewed up close, provide deep reflections of ourselves and society. Technologies in particular have amplified our North American desires for choice, flexibility and individualization, so it’s easy to be seduced by a vision of blended learning environments delivering only what we want, when and how we want it customized.”

While the suggestion that American society’s appetite for individualized learning is a reflection of its individualistic values is an interesting point, it is also worth noting that students’ interests and individual abilities are unique to each student. Reaching students at different levels of interest and ability has always been one of the challenges of education. If technology enables the same content to be presented simultaneously in different ways to engage individual learners based on their strengths and interests, it will make little difference whether the students come from individualistic or collectivist societies: as long as students are evaluated for individual performance, customizing content will help individual learners succeed.

As always, it is important to align learning objectives with considerations of audience and content, but blended learning approaches, including the flipped classroom, are another option available to educators looking to innovate their classrooms. And with a growing amount of content, including Open Educational Resources (OERs), available online, implementing a blended-learning approach has never been easier. 

MOOCs gone wrong

Despite continual improvements, MOOCs as a concept are still in a fledgling, experimental phase. As with any experiment, things do not always go to plan.

In 2013, Slate reported that in January of that year San Jose State University entered into an agreement with Udacity, a major MOOC platform, to offer some of the university’s courses online for credit both to its students and to the public. While this was exciting news about the progression of MOOCs (which were then being offered for credit - could they replace traditional classroom education?), it turned out the idea of MOOCs as university courses offered for credit might not yet have been ready for prime time. SJSU mothballed the program just a few months later when pass rates for the courses failed to hit 50%.

What went wrong? Was it the students? The instructors? The courses? The delivery method (MOOCs) itself? Slate’s coverage suggested SJSU's particular group of pupil might have been an atypical student body by previous MOOCs' standards. Regardless of the reason or combination of reasons contributing to MOOCs' various challenges, each experiment with MOOCs is another data point and another opportunity to refine the MOOC model, the course offerings, the evaluation methods, and every other conceivable variable pertaining to MOOCs.

Another ironic example of MOOC meltdown occurred with a Coursera course called “Fundamentals of Online Learning: Planning and Application.” Sadly, the course was a largely negative experience for students and eventually had to be shut down. Critics, including students, complained of poor course design and execution. Given that it was a course about creating online courses, this was rather unfortunate.

Andrew Ng, cofounder of Coursera, had this to say about the course:

“We believe strongly in giving our university partners the ability to experiment with online education, and we encourage them to think outside the box when approaching online course development. Unfortunately this particular experiment did not go as planned, and out of respect for our students' time and effort, Coursera and Georgia Tech collaboratively determined that the best way to serve our students would be to close the class until the issues are resolved and we can offer a great experience. Moving forward, we will work with professors and universities to guarantee that all parties have a sufficient amount of time to review course material and design before a course’s start date. This will ensure that we have time to flag and address any issues and concerns before a course begins.”

Mr. Ng’s comments underscore the importance of experimentation, course design, and interaction between MOOC developers and MOOC platforms, both of whose names are associated with the experience.

Beyond getting evaluation and course design right, though, other aspects of MOOCs are also worthy of experimentation. For example, many MOOC creators would love to figure out how to improve completion and pass rates. In addition, for the time being, many courses are available to students free of charge. While providing a clear public benefit in the present, over the long term, creating, maintaining, and updating free content and continually enrolling new students year after year are not sustainable. The financial model of MOOCs will eventually require attention. Moreover, is price a factor in completion and pass rates? While there is some research linking paid MOOCs with higher completion, what is the optimal price for a course to maximize completion rates?

A third concern regards who is signing up for courses. To increase MOOCs’ benefit to society, MOOC creators and providers may wish to target more than the current folks who typically enroll in MOOCs: curious-but-already-educated Westerns, including many educators. Finally, it would be interesting to identify the role of different student profiles (regressed against factors like socioeconomic status, education level, gender, nationality, etc.) in completion and pass rates, as well as the roles of accreditation, certificate and diploma programs, and professional credibility on enrollment, completion, and pass rates.

Despite the challenges MOOCs face, the promise, the potential of MOOCs – their scalability, their reach, their innovation – merits continued investigation.

MOOCs - the good, the bad, and the ugly

The MOOC model has many benefits, but there are limitations as well. Below are non-exhaustive lists of benefits and drawbacks to MOOCs.

Benefits:

• Ability to accommodate much larger class sizes than traditional classrooms
• Open enrollment – no formal admissions process
• Flexibility for students’ schedules and locations
• Access for all to the world’s best experts, educators, and institutions (imagine if we could all take science classes taught by Bill Nye!)
• Ability to piece together the best courses possible from multiple institutions
• Flexibility for instructors to “take the classroom with them” to film a lecture on location (at a museum, in a place of interest, etc.)
• Opportunity for instructors to “get it just right” with multiple takes when recording lectures
  • Highly reusable lectures for what previously might have been multiple sections of a single course and in subsequent semesters or school years (barring major changes in content area)

• Immediate feedback on homework/exercises through automated grading
• Lower costs to institutions and students (no physical classrooms, larger class sizes/fewer professors, often free class materials, automated grading and peer feedback through online forums (fewer TAs required))
• Increased reach of world-class education to people around the world and of various socioeconomic backgrounds (including traditionally marginalized groups)
• Vast array of new data ranging from how and when students learn best to specifics on where students make mistakes

Limitations:

• Programs that aren’t accredited in the same way as traditional university courses (even though they’re from accredited institutions)
• Courses mostly offered individually, with fewer program-level options (although this is changing)
• Lack of a degree-granting exclusively MOOC program; as such, even a MOOC certificate is not (yet) a replacement for a traditional 4- or even 2-year degree
• MOOCs' lacking respect compared to other traditional degrees and certifications, even those offered by the same institutions
• Low, at times abysmal, completion rates
• Challenge of engaging students who are not physically present
• Difficulty of establishing a sense of community or camaraderie akin to a traditional classroom or university setting
• Larger class sizes with little if any individual interaction with professors
• Challenges inherent with certain course types
  • Difficulties with automated grading of long-form essays/written work, providing challenges for certain types of courses (e.g. humanities, art, social science, advanced language courses)
  • Challenges for courses requiring a physical product (e.g. engineering, sewing, cooking, mechanics, etc.)

Efforts are underway to address these limitations where possible. For example, universities are experimenting with certificate programs for completing a series of MOOCs, as well as college credit for completing certain courses. Eventually, entire degree programs may be available.

Issues with engagement are being addressed in a few different ways. For example, online forums allow students to interact with each other to discuss questions and assignments. Instructors can even chime in to the discussion to provide corrections and feedback that are visible to all. In addition to online forums, edX encourages students using its platform to meet in person with other people in their area taking the same course. Research has shown that students who meet in such study groups are far more likely to complete their courses. Finally, course instructors can host virtual office hours via Google Hangouts or other group video chat software to allow students dedicated time to ask and receive answers to their questions.

Grading and evaluating students’ work is another challenge for MOOCs because class sizes are so large. For some types of content and question types, computer software can easily provide instant feedback to learners, reinforcing right answers and providing explanations for why various answers are incorrect. For questions and subjects requiring longer written answers, such as the humanities, MOOCs employ a few different approaches. For example, self- and peer-grading, where professors provide guidelines as to what they were looking for and students correct their own and others’ work, has proven successful. Advances in computer software also have also improved computers’ ability to grade even longer written passages.

Despite these efforts, there’s still no perfect MOOC method or platform that works for every type of content. As with any pedagogical development, it’s crucial to keep audience, content, and delivery method in line with the learning objectives to design the right course. Innovative instructional designers are right to imagine new ways to present content and work around the limitations of online and distance learning inherent in MOOCs, but there will likely always be some topics and concepts best taught hands on and in person.

MOOCs - an introduction

MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course. But what is a MOOC, exactly? How is a MOOC different from other educational instruments?

A short answer can be derived from its name. MOOCs are:

• Massive – some MOOCs have hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in a single course at the same time.
• Open – typically, MOOCs are open enrollment, meaning anyone can sign up for a course. Many, perhaps even most MOOCs are also available either for free or at a low cost to students.
• Online – MOOCs are online. This is the only way to accommodate MOOCs' massive class sizes.
• Courses – This one is perhaps self-evident, but MOOCs are courses – logically organized lectures, lessons, exercises, examinations, and other pedagogical tools and methods.

With these powers combined, they are Captain MOOC! 

Okay, cheesy 20th century cartoon references aside, the combination of these factors has created a novel, technologically innovative approach to education.

A more nuanced approach to answering the initial questions posed in this post is to look at the history of MOOCs. When/how/why did MOOCs first come about?

Predecessors to what we today call MOOCs run back to the early 2000s. The image below posted in Li Yuan’s Cetis Blog shows the evolution of MOOCs over time.

As the diagram illustrates, what a MOOC is isn’t always straightforward. Taking a step back to a time before MOOCs leads to one of MOOCs' influential ancestors: Open Educational Resources, or OERs. According to UNESCO,

“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”

The concept of making educational resources available - either through original creation or copyright changes - for free stems from the idea that education is, or at least should be, a public good. The idea that education should be free is not new to the 21st century, but MOOCs' novel uses of technology in education are driving down the costs of share education materials.

More than just sharing materials, however, by 2012, MOOC platforms, including Udacity, Coursera, and edX, were beginning to offer courses on a wide variety of topics. The courses offered on these platforms were (and still are) often either free or comparatively inexpensive and open to the general public, providing access to what has in the past been education restricted to those admitted to the world’s top academic institutions.

Traditional classroom instruction, on the other hand, is expensive. There are instructors, facilities, and materials to pay for, and classroom sizes are limited. Soaring costs for higher education have left many graduates deeply in debt and would-be students questioning whether there isn't another, cheaper alternative for educating themselves. Not surprisingly, then, one of the forces driving MOOCs is their potential to greatly lower the costs associated with education. With the ability to broadcast live and on-demand video at low costs, many students can benefit from a single instructor’s expertise, with the added benefit of allowing students to absorb the content on their own schedule and at their own pace. (You can’t rewind your teacher in a live class.) Moreover, the costs to institutions of higher learning and their students can be greatly reduced.

Critics might find it ironic that universities are cannibalizing the high-tuition, small-class-size cash cow, but with the internet's democratizing force on information distribution and accessibility, it could be that those leading educational institutions devoting significant resources to offering their most valuable product for free to the masses are seeing the writing on the wall: innovate or die. The successful educational institutions of the future might be those that figure out the right balance between personal attention to students and scaling content and courses to reduce costs, and no institution wants to be left behind.

So the business case for MOOCs, both for students and educational institutions, is clearly there. But MOOCs (or whatever one might choose to call them in a post-MOOC world) are still in their infancy. Critics suggest MOOCs are not the solution to challenges in higher education, citing low completion and pass rates (even in optimistic reports). In addition, it’s hard to replace the traditional four-year, on-campus college experience. Education is about so much more than the information. It’s about the whole experience.

It will take additional time to see whether these critics are right. But as the diagram above also shows, MOOC platforms continue to evolve and adapt as well, moving into corporate training, competency-based education, and new service models. What comes next, and whether academia and the general public have passed “peak MOOC,” remains to be seen. What is clear is that technology has the potential to revolutionize education and in ways has already begun to do so.

The Ed Tech Blog - an introduction

Welcome to the Ed Tech Blog, a blog all about innovations in education and technology.

The field of education is ripe for innovation, and technology is (finally) beginning to have an impact at the scale of what could be an educational revolution. While the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions brought technology that has improved so many aspects of human life - from smartphones to smart homes, electric lights to electric cars, modernist cuisine to modern medicine - an Educational Revolution has proven elusive. Up until a few years ago, our primary method for formal education - live, instructor-led, classroom lectures - had remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. The chalkboard might have been the last major educational innovation.

The advent of telecommunications, however, and more particularly of the Internet, enabled learners to participate at a distance. First, the ability to broadcast, and second, the ability to record broadcasts meant instruction could reach audiences removed in space and time from the instructor. But it was not until the advent of digital media and networked data storage that the best of both these worlds - knowledge on demand and at temporal and spatial distances - was fully realized. This is the Internet, and it clearly has changed everything.  Online meeting technology meant students no longer need to be physically present to participate in a class. But the class itself - live and instructor led - remained unchanged until recently. 

The Internet has greatly changed how anyone with a connection can access information. Historically, knowledge of the world was restricted to those who could gain access to institutions of higher learning. Constraining factors of class size (at most, those who could sit within earshot of the lecturer) and a minimum level of affluence (the luxury of not needing to devote all one's energy to sustaining life) further restricted those who could apply (not to mention arbitrary societal factors such as gender and race). Education was limited to society's elites. While barriers to accessing information remain, the Internet has greatly increased the proportion of people with access to information of all kinds. As a vast repository, the Internet is democratizing knowledge.

But education is more than access to information or knowledge. The methods for transmitting information, instilling knowledge - these remained largely unchanged throughout the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Students still attended (and indeed still primarily attend) live, instructor-led, classroom presentations. These are not without their benefits, as the student-to-instructor ratio often remains low enough for students to interact directly with their instructors for immediate feedback and answers to questions. But they are also not without their limitations. Up until very recently they have always required students to be in the same location as their instructors, which has in turn required a critical mass of interested students in a geographical area, reducing the potential for specialization. In addition, students have access only to the most informed or skilled instructor available to their institution of learning at the given time, rather than having access to the world's most qualified (who wouldn't want to learn Relativity from Einstein?). Moreover, traditional classrooms are limited to their time and place, restricting the presentation of materials to that which is available temporally and spatially in their classroom or immediate vicinity. (If the object for discussion is in a city halfway around the world, it might not be possible to bring it to the classroom. But what if you could transport the classroom to it?) 

And so the field of education is ripe for technological innovation. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are just one example of how the innovation is already underway. They allow for larger class sizes than would be possible even in the world's largest arenas. They are accessible, many of them for free or at a very low cost, to people all over the world. They allow access to the world's specialists in a wide array of fields. They allow the instructor to travel to remote parts of the world and "transport" the classroom along with her. They are available on demand to accommodate different study schedules. And they allow students from all over the world with diverse and specific interests to come together in a single setting, allowing increasing opportunities for specialization.

And then there are blended learning and flipped classrooms and corporate LMS systems and so much more. So what's next? Stay tuned as we explore the ever-changing field of education technology.