Fortnightly Mailing

Understanding the weak overall performance of K12 Inc. virtual schools

Gary Miron's and Jessica L. Urschel's A Study of Student Characteristics, School Finance, and School Performance in Schools Operated by K12 Inc. [PDF], from the school of education at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a substantial and critical study of K12 Inc., the largest private provider of virtual schooling in the US. Education Week reports that the value of K12's stock fell by over 30% within three days of publication.

The study is broad in its focus. Here are three "stand out" findings: 

Innovating Pedagogy 2012

Photo of William Gibson by Frederic Poirot; original source; file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Mike Sharples sent me a link to this pre-release version [PDF] of Innovating Pedagogy 2012, which he has written for the Open University with Patrick McAndrew, Martin Weller, Rachel Ferguson, Elizabeth FitzGerald, Tony Hirst, Yishay Mor, Mark Gaven, and Denise Whitelock.

The report gives an accessible overview of ten new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, and it has been written for non-academics. It looks to have been inspired by the EDUCAUSE Horizon Reports, but with a focus on learning and teaching.

Three things struck me about the report:

New insights into Udacity, its learning and business models, and Thrun's thinking

This 3 July 40 minute interview by Jason Calcanis with Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun is, how shall I say? very "West Coast", even setting aside the advertisements.

I found myself feeling greater empathy with the interviewee than the interviewer, though you do have to admire Calcanis's interview technique, apart from his tendency to interrupt a bit too much.

Thrun has a very clear vision; his heart is in the right place; and he has understood in a deep and serious way how online learning, done on a really big scale, and organised and supported in the right way, can and will change things for the better. The kinds of changes that Thrun envisages (to models for learning, to what it means to be a teacher, to the educational establishment) will -- if they are done right -- be worth it from the point of view of learners and the world at large. But if you were now setting out on a career as a teacher, especially in post-compulsory education, wouldn't you have to take seriously Thrun's points about the fall in the proportion of the workforce in the developed world involved in farming, once modern mechanised methods took hold?

[By way of a counter-argument, see Jordan Weisman's Why the Internet Isn't Going to End College As We Know It in The Atlantic, via Mark Guzdial.]

Edinburgh University bites on the "MOOC" bullet with Coursera

Don't be put off by the slightly stodgy tone in parts of this just-released promotional video from the University of Edinburgh about www.ed.ac.uk/moocs. Instead, listen carefully to what Stanford's Daphne Koller has to say about scale and formative assessment in Coursera's new "breed" of free on-line courses, as well as to the comments from Vice-Principal Jeff Haywood about Edinburgh University's approach to quality assurance. [See also coverage by BBC, Guardian, The Times Higher, Inside Higher Ed, Downes. ]

Of possible interest to readers of Fortnightly Mailing will be one of Edinburgh's Coursera courses E-learning and Digital Cultures, taught by Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross, and Christine Sinclair. E-learning and digital cultures will "explore how digital cultures and learning cultures connect, and what this means for e-learning theory and practice". [On 8 August, ALT published MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera, Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair.]

Questions to use in an interview with Eric Mazur

On 18 July I will do an interview for ALT News Online with Harvard physicist Eric Mazur, who will be a keynote speaker at the 2012 ALT Conference, but who happens also to be speaking in my home town Sheffield. I asked the ALT Members' Discussion List for suggestions for questions to use in the interview, and here are the 10 interview questions I will use as the basis of the interview.

Final update, 18/7/2012.

1. Was there a breakthrough moment when the idea of peer instruction came to you? Can you describe it?

2. Your original work on peer-based instruction preceded the ubiquitous Internet. What difference has the Internet and the widespread availability of "always on" devices made to your thinking on peer-based instruction?

Snippets from 1 July to 13 July

Via @shackletonjones "Is online learning really cracking open the public post-secondary system?" by Tony Bates. 5 lessons in comment below. - http://www.tonybates.ca/2012...

Lesson 1: No president with an activist Board of Governors is now safe if the university does not have a clear institutional strategy for online learning. It’s now become the latest buzzword in post-secondary education.

Lesson 2: MOOCs may be the answer – but what is the question? May there be better solutions to the question? And may such solutions exist already but are not being sufficiently supported?

Lesson 3: Governments are increasingly not going to accept the status quo or business as usual. In particular, if your institution doesn’t have a meaningful strategy for innovation in teaching, for improving the cost-effectiveness of the organization, and particularly a strategy for online learning, you will become increasingly vulnerable to funding cuts.

Lesson 4: Prepare and train your faculty to deal with change and innovation in teaching, and in particular for teaching online.

Lesson 5: If public institutions do not respond effectively to the challenge of change, they will eventually be swept aside by the private sector – and will deserve it.

The emergence of mass on line tutoring systems (MOTS)

Epigeum is a spin-out company from Imperial College London. Co-founder David Lefevre sent me this piece about mass online tutoring systems. He wrote it partly prompted by hearing a talk - "one of the most impressive presentations I have seen in our field" - by Daphne Koller (co-founder of Coursera), on 2 July at the University of London Computer Centre.

Lefevre is not making a new point, but he gets to the heart of the matter, in this snippet:

Human tutors are present but the delivery system allows them to operate largely at a meta level and therefore teach many more students than is possible via more traditional methods. .....  As anyone who has taken a course on these systems will attest, the learning experience does not feel impersonal. The effect is a rich, engaging experience far removed from the solitary browsing experience provided by OpenCourseWare.

(I wonder if the MOTS acronym will stick?)

Lessons from Finland – do comparisons help?

Pasi Sahlberg Source

[This is a Guest Contribution by Andrew Morris of the Policy Consortium, an informal grouping of independent consultants to which I belong.]

Education in other countries sounds so much more interesting than our own! In Switzerland it’s the calibre of apprenticeships, in France the breadth of the Baccalaureat, in Scandinavia the quality of pre-school play. But as I see more and more examples used in political argument I begin to wonder how much we simply cherry pick from abroad to suit our pet criticism of the home system. Do we fall for the best features in other countries but fail to look at the whole, warts and all?

Peter Norvig's TED talk reflecting on creating and running the online AI course

[Added 9 July 2012: The discussion on Hacker News prompted by this post by Colin Wright is well worth reading.]

Peter Norvig is Google's Director of Research. Here, finally, is a recording of Peter Norvig's February 2012  six minute TED talk about his and Sebastian Thrun's 2011 mass free online computer science course about artificial intelligence (in which I took part as a student and from which I wrote weekly reports throughout - to find them scroll down here). It is interesting in its own right. It also shows how much can be conveyed in only six minutes (though post-talk questions and discussion would have added a great deal).

Note Norvig's conclusion:

"....the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come."

[Below the video I have pasted the transcript of the talk.]

Just how little students learn - Mark Guzdial

Nearly two years old, but still fresh, this post by Mark Guzdial in his Computing Education Blog, is worth reading. As an aside, it has an interesting description of how/why "ordinary" users fail when they try to edit Wikipedia. Mark's  Education is already Gamified (from which I came across "Just how little students learn") sheds interesting light on the current enthusiasm for badges, and why the "badge fad" needs treating with some care.