Readings

MITCET: Survey of hybrid learning at MIT in 2010.

Hybrid learning describes a point on a spectrum of pedagogical structures that vary along the dimension of “presence”, where presence refers the frequency, mechanism, and format in which the learning group (the ‘class’) comes together physically to meet.”

MITCET: Snapshot of Educational Technology at MIT circa 2004-2005.

As of 2004-2005, status and trends at MIT:

• Leveraging commodity computing and individual ownership- One-to-One
  Computing@MIT
• Technology device form factors are continually evolving, now embracing
  workstations, laptops, tablet PCs, and handhelds.
• Spatial data services have grown with the establishment of the collaborative partnership in Geographical Information Systems between IS and MIT Libraries.
• Software infrastructure to support teaching and research: Athena
• Recently a Windows-based software infrastructure and delivery system has been implemented and integrated into the underlying MIT core
• The Open Knowledge Initiative has delivered 16 core enterprise services, and is currently completing related implementations, documentation and exemplar applications, aimed at streamlining systems interoperability and development effort in higher education.
• Faculty are using computing devices and portable storage devices (e.g., thumb drives) to bring digital lecture content into the classroom.
• Physical infrastructure (Spaces) to support technology enhanced teaching: classrooms, wireless networking.
• Supporting Integration of Educational Technology in the Curriculum: Course Management, Academic Software Infrastructure, developer support, communication and communities of practice.

MITCET: Snapshot of educational technology at MIT circa 2006.

In the Fall of 2006, we began a study examining the use of educational technologies in MIT subjects that are considered to count towards the General Institute Requirements. Not surprisingly, subjects aiming to train students to be professional scientists and engineers tend to incorporate tools that professionals and researchers will need to know fluently: MATLAB, Mathematica, ArcGIS, SolidWorks, Excel, Stata, etc. Faculty want to bring these research tools into the classroom. Over half of the GIR subjects rely on Stellar for syllabus and materials distribution. Many subjects sign up for discussion board services but most fail to use them. Wiki and blog use for collaboration and project tracking is becoming increasingly popular. Students are frequently being asked to utilize multimedia sources beyond text – videos, simulations, audio – in the creation of reports and presentations. Students also are asked to view or listen to media elements in addition to reading online text-based sources. Custom courseware varies from extensive, media-rich applications that take years to develop to smaller, “one-off” demos or simulations. There are more instances of the latter than of the former.

MITCET: Historical report, to draw parallels with current activities.

This report presents the recommendations of MIT’s Council on Educational Technology. It considers the Institute’s future educational activities in a world of new and emerging information technologies, and it proposes ways to support these activities.

1.1. Principal Recommendation: Initiate Project
MIT should undertake an ambitious five-year project – yet to be named – that will make the Institute the recognized leader in the creation and effective application of advanced educational technology and that will create an exportable model for higher education.

1.2 Educational Philosophy: A Time to Experiment
We therefore believe that the project we recommend should be centered on a set of carefully chosen experiments designed to probe the possibilities of new educational technologies along several dimensions, resolve some of the most critical uncertainties, and provide a reliable basis for future investments.

1.3 The Experimental Framework
1. Educational uses of new analytical and synthetic tools—such as advanced simulation, visualization, and rendering software, together with the integration of text, sound, and images—to help us pursue new and effective ways for teaching our basic science, engineering, management, design, literature, language, music, and humanities courses.
2. Educational uses of new information linkage tools— in particular, tools for organizing, finding, sharing, leveraging, and distributing information in a “webbed” world.
3. Learning through collaboration—for example, by using remote conferencing, electronic mail, the World Wide Web, and various kinds of new groupwork tools that coordinate synchronous and asynchronous learning activities.
4. Pursuit of lifelong learning approaches that extend the reach of our institution—on both sides of our current age group—to include MIT-bound young students, MIT alumni, and the professionals of our corporate partners.

1.4 Creating the Necessary Infrastructure
1. Create the MII—a high-performance, MIT Information Infrastructure to
2. Reinvent the campus by carefully and imaginatively integrating electronic facilities and physical spaces.
3. Create the virtual equivalent of Killian Court and the Dome.

1.5 Building on MIT’s Comparative Advantage
The council believes that this experimental strategy builds effectively on MIT’s traditions of research leadership in science and technology, its commitment to close integration of cutting-edge research and classroom teaching, its capacity to work closely and effectively with industry, and its proven capability to design and implement innovative large-scale systems.

MITCET: Report of NSF workshop on cyberinfrastructure.

Cyberinfrastructure has significant potential to radically influence educational practice. We note that it is common to overestimate the near-term effects of technology and to underestimate its long-term consequences. Given the generative importance of education, we must not view the impact of Cyberinfrastructure on education as merely a side benefit of efforts aimed at practicing scientists. The fundamental activities of design, creation, implementation and research concerning educational and learning processes supported by technologies pose a unique set of challenges for Cyberinfrastructure that merit investigation in their own right.

This report investigates the following issues relating to CELF:

1. Blending Formal and Informal Learning: How does CELF transcend the conventional boundaries of school-based education to leverage learning taking place across the contexts established by time, space and social arrangements (e.g., non-school activities involving family, community, work and play)? How does it differ from these contexts?
2. Lifelong Learning Chronicles: What forms of rich qualitative and quantitative data need to be collected to dynamically inform the multitude of education stakeholders?
3. Teaching Through the Cyberinfrastructure: What are the new images of teaching and teachers afforded by CELF?
4. Communities of Learners: How can CELF support and transform communities of learners?

I wanted to see if technology could offer cost effective alternatives to large lecture courses. The idea of broadcasting lectures to students working at home never appealed to me. That approach just made the big lecture bigger and more impersonal. One-on-one or small class instruction would be better for students, but not cheap. Try going to any research university and see if they would be willing to turn a five hundred student lecture into fifty seminars each with one professor and ten students.

However, one idea for breaking up big lectures into small student led study groups caught my eye early on. It was an experiment conducted by J.F. Gibbons in the early seventies. [1] At that time, Gibbons was dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering, and the problem he faced was one of extending Stanford’s distance education program to Hewlett Packard students in Santa Rosa, which was just outside the range of Stanford’s broadcast station.

Gibbons decided to use an alternative technology that is now obsolete, but was all-the-rage at the time: videotape. Since the students would not be able to phone in questions in real time, he thought it would be good for them to view the recorded lectures in small study groups.

MITCET: Report on how NSF might support cyberlearning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The Task Force on Cyberlearning was charged jointly by the Advisory Committees to the Education and Human Resources Directorate and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure to provide guidance to NSF on the opportunities, research questions, partners, strategies, and existing resources for cyberlearning. This report identifies directions for leveraging networked computing and communications technology. It also calls for research to establish successful ways of using these technologies to enhance educational opportunities and strengthen proven methods of learning.

We have identified five recommendations that cut across the strategies for growth and opportunities for action detailed in the body of the report:

1. Help build a vibrant cyberlearning field by promoting cross-dicsiplinary communities of cyberlearning researchers and practictioners.
2. Instill a “platform perspective”—shared, interoperable designs of hardware, software, and services—into NSF’s cyberlearning activities.
3. Emphasize the transformative power of information and communications technology for learning, from K to grey.
4. Adopt programs and policies to promote open educational resources.
5. Take responsibility for sustaining NSF-sponsored cyberlearning innovations.

In the late 1990s, the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a problem. The department was responsible for teaching the two required physics courses that are part of the General Institute Requirements (GIRs), MIT’s core curriculum—Physics I (mechanics, or in MIT parlance, 8.01) and Physics II (electricity and magnetism, 8.02)—and the failure rate in both was dismal. Often as many as 15 percent of the students didn’t pass mechanics on their first try, and 10 percent didn’t get through electricity and magnetism. The department head, Marc Kastner (now dean of the School of Science at MIT), and the associate department head for education, Thomas Greytak, were under pressure from the senior administration, as well as faculty in other departments, to fix the problem.

MITCET: Some of Chris Dede’s current thinking.

Reinventing the Academy: Transforming for New Learners, Digital Technologies and Student Success

MITCET: Survey of hybrid learning at MIT in 2010.

Hybrid learning describes a point on a spectrum of pedagogical structures that vary along the dimension of “presence”, where presence refers the frequency, mechanism, and format in which the learning group (the ‘class’) comes together physically to meet.”

MITCET: Survey of eLearning circa 2005, a bit dated but useful for background reading.

[As of 2005,] E-learning as we know it has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea—the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven—to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. It’s the core to numerous business plans and a service offered by most colleges and universities.

And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it’s changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0.

MITCET: Educause Summary of NSF Fostering Learning in a Networked World cyberlearning report.

MITCET: Announcement of NGLC grant competition.

Bill Gates has been taking online classes for years. Now, he thinks it’s time to make sure a whole lot more students do the same. Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is announcing a new multiyear grant program that will give millions of dollars to those with novel ideas on how to use technology, and in particular online courses, to improve education. The Next Generation Learning Challenges are aimed at both funding new ideas and getting various groups to partner and expand on some of the good ideas that are being tried out, but only at small scale.

MITCET: Example of a “track progress” through an OCW course, though the course structure looks similar to OCW Scholar.

MITCET: Thinking about what education means in the world of today, with the affordances that are available.

If academia ever was an ivory tower, it is being chiseled open by the persistent hammer of technological, social and economic change. Far from being removed from the gritty realities of everyday, today’s universities have been plunged into the thick, vibrant epicenter of global change. Tightly coupled global markets, the continual flow of real-time information and the availability of anywhere and anytime access have accelerated not only the pace of change but the immediacy of its impact.

That change is placing unprecedented demands on educators, administrators and students alike. Where content once was bound by time and place, it now pours freely from an abundance of sources, allowing students to shift their attention from ingesting factual data, to actively applying their knowledge to real life problems. What used to be a one-way conversation, teacher to student, has become a multi-party conversation, between teachers, students, outside peer groups and influencers.

MITCET: “Reimagining the 21st-Century University captures the essence of that debate; a dialog that revolved around how to design educational institutions that can be truly responsive to the needs of contemporary society.”

Building on this discussion, the UOC, as part of its ongoing desire to rethink higher education, together with the New Media Consortium (NMC), organized the second annual Open EdTech seminar on 19 and 20 October 2009 under the title Create the University of the Future. A group of 40 innovators in the field of education, new technologies and e-learning gathered in Barcelona to establish the new bases for the university of the future – a university based on digital technologies and open content, overcoming physical boundaries, being accessible to all and providing personalized and student-centered learning experiences.

While the groundbreaking brainstorming, so generously encouraged by the participants, was in course, we realized that it was necessary to address the fundamental issues of this discussion in the form of a publication. Reimagining the 21st-Century University captures the essence of that debate; a dialog that revolved around how to design educational institutions that can be truly responsive to the needs of contemporary society. We hope that by providing a forum in which participants have the freedom to inquire “what if” we can spark other conversations that may someday lead to “how to”.

MITCET Lori Breslow Summary:

• Learners construct understanding by connecting new information to prior knowledge
• “Practice at retrieval” is crucial
• Chunking information extends working memory
• Varying conditions under which learning takes place results in better learning
• Learning is enhanced when learners are required to “re-represent” information, concepts, etc.

Higher fees should reflect an institution’s quality, rather than status, so we should start measuring it, argues Graham Gibbs.

MITCET: Educational technology horizon circa 2010.

Key Trends:

• The environment of higher education is changing rapidly.
• Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college.
• Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship.
• The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Amateur scholars are weighing in on scholarly debates with reasoned if not always expert opinions, and websites like the Wikipedia have caused the very notion of what an expert is to be reconsidered.
• Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty.

Critical Challenges

• Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers.
• There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.
• While progress is being made, issues of intellectual property and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done. Intellectual property law presents a number of challenges to institutions of higher education.
• There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content.
• The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.

Technologies to Watch:

Near Term

• User-Created Content. It’s all about the audience, and the “audience” is no longer merely listening.
• Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest.

Mid Term

• Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives.
• Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world—or diverge wildly from it—present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way.

Far Term

• The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing.
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing.

MITCET: Educational technology horizon circa 2010.

Technologies to Watch:
Near Term

• Grassroots Video. Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software.
• Collaboration Webs. Collaboration no longer calls for expensive equipment and specialized expertise.

Mid Term

• Mobile Broadband. Each year, more than a billion new mobile devices are manufactured a new phone for every six people on the planet.
• Data Mashups. Mashups—custom applications where combinations of data from different sources are “mashed up” into a single tool—offer new ways to look at and interact with datasets.

Far Term

• Collective Intelligence. The kind of knowledge and understanding that emerges from large groups of people is collective intelligence. In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained.
• Social Operating Systems. The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content.

Critical Challenges:

• Significant shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning have created a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.

Significant Trends:

• The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking—combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization—is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship.
• The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases.
• Access to—and portability of—content is increasing as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced.
• The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen. Students and faculty continue to view and experience technology very differently.

MITCET: Educational technology horizon circa 2010.

Technologies to Watch:
Near Term

• Mobiles. Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly.
• Cloud Computing. The emergence of large-scale “data farms” — large clusters of networked servers — is bringing huge quantities of processing power and storage capacity within easy reach.

Mid Term

• The Personal Web. Springing from the desire to reorganize online content rather than simply viewing it, the personal web is part of a trend that has been fueled by tools to aggregate the flow of content in customizable ways and expanded by an increasing collection of widgets that manage online content.
• Geo-Everything. Geocoded data has many applications, but until very recently, it was time- consuming and difficult for non-specialists to determine the physical coordinates of a place or object, and options for using that data were limited.

Far Term

• Semantic-Aware Applications. New applications are emerging that are bringing the promise of the semantic web into practice without the need to add additional layers of tags, identifiers, or other top-down methods of defining context.
• Smart Objects. Sometimes described as the “Internet of things,” smart objects describe a set of technologies that is imbuing ordinary objects with the ability to recognize their physical location and respond appropriately, or to connect with other objects or information.

Key Trends:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

Critical Challenges:

• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
• Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not.
• Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
• We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices.

MITCET: Educational technology horizon circa 2010.

Key Trends:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
• The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.

Challenges:

• The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives — is changing.
• New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate. Across the board, institutions are looking for ways to control costs while still providing a high quality of service.

Technologies to Watch:
Near Term

• Mobile computing, by which we mean use of the network-capable devices students are already carrying, is already established on many campuses, although before we see widespread use, concerns about privacy, classroom management, and access will need to be addressed.
• Open content, also expected to reach mainstream use in the next twelve months, is the current form of a movement that began nearly a decade ago, when schools like MIT began to make their course content freely available.
  2-3 Years Out
• Electronic books have been available in some form for nearly four decades, but the past twelve months have seen a dramatic upswing in their acceptance and use.
• Simple augmented reality refers to the shift that has made augmented reality accessible to almost anyone.
  4-5 Years Away
• Gesture-based computing is already strong in the consumer market and we are seeing a growing number of prototypical applications for training, research, and study, though this technology is still some time away from common educational use.
• Visual data analysis, a way of discovering and understanding patterns in large data sets via visual interpretation, is currently used in the scientific analysis of complex processes.

MITCET: Snapshot of Educational Technology at MIT circa 2004-2005.

As of 2004-2005, status and trends at MIT:

• Leveraging commodity computing and individual ownership- One-to-One
  Computing@MIT
• Technology device form factors are continually evolving, now embracing
  workstations, laptops, tablet PCs, and handhelds.
• Spatial data services have grown with the establishment of the collaborative partnership in Geographical Information Systems between IS and MIT Libraries.
• Software infrastructure to support teaching and research: Athena
• Recently a Windows-based software infrastructure and delivery system has been implemented and integrated into the underlying MIT core
• The Open Knowledge Initiative has delivered 16 core enterprise services, and is currently completing related implementations, documentation and exemplar applications, aimed at streamlining systems interoperability and development effort in higher education.
• Faculty are using computing devices and portable storage devices (e.g., thumb drives) to bring digital lecture content into the classroom.
• Physical infrastructure (Spaces) to support technology enhanced teaching: classrooms, wireless networking.
• Supporting Integration of Educational Technology in the Curriculum: Course Management, Academic Software Infrastructure, developer support, communication and communities of practice.

MITCET: A possible funding source for MIT initiatives. RFP is due November 19.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonprofit education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools.

An initial $20 million round of money, from the Gates Foundation, will be for postsecondary online courses, particularly ones tailored for community colleges and low-income young people. Another round of grants, for high school programs, is scheduled for next year.

MITCET: Historical report, to draw parallels with current activities.

This report presents the recommendations of MIT’s Council on Educational Technology. It considers the Institute’s future educational activities in a world of new and emerging information technologies, and it proposes ways to support these activities.

1.1. Principal Recommendation: Initiate Project
MIT should undertake an ambitious five-year project – yet to be named – that will make the Institute the recognized leader in the creation and effective application of advanced educational technology and that will create an exportable model for higher education.

1.2 Educational Philosophy: A Time to Experiment
We therefore believe that the project we recommend should be centered on a set of carefully chosen experiments designed to probe the possibilities of new educational technologies along several dimensions, resolve some of the most critical uncertainties, and provide a reliable basis for future investments.

1.3 The Experimental Framework
1. Educational uses of new analytical and synthetic tools—such as advanced simulation, visualization, and rendering software, together with the integration of text, sound, and images—to help us pursue new and effective ways for teaching our basic science, engineering, management, design, literature, language, music, and humanities courses.
2. Educational uses of new information linkage tools— in particular, tools for organizing, finding, sharing, leveraging, and distributing information in a “webbed” world.
3. Learning through collaboration—for example, by using remote conferencing, electronic mail, the World Wide Web, and various kinds of new groupwork tools that coordinate synchronous and asynchronous learning activities.
4. Pursuit of lifelong learning approaches that extend the reach of our institution—on both sides of our current age group—to include MIT-bound young students, MIT alumni, and the professionals of our corporate partners.

1.4 Creating the Necessary Infrastructure
1. Create the MII—a high-performance, MIT Information Infrastructure to
2. Reinvent the campus by carefully and imaginatively integrating electronic facilities and physical spaces.
3. Create the virtual equivalent of Killian Court and the Dome.

1.5 Building on MIT’s Comparative Advantage
The council believes that this experimental strategy builds effectively on MIT’s traditions of research leadership in science and technology, its commitment to close integration of cutting-edge research and classroom teaching, its capacity to work closely and effectively with industry, and its proven capability to design and implement innovative large-scale systems.

MITCET: This brief review of the literature presents a working definition of online learning, sketches the beginnings of a profile of students who participate in online learning programs, and makes the case for redesigning online learning spaces to foster a stronger feeling of community and connectedness.

MITCET: This context-setting piece identifies and frames e-learning issues including the new generation of learners, teaching and learning priorities, the contemporary landscape and competitive advantages of e-learning.

It is time for American higher education leaders to get serious and strategic about the coming disruption and the need to reimagine P-20 education, workforce training, and competence development. In “Linking Analytics to Lifting out of Recession,” we discussed the disruptive power of the dislodging events occurring in American higher education, today. If we miss the opportunity over the next several years to leverage these disruptions and achieve financial sustainability, American colleges and universities may find themselves in an untenable, unsustainable position by 2020.

The for-profit sector understands these challenges and opportunities and is responding to them. When Michael Dolence and Donald Norris wrote Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century (1995), they suggested the unbundling of offerings and reinvention of business models that have since been embraced by the for-profit sector. Now is the time for practitioners of online, blended, and e-learning to embrace the imperative to leverage innovations and transform practices and business models.

MITCET: Five calls to action for faculty and universities.

Create the university of the future. This was the goal of the forty leaders in open education and technology who met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the Open EdTech Summit sponsored by the Open University of Catalunya and the New Media Consortium. Together, this group considered the question of how to design educational institutions that can be truly responsive to the needs of contemporary society and of today’s students.

A call to action:

MITCET: Placeholder for 2010 report.

We believe there is a need to rethink the learning environments of the future, so we can create the necessary conditions for great leaders to arise, for great achievers to lead, for great social entrepreneurs to change the world, and so on. In the past, online learning environments, limited originally by costs, technology and access, replicated what existed in traditional environments, in terms of classroom activity mostly (a place for resources, to discuss, to communicate, to grade). As the world becomes digital and global, there is a need to rethink these environments, as the way people live, relate, create and participate, have shifted and significantly changed, and the way we learn has also changed as well. The new digital culture brings about new opportunities and new ways of doing things.

We then see the need to create online learning environments that motivate learners to learn, share, participate, lead, grow, etc. The online classroom environment will not, by itself, inspire and motivate learners, just as their classrooms in traditional off line settings and the faculty members are also not sufficient to motivate them. New learners need an enriching and inspirational surrounding, spaces, an environment that breathes and promotes flexibility, sharing, participation, possibilities for creating, personalizing, etc.

MITCET: Snapshot of faculty use of technology circa 2009.

The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement surveyed approximately 4,600 faculty members at 50 U.S. colleges and universities in the spring of 2009.

MITCET: Take a look at the Key Findings document summary, especially pages 7-11.

Since 2004, the annual ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We gather information about how skilled students believe they are with technologies; how they perceive technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for IT in courses. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010 is a longitudinal extension of the annual 2004 through 2009 studies. It is based on quantitative data from a spring 2010 survey of 36,950 freshmen and seniors at 100 four-year institutions and students at 27 two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 84 students at 4 institutions; and review of qualitative data from written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to exploring student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, including ownership and use of Internet-capable handheld devices, the 2010 study also includes a special focus on student use of social networking websites and web-based applications.

MITCET: National study of student use of information technologies in higher education.

Key findings revolve around: student ownership of computers, interactive communication tools, technologies in use in classroom, how students view their own technology adoption and IT skills, course or learning management systems, student perceptions of IT in courses, undergraduates and the mobile revolution, mobile devices in the academic environment and emergency notification.

“The study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 studies. It is based on quantitative data from a spring 2009 survey of 30,616 freshmen and seniors at 103 four-year institutions and students at 12 two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 62 students at 4 institutions; and review of qualitative data from written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2009 study also includes a special focus on student ownership and use of Internet-capable handheld devices.”

In order to understand both what that means and how it might be achieved, we need to examine some of the recent transitions in learning which have emerged in the 21st century. In particular we need to consider several dimensions of learning (knowing, making, and playing) that have taken on new, more distributed forms in the networked age.

http://chronicle.com/article/TryFail/44779

http://www2.unca.edu/ctl/what%20the%20best%20college%20teachers%20do.htm

Booklist Review:

“With the strong conviction that good teaching can be learned, and after 15 years of observing teachers in action, Bain undertook an exploration of the essentials of effective teaching. The result is an insightful look at what makes a great teacher, based on a study of three dozen teachers from a cross section of disciplines from medical-school faculties to undergraduate departments.”

MITCET: Example of a “track progress” through an OCW course, though the course structure looks similar to OCW Scholar.

MITCET: Consider the “recommendations concerning terminology, discoverability, sharing of best practice and improving market intelligence, which are outlined in the executive summary.”

To inform the work of the Online Learning Task Force (OLTF), HEFCE commissioned the Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning team at the University of Oxford to carry out a study of the current UK provision of higher education-level online distance learning and to advise the OLTF where further work was required to increase understanding of this sector. This report presents the findings, based on desk research exploring the web-sites of HEIs, FECs and commercial providers, and interviews with key players in online learning.

The study highlights the difficulties in finding information about online courses on institutions’ web-sites, and the lack of clarity in the terminology institutions use to describe their online programmes. It makes recommendations concerning terminology, discoverability, sharing of best practice and improving market intelligence, which are outlined in the executive summary.

The best college and university teachers,” writes Ken Bain, “create a safe environment in which students can try, come up short, receive feedback, and try again.

MITCET: Southern New Hampshire University President talks about how they are reinventing higher education.

Reinventing the Academy: Transforming for New Learners, Digital Technologies and Student Success

MITCET: How are for-profit colleges and schools applying resources to ensure the success of their online learners.

Reinventing the Academy: Transforming for New Learners, Digital Technologies and Student Success

MITCET: Story about the launch of the National Educational Technology Plan, with quotes by Chris Dede.

National Educational Technology Plan, issued in draft form in March by the U.S. Department of Education. “The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures,” says the plan.