Multilitteratus Incognitus

Yesterday evening I came across a post by Tony Bates where he shared some findings from some recent reports on faculty (and student) preferences for learning in a post-pandemic world . I haven't read the reports yet, but I had some initial thoughts based on Tony's high-level overview of those three reports.   Two big things jumped out at me. The first is that students and faculty aren't on the same page (for the most part), and faculty still overwhelmingly prefer on-campus.  Tony notes that, at least in the EDUCASE case, compared to pre-covid numbers, more faculty have expressed an interest in something other than purely face-to-face (about 79% pre-covid, with 50% now). Tyton Partner's Analysis of Modality Preferences The first thing I noticed above is where students and faculty fall in their respective preferences.  If taken together, something other than purely face-to-face is a clear winner for student preferences.  Now, what that something else actually is....

It's the end of the year, and the end of the term, so I look back at my own learning this past fall semester. This fall, I decided to revisit FutureLearn.  Over the past few years (since 2018ish?) I've been signing up for FutureLearn courses so that I can have them in my queue (in case they disappear). I guess I was optimistic in 2019...and 2020...and 2021 that I would get to these, so the queue of courses kept getting larger and larger 🤣. So, with the queue so long I decided to do something about it: The total number of courses I went through this fall (August through December was 36.  Some courses were outside of my wheelhouse but seemed interesting, while others are peripheral to what I am doing, so things were not always new.   Unsurprisingly, the courses that were on subject matters that I already knew something about went by rather fast since past information kept coming up, both my own previous knowledge and things that came up in previous FutureLearn courses...

"I go into the office for collaboration" - the collaboration... I suppose the title should be " some of what I learned...," since I probably can't fit everything in a blog post, but let's begin and see where I end up ;-)   The TL;DR: be careful about the word "choice," while choice is good, you might get results that you didn't expect and are ill-equipped to handle. I follow a Twitter personality who evangelizes about the remote office. I admit, I am biased and lean toward positive views of the remote office and remote work in general.  This morning one of the Twitter posts went like this: ~~~~~~~ Personality: Old people: young people need the office for social contact Young people: actually we'd like to live closer to our friends and family Respondent 1 (toward personality): My 20-year old son old prefers to go into the office and doesn't enjoy working from home the one day a week. People need choice. Working from home is not for ever...

I was reading Twitter the other daaayyy (just picture someone from Letterkenny saying this😜) and I came upon yet another discussion that basically boiled down to online (or remote) versus face-to-face. I made the mistake of reading the replies🙄.   On the one hand, I was hoping that there would be a more nuanced discussion (and to be fair, I did get those types of replies from people I follow), but there were so many more about "online not being for everyone,"  about how people who teach face to face can "see if their points are landing and if learners are confused," or how "face to face is easier for building community" (maybe for you extroverts...🤨), or even "online works great if you love reading information off a screen and taking self-paced tests" (someone's learning like it's 1999...🤣) and other such (insert word/phrase of your choice). Obviously, the quotes are paraphrased. I became upset and irritated reading such non-sense pos...

It's hard to believe, but the summer is in the rearview mirror.  Next week the fall semester begins and as I look back over the summer  I see some things I learned (or observed) in these coronatimes: The FoMo is still strong! I thought I had beaten back FoMo (fear of missing out) but I guess not :-).  This summer many conferences made the switch to online this summer due to the ongoing pandemic and their registration was free.  This made them accessible both in terms of place (online) and cost (free) for me.  So I registered.  I might have registered for far too many because there weren't enough hours to participate synchronously and attend everything I wanted to.  Luckily most sessions were recorded, so I was able to go back and review recordings of things I missed.  Between the Connected Learning Conference, IABL Conference, OLC Ideate, Bb World, HR.com's conference (and a few more that I can't remember at the moment), I got more Professional...

Me, pondering OK, maybe the analogy isn't totally clear to you, so let me explain my context.  When I was in high school (mid-to-late 90s) the advertised (or expected) path after high school seemed pretty clear to me: go to college. There were really no "buts" about it, and there were no gap years considered (those were luxuries that well-off people had since they had money to burn). It was an expectation, from guidance counselors, from teachers, from parents, maybe even from society. Higher education was the path to a good middle-class life, and people were willing to take out loans to go to their dream school in order to achieve this goal. This was a pretty important goal for my parents considering that neither one of them made it to university and I'd be the first in the family (maybe even my broader family) to do this. No pressure, eh? ;-) One thing that seemed like an underlying current was how dismissive some (many?) people were about community coll...

The question of synchronous sessions in online learning has been swirling in my head over the past few weeks.  So has the term "remote" instruction (🙄).  I usually tend to sit on the sidelines these days, maybe throwing a few potshots on twitter here and there when I have time, but this article on IHE today was one where my eyes rolled too hard, and there was an audible grunt in the room... First of all, I guess I should explain my aversion to the term "remote" instruction.  Our field, distance education, has many terms to describe learning at a distance that actually mean something, and have actually had decades of research behind them!  Because the existing terms mean something, and usually have legalistic implications, it's like administrators are using a synonym for "distance" in order to avoid any sorts of contractual agreements that they have made.  For instance, at my institution, if a faculty member develops an online course from scratc...

...or wait... will it? It's been a while since I wrote something on here†, and in all honesty, I thought about taking a sabbatical  from blogging to focus on dissertation-related matters.  However, I really hate the current practice of threading on twitter where someone writes 10, 20, 30, or 40 tweets in a thread.  We've even invented an app to make these threads more readable .  I can't roll my eyes hard enough at this because it's a solution for a problem we shouldn't have.  We have long-form means of communicating - they are called blogs.  But anyway - I'll cease my "get off my lawn"-ness and move on to the point.  Now, where was I?  Oh yeah... I wanted to respond to something I saw on twitter, but I didn't was to just create a stupidly long thread. So, in case you have not been paying attention, there is a bit of a global health scare going on, namely COVID-19 (or Coronavirus as the media calls it). It's gotten to the point where c...

OK, I am almost 'caught up' with the stuff I missed while I was on vacation (at least as far as 806 goes).  I remember receiving an email from Pearl indicating that Sir John Daniel would be presenting. Too bad the internet wasn't that reliable :-/  Oh well, thank goodness for recordings ;-) Sir John Daniel seemed like a pretty interesting  person, and very knowledgeable (with over 300 publications to his name) and he must be a respectable human being because he wouldn't hold 32 honorary degrees from 17 different countries if people only liked him for his scholarship.  I guess the bar has been set for me (haha! :-) ). The only area where I surpass him is in the amount of MOOCs I've taken vs how many he's taken.  Even as a recording it was great to get to 'meet' such a distance education heavyweight (maybe I can email him and we can go for some coffee and discuss the future of DE next time I am around his neck of the woods in Canada ;-)  ). In any ...

Finally!  I've made it to the end of the book!  It only took me nine months to do so (a couple of chapters each month?) but it's finally done!  This will be my final review of chapters in  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future .  I was going to write two separate blog posts about this, one for each chapter, but I've sort of run out of steam, and I have a sense that I will be writing the same (or similar things) for the last two chapters. Today under the microscope are chapter 11, which is titled  MOOCs: Evolution and Revolution, and Chapter 12 which is titled  The Evolution of Online Learning and Related Tools and Techniques toward MOOCs . It should be noted that there is actually a chapter 13 and 14, but I had received those to review before I got this book, and I've written briefly about them, sometime last year - so no rehash in this post. The abstract for chapter 11 is as foll...

It seems that Inside Higher Education is playing a game of 7 questions . I thought that it would be interesting to respond to these when I has little more brain space to write some more in-depth answer instead of "agree or disagree" which was the original prompt.  These might very well fit into my Educational Leadership course now that I think of it.  So the questions are in italics , and my responses are in regular text. 1) A higher education program where students graduate with a credential, but without substantial career development, is a failed experience. It depends! I don't necessarily see higher education as being concurrent  with career development.  Sometimes, in some programs, and certainly depending on the degree, the benefits of higher education are seen in the long term, not just in the short term after graduation (i.e. gaining a new job or obtaining a promotion).  Some programs require  apprenticeships or practica.  In such cases I ...

This past week the web was abuzz with new research to come out of Harvard and MIT on cheating identification in MOOCs, specifically xMOOCs hosted on the edX platform, but I suspect that any platform that collects appropriate analytics could see this used.  The title of the paper is Detecting and Preventing "Multiple-Account" Cheating in Massive Open Online Courses and it's an interesting read. I find the ways of crunching data collected by web-servers as a way of predicting human behavior fascinating.  While I am more of a qualitative researcher at heart, I do appreciate the ways in which we can use math, data, and analytics to derive patterns. That said, my main argument with the authors of the article are not the methods they use, but rather the actual utility of such an algorithm.  The authors write that CAMEO (Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online)† is a potential threat to MOOCs because CAMEO is highly accessible. Anyone can create additional ac...

With Campus Technology behind us, I've got some free time to compose some thoughts on what I experienced this year in Boston.  I like going to Campus Tech each year as I have an opportunity to attend some sessions, see what the EdTech vendors are up to, and meet with new and existing colleagues.  One of the keynotes this year, by SNHU ( Southern New Hampshire University ) President was really unsettling. Whereas the keynotes in previous years seemed to be hinting toward innovation in higher education, this particular keynote, under the guise of disruptive innovation  in higher education seemed to hint more toward a commodification of higher education, a de-professionalization of many types of jobs in the field, and a process for teaching and learning that reminded me of an industrial age model of education. This was a bit jarring to me, as a regular attendee (and twitter reporter) of campus technology each year.  On the one hand Paul LeBlanc (SNHU President) di...

"Fractured Spock" - by me and Net Art Generator, for #clmooc Over the past couple of years, since the silly acronym "SPOC" was invented to denote a course that was the antithesis to the MOOC, a Small Private Online Course , I've had issues with the acronym, and took exception to this new discovery  on the part of schools that newly invented  this form of education, considering that there are schools that have been doing it since the early aughts. In any case, I was finally going through my Pocket account today, trying to read as many things as I've saved for later reading since Rhizo15 when I came across a couple of articles that really made me roll my eyes a bit and made me want to facepalm... The first article is a featured article in Harvard Magazine, July/August issue, titled Is Small Beautiful? This was a fairly quick read, but I couldn't help but think that this was mostly a PR piece on the part of Harvard and Harvardx. There is a lot ...