Serendipity35

I'll be attending and presenting on September 25 at the eLearning 2.0: The Next Generation of Online Education Conference at the University of Connecticut. My particular session is called "Web 2.0 Delivery & Content for University 2.0" which is one of those titles that might cause you to ask for clarification.

My original inspiration came from seeing Web 2.0 and open source software used by non-academic organizations and individuals. Companies are using them to deliver training online that was once only the domain of universities and only the larger businesses. Now, many small businesses, K-12 schools, home-schoolers and groups can create learning environments for free or very little cost to serve their members.

Unfortunately, many colleges that offer online courses, continue to offer what might be called eLearning 1.0. These courses lack the collaboration, discussion, social networking and interactivity that defines 2.0.

My original presentation has become a roundtable session. What I want to discuss with this academic audience is their use of web 2.0 and open source tools and services (blogs, wikis, folksonomy, RSS, social media, Moodle) and appropriate methodologies for promoting collaboration, social networking and interactivity.

My own starting point is from my days at NJIT where my department designed online courses, but also designed training for government and companies and the contrast was evident. Perhaps surprisingly, the non-academics (such as the NJ State Police) were much more concerned with accountability and monitoring student usage and the completion of tasks than traditional courses. Security, accessibility, SCORM compliance and a number of other issues first came up in our design for training courses before there was any mention of them in the academic areas.

Companies have also jumped into all the 2.0 world with less hesitation. From Drupal, RSS, YouTube, and Facebook to the current darlings like Twitter, they are trying things out and seeing what works. Perhaps for good reasons, colleges are much slower to adopt these tools and services.

Currently, I teach in the graduate program in Professional and Technical Communication at NJIT. It is an MS degree that is totally online, and I use web 2.0 not only as a delivery method for courses, but as the content for my course - as do other courses in the program. For example, students use blogging as a reflective practice to complement the more traditional ePortfolio that is used to assess core competencies. We use Moodle as our LMS. Students do collaborative work in wikis, use tagging to share resources, create podcasts and view my iTunes U podcast "lectures." (Lecture is a misnomer since these are 10-25 minute modules and not "lecture capture.") Perhaps more importantly, students work within that 2.0 environment. For example, in creating websites, we might use online services (like Google Sites) that don't require software purchases or learning HTML and coding. They might first explore CSS via their blog's style template. In the Content Management and Information Architecture course, they might build a system using the free Drupal CMS. The course that was once taught on computer-based training (CBT) is now Web-based Training (WBT).

Online courses have always cultivated strong independent study skills and a self-paced environment. (This is often the downfall of many younger online students.) But I am observing that, not by design, e-learning is becoming less independent and more collaborative.

It is hard to ignore that almost 3.5 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2006 term. In U.S. higher education it was almost 20% taking at least one online course. That was a 10% increase over the number reported the previous year. And the 9.7% growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.

The next generation of online education is social and collaborative. Whether educational institutions will lead or follow is yet to be decided.