Distracted by digital devices

Survey: 40% of Students Don’t Last 10 Minutes Without Digital Devices

A survey of 500 college students has found that 67 percent can’t go more than an hour without using some sort of digital technology, and that 40 percent can’t go more than 10 minutes. The independently conducted survey was prepared for CourseSmart, which sells e-textbooks on behalf of leading publishers. The survey found that students today are more likely to bring a laptop to class than to bring a textbook.
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Ugh, but aren’t many of us older folks in the same boat?  I was attending a live music event last week, but I noticed both my husband and I each felt compelled to check our smartphones a few times during the hour-long performance.

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Related:

• Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
• Successful media multitasking teens are a myth

Harvard online learning: ‘five years from now will look very different from what we do now’

Last week Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced their new partnership, known as edX, will offer free online courses.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.

Coursera and Udacity, two other MOOCs (massively open online courses) from elite universities have also recently been announced.  This online thing seems to be taking off, accompanied by ardent predictions from educators.

“My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now,” said Provost Alan M. Garber of Harvard …

“Online education is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, a past president of Tufts who is a member of the Harvard Corporation.…

President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”…

Online learning is not brand new, but David Brooks makes a point about the recent entry by the most selective institutions:

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures….

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

Rescrambling.  Makes me think of this.

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
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Google search tips for students

Students lack good Google search skills.

Sadly, though web searches have become an integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a “reasonably well-executed search.” Wrote researchers, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.”

If college students are so poorly prepared to conduct Google searches, K-12 students must be even less so.  With all the talk about teaching 21st century skills in our public schools, not enough time is spent on this basic element of  school work.  What’s going on?

Here’s an infographic from HackCollege that offers basic search tips.  If teachers even spent a few hours on this every year, high school graduates would be better prepared for college and for life.

CLICK IMAGE TO GO TO INFOGRAPHIC

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I need to use these tips more regularly:

Using the Internet is ‘supereasy’, but ‘deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning’ is hard

‘Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace The Traditional Kind

I would like K-12 schools to focus more on teaching background knowledge and traditional competencies instead of spending so much time teaching so-called 21st century skills.

… But that’s not how an increasingly powerful faction within education sees the matter. They are the champions of “new literacies” — or “21st century skills” or “digital literacy” or a number of other faddish-sounding concepts. In their view, skills trump knowledge, developing “literacies” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Googleable and therefore unworthy of committing to memory.

Students need a broad base of knowledge before they can become critical thinkers.

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a leading expert on how students learn. “Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about,” Willingham has written. “The very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving — are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”

iPads are not a prerequisite for innovation, collaboration, and evaluation.

There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st century skills” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered. Nor is there any reason that these skills must be learned or practiced in the context of technology. Critical thinking is crucial, but English students engage in it whenever they parse a line of poetry or analyze the motives of an unreliable narrator. Collaboration is key, but it can be effectively fostered in the glee club or on the athletic field. Whatever is specific to the technological tools we use right now — and these tools are bound to change in any case — is designed to be easy to learn and simple to use.

Using the Internet is “supereasy” compared to “deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning”, which are hard.  Schools need to focus on providing expert instruction for the hard stuff.

Related:  Wikipedia co-founder says we need to memorize things, not just ‘Google it’

The Minerva Project is an attempt to establish an elite online university

The Minerva Project is attempting to create an elite online university, a move that if successful could accelerate the higher education reform being driven by escalating costs and improving technology.

Traditionally, for-profit colleges have operated on the lowest rungs of America’s educational ladder, catering to poor and lower-middle-class students looking for a basic, convenient degree or technical training. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have remained far out of the industry’s sites.

That is, until now.

This week, the Minerva Project, a startup online university, announced that it had received $25 million in seed financing from Benchmark Capital, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for its early investments in eBay, among other successful web companies. Minerva bills itself as “the first elite American university to be launched in a century,” and promises to re-envision higher education for the information age. The chairman of its advisory board: Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president. Among others, he’s joined on the board by Bob Kerry, the former United States senator and president of The New School.

A shortage of elite schools

… The demand for elite, American-style education far outstrips the current supply, he explained, not just stateside, but worldwide….  applications from qualified students are skyrocketing, while admissions rates are falling.

The Minerva business model

… The idea is to scoop up those students who are being shut out, whether it’s a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts. Minerva will admit applicants based on their academic chops alone — jocks need not apply — and students would live in urban dorms scattered across the globe’s great cities. They’ll take online courses designed by highly esteemed professors from other established institutions. Meanwhile, tuition would cost “less than half” the price of the standard Ivy league sticker price (so somewhere around $20,000 or below). That, anyway, is the plan.

There are opposing opinions on whether something like this can work, and I can only go on my feeling that some big change is around the corner.  Exactly how it will shake out is probably anyone’s guess, but imposing stringent admission standards would be critical in raising the prestige of any online institution.

The value of peer interaction on a physical campus is cited as one reason online college will always be considered second best.  On the other hand, the argument is made that young people are finding online interaction to be just as important as  face-to-face meetings.  Perhaps related,  it has recently been reported that a smaller percentage of teens are bothering to get their driver’s license these days.

A physical campus helps create a community of scholars who engage in various social, artistic, political, and humanitarian pursuits that are integral to the experience sought by elite students.  But if an individual has the smarts and the initiative, an online community could also offer support for getting this type of experience,  just without the need to go into debt for next 20 years.

Will the Minerva Project be the the first elite online university?  If so, we may have to make room for an online Ivy League.

The Minerva Project

Related:  Online degree from London School of Economics for $5,000

Can webcasts replace 200-student college lecture classes?

Webcasts instead of large lecture classes could produce better results and cut costs.

Glenn Reynolds writes in Popular Mechanics:

… Now that webcasts are a routine feature of corporate training, perhaps it’s time to make better use of the Web for education. Take the top teachers in a field and let students at multiple colleges access their lectures online. (Sure, there’s not a lot of interaction that way—but how much is there in a 200-student lecture class anyway?) Once the basic information is covered, students can apply it in smaller advanced classes, in person. Would this save money? Possibly—and it would almost certainly produce better results.

This seems promising, especially if the webcast professors speak clear English.  I still hear stories of college lecturers with heavy foreign accents that create problems in understanding the lesson.

I recently participated in a webcast that was probably better than if I had attended the same presentation in person.  The expert speaker covered the issues clearly while I was able to view the relevant images on my computer, switching screens at my convenience.  We were able to submit questions during the webcast, with some being answered right then and others answered later via email.  It was all very convenient.

Read more: Can Technology Fix the College Debt Crisis? – Glenn Reynolds on the College Bubble – Popular Mechanics

Kindle ‘Popular Highlights’ may become popular with college students

The lazy college student finds ways to do less reading.

In the near future, it may be unnecessary to rely on used textbooks for another student’s highlights.  Instead, the “time-challenged” scholar will be able to use Kindle’s Popular Highlights feature to see what many other students considered the important passages in the textbook.

Q: What are Popular Highlights?
The Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Apps provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them. We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.

I’ve been noticing Popular Highlights in a book I’m reading for a continuing education course.  Although they are not particularly germane to the course I’m taking, as the highlights come up I can see how they could be very helpful in cases where hundreds of students are using the same book for the same course.

Apple iBooks 2 – Is easier and flashier always better for learning?

Apple announced it would update its iBooks platform to include textbook capabilities.

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iBooks 2 was introduced last week, and I can’t help but get excited.

… a new textbook experience for the iPad. The first demonstration showed what it’s like to open a biology textbook, and see an intro movie playing right before you even get to the book’s contents. When you get to the book itself, images are large and beautiful, and thumbnails accompany the text. To make searching easier, all users need to do is tap on a word and they go straight to the glossary and index section in the back of the book.

Navigating pages and searching is easy and fluid, and at the end of each chapter is a full review with questions and pictures. If you want the answers to the questions, instead of searching for a page toward the back of the book, all you need to do is tap the answer to get immediate feedback.

Need to take notes? Apple now lets anyone highlight any text on the page using your finger. iBooks 2 immediately and automatically takes your highlighted notes and turns them into flash cards for later studying.

Downsides?
Okay, I’m salivating just thinking about how easy this will be to use.  But I wonder about the downsides.  Remember, there are always downsides.

I’m taking a self-study continuing education course right now, using an e-textbook.  When I need to look up a term in the book, it’s easy to do a quick search without having to know the context, without having to think much about it.  But if I had to search the old-fashioned way, I would be forced to consider what chapter or context would likely include the term.  I would have to think more and in different ways – assess, infer, predict, recall, reason, apply logic, and more.  It would not be as easy as simply typing in a word and letting the search function find it for me.*  Does this make a difference in how I’m learning?  Yes, I believe it does.  And while I don’t know exactly how it’s different, I strongly suspect there’s a downside.  Does the overall improved efficiency make up for the decreased amount of critical thinking?  I just don’t know.

Here’s my question in a nutshell.  Even if it’s easier to go through the course material, is it possible that I am actually learning less?

* Yes, a paper book typically has an index that can be used in a manner similar to an ebook search function, but it usually requires more thinking skills to use as efficiently.

A more basic problem for public schools:  In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will have to own an Apple iPad.

Related:  Kindle Fire – the end of deep and focused reading?

Hybrid learning breaks down geographic barriers for Northeastern University

Northeastern University is expanding its brand of co-op business education across geographic regions by investing heavily in hybrid education, with its first branch campus in Charlotte, NC.

The goal is to offer master’s degrees in industries like cybersecurity, health informatics and project management, matching programs with each city’s industries and labor needs, through a mix of virtual learning and fly-ins from professors based in Boston (tuition will be the same as at the main campus).

And it’s not doing it on the cheap

Northeastern, which is spending $60 million to support the expansion, is perhaps the most ambitious of a handful of brick-and-mortar institutions looking to broaden their footprint in new markets and with new methods of instruction….

Northeastern has hired 261 tenured and tenure-track professors in the last five years, about twice as many as in the previous five, and plans to add 200 more in the next three years — all of whom will be based at the home campus in Boston.

Examining traditional assumption that face-to-face is always better than online

“This is a time of huge transition in an industry that hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages,” said Charles P. Bird, a former vice president of Ohio University who helped develop the institution’s online offerings and now works as a consultant. “Higher education is going from traditional face-to-face delivery, and the unexamined assumption that that is good, to thinking about delivering a high-quality online experience, whether fully online or hybrid.”

Drexel University has struggled with a similar enterprise it began in 2009, perhaps miscalculating the importance of local relationships.

“Bill Gates says place is going to matter less and less for universities in the future, but I think that’s wrong,” said Mr. Aoun, Northeastern’s president. “I think a successful university has to be part of a community.”

Savings for students, and the question of quality

Tuition costs for Northeastern’s new hybrid master’s are the same as those for its Boston campus program, but the savings for students will be in time, convenience, and living expenses.  I remember years ago when my husband was planning his return to school to pursue an MBA.  Since online was not an option, we had to price out the potential costs in terms of my lost income and moving expenses.  Today, that equation is quickly changing.

An important question that remains unanswered is about how the quality of online education compares with face-to-face.  Northeastern, ranked 56 on BusinessWeek’s list of business schools , would seem to have a good chance of serving up a high quality experience with its hybrid approach.

Related:

• The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School is taking its brand online.
• M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program 

M.I.T. adds credentialing to its online course program

M.I.T. has enhanced its long-standing free online course program.

But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions.

CREDENTIAL for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught!

While access to the software will be free, there will most likely be an “affordable” charge, not yet determined, for a credential.

“I think for someone to feel they’re earning something, they ought to pay something, but the point is to make it extremely affordable,” Mr. Reif said. “The most important thing is that it’ll be a certificate that will clearly state that a body sanctioned by M.I.T. says you have gained mastery.”

The certificate will not be a regular M.I.T. degree, but rather a credential bearing the name of a new not-for-profit body to be created within M.I.T; revenues from the credentialing, officials said, would go to support the M.I.T.x platform and to further M.I.T’s mission.

Will employers buy it?

“It seems like a very big deal because the traditional higher education reaction to online programs was, yeah, but it’s not a credential,” said Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “So I think M.I.T. offering a credential will make quite a splash. If I were still in industry and someone came in with an M.I.T.x credential, I’d take it.”

Related:  Is higher education on track to lose its credentialing monopoly?