Marc Alan Sperber

How do you know when you’ve come across a hot topic?  Would you say this is a good clue:  you forward a link to your boss, she forwards it to your Director or Dean, and he forwards it straight to the CIO and Provost?  Yes?  Okay, I’m here to report that I found a hot topic:

What Does College 2.0 Look Like in Singapore? China? South Korea? India? – College 2.0 – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education writer Jeff Young is headed to Asia for the month of September to report on how digital technologies are changing higher education in Singapore, China, South Korea, and India.  The column is called “College 2.0 in Asia.”  He wrote in today’s post:

The themes I’m focusing on are teaching with high-tech tools, improving access to education through online teaching, developing digital libraries and e-textbooks, connecting researchers with collaboration tools, and moving high-tech research from the lab to the marketplace.

I, for one, am looking forward to reading Jeff’s updates.  I even set my Twitter account to send his Tweets as text messages to my mobile phone.  Now, that’s serious business.

According to Li Feng in a recent UMass Online Blog, e-learning is becoming widely adopted in Chinese corporations.  In her post, Li discusses how some of the observations found in the corporate sector confirm what she has found to be true about online learning, in general, in China.

Three of her observations:

1. Chinese students strongly prefer videos of lectures over text-based courses.
2. Chinese students value a certification at the end of a course.
3. Chinese students enjoy interactivity with their course content and with the instructor and other students in the course.

Of course the implications of this news stretch far beyond those of online education.  But, this is an educational technologies and distance education blog, so I’ll keep my focus narrow.

First, the news.  According to the UK’s Guardian,

East Africa shed its tag as the only major inhabited coastline excluded from the global broadband map today when an undersea fibre-optic cable linking it to networks in Europe and India went live…

Aly-Khan Satchu, a financial analyst in Nairobi, compared its significance to the construction of the railway network in east Africa a century ago.  “With the arrival of mobile phone and now broadband internet, we are leaping from the medieval age connectivity-wise into the 21st century in a very short period of time. This represents an enormous economic boost and a political game changer given how information is now going to be spread.”

Sure, there have been ways to deliver distance education to East Africa, but these ways have been stripped down versions of what could have been done elsewhere.

Significant technical challenges aside, it is difficult to ensure academic success when students are deprived of information, instructor feedback, and social presence.  Gone have been the opportunities for students to explore the vast resources available on the Web, gone have been the opportunities for students to use online collaboration tools, gone have been the abilities to allow for webcasting, webconferencing, or videoconferencing.  But, with one thin cable, that is all changing.

How are Africans reacting to the Seacom cable and the increased speed and lower costs that it will bring to East Africa?  Global Voices, a community of international bloggers, highlights some of the debate that has been occurring around the blogosphere since the arrival of the cable.  It appears there is both optimism and skepticism.

What do you think?

Why the name change?

Why go from “Marc Alan Sperber – Educational Technologies & International Online Education” to “Marc Alan Sperber – Educational Technologies & Distance Education?”

Well, partly because I’m indecisive.  And, partly because I realized that with the former name, I was unintentionally limiting myself, or heading in the direction of having a blog title that did not align with the topics of my posts.

Beyond those reasons, distance education is a broader term which encompasses international, national, or transnational online education.  It also encompasses online, hybrid/blended, and face-t0-face education.  I plan on covering all of the above here on this blog.

There… I feel better now.

Thanks to funding from a Duke Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) “Jump Start Grant,” I am involved with a very exciting project – exploring the use of iPads as a fieldwork research tool for the Duke Global Health Institute (where I am their Educational Technologies Consultant).  First, this fall, the tool will be explored in a master’s-level research methods course (taught by faculty member Jen’nan Read), where students will be learning about qualitative field research, quantitative survey research, evaluations, and interventions.  Students will receive iPads to use throughout the semester and will have the opportunity to use the devices in local fieldwork exercises.  Then, next summer, as part of their global health research projects, some of the students will bring the iPads with them to remote, low-resource settings, all around the world.  Read more about the project on DGHI’s website.

Screen grab from the DGHI article (my quote may make more sense after you have read the first part of the story):

Already a few magazines and websites have picked up the story:

• Campus Technology
• Research
• iMedicalApps.com

I will certainly keep folks up to date.  Because I have linked to several stories about the project, I will not write much more about it here, now.

Currently, I am still exploring applications, working with Jen’nan to come up with fieldwork exercises, having discussions with IT about how we should configure the iPads for students (of course, iOS 4, the new, but still unreleased operating system for the iPad, looks like it might come out right around the time we want to hand these over to students!), etc.

Please feel free to ask me any specific questions – - use the comments section of this post and I’ll respond.

I just finished reading “Are We Migrating Education Online Too Fast?” on Good’s website.  In his article, Nikhil Swaminathan reported:

The study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Policy, focused on an introductory course in microeconomics in which more than 1,600 students are enrolled each semester. As a result of space issues, many of the students opt to watch online versions of lectures.

“At the least, our findings indicate that much more experimentation is necessary before one can credibly declare that online education is peer to traditional live classroom instruction, let alone superior to live instruction,” the report states.

Wait a second here: “Many of the students opt to watch online versions of lectures.”  That’s what they are calling online education?  That’s not online education!  I went on to read the Northwestern study and found that, sure enough, the misnomer came straight from the School of Education and Policy researchers (repeat: School of Education and Policy).

Sure, one can learn a lot from watching a video.  But, one can not receive an education from watching a video.  Even the MIT OpenCourseWare website (which offers free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT) states that “OCW is not an MIT education…MIT OpenCourseWare is a publication of the course materials that support the dynamic classroom interactions of an MIT education.”

Dynamic classroom interactions, that’s the key phrase.  It has been shown time and time again that it is indeed possible to create such an environment in an online classroom.  While certain lecture capture systems do offer robust interactive video players and they make watching an online lecture slightly more tolerable, students interact with the recorded content – not with the instructor, and certainly not with their classmates.

The Northwestern study, I’m sure, had accurate findings.  It’s not entirely surprising what they reported: face-to-face lectures are more effective than recorded lectures.  What is surprising is that based on these findings, the authors wrote, “live-only instruction dominates internet instruction.”  They also failed to mention that most other researchers in the field have found that it is essential to utilize multiple instructional strategies for online learning (and most of these researchers would be against having students watch entire lectures online).

Traditional classroom-based courses cannot be “migrated” online.  There have to be significant changes.  In tandem with comprehensive faculty development, courses have to be redesigned from scratch.

Maybe we can chalk this story up to poor wording.  Maybe the authors didn’t mean to imply that online education is inferior to classroom-based education because videos of lectures are not as effective as face-to-face lectures.  Since this report came out of a school of education and policy, I sure hope this is the case.

With that said, I know there are still a lot of schools (hopefully not schools of education) recording lectures and delivering them as “distance education.”  Is this you?  Tell me about it.  How long is each video?  What kind of student feedback are you getting?  What other instructional strategies are you using?  What’s the ratio, video:other.  Is this working for you?  If not, and if you want to change your approach, are you facing resistance?  From whom?