A Positive Report on the Cusp of the New Year: Carnegie Mellon’s Online Learning Initiative

5 Responses to “A Positive Report on the Cusp of the New Year: Carnegie Mellon’s Online Learning Initiative”

1. Barry,

   Thanks for those fascinating links. The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) suggests an education industry structure which addresses many of the concerns your last blog post raised about measurement and accountability. However, instead of government regulation it could harness market forces.

   One of the most inefficient (and evaluation unfriendly) characteristics of the current structure is the duplication of curriculum development. The OLI gives us a chance to decouple development and delivery, resulting in a large catalog of courses from which colleges could select. Depending on their market, they might weight their curricula toward courses developed by MIT, CMU or Podunk.

   The college’s value proposition would be the way they facilitate student mastery of these subjects and enhance it with a deeper understanding. Some might follow the model suggested in the article where the students still come to a class and the instructor, who’s aware of their online problems, spends time covering that area. Others might have the instructor become more involved and intervene as students have troubles and some might use the instructor to facilitate peer to peer learning. Some would focus and mastery of the explicit knowledge and others on the development of tacit knowledge.

   What intrigues me about this model is that it would guarantee a base level of competency (if we didn’t want to rely on the reputation of MIT or CMU, an evaluating body would at least have significantly fewer curricula to analyze) and opens the delivery of content to all sorts of new modalities, which leads to more choice for consumers.

   It seems like a great opportunity for the private education industry to take a leadership role and start experimenting with something that’s going to disrupt the current paradigm.

   bob roan | January 2nd, 2010 at 4:47 pm

2. is it like a school, i want to know more on it.

   faith | January 25th, 2010 at 5:01 am

3. I am a graduate of Kaplan University’s Master of Criminal Justice Program. I am still employed at my same job and have not been promoted. I have not been able to change employment. As a matter of fact I applied at Kaplan and have not been successful in gaining employment with the University that I am a graduate. It is disheartening to think that I have invested years in education and I am not able to utilize it.

   Doris Watkins | January 29th, 2010 at 11:48 pm

4. i am just looking forward to continuing my school to better myself.

   cindy | February 8th, 2010 at 9:42 pm

5. I am concerned about some of the managers who are hired by Kaplan to handle their local/regional offices. I have offered my services several times to these agencies, one recently looking for people to teach teachers, ansd have been rebuffed. These managers often act as those if one has not graduated from Ivy League-level schools or is older than 24 than he/she is not capable. My background as a teacher at Rutgers, as a consultant with The Princeton Review, and as an educator in various capacities for over thirty years with public and independent schools in four states seems to have no positive effect upon them.
   I would truly like to work for Kaplan in this field, and I can provide nearly anything needed to help the program, but it appears that that will never occur.

   Ralph | February 16th, 2010 at 7:35 pm