Breakthrough Degree Programs

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) is a program that wants to accelerate educational innovation through applied technology. Their goals include showing dramatic improvement in college readiness and completion in the United States. They provide investment capital to expand the use of proven and emerging learning technologies, for collecting and sharing evidence of what works, and fostering a community of innovators and adopters.

How do they define a “Breakthrough Degree Program”? These are programs that generally depart from the higher education’s structures with which we are familiar. They question how we typically use technology (preferring to allow faster progress to a degree via personalized pathways or competency-based learning), tuitions (preferring more affordable costs), how course time is used and measured, and new roles
for students and those who support students.

At the website nextgenlearning.org, you can read more about their work and their partnerships. Those partnerships provide the investment capital - and sometimes are the reason that their ideas are looked at with some suspicion by educators.  Their Executive Committee, comprised of EDUCAUSE, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the League for Innovation in the Community College, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, and the Council of Chief State School Officers, guides the project’s overall efforts. (EDUCAUSE has management and fiduciary responsibility for the program.)

Examples of what a “Breakthrough Degree Program” can look like can bee seen in Southern New Hampshire’s "College for America," Northern Arizona University’s "Personalized Learning Program, and programs at Rio Salado College. These programs address alternatives like subscription models for tuition with one low-cost, all-inclusive rate. They also experiment with college-level learning being driven by and built upon the experiences and competencies that students bring with them. Some focus on support systems that use technology but rely on advisors, peer mentors, coaches, and instructors.

NGLC also likes to support K-16 partnerships tying postsecondary work to the being done in K-12 (see iNACOL and CCSSO) since college readiness and college completion are both big issues on campuses and appear to be intertwined.






Off the Clock: Moving to Competency-Based Learning

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

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There is a good article, "Technologies that Unlock Competency-Based Learning" by Dian Schaffhauser, that looks at how in New Hampshire a shift away from an educational system based on "seat time" is already underway.

I have been writing about "competency-based" programs for a few years, but a real national shift started in August 2013 when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a report calling for the dismantling of their own "Carnegie Unit."

That unit of measurement, which is tightly tied to the high school and college credit system, is being questioned even by those who created it. One alternative getting the most attention is CBL - Competency-Based Learning.

This new approach flips the Carnegie Unit (time is the constant and learning is the variable).
Learning becomes the constant and time is the variable. That means students take as much or as little time as they need to master a competency. The main requirement is that they continue to make progress. The student who completes a 15 week, 3 credit course in 9 weeks moves on. Another student takes 20 weeks to complete those competencies.

Obviously, this requires some big shifts to how we view credits, degrees, semesters and coursework.

It's an idea that has been used more in online courses and programs than with F2F courses in recent years, and technology plays a big role in this transformational approach.

According to the article, New Hampshire was trying this concept prior to the Carnegie announcement. High schools there have been shifting since the 2008-2009 academic year from the traditional time-based model of credit for sitting in class for about 180 days and moving students on even if they have not mastered the content.

The program has had challenges, which is what we would expect.

In a somewhat oversimplified explanation, you have a competency itself, and an assessment by which that competency is measured. New Hampshire-based Virtual Learning Academy Charter School (VLACS) sees a competency as including a "student's ability to transfer concepts and skills across content areas. A sample competency might be the following: "Students will demonstrate the ability to comprehend, analyze, and critique informational text in print and non-print media." VLACS is a a competency-based charter school for grades 5 to 12. Tuition-free to in-state students, this "alternative school" appeals to a variety of learners, including those who want to take courses not offered by their own schools.

How would this work in colleges that don't have the time luxury of 180 classes and a 10 month year? 

Will we see the completion rate at colleges decrease as students speed through courses in less than a semester - or will it get even longer than it is now because students cannot meet the competencies for certain required courses?

Many questions still to be asked and answered.


The End of Skeuomorphism

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on


Would you ever put your music, pictures or videos in a "folder"?  Well, you do digitally. That's skeuomorphism.

A skeuomorph is an object that retains some design elements to earlier objects. Why do designers use them? Because our brain is organized by analogies and it is key to the way that we understand. 

For example, when designing early graphical user interfaces for computer operating systems, designers used the skeuomorph of a paper folder as a place to put "files." This made more sense when you were filing word processing documents than it did for music files, but the analogy has held on to this day.


Skeuomorphs are not just computer-related. When you see physical objects with faux rivets to look like they are made of metal, or stitching to give a leather look or faux wood on a cars side panels or dashboard, these are all skeuomorphs.

Add an old design element to a new one. Some designers view them as cheats, especially when they are less than subtle. Other designers like that they help users make connections.

PowerPoint replaced trays of 35mm slides in presentations and so Microsoft used "slides" as the term and the framing device for each file in the presentation.

We still see various icons of trashcans and wastebaskets as the place to dump out deleted files.
Even though we click rather than "press" many icons on screens, they still look like and are referred to as "buttons."

If you never worked in a photo darkroom, then some of the icons and terms used in the Photoshop software package may seem strange. In order to move photographers who had used darkrooms into the digital world terms like dodge and burn and the sponge and eyedropper from the darkroom were retained in the digital darkroom.

An article in Forbes magazine suggested that it was time for skeuomorphism "to die."  The author points to Apple's design whiz Jony Ive as one person there who would rather not design with that nod to the past.

Apparently, Steve Jobs did not agree. That's why we saw on Apple products: calendars with faux leather-stitching, bookshelves with wood veneers, fake glass and paper and brushed chrome. When a technology is new, it helps. Taking notes on a screen may feel more comfortable if the the application gives us "pens and highlighters" and the screen looks like a lined notebook or sticky notepaper.

But at some point, the technology is familiar enough that we shouldn't need these nods to the past.

My students don't know what I mean by a Rolodex, but they recognize the cards as a symbol for a contact.

Skeuomorph is from the Greek: skeuos (container or tool) and morphê (shape) and has been used since the late 1800s.

But the design concept has been around since antiquity and can be seen in leather and clay pottery which used traits from the wooden counterparts of earlier artisans. Clay pottery with rope-shaped handles were creating a connection to a familiar shape and usage.

Digital skeuomorphs abound. Your digital camera or smartphone still makes a shutter-like click is an auditory skeuomorph since there is no mechanical shutter present. Even the swipe on a pad to turn a page is a nod to the actual paper page turning motion.

Apple's iOS 7 is seen as a shift from skeuomorphism to a cleaner, more digitally pure design. The death of skeuomorphism? I doubt it. 




Does a old dial television still work as the symbol for a video that streams over the Net?





Anniversaries and Predictions

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

PhilThis blog has now crossed the calendar mark and into its ninth year. In blog years, that is getting close to the senior citizen discount age. Over the years, we have looked at others predictions about learning and technology and we have made a few our own. It is interesting but I never view these predictions very seriously. We in this edtech business don't score much better than Oscar predictors or long-range weather prognosticators.

Groundhog Day is my reminder that another blog year has passed at Serendipity35. Phil, "the groundhog of record," saw his shadow and so predicts six more weeks of winter. If spring comes in four weeks, Phil doesn't get much bad press. And that's my thought on technology predictions too - we need to check back on them a year ot two out to grade them.

The predictions de la semaine are in the new “NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition,” a 52-page document that is available free from the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.

Before we get to the new report, I thought I would recap what I wrote four years ago about the 2010 Horizon Report predictions, The report always looks at the time-to-adoption for technologies or trends. Four years ago they said that the Time-to-Adoption was one year or less for "cloud computing and collaborative environments. Both of those had pretty much arrived in 2010 already, so those are your safest bets. The cloud is certainly here now. Although collaborative environments may exist, they haven't taken any greater hold now than they did a few years ago.

In 2010, game-based learning and mobile learning was seen as 3 to 4 years away. Mobile is used more than it was a few years ago, but it is hardly a major part of the learning world. Gamification is still a topic for conference presentations as "on the horizon."

The predictions that are the most difficult are the ones that wil be arrive in 4-5 years. That 2010 Horizon Report said they would be augmented reality and flexible displays - both of which are still far from being a part of the learning environment in any significant way.

So, why even look at predictions? It is a good thing to be aware of what appears to be on the horizon. I belong to several groups, such as the NJEDge Academic Technology Group, that meet and try to do the same kind of predicting on an ongoing basis. We llok at emerging technology, so things like the Horizon report are useful in setting the agenda.


The new Horizon Report looks at six technologies and the changes they’re expected to bring. Of course, you should read the full report, but here is my PowerPoint slide summary. 

Social media’s expansion into education will continue and have its maximum impact within two years. “Understanding how social media can be leveraged for social learning is a key skill for teachers, and teacher-training programs are increasingly being expected to include this skill.”



The other trend that is here and will continue to make inroads is the blending of traditional face-to-face instruction with online, hybrid, and collaborative learning. The report says it has “the potential to leverage the online skills learners have already developed independent of academia.” 



In the next 3-5 years, we should expect data-driven learning and assessment to have more of an impact on attempts to personalize learning and improve performance measurement.

Also listed as having more of an impact in three to five years is a shift toward “learning by making and creating rather than from the simple consumption of content.” That sounds like my idea that the Web 2.0 shift would cause a Learning 2.0 (AKA University or even School 2.0) to follow.



The most challenging predictions are the two trends that are long-range (5 or more years away). The Report predicts one of those to be the softer prediction that there will be a continuing evolution of online learning. That includes thinking about what effects MOOCs will finally have on academia. The second general trend is universities shifting to more agile “approaches to teaching and learning that mimic technology start-ups.”

That last prediction makes me want to say that education always seems to move slower than the the corpoarte world or even the general consumer world when it comes to embracing new technology. Mobile has arrived in almost every sector except education where it is still viewed as a distraction. MOOCs will probably have a greater impact first in corporate training and for lifelong learners than it will in academia in the next few years.

But it is interesting to guess. And I think Twelve Years a Slave will win the Best PIcture Oscar.