But what if we are looking at the numbers in the wrong way?

Take this real life scenario into consideration: a certain college near where I work increased the student body population from 10,000 students to 25,000 students in less than two decades. A 250% increase. Now consider this: has the quality of the average high school graduate really increased by 250% over the past two decades? Has the quality of the average high school graduate really increased at all? Or have colleges lowered their entrance standards? You will find similar statistics in many of your “growing” colleges and universities today. If you do the math, 60% of those students may have not been ready at all for college when they entered.

I’m not trying to say that they shouldn’t be there – I want to see people educated. But in light of the consideration that maybe up to (at least) 60% of the students in any given college may not have even been prepared to be there, a statistic that says that 36% of them didn’t show statistically significant gains might be a small miracle.

Or maybe not – but if we aren’t looking at bigger picture factors in all this data we are gathering… how do we really know what we are looking at?

I know this is old news to people that are really into research and data… but some of this still seems to be shocking people out there. Today we read that “Students Might Not Be ‘Academically Adrift’ After All, Study Finds.” One of the many interesting points in this article is that the authors’ of Academically Adrift might have been incorrectly “translated by some people in politics to say, ‘College doesn’t matter.’”

Some people? Try a lot of people in key positions. People that are now rushing into certain crazes without having a bit of evidence that they work. Which is not a bad idea at an experimental level, but when entire degrees and millions of dollars are thrown at untested ideas just because people didn’t take a more nuanced look at the numbers? That is very dangerous territory for a field that is already teetering on the edge of obscurity, unable to afford another big blow to credibility.

The time of “chilling out” and just “being happy that there is attention to new ideas” is long past. The whole idea of “don’t look behind the curtain, don’t think critically, just ignore the negative because we all need to be shiny happy people that hold hands and sing kumbaya” never really worked for, well, anyone. It sounds cool to say “don’t bash the movement, just move it in the right direction using positive energy” before the sell-out happens… but it is impossible to accomplish that (and it sounds down-right Great Wizard of Oz-ish to say it) once the sell-out has already happened. And I just don’t see how anyone can look at education now and not see that the Great Sell-Out has already started to happen en masse.

I get that people don’t like that the haters are now tossing out the baby with the bathwater.. but is the only other option to keep the bathwater because we like the baby?

But stick this exact same model online and get enough media hype about it and suddenly it is a good idea? I’m confused.

Sure, open learning is a great idea. And obviously I like online learning. But open online learning based on bad pedagogy is still just as bad as the lecture hall class that uses the same pedagogical model.

Of course, I have been labeled a Luddite just for questioning the almighty xMOOC… but I am glad to see others are starting to do the same. The hype cycle for xMOOCs is still following the same path that the cycles for Google Wave and Second Life followed.

“But it gives people that can’t afford college in developing countries a chance to get an education!”

So…. what is wrong for the rich kids at Universities is okay for the poor people of the world? Someone that pays a lot of money can complain about bad course design and being herded like cattle through a system – but people in India and inner city America should just be happy to get whatever crap we toss their way?

Look – I love new ideas and deconstructing the university as much as the next EduGeek. But we still have to recognize bad design when we see it and call it out. And I am glad that there are still scholars sounding alarms about where technology is taking us. I don’t always agree with the alarms they sound, but they raise good questions in an age when many of the public figureheads of “ed tech innovation” seem to be afraid to step out of the corporate line. It seems like you have to love it or hate it…. with discussion and disagreement all lumped into the “hate it” category. You can read the comments on pretty much any article on The Chronicle that questions anything coming out of the corporate sector to see that people don’t know how to respectfully disagree or even realize that sometimes it is good to question everything.

“Question everything.” Give me a minute to let out a sigh here and remember the good old days when that was considered the cool thing to do. Back in the days before EduPunk was stolen and most of the “innovators” in our circles sat by and let it happen, or worse, mocked Jim Groom for speaking up for the purity of his baby.

Dang, I am starting to sound like a hippie. Time to go ingest some red meat. Maybe then I will see the light of the xMOOC.

Or maybe someone can point me in the direction of a good xMOOC that doesn’t just replicate what happens in large lecture halls all over the world? Every time I sign up for one, I just have a sense of deja vu and start feeling a loud “Mooooo…..” coming on.

But I guess the big question I have is: why kill something with millions of users and force them to go somewhere else for their service? Why not integrate Reader into Google+? I rarely use Google+, but to be honest I might give it another try if it had better content.

Yes, I know that you can share articles with other users in Google Reader – so why does it need a social network attached? Because so many people don’t use those sharing features. But they will post articles they read on Facebook all the time (and you can see in the link that they originally read it on Google Reader). So the question for Google: why not integrate Reader into your ghost town of a social network and inject some life into it? I would personally like to read my RSS feeds in an integrated social network stream.

Even better for educators, you could use Circles to share articles of interest with only your students. Which you already can, of course – but it would be so much simpler if you are reading and sharing those articles all from the same service.

But you could probably also say the same about many of the other dead or dying Google services. Makes you not want to sign up for anything they do – why get attached to a service that will be gone in a year?

But maybe that was just my experience. Maybe I was just hitting the same outlier school every time?

Or maybe it really was that the argument itself was invalid and I just didn’t know enough about history to know why.

Mike Caufield posted today about the problems he has with the current ideas of Sugata Mitra, and in doing so he also shed some light on the real problems with the “schools are industrial-age relic” arguments.

Caufield’s summary of his disagreement really tells the whole picture, but it is worth reading the whole article to look at specific historical reasons why he comes to his conclusions:

The history Mitra narrates is this. There once was a race of Victorians. They built a can opener called education, and nobody has changed that can opener since, even though we no longer eat from cans. But we no longer eat from cans! Give me a million dollars, please.

This is what we hear from so many educational reformers today.  No one would deny that our systems are not working and need to be fixed, changed, or re-built from the ground up. But how can we really know what needs to be changed if we are so ignorant of where we have come from and where we currently stand right now? To extend Caufield’s summary into the world of educational reformers, what we are basically getting is this:

But we no longer eat from cans! We eat from plastic containers. So we are going to change the can opener to a plastic container opener thingee (whatever that is – don’t ask us to explain ourselves okay?). Don’t listen to these people saying they don’t need can openers or plastic containers.  Ignore the man behind the curtain and give me a million dollars, please.

Isolated incident? What about Google Wave? Same cycle (even though it was forced to be a bit under the radar at first because of the restricted access imposed by Google). Once people started dividing and taking extreme sides…. poof. It died.

That is pretty much the cycle you see with many education tools and concepts. Under-the-radar experimentation gives way to mass exposure and hype, which brings out people that question the hype, which devolves into rigid camps and opposing sides, and finally ending with the quick death of the tool or idea.

Blogs, e-books, Twitter, and all these other tools that live on seem to so do so because no one really knows if they work or not. When the proponents stay open and honest about the short comings of a tool they champion, that tools seems to stay around a lot longer.

When a tool or concept gets labeled disruptive before it actually disrupts anything…. it more often that not dies out. But not before people take extreme sides and miss out on the good points the “other” side is making. The good news is that services that still live on after the death of the hype cycle (like Second Life) still see a core of people that experiment and do interesting things.

So far this year, it seems like the same cycle has been set in motion for MOOCs. First sign was an Inside Higher Ed article that slams MOOCs for being “designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering.” There is a good point in that statement: the business model behind many MOOCs is questionable at best. But I would say this statement goes a bit too far in painting an extreme picture of ALL MOOCs. Which could be said about many of the points in the article – something good to think about, but possibly taken to a bit of an extreme viewpoint against MOOCs.

In response, Mark Smithers questions the Inside Higher Ed article and defends MOOCs by saying that “Much of the learning that takes place in MOOCs is of the highest quality.” Smithers gives no definition of what exactly he means by highest quality… and I have probably heard about 50 million definitions of what “highest quality” means in the past few months alone. Then add on top of that the fact that many researchers will tell you it is impossible to really rate how high the quality of learning is… I’m not sure you can really say that one way of the other.

[What I would say is that the current dominant model of MOOC skews heavily towards independent learning, multiple choice testing, talking head videos, and other passive learning techniques that social constructivist leaning people like me feel does not lead to high quality learning. That is up for debate even in the social constructivist circles.... but I think it is really hard to say definitely either way.]

I think both articles have good points that fans and critics of MOOCs should take to heart. But I also think both articles embrace hyperbole that is not helpful to the debate. I don’t know much about the authors of the Inside Higher Ed article (there are 6 of them for a 14 paragraph article), but I do follow Smithers and he consistently makes great points in his blog.

Now we have problems cropping up like a MOOC being pulled suddenly for no reason and this week a teacher leaving a MOOC possibly because students didn’t want to work to his standards (don’t sign up for a course and then whine that the instructor wants you to actually work hard). All part of the cycle that usually ends in the death of the “over-hype phase” of a tool or idea.

Not that it is bad for these over-hype phases to die. It brings out the true believers and gets rid of the posers.

I think what further exasperates the problem is that those of us in Educational Technology (myself included) forget to consider what a small fishbowl we occupy. I talk to friends and students on campus all the time about online learning. Those outside of Ed Tech circles have rarely heard of MOOCs. Many are still asking me “how on Earth can you take a class online?” Many, many more than most people reading this blog would believe. Just because MOOCs are all over our news outlets doesn’t mean that they are disrupting anything. I just don’t agree with Smithers that “MOOCs are a classic disruptive innovation that fits the model described by Christensen precisely”…. yet. It may get there. But so far, my gut is telling me it is going to die out like others. If I am wrong, no problem. Won’t be the first time this hour.

Of course, I have to stop for the obligatory detailing of the “two different MOOCs”. First there is the original flavor of MOOC that was championed by Downes, Siemens, Groom, Levine, Cormier, and others. I say “was” because many of these leaders have hinted at or secretly admitted that they are ready for the MOOC hype to die. Sorry if I exposed some of you guys… but its time to come out of the closet on your feelings about MOOCs :).  But few people actually read this blog, so probably no harm done. Then there is the current, much more dominant flavor of MOOC (that are most often featured in the news) by MIT, EdX, and Udacity. Most of the discussion about MOOCs is about this newer, more dominant model.

The bigger problem with this whole area is really with our discipline as a whole. We have slowly changed from thought leaders to thought followers. Instead of evaluating trends or tools and asking “does this work at all and if so, where, how, why, etc?” we just say “this is the way that it is happening – get on board or get out of the way!” We think we are helpless bull-riders stuck on the back of a raging bull… not realizing that it is possible to tame the bull and utilize its full potential. Because a wild, raging bull is not good for anything but gawking entertainment and goring people. A trained bull can still do all that and much, much more.

And yes, I know that education has been stuck in a dictatorial-based mindset for a long time – with administrators telling everyone what to do (even though they never stopped to find out what really works) and “sage-on-the-stage” educators boring students to sleep. I agree that model doesn’t work, either. But we don’t need to swing the other way and just say “this is the way the world is going… grab on or get left behind!”

If Steve Jobs had listened to people telling him where the world was going, there would be no iPhone, no iPad, probably not even a mouse on any computer. But Jobs had a vision for the direction he thought the world should go, and he took the world there. He didn’t let the world take him to a place where “no one wants a computer in their cellphone – Palm phone sales are dismal!”

Or think of it this way: one of the biggest complaints I hear from some teenagers once they grow-up and enter into adulthood (the two don’t always happen at the same time) is that their parents didn’t reign them in enough. For these people, their parents were so concerned with being the cool, hip parents that they didn’t stop every once in a while and say “that’s not a good idea.” Really – I hear it all the time when I talk to college students. They don’t want dictators … but they wanted more guidance than they got.

What I am saying is we seem to be missing the middle ground. We don’t need to be dictators or hype-worshipers. We need leaders that question everything but still end up liking some things. We have a few out there, but we need many, many more. We need to reject the idea of the constant negative naysayer as much as we do the overly optimistic hype proselytizers.

I guess I am just coming out of the closet myself as a pragmatist in many ways…. and hoping that others will take that path, too.

Part of it is probably because of the way it happened, but I think the real reason is a bit larger in scope: the magic savior/disruptor of higher education, the promised one that was to come and fulfill all prophecies and lead us into a glorious new educational future – has proven to be just as fallible as any other tool or idea.

Maybe we are beginning to realize that the problem with education today is not necessarily the system or the structure or the pedagogy or the tools, but it is the people using those systems, structures, pedagogies, and tools incorrectly. Maybe we are now realizing that our awesome ideas that will destroy higher ed can themselves be misused in the wrong hands. Maybe we are beginning to realize that the people in charge of cool, new hip systems can make just as bone-headed decisions as the suit and tie guys in charge of academia if they don’t have the correct information.

Maybe it is time to realize that the road to true revolution in academia is not about disruption or trying to recreate the “mp3 of the educational world” or even about revolution at all. Maybe it is about spending the time to train people correctly in how to use the correct tools in the correct way. Maybe it is time to stop making fun of the people that are calling for research into new ideas by saying that they are “resisting the inevitable future” (sometime research reveals that new ideas are good – so its not like people calling for research are resisting new ideas).  Because I am starting to think that the only inevitable thing about the future is that we will be doomed to repeat the past if we don’t learn from it. This whole scenario with Coursera seems to just be us repeating past mistakes because we didn’t try to learn from them along the way.

Maybe it is time to stop looking at mistakes as something to be discarded and start looking at the them as something to learn from and possibly even improve upon.

I did get to look at some screenshots of the new Blackboard redesign recently – it seems like they are taking Facebook pretty seriously. Everything that I saw looks like it will be a social network for education. But they also thought their current version was user-friendly at one time (it never was), so you will have to excuse some skepticism on my part. The new Blackboard looked a bit like information overload to me – and I still saw some pop-up windows. One pop-up is just too much – use some AJAX already people.

I am currently taking a course in Schoology, and so far I like their interface. It seems to be missing some features here and there, but what they do have is easy to use from a student standpoint. I can’t speak for instructors or instructional designers, but I like it so far.

I also plan on keeping an eye on the Sensei project by WooThemes – they are building an open source LMS-ish project as a plugin to WordPress. If it works good and can be kept up to date, it could be an attractive option for schools to use as a content management system, blogging platform, and LMS all rolled into one.

Despite what others have said, Moodle is still out there and still gaining some ground (according to pesky statistics, that is.). Same can be said for Desire2Learn. Both are well-designed systems that could really use some big press right about now. I am hearing that some people who went with a newer LMS start-up are wishing they did their homework more and considered one of these two. Moodle and Desire2Learn definitely appeal to more select crowds, but once people really dig into them they tend to find that there is a lot to like that they never thought they needed, whereas there isn’t much depth (yet) to the start-ups – which is understandable.

But those are all just random thoughts about random LMS providers. Many industries that see as much as we have seen announced about new options and ideas tend to settle in for a long period of relative quiet. I don’t think that will be the case in the LMS realm. There are still many players that are just getting started (like Google). There are others (like Pearson) that have been around a bit but are really still just getting warmed up. Even Blackboard has pulled out some big surprises recently that makes people second guess where they think they are going. What will probably happen is that a few companies will try to beat Blackboard to the punch and jump out with their big announcements early. Then the new version of Blackboard will probably shock and surprise many. This will lead many others to hurry up and jump on the band wagon. Then companies like Instructure and others that have taken many steps to differentiate themselves from Blackboard will step-up and make some big announcements on just how different they are. Which is good – we need the diversity in the market.

So, in other words, if you think it is time to kick back and not pay attention to the LMS market, I think you are in for a bit of a jolt. Things aren’t going to slow down anytime soon.

You can read the details about this project also in this article at The Chronicle. Gooru Learning is also a part of this partnership.

Of course, instructors have been doing mash-ups with photocopying machines forever, with many of them switching over to scanners and PDFs once they take their courses digital. My prediction is that the price point on these “mash-up” textbooks will be the make-or-break of this project. Students have already grown tired of over-priced digital textbooks.

Another issue to consider is what else can be mixed into the content. What about interactive activities? Videos? If you are going to put these on a mobile device, will you be able to insert blog posts and other websites into the content? Will the authors of these websites be compensated for their inclusion?

I am also curious to see if there will be some kind of bulk rate for entire schools. Most schools purchase access to journals and other electronic research materials… why not just buy access to textbooks also? Then you can mix in journal articles with the chapters from the text book you want, and the students don’t have to pay extra for textbooks on top of fees. Or maybe they just have a low, flat textbook fee each semester? If they focus Project Blue Sky on individual instructors, it will basically just become as convoluted as our current textbook system is – just a bit easier on the back. But focus it on entire Universities – you might have a massive, customizable tool right at your fingertips.

Due to recent announcements from Blackboard, I have been waiting a bit to see how their new directions will fit into the Open Learning world. I attended a sneak preview of their next generation product, and to be honest… I am not sure. It seems like they are recreating Facebook as a learning-centered social network in some ways. But there are ways to connect to external services like Facebook and Twitter. So a lot of that remains to be seen – but that can be figured out later. For now, on to the new and improved open learning diagram:

Personal Learning Environments / Networks

If you are online, you probably already have a PLE or PLN. Possibly even both. The network would be the people you follow, read, etc regardless of platform – as well as the people that read and follow you. The environment would be the tool or tools you use to bring in everything you want to read – like Google Reader, a list of certain topical pages on Facebook, or something else like that. If you use them, then you would use several environments to create your network. The main idea is that no two people create the same PLE/N, but they all interact with each other.

We all know that we can control our identity in our own PLE/N. We can post anonymously in some places, as ourselves in others, and as a fictitious pseudo-name in others. I have already touched on how this is important for privacy issues. I just want to touch base with the idea again to re-enforce the point that many others (Siemens, Downes, Groom, Cormier, etc) have made: open learning gives students more control over their identity and therefore fulfills the original intent of FERPA and other privacy measures.

The downside to realize is that students will need much, much, more education on what that control means.

So, back to the diagram. I made another change in that the Student PLE looks more like a cloud of environments, rather than just one static shape. This is more in line with how a PLE/N really works. So many things over lap out there on the web. Many students work together. Many students go off on a side tangent and discuss or investigate things that are external to the course topic. All of this is a valid part of the learning process. It is impossible to draw hard, fast lines in this cloud – I really just put an arrow there to highlight what could happen, but it is really not that neat and tidy.

Another important facet to point out is that the arrow between a specific student’s PLE/N and the Learning Space goes both ways, as students can also learn from the instructor as well as submit new ideas and concepts to be learned by the instructor. In reality, the Learning Space would not necessarily be where you would place the instructor on this diagram. They would be one of many nodes existing out in the “cloud” of PLE/Ns. This is why the diagram says “Student / Teacher PLE / N” – the instructors would be the administrators of the Learning Space and the guides of what students learn, but ultimately they would be in the network sharing and learning along with the students.

The bigger picture would look like a huge cloud of PLE/Ns. As you get closer to the school itself, this cloud would form more order and organization, as students and teachers make sense of what they are learning. The Learning Spaces would form the technology barrier between the chaotic learning cloud and the learning institutions. These spaces would be where learning is observed, where ideas are organized into assignments, where interaction is organized into discussions. This organized content would be sent to the university or other institution for analysis, proof of learning, statistics  etc. But this organization would also be spit back out into the cloud of learning for others to learn from, tear through, re-organize, re-mix, etc.

The idea is to have a constantly moving, changing, chaotic, living, growing, breathing process of learning rather than the static, predictable  unidirectional process that we currently have.

“Ever wish you could engage your learners more without even trying?”

Yes – it actually says that. Call me old fashioned, but I remember the days when “engagement” by default meant you had to try or it just wasn’t actually engagement. But I guess the goal is a newfangled kind of learning where the instructor doesn’t even try.

Sounds good to me – collect a paycheck without lifting a finger! We can automate this whole process it seems.