Experiential eLearning

EdX and MOOCs

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.

H20 Free Online Classroom Tools from Harvard’s Berkman Center

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.

The Case for Custom Business Simulations

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.

Best Practices in Online Learning: Full Sail University

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.

Why Educational Simulations?

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.

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.

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.