"Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education. Getting Credit for What You Know Excerpt: "IT (Information Technology) was among the industries that pioneered the new approach to credentialing. Some 20 years ago, employers in the tech sector came together and devised a process to identify the skill sets needed for the most common jobs in the field. It’s a complex, laborious process, and it has to be repeated every few years as new technology ripples through the industry. But the end result is invaluable: a set of industry standards for what a well-trained worker needs to know." 3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education Excerpt: "You can read this year’s report, based on a survey conducted in 2014, here. But if you don’t have the time, here are three things academic leaders believe about online education: 1. Online education has become mission-critical, even at small colleges. The percentage of academic leaders who agreed that online education is critical to the long-term strategy of their institutions crept up steadily until 2013, when it fell slightly, from 69 percent to 66 percent. In 2014, however, the percentage was back up to 71 percent, the highest rate yet. The most-drastic recent shift in the perceived importance of online education was at small colleges (i.e., those with fewer than 1,500 students). In 2012, 60 percent of academic leaders at small colleges said online education was strategically crucial. Now that number is 70 percent—nearly the same as at universities with more than 15,000 students. 2. "Hybrid" courses are at least as good as face-to-face courses. A majority of survey respondents said hybrid courses—which are held partly online, partly in the classroom—are equivalent to courses that are held entirely in person, but nearly 33 percent said they thought hybrid courses were superior. This is not a new belief: The percentage of academic leaders who believe in the superiority of hybrid courses has hovered around one-third since at least 2012. (The U.S. Education Department expressed a similar view way back in 2010.) In fact, the slim percentage of respondents who thought hybrids were worse than face-to-face courses actually went up in 2014, from 7.9 percent to 10.6 percent. 3. Most professors still don’t think online courses are legit. Some things never change. Back in 2002, Babson asked academic leaders if their faculty members "accept the value and legitimacy of online education." That year 28 percent said their professors thought online courses were legitimate. This year it was … 28 percent." Sharp Drop in Part-Time Student Enrolment Since Fee Rises  Excerpt: "Part-time student enrolments in higher education fell by 22% in the two years since university tuition fees were allowed to triple, according to new figures released last Thursday by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, or HESA. Between 2012-13 and 2013-14, the number of part-time students fell by 2% overall. According to HESA the decline in total student numbers of nearly 41,000 was mainly because of a fall in undergraduate enrolments, down by 2%, and part-time student numbers, which fell sharply by 8%." Pell Report on Access to Higher Ed Excerpt: "Nonetheless, as illustrated by the indicators in this report, higher education outcomes are highly inequitable across family income groups. Moreover, on many of these indicators, gaps in outcomes are larger now than in the past. The disinvestment of state funds for public colleges and universities occurring since the 1980s and the declining value of federal student grant aid have all aided in the creation of a higher education system that is stained with inequality. Once known for wide accessibility to and excellence within its higher education system, the U.S. now has an educational system that serves to sort students in ways related to later life chances based on their demographic characteristics rather than provide all youth with the opportunity to use their creative potential to realize the many benefits of higher education and advance the well-being and progress of the nation." What It Takes: Video Didn’t Kill the Radio Star (Equivalent to classroom and online higher ed?) Excerpt: "That argument is rubbish. In the late 70’s, the Buggles sang "Video Killed the Radio Star," but the reality is that a new medium didn’t kill the radio star or the theatre production or film or books or television shows. Lack of vision killed the second-rate versions of all of these, while the classics survived and the visionaries emerged."  

Pittsburgh, PA "Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education. :: The Community College/‘Real College’ Divide Community Colleges are becoming more central to US education policy. This may be simply due to the fact that they are so central to the desire (within the Obama administration, particularly) to increase the rate of post-secondary participation. Here, the New York Times highlights the way that community colleges are often seen as second-class. Excerpt: "I heard it again, another community college putdown. This one came from an educator explaining criteria for high school graduation. She followed her summary with these words to her audience of parents and incoming freshmen: "So that’s the minimum requirement. But here’s what you should take if you want to go to real college — you know, not community college." :: Babson Report 2014 Always interesting, the Babson Report for 2014 is now available. One of the results attracting attention is the significant divide between faculty belief (interest?) in online education and the importance of the online format to the university’s leadership. Worth a look. Excerpt: "Is Online Learning Strategic? Background: Previous reports in this series noted the proportion of institutions that believe that online education is a critical component of their long-term strategy has shown small but steady increases for a decade, followed by a retreat in 2013. The evidence: The proportion of academic leaders who report that online learning is critical to their institution’s long term strategy has grown from 48.8% in 2002 to 70.8% this year.
! The proportion of chief academic leaders that say online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at an all-time high.
! For-profit institutions account for the change for 2014; for the first time ever they are reporting a higher rate than public institutions.
! The proportion of institutions reporting online education is not critical to their long-term strategy has dropped to a new low of 8.6%.
" :: NMC 2015 Report I don’t find the annual report from the New Media Consortium particularly useful. It’s forecasts of emerging technologies in education rarely surprise professionals that are paying attention. Nevertheless, readers may find the way that the new technologies are organized in the report useful. Excerpt: "There is an increasing interest in using new sources of data for personalizing the learning experience, for ongoing formative assessment of learning, and for performance measurement; this interest is spurring the development of a relatively new field — data-driven learning and assessment. A key element of this trend is learning analytics, the application of web analytics, a science used by businesses to analyze commercial activities that leverages big data to identify spending trends and predict consumer behavior. Education is embarking on a similar pursuit into data science with the aim of learner profiling, a process of gathering and analyzing large amounts of detail about individual student interactions in online learning activities. The goal is to build better pedagogies, empower students to take an active part in their learning, target at-risk student populations, and assess factors affecting completion and student success. For learners, educators, and researchers, learning analytics is already starting to provide crucial insights into student progress and interaction with online texts, courseware, and learning environments used to deliver instruction. Data-driven learning and assessment will build on those early efforts.
" :: APLU HBCU Conference APLU is presenting the HBCU Conference in June 2015. This is crucial time in the evolution of these institutions. We’ll be attending. Excerpt: " . . . over 250 HBCU senior level administrators, students, faculty and staff to learn about best practices and develop strategies for historically Black institutions to improve student success." The deadline for submitting proposals is March 15. More information available here.  :: Computer ‘Mines’ Facebook to Predict Personality File under "Technology: Wow." A study conducted at Stanford University suggests that computers can be remarkably accurate measurements of even the most human issues: personality traits. Excerpt: "Based on what you’ve "liked" on Facebook, computers can pin down your personality traits more accurately than your friends and colleagues can. In fact, artificial intelligence can draw inferences about a person as accurately as a spouse, according to Michal Kosinski, co-lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. A new study compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People’s judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while the computer used digital signals—Facebook "likes." According to Kosinski, the findings reveal that by mining a person’s Facebook "likes," a computer was able to predict a person’s personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Only a person’s spouse came close to matching the computer’s results." :: Faculty’s Role in Higher Education Innovation As noted above, faculty attitudes about instructional technology have shifted little in the last decade. The Gates Foundation recently released a study they sponsored that looks squarely at what’s behind these attitudes. Excerpt: "To that end, we commissioned research from FTI Consulting to help us better understand how different factors influence faculty willingness to learn about and incorporate new ideas and approaches in their teaching, particularly approaches that personalize learning (such as courseware) in undergraduate education, and spread these new ideas to peers and campus leaders. The results are inspiring on a number of levels. Most notably, the report: Shows that a significant proportion of faculty is open to using courseware and other innovations to improve their students’ success; Demonstrates very specific obstacles that faculty face in evolving their practice; and Illuminates approaches that colleges and others can take to help reduce or overcome those obstacles.    

It’s no secret to anyone in higher education that college completion rates for wealthy students have soared, while college graduation rates for students from lower socioeconomic rungs have languished over the last 45 years. In fact, according to a new report from the University of Pennsylvania and the Pell Institute for Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, 77% of adults from families in the top income quartile earned at least a bachelor’s degree by the time they turned 24, up from 40% in 1970. But only 9% of those from the lowest-income bracket earned a bachelor’s in 2013, up from 6% in 1970. Source: Indicators Of Higher Education Equity in the United States. The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education While it is true that low-income students are enrolling at higher rates than they did 40 years ago, the reality is that most low-income students fail to graduate. Only about one in five college students from the lowest income brackets completes a bachelor’s degree by age 24. Among students from higher income brackets, 99% of students complete their degrees, up from 55% in 1970. So while access to higher education has generally improved in the last 40 years, there’s still much to be done to help students—particularly low-income and disadvantaged students—complete a postsecondary program so they can live better lives and realize personal and professional success. The good news is there’s significant momentum to help accomplish this. Late last year, The Gates Foundation, a private foundation focused on increasing post-secondary success, announced a $20 million investment. It aims to develop next-generation digital courseware that leverages the best of what is known about the learning sciences, education research, and technology-enabled learning. The Gates Courseware Challenge will lead to the creation of next-generation digital courseware to personalize instruction and help underperforming and disadvantaged students successfully complete required general education "gateway" undergraduate courses. The Foundation hopes to prove, via this challenge, that student outcomes, especially for those most disadvantaged, and institutional productivity (defined as individual learner mastery and completion, time to degree, retention and cost per completion), can be enhanced and improved with the broad adoption and implementation of a new generation of exemplary digital courseware. As one of seven recipients of Gates Courseware Challenge Funding, (Other recipients: Cerego, CogBooks, Lumen Learning, Rice University OpenStax, Smart Sparrow, and the Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University), we recognize that scaling new instructional strategies and best practices requires evidence of impact and ease of implementation. To that end, we endeavor to partner with institutions focused on improving completion rates, particularly those serving a large Pell-eligible population to offer feedback on implementation and impact of our forthcoming adaptive courseware - scheduled to come online this summer.  Our pilot site goals include: Successful implementation of our adaptive courseware demonstrating improved learning outcomes, particularly among low income and disadvantaged students; Development and dissemination of best practices associated with implementing courseware models across a range of higher-education delivery modalities including hybrid and online models; Development and refinement of institutional and faculty training and support services to support scaled courseware adoption. There is no cost for an institution to participate as a courseware evaluation site, and students will receive the courseware at a significantly discounted price for the duration of the pilot.  If your institution would like to learn more, please see the links below. Learn more about the Gates Courseware Challenge. Learn more about becoming a Gates Courseware Challenge Institutional Partner.

Last week the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative released their 12th annual Horizon Report on technology integration in higher education.  Each year these groups coordinate the work of a diverse panel of more than 50 experts to identify key trends, significant challenges, and important developments in educational technology. The final report includes predictions for future adoption of various tools and approaches in the short term, as well as over the next five years and beyond. This year’s Horizon Report identifies two key trends influencing tech adoption over the next two years on a global scale. Evolution of Online Learning The nature of technology in general is that it is constantly changing. As new capabilities are realized and access becomes more ubiquitous, the use of technology allows us to work and live more effectively and efficiently. Online education is just one context in which ever-changing technology is making a difference in both teaching and learning. Online education is steadily gaining a reputation for not only offering convenience and flexibility, but also high-quality academic experience for learners. The work of educators and researchers to develop new strategies and establish leading practices has led to more research and innovation in the following areas: Blended Learning: Students enrolled in blended or hybrid courses can expect a mix of requirements to meet and interact via online resources and face-to-face. As the integration of technology into educational settings evolves, traditional courses are incorporating more blended components with which students can prepare for class, review course materials and textbooks, and continue in-person discussions online. Communication Options: A combination of asynchronous and synchronous (i.e., real-time) tools allows students to connect with each other and the course materials, as well as with their instructors in a variety of ways. The selection of specific media resources to meet specific needs, such as class discussions, social community building, and demonstrations can mean the adoption of multiple tools and techniques. Rethinking Learning Spaces The Horizon Report recognizes that "a student-centered approach to education has taken root," resulting in the need for redesign of traditional learning spaces, both physical and virtual in nature. No longer confined to a physical location, or even a single course website, learners can benefit from new tools and strategies used to organize and structure the environments in which they connect and learn. Personalized Learning: Students bring a variety of learning needs to the learning space, which can be met through environments that not only allow for some degree of choice (i.e., activity options based on learning preferences), but also present materials and assessments based on each learner’s skill level and previous work. Active Learning: While traditional learning spaces provided more passive learning activities, such as reading a textbook or listening to a lecture, active strategies allow students to interact with course content and each other. Online environments increasingly provide opportunities for active learning through virtual laboratory exercises, collaborative projects, and simulations, and game-based activities. Are you involved in technology conversations, planning, and decisions at your institution? Find out more about these and other trends presented in the 2015 Horizon Report for Higher Education and how Acrobatiq’s adaptive courseware offers institutions an innovative approach to designing effective online learning environments.

It’s only February and 2015 is already shaping up to be a watershed year for Acrobatiq. We finished 2014 very strong by releasing major enhancements to our personalized learning platform, and further enriching the data insights available to faculty using The Learning Dashboard. In October 2014, we were honored to be selected by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to receive a Next Generation Courseware Challenge Grant which we plan to use to significantly enhance our current courseware, and to fund the development of new courseware for pre calculus.   In addition to pre calculus, we also announced we would be expanding our courseware portfolio with the addition of 25 more adaptive courseware products — many targeted at the largest general education "gateway" courses and available by this summer, in time for fall classes. Here’s a look forward into what else we’ve got planned in 2015: New Courseware Enhancements As part of the Next Generation Courseware Challenge grant, Acrobatiq is significantly enhancing our adaptive courseware with more dynamic media to deepen engagement and enrich the student learning experience. Examples of dynamic media elements include: Self-contained "mini" presentations that guide students through a concept using interactive images and formative assessment Interactive images with call-outs, hotspots and "pan and zoom" features that allow students to explore topics from multiple perspectives Expanding photo galleries highlighting time-lapsed events that can be viewed in-line, as part of a narrative, or full-screen More video and animation to help simplify difficult concepts and boost student achievement and engagement Here’s a peek at the hotspot feature: Many of the new dynamic elements also include clickable anchor points to formative assessment activities so students have ample opportunity to practice skills and demonstrate learning mastery. Acrobatiq also is developing an additional range of assessments that will provide even more flexibility for instructors who want to use our courseware in traditional classroom settings as a textbook replacement or as part of a hybrid or even fully online course.  Examples of these new assessment types include: Personalized, adaptive exercises emphasizing synthesis and application of concepts added to the end of each module.  These personal practice sessions can be graded, or not. Scored summative, item-based module-level quizzes and unit-level tests. Enough items will be developed to support multiple attempts for both quizzes and tests. New Courseware, Coming Summer 2015 Helping institutions improve course completions and shorten time-to-degree are central to what we do. In order to provide students with a productive pathway to program completion, with the most flexible options, we are developing personalized, adaptive courseware for many of the largest "gateway" courses.  These courses often become the bottleneck for students working toward a degree or certificate. By offering students more choice in delivery modalities, institutions can dramatically improve the chances of students progressing and graduating on time. *2015 Enhanced Courseware Developed With Funding From The Gates Foundation.  Learn More About The Gates Foundation Courseware Challenge New Courseware Authoring Environment Critical to courseware adoption and usage by faculty is the ability to easily remix or adapt courseware to match specific instructional needs or desired delivery modalities. Many instructors would like to use digital courseware in both on-ground and online teaching modalities, but need assistance to overcome set-up, delivery, and content challenges. Here at Acrobatiq we’re taking on those challenges. By systematically developing from the ground up a new courseware authoring environment, we can help teaching faculty, TA’s, or an instructional design team to develop comprehensive, integrated courseware based on the Acrobatiq course-design methodology, grounded in learning science.  Features of the authoring environment include: A simple interface, based on the proven Open Learning Initiative course design methodology  to author or edit learning objectives, skills, and expository content, in addition to coordinating formative/summative assessment items Twenty-four different activity types including not only the basic tools such as multiple choice and drag n’ drop, but also more sophisticated tools that will really stretch creative instructional design such as the ability to make basic images interactive Functionality enabling the addition of self-made video clips captured from almost any device, or the addition of links to videos on YouTube and other sources. Here’s a sneak peek at the new courseware authoring environment: New Acrobatiq Enterprise Learning Platform Developments  The Learning Dashboard™ Over the last several months, we have iteratively released enhancements to The Learning Dashboard. These improvements help instructors, course mentors, and course designers get even more insight from the data, and provide tighter integration with leading Learning Management Systems. Examples include: New Data Card "How Well Are My Students Self-Assessing?" This new data card asks students to rate their confidence level in their learning on a scale of 1-5 and to provide feedback on areas within the course where they may be struggling. Instructors can pin this card to their dashboard as an easy way to see ongoing and topic-specific feedback from students.   Improved Data Organization The overall look and feel of the Learning Dashboard is more streamlined with the most common questions about student learning performance  organized in one trim column. Users simply click on a data card or a question to see the data insight rendered in a visual graphic. The data can also be viewed and sorted in table format. Learning data can also be manipulated in the following ways: Pare down the data based on  parameters, such as population (all or selected students), time, learning objective, location in course (units or modules), and more Switch between graphical and table views of the data Filter the data when it’s displayed as a data table Export the data by printing, creating a PDF, creating a CSV-format spreadsheet, or by copying the data to your clipboard so you can paste it into an existing document or email Add an at-a-glance card to the default dashboard Over the next year, we will continue to make iterative improvements to both the underlying statistical models that generate the learning data, and to the data visualization tables. What Our Learning Scientists Are Researching Creating more personalized learning experiences has been a recent theme for online educational resources. To date, the work in this area has focused on the following approaches to personalization: providing immediate feedback tailored to learner responses, selecting examples or contexts to match learner interests, and adjusting material (e.g., topics, problems) and/or support (e.g., degree of scaffolding, problem difficulty) to fit learners’ current knowledge. It is noteworthy, however, that online educational resources have not yet incorporated the rich literature on human individual differences to create additional modes of personalized, adaptive learning. The goal of individual differences research is to identify and measure particular features of the student that are relatively stable across time and consistent across contexts, and then study their effects on performance, learning, and other behaviors (e.g., Jonassen & Grabowski, 1993; Snow, 1986). This work has included studying an individual’s personality, memory, sensory sensitivity, motivation, and various beliefs about the self. By measuring these individual difference parameters for each learner working in an online environment, we can better account for a significant source of variation in learners’ responses and behaviors, and, in turn, more precisely estimate their learning states, select more targeted instructional interventions and support, and provide more tailored advice and recommendations. Look for more information in the coming months on how we plan to incorporate parameters of individual difference into our learning model to more precisely estimate the learner’s knowledge state, and further personalize and adapt content, pedagogy, and learning strategies for each learner. So I hope this gives you a good overview of where we’re headed over the next six to eight months.   If you have questions, or would like to reach me directly to discuss these or other topics of interest, feel free to email me at alison@acrobatiq.com. For general information related to Acrobatiq adaptive courseware, or our enterprise learning platform, follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linked In. You can also reach us at info@acrobatiq.com, or by calling 877.998.2937.    

As many higher education instructors know, student success isn’t exclusively dependent upon a student’s personal dedication to learning course material. Helping students complete courses requires a combination of effective teaching and learning strategies. John Hattie, the Director of Melbourne Education Research Institute and creator of the Visible Learning approach, conducted one of the largest meta-analyses of research done to date to uncover factors that most impact student achievement. The factors Hattie ranked included everything from family background to teacher-student relationship to instructional practices. By examining how these influences interact and guide learning, Hattie’s research provides insight into how instructors can better identify—and help—at-risk students. According to Hattie’s research, and other subsequent research like it, five common things at-risk students say and strategies to help them succeed include the following³: 1.  "I read the textbook, but I just don’t seem to get it." What It Might Mean:  Low or poor reading skills and/or poor study skills How To Help:  Consider integrating more active learning techniques or interactive learning resources. Providing an alternative learning experience to traditional print textbooks can allow students with weak reading and/or study skills to stay motivated and persist in reaching desired learning outcomes. 2.  "I feel lost—I am not sure what I should be studying." What It Might Mean: Poor organizational skills and/or inability to identify priority tasks How To Help:  Assigning learning resources organized by clearly-stated learning objectives enables students to better understand of what they should master by the end of each study session. This eliminates time wasted studying information that’s not directly related to the desired learning outcomes.  Here’s an example from our own courseware showing three learning objectives outlined at the top of the page.  By the end of this learning session, students should be able to identify parts of the digestive system. 3.  "I feel like I studied really hard, but I still failed." What It Might Mean: Poor test-taking skills and/or poor study habits How To Help: Provide ample practice opportunities with targeted and timely feedback. Assigning learning activities with pedagogy like imbedded hints and targeted, contextualized feedback allows students to gauge their own progress more frequently,  and find areas where additional study focus might be needed. As a result, students are better able to assess their own readiness for summative assessments. 4.  "I am a terrible test-taker." What It Might Mean: Test anxiety How To Help: Prepare students for summative assessment with frequent formative assessment experiences that simulate what they can expect in a testing experience. Also, assign learning resources that collect and report learning performance data while students are actively engaged with course material. Doing so provides students with insight into their own progress, which can help them feel more prepared and reduce test anxiety. 5.  "I missed a couple of classes, but I can make them up." What It Might Mean: Limited study time and/or conflicting personal priorities.  Note that according to recent census data, enrollment of students age 25 and over has risen 41% since 2000 and over 40% of college students now work at least part time.² This means increasing numbers of adult learners are juggling the demands of work, school, and family.  Traditional classroom-based learning models can make it difficult for these adult learners to "catch up." How To Help: Assign learning resources that can be accessed on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and ensure out-of-class efforts are highly structured in order to maximize  limited study time. How Acrobatiq Courseware Can Also Help You Promote Student Success By providing students with evidence-based learning resources that enable continuous and near real-time insight into student learning performance, instructors can more effectively monitor student progress and potentially identify at-risk students earlier. In reviewing Hattie’s research on factors known to positively correlate with student achievement, these five critical factors below positively correlate with increased student achievement and also form the basis of the design methodology of Acrobatiq adaptive courseware: Formative evaluation (.90) Effective feedback (.73) Meta-cognition (.69) Mastery based learning (.58) Interactive content (.52) In multiple evaluation studies conducted at both 4- and 2-year institutions, Acrobatiq courseware has been shown to produce equal or better learning gains when compared to students learning in traditional classes, and require less out-of-class time from students to achieve similar outcomes. To learn more about Acrobatiq’s adaptive courseware combining high-quality authoritative content, real-world simulations, assessments, and goal-directed practice activities with targeted feedback, visit our course catalog. [1] U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2013). Digest of Education Statistics, 2012 (NCES 2014-015),Chapter 3. [2] Current Population Survey (CPS) and Integrated Post secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) (May 2014). [3]  Adapted from Recognizing Common Student Study Problems, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, edited by Gail Tennen and Gary K. Hagar  

The concept of technology-enabled learning is certainly not new. Ever since the use of the personal computer became mainstream, multimedia technology has played an important role in the classroom. Initially this was done with film clips, later with PowerPoint presentations and Smart Boards. Technology has also helped students assimilate knowledge—first through computer-based homework systems, then through interactive eBooks, and now through more personalized and adaptive technologies. Yesterday’s notion of online coursework (i.e., digital homework solutions that are often textbook-centric) has quickly evolved into today’s adaptive, intelligent courseware. What is Adaptive, Intelligent Courseware? In its simplest form, "courseware" is technology-enabled resources designed to augment teaching and learning. More specifically, and in the case of formal learning, courseware can be thought of as a tool, or set of tools designed to optimize the learning process and bring about a change in knowledge state. Adaptive, intelligent courseware, sometimes referred to as "Next Generation Courseware" differs from other types of courseware in that it combines principles from learning science—or what we know about how people learn—with intelligent tutoring capabilities. In this setting, the computer helps enact instruction by providing detailed, timely, and context-specific guidance as students work through learning activities. This embedded and ongoing feedback simulates the role of a human tutor to help students stay motivated and fine-tune their learning. Embedded formative and summative assessments have the added transformational benefit of providing detailed student learning data that, when combined with state-of-the-art statistical tools, enable near "real-time" and highly accurate predictions about learning progress. This nuanced view of student learning performance is a potential game changer for faculty. Here’s why: while traditional types of periodic quizzing and assessments are lagging indicators about what’s happened in the past, predictive learning models like those embedded in adaptive, intelligent courseware offer insight into what’s likely to happen in the near future.This allows for timelier and targeted instructional interventions that can be applied right at the point of need.   The idea, of course, is not to use computers to replace the role of a passionate and effective instructor, but rather to use technology as a powerful "virtual assistant" to aid faculty in the process of teaching while reducing time spent grading and responding to grade-related issues. Providing instructors with real-time insights about what students are learning while learning is actually occurring is a powerful new tool to help faculty move students from passive receptors of information to active participants in their own learning. How Adaptive, Intelligent Courseware Benefits Instructors As previously discussed, the transformational benefit of adaptive, intelligent courseware is the ability to use student interactions from within the courseware to make dynamic and continuously updated predictive estimates about student learning progress against a set of desired outcomes. Traditionally, the process for measuring and evaluating student learning is still largely centered on assessments given at periodic intervals covering large portions of curriculum that students are expected to master. The problem with this approach is two-fold: First, typical summative assessments rarely produce quantitative details about specific skills or knowledge components where students are struggling. Rather, they provide instructors with averages or distributions of student scores -often at too high of a level to be meaningfully actionable. Secondly, for students, typical quiz or test scores happen after the unit of material is completed, and many students are less motivated to remediate given the expectation that all students must progress at the same pace. For students, the very real risk of "falling behind" often necessitates moving ahead, despite clear evidence that they may not be ready to move ahead. With intelligent courseware, we have the ability to collect fine-grained details about student learning progress, as learning is happening,  and individualize practice  based on student-specific needs. For students with low levels of learning mastery, more instructionally scaffolded practice can be provided; for students with high learning estimates, less. By adapting personal practice sessions based on real data, students are more apt to persist, and stay motivated in the leaning process. What’s more, learning data can also be utilized with other key stakeholders involved in the teaching and learning process like course TAs, or course mentors where access to finely-tuned and student-specific learning data can help make their efforts more effective and efficient. Acrobatiq’s Learning Dashboard from adaptive, intelligent courseware Using learning analytics to help optimize the learning process for students is not all that different from how industries like healthcare, for example, are using data analytics to support new models of evidence-based practice and drive improvements in health outcomes. Increasingly, the same data-driven decision-making capabilities are reaching education. While faculty and institutions are beginning to see the potential of learning data, many are still in early stages of using learning analytics to inform decisions about their instructional practice. With today’s adaptive, intelligent courseware and learning analytic dashboards,  faculty now have a whole new set of powerful and easy-to-implement tools to assist them in their core mission: helping more students successfully complete courses and achieve their educational goals. To learn more about Acrobatiq’s adaptive, intelligent courseware and how it benefits teaching faculty, particularly in high-enrollment "gateway" subjects, contact us today. View our courseware catalog. Schedule a meeting to learn more about custom adaptive courseware development at info@acrobatiq.com.

"Worth Reading" is a hand-picked weekly collection of new and not-so-new articles, ideas, events and other items for busy professionals in higher education. Will Professors Teach Differently in 10 Years?  Marcelo Knobel asks if the lecture will fall from its dominant position for teaching in higher education. Excerpt: "Unfortunately, my guess is that the answer to this question is a sound "NO". Despite continuous claims of a revolution in classroom teaching strategies, the advent of massive on-line open courses, and the huge expansion in the use of technological devices (cell phone, computers, tablets, etc), in most higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world traditional lecturing endures. It will probably continue this way for many years to come, because to do otherwise requires a change of paradigm for hundreds of thousands of instructors, HEIs tradition and culture, and every aspect of institutional operation (research grants, hiring and promotion processes, etc)." :: Save the Wisconsin Idea Christine Evans rejects Governor Scott Walker’s ham-fisted attempt to reconfigure the mission statement at the University of Wisconsin. Excerpt: "Earlier this month, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and potential Republican presidential candidate, unveiled a proposed budget that would cut $300 million of funds to the University of Wisconsin system and shift power over tuition from the Legislature to a new public authority controlled by appointed regents. The initial draft of Mr. Walker’s budget bill also proposed to rewrite the university’s 110-year-old mission statement, known as the Wisconsin Idea, deleting "the search for truth" and replacing it with language about meeting "the state’s work-force needs." Higher Education, Liberal Arts and Shakespeare Frank Bruni suggests, as many before him have, that the Liberal Arts is more important than ever. Excerpt: "But it’s impossible to put a dollar value on a nimble, adaptable intellect, which isn’t the fruit of any specific course of study and may be the best tool for an economy and a job market that change unpredictably." :: K12, Higher Education Worlds Must Collide to Improve Student Outcomes Douglas Baker, President of Northern Illinois University, calls for a more coordinated relationship between K12 and higher ed. Excerpt: "Put simply, each level of the educational system — including higher education — is more conjoined than legislators and other thought leaders recognize. With the increasing and highly appropriate emphasis on raising what are admittedly low four and six-year college graduation rates at universities, the spotlight has shone on how prepared students are, or are not, for the academic, financial and emotional pressures and demands of higher education. That level of preparation has proved to be inadequate for almost half of our students. As educators, we all share responsibility and blame for that — and, working more closely together, we all need to be part of the solution." :: Mapping the Competency-Based Education Universe Eduventures attempts to map the growth and trajectory of competency-based education. Two Events We’re Attending This Spring International Symposium for Emerging Technologies  & The Education Innovation Summit The Online Learning Consortium (formerly Sloan Consortium), MERLOT, and our Emerging Technologies steering committee welcome you to the 8th Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning International Symposium (ET4Online), which will be held Dallas, TX on April 22-24, 2015. The Education Innovation Summit, in its 6th year, is held in Scottsdale, Arizona on April 6-8

University of Michigan In-House Digital Innovation The University of Michigan recently announced the launch of the DIG - the Digital Innovation Greenhouse. This is a model for generating innovation that other schools would be wise to watch. First impressions suggest that the initiative is particularly interested in using data to better understand and serve. A second focus, rightly, is in ensuring innovations scale across the institution - which has often stymied efforts at other institutions. Learn more about DIG here and here. What Are They Saying About Us? There’s no shortage of talk about higher education within higher education, but what are those outside of the institution saying? In my experience, there’s much to learn by paying attention to those outside of the institution are thinking, especially critical views. Below, are two recent examples: Bob Hayes, a second-year student at Northwestern reflects on his experience thus far, and wonders why he "  . . . learned more in the classrooms of nearby New Trier High School than I have during my time in Evanston. How does it make sense that I learned more at a public high school than I have at the elite college for which my family pays more than $65,000 per year?" "Synapse" uses a comic book format to question the impact on social class of the college system in "Why America’s Higher Education Needs Reform." Innovation: Inside and Outside of Higher Ed There’s no shortage of smart people doing interesting work in online higher education in 2015. But equally important is the work in digital learning happening outside of our institutions. Unhampered by the regulatory, cultural and financial model of higher education, a number of interesting initiatives are growing at extraordinary rates. Udemy (u-du-me) recently announced that its top 10 instructors have generated more than 17 million in revenue. Lynda.com has raised more than 100 million in financing. Codecademy, which focusses on teaching code, is also doing very well. The success of these organizations can tell us a great deal about what the future of online learning might look; which parts will be based within traditional colleges and universities, and which will be served by the commercial sector.

Kevin Carey has been one of the more useful non-academic writers on US higher education of the last decade. It’s not surprising then that his recently released book, The End of College, is generating significant attention. Also not surprising is the significant backlash that has been generated in the blogosphere from those that question the role of technology in higher education; each offering criticisms with gaps that you could drive a truck through - but judge for yourself. Book excerpt: Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official Critical responses: MOOCs as torture. | More or Less Bunk The Higher Ed Disruptors Are Still With Us  Silicon Valley’s Thunder Lizards Want to Hack America’s Broken Universities :: As you know, funds have been short in California and many are watching to see how they respond to these conditions; a test case for other jurisdictions to come, I suspect. In this context, an investment fund of 50 million dollars is of interest. California offers $50 Million Carrot for College Innovation Excerpt: The governor has pledged $50 million to reward campuses with creative and cost-effective approaches to getting more students to earn degrees in less time. A seven-member committee chaired by Brown’s finance director is scheduled to name the winners of the California Awards for Innovation in Higher Education later this month. :: Many countries have publicly funded organizations that track and support the work of colleges and universities. One of the better ones in Canada is HEQCO. Two recent projects by HEQCO are of particular importance: HEQCO is leading the charge in Canada to raise the profile of measurable learning outcomes. Earlier this week they released The Learning Outcomes Assessment: A Practitioner’s Handbook, which is available here: Learning Outcomes Assessment: A Practitioner’s Handbook They’ve also just released a comprehensive analysis of Canadian universities, with a rather provocative atop their press release: "When it comes to Canadian universities, the level of funding doesn’t predict performance . . . " Access the report here: Canadian Postsecondary Performance: IMPACT 2015 Excerpt: "When it comes to Canadian universities, the level of funding doesn’t predict performance, according to a new report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). In its newest and most comprehensive analysis of Canadian postsecondary systems, HEQCO finds that Ontario and Nova Scotia are top performers overall despite lower per-student operating costs, while other provinces that spend the same or in some cases considerably more money achieve average or below average performance. "It’s no longer just a question of how much money is spent on postsecondary education," says HEQCO president and CEO Harvey P. Weingarten. "It’s a question of how the money is spent and what outcomes are achieved." :: How to Calculate the Real Costs of Developing and delivering MOOCs eCampus News points us to two studies looking at the ROI of MOOCs. The real challenge in this case, of course, is defining what constitutes ROI. Read more here.          

The speed with which innovations in technology move from inception to adoption by individuals continues to pick-up; it takes years rather than decades. Although the television was invented in the 1920s, it wasn’t until the 1950s that it became a common feature in Western living rooms. Fast forward to 2015 and of the 220,000 drones expected to be sold this year, 70% are for home use. (In case you missed it, "National Drone Day" was this past Saturday, March 14.) At the same time, new technologies are more frequently taking hold first in consumer markets, rather than among enterprises (hospitals, government, corporations, military), which was once the norm. As the size of the consumer market for technology swells, investment and talent follow.  (For more information, see the "Consumerization of IT".) In the midst of these changes, it’s useful to take a moment to consider how consumer technologies interact with education technology. First, it is common for educators and even institutions to adopt technologies that were designed for consumer markets. Youtube, Twitter, WordPress, Google+, Facebook and others are deployed by individual academics to facilitate parts of courses. (It’s worth noting these technologies likely start as personal applications for educators in their role as consumers.) Similarly, institutions turn to Google and Microsoft for email and other enterprise technologies. The benefits of adopting widely-used consumer applications for educational purposes is plain: the majority are free, and students are already familiar with them - thereby reducing complexity. However, many institutions struggle with security and privacy concerns, as a result. If an academic chooses to use a WordPress site for part or all of a course, the students’ work may be exposed to the general public or to servers that don’t meet institutional standards. University requirements for data security tend to be more stringent than those of external, commercial providers - many of which pay their bills by sharing data with advertisers. Equally important is the degree to which these external applications are suited to the goals of teaching and learning.  Certain types of social media, for example, have proven to be an awkward fit. While social media is well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people - with no clear or prescribed beginning and end - higher education has clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. a fixed and standard set of assessments). Social media is user-generated and leaderless; that’s what makes it so compelling. On the other hand, higher education is top-down and instructor-directed. Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users within a single, overarching community. A high volume of users provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency.  Twitter and Linked In have well over 100 million users. Higher education instruction typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. average of 40 students per course). This is not to say that social media can’t be used in higher education; they can, and they are. But their use will be limited given that they are not designed for teaching and learning in our institution’s unique constraints. Higher education interacts with consumer technology in a second, possibly more productive, way. It involves mimicry. Technologies are built specifically for online education, but they draw on the best of consumer technologies. They identify what works well in consumer technologies that can be used to support educational objectives, rather than, for example, maximizing exposure of user demographics to advertisers. Second, these educational technologies are designed with a recognition that many of the preferences and behaviours of students are being established in the consumer environment. At this point in history the consumer technology market is the dominant, defining force in technology use. Education should seek out ways to leverage this fact in order to meet its own objectives. The interplay between consumer and educational technologies, specifically in terms of online education, will continue to evolve. And I anticipate that we will continue to see both education and consumer-born technologies being used to create and support online learning. But it is also the case that the education technology sector is beginning to find its feet. Investment is up and just as importantly, more talented people are applying themselves to crafting new and better education-specific technologies.  

:: SXSW Edu SXSW Edu has become an increasingly popular conference over the last five years. Acrobatiq was invited to participate as part of the Higher Ed Innovation Showcase, part of the Getting to College Graduation Summit, organized by the Gates Foundation. Also noteworthy, is the creation of an Ed Tech Women, part of the Change Makers series. :: Protests There’s been a flurry of protests recently in higher education, all related in one way or another to concerns about costs. The University of Toronto and York University (Toronto, Canada) have both dealt with strikes. More information here. A small group of LSE (London School of Economics) students recently staged a protest to demand that the government scrap tuition fees. More information here.  Dutch students call for a "new university" model with transparent finances. More information here. Finally, the University of California’s new President, Jane Napolitano referred to a student protest over tuition hikes as "crap" (unfortunately, for her, within reach of a recording device) to the "crap" of student protests. More information here. :: Trends We continue to study to evolving higher education landscape. Two trends worth noting, include: Competency-Based Education: The Ripple Effects of Taking Assessment to the Next Level & The Interplay Between Educational and Consumer Technologies We look forward to hearing your thinking on these and other subjects. :: Opinion University of California President, Janet Napolitano, responds to the refrain that higher education is in the throes of a meltdown with "Higher Education is Not in Crisis". She uses quick reviews of two books as a launchpad for her argument: Ryan Craig’s "The Great Unbundling of Higher Education" and Kevin Carey’s "Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere".  Read the full article here.

Report on Personalized Learning Ithaka S+R has been steadily producing studies and reports on the state of higher education. The most recent is of particular interest to those of us concerned with the role of adaptive learning: "Personalizing Post-Secondary Education: An Overview of Adaptive Learning Solutions for Higher Education". It reviews thirteen adaptive learning providers, focusing on the high-level technical and pedagogical characteristics of their solutions; business models, content models and partnerships. More here: Personalizing Post-Secondary Education.  http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/personalizing-post-secondary-education The Presidents Speak Two recent events, one at the Brookings Institute, the other sponsored by ACE, included talks by university presidents about the shifting conditions of US higher education. Above average stuff.  "Higher Education Reform: Affordability, Accountability and Value". Keynote: Purdue University President Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. & "Information Technology and the Future of Teaching and Learning." Stanford University President John L. Hennessy (The 2015 Robert H. Atwell Lecture) The 2015 Atwell Lecture: Stanford President John L. Hennessy Examples of Innovation Nature magazine collected some very interesting examples of innovations at universities. Inspiring efforts. Check out The University Experiment: Campus as Laboratory. More here. The University Experiment: Campus as Laboratory  

Kevin Carey is an American higher education writer and policy analyst. He is serving as Director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization based in Washington, D.C. We asked Kevin about his recent, provocative book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.  :: Before we get to the substance of the book, I’d like to ask about its reception. If you’re like most writers, you are surprised by some of the interpretations of your work. What responses did you not anticipate?  Most of the book takes place in the past and the present, telling the story of how American colleges and universities became what they are and how information technology might allow them to become something new. In the last two chapters, I present some ideas about what the future might bring. As I see it, some students will learn mostly online, particularly as human-computer interaction and digital learning environments improve. But many will continue to attend in-person institutions that provide direct relationships with peers, teachers, and mentors. Those institutions won’t, however, have to be colleges as we know them today. In other words, the future of higher education won’t be solitary, with everyone but an elite few learning alone in front of machines. Some of the criticism of the book has left out that last part, which is disappointing. Then again, it’s been out for less than a month, so maybe people haven’t gotten all the way to the end yet. The future of higher education you present in "The End of College" places more responsibility on individual learners to design and follow-through on their own studies. Self-direction has long been an instructional ideal - we want students to take responsibility for their own learning. But there’s a fear that they simply won’t, at least not to the extent required in the scenario you’ve laid out in "The End of College".  People vary a great deal in their educational skills and motivational constructs. Some of them need a lot more support, or different kinds of support, than others. Existing colleges are often impersonal and cookie-cutter in how they treat students, and I think the future will provide more opportunities for customization, personalization, and variation in organizational philosophy. Traditional colleges are less diverse than they like to believe — they share a great deal of the same organizational DNA.  I also think there’s an important distinction between "design" and "follow-through." Pretty much everyone needs guidance on the design of their studies. Effective pure auto-didacticism is rare. In many ways, that’s the very definition of education: creating an environment and set of relationships that deliberately guide people in the acquisition of skills, knowledge, and habits of mind. On the follow-through side, I think simply being better will accomplish a great deal. Good education challenges people to work hard and move out of their comfort zones, but doesn’t push them past the threshold of total frustration. That’s crucial and not easy to accomplish, which is exactly why people like the cognitive tutor designers at Carnegie Mellon are working to solve the problem. So there’s no reason to believe the future of higher education will reduce the amount of necessary support that students receive. Quite the opposite. It’s been suggested that your vision for higher education is best suited to well-supported, above average students - leading to a sharper class divide. Poorer students get MOOCs, and the 1% get 4 years at Yale. How do we ensure that this isn’t the case?  Only the 1% get 4 years at Yale now. That’s the way it has always been, and always will be, as long going to Yale means living in a faux-Gothic building in New Haven, Connecticut. So the question is, can we radically expand the number of people of people who have access to the educational riches of Yale, and institutions like it? The answer is clearly "yes." You can already access the lectures, courses, syllabi, assignments, and exams at Yale, for free. That problem has been solved. The question, then, is what additional educational resources does Yale offer, and can we provide them to many students at an affordable price? The existence of organizations like the Minerva Project, which is just as selective as Yale and also provides a rich liberal arts curriculum, for about one-third the tuition, suggest that we can. There can be many more organizations like that. A common characteristic of discussions about change in higher education is the tendency for lines to be drawn between commentators and initiatives from within higher education (e.g. faculty) and those outside (e.g. think-tanks, entrepreneurs). Several of the people and initiatives you highlighted in the book are from outside higher ed proper (even some of the MOOC providers felt compelled to step outside of their institutions to bring something to the masses). And you, as an analyst at a think-tank, might also be considered an outsider. Is this divide significant? What might be its’ origins?  It’s significant, but it can be overstated. Anant Agarwal left a great, prestigious job as the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to head up edX. This involved moving from a building on the MIT campus to a building located one block away from the MIT campus. I interviewed Robert Lue, faculty director of HarvardX, in his office in the Harvard natural sciences building. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He said to me, "HarvardX is Harvard. It is us." The West Coast MOOC providers have definitely stepped outside the academy into the world of for-profit, venture-backed companies, but that’s an incredibly porous border. The companies are located in Palo Alto and some of the founders still teach at Stanford. That said, it’s not surprising that people who are currently employed by colleges are only going to go so far in agreeing with the thesis of a book titled "The End of College." In a review of your book, Don Heller wrote the following: "In his claim that MOOCs and other online learning materials will replace colleges and universities, Carey also provides a very narrow view of the goals of higher education. A bachelor’s degree is more than just a collection of individual courses; college — when done right — also satisfies other developmental objectives, including extracurricular learning, developing interpersonal communication skills (of both the online and face-to-face variety), and instilling a sense of an individual’s role in a democratic society." This is a common criticism of online higher education. But it’s also odd given that online higher education didn’t set out to supplant all aspects of the traditional college experience - its’ focus is instruction. On the one hand, I recognize that meeting your spouse or having inebriated conversations with other students at the campus pub is important - it was for me. But isn’t also the case that these extracurricular dimensions of higher education are primarily accidents of history - rather than by design. Is it the case that our institutions set out to provide instruction, but these other dimensions then began to form around the core mission?  Per my response above — I have a lot of respect for Don as a scholar of education but I think his critique ignores some of what I say at the end of the book. I quote from some of the relevant parts of the book here http://www.edcentral.org/universityofeverywhere/ in explaining why. In short: there’s no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds, online and in-person, for a lot less money than traditional colleges and universities charge today. If alternative credentials grow in stature and students gain access to more information about the actual learning gains that a particular provider can offer, are we setting in motion a highly competitive education market (i.e. informed consumers with choice)? Are our institutions ready for this? Will they allow it?  Yes, No, and It won’t be up to them. We need a competitive market in providing students a great education. We really don’t have one now. Educational institutions are complicated and hard to understand and most consumers are naive. There’s a dangerous conflation of price and quality. Existing institutions are theoretically in a great position to take advantage of this opportunity, because they employ a lot of smart, knowledgeable educators and have brand names that people trust. But many are deeply committed to not changing, are they are likely to struggle. They’ll fight opening up the market to new credentials, for obvious reasons of self-interest, but that’s not a fight that can be won forever. If you’re battling against better information, your days are numbered.  

The pace at which new ideas, initiatives and technologies are surfacing in higher education continues to quicken. Universities, vendors, philanthropists and non-profit organisations are responding aggressively to the growing pressure to improve student outcomes, reduce costs, and expand our capacity to serve under-represented student populations. However, a remarkable number of these efforts will fail to take hold. Some will run out of money. Others simply won’t work. But many — despite the benefits they may offer —  will fail because they don’t "fit". That is, the innovation isn’t aligned with the unique organizational structure, processes, reward systems and culture of our colleges and universities. Consider the LMS and MOOCs, two influential innovations from the world of edtech. Like a Glove: The LMS A quick scan of the original business plans prepared LMS companies will uncover a passage that reads something like this: "Our LMS . . . enables individual educators to create and deliver online education with limited technical expertise and minimal technical assistance". The technology allows individual educators to continue to create and manage their own courses despite the introduction of "high-tech" (as it was called then) into the teaching and learning process. The rapid (and now almost universal adoption) of the LMS in higher education was possible precisely because it fit into the existing organizational processes, roles, and hierarchy. It made it relatively simple for institutions to "put their courses online" without disrupting the existing institutional model. Yes, most institutions created service departments to provide technical and instructional design support, but these departments were designed to get the instructor working independently as soon as possible. A La MOOCs On the other hand . . . After a honeymoon of roughly 18 months, during which MOOCs were interpreted as either the end of higher ed as we know it or its saviour, this particular innovation began slowly backing away from higher education. Despite its historical roots in higher education, it’s now in search of potentially more forgiving venues, such as the retail and corporate training market. At least two obstacles stand in the way of MOOCs easily integrating into higher education: the economics of credentials and conventional understanding of the proper role and responsibilities for faculty. :: Until alternative forms of credentialing, such as badges, gain greater acceptance, the value of MOOCs is highly contingent on their being accepted for formal credit at colleges and universities. The path to credit for MOOCs is anything but straightforward — here are a few reasons why. Were MOOCs widely accepted for credit, the institutions offering MOOCs (at this time, primarily selective institutions) would be able to increase revenue, reach new learners, and extend the reach of the institution’s brand. In any other market, this would be ideal and straightforward. But extending access to an elite university credit in this way could, first of all, weaken the institution’s hard-won exclusivity — a core source of value upon which so much of its status is tied. :: At the same time, it’s unlikely that only a small subset of institutions would offer MOOCs, once widely accepted for credit. Other less prestigious institutions — motivated by tightening budgets and in pursuit of new revenue streams — would quickly follow suit. They’d have no choice, given the very real possibility that their students could now enrol in cheaper courses from more prestigious institutions. So, in time, the market for MOOCs would be flush with suppliers. The financial benefit to any institution, then, would require the total size of the market to grow as quickly as supply. Early indications suggest that almost all of the growth would be from students in developing nations. :: Competition in an open MOOC market may also force selective institutions to compete for learners on the basis of criteria for which they are not well-suited. US higher education is diverse and stratified. Institutions at the top of the heap are typically defined by high-levels of research productivity, award-winning faculty, high tuition ("sticker prices"), and tough admissions standards. These characteristics, though, don’t necessarily translate into a capacity to produce and deliver high quality online learning. Indeed, in a robust market of MOOCs, the advantage will — all things being equal — go to those institutions that have long invested in online learning and that, more generally, see teaching and learning as core to their mission. The current advantages enjoyed by elite institutions would be reduced in a competitive MOOC market. Once pulled out of its typical context, and its wares placed side-by-side with competing courses, a new criteria emerges. Here, institutions are forced to compete on the basis of instructional quality, relevance, production value, ease of use, and other digital-borne criteria. Of course, it’s entirely possible that elite institutions could use their relatively strong financial status to outspend the competition, but that’s not the basis of a competitive advantage. If this is a true marketplace, these additional costs will eventually need to be recovered. :: The issue of "fit" is also shaped by our common notions of what constitutes the proper role and responsibilities of faculty. While much has been made of the poor academic results of the Udacity pilot at San Jose State University, what’s less often discussed is the concerns among SJSU faculty about the effects of MOOCs on their vulnerability in the labour market. In a letter penned a letter to Michael Sandel, the Harvard prof who taught the MOOC, the faculty wrote: "Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education." Putting a slightly different spin on it, Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD turned down an offer to participate in a MOOC, describing the project as a form of "academic colonialism" — whereby the powerful dominate the less prestigious faculty, weaker schools. Petriglieri put it this way: "It is far more similar to colonialism, that is, disruption brought about by ‘the policy and practice of a power in extending control over weaker people or areas’ and simultaneously increasing its cultural reach and control of resources." Theoretically, MOOCs could work around these organizational challenges. They could, for example, break the course into smaller units of instruction that could then be plugged into courses at other institutions, according to the needs and preferences of local faculty. Similarly, they could remove overt references to the faculty and institutions from which the course originated — "white-label" their work, in effect. But then this would remove what makes MOOCs, well, MOOCs. Affiliation with elite professors and universities (e.g. Michael Sandel at Harvard) was what made MOOCs newsworthy in the first place — as did the decision to package this intellectual property in the form of course. Both decisions support an equivalence between the MOOC and the "real" course offered at the source institution. I seriously doubt that MOOCs would have been discussed in the pages of the New York Times and in such glowing terms, had they come to us from the likes of Pocatello Community College — fair or not. :: The difficulty of creating education tools, programs and services that fit well in higher education has many origins. Most obviously and commonly, the culprit is a lack of knowledge of the unique characteristics of this institutional, but even professionals that work within higher education can get it wrong. I’ve become acutely aware of the importance of understanding organizational fit since joining Acrobatiq. The company is a by-product of a long-term research and development project of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Unlike most organizations I’ve worked with over the years, the team at Acrobatiq comes from higher ed; they have decades of collective history working in higher education as faculty and administration. Indeed, some continue to work in universities. Higher ed is home turf and we are able to draw on our understanding of how higher education actually operates, what it needs to achieve its objectives, and what truly motivates the professionals that work in these institutions.

  Report: Few Women in Engineering and Computer Science "Currently, women make up just 12% of the engineering workforce and 26% of the computing workforce.  In 1990, women made up 35% of the computing workforce, a drop of 9%.  Women in engineering have increased slightly by 3%, from 9% in 1990.  Yet, women make up more than half of our nation’s population and 57.3% of enrollments in institutions of higher education, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics.  In the next several years, women are projected to be well over 60% of the enrollments in colleges and universities."  :: Kevin Carey - The End of College: Q&A with Kevin Carey We did a Q&A with Kevin Carey, author of the recently published, provocative book: The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. "[Universities) will fight opening up the market to new credentials, for obvious reasons of self-interest, but that’s not a fight that can be won forever. If you’re battling against better information, your days are numbered." :: How do you Design the Library of the Future? I love libraries. Or I think I do; I haven’t been in one in a few years. "Once Upon A Time libraries were the gatekeepers to most of the information students and academics needed. Books had the information and libraries had the books. Then one day the Big Bad Internet came along and made hundreds of millions of books, articles and manuscripts freely available to anyone with access to a computer. The library was no longer the only game in town. Most of today’s students have used computers since a young age and Googling is second nature to them. Why would they go to a library when they could find the answers from the comfort of their own home — or Starbucks?" :: Innovation in Higher Education: The Importance of Organizational Fit " . . . a remarkable number of these efforts will fail to take hold. Some will run out of money. Others simply won’t work. But many — despite the benefits they may offer —  will fail because they don’t "fit". That is, the innovation isn’t aligned with the unique organizational structure, processes, reward systems and culture of our colleges and universities." ::    

Eric Frank, Founder, Acrobatiq GSV-ASU Return on Education Innovation Awards Acrobatiq is a winner of the 2015 Return On Education (ROE) VentureED Innovation Award. Acrobatiq was singled out from among more than 270 presenting companies for its potential to dramatically improve learning outcomes and increase access to education. Sponsored by Arizona State University and GSV Capital, an investment firm, the annual Summit brings together more than 2,400 key stakeholders - educators, investors, policy makers, foundation leaders, business leaders, social and commercial entrepreneurs, and philanthropists - in one place to collaborate and drive change, and serve as a launch pad for new ideas and ventures. The ROE awards honor companies who demonstrate a high return on education by significantly increasing access to education; greatly reducing the cost for learners and/or learning institutions; dramatically improving learner outcomes; providing substantial leverage to learning leaders; and/or making a sustainable and scaled impact. This award follows our being named a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Next Generation Courseware Challenge Grant recipient. The Lumina Foundation: Stronger Nation The Lumina Foundation has released an update on US progress toward higher post-secondary completion rates. The foundation said 40 percent of working-age Americans held a two- or four-year degree in 2013, a modest improvement from the previous year’s rate of 39.4 percent. Read the full report. Employer Perspectives on Competency-Based Education A new report from the American Enterprise Institute. Key Points Employers’ overall awareness of competency-based education (CBE) is low, but the small minority of hiring managers already aware of CBE have a favorable view of the model. CBE programs generally employ student-centric marketing efforts,­ as opposed to employer-centric marketing messages, which may help explain the low levels of employer awareness. Employers rooted in traditional hiring approaches express significant misgivings that targeted skill-building approaches (as in CBE) may come at the expense of more general skills. Still, two-thirds of employers think that they could be doing better at identifying students with the skill set required for each job. Institutions offering CBE programs should partner closely with employers to help students attain the general and specific skills they need to succeed in the labor market without breaking the bank. Read the full report. Innovation Series Two instalments so far in our new series on innovation. First, an introduction and then notes on the nature of change in higher education. Innovation in Online Higher Education Change and Innovation in Online Higher Education    

What is adaptive learning? How about predictive learning? Where do learning analytics fit into the big picture? Like other fields, the education technology community is not immune to jargon and catch phrases. Understanding some of the basic terminology used today can help:   Describe current challenges and future goals Ask questions about how specific technologies and approaches affect learning outcomes Connect with the tools and strategies that have the potential to improve the online learning environment Navigate the ever-growing number of technology options on the market Below are just a few of the more commonly-used terms you’ll see referenced here on the Acrobatiq blog, and around the Web, with some specific detail on how we think about the term here at Acrobatiq.  While there’s no single source for definitions, these descriptions offer a good starting point as we think about innovations in online teaching and learning. Adaptive Learning: The application of technological tools that provide students with a customized experience based on their progress and previous accomplishments with the materials, practice activities, and assessments. Students are presented with more, or less, challenging items as they interact with the materials and respond to questions. How we think about adaptive learning: Our approach to adapting the learning experience is conservative by most standards, in part because of our roots in evidence-based learning. Rather than simply depending on a statistical algorithm to force students down different pathways based on what we think they know or don’t know, or down-sampling students to easier questions from those they answered wrong, we take a much more nuanced approach. First, its contextually useful to know that our curriculum development process begins with identifying a Skill Graph (also sometimes referred to as a Knowledge Graph)  that defines a set of learning objectives and skills for what a student should know and be able to do by the end of a learning module. As students work through interactive learning activities, we collect activity data that’s then combined with other statistical parameters to generate a robust learning estimate for each student against each learning outcome. This point is important because we often get questions about how and what we adapt. Having an underlying Skill Graph forms the "what" by providing a clear view into  the relationships between learning objectives and sub skills. For students with low learning estimates, we adapt the learning experience by enabling more practice opportunities on one or more specific skills. It’s really that simple. And it is just that simplicity that makes the approach effective. For students with high learning estimates, we enable less practice so they can confidently move faster through the material. The benefit of this approach is that for faculty in blended or online learning environments, there is no "guessing" about how students progressed through the curriculum. Because of the underlying Skill Graph, it’s easy to see which skills students are mastering, and where additional help is needed. By adapting the learning experience with more practice at the end of each module for only those students who really need it, we can give students exactly the kind of personalized learning experience that helps get them "unstuck." Competency-Based Learning: Focused on mastery of specific knowledge and skills, competency-based models allow students to demonstrate their understanding and abilities via multiple strategies, e.g., exams, portfolios, and projects. This alternative to traditional academic classes is usually self-paced and provides each learner with the opportunity to earn credit or advance within a course or program according to his or her previous experiences and prior knowledge. How we think about competency based learning:  One critical component to effectively delivering CBL is the ability to understand and assesses students’ mastery of key competencies.  Like adaptive learning, understanding the component skills of a competency makes assessment that much easier.  Increasingly, because our curriculums have an underlying Skill Graph, CBL programs can benefit from the resulting data derived from measuring learning at this deep level.  Our ability to include human-graded rubrics in our statistical modeling of student learning estimates enables a wide range of project and portfolio-based learning possibilities. Courseware: Learner materials, activities, and assessments are organized within a system that not only provides instructional content and assessments, but also tracks details about student progress and allows instructors to review their progress, evaluate challenges, and make decisions about possible interventions. How we think about courseware: For many faculty, the notion of using "courseware" is not all that attractive, in large part because most courseware that’s available today can’t really be customized to fit specific course or program goals. At present, our curriculum (or courseware) can be customized only in that modules can be hidden or reorganized. Later this summer, however, we will be releasing a new authoring tool to support more granular levels of customization, including the ability to add locally developed content. For more on the faculty benefits of courseware, see Courseware: The Next Big Thing for Faculty. Learning Analytics: This term is used to describe a wide range of data collection, analysis, and reporting techniques that inform decisions about instructional strategies and interventions. In the context of online education, the software that runs learning analytics can include everything from tracking student performance to identifying complex learning trends and problems, and is often integrated into courseware and learning management systems. How we think about learning analytics: In our context, the analytics that we generate focus on measuring deep learning - or learning happening at the skill level. Formative and summative assessments are embedded in
the courseware and analyzed using a statistical model developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. The theory of learning that forms the framework of this computational model takes into account a number of factors, including both observations of learning (number of right/wrong answers, number of hints revealed, number of attempts per question, etc.) in addition to cognitive processes like cognitive load, rate of learning, learning decay, etc. The result is an accurate, real-time assessment of each student’s knowledge state against a defined outcome (like, for example, a learning objective). Learning Optimization: The process of data collection and analysis informs a wide range of decisions about overall course design, including instructional strategy selection and implementation. Continued study of the benefits and challenges of various course features, functions, materials, and interactions allows for continued review and revision with a goal of offering the most effective learning environment for each student. How we think about learning optimization: Again, in the context of Acrobatiq, we optimize learning by using learning analytics we collect from within our courseware as the basis for powerful feedback loops. Data makes possible effective instructional interventions, course corrections, and detailed student feedback based on individual student learning performance.  Student activity data also helps inform course designers about how students are performing on learning activities so that the curriculum can be continuously refined to produce the best learning outcomes. Personalized Learning:  Similar to the term adaptive learning, personalized learning has been broadly used to describe a flexible approach to educational activities that can be tailored to meet the needs of individual students. This term is also used to describe learning environments that allow students to create their own paths to achieving learning outcomes. This can include choosing from among multiple types of interactions, activities, modes of delivery (e.g., online, blended, in person; video, audio, text), and even assignments. How we think about personalized learning: We think about personalizing learning first by understanding the desired outcomes of the learning experience, and secondly, by accurately being able to assess a student’s specific learning estimate against each defined outcome. Only then can we begin to ascertain what to personalize, and for whom and how. Predictive Learning: Through the application of systems that apply mathematical modeling techniques, educators can more readily identify potential challenges a student might face in a course or program, based on his or her characteristics and past performance. Being able to anticipate the challenges allows time for instructors to intervene with guidance and support, before the issue becomes a problem that prevents learning success. How we think about predictive learning: The Acrobatiq predictive learning model can be a powerful tool to help educators and others develop deep insight into student learning performance. By first understanding desired outcomes, and then developing opportunities for students to both learn new skills and demonstrate evidence of learning as they are learning, we can begin to use statistical predicative techniques. The benefit of this approach is that we can get out of front of students that might be at risk - and, conversely, accelerate students that might otherwise be slowed down in a one-size-fits-all learning environment. Follow the Acrobatiq blog for more information about innovations in data driven curriculum design and personalized, adaptive learning.

Acrobatiq’s home field: Pittsburgh, PA. We often hear that "change comes slowly to higher education". There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; change isn’t always good, of course. But as the importance of higher education to the population grows and advances in technology pose ever-more tantalizing opportunities for us to rethink how we do our work, there’s a tremendous interest in understanding the obstacles to innovation in this sector. We can approach this on two levels: we can ask, first, what structural and system-wide obstacles are in place that make changes of any sort difficult, regardless of their intention, tactics, or context. We can also, though, "get into the weeds" and consider how specific innovations or attempts at innovations run up against specific obstacles. The answers are closely related, and are best tackled in tandem. Obstacles and Business Models Lloyd Armstrong, Provost Emeritus at USC, nicely deploys the framework of business models to look at the structural factors inhibiting innovation. His analysis cites: a regulatory (accreditation) scheme that polices institutions, but also serves to protect the current definition of post-secondary education, and by extension, the institutions that adhere to the standard model faithfully; the unique dual role of faculty, as both educators and institutional managers, enables them to challenge changes that might lead to re-skilling or de-skilling of their work and therefore, potentially weakening their labour market value. (Armstrong isn’t suggesting that faculty are unusually self-interested. Indeed, if faculty were to prop up changes that lead to diminishment of their labour market value, they might be the first occupation to ever do it); the difficulty and tendency to not aggressively measure value in higher education that, in turn, has resulted in an over-dependence on "surrogates of quality" that have only a limited impact on the quality of learning (e.g. research productivity of faculty; tuition - the higher the "better").  This can weaken an institution’s commitment to improving the quality of learning; people in successful organizations tend to internalize commonly held notions of what constitutes a great university; interpreting these practices, processes, and ideas as natural and best. Specific Innovations, Specific Obstacles We can take a second step and consider how the design and logic of our institution - it’s business model, essentially - plays out in actual instruction. As Scott Levine noted in response to last week’s post on Innovation & Change in Online Higher Education, we need to move beyond generalities and start analyzing the specific ways that innovation is limited and enabled. How can we use the framework of business models to help us understand precisely how innovation can and can’t work in higher education? Many consider online higher education consider to be an example of business model innovation (see Clayton Christensen). I think that’s the case, but it’s not the whole story or even the most interesting part. While a large number of our colleges and universities took the initiative to make online courses and programs part of their offerings, most did it without making substantial changes to how the institution operates; instructional technology was used to make incremental or sustaining, rather than radical or disruptive innovation. Technology was affixed to the existing, traditional business model of the institution, rather than using it with a new business model - which, according to Christensen and others - that have studied innovation, is the path to dramatic increases in value. The now ubiquitous LMS, for example, was designed so as not to alter the organizational DNA of the institution; it allowed instructors to continue to work largely independently and "own" their courses, as has long been the tradition - despite the oft-repeated contention that this one-person, "cottage model" limits what can be achieved in terms of the course design and development. Nor was the technology used to take greater advantage of the tremendous economies of scale that the Internet enables. Not surprisingly, the quality and cost benefits from instructional technology have been less stellar than first imagined. Unlike other sectors that have applied technology to new business models to reduce costs, improve quality or both, higher education remains largely subject to the ‘iron triangle’, in which any efforts to improve one objective - cost, quality or access - leads to a negative impact on one or both of the others. By understanding innovation in terms of the unique characteristics of higher education may be a useful place to start in order to better navigate around potential obstacles. So, how might specific types of innovations interact with obstacles that are endemic to higher education? Social media can serve as an example. Many educators have sought to leverage the tremendous popularity and functionality of social media for instructional purposes. But the way in which social media is designed, and the particular ways in which people seem to want to use it, are in some quite fundamental respects, out of alignment with how higher education is organized - for example: Social media is well-suited to facilitating open-ended exchanges between people - with no prescribed beginning and end. Users float in and out of conversations; they rarely have specific goals for these interactions, and they enter these spaces only when and to the degree they wish. Higher education, on the other hand, has very clear boundaries (e.g. course duration) and largely predetermined objectives (e.g. a fixed and standard set of assessments).  The content of social media is user-generated and leaderless; the line between "author" and "audience" is seriously blurred. This is one of its’ most compelling characteristics. Higher education, however, is inherently top-down and instructor-directed. The educator is the primary source of knowledge. Efforts to redefine the academic as anything other than the subject-matter expert - such as having them teach other people’s curriculum - are met with intense resistance.   Social media thrives when there are thousands, if not millions, of users within a single, overarching community. The high volume of users provides online communities with enough activity and content to ensure that each user finds what and who they want with sufficient frequency to make participation worthwhile. Twitter and Linked In have well over 300 million active users. Higher education instruction, by design, typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 40-100 students per course). Indeed, exclusivity and small class sizes are equated with quality. This is not to suggest that social media can’t be used effectively in higher education. They can, and they are. But the business model of higher education used by the vast majority of institutions will, on average, make their use less effective, more complicated, take longer to achieve, and cost more. Business models are the structures in which we work; they frame the possibilities. A wider discussion about the qualities of the institution’s business model can help us identify where the greatest opportunities for improvement lie.  :: This is the third piece in our "Innovation Series". The second instalment can be found here and the introduction, here.              

Universities on the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown Ignore the misleading headline. Six pundits offer creative ways to improve the quality of learning. Interesting stuff. :: MOOCs keep getting bigger. But do they work?  Jon Marcus suggests that MOOCs need to make a greater commitment to measuring learning outcomes. We couldn’t agree more. Excerpt: "There’s just one hitch: Amid all this rush, no one really knows yet how much people learn in a MOOC. What research does exist shows that the success rate of online education, in general, is poor. And one high-profile experiment with MOOC-style teaching in particular has ended in disappointment." :: California’s multi-million dollar online education flop is another blow for MOOCs I never quite understood the assumptions behind this initiative. A review of the experiences of other institutions might have been helpful. "We spent a lot of money and got extremely little in return," said Jose Wudka, a physics professor at UC-Riverside who previously chaired the Systemwide Committee on Educational Policy of the Academic Senate, which represents faculty in the UC System." "The project, which cost $7 million to set up at a time when the state was cutting higher-education funding, aspired to let students take courses across campuses. A UCLA student, for example, would be able to take a UC-Irvine class online." :: Ohio State faculty reassert claim to scholarly research ownership  Intellectual property was always a lawyer’s dream - lots of grey areas. But with the expansion of formats, devices, and sharing models, it’s become a nightmare. Excerpt: "Ohio State University is assuring its professors that their scholarly works — books, articles, software and other works that can be copyrighted — belong to them." "That’s the arrangement that had been in place for years. But a policy proposed last month stoked fears that the university was trying to take control of those works. Some professors threatened to quit if it was approved." :: Tyton report highlights dearth of tech solutions for adult ed programs Another interesting report from Tyton Partners. (Something in the water in Boston.): adult learners and learning technology. Excerpt: "But a major segment of the student population has largely been left out of the innovation surge — adult students lacking basic math and literacy skills. According to a new report by education consulting firm Tyton Partners, there is demand for instructional technologies in this sector but very little supply." :: LinkedIn: Moving Into Online Education We’d need to be living under a rock for the past week to miss this news item: Linked In purchases Lynda.com for 1.5 billion USD. If you’ve attended an education technology related conference in the last year you’ve probably noticed that Lynda.com is trying to sell its growing line-up of online, life-long learning courses to colleges and universities. This deal with Linked In is interesting on a number of levels, not the least of which is the connection between the growth of public portfolio’s (like Linked In) and certification of learning.

Helping institutions improve course completions, particularly in high enrolling general education gateway courses, is at the core of what we do. Our robust, online learning environments, grounded in the science of how people learn, use real-time student activity data to generate fine-grained predictive estimates of student learning performance against outcomes. The benefit is threefold; faculty get deeper, and more accurate and timely insight into student learning without having to generate and grade numerous, periodic summative assessments; students get a richer, more active and engaging learning experience that helps them learn more effectively, often in less time, with better knowledge retention and transfer rates (measured by pre and post testing); and course developers get unprecedented insight into curriculum effectiveness by ensuring the tight alignment between content, activities and assessments and desired learning outcomes. Our curriculum development and continuous course improvement process is illustrated below: Until now, an Acrobatiq team of learning engineers, subject matter experts, data scientists, and technical professionals facilitated this process. And, once the curriculum was developed and "tuned" to the statistical model generating the predictive learning estimates, making changes to the curriculum risked negatively impacting the model and resulting learning analytics. Thus, faculty empowered with teaching these courses had to take the curriculum "as is" with only limited and periodic ability to customize or make changes. I share this as preface to our exciting road map news: we’re very close to beta on our new authoring environment for adaptive curriculum. In many ways, we’re again breaking new ground with this capability. Nothing exactly like this tool exists in the marketplace, and the demand for it is high, in large part because institutional leaders and faculty are looking for cost effective and high ROI strategies to improve learning outcomes. Developing adaptive, personalized learning solutions that generate meaningful data about deep learning is one strategy showing great promise. So let me highlight some of our key goals in developing the new authoring environment, illustrated with screen captures pulled from the dev environment. Development Goals: Simple and intuitive design: First and foremost, (and not unlike most new technology applications), our goal is to develop an authoring application that is simple to use, with intuitive navigation. Imbedded learning science: Developing highly effective online learning experiences proven to help students learn is made easier when you have the benefit of learning science to guide curriculum design decisions. Imbedded in our forthcoming authoring environment is the evidence-based design methodology from CMU’s Open Learning Initiative including tips and suggestions that helps faculty, curriculum developers and instructional designers use learning science research to create exemplary online learning experiences. Integration of dynamic media: Adding engaging and dynamic media often means opening custom applications like Captiva, PowerPoint or others. Now, it’s a click away using pre formatted templates. Just select the kind of dynamic media activity you want to add, customize the content, and publish it to your page. Skill Graph Development: Having clear, measurable outcomes in any course is important, but particularly in online courses, as it helps guide and organize student learning. In Acrobatiq courseware, the Skill Graph also forms the basis for how what’s measured gets measured. The underling Skills Graph (or Knowledge Graph as it is sometimes called), connects learning objectives and skills. Every learning objective is tied to component skills, and each component skill is then tied to practice. As students complete the practice, the Acrobatiq inference engine analyzes the activity data and produces a learning estimate for each LO. The authoring environment will help courseware authors develop a Skills Graph, tied to the inference engine so good student learning estimates against outcomes can be effectively measured. Adding activities and assessments: Developing good practice questions often takes practice. Embedded in the authoring environment is multiple activity type templates that save time by essentially functioning like mini-forms. Simply select the activity type and enter content in the fields.   Managing media: Engaging online courses often include a range of static and dynamic images, videos, and other types of media. Included in the authoring tool is a robust Media Manager that helps curriculum developers manage and organize all their media elements.\ The new authoring environment is currently in private beta with selected partners.  In the coming months, I’ll share more updates and screen captures as development progresses.  We’re tremendously excited about this initiative and welcome feedback and input.  If you’re interested in learning more about the authoring tools, or would like a demo, please contact us. 

New York City, Aerial View Fooled by Experience Excerpt: "We rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions. We interpret the past—what we’ve seen and what we’ve been told—to chart a course for the future, secure in the wisdom of our insights. After all, didn’t our ability to make sense of what we’ve been through get us where we are now? It’s reasonable that we go back to the same well to make new decisions.
It could also be a mistake. 
Experience seems like a reliable guide, yet sometimes it fools us instead of making us wiser." Read the full article.  Think Tuition Is Rising Fast? Try Room And Board Excerpt: "Valerie Inniss took out $11,500 in student loans this year to pay for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. None of it was for tuition. The 21-year-old is on a four-year, full-tuition scholarship, won on the strength of her high school test scores. And she qualifies for the maximum federal Pell Grant — $5,730 — for low-income students. But that and a campus job were still not enough to cover all her other costs and fees, from health care to books. The biggest expense? Nearly $11,000 for room and board, a charge that’s risen 15 percent since she started college four years ago." Read the full article.  What works and why? Student Perceptions of ‘Useful’ Digital Technology in University Teaching & Learning This research paper looks at eleven different "benefits" of instructional technology as defined by students, such as "reviewing, replaying and revising", and "organizing and managing the logistics of studying". Interesting. By Michael Henderson, Neil Selwyn and Rachel Aston. Read the full article.  Innovation in Online Higher Education: Navigating Obstacles Excerpt: "We can approach obstacles to innovation on two levels: we can ask, first, what structural and system-wide obstacles are in place that make changes of any sort difficult, regardless of their intention, tactics, or context. We can also, though, "get into the weeds" and consider how specific innovations or attempts at innovations run up against specific obstacles. The answers are closely related, and are best tackled in tandem." Read the full article. Funding of Higher Education (Report, Moody’s) Excerpt: "Over the past several decades, the growth in state funding for discretionary spending categories has declined at an alarming rate. Mandatory spending programs, specifically Medicaid, are requiring more and more state funds, which in the zero-sum world of state spending, has left fewer and fewer dollars for other programs. Medicaid spending, for example, was less than 10 percent of state sourced spending 30 years ago, but today accounts for nearly 16 percent. Taking all funding sources into account, Medicaid has grown to more than a quarter of total state spending. Higher education funding has borne the brunt of much of this crowding out, falling from around 14 percent of state sourced spending in the late 1980s to just over 12 percent today. Our baseline forecasts show that trend continuing throughout the next decade and beyond." Read the full article.   

We’re beginning to see real change in higher education. Not just incremental, "around the edges" change, but substantive and inspiring. No, I’m not referring the first wave of MOOCs. These early efforts at MOOCs amounted to little more than promotional vehicles for elite universities that don’t need promotion, and innovation from institutions with the least to gain from change in higher education. Rather, I’m thinking here of initiatives like ASU’s Global Freshman Academy, the sincere interest in competency-based education which, if done right, requires a substantial modification to current practices, new kinds of partnerships between education companies and colleges, and Minerva University, which blends location and online in new ways. Each of these represents an example of business model innovation. A business model is simply a way of describing how an organization - whether it is a private enterprise or non-profit, retailer or university - goes about providing something of value to people. It’s how it creates, markets and sustainably funds the goods or services it offers. Higher Education’s Overarching Business Model The concept of business models can be used to help us more clearly see understand how our institution is organized and how it operates. This isn’t always obvious: over time, the design of mature institutions like higher education often appear natural and inevitable - fish are the last to notice the water. The concept of business models can help us identify the ways we differ from other organizations. And most importantly, it can help us imagine new ways of organizing ourselves in order to do better work. Most non-profit colleges and universities of higher education in North America operate under essentially a single business model. The differences are a matter of emphasis, variations on a common theme. For example, some institutions place greater emphasis on full-time faculty research productivity. But most institutions only hire faculty that have demonstrated the capacity to do university-level research. And as Christensen has argued, many institutions - regardless of how selective, or how much they emphasize research - share a common notion of what constitutes a "great university" (i.e. research prodcutivity, brand-name faculty, selective admissions, etc). But as many of the examples above suggest, more substantial forms of innovation operate at the program level, rather than on an institutional level. This is true in higher education, as well as in other sectors. The challenge is to scale-up these efforts once they prove successful. The Business Model Canvas Rethinking how we operate can be aided by tools like the "business model canvas", created by Alex Osterwalder and described in his very popular book, Business Model Generator. The Canvas makes it relatively to understand your organization’s mode of operation, and how you might do it differently. The Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder Here’s a quick application of the Canvas to higher education: Market segments Who does the institution serve? Many universities focus on 18-24 year olds, who have recently graduated from high school. Some universities widen their focus with programs serving adults, who are returning to complete undergraduate degrees. Value proposition What are the reasons students and other turn to your institutions? E.g., Widely-recognized credentials that have value in the labor market; ranking as a top research university. Key activities Which activities are fundamental to your organization? E.g., Research, teaching, evaluating student performance, developing programs in subjects of value to society, and granting degrees. Revenue streams What are the sources of funds that make your institution sustainable and how do you capture these funds? E.g., Government capital grants, tuition, philanthropists and research grants. Channels How does your institution interact with stakeholders? E.g., Through on-campus teaching, conference participation, scholarly journals and media. Key partners What are the other organizations your institution partners with on a regular basis? E.g., Research granting organizations, private companies seeking research partners, and regulatory/accreditation bodies. Cost structure What are your main costs, and how do you go about paying for these costs? E.g., Faculty and instructor salaries, administrative staff, building maintenance and marketing. Key resources What are the key resources that every college and university must possess? E.g., Faculty, buildings and accreditation. Stakeholder relationships How does your organization build and maintain relationships with its key stakeholders? E.g. alumni organizations, university email systems, university social networking (Facebook), learning management systems, and media relations officers. Identify Differences Between Types of Institutions To illustrate how you might use the Canvas, let’s consider some of differences between types of higher education institutions: Elite colleges and universities in the US. Higher admission stanadards impacts "Key Resources", for example. More emphasis is placed on physical campus. The "Cost Structure" will include a higher sticker price (tuition), as well as higher level of discounting, and greater funds from alumni (due to the relative wealth of student population and their future earning potential). Fully online coleleges and universities will have different "Cost Structures" (less need for buildings), different "Channels" (online versus face-to-face, and different means of manitaining "Stakeholder Relationships". For-profit colleges and universities in US. They place less emphasis on research and the social aspects of higher education. This difference will be captured, for example, in "Cost Structure", "Key Resources", "Key Activities", and "Market Segments". What constitutes a wholly different business model is subjective: there are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a different business model rather than simply a difference in emphasis, but I don’t think this weakens the value of the Business Model as a concept for analysis. Online Competency-Based Education as Business Model Innovation Competency-based education is a significant shift; a distinct business model. CBE gives shape and direction to the long overdue need to personalize learning in higher education. It allows students to progress at their own pace, incorporates the practice of prior learning assessment (indirectly through self-paced learning or directly through credential recognition), and offers a logical framework for aligning the demands of the labour market with higher education to the extent deemed appropriate by the institution. CBE works especially well for adults that are returning to school to complete programs of study, and it has the potential to reduce costs for students, institutions, and taxpayers by shortening the time to completion. Designing competency-based learning requires, if done well, considerably more thought and planning than is currently devoted to course design. Ensuring that each component of the course — objectives, assessments, and learning activities — are perfectly aligned is, sadly, not common. Moreover, creating the high volume of assessments (formative) required to measure student mastery of the material is labour-intensive. Rather than offering students 3 to 5 assessments per one-semester course, as is common, competency-based learning requires that we provide each student with hundreds of opportunities to test their understanding of the material. These assessments are required in order to measure a students’ mastery and, in turn, to determine how quickly they can move through the curriculum — a foundational element of the CBE model. This requires different tactics for designing and developing courses. Few institutions are currently set up to build hundreds of formative assessments needed to measure student progress and to ensure that each of these are aligned with the prescribed learning objectives and learning activities. Few have the internal capacity to create learning platforms that measure student performance and provide detailed asssessments based on these measurements. Institutions will turn to vendors and form partnerships with other institutions to build these tools and processes. More will link their programs to other institutions and industry associations to increase the volume and value of the data that needed. Institutions will need to be prepared to move students through at different paces — rather than as a cohorts, semester-by-semester. This has both pedagogical and administrative implications, as students benefit from having other students learning the same material at the same time. We need to maintain (if not extend) this benefit while accommodating variable time-to-completion. Institutions need to be able to register and process students on an ongoing basis. This is technically simple, but not as easy as you might imagine given the embedded nature of these administrative systems in our institutions. It’s certainly not business as usual, but the benefits could be tremendous.

Dr. Michelle R. Weise is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute specializing in disruptive innovation in higher education. She co-authored a book with Clayton M. Christensen about how online competency-based education will revolutionize the workforce and disrupt higher education titled, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution. Michelle’s commentaries and research have been featured in a number of publications such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Inside HigherEd, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and USA Today. Prior to joining the Institute, Michelle served as the Vice President of Academic Affairs for Fidelis Education. She has also held instructional positions, serving as a professor at Skidmore College as well as an instructor at Stanford University. Michelle is a former Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Stanford. :: Q1. You recently co-authored a paper with Clayton Christensen, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution that considered the potential of competency-based higher education. What is the key take-away of the paper?  Our publication highlights online competency-based education (CBE) aligned to labor market needs as an early-stage threat that will strengthen over the years to become a significant workforce solution. These learning providers are hitting the mark by combining the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers, and the right business model. There is a flexible architecture to competencies, which enables providers to stack together modules of learning easily and cost-effectively for a wide variety of industries and specializations. Although most of the innovation in CBE is currently occurring in traditional degree programs, online CBE is almost more powerful in the way that it can be used to build pathways that do not necessarily end in degrees. Q2. The concept of "lifelong learning" has been around for at least a couple of decades. It underscores the idea that people need to continually recreate their professional lives through education. Setting aside the impact of an aging population in Western nations on the average age of learners, are we seeing a significant growth in demand for adult, lifelong learning?  Yes, the four years of college at the front-end of a lifetime are simply no longer a guarantee for career. Particularly with rapid advancements in technologies, more and more working adults are seeing the need to skill up—simply to maintain their current jobs. McKinsey has this incredible statistic: between September 2009 and June 2012—in less than three years—the number of skillsets needed in the workforce increased from 178 to 924. We can only imagine how that number will increase with time. As a result, we’ll need more flexible and relevant lifelong learning mechanisms to help us move forward, re-tool, and advance our careers. Q3. I’ve argued elsewhere that the growth of competency-based education will lead, in turn, to a greater lever of attention on measuring learning, for the simple reason that in order to facilitate students moving at different speeds through their programs, we need more accurate and frequent measures of mastery. What will it take for a critical mass of institutions to get to the point that they can offer this level of assessment?  First off, it’s important to underscore that these online CBE programs that seek to facilitate a whole new value network for employers and students are not competing head-on with schools that deliver the traditional 18- to 22-year-old residential college experience. These pathways are and need to be driven by demand—not by accreditors or institutions. And this is what is truly disruptive: Because the employer truly is the ultimate consumer of the graduates in training, employers are really the main stakeholders that need to be persuaded. Many of these online CBE programs are therefore building unique distribution channels by partnering directly with employers and trying to skill up an existing workforce for the opportunities at hand. Employers are able to observe firsthand whether the quality of work or outputs of their employees are markedly different with these new programs in place. Q4. To what extent do employers and educational institutions see the problem of employability differently? How will these differing perspectives impact the growth of CBE?  Skeptics of CBE worry that employers will somehow end up dictating the requirements for student learning. In academia, there’s an intense territoriality over student learning as well as an undeniable scorn for vocational training. But those who disparage vocational training tend to get caught up in its connotations of career education, corporate training, and utility. Vocational training, however, doesn’t necessarily preclude the liberal arts or notions of effective citizenship, well roundedness, or artistry. In fact, as early as 1915, John Dewey argued "nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to only one line of activity." Rather, these new competencies embody what Dewey called "a continuous activity having a purpose" with "an end in view."