Mar
12
Evidence-Based Education
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Paradox: nothing is more measured, assessed or examined than education, but we still seem to know remarkably little about how people “learn” in full sense of the word. And while the world is full of learned academics with impressive qualifications in “cognitive processing” and the like, try to build a “learning system” for humans and you encounter immediate design problems. Indeed, it is easier to teach machines to learn. So each generation seems to approach the problem – that each of us learns differently, under different stimuli and at different ages – in a different way. Once it was a matter of coursework and textbook. In this age, the Age of Assessment, satisfactory proof of learning is accomplished by testing. Never mind that the learner may have no resulting ability to deploy his or her learning in any other context than a test; we are developing people who can jump immediate hurdles and may not be able to successfully navigate the great oceans of life in front of them. This applies to schools and universities, but also to the rapidly growing vocational and training sectors.
Over in the medical environment, we have had evidence-based practice for over a decade. This is now becoming a discipline in its own right, combining systematic review of literature (for example, the Cochrane Collection) with statistical analysis, meta-analysis and risk-benefit analysis to produce, in combination with the patient record, some really effective results in diagnostic terms. These are now widely deployed in different configurations by information service solution providers like Elsevier, WK Health and Hearst Medicine. As genetic analysis and custom drug treatment become more common, this will no doubt develop, but as we have it today, the information service players are fully plugged into the system. How different to this is education!
Despite the huge collection of indicative statistics, there is still no feedback loop in education which tells teachers what works with certain types of learning profiles. As they develop and test digital learning environments, private sector learning systems developers (not just systems houses but content developers too) are getting significant feedback on the efficacy of their work. Schools store an ever-growing amount of performance data, and much of this can be related to learning systems. Examination boards have yet more (Digression: my most depressing moment in education this year – going to a parent’s evening with a sixth former studying classical civilizations. Question to teacher: what do you recommend as additional reading (I have shelves full of possibilities); Answer: we do not recommend reading around the subject. It only confuses people to have several interpretations and inhibits their ability to secure high pass grades!). And yet all of this content or evidence is disaggregated, not plumbed for learning experience significance, and there is no tradition of building ideas about what input might secure learning gains – just give the learner another diagnostic test!
These notes were sparked in the first place by the announcement last month of the creation of a Coalition for Evidence-Based Education by the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York. I also know of the TIER project in the Netherlands (involving the Universities of Amsterdam, Groeningen and Maastricht) and have great respect for the ongoing work of Better magazine, created by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Research and Reform in Education. But all of these seem to me as much concerned with applying evidence to changing policy at government or school administration level, as they are with developing practitioner tools. And they exemplify something else – there is not a publisher/education solutions supplier loose around any of them. True, no one ever field-trialled a textbook (though I once did this with a UK Schools Council course in the 1970s called “Geography for the Young School Leaver” – and it had dramatic effects on the presentation and construction of the learning journies involved). Yet here we are in the age of Pearson’s MyLab or the Nature Education’s Principles of Biology online learning experience. The age of iterative learning devices, wired for feedback and capable of recording both anonymized statistical performance data and giving diagnostic input to a single user or teacher on what needs support and re-inforcement in a learning process. Yet I know of no developer who trades use with feedback in terms of co-operating with government and schools in trialling, testing and developing new learning environments. And given that these are iterative – they tend to change over time as refinements are made and non-statistical feedback is procured – I know of no schemes which are able to demonstrate the increasing efficiency of their learning tools.
ELIG (the European Leaning Industry Group) has issued members of its marketing board, like myself, with an urgent requirement to uncover good case studies which demonstrate the efficacy of learning tools in practice. I can find plenty, but they are all based on the findings of the supplier. I can even find some where a headmaster says “exam results increased X% while we were using this system” – but they never indicate whether this was the sole change that led to the finding. If I were a teacher with a poor reader with real learning difficulties, where do I go for the ML Consult or UpToDate medical review equivalent – a way of defining my pupil’s problem and relating it to success with others with similar problems, and the learning systems feed back on the systems that worked? The answer is that you do not go anywhere, since education, one of the most lonely and secretive jobs in the professional world, is still not quite prepared to enter the digital age with the rest of us. And its suppliers, sharing something of that culture, still operate in an isolated way that also predates the new world of consolidation and massive systems development now beginning in this marketplace. And the Learner? Processed or Educated? It all depends on the feedback loop.
Jan
5
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
My holiday reading, courtesy of Skip Pritchard who gave it to me, has been Michael Korda’s vast biography of T E Lawrence, and despite my familiarity with the story, I have found it an entrancing experience. Lawrence is almost impossible to reconstruct, since he shone a different light in the direction of every individual he met, and one is left feeling that nowhere does a real Lawrence exist. So very like the information game, then! Every observer sees a different fraction of play, and no one can predict the outcome. This comment is meant to mask my residual guilt at reading my book while my knee mended and not writing pages of forecasts and predictions for the amusement of readers, and to confirm my frailties as a prophet of anything.
Lawrence wrote “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, one of the world’s unread classics (and almost unreadable in parts: he lost the only copy of the full manuscript on Reading train station and had to recreate 200,000 words, during which he clearly became bored.) In 800 words I can communicate seven thoughts – not so much Pillars as pillows, and not predictions but observations of this unknowable industry. Here goes:
1. Some think its about content and others that it is about platforms and technology. For me it is still about communications, and the greatest challenge is still holding people’s attention, having gained their recognition. Even Facebook hits a plateau. The gods remain Reputation, Identity, and Attention.
2. You are either a communication company or you are not. News Corp is a format company. It does newspapers, film and television and has little corporate bandwidth for non-format communications. This cannot be changed by executive whim, and the collapse of Beyond Oblivion, its music initiative, before the holidays (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds), as well as the veil of silence around the performance of The Daily on the iPad, following on as they do the oblivion that was My Space, demonstrates all of this very well. Yet Mr Murdoch has signed on to Twitter. There is no evidence yet that the world can be saved with a single Tweet. There is no evidence yet that traditional media and information businesses can recreate themselves in new marketplaces without either starting afresh somewhere else or by buying a new business and moving into it. Boinc.
3. Apple, according to MacRumors (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/apples-january-media-event-to-involve-digital-textbooks-and-education/), is about to enter the textbook market, maybe with Pearson and certainly via the iPad. This was apparently a dearly held dream of Steve Jobs, at least according to Walter Isaacson, who is shaping up to be not just the biographer but also the Delphic oracle. I have some doubts – not about the iPad as a display device, but about whether markets want textbooks re-invented. Learners would like learning re-invented, and made easier and more compelling. Textbooks are an extinct format. And learning should operate equally well on whatever platform you have available. What a waste of all this energy around eLearning if we abolish the old formats like textbooks and replace them with rigid device platforms. And yet I am sure that the analysts are right – there are only a few global growth markets and education is the largest.
4. Then I had a great comment from Brad Patterson at EduLang (www.edulang.com). He points out that 500 million people are trying to learn English and only 50 million can afford textbooks, online or otherwise. So his business model for his interesting TOEFL and TOIEC Simulators is “pay what you can”, with half going to a reading charity. In many ways this is very neat – it reaches out to 450 million people with a trust relationship, and could be a really interesting business model to watch. Above all, how encouraging it is to see someone moving the goalposts – we did not score many goals in regular business model configurations so lets applaud the courage of someone doing something different.
5. Semantic Web technology and deployment in mass markets is getting closer and closer. I took part in the beta of Garlik (www.garlik.com) some 3 years ago, partly because of an interest in technology around identity, and partly out of interest in technologies derived from the University of Southampton Computer Science department, and blessed by such eminences as Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt – and Sir Tim Berners Lee himself. Two days before Christmas Garlik was sold to Experian, in a move that I think was as significant as Reuters buying ClearForest all those years ago. Garlik protects personal identity through web search, was founded by the men who built the UK online banks Egg and First Direct, and backed by Doughty Hanson. This is a straw in a wind which will go galeforce.
6. But if the Semantic Web is going to be so clever, and linked data will recreate so many service environments, where is it now? Well, look at the obvious places. In most of our economies building and construction is the largest sector in terms of activity and players, large and small, and has great companies serving it with supplier and materials information. Thus, in a US market replete with Reed Construction, Hanley Wood and McGraw-Hill. But what if a semantic web-based environment were able to search all online catalogues and directories to produce a sweeping coverage of suppliers and products that was at once more detailed and more comprehensive than any directory-style database, and could include more metadata from suppliers and users to create a continually developing industry specification site, deliverable and self-formatting to every platform and device? That is what interests me about MaterialSource, (http://www.materialsource.com/about) as well as its use of SPARQL, Semantic Web Pages for faceted and graph-based browsing, smartphone and tablet Apps using HTML5, ontologies etc, etc. If they do it, someone will have to buy them!
7. I keep on thinking about the neglect of audio, so I was delighted to see SoundCloud (http://soundcloud.com/). There has to be room for an audio portal, and a community for sharing sound and cross-referencing its sources and users. I anticipate that they know things about users that Beyond Oblivion didn’t.
Last words of a predictive nature before I get back to real work. A correspondent asks “what technology are you following in 2012!” Since I say every week that I am not following technologies but users, I take mild offense at this, but I do admit to a penchant for 3D printing. Now that really could have an impact. Especially in medical workflow. I have also been asked by a venture capitalist who should know better what is likely “to be certain” to succeed this year. He is a serious man so I owe him a serious answer: anything that saves more time and money than it costs. The prime example this year in the UK has been Shutl, a delivery logistics service that gets your online purchases to you physically (average delivery time in London was 90 minutes, with a cost of £5). Is that all the queries? I am beginning to feel like an Agony Aunt!
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