QS, Top Universities 2014. See http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings The Psychology program at Caltech was once identified as one of the top 25 programs of its type by the National Research Council. Unfortunately, as Brewer et al point out, Caltech didn’t have a Psychology program. Great moments like these in the history of university rankings underscore the importance of an institution’s overall reputation on everything it does, what Brewer et al refer to as the "halo effect". But it also points to the emphasis placed on research productivity: high-ranking institutions are those with faculty who have won the most rewards and captured the greatest volume of external research funds. "Institutions do not build prestige in the student market by being innovative or by identifying and meeting new types of student demands. Rather, they build prestige by essentially mimicking the institutions that already have prestige". (link) The most direct route for an institution that wants to move up in the rankings is to mimic the behaviour and structure of those institutions at the top of the ladder. This limited notion of what constitutes "the best" and the type of competition it leads to is, first of all, one of the factors leading to increased tuition levels, which can, in turn, reinforce the hypothesis that the best institutions are also the most expensive. (See this and this analysis of NYU, for example). But it also draws attention away from teaching and learning. "Prestige is expensive to seek, and the rewards come only to the victor."(link) Online Education’s Role in Reconfiguring How We Evaluate Institutions The growth of online higher education may prove to help reconfigure how institutions are evaluated — drawing more attention to instructional quality; here’s why: ~ By virtue of its relative unfamiliarity, online education generates a greater focus on instructional design. To move from the well-established and familiar classroom format to the online space requires the institution and faculty to rethink the process of creating and supporting learning. (Instructional designers are occasionally told by the faculty with whom they work that the process of creating an online course was the first time in their careers that they had had extended conversations with someone about instructional strategies.) ~ The quality of the student’s experience in online education is primarily determined by the quality of instruction; other aspects of the university experience, such as student affairs, parking availability, are less central. ~ Non-elite institutions are often the fastest growing and most ambitious institutions in online education. To a greater extent than elite institutions, these upstarts (e.g. SNHU, WGU) compete on the basis of instructional value. ~ Online education offers new opportunities to measure student learning that, once reported, provides the basis for identifying quality in teaching and learning. These characteristics of online higher education won’t singlehandedly make instructional quality the means by which institutions rise to the top rungs of our current ranking systems. Many students will continue to try to enrol in the most prestigious instituitons with highest admission standards. The more exclusive the institution, the greater its value in the labour market. Yet the rise of online education may work alongside other developments, such as the utilitarian approach to education taken by the growing number of adult learners, to reconfigure how institutions are ranked and the relative importance of instructional quality.

America’s "No Confidence" Vote on College Grads’ Work Readiness Excerpt: "Ninety-six percent of Americans say it is "somewhat" or "very" important for adults in the country to have a degree or certificate beyond high school. . . . Only 13% of Americans strongly agree college graduates in this country are well-prepared for success in the workplace." Read the full report :: Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and Online Learning Excerpt: "It is our intent that these reports will serve to introduce academics, administrators, and students to the rich history of technology in education with a particular emphasis of the importance of the human factors: social interaction, well-designed learning experiences, participatory pedagogy, supportive teaching presence, and effective techniques for using technology to support learning." Read the full report :: Competency-Based Higher Education: Q&A with Dr. Michelle Weise Excerpt: "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." Read the full interview :: Online Higher Education: Notes on Instructional Quality and Rankings Excerpt: "The Psychology program at Caltech was once identified as one of the top 25 programs of its type by the National Research Council. Unfortunately, as Brewer et al point out, Caltech didn’t have a Psychology program. Great moments like these in the history of university rankings underscore the importance of an institution’s overall reputation on everything it does, what Brewer et al refer to as the "halo effect". But it also points to the emphasis placed on research productivity: high-ranking institutions are those with faculty who have won the most rewards and captured the greatest volume of external research funds." Read the full article  

Building a Culture of Innovation in Higher Education Rare is an instructional document that focuses innovation in higher education; a welcome addition to the literature. "Rethinking something, tinkering with it, breaking it apart and starting over, all requires an innovator’s mindset. But how can higher education institutions cultivate that? And who is already doing work in this area to make it happen? That’s what this report works to uncover and share." Access the report here.  This document is a follow up to 2014′s "So You Think You Want to Innovate". :: Lessons for the Future of Digital Courseware in Higher Education (3 Part Series) Another useful effort from Tyton Partners, Time for Class: Lessons for the Future of Digital Courseware in Higher Education, a three-part series. Part One: Faculty Perspectives on Courseware Part Two: Evolution of Courseware Suppliers Part Three (coming soon) I particularly like the relatively "on-the-ground" focus of the papers from Tyton Partners. I think we have all seen too many vague, generalized papers that try to sum up a diverse range of issues in educational technology. What’s needed is a sharper focus on particular issues and technologies, as this series offers on digital courseware. :: Who’s to Blame for High Costs? Debate around what has caused long-term increases in costs in higher education is slowly shifting from biased assertions of blame to more thoughtful analysis. A recent contribution to the dialogue comes by way of Demos, left-of-centre think tank in New York. (Questions for readers: Is Demos New York affiliated with Demos, a UK-based think-tank? Access the analysis here. Also see this review of the report from Inside Higher Ed. "Report says administrative bloat, construction booms not largely responsible for tuition increases." "The report attempts to pinpoint the factors driving up the price for students seeking a four-year degree at a public college. It asserts that while rising administrative and construction costs are a factor, they’re not as gargantuan as widely believed. A decline in state funding is the real culprit, says author Robbie Hiltonsmith, a senior policy analyst with Demos. "          

One of the skills I’ve come to appreciate in leaders of online and hybrid education is the ability to evaluate not just the value of the ever-increasing range of new technologies, instructional methods, and business models on offer, but also how well these different opportunities align with the unique organizational design, processes and culture of our colleges and universities. They recognize that "fit" is all-important. As more opportunities and solutions get thrust in front of academic leaders, they need to demonstrate an understanding of instructional value with a sensitivity towards how these different opportunities will or won’t succeed within the institutional setting. For the purpose of illustration, consider the difference between the LMS and the version of MOOCs originally presented by Udacity and Coursera. MOOCs a la Udacity and Coursera Despite the excitement created by these courses and the fact that they came from elite institutions, getting institutions to grant academic credit proved difficult. The problem wasn’t so much a lack of a clear revenue model, as was often argued, but that the value of these courses, despite their pedigree, was largely dependent on their being accepted for credit. With acceptance for credit, their value would leap and the revenue would follow. Asking institutions to adopt these courses for credit ran headlong into a number of entrenched interests and practices. Here are a few: 1 . . . Elite institutions benefit when they maximize exclusivity; this is an enduring marker of quality in the higher education marketplace. They accomplish this through high tuition levels (pre-discounts), but primarily through tougher admission standards. Providing open admission to MOOCs that, not incidentally base their value on their similarity to the "real" courses offered at elite institution, works against the imperative of exclusivity. 2 . . . If MOOCs were accepted for credit, a sizeable percentage of the higher education market would be compelled to establish themselves as suppliers in this new marketplace. (A new version of "publish or perish"?) But if the market for MOOCs operated like other markets, and I don’t know why it wouldn’t, the vast majority of institutions would be in the role of consumers; they would adopt courses built elsewhere. The adopted courses would bear the marks of the institution and academics from which they originated. However, higher education is organized such that each institution and each faculty member is hired and rewarded on the basis of subject matter expertise; they are expected to be the source of knowledge for the students that attend. For institutions, this is reflected in the way faculty research and rewards serves as the basis for rankings. (QS University rankings, for example, calculate the number of awards granted faculty to compile its list.) With respect to individual faculty, demonstration of subject-matter expertise isn’t merely a requirement for employment and the means of promotion, but part of their professional (and I would suggest, personal) identity. It’s what makes them different from mere "teachers". The misalignment of this version of MOOCs and higher education was evident in the concerns raised by some of San Jose State University faculty who were asked to use a MOOC from Harvard; they wrote: "Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education." In his refusal to serve as faculty for another MOOC, Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD described the venture as a form of academic "colonialism". ____ Arizona State University is launching a different and very promising new tactic for leveraging the potential of MOOCs. Stuart Butler of the Brookings Institute provides a good overview, here. ____ 3 . . . Institutions may also have seen the early version of MOOCs as a threat to a key source of revenue — high-enrolment courses. Accepting credits from students who enrolled in MOOCs at other institutions, or offering free or low cost MOOCs at their own institution, may cut into the revenue that goes a long-way toward funding other parts of the institution (i.e. cost-shifting). Because of these and other obstacles, the MOOC model defined by Udacity and Coursera was perceived as often as a threat as an opportunity. In lieu of acceptance of these courses for academic credit, or the emergence of alternative forms of credentials from outside higher education proper, this particular approach to MOOCs reduced the effort to a promotional vehicles for elite universities that didn’t really need promotion, and examples of innovation from institutions with the least to gain from change in higher education. The LMS: A Perfect Fit On the other hand, learning management systems were quickly and widely adopted when they first landed fifteen-plus years ago. Their success was predicated on the fact that they fit easily into the existing organizational model of higher education. The technology was expressly designed to allow individual educators to create and deliver their own courses — without significant assistance or mediation by the institution. Which is, of course, how classroom higher education has long been organized. This kept the cost of putting courses online down (by minimizing the need for additional labour), adhered to conventional notions of academic autonomy, and didn’t require a significant modification to institutional practices. By mirroring the existing organizational design the LMS may have inadvertently reinforced an approach to online course design and development — the "lone-wolf" model — that is actually quite ill-suited to the demands and possibilities of online education. Nevertheless, it fit the needs of the institution well. At Acrobatiq we spend a lot of time ensuring that the learning analytics, courseware and authoring platform we offer fits easily into the existing institutional model. Our ability to do this well shouldn’t be surprising, though: the company and the technology were born in Carnegie Mellon University, and our team consists of many former university educators and staff. Higher education is our home turf.

:: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." The idea at the core of this quote has been rehashed so often and by so many public figures that it’s now difficult to be certain of its origins (Woodrow Wilson?). But the relevance and longevity of the quote likely owes less to the actual insignificance of the debates in higher education, than its unrestrained quality. We have a tendency in higher education to not hold back. There is no end to the topics worth debating: rising costs in higher education (and who’s to blame), identity politics, the "adjunctification" of academic labor, and rising calls for accountability, to name but a few. The role of educational technology is now a frequent focus. There’s more of it, too. The Internet has dramatically increased the number of venues to facilitate debate. And just as importantly, its’ allowed many of the interactions between warring camps to be anonymous - a perfect recipe. Faculty v. Administration Debate in higher education is frequently organized along the lines of faculty versus administration. I’ve been on both sides of the fence and the differences are striking. More often than not, the context for public debate favours academics. The rules of engagement and the skills required to compete effectively suit them well. Academics tend to be granted more freedom to publicly and passionately weigh-in on issues pertaining to higher education. Of course, serving as public intellectuals is considered part of the job - although only a fraction of academics do this regularly. The opportunity to speak-up is not limited to the academic’s area of expertise (e.g. neuro-engineering), but includes anything related to the institution.  And when they do speak, it’s as individuals, buffered by academic freedom, not as representatives of an institution. It’s not surprising, then, that academics feel able to speak from the heart and with more passion, which in turn tends to generate more attention and, amongst audiences with limited knowledge of the topic under discussion, passion, certainty and the title of "professor" is often more than what is required to be perceived as in-the-know. Not least important, academics tend to be very good at debating. It’s a core skill of the occupation and I think, as a group, they may be more comfortable with the flurry and exchange of ideas than almost any other category of professionals. Administrators, on the other hand, are expected to be far more circumspect in their public statements. When they speak publicly they are representing an entire organization, unlike academics. Nor do administrators have the protection of academic freedom. Not surprisingly, administrators are often less skilled at debate. Administrators may be at a disadvantage, then, given the rules of engagement that structure public debates.  This isn’t to suggest that administrators are powerless. Indeed, I think it’s safe to assume that administrators have more power and universities are "more manageable" than a quarter century ago, much to chagrin of most academics. But this increased power may not be a result of administration’s effectiveness at public debate. Having said this, both faculty and administrators are operating within a broader social and political climate that limits thoughtful debate. We seem to have less patience for nuanced arguments, quicker to publicly shame people we disagree with, and more anxious about offending others (and lawsuits). Freedom to speak honestly and accurately, regardless of your views or the position you hold, improves the quality and value of debate for everyone. At a time when the issues shaping higher education are more important than ever, we can’t afford to suppress conversation further . :: Mary Lewis, PhD, Professor of History at Harvard has been compiling a list of interesting articles that concern key subjects of debate in higher education. Available here. Keith Hampson PhD is part of the team at Acrobatiq, a Carnegie Mellon University venture.  

:: Design and Technology We’ve written about the role of good design in educational technology and media before. See here and here. Former RSID President, John Maeda, provides an excellent overview the growing integration of design (and designers) and technology. File (Slide deck): Design in Tech Report 2015 :: What Do Great College Professors Have in Common? Simple, but a good set of reminders about what often makes the difference for students.   File: MindShift.  :: Big Data and Learning Analytics in Blended Learning Environments: Benefits and Concerns By Anthony Picciano, a well-written and accessible journal article about the use of learning analytics in blended environments. File: PDF available here. :: Lobbying and Regulation in Higher Education As you likely know, a number of the proprietary colleges and universities in the US are sliding into financial trouble, brought on by declining enrolments. (Another recent sign: Wells Fargo recently chose to stop covering the education sector.) Pressure on these organizations also comes by way of regulation, such as those targeting "gainful employment". Some of the proposed regulations apply equally to non-profit institutions that, according to these two articles, has lead to for-profit and non-profit institutions working in-concert to lobby against more regulatory oversight. Interesting times.   File: Fighting Obama Education Plans, Colleges Boost Lobbying File: The Disturbing Reason Higher Education Lobbying Groups Are Supporting For-Profit Colleges  

:: If you’re responsible for leading your college’s growth in technology-supported learning, you don’t need to be told that the range of options for how you go about it are expanding rapidly. A growing variety of software products, instructional models, and partnership arrangements have emerged over the last 3 or 4 years. Failure to make sense of this quickly evolving space can inhibit institutions from making the best decisions or, in the worst case scenario, no decisions at all. Clear and relevant analysis of the online higher education space is more important than ever. Tyton Partners (formerly Education Growth Advisors) continues to offer reports of value to both institutions and the vendors that serve them. They’ve distinguished themselves from other private consulting firms by focussing much of their growing body of work on instructional issues. For good reason: it’s here, rather than in the areas of marketing and administration (the primary focus for many private firms), that higher education has the greatest opportunity to bend the "iron triangle" of costs, quality and access. "Time for Class: Lessons for the Future of Digital Courseware in Higher Education" is a three-part series that considers the current state of the digital courseware market. Digital courseware is defined for the purposes of the study as "curriculum delivered through purpose-built software to support teaching and learning". Over 2,700 faculty and administrators (presumably all in the US), were surveyed and combined with an internal analysis of over 120 courseware products. (My notes concern only the first two instalments; the third paper is forthcoming.) :: Their conclusion? Digital courseware enjoys high awareness and significant use by faculty, but "leaves many users woefully dissatisfied and also faces considerable barriers to further adoption." The dissatisfaction stems, in part, from the fact that the suppliers are focused on "efficacy" — the quality and impact of the courseware on student learning outcomes. But faculty and administrator placed a great deal of emphasis on other factors, such as "impact on faculty time, faculty control over instructional method and course experience, and technical integration challenges." "While our research substantiates the importance of efficacy, it also provides insights into faculty experiences and perspectives that challenge the notion of efficacy as a silver bullet to drive courseware adoption. The existence of other significant barriers to adoption, along with high levels of dissatisfaction with courseware products, suggests that efforts must be made to bring down multiple barriers if we are to see digital courseware implemented with greater scale and with favorable impact on student outcomes. By listening to faculty demands for simpler products that are less time-consuming to adopt and customize, and by evaluating institutional conditions for use, suppliers and institutions could make digital courseware a less daunting tool for faculty to adopt." We certainly agree with the importance placed on ease-of-use and institutional alignment. Acrobatiq totally reconfigured the user experience of its courseware and platform to make it simple and engaging for both students and faculty. Given our deep roots in academia, we are intimately familiar with the importance of the alignment with institutional practices and culture. Recently, we argued that one of the most qualities of great educational technology leaders in higher education " . . .  is the ability to evaluate not just the value of the ever-increasing range of new technologies, instructional methods, and business models on offer, but also how well these different opportunities align with the unique organizational design, processes and culture of our colleges and universities. They recognize that "fit" is all-important." :: We need more studies that look at the experiences and perceptions of faculty and administrators as they try to make the best use of available resources. Due to the capital-intensive demands of technology and services, institutions will likely continue to turn to vendors and consortia for many of their needs as they expand their footprints in online higher education. Time for Class is a useful contribution to this goal. But the study could have been enhanced by a more narrowly defined concept of courseware, as well as greater consideration for the importance of survey respondents different knowledge of the subject. As it is, not all respondents were properly prepared to provide meaningful answers to the questions posed by the research. The survey asks faculty and administrators to provide an assessment of how well the courseware is serving their needs. This seems appropriate given that, according to the study, a whopping 96% of respondents are "aware or somewhat aware" of digital courseware and 54% have used it within the last year. But the study then also notes that the respondents actual knowledge of the products was very low: "Faculty and administrators have a high awareness of courseware as a category but very low awareness of specific products and offerings." " . . . Furthermore, we found a widespread lack of recognition of courseware as a category distinct from learning management systems and course delivery solutions (e.g., homework tools, lecture capture tools, content management systems) . . ." "Over half of our respondents did not or could not name the product that they used. Over half of those who did respond named learning management systems." The lack of knowledge is exacerbated by the very broad definition of courseware used in the study, which included: textbook bundles assess and adjust learning experiences interactive textbooks open education resources (OER) course products game or role-based experiences custom courseware tools These are not merely different versions of a single category of educational products, but different categories. But more to the point, we know that these types of products differ in ways that directly impact the criteria used in the analysis. The impact on faculty workload, for example, is radically different for OER than it is for deploying an interactive textbook. Similarly, the ability of a faculty member to customize game-based experiences is very different than when they are simply using an LMS. (See the reference to "LMS" above.) :: To enhance our understanding of how well courseware is serving academia, we need to be confident that the study participants have a solid understanding of what is being assessed. This will, in turn, provide vendors and education professionals with a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities for implementing courseware that meets the institution’s needs.      

:: 2015 Internet Trends Report Read the report. http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends The annual report from Mary Meeker of KPB. Excellent collection of data points. You Draw It: How Family Income Affects Children’s College Chances How likely is it that children who grow up in very poor families go to college? How about children who grow up in very rich families? We’d like you to draw your guess for every income level on the chart below. Test your knowledge!  It’s All About the Money Excerpt: Markets and money have always mattered in American higher education, but not nearly as much as they do today. Throughout much of the 20th century, a well-educated citizenry was regarded as the ticket to national prosperity, and that shared belief was the rationale for spending tax dollars to underwrite public universities. The tacit bargain that states made with their flagship universities was simple—the state would subsidize these institutions to keep tuition low if they delivered a world-class education to the best and brightest state residents, and produced research that contributed to the common good. Under the terms of that bargain, enrollment mushroomed and America’s premier universities became the best in the world. In The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz demonstrate that this bet on higher education explains why, in the decades after the Second World War, the United States became the world’s richest nation. Read the full article.   Keeping it on the Company Campus (The Economist) As more firms have set up their own "corporate universities", they have become less willing to pay for their managers to go to business school. Read the full article here.     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:: ‘New American University’ Fueled by Scale, Speed and Diversity Arizona State President, Michael Crow, sees an inclusive, tech-heavy higher ed model for a new time. Read more.  Republican Rubio Urges Overhaul of U.S. College ‘Cartel’ Read more.  On the same day Rubio made this remark, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, released the budget in which he wrote that "we’ll open whole sector to new entrants who can deliver the highest standards". More information here: Osborne accused of picking on young people with "earn or learn" budget. What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page? The way we value and pay for digital content continues to shift. Unbundling of content has moved to a new level with Amazon’s pilot program to charge readers by page. Read more.  Unpacking "Career Readiness" ACT takes on the challenging subject of defining career readiness. Worth a read. Read the report. Academic Innovation Incubators: Emerging Models and Strategic Considerations for Leaders The rise of incubators in higher education has been fast and furious. Great information on the subject from Huron Consulting. Read the report.   US Colleges with Fastest Rising Tuition The U.S. Department of Education is out with its annual list of colleges whose tuition and net price have risen the fastest in recent years. (Four-year public colleges where tuition rose the most, as a percentage, from 2011-12 to 2013-14.) Read more.

:: The first instalment in this series on internet economics, Internet Economics and Online Higher Education (Series Introduction), can be found here. :: The "iron triangle" of cost, quality and access in higher education has seemed, at times, unbreakable. The sector has frequently operated under the assumption that improving one of the three objectives - access, quality or price  - is necessarily at the expense of one or both of the others. Like health care,  costs in higher education rise faster than in other industries where technology can be more easily deployed to increase productivity. Breaking the iron triangle has become more pressing issue for higher education’s stakeholders as student debt hits record highs, institutional costs rise faster than inflation, and access to higher education becomes a social and economic imperative for nations struggling with challenges of global competition. "We can’t allow higher education to be a luxury in this country. It’s an economic imperative that every family in America has to to be able to afford." President Barack Obama, February 27, 2012. In this context, the task of finding smart ways to "scale-up" and improve economies of scale is generating more attention. Historically, institutions of higher education have used a number of tactics to increase scale, including: Large, lower-level courses that enrol hundreds of students at a time. While much maligned, the "lecture" course is very economical; Greater reliance on adjunct/sessional instructors, which allows institutions to adjust supply quickly as demand rises and falls, at a far lower cost that full-time faculty; Mega-universities. While not common in Western nations (save for Open University UK), these institutions, according to an analysis by Sir John Daniel, have a lower per-student cost; By simply creating more universities: many Western nations funded a new crop of all-purpose universities in the mid-twentieth centuries to serve the first of the baby boomers and feed an increasingly post-industrial workforce. Participation in consortia with the hope that sharing resources, rather than going it alone, reduces costs. (My own analysis of online consortia found that this objective often remains elusive.) :: The impact of technology-mediated learning in higher education on costs, quality and access has been, to date, moderate. While the online format has added significant value, particularly through convenience for adult and working learners, it has not led to downward pressure on tuition or significantly increased participation rates. And certainly online education’s scalability pales in comparison to the new breed of Internet-born companies we hear about so often these days. (Instagram was sold for 1 billion dollars when it had only 13 employees.)  For our purposes here, let’s set aside the terrifying labour implications of this particular example. The challenge of scale in higher education is not merely technological - it’s organizational and social, as well. While achieving scale is fundamental to most enterprises, it can be deleterious in higher education. Increasing access and reducing price can actually hamper an institution’s value in the marketplace.  Value is based, in part, on maximizing exclusivity: an institution’s reputation typically increases when it admits fewer applicants than competing institutions. When we tell friends that our daughter "got into a good school" we mean, in effect, a school that is relatively difficult to get in to. The recent statements by Peter Thiel about the unique economics of higher ed, who made his fortune through highly scalable Internet-based businesses, are amusing in this context: "[Higher education admissions is] a crazy tournament. It’s a zero-sum tournament. If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we’re going to double or triple our enrolment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you’re really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that’s got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It’s branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum." The same claim can be made about price: Increasing tuition levels can increase exclusivity, which in turn, increases perceptions of value. New York University and George Washington University have taken this tactic to heart according to Daniel Luzer (see The Prestige Racket). :: The good news is that educational technology has matured to the extent that it can now have a major impact on costs, access, and quality.  It scales. Some of the more promising applications of technology include: Software that generates automated, real-time feedback to students on their performance. This instructional technique frequently increases student retention of the curriculum and ensures that the student doesn’t proceed to the next unit of curriculum with misconceptions about the curriculum; Sharing common instructional content across as many courses and programs as is suitable in order to ensure (a) the lowest possible cost per student and (b) access to the highest possible quality (at a given price); Adaptive, personalized learning that identifies and responds to student differences - an instructional tactic that’s not feasible in most mid to large size courses due to the demands it places on instructional staff; Course authoring applications with instructional intelligence embedded within the software. LMS typically don’t seek to guide instructors/authors toward best (better practices). But new, more sophisticated applications have been developed that make it possible to generate learning activities that are beyond the capacity of what most instructors can achieve independently. (In this respect, educational technology will become more similar to other, time and labour saving technologies, such as desktop accounting software that, for example, directs the user toward adhering to accounting standards and rules, or blogging software like WordPress that makes it possible for content creators with stunted design sensibilities to create beautiful, easy-to-navigate sites.) Most importantly, each of these applications of technology reflect what educators have told us is valuable to students. The technology isn’t dictating the instructional method; rather, it reflects our best thinking and practices while allowing us to scale education, one of most important and precious resources.

:: How Big Data has Transformed Research Guardian Higher Education speaks with four researchers that are using data to enhance research. Excerpt: "Illustris is a computer simulation of the evolution of the universe, through which we study how galaxies and their constituent stars and black holes form and evolve over cosmic time." Read more.  :: For Americans Seeking Affordable Degrees, German Schools Beckon Excerpt: "Looking to escape the staggering costs of a university education in the United States? You are not alone. And German education officials say a growing number of Americans are heading to the land of beer and bratwurst to get one. At last count, there were 4,300 Americans studying at German universities, with more than half pursuing degrees, says Ulrich Grothus, deputy secretary general of the German Academic Exchange Service. "We’ve seen an overall increase in international students in this country over the last 10 years, but the increase for Americans has been much faster," he says. Between 2003 and 2013, he says, the number increased by 56 percent." Read more. :: Don’t Make These Common Higher Education Mistakes Excerpt: "There is a strange disconnect happening in discussions about college prices. On one hand, there are stories and data illustrating how low- and moderate-income families are experiencing ever-growing living costs in the face of stagnant wages, including the rising price of college. On the other hand, there are arguments that the actual out-of-pocket price of college is quite low or even free for the lowest-income students. The radically different presentations of college affordability reflect the ways in which language and vocabulary around higher education can lead to wildly different assumptions. Those who say that college is affordable use the word "price" to mean tuition and fees. Those who say that college is increasingly unaffordable are referring to a larger definition of price that includes room and board, transportation, and other expenses students accrue in order to complete college." Read more. :: Connecting Credentials, a Lumina Foundation Initiative Excerpt: "Connecting Credentials is a group of collaborating partners who share the commitment to build large-scale use of competency-based credentials by businesses, educators, and learners/workers across the nation. The purpose of this initiative is to support the growing number of stakeholders who are becoming involved in improving credentialing in the United States. The website is being managed by the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), with support from Lumina Foundation." Read more. :: Adults, Computers and Problem Solving / Report from the OECD Abstract: The report provides an in-depth analysis of the results from the Survey of Adult Skills related to problem solving in technology-rich environments, along with measures concerning the use of ICT and problem solving. The Nordic countries and the Netherlands have the largest proportions of adults (around 40%) who score at the higher levels in problem solving, while Ireland, Poland and the Slovak Republic have the smallest proportions of adults (around 20%) who score at those levels. Variations in countries’ proficiency in problem solving using ICT are found to reflect differences in access to the Internet and in the frequency with which adults use e-mail. The report finds that problem-solving proficiency is strongly associated with both age and general cognitive proficiency, even after taking other relevant factors into account. Proficiency in problem solving using ICT is related to greater participation in the labour force, lower unemployment, and higher wages. By contrast, a lack of computer experience has a substantial negative impact on labour market outcomes, even after controlling for other factors. The discussion considers policies that promote ICT access and use, opportunities for developing problem-solving skills in formal education and through lifelong learning, and the importance of problem-solving proficiency in the context of e-government services. Read more.  :: Why Is The University Still Here? / Searching For The Next Wave Of Education Innovation Two short articles on technology and innovation in education by Danny Crichton. Read Why is the University Still Here? & Searching for the Next Wave of Education Innovation  ::      

:: The first and second instalment of this series on Internet Economics can be found here and here. :: Most people are familiar with economies of scale, which we discussed in a recent post. The Network Effect, sometimes called "Metcalfe’s Law", is less well-known, but equally relevant if we want to understand how the unique economics of the Internet are influencing higher education. Economies of scale is concerned with the impact of increases in volume on cost - specifically, cost per unit. Network Effects, on the other hand, concerns the impact of volume on the perceived value of the good or product. When the Network Effect is present and positive, the value of the good or product increases as more people use it. Social media is the clearest example: the value of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and other peer-to-peer technologies increases as more people participate. As participation rises, the volume of interactions, possibilities for new connections, and the range of available content increases - in turn, so does the value to each participant. The Network Effect and Online Higher Education At first glance, the Network Effect seems to have little relevance to higher education. Value in higher education is conventionally thought to correspond to low volume: smaller classes and more exclusive institutions, for instance. But the continued migration to Internet-based learning and services in higher education has the potential to change the dynamics between volume and value. Consider, for example, MOOCs. Critics argue that students won’t learn or persist with an educator-to-student ratio of 50,000 to one. But advocates point out that by using peer-to-peer learning in this context, we may be able to actually complement the traditional educator-student model. If properly designed, an increase in the number of students participating in the MOOC will actually increase its value to each student. Ironically, the application of social media to higher education often fails to leverage the Network Effect, highlighting the importance of context on the value of technologies.  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 now have over 300 million active users. Higher education instruction, by design, typically restricts participation to a single class (e.g. 40-100 students per course). As mentioned, exclusivity and small class sizes are equated with quality. When More is Better Not surprisingly, the concept of Network Effects is most often often associated with products and services that involve networks in which people or objects are connected in some fashion, such as telephone systems and, as mentioned, social media. But many writers expand the concept to include other types of product or services in which the value for each user increases as the number of users climbs - regardless of whether the people or objects are connected. As the number of people and organizations that use Microsoft Excel increases, for example, the application becomes more valuable for job-seekers. Learning analytics is an example of this expanded use of the Network Effect. As we define it at Acrobatiq, learning analytics concerns the granular, real-time measurement and estimation of student learning. When guided by a deep understanding of learning theory, this use of technology generates new insights into what leads to better learning outcomes. The data our clients capture concern a single student. And this is the core of its value:  it provides the necessary insights needed for accurate customization and evidence-backed continuous improvement. But new kinds of insights can also be generated by aggregating data across a larger number of learners. By reviewing student performance data across a number of institutions we can identify patterns based, for example, on socio-economic status or high school GPA. This kind of information is an important aid to institutional strategy (e.g. recruiting tactics, financial support, student services), and better government policy and funding. :: The first and second instalments of this series on Internet Economics can be found here: Internet Economics and Online Higher Education (Series Introduction) Internet Economics: Scale and Online Higher Education ::

Sales team training is a long-term investment with a number of challenges that multi-national corporations, SMEs, start-ups, sales directors, managers, and decision makers must overcome. But as technology has become more prevalent in the workplace, organisations have figured out that mobile sales teams - that is, sales teams which are spread across various regions of the world - can benefit massively from online software and mobile applications, online software and mobile applications which are designed to turn employees into experts with quality training programmes that benefit existing development initiatives. Although the number and quality of applications for training sales teams has grown, though, there are core challenges with training a mobile sales team to consider. Let’s take a look at these core challenges to raise awareness and to better your understanding of the experiences training a mobile sales team will bring.   1. Cost The true cost of training a mobile sales team is hard to determine; every organisation will differ, but all organisations will face the same challenges - flight/ other transport costs, accommodation costs, and loss of communication/ potential sales from a salesperson leaving their territory. The true cost of these can only truly be determined through experience and bringing a salesperson, salespersons, or an entire sales team from across one region to one location for training multiple times. Of course, this challenge can be overcome simply and easily by providing training on mobile devices through a mobile app or web app. By giving employees the ability to learn from their smartphone or tablet, you will empower them with the ability to train at their own pace and when it is convenient for them and your organisation. This will cut costs dramatically and free up internal business resources.   2. Accessibility Right now, there are over one hundred smartphones on the market, over fifty tablet computers, three main mobile operating systems, and over 30 versions of those operating systems. As such, it is not always possible to deliver training to employees through a mobile application, as not all applications have been developed for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, or the latest versions of those OSs. This potential lack of accessibility can negatively affect training and inconvenience the user. This challenge can be overcome by implementing a company policy for compatible devices, aided with funding/ partnerships with carriers, to limit the expense (if any) to employees. Another option is to develop a web application, which can be used from anywhere in the world with a web browser. One thing is for sure, the smartphone is not going away and mobile learning will become an essential component in the employee training playbook of any savvy learning and development professional.   3. Change Organisational cultures change, products and services change, consumer behaviour changes… sales team training has to adapt to constant change to survive, and it is critical that the company they work for is able to communicate new product information, competitor information, promotions, and other things to them as soon as possible. This is one of the biggest advantages to training a mobile sales team through a mobile or web application - training and resources can be instantly updated and changed, which makes mobile training more efficient and flexible. For example if a new product is introduced, a salesperson can simply take out their smartphone and complete the most recent and relevant training module.   4. Knowledge gaps Organisations invest a lot of resources into analysis to determine knowledge gaps and training needs for employees, and mobile sales teams are particularly vulnerable to this behavioural trait. The knowledge gap was defined in 1994 by George Loewnstein using but one word, curiosity, a feeling which stems from a lack of understanding and the unknown, or in a sales teams case, a lack of training and education. Mobile training applications are an ideal solution to filling knowledge gaps among salespersons, for they can include any level of information about customers, brand philosophy, basic sales techniques, product/ service information, promotions, plus much more. Wranx has been designed to plug knowledge gaps and areas of difficulty through Spaced Repetition, a scientifically-proven algorithm for optimising the order of questions  for advanced knowledge retention.   5. One-to-one coaching Considered by some to be the best way to empower employees with the skills needed to sell, one-to-one coaching can be nigh on impossible to achieve with a mobile sales team, as the very nature of the mobile sales role demands employees to travel and not stay in the same place for extended periods, or stick to a region as the sole contact for customers which limits coaching potential significantly. Thanks to technology, employees no longer have to come into head office for one-to-one coaching, though. Employees can experience one-to-one coaching on a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone from anywhere in the world by using Wranx, our fully optimised and science-driven learning platform for sales teams which is designed to deliver advanced knowledge retention and accelerated learning for all levels of sales professionals.   Ultimately, one-to-one mobile coaching is going to educate and train employees in a consistent way, and sales teams are going to feel incentivised and supported during the sales process. Share this post with your own audience

Know what you sell, sell what you know Every sales guru in the world will tell you the same thing: Your sales staff will do better if they know the products they’re selling and truly believe they are the best choice out there. Sending a salesman into the field without full knowledge of the product or service he’s selling is a recipe for disaster. In many companies, the solution to this problem is to sit the sales team in a corporate classroom for a knowledge cramming session. However, this isn’t the most effective way to educate your team. Understanding how to educate your sales team, and why traditional methods don’t always work best, can be the first step to increasing their sales performance. Looking at other learning techniques, it is possible to boost your sales team’s performance and make them really enjoy the process. Of course, it can also help your company’s bottom line!   Knowledge is power Whether your sales team is familiar with Francis Bacon’s idea that ‘knowledge is power’ or the GI Joe version of the concept, that ‘knowing is half the battle’, they probably have a basic idea that they need to have a good grasp of what it is they’re meant to sell. Knowing the product inside and out, and having a firm understanding of it, is the only way they’re going to be able to sell at their best level. When a salesman joins your team, they probably don’t know much about your product. They enter with the same knowledge one of your potential customers might have. It’s your job to bring them up to speed so they can go out and educate others about the merits and USPs of your product. Having full knowledge of your products will also help in tricky sales situations. If a salesman is asked a question about your product and they don’t know the answer, it will undermine their confidence, the product, and the sale. Every salesman needs to be your field expert, knowing what your product does, how it does it, and why a customer should pay for it. This means having to know everything there is to know about it, even the most obscure details.   Teaching the details Most companies understand that their salesmen need to have a good working knowledge of their product and their company. The way this is achieved is usually through the corporate classroom. Sales staff are gathered together once a month, once a quarter, or once a year. They sit in a room together, either at the office or at a conference centre, and are lectured about new products and changes to old ones. New sales staff are often given a large document about the products they’ll be selling. They’re told to go home and learn all they can, ready to present the company’s offerings to potential customers. The problem with both of these methods of learning is that they replicate the school environment. While some of your sales staff may have loved school, thriving in the classroom environment and relishing in every piece of homework they were assigned, it’s likely that most of them weren’t that student when they were younger. Even the past lover of the classroom may have outgrown that mentality. They don’t want to learn through a lecture, they want to be out there selling. Knowledge cramming has been shown over and over again to be an ineffective way of learning. Much like trying to cram before a school exam, getting your sales team to cram over the course of a corporate education session simply won’t result in retained knowledge. They might be able to quickly recall some of the facts in the days following the cramming, but in a few weeks or months, when they’re actually out there trying to sell your product, the finer details will have escaped them.   An alternative method Rather than sitting people in a corporate classroom and hoping they stay off their mobiles while the products are being presented, you can achieve a better quality of learning by offering continuous training. Learning things in bite-sized chunks over a long period is much more effective than knowledge cramming. This takes learning beyond simple memorisation. When your sales team learn something by rote memorisation, they can only recall the facts. If a customer asks them a tricky question, they won’t be able to come up with the answer. However, when they have learned about your product in a different method, they will have a fuller understanding of it. While there are many different approaches to learning, one that works particularly well for sales training is spaced repetition. This learning technique involves presenting small pieces of information on a regular basis. Each piece is repeated over a period of time, reinforcing the knowledge of the information. It is a method that is frequently used for learning languages and other things that have a lot of pieces that need to be remembered indefinitely. One way of thinking about spaced repetition is recalling flashcards. These education tools from your younger days were an invaluable resource for learning vocabulary, basic mathematics, and many other simple lessons. Each flashcard limited the amount of information you were working on - usually only a single word or equation - and offered an easy, on the go way of studying. The knowledge you gathered in this method stuck with you and is accessible to you even now, however many years have passed.   Applying spaced repetition to business Your sales team probably won’t want to carry around a stack of flashcards about your product. It wouldn’t look professional and would be cumbersome. However, you can apply spaced repetition learning to your business using software such as Wranx. Spaced repetition software offers you a way to continuously educate and train your sales team. Wranx takes the information you want your employees to learn and packages it in a way that is made for spaced repetition. These bite-sized, flashcard type pieces are delivered to any device, anywhere. This means your employees can learn while they travel, at home, or in the office. Using a spaced repetition program like Wranx also gives you something flashcards can’t - reporting on how employees are doing. With regular reports delivered to your inbox, you can see how employees are doing with their learning. You can then address any weak spots that need to be handled. By making the information more easily digested, it also reduces the amount of time your employees have to spend on this education. Rather than taking full days to learn all they can, the information is presented to them in small pieces that only require a few minutes. The end result is that the actual time spent learning can be reduced significantly. Rather than spending huge amounts of time for hit and miss results, you can have a sales team that have spent less time on learning but gathered much more lasting knowledge.   Making learning fun Another element that can help with employee education is making it fun. By adding in an element of gaming, Wranx allows your employees to compete for the top ranking. This is something that any sales team will really enjoy, and keep them motivated to learn more. While your salesmen try to outdo each other in their learning, you can also be sure that nobody is going to be left behind. If there’s a particular part of the product that a certain salesman just isn’t getting to grips with, Wranx will help focus their learning. Much like using flashcards you were able to quickly weed out the easier ones and focus on the ones you found more difficult, spaced repetition software will use an algorithm to do the same for your employees’ learning experience. This all results in a highly effective learning method that encourages advancement while managing problems. If you’ve ever run a corporate classroom, you know that these are two elements that are often missing. Classroom environments tend to breed boredom and force employees to go at a single speed. This holds back more advanced salesmen and makes things more difficult for newer salesmen. The end result is usually a lack of enthusiasm on both ends of the spectrum.   Improved sales through education At the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line. Having a well educated sales force is great, but the reality is that it needs to result in more sales. When a salesman understands a product, he’s more likely to show and recommend it to customers. One of the most effective ways to boost your sales is through education. An educated and excited salesman can’t wait to tell others about a product. He is enthusiastic in the field, and able to clearly explain what your product and your company have to offer that your competitors don’t. An enthusiastic salesman is more convincing and will close more sales, simply by being able to demonstrate things in such an effective way. Many studies have shown that robust and comprehensive retail sales training is an important area that delivers a measurable return on investment. Enthusiasm isn’t an innate thing when it comes to your product, though. Your sales team will come together without any previous knowledge of your product. It’s your job to turn them into experts who can recommend your product to others. Word of mouth advertising is extremely effective — just think of how many purchase decisions are made based on online reviews by other consumers who aren’t even personally known. When you give your sales team full knowledge of your product in a way that is retained over the long term, they can offer this word of mouth type of pitch. Spaced repetition effectively turns your sales team into experienced users of your product. They know everything there is to know and can recall it in an educated manner. They aren’t simply repeating a few key phrases they remember from that weekend retreat. Instead, they know your product intimately and can tailor their sales message to each new customer.   Making spaced repetition work for you Spaced repetition software is one of the easiest ways to bring this system of learning to your company. It doesn’t need to replace other learning methods, either. In fact, combining it with existing methods, including corporate classroom techniques, can make them more effective. This is because the group learning becomes a refresher course for your sales team. It gives them a way to interact with each other, ask further questions, and really engage with what you have to offer. Another benefit of spaced repetition is that it offers the ability to constantly update the information. If your products and services are changing on a regular basis, you don’t want to have to keep calling your sales staff in for more and more classroom meetings. It isn’t cost effective and will detract from their ability to be in the field making money.   The financial benefits of spaced repetition software are also significant. As an education solution for your team, Wranx offers a customisable package that reduces the amount you need to spend to bring your employees up to speed. This is particularly good for new hires, since it certainly isn’t a good value to pull together a corporate classroom situation every time somebody joins your team. Your sales team is with you to sell, and you need them to sell in the most effective way possible. This means fully understanding your product and what you offer customers. While traditional learning methods can be a good way to present some types of information, they often fail to get a sales force fully engaged and knowledgeable. Adding spaced repetition to your employee education can be a way of boosting their understanding, confidence in the field, and, most importantly, their sales volume. Corporate education is vital, and finding a technique or mix of techniques that works for you and your employees is the first step to improving your overall sales. If you’ve tried classroom education and not had the results you wanted, it isn’t time for a new sales team. It’s time for a new mode of educating the team you have. Share this post with your own audience