Assyntk's List: H817

• There is general agreement on several features of real learning, and one of them is that direct individual feedback is its foundation. Learning is personal, interactive, iterative, and rooted in dynamic relationships and overcoming the resistance of the material. 
• earning means interaction, context, resistance, immersion, and overcoming, not the reception of broadcast streams:
• We do know how to make pretty much everybody smarter and more creative. The deeper question is whether as a society we actually want to.
• Out of the economic crisis of the 1970s, the U.S. generated a kind of human potential movement within management theory. I
• society of happiness and its culture of mass creativity (to use my terms, not theirs).  A landmark text was Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr''s In Search of Excellence, published thirty years ago, which recognized that the U.S. economy was being undermined by failure to use the capabilities of its entire workforce, in contrast to the curatorial example of highly-successful Japanese corporations.
• cultivation of "excellence" (as a euphemism for "creativity"
• MIT industrial psychologist Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), and used MacGregor's distinction between two conflicting theories of human capability in society.  McGregor, they write,
   

   termed Theory X "the assumption of the mediocrity of the masses.’”  The masses “need to be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment to get them to put forward adequate effort,” McGregor wrote.  Theory Y, by contrast, assumes . . .  that the expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as in play or rest . . . and  the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population. (95).
• the broad Theory Y worldview was and remains correct about the ties among deep learning, creative capabilities, economic health, and social development. The historic role of public universities is to support the broad rather than the narrow development of the population. The failure to develop society broadly is increasingly well understood by scholars -- most recently in books like The Spirit Level and Why Nations Fail --as a recipe for economic and political decline.
• Analysis of the "network society" and a dozen related major concepts always pointed in the same direction of a society whose health, happiness, value to itself depends entirely on widely distributed creativity --materially supported at every node and crossroads in the population. 
• why is it in fact rejected by actual educational funding policy, which refuses to pay for active learning for all -
• ut democratic educators have not positively chosen Theory Y, and then tried to figure out how to fund it.
   
   A major symptom of this problem is the muddled discussion over expanding the role of on-line learning. Advocates generally trumpet ease of distribution of educational materials via the Internet without specifying the quality of the materials or the quality of the impact on their students. 
• Free on-line academies like Khan won't continue to inflate the student debt bubble, but they need now to specify high-end populist quality results to go with their quantity of access.
• The real barrier to educational quality on the mass public scale is not resistance to innovation but systemic poverty.  Writing on "The Rise of the SuperProfessor," Doug Ganss hits the nail on the head:
   

   People most effective at producing courseware in the future will have complete production studios staffed with video crews, interactive experts, gamification mavens, courseware experience specialists, usability teams, outcome testers, and much more.

   Public upgrading depends not on the entrepreneurial will of public U faculty, which exists in abundance, but on access to Hollywood-Silicon infrastructure.  The Stanford-Google-TED complex has this. UC and CSU do not: -now, after 3 years of cuts, less than ever.
• It's rather dumb Theory X rich-kid behavior to blame faltering Public U educational results on a lack of innovation rather than on a lack of money. 

  • good point well made
• If we focus on social development rather than on global revenue streams, it's clear that the TED-ED sector should actively partner with the publics rather than casting them as retros which their courseware production studios are destined to replace.
• public universities should hold the Udacities of the world to Theory Y standards of creative educational outcomes--excellent staging yes, but mass creativity as the actual point.

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• All that is solid must be melted into air for the entrepreneur to be free to innovate and thus transform.  The resulting wreckage and waste is part of progress, and must not be reduced through regulation.  This is true for shuttered factories, and also for high levels of inequality: both are part of liberating the entrepreneur to create the greater wealth of the future.
• Although years of reading Prof. Christensen makes me think he's personally humane, his theory is the business world's single most powerful rationalization for disrupting every type of humane condition, such as job security, tax-funded public infrastructure, or carefully nurtured, high-quality product lines
• Prof. Lepore concluded that "sustaining" innovations--which continuously improve a product--are far more successful that Prof. Christensen's theory admits.  Discussing a core Christensen example, the disk-drive industry, Prof. Lepore posited a more accurate history,
   

   In the longer term, victory in the disk-drive industry appears to have  gone to the manufacturers that were good at incremental improvements,  whether or not they were the first to market the disruptive new format.  Companies that were quick to release a new product but not skilled at  tinkering have tended to flame out.
• o disrupt disruption, particularly in a service sector like higher education, we need a better appreciation of the deeper purpose of disruptive innovation I mentioned above.  The history suggests that Prof. Christensen became influential  because he enhanced an top-down kind of innovation management, not because of his insights about innovation as such.
• tell this history to help us avoid interpreting Prof. Lepore's account to suggest that Clay Christensen's rise was based on a series of misreadings  of corporate histories that never got fact-checked by his propagandistic discipline.   To the contrary, Prof. Christensen became a pivotal figure in management history by using innovation to re-empower management.  We can see him, in retrospect, as offering a comprehensive antidote to what American capitalists could only regard as the poison of neo-workplace democracy.  Some 1980s business blockbusters were telling stockholders and executives to share power with a new, insufferably smart-ass "no-collar" generation of knowledge workers, and that only this concession would turn the tables on the Japanese.  Many owners and executives must have felt that this price of recovery was too hig
• post-capitalist university
• of. Christensen, in short, offered an antidote to an unexpected return of neo-workplace democracy. His work circulated widely in firms who wanted to avoid losing to more "innovative" competitors. But even in those contexts, his work was less about maximizing innovation and more about controlling it.
• n three main axioms
• he assumed that losing major industrial sectors to other countries is a natural law of capitalism
• ur employees' genuine love of excellence is not the solution: it's the problem.  They will keep making better, higher-quality products (Theory Y is true!).  Meanwhile, disruptive innovation will steal your market share with crappier, lower-quality products at new, low low prices.  Your employees do want to focus on higher quality and smarter technology.  But these are always, in the Christensen model, "sustaining innovations," which are bad for profits
• hird, this control must be exerted by management.  It is management that must interpret market requirements, and do so without concern for the human interests at stake and then compel employees to comply with these. In the Christensen antidote to a kind of shared governance with knowledge workers, management had a whole new lease on life and, indirectly, a gigantic claim to company resources. Companies should manage innovation with structures like "heavyweight teams."
• . In the case of university "reform," the management team transmits a preconceived mission: The Innovative University recounts how senior managers at BYU-Idaho pushed through unpopular changes like the elimination of sports teams and summer teaching breaks on the basis of unilateral decision rights--in their case rooted in collaboration with the senior leadership of the LDS Church itself.  (BYU-Idaho has an interesting teaching model that deserves independent analysis: my point here is that it was imposed through top-down managerialism wearing innovation's clothing.)
• Christensen antidote to knowledge-worker autonomy.   In contrast to professional authority, which is grounded in expertise and expert communities, managerial authority flows from its ties to owners and is formally independent of expertise.  Management obviously needs to be competent, but competence seems no longer to require either substantive expertise with the firm's products or meaningful contact with employees.  The absence of contact with and substantive knowledge of core activities, in managerial culture, function as an operational strengt
• he Christensen model does not favor university managers who understand what happens in the classroom and who bring students and faculty into the strategy process.  For employees and customers are exactly the people who want to sustain and improve what they already have, which in disruptive capitalism is a loser's game.
  
• The power of the Christensen script can be seen in the care with which MOOC advocates have been following it since 2012.  They first cast universities as overbuilt incumbents, the kind of places that do indeed hire nonfaculty professionals at ten times the rate of full-time tenured faculty in order to chase high-end customers and avoid the less demanding and underserved masses.  Second, MOOCsters slammed instructional employees as opposed to innovation: articles or books by analysts like Mark C. Taylor, Ann Kirschner, and Richard A. DeMillo heaped scorn on what Dr. DeMillo called "faculty-centered" universities. Third, during the 2012-2013 boom, MOOC entrepreneurs bypassed faculty to connect directly with venture capitalists, politicians, business leaders, and senior university managers.  One triumph of the campaign was the Udacity-San José State contract for three MOOC courses, which must have been the first time in history in which a university's outsourcing contract for one department's remedial curriculum was signed in the presence of the state's governor.  2014's MOOC business plays have continued the outreach to academic managers and the sidelining of teaching professionals (e.g., UC Berkeley, or Udacity's "nano degree").  MOOCs moved in so easy because they fit with the managerial ascendency over the professional authority of professors--the key institutional goal of disruptive innovation.
• ) Towards Sustainable Innovation
• back to universities. We need a new era for them, in which they are allowed to find sustainable financing and to support sustaining innovations.  (Something analogous needs to happen for industries that have huge social value, like polymer solar cells, but that can't attract private capital.)   Jill Lepore's critique of Clayton Christensen's historical errors moves us in this direction by discrediting disruption-as-such.  
• ronically, faculty can also get help from Clay Christensen's work, where a democratic impulse survives its deep managerial bias.
• rof. Christensen's work, asking two questions: (1) what job does the "customer" want done ( not what product does the customer want to buy); and (2), what jobs can the university "do uniquely well."
• 
   The Innovative University's answer to the first question was this:
• the job that students and policymakers need done is the bestowal of the insights and skills necessary not to just make a living but to make the most of life.
• it grounds even the "disruptive" (cut-rate) university in human development rather than job training.  It also leads to refocusing the university on its core elements: "(1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, (2) remembering and recalling the achievements of the past, and (3) mentoring the rising generation" (331).
•  The historical tragedy of the Schumpeter-Christensen model is that it elevated a managerial class that opposed the democratization of invention we now can't do without.
• all businesses want to escape from competitive markets. Once they have done so, however, the monopoly "rents" that they earn are attractive to other businesses. Schumpeterian creative destruction describes the way in which new innovations provide a way to breakdown the barriers that incumbents have erected.
• o I don't agree with this sentence: "Schumpeterian creative destruction describes the way in which new innovations provide a way to breakdown the barriers that incumbents have erected," because I think we've confused innovation with what breaks down incumbent barriers (and makes new barriers as fast as possible)--IP litigation; mergers and acquisitions; underselling, tie-ins, and some other practices that used to be called "unfair competition"; lobbying, campaign contributions, and related capturing of the political process; and so on.
• would never say that innovation isn't in there too, but it's been exploited as the most palatable front man for what would otherwise look like everyday predatory capitalist behavior that people would then feel justified regulating or eliminating (i.e., it would be seen as a firm pursuing it's narrow self interest and not as tech progress through cheaper-that-becomes-better).
• higher ed. I'm not at all opposed to learning technology, but to its top-down imposition on educators by managers who are using tech to pursue some other strategy, and who don't know or care about the impact on the quality of the product, which in this case is students' "creative capabilities" and which we cannot allow to be lowered and cheapened in the way photocopiers could be. Or so it seems to me.

  • good point!

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• isruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

• “big bang disruption.” “This isn’t disruptive innovation,” they warn. “It’s devastating innovation.”

• LOs became OERs but more importantly became blogs, slideshare, flickr, etc
• Funny how technologies that cost oodles of money, fail to gain uptake, and yet are based on rigid centrally managed structures will get funded by institutions – but the second you start releasing control to the masses there’s silence…

  • Brilliant!

• Attwell, G. & Pumilia, P.M. (2007) The New Pedagogy of Open Content: Bringing Together Production, Knowledge, Development, and Learning. Data Science Journal, 6, 211- 219.
• Burbules, N. C. (2006) "Self-Educating Communities: Collaboration and Learning Throughout the Internet," in Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader, Zvi Bekerman, Nicholas C. Burbules, and Diana Silberman-Keller, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 273–284.
• Calverley, G. and Shephard, K (2003) ‘Assisting the uptake of on-line resources: why good learning resources are not enough’, Computers and Education, Vol. 41, pp.205–224.
• Conole, G., McAndrew, P. & Dimitriadis, Y. (2010). The role of CSCL pedagogical patterns as mediating artefacts for repurposing Open Educational Resources’. In in F. Pozzi and D. Persico (Eds), Techniques for Fostering Collaboration in Online Learning Communities: Theoretical and Practical.
• Iiyoshi, T. & Kumar, M.S.V. (2008) Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
• Wiley, D. and Henson, H. (2006) 'An initial characterization of engagement in informal social learning around MIT OCW' Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences, pp. 832 - 837 ISBN:0-8058-6174-2

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• It turns out that reusability and pedagogical effectiveness are completely orthogonal to each other.  Therefore, pedagogical effectiveness and potential for reuse are   completely at odds with one another

  • Could not have put it better myself!!!

• Mentions that the repositories/cataloguing was a way to make sure the objects were found (as per library archives) = this was at the time when Google did not exist - now not much of an issue.
  Metadata/repositories institutionally set up - got nowhere (he was supporting one and knew it was not working but had a job so did it)! They were ghost towns.
  Using Blogs for work as a sideline - made a difference ...in thinking about the sharing + communities of practice + collaboration - this made them realise that this can be achieved by blogging/wikis (2 years b4 got them to the conference)
  Learning object = blast from the past cf some criminal act you were hoping everybody forgot about...;) LOL - assyntk on 2013-03-25

• On the basis of the benefits that these   terms might suggest, government and industry are spending substantial amounts   of money, giving rise to a veritable "educational object" and "standardization"   movement in educational technology.
• problems associated with this movement, all  of which arise in some way from the juxtaposition of narrow technical and  specialized concepts with the general and varied dimensions and contexts of  learning.
• Only recently has discourse in this area moved beyond broad generalization,  technical elaboration, or promotional pr?cis. To the knowledge of this author  (and as clamed by Banks [2002]), there have been no in-depth studies of the  pedagogical consequences of these systems and ways of thinking, and no  examinations of their epistemological and ideological implications. On a more  practical level, others have noted a general lack of adoption of these  technologies by both practitioners and vendors (e.g. Robson, 2003; Farance,   2003).

  • Well - exactly the same hype as now with MOOCs - aound 10 years on...
• perspective of someone who   has been actively involved in these activities and this environment for a number   of years, and with a special emphasis on the interests and values of public   education. It does so also in recognition of the fact that only through open   discussion of both positive and negative aspects can the vision of sharing educational   resources be made more relevant to the work of learning practitioners and to   learners themselves.
• There are few things, in other words, that can   not be learning objects. As David Merrill puts it, "No one seems to know   what a learning object is in the first place. One of the absurd definitions   I heard was, 'as small as a drop, as wide as the ocean.' In other words, if everything   is a learning object, then nothing is a learning object" (Merrill, as cited   in Welsch, 2002).

  • brilliant:)
• he term was "first   popularized by Wayne Hodgins in 1994 when he named the CedMA [sic; Computer   Education Management Association] working group 'Learning Architectures, APIs   and Learning Objects'" (Polsani 2002)
• he origin of this term in the    world of technical systems training is significant
• he term "object" in "learning   object" has clear origins in "object oriented" programming, design,   analysis and theory
• This programming   and design approach or "paradigm" (Alhir, 1998) has been developed   and consolidated in the area of software programming and design over the last   thirty years.
• the term "learning object" juxtaposes  two words that are in many ways incongruous and ultimately, incommensurable: The  first, "object," is a thoroughly and very specific technological paradigm--as  specialized terms such as "concurrency," "polymorphism" and "typing" indicate.  It is part of an approach whose basic principles are so specialized as to be  difficult to express in everyday language. And the second, "learning," is  equally extreme in its vagueness, generality and broadly non-technical nature.  In clear contrast to the dominance of the object-oriented paradigm in  programming and software design, there is no consensus among educational experts  as to how learning occurs or how it can best be understood. There is no  "all-pervasive" approach or "paradigm" for learning or education as is claimed  for programming and software design. "Pedagogy as well as instructional design,"  as Allert, Dhraief, and   Nejdl say, "are ill-structured domains" (2002).

  • I love this idea of "learning object" encapsulating the contrasting and incongruous paradigms by definition:)
• This incongruity can also be seen to repeat a negative historical pattern that has recurred in different   forms with previous innovations in educational technology. In this pattern,   these innovations are introduced into educational contexts and practices clearly   bearing the stamp of their technical origin. Instead of being presented in terms   familiar and meaningful to educators, they bear connotations that appear unclear   or even negative in these practical contexts.
• Seldom did investigators try to adopt   a teacher's perspective or appreciate the duality of continuity and change   that marked both schools and classrooms
• A substantial tradition of research into the spread or diffusion of innovations   among populations underscores this point. This research shows that the rate   of adoption increases significantly when innovations possess some of the following   characteristics: 1) simplicity, 2) compatibility with existing methods and techniques,   and 3) relative advantage in comparison with these established methods and techniques

  • I think cultural factors should be more emphasised here although existing methods and techniques sort of cover that...
• e-mail or mobile phones provide good examples of technologies   that meet these requirements
• In order for the positive potential of learning objects to be realized,   they need to be labelled, described, investigated and understood in ways that   make the simplicity, compatibility and advantages claimed for them readily apparent  to   teachers, trainers and other practitioners.
• the benefits of this standardization work will be manifold and variegated:
• Moreover, this content and these management   systems are often created in a manner that makes it very difficult if not impossible   to support their interchange or their successful interoperation.
• Standards in   e-learning seek to address these shortcomings by ensuring the interoperability,   portability and reusability of this content and of these systems.
• they are frequently described as "pedagogically neutral"   or "pedagogically agnostic"
• One prominent specification effort that emphasizes this type of neutrality   is the "SCORM" initiative (Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model):   It describes itself as providing "a pedagogically neutral means for designers   and implementers of instruction to aggregate learning resources for the purpose   of delivering a desired learning experience"

  • OMAG - the development of SCORM was supported by the US Dept of Defence!!!???
• being developed by the Advanced Distributed Learning   initiative (ADL), an effort sponsored by the White House Office of Science and   Technology Policy and the US Department of Defence.
• Dan   Rehak, one of the "chief architects" behind SCORM, has stated that   this framework, has "a limited pedagogical   model unsuited for some environments" (as cited in Kraan & Wilson,   2002). "SCORM," Rehak says, "is essentially about a single-learner   [whose learning is] self-paced and self-directed.

  • It's also mostly about content - but there is no reason why other things can't be hang off the content e.g. groupwork or project work etc.
• hese issues arise not from the particularities   of SCORM's or ADL's approach to standards and specifications, but from its implied   understanding of pedagogy: namely, from its simultaneous claims to pedagogical   relevance and pedagogical neutrality.
• specifications and applications that are truly   pedagogically neutral cannot also be pedagogically relevant.
• Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear the imprint of the ideology   and culture of the American military-industrial complex--of ways of thinking   that are related either marginally or antithetically to the interests and values   of education generally and public education in particular.
• Noble begins his study by emphasizing the preponderance of military educational   research over its public counterpart in the United States:
• within government agencies, the military spends seven dollars for every civilian   dollar spent on educational technology research. Each year, for example, the   military spends as much on educational technology research and development   as the Department…of Education has spent in a quarter century."

  • This is rather frightening...but I guess similar goes for other areas of scientific research etc..
• The characteristics of this worldview that are of special significance in this   paper are its emphasis on "systems thinking" and, of course, the prominence   of "uniformity and standardization."
• n military contexts, "systems thinking"   is often realized in the form of cybernetic, "man-machine" weapons systems
• "theorize humans as component parts of weapons systems"
• Lt Col Braskin argue   more broadly for an understanding of "learning" in general "as   a weapon system"

  • understanding learning as a weapon system - dear GOD!!
• his diagram depicts without  apparent exaggeration a vision of e-learning and e-learning specification that  US military sees as attractive. This vision is one where components--human   organs, machine components, devices and objects--work together as a larger  system, with each part engineered to achieve   optimal performance.

  • Human organs - the target of learning and integration with industrial-military machine...
• he key participants   in the e-learning standardization movement--Rehak and Hodgins, for example--are   engineers themselves
• Public education, despite its radically different goals and levels of funding,   can be seen as having embarked on a larger, idiosyncratic "edspecs"   enterprise.
• Looking at the man-machine system schematized in the diagram above, it is easy to see that vision of e-learning   specifications and systems for military applications is rather far afield from   the practices, contexts and values that dominate public (and other forms of) education. The  obvious fact is that the goals of public education,   however they might be construed, are radically different than   those of the American military.

  • the sad thing is that many would have you believe that there would be nothing wrong in applying a similar design to public education. And the way HE is spoken of these days as providing people who fit with the skills required by the industry in the most cost effective way, perhaps this is what we are encouraging?
• Developers   and designers will have to recognize and choose relevant (and probably differing)   pedagogical positions, or risk pedagogical irrelevance.

  • I guess this already happens in the industry judgng by all these websites on learning design...but also see MOODLE which specificially declared its pedagogical bias recently (with most recent major update a couple of years ago).

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• as they   are created or generated by content authors, and second, as they are displayed   or used by students and other client groups.

  • fundametal difference between web 1.0 approach to reating 'learning objects' to everybody being able to make and remake the web/objects
• description of the sine wave function

  • and that the teaching of it can be devoid of contextual information relating to the discipline - but can it? is it the most effective way to teach?

  • There is an underlying assumption that there is only one way to describe sine wave function correctly. Also that there is only one way to teach sine wave function...
• The economics are relentless. It makes no financial sense to spend millions of dollars producing multiple versions of similar learning objects when single versions of the same objects could be shared at a much lower cost per institution. There will be sharing, because no institution producing its own materials on its own could compete with institutions sharing learning materials.
• Course sharing between institutions is difficult to define and maintain. One reason is the regional nature of course articulations – it is notable that Oregon State University has made no attempt to articulate courses offered by, say, community colleges in Florida. The detailed topic-by-topic definition or articulation agreements are also a challenge. It is unlikely that any course could be shared by any significant number of institutions in different states or different nations.
• Whether at the K-12 or college level, today’s classroom is already an   example of extensive resource sharing.

  • That is actually not true
• The clearest example of resource sharing   the old way in today’s classrooms occurs through the use of textbooks.

  • Textbook is not sharing in the grassroots way. And at universities you are not expected to repeat the txtbook contents exactly anyway.
• Moreover, there appears to be no resource metadata and the search mechanism provided on the Merlot site is no better than standard web search engines.

  • Actually there is metadata and there is nothing wrong with the standard webs search mechanisms these days - they are often superior to the bespoke database search engines...
• As we can see from this discussion of articulation, there is a need for a mechanism   to connect online learning resources with detailed course objectives.

  • I guess the Nottingham initiatives sort of address this need of a syndicated search (see Open Education week).

  • He highlights the problem with locating the relevant resources - it takes time and the repositories are not structured to enable it. What I think is that the repositories should be catalogued in Google or library catalogues so that we can search it using tools we are already familair with...
• MarcoPolo is a compilation of teaching resources   from six educational institutions that provide free Internet content for K-12   education
• adherence to national   curriculum and evaluation standards in the subject areas.
• Material is categorized   by grade level, and individual items are matched to individual learning topics.

  • What is the currculum changes - also this is only applicable in the states - what about other English speaking countries?
• a closed project
• There is no centralized search facility   and no metadata listings for the resources. The only curricula supported are   United States school curricula, so the resource is not useful in a global marketplace
• Much better systems of categorization and searching, and more   robust mechanisms for updating and submissions are required.
• Learning resources   need to be tied more closely to learning objectives, but in such a way as not   to be tied to a specific curriculum.
• It is nearly impossible to identify   consistency in format, scope, methodology, educational level or presentations.
• university courses are fundamentally different from K-12   courses
• While   this argument may be true enough, it is important to look at the cost of creating   courses, and especially online courses, in this manner. Creating an online course   from scratch is a long, labour intensive process. Costs can vary from CDN $4,000   to CDN $100,000.

  • Why is cost the sole criterion to be taken into account in evaluating the course? If the value added by putting an angle on the old story is worth while, why not look at making it cheaper and easier to create courses from scratch for online delivery rather than creating cumbersome expensive monsters that nobody has time or budget to update?
• At $5 per student, the company would make the $1,000,000   investment back in one year! The economics are very good, and this excellent   resource would be cheaper than even the book alone.

  • Except that you do not take into account the cost of infrastructure and its maintenance which enables delivery via this medium...and wil the kids be able to keep it or does it stay with the school etc..
• From a certain perspective, an online course is nothing more than just another application, and software engineers have long since learned that it is inefficient to design applications from scratch. Educators need to apply design techniques learned long ago by the software industry, and in particular, they need to learn a concept called Rapid Application Design (RAD).
• Rapid Application Design is a process which allows software engineers to develop   products more quickly and of higher quality. RAD involves several components,   including a greater emphasis on client consulting, prototyping, and more informal   communications (see http://sysdev.ucdavis.edu/WEBADM/document/rad_toc.htm   for more information)
• re-use of   software components within the context of a CASE (computer-aided software engineering)   environment
• An online course, viewed   as a piece of software, may be seen as a collection of reusable subroutines   and applications.
• An online course, viewed as a collection of learning objectives,   may be seen as a collection of reusable learning materials
• Wayne Wieseler, an author working with   Cisco Systems, writes, “reusable content in the form of objects stored   in a database has become the Holy Grail in the e-learning and knowledge management   communities”
• another concept from computer programming, object-oriented   design
• A third major concept drawn from the world of computing science – and   especially from the recent emergence of Internet technologies – is the   use of open standards in course construction.
• The IMS Protocols and SCORM
• The IMS (Instructional Management Systems) Project is a consortium of educational   institutions, software companies and publishers. The Project’s objective   is to “promote the widespread adoption of specifications that will allow   distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors to work   together (in technical parlance, 'interoperate')” (IMS Global Learning   Consortium, 2000)
• The common language adopted by IMS and SCORM – and being adopted by database   programmers, librariansm and designers around the world – is the eXtensible   Markup Language, or XML, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (1997a).   XML is a means of representing documents according to their internal structure.
• There are two major facets to authoring learning objects. The first is the content   of the learning object itself; the second is the metadata describing   the learning object.
• in practice designers have opted for a performance-based or competency-based   theory of design.
• The Learning Object Economy: A Polemic
• To put the question in as sharp a light as possible: do first-year engineering   students need a brand-new Shakespeare course, or will the interpretation   developed last year (or two years ago, or in Saskatchewan) do the job? And moreover:   is it fair to require that students, whose primary goal is at best a surface   understanding of “Hamlet” to pay for the development of a   brand-new interpretation, when last year’s, or Saskatchewan’s,   would have done just fine?

  • OMAG! - seriously? do you mean the university's reason for existance i.e. providing new interpretations and thinking all the time should be demolished entirely because it would be cheaper? Well - I'd rather somebody just sat down and talked to the class without any of the whizz bang new tech in his case. Cheaper, more creative and more open.
• I agree that hand-rolled bread, carefully prepared by a master chef, is superior   in quality to a standard loaf purchased at a supermarket. But to a person who   is merely hungry – rather than a connoisseur – the obligation to   purchase only hand-rolled bread is more than just an imposition, it amounts   to a denial of basic sustenance for many.

  • how about an ambition to provide hand rolled bread to all? will those who cannot pay be fed pig slops just to keep their bellies from rumbling?
• especially in less developed nations

  • I dont think this is the real question here?
• There is very much a tension, between those who create the knowledge, and who   jealously guard their monopoly over its propagation and distribution, and those   who must consume that knowledge to get a job, to build a life, to partake fully   in society. My personal belief is that arts and humanities professors –   even those who teach senior courses – will have to redefine their approach   or be priced out of existence. Probably history, not argument, will show whether   this belief is well founded.

  • What does this guy have against liberal arts professors? If you are having an argument along these lines you should perhaps go all the way and say that nobody needs Sheakspeare or lib arts to get a job.

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