Address of the bookmark: http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/academics/phd/upload/PattersonJMP11_18.pdf

Thomas Frey provides an analysis of current trends in education (and, more broadly, learning) and predicts a grim future for colleges and, by extension, schools and universities. This is not a uniformly well-informed article – Frey is clearly an outsider with a somewhat caricatured or at least highly situated US-centric view of the educational system – but, though repeating arguments that have been made for decades and offering no novel insights, the issues are well summarized, well expressed, and the overall thrust of the article is hard to argue with.

His main points are summarized in a list:

1. Overhead costs too high – Even if the buildings are paid for and all money-losing athletic programs are dropped, the costs associated with maintaining a college campus are very high. Everything from utilities, to insurance, to phone systems, to security, to maintenance and repair are all expenses that online courses do not have. Some of the less visible expenses involve the bonds and financing instruments used to cover new construction, campus projects, and revenue inconsistencies. The cost of money itself will be a huge factor.
   
2. Substandard classes and teachers – Many of the exact same classes are taught in thousands of classroom simultaneously every semester. The law of averages tells us that 49.9% of these will be below average. Yet any college that is able to electronically pipe in a top 1% teacher will suddenly have a better class than 99% of all other colleges.
   
3. Increasingly visible rating systems – Online rating systems will begin to torpedo tens of thousands of classes and teachers over the coming years. Bad ratings of one teacher and one class will directly affect the overall rating of the institution.
   
4. Inconvenience of time and place – Yes, classrooms help focus our attention and the world runs on deadlines. But our willingness to flex schedules to meet someone else’s time and place requirements is shrinking. Especially when we have a more convenient option.
   
5. Pricing competition – Students today have many options for taking free courses without credits vs. expensive classes with credits and very little in between. That, however, is about to change. Colleges focused primarily on course delivery will be facing an increasingly price sensitive consumer base.
   
6. Credentialing system competition – Much like a doctor’s ability to write prescriptions, a college’s ability to grant credits has given them an unusual competitive advantage, something every startup entrepreneur is searching for. However, traditional systems for granting credits only work as long as people still have faith in the system. This “faith in the system” is about to be eroded with competing systems. Companies like Coursera, Udacity, and iTunesU are well positioned to start offering an entirely new credentialing system.
   
7. Relationships formed in colleges will be replaced with other relationship-building systems – Social structures are changing and the value of relationships built in college, while often quite valuable, are equally often overrated. Just as a dating relationship today is far more likely to begin online, business and social relationships in the future will also happen in far different ways.
   
8. Sudden realization that “the emperor has no clothes!” – Education, much like our money supply, is a system built on trust. We are trusting colleges to instill valuable knowledge in our students, and in doing so, create a more valuable workforce and society. But when those who find no tangible value begin to openly proclaim, “the emperor has no clothes!” colleges will find themselves in a hard-to-defend downward spiral.

It is notable that many of the issues raised are fully addressed by online universities like AU, and have been for decades. We have moved on to bigger and more intractible problems! In particular, the idea that classes and teachers are a fixture that cannot be changed is a bit quaint. It is also fair to say that Frey has only a rough idea of how education works: the notion that high quality lectures has anything much to do with learning or the university experience shows a failure to understand the beast – but then, the same is true of potential students and more than a few professors. But pricing competition, credentialling competition, relationship-building and, above all, the ’emporer has no clothes’ arguments hit home, and I think will have the effects he anticipates much sooner than 2050. Nothing new here, and a bit coarse, but it clearly expresses the stark reality of the consequences.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2013/07/by-2030-over-50-of-colleges-will-collapse/

Terry Anderson on an Estonian approach to assessing teacher competences (and other projects) using Elgg – the same framework that underpins the Landing. I’ve downloaded the tool they have developed, Digimina, and will be trying it out, not just for exactly the purposes it was developed, but as the foundation for a more generalized toolset for sharing the process of assessment. May spark some ideas, I think.

A nice approach to methodology: Terry prefers the development of design principles as the ‘ultimate’ aim of design-based research (DBR), but I like the notion of software as a hypothesis that is used here. It’s essentially a ‘sciency’ way of describing the notion of trying out an idea to see whether it works that makes no particular claims to generality, but that both derives from and feeds a model of what can be done, what needs to be done, and why it should be done. The generalizable part is not the final stage, but the penultimate stage of design in this DBR model. In this sense, it formalizes the very informal notion of bricolage, capturing some of its iterative nature. It’s not quite enough, I think, any more than other models of DBR quite capture the process in all its richness. This is because the activity of formulating that hypothesis itself follows a very similar pattern at a much finer-grained scale to that of the bigger model. When building code, you try out ideas, see where it takes you, and that inspires new ideas through the process of writing as much as of designing and specifying. Shovelling that into a large-scale process model hides where at least an important amount of the innovation actually happens, perhaps over-emphasizing the importance of explicit evaluation phases and underplaying the role of construction itself.

Address of the bookmark: http://terrya.edublogs.org/2015/04/24/assessing-teachers-digital-competencies/

Report on a nice bit of cognitivist research – as the title suggests, delayed feedback (ie don’t give the answer right away) assists retention, and is best done after an unpredictable delay of a few seconds. What’s most interesting about it is the hypothesized reason: it’s curiosity. It only works if it piques your interest enough to want to know the answer, and your level of attention is raised when the timing of an upcoming anticipated event is uncertain. Like so many things in learning, motivation plays a big role here. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wait-for-it-delayed-feedback-can-enhance-learning/

This is pretty bad news for universities in Russia, coming on top of existing major cuts. It is notable that this mostly affects certificate mills with dubious credentials and very shady practices that have sprung up since the 90s, but will also affect some state-funded institutions. While there is clearly a long-overdue crackdown in progress on unethical companies pretending to offer education but really just selling certification, this doesn’t seem to tell the whole story and the article does not explain the underlying problems that this is a solution for. It makes me wonder whether this is just a local problem in Russia, or whether it is a part of a more general trend. I presume there may be some places where universities are gaining ground but, for the most part, the news I read suggests that most, the world over, are in more or less worsening straits. Is there any research out there on this as a global phenomenon? 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150417043945585

Quite a slide in just five years!

It is blamed by the incoming VC on general drops in student numbers in the UK, that most notably affect part-time students (like AU, all of the OU’s students are part-time). A recent article suggested a 37% drop in recent years in the UK HE sector overall, so 28% is perhaps not that awful, in relative terms.

The drop is not too surprising, given that UK fees have risen precipitously in recent years thanks to decades of attack on higher education by both labour and conservative governments. In the OU’s case, according to one of the commenters, this equates to an increase from £500 (a bit over $900 Canadian) to £1600 (about $3000) for a course. When course costs rise, part-timers (many of whom are self-funding and were, in the past, doing it for love as often as for career change or advancement) are inevitably going to be the first casualties.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/open-universitys-numbers-dive-28-as-pool-of-part-timers-dries-up/2018593.article