Thoughts on Innovations in Education

The following thoughts were prompted by a video entitled What is a MOOC? which was written and narrated by Dave Cormier. I think the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is a very brave concept, but I have some issues with their viability in the long term.

Let’s begin with the acronym itself. M is for massive, which could refer to the number of people in the course (how many people make a course massive?) or it could refer to the egos of the course facilitators in declaring it to be massive. I realize there is a parallel here with MMOGs and MMORPGs, but we might consider leaving the term massive off of our courses until such time as we can develop a course that has more drawing power than World of Warcraft.

O is for open, as in open to anyone to participate. The other O is for online, which is the medium for facilitation. I don’t have much argument with those.

C is for Course. Courses have beginnings and ends. Of all the letters in the acronym, it is this one that I find most interesting. Why does it have to be a course? Why must it be an event? If, as Dave asserts, the MOOC is supposed to result in the creation of lifelong learning networks that will remain long after the course is finished, then why would we think of it in terms of a course at all? That is only necessary in terms of fitting it into a course credit system. After the course ends, it will almost certainly die as a learning object/network.

In a MOOC, participants aren’t asked to complete assignments, but to engage with the material, each other, etc. This also would seem to be more-or-less at odds with the ‘event’ idea as well. Lars Hyland says we should Think Campaign Not Course, but that still implies a beginning and an end. What I find much more appealing is the idea of running a courseless MOOC. A MOO, if you will.

A MOO is not a course but a group seething mass of people focused on learning about a specific topic. Each person contributes and learns to the extent that they want to. All contributions become part of the MOO which new people can access as they join. A MOO could take on a life of its own and grow to incorporate an entire body of knowledge. Students become facilitators become students become explorers/leaders/edupreneurs/innovators.

Of course, facilitating a course is one thing. We know how to handle learning experiences that have a beginning and an end. Something of indeterminate length is much harder to keep alive. For a MOOC, I think the question is: How do we keep the MOOC from becoming another lifeless learning object on the web after the course finishes? For a MOO, the question is: How do we keep the learning going through successive generations of learners?

MOOs must be designed to allow MOO members to construct their own knowledge. However, a newcomer confronted with a mature MOO would almost certainly feel overwhelmed – drowning in a mass of interactive material produced by previous learners. How can we structure a MOO to avoid that overwhelmed feeling? How can we ensure that participants at different levels of knowledge can all participate in a MOO in ways that are meaningful to them without becoming lost at sea?

Think about it. Share your thoughts with us…

Not long ago, I started reading an excellent book about developing business models by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur called Business Model Generation. One business model pattern they discuss is the Unbundling business model, and reading this section was like having a cold bucket of ice water poured down my back. Never far from my mind is the need for educational reform, and my first thought was that this is exactly what the educational sector needs to do (particularly higher education). Education has been too many things to too many stakeholders for too long.

After reading Mark’s post last week, I picked up DIY U by Anya Kamenetz and found “The Great Unbundling” listed as one of four trends guiding education today. This led me to think about what has been bundled within education and what that unbundling could look like. [Of course, I’m not the first to consider these things but there is a surprising lack of specificity in other discussions. For example, Arne Duncan’s post.]

Let’s start with a simplified version of a large University. They offer undergraduate education and research-based graduate education. These have different client bases (if you consider students as clients) and different stakeholders. Undergraduate students typically complete a specified number of course hours in specific topic areas to achieve a degree. Research-based graduate programs may include some coursework, but the primary emphasis is on research and dissemination of results. These two types of programs could certainly be unbundled from each other, resulting in a greater focus on the end results and better overall use of resources.

The argument that high-volume entry-level courses underwrite a University’s ability to offer low-volume upper-level courses is often advanced. However, I’m not personally convinced that the balance sheet will back that assertion up. Yes, you can ‘do the math’ and ‘show’ how much money large classes generate vs. small classes, but there isn’t necessarily a connection between the revenue flows. The cynic in me would expect the revenue to go to upkeep on the football stadium or subsidizing the new marketing program. Nor can money generated through research grants be left out of the equation.

[As a side note, adding low freshman success rates to the mix makes this argument very much sound like robbing the failures (students who will ultimately reap no benefit from higher education except debt) to pay the way for the successes.]

Another argument frequently heard is that research professors (who teach very few classes) bring up-to-the-minute experience in the field to the lower-level classes they teach. Not very likely. At best, they might bring a few anecdotes that will make a lecture interesting. Perhaps their experience will add value to upper-level undergraduate courses, but for the most part the research professor’s greatest value is in doing research and mentoring future researchers (graduate students) as they become proficient in doing research. A business model based on a teaching cadre composed of only researchers to teach textbook-based courses makes little sense.

Undoubtedly someone could easily poke holes in this brief argument. But that is a moot point. You only have to look at the number of adjunct professors who make a living teaching at Universities, but who do not fit in the research professor mold. The market holds the ultimate logic in this argument.

The unbundling of education is frequently discussed at a much lower level. For example, unbundling assessment from content delivery. But I feel that a discussion of unbundling at this higher level would be very fruitful because it is something that can be done fairly easily at the business level. In other words, there are no major pedagogical issues to solve, only business issues. The two businesses can continue to reside in the same campus and even under the same name. But what would their business models look like? Here are my initial thoughts (using the business model canvas from the book Business Model Generation).

Undergraduate Education

Key Partners Employers Other Universities Professional organizations	Key Activities Course delivery	Value Proposition Knowledge Skills ‘Sheepskin’		Customer Relationships Personal assistance Community	Customer Segments Mass market – individuals seeking a four-year degree. Will split into niche markets as they progress.
	Key Resources Physical campus Faculty Course management system			Channels Direct Instruction Indirect Instruction
Cost Structure HR: Faculty and Course Designers			Revenue Stream Tuition

Graduate Education

[Note: I am treating this as a multi-sided business pattern bringing researchers (and researchers in training) together with those who want to support research for whatever reason.]

Key Partners Undergraduate institutions Other Universities Government	Key Activities Research Mentoring	Value Proposition Research facilitation Knowledge Skills Sheepskin		Customer Relationships Dedicated personal assistance Community	Customer Segments Researchers Research funders Graduate students
	Key Resources Research facilities Body of knowledge Researchers			Channels Dissertations Research reports Journal articles Books Mentoring
Cost Structure HR: Faculty and Graduate Students Research Facilities Research Databases			Revenue Stream Research grants Patents/Licensing

The major differences between the two models are the revenue streams and the key activities, plus the greater complexity of the value proposition, cost structure, and customer segments of graduate education. While this is just an early ‘brainstorm’ of the business models on my part, the more I look at it, the more I wonder how these two types of institutions could remain bundled for so long. From a business standpoint, having these two businesses operating separately but in a close partnership makes a lot of sense. People who have a talent for teaching could be teachers in the undergraduate model and people who have a talent for research and mentoring could be researchers in the graduate model. Tuition paid by undergraduates would go to serve undergraduate needs while research funds would go to serve the interests of the graduate institutions.

Have a think about it…

This is in response to the blog post in the Daily Telegraph of 26/11/10 “Why free online lectures will destroy universities – unless they get their act together fast”. In the post Adrian Hon claims that the university’s very existence is under threat from free open content unless they can quickly adapt.

The post is interesting and Hon makes a number of valid points, however this is hardly a new debate and has been a theme at educational conferences for some years now. For example at E-Learn 2008 in Las Vegas, this topic was raised by David Wiley, George Siemens and Richard Baraniuk among others, as the increasing trend towards Open Content and Open Educational Resources (OER) dominated much of the discussion. Baraniuk is one of the founders of Connexions, an open education resource repository, while Siemens paper, linked above goes way beyond the broad outline in Hon’s posting. Professor Curt Bonk of Indiana University also discusses many of these ideas in his book “The World is Open”.

The book DIY U by Anya Kamenetz also picks up the same theme in a US setting, taking a detailed look at the history, sociology and economics of the claimed transformation and also providing a guide for those learners who do want to ‘DIY’ their education using the wide range of free, high quality resources available.

There is no doubt in my mind that some of the changes outlined are going to have a profound affect on the way that higher education is delivered and especially an impact around the ownership of knowledge and learning.

The traditional view of course is that it is the institutions, universities and colleges, who own knowledge and learning and that is reflected in the Learning Management System (LMS) model of content delivery such as Blackboard and, to a certain extent, even Moodle. The alternative outlined by Hon and examined in more detail elsewhere, is that the student owns his or her learning by connecting to content in open course materials such as those of MIT and the Open University and by reading the blogs and following the ‘tweets’ of the experts in their particular field of study. This is done by virtue of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) owned and managed by the student.

As an adult learner I have personal experience of both models and I have to say that I learned at least as much from the PLE that we were encouraged to develop on my Open University course, as I did from the ‘official’ content LMS of the course. The added benefit is that this learning has continued long after the course has been completed and still goes on now, indeed my learning network continues to grow and develop. This very blog post will connect back to some of the people in my network and so will inform other learners. However it is the credential provided by the Open University that was my original motivation for studying and this should not be overlooked.

Most learners do not just want to learn, they want and need recognition of that learning in the form of certification and awards and for this reason alone, I do not believe that universities will be ‘destroyed’. Instead they may need to change the focus of their operations to the provision of recognition of learning.

This debate is also interesting within the context of the changes taking place in English higher education at the moment. The new coalition government is seeking to apply free market economics to a university education, clearly in the view that it is a private good and so should be paid for by the individual who has the benefit of receiving it. The counter position of course, is that that higher education is a public good that benefits all of society and so should be provided by the state. This is reflected in the freeing up of universities (and the ‘feeing up’ of degrees) to be able to set tuition fees depending upon the supply and demand for their courses, though still within a pricing band. This debate is examined in more detail in this post from “The Skeptical Economist”. One wonders how long learners will be prepared to pay fees to universities when better quality content is out there and available for free. What is more an increasing number of cutting edge experts are blogging and sharing their knowledge freely and openly. So why pay for a regular faculty member when you can have a world leader in your PLE and also get professionally produced resources from the likes of MIT that are of far higher quality than those produced by your own institution?

There are also implications in terms of the literacies that are going to be required of learners in this new environment. It does take a certain amount of digital literacy and self motivation to develop a high quality personal learning network and maintain it. If students are to be lifelong learners, then these skills are essential and become part of the learning that universities and schools have a duty to develop in their students. Steve Wheeler at Plymouth University sets out to explore these in a series of posts on his ‘Learning with E’s‘ blog.

This blog post itself is the result of my own learning network, I follow the Twitter feeds of Seimens and Wheeler and read their blogs along with those of Bonk, Wiley et al. In my opinion, this is the model that lifelong learners are going to have to adopt to stay current in their fields. However I seriously doubt this is going to destroy universities any time soon.

For one thing we have to remember that the university is one of the oldest forms of institution, with a history going back more than one thousand years. It has survived wars and other, earlier, technological revolutions and it has adapted and survived. I see no reason why that will not happen now. Yes there will be changes and I, for one, believe that changes are badly needed in education, not only at the HE level but also in schools and K12. However that is a topic for future posts. For now, I think universities are pretty safe but that some of their faculty do need to wake up to the changes in their learners and in what is available out there in terms of content. The world is full of rich and diverse learning materials, faculty and students need the digital literacy to be able to access and use them to leverage effective learning and universities and colleges need to provide and support the development of those digital literacies.