[Note: Bert Kimura posted the following as a comment on 19 June 2009, in response to "‘The College of 2020: Students’ – A Chronicle Report." We've decided to publish Kimura's comment as an article to facilitate further discussion. The original comment has been expanded to include a note from his email message to me on 6.20.09. -JS]
Jim, thanks for posting the summary. From my own experiences teaching online classes at UH-Manoa in Educational Technology and also having tried such classes with Japanese students, the items summarized certainly make a lot of sense.
There are three items that I believe will become important by then, if not, perhaps passé by then:
1. The 2020 students may not have had any familiarity at all with desktop computers and traditional operating systems. Instead, all of the communications, creation, and retrieval of info will be done with mobile devices. I also believe that, as may of us have two or mobile notebook computers today, 2020 students will have multiple devices to accomplish their online tasks. The proverbial “toaster” could still be one of them. :-)
The idea of the end of the desktops should also be attributed to Alan Levine, CTO of the New Media Consortium. He also does a very informative (with a unique perspective) blog: http://cogdogblog.com/. Alan was formerly the instructional technologist for the Maricopa CC system and was tremendously influential in getting faculty in the system to adopt technology in teaching and learning.
2. Texting such as this comment will be replaced by or, at least, on par with verbal, visual or multimedia communication modes. Consequently, faculty need to be able to reach visual learners in an effective pedagogical manner as well.
3. Internationalization will enable many more distance learners to participate in online courses, and thus the online student community will be more multicultural than the current group. I believe that this will result in a much richer student experience.
Four decades ago the Coleman Report examined student achievement and concluded that the primary factors for student success belonged to the student—ability and socioeconomic status. The school could not control those conditions of success. Recent research has revealed the fatal methodological flaw in the Coleman study and reversed those findings. The primary factor in student success is now believed to be that student’s teacher.
Coleman compared the average results of schools, without comparing the results of individual teachers within those schools. I once participated in an internal study for a school district. Students had taken a pilot writing assessment in grades 4, 8, and 10. The average results for each of the schools was about the same, and they were consistent with what would be expected for the socioeconomic status of the area—something over 50% of the students were proficient or better. Our research team had access to the raw data, though, and the results were startling. Many of the teachers had more than 80% of their students rated as proficient, and some had 100% proficient. Many of the teachers had fewer than 20% proficient, and some had none at all. (These were all heterogeneous classes.) Not a single teacher had results between 20% and 80%.
Because of this huge disparity in results, it was easy to tell which teachers were in each group when we analyzed the anonymous surveys. Most interestingly, 100% of the low-performing teachers believed that academic success depended upon the abilities of the student, and 100% of the high performing teachers believed that the teacher could make any student successful by applying appropriate instructional techniques to meet that student’s needs.
For much of educational theory, research has shown us what methods are most effective. Convene a meeting of the top theorists in instruction and they will spend their time agreeing with each other. Unfortunately, much of what they will be agreeing on is counterintuitive and non-traditional. School districts must officially adopt them quietly, or the local newspapers will scream that they are destroying education. Even when they are officially adopted, most teachers ignore them and go on as they always have, so nothing actually changes.
At the college level, those theories are rarely even introduced. I was once invited by a prestigious technical college to help them improve their writing program. It did not go well. When I told them my plans, they were aghast and would have none of it. If I were to use those techniques, too many students would be successful, they would earn high grades, and the school would be accused of grade inflation. In higher education, educational excellence is still too often believed to occur in a 400 student lecture hall.
In Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, Clayton Christensen identifies the primary path to student success, and he predicts that technological changes, particularly in the world of online education, will make it possible. The successful teacher diagnoses the learning needs of individual students and makes appropriate adjustments to that student’s learning plan. The truly skilled individual teacher is able to do that in a face to face classroom, but it is not easy. Technological advances to make that possible would indeed disrupt all of education.
That means, though, that these changes must serve those counterintuitive instructional strategies that actually work.
I was approached by a vendor with the technology that would supposedly solve all my online education instructional needs. They had gone into the lecture halls of various colleges and recorded lectures. On your computer you could watch the fascinating talking heads and view the accompanying PowerPoints. Instead of being mind-numbingly bored to tears in a 400 seat lecture hall, you could be mind-numbingly bored to tears in the comfort of your home.
Much of the educational technology I see is imitating the bad instruction that produces poor student achievement. Technology developers must seek out what really works and focus their attention accordingly. I visited such a program recently, and what I saw gave me great hope for the future. As a developer of online education curriculum, I know what kind of technology we need to be successful, and when it comes, it will certainly transform education.
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Spotlight
Curt Bonk: “Today, anyone can learn anything from anyone at any time." "Students want feedback on everything they do. You know what happens when you give feedback on everything they do? You die” (Stone Soup with Curt Bonk: Armchair Indiana Jones in Action by Stefanie Panke). Daniel McGee: "Successful [Calculus I] students appeared to need a unified approach, which emphasized verbal situations, geometric figures, algebraic expressions and the relations between them" (Study Suggests the Need for an Intergrated Learning Styles Approach to Calculus by Jessica Knott).
Kathlyen Harrison and Michael Gilmartin: "We highly recommend [Triptico] for teachers that want to improve interactivity, foster competition, and engage students in the learning process" (Triptico: A Powerful and Free Instructional App).
Niall Watts: "I cannot see a MOOC like ‘Designing a New Learning Environment‘ replacing a university course.... Nor do I see such a MOOC as a ‘taster’ for Stanford. The MOOC is a completely different experience, a bit like a virtual learning environment open to the world" (The MOOC, an Incubator for Great Ideas: A Personal Experience).
Tim Holt: "What happened to these professional learning communities is that they had simply become meetings where teachers and administrators looked at student data and were trying to outwit the test" (An Interview with Tim Holt, Author of ’180 Questions’ by Bonnie Bracey Sutton). Dan Branan: "I see studies like this one [Colorado Department of Higher Education study] as a first step in establishing the legitimacy of online educational experiences in the sciences" (Not Satisfied, but Hopeful, About Online Science). Bert Kimura: "If paper and pencil testing is absolutely required in a class, it probably shouldn’t be offered as a DE class. Not today anyway" (Remote Proctoring: More Questions Than Answers). Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (How Will Traditional Leaders Fare in the Wave of Open Courses?) Janet Buckenmeyer: "It takes more time to design and develop the [online] course. It takes more time to monitor students in an online course.... How are faculty compensated in terms of workload and pay for the additional work an online course requires? How many students should be placed in an online course?" (A Talk with Janet Buckenmeyer on Issues in Online Course Development, by Lynn Zimmerman). Billy Sichone: "My phone has been a valuable asset as I can check the internet for information at any and every time. For instance, I once took an international trip to two countries in a row and the phone was my only source of assignment submissions etc. I did not miss out at all" (A Student’s View of an Open University: An Interview with Billy Sichone, by Stefanie Panke). Julia Kaltenbeck: "Seek ways to build and maintain your community! The community is the single most important success factor in crowdfunding and social payments. To put it simply: No community, no funding" (Julia Kaltenbeck: How Crowdfunding and Social Payments Can Finance OER, by Stefanie Panke). Jessica Ledbetter:
"What keeps me going is that I’m actually creating things I might not find the time to do otherwise. It’s nice to be able to learn with others and see what they’re doing. I always learn by looking at others’ code" (Open Learning at P2PU: An Interview with Jessica Ledbetter, by Stefanie Panke). Susan Murphy: "We are all so afraid that we're going to miss out on something, so we just skim and scan and re-post without really taking time to consider the source. We sometimes forget that there are real people behind the avatars. And that it's worth getting to know more about them" (The Human Face of Twitter: An Interview with Susan Murphy, by Jessica Knott). Judah Schwartz "is a remarkable pioneer in our field because he saw technology as a way of looking at mathematics in very new and alternative ways....He likes to say the Ptolemy observations of the solar system were accurate. There was just one thing wrong with them and that was they were basically incorrect" (Judah Schwartz: Through the Lens of the Computer, by Frank B. Withrow). Jessica Knott: "While a lot of these younger students are pretty gung ho to go forth and innovate technologically, they will be stymied in many cases by an aging infrastructure and restrictive technology rules. Perhaps even by the culture of co-workers who discourage them from using tech in their teaching" (An Interview with Jessica Knott: Teaching an Online Class on Course Development). Emily Hixon: "If a teacher thinks that she/he is going to be able to talk 'at' students and they will learn, she is mistaken. Teachers must be prepared to engage students and use technology to support an interactive, meaningful approach to learning" (Integration of Pedagogy and Technology in Teacher Education: An Interview with Emily Hixon, by Lynn Zimmerman). Henry Neeman: "Today, there are a number of ways for citizens to access supercomputing. Often, these are known as 'science gateways,' and they provide a simple interface to a complicated back end. An example is nanoHUB, which K-12 and postsecondary students can use to do nanotechnology simulations" (Supercomputing: An Interview with Henry Neeman). Parry Aftab: "Unless we can make the technology safer and provide the right skills to use it responsibly and teach cyber-self-defense, we can’t expect students to use it, enjoy it or benefit from it. We owe it to the kids" (Cyberbullying: An Interview with Parry Aftab). Nancy Willard: "It sure does not help us in transitioning to Web 2.0 if the news is that cyberbullying is at an epidemic level. But it isn’t. And my approach will demonstrate the positive norms of students, which should also translate to greater willingness to also use these technologies for instruction" (Cyberbullying: An Interview with Nancy Willard).
Marc Prensky: "Instead of just spending, and often wasting, billions of dollars to create things that are new, let’s try harder to fix what we have that’s already in place" (Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools). Idit Harel Caperton: "I think students learn more effectively by creating and/or building an entity for public consumption and through collaboration, connecting a learning community and using their creativity — learning to problem solve. . . . I am a longtime advocate of 1:1 learning environments in which each student has access to his/her own computer and broadband connection" (Idit Harel Caperton – An Interview at the Edge of Change, by Bonnie Bracey Sutton and Vic Sutton).