It's been almost a year since I wrote about the edX announcement and launch. Alot has happened since then -- particularly in the area of understanding more about their platform's adaptive tutoring and grading capabilities, learning analytics promise, and business model opportunities. This post takes a look at some of these areas that show the interesting value proposition that the platform -- and not just the content brands and quality -- brings to the offering.
This blog entry reviews a not-for-profit organization called ITHAKA that focuses helps the academic community “use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.” It does this via a number of entities and platforms – some you may have used, others merely heard about, and some that may be new to you entirely. But for anyone interested in “transformative uses of new technologies in higher education” – and particularly in the area of online learning and education – it’s an incredible resource. I’ll briefly review the organizational arms and also mention two recent reports related to online learning.
Harvard’s announcement this month that it was joining forces with MITx to launch EdX, a series of (free and paid) openly-available online courses, fueled an already buzzing trend in higher education: MOOCs, or massively open online courses. The move is being portrayed in a variety of ways – the promise of democratizing higher education and potentially disrupting, or at least fundamentally altering the structure and quality of, online learning and even face-to-face classroom education. Here’s a look into the MOOC evolution and how EdX fits into the picture.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is an “entrepreneurial nonprofit” whose mission is to “explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.” Basically, they study the relationship between the Internet, law, and society through a number of fascinating initiatives, many of which involve some of the celebrated intellectuals and authors in fellowship at the center. Some of these initiatives involve tools that better enable educators to utilize, and be supported by, online and technology-based platforms. We invited Kendra Albert, research assistant at the Berkman Center and assistant to noted Berkman steward and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain, to visit with us at Harvard Business Publishing and give an overview of some of the free tools and platforms they’ve developed for education.
At Harvard Business School's Publishing group we've been a longtime fan of custom business simulations, and took thet custom development approach when we designed the platform and portfolio of our own business simulation games. It's nice to see that the idea of creating custom simulations has only gained prominence in both academic and corporate settings. BTS, a creator of experiential learning solutions for strategy implementation including custom business simulations, recently released a whitepaper called "Navigating Strategy Execution: The Case for Custom Business Simulations" (see their whitepaper page to download). It's a great overview of the benefits that custom simulations can provide in corporate environments but also includes some great universal truths about the impact of this type of approach on learning. We're heard great things about BTS and their approach and a few years back I had interviewed Executive VP Rommin Adl as part of an interview series on business simulations. Check out the white paper - it's a great, short read and a nice synopsis of this great approach to experiential learning.
I recently attended a presentation at Harvard Business School by information architecture (IA) guru Peter Morville. Peter is creator of the findability.org blog, founder of IA and user experience (UX) consulting firm Semantic Studios, and author of several O’Reilly books on IA including Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (with Louis Rosenfeld), Search Patterns (with Jeffery Callender), and Ambient Findability. He is currently consulting with Harvard Business School’s Baker Library and has done work for everyone from Ford and the Discovery Channel to the Library of Congress and the International Monetary Fund.
Here’s a link to Peter’s Prezi on the subject, which was a small part of the presentation he gave. Good stuff.
At Harvard Business Publishing we’re investigating ways to best enable our customers to use our business content in online environments. To that end we spend a good deal of time info-sharing with eductators and program designers to hear about their best practices, challenges, and lessons learned. We recently held an information sharing session with Full Sail University. Full Sail is one of the premier art, music, game and web design, and film schools in the world – and its online programs have been lauded for their success in engaging and educating learners (they won a “21st Century Best Practices in Distance Learning Award” in 2011 from the United States Distance Learning Association). Here’s a review of how they achieve such great results with their online program.
Experiential learning and simulation guru Clark Aldrich has a great new piece called "Why Educational Simulations? Designs to Develop Competence Plus Conviction" in the UK magazine Inside Learning Technologies & Skills. It's a great short piece that distills his theories of "learning to do" (vs. "learning to know") down to two powerful value propositions for educational simulations: the ability to foster Competence and Conviction in users. For more on educational simulations, experiential learning, and serious games, see the collection of works and articles at the Clark Aldrich Designs website.
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 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.
