:: It’s often suggested that higher education is undergoing the same changes we’ve seen unfold in other sectors - notably music recording and journalism. The Internet will do to us what it did to them. Apparently, we won’t like it.  "Look at the music industry. It’s been completely overturned by the Internet. My vision of the world is that everywhere will be like the music industry, but we’ve only seen it in a few places so far. Journalism is in the midst of the battle. And higher education is probably next." Tyler Cowen The nature of these changes is typically described using one or both of these related concepts: disintermediation and unbundling. Disintermediation: The Internet makes it easier for people to bypass certain types of gatekeepers and other mediating organizations to get products and services directly from the source. (Investing directly in the securities market, rather than through a bank, is a well-known example.) What constitutes the "source" differs by sector, but in most cases disintermediation leads to an increase in the intensity of competition between providers, improves choice for consumers, and drives down prices. In the higher education context, disintermediation takes the form of students learning from organizations outside of accredited institutions.  Unbundling: The concept of unbundling refers to the practice of marketing goods and services separately rather than as part of a package. A university degree, for example, can be understood as a bundle of courses. A music album is a bundle of songs; iTunes makes it easy to unbundle albums.  Traditionally, institutions have required students commit to the full degree/bundle. A range of standards and practices, such as how student loans are devised and distributed, reinforces the bundled model. The vision of unbundling in higher education is of students creating their own personalized compilation of courses from a variety of providers, in the same way that music fans create their own "playlists". Substitute Goods and Credentials There’s no question that higher education is subject to the effects of disintermediation and unbundling: more learning will occur outside of accredited institutions (disintermediation) and more institutions will make it easier for learners to pick and choose courses from multiple colleges (unbundling). But in their zeal to shake us from our complacency, writers that use dire comparisons to the music and newspaper industries tend to understate important differences between higher education and these other industries. "Substitute goods are two goods that could be used for the same purpose" The key difference is the degree to which "substitute goods" are available. Consumers of music and journalism are relatively free to select new providers and to use them in new ways without the value of the goods declining appreciably. Not so in education.  People are accessing news from a wider range of sources, many of which are free. Some of these sources actually produce news, others simply aggregate and redistribute news developed by larger established news organizations. Individual consumers become producers of a sort when they pass on news through social media.  Music consumers are purchasing single songs, rather than albums; p2p remains a factor; new platforms allow people to listen songs without paying (e.g. 8track.com), and although revenue from streaming services (e.g. Spotify) is increasing quickly, it has yet to make a sufficient dent in earnings.  There is no material disadvantage to a consumer that chooses to get their news or music from new sources or to use it in new ways. For students, the disadvantages are significant. The difference, of course, is accreditation - the ability of the source to offer recognized credit courses and bestow degrees and diplomas. A student needs assurance that the education in which they invest their time and money will be widely recognized by other institutions and, in particular, future employers. In a mass and increasingly mobile society, the universality of credits earned is crucial. The degree functions as a key signalling device in a world where CVs are just as often read by computers than humans, and we apply for work at organizations we’d not heard of until we read the "help-wanted" ad. The importance of formal, widely recognized credentials won’t fade quickly, and, as a result, disintermediation and unbundling will unfold far more slowly in higher education than elsewhere.  :: Disintermediation and unbundling are important concepts for understanding the future of higher education. But there is another parallel between higher ed and other digital, information-dependent industries that may prove to be more important in the short-term. It involves the impact of the Internet on the level of investment that’s available for the development of any one digital product. The massive expansion of the number of providers and the dispersion of eyeballs that followed (and with it, revenue) has at times reduced the amount of funds available for higher quality digital products. This impacts news journalism, in particular. The potential parallel is online course development. We’ll address this connection in the next instalment.  Part II of this post can be found here.  

:: The Fascinating Science Of Aesthetics Interesting notes from the world of cognitive science and biology about how we interpret images. Implications and applications for education? Read the full article here. 6 Telltale Signs of Disruptive Innovation Michelle Wiese, whom we interviewed on these pages last month, provides a simple "starter kit" to help people make sense of the concept of disruptive innovation. After years of stretching the concept beyond recognition, there seems to be a will to pull it back into its original shape. Useful. "Weise gave an overview of what the term means and how it has played out in higher ed and other industries, but at the core of her talk were six defining characteristics of disruptive innovations — telltale signs worth posting on the wall of every IT leader’s office: They target people who are non-consumers or who are over-served by existing products. The innovation is not as good as existing products, as judged by historical measures of performance. They’re simpler to use, more convenient or affordable. There is a technology enabler that can carry the new value proposition upmarket. The technology is paired with a business model innovation that allows it to be sustainable. Existing providers are motivated to ignore the new innovation and are not threatened at the outset. It’s that last one that makes disruptive innovation so insidious — by its very nature, it’s likely to be underestimated and ignored, making it difficult to spot." Why Design Matters More than Moore John Maeda, former President of the Rhode Island School of Design, argues that improvement in design quality is now surpassing increases in computing power (Moore’s Law). We’ve written about the importance of design to online higher education here, here, here, and here. "Just as you cannot imagine buying a car without design, we have entered an age in which you cannot buy tech without design." An Increasingly Popular Job Perk: Online Education Another university prepares an institutional deal with a major employer. A trend worth watching. Interesting comments, too. "A partnership between Southern New Hampshire and Anthem Inc., a health-insurance company, will allow some 55,000 Anthem employees to earn associate or bachelor’s degrees through the university’s College for America, a competency-based assessment program. The announcement is one of several recent deals between a college and a corporation that will expand higher-education opportunities for employees at no or reduced cost, following a high-profile deal, announced last year, between Starbucks and Arizona State University. On Monday, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced a similar arrangement with Strayer University." I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me I was university faculty when this sort of hyper-vigilance described by the author was just beginning to take shape. It was, as the author of this piece notes, unnerving trying to navigate the shifting politics and sensitivities of the student population while still making sure that the classroom remained an open and honest site for the exchange of ideas. "I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students. Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones. Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best." Also see this piece about the reaction to Professor Laura Kipnis (Northwestern) study of discourse on university campuses: Why Northwestern investigated a professor for writing an essay about "sexual panic"      

Educators at every level today are exploring and incorporating the teaching and learning benefits that digital curriculum affords over traditional, print-based learning. Some field experts see digital curriculum as a real watershed, poised to break through education’s "iron triangle" by increasing access to and lowering cost of instruction, and simultaneously improving its quality.  As we develop the next generation adaptive platform and digital curriculum solutions, we’re enabling the following critical benefits: Deeper insight into student learning performance (without time-consuming, boring assessments): Digital curriculum, combined with advanced statistical modeling techniques, enables significantly improved insight into student learning performance at a more nuanced level than that of previous assessment techniques. By continuously collecting and assessing students’ activity data as they progress through digital curriculum, we can dynamically estimate learning mastery against a set of outcomes, with no increase in faculty workload. It is possible to replace humdrum periodic quizzing with dynamic learning analytic dashboards to measure performance on an ongoing basis, in real-time. The benefit is faster instructional intervention and improved student performance. Personalized learning, tailored to individual student needs: Current cognitive science underscores how digital curriculum creates the foundation for personalized, adaptive learning.   Ongoing research at CMU and elsewhere explores how data, derived from student activity within the digital curriculum, is used to predictively estimate whether students are successfully mastering key learning outcomes. For students with low learning estimates, we can now dynamically present recommendations, or even additional practice, based on specific skill gaps. The power in the Acrobatiq model is the ability to generate learning estimates at the skill level - or lowest level of knowledge required to master a learning outcome (LO). By first "mapping" or "Skill Graphing" LO’s to component skills, and then aligning content, practice, and assessments to each component skill, we can measure and estimate a student’s precise learning status. Without this critical computational model, we merely capture what the student has done, and not the concepts and skills the student has truly learned and mastered. Project-based learning - including problem-based learning: Digital curriculum and assessments at first glance can bring to mind boring, limited assessment formats such as multiple choice and true/false questions. After all, if the computer scores the assessment, it has to be either a 1 or 0, right? The good news is that today’s digital curriculum and assessment capabilities are dramatically more enriching and exciting. The newest capability is entwining human-graded rubrics in such a way that the computational model that estimates learning can also integrate human-graded rubric scores. A new range of project-based and problem-based learning opportunities are made possible, in which performance assessment can be computer-generated, human-generated or even both! We know that when students participate in relevant contextual projects or problem-based learning, they are more engaged and able to connect what they’re learning with real life. Learning is more concrete and therefore, more long lasting.   Authoring tools to  continuously improve digital curriculum with surgical-like precision:  Course completion rates, we know, are a significant matter. Educators and administrators, across the board but perhaps particularly at community colleges, are working to de-mystify the college completion pathway so that students can quickly ascertain specific course degree requirements.   The debate regarding which courses could or should be included in a degree pathway is a deep concern, and has profound implications for improving degree completion rates. Establishing general education guidelines across programs, and providing students with high quality delivery alternatives for gateway gen ed courses like, for example, exemplar online courses enable, will help more students complete  courses and programs on time - and potentially with better learning outcomes than traditional print-based learning materials. With digital curriculum, we can now ensure a high quality standard by using deep learning learning data to reveal course constriction points, and then making surgical-like improvements to content, assessments, or activities as needed. Each student cohort that completes a course produces a raft of good learning data for educators, administrators, and course designers to examine.   However, insightful learning data is only beneficial if it’s actionable.  Educators need easy-to-use  authoring tools to quickly and efficiently modify, adapt and/or customize digital curriculum to both "make it their own" and ensure a complete, cohesive, and quality learning experience.  As an important component to our next generation digital curriculum development strategy, we are also releasing a brand-new adaptive learning authoring environment so faculty, instructional designers and others can adapt and modify digital curriculum.   Preparing students for the 21st century workforce: Given the rapid pace of technology application in almost every facet of our lives, the more we prepare students for success in a technology-saturated workplace, the better.   Today’s entry-level employee in almost any industry must possess written, oral and digital literacy skills. By incorporating digital curriculum in the classroom, students can build the digital literacy skills critically necessary for professional success. While most educators, instructional designers and student success content providers clearly acknowledge the benefits of digital curriculum, transitioning to digital curriculum takes more than just will. Moving forward from traditional print-based learning resources such as textbooks can be challenging, and professional development is key. Surveys by industry associations including the Software Information and Industry Association suggest strongly that educators desire to experiment and integrate digital curriculum, but require support and assistance to do so seamlessly. To be meaningful, this support must go beyond a simple summer two-day training session on the latest software application or new LMS feature. So that investments in digital curriculum are maximized at every level, educators on the front lines are partnering with administrative leaders to develop robust and ongoing faculty training, led by experts in the field. Organizations like Quality Matters, for example, produce numerous professional development opportunities for faculty, instructional designers, and administrative leaders to improve the quality of online and blended courses, including evaluating and developing digital curriculum. At Acrobatiq, as we produce and develop digital curriculum, we’re also thinking hard about how best to support professional development initiatives and enable robust and ongoing training for educational leaders looking to expand their teaching practice. So while these are not the only benefits of digital curriculum, they certainly represent some of the more interesting. Over the next six months, Acrobatiq, in partnership with The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and our institutional partners, will be releasing what the Gates Foundation is calling NextGen Adaptive Courseware.  We’re focused on developing for the largest-enrolling, general education gateway courses that stand to most improve from digital transformation and the continuous course enrichment it yields. To learn more about Acrobatiq’s adaptive platform and digital course curriculum development roadmap, or to join our team as a reviewer, contributor or pilot adopter, please contact me today. Alison Pendergast alison@acrobatiq.com  

:: We like to believe that we interpret the world around us objectively, accurately, and consistently. But to a great extent we make sense of the people, objects and virtually everything around us on the basis of the circumstances in which we experience them. Context matters. Art is the classic example. If we take a work of art out from behind the red ropes, away from the quiet guards, and out of the art gallery, the meaning and value of the art may change a great deal. So too might its’ monetary value; in fact it may no longer be interpreted as art at all (c.f. Senie, Harriet). Context is also crucial in commercial markets. Vendors go to great lengths to control the context in which their products and services are positioned. Television advertisers, for example, avoid placing ads in the middle of programs that address unsettling topics; that evoke emotions and sensibilities that are not supportive of the product being promoted. "The Day After" was a bad made-for-TV movie in the 80s about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the U.S. The film’s producers found it so difficult to attract advertisers that they were forced to run all the ads prior to the point in the film when the nuclear attack occurs. Apparently, convincing people that having fresher breath will make them truly, finally happy is more difficult after witnessing the end of the world. What, if anything, does this have to do with higher education? Until recently, not much. Historically, higher education has limited what people outside of the institution could access to and, generally, held great control over how people interpreted the institution’s value. Compared to other types of organizations, colleges and universities are like remote islands, "all-inclusive" experiences, in which only enrolled students have access. Educational Content in New Contexts But the walls around higher education are becoming more porous; sometimes by design, sometimes not. Piece-by-piece, components of the university experience are becoming knowable outside of the university. Students rate professors on commercial sites like "RateMyProfessor", universities set up Facebook groups in which all-comers can contribute, and ranking systems by the likes of US News and World Report are becoming common destinations, as well as easier to interpret. But the most dramatic change involves access to instructional content. The Net is making it easier and, possibly inevitable, for instructional materials — normally held behind password-protected sites — to be available to those outside the institution. This puts the core of the institution on display in a way that we’ve not seen before, opening it up to evaluation and comparison. We saw this first with OER — open educational resources. Individual instructors uploaded elements of their course materials for public consumption on platforms like MITx, Academic Earth, OpenStax and Merlot. Sharing instructional content publicly was a low-key affair; faculty often made the decision to share content on their own accord. Yet, even early on, we began to see how this sharing of content; this new transparency could lead to surprising repercussions. Even the most prestigious institution was now subject to criticism if what they shared publicly wasn’t well-prepared. For instance, Philip Greenspun did a rather biting minute-by-minute evaluation of a lecture by a high-profile, Ivy League professor, suggesting that it was a wasteful, self-indulgent use of class time. I first wrote about this trend in early 2012. At that time I suggested that if this trend continued — and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t — then academic leaders would need to pay more attention to what is being shared, as these course materials ultimately represent and reflect the institution from which they come. And Then MOOCs Then . . . MOOCs happened. Suddenly, this small-scale sharing of instructional materials became a very big, very public matter. Not merely of interest within academia, MOOCs became a subject of discussion in the broader public through celebratory articles in The Guardian, New York Times, Huffington Post, and elsewhere ("Free Elite University Education!"). Regardless of their level of interest in online learning to-date, university presidents at elite institutions were now paying rapt attention. They knew that participating in this MOOC frenzy was a key means by which their university was going to define its identity in the broader marketplace of brands. The money spent on MOOCs went higher with every editorial in the New York Times or Washington Post. Soon, videographers, make-up artists, lighting crews and even actors were receiving invitations to campus to help create a more polished product. It would be easy to cynically dismiss this as merely a marketing issue. But if we take a step back, I think we can see this as part of a broader trend toward greater transparency and accountability in higher education. As is the case in other fields, the Internet is increasing the amount of information available to the public. If so inclined, a student can gather an extraordinary amount of information about an institution, its faculty, students and, of course, its scandals. And, clearly, they want this information. Institutions would be best to be prepared. Keith Hampson, PhD is part of the team at Acrobatiq. References Harriet Senie. Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. Smithsonian Institution, 2014.

:: Can Digital Badges Help Encourage Professors to Take Teaching Workshops? Ensuring faculty find the time to continue developing their teaching skills is a common topic of discussion. The article below considers how badges may serve as an incentive. Excerpt: "Several badge formats have emerged that can be embedded on a LinkedIn profile or a personal web page, in a way that certifies the achievement was in fact earned and can be clicked on to reveal a detailed record of what the learner did to get the badge. Among the most popular badge platforms are Credly and the Mozilla Open Badges project." "Now some colleges are trying the badge approach in their in-house training, in part to expose more professors to the badge concept so they might try it in their own courses." Read the full article. Amid Fast Change, Group Seems Slow to Enhance Colleges’ Control of Online Courses Developing successful alliances between universities can be hard going. We touched on some of the issues in an earlier piece, here and here. Below, The Chronicle reports on the slow growth of Unizin, a high-profile effort launched last year. Excerpt: "Last spring a group of university leaders announced a bold, new project intended to help colleges gain more control of their online course platforms, as they increasingly turned to providers like Coursera or edX. A year later some observers are wondering what the group has actually accomplished, and where the consortium is headed." Read the full article.  LinkedIn Eats the University Ryan Craig interprets the recent move by Linked In to build a competency marketplace as an embodiment of Marc Andreessen’s claim that "software will eat everything". Excerpt: "LinkedIn’s competency marketplace is the "software" Marc Andreessen has been waiting for and that colleges and universities have long feared. And by owning the marketplace, LinkedIn is betting $1.5 billion that its own courseware will be disruptive as well." Read the full article.  New Minecraft Mod Teaches You Code as You Play Connecting gaming to learning is the dream of many educators. Easier said than done, though. Here’s one approach that uses the incredibly popular Minecraft to teach beginner programming. Excerpt: "Strum is one of 150 students who are now tinkering with LearnToMod, an educational add-on teaches you the basics of programming while creating tricks and tools that you can use within the Minecraft. The mod will be available to the general public in October, and its creators hope it will help turn Minecraft into a kind of gateway drug for computer programming."  Read the full article.  The Fascinating Science Of Aesthetics Science is fundamental to what we do at Acrobatiq. In this article, scientists explore the connection between images and emotion. Excerpt: "Filters may also stir up emotions that draw people to the image. The study authors note this connection—their findings mirror other studies showing that emotional response drives people’s engagement in social media. "Filters could have an effect on how the viewer feels," explains Oshin Vartanian, a psychologist who studies cognitive neuroscience at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and who wasn’t involved in the study. "And there’s strong evidence for a link between an emotional response and aesthetic preferences."  Read the full article.       

The rise of "free" content may be shaping higher education and news journalism in similar ways.  Note: The first instalment on this topic can be found here: Music Recording, News Journalism, and Higher Education. :: Writers concerned with the future of higher education frequently point to the music recording and news industries as evidence of the changes in store for higher education. Apparently, the change won’t be pleasant. As described in a previous post, these forecasts for higher education typically draw on the intertwined concepts of "disintermediation" and "unbundling". It’s argued that learners will increasingly bypass universities to learn directly from other, direct-to-consumer providers (i.e. disintermediation) and they’ll assemble (i.e. unbundle) their own, unique portfolio of learning experiences (e.g. individual courses, nano-degrees). There’s much to like about this vision from a purely instructional point of view. If well executed, it puts more choices in front of learners and enables a new degree of personalization. Examples of non-collegiate providers that might reflect this vision include General Assembly, Fullbridge, and Codecademy. But the comparison to the music and news industries tends to understate the degree to which individual learners are restricted from seeking out and assembling educational experiences according to their own criteria. Whereas consumers of music and journalism are free to make up their own minds as to what constitutes good value, what constitutes "educated" is defined by social conventions, regulatory and loan systems, and, of course, employers. Determinations of what constitutes good value in education can’t be made unilaterally. New and more flexible forms of credentials will continue to become more widely accepted, but the processes of disintermediation and unbundling will unfold far more slowly than in other sectors. Scaling Back High-End Journalism There is, however, an alternative parallel that exists between higher education and, in particular, the news industry. It springs from the unique economics of the Internet and the ways in which it has expanded the number of content sources, role of free content, and the sustainability of relatively expensive content. Revenue in the news industry has declined sharply during the last decade. While consumption of news remains high, the Internet has expanded the number of providers, and dispersed advertising revenue more widely. Many major news organizations have been forced to reduce costs. Source: Journalism.org Funding of relatively expensive types of reporting has been especially hard-hit. Journalism that takes longer to produce, involves a larger and/or more experienced team of professionals, and requires substantial research is obviously more costly.  The social and political implications of this change are considerable. Nicholas Carr, a longtime analyst of the relationship between society and technology, believes that the Internet has ultimately weakened professional journalism: "If we can agree that the internet, by altering the underlying economics of the news business, has thinned the ranks of professional journalists, then the next question is straightforward: has the net created other modes of reporting to fill the gap? The answer, alas, is equally straightforward: no." Nicholas Carr Provocateur Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and The Internet is Not Enough, argues that the rise of free content by non-professionals is undermining the quality of journalism and other fields. "What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune . . .  "The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave." Andrew Keen.  Free Instructional Content in Higher Education Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education Free content has also come to occupy an important role in higher education. Educators regularly capture free content from the web for use in their courses. Most of this material is found through general web searches (i.e. Google), but a small and growing percentage is found on sites dedicated to free curated instructional content (OpenStax, Merlot). In limited instances, educators take steps to share content they’ve created on these sites, as well. The vast majority of free, publicly available content built expressly for instructional use in higher education is developed in a DIY fashion - by instructors working independently, drawing on a limited range of skills, and supported by minimal investment. Although the Instructor may intend to share the content with instructors and students at other institutions, the funding model for course development in place at colleges and universities typically is designed according to the assumption that the material will be used only within a single institution for a single course. This limits the investment of talent, time, and money that can be made in each effort, as a limited number of end-users, which subsequently limits the revenue generated from the material (i.e. tuition and grants), which in turn limits the development budget. Despite the social benefits of sharing instructional content, institutions are not designed to underwrite the instructional costs of other institutions, or inclined, I suspect. Source: BC Open Campus As a result, the free instructional content built for use in higher education tends to be limited to simple lecture video, home-made graphics, and text - the types of materials that this particular resource configuration allows. What this resource configuration doesn’t enable is the development of instructional materials that are more capital-intensive, such as games, adaptive learning, extensive feedback mechanisms, and rich media. Both types of content are valuable. Both are needed. The danger is that free content may limit the sector’s ability to sustainably produce and distribute more expensive forms of instructional media and software that offer different types of instructional value - types of value that are simply not possible through the DIY model. Source: Wall Street Journal One symptom that this may be occurring is the state of the textbook industry - historically, the source of more third-party instructional material in education. Second-hand textbook sales, piracy, as well as the growing volume of freely available materials are all contributing to declining revenue. Textbook publishing is organized to enable a relatively high-level of investment in instructional materials. Whereas a open-content initiative may offer a faculty member the chance to produce a new open textbook with a $5,000 grant (often from public sources), a textbook publisher can easily spend 100 times that much on the same effort. It is entirely possible that open content is built with a larger pool of talent, more time, and far more funding. And it’s not unheard of; examples include The Big History Project, produced by Intentional Futures and funded by the BMGF, and RSA Animate Series, a product of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. But open content as this time seems to be aligned with an interesting mix of culture, politics and occupational standards that eschews larger projects and celebrates individual, "edu-punk", DIY-style efforts. Indeed, anti-corporatism is part of its identity (c.f. .Never Mind the Edupunks; or, The Great Web 2.0 Swindle). The antagonistic, "us versus them" stance taken by some advocates of open content regularly targets the traditional publishing industry. Parallels: High-End Journalism and Instructional Media We have, then, something of a parallel between the news industry and digital higher education. As citizens we need to ensure that we have ready access to the more substantial, in-depth reporting by experienced professionals, As educators, need to ensure that digital learning is not limited to simple, DIY forms; that we find ways to regularly test, develop and distribute more advanced forms of digital instruction. The ability of individuals to produce and distribute content - both journalism and education - is one of most positive and important developments in the early 21st century. It expands the range of voices and pushes back against entrenched interests and their perspectives. But we need to be certain that our desire to push-aside corporate and other large scale enterprises doesn’t weaken our capacity to provide students with more sophisticated forms of instructional media that are only possible through more extensive investment, wider pools of talent, and the luxury of time. Improving learning outcomes has proven very difficult, and we need to begin to take fuller advantage of the possibilities of new types of instructional media and software.

Art Fridrich is the first Director of Distance Education at Virginia State University, where he’s charged with bringing courses and programs from the classroom to the online environment. Art also works with faculty members to change the in-class experience for students. Prior to his role at VSU, he spent over 30 years in higher education as a consultant, administrator and technologist with over 70 colleges and universities in the US and abroad. :: Q. The common perception is that HBCUs have been less aggressive about creating online and hybrid programs. Is this a strategic decision? This is a common perspective that I’ve heard many times. However, I believe that this thought might be somewhat misplaced. Nationally, there are 106 institutions that have the designation of an HBCU. Of those, a little over 30 percent offer at least one online program. The institutions that comprise this mix includes Tugaloo College, a private institution with less than 1000 students, who offers one online program to North Carolina A&T, a 10,000 student public institution with thirteen certificate and degree programs. The two institutions offering the most programs online are Hampton University, a private institution and Tennessee State University, a public institution, which are offering 20 programs online. In the end, when you consider size and other factors, I believe HBCU’s are delivering a comparable number of online programs to other institutions. With this being said, there is certainly tremendous room for further growth, not only among HBCU’s but in general. Regarding the HBCU community, there are likely many factors that contribute to what may be perceived as stunted growth that might be encapsulated under the moniker of "strategic decision." Q. Should technology play a bigger role at HBCU’s?  Even as a technocrat, I do not personally see technology in and of itself as a game changer. This is illustrated by the fact that I can’t begin to come up with the amount of technology that has been acquired by institutions during my career and shelved prior to or after implementation due to a lack of audience for the product. In my mind, it is the role of a university’s administration and faculty to set into motion the evolution or transformation of the academy, embrace this change and then to adopt the appropriate technologies required to facilitate this change. For some institution’s, HBCU’s or otherwise, this already exists and it frankly isn’t difficult to identify them when looking. For others, there may be a need to reexamine their reason for existence, determine whether they need to begin developing a culture of change and then adopt the technology that will facilitate their vision of the future. Q. Competency-based education has taken off in the last year. How do you see CBE fitting into the larger higher ed landscape?  For an educational model that is still in its online infancy, I find myself as a big proponent of CBE. Nationwide, over 30 million adults have taken some and 4 million of those have completed at least two years of college. For even a portion of these learners, the ability to reenter the academy and apply a portion of their life experiences towards their completion will not only enhance their growth potential moving forward, but likely contribute to the reduction in the shortage of college graduates the nation now faces. For traditional students, CBE has the potential to address a major dilemma we currently face in education. Specifically, our classes are filled with students of varying readiness for the class they are enrolled. As such, the instructor is left to determine which population to address in the course, which leaves lesser prepared students by the wayside or better prepared students bored and unfulfilled. By focusing in on the level of knowledge acquired we rip down the barriers of time and types of student to provide just in time education. Q. What areas of instructional technology do you find most promising as of 2015?  With proliferation of VC infused vendors across a broad range of niches, that’s a difficult one to answer. So here’s my sense at this moment - MOOCs, Adaptive Learning and Competency Based Learning. With MOOCs, I may see their role somewhat differently than others. I believe they have started to be and will continue to be the incubator for new education technologies. With the sheer numbers of students enrolled, regardless of motive, MOOC outcomes provide the most significant environment for quantitatively assessing the role a technology plays in the outcome of a student. Although the latter two have a few years behind them, I don’t sense that they’ve come anywhere close to reaching their apex in the market yet. With Adaptive Learning, we have a large number of resource and platform based solutions, which I suspect will take five years or so before the technology settles and the market corrects itself to a supportable number. With CBE, we have seen explosive growth in the institutions adopting it and consultancies supporting it, but we (or at least I) haven’t seen the same explosion in technologies, beyond that of AL and proprietary institutional software.

  New letters from U.S. and accreditors provide framework for approval of competency-based degrees Excerpt: "Earlier this month the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, which represents the seven regional accreditors, issued a common framework for how to assess and approve competency-based programs. The Education Department followed last week, with a letter to accreditors that echoes many of the same points. The department’s letter also described requirements for a meaningful faculty role in competency-based education, including students’ ability to interact directly with instructors." "With two sides of the regulatory triad that oversees higher education having weighed in (states are the third), experts said colleges have clearer guidance as they seek to create competency-based programs." Read the full post. The Fourth Estate and Instructional Media Excerpt: "But the comparison to the music and news industries tends to understate the degree to which individual learners are restricted from seeking out and assembling educational experiences according to their own criteria. Whereas consumers of music and journalism are free to make up their own minds as to what constitutes good value, what constitutes "educated" is defined by social conventions, regulatory and loan systems, and, of course, employers. Determinations of what constitutes good value in education can’t be made unilaterally. New and more flexible forms of credentials will continue to become more widely accepted, but the processes of disintermediation and unbundling will unfold far more slowly than in other sectors." Read the full post Why there are so many video lectures in online learning, and why there probably shouldn’t be Excerpt: "Over the past few years, a big trend in online learning has been to move lots of content and learning materials online in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). While these courses cover a wide range of subjects and exist on a number of different platforms, one thing nearly all MOOCs have in common is a focus on delivering content to the learner through video. The majority of these videos look like traditional lectures chopped up into smaller chunks, in the style of a "talking head" (lecturer talks to the class) or "tablet capture" (lecturer writes on the blackboard while talking)." Read the full post Kadenze launches online education platform for creative arts courses Excerpt: "Online learning platforms are out of tune with creative arts education, according to the ed-tech start-up Kadenze. "Its platform, which launches today, aims to become a hub for online courses in art, design, music and other disciplines underrepresented online. Those courses have proven challenging to teach to an audience in dozens, let alone the hundreds or thousands, as faculty members struggle to translate face-to-face instruction to an online setting or evaluate students based on highly personal work. As a result, massive open online course platforms often feature lineups heavy on courses in which student performance can be determined with quizzes and peer-graded writing assignments." Read the full post.   

:: Note: The second instalment on this series on "Internet Economics" can be found here. :: It’s not often you hear reference to the "economics of the internet" at conferences held on digital teaching and learning, or at one of the workshops offered on campus about "how to teach online". That’s a shame. Although the effects internet economics have yet to be fully realized in higher education, there are very few factors that will have greater impact on the institution in the coming years. Figuring out how to best navigate these influences is a core challenge of our time. In other sectors, the internet’s impact on costs is familiar terrain. Jonathan Levin of Stanford summed up this influence succinctly: " . . . the internet has lowered a range of economic costs: the cost of creating and distributing certain types of products and services, the cost of acquiring information about these goods, the cost of collecting and using data on consumer preferences and behaviour." Jonathan Levin But the influence of economics goes well beyond costs, distribution, and the processes of acquiring information. Economic factors ultimately influence what gets produced, how it’s produced, where, and by whom. Evidence of the huge impact of internet economics are clear in a handful of new, internet-native organizations: "Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening." Tom Goodwin Few types of organizations seem more removed from the above examples of location-neutral, born-to-be-flipped, consumer-facing enterprises than higher education. While there are a few institutions and organizations in higher education that are clearly Internet-enabled - I’m thinking here of Minerva, WGU, and Coursera - the vast majority of institutions have had their organizational structures and practices held in place by several, especially resilient forces: regulatory systems (accreditation, student loans), tradition, social conventions, and the effects of decentralized management. But there are signs that the internet economy is beginning to more broadly infiltrate higher education. New learning providers are taking advantage of the economics of content creation and distribution to offer inexpensive alternatives to higher ed - some of these are being integrated into traditional institutions. MOOCs have provided a concrete example of what a widely distributed, rationalized content model might look like - providing scale on a level not seen since the heydays of textbook publishers. Learners are gaining access to more information about institutions to help them measure the value of different institutions; and more. It’s important we develop a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the unique properties of internet economics. This will help us leverage its unique properties to meet our goals and, when needed, avoid its influences for the same reason. In the next few posts, we’re going to address a series of concepts that are intertwined with the Internet economics, including: - scale and economies of scale - network effect - mass customization - freemium - unbundling - disintermediation Each of these concepts were in use prior to the Internet; but the economics of the internet have made them more common and/or important. We’ll address one at a time and as we do, we will consider how they relate to aspects of higher education. We’ll start with scale and scalability in our next post. :: Note: The second instalment on this series, "Internet Economics: Scale and Online Higher Education" can be found here.

:: Why Universities Should Get Rid of PowerPoint and Why they Won’t Excerpt: "An article in The Conversation recently argued universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring. I agree entirely. However, most universities will ignore this good advice because rather than measuring success by how much their students learn, universities measure success with student satisfaction surveys, among other things." Read the full article.  Americans Value Skills Over College Excerpt: "Earn a college degree, and you’ll set yourself up for life: a stable job, salary, and mortgage. That was the old adage for generation after generation, following World War II. Yet, both young and old workers no longer hold the same abiding faith in the power of four-year degree, according to the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll." " Instead, understanding computer technology, working well with different types of people, keeping your skills current, and having good family connections trump the importance of college—at least, when it comes to people’s notions of what it takes to succeed in the modern workplace. "If you don’t have a good grip on technology, it is very hard to succeed," said 45-year-old Christine Welch of Idaho, who has three children, ages 17 to 25." Read the full article. Author Discusses Book on How Historically Black Colleges Evolved Amid Unfair Treatment Excerpt: "Historically black colleges — public and private — were created amid an era of overt discrimination and hostility to their mission. A new book traces how they responded to those challenges, typically without the financing enjoyed by other institutions, as well as to challenges that followed the theoretical end of Jim Crow. In the Face of Inequality: How Black Colleges Adapt (State University of New York Press) is by Melissa E. Wooten, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She responded via email to questions about the book." Read the full article.  Obama Administration Further Dials Back College Rating Plan Excerpt: "The Obama administration continues to dial back once-aggressive plans to rate colleges and draw off federal dollars from the weakest schools, saying instead they intend to present new information about performance to empower consumers." Read the full article. Open Universities Australia Responds to Falling Revenue with New Strategy Excerpt: "Australia’s biggest online education provider Open Universities Australia (OUA) has suffered a sharp drop in profit to $2.6 million in 2014, down from $19.4 million the previous year, as it faces more competition from universities, some of whom are its shareholders. 
Revenue also fell, to $163.7 million in 2014 from $180.7 million the previous year. 
OUA’s main business, selling university degrees online that are provided to it by Australian universities, has been undercut by growing competition in the online degree market, easier student access to conventional university degrees, and the advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which offer online education at low cost or free. 
OUA chief executive Paul Wappett said the changing business environment had been anticipated and OUA was well progressed in implementing a strategy to shift the focus of its business away from offering degrees. " Read the full article.  Elizabeth Warren Finally Has the Right Idea on Higher Education Excerpt: "Senator Elizabeth Warren has been a vocal, if unsuccessful, advocate for higher-education reform. So far her efforts have either been unrealistic—such as her proposal to reduce student loan interest rates to below 1%—or insufficient, such as her push for student loan refinancing. But in a speech last week, Warren outlined a higher-education agenda that’s ambitious, prudent, and potentially game-changing." Read the full article.