Online Learning

This New York Times piece by Tamar Lewin is a good overview of developments in online learning -- MOOCs (massive open online courses); companies including Coursera, Udemy, edX, Udacity. 

"Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later" -- 

In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

The Next 150 Years

 From the BBC -- "Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years" -- 

As we begin a new year, BBC Future has compiled 40 intriguing predictions made by scientists, politicians, journalists, bloggers and other assorted pundits in recent years about the shape of the world from 2013 to 2150.

-- in the domains of Computing and Robotics, Politics and Business, Science and Nature, Society, and Technology. 

This is also, in and of itself, a wondeful infographic. 

IT and Higher Ed in 2013 and Beyond

In Inside Higher Ed, Lev Gonick (VP for IT and CIO at Case Western) writes about "The year Ahead in IT, 2013." This is the best, most comprehensive, prescient pieces about the future of higher ed IT I have read in several years. 

This is a must-read. (Endure the first few florid paragraphs; he starts making sense by the sixth paragraph or so.) 

... 

The emerging learning enterprise is about designing and creating experiences that provide opportunities to discover and gain 21st-century competencies based on assembly, synthesis, perspective, critique, and interconnected systems thinking. It is precisely the role anticipated by Ellul to create opportunities for conscious self-reflection.

The mechanisms for certifying competency, along with the persistence of learning communities, in varying degrees of proximity to the received assumption of the centrality of the physical brick and mortar campus, represent the value, brand and opportunity of universities in the 21st century.  And while the university’s once near-monopoly on the credentialing of a certain set of valued and relevant skills in the post-war era is all but over, the emergent competitive landscape will lead to adaptation and creative destruction.

The year ahead will remain turbulent for universities and opportunistic for learners. The top 10 IT trends impacting the future of higher education in 2013 will enable more learning opportunities. The 10 trends outlined below will also afford those universities and colleges committed to reinvigoration an opportunity to leverage technology to advance university mission and the pursuit and re-dedication to relevance in the year ahead and well beyond.

1. Open Learning, MOOCs, etc. Excerpt: "Open learning in the current overhyped environment is one kind of learning experience but it is not the same thing as a high-quality and sustainable form of learning and inquiry, even when it has elite branding." 
   
2. Flipped classrooms. "Flipping the classroom sets expectations that learners take greater responsibility for their own learning by coming to “class” prepared in advance having viewed and assimilated assigned preproduced video materials. Scheduled class time now affords faculty an opportunity to adopt problem-based, challenge-based, or case-based teaching, enabling learners to become more actively involved in the learning process. And while the convenience of lecture and textbook model produces little evidence of learning that lasts nor transforms the learner, the emergence of high quality video-based learning materials affords even the most reluctant lecturer an opportunity to revisit their pedagogical goals." 
3. The 24/7, mobile university. Smartphones and tablets, ubiquitous high-speed networks. 
4. Learning analytics. "A confluence of factors around student success, including demands for accountability, funding formulas based on successful completion, timely remediation and intervention, and the broader social value of a more educated population have converged and the result is a growing expectation of institutional responsiveness." 
5. Collaboration and networks/the cloud. "The value of investing in next generation networks is less about access, speeds or raw throughput. As Net+ is demonstrating, the value of our investments is in the enabling and provisioning of service offerings above the campus network to advance the missions of our institution, including research, teaching, and service." 
6. Enterprise systems continue to move to softwares-as-services. 
7. "Learning space" (i.e., classrooms and lecture halls) are fitted with even more technology. "Beyond inverting the class with preproduced video content, there is much to be done in re-imagining and re-inventing the physical learning environments.  And while creating a replicable, cost effective immersive adventure in the likeness of Universal Studio’s Harry Potter Forbidden Journey may be ambitious, the era of defining technology-enhanced classrooms as a PC and a projector is past." 
8. Universities take the lead in extending high-speed networks to the public. "In their e-book, The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama’s Legacy (Odyssey Editions, November, 2012),  Blair Levin, the author of the National Broadband Plan and Executive Director of Gig.U, and former FCC chairman Reed Hunt make the case for creating what they call a national broadband advantage. The catalyst for creating a national broadband advantage is leveraging our nation’s universities and colleges. As the authors document, students, faculty, and staff -- long the progenitors of much of the economic growth and productivity associated with technology -- have unique opportunities to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks in communities around the university campus." 
9. Open data across the campus. As in, "open access" in the library world. 
10. Campus IT services change and reorganize radically. "As technology leaders in higher education assess how to align our organizations to these twin challenges, the time has come to consider discontinuous organizational change. Tinkering and tweaking with traditional organizational issues like the federated models for technology support across the university or whether or how to merge academic and administrative computing are inadequate and unlikely to help the institutions we serve with strategic value-add. Expensive external consulting groups can tell our executives what we already know. Our IT organizations (and many other parts of the university) are products of a legacy environment that has, to varying degrees, become calcified and nonresponsive to the needs of the university going forward."

Update on Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 05:25AM by williamgarrity

My colleague Josh Kim's parsing via Inside Higher Ed of Gonick's piece, specifically his point #10 -- "http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/amplifying-lev-gonicks-year-ahead-it"

The Decline of Microsoft?

Wow -- there are several recent tough commentaries on Microsoft's future, likley precipitated by the "uniqueness" of Windows 8 and/or its slow take off, plus given the continued juggernauts of Apple/iOS and Google/Android. 

Dan Lyons in readwrite: "Microsoft 'Blinded By Its Own Hallucinations' And 'Turning Into A Sideshow'" --

I have written my share of blistering articles about Microsoft over the years, but I just read this one by market research analyst Roger Kay and all I can say is, "Wow." Kay has been around for a long time. He used to run the PC research group at IDC, and now has his own firm, called Endpoint Technologies Associates. The point is, he knows his stuff. And he knows Microsoft incredibly well. And boy did he just go ballistic in a column published on Forbes.com.

The gist of his article is, Let's stop beating around the bush and just say it - Windows 8 is a dud. So is Windows Phone 8. Everyone in the world knows this, except Microsoft. 

"Microsoft has reached an Orwellian impasse, in which it cannot tell the truth - even to itself," Kay writes. "It is blinded by its own hallucinations about how the market is operating. The result is that its public pronouncements entirely lack credibility."

Continued at link.

Here is aforementioned article by Kay in Forbes: "Microsoft Is Fast Turning Into A Sideshow"

And, here, Fast Company weighs in -- "5 Lessons Microsoft Must Learn To Compete In 2013;" -- in summary -- 

1. Commit to innovation -- stick with changes introduced (including Windows 8). 
2. It's risky to allow your hardware partners to deliver your innovation. 
3. Have an ecosystem. 
4. Deliver the apps! 
5. Build credible excitement about your direction. 

Social Media Trends

I think Jeff Bullas is a wonderful, prescient commentator about social media.

Here, he writes about social media trends for 2013. 

"6 Social Media Trends You Should Not Ignore in 2013" -- 

1. "Social content" predominates -- integrated more and more with "search." 
2. Social requires scale -- will be increasingly the provenance of enterprise. 
3. Twitter -- more and more a social medium that can't be ignored. 
4. Facebook will continue to thrive. 
5. Social will become increasingly visual -- think Pinterest. 
6. Social must be mobile friendly.