What happens when most students are off-campus?

My university (Kalmar in south-east Sweden) had 40% of its students as distance learners in 2008. The figure has been steadily climbing for several years and the question is whether the off-campus students will some day be in the majority. Many universities have already crossed that line, though few have actually made the psychological adjustment. Throughout history schools and universities have been seen as places where people come to learn. Generations of students have developed high levels of loyalty to their alma mater represented by the campus area and the often impressive buildings there.

What happens then when most of a university's students hardly ever visit the campus and learn instead on the net? This is taken up in an article in the magazine Inside Higher Ed, The Distance Ed Tipping Point. Traditions and loyalty are much harder to maintain on the net though some are trying to counter that. Bryant & Stratton College in the US, for example, are holding a virtual graduation ceremony in Second Life for 40 of its distance students, complete with avatars in academic robes (see article in Campus Technology).

So what has to change as the university goes more net-based?

• When most students are on the net suddenly net-based learning is core business and administrative routines have to be revised accordingly.
  
• The role of the teaching staff changes when lecture time is no longer so relevant.
  
• Staff training has to focus on the new skills of teaching effectively on the net.
  
• Digital competence becomes a key factor in staff recruitment.
  
• The use of campus buildings, classrooms and infrastructure needs to be reviewed.
  
• Many universities are supported by local authorities and industry and are seen as integral to the region's development so what happens when most of the students live outside the region?

The next health issue - text thumb?

Some of us just can't stop communicating. The simplest form of digital communication is of course good old SMS or texting. It's really a primitive service of max 140 characters that was included in second generation cellphones to enable the telecom operator to tell you that you had a voice mail message waiting. However teenagers in particular discovered that it was cheaper to text a message than to make a phone call and the rest is history. Today modern cellphones can send all sorts of multimedia messages but the good old text is still going strong and now has a trendy cousin in the shape of Twitter (also 140 characters).

In the health section of the New York Times there's an article about many teenagers' addiction to texting, Texting may be taking a toll. It claims that the average American teenager sends and receives 2,270 texts per day and that the communication often goes on all through the night. One extreme case is given of a girl who was clocked at an incredible 24,000 texts in a month. Concerns for the health of our young are of course voiced, in particluar the problem of constantly waking up at night to check and answer the latest messages. Not to mention the danger of a new health risk - text thumb, the modern equivalent of tennis elbow or mouse arm.

Is this just another media scare on the dangers of modern technology? It's really about people wanting to communicate but in some cases it can become obsessive. Is obsessive texting worse that obsessive reading or TV viewing? Many people can read a book non-stop for hours or even days and that is seen as a healthy interest in literature. Everything in moderation. It would be really interesting if there was some real research in this area because without that we can only speculate.

Back chat

Twitter has definitely become this year's Facebook. Just about everyone is on Twitter including a cat called Sockington who has amassed around half a million followers, thereby putting many top celebrity tweeters to shame. What started as a simple way of telling your friends what you are doing has found many other uses such as providing front line news coverage, non-stop celebrity updates and customer feedback. I registered for Twitter ages ago but I'm afraid I have so far not found any good reason to start tweeting yet. I've thought about being a follower but who do I follow out of the millions already out there?

Twitter is certainly thriving in the education sector and there are already many excellent guides on using it on courses, among colleagues or at conferences. See, for example;

• Twitter for teachers
• Twitter literacy (Howard Rheingold)
  
• Twitter tips: for teachers and educator (David Hopkins)
• Even a book! The Twitter Book (O'Reilly and Milstein)
• And a conference - The Twitter Conference
  

One feature often used today is that Twitter provides a back channel for discussion at conferences. The conference Twitter feed can be shown on a screen on stage though this can be a major distraction since the chat can be more interesting than the speaker. Some chat is highly relevant to the topic being presented but can also be highly irrelevant. It's really a digital version of the age-old custom of passing notes under the desk during class. Should it remain under the surface or shown up front? Are we really multi-tasking or are we bored with the one way nature of the lecture format and long for a discussion?

A new phenomenon is discussed on Tony Karrer's blog, Twitter and webinars. E-meeting tools like Adobe Connect or Elluminate are used for seminars and lectures and even though such tools offer simultaneous text chat between participants it seems many are choosing to chat via Twitter instead. This means that the discussion is only visible to those participants with Twitter accounts and the main chat window is therefore relatively empty. The answer suggested in the post is to encourage participants to chat in the e-meeting chat session as a service to the group. The long-term solution is for the e-meeting tools to integrate Twitter and other social media and make it easier to interact with other participants. More integration and fewer proprietary solutions.

Art for art's sake

A recent article in the New York Times made some radical suggestions on how to reform universities to meet the demands of the 21st century. Mark C. Taylor's article, End the university as we know it, is highly critical of an academic world largely lacking in relevance for the outside world and increasingly inward-looking, producing ever more specialised research papers that are of interest only to a tiny circle of specialists.

"Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)."

Taylor suggests abolishing permanent subject-based departments and working towards inter-disciplinary collaboration in areas such as Water, Infomation or Body which can be examined from multiple perspectives leading to deeper insights and unexpected conclusions. Universities should collaborate on programs even internationally providing multi-national perspectives for students. The traditional dissertation format should be questioned and alternative ways of presenting research findings using net-based tools should be encouraged in order to make the findings more accessible to the public.

The article prompted 437 comments and they are probably more interesting than the article itself. There are, of course, universities that are already doing what Taylor suggests and show that many of his ivory tower accusations are rather too sweeping. A lot of research today may well seem rather obscure but haven't many great discoveries been made by examining seemingly insignificant details? The analysis of many small and obscure details can lead to the discovery of important patterns. Much research today is indeed closely linked to industry and public interest but curbing the pursuit of pure knowledge would be a dangerous path to follow.

This is an age-old debate of course and will rage on. Change is happening, though academic traditions are mighty hard to break.

Why technology?

Ben Grey's article Why Technology? in Tech & Learning sees signs that universities will start cutting technology spending on the grounds that it's a big budget item and there are few concrete signs that student performance has improved due to increased use of technology in class (ie. measureable improvement in terms of exam success). He advises us to sharpen our arguments about how the pedagogical use of technology can enhance the learning process. The comments after the article provide plenty of possible answers.

Maybe it's good to have convincing arguments ready to meet any 'back to basics' initiatives but I find it strange that we still have such scepticism about net-based education. Does anyone seriously question the use of technology in finance or administration? Is it possible to work in a university administration and say that you don't believe in using technology, preferring to use mechanical calculators, typewriters and filing cabinets?

Read a response to the article on John Strange's blog; part 1 and part 2.

Not without my iPod

The University of Missouri's journalism school has decided to require students to use either an iPod Touch or iPhone as part of their studies according to an article in The Wired Campus (even more interesting to read all the comments). See also a report in the Missourian. The reason for this move is to enable students to view podcasted lectures and communicate and follows a clear trend towards mobile learning solutions. The difference here is that the students are being asked to buy one particular brand and although Apple is generally regarded as cool, not everyone on campus is enthusiastic resulting in an anti-Apple group on Facebook.

The idea of podcasting lectures and other learning objects is excellent but we have to be able to do this to a variety of terminals and platforms giving users a choice. Most places have admittedly been locked into Windows for years but in recent years it has been possible to study using Apple or Linux computers. It really shouldn't matter what you use and we have to move away from all these proprietary solutions. It's particularly tough on students who have recently invested in shiny, happy terminals from other vendors.

One of the comments on Wired Campus claims that the university is starting to phase out campus computer labs thereby passing that cost over to the students who have to fork out for their mobile terminals. I think the age of the computer labs is soon over (let's face it, they are seldom inspiring learning environments) and that WiFi access and laptops is a much more attractive and flexible solution. The question is who finances the purchase or all those laptops and mobiles; let the students pay, offer leasing deals or even subsidised giveaways.

Missouri is one of many universities that are moving towards more mobile and flexible ways of distributing educational material. With so many universities distributing lectures via iTunes, Apple obviously have a massive student market but it's vital that education doesn't get locked into one particular brand or technology.

Are e-books a threat or an alternative?

E-books are in the news these days with Amazon's Kindle reader attracting lots of attention (not yet available here in Sweden sadly). Many fear that attractive e-readers will lead to a collapse of the publishing industry in the same way as the growth of the iPod and suchlike has caused havoc in the music industry.

A UK project called JISC National E-books Observatory has been investigating these fears and the preliminary findings are surprising. They have given all UK students access to e-book versions of 36 standard university textbooks in medicine, technology and science and monitored usage patterns. Interestingly they have not found any signs that e-book access has influenced book sales at all. Those who would normally have bought the books have done so and the others have probably used the e-books as an alternative to borrowing or copying the hard copies (as they did in the past). Another surprising finding was that there was no indictaion that the younger generation was more interested in e-books than the older generation; thereby denting the net generation myth.

The project is the largest ever survey of e-book reading habits and has involved nearly 50,000 responses. Read more in an article in Publishers' Weekly.

Bon appetit on the net

Way back in the fifties they tried to add smell to feature films (smell-o-vision) by scraping a card at a given moment and thereby being able to capture, for example, the doft of spring flowers or newly-cut grass. The technique was a flop of course and despite today's advances in HDTV we still can't smell or taste anything we see on screen. Imagine how popular all those cookery shows would be if we could smell and taste what they make!

However you can still use the net to taste and smell food. At work today we have been hosts for a fascinating initiative where juries around Sweden have been tasting and judging locally produced food products by video conference. Under the guidance of French gourmet Paul Le Mans, groups sat in 8 video conference studios around Sweden and tasted different types of bread, meat products and cheese. The aim was to develop the vocabulary of describing taste, smell and touch. All participating groups had the same selections of produce and tasted one after the other and agreed on common descriptive terms.

This event was part of a project called Eldrimner (main site, in Swedish), a national resource centre for artisan food, which focuses on promoting local food produce around Sweden.

Open high school

With all those open educational resources available out there it's no surprise to see brave attempts to create net-based schools or universities around them. Previously I've referred to the projects University of the People and Peer 2 Peer University and now I've found a high school in Utah that is completely on-line and uses OER. It's called the Open High School of Utah, a public high school and free for all residents of the state.

The idea is to use existing learning objects as study material sewn together by teachers available via the learning management system and e-meetings. They offer students free computers and individualised curriculum and presumably the students are expected to study completely from home. I assume they are somehow connected to a more established school but that is not clear from the website. They've just closed applications for the first semester and it will be interesting to see how the school develops.

The freedom and creativity of this kind of school gives a new dimension to home study students and those living in remote areas. How they develop sporting activities and foster group work is not obvious on the net. The experience of attending a real brick-amd-mortar school with all the social contacts, sports and networking will not be replaced by the virtual high school but the future will undoubtedly offer many hybrid forms.

Attention please

I enjoyed reading an article (Attention literacy) by a guy called Howard Rheingold about his efforts to grab the attention of his students. It's a recurring theme in many edublogs and it's not clear whether everyone in class who are busy checking Facebook, MSN, eBay etc are skillful multi-taskers or are simply not paying attention to the class.

Howard teaches a course in social media and communication at Berkeley and his tactics were to film his students and show them what the class looked like from the front; "... I realized that none of the students knew what it feels like to stand up in front of a room full of people who are not watching me or each other, but appear to be hypnotized by something on their computer screens."

The interesting point here is that Howard has spent time with his class teaching the important skill of attention; something that is not instinctive and must be learnt. It's important sometimes to create space to be able to think without all the distractions available all around us. Insights and ideas often come to us in moments of silence or even boredom but if we constantly fill the spaces with noise we'll never be able to reflect.

Have a look at Howard's video on the subject:

Is cheating creative?

I read a short article in my local newspaper yesterday about a survey of the most popular websites amongst 10-15 year-olds. The top two were predictable, YouTube and MSN, but in third place was a Swedish site called fuska.nu. This web address can be translated as cheat.now. Here you get masses of cheat codes for virtually all games, enabling you to beat everyone without bothering to learn the finer points yourself. Many games take weeks or even months to work up to a higher level but many players are evidently tempted to take short cuts to glory.

Similarly, there’s the phenomenon of people selling ready-made heroes or high status attributes on eBay and suchlike. Those who have no patience with the long learning process in the game can buy their way to instant status.

Does this mean that cheating is becoming more acceptable? The site doesn’t try to disguise its content so the word must be more positive than in the past. The “cheaters” compete with each other in trying to uncover the bugs and loopholes in the latest games and make them public as quickly as possible. Those who spend their time testing and finding cheat codes are indeed creative talents and actually provide some pretty concrete feedback to the games’ programmers by revealing the glitches. However those who simply use the cheat codes to find a short cut to beating their friends are not being particularly creative.

Sometimes you have to admire the ingenuity involved in cheating effectively. Why not use that creativity to do something more positive instead? But then again there’s the challenge of beating the system and the glory of succeeding. The file sharing community is very much about “beating the system” and finding ever more ingenious methods for doing so and avoiding discovery. At the same time the companies they are fighting against battle in vain to close down the loopholes and improve security. It's a fascinating battle.

Maybe all this can be seen as necessary irritants to force an otherwise complacent industry from getting too powerful. They are forcing the computer, telecom, music, film and gaming industries to be constantly on their guard and in some cases realize their vulnerability if they don’t adapt. It’s all part of a grey zone between relatively honest creative experimentation and the hardcore criminal activities of the major hackers.

Questioning the course

A few weeks ago George Siemens and colleagues organised an original on-line conference about how to make conferences more communicative and interactive (see my review in an earlier post). Now they are organising a similar activity and this time the concept of the course will come under the microscope (see From Courses to Dis/Course). We organise nearly all education in tidy packages known as a courses but is this model in need of re-assessment as the potential for net-based collaboration and informal learning develops? The seminar will take place 14-15 May using the e-meeting tool Elluminate as well as Moodle. More information will appear shortly on the blog.

Distance learning is good for you

I've just read a new Canadian study from Memorial University of Newfoundland entitled The Impact of High School Distance e-Learning Experience on Rural Students’ University Achievement and Persistence (Dodd, Kirby, Seifert, Sharpe. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume XII, Number I, Spring 2009).

The authors examined the success rates of first year university students and compared those with experience of distance learning from high school to those with only traditional classroom learning at high school. The results show that those with previous experience of distance learning had a higher success rate at university than the control group (regardless of the type of instruction used at university).

To quote from the abstract:
"The rapid growth of information technologies has influenced the way in which education is delivered and experienced. Little is currently known about the impact of distance education experience at the secondary level of the educational system on subsequent educational pursuits in the post-secondary education system. This research utilized archival data to explore the impact of high school on-line education experience on students’ performance and persistence in the first year of university. The results of this analysis suggest that first year university performance and persistence is significantly different for students who have previous experience with on-line education experiences and those who do not."

The reason for this would seem be that the distance students had developed a higher degree of self discipline and more independent study habits and as a result were better equipped to succeed in higher education.

I often get asked if distance courses are as good as campus-based ones and I reply that in many courses the net-based version is better in that you learn so much more. It should be seen as an advantage that you have taken a net-based course since not only have you studied the subject, you have also developed networking skills, learned to use a variety of net-based communication and presentation tools and participated in virtual teamwork. All those skills are vital in today's globalised job market and should be taught to all students.

Nobody asks if accountants really need to use Excel and net-based accounting resources; they are essential tools for the job. Why should we be so cautious with technology in teaching?

Sharing and caring

What happens when everyone shares everything? The music and film industries are struggling to come to terms with a world where copying is so easy and virtually impossible to control. The publishing industry is also under threat and the educational sector can't quite decide if the power of new web services are a threat or an opportunity. More and more information is being shared thanks to various wiki projects and educational material is more freely distributed than ever before. At the same time as we can share our own material we are also able to "share" other people's material with or without their permission.

I love the idea of open learning resources allowing access to educational material without a price tag. I'm not so sure about file sharing when the product of several months of an artist's/author's/actor's life can be distributed without that person getting any financial reward or credit. However the technology to do so is available and we have to adapt to a new reality where many established businesses will disappear in the next few years.

The power of sharing is a disruptive process and threatens many established structures. Mark Pesce has posted a lecture on this theme (see below) and is well worth a look. He examines amongst, many other areas, the possibility of creating a truly open university with lectures available from anywhere at any time and rated by students and peers. Many areas of university administration are being slowly opened up and put into the hands of the consumers (students). What will happen to the bricks-and-mortar campus ideal when you can choose when to study, where to study, what pace to study and are free to choose which lecturers to follow? Can this change be managed and structured or will the customer decide? Have a loook ..

See even Mark Pesce's blog The Human Network.


Share This Lecture! from Mark Pesce on Vimeo.

Sign language on-line

Whenever I see groups of people discussing in sign language I feel rather ashamed that so few of us with good hearing bother to learn even the basics of a language used extensively throughout the country but inaccessible to most. Why isn't basic sign language compulsory in schools? Just enough to handle simple situations.

A new EU project can help the situation. It's called Spread the sign and is a cooperation between 10 organisations in 8 European countries as part of the Leonardo daVinci programme. It is basically an on-line dictionary where you can enter words, phrases and sentences in the languages of the member states and get a video showing the sign language equivalent for each country. This can be of great use to those who just want to learn some basic phrases but most of all the resource is to help deaf people around Europe to understand each other. Sign language is just like the spoken language in that every country has their own language and this is a problem for, say, deaf students travelling on exchange programmes around Europe. Spread the sign enables you to at least practice the rudiments of the target language.

The project was officially launched by Queen Silvia of Sweden 31 March and you can read more about that on the official press release. Plans are to expand the project to become a global initiative by including countries outside Europe such as Japan. See also an article from Swedish SVT on the inauguration (article in Swedish).