Opinion | Mark Smithers

MIT - Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Yarian Gomez

MIT today announced MITx which appears to be an open learning initiative. They describe it as “an online interactive learning platform” that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses.

organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace

feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication

allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx

operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

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This morning I was unfortunate enough to attend a vendor presentation for a series of online academic staff development modules. Basically a series of SCORM packages (so HTML pages, images and Flash content with a little xml thrown in). I won’t mention the vendor’s name for fairly obvious reasons.

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People that know me know that I didn’t always agree with Steve Jobs but I have no doubt of his creative skill and vision and his impact on modern life. I also think he had a huge impact on education and not always in the ways you might expect. I’ve been watching the Stanford University commencement address given by Steve Jobs in 2005. I had never seen it before his death on Thursday.

In his address he tells three stories about his life. The first is about his adoption and how his biological parents where determined that he be adopted by college graduates but that didn’t happen. In fact neither of his adopted parents had a college education. When Steve Jobs went to college himself he described how he effectively dropped out after six months. In his words what happened was that he then ‘dropped in’. He spent the next 18 months going to classes that interested him including a class on calligraphy that sparked an interest in beautiful typography. Ten years later when building the first Apple computer he used his understanding and knowledge from those classes to create what he describes as the first computer with beautiful typography. Continue reading →

Obey — Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 to Dear Knucklehead

It seems to me, as an interested observer of the higher education landscape over more years than I care to think about, that we are reaching the point where it can be argued that the private sector is behaving increasingly in ways that universities should behave and some universities are increasingly behaving in ways that we expect profit motivated corporations to behave. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ways organisations encourage or discourage blogging and, by implication, the degree to which they trust the members of their organisation (employees for corporations and faculty/students for universities).

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I was interested to see this new lecture enhancement technology being bought to market. Prof: ‘Engage Students Through Their Laptops’ — Campus Technology.

I particularly liked this quote:

“The key is to engage students through their laptops or cellphones, so they don’t drift off onto social networking sites”

Of course maybe they actually prefer collaborating online than sitting passively in massive lecture hall. Shouldn’t we take advantage of that?

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The number of higher education institutions (HEIs) moving their student email (and, in many cases, staff email) to a cloud solution continues to grow. Every other day there is a new report one one HEI or other adopting either Google or Microsoft. Intrinsically I am not against this although I do find it interesting how little debate there is about integrating so completely with such overtly commercial companies. By the way, let’s not kid ourselves that that Google are any less of a ruthless corporate entity than Microsoft or Apple or Oracle or any large IT company.

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The other day I happened to be on the campus of an old and prestigious university (that shall remain nameless other than to say it was not my own university) when I thought I’d treat myself to a coffee in the main campus coffee bar/ restaurant. Nothing unusual so far but having made my way past all the signs saying that I would be summarily executed if dared to take any crockery outside, I eventually found myself a table only to find a sign on it saying that I was not to use the table for studying between 12 and 2. Stifling the instinct to laugh out loud I was privately relieved that it was outside the proscribed period and I could therefore study to my hearts content. I immediately used my smart phone to browse for the sports results which, presumably, I wouldn’t have been able to do between 12 and 2.

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Last night Twitter pointed me in the direction of a new Seth Godin post entitled “Bring me stuff that’s dead, please” in which he bemoans the the way ‘drive by technoratti‘ are obsessed with whatever the latest technology is. He makes the point that:

“Only when an innovation is dead can the real work begin.”

This applies to educational technology perhaps more than any other area. Many education technologists are focussed almost exclusively on the latest innovation. They often see it as being a panacea for lack of adoption as if this magic bullet will change the entire faculty’s mind about edtech without anybody having to do any messy staff development work. Continue reading →

Licensed CC by The Reith Lectures

Is lecture capture the single worst example of poor educational technology use in higher education?

Many institutions seem to be completely obsessed with lecture capture technology as a method of generating flexibly accesible learning content. For me though the large scale implementation of lecture capture is probably one of the costliest and strategically misguided educational technologies that an institution can adopt. Now before I go on let me say that I wouldn’t be here now if not for lecture capture. I used nascent lecture capture technology at a UK university in 1994 to record myself and then used the recording as part of a succesful job application to be an academic at an Australian university. In fact I don’t have a deep seated dislike of the technology itself, just the way that it gets used. It certainly has some uses, like getting a job. Continue reading →

Over the last couple of months I have been asked to help a university (that will remain nameless) in its transition to a newer version of of its Learning Management System (LMS). As part of this I have had to access many LMS course spaces to check that content has migrated successfully and that that things are working as they should.

It has been a profoundly depressing experience. I knew it would be and you’ll appreciate why I knew if you look at my current full time occupation.

Let me begin begin by saying that there are a few dirty little secrets about online learning at traditional universities. Here are two:

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Mark Smithers

Learning and Educational Technology in Higher Education

Category Archives: Opinion

Early Thoughts on MITx

Teaching lecturing online: is this the definition of irony?

Dropping out and dropping in – Steve Jobs and higher education

Blogging and trust in Universities

Prof: ‘Engage Students Through Their Laptops’ — Campus Technology

No Studying Between 12 and 2

More dead edtech please

Is lecture capture the worst educational technology?

Licensed CC by The Reith Lectures

Is lecture capture the single worst example of poor educational technology use in higher education?

eLearning at Universities: A Quality Assurance Free Zone?

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Licensed CC by The Reith Lectures Is lecture capture the single worst example of poor educational technology use in higher education?

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Is lecture capture the single worst example of poor educational technology use in higher education?