Experiential eLearning

The Future of Business Education

I was privileged to be invited to a “Future of Business Education” conference hosted by the Acton MBA program in Austin, Texas, this past Fall.  Jeff Sandefer, founder of the Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship and an entrepreneur, educational innovator, and philanthropist, assembled a group of entrepreneurs and thought leaders in business education to discuss some of the thornier issues facing this constituency today.  It was a provocative and inspiring few days and I’ll try and detail some of the discussion here.

The Digital Revolution and Higher Education

The Pew Research Center issued a report entitled The Digital Revolution and Higher Education (report available online and in PDF format here), with the tagline "College Presidents, Public Differ on Value of Online Learning".  The Center is a non-partisan 'fact tank' that does not make policy recommendations, but rather "collects information and disseminates it in an understandable and analytical way, rather than producing expert opinion on policy subjects".  Here's a brief overview of the report's Executive Summary.

Designing and Building a Platform for eLearning Delivery

For years, Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) has offered online courses on a number of management topics such as Finance, Financial Accounting, Quantitative Methods, Spreadsheet Modeling, etc, for sale to academic customers.  This eProduct line has been very successful and has been deployed to thousands of users annually, both for educational institutions (many of whom use the courses for program prematriculation gating or benchmarking) and for individual managers who can purchase the courses via the Harvard Business Review website.  The platform on which the courses were hosted was a proprietary application built by the Harvard Business School (HBS) Educational Technology Group, since many of the courses were offered both to HBS students and to academic customers via HBP.  After years of successful delivery, a decision was made to phase out this original platform and consider adopting a more robust and modern delivery platform.  This blog provides an overview of the considerations and ultimate design and development plan for this new platform.

The Convergence of Content Providers and Learning Platforms

As an academic content provider, Harvard Business Publishing's Higher Education group distributes business content to educators who then post that material on learning platforms.  But often times our content and other publishers' content is distributed by 3rd party content aggregators who then sell directly to educators.  Historically there was a clear distinction between content providers (publishers and aggregators) and the learning platforms on which their content was distributed/used.  That's no longer the case -- there has been a massive convergence of these entities across both web and devices.  Here's some that piqued our interest.

Teaching Case Studies in Online Courses

At Harvard Business Publishing, part of our job is to support the use of case-method teaching (and other aspects of participant-centered learning) to the faculty and students who use our materials.  To that end a discussion has started on our Teaching Post blog that focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with using cases and other participant-centered learning content in online learning environments.

Visit the blog entry for more details.

Identifying the "Job" for OER Repositories

For those not familiar with the Open Education movement or Open Education Repositories (OER), please see my earlier post on Open Education.  This entry applies Clay Christensen's theory of "jobs to do" marketing and explores some challenges and opportunities for OER repositories using that perspective. Both of these entries are based upon ongoing discussions in the Open Education Practice and Potential course in Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education, and I'm grateful to my classmates as well as instructors Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar for exploring these topics.

Open Education

I'm currently enrolled in a hybrid classroom/online course called Open Education Practice and Potential in Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education.  The course is taught by Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean and Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (bio) and Brandon Muramatsu, Senior IT Consultant in the same MIT office.  Both are incredibly accomplished learning technologists dedicated to the "Open Education" movement -- a movement aimed at improving education access and quality by enabling educators to develop, use, re-use, and share digital learning resources.  Although the class isn't over yet and I'm by no means fully educated on this expansive topic, I thought I'd make an attempt to describe this movement and detail just a few of its components that challenge the conventional educational content landscape.

Private Sector Colleges & Universities

The debate continues about the academic efficacy and student adoption/retention practices associated with "private sector" colleges and universities.  Also known as "proprietary" and "for-profit" education and sometimes referred to as the "career college" market, this is a growing segment within the higher education landscape both in terms of numbers of students and educational dollars.  I've attempted an overview of the segment that includes the recent/ongoing political controversy as well as insights into their program design practices that, for some of these institutions, promise real educational reform and opportunity for otherwise neglected student populations.

Mobile Learning in Higher Education

I recently attended a NERCOMP event on Mobile Learning in Higher Education.  NERCOMP - the NorthEast Regional Computing Program -- is an EDUCAUSE affiliate.  The "day of discovery" was hosted by Kristin Lofblad Sullivan, Manager of Instructional Technology at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.

The Future of Textbooks

The textbook landscape is changing so rapidly that it's hard to pinpoint current state in order to benchmark it against possible evolutionary paths.  But in general we who deal in fairly-priced, atomized pieces of content have long benefited from an industry that welded content to the ultimate unwieldy platform - the overpriced, bloated textbook -- and then embarked on a forced-upgrade revision cycle that ultimately drew Congressional wrath.   But that industry is fast-reforming and the reforms are worth noting for both consumers and competitors alike.  Here's a brief recap of some of the activity.