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Predictions for 2009

Every year at this time, eLearn Magazine asks experts in the field of e-learning to share their predictions about what lies ahead for the e-learning community. Following is a summary of their predictions for 2009.

  • Cellphones will emerge as the dominant learning platform for the developing world.
  • As organizations try to stretch their learning budgets in hard times, e-learning will become an attractive option.
  • Processes like ADDIE and classic ID will be used selectively or fragmented due to time and cost pressures. As the recession bites and training budgets are slashed, organizations will no longer be able to afford the production of sophisticated courseware. Instead they will become more reliant on employee-generated content and increasingly appreciate the potential of Web 2.0 approaches for informal, social, and collaborative learning, and knowledge sharing throughout the enterprise. E-learning will finally break free of the courses-online model as more people realize the business benefits of networked informal learning. Whether tethered to distinct courses or as ongoing communities of practice, the challenge is to create structures and activities that generate informal content—such as stories from the field—in support of learning, training, or performance goals. Learning professionals’ fears of obsolescence, expectations of connected employees, and demands for quicker solutions will drive the rest of us to increasingly abandon traditional instructional design in favor of experimentation—creating messy, loosely structured courses supplemented with low-cost social software and old-school support tools like job aids.
  • As economies worsen and country and state and provincial budgets tighten, free online courses, programs, and universities will increasingly be discussed, debated, and ultimately enrolled in. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement will strengthen, and will face up to the “cultural” challenges of winning learning providers and
    teachers to use OER.
  • We’ll see more use of games (immersive learning simulations) as a powerful learning opportunity, and tools to make it easier to develop.

Read more.

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LINGOs and eCornell: taking learning to new places

Eric Berg, the chairman of LINGOS  visited our office last week and provided our staff with a compelling presentation of how the eCornell courses are having an impact in many international NGOs.  Through our partnership with LINGOs, employees of NGOs such as CARE, Habitat for Humanity, the World Wildlife Federation and dozens more have access to courses authored by Cornell faculty where they live and work.  They are using these courses to make significant improvements in how they deliver the critical services provided by their organizations in some of the world’s most demanding environments.  And as Eric points out, even a small improvement in how an NGO delivers its services can save thousands or millions of dollars, and in this challenging environment for philanthropy, it may be a life saving difference.

We learned about the refugee camp manager who is completing a Financial Management certificate to be able to be a better financial steward of the resources he has received in order to house and feed hundreds of people.  We also heard of the park ranger for World Wildlife Fund who is using the project leadership skills he learned in his eCornell course to better manage a conservation project aimed at saving gorillas and their habitat.

In our hyper-connected world, it was amazing to hear about people running 150 feet of power cord from their solar panels to their makeshift office in order to power the computer to take online courses.  The demand for new knowledge and skills is incredible, and it is humbling to be able to serve some small component of that knowledge through eCornell.

We look forward to expanding our relationship with LINGOs and will keep you posted on how online learning is making a difference through these professionals.

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Online Learners are More Engaged

The 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) was just completed for 2008.  They surveyed 22,000 students at 47 institutions of higher education.   This year the survey was expanded to also survey students who had completed online courses, and they compared the results of those students who had an online learning experience with those who hadn’t.  The online students reported higher levels of “higher-order thinking,” “integrative thinking,” and “reflective learning.”  Together NSSE refers to these three as “deep learning.”  This finding is consistent with other surveys, and anecdotal reports of both faculty and students in higher education who have experienced online learning.

While we serve a different learning population, it also reflects our experience with the level of engagement of the professionals and managers who enroll in eCornell courses.  We find learners deeply engaged in integrating their real-world experience with the conceptual frameworks in the course, or reflecting on their personal experiences, biases, and approaches when solving the problems presented by a faculty member.

The survey posits several reasons for this differerntial.

“It may be that students who pursue online courses—such as older students for whom the flexibility and convenience of the medium may be particularly important, given work or family commitments—are those who embrace the spirit of independent, student-centered, intellectually engaging learning as captured by the deep learning measures. It may also be the case that professors who teach online courses make more intentional use of deep approaches to learning in their lesson plans.”

I think that learning online, especially, in a structured yet asynchronous course, such as eCornell’s, provides an opportunity to intentionally design in reflection and time for application and integration.  I meet many corporate learning managers who are interested in “on-demand” learning and are concerned that a more structured model just doesn’t fit the demands of the modern workplace.  I disagree.  In a dynamic and uncertain environment, and we all find oursleves in that environment right now, we are better served by creating the space to think, to test ideas, to reflect on what has worked and not, and then identifying new solutions that we can implement. An immediate response to a new piece of knowledge if acted upon right away, may be very different than if I have an hour, or a week, to reflect, then respond in a more strategic way.

Also, in a traditional classroom, we ask students to respond now–raise your hand, participate in a small group discussion–and in an isolated location–away from work, life etc.  In an online course that unfolds over days or weeks instead of hours, the learner can begin to integrate the ideas from the course into their work or their life while they are still engaged in the learning experience.  Rather than leaving work to attend class, and learning in isolation, the learning comes to them.  The result is a more integrative, higher-level, and reflective learning experience that has a greater opportunity for significant impact in their worklife, then the traditional experience which may have transferred knowledge but may have been less successful at creating change.

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A Widget Onto the Future

They float around on desktops, populate home pages and bulge out of Facebook profiles. They aren’t exactly tangible, which is why they’re called widgets, but they’re real enough within the digital ether than some educators want to turn them into teaching tools.

The portable, Web-based gadgets are an ideal medium, they say, for creating interactive, individualized instructional materials that can live on a course Web site, a personal blog or even a mobile phone.

Already, some instructors are using them in their own courses, and the idea is catching on as others consider the possibilities.

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As the latest versions of course management packages adopt module-based interfaces and as colleges’ Web portals cull together widget-like boxes for the latest news and e-mail, the objects are becoming more familiar to students — even if they don’t realize it yet.

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“With a widget, you can give them more interactive chunks of Web content, more customized chunks … and with the page aggregators, the teacher or the student can arrange it in a way that teaches [them] well,” said Mark C. Marino, who teaches writing at the University of Southern California and who created a customized widget that instructs students in the use of “topoi,” a Greek concept used to better understand an idea.

Marino created an entire page, hosted by the Web service Pageflakes, that serves as a kind of home base for the topic. Students can visit the page and see a collection of modules: one that explains the topoi, another that encourages students to “rip” and share the topoi widget, another that serves as a Web-based notepad, and so on. It all revolves around the widget itself, a small interactive tool that walks students through the concept and links them to videos from class.

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“What I see happening, as this moves away from course management systems, is [the ability to] embed a bunch of different gadgets, whether it’s a discussion gadget or a calendar gadget, to create a curriculum,” said Eileen McMahon, who uses widgets in one of her courses at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and is organizing the Nercomp meeting next year.

Read more.

 

By Andy Guess for Inside Higher Ed

 

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Better Learning With Sites and Sound

New research suggests that students who create and edit documents using Web-based collaboration tools include more complex visual media in their assignments — and come away with a better understanding in the process. Another ongoing experiment finds, with statistical significance, that instructors can be more effective in grading students’ work if they record their comments directly into documents as audio.

Students in four graduate courses at West Virginia University worked on and submitted group projects in two different ways, alternating for each assignment: using Microsoft Word to save, track changes, add comments and send files back and forth as e-mail attachments; and sharing files and editing them online using Buzzword (a Flash-based suite of online productivity tools from Adobe). According to the study, the students “were more likely to use graphics, charts, links, etc. in Buzzword because of the ease of inclusion” than in Word, possibly as a function of the interface’s comparative ease of use.

Perhaps more significantly, the study found that they were “more likely to explain more complex concepts using a combination of text and non-text based materials. The majority of participants … expressed the view that it was easier to express themselves at a higher cognitive level when they could present material using multiple media sources.” They also had higher levels of satisfaction. According to the study’s leader, “the multiple forms of sensory input” such as charts, links and graphics not only make the information more understandable to the reader “but apparently … students are learning more from that process as well.”

In theory, then, collaborations using Web-based editing tools can potentially boost understanding, at least visually.

Read the full article.

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The Case Against Pre-Testing For Online Courses

Clark Quinn, executive director at Quinnovation, pokes holes in the conventional wisdom about pre-tests. It’s a given that completing an online course will result in a change in knowledge, but, according to Quinn, that’s not the point. The point is whether learners can demonstrate mastery of new skills. “What’s important is not that learners can do more than they could before, but that they can now do what they need to do. This is criterion-referenced performance.”

To the argument that pre-tests help prepare students for learning, Quinn admits that by activating relevant pre-existing knowledge, pre-tests may help to prepare students cognitively. But they’re not likely to prepare students motivationally. On the contrary, “knowing that every course will start with a quiz is likely to drive students away.” Instead, Quinn suggests situating the learning in context, which can prepare learners both cognitively and emotionally.

The only legitimate use Quinn sees for pre-tests is to enable students to test out of a course. Under those circumstances, the pre-test should be designed to demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives and it should be optional.

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How does an eCornell course work?

We get asked quite often to describe how an online course works….

Each course has a set start date and end date but when you complete the course work in between those two dates is entirely up to the you.  There is an instructor who leads the course but that person does so through email and discussion boards.  You do not have to be logged on at any particular time. At times, instructors will have online office hours for chats, but these are not a requirement of passing the course.

We do suggest that you budget 3-5 hours per week for your studies.  It can be a half hour a day or a couple hours each day on the weekend.  The course is available to you 24/7.  There is collaboration with other students and this is done on various discussion boards throughout the course.  The instructor will post a question on the discussion boards and all students must post a response at some point during the course.

The beauty of an online eCornell course is flexibility. This flexibility works well for today’s busy working professional.  A student does need to complete the course work within the start and end dates of the course, but when they complete the requirements is up to their discretion and schedule.

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From Blue Books to Secure Laptops

Computer-administered testing, made available on students’ own laptops, first became a reality for both students with disabilities and for professional graduate programs with intensive testing regimens, such as law school and medical school. In summer 2007, the New York State bar exam made headlines when problems with the software made available to students for their laptops, Securexam, resulted in some test takers having trouble saving or uploading their work. Since then, the problems with that particular software have been resolved.

Occasional mishaps aside, Securexam and similar offerings from companies such as Respondus are trickling down to the undergraduate level. Securexam has some 150 clients — also including high schools and professional certification programs — in five countries worldwide, including Seton Hall University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is extending
a pilot for the College of Arts & Sciences so that any interested faculty members can use the software in their classes.

The software works by opening a word processor window in students’ laptops and simultaneously locking down all other programs, including network access. When they are done with their exams, students can save and then upload their files — which are immediately encrypted and which they can’t open again — to a server accessible only by the instructor. Students can also submit later, if they need to find a working Internet connection, but the laptop remains locked — even after shutdowns or restarts — until they do. Licensed institutions pay on a user-per-year basis, ranging from $5 to $25 each.

More …

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Sharing Your Notes Online—and Getting Paid for It

Knetwit is a Web site that combines some familiar Web 2.0 features — user profiles, file sharing, online communities — with the goals of campus note-taking services. Its creators, who dropped out of Babson College to launch the service, have ambitions to develop it into a one-stop destination for educational content not only for students, but for professors and researchers as well.

As is often the case with new sites that rely on user-supplied content—and especially those that direct advertising revenue to members based on the popularity of that content—the model could raise some thorny legal questions, such as ones that continue to dog paper-based note-taking services, namely: At what point do class notes become indistinguishable from lecturers’ intellectual property? And how much legal responsibility does the site bear for the contributions of its members?

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I’ll Take My Lecture to Go, Please

It looks like students can be open-minded after all: When provided with the option to view lectures online, rather than just in person, a full 82 percent of undergraduates kindly offered that they’d be willing to entertain an alternative to showing up to class and paying attention in real time.

A new study released today suggests not only a willingness but a “clear preference” among undergraduates for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for concurrent or later viewing.

More …