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Niggles about NGDLEs – lessons from ELF

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Malcom Brown has responded to Tony Bates and me in an Educause guest post in which he defends the concept of the NGDLE and expands a bit on the purposes behind it. This does help to clarify the intent although, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I am quite firmly in favour of the idea, so I am already converted on the main points. I don’t mind the Lego metaphor if it works, but I do think we should concentrate more on the connections than the pieces. I also see that it is fairly agnostic to pedagogy, at least in principle. And I totally agree that we desperately need to build more flexible, assemblable systems along these lines if we are to enable effective teaching, management of the learning process and, much much more importantly, if we are to support effective learning. Something like the proposed environment (more of an ecosystem, I’d say) is crucial if we want to move on.

But…

It has been done before, over ten years ago in the form of ELF, in much more depth and detail and with large government and standards bodies supporting it, and it is important to learn the lessons of what was ultimately a failed initiative. Well – maybe not failed, but certainly severely stalled. Parts persist and have become absorbed, but the real value of it was as a model for building tools for learning, and that model is still not as widespread as it should be. The fact that the Educause initiative describes itself as ‘next generation’ is perhaps the most damning evidence of its failure.

Elves

Why ELF ‘failed’

I was not a part of nor close to the ELF project but, as an outsider, I suspect that it suffered from four major and interconnected problems:

  1. It was very technically driven and framed in the language of ICTs, not educators or learners. Requirements from educators were gathered in many ways, with workshops, working groups and a highly distributed team of experts in the UK, Australia, the US, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand (it was a very large project). Some of the central players had a very deep understanding of the pedagogical and organizational needs of not just learners but organizations that support them, and several were pioneers in personal learning environments (PLEs) that went way beyond the institution. But the focus was always on building the technical infrastructure – indeed, it had to be, in order to operationalize it. For those outside the field, who had not reflected deeply on the reasons this was necessary, it likely just seemed like a bunch of techies playing with computers. It was hard to get the message across.
  2. It was far too over-ambitious, perhaps bolstered by the large amounts of funding and support from several governments and large professional bodies. The e-learning framework was just one of several strands like e-science, e-libraries and so on, that went to make up the e-framework. After a while, it simply became the e-framework and, though conceptually wonderful, in practical terms it was attempting far too much in one fell swoop. It became so broad, complex and fuzzy that it collapsed under its own weight. It was not helped by commercial interests that were keen to keep things as proprietary and closed as they could get away with. Big players were not really on board with the idea of letting thousands of small players enter their locked-in markets, which was one of the avowed intents behind it. So, when government funding fizzled out, there was no one to take up such a huge banner. A few small flags might have been way more successful.
  3. It was too centralized (oddly, given its aggressively decentralized intent and the care taken to attempt to avoid that). With the best of intent, developers built over-engineered standards relying on web service architectures that the rest of the world was abandoning because they were too clunky, insufficiently agile and much too troublesome to implement. I am reminded, when reading many of the documents that were produced at the time, of the ISO OSI network standards of the late 80s that took decades to reach maturity through ornate webs of committees and working groups, were beautifully and carefully engineered, and that were thoroughly and completely trounced by the lighter, looser, more evolved, more distributed TCP/IP standards that are now pretty much ubiquitous. For large complex systems, evolution beats carefully designed engineering every single time.
  4. The fact that it was created by educators whose framing was entirely within the existing system meant that most of the pieces that claimed to relate to e-learning (as opposed to generic services) had nothing to do with learning at all, but were representative of institutional roles and structures: marking, grading, tracking, course management, resource management, course validation, curriculum, reporting and so on. None of this has anything to do with learning and, as I have argued on many occasions elsewhere, may often be antagonistic to learning. While there were also components that were actually about learning, they tended to be framed in the context of existing educational systems (writing lessons, creating formal portfolios, sequencing of course content, etc). Though very much built to support things like PLEs as well as institutional environments, the focus was the institution far more than the learner.

As far as I can tell, any implementation of the proposed NGDLE is going to run into exactly the same problems. Though the components described are contemporary and the odd bit of vocabulary has evolved a bit, all of them can be found in the original ELF model and the approach to achieving it seems pretty much the same. Moreover, though the proposed architecture is flexible enough to support pretty much anything – as was ELF – there is a tacit assumption that this is about education as we know it, updated to support the processes and methods that have been developed since (and often in response to) the heinous mistakes we made when we designed the LMSs that dominate education today. This is not surprising – if you ask a bunch of experts for ideas you will get their expertise, but you will not get much in the way of invention or new ideas. The methodology is therefore almost guaranteed to miss the next big thing. Those ideas may come up but they will be smoothed out in an averaging process and dissenting models will not become part of the creed. This is what I mean when I criticize it as a view from the inside.

Much better than the LMS

If implemented, a NGDLE will undoubtedly be better than any LMS, with which there are manifold problems. In the first place, LMSs are uniformly patterned on mediaeval educational systems, with all their ecclesiastic origins, power structures and rituals intact. This is crazy, and actually reinforces a lot of things we should not be doing in the first place, like courses, intimately bound assessment and accreditation, and laughably absurd attempts to exert teacher control, without the slightest consideration of the fact that pedagogies determined by the physics of spaces in which we lock doors and keep learners controlled for an hour or two at a time make no sense whatsoever in online learning. In the second place, centralized systems have to maintain an uneasy and seldom great balance between catering to every need and remaining usably simple. This inevitable leads to compromises, from small things (e.g. minor formatting annoyances in discussion forums) to the large (e.g. embedded roles or units of granularity that make everything a course). While customization options can soften this a little, centralized systems are structurally flawed by their very nature. I have discussed such things in some depth elsewhere, including both my published books. Suffice to say, the LMS shapes us in its own image, and its own image is authoritarian, teacher-controlled and archaic. So, a system that componentizes things so that we can disaggregate any or all of it, provide local control (for teachers and other learners as well as institutions and administrators) and allow creative assemblies is devoutly to be wished for. Such a system architecture can support everything from the traditional authoritarian model to the loosest of personal learning environments, and much in between.

Conclusion

NGDLE is a misnomer. We have already seen that generation come and go. But, as a broad blueprint for where we should be going and what we should be doing now, both ELF and NGDLE provide patterns that we should be using and thinking about whenever we implement online learning tools and content and, for that, I welcome it. I am particularly appreciative that NGDLE provides reinvigorated support for approaches that I have been pushing for over a decade but that ICT departments and even faculty resist implacably. It’s great to be able to point to the product of so many experts and say ‘look, I am not a crank: this is a mainstream idea’. We need a sea-change in how we think of learning technologies and such initiatives are an important part of creating the culture and ethos that lets this happen. For that I totally applaud this initiative.

In practical terms, I don’t think much of this will come from the top-down, apart from in the development of lightweight, non-prescriptive standards and the norming of the concepts behind it. Of current standards, I think TinCan is hopeful, though I am a bit concerned that it is becoming over-ornate in its emerging development. LTI is a good idea, sufficiently mature, and light enough to be usable but, again, in its new iteration it is aiming higher than might be wise. Caliper is OK but also showing signs of excessive ambition. Open Badges are great but I gather that is becoming less lightweight in its latest incarnation. We need more of such things, not more elaborate versions of them. Unfortunately, the nature of technology is that it always evolves towards increasing complexity. It would be much better if we stuck with small, working pieces and assembled those together rather than constantly embellishing good working tools. Unix provides a good model for that, with tools that have worked more or less identically for decades but that constantly gain new value in recombination.

Footnote: what became of ELF?

It is quite hard to find information about ELF today. It seems (as an outsider) that the project just ground to a halt rather than being deliberately killed. There were lots of exemplar projects, lots of hooks and plenty of small systems built that applied the idea and the standards, many of which are still in use today, but it never achieved traction. If you want to find out more, here is a small reading list:

http://www.elframework.org/ – the main site (the link to the later e-framework site leads to a broken page)

http://www.elframework.org/projects.html  – some of the relevant projects ELF incorporated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061112235250/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Altilab04-ELF.pd – good, brief overview from 2004 of what it involved and how it fitted together

 https://web.archive.org/web/20110522062036/http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/AltilabServiceOrientedFrameworks.pdf  – spooky: this is about ‘Next Generation E-Learning Environments’ rather than digital ones. But, though framed in more technical language, the ideas are the same as NGDLE.

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20110621221935/http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/nontechguide2 – a slightly less technical variant (links to part 1, which explains web services for non-technical people)

See also https://web.archive.org/web/20090330220421/http://www.elframework.org/general/requirements/scenarios/Scenario%20Apparatus%20UK%205%20(manchester%20lipsig).doc and https://web.archive.org/web/20090330220553/http://www.elframework.org/general/requirements/use_cases/EcSIGusecases.zip, a set of scenarios and use cases that are eerily similar to those proposed for NGDLE.

If anyone has any information about what became of ELF, or documents that describe its demise, or details of any ongoing work, I’d be delighted to learn more!

 

 

On learning styles

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This post by James Atherton makes the case that, whether or not it is possible to identify distinctive learning styles or preferences, they are largely irrelevant to teaching, and are potentially even antagonistic to effective learning. Regular readers, colleagues and friends will know that this conforms well with my own analysis of learning styles literature. The notion that learning styles should determine teaching styles is utter stuff and nonsense based on a very fuzzy understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning, and a desperate urge to find a theory to make the process seem more ‘scientific’, with no believable empirical foundation whatsoever. This doesn’t make the use of learning styles pointless, however.

Teaching is a design discipline much more than it is a science. One of the biggest challenges of teaching is making it work for as many students as possible, which means thinking carefully about different needs, interests, skills, concerns and contexts. So, if learning styles theories can help you to think about different learner needs more clearly when designing a learning path then that can be a good thing.

The trouble is, thinking about personality patterns associated with learners’ astrological star signs or Chinese horoscope animals would probably work just as well. A comparative study would be a fun to do and, I think, the methodological issues would reveal a lot about how and why existing research has signally failed to find any plausible link.

There are alternatives. In the field of web design we often use personas – fictional but well fleshed-out representative individuals – in order to try to empathize with the users of our sites and to help us to see our designs through different eyes. See https://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html for a thorough introduction to the area. I use these in my learning design process and find them very useful. Thinking ‘how would John Smith react to this?’ makes much more sense to me than thinking ‘would this appeal to kinaesthetic learners?’, especially as I can imagine how John Smith might change his ways of thinking as a course progresses, how different life events might affect him, and how he might interact with his peers.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learning_styles.htm

Super-private social network launched to take on Facebook with support of Anonymous

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The first question that emerges for a free, encrypted, ad-free, unsurveilled, intentionally private, celebrating anonymity, social networking site and mobile app like this is ‘How does it make enough money to support itself’? The answer appears to be a freemium model – you pay to use the API more than a basic amount, for storage, and a premium service. I am a little concerned that the terms and conditions seem to give the site owners free access and perpetual rights to use any public content. I don’t see why a creative commons licence could not have been applied, especially given the claimed open nature of the thing. None the less, this is a good step in the right direction, though I have to wonder whether it is really sustainable. A lot depends on its open source software: if content and identity can be distributed further and not limited to this one site, this could be a really interesting alternative to other systems based on a similar business model like WordPress and Known.

The software on which it runs is allegedly open source and available via https://www.minds.org/#/ – unfortunately, though, almost all of it, apart from a mobile client, is disappointingly listed as ‘coming soon’. Definitely one to watch, assuming the server software is to be open-sourced. It will be interesting to compare it with Elgg – the site itself seems slicker than most Elgg installations but .

Address of the bookmark: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/superprivate-social-network-launched-to-take-on-facebook-with-support-of-anonymous-10325307.html

From discipline-and-punish to a culture of prevention | Philadelphia Public School Notebook

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It all sounds so reasonable – reward kids with play money for behaving the way you want them to behave. It is certainly, as the article explains, way better than punishing kids to make them behave the way you want them to behave. But, like all such things, it completely misses the point.

Best quote:

“As the day started, Dallaire said, the boy told him, “‘I’m not going to behave until it’s 9:15.’ And as soon as 9:14 hit, I swear he sat down and started to do the assignment on the board.””

Simply replacing punishments with rewards but without making the process actually rewarding is really no improvement at all. It’s crowd control, not teaching, and it preserves all the extrinsic, despotic, controlling nonsense that kills the love of it in both teachers and, above all, their students.

Address of the bookmark: http://thenotebook.org/blog/158653/from-discipline-and-punish-to-culture-of-prevention#

Surprise! Our Attention Spans Aren’t Dead!

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Interesting bit of analysis from Medium, the makers of Pocket (which, self-referentially, I used to save this link to read – and bookmark here – later), showing that users of Pocket save and read articles of 2000-5000 words more often than those of other lengths, equating to around 16 minutes of reading time on average. I don’t think this means that our attention spans are alive and kicking at all  – we save things to Pocket (and ReadItLater, EverNote, etc) precisely because we are busy being distracted by other things most of the time – though it does show that at least some of us do spend more than a second or two reading some things. 

The most interesting bit of this, though, comes towards the end, under the heading of ‘self improvement’. Pocket is clearly an important part of a self-directed personal learning environment (PLE) for many people and it is highly significant that a very high percentage of what people keep for later reading are all about learning, with psychology (actuall psychology, not self-help nonsense) topping the list of saved articles, with technology, current events, culture, science and history making solid showings.  

I have highlighted this role many times in presentations I have given on the subject of PLEs myself. Pocket and others of its ilk (from the more free-form Evernote, Microsoft OneNote and Google Keep to simple browser bookmarks or the elderly but still useful del.icio.us) are important parts of the learning technology assemblies that we make to support our learning. They are a major feature of the teaching crowd, tools that allow us to make sense and meaning of the torrent of knowledge we swim in all the time. In the old days I used to keep paper notebooks but they were of limited use. Now I just have a physical whiteboard pad for odd quick jottings but, if they are important, they always make their way into my electronic notes. The fact that these notes are searchable, taggable, reorganizable in many ways, and all in one place, turns them into powerful and persistent learning technologies that are orders of magnitude more useful than the primitive self-directed learning technologies of the past. 

Apart from Pocket – a convenient, simple and very usable tool – having experimented with a great many alternatives I now almost exclusively use Apple Notes for original jottings because I like the simplicity, the cross-platform capability, the fact they are auto-saved in multiple redundant online accounts as well as locally and, above all, the fact that (underneath it all) they are actually saved as emails in IMAP folders, so are open, standards-based and not bound at all by proprietary tools. That matters: things like EverNote, Keep and OneNote are functionally great but they are built to lock you in. I forgive Pocket that flaw because it is a one-trick pony, does provide a useful RSS feed and little would be lost if I jumped ship to another tool at a moment’s notice. I stick with it because it is a high quality piece of software that does what I need. We need such things to build robust personal learning ecosystems: small, robust pieces, interconnected and replaceable. This bookmark is just another one of those pieces – part of the public face of my PLE. And it too is not bound to a single tool. You can also find it at https://jondron.ca (or will be able to when it gets harvested some time within the next 24 hours!).

Address of the bookmark: https://medium.com/@Pocket/surprise-our-attention-spans-aren-t-dead-154ce24e5aab

Open access: beyond the journal

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Interesting and thoughtful argument from Savage Minds mainly comparing the access models of two well-known anthropology journals, one of which has gone open and seems to be doing fine, the other of which is in dire straits and that almost certainly needs to open up, but for which it may be too late. I like two quotes in particular. The first is from the American Anthropologist’s editorial, explaining the difficulties they are in:

“If you think that making money by giving away content is a bad idea, you should see what happens when the AAA tries to make money selling it. To put it kindly, our reader-pays model has never worked very well. Getting over our misconceptions about open access requires getting over misconceptions of the success of our existing publishing program. The choice we are facing is not that of an unworkable ideal versus a working system. It is the choice between a future system which may work and an existing system which we know does not.”

The second is from the author of the article:

“Collabra, Open Library of the Humanities, Knowledge Unlatched, and SciELO — blur the distinction between journal, platform, and community the same way Duke Ellington blurred the boundary between composer, performer, and conductor.”

I like that notion of blurring and believe that this is definitely the way to go. We are greatly in need of new models for the sharing, review, and discussion of academic works because the old ones make no sense any more. They are expensive, untimely, exclusionary and altogether over-populous. There have been many attempts to build dedicated platforms for that kind of thing over they years (one of my favourites being the early open peer-reviewing tools of JIME in the late 1990s, now a much more conventional journal, to its loss). But perhaps one of the most intriguing approaches of all comes not from academic presses but from the world of student newspapers. This article reports on a student newspaper shifting entirely into the (commercial but free) social media of Medium and Twitter, getting rid of the notion of a published newspaper altogether but still retaining some kind of coherent identity. I don’t love the notion of using these proprietary platforms one bit, though it makes a lot of sense for cash-strapped journalists trying to reach and interact with a broad readership, especially of students. Even so, there might be more manageable and more open, persistent ways (eg. syndicating from a platform like WordPress or Known). But I do like the purity of this approach and the general idea is liberating.

It might be too radical an idea for academia to embrace at the moment but I see no reason at all that a reliable curatorial team, with some of the benefits of editorial control, posting exclusively to social media, might not entirely replace the formal journal, for both process and product. It already happens to an extent, including through blogs (I have cited many), though it would still be a brave academic that chose to cite only from social media sources, at least for most papers and research reports. But what if those sources had the credibility of a journal editorial team behind them and were recognized in similar ways, with the added benefit of the innate peer review social media enables?  We could go further than that and use a web of trust to assert validity and authority of posts – again, that already occurs to some extent and there are venerable protocols and standards that could be re-used or further developed for that, from open badges to PGP, from trackbacks to WebMention. We are reaching the point where subtle distinctions between social media posts are fully realizable – they are not all one uniform stream of equally reliable content – where identity can be fairly reliably asserted, and where such an ‘unjournal’ could be entirely distributed, much like a Connectivist MOOC. Maybe more so: there is no reason there should even be a ‘base’ site to aggregate it all, as long as trust and identity were well established. It might even be unnecessary to have a name, though a hashtag would probably be worth using.

I wonder what the APA format for such a thing might be?

Address of the bookmark: http://savageminds.org/2015/05/27/open-access-what-cultural-anthropology-gets-right-and-american-anthropologist-gets-wrong/

The Voice Magazine – Interview with Vive Kumar

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Vive Kumar waxes lyrical on the differences between online and face-to-face learning, the value of analytics, and the importance of culture and spirituality in learning. Good, thought-provoking stuff. I too get a bit sentimental about some of the things about physical proximity that Vive misses in the online teaching environment, but I think there are lots of positive differences too, not least the control it offers, the student-centred shifts in power relationships it almost enforces, the rich variety of pace that it effortlessly supports, and the huge knowledge-forming benefits of reified dialogue. Also, overcoming the challenges and understanding the nature of those differences is one of the main things that keeps it interesting for me. It’s different, but that’s often a good thing.

I have greatly enjoyed this series of faculty interviews in AUSU’s Voice Magazine (and been the subject of one of them, as have Terry Anderson and George Siemens). It’s really helpful in starting to make those human connections that Vive talks about in this interview. I have also really enjoyed the student interviews with which they are interspersed, that help to provide a glimpse of the human beings that we normally only see in caricature through their learning interactions. A great series. The Voice magazine is a treasure that I only discovered as a result of being interviewed. For those that work at Athabasca U or that want to understand its culture and processes, it’s a great read. It’s a bit hard to navigate around it at times, but it’s well worth the effort.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.voicemagazine.org/articles/featuredisplay.php?ART=10501

Why so many questions?

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Athabasca River Flood

At Athabasca University, our proposed multi-million dollar investment in a student relationship management system, dubbed the ‘Student Success Centre’ (SSC), is causing quite a flood of discussion and debate among faculty and tutors at the moment. Though I do see some opportunities in this if (and only if) it is very intelligently and sensitively designed, there are massive and potentially fatal dangers in creating such a thing.  See a previous post of mine for some of my worries. I have many thoughts on the matter, but one thing strikes me as interesting enough to share more widely and, though it has a lot to do with the SSC, it also has broader implications.

Part of the justification for the SSC is that an alleged 80% of current interactions with students are about administrative rather than academic issues. I say ‘alleged’ because such things are notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy. But let’s assume that it actually is accurate.

How weird is that?

Why is it that our students (apparently) need to contact us for admin support in overwhelming numbers but actually hardly talk at all about the complicated subjects they are taking? Assuming that these 80% of interactions are not mostly to complain about things that have gone wrong (if so, an SSC is not the answer!) then it seems, on the face of it, more than a bit topsy turvy.
 
One reasonable explanation might be that our course materials are so utterly brilliant that they require little further interaction, but I am not convinced that this sufficiently explains the disparity. Students are mostly spending 100+ hours on academic work for each course whereas (I hope) at most a couple of hours are spent on administrivia. No matter how amazing our courses might be, the difference is remarkable. It is doubly remarkable when you consider that a fair number of our courses do involve at least some required level of interaction which, alone, should easily account for most if not more than all of that remaining 20%. In my own courses it is a lot more than that and I am aware of many others with very active Landing groups, Moodle forums, webinar sessions, and even the occasional visit to an immersive world.
 
It is also possible that our administrative processes are extremely opaque and ill-explained. This certainly accords with my own experience of trying to work out something as simple as how much a course would cost or the process needed to submit project work. But, if that is the case, and assuming our distance, human-free teaching works as well as we believe it does, then why can we not a) simplify the processes and b) provide equally high quality learning materials for our admin processes so that students don’t need to bother our admin staff so much? If our course materials are so great then that would seem, on the face of it, very much more cost-effective than spending millions on a system that is at least as likely to have a negative as a positive impact and that actually increases our ongoing costs considerably. It is also quite within the capabilities of our existing skillset.
 
Even so, it seems very odd to me that students can come to terms with inordinately complex subjects from philosophy to biochemistry, but that they are foiled by a simple bit of bureaucracy and need to seek human assistance. It may be hard, but it is not beyond the means of a motivated learner to discover, especially given that we are specialists in producing high quality learning materials that should make such things very clear. And in motivation, I think, lies the key.
 
 

Other people matter

Other people are wonderful things when you need to learn something, pretty much across the board. Above all they matter when there is no obvious reason that you should be interested or care about it for its own merits, and bureaucratic procedures are seldom very interesting. I have known only one person in my whole life that actually likes filling in forms (I think it is a meditative pursuit – my father felt much the same way about dishwashing and log sawing) but, for the most part, this is not a thing that excites most people.  
 
I hypothesize that our students tend to need less academic than bureaucratic help at least partly because, by and large, for the coursework they are very self-motivated people learning things that interest them whereas our bureaucracy is at most a means to an end, at worst a demotivating barrier. It would not help much to provide great teaching materials for bureaucratic procedures because 99% of students would have no intrinsic interest in learning about them, and it would have zero value to them in any future activity. Why would they bother? It is far easier to ask someone.
 
Our students actually like the challenge of facing and solving problems in their chosen subjects – in fact, that’s one of the great joys of learning. They don’t turn to tutors to discuss things because there are plenty of other ways of getting the help they need, both in course materials and elsewhere, and it is fun to overcome obstacles. The more successful ones tend to have supportive friends, families or colleagues, or are otherwise very single-minded. They tend to know why they are doing what they are doing. We don’t get many students that are not like this, at least on our self-paced courses, because either they don’t bother coming in the first place or they are among the scarily large percentage that drop out before starting (we don’t count them in our stats though, in fairness, neither to face-to-face universities).
 
But, of course, that only applies for students that do really like the process of learning and most of what they are learning, that know how to do it and/or that have existing support networks. It does not apply to those that hit very difficult or boring spots, that give up before they start, that hit busy times that mean they cannot devote the energy to the work, that need a helping hand with the process but cannot find it elsewhere, or that don’t bother even looking at a distance option at all because they do not like the isolation it (apparently) entails. For those students, other people can help a lot. Even for our own students, over half (when asked) claim that they would appreciate more human interaction. And those are the ones that have knowingly self-selected a largely isolated process and that have not already dropped out. 
 
Perhaps more worryingly, it raises concerns about the quality of the learning experience. Doing things alone means that you miss out on all the benefits of a supportive learning community. You don’t get to argue, to explain, to question, save in your own head or in formal, largely one-way, assignments. You don’t get multiple perspectives, different ways of seeing, opportunities to challenge and be challenged. You don’t get the motivation of writing for an audience of people that you care about. You don’t get people that care about you and the learning community providing support when times are hard, nor the pleasure of helping when others are in difficulty. You don’t get to compare yourself with others, the chance to reflect on how you differ and whether that is a good or bad thing. You don’t get to model behaviours or see those behaviours being modelled. These are just some of the notable benefits of traditional university systems that are relatively hard to come by in Athabasca’s traditional self-paced model (not in all courses, but in many). It’s not at all about asking questions and getting solutions. It’s about engaging in a knowledge creation process with other people. There are distinct benefits of being alone, notably in the high degree of control it brings, but a bit of interaction goes a long long way. It takes a very special kind of person to get by without that and the vast majority of our successful students (at least in undergraduate self-paced courses) are exactly that special kind of person. 
 
If it is true that only 20% of interactions are currently concerned with academic issues, that is a big reason for concern, because it means our students are missing out on an incredibly rich set of opportunities in which they can help one another as well as interact with tutors. Creating an SSC system that supports what is therefore, for those that are not happy alone (i.e. the ones we lose or never get in the first place), an impoverished experience, seems simply to ossify a process that should at least be questioned. It is not a solution to the problem – it is an exacerbation of it, further entrenching a set of approaches and methods that are inadequate for most students (the ones we don’t get or keep) in the first place.

A sustainable future?

As a university seeking sustainability we could simply continue to concentrate on addressing the needs of self-motivated, solitary students that will succeed almost no matter what we do to them, and just make the processing more cost-efficient with the SSC.  If we have enough of those students, then we will thrive for some time to come, though I can’t say it fits well with our open mission and I worry greatly about those we fail to help. If we want to get more of those self-guided students then there are lots of other things we should probably do too like dropping the whole notion of fixed-length courses (smaller chunks means the chances of hitting the motivation sweet-spot are higher) and disaggregating assessment from learning (because extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation).
 
But, if we are sticking with the idea of traditional courses, the trouble is that we are no longer almost alone in offering such things and there is a finite market of self-motivated, truly independent learners who (if they have any sense) will find cheaper alternatives that offer the same or greater value. If all we are offering is the opportunity to learn independently and a bit of credible certification at the end of it, we will wind up competing on price with institutions and businesses that have deeper coffers, cheaper staff, and less constraints. In a cut-throat price war with better funded peers, we are doomed.
 
If we are to be successful in the future then we need to make more of the human side of our teaching, not less, and that means creating richer, more direct channels to other people in this learning community, not automating methods that are designed for the era of correspondence learning. This is something that, not uncoincidentally, the Landing is supposed to help with, though it is just an exemplar and at most a piece of the puzzle – we ideally want connection to be far more deeply embedded everywhere rather than in a separate site. It is also something that current pilot implementations of the SSC are antagonistic towards, thanks mainly to equating time and effort, focusing on solving specific problems rather than human connection, failing to support technological diversity, and standing as an obstacle between people that just need to talk. It doesn’t have to be built that way. It could almost as easily vanish into the background, be seamlessly hooked into our social environments like email, Moodle and the Landing, could be an admin tool that gives support when needed but disappears when not. And there is no reason whatsoever that it needs to be used to pay tutors by the recorded minute, a bad idea that has been slung on the back of it that has no place in our culture. Though not what the pilot systems do at all, a well-designed system like this could step in or be called upon when needed, could support analytics that would be genuinely helpful, could improve management information, all without getting in the way of interaction at all. In fact, it could easily be used to enhance it, because it could make patterns of dialogue more visible and comprehensible.
 

In conclusion

At Athabasca we have some of the greatest distance educators and researchers on the planet, and that greatness rubs off on those around them. As a learning community, knowledge spreads among us and we are all elevated by it. We talk about such things in person, in meetings, via Skype, in webinars, on mailing lists, on the Landing, in pubs, in cafes, etc. And, as a result, ideas, methods and values get created, transformed and flow through our network. This makes us quite unique – as all learning communities are unique – and creates the distinctive culture and values of our university that no other university can replicate. Even when people leave, they leave traces of their ideas and values in those that remain, that get passed along for long after they have gone, become part of the rich cultural identity that defines us. It’s not mainly about our structures, processes and procedures: except when they support greater interaction, those actually get in the way much of the time. It’s about a culture and community of learning. It’s about the knowledge that flows in and through this shifting but identifiable crowd. This is a large part of what gives us our identity. It’s exactly the same kind of thing that means we can talk about (say) the Vancouver Canucks or Apple Inc as a meaningful persistent entity, even though not one of the people in the organization is the same as when it began and virtually all of its processes, locations, strategies and goals beyond the most basic have changed, likely many times. The thing is, if we hide those people behind machines and processes, separate them through opaque hierarchies, reduce the tools and opportunities for them to connect, we lose almost all of the value. The face of the organization becomes essentially the face of the designer of the machine or the process and the people are simply cogs implementing it. That’s not a good way forward, especially as there are likely quite a few better machine and process designers out there. Our people – staff and students – are the gold we need to mine, and they are also the reason we are worth saving. We need to be a university that takes the distance out of distance learning, that connects, inspires, supports and nurtures both its staff and its students. Only then will we justly be able to claim to have a success centre.

 

How Do You Google? New Eye Tracking Study Reveals Huge Changes

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Over the past ten years, the ‘golden triangle’ (the sequence of where people look when viewing Google search results and, indeed, many web pages) has changed to a fuzzy line straight down the left of the page. It used to be that people started on the left, scanned to the right, then moved on down the page – that’s what we have taught in interaction design classes, at least for web designers, for quite a while. Now, they just scroll down. They also make faster (but are they better?) decisions about where to click.

There are clearly many factors that influence this, not least of which being Google’s UI changes, improvements in Google’s algorithms, as well as increasing familiarity with the tools – people are getting better at knowing what to ignore, perhaps less influenced by a lifetime of reading on paper, not to mention the effects of the massive increase in mobile device usage, in which scrolling is pretty much the only game in town. It’s a massively complex self-organizing system and fascinating to see how design and use responsively interact on a web-wide scale. So, now, designers will work on the assumption that people are going to be scrolling down, so that’s what users will learn to do, more and more, and what they will come to expect. But will it last?

It’s intriguing to wonder what will happen next. Though I remain a bit sceptical about wearables like the Apple Watch (at least until battery life gets better and app makers get away from behaviourist models of user psychology), I suspect that might be the next thing to stir up this complex ecosystem. I expect to see more single-glance sites coming soon.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2015/03/03/how-do-you-google-new-eye-tracking-study-reveals-huge-changes/