NEW LEARNING 2.0: PROMISE OR THREAT? THE INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE A Presentation for the EDEN Annual Conference 13-16 June 2007 Nicholas H. Allen, DPA.

NEW LEARNING 2.0:PROMISE OR THREAT?

THE INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE

A Presentation for theEDEN Annual Conference

13-16 June 2007Nicholas H. Allen, DPA

Web 2.0 Language

connectivism

Nomadic learners

Virtual worldsPLE

Volitional literacyavatars

Rss feeds

wikisblogs

folksomoniesSocial software

Tag clouds

args

ajax

Google maps

Pod casting

M-learning

Video blogs

Myspace

facebook

Second life

Vr 2.0

Web 3d

Open educational resourcesParasitic learning

Serendipic learning

Social web

Snowflake effect

Web 2.0 Culture:

• Openness as hallmark• Open source and open content• Micro content• Users in charge• Constructivist learning• Metadata• Swarm intelligence• Social networking• Networks of networks• Spontaneity• Dynamic and continuous change

Agenda: Here’s what I intend to do:

• Tell a little about myself and my institution so you may understand my perspective

• Discuss some of the promise and threats I see for educational institutions related to Web 2.0, especially ODLs.

• Offer some suggested areas of action to avoid some of the threats and leverage the promise

• Conclude with a comment on the future

About Me• Early values about learning and education.

• Formal education that mixed general engineering and systems thinking with business, management and human systems.

• 23 years experience in a large public humanitarian organization; 20 with a large open and pubic university as: senior faculty, dean, provost, and interim president during the online revolution and great change.

• Now provost emeritus, university ambassador, and faculty on sabbatical.

• Strongly held beliefs about the importance of:

access to quality education technology used wisely with sound process reengineering

principles as a means of meeting the world’s capacity needs.

About UMUC• University of Maryland University College: One of the 11

degree-granting public universities of the University System of Maryland.

• Only 6.4% of funding comes from public funds

• Mission: Open assess university of the State of Maryland; a university devoted in its entirety to serving students.

• Serves primarily adult and part-time students 18 to 80.

• Approximately 100,000 students and 3,800 faculty worldwide.

• Baccalaureate & Post-baccalaureate Certificates; degree programs: Associate; Baccalaureate; Masters, Doctoral.

UMUC and Distance Education• UMUC involved in distance education for more

than 50 years; online for more than 13 years

• First 4 online courses in 1994; approximately 85% enrollments now online.

• All 20 master’s degrees, 21 of 29 bachelor’s degrees, and 58 certificates available fully online

• More than 700 individual courses available online

• More than 165,000 online enrollments in 2006

Worldwide Online Enrollments

We use an “interactive” course paradigm characterized by:

• Communication between teacher and students (and among students)

• Learning directed by the teacher• Structured syllabus and sequence of

assignments• Less multimedia technology• Smaller class sizes (number of

students per teacher)

Online Course Paradigm

UMUC Online Classroom

•Proprietary Course Management System (Web Tycho): scaleable, reliable, intuitive.

•Asynchronous: Students and faculty do not have to be logged into the classroom at the same time

•Comprehensive: All services needed by students (library, technical assistance, etc.) are available within the online classroom

•Interactive: Students and faculty have multiple communication/ interaction options; some features of today’s Wiki’s and blogs in use for several years

Model of the Online Classroom

Academic Support Services

Students taking online courses have remote access to:

24/7 technology help and support

24/7 library resources and services

All student servicese.g. admissions; registration; advising; financial aid

How Did We Get Here?

• The bottom line is UMUC was poised at the right place at the right time at the beginning of the internet revolution in the mid 1990s. University culture of distributed

education and serving students Emergence of societal needs for

continuing education and learning The introduction of technology to make

distributed education more possible

THE GLOBAL CHALLENGEAND

THE PROMISE OF WEB 2.9 TECHNOLOGIES

The Global Challenge (for all of us)

• Climate change (for education): The rising tide of expectations: education--a right of every

citizen The belief that education offers hope for a better job, better

life, and more fulfilling role in society A belief that cuts across economic, cultural, and social classes.

• The gap in world capacity building: World population is out stripping the capacity of governments,

NGOs, and academic institutions to meet the growing need. Nearly 1 billion working age illiterate adults today (UNESCO). This need will over take the capacity of institutions to meet the

demand; is already happening.

• The impending crisis: Ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots of the

world A world further subject to extreme poverty, ignorance, and

instability.

The challenge for educational institutions:

Balancing: access, cost (affordability), quality, accountability

Keeping up with the growth in knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that need to be learned in today’s rapidly changing world (more to cover)

Dealing with increasingly with highly diverse levels of preparation of learners who appear to their door

Dealing with finite resources

Dealing with increasing expectations and demands from stakeholders: students, faculty, employees, accreditation agencies, governments, politicians, taxpayers.

Technology: The Enabler:

• Transform education, workforce training, and lifelong learning in a similar way that ICT advances have already transformed other national and global industries.

• Enable universities, libraries, and museums to reach out to millions no matter how poor and to deliver content outside traditional institutional walls.

• Keep cost affordable even for the most needy of our students

• Raise the achievement of students’ learning.

Technology combined with Effective Process Reengineering of Educational Institutions and their Systems has the potential to:

But:

Scaleable operations, processes, procedures, pedagogies

Standardization of basic platforms, procedures Technology mediated delivery Self service facilitated by technology and

people Measurement of both business and academic

outcomes Mass customization of services and learning

Technology can only Deliver the Promise if we think in terms of mass delivery, and that means organizations follow a few clear strategic principles:

The Promise of Web 2.0 Technologies:

• Help learners learn more• Help faculty teach better• Improve learning outcomes• Reduce the costs of education• Increase access• Facilitate evaluation of faculty and

institutional effectiveness

Will be fulfilled to the extent they can they can enable organizations to accomplish the above objectives to:

ISSUES AND CONCERNSRELATED TO WEB 2.0

Issues: Impact

Do we know what we are doing and how do we know it?

• Where is the impact data on the introduction of new learning Technologies? On helping students learn On helping faculty teach On learning outcomes On access On cost reduction

• Perceived usefulness and ease of use also have an impact on the acceptance of the technology.

Issues: Pedagogy• Finding the appropriate mix of formal versus informal

learning Web 2.0 tools geared to informal learning.

• Importance of learning design and fitting the informal learning opportunities within the framework of the formal learning system. Consequences of not matching the appropriate

learning tool or innovation to student learning objectives.

• Consideration of the needs of the learner: Different styles for different personality types Different levels of preparedness Different levels of technological sophistication

• Constructivist learning and the risks inherent in avoiding what is uninteresting or missing the undiscovered. Risks of losing national and cultural memories. Loss of structure, direction, and purpose.

Issue: Student Information Literacy Skills

• American Library Association: Information literacy--ability to recognize when information is needed and then have ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. Information literacy is as important as technology fluency skills Information literacy should be a systemic requirement.

• What is the capability and level of student NET skills: How to effectively evaluate Web resources How to ethically use them How to protect personal information How to find what they need

• Will visual literacy become a new required skill –media studies?

Issue: Support

The importance of providing effective scaffolding for both students and faculty in using new learning technologies.

• Some students and faculty may not be prepared or disciplined sufficiently to function with the virtual world.

• There is a need to provide structure and a guiding path for many students.

• A false premise that all course management systems (CMS) lack interaction with faculty and other students, cannot be personalized, and foster sterile, cold approaches to learning.

Issue: Scale

• Who picks what material, tools, products to use? • A return to the college industry structure that

has dominated higher education in the past will result in failure of institutions to develop capacity for the future.

• Traditional institutions have a greater problem than ODL institutions. The culture is one where every individual faculty designs

their own course, even when multiple sections of the same course exist at the same institution, and thousands at other institutions.

The market for innovative educational material is fragmented and changing

Issue: Organizational Needs for Stability

• With open content sites, and open educational resources (OERs) in general What assurance a particular site or link will be there tomorrow, or

next term with the same features as today?

• Perpetual software development, the end of the beta phase—a challenge for large scale institutions: The impact of a problematic change to software can be immense

and costly. Old development cycles (2-3 years) are too long; but perpetual

change is problematic as well Issues of training faculty—many faculty at traditional schools are

far behind in use of technology

• Democratization of education where what one needs to learn is found in Web 2.0 for free suggests institutions become credentialing services—a huge structural change.

Issue: Intellectual Property

• Issues of trust, reliability, ownership of sources

• Assurance of the legal right to use, even if found in the creative commons—institutions held accountable—highly sensitive issue now in North America.

• Copyright and intellectual property issues from the institution’s perspective—what assurance that the creative commons material does not carry hidden ownership and liability risks that materialize when the institution or it faculty use the open resources in a way that results in a return or profit for the institution.

Issue: Efficiency

Considering the ROI of the institution’s investment resources and in faculty and student time to achieving the learning objectives.

• How much noise (Meta noise) can be tolerated in Web 2.0 systems?

• Use of multiple CMS in one curriculum or campus• Which objects or tools from Web 2.0 are justified in

terms of learning objectives and costs in student time to achieve?

• Interoperability of new tools and innovations; how they fit in and are used within CMS platforms

• Sustainability—who pays, who maintains?

What is Needed forInstitutions to Cope with Web 2.0

Evolution?

(So the Promise of New Learning 2.0 will become Fulfilled

and the Threats Minimized)

Needs for the Future

1. A systems approach for introduction of Web 2.0 technologies into the formal learning system of an educational institution. Deliberate institutional choices about finding the right mix of

formal to informal learning opportunities.

2. Impact evaluation research that will inform faculty and administrators which new EDUWARE products, approaches, and New Learning 2.0 techniques have the greatest positive effect in: Helping students learn, teachers teach, and institutions to

deliver affordable, quality education. Treating users decently, selecting technologies that have

positive impact on the user’s time, are low cost, and have proven positive impact on learning or teaching.

Needs for the Future

3. Sophisticated learning outcomes measurement systems that provide immediate feedback to learners, faculty, and institutions on achievement of the desired learning outcomes, areas for adjustment in study, teaching, or the curriculum.

4. Intelligent tutoring systems for students to supplement the interaction with their faculty and other students with interactive material that encourages them to fill in the gaps. Scaffolding systems that engage learners with immediate feedback

and increasingly challenging levels of practice. Technology that facilitates learners’ ability to grasp complex

concepts and transfer to practical situations. Stronger learner support systems to help them get through the

maze of bureaucracy that characterizes our institutions.

Needs for the Future

5. Required courses in information literacy so that learners can distinguish credible sources of information from the junk.

6. Required faculty development programs to train faculty in the new Web 2.0 technologies and how these tools may best be used to accomplish learning objectives.

7. Common cartridge systems that support interoperability: Enable one to seamlessly plug and play new features across

course management systems, Sets of common specifications or standards (IMS) that allow

digital products and content supplied to textbooks, faculty produced course add-ons, common courseware, to plug and play in any system.

Needs for the Future

8. Virtual laboratory systems that let learners conduct realistic experiments in the different sciences.

9. National and global OER systems that facilitate digitizing the collective national memories of societies from libraries, museums, and public media and make these original, reliable resources available to anyone anywhere anytime

A COMMENT ON THE FUTURE

New Learning 2.0: Promise of Threat?

• Something is taking place to which we need to attend,

• We have right to be excited about the emerging possibilities

• But from an institutional perspective we also have a responsibility to temper this excitement with a quest for realism, practicality, and evaluation for impact.

• We owe this for our students who justify our main reason for being as educators.

Paul de Troyer