Tamny’s opinion is both different from most business analysts and important. His conclusion discourages further investment in current and potential start-up enterprises. It also presents another perspective for institutional boards and governments seeking to better understand the role of education technology.

Joshua Kim, in his Inside Higher Ed blog “Learn,” (here and here) was frustrated by Tamny’s choice of the term “online education.” Kim correctly reports online education technology is heavily used in traditional classrooms as well. Tmany’s article divided higher education between colleges and universities offering classroom instruction and firms offering online education that lack contact with peers and faculty—the typical MOOC provider (Massive Open Online Course). These are two extremes of Kim’s spectrum of the use of “online” technology.  Tamny did not use the term “MOOC” itself.

John Tamny is a graduate in government from the University of Texas Austin and MBA from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, both traditional universities. He may also be viewing higher education from that perspective as well.

Education as an economic enterprise

An analysis of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) data by e-Literate’s Phil Hill (here) provides evidence supporting Tamny’s conclusion if Tamny’s “online” education refers to MOOC course providers such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. With 65-75% of MOOC students having a bachelor’s degree or higher, Hill concluded: “When combined with the fact that MOOCs to date have not been applied for academic credit, it is apparent that the primary usage of MOOCs has been for professional development or lifelong learning.” (His emphasis). Hill explains:

The data points to the need for targeting degree-seeking students in a more aggressive manner than the current “it’s open for all” approach while also finding more immediate methods for allowing MOOC students to earn academic credit. To allow for academic credit for MOOCs, the actual course designs and assessment have to satisfy accrediting bodies, and the credits have to be accepted by degree-granting institutions.

Providing online credit-bearing courses is a task that some accredited colleges and universities are doing well. The primary barrier to broader use appears to be additional investment at a time of financial exigency. Course materials and learning infrastructure, and providing both technical and tutorial support for online students is costly. For example, the cost of course materials by HarvardX is estimated to be $250,000. Experts estimated WGBH Sandel’s Justice lectures and student participation at $1 million.  (The video and supplementary course materials are distributed by PBS as a DVD). A typical college or university has between 1,000 and 2,000 courses, some taught infrequently. The potential investment, if borne by one institution, would be comparable to Open University UK’s 3-year undergraduate program cost of US$ 1billion. Publishers have made similar investments in their course materials and online learning services provided with textbooks. Offering a faculty member $500 to $5,000 to independently create such a course cannot be expected to achieve comparable quality.

Some colleges and universities are expecting faculty to independently create course materials (without permission or license copyright precludes use of video, audio, slide presentations, assessment items and readings and, often, online learning services access now included with a textbook). Some colleges and universities support a team that has all of the essential talent and subject matter expertise and facilities and equipment to develop a course or assemble a course from existing materials. They may have studio facilities with the latest technology and experienced talent. Expecting faculty themselves to produce comparable learning materials is unreasonable. A quality brand and faculty reputations imply sophisticated, comprehensive, and proven course materials.

Providing technical support and tutors for online courses requires an organization with skills and knowledge, and training to be effective tutors. This support does improve student performance and retention as well a student satisfaction.

Coursera changing course?

Tamar Lewin, The New York Times quotes Daphne Koller:

“Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”

Coursera’s new market would be for-credit online courses for 1.25 million students at partnering public institutions.

The unsigned Coursera agreement with the University of Kentucky requires course materials to be provided by the University based on Coursera’s model of instruction. Courses are offered under the “brand” of the offering college or university.

The capability to transfer course materials from one learning system to another is key to low unit costs per student enrollment by increasing the number of students who are benefiting from the investment. Recent start-ups, including Coursera, have not publicly made commitment to the standards needed for interoperability. (Coursera does have options that permit the course to be offered to others for delivery to their students and to license courses to others for use with Coursera-compliant software).

The U.S. Department of Defense sought similar unit cost benefits; the SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) specification was implemented by most open source and commercial learning systems for higher education and by textbook publishers. Though dated and limited, this standard continues to serve its purpose. A new version based on real-time exchanges of data (CMI-5) has been incorporated in several commercial systems.

A combination of current and new providers of online courses, sharing course materials and courses, could scale faster if all parties agreed to follow standards.

Online with support?

The data Phil Hill cites also suggests a third level—professional development and personal interest with tutorial support. This is the online “continuing education” option. These courses have value for students and their employers. Both students and employers have a history of paying for these courses.

Three business models have been tested: The MOOC providers have tested offering courses for free.

A variant of the first, fees for additional services. Now MOOC providers are implementing fees for security and identity management, for certificates of completion and for course credit recommendations. These fees are nearing the $100 per enrolled student that may make open courses economically viable. “Advertising” was implicit in the “free” open course offerings. The online experience could encourage a student to enroll in other offering college or university. There is limited early opinion suggesting this may be the case.

Second, Courses for professional development and personal interest instruction. “Great Courses” has developed the DVD/CD-ROM market. With 350 courses The Teaching Company appears to be profitable. (It is a private company). College and universities continuing education often is successful with a similar model. With support, the MOOC providers could charge an additional or higher fee for this service. Hill’s professional development model suggests this model.

Third, the online courses offered for credit by accredited colleges and universities, or on their behalf as Coursera is now offering for public university systems.

Accreditation, course or institution or both

Thursday Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, “urged a new system of course-level accreditation that would make those courses eligible for federal financial aid” and presumably could be used to supplement course offerings of the California public colleges and universities to increase capacity for enrollments. In his testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s subcommittee on higher education and workforce training, Carey wrote:

[C]olleges are free to define their own standards of academic success, which accreditors must accept. Unsurprisingly, nearly all colleges believe they are successful.

He continued,

Accreditation involves no legitimate investigation of how much students are learning or what kind of academic standards, if any, are enforced. The existing accreditation process simply does not allow for such questions to be asked, or answered. That is why standards have fallen so far under the aegis of accreditation.

He concluded:

The accreditation process is also a major barrier to innovation. Accreditation is a club, and if you want to join the club, or be allowed to stay in the club, you have to show that you’re like the other members. This all but eliminates the possibility of price competition from new entrants to the higher-education market, which is the only thing that will solve the nation’s college cost problem in the long run.

Barriers to success

The data Phil Hill cites and John Tamny’s observation does not say online education as practiced by MOOC providers is not viable, but rather there are separate markets with different needs at different prices. Other data shows student performance online is comparable to lecture, especially in engineering, mathematics and science courses. It also shows introducing online materials as part of a course permits faculty to be more productive and students to learn more and retain it longer.

Data does not support that all of the learning experiences in an undergraduate residential college environment can be reproduced through online learning; John Tamny believes employers value residential education. Hence his conclusion: traditional colleges and universities will continue to be viable, but online providers—in the narrow sense—are doomed to failure. His inference is motivation for a thorough discussion of costs and benefits of employing different methods of instruction.

The opinion of employers of online education is conflicting and largely unknown. Course accreditation remains unresolved.

Higher education is a long-term and complex process in a changing economic and political environment. John Tamny, Phil Hill and Joshua Kim have contributed to an important conversation that should broadly continue.

The post MOOCs: A slowly deflating “Bubble”? appeared first on e-Literate.

In retrospect, it turns out that the breakup of the grand coalition and resulting near-death experience may be the best thing that ever happened to the project.

A Brief History

I wrote a long post about the lead-up to the collapse of the project a while back, which I won’t reconstruct here. But for those who aren’t familiar with the history, here’s the short version:

• OAE started as an experiment by Cambridge, whose tutorial-style education is quite different from that of a traditional American university and is particularly poorly served by a traditional LMS architecture. They wanted a platform that was well suited for fluid academic collaboration.
• Early prototypes generated excitement in the community. There was a feeling that the project had the potential of truly re-imagining the virtual learning environment. Other schools began to volunteer developers to work on the project.
• Some elements in the leadership of the Sakai community, which had been frustrated with the slowing pace of development and innovation in the Sakai platform, decided that the Cambridge project would become the future of Sakai. The project was dubbed “Sakai 3.” This created resentment among the developers who were working hard to keep the Sakai platform fresh and up-to-date while putting additional pressure on the Cambridge group to build functionality quickly.
• The Foundation board and new Executive Director, seeing the damage that was being done to the traditional Sakai CLE coalition, revised their position on the relationship between the two platforms, arguing that the old and the new would likely co-exist for many years. Sakai 3 was renamed “Sakai OAE (Open Academic Environment” to help underscore this point.
• Nevertheless, Sakai OAE continued to be seen largely as the successor platform, even if the succession was now further out into the future. Some of the big-named schools in the Sakai community began making major commitments of resources to the development of the OAE platform.
• With these new resources came new requirements. The new schools were focused on meeting their local need of having a fresh, next-generation platform that could replace their existing Sakai platform with minimum user pain and retraining required. Recall that this was precisely not what Cambridge was originally trying to achieve.
• The new resources also brought more complex governance, with multiple committees and multiple layers of approval required.
• Meanwhile, the OAE team had discovered flaws in their original architecture that caused serious scalability problems. While some attempts were made to address these problems, they were not given priority over functional requirements as they should have, probably in part because of the strong and ever-growing pressure to deliver a full LMS replacement in a short period of time based on an inflexible roadmap that was defined by an unwieldy bureaucracy.
• Predictably, the project collapsed under its own weight. OAE hit the scalability wall that they had seen coming for some time. It became clear that the project had no chance of coming close to delivering on its road map.
• The schools that had joined the coalition began leaving the coalition, in roughly the reverse order in which they had joined, leaving just a few survivor schools to figure out if they could do anything of value with the limited funding and therefore time they had left.

Back to Basics

The surviving team took several crucial steps. First, they focused on the architectural problems and, in doing so, returned to the project’s original commitment to build as little as possible on as much existing open source infrastructure as possible. In the early phases of the project, OAE was going to be built on top of Apache Jackrabbit. It turned out that Jackrabbit did not have the right performance characteristics for the kinds of usage that OAE would see. But by the time that became clear, there was a lot of code in OAE that would have to be completely refactored in order to move to another open source back end. Rather than do that in the face of mounting pressure for progress on functional requirements, one of the OAE architects wrote a custom back end that could replace Jackrabbit with relatively minimal change to the code on top of it. And this was the source of OAE’s near-fatal performance problems. This time, the team bit the bullet and re-implemented the back end on the battle-tested Node.js platform. In the process, they redesigned OAE as a true multi-tenant system.

Second, they returned to the original focus on academic collaboration. If the first generation of LMSs were inspired by nineties-era generic groupware like Lotus Notes, OAE is inspired by teensies-era generic groupware like G+ and Dropbox. But rather than just copying those systems straightforwardly and then adding features on top, the team asked the question, “What are the limitations in the basic structures of these systems that make academic collaboration more difficult?” The answer often came back to one of my favorite bugaboos in academic software—permissions. Sharing in these generic tools is awkward for academic contexts, where sometimes you need to be quite restrictive and other times you want to be quite open. The OAE team focused on the relationships among people, documents, and discussions, thinking through some common academic use cases and building a system that specifically supports those use cases.

And finally, they threw out most of the governance, letting the product team run with the vast amount of input they had already gotten regarding user needs over the past few years. The team largely set its own roadmap and made its own design decisions.

And Now…?

As I mentioned earlier, the new system is now true multi-tenant. In fact, Cambridge, Georgia Tech and Marist are sharing an instance of the platform. Furthermore, it has a feature called “permeability” which allows sharing and discoverability between tenants on the platform. (Each tenant can turn this on or off.) Functionality appears to be roughly where it was before the implosion, with some incremental improvements in both capability and usability. The system scales linearly. (You can see a recent state-of-the-project presentation here and an architectural overview presentation here.) On the one hand, the project has far fewer resources than it did a year ago. On the other hand, the current project participants seem committed to continuing the work, and the overhead of additional resources didn’t seemed to do more harm than good.

That said, OAE is at an interesting crossroads. Having caught up with its original goals, they need to decide what to do next. Even more importantly, they need to decide how they are going to decide. The biggest challenge for user-facing academic open source projects like OAE, Sakai, and uPortal is maintaining the right kind of link with the users and sponsors. These projects need continuous and serious input from their adopting stakeholders in order to feed their vision for what to do next in order to keep their projects fresh and compelling. In the Sakai and Jasig communities, I have generally seen one of two things happen in this regard:

• A top-down effort is created to drive the effort through a coalition of senior managers, which often results in inefficient development, lots of political squabbles, and clunky software. (See Conway’s Law.)
• The developers are left to drive the product progress on their own, which often results in insufficient resourcing for work that needs to be done and poor or inconsistent processes for getting user input and developing a vision for the product’s future, since it is led by developers who have not had training as product managers and often don’t see product management as what they do.

The OAE project actually has some talented product management types on the team who have actually been functioning as product managers during this last period of the project’s development. But it’s not yet clear how the product management role can function best in the context of a project that is funded by multiple institutions. I am very curious to see how the governance works out. I am also curious to see how the project pivots to its next set of goals as their foundational academic collaboration functionality matures. It is not obvious to me that moving to traditional LMS assessment and grading functionality is the next logical step. I could see, for example, how OAE could be a terrific hub for Connectionist MOOCs, particularly if it were to add RSS aggregation and sharing capabilities or even deeper WordPress integration.

Regardless, the turnaround the project has achieved to-date has been remarkable. There are some deep lessons here participants in such projects—ones that merit further study. I hope that we will hear some more retrospective analysis from project participants at some point.

The post The Death and Rebirth of Sakai OAE appeared first on e-Literate.

Now that the bill has passed its major test in the senate, it would be worth comparing the current bill with that proposed a few months ago, as the amendments have been significant. The majority of amendments have been in response to faculty concerns about governance and quality assurance of online courses. The full text of the current bill can be found here.

Highlight of Changes

Original proposal of SB520 would have:

• Created the California Online Student Access Platform to be administered by the California Open Education Resources Council (the one created to administer California’s OER law SB1052);
• Created a single pool of online versions of “the 50 most impacted lower division courses” across all three systems (University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges);
• Required the three systems to provide credit to students who successful take and pass the courses; and
• Included content that has been reviewed and recommended by the American Council on Education.

Current version of SB 520 that passed senate would:

• Create a set of three Incentive Grant programs for online courses to be administered by the office of President or Chancellor for each system “in consultation with their respective statewide academic senates”;
• Create a list of 20 high-demand lower-division courses for each system that are “deemed necessary for program completion, deemed satisfactory for meeting general education requirements, or in areas defined as transferable lower division courses”;
• Require the three systems to “each provide up to 15 incentive grants to faculty and campuses to facilitate certain intersegmental and intrasegmental partnerships and partnerships between online course technology providers and faculty”;
• Place these courses into the California Virtual Campus portal;
• Prohibit public funds from being used to fund any private aspect of a partnerships;
• Give priority to courses that have also been selected by one or both of the other segments;
• Require grants for only a course that has “associated with it a member of the faculty of the segment providing the grant who serves as the instructor of record, and the course is approved by the academic senate of that segment”;
• Shift the approval of the pool of online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC) to the administration and faculty senates of the three systems while also removing any tie to American Council on Education recommendations;
• Regularly solicit and consider from their respective statewide student associations advice and guidance; and
• Tie the provisions of the bill to funding in the Annual Budget Act.

Criteria for Incentive Grants

The primary definition of the course criteria are largely the same:

Section 2 (e) When evaluating a potential faculty or campus grantee to receive an incentive grant pursuant to this section, the President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges shall consider the extent to which the developed or deployed course will do each of the following:

(1) Provide students with instructional support and related services to promote retention and success.

(2) Provide students with interaction with instructors and other students.

(3) Contain a proctored student assessment and examination process that ensures academic integrity and satisfactorily measures student learning.

(4) Provide a student with an opportunity to assess the extent to which he or she is suited for online learning before enrolling.

(5) Use, as the primary course text or as a wholly acceptable alternative, content, where it exists, from the California Digital Open Source Library established pursuant to Section 66408.

(6) Include adaptive learning technology systems or comparable technologies that can provide significant improvement in student learning.

(7) Be made available to students of another system, regardless of the system at which they are enrolled.

Comments

Michael and I put down our thoughts on the subject of online education to address bottleneck courses in the position paper, and I think several of our recommendations are relevant to the current SB 520 (I cannot speak to the correlation or causation of our paper and the amendments, but the intent of The 20 Million Minds Foundation was certainly to use the paper to influence policy makers).

4) Foster a culture of experimentation and craft among faculty – Campus faculty should be encouraged to learn about how they can incorporate technology to solve educational problems and be empowered to develop their own solutions for their campus’ bottleneck course problems. To this end, the state should fund a broad grant program in which faculty develop pilot bottleneck course solutions. Participants should be led through a development process using educational technologies that exposes them to a range of technology-supported course design options.

5) Encourage the implementation, dissemination and broader adoption of faculty-developed solutions – When good bottleneck solutions are developed by faculty, either through the grant program or through other means, every effort should be made to see that they are implemented locally and adopted broadly. Knowledge of and experience with solutions developed to teach with quality at scale should be recognized as an essential part of California faculty’s professional development.

6) Avoid the trap of treating all three systems with the same solution – Each of the three systems has a distinct mission and student population, and care should be taken to craft different solutions based on the systems’ needs.

9) Provide a “safety valve” of outside provision of credit-bearing, transferable online courses by filling gaps to allow SB 520 to succeed. To achieve the key balance we envision – enabling and supporting faculty to create local solutions while keeping in mind the student right to have access to needed courses, there is an implied two-tiered course selection system.

10) Provide a multi-level course approval process for SB 520 – Whenever possible, faculty should retain oversight of quality. The initial list of approved safety valve courses should therefore be reviewed by a faculty-driven mechanism, which can be set up through the academic senates. However, since access should be a student right, there must always be some safety valve option. Therefore, in the event that the faculty-driven process is not able to recommend adequate provisions, an administrative body should review any gaps in the list and ,where solutions are inadequate, either fund development or partnership to provide the necessary courses or select contingency solutions until such time as a faculty-approved alternative can be provided.

Despite much of the public discussion, SB 520 is not targeted at MOOCs – it is targeted at online courses in general. The bill does allow and encourage partnerships with “online course technology providers”, but that could include non-MOOC providers such as StraighterLine, Pearson, Academic Partnerships, Deltak, 2U, or others.

The post California’s Online Education Bill SB 520 Passes Senate appeared first on e-Literate.

• LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact
• Instructure, maker of Canvas LMS, raises $30M
• Desire2Learn announces Student Success System as predictive analytics with new release
• Sakai OAE recovers from loss of partners, rebrands as Apereo OAE
• Coursera shifts strategy in partnering with schools, now overlaps with LMS market
• edX finishes releasing platform code as open source
• LMS conference season approaching

LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact

In mid May, Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik hosted a panel discussion of the LMS CEOs at the Learning Impact conference. Blackboard’s new CEO, Jay Bhatt, was welcomed into the higher education community with the, ahem, liveliest panel discussion in recent memory. Given the all-star panel (John Baker, CEO, Desire2Learn; Jay Bhatt, CEO, Blackboard; Josh Coates, CEO Instructure; Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle; Manoj Kutty, CEO, LoudCloud Systems; Matt Leavy, CEO, Pearson eCollege), I’ve been surprised to see very little discussion after the event.

But then I remembered:

The First Rule of the LMS Panel is you do not talk about the LMS Panel

Instructure, maker of Canvas LMS, raises $30M

Ever since Instructure’s release of the Canvas LMS in 2010, the company has been gaining steadily in the LMS market within North America. This morning the company announced that they have raised $30M in series D funding (often the last round of venture capital funding before a company goes public or has some other equity event). As reported at TechCrunch:

Utah-based Instructure launched Canvas in 2011 to capitalize on the new opportunity and audience emanating from the crazy growth in online education (and students moving online) and give colleges and universities a flexible, open-source alternative. And, if the company’s news today serves as any indication, it’s been working, as Instructure announced this morning that it has raised a hefty $30 million in series D financing.

The new round, which brings the startup’s total investment to $50 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from the company’s existing investors, including EPIC Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures. As a result of the round, Bessemer partner and former IBM exec Byron Deeter will join Instructure’s board of directors. [snip]

Today, Canvas has six million teacher and student users from across 425 institutions, and the company itself has booked more than $90 million in contracts. This, the founders said has led to double-digit revenue growth over the last three year — a trend which they hope the new capital will continue.

Desire2Learn announces Student Success System as predictive analytics with new release

Desire2Learn has been in the LMS market since 1999, but they have been experienced significant growth during the past 3 years after their success in the Blackboard patent lawsuit struggle. Their focus on learner analytics is not new, as they’ve offered data and reporting tools since 2010. The new announcement from early May puts Desire2Learn into the game of predictive analytics – using learner activity data to predict course and program success, as reported in the Wall Street Journal:

Computer-based educational systems have long helped impart information to students and assess their understanding of it. The next step, one company in the field says, is using their behavior to make predictions.

That’s the aim of technology being announced Tuesday by Desire2Learn, a Canadian company that specializes in cloud-based based learning systems it markets to colleges, schools and companies.

Desire2Learn, launched in 1999, competes with companies like Blackboard and Instructure. It claims that 10 million learners at a range of institutions have made use of its technology, including some at big U.S. university systems.

John Baker, the company’s president and CEO, says that over the years it has gathered extensive data about students’ usage of its software, including records on how often they read or otherwise engaged with instructional materials and how they subsequently performed on tests.

With the aid of that data, Desire2Learn has developed a series of “machine learning” algorithms to make predictions about how users ultimately will perform based on their activity as online classes progress, Baker says. The idea is to give instructors’ early warning about students that might need extra encouragement or individualized attention.

Sakai OAE recovers from loss of partners, rebrands as Apereo OAE

Last year I described the difficulties faced by the Sakai OE project based on the departures of founding members University of Michigan and Indiana University, followed by UC Berkeley and Charles Sturt University. At the time I questioned the “sustainability of the community source model as practiced by Sakai” and asked whether the project could use the changes to “coalesce behind a unified vision and leverage the community source model to execute on that vision in a timely manner”.

Based on initial reports from the Apereo conference this week, there is now reason to believe the answer might be yes. From the OAE session:

The Sakai Open Academic Environment [ed. now rebranded Apereo OAE] is a platform that focusses on group collaboration between researchers, students and lecturers, and strongly embraces openness, creation, re-use, re-mixing and discovery of content, people and groups. A core principle is enabling actual end-users to drive innovation from the inside and contribute in a number of different ways.

During the summer of 2012, the number of stakeholders in the project shrank, and changes were made to the project?s anticipated usage and deployment model, as well as the initial project scope. In September 2012, the OAE team embarked on a re-architecture of the code base, targeting a much higher scale and a multi-tenant cloud-compatible deployment model, where a single installation can host multiple institutions at the same time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Coursera shifts strategy in partnering with schools, now overlaps with LMS market

In a November 2012 post referencing the Canvas Network and Coursera / Antioch partnership, I argued that “However this development turns out, I do believe the LMS and MOOC markets are starting to overlap and influence each other.”

One additional aspect of Coursera’s announcement last week that it is partnering with 10 statewide higher education systems is the significant overlap in role between Coursera’s learning platform and the traditional LMS-based learning platforms. Now that schools will be using Coursera to embed content within their hybrid or online courses, the platform is now indirectly competing with established LMS solutions. As described at Inside Higher Ed:

Morgan [ed. from Tennesse Board of Regents] said his system currently uses Desire2Learn to offer online classes, but he wants to test out the analytics software that Coursera offers to instructors trying to track student progress and prevent students from derailing.

“We believe it will offer opportunities beyond what our current capacity is,” Morgan said. (He said he had not yet looked at Desire2Learn’s new analytics service, which was announced several weeks ago.) [snip]

At SUNY, Hatch said a large enrollment course at Stony Brook University that uses Blackboard has run into difficulty.

“We know Coursera scales and can handle hundreds of thousands of users at a time and we can’t say that today about our current platforms” — primarily Blackboard, Hatch said.

Koller said Coursera does not currently view itself as a competitor to Blackboard and other learning management systems, though she said there is a “70 to 80 percent” overlap in capabilities. [emphasis added]

“It’s pretty clear to me that we will not replace every single course with this format,” she said.

edX finishes releasing platform code as open source

After a long process that started with MITx promising to be an open source platform back in late 2011, edX has now completed the work to make its code fully open source. As described by The H Open:

The edX learning platform has now completed its transition to open source and is available under an AGPL licence. The core of the system is the edx-platform which includes both the LMS (Learning Management System) and Studio, a tool for creating courses. Other parts of the system, such as the XBlock component architecture for courseware, machine-learning-based grading such as EASE, the discern tool, deployment tools, interfaces to external grading systems and Python execution utilities, can all be found on the new code.edx.org.

LMS conference season approaching

Expect more news from the LMS / Learning Platform market as the LMS user conferences approach this summer.

The post LMS Market Update: May and June News appeared first on e-Literate.

 Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC users, the company realized that most of them had already earned college degrees, said Ms. Koller. That was well and good, but it suggested to Coursera’s founders that MOOCs would not be sufficient to achieve their ambitions.

“If you’re looking to really move the needle on fundamental educational problems, inside and outside the United States, you’re going to need to help people reach the first milestone, which is getting their degrees to begin with,” Ms. Koller said.

and from the New York Times:

“Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”

These statements can be understood by looking at the demographic data for students that have been taking xMOOCs (i.e. from Coursera, Udacity and edX) in their first year.

As early as Fall 2012, demographic information was coming out that the majority of MOOC students already had a higher education degree. From Chuck Severance’s slideshare summarizing student data in his Internet History, Technology and Security course on Coursera, we saw that 73% of students answering his survey already had at least a bachelor’s degree.

From Duke’s February 2013 report on their Bioelectricity course on Coursera, 72% of students answering their survey already had at least a bachelor’s degree.

And from the University of Edinburgh’s May 2013 report on six different courses all on Coursera, we find that a combined 70% of students in their study already had at least a bachelor’s degree.

At Coursera’s April 2013 partners conference, they shared that across all courses 75% of students within their system already had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Is this situation unique to Coursera? Perhaps not. In the Summer 2013 issue of Research & Practice in Assessment magazine, Lori Breslow and others studied the Circuits & Electronics course in edX and found that 65% of students answering his survey already had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Of the survey responders who answered a question about highest degree attained, 37% had a bachelor’s degree, 28% had a master’s or professional degree, and 27% were high school graduates.

It is interesting to note that there is virtually no public data from Udacity or its partners. Coursera and their partners have been leaders among the xMOOC providers in sharing data from these courses.

The consistency of data (ranging from 65% – 75% of MOOC students having at least a bachelor’s degree) is actually quite remarkable given the ad hoc nature of surveys and studies.

When combined with the fact that MOOCs to date have not been applied for academic credit, it is apparent that the primary usage of MOOCs has been for professional development or lifelong learning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that . . .

Click here to view the embedded video.

In fact, some of the proponents of the original connectivist MOOCs, or cMOOCs, have exactly that goal in mind of enabling lifelong learning.

How Does This Affect Recent Announcements?

The MOOC providers set out to revolutionize higher education, but as Daphne Koller indicated the usage of standalone MOOC courses to date is not sufficient, despite the huge numbers of enrolled students. The data points to the need for targeting degree-seeking students in a more aggressive manner than the current “it’s open for all” approach while also finding more immediate methods for allowing MOOC students to earn academic credit. To allow for academic credit for MOOCs, the actual course designs and assessment have satisfy accrediting bodies, and the credits have to be accepted by degree-granting institutions.

To have a real impact on helping students get their degrees, there seems to be two choices:

• Option 1) Replace colleges and universities as providers of for-credit courses or even degree programs
• Option 2) Work with colleges and universities to embed MOOC courses or courseware into for-credit courses or degree programs

The biggest news in the MOOC world in 2013 is the development of Option 2), which is the only viable way in the short term for MOOCs to directly impact degree-seeking higher education students. edX expanded their pilot program at San Jose State University to embed Circuits & Electronics MOOC within official SJSU courses. Udacity also announced a program with SJSU to offer for-credit MOOC-based courses. Udacity also announced the development of a MOOC-only online master’s degree program through Georgia Tech. And now, Coursera also moves to use MOOC courses as the basis for college and university courses.

I do not see Options 1) and 2) and mutually exclusive, by the way. I would assume that Coursera, Udacity and edX will continue to offer standalone MOOCs while also enabling collegiate embedding of MOOCs into official courses and programs.

The post MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context appeared first on e-Literate.

Recommendations

The scope of this position paper is an analysis and set of recommendations on the “application of state-driven online education initiatives to address the bottleneck course problem at the three public systems in California”. In particular, we should address the question of of how the state could most effectively invest the proposed $37 million in funding, above and beyond the increased general funding to the three systems.

The key aspect for increased online education is to create and support a new right – for matriculated students to have access to the courses they need to complete their degrees.

Towards achieving that goal, we recommend the following:

General Issues

1. Maintain Focus - The state government should remain in a supporting role – provide funding, provide incentives, and require accountability from the systems on use of funding. The additional funding and public pressure do not replace the general budget funding, and it should be used selectively to maintain the greatest effect. While there are other laudable goals for online education options in public higher education systems, the state should invest additional funds to support only those online programs that measurably address bottleneck course problems.
2. Develop measurable goals – Measuring both the size and the impact of bottleneck courses can be difficult, but it is also essential to ensuring that the state’s investment pays off. Likewise, it will be important to measure student completion and other success measures for any non-traditional solutions to bottleneck course problems, including but not limited to safety valve programs. The state should work with the systems to identify a small number of practical success measures and then provide funding necessary to implement the data collection to track these measures.
3. Ensure that students have access to support services and academic mentoring - As described by multiple studies, a crucial aspect of successful online programs is to provide support and retention services for students taking online courses. This is especially important for any systemwide initiatives where the student’s home institution may not have the knowledge or resources to help the student taking a course originating outside the institution. For example, campus advisors should receive alerts when their advisees sign up for third-party courses as well as when those students are in danger of failing to complete those courses.

Increasing Capacity in Traditional Courses

4. Foster a culture of experimentation and craft among faculty – Campus faculty should be encouraged to learn about how they can incorporate technology to solve educational problems and be empowered to develop their own solutions for their campus’ bottleneck course problems. To this end, the state should fund a broad grant program in which faculty develop pilot bottleneck course solutions. Participants should be led through a development process using educational technologies that exposes them to a range of technology-supported course design options.
5. Encourage the implementation, dissemination and broader adoption of faculty-developed solutions – When good bottleneck solutions are developed by faculty, either through the grant program or through other means, every effort should be made to see that they are implemented locally and adopted broadly. Knowledge of and experience with solutions developed to teach with quality at scale should be recognized as an essential part of California faculty’s professional development.

Internal Online Providers for Statewide Systems

6. Avoid the trap of treating all three systems with the same solution - Each of the three systems has a distinct mission and student population, and care should be taken to craft different solutions based on the systems’ needs.
7. Identify and support an organization to share best practices at California Community Colleges. While CCC has expanded its use of online education already, there is little support for the campuses to share best practices in course design. The state should consider a model similar to Tennessee’s Regents Online Campus Collaborative (ROCC), which provides peer review of online courses and dissemination of best practices. CVC seems the most likely organization to provide these services, but its charter and organization would have to adapt to the new mission.
8. Review the missions of CVC, Cal State Online and UC Online – CCC,  CSU  and UCleaders, with the encouragement of the state, should consider adjusting the CVC and Cal State Online missions to directly focus on the bottleneck course problem. For CVC, there would need to be expansion of services beyond a catalog to include transfer articulation agreements and cross-campus registration of common courses. For Cal State Online, there would need to be a change in model to support the provision of online courses that are not necessarily part of a fully-online program. UC Online would need to shift its priorities to accelerate the development of lower-division courses.

3rd Party Providers (Safety Valve)

9. Provide a “safety valve” of outside provision of credit-bearing, transferable online courses by filling gaps to allow SB 520 to succeed. To achieve the key balance we envision – enabling and supporting faculty to create local solutions while keeping in mind the student right to have access to needed courses, there is an implied two-tiered course selection system.
10. Provide a multi-level course approval process for SB 520 – Whenever possible, faculty should retain oversight of quality. The initial list of approved safety valve courses should therefore be reviewed by a faculty-driven mechanism, which can be set up through the academic senates. However, since access should be a student right, there must always be some safety valve option. Therefore, in the event that the faculty-driven process is not able to recommend adequate provisions, an administrative body should review any gaps in the list and ,where solutions are inadequate, either fund development or partnership to provide the necessary courses or select contingency solutions until such time as a faculty-approved alternative can be provided.
11. Reduce the bottleneck course problem by reducing the number of students who need to take bottleneck courses – The state should support individual campuses experimenting with competency-based education or prior learning assessments. We are not yet in a position to leverage successful pilot programs in this area, so the focus should be on supporting local innovation. At the statewide level, New York’s Empire State College has been a leader in developing this model, leading to the SUNY REAL (Recognition of Experiential and Academic Learning) program.

Funding and Sustainability

12. We also believe, however, that the three public systems need to take a longer-term perspective and establish organizational models to encourage effective use of online education. California is behind other states, but there is no reason we cannot learn from others and harness the resources of the state to once again take a leadership position on this important subject. Therefore, beyond the recommendations provided here for short-term action, we strongly believe that California should study other established statewide models for online such as New York’s Open SUNY, Penn State’s World Campus and Tennessee’s ROCC. All three examples provide viable models to foster collaboration in online and blended learning, including key issues such as course discovery and transferability. California should form a group to study these models, including in-person meetings, and make recommendations for California adoption.
13. Provide adequate funding – The Governor’s budget proposes $37 million for additional support of online education. It is worth considering whether this amount is proportionate to the need given the recommendations of this paper. We believe that the amount is roughly appropriate to fund the first stages of the safety valve provisions alone, the bulk of which would go to developing a state-wide registration system and building capabilities for campus support networks to receive information relevant to student success from third-party course providers. (The capacity built in these areas will also be useful for supporting students taking bottleneck courses from other California state schools, whether online or on campus.) For building campus capacity, appropriate additional funding would be in the range of $20 million to $25 million, the majority of which would go to providing Phase 1 grants for development of hybrid of fully-online courses by campus faculty and a smaller number of larger Phase 2 grants for adoption of courses across multiple campuses. The cost for building system- or statewide capacity to address bottleneck courses through programs such as UC Online, Cal State Online, or California Virtual Campus is likely also somewhere in the $20 million to $40 million range. However, it is also much further than the other two from being “shovel-ready.”  For the current budget year, we recommend sufficient funding to study state-wide programs in other states and propose a plan. The budget for this first step is more likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than in the millions.

Conclusion

We believe that California has a real problem with bottleneck courses and a real opportunity to address the problem. Matriculated students in our public higher education systems should have the right to access courses needed to complete their degrees, and accessible, scalable online education – when properly designed and supported – can be an important component in the state’s ability to deliver on its promises. The recommendations in this paper are meant to help pave a path forward with changes that can impact students in the next few years.

What we hope to have provided is a framework that addresses the bottleneck course problem at several levels. This framework acknowledges the need to expand access at the local college and course level and at the systemwide level, while providing a safety valve of 3rd party online courses to ensure that students have the right to access needed courses.

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Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses.

Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry’s most established players.

The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera’s online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

One key aspect of this announcement is Coursera’s full-fledged move into courseware as a new business line to complement their standalone courses. Courseware is the combination of “the curriculum, the course materials, the assessments and, in some cases, the analytics to track student progress and make study suggestions” as described in Michael’s post “MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact“. In essence, courseware is everything but the instructor and interactive discussion, certification and support. This is what is meant by “wrapping” around a MOOC.

As seen below, there are different levels of courseware, depending on whether learning objectives and a unifying navigation structure is included.

This Courseware space is being populated both by publishers and MOOC providers, and today’s news from Coursera further establishes this trend.

In his post, Michael listed some of the other examples of MOOC as Courseware.

On the other hand, there was widespread enthusiasm for using MOOCs as essentially substitutions for textbooks in classes that included instructors from the local campus. Vanderbilt created what they called a course “wrapper” around a Coursera MOOC on machine learning. Folks from Stanford talked about the notion of a “distributed flip,” i.e., a group of flipped classrooms participating together in a MOOC. And SJSU talked about using an edX course in a blended course environment on one hand, and a Udacity course with Udacity-provided “course mentors” on the other.

Mike Caufield has been calling out this trend for some time, and his post today ties together previous comments that help put the Coursera announcement in context.

Why would Coursera, Udacity and edX all move towards the Courseware space? I think there are three key issues

1) Moving away from the dominance of professional development and focusing more on higher education

Daphne Koller called out this motivation in the Huffington Post article:

“We noticed the vast majority of ours students were people who already had degrees and wanted to continue their education,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. “We really wanted to move the needle on fundamental educational problems” of access and affordability. Because Coursera does not produce its own content or administer degree courses, “you have to work within the framework of the institutions that are actually good at that,” she said.

2) Finding a way to work with higher education institutions to give students credit for taking MOOCs

Without this partnership, MOOCs will continue to exist as professional development with no formal credit. Anya Kamenetz called this out in Fast Company.

Coursera is partnering with 10 major public flagship and state university systems, from the State University of New York to West Virginia University, that collectively enroll 1.25 million of the nation’s 21 million college students. Coursera’s existing university partnerships with schools like Stanford and Penn mainly involve professors creating and offering online courses to several million users on the platform. These new public partnerships, however, are aimed at using MOOCs to enhance teaching, learning, and collaboration not only for online students around the world, but also for students already physically attending classes at these universities, and high school students who hope to enroll there.

3) Finding a revenue model that doesn’t require charging MOOC students directly

As described by Inside Higher Ed (which includes short quote from me).

Some university officials say they see Coursera as a potential replacement for some services universities now receive from the makers of learning management systems. Others see Coursera’s online courses as this generation’s textbook. Because Coursera and university officials discussed the project in advance of an official public announcement on Thursday, many of those potentially affected — faculty groups, business competitors and others — did not have an opportunity to react. [snip]

Phil Hill, an education technology consultant, said Coursera’s announcement represented not just an expansion of colleges that partner with Coursera but an expansion of and change to the company’s business model.

“This could be an indication of the MOOC providers getting much more pressure from their venture capital investors and themselves that they need to find revenue models — and LMS is a revenue model,” Hill said, referring to the learning management systems market.

There are other interesting aspects of the Coursera announcement, but for now the rise of Courseware, from both publishers and MOOC providers, is proving to be one of the most important trends of 2013.

For more coverage on today’s announcement:

• Inside Higher Ed, “State Systems Go MOOC”
• Chronicle of Higher Education, “In Deals With 10 Public Universities, Coursera Bids for Role in Credit Courses”
• Huffington Post, “Coursera Announces 10 Public Universities Plan MOOC Adoption”
• GigaOm, “With state school partners, Coursera explores different uses for massive online courses”
• Fast Company, “Open University: Coursera Partners with 10 Major State Schools”
• TheNextWeb, “Coursera partners with 10 new US universities not just for online courses, but to add MOOC to their classes too”
• New York Times, “Universities Team With Online Course Provider”

Update 5/30: Added language to clarify that this trend does not mean that MOOCs will only be Courseware, but rather that this is a second line of business to complement standalone courses. Also added link to NY Times article (how the heck did I miss that?).

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Focus on Student Rights and Perspectives

Given these four approaches that California’s public higher education systems have available to address bottleneck courses, where should the state begin? There are important questions or organizational priorities for the three systems as well as faculty autonomy to consider. Unfortunately, much of the public discussion of online education issues has tended to focus on organizational needs or advocacy for the power of technology. Often what is lost in the shuffle is the perspective from those who are most impacted – the students.

The key to addressing bottleneck course problems is to consider a new right for admitted students to have access to the courses they need. Rather than starting from the institutions and how they operate, the opportunity California higher education leaders and state government leaders have is to start from the perspective of the student’s rights and needs and then define institutional incentives to ensure those rights are preserved.

The Right to Access

Students enrolled in California public colleges and universities should be guaranteed timely access to the core courses that they are required to take in order to graduate. Given that there are a variety of ways in which the institutions could meet this obligation, the state should avoid being overly prescriptive about the method. Rather, it should supply the mandate for educational access, support institutions in meeting this mandate, and provide a safety valve to ensure the mandate’s right is preserved.

Regarding support for the mandate, the state can provide faculty and institutions with funding, training, and other resources for helping them solve the bottleneck problem locally and organically. We will make recommendations in this regard later in this paper.

The safety valve should be a mechanism consistent with the broad goals of California SB 520. If a school fails to support the student right of timely access to crucial required courses, then the students should have the right to take courses from a state-approved third party and receive credit for that course. And the burden of paying any extra costs involved should fall to the institution rather than the student.

Given the mandate to support a student right to educational access and support for that mandate, institutions and statewide systems can and should play a central role in applying their considerable experience and creativity to craft solutions based on local needs and diverse student populations. Despite some of the public rhetoric, no realistic solution to bottleneck courses should bypass the local faculty and their knowledge of student needs.

At the same time, the local politics of the individual institutions should not be allowed to take precedence over the students’ right to access. For this reason, the support of local solutions and the administration of the safety valve provision must be treated differently from each other. The support of local solutions, which should always be the preferred approach, should focus on providing campuses with maximum support and autonomy to meet access goals. The safety valve, which is the solution of last resort, should ensure that students are guaranteed access to courses regardless of campus limitations or local politics.

Beyond Access: The Right to Quality

It is important to remember the real goal of using online education to address bottleneck courses here. It is not to offer students seats in courses. It is to get students to complete those courses successfully so that they can complete their programs more quickly. While California cannot guarantee student success, the state can put in place provisions that guarantee students access to the kinds of support that are known to increase the likelihood of student success. This includes taking care to preserve existing campus support networks when bringing in new solutions—particularly solutions implemented by third parties—as well as taking care to provide students with extra support when it is needed. These considerations are important for locally developed solutions, but they are especially important for safety valve solutions where some of the traditional campus support and quality control mechanisms may be circumvented to achieve greater accessibility.

Targeting appropriate students for online solutions

Online education classes typically require more self-discipline, better reading skills, and better awareness of when to seek help than traditional classes do. Offering an online class to a student who otherwise would be shut out altogether is often better than nothing. But we need to recognize that we are already starting with a solution that has its challenges for achieving a goal of high completion rates, even if everything else is equal. Not all students are equally well-prepared for online learning, and pushing students who are likely to fail into an online course may, in fact, be worse than the status quo. Online courses are not a panacea. Students will need help in evaluating whether online is appropriate for them. And if it is not, those students should be given priority access to the traditional on-campus or blended courses.

Wisconsin’s eCampus provides a valuable model in their approach to informing students about the online course options in a neutral manner - seeking to inform and qualify students rather than purely marketing the online courses. This type of qualification approach is crucial to student retention, and it is the basis for the New America Foundation recommendation to “Institutions and state systems should provide support and retention efforts given the attrition problems that can occur with online course-taking”.

Preserving the campus support network

In a traditional course, faculty on campus are able to talk to each other and to support staff such as student advisors in order to best meet the needs of particular students. This can happen with online courses too; many fully online programs include online advising and even provide Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software so that all of the staff who interact with a given student can share insights and keep track of is working with the student on what. However, once third-party course vendors are brought into the picture, it is easy for this support network to be severed. Any legislation supporting the use of third-party vendors should account for the fact that support of student success goes beyond the work of individual faculty members behind closed classroom doors and take steps to ensure that the students’ support network in their home institutions are able to continue providing students with the support they need. This is a complex problem, since it can potentially involve sharing private student data with the private corporations that are providing the courses. A balance will need to be struck between privacy and support for success. But at the very least, the students’ home institution should have timely access to information about their progress during the course, as well as early warning of any problems that might result in the student failing or dropping the course.

Timely course access

A third issue is primarily relevant to the safety valve provisions. According to the early drafts of SB 520, students are only eligible for third-party courses once it is determined that no such courses are available on their home campus. But the bill is unclear about when the determination of eligibility would be made. Every week of class that the student misses while waiting for the question to be resolved lowers the student’s chances of passing the course. Likewise, every week that goes by before financial aid, which is determined in part by course load, can be distributed, may be a week when students cannot afford to buy the textbooks and therefore lowers their chances of success. More generally, the workflow for the students—from deciding that they need to take a special course to determining whether those courses are appropriate to registering and receiving financial aid for those courses—must be addressed. Courses that are theoretically available but practically inaccessible are not consistent with supporting the students’ right to access.

Metrics – How Will We Know?

For any state government investment and attempt to influence public higher education, it is critical to get beyond the level of hype and platitudes. The state needs changes that are effective, and there should be a systemic capability to learn which efforts are working, which are not, and which adjustments are warranted. There should be a reasonable set of top-level metrics to inform this process.

Before going too far, however, it is also important to apply metrics with care. There are hard and soft measurements for any strategic initiative not everything can adequately be measured with hard data. In particular, student learning is difficult to measure with simple metrics. The state should take care and apply metrics judiciously and appropriately.

Focus on Student Outcomes

The problem at hand is bottleneck courses and their impact on student degree completion. The key metrics should be based on desired student outcomes. Did they successfully complete the bottleneck course? How many courses are overenrolled and unavailable to students? Are the online initiatives impacting student time-to-degree or time-to-transfer?

There are new efforts nationwide and statewide based on a scorecard approach – making information on institutional performance for student completion available and accessible online. CCC has just released its statewide scorecard. There is much to commend in these efforts, particularly in their transparency, ease of access for each institution, and breakdown along demographic lines (ethnicity, full-time or part-time, and remedial status). The data for this last item – remedial status of students – is crucial, given the number of unprepared students entering college in California.

However, the measurements in the CCC scorecard have some flaws. Why are measurements based on 6-year completion rates for degrees or transfers at the community college level? While it would be naive to pretend that all students see community college as a 2-year degree or transfer, measuring only 6-year data is an acceptance of the status quo.

Short term, higher education institutions and systems should collect 2-year, 4-year and 6-year data for community colleges (2-year only for full-time students), and 4-year and 6-year for CSU and UC undergraduates. Long term, there should be a shift to collect information from students on their desired goals: 2-year degree, 4-year transfer, unknown, 5-year degree, etc. These student records would be easy to add to student information systems and could be updated annually by students. This method would allow a more direct measurement of how well our public institutions enable students to meet their educational goals.

Additional Considerations

When getting into the world of online education, particularly for open education models such as MOOCs, there are additional dynamics at play. Namely, it is not safe to assume that all students have the same goals. In fact, there appears to be five different student types emerging within MOOCs and open online courses: No-Shows, Observers, Drop-Ins, Passive Participants and Active Participants. This variety of student types is a strength, not a weakness, of open education.

The subset of online students of particular interest to this report are Active Participants – those who desire to complete the course and receive credit. Online providers planning to work with the state  should collect and publicly share this information.

Since the problem is bottleneck courses, per se, and not online education (the means to an end),  there is a parallel need to collect and report on the same data for face-to-face bottleneck courses.

Key Metrics to Collect

The recommended metrics to measure progress on bottleneck courses include the following:

• Waitlist data (number of students per course and per institution) for high-enrollment lower-division courses
• Completion rates for all bottleneck courses, both for face-to-face and online versions, normalized for demographics such as remedial status and student preparation
• Degree-completion rates for 2-year, 4-year and 6-year periods for CCC, 4-year and 6-year for CSU and UC
• Transfer rates for 2-year, 4-year and 6-year periods for CCC
• Degree and transfer completion against student goals

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Three Basic Approaches

By its very nature, the problem of bottleneck courses is centered on access and scale. Students need access to courses which tend to be in high demand and are overenrolled. These high-demand lower-division courses imply the ability to scale the course in a cost-effective manner, to meet the realities of budget and enrollment demands.

Face-to-face education has relied on large lecture courses, often with hundreds of students enrolled, to try and address this problem. Despite the prevalence of large lecture courses, this approach has proven inadequate, however, as a general solution to scale and access.

For the past century in higher education, the core concept of course design is that an individual faculty member, or occasionally a small team of faculty members, designs and delivers each course. There may be some guidelines and policies from the institution, but after initial review of the course objectives and design, the course belongs to the faculty designing and teaching it. While there are many benefits to this model, there is a key challenge to consider.

How do you cost-effectively scale the course or program to provide greater access to more students given the explicit connection between course and faculty? There are three basic approaches to consider for California’s three public systems.

1. Leveraging educational technology to increase capacity in traditional courses;
2. Using internal online providers to help scale across campuses at each system; and
3. Using 3rd-party online course providers to provide a safety valve.

In addition to the three basic approaches described above, there is a future consideration of promoting competency-based education and prior learning assessments.

Adjustment to Team Course Design

In many instances of at-scale online and blended education, a course gets replicated into multiple, relatively consistent sections in a repeatable manner. In this approach, instructional design teams – typically including multi-media experts, quality assurance people and instructional designers – work with faculty members and / or subject matter experts to design a master course. Once designed, the master course is replicated in multiple sections that can be taught or facilitated by multiple instructors, typically adjunct faculty. The faculty members that are part of the design can also be instructors for a couple of sections, but by-and-large the sections are taught by instructors who were not part of the design team.

This concept changes the assumptions on who owns the course, and it leads to different processes to design, deliver and update courses that just don’t exist in traditional education. The implications of this approach or concept are significant. Because of these differences, there is in reality an institutional barrier that makes it difficult for institutions to cross without deliberate strategies.

It will be difficult for many faculty to adapt to this new paradigm. For those faculty wishing to participate in a team-based course design, they will need support. For those faculty not participating, we should expect some discomfort and pushback from the concept. In both cases, there should be deliberate support for faculty to understand the online education concepts, to allow them to engage in the conversations about future directions, and direct professional development for those faculty developing and instructing online and blended courses.

Increasing Capacity in Traditional Courses

The most promising usage of online educational technology that could increase the capacity of traditional face-to-face courses is to develop blended-learning approaches that combine the best of online and the best of face-to-face within a course.

Blended or hybrid courses, including the recent push for flipped classrooms, combine online and face-to-face class time in a structured manner. Although there are varying mixtures of content delivery and interactive activities in this approach, the logical extension is something called the “flipped classroom.” The flipped classroom model involves courses that move the traditional lecture, or content dissemination, away from face-to-face hours and into online delivery outside of class time. The face-to-face class time is used for practice and actual application rather than for introducing the content being studied. The instructor then has time to help students face-to-face with specific problems. Flipped classrooms have been in existence since around 2000, but they have recently been gaining popularity in both higher education and K-12 institutions.

The common theme is to make face-to-face class time more effective, using it to provide much of the instructor feedback and interactive skills portion of a class while pushing content delivery into more-efficient online tools.

San José State University has made significant advances in blended courses based on their partnerhip with edX. Based on this success, the school announced the creation of the Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning, the first project of which will be to teach faculty at 11 other CSU campuses how to use an edX course on circuits and electronics as the basis for a flipped class. As described in the LA Times, “early results found students in this blended class setting passed at a rate of 91%, compared to a 55% pass rate for students in the conventional class.”

Beyond California, the National Center of Academic Transformation led an effort for Program Course Redesign from 1999 – 2003 that worked with thirty institutions to demonstrate “how colleges and universities can redesign their instructional approaches using technology to achieve cost savings as well as quality enhancements”. The redesign projects focused on high-demand, lower-division courses, “which have the potential of impacting significant student numbers and generating substantial cost savings”.

The outcomes of this program were documented at EDUCAUSE Review in an article by Carol Twigg, citing several key findings:

• “Preliminary results show that all thirty institutions reduced costs by about 40 percent on average, with a range of 20 percent to 84 percent”; and
• “Consistent content coverage means that all students have the same kinds of learning experiences, resulting in significant improvements in course coherence and quality control”.

More recently, the Open Learning Initiative through Carnegie Mellon University conducted a 2007 study looking at introductory statistic courses, replacing the traditional model with a blended approach. Based on an independent review by ITHAKA, they found that students in the OLI classes “performed as well or better than students in traditional instructor-lead classes”.

It’s a short step from training faculty on how to flip a class using outside content to a “distributed flip,” where those faculty members are sharing best practices with each other as they teach the same class using the same class using the same materials, and having their students interact with each other on the online discussion board.

Internal Online Providers for Statewide System

Given the faculty- and department-driven nature of many U.S. postsecondary institutions, the creation of campus-based online courses and programs is not at all surprising. Due to this often ad hoc nature, there are also myriad reasons for the online courses and programs, ranging from faculty exploration of the new medium to the specific needs of particular programs.

Faculty members teaching campus-based online courses are one of the most important yet overlooked sources of knowledge and experience regarding online education. Although ad hoc online courses and programs blazed the trail in what is possible, they are not typically designed to address bottleneck courses, as they are not designed for scale in terms of numbers of sections or students.

CCC in particular is a system with plenty of campus-based online courses – and in fact over one in four CCC students take at least one online course.

The non-profit organizations that have delivered online programs at scale have tended to be entirely new organizations within a higher education system. These new online organizations fit within the overall system governance, but the operations, budgets and academic oversight are typically provided by these unique organizations. Examples include Rio Salado College, University of Maryland University College, Colorado Community College Online, and Penn State World Campus.

One example of this approach is to partner with another organization who already has experience and capabilities to implement online courses at scale and the associated operations, while providing these courses through the traditional institution.

There is a burgeoning industry built around outsourced, for-profit service providers – companies that can outsource the adminitstrative, marketing, support and even instructional design services for an online program. The institution selects which services are most appropriate for the outside vendor to provide and which services should remain with the institution.

Recently UC Online and Cal State Online have been created, but as discussed in an earlier section they are not currently addressing bottleneck courses. There is no reason, however, that these organizations could not be re-purposed to directly target solutions for bottleneck courses, and this is one option to consider.

3rd Party Providers (Safety Valve)

The most common method over the past decade or two for institutions looking to increase scale and access has been to use separate organizations that will implement the online program. There is a rich history, dating from the late 1990s of outsourced organizations providing such programs.

With this history comes uneven success. The state of California and its higher education systems have been proud of the academic quality provided, and care should be taken that any outside organizations are chosen carefully for their quality standards and ability to work with the three public systems.

Perhaps the type of scaled course that is generating the most interest lately has been the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). In one version – typified by edX, Coursera and Udacity – the course itself is scaled to enable thousands of students to take the course from the faculty members who both design and lead the course. This design process can include a full instructional design team, but without the need to simply duplicate the course section itself multiple times.

The challenge for this 3rd party online provider approach is to ensure instructor – student interaction and support services that will help students succeed.

Rather than directly address the institutions and how they operate, a promising concept for 3rd-party online courses is Senate Bill 520 (SB 520) – the proposed legislation in California that would identify and approve a set of up to 50 online courses that the three public systems would accept as credit. This approach focuses on the student and (if successful), this approach will change the conversation. Admitted students would have the right to get the lower-division courses they need, and if the school cannot provide the courses, there will be a safety valve of online courses that the schools will accept for credit.

Recently, the SB 520 bill has been amended to incorporate feedback from faculty groups wishing to improve the quality assurance aspects that are important to the state. The themes of the amendments are to:

shift the approval of the pool of online courses from the California Open Access Resources Council (COERC) to the administration and faculty senates of the three systems (University of California, California State University, and California Community Colleges);

• tie the administration of the program to the California Virtual Campus;
• restrict each course to matriculated California public higher education and qualifying K-12 students;
• tie the provisions of the bill to funding in the Annual Budget Act; and
• focus quality approval processes through academic senates of the three systems.

This approach, while not directly addressing what any individual college or university should do, does change the risk / reward structure. It is well-known that high-enrollment lower-division courses are in fact some of the biggest money-makers for a campus. By having the availability of 3rd-party online courses, it is likely that campuses would eventually have greater motivation to expand access internally and provide the courses for more students who need them, as a method of retaining revenue.

If a school chooses to cut the seats available for these critical courses, there would be a financial cost to their decision in a way that does not exist currently. Right now, once the enrollment is set, the schools gets the same state revenue regardless of whether they provide courses or not.

There is a little-discussed issue in public higher education. Are public institutions offering the right mix of courses and programs based on student needs? The bottleneck course problem is not as simple as a course problem – it’s also a curriculum problem.

The challenge, however, is to spark change in our higher education system without having outside parties (such as state government, accrediting agencies, online providers) micromanage what is essentially an academic-led decision on curriculum.

The goal behind the proposal of SB 520 is to provide an incentive system that avoids micromanagement – let the academic bodies lead curriculum decisions – but provides a risk / reward structure to help ensure student needs come first. Should schools decide to essentially outsource part of the lower-division curriculum while providing other courses not in such high demand? Yes, there are reasons to do so in many cases, and this should be a local campus decision. But if a school decides to use its resources this way, having a safety valve would reduce the likelihood that admitted students would be short-changed.

Prior Learning Assessment Competency-Based Education

Both Prior Learning Assessments (PLA) and Competency-Based Education (CBE) are based on the notion of moving beyond using seat time as the foundation of college credit, and both are biased towards non-traditional working adults. With the goal of improving time-to-graduation and ensuring students get the courses they need, one important approach is to eliminate the need for certain students who already have the requisite knowledge and skills from needing to take the class in the first place.

Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA, is a little-discussed strategy to facilitate time-to-degree, particularly for non-traditional students. The concept is to set up the structure and processes to evaluate corporate training from employment, military training, civic responsibilities, travel, and independent study and award academic credit from these out-of-the-classroom learning situations. As the higher education population diversifies with much higher percentages of working adults, PLA can be an important factor in reducing total cost and time-to-degree.

In 2010 the Council For Adult & Experiential Learning (CAEL) published a study that was funded by the Lumina Foundation. One of the key findings was that “PLA students had better academic outcomes, particularly in terms of graduation rates and persistence, than other adult students”, and that “Many PLA students also shortened the time required to earn a degree, depending on the number of PLA credits earned”.

And for this same student population – primarily working-age adults with prior working experience -there are similar methods to fill in the holes of a program where they do not have the requisite knowledge and skills. This is the role of Competency-Based Education.

Competency-based education is based on the broader concept of Outcomes-based education (OBE), one that is familiar to many postsecondary institutions and one that forms the basis of many current instructional design methods. OBE works backwards within a course, starting with the desired outcomes (often defined through a learning objectives taxonomy) and relevant assessments, and then moving to the learning experiences that should lead students to the outcomes. Typically there is a desire to include flexible pathways for the student to achieve the outcomes.

OBE can be implemented in various modalities, including face-to-face, online and hybrid models.

Competency-based education is a narrower concept, a subset or instance of OBE, where the outcomes are more closely tied to job skills or employment needs, and the methods are typically self-paced. There are explicit learning outcomes with respect to the required skills and knowledge (standards for assessment), and adaptable programs to enable learners different paths to achieve the required outcomes.

For these self-paced CBE initiatives, which are the subject of recent growth in adoption, the current implementations of CBE tend to be:

• Fully-online;
• Self-paced;
• Flexible to allow for retaking of assessments until competency demonstrated; and
• Flexible to allow passing of assessments up front and not even need instruction / activities, thus allowing credit for life experiences or prior learning assessments (PLA).

Both of these interdependent concepts are excellent approaches to improving time-to-degree for non-traditional working-age students.

The post The Right to Educational Access Paper, Part II appeared first on e-Literate.

So with all that as background, his comments on the scope of the bottleneck course problem are worth reading:

In my interviews with students, I have found that the biggest reasons for a delay in graduation is that students switch majors, they fail out of courses, they cannot get required courses, they do not qualify for their intended majors, they have to work to pay for their living expenses, they do not think there are any jobs for them after graduation, they pursue double majors, they do not receive adequate advising, they have medical problems and personal issues. Students also complain about the number of requirements for certain majors and their dislike of large lecture classes. A comprehensive survey of the UC system would help to determine what is really happening on a local level.

Another important aspect of this problem is the question of how much money individual campuses dedicate to undergraduate instruction. UCOP has reported on the increase in classes and the decrease in faculty relative to the number of students, but it is still unclear what has caused these changes. After all, during the last five years, while the state did reduce the UC budget by $1 billion, total tuition revenue went up by over $1.2 billion. It would seem that as students pay more for their education, they would get more support and smaller classes instead of less support and larger classes, but as this blog has stressed, the university continues to use undergraduate funds to subsidize many other university functions.

The focus on time-to-graduation is important because, as Phil and I detailed in the portion of our position paper that I published earlier today, a delay in graduation is costly to students and taxpayers alike. As Bob points out, we don’t have a lot of clean data telling us exactly how much of the delay in aggregate graduation time is due factors that colleges and universities can control, like access to bottleneck courses or better student advising on what courses they should be taking, and how much of it is due to factors in the students’ lives that are external to the school itself. This is important information to have, both to give us a sense of where the state should be focusing its efforts and in terms of monitoring the success of those efforts. Furthermore, at least some of the data can be gathered relatively quickly and easily—for example, through student surveys. While Phil and I do believe there is enough evidence that bottleneck courses are a problem to merit increased attention and funding, we also believe that getting more hard data quickly enough to influence the policy that is currently being shaped should be a high priority.

The financial aspects that Bob highlights in the second quoted paragraph are important too. Our position all along has been that there are a variety of ways to solve the bottleneck course problem and that technology is not a silver bullet. While we take no position on the specifics of Bob’s math, it is certainly legitimate to ask whether budget money that is currently being applied to other priorities should be redirected to opening more course sections of bottleneck courses.

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