How Big Data has Transformed Research | The Guardian Interesting examples of the use of big data in university research Example video concerns "Illustris", a computer simulation of the evolution of the universe. Read more The Death Of Expertise | The Federalist Excerpt: "I fear we are witnessing the ‘death of expertise:’ a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers - in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other specialists in various fields. Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live. "What has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live. This is a very bad thing." Read more Growing Questions About the Business Model for Higher Education in the US | ICEF Monitor Excerpt: "For several years, higher education institutions in the US, and to some extent those in other major destination markets, have faced financial pressures that are, without a doubt, difficult to solve. These include: Increasing competition amid an expanded range of educational choices available to students - including those offered by for-profit universities and institutions (both bricks-and-mortar organisations and increasingly, online institutions such as the University of Phoenix) Growing concerns among students and families as to the cost of education, as well as a greater interest in concrete indications of the return on educational investment (e.g., graduates’ employment rates in desired professional fields) Increasing operating costs including higher technology costs and necessary salary increments for faculty and staff, at the same time as governments are reducing institutional funding and endowments are shrinking." Read more Udacity Says It Can Teach Tech Skills to Millions, and Fast | The New York Times Excerpt: "What she really wanted to do was code. Ms. Marchisio had taken several computer science classes at Harvard, sparking her interest in programming — which happens to be one of the economy’s most in-demand skills. But how does someone with a master’s in education move from customer service to coding as an occupation?" Read more

Annie Murphy Paul’s recent blog, Are College Lectures Unfair?  gives us another look at the weaknesses of the lecture format as a teaching method. She reminds us that teaching through lecture is a cultural phenomenon. According to Norm Friesen’s, The Lecture as a Transmedial Pedagogical Form: A Historical Analysis, the education lecture originated in the early Middle Ages to transmit the written word, first, literally, as lecturers read to their audiences many of whom copied down exactly what they heard so they would have the material in written form. After the Gutenberg printing press made books available to the public, lecturers also included well-respected commentaries in their presentations. It wasn’t until the Renaissance, that lecturers started giving original talks reflecting their own ideas. By the 20th century, when audio and video came into play, lectures started evolving into multimedia presentations. Guides on how to give effective lectures including tips on speech delivery, engaging students, and multimedia integration continue to advise instructors on best lecture practices. As Paul points out, not only are lectures the mainstay of higher education, they are also embedded in online courses such as MOOCs. There is a lot of contradiction on the place of lectures in education. Friesen notes that you can even watch TED talks on the ineffectiveness of lectures. Even if the speaker isn’t behind a podium, it’s still a lecture. How many lectures on pedagogy have you attended that tell you that’s not the best way to teach? Friesen supports the continued use of the lecture format. He sees lectures as "bridging oral communication with writing and newer media technologies, rather than as being superseded by newer electronic and digital forms." In contrast, Paul questions whether the lecture format meets the learning needs of all students. She reviews studies on how lecture courses affect women, minorities, and first-generation and low-income students (non-dominants) who haven’t historically come from or participated equally in the dominant Western culture of well-off white males (dominants). Paul found that the non-dominants do more poorly than dominants when a course is lecture-centered. In the studies she reviewed, professors engaged students with active pedagogical approaches such as questions, exercises, and collaborative work, that required students to engage with the subject matter more than they would with lectures. All groups did well with activity-based learning. And, the non-dominants benefited even more than dominants. In one study, the achievement gap between white and black students decreased by 50% and the divide between first-generation college students and those with a family history of college disappeared. Paul ends her article with this question: Given that active-learning approaches benefit all students, but especially those who are female, minority, low-income and first-generation, shouldn’t all universities be teaching this way? Education technology advocates are responding to Paul’s question with robust digital programs in which students learn through activities such as participating in simulations, completing exercises, drawing diagrams, initiating peer communication, and problem-solving. As higher education institutions and instructors integrate these programs into their courses, they will write the next chapter on how higher education courses are taught.

:: :: Reducing the cost of higher education is one of the more significant possibilities offered by online competency-based education (CBE). College budgets are not going to get any easier to balance in the near future, and the pressure to restrain decades of increases in tuition is now coming from the highest offices in the US. However, that there’s not yet a great deal of data on costs in CBE. This isn’t unusual: higher education hasn’t spent a great deal of energy trying to understand the cost implications of different instructional models in the past. Partly because it is difficult for institutions to separate the costs of shared services, and partly because such an effort implies that instructional models can and should be designed and evalauted in terms of costs - a highly unpopular view within many instituions. Consequently, institutions too often rely on simplistic calculations to determine "profitability". One institution with which I worked, for example, assumed that a course was profitable if the tuition it generated in any given semester (number of students X tuition rate) was greater than the Instructor pay rate. Competency-based education is an ideal place to start thinking more about the relationship between costs and instructional strategies. The focus on learning outcomes, rather than the traditional focus on inputs - such as faculty credentials, research productivity, tuition rates, and other surrogates of quality - provides the basis for an analysis of instructional value that can be more thoughtfully tied to dollars spent. It makes it easier, though certainly not easy, to compare the value of different instructional strategies in financial terms. A first step is identifying the unique variables shaping costs in CBE. Course Design and Development For most colleges and universities creating CBE courses and programs requires a departure from standard practices. It is typically a more rigorous, disciplined and labor-intensive process than simply "putting classrom courses online". The factors we need to consider with respect to course design and development include: Course Design and Development Resources. Which technologies and talent are required to develop CBE courses? Who will be involved in defining and aligning the objectives, assessments and learning activities? Which software will provide the institution with the data it needs to confirm students are achieving mastery of the curriculum? CBE is perfectly well-suited to leveraging adaptive software and learning analytics; it allow us to estimate the student’s grasp of the curriculum, adjust the experience to meet their particular needs, and allow them to proceed as fast or slow as is suitable. Adjusting Roles and Responsibilities. The design of CBE courses may involve an adjustment to the roles and responsibilities of faculty and support staff. This will have significant cost implications, given that instructional labor accounts for roughly 75% of an institution’s costs.  At Western Governors’ University, for example, the traditional one-instructor per course model is replaced with a more nuanced model, suitable for their CBE-based programs: Course Mentors are responsible for mastery of the content, and Student Mentors provide one-on-one guidance and support to students. Tuition and Loans At this point in time CBE programs tend to be offered by institutions that have lower than average tuition rates. While significant, this alone doesn’t tell us a great deal about the effect of the CBE instructional model on student or institution costs. Speed to Completion. More than other types of instructional models, cost is influenced by speed to completion. The faster the student proceeds through the program, the lower their total costs. This is amplified by the use of subscription or "all-you-can-eat" tuition models in which students are charged for a period of time, during which they can maximize (or minimize) the volume of competencies/courses completed. This obviously can reduce costs for students proceeding quickly and may, as Robert Kelchen notes in his excellent review, serve as a motivation for learners. Availability of Loans. Finally, while CBE has been around for decades in one form or another, regulators are only now getting serious about finding ways to ensure that students can have access to the full array of financial support systems. For better or worse, loans are now fundamental to American higher education; they’re the lifeblood  for a significant percentage of the students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, and the institutions they attend. Identifying the potential for cost savings in CBE requires a better understanding of the availability of loans and other factors.

:: Data-Informed Design, a Sasaki Perspective in SCUP Journal Excerpt: "In the following Q&A, Claire Turcotte, managing editor of SCUP’s journal Planning for Higher Education, speaks with Sasaki principals Vinicius Gorgati, AIA, LEED® AP, Tyler Patrick, AICP, and Ken Goulding, [pictured above, left to right] about data-informed design. The three experts offer insight on the role data plays in higher education campus planning, the types of tools used during this process, and where data will take us in the future, as illustrated by a case study of Sasaki’s planning work at Brown University." Read more Why Slack Could be the Future of Conferences Excerpt: "We go to conferences to meet people, whether for business or personal reasons, and yet often I meet far fewer than I hope to. Inside a crowded convention space, things can turn cliquish in a hurry. Come lunch time, I’m right back to being the new kid at school, sheepishly hunting for a table that will accept me. Want to know anything about the strangers around you? Just read the fine print on their name badge, and do it before they notice and think you’re staring at their chest. Little about this experience has changed in the last 50 years, and technological efforts to reinvent it have largely stalled out. Glassboard, a private messaging app often recommended for conference-goers, shut down last November. Lanyrd, a full-featured app for discovering and better enjoying conferences, was acquired by Eventbrite in 2013 and hasn’t updated its apps in more than a year. But at the XOXO Festival in Portland this weekend, I saw a new app remaking the conference experience in more ways than I could count. And the app, strangely enough, is Slack." Read more What We Still Don’t Know About Higher Education Excerpt: "We know that over 20 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities this fall. But we don’t know enough about who these students are, how likely they are to succeed at earning their degrees, and whether they will be able to get good enough jobs to pay back their debt. Here, we investigate what is known — and what still we need to know — about today’s students so we can help more of them realize their college dreams. Who are today’s students? How do they fare in college? We know that the popular idea of college — four years of football games, dorms and parties — is not the experience of most students today. More students who enter college have work and family obligations, leading them to pursue higher education in non-traditional ways such as attending part-time or online. We don’t know enough about how many non-traditional students — like low-income, first-generation and adult students — actually reach their goals at particular colleges because we don’t report that information for all students. Considering how many barriers these students had to overcome just to get into college, they deserve to have the information they need to choose the schools that will help them succeed." Read more There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts Excerpt: "Students are paying higher tuition than ever. Why can’t more of that revenue go to the people teaching them? In early June, California labor regulators ruled that a driver for Uber, the app-based car service, was, in fact, an employee, not an independent contractor, and deserved back pay. The decision made national news, with experts predicting a coming flood of lawsuits. Two weeks later, FedEx agreed to a $288 million settlement after a federal appeals court ruled that the company had shortchanged 2,300 California delivery drivers on pay and benefits by improperly labeling them as independent contractors. The next month, the company lost another case in a federal appeals court over misclassifying 500 delivery drivers in Kansas. Meanwhile, since January, trucking firms operating out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have lost two major court battles with drivers who claim that they, too, have been robbed of wages by being misclassified as independent contractors." Read more  

Why Is It So Hard for Pell Recipients to Graduate? Excerpt: "A new report released Thursday provides a detailed look at the graduation rates of low-income college students. At many colleges, low-income students graduate at much lower rates than their high-income peers. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, only 35 percent of Pell grant recipients graduate college, a rate that is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their wealthier peers. And at St. Andrews, a liberal arts college in Laurinburg, North Carolina, only 13 percent of Pell grant recipients graduate, more than 50 percentage points less than students who don’t receive the grants." Read more Who’s Benefiting from MOOCs, and Why Excerpt: "In the last three years, over 25 million people from around the world have enrolled in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by Coursera, EdX, and other platforms. Initially heralded as a revolution in higher education access, expectations have been tempered as research revealed that only a small percentage of these millions were completing the courses, approximately 80% already had at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly 60% were employed full-time, and 60% came from developed countries (defined as members of the OECD). MOOCs seemed to be serving the most advantaged, the headlines blared, and most people weren’t even completing them." Read more Just Half of Graduates Say Their College Education Was Worth the Cost Excerpt: "Only half of 30,000 college alumni polled for the Gallup-Purdue Index strongly agreed that their higher education was worth the cost, according to the results of the second annual national survey, being published on Tuesday. Among recent graduates, the proportion who were unequivocally positive was even lower: only 38 percent of those graduating from 2006 through 2015." Read more Ernst & Young Stopped Requiring Degrees. Should You? Excerpt: "The U.K. offices of Ernst & Young have announced they will stop requiring degrees, but instead will offer online testing and search out talented individuals regardless of background. Why? They say there is no correlation between success at university and success in careers." Read more  

Adaptive learning is a key strategy in higher education today (see previous blog, What’s A Seventeen-Year-Old to Do?).  Research shows that online courseware based on personal learning data has increased success for diverse students. It’s clear that in education one "size" does not fit all. While this research and practice has made an impression on me, others continue to debate the pros and cons of tailoring programs to individual learners. Looking for more confirmation, I found a study that underscores the need for a non-uniform approach from a source outside of education. A recent BuzzFeed article, This Is What "One Size Fits All" Actually Looks Like on All Body Types, describes the results of a test on consumer reaction to the trend towards replacing delineated sizing such as 10, 12, 18, with clothing in one size that companies advertise will fit everyone or as one company says, "most." In BuzzFeed’s experiment, they asked five young women, sized 0-18, to try on samples of several outfits produced as "one size" to compare how they fit. BuzzFeed showed their results through photos and the participants’ comments. The outcomes of the fittings in terms of physical appearance could be anticipated. A skirt only fit on one leg of half the women. One shirt looked like a dress on others. Clearly, to fit physically, the clothes had to be altered to individual characteristics. What was surprising was the women’s comments on how the general experience affected them psychologically. It wasn’t just about how they looked. They talked about how the experience made them feel. I took the liberty of substituting education phrases in a representative response [original wording appears in brackets]: Allison [size 0]: "There’s clearly no such thing as one size fits all! Everyone has a different way of learning [shape], and higher education [clothing stores] should embrace that instead of making people feel shitty for not being able to succeed [fit] following what they deem to be a universal learning pathway [size]. ‘One size fits all’ sends a message that if you don’t  learn successfully in their programs,[fit into the clothing], whether it’s too advanced [big] or too slow-paced [small], you’re not ‘normal,’ and leads to all sorts of feelings of [body] dissatisfaction with how smart you are and how successful you can be."  Kind of eerie that the message for clothing and education can be the same. Yes, education is more complicated; you can’t look in a mirror to see how a course fits you, but over time you will feel the psychological effects of the right or wrong fit in a course. Which brings us back to why we should continue to move towards adaptive and personalized learning online and in the classroom: these strategies put learning in a context that supports all students without stigmatizing them for starting at different levels or coming from diverse backgrounds. And, a positive environment motivates learning. As Lara [size 4/6] says: "We’re all different, so the idea of ‘one size’ for all of us is just absurd. Different minds [bodies], unite!"

Last week, MIT announced they’re making Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)  part of their admissions process-candidates for their one-year Supply Chain Management master’s program will enhance their chances of acceptance into the program if they successfully complete relevant MOOCs before application. If they are accepted into the program, they will get credit for their online work and only have to complete one semester on campus to get their degree. Why is this exciting? Like adaptive courseware, MOOCs are fairly new. The University of Manitoba’s Stephen Downes and George Siemens built the first online course called a MOOC in 2008 to see just how learning might be accomplished using the internet. Since then there’s been a lot of speculation about how MOOCs fit into the broad spectrum of education. Initially, many hailed MOOCs as the wave of the future. Others saw it as a disruptive, revolutionary force that would replace colleges. When early reports showed that retention or course completion of  MOOCs was 5-10%, many education stakeholders breathed a sigh of relief—MOOCs would not replace or even really compete with institutions of higher education. Others, like Koller, Ng, Do and Chen in Retention and Intention in Massive Open Online Courses: In Depth aren’t ready to write off MOOCs. Retention should be understood in context. MOOCs have large enrollments, many with over 100,000 students. Where 5% would be a ridiculously low retention rate for a college class of 100, for a MOOC, 5% represents more students than some faculty reach in a decade. Koller et al. suggest we change the way we evaluate MOOCs: …one can relate the act of enrolling in a free online class to that of checking out a book from a public library…Some people might read a few chapters of a nonfiction book and stop after getting enough information to suit their needs. Others might read more deliberately and renew the book a few times before finishing. In both cases, few would consider the lack of completion or the extra time taken to be a waste or a failure of the book. MIT’s new policy also represents looking at MOOCs in a different way-as a "test" for admission. The shortcomings of standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT are well-known. Wouldn’t seeing how a student learns in an online program be a more accurate picture of their abilities? And completing relevant learning activities would give students a taste of what’s to come, helping them make more informed decisions about how they want to further their education. MIT’s policy, which could be a first step towards unseating a decades-old admissions policy in all areas, is a reminder that we are far from harnessing the full power of digital learning programs. Because the major shareholders-students, faculty, institutions, and education technology companies-are learning by doing, we can’t even foresee all of the possibilities. If we’re open-minded rather than judgmental about innovations, if we’re willing to take some risks and even fail at points in the process without ditching the whole framework, we’ll make great strides in education.

Blended or hybrid learning has come a long way from its original concept of brick (classroom) and click (e-learning) in 1999. Just using some media with students doesn’t make it a blended approach anymore. Now, blended learning is usually described as the integration of adaptive courseware yielding learning analytics and face-to-face learning situations such as class lecture, tutoring, or discussion groups, to advance student learning. Penn State professor Ike Shibley advocates for blended learning: "When you see how well blended learning fits with established pedagogical paradigms, creating a synergistic blend of what works best in face-to-face and online, the question becomes why wouldn’t you want to at least try it?" Maybe because we still have to dispel some myths about blended learning: Myth#1 Blended learning isn’t as good as traditional approaches. On the contrary, research confirms that blended learning is more effective than on-line learning alone or class learning without technology. A 2010 US Department of Education meta-analysis of 84 studies  (79 with higher education or adult learners) concluded that blended learning is much more effective in achieving learning outcomes than face-to-face instruction alone. Myth #2 Blended learning requires less faculty. Not true. The 2010 study cited above found that students using courseware received more "learning time and instructional elements" than those who did not use courseware. When instructors use courseware learning analytics on individual and group progress to inform teaching, they spend less time in front of the classroom, but they spend more time in targeted communication with students. This aspect of quality blended learning became clear in a recent pilot program with adaptive learning in math at New Jersey’s Essex Community College. After the one-year pilot, less students passed in the adaptive course than in the traditional course. Lack of legitimate faculty involvement was cited as one of the major contributing factors to the pilot’s shortcomings. Essex CC thought they could just use graduate students to teach segments of the course. According to Douglas Walcerz, a  program consultant, "We underestimated the skill that you would need as a teacher to deliver that content." Myth #3 Blended learning creates more ongoing work for instructors. As happens with most changes, startup takes time. Once instructors take the plunge, however, teaching a blended course is no more time-consuming than teaching a traditional course. How much time it takes to make the transformation also depends on which approach you take. Instructors who create all of their online materials will do the most work. That’s why in her  insightful post, Blended Learning on the Ground: Advice from College Educators, Jennifer Spohrer advises against starting from scratch. She suggests instructors new to blended learning "stand on the shoulders of giants" and use pretested online products from education technology companies as the foundation for their courses. Finally, there are added benefits to blended learning (see previous blog, What’s a Seventeen-Year-Old to Do?) including those articulated by learning and development professionals in a 2013 survey:  …it’s critical to foster lasting learning. It helps ideas stick and creates an air of accountability that is critical to learner success." "Blended solutions deliver customization and focus on individual needs which traditional methods just can’t match.

President Obama started off this school year by talking about testing. While he highlighted the overuse of standardized testing, others have found that low-stakes testing can actually enhance learning and performance on high-stakes tests. Cognitive psychologist Roddy Roediger is a prime mover in getting people to understand that testing can be a part of learning. Doing well on tests largely involves retrieving information from memory. Learning and memory are inextricably connected. According to the American Psychological Society   Learning is the acquisition of skill or knowledge, while memory is the expression of what you’ve acquired. Another difference is the speed with which the two things happen. If you acquire the new skill or knowledge slowly and laboriously, that’s learning. If acquisition occurs instantly, that’s making a memory. Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Psychology In other words, learning takes time and practice. If you’ve ever crammed for an exam, you know that you really haven’t learned the material even if you pass the test. Roediger and his colleagues started with studies that included learning a number of terms. While the control group studied in the traditional manner, the other group was quizzed intermittently. On the final test, the quizzed group did significantly better than the control group. The reason for this is that these students actually practiced retrieving the information which is at the core of the testing experience. But does this have any meaning when it comes to higher levels of cognition such as analyzing and synthesizing information? Yes, according to the researchers: ...retrieval practice doesn’t just lead to memorization. Because students have a better understanding of classroom material by having practiced using this information, students can adapt their knowledge to new situations, novel questions, and related contexts. You can use a variety of question types (fact-based, conceptual, complex or higher order, etc.) to ensure that students are not memorizing, but using information flexibly. In the past, frequent quizzing and practice opportunities, have been impractical, taking instructors hours to correct and provide feedback to students.  Digital programming has changed all that. Now opportunities to practice retrieval and application during the learning process are built into courseware.  In Acrobatiq students do various exercises including problem-based activities, applications, quizzes, and checkpoint assessments before taking summative tests (see previous post, Formative Assessment in the 21st Century).  Each type of practice is a powerful learning strategy in itself. The combination of varied exercises for the same content only strengthens the effectiveness. As we continue the conversation on testing, we need to make sure that we clarify what kind of testing we are discussing. Some "tests" are essential to learning.

While there doesn’t seem to be one definition for the student or learner-centered approach in higher education, Barbara McCombs, author of two books on learner-centered teaching, provides a comprehensive definition including the three features discussed below: The core of the LCM [Learner-Centered Model] is that all instructional decisions begin with knowing who the learners are - individually and collectively. Instructors need to take into account who they are teaching. Each student comes to class with their own past—academically and experientially. They also come with their own goals. Not everyone will succeed in the same way and with the same type of instruction. Personalized learning data is key to understanding and supporting this aspect of the student-centered approach. Instructors can obtain this data by analyzing each student’s work and engaging with them. Courseware that incorporates personalized learning (see previous post  One Size Fits All…Not) makes this process easier and more productive. The data that instructors obtain from courseware helps instructors reach individuals and the class as a whole in real time. This allows instructors to use their time in a more focused way to move the whole class forward. This [the first tenet] is followed by thoroughly understanding learning and how best to support learning for all people in the system. Approaches to student-centered learning are innovative and varied. They usually fall into these categories: Activity-based learning such as discovery exercises, exchange of ideas (in person or online), simulations, problem-based learning, and project-based learning Choice such as students choosing assignments, when and where they study, how they want to approach a topic, and deadlines Collaboration such as team-based learning and peer exchanges Real-world challenges such as problem-solving and community outreach Metacognition such as transparency of progress and learning pathways, reflection on learning, and self-motivation Quality courseware includes most if not all of these types of support for learner-centered programs. Decisions about what practices should be in place at the school and classroom levels depend upon what we want learners to know and be able to do. Learning outcomes based on instructor-determined teaching goals are integral to the success of student-centered learning. The student-centered approach changes but doesn’t eliminate the role of the instructor in the learning equation. While the instructor’s role is no longer mainly about transferring knowledge, it’s still about determining what students should learn and how they learn it. At the institutional level, faculty coming together on how to implement the student-centered approach strengthens the success potential of the approach. Creating learning outcomes across departments and connected to institutional outcomes is important. Faculty have also begun to value using personalized courseware that works across subject matter areas so that students are engaged in a consistent method of learning. What we see as innovative for instructors is also innovative for students, particularly those in higher education today who are used to more traditional methods of learning. The more practice learners get at student-centered learning, the more impactful the approach will be. And that applies to those implementing it as well.