Open Learning Network

Educause and Next Gen Learning Challenges

EDUCAUSE, has launched ‘The Next Gen Learning Challenges’ (NGLC) initiative to invite the conversation and to foster a genuine and active community dedicated to improving college readiness, encouraging college completion, and exploring the transformative effect of learning science and emerging technologies on student success.

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

Although the initiative focuses primarily on US post-secondary education, EDUCAUSE invites the international community to participate, exchange ideas and experiences and reflect upon best practices from specific programmes and research.

The briefing event

On July 27th, I attended the first from a series of virtual briefing events for NGLC aiming to outline the initiative’s goals and to open up the conversation with related or relevant programmes from the William and Flora Hewlett as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations.

The session was co-ordinated by Diana Oblinger, president and CEO of EDUCAUSE. Carrie Page, Community engagement coordinator in EDUCAUSE presented the new features of the nextgen website. Other presenters included Mark Milliron, and Josh Jarett, both invovlved in Postsecondary Improvement Programme at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , and Stella Perez from the League for Innovation in the Community College. Over 130 people participated.

The session has been archived  and includes presentation slides and audio, as well as chat transcripts. Here I am including a summary of my reflective notes  from presenters, together with some of the most interesting comments from the discussion.
 

College completion and college readiness: the context
 

Diana Oblinger started outlining the goals of the programme, mentioning that the aim is to:
 

• Address college COMPLETION, and therefore develop an understanding of college READINESS through a continuum of issues.
• Focus on transitional moments from secondary to post-secondary education  and continuing education among young adults (17-26 year-olds cohort)
• Build on existing “islands of innovation” and not focus on early research and development.
• Identify solutions displaying early promise and help develop proof-of-concept
• Address the issues surrounding diffusion of innovations and effectiveness. However, the intention is to take risks on breakthrough ideas and failure – and learning from failures – are part of the cycle of innovation
• This programme focuses on the integration of ICTs and social media, rather than on generic financial support

   Four core challenges were outlined:
  o    Challenge 1: Open Core Courseware?: Expand access to high-quality, openly licensed courseware for developmental and general education.
  o    Challenge 2: Web 2.0 Engagement?s: Integrate interactive Web 2.0 approaches to stimulate deeper learning and ultimately improve college readiness and completion.
  o    Challenge 3: Blended Learning: ?Expand the use of established, effective online and face-to-face learning models on a cost-effective basis.
  o    Challenge 4: Learning Analytics: ?Foster the development and implementation of easily accessible learning analytics for those directly involved in student success.
   

Outlining the rationale and responses of the Gates Foundation to the issue of failure and the challenge of completion, Josh Jarrett drew a picture that addresses some of 4 core problems/ challenges that are addressed and/or  are highlighted by urgent work:
1.    Completion challenge – only about 40% (research in the multiple institutions; instead of IT innovations; focus on learners and adjust the technology to fit their needs, rather than the other way round)
2.    Demographic challenge – 85% of students are not traditional (as defined by the US Department of Education); increasingly diverse cohort
3.    Funding challenges – Economic downturn, but also competition with healthcare costs
4.    Scaling challenges – Islands of innovation; fragmented decision-making and incentives

Josh mentioned that the focus on the learner, may involve multiple institutions: why student’s aren’t complementing?: is what is the relevance and nature of engagement? what are the cost structures involved? Is the idea of creating programmes around civic engagement through learning viable and creative?

To this end, Gates Foundation aims to:
•    Dramatically increase number of students in high school
•    Assist the completion of a degrees/credentials within the workplace
 

I liked the fact that both Diana and several other participants addressed the technological deterministic discourse around with a softer approach to socio-economic and cultural ideas about diffusion and adaptability. But I felt that throughout the session these were slightly downplayed and the issues regarding choices and literacy – which, though addressed – were marginally problematised by the core presenters. This is something that was picked up by some other participants in the chat window.  As Vijay Kumar from the participants mentioned: two additional, yet important challenges for college completion: 1) Student Self Confidence and 2) sustained motivation.

A number of research questions emerge here:
•    How do we measure completion? At student level –longitudinal surveys for student engagment can provide the big picture, but more is required.
•    How can we define completion? Plugging the ‘loss points’ (in a students’ learning journey) and students to feel a sense of momentum to reach their own end points. So, what are these ‘loss points’ and what are the strategies to address them?
•    Other Gates Foundation programmes look for transformative effects in post-secondary, looking at the re-design of college, 'learn and earn' initiatives, quality (K-12 initiatives); How can we improve innovations? Work/life balance?  This proposed initiative (NGLC) cuts across all these existing initiatives. What are the biggest challenges in their learning journeys? How do we define and assess/evaluate when they gain progress and momentum? Mark suggested to look at the metrics and how to combine 'stack-able' credentials.

Unpacking completion is a big conversation! Educause and the Foundations would like  to use this programme to catalyse this field and help students gain credentials for a pathway to possibility.
•    A shift from increasing access to technology infrastructure and solutions to helping students leverage and improve learning and gain credentials along the way….
•    College completion is a shorthand really.  Unpacking what completion means is a big issue but believe that the use of technology may assist completion by leveraging the benefits.
o    My question then: Is building personal professional and reflective portfolios beyond Walled Gardnen models like VLEs the answer?
o    A concern from a participant was expressed: As we focus on completion and credentials is there also a danger of schools focusing on end results - a certificate, a degree - at the loss of quality.  i.e. and emphasis on successful test taking vs emphasis on learning.
 

Intervening, Diana mentions that:

Completion, progress, momentum and QUALITY are important.
There's a need to develop studies to measure:
o     why students are lost during transitional periods (school to college)
o    How can students build momentum? How can they reach a point that they can define for themselves

Discussion at this point got heated as some participants from the audience posted that metrics in isolation and over- focusing on completion can have a detrimental effect on other ways; the focus on effective pedagogy is one way to address this challenge. The response from the Gates Foundation project leads was that empirical research suggests that that credentials (of any kind) that can build for the formation of a degree have a catalytic effect in breaking cycles of poverty…. They look at an array of activities how can improve innovation in learning management, learning to learn skills, work-life balance, access to blended learning , etc.

Perhaps on the ways to address these challenges is to address whether and how ‘deeper learning’ happens. Deeper learning, a programme that is part of the Hewlett Foundations top research agendas relates to metacognitive skills, problem solving, learning to learn sills and  cuts across specific academic subjects and they are increasingly critical for competing in a knowledge economy context.

Next Gen programme elements

In sum, the NGLC Programme elements are:
1.    Investment capital for people to identify solutions for barriers to education and creative solutions at scale
2.    Building evidence – Believe we can help build this community by sharing evidence we have, also, evaluation of projects that receive grants will be important.  Will also be working with professional evaluators; Evaluation of existing projects
3.    Community – want to assemble a community of people interested in this area to solve this problem, want to be sure appropriate metrics and to seek advice/experience from the forums to ensure the finer details of the programmes are most appropriate. A wiki has been set to up to share ideas; and related Communities porgrammes from all the foundations is here

Three waves of implementation have been identified to address the challenges:
 Wave 1 – Building blocks for college completion
-    Deploy open core courseware for developmental and general education – Foster development and adoption of courseware that is open, high quality and modular
-    Learner interactivity and engagement: Encourage deeper forms of engagement through web 2.0 technologies (more speculative work, e.g. Around gaming, social media; Is funding to some of these areas that have potential feasible?) Primary target is post-secondary education
-    Flexible delivery and Scaled blended learning: (how do we do this in a systematic and scaleable way? Student experience to be contextualized in local learning environments
-    Use of learning analytics by students, instructors and advisors: (what data can we use to refine the student experience, focus on learning analytics at teaching/learning moment in addition to more standard forms of data analysis); Important to have academic analytics instead of admin analytics; push it to the moment of teaching and learning as possible.

The view on OER from the participants raised familiar alarm bells: Cindly Jennings put it: ‘Curious ...question to the group here: How many of your think the idea of OER for gen ed will be welcomed by faculty at your respective institutions?’ and it spiraled a wave of responses from participants mainly pointing to HUGE challenges pertaining: institutional support  and reward systems for professional development that involves OER, issues around confidence and ownership; time-limations and the need to foster subject-specific communities on curricular issues.

As a couple of participants in the chat window put it:

‘on adoption of open courseware, go at it from the faculty  POV - what helps the instructor and have other faculty engage with adoption by other faculty.  The IT person is probably not best tobe primary to move that agenda’

…’ yeah, you'll need a faculty to be your champion.  If you go that route, then you're doing it WITH them as opposed to having IT do it TO them :)’

These points are familiar and have emerged in several meetings and workshops that I have participated it in (see for example, Blended design workshop, Open Exeter Workshop). In a panel on Openess in Education, I co-organised my with Andrea Forte from Drexel University at the at 6th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (Wikisym 2010), these issues were raised by an audience that consisted - by enlarge - of faculty that are both proponents of open access and have proven willingness to experiment with creative pedagogies through social media. Perhaps a core issue about the effectiveness of OER is within its alignment to  critical literacies and to Hewlett’s definitions of 21st century competencies, and critical thinking skills. Looking beyond core courseware, we may need to consider how research in education and learning networks are aligned to that.

The view/definition of blended learning was interesting. In the context of the presentations and the discussion blended learning is not just about technologically mediated versus face to face learning. Instead a nuanced definition involves the ways in which learning and study can fit with work and family commitments, how it can ccut across boundaries across institutions and programmes seeking effective conceptual models. 

Learning analytics (see also http://www.itap.purdue.edu/tlt/signals/) is another way to address the challenges in developing programmes during the first wave of development. Analytics being built more and more into the commercial LMS, and usually turned off in default site releases. But the point is to go beyond course management systems to assess types of engagement; particular intervention challenges, etc.

Summing up Josh and Mark from the Gates Foundation noted

•    This is  not just about the potential of technology, but learner needs to be the focus and the quality of learning.  (Technology – how can it be leveraged? How can it fit to the reality of the systems that already existy)
•    Scale – need to reach learners who are falling through the cracks, not just a project which pilots one or two courses, but a developing something that reaches large numbers of students that are missing out, what is needed? Encouraged partnerships. It relates to the affirmative action programmes…and addresses the issues regarding financial problems…and work-life-study balances…what are the big ideas about the step changes and the learning outcomes?
•    It’s about the big picture – helping change lives and achieve credentials, access agenda has been very successful, now need to focus on next stage. Helping students to gain any kind of HE or post-secondary credentials
o    Strategic use of technology to assist helping the agenda: not the other way round.

Calls for proposals will be possibly announced in early October with initial funding in early January.

The partners to the NetGen learning challenges initiatives are:
•    Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: capital and research investment
•    The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
•    League for innovation in the community college organization dedicated to research in the developmental education
•    Educause: 300 colleges and university to support IT development and experimentation
•    The Council of Chief State School Officers (In K-12 environment)
•    International Association for K-12 online learning: sharing best practices and professional development