Online Learning … A Failure?

I came across this article last night and cued it up for a quick read today and thought I’d post a few thoughts and reactions — of course from my point of view. The article, Online Education Flunks But New Focus May Spark Revival, is an interesting read and does a decent, if limited job of describing the challenges of the eLearning boom and (perceived) bust. I understand the point of the piece is to look at the big-time (for-profit) initiatives lots of Universities engaged in and around the Internet craze of the dot com era … where it fails to go, IMHO, is at the way these distance or web-based learning initiatives have driven resident education.

Get in the way back machine with me for a minute … when I came to PSU, I was fresh off my stint in start up land and had just accepted a position at the University in the World Campus (WC) as an Instructional Designer. At that time, the WC was all abuzz with huge upside, tremendous growth potential, and the start up feeling I had just left. The only problem was that the University, in traditional University fashion, went head first into the initiative without a whole lot of thought on how to actually implement the thing. Our early numbers showed that … the University did lay some amazing groundwork to what has become a successful program, but a lot of that has happened in the last couple years … they’ve since built a relatively efficient process, workable policies, done some major reorganizing, and taken a few lumps to create a sustainable model. One thing that struck me about the WC back in the day was that eLearning courses built by us in the WC were not to be used for resident education, period … that was a very strange decision in my mind (of course I didn’t understand the political underpinnings at the time) … and one they’ve since reassessed.

Fast-forward a couple of years as I move over to the School of Information Sciences and Technology to get our eLearning initiative going and to do it the right way. I was one of the first employees in the School, so there wasn’t the history of how it was done in the past — we invented our situation. We decided from day one that eLearning would support our resident offerings first and be used for distance education second. Fundamentally, a great idea given our School was a start up and was at 19 of the PSU Campuses across the Commonwealth of PA. eLearning was used to support a consistent and quality learning experience in the classroom. That is a key differentiator … our eLearning materials are designed to help faculty at all locations get the real core of what IST is all about.

I think going forward we’ll see more success for pure DE types deliveries, ala World Campus, but I think more and more schools (k-20) will be using designed content as the basis for a lot of what happens in the classroom. Its funny, the year I came to IST to start the Solutions Institute I went to the President’s State of the University Address and listened to him say something to the effect of, “I see a day in the future where all of our resident courses will be a blended, hybrid structure with both in class and eLearning components …” It made me sort of angry at the time … I thought, why isn’t he talking about IST, we’ve been preaching hybrid for a year now? Looking back, I know he was. To date our eLearning program, Online IST, has touched over 10,000 enrollments in just four and half years … what’s amazing is that faculty have chosen to adopt it to change what goes on in the classroom. Good stuff!

eLearning isn’t at all dead, and was never a bust … its alive and will continue to fundamentally change what we as teachers do and what our students come to expect. Its a perspective thing … and its easy to have my point of view sitting inside the non-profit world of higher education, but let’s get real, if it didn’t make a difference and it was bleeding dollars we’d be done with it. Or, I’ll be wrong again … who knows … what do you think?

What’s Your Choice?

Please excuse the blatant rip off from apple.com of the above image … I feel like a criminal … anyway, after I posted my iShuffle thoughts yesterday I got a comment that talked about how important the shuffle feature of the iPod is. I have never been a shuffle kind of guy — just too much junk on my iPod (TV themes, audiobooks, podcasts, and my own awful garage band songs come to mind) that end up getting in the way. I do use a ton of playlists, both smart and unsmart (I guess even though those are the ones I built myself … hmm?) on all my Macs.

My questions for all of you are … what iPod (or device) do you use to listen to music on, do use a shuffle feature, and do you spend time building playlists? This is the first time I am asking for real feedback and I am probably setting myself up for a very disappointing set of results, but go ahead and comment. It might be interesting.

The Winter … Its Just Starting

Looking out my front door last week … looks like there is another storm coming Monday. Why is this picture here? Well, I am trying out new photo to blog and photo album software. This was actually posted from iPhoto using the spiffy Photon plugin available here. Not a perfect solution, but not bad. I am really looking for something that lets me create a nice set of thumbnails all linked to a gallery page and works with WordPress 1.5. Any ideas out there?

iPod Shuffle … Of Course

I can’t help myself. I may have a problem, but I refuse to admit to it, that’s for sure. We went to Target today (what else it there to do) for some stuff, but I was really hoping to stumble across a Shuffle. I got there and the sign said something like, “iPod Shuffle Available 2.27.05″ … well, that’s tomorrow. I figured it wasn’t like an Apple truck was going to pull up tonight, so I asked a guy who clearly worked around the electronics area, but not in it … he said, “yeah, we have tons of those under the counter.” He borrowed a key, opened it up, and handed me a 1 GB Shuffle. Nice. It is a nice piece of engineering, even if it is a screenless little piece of plastic. Apple touches abound — the little metal bearings in the end cap that hold the USB cover on is a fine example. The packaging is actually very cool as well … pictures below.

The nice thing is that I plugged it into my 12″ PowerBook, it asked me if it should autofill it for me, I said yes and it picked a random selection of songs. I have it on right now and it is in shuffle mode — something I never do with my 60GB iPod photo … just too much stuff to get in the way. It hasn’t played a bad song yet … went something like, U2, Dave Matthews, Grateful Dead … not bad taste if you ask me. Very cool. This is going to make the perfect refillable podcast machine. Exactly what I was looking for!

P2P … For Citations

Happened to come across this from a very short post on Copyfight — great blog by the way … CiteULike is an online service that allows users to quickly and easily share, organize, and maintain academic papers. A really great idea that could actually work. From their front page:

When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer. You can share you library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about.

Might be worth a look … I really like the tagging they have going on.

iWork … No Really

WTF, why does it take our School so long to deliver software? I mean I ordered this stuff weeks (dare I say months) ago. I finally got my version of Apple’s iWork today … I am almost embarrassed by the fact that I haven’t had my hands on it by now. Keynote 2 is great … they actually made it usable beyond just great looking. The real gem, IMHO, is Pages. It’s not a Word killer, but it will make running a small biz so much easier. The integration with iLife is fantastic and built in layouts are really nice … I have already started using it to write a white paper. I’ll post a little about that tonight or tomorrow as I get it further along.

I hate when people look over my shoulder as I type, so I guess its time to wrap up this post. iWork is worth the price of admission. I need a category for fluff …

Working at Otto’s

Here we are at [Otto's](http://www.ottospubandbrewery.com/) (a nice little brew pub in State College) to discuss podcasting and I am demonstrating WordPress … no other way to talk about the power of RSS without showing people just how easy it is to make and edit content. Todday I met with two faculty members from our [College of Education](http://www.ed.psu.edu/) to discuss a NSF grant they are assembling. One of the things they are really interested in is podcasting. Let’s just say they walked away with the light bulbs on!

Again, it is just really cool to see people’s reactions when the whole content delivery via rss thing clicks with them. I have a feeling we’ll be doing quite a bit of good stuff with these guys! One of them was Kyle Peck — quite frankly one of the most respected names in Instructional Systems Design … I studied his book in grad school for crying out loud! This isn’t the first time Kyle and I have hooked up … he is a great guy and very into pushing the limits of technology (and the establishment, research, educational philosophy, etc) and is just great to hang out and talk with. He is going to be a guest on the From the Basement Podcast here in the next couple of weeks.

We’ll be setting up a pilot program that I’ll be blogging about here. Until then let’s just say it was a great meeting that will unlock a ton of opportunities.

Timing: blogs@ist.psu.edu

I read D’Arcy Norman’s post about getting a school-wide blogging service going and really couldn’t believe it. Seems we are on the same page. I have been pushing my group on the blog front for months — since last spring really. He does a great job laying some much needed groundwork … and then tonight I stumble across this post over at incorporated subversion and I am starting to think there is a paper here that would help a lot of people figure this thing out (at least a well executed blogsite).

I sat on the University-wide committee that selected (not passing any judgment on the selection, but …) ANGEL as our course management system and we used some well created matrices that outlined our needs, the tools on the market, and how it all aligned. I have been looking for something like that for multi-user blog tools and haven’t been able to find it. It looks like the need is very timely and there seems to be other interested people out there. I’d help work on something like that if anyone is interested.

We want to create an environment that allows faculty (at first) to create and manage their course blog sites. It has been a requested service by a few of our early adopters, but we haven’t gone after it yet. We did build some basic blogging functionality into the version 2.0 release of our Edison Services toolset, but pulled it at the last minute in favor of putting the horse back in front of the cart and collecting some requirements. I’d really like to have something in place by fall 2005, so we’ll see.

We have been able to automate a standard WordPress installation via a web interface that faculty can use, but it would become an administrative nightmare very quickly. Every install requires its own database and there isn’t any sort of way to upgrade all 160 faculty members’ blog spaces on the fly. I can only imagine what a bitch that would turn into. I love WordPress and am very excited to see the multi-user version! At any rate, we need a solid set of recommendations that match up to the needs of higher education. Let’s get it done … anyone want to help?