“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.”—Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
These two stories on the seismic changes underway in education could be footnotes to the post “Witch Hunt or Reformation?” but they seem to stand well on their own.
Anya Kamenetz writing for Fast Company recounts a note from Coursera’s Daphne Koller on putting the student first, a trend that will no doubt gather into an avalanche. The enrollment figures alone for Coursera and Udacity make an interesting statement regarding the numbers of people gravitating to alternative forms of education.
“From their experience teaching 100,000 students in ‘massively open online courses,’ Two groups of Stanford professors founded two rival startups, Coursera and Udacity, in 2012. Udacity’s Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun created all their courses in-house, while Coursera’s Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng partnered with leading universities to present their best professors’ stuff across all disciplines.
‘Our cardinal rule, our touchstone was ‘what’s the best for the students,’ says Koller. ‘Stanford alone? Or multiple top universities? Computer Science or all subjects? The choice was clear cut.’
By the fourth quarter of the year, Coursera had 33 university partners, over 300 courses, and 1.6 million students; Udacity had 14 courses & just 112,000 students.”
In the second story of note Salman Khan of the Khan Academy went on record with his vision of a new university – a self-paced learning environment, based on a flipped classroom model, that fosters engagement and doing in conjunction with guidance from accepted masters in the subject area. Interestingly Khan embraces the portfolio as the metric of achievement, not the exam or credit-hour.
Alisha Azevedo writing for Wired Campus:
“In a chapter titled ‘What College Could Be Like,’ Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors.”
Further on:
“Although students would not be graded in the imagined university he describes, they would compile a portfolio of their work and assessments from their mentors.
‘Existing campuses could move in this direction by de-emphasizing or eliminating lecture-based courses, having their students more engaged in research and co-ops in the broader world, and having more faculty with broad backgrounds who show a deep desire to mentor students,’ he writes.”
Peter Thiel gets a nod as well from Khan in the Wired Campus post.
REFERENCES.
Kamenetz, Anya, “Coursera Co-CEO Daphne Koller On Putting Students First“, Fast Company, 26 November 2012.
Azevedo, Alisha, “Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College“, Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus, 29 November 2012.
Increasing numbers of middle schools, high schools and colleges are flipping or inverting their courses. Flipping is catching on with impressive results, catching praise from both students and teachers. Apparently even parents are pleased.
A few careful watchers are calling for research into the method, questioning its effectiveness and long-term value. Others already note that it does come at a cost: It is more work for the teacher. Production of background audio and video presentations aside, it is dangerous to fill the class time with material that is not engaging. No old-wine-in-new-bottle here. This is going to be the major obstacle to the widespread success (not adoption) of the Inverted Classroom.
References.
‘Flipped Learning’ Classroom Model Embraced By Teachers In Schools Nationwide
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/28/flipped-learning-classroo_n_2567279.html
Teachers Flip for ‘Flipped Learning’ Class Model
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/teachers-flip-flipped-learning-class-model-18330896?page=2
What happens when the consumers become the producers?
If students designed their own schools…
“The best small town in America experiments with self-directed learning at its public high school. A group of students gets to create their own school-within-a-school and they learn only what they want to learn. Does it work? Charles Tsai finds out by spending a week with the Independent Project.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RElUmGI5gLc
Peter Reinhardt at http://rein.pk/online-educations-dirty-secret-awful-retention/ pens a pointed criticism of the quality of service offered by Coursera and EdX based on his recent experience as an online student. He claims experience with Coursera, EdX, HackDesign, Duolingo and Codecademy in a variety of courses ranging from physiology to programming.
Interestingly, Reinhardt’s own hollow experience of xMOOCs (apparently) might well foreshadow a return to the art of teaching:
“But my favorite teachers didn’t just have great content, they also had great content delivery. They made the content fun. Gripping even. And thats where Coursera and EdX have let me down.”
This, of course, smells a lot like the age-old educational technology problem of the old wine in a new bottle.
Reinhardt speaks from personal experience with each of the top MOOCs. His analysis leads to three additional problem areas:
“… the starting commitment is too high, the re-engagement emails are terrible, and the pacing is impersonal.”
Read the full article at:
http://rein.pk/online-educations-dirty-secret-awful-retention/
It’s well worth your time and attention.