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.

Understanding Information Architecture

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.

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.

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.

'Guerrila Publishing' Options

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.

Tools of Change for Publishing

Last month some colleagues and I attended the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York.  This conference explores new business models for publishers, new avenues for digital distribution, evolving content workflow models, etc. Here's a recap of a few of the sessions.

A Publisher's View of eLearning Predictions

It's budget planning time for us again, which in our educational publishing environment means we get to try and make the case for incorporating new technologies into our product development and distribution plans.  And the time of year means that any survey of emerging technologies invariably surfaces the annual eLearning prediction lists.  These lists are frustrating.  As an educational technologist, the list of tools and technologies is exciting -- the options for exploring and assisting learning in new ways is evolving at an unbelievable pace.  But as a publisher I find myself using a much more practical lens -- partially due to the perspective of the part of the industry we occupy, but also due to understanding the real world constraints that cause me to temper some of the hype.  Here's a review of some of the prediction lists and some immediate reactions.