Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education

Educationalist Sugata Mitra with pupils at a primary school in Gateshead. Photograph: Mark Pinder for the Observer

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don't think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: "Google is full of junk."

In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else's work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school.

The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: "We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to."

One of the teachers who works with me said to her class of nine-year-olds: "There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can't see, can you figure out what it is?" The children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. This is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups' work and so on.

One of them says: "Aren't we going to do any work?"

"What do you think you were doing?" asks the teacher.

"Learning about electromagnetism."

"What's work, then?"

"Work is when you say things to us and we write them down."

Methods from centuries ago may seem romantic, but they do get obsolete and need to be replaced. The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the "good old days". It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.

Any standard room in a Holiday Inn is better than the best facilities in an emperor's room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution. Beating children into submission will not solve the problem of educational disengagement.

If examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. "Where did language come from?", "Why were the pyramids built?", "Is life on Earth sustainable?", "What is the purpose of theatre?"

Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. AThat's a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

In this kind of self-organised learning, we don't need the same teachers all the time. Any teacher can cause any kind of learning to emerge. A teacher does not need to be physically present, she could be a projected, life-sized image on the wall. A "Granny Cloud" of such volunteer teachers have been operating out of the UK and a few other countries into schools in India and South America for more than five years, using a combination of the internet and admiration to provide a meaningful education for children. We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated "disciplines", connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children.

Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, and the winner of the $1m TED Prize 2013. He devised the Hole in the Wall experiment, where a computer was embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi for children to use freely. He aimed to prove young people could be taught computers easily without formal training.

View the original article here

UK higher education: let's not follow the leader but develop our own vision

 The UK needs to evaluate the disruptive possibilities of MOOCs, and create its own hybrids to energise its university ecosystem, says Saint John Walker. Photograph: AP

An avalanche is coming. Education is broken. Classrooms kill creativity. Higher education is a rotten tree being hit by lightning.

All these things have been said about higher education recently (Clay Shirky wrote the last one if you're interested). In fact, when I playfully did a Google search on "higher education is doomed", it returned some 2 million results. Those who work in teaching, especially in higher education, have had a rough time of it recently. It seems everyone's got it in for them and everyone has a prognosis of what to do about it.

To paraphrase Monty Python, you'd think the university system had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, gone to meet its maker, joined the bleeding choir invisible. But I disagree. I actually think that higher education system's vital signs are quite healthy even if I do think (to spin out the Palin-Cleese exchange a little further), it's probably been too busy pining for the fjords.

Higher education is often criticised for what it hasn't done rather than what it has.To quote the IPPR report, 'An Avalanche is Coming': "Nothing looked more impervious to revolutionary change than Brezhnev's Soviet Union in 1980, yet just over a decade later it was gone. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in Ireland looked unshakable in 1990, but two decades later it was gone". You get the subtle suggestion – higher education hasn't moved with the times, it needs glasnost and perestroika.

One of the biggest snowballs in this supposed avalanche is the MOOC (massive open online courses) phenomenon which has captured the imagination of so many observers. It's a rather simple and utopian ideal: education for all, free, delivered to your laptop, time-shifted to your schedule not the university timetable. It's also the notion of unlocking quality knowledge from elite campuses like MIT, Stanford, Harvard and UCLA that makes it such a seductive idea.

This story is also inextricably linked to the Silicon Valley meme of technology for good, and the alluring narratives of disruption and technical fixes that will create a new culture of mass learning. One of the noticeable things about this vision of the future is that it is (the launch of FutureLearn withstanding) very much an American story, and it's easy to see the reasons why.

According to the US Department of Education, student debt is now over $1 trillion, and an estimated 53.6% of degree-holders in the US are jobless or underemployed. The contract between higher education and the learner, who is willing to put up with short-term debt to get a great career, has broken down. There is a crisis of confidence.

Add to this mix the prediction that the edutech space is set to be worth $107bn (£70bn) by 2015 and you have a powerful impetus for change. It's often said when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. Will that be the case in the higher education sphere too?

The European Union registered an unprecedented youth unemployment rate of 22.8% in September 2012, and in the UK 40% of graduates cannot find graduate-level work two years after their degrees. But student debt, despite recent changes, is nowhere near as extreme as in the US.

So, we have a different motive for our changes to education in the UK. We shouldn't just accept US-style MOOCs as a solution that also fits our national landscape. There are alternative narratives, different stories, and a more British vision of higher education that could be articulated.

We could use the language of complementing and collaborating a little more, rather than the US narratives of disruption, competition and overhaul. Let's critically evaluate the disruptive possibilities – good and bad – of MOOCs, and create our own hybrids to energise our particular university ecosystem.

Of course we too need edutech companies, entrepreneurs and educational venture capitalists. But here's my idea for a few acronyms that we Brits should create: POOCs, or Personal Open Offline Complements – real human gatherings based at scale; OAFs, or Open Access Funnels, that lead disenfranchised people from online courses to the real valuable experience of being part of a community at a physical place of learning; and how about hybrid apprenticeship and degree mixes?

There are plenty more acronyms we could create together. Let's include the most receptive and agile universities in those debates, treating them like a living breathing partner, rather than that poor old Norwegian Blue parrot with its feet nailed to its perch.

Saint John Walker is head of development at Creative Skillset, the UK skills council for the creative industries – follow it on Twitter @skillsetssc

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Higher education: our MP3 is the mooc

 Clay Shirky: ‘In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now it’s our turn’. Composite: David Levene/Sarah Habershon/Guardian

Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn't a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side-effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.

The recording industry concluded this new format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen.

If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. That's not what happened. Instead, Spotify happened. ITunes happened. Amazon began selling songs in the hated MP3 format.

How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? They crushed Napster, but what they couldn't kill was the story Napster told.

The story the recording industry used to tell us went like this: "Hey kids, Alanis Morissette just recorded three kickin' songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the 10 mediocrities she recorded at the same time." But Napster said: "You want just the three songs? Fine. You want every cover of Blue Suede Shoes ever made? Help yourself. You're in charge."

The people in the music industry weren't stupid, of course. They just couldn't imagine that the old way of doing things might fail. Yet things did fail, in large part because, after Napster, the industry's insistence that digital distribution be as expensive and inconvenient as a trip to the record store suddenly struck millions of people as a completely terrible idea.

Once you see this pattern – a new story rearranging people's sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know – you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don't notice the change. When they do, they assume it's minor. Then that it's a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It's been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own back yard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or mooc), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralised and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we're probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.

Last year, an online course in artificial intelligence from Stanford, taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus. As Thrun put it, "Peter and I taught more students AI than all AI professors in the world combined." Seeing this, he quit and founded Udacity, an institution designed to offer moocs.

The size of Thrun and Norvig's course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organisations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. In a New York Times OpEd, Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia focused on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: "[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?"

Now you and I know what he means by "the very best sort" – the intimate college seminar, preferably conducted by tenured faculty. He's telling the story of the liberal arts education in a selective residential college and asking "Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at the University of Virginia?"

But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18-year-old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of moocs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn't what education of "the very best sort" looks like, but what the whole system looks like.

I was fortunate enough to get the kind of undergraduate education Edmundson praises: four years at Yale, in an incredible intellectual community, where even big lecture classes were taught by seriously brilliant people. Decades later, I can still remember my art history professor's description of the Arnolfini Wedding. But you know what? Those classes didn't create genuine intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we'd heard in smaller sections.

And did the professors also teach our sections too? No, of course not; those were taught by graduate students. The large lecture isn't a tool for producing intellectual joy; it's a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.

Cheap graduate students let an institution lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time. The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre.

Every university provides access to a huge collection of potential readings, and to a tiny collection of potential lectures. We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you're at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not. And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we've never had a good way of publishing lectures.

The top 50 colleges on the US News and World Report list only educate something like 3% of the current US student population. The entire list, about 250 colleges, educates fewer than 25%. The very things the US News list of top colleges prizes – low average class size, ratio of staff to students – mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list. This is why most of the early work on moocs is coming out of Stanford and Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As the academic and games designer Ian Bogost has said, moocs are marketing for elite schools.

Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students in the US —over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the 4,000 institutions you haven't heard of. When we talk about college education in the US, these institutions are usually left out of the conversation, but Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrols as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.

The fight over moocs isn't about the value of college; thousands of institutions you haven't heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education. For-profit schools like Kaplan's and the University of Phoenix enrol around one student in eight, but account for nearly half of all loan defaults, and the vast majority of their enrollees fail to get a degree even after six years. Reading the academic press, you wouldn't think that these statistics represented a more serious defection from our mission than helping people learn something about artificial intelligence for free.

The fight over moocs isn't even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia's Bachelor of interdisciplinary studies or Rutgers's Master of library and information science degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one moocs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.

That's because the fight over moocs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it's for, how it's delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instil reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidise the professor's work?

Moocs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility they hold out isn't replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility moocs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. Moocs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system.

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it's a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as songs came unbundled from CDs.

If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.

Udacity and its peers try to answer some new questions, questions that the traditional academy – me and my people – often don't even recognise as legitimate, like "How do we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year, all over the world, at a cost too cheap to meter?"

Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there's no containing the story it tells: "It's possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free."

Once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrolment.

College mottos run the gamut from Bryn Mawr's Veritatem Dilexi (I Delight In The Truth) to the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising's Where Business Meets Fashion, but there's a new one that now hangs over many of them: Quae Non Possunt Non Manent. Things That Can't Last Don't. The cost of attending college is rising, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can't last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now it's our turn, and the risk is that we'll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can't imagine – really cannot imagine – that the story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it's true. Especially when it's true.

This is an extract from a longer article. Read the original here.

• Clay Shirky is associate professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

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Moocs - are they a higher education game-changer or another damp squib?

The idea is that massive open online courses are uploaded to the 'cloud' where they are available to everyone. Photograph: Images.com/Corbis

I have tried, really hard, not to write about Moocs. But I can't keep it up forever, and what better time than the silly season to write about this phenomenon, which may transform higher education, or just turn out to be another damp squib.

Moocs, for anyone who has switched off from the chattering of the policy/management class, are massive open online courses. The idea is that courses are uploaded to the "cloud" where they are available to everyone. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is credited with being first, and now some big global media companies have piled in. The catch, of course, is that credentials – which is higher education's core business – will remain as tightly rationed as ever.

So Moocs, if they ever take off, are likely to be used in two ways. The first is to fob off the "masses". Government cuts, high fees, league-table snobbism – all point to a reinforcement of elite forms of higher education. Attempts to deliver HE-lite through further education colleges and private providers are never going to get very far. So Moocs provide the perfect cover story – "higher education for the masses" when real-world opportunities to go to university are being cut.

Separating teaching from accreditation is an idea that appeals to some politicians, including David Willetts, the universities minister. He has suggested that students could study in one (lower-level) institution and be examined by another (high-status) one – which seems to come from the same stable as the idea that "top" universities should set A-levels. Moocs could help here, too.

The second way is to reduce teachers by using online material as a substitute for face-to-face teaching. For decades policymakers and university managers have been looking for ways to increase "productivity", which have been stubbornly resisted by students who already feel they are being short-changed. Now this new economy of learning can be sold as providing instant access to global "stars" who are far better than our own run-of-the-mill lecturers.

Whether Moocs actually fly will depend on whether students buy this line and whether a workable business model can be developed. After all, someone has to make money out of Moocs.

High fees make the task of persuading (conning?) students more difficult, of course. And every decade since the 1970s we have been promised a Brave New World IT-powered revolution in higher education (remember the e-university?). So don't hold your breath. Moocs are actually only part of the story. Why has university teaching remained so stubbornly traditional, and why have learning technologies been used to enrich this traditional diet rather than as a game-changer? The answer seems to be that at the heart of the best teaching is an irreducible uncertainty. Like Socrates, all we really know is that we do not know. Or, following Karl Popper, the most we can hope for is provisional knowledge that has not yet been falsified. As a result, the best teaching has to be communal and reflexive, to allow for permanent dialogue.

Glitzy online lectures, or fancy learning technologies, are difficult to reconcile with this fundamental scepticism. But it is also significant that Socratic dialogue, and Popperian science, have been equally resistant to relativism, the idea that everyone (and anyone) knows best. No one seriously imagines there are no hierarchies of knowledge. However tainted with power, some things are just truer than others. Nor can it be denied that expertise, rooted in codified and accumulating knowledge, is at the heart of professional education, perhaps the main task of the 21st-century university.

So the debate about the potential of Moocs has to be put into a wider context, a more fundamental debate about the nature of the university curriculum and teaching in a mass system. How can the Socratic tutorial coexist with the delivery of expert skills? How can we keep the curriculum open in increasingly industrialised "learning environments" and "managed" institutions?

There is another equally fundamental debate about "openness" more generally – the links between open-access courses and open access (good old "widening participation") and between open-source research publication and democratic science, and also between both and the need to build an open society.

Difficult stuff – but far better than narrowing the debate about Moocs to a neo-liberal fix. That way makes it almost inevitable not only that Moocs will be just the latest edu-tainment "bubble" but that, despite their claims to be "open", they will actually contribute to closure – of minds, hopes and opportunities.

Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies, Institute of Education

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Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education

Educationalist Sugata Mitra with pupils at a primary school in Gateshead. Photograph: Mark Pinder for the Observer

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don't think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: "Google is full of junk."

In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else's work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school.

The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: "We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to."

One of the teachers who works with me said to her class of nine-year-olds: "There is something called electromagnetic radiation that we can't see, can you figure out what it is?" The children huddle around a few computers, talking, running around and looking for clues. In about 40 minutes, they figure out the basics of electromagnetism and start relating it to mobile signals. This is called a self-organised learning environment, a Sole. In a Sole, children work in self-organised groups of four or five clustered around an internet connected computer. They can talk, change group, move around, look at other groups' work and so on.

One of them says: "Aren't we going to do any work?"

"What do you think you were doing?" asks the teacher.

"Learning about electromagnetism."

"What's work, then?"

"Work is when you say things to us and we write them down."

Methods from centuries ago may seem romantic, but they do get obsolete and need to be replaced. The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the "good old days". It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.

Any standard room in a Holiday Inn is better than the best facilities in an emperor's room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution. Beating children into submission will not solve the problem of educational disengagement.

If examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. "Where did language come from?", "Why were the pyramids built?", "Is life on Earth sustainable?", "What is the purpose of theatre?"

Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. AThat's a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

In this kind of self-organised learning, we don't need the same teachers all the time. Any teacher can cause any kind of learning to emerge. A teacher does not need to be physically present, she could be a projected, life-sized image on the wall. A "Granny Cloud" of such volunteer teachers have been operating out of the UK and a few other countries into schools in India and South America for more than five years, using a combination of the internet and admiration to provide a meaningful education for children. We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated "disciplines", connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children.

Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, and the winner of the $1m TED Prize 2013. He devised the Hole in the Wall experiment, where a computer was embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi for children to use freely. He aimed to prove young people could be taught computers easily without formal training.

View the original article here

EdTech in Special Education

When we talk about EdTech, the focus tends to be more on the typical classroom or student. However, there is a great deal of activity around using EdTech for remedial or special education where the technology can help improve outcomes. It’s also worth noting that in many districts, special education is becoming one of the fastest growing areas of the budget, and one where the costs seem to be difficult to cap.

Using EdTech solutions for these students and classes may be able to help counter this trend and restore some balance to the budget. In this blogs I’ll look at few instances of how EdTech is making a difference in this area.

With the hope and goal of helping special needs students be able to participate more in mainstream classes and activities, EdTech offers some interesting capabilities. In this example, the teacher has found that a rather underutilized EdTech tool, the electronic whiteboard had the potential for improving the group teaching that was being done for this class. Using this larger and group oriented approach, the teacher was able to not only engage the group, but also use learning tools like the Unique Learning System (a symbol based curriculum) in this interactive group setting to improve results. The creativity of finding a non-traditional EdTech tool is worth noting.

One of the most consistent education problems around the country is a shortage of many of the highly trained professionals that specialize in unique learning needs. Speech language pathologists (SLPs) are a great example. Most are well over recommended case loads and waste what could be productive hours driving from one location to the next. Using the well understood distance learning technologies, some districts are now engaging in the use of “teletherapy” to better utilize the scarce time resource of special needs teaching professionals and extend their reach without lost travel time. This also allows districts to better utilize highly specialized professionals via teletherapy where the ability to actually get them physically on-site just didn’t exist.

There are many disabilities that limit a particular student’s ability to interact with the printed word. Dyslexia is one of the best known and most prevalent, but there are many others. And EdTech can help. Rather than relying on just printed classroom materials, handouts, or other forms of printed communication, using technology, these documents can be delivered electronically. This makes it simple to turn the printed word into speech that can be “read” to the special needs student, or can be converted to symbols if that is better understood. Simply put, once the information is in digital form, there are many options for delivering it that can help the special needs student.

Of course, there are many more specific instances or ways that can help improve the results and outcome of special needs students. The one consistent element among these three examples, and I’m sure many others is creativity. Using EdTech to improve this aspect of education is not about being an engineer; it’s about finding new ways existing technologies can better serve those who need them most.

View the original article here

UK higher education: let's not follow the leader but develop our own vision

The UK needs to evaluate the disruptive possibilities of MOOCs, and create its own hybrids to energise its university ecosystem, says Saint John Walker. Photograph: AP

An avalanche is coming. Education is broken. Classrooms kill creativity. Higher education is a rotten tree being hit by lightning.

All these things have been said about higher education recently (Clay Shirky wrote the last one if you're interested). In fact, when I playfully did a Google search on "higher education is doomed", it returned some 2 million results. Those who work in teaching, especially in higher education, have had a rough time of it recently. It seems everyone's got it in for them and everyone has a prognosis of what to do about it.

To paraphrase Monty Python, you'd think the university system had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, gone to meet its maker, joined the bleeding choir invisible. But I disagree. I actually think that higher education system's vital signs are quite healthy even if I do think (to spin out the Palin-Cleese exchange a little further), it's probably been too busy pining for the fjords.

Higher education is often criticised for what it hasn't done rather than what it has.To quote the IPPR report, 'An Avalanche is Coming': "Nothing looked more impervious to revolutionary change than Brezhnev's Soviet Union in 1980, yet just over a decade later it was gone. The hegemony of the Catholic Church in Ireland looked unshakable in 1990, but two decades later it was gone". You get the subtle suggestion – higher education hasn't moved with the times, it needs glasnost and perestroika.

One of the biggest snowballs in this supposed avalanche is the MOOC (massive open online courses) phenomenon which has captured the imagination of so many observers. It's a rather simple and utopian ideal: education for all, free, delivered to your laptop, time-shifted to your schedule not the university timetable. It's also the notion of unlocking quality knowledge from elite campuses like MIT, Stanford, Harvard and UCLA that makes it such a seductive idea.

This story is also inextricably linked to the Silicon Valley meme of technology for good, and the alluring narratives of disruption and technical fixes that will create a new culture of mass learning. One of the noticeable things about this vision of the future is that it is (the launch of FutureLearn withstanding) very much an American story, and it's easy to see the reasons why.

According to the US Department of Education, student debt is now over $1 trillion, and an estimated 53.6% of degree-holders in the US are jobless or underemployed. The contract between higher education and the learner, who is willing to put up with short-term debt to get a great career, has broken down. There is a crisis of confidence.

Add to this mix the prediction that the edutech space is set to be worth $107bn (£70bn) by 2015 and you have a powerful impetus for change. It's often said when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. Will that be the case in the higher education sphere too?

The European Union registered an unprecedented youth unemployment rate of 22.8% in September 2012, and in the UK 40% of graduates cannot find graduate-level work two years after their degrees. But student debt, despite recent changes, is nowhere near as extreme as in the US.

So, we have a different motive for our changes to education in the UK. We shouldn't just accept US-style MOOCs as a solution that also fits our national landscape. There are alternative narratives, different stories, and a more British vision of higher education that could be articulated.

We could use the language of complementing and collaborating a little more, rather than the US narratives of disruption, competition and overhaul. Let's critically evaluate the disruptive possibilities – good and bad – of MOOCs, and create our own hybrids to energise our particular university ecosystem.

Of course we too need edutech companies, entrepreneurs and educational venture capitalists. But here's my idea for a few acronyms that we Brits should create: POOCs, or Personal Open Offline Complements – real human gatherings based at scale; OAFs, or Open Access Funnels, that lead disenfranchised people from online courses to the real valuable experience of being part of a community at a physical place of learning; and how about hybrid apprenticeship and degree mixes?

There are plenty more acronyms we could create together. Let's include the most receptive and agile universities in those debates, treating them like a living breathing partner, rather than that poor old Norwegian Blue parrot with its feet nailed to its perch.

Saint John Walker is head of development at Creative Skillset, the UK skills council for the creative industries – follow it on Twitter @skillsetssc

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The Role of Virtual Classrooms in Primary Education

The use of virtual classroom technology is becoming very common in Higher Education, but there has not been a corresponding rise in use within Primary (K-12) Education. Yet, the promise of the technology and the launch of a recent television commercial showcasing an ill student use case has raised the visibility of the issue. It’s certainly worth evaluating.

Before the discussion of the value and reach of virtual classrooms even starts, we have to begin with the technology basics. It’s more than just built in webcams on laptops or even a classroom camera and smart blackboard. In order to engage the students that are not physically in the classroom, we need multiple feeds and camera angles, and critically, a two way system that lets the teacher see what the remote student is feeling, focusing on, and in some manner, pick up on the visual clues that come from students. It’s not a TV studio, but, it is more than basic Skype like functionality. This can be an issue in a budget challenged district. There are some vendors with packaged virtual classroom solutions that are worth looking at.

School choice is a growing issue, and is unlikely to go away soon. And the use of virtual classrooms can be a means of taking schools that are “magnet”, “gifted”, or otherwise provide enhanced services in one attribute to a larger group of students. There is even a push among Catholic educators to use virtual classrooms to provide greater reach. One member of our local school board brought up the issue of using virtual classroom technology as a means of providing special education services for a number of districts at the same time, with one physical classroom, to reduce costs.

Another, and I believe highly important, role for virtual classrooms is for use during a weather event or other scenario where a large proportion of the student body is unable or unwilling to go to the physical school building. Clearly an event such as Hurricane Sandy would be an example, but even the recent influenza scare going through the Northeast may result in many children staying home to limit exposure to the virus. In these situations having the ability to conduct some level of virtual learning would be an improvement on just missing school completely. Of course if there is no power or communications network, this is a problem. However, during most events there is some level of connectivity that can be achieved. School districts would have to have technology contingency plans in place. These need not be expensive. Having a standing Webex site and teachers equipped with webcams is a very basic way you can start implementation. It’s not going to be the same as an actual class, but it would be better than just missing days.

Virtual classrooms aren’t just for colleges and universities any more. Yet, this isn’t a simple plug and play technology, and districts will have to spend the time to create very finite plans for how the virtual classroom will be used. But the benefits are there. There are even potential ways to save costs, and that can help pay for a virtual classroom initiative. The future is now and it is time to start the process. In 5-10 years, the role of virtual classrooms will no longer be an issue as they will become a common part of the educational process.

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Higher education: our MP3 is the mooc

Clay Shirky: ‘In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now it’s our turn’. Composite: David Levene/Sarah Habershon/Guardian

Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn't a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side-effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.

The recording industry concluded this new format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen.

If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. That's not what happened. Instead, Spotify happened. ITunes happened. Amazon began selling songs in the hated MP3 format.

How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? They crushed Napster, but what they couldn't kill was the story Napster told.

The story the recording industry used to tell us went like this: "Hey kids, Alanis Morissette just recorded three kickin' songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the 10 mediocrities she recorded at the same time." But Napster said: "You want just the three songs? Fine. You want every cover of Blue Suede Shoes ever made? Help yourself. You're in charge."

The people in the music industry weren't stupid, of course. They just couldn't imagine that the old way of doing things might fail. Yet things did fail, in large part because, after Napster, the industry's insistence that digital distribution be as expensive and inconvenient as a trip to the record store suddenly struck millions of people as a completely terrible idea.

Once you see this pattern – a new story rearranging people's sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know – you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don't notice the change. When they do, they assume it's minor. Then that it's a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It's been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own back yard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or mooc), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralised and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we're probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.

Last year, an online course in artificial intelligence from Stanford, taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus. As Thrun put it, "Peter and I taught more students AI than all AI professors in the world combined." Seeing this, he quit and founded Udacity, an institution designed to offer moocs.

The size of Thrun and Norvig's course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organisations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. In a New York Times OpEd, Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia focused on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: "[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?"

Now you and I know what he means by "the very best sort" – the intimate college seminar, preferably conducted by tenured faculty. He's telling the story of the liberal arts education in a selective residential college and asking "Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at the University of Virginia?"

But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18-year-old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of moocs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn't what education of "the very best sort" looks like, but what the whole system looks like.

I was fortunate enough to get the kind of undergraduate education Edmundson praises: four years at Yale, in an incredible intellectual community, where even big lecture classes were taught by seriously brilliant people. Decades later, I can still remember my art history professor's description of the Arnolfini Wedding. But you know what? Those classes didn't create genuine intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we'd heard in smaller sections.

And did the professors also teach our sections too? No, of course not; those were taught by graduate students. The large lecture isn't a tool for producing intellectual joy; it's a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.

Cheap graduate students let an institution lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time. The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre.

Every university provides access to a huge collection of potential readings, and to a tiny collection of potential lectures. We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you're at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not. And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we've never had a good way of publishing lectures.

The top 50 colleges on the US News and World Report list only educate something like 3% of the current US student population. The entire list, about 250 colleges, educates fewer than 25%. The very things the US News list of top colleges prizes – low average class size, ratio of staff to students – mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list. This is why most of the early work on moocs is coming out of Stanford and Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As the academic and games designer Ian Bogost has said, moocs are marketing for elite schools.

Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students in the US —over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the 4,000 institutions you haven't heard of. When we talk about college education in the US, these institutions are usually left out of the conversation, but Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrols as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.

The fight over moocs isn't about the value of college; thousands of institutions you haven't heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education. For-profit schools like Kaplan's and the University of Phoenix enrol around one student in eight, but account for nearly half of all loan defaults, and the vast majority of their enrollees fail to get a degree even after six years. Reading the academic press, you wouldn't think that these statistics represented a more serious defection from our mission than helping people learn something about artificial intelligence for free.

The fight over moocs isn't even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia's Bachelor of interdisciplinary studies or Rutgers's Master of library and information science degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one moocs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.

That's because the fight over moocs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it's for, how it's delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instil reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidise the professor's work?

Moocs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility they hold out isn't replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility moocs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. Moocs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system.

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it's a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as songs came unbundled from CDs.

If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.

Udacity and its peers try to answer some new questions, questions that the traditional academy – me and my people – often don't even recognise as legitimate, like "How do we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year, all over the world, at a cost too cheap to meter?"

Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there's no containing the story it tells: "It's possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free."

Once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrolment.

College mottos run the gamut from Bryn Mawr's Veritatem Dilexi (I Delight In The Truth) to the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising's Where Business Meets Fashion, but there's a new one that now hangs over many of them: Quae Non Possunt Non Manent. Things That Can't Last Don't. The cost of attending college is rising, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can't last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now it's our turn, and the risk is that we'll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can't imagine – really cannot imagine – that the story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it's true. Especially when it's true.

This is an extract from a longer article. Read the original here.

• Clay Shirky is associate professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

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Technology in Vocational Education

The vocational or trade school educational environment has often been on the short end of spending for computers and information technology. It is far less pronounced than it was just a few years ago, but for many trade or vocational high schools there is still a noticeable difference. Even 20 short years ago this could be easily justified based on the very different curricula that existed between different types of high schools.

My sense is that this is short sighted given the fundamental changes that impact vocational education. With the role of information technology increasing across every industry, turning out vocational school graduates that are comfortable and knowledgeable about the information systems they will be using every day is essential.

Working on cars used to be a fairly simple process, many of us grew up doing major work on our first junk box car. However, in today’s automotive industry, the technician needs to start with computer based testing and diagnostics before even picking up the first wrench. Today’s cars are a series of complex computing systems. Although these systems are very different from using Microsoft Office, the tech’s ability to understand basic computer functionality and technology enhances their ability to do their job better. This knowledge also leads to less frustration and lost time during the actual repair.

Even small independent repair shops rely on management systems that track all the costs and are the basis of how automotive technicians are paid. Techs now interact with dealer management or shop management systems that track parts, time allowances, and often provide links or actual access to repair bulletins and other critical information. Many of these are like any other order entry or CMS system that is used by white collar employees. Being facile and effective with these systems results in a better employment experience and raising the odds of advancement. Further, thorny problems may require traditional computer based research skills to find new fixes or input outside of the shop system.

The automotive industry is just one example of the many areas of vocational school specialties where the need for strong technology education is important the overall success of the graduates. Simply put, there are few trades that haven’t become dependent on technology for the actual work, the business side, or both.

For many vocational schools, the new complexities and demands of many trades have taken up much of the focus for curriculum change. The demands of technology must be part of this change, and can’t be ignored. The ability of trade professionals to comfortably use the trade specific and more traditional computer systems is required to make them work force ready. The ability to use these vocation skills within the framework of the systems that support them is driving modern vocational schools.

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How to use Big Data in Elementary Education

The Big Data initiative is all the rage for commercial and industrial organizations. The term itself conjures up images of huge rows of high end hardware with lots of expensive software and amazing subject matter experts that are creating new breakthrough business opportunities. And while there is some truth in that vision, when we talk about Big Data and elementary education, we need to focus less on a data center image, and more on how the approaches found in Big Data can provide us with new information to assist in providing a better educational environment and improved results.

The fundamental idea behind Big Data is to combine a larger number of data sets into our analysis to get better information that helps improve the processes of the organization. And for elementary education, this holds great promise.

To start, most school districts in general have not seen much analysis and analytic work to find out what is really happening. So the idea of starting the process in earnest to assess results with more and broader input is a huge positive. For example, consider assessing the results of big annual standardized tests by analyzing students’ results from quizzes, homework problems, and other intermediate metrics in their classes and contrasting it with these standardized test results. Could we find a curriculum hole? Or a set of skills that aren’t developed well enough to succeed? By taking the Big Data approach of analyzing metrics that are allied with the standardized test to better understand why the test results are as they are, we can develop ways to improve the outcome.

It doesn’t take a new data center or huge investments in new staff and software to do this kind of work…. it takes initiative. By using existing data and information and combining it in new and different ways, you can get the benefits of Big Data without a lot of new costs. One issue may be moving your school toward more information being stored in classroom or grade management systems so that it can be accessed for this analysis. And with the “carrot” of improved understanding of student results, it may be easier to get better and more comprehensive use of these systems.

And it doesn’t stop with just grades and curriculum. Big Data can be used to help the district understand their budgets better, and find ways to save money. Consider a simple task like optimal bus routing. If a school has 7-10 separate bus routes each day, and a Big Data analysis finds a way to eliminate just one route, that’s a 10-14% savings right there!

Simply put, Big Data is really just a marketing way of talking about smarter use of existing data to save money and improve results. There are numerous ways this can help a school district, and with this next generation of tools that simplify the task and can handle many kinds of data, we can leverage this trend to meet the tight budgets and rising demands on primary education.

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Online learning: pedagogy, technology and opening up higher education

Is online learning the answer to widening participation in higher education? Photograph: Stringer Shanghai/Reuters

Higher education has always been fond of its acronyms and they don't get much more prolific than the current four letters doing the rounds. From the December 2011 launch of MITx Stateside to the University of Edinburgh's decision to join the Coursera platform, MOOCs (or Massive Open Online Courses) have barely been off the education news menu. Nor was the Observer alone in recently asking: "Do online courses spell the end for the traditional university?"

Of course, the provision of off-campus higher education is not a recent development. The Open University has championed open and distance learning since 1969 – from its original correspondence courses and late-night TV broadcasts to the latest research and development conducted by its Institute of Educational Technology.

By definition, online learning is the meeting of technology and pedagogy – and universities are still exploring the right balance between the two. In his 2011 slideshare, Guillermo Ramirez outlines 'five big mistakes of virtual education', from the use of the term massive ("you don't have one course of 250, you have 250 courses of one") to the risk of tech taking the fun out of the education process.

MOOC cheerleaders point to their potential for widening access to higher education. "I can see openings where MOOCs might find a useful place in HE," says Jeff Haywood at Edinburgh, "enabling those in less privileged HE settings to access courses in subjects that they cannot take ... and for teachers in universities to pick up new ideas as to how to teach and learn online." And as PhD student Bonnie Stewart blogged for us: "It is this participatory element ... that enables open online experiences to offer value, even to those of us already studying in conventional institutions."

But while take-up is growing so too are drop-outs. An article in the Atlantic cited drop-out rates of 80-95% from MOOCs offered by Stanford, MIT and UC Berkley, before provocatively suggesting "if anything the low rate of success is a sign of the system's efficiency". Meanwhile Patrick McGhee, vice-chancellor of the University of East London, warns: "There is a danger that MOOCs will reinforce rather than disrupt a two-tier education system in the US, and eventually in the UK, with campus-based learning as premium elite education and online learning as a basic offering."

Where do you sit in this debate? And what models are working best for students – and universities? In partnership with the Open University, this week's live chat will consider the new landscape of online learning and how it might open, widen and formalise access to quality higher education. Join our expert panel to talk MOOCs and more on Friday 23 November from 12-2pm GMT.

The debate will take place in the comments section below this article

Josie Taylor is director of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University with more than 20 years' experience in research, development and evaluation of interactive media and innovative pedagogies

Peter Scott is director of the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University @peter_scott

John Daniel served as a university president for 17 years in Canada (Laurentian University) and the UK (The Open University) before joining UNESCO as assistant director-general for education in 2001 and assuming the presidency of the Commonwealth of Learning in 2004

Helen Keegan is senior lecturer in interactive media/social technologies at the University of Salford and a UK national teaching fellow at Higher Education Academy @heloukee

David Kernohan is responsible for the JISC/Academy OER programme and other work around learning resources and activities @dkernohan

Tony Bates is president and CEO of Tony Bates Associates Ltd, a private company specialising in the planning and management of e-learning and distance education

Jesse Stommel is assistant professor of English and digital humanities at Marylhurst University in Portland @Jessifer

Jeff Haywood is vice-principal for knowledge management, chief information officer and librarian at the University of Edinburgh

Bonnie Stewart is a writer, PhD student and sessional lecturer in the University of Prince Edward Island's faculty of education @bonstewart

David Glance is director of the University of Western Australia's Centre for Software Practice. The UWA CSP is currently collaborating with Stanford University to build a MOOC platform Class2Go @david_glance

Michael Thomas is senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and editor of a four-volume major work on online learning

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Five Thought-Provoking Ideas For Transforming K-12 Education to Another Level

The current education system has become stagnant and needs a tremendous boast to get the relevant interest of the students. Hence; in this article we have specified some innovative strategies to take K-12 education to another level. Click here to view the article.

Education has become a mere formality nowadays without any impetus on providing learning to students. We are seeing lots of e-learning courses being developed, but the sole purpose of education is lost. There is a need for an educational structure that can not only provide better learning opportunities to students, but also stimulate them to gain knowledge from the subjects. In order to fulfill this prophecy, there is a need for an educational mechanism that can transform the thinking of the students to another level.

Some of the ideas for radically transforming K-12 education include:

The transforming role of teachers: Teachers are more than just tutors in the lives of the students. They function more like mentors who are liable for making or breaking the career of the student. Hence; there is a need for an e-learning course which can not only provide interactive support to the children through one-on-one counseling, but also look after the academic progress of the student. Teachers should deliver the content in such a manner that students enjoy the learning process and get the intellectual knowledge thoroughly.The evolving role of tests: In the traditional learning methods, teachers used to take tests of the students. But with the inception of e-learning courses things have changed dramatically. Now, no longer does a teacher take test of the student to evaluate their progress. It is done through online practice. Hence; there is a need for a practice management tool to be integrated in the e-learning courses such that students can practice basic problems to understand the topic. Interactive exercises should also be amalgamated in the e-learning courses so that they can make the learning process interactive and fun-loving.Need for customized learning path for each student: It is very important to create customized learning patterns for students based on their intellectual capacity and understanding. The courses designed should follow the common core curriculum and state boards.Guidance from experts from relevant field: In order to be a success, it is very important for an e-learning course to integrate expertise knowledge from relevant domain so that whenever, students get stuck they can get spontaneous response from the expert of that particular field. It should also be noted that there should only be one tutor per student so that the student can enjoy undivided attention from the expert.Integration of images alongwith videos in the content: E-learning courses have to be designed in such a manner that students get interactive content including lots of images and videos; so that they can learn in a fun-filled environment. This kind of teaching pattern is especially important for primary level students as it makes the learning process interesting and interactive.

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3 Genuine Ways to Get Result Oriented Education from eLearning Courses

E-learning courses are in huge demand recently. But lots of these courses are not result-oriented. Hence; in this article; we look at some ways to get result-oriented education from e-learning courses.

Lots of e-learning courses have come up recently in the market. However, these courses are designed differently as per the needs and requirements of the target audience. There are two kinds of e-learning courses available in the market:

E-learning driven by budgetsE-learning driven by results

E-learning driven by budgets is concerned with creating courses according to the budgets set by the company. It cannot be result-oriented because the focus has shifted from providing quality education to target-based education. Knowledge cannot be delivered with constrained limitations. Education is all about creating awareness amongst students about various courses and imparting quality education to them. A result-oriented e-learning pattern can be very useful as it utilizes quality content to impart knowledge to students.
Let us now look at different ways through which you can get result-oriented education from e-learning courses:

E-learning should symbolize the characteristics of your brand:  It is often said that “A product is as good as the brand name of the company”. Hence, it is very important to have a sync between the brand name of the company and the product i.e., in this case it is e-learning course. If the brand name and the e-learning course are not in sync then it will be very difficult for the company to market the e-learning course effectively.E-learning is all about creating managers and leaders instead of followers:  E-learning coursescreate right beliefs, decisions and behaviors in employees. It also about changing the behavior of the employees and making them self-reliant in decision-making process. In corporate world, it is very important to take quick and efficient decisions as time is prime importance. Hence; by solving real-life case studies students can learn about practical problems that they will face in the near future.Aligning the e-learning outcome with your learner’s outcome:  Education can be imparted in two ways:You make them learn the subjectsYou engage them by making them interested in the subjects

Until and unless you create interest in the minds of the students for the subjects it will not serve the purpose. Hence; you need to make them emotionally involved in the course and create genuine interest that will help them solve the problem. It is all about aligning e-learning outcome with your learner’s outcome.

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Its Learning Management system (LMS) allows students to retrieve all the courses 24/7/365 by accessing the portal. emPower e-learning training program is an interactive mode of learning that guides students to progress at their own pace.

For additional information, please visit http://www.empowerbpo.com.

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6 Evolutionary Trends In e-Learning Education

Withthe emergence of internet, e-learning education has become a revolution. We have already seen lots of e-learning courses being introduced in the market. There are some emerging trends which can really give real impetus to e-learning and take it to another sphere. Let us look at some of these trends:

SHIFT TO OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGY:Learning Management Systems (LMS) have traditionally been a paid service. But with time there are lots of new open source systems like OpenClass have come up which have received a warm welcome from students and educators.Key integration of e-learning courses by employers:E-learning courses have not enjoyed popularity amongst students and career oriented employees; as the certificates for the courses are not regarded as a valuable thing in the job market. But as the popularity of e-learning courses increases with the number of masses this perception will change.Assimilation of hybrid courses: Different types of courses have been developed with the assimilation of online education along with face-to-face teacher interaction. This type of education is revolutionary and can change the paradigm of online education system.Excellent growth in enrollment of e-learning courses in comparison to traditional courses: Enrollment of e-learning courses has risen to 21% growth rate in comparison to a paltry 2% growth rate in overall higher education. As the technologies grow; you can expect the rise of e-learning enrollment at the same pace.Increasing use of social media tool for education: Social media is often regarded as a tool for masses to interact with friends and be in touch with them. But recently the trend is changing. Increasingly social media tools are being used for educational purposes, and this will enhance the quality of the entire online educational system.Digital content distribution in lieu of books and closed texts: For e-learning courses; textbooks have been replaced by digital content distribution system. It gives freedom to students and professionals to get the relevant information through various mobile devices.

About emPower

emPower  is a leading provider of comprehensive Healthcare Compliance Solutions through Learning Management System (LMS). Its mission is to provide innovative security solutions to enable compliance with applicable laws and regulations and maximize business performance. empower provides range of courses to manage compliance required by regulatory bodies such as OSHA, HIPAA, Joint commission and Red Flag Rule etc. Apart from this emPower also offers custom demos and tutorials for your website, business process management and software implementation.

Its Learning Management system (LMS) allows students to retrieve all the courses 24/7/365 by accessing the portal. emPower e-learning training program is an interactive mode of learning that guides students to progress at their own pace.

For additional information, please visit http://www.empowerbpo.com/.

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Universities leading the way with education technology

"The future is all around yet many of us in universities have our eyes wide shut." Photograph: Images.com/Corbis

Georgia Institute for Technology's Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U) is a self-described living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education. Its mission: to foster and accelerate the innovation, validation, adoption and deployment of disruptive ideas-particularly those involving technology in the service of teaching and learning, industry wide.

Accelerate is just the right word. When it comes to change, we are reaching warp speed.

Sebastian Thrun's Udacity courses in building a search engine and programming a robotic car have attracted thousands (including me). Apart from teaching, Thrun has set himself the goal of democratising education; education should be free. Accessible for all, everywhere, and any time.

While I have your attention, drop in to the Khan Academy which, with a library of more than 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 315 practice exercises, you will find that it too is on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

For another glimpse of the future pop in to MITx where 90,000 people are studying 6.002x (circuits and electronics), and which has set itself the modest goal of organising and presenting course material to enable students to learn worldwide.

Writing for The Guardian's Higher Education Network, Matthew Draycott declared himself surprised that the impact of "disruptive technological methodologies" was not top of mind in UK higher education circles.

He is right to be surprised. I am surprised that he is not thoroughly gobsmacked. The future is all around yet many of us in universities have our eyes wide shut.

There is no need to go all apocalyptic over the technological 'disruption'. Bricks and mortar universities (particularly those made of very old bricks and ancient mortar) are not about to disappear.

But if they don't 'do something' then their hallowed halls (and their mischievous postmodern equivalents) will in some distant time reverberate to the sound of a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar (to borrow Matthew Arnold's peerless phrase) as many students leave to seek alternative forms of higher education.

And what will be the hallmark of these alternatives (or perhaps replacements)?

They will put students front and centre of all they do. Agrarian-legacy lengthy holidays will end and teaching will take place year round to cater to the increasingly busy lives of students. They will be able to study any time, night or day.

Students will study what they want to study, not what academics wish to teach.

Technology will be tailored to students' needs. Online offerings will be as familiar as YouTube, but they won't merely be images from a camera plonked in front of a traditional class with a traditional lecturer fumbling with a traditional Power Point presentation. They will be bespoke, well made, smartly edited videos or other visual presentations designed with the student in mind.

Universities will increasingly share resources with other universities – perhaps students at University A will study electronics by video from University B, which specialises in the field; while students at University A will study, say, ancient history presented by the specialists at University B.

These are just some ideas. What else do we need to do to adapt to the future that's already arrived?

Steven Schwartz is vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia

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20 ways of thinking about digital literacy in higher education

20 ways of thinking about digital literacy in higher education Photograph: Corbis Bridge / Alamy/Alamy

First define what you mean by digital literacy: The definition I most frequently use is this one: digital literacy = digital tool knowledge + critical thinking + social engagement. Then it's worth knowing its main characteristics:

• It supports and helps develop traditional literacies
• It's a life-long practice
• It's about skills, competencies and critical reflection on how these skills and competencies are applied
• It's about social engagement

Top tips for developing the digital literacy of non-traditional students: Begin by exploring the ways in which the group are already using mobile and web based technologies. Many of them will already be engaging with tech for personal use, for example Skyping relatives, keeping in touch on Facebook or using mobile phones. If you have a group who aren't using technology in any of these ways, personal use might be where you start the conversation.

Literacy is not static: I like Bélisle's three models of literacy: functional, socio-cultural and transformational. The functional and practical skills required to function within a community; Socio-cultural refers to literacy only being meaningful within a social context, and facilitating access to cultural, economic and political structures. Transformational recognises that new ways of seeing and thinking about the world become possible as new cognitive and processing tools come into play.

All education sectors are facing many of the same challenges with digital literacy, so we can learn from one another: Some of the obvious issues are: how do we get staff to engage? How do we resource digital literacy support in an on-going and sustainable way? How do we make sure that organisations embed digital literacy as a cultural approach and expectation rather than as a discrete thing that one or two staff members are responsible for 'delivering'? What does a successful approach to digital literacy look like?

We have set up a partnership group, the Digital Leicester Advisory Group, with both Leicester universities and with community activists to support the promotion and expansion of digital literacy, inclusion and citizenship. I'm keen to support a move away from a perception of education as something that happens at specific times and in designated places, and towards planning and provision which takes the affordances of digital environments seriously and sees the city itself as the learning environment.

Recognise that students arrive with their own digital practices: We have some very well established practices in universities that traditionally we have tried to 'pass on' to students. But students are arriving with some well established digital practices of their own. It isn't always a question of 'both/and'. For example, referencing and plagiarism are areas where students' own digital practices and cultures clash with those of the university. We should identify the the values and history behind those academic practices, rather than slavishly learning Harvard style punctuation. We can't just see students as empty vessels to be filled up with what we do over here in academia.

Developing digital literacies in practice requires:
• Providing authentic contexts for practice, including digitally-mediated contexts
• Individual scaffolding and support
• Making practices of meaning-making explicit
• Anticipating and helping learners manage conflict between different practice contexts
• Recognising and helping learners integrate their prior conceptions and practices

This is a person-centred, culturally-situated approach to student development and it's important that developing digital literacies programme involves groups of staff that have always taken approach seriously, such as careers and employability staff, learning skills staff, as well as student-facing staff in libraries.

Establish guiding ethical principles: If you look at the graduate attributes that universities now ask their students to aspire to, many of them are really values. Developing digital literacy should also have an ethical dimension. What does it mean to behave well as digital professionals, researchers or citizens? How do we act ethically in environments where public and private are blurred?

Mid-career is the worst time for academics and professional staff to be up to date with technology: I've just been reviewing some audits that show that older and more secure academic staff may actually have more time to experiment and are more confident to admit they need to learn. It's all about having time, having opportunities for 'peer supported experimentation' - which turns out to be the best way to learn new technical tricks, and of course, having some incentive.

'Digital natives' need a basic understanding of computers as technical platforms, or of coding: As a teacher I am constantly aware of my own ignorance of coding skills and electronics, but still make a case for the value of not keeping technology in a black box and getting students to have a little more mastery by writing programs in an object-oriented language. I worry that our computers are becoming like our cars: we are increasingly dependent on them but when we open the hood and don't know what to do. I teach poets to program, so I feel it is valuable to everyone.

Acknowledge that there is also anxiety about technologies in the classroom and take the lead: Too many people in universities have been shirking their responsibilities to educate students about this important subject either because they feel anxiety about their own technical literacy or they feel the barbarians are at the gate, with many faculty members feeling that traditional literacies are under attack. If professors are going to be considered as experts rather than merely fodder for funny remixes like this one or this one they need to take the lead.

On managing your online identities: For years search engines treated Liz Losh and Elizabeth Losh as separate people, so my identity as a blogger and digital activist was very separate from my identity as a scholar and academic. No more. Google now knows that both names are me and that I can't have a divided personality. My only piece of advice is don't friend your students until after they graduate.

We need to understand learners personal digital literacies before ploughing into 'supporting' them: Many of the learners we have interviewed for our Visitors and Residents project still make quite a hard distinction between the 'real' i.e. books, lectures and so on and the digital. They have many highly effective digital literacies but often feel that they are not 'real' or legitimate approaches.

HEIs need to help legitimise digital practices without trying to own them: In my experience academics don't engage with digital tech because they don't need to. Their way of working is successful within the system. Has anyone been rewarded by their institutions for tweeting? Digital tech can improve the quality of what we do but often comes with an associated additional time/effort side effect, which is rarely officially acknowledged.

A key digital literacy is how you manage distraction: How to not get walked all over by Facebook et al. Many of the learners we have spoken to recognise that they are poor at managing this.

Engage students in this debate and ensure that they too have ownership of this agenda: Our terms may not mean anything to students. In the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme projects have been involving students as partners in their research and giving them a voice to express their views and ideas on what the term means to them, what skills they feel they need to live, learn and work effectively in a digital environment. See the PRIDE (University of Bath), CASCADE (University of Exeter) and DL in Transition (University of Greenwich) projects as excellent examples of how institutions are engaging students in this debate.

Reticence to adapt is less about the fear of the technology itself but about the fear of doing this differently from the way they've have always been done: Those of us who work in this space must show the benefits: for example how technology can save time or help HE staff do things easier. This is where we can also utilise the expertise of students to work with staff and assist them with gaining confidence in using new technologies. There is a lovely example from the University of Wolverhampton on students as partners in blended learning.

Digital literacy as an important part of transliteracy: Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. It is the literacy of convergence, unifying literacies past and present across different platforms, media and cultures. This means it encompasses all kinds of communications from scratching pictures in the sand to editing photos in Instagram, or from inscribing tablets to text-messaging. When promoting digital literacy on its own, we can alienate people who are already very literate in other areas, and that's why I prefer to take an holistic approach and be as inclusive as possible.

The idea that you build some kind of identifiable career capital online is likely to have a big influence on your ability to get a job: There is an assumption that the issue of digital literacy will go away because students are good with computers and have Facebook accounts. I think that in the context of learning organisations the question is how they can apply the skills that they have to new areas such as employability skills. Have a look at the site Dear Lisa Rogers, one social media fanatic's attempt to get the job of social media director at the University of Michigan, as an example of this.

Digital engagement shouldn't be lead by a platform or task-specific agenda: What is required is a change in consciousness in how we relate to technology. The underlying principle is that all technology should facilitate critical reflection - awareness of the self and the ability to articulate ideas. We need people to make judgements on the information they consume and the contexts they create whilst sharing information. Technology is becoming increasingly seamless but our relationship with it isn't intuitive.

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