51 Sources Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Free eBooks
eBooks should’ve been a game-changing technology.
The idea was simple enough: no longer did you need to travel to the library to wade through rows and stacks and floors and buildings and card catalogs only to wag home only as much as you could carry.
Or risk spending the afternoon locked in a room with the reference books you couldn’t check out. With eBooks, databases were now entirely searchable–and searchable through mobile devices from your pocket.
Books were also just a click away (provided you had an internet connection). Nothing against libraries, but the argument makes sense: the more accessible books are, the more people should read.
It’s a bit troublesome then that most of the press of eReaders has to do with who they’re putting out of business and who is making a killing than how has reading changed–especially for those who may not have read much before?
If all eReaders have done is make it easier for highly literate people to purchase books, then there is a worrisome economic and cultural disparity only being deepened by technology.
But if there truly is improved access–and everyone has it and knows about it and can find books they’d actually want to read–well then, we’ve done something right. We’re using technology to produce better readers.
While we can’t help with the financial and hardware end (and to be fair, most smartphones can download and use the Kindle reader for free), we can help with the access to free eBooks bit, with the following listly from Fasal Khan.
The Digital Lives of Teens: What Time Is It? Now!
Technology has made teens obsessed with the present moment. With feverish intensity, they post the latest happening on Instagram or Tumblr, marching around like paparazzi, holding up their phones to flash and capture every little detail of their lives unfolding.
Ironically, the commitment to the present moment is at the core ofmindfulness practice. Noted mindfulness guru Jon Kabbat Zinn defines mindfulness as “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.”
In a humorous yet poignant way, Kabbat Zinn often asks, “What time is it?” And his response is, “Now.”
The New “Now”
Teens are highly tuned in to the “now,” just not in the way Kabbat Zinn imagines or defines.
Any parent with a teen will share a story of how time disappears when teens are engaged in Xbox or other video games like Minecraft. The teen engrossed in the game loses all conception of time, blocks out the rest of the world, and gives undivided attention and focus to the game, so much so that it might take a parent four or five attempts to garner his or her attention. Or the teen might be fully absorbed in a stream of group and individual texts.
The teen in the game or virtual environment is “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment.”
The tricky part of the mindfulness definition for teens living in virtual worlds is to be “[nonjudgmental] to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.” Texts can be hard to decipher for tone and intent, and often the words in texts can have a sharp edge, leaving digital wounds for the receiver.
Of course, mindfulness practice as envisioned by Kabbat Zinn exists in the real world, not the virtual one, with careful breathing, centering and focus as its cornerstones. Mindfulness is about blocking out extraneous thoughts and keeping the mind clear and available for the present moment. Teens want to be in the present moment and can’t stand the idea of missing out on anything.
Authentic Connection and Reflection
In a recent New York Times article, Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor and author of Sleeping With Your Smartphone, comments: “Nobody can think anymore because they’re constantly interrupted. Technology has enabled this expectation that we always be on.”
The “always on” and the “now” go hand in hand. Thoreau once said, “All men lead lives of quiet desperation.” In the digital age, teens are living lives of public desperation, struggling to find digital quietude.
Technologists and mindfulness practitioners are looking to each other to begin figuring out how to marry the “present” moment of “always on” and “now.” At Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco this past February, leaders from Silicon Valley and the mindfulness community joined hands in an attempt to “discuss how to use technology more wisely,” as Tony Schwartz writes in How to Be Mindful in an “Unmanageable” World, an article for Harvard Business Review. He explains how the tension point revolves around “digital connection, instant gratification, and the cheap adrenalin high of constant busyness.”
The languages of mindfulness and technology are not that far apart from each other, both aiming to capture the “now,” but in vastly different ways. The challenge is how to block out the digital flotsam that plagues teens and adults who are wrapped up in digital devices.
And, for educators and parents, the key is how to find windows for teens to enter into device-free spaces to forge “authentic connection and reflection,” as Schwartz writes.
It does not have to be all or nothing, but the conversation needs to happen so that teens can make room for unplugging from the virtual “now” in order to find peace in the physical “now.”
What are ways that you have tried to balance mindfulness with technology?
What You Need to Be an Innovative Educator
Innovation isn’t a matter of will.
Like most things worth creating, critical ingredients pre-exist the product. In the case of innovation in education, many of those necessary ingredients are simpler and more accessible than they might seem — which is, of course, good news to an industry already up to its nostrils in oh my gosh for the kids we must have this for the kids yesterday for the kids admonishments.
Whether you’re innovating a curriculum, an app, a social media platform for learning, an existing instructional strategy, or something else entirely, innovation in education is a significant catalyst for change in education.
If our data is correct, you’re probably a teacher.
And if you’re a teacher, you’re probably interested in innovation in the classroom, so let’s start there — with project-based learning, for example.
Project-based learning is an example of innovation, but probably not the way you’d expect. While learning through projects is indeed innovative compared to sit-and-get, drill-and-kill, teacher-led and textbook-sourced instruction, PBL’s primary innovation is probably its flexibility. There’s almost no other learning trend or innovation than can not only co-exist with PBL, but also fit seamlessly and entirely within it.
PBL promotes innovation in education by making room for it.
But creating that innovation — what does that require? What kinds of ingredients can you put into the tin, shake up, and end up with innovation?
1. Sense of Priority
First and foremost, there needs to be a sense of priority. What’s most important? What must the students learn? What must we use? What must we achieve?
And note that priority here doesn’t mean “rhetorical hyperbole.” Real priority requires a kind of honesty that can look at a giant list of academic standards and say, “Yeah, but . . .”
Innovation requires that kind of honesty, the kind of priority that allows your team of teachers or students to see what’s most important in any given circumstance, and cultivate what’s necessary from there.
2. Selflessness
Selflessness is also a factor when trying to innovate. Innovation is not carrying a single idea to a predetermined destination. At some point, innovation must be inclusive. While creativity certainly needs quiet reflection and independent thought, anything done from start to finish in isolation depends on a kind of genius — or at least inspired cleverness — to succeed.
If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
By serving a greater cause and removing your sense of self from a situation, you greatly increase the chances of a truly innovative end result.
3. Time and Energy
It goes without saying that to be innovative, you’re going to need stuff. The most tempting resources typically sought for innovation are money and permission. Ironically, these are two of the least critical resources.
What you will need to innovate in education is time, and the boundless energy of a second-grader hopped up on Mountain Dew.
4. Models
Exemplar models can stifle innovation by suggesting a path that you didn’t need suggested. There is a time and a place for models, and it depends on the circumstance when you’ll need yours. But by looking at existing models — cool stuff that has been accomplished by others before you — you’ll have an idea of what’s possible. And of what you might be missing.
5. Willingness to Take Risks
A lot of people say they want to be innovative, to “take risks.”
To have what we’ve never had, we have to do what’s never been done — and 47 other cliché quotes that show up in educator signatures everywhere.
But a real willingness to take risks means being prepared for failure. And failure might come in the form of lost funding, an article written about you in the local newspaper mentioning a “project gone bad,” unflattering data, and a million other possible outcomes.
Being willing to take a risk shouldn’t empower you to implement wrong-headed, half-baked ideas under the guise of an “innovative spirit,” but you should be prepared to fail. Which is fine, because education’s been failing long before you got here.
6. Trust
While you don’t always need green lights, district “buy-in” or outright permission, you do need trust, and that starts from the students backward. They’re your most vocal critics and your most critical audience.
It will be in their curious, intellectually playful demeanors and long-term academic performance that you’ll see the end result of any given innovation. (If not, what’s the point?) But students — of any age — are incredibly good at sniffing out a rat. If something is murky, sterile, boring, stifling, cliché or downright clunky, they’ll let you know.
The trust of administrators, colleagues and parents certainly matters. You can lose your job or professional standing without it. But without trust from students, you’re just a well-dressed, silly person with your name on the placard by the door.
And the innovation will never come.
What the Future of Learning Might Look Like
Education and learning could look radically different in the next few years. The education foundation KnowledgeWorks has released a forecast on the future of learning, focusing on ways that technology and new teaching strategies are shaking up traditional models. Check out this snapshot of an infographic the organization created to depict a learning ecosystem that includes whole communities in education. Make sure to check out the full infographic.
A List Of 75 MOOCs For Teachers & Students
“TeachThought’s intrepid staff have featured a list of 75 different MOOCs for you to explore in the following article by Mike Acedo—courses made for students and teachers alike!”
A List Of 75 MOOCs For Teachers & Students
by Mike Acedo
In today’s world, society has placed its highest value ever on upper education and its requirement in the work force.
Unfortunately, the price tag for such an education has simultaneously risen exponentially, limiting millions of potential students from attaining the fundamental human right of a quality education. Furthermore, it prevents students from broadening their own knowledge and stems their capability of developing new skills that may improve their own lives, their families, and their communities. Fortunately, with the rise of technology in today’s society, it has become possible for the low income and underserved members of society to have access to a free, quality education from some of the top universities in the world.
With the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), students from anywhere with an Internet connection, can access free courses facilitated by some of the top educators and experts in every subject area. From mathematics, to computer science, to philosophy, to business design, MOOCs give learners unprecedented access to some of the most valuable knowledge, from some of the most prestigious universities, for free. Though most of the courses do not offer actual credit towards a degree, some MOOCs are beginning to offer certificates, additional credit options, and other enhanced learning services for nominal fees. Students have also been able to submit course work done through MOOCs to their own universities and be granted credit or research units. Additionally, students may use completed courses as a way to build their qualifications by highlighting their work on resumes, cover letters, and social media.
Though some have criticized the real value of MOOCs, it is undeniable that these courses give students the capacity to learn at a level never before made available to them. It may not be perfect, nor at times pretty or easy, but it is a step forward towards the ultimate goal of providing a quality education to not only the lucky and privileged, but to all who seek to better themselves through learning.
Below is a list of courses from various MOOC providers, separated by subject areas that are increasingly valuable in today’s society. Also included are courses that educators can use to improve their own teaching methods, skills, and facilitate a more effective learning environment in their classrooms.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for Students
Social Science
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Unlocking the Immunity to Change: A New Approach to Personal Improvement
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Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead
Personal and Professional Development
Information, Technology, and Design
Mathematics
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Image and Video processing: From Mars to Hollywood with a stop at the hospital
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Making Better Group Decisions: Voting, Judgment Aggregation and Fair Division
Business & Management
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Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I
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The Power of Macroeconomics: Economic Principles in the Real World
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for Teachers
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Effective Classroom Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development
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Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching: 3 Key Ideas & High Leverage Technique
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Emerging Trends & Technologies In the Virtual K-12 Classroom
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Foundations of Teaching for Learning 3: Learners and Learning
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Foundations of Teaching for Learning 7: Being a Professional
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Foundations of Teaching for Learning 8: Developing Relationships
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Tinkering Fundamentals: Integrating Making Activities into Your STEM Classroom
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First Year Teaching (Elementary Grades) – Success from the Start
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First Year Teaching (Secondary Grades) – Success From the Start
Blended Learning Barriers Spark Creative Workarounds
Flexible blended learning models allow teachers in Milpitas School District in California to spend time with small groups of students while others learn on computers. / Photo courtesy of Milpitas School DistrictThese barriers fit into three categories: Redesigning teacher roles that meet state policy and union contract provisions, purchasing and managing technology, and recognizing online classes as valid for admission to California university systems. A report from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation lays out both the barriers and workarounds in an effort to help superintendents share their ideas.
Three of the most important workarounds center around teacher licensure requirements, BYOD and online course approval.
“There is some real creativity and leadership among the superintendents in California, and several of them are not content to take the California education code as-is when they think that there’s something they can do to benefit students,” said Michael B. Horn, co-founder and executive director of education at the institute.
Creative workarounds for teacher licensure requirements
With blended learning, teachers often need more flexibility in terms of which subjects they teach and how they work with students. Some models work best with a teacher who is certified in a single subject in elementary school, while others work better with a teacher who is certified in multiple subjects in high school, the opposite of what typically happens.
But the California Education Code requires teachers to be credentialed in whatever subject they’re teaching at the time, which means that school districts need to get creative with how they manage staff in these different models. And they also have class size requirements to deal with.
In the Milpitas School District, an initial State Board of Education waiver for elementary class sizes and credentialing helped them overcome these barriers. But then the district changed its model. Now grade level teams of two to three teachers shuffle elementary school students back and forth next door. They’ll also have students rotate within a classroom.
“I see the teacher doing small group instruction with five to six kids, and the rest of the class is completely engaged in their own learning,” Superintendent Cary Matsuoka said.
Myth buster: BYOD and a free education
As the Santa Clara and San Mateo County superintendents threw out barriers, it turns out that one of them wasn’t an actual barrier at all, just a perceived one. The California Education Code requires schools to offer a free education, and some superintendents didn’t think they could have students bring their own devices to school for blended learning because of that requirement.
But they could shift to student devices as long as they don’t require students to bring them. The trick is in the wording, Horn said. They can allow students to bring them and provide devices for students who don’t.
Creative workarounds for online course approval
Along with local culture and policy barriers, school districts have to deal with college admission requirements, which they didn’t always think were barriers in the past. With the rise of online classes, the University of California and the California State University systems have many online high school classes to review for college admission requirements. The process is time consuming and doesn’t necessarily result in course approval, so it leaves student schedules and school course offerings in limbo for a time.
As a result of this approval process, school districts must be careful about how they handle online learning in the context of college admission requirements. One district didn’t say a course was online or in person. It’s staff just provided transcripts with the title of the course, and that helped them get around this issue.
Key takeaways
As blended learning and technology change the way students learn, states need to be tighter on student outcomes and looser on how they get there, Horn said. Smarter regulations can give schools more creativity and flexibility so they can generate better student outcomes.
And while these superintendents came up with a number of barriers and workarounds, superintendents in other regions and states may face different barriers. Horn encouraged superintendents in other counties to come together for a day to hammer out some of these issues with their collective knowledge and experience.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Blended-Learning-Barriers-Spark-Creative-Workarounds-.html
An Introduction To The Basics Of Competency-based Education
You may have seen headlines touting the growth and transformative potential of competency-based education. People working to make higher ed more accessible are very excited about the possibilities of this format to help more students earn degrees and to close the skills gap.
Nevertheless, competency-based education, remains an obscure concept to people outside of the few dozen universities that are pioneering it. So I want to use this article to lay out some of the basics for people hearing the conversation grow louder and who want to know what it’s all about.
No, scratch that. By the end of this article, I want you to be able to participate in the conversation. And that shift in focus, from what I deliver to what you are able to do with it, is the start of our lesson.
The basics of competency-based education
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Think of CBE as a shift in focus from what a student is taught to what they are able to do. Designing a program begins by asking what students should be competent at when they finish the program. For example, a computer science department, instead of starting with what languages and concepts to teach, might determine that a graduate should be able to write a secure web application (among many other things.)
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Think of CBE as built around assessment. Exams or projects are designed for students to prove they have mastered the competencies. In the case of writing a secure web application, the classes will teach the concepts and languages leading to that ability, and ultimately a student will have to demonstrate they can do it. There won’t be a test at the end of this article, but if there was, it would test what you are able to do with this information.
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Think of the competencies as units or modules. Lesson are designed around each competency, and a student progresses from one to the next. The ability to write a secure web application might be a competency needed toward the end of a program with many other milestone competencies leading up to it. Or, in a graduate-level program, it might be the competency needed to progress past the first few lessons.
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Think of CBE as a form of time shifting like what has happened with television viewing. Instead of millions of people watching a broadcast at the same time every week, we now watch episodes on our own schedules. Sometimes we are one day behind the broadcast, sometimes a show waits on the DVR for months, and sometimes we binge watch an entire season. You move on to the next episode when you are ready. Similarly, in competency-based education, each student progresses not according to when lessons are delivered but according to when a competency is mastered.
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Think of a competency as something a student may have even before they enter a program. CBE awards credits based on what students can demonstrate they are able to do, so they sometimes don’t have to sit through the related lessons, and they start out that much further toward degree completion.
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Think of CBE as a change in how progress is measured. Now students make progress toward a degree by earning “credit hours” primarily by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair for a certain amount of time (usually at times not convenient for working adults). CBE refocuses attention on learning rather than on seat time.
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Think of CBE in terms of the working adult population and others without access to higher ed. Too many conversations about college presume a student body of middle-class Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 who are enrolled full time. But that “traditional student” is a shrinking share of who actually attends college. And it’s a miniscule share of who wants or needs to earn a degree. CBE is most relevant to the “non-traditional” student body who can’t access college on traditional terms.
Advantages of competency-based education
At this point, the potential advantages of CBE are probably starting to become apparent.
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Because it is self-paced, it may be more effective and more practical for many students.
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Working adults with real experience can start with a significant portion of the degree progress already complete.
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It’s cheaper. College for America’s online competency-based degree, for example, is $2,500/year
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There is a clearer connection between lessons and real skills, which is attractive both to students and to employers. A CBE degree may more clearly signal career readiness than traditional degrees do.
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Competencies are potentially more recognizable across institutions. In the current system, credit hours are idiosyncratic, so students have trouble transferring credits, which is particularly hard for working adults. More portability of credits could help with the more than 30 million people in the U.S. who have earned some college credits without graduating. 7 million of those have more than two years worth of credits. Competency-based assessments could put those 7 million people at the threshold of an associate degree and halfway down a clearly defined path toward a bachelor’s degree.
Two factors turbocharging competency-based education
CBE has actually been around for quite awhile, and everything said above is technically true of “traditional” campus-based CBE, but now two new factors are emerging that have the potential to scale the concept quickly.
First, online education is becoming more viable. When that is paired with competency-based education, many commentators think you have a game changer. The Christensen Institute, for example, says online CBE is a disruptive innovationthat will challenge traditional degree programs “because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers and the right business model.”
And that’s with the business model not even competing on equal ground. So far, students in most competency-based programs haven’t been eligible for financial aid, because that aid is based on credit hours. Therefore, students in CBE programs have had to pay the rack rate, which is still competitive enough with traditional programs subsidized by financial aid that CBE programs are thriving.
What will dramatically turbocharge CBE is if it becomes eligible for federal financial aid. The Department of Education has indicated they are open to this, and they are experimenting along those lines. Last month, they authorized the University of Wisconsin to award federal financial aid for its UW-Flex program, and more are on the way.
Where is competency-based education actually happening?
Western Governors University, StraigherLine and Excelsior College pioneered online CBE programs about ten years ago. Meanwhile, the programs have been growing steadily in traditional university systems, often in their continuing ed or online ed branches.
Perhaps most exciting is that several projects are underway, supported by major foundation funding, to bring together dozens of existing and aspiring programs. For example:
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The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning has a multi-year project to provide training and technical assistance to a cohort of institutions just getting started in CBE.
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Next Generation Learning Challenges from Educause is making grants to “breakthrough” CBE programs.
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Lumina Foundation has brought together a consortium of institutions experienced in CBE to share challenges and solutions.
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The Association of American Colleges & Universities is working on General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), a project to promote competency-based pathways to liberal arts degrees.
Where can I learn more?
I certainly don’t mean to make competency-based education sound easy to design or without objections. In a future article, I’ll look at some of the potential obstacles and the arguments against CBE.
In the meantime, lots of valuable information is emerging for people interested in what the emergence of CBE means for their schools, their students or their business community. Here are two great documents I recommend where you can dig deeper.
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For the business case, take a look at the Christensen Institute ebook Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution.
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For a white paper with lots of examples of what schools are currently doing, a great summary is from The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning.
Testing Reimagined: How and When Should Competency Be Assessed ?
Research Fellow, Education Team, The Clayton Christensen Institute
Competency-based education presents an alternative philosophy of when and on what terms students take tests and move on to new material. In competency-based models, students advance upon mastery. A different spirit of assessment sits at the fulcrum of competency-based approaches: students only move on to new or more challenging material once they can show that they’ve mastered more basic skills and concepts. This means that students will often advance at different paces, and sometimes along different pathways. This also means that a competency-based system requires paradigm shifts in both how and when we assess students’ mastery.
How are students assessed for mastery?
Competency-based high schools in the U.S. use a variety of modalities to assess students. A number of these approaches are being used in the state of New Hampshire, in the United States, which has mandated that all high schools measure credit in terms of competency rather than time. Some schools like Sanborn Regional High School still use many traditional pen–and–paper exams, but with one key difference: they offer “reassessment without penalty” for students scoring below 80 percent. Therefore students do not fail, but rather revisit material until they are able to retake tests to demonstrate mastery.
Other competency-based schools, particularly those using blended learning curricula such as North Country Charter Academy, rely heavily on online assessment. In such schools, students engage primarily in self-paced online curriculum and receive face-to-face support from teachers on an as-needed basis. As such, the school relies heavily on online assessments to gauge gaps in students’ understanding and determine when individual students are ready to move on to the next online lesson or module.
Still other competency-based models, like Next Charter School, assess mastery through student projects rather than on pen-and-paper or online tests at the end of a lesson or unit. For example, the students in a social studies course might be asked to write a letter to President Obama proposing foreign policy strategies. The letter might have to include both a historical account of previous foreign policy strategies, a proposed action, and a rationale and justification for why that proposed action was the best option. To assess these projects in a competency-based rather than a time-based manner, the school adds in additional supports and opportunities to revisit material. Leading up to final projects like this one, teachers use various formative assessments, like short quizzes or less formal inquiry, to gauge students’ progress toward mastering various competencies and readiness for their final project. This helps to ensure that students are not assessed until they appear ready, rather than on a fixed schedule regardless of their mastery or lack thereof. Additionally, if a student fails to demonstrate mastery in his final project, he has the option to revise his final project, or he can move on and design a new project to address the competency or competencies that he failed to master.
As schools design systems and processes to assess mastery and growth on an ongoing basis, they are also increasingly incorporating performance assessments in their curricula. Performance assessments are tests that aim to assess students’ abilities to demonstrate competencies across various disciplines and focus on the “application” of competencies, rather than on the rote memorization of facts. For example, a student may be able to answer multiple-choice math questions, but a performance assessment would test his ability to calculate change in dollars and cents in a sales transaction.
Some schools like Sanborn are designing performance tasks that can be administered through traditional pen-and-paper exams, but test concepts in the context of real-world examples. Other schools have incorporated performance-based assessment into projects, such as the letter to the President described above, through which students are expected to apply their understanding of U.S. history and foreign policy to a real-world persuasive writing task. At still other schools, such as MC2, students are expected to ultimately defend their learning in front of a panel of teachers, much like doctoral students are expected to defend their dissertations in front of a committee of scholars.
When are students being assessed?
Shifting assessments to create a competency-based model not only requires new modes of testing student mastery, but also more flexible, on-demand opportunities for students to take tests. Without fundamentally shifting its assessment schedule to allow students to take assessments when they are ready, and providing opportunities for students to revisit material that they have not mastered, schools cannot pursue a truly competency-based model.
On-demand assessment is challenging because it contradicts schools’ traditional approaches to verifying student learning on a fixed academic calendar. Schools must reconceive their calendar and schedule in a far more individualized light if they are to imagine assessing students when students are ready to be assessed, rather than on a fixed day, at a fixed time. Some smaller schools may manage to assess students on this as-needed basis. But to scale such a system likely requires the adoption of new technology platforms. These platforms will need to track student progress, help to calculate when students are ready to be assessed, and in some cases provide appropriate assessment items on-demand. Without such capabilities, tracking each student’s progress and appropriate assessment schedule would prove overwhelming to any one educator.
Government accountability systems, such as annual exams, likewise pose obstacles to creating on-demand assessment systems. To ultimately square top–down accountability regimes with ambitions for more personalized learning systems, these national or state tests will likely need to be administered on a more
Michael B. Horn on Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education:
How online competency based learning is changing the higher education landscape
We recently had the pleasure to interview Michael B. Horn, Co-founder and Executive Director of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. If you are new to innovation in higher education, Michael is a thought leader you want to be following. From his policy work dedicated to transforming ‘monolithic, factory-modeled education systems’, to his research and award winning authorship—Michael has dedicated his career to pushing for education initiatives that will enable each of us to reach our fullest potential and in turn, change the world.
While there is a solid array of disruptive innovations popping up as technology advances, we have decided to focus in on an area that is being realized not only in education, but in healthcare and corporate learningenvironments as well—competency based learning!
In your view, which 3 disruptive learning innovations are making the most drastic change in higher education today?
So I think that there is a broad movement right now in higher education with online learning being a macro disruptive innovation that’s sweeping through higher education. My sense is that the three biggest changes we’re seeing emerge right now are manifestations of online learning. These changes include:
1. The online competency based programs that are emerging. Institutions like UniversityNow and theSouthern New Hampshire College for America I think are going to be very significant in changing the higher education landscape.
2. The second one is related to online competency based learning and it is those institutions that are working much more closely with employers. Here I really think of the online players like Udacity who have partnered with AT&T, Google and Facebook to provide online courses which teach students marketable skills that meet industry demands.
3. The third one is the place-based coding boot camps that are starting to pop-up like General Assemblyand Dev Boot Camp. I think immersive social learning programs like these are going to be a critical piece to this puzzle. As online learning continues to find better ways to deliver content, it’s going to be about meeting the face-to-face needs of learning by creating networks and having places to create projects so we can learn and socialize with others.
Online competency based learning has been heralded as the next big change in higher education. How is online-competency based learning transforming the traditional higher education market as we know it?
I think online competency based learning really flips the traditional world of higher education on its head—it is fundamentally about learning and showing what you can do and know. It’s not about the amount of time you spent on campus or the amount of time you’ve spent in class—it’s about building skills—often at a lower cost because you can move as you master things. It really says that research is not at the center of this model, it’s actually teaching and learning. It presents the possibility for students to move in very different pathways through the material which is really unique from the traditional higher education learning experience. It says, hey, if you learn something outside of the institution that’s okay, because we can still show through assessment that you have mastered this or you know how to do it.
This brings me to the last thing—assessment has become a big part of online competency based programs. Right now, in traditional programs, courses are designed to weed people out of subjects not to encourage the learning and actually make people stronger.
While online competency based learning has proven to be a powerful tool in changing the way we learn, there are still many criticisms. Which criticisms are at the forefront of your mind and how can we address them?
There are two main criticisms that occur to me that I keep thinking about…
1. Many of us see that competency based learning is a powerful tool but there are still many that say, “Is it really rigorous?…Does it actually work?…Wait a minute, you get to take these same assessments five times until you master it—that doesn’t seem rigorous?!”
When you step back from these criticisms and think about how absurd the comparison is, in many ways, it is easy to gain perspective. Look at traditional institutions for example, does it really benefit students when they are forced to move on after not mastering something? How do we possibly think that this is more rigorous than a program that requires you to really master something? I think the important thing for competency based learning programs to keep in mind when facing these criticisms is that you can do competency based learning really badly. You can still move people on and say they have mastered something even when they haven’t. I think it’s really important for online-competency based programs to remember when they are handling these criticisms is to not just sell “competency based learning”, but really focus on making them high quality programs.
2. The second thing people are criticizing is that competency based learning is “too career focused” and “too focused on narrow jobs and not developing citizens”. I guess the way I think about it is that online competency based programs don’t just have to be centered on careers. We’re already seeing this with Northern Arizona University and their liberal arts competency based program. I think we are beginning to have a much broader sense of how competency based programs are applied. Additionally, as they get better and better, we will begin to see them extend into more and more fields.
The last part to this is that I think a lot of employers are seeking skills that are actually not that narrow at all. If competency based learning programs are focused on skills that employers want employees to know and do—I really don’t think that’s a terrible thing because these skills are not incongruous from being a really great citizen in the 21st century.
We couldn’t agree more Michael! Being a great citizen is not at all disparate from being a great employee—especially with the increasing focus that many organizations have on the triple bottom line.