Serendipity35

Last month, I attended the Fusion 2016 conference in Washington DC sponsored by the learning management system Brightspace (D2L or Desire2Learn). Two of the topics that ran across many of the presentations were competency-based education (CBE), programs and degrees, and adaptive learning. Both of these topics have been ones I have been written about and have been interested in the past two years.

CBE is a movement that Brightspace has put some focus on in its design. Success in CBE is assessed by the knowledge gained, not the time spent, so when a student masters a concept, they move on to the next. Until they master it, they receive specific guidance to help them. The plusses of CBE are usually given as faster completions, individualized pacing, credit for prior knowledge more immediate feedback and potential cost savings for students.

Adaptive learning is an educational method which uses technology (computers, LMS etc.) as interactive teaching devices. More importantly is using and coordinating any human (faculty, tutors etc.) and mediated resources to the unique needs of each learner. For me, adaptive learning is a 21st century take on what we called individualized learning several decades ago.

I believe that both approaches have value, but after hearing a number of presentations on them last month, I wrote in my notes "Why not blend adaptive learning with CBE?"

Dragan Gasevic has said that that what we need to do is create adaptive learners rather than adaptive learning. The idea that software should develop those desired attributes of learners that we want requires shifting education from the acquisition of knowledge. Gasevic and George Siemens consider knowledge acquisition to be "the central underpinning of most adaptive learning software today."  They would like to see more focus on the development of learner states of being, including affect, emotion, self-regulation and goal setting.  

I am not unique in looking to a blending of CBE and adaptive learning. Unfortunately, for a time, individualized/personalized learning, competency-based education, and blended learning were not well-defined by educators and were sometimes even used synonymously. iNACOL and its project, CompetencyWorks, have looking at some of the misconceptions of CBE that might actually undermine equity.taken leadership in helping the field understand these concepts as different and relational to build knowledge in communicating these topics.

One misconception noted is that the idea of flexible pacing is misused to be synonymous with competency education. Allowing self-pacing flexibility and software for improved data feedback loops is a positive step, but it is not necessarily mean you have a personalized learning environment or a competency-based progression.

In the issue of equity in competency education, one concern is that variation in pacing may mean a percentage of students get left behind. It is not that gaps for students who lack knowledge and skills already exist, but a more time-based structure means these gaps only grow over time. Competency education requires daily focus on student progress, supports to stay on pace and acting to ensure they demonstrate mastery.

I found it interesting that when The Chronicle of Higher Education assembled its list of national trends for its Trends Report, they included instructional design as one of them. It's odd to think of it as a "trend" since ID did not start in education, it has been around for several decades and it has a big role, especially in higher education, today.

Instructional design started during World War II with the armed forces. It came from a need to provide technical training to large numbers of people efficiently.

Having worked in instructional design formally since 2000, I have seen the field change during the past 15 years. I subscribe to a few of those job alert websites and every week I see more openings for designers. Some of those jobs are in academe and even more are in industry. Most major companies now use instructional designers to develop employee training materials.

In higher education, instructional design is likely to have started at a college as a way to prepare distance-learning and extension programs. Those programs initially appealed to non-traditional students with family and work obligations and often as a distance from the physical campus that made attending classes difficult.

As the proportion of those students increased and as the technology to deliver courses became more sophisticated, online learning became more popular. Its acceptance by faculty lagged behind its acceptance by students. Designers who worked with faculty helped gain acceptance as they learned what an ID could do to actually help design their course for online delivery.

The share of students taking online courses has gone from less than 10 percent in 2002 to 28 percent in 2014, according to the Babson Survey Research Group. Babson also found that the percentage of academic leaders who see online learning as critical to their institution’s long-term strategy went from about half to nearly two-thirds. And that is why the one of their ten trends is to say that there is increasing importance and visibility for instructional designers.

A professional ID is needs technical ability, design skills, pedagogical knowledge, and the interpersonal skills to work 1:1 with subject matter experts - SMEs, or in this case, faculty. 

In my early days of managing an ID department, we often met faculty who were told that they had to "teach my course online" and who fully expected to just digitize all their regular face-to-face materials. They would ask us to scan hundreds of pages of handouts and readings, create or convert PowerPoint slides, and they wanted to videotape their usual 90 or 180 minute lectures. It was a very big learning curve.

A few saw the opportunity to translate their in-person courses to be offered online as an opportunity to really rethink the course objectives. In those early days, all faculty had to learn technical skills, especially whatever the current course management system was that the college was using. (Those often changed, much to their dismay.) 

For me, the best outcome over the 16 years that I worked in instructional design was that we were viewed not as just "the people who do online courses" but also as a department that could help improve the quality of teaching, whether in online, in-person, or hybrid courses. 

Having myself been trained as a K-12 teacher and doing graduate work in pedagogy, I was initially surprised at the lack of knowledge that professors had in that area. I shouldn't have been surprised since they always told me that they never took an education course and tried to "do the things my best teachers did and avoid the things the bad ones did." Objectives versus goals, rubrics, Bloom's Taxonomy and almost all of the things I had been taught and used in my secondary school classroom were brand new to higher education faculty. My knowledge about pedagogy needed to be diplomatically transferred to professors, but the best ones were intrigued and eager to know not only how to teach online but why to teach in new ways.

A course at the University of Texas at Austin offers 24 "lucky" students a seat in a face-to-face classroom for an introductory psychology course that enrolls 1,500 undergraduates who take the course each semester online. The course’s professors, try to make the classroom entertaining ("like it’s a TV show"), according to an article on chronicle.com. The article is titled "Same Time, Many Locations: Online Education Goes Back to Its Origins" and it is categorized under the old-fashioned heading "Distance Education."

To many of us, this move to large-scale, real-time distance education for introductory courses is a throwback to the pre-broadband era of the mid-1990s. Then we relied on synchronous offerings in distance learning (that was often the name of the department that organized the offerings) because the technology didn’t allow us to do much more. ITV, instructional television, was another term we used and many campuses had ITV rooms dedicated to hosting a F2F class that was sent out to other locations.

In my early days at NJIT, we sent classes to area high schools as dual enrollment and many schools that had several campus locations, especially community colleges, used it to offer low enrollment courses on one campus to other campuses to keep the numbers up - and the cost of faculty down.

UT Austin has been doing this flashback since 2012 and sounds committed to synchronous online courses. It seems strange since the appeal of online learning is very often its asynchronous nature. In synchronous courses, students must watch remotely at a set time. Many of those early courses were videotaped at he end of the 20th century and then repackaged as asynchronous courses.

As the article states: "Most of the excitement, support, and growth in distance education has come as a result of advances in courses that students can watch at their own pace: asynchronous online education."

LinkedIn has been around for more than a decade and is the social network for professionals with 433 million members in 200+ countries. It is still thought of by many people who use it and by those who don't use it as being just a "job site." And it is that, but it also became a B2B site. But beyond those B2B interactions and using it to find a job and advertise your personal brand, it has been getting much closer to the world of training and education.
LinkedIn certainly took note that online learning back in 2011 had about $35.6 billion spent on self-paced e-learning worldwide and in 2014, e-learning was a $56.2 billion industry. So, they spent $1.5 billion in 2015 to buy online training website Lynda.com. You want a new job, you quite possibly need new training. A natural combination for LinkedIn.
Perhaps, we will see LinkedIn begin to offer partnerships with colleges to offer some of that training - and I don't think those will be free and open courses (think MOOC) but rather paid professional learning. 
Inc.com has also identified publishing content as a place they see LinkedIn headed to now. Also a natural fit with training. They are already sharing professional content in partnerships with industry news publications and outlets, and they encourage crowd-sourcing of content. I share/publish native blog posts and re-posts there and it does give you a new and larger audience. There are also podcasts, tweets and videos inside the platform.
Higher education should be paying attention the road LinkedIn is traveling on, because it leads to their campus.