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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
We've been researching the Millennials for some work we're doing related to designing engaging, interactive products for eLearning. As familiar as this subject is to many of us involved in the design and delivery of educational content, it's still powerful to review the truly unique nature of this generation of learners. Here's a few summary points and then pointers to more resources that we found especially helpful.
The post-Web 2.0 world has a lot to offer those seeking channels and tools to publish and distribute their content. As I work for a small-to-mid-sized, 'official' publishing house, I'm biased at some of the content, services, and options that we can still offer that smaller players and systems can't always match. But the quality and quantity of self-publishing options is still impressive and growing. Here is a quick recap of a few options for 'small industrial' distribution and beyond.
