There is an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to the arguments being used against the proprietary sector in recent weeks. As a founding president of a community college and a state university, I was especially disappointed to see the litany of arguments against for profit higher education paraded out in a recent article in the Huffington Post by Dr. Gail Mellow. Dr. Mellow is a strong leader and a fine president. But these arguments are infused with bias as well as being flat inaccurate. continue reading

Technology-based techniques are beginning to be applied in education, but often just for the solo learner, whether on their own at home, or to do work away from class on their own.  Nothing wrong with this - in fact, matching a challenge to student skills (”Hard but not too hard” as Vygotzky might put it, or “hard fun” as Papert would put it) can be very motivating as well as edifying.

Not so easy, though, to fully integrate teachers and an entire classroom in an adaptive process.  Just by its nature, a group is harder to adapt for than an individual.  Clickers and technology are being used in some classes (e.g., Kurt Mazur’s use of technology before, during, and after his large lecture sessions) to at least gather information about how students are understanding what’s happening, and informally use this to  alter a teachers’ approach - but that’s still not the same as using that information systematically to modify how subgroups within the class might be instructed.

Some experiments are out there, pointing the way.  An article in the July/August Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Littlest Schoolhouse“, describes how New York City is running an experiment called the School of One, to see what can be done. Joel Rose who created the pilot program, had an idea for how an adaptive classroom might work:  ”The vision I had was a large open space with different modalities happening at the same time.”

As Mr. Coates describes it,

————–

[F]irst, the student and his parents and teachers are surveyed about his classroom habits. Then the student takes a diagnostic test to see how well he understands basic math. Those data are then sent to the New York Department of Education’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, where School of One’s algorithm produces a tentative lesson plan. That lesson plan is then e-mailed to the student’s teachers, who revise it as they see fit. At the end of every day, the student takes another short diagnostic, which is used to create another tentative lesson plan that appears in the teachers’ in-boxes by eight o’clock that evening.

—————

Customized instruction, deeply involving the teacher, relying on a daily cycle of instruction, assessment, evaluation, and new instruction within the classroom, moving students between working with the teacher, working with a virtual tutor, or working with a computer program. Now that’s starting to be an interesting, integrated approach to education - embedding technology within the whole learning environment while leaving open the possibility of transforming dramatically what any one (or small groups) of students experience, if that seems to turn out to be best for them.

We need to be running these experiments all across the educational system. In higher ed, for example, the variance of student backgrounds is even wider than that in high school, middle school or certainly grade school, especially when you consider the large number of students looking for higher education after or while working. Figuring out ways to combine technology, teachers, classrooms, and the right approach to skills provides powerful potential to create engaging, effective, and efficient experiences.

In “Midnight Class Is Latest Sign of Higher Education’s Demand,” the Baltimore Sun reports on community colleges that are offering graveyard-shift classes, including a psychology class - “Midnight Madness” coming this fall from 12-3 a.m. at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland. It certainly provides access and relieves pressure on crowded community college facilities. There’s nothing wrong with the concept and it creates some buzz. Classes in the middle of the night may be just the ticket for some. But … continue reading

I attended The Arizona State University (ASU) Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, AZ last week.  It was a bracing, mind-opening swirl of new ideas, great aspirations, serious potential, innovative applications of technology, deal-making around all of this, and a cast of remarkably productive characters working hard to alter many aspects of education across many age ranges.

While the many innovations I saw are welcome (and some may wind up ground-breaking), something was missing across all the events I attended.

I’m an M.D.-Ph.D. who’s worked in technology-enabled learning for the past fifteen years, so I often compare the health care and education ecosystems. Imagine spending two days at a conference on combating problems in cardiovascular disease. Could you imagine the two days going by without a single public mention (not to mention multiple sessions) on the evolving fundamental science behind the disorders?

It is most curious how many education conferences – even ones as up-to-the-moment as this one was – are completely devoid of references to how learning actually seems to work.  E.g. (many, many other works could be mentioned):

• No reference to the many sources of research about fundamental limitations on thinking and learning (finite working memory, for example, or the absolute requirement for new expertise to be built on fluent competencies burned in through practice) that have multiple lines of evidence behind them.
• No mentions of the great work of people like Richard Mayer, or John Sweller, or David Merrill, who’ve built up decades of understanding on fundamental limits and opportunities for media and instructional design to dramatically improve (or hinder) learning.
• No mention of the work of researchers like Jan Plass and others, directly investigating what specific design elements of simulations and games lead to better learning.
• No sighting of local empirical investigators like Kurt Van Lehn, one of the leading researchers on automated tutoring systems, who’s a faculty member at ASU.

There’s an explosion of innovation going on in education right now. Yet there’s also an explosion of understanding of how learning seems to work (just wait until the functional MRI boys and girls get traction on important cognitive tasks!).

What we’re missing is a parallel to the biotech explosion in health care: New, practical ideas (and companies) solving problems in learning that flow from fundamental understanding of how learning works (or doesn’t). In biology departments across the country, faculty members and graduate students regularly combine basic research with outside work deploying research through companies – admittedly, not always stress-free.

Not there yet in learning, are we?

Part of the problem is  we don’t yet have the equivalent of pharmaceutical companies in learning to make the “at scale” implementation of such research.

Kaplan could play that role. We have more than a million students per year around the globe across all stages of learning, from kids learning their first writing and math skills, to adult professionals continuing to perfect their own skills. We have the potential (and interest) to do randomized controlled trials to find out which well-founded research-derived interventions really work at scale.

Where are the “cogitech” companies for us to talk to?

Katie Hafner‘s piece in today’s (April 18) New York Times is a must read for those interested in the use of technology, particularly online learning, in higher education and learning in general. Make sure to read the comments, too, a number of which intelligently lay out the range of reactions that one would expect to an article on this topic. continue reading

Even as the recession eases, we are confronted by two realities: state budgets that are deeply in the red and a rising demand for higher education. The President says we need more success in higher education to stay economically viable. and learners are voting with their feet, returning to school in record numbers.  If, however, our objective is to open higher education to more qualified and capable people, and to succeed with them, what is the actual impact of the recession and state budget deficits on most students and colleges? continue reading

I am very pleased that my most recent book, “Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning” (Jossey-Bass, Jan, 2010) was published in January. Writing the book has been a journey for me: changing me in the writing and changing the book as a result of the intellectual ferment created. I have come to understand this technological revolution as more  than a set of linked events with a cumulative widespread impact on almost every facet of our lives. Indeed, I now understand it as a new ecology, a new environment for information and intellectual activity which cannot be controlled by existing hierarchical structures, such as universities and governments. continue reading

Every so often you just need to take a break to let your mind and your mouse wander around the net. Here are a few items from my recent foraging that readers of Rethinking Higher Education might find of interest. continue reading

I am excited and pleased today because I am holding my new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass, Jan. 2010), in my hands. It lives up to its title, I think, describing how our technology-rich environment, populated with platforms, networks, social sites, and downloads, makes possible a level of access and completion in higher education that has been unattainable up to this point. I illustrate this point with a number of examples. Primary among them is being able to self-assess your experiential learning and then, if you wish, get it reviewed formally for academic credit , all on-line. continue reading

The razzle-dazzle around unveiling of the iPad was about much more than the potential of that device to replace the pounds/dollars of textbooks that are part of today’s college life, but there was certainly buzz about its potential to do just that.

It may. Combine what it obviously offers with the increased functionality that businesses like Scrollmotion and Inkling may add to the mix, and you begin to see realized the potential that we all know is there for eTexts. continue reading