Hapgood

(With apologies to Jerry Garcia). OK, so here’s the thing. I just want someone to model what the Pay it Forward, Pay it Back plan looks like in a variety of cases compared to actual existing alternatives. That would seem an easy thing, something that legislatures and policy houses would do before taking positions on Continue reading

I’ve just finished reading Susan Cain’s Quiet, which is a must-read for anyone in instructional design. (And by must-read I don’t mean you should read it because you will like it, but that you should read it because to not read it would be negligent: this book will open your eyes to an educational system Continue reading

From Thrun’s blog, explaining why the Udacity approach didn’t work well for SJSU: The traditional-semester pacing of the classes didn’t work well with the lifestyles and time-demands of the students in the program. In fact, 30% of our students worked 30+/hours per week in addition to coursework. Another 40% worked at least part-time. Work, families, Continue reading

My sense is that xMOOCs have a community problem. Sure, you can get an answer to a math problem at 2 a.m. from a student in the Czech Republic, and that’s pretty cool. But whereas cMOOC communities persist and do meaningful things in the world, in general xMOOC communities are less robust. They don’t persist. Continue reading

Presentation I gave at InstructureCon on Distributed Flip types of things. I blow through the presentation in about 16-17 minutes, but stick around for the Q & A if you have time, I think it was a great discussion. Continue reading

I agree with the bulk of the Salon article We Must Hate Our Children. This stat, however, is pretty egregious stat abuse. [Y]oung American adults are less likely than older Americans to have attended college. This has to be the first generation for whom that’s true. We’re putting the history of American progress in reverse. Continue reading

One of the interesting things that is going on right now is that MOOC providers, unable to find a path to sustainability in the direct-to-consumer market, have now positioned themselves as providers of materials for campus-based flipped classes, part of a larger trend Amy Collier and I have been referring to as the “distributed flip”. Continue reading

I gave a presentation at InstructureCon last week on the distributed flip, and in particular, how it related to MOOCs. I thought the session went extremely well, and when the video is available a couple weeks from now I’ll post it. But I wanted to get the main argument down here. I flew through it Continue reading

This is a short presentation I gave our advisory board at the college recently. What I wanted to explain to the board (mostly businessmen and political people) is why we are looking at Open Course Frameworks with Lumen/Kaleidoscope. For the uninitiated, Open Course Frameworks are to commercial courseware what open textbooks are to textbooks. The Continue reading

So I’ve taken a bit of ribbing for my Chromebook purchase since the PRISM leak (although it’s increasingly looking like PRISM is overstated, and other aspects not tied to providers are understated — so I guess we’re all going to stop using the internet and phone service now…).  But as quirky as my little $250 Continue reading