Mar
5
MOOCs Mood
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
I have been rumbling silently about MOOCs for a long time, but it was only when I read a report on the Domain of One’s Own experiments that I realised what it was about Massive Open Online Courses that gave me a sense of disquiet. MOOCs have had huge publicity in the last six months, and as always we seem to be convinced that a single initiative is going to Save education / universities / educational content / publishing / Life on Earth. Yet clearly not all MOOCs are alike. And their shooting to prominence is no accident. If you look up the history then you find that you can relate them to Buckminster Fuller, Douglas Engelbart, the Khan Academy, and a group of Canadian educators (I am now a Canadian Nationalist by Marriage, so underline with pride that the term was created by a faculty member at the University of Prince Edward Island!).
But I cannot claim much else. A whole raft of MOOCs are simply instructional materials online presented much as the Open University did in the UK from the 1960s and its South African equivalent from a decade earlier. OK, techniques have changed a bit and Instructional design has improved a s a workflow model, but this is essentially distance learning as of old. Course members have no connection with each other and while I am delighted to see distance learning updated and to see it re-promoted I am at a loss to find a revolution in what many major universities, and people like Udacity and Coursera, are offering. It is good, in a networked world, to see the internet used as a delivery mechanism, but the pattern of development in a networked society has been for the network to change the way we do things, as well as deliver it more effectively.
We are on safer ground, I feel, when we look at so-called “connectivist” models around MOOCs. Cast your mind back to those early network diagrams, and move away from star network models and one to many thinking. Long term network impact comes when everyone is connected to everyone equally, and in a MOOCs environment this pre-supposes that all learners and instructors are equally so connected. Elsewhere we have learnt about the powerful nature of educational change through collaboration in small groups – as a class or a project group. We know that groupwork styles are no bar to effective assessment, and that for many they speed learning processes. And we know that what we desire are learning outcomes that are reliable and certificated, not the importation of real world learning environments into the network for the sake of it. I see us then as re-iterating the break-out from the school/classroom nexus at very many levels. Second Life was clearly one attempt: in true network fashion it has ceased to be a fad, is being re-absorbed, and virtual reality learning will come back again, perhaps alongside connectivist MOOCs, in a new synthesis before long.
But for all of this to happen something must happen at the learner end of things At present learners have no way of managing their educational experiences online, synthesizing their learning, keeping their own record of what content impacted with them and constantly collecting and reframing successful knowledge breakthroughs. Well, its all on a hard disk somewhere, but it is not educationally or network portable. Just as the Electronic Lab Notebook, as a Cloud service, and developments like Mendeley and ReadCube, will emerge as a vital researcher tools for both productivity and compliance purposes, so the Lifelong Learning Portal will remind you of what suddenly made Pythagoras clear to you, that you can always rehearse that key video on the Theory of Relativity, that the papers you have written and the certificates you hold can be auto-matched with job requirements, that you can allow limited access to recruiters seeking to match job needs, that your qualifications open up these opportunities for you in terms of more specialized education , and that whenever you learn you are sitting next to someone who can help you – as you help them.
So far I have seen nothing quite like this (and may never!) but I was very intrigued by the work of the faculty at Mary Washington University (http://bavatuesdays.com/domain-of-ones-own-faculty-initiative/) who are working on creating a Domain of One’s Own development. So far this seems to be a faculty-only initiative, and so far it is as much about faculty awareness of the need to place themselves in the network as anything else. But I liked the enthusiasm and the phased development of the faculty immersion – an important reminder that while the network nature of our society and economy is what sustains us, there is still the possibility for whole cadres and classes of people to imagine that their daily lives are not network-orientated – and, amazingly, educationalists have been less network orientated than many others. Certainly their students!
Feb
22
Viewable Impressions II
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
Day Two began with a trip down Memory Lane – a presentation from the Editor of Estates Gazette (EGi) that at once reminded me that it is now 16 years since Mark Kelsey’s innovative interactive service at Reed Business engaged that most conservative of audiences, the British commercial property agent, and that EGi itself needs, like us all, to adapt to changing market circumstance. The old magazine is still there in print, and in replica on iPad (50% of users have one) with embedded video (this edition published a revolutionary 24 hours before the print!). The sale is still a bundle, and at £3,000 for an individual, and £30k multi-user licences fairly normal, cannot be called a low price deal. In difficult markets for commercial property net growth is a problem, but the hint in this presentation that the answer lies in data integration seems to me just right. Enable all that data on occupancy, planning history (zoning), ownership etc to be linkable, and you have the ability to mine the data for building reports (they have created 635,000 so far) and for custom re-use. They have just signed their first exclusive contract with a major agent: this data really needs to be used in conjunction with the agent’s own data to make sense. And of course they are redesigning, going global with links to major property trade shows etc, but to me the essence lies in the data. Get it all on one platform, encourage users to avoid print through the pricing bundle so as to increase margins, and then play the data game to become the bedrock internal information service provider for the agencies. Digital may make you smaller, but it should also make you more profitable and very sticky in increasingly less competitive markets.
Someone who clearly gets it is Charles Thiede, the CTO at Informa Business. His portfolio, with revenues around $400m and an operating margin of $140 m is 80% digital in its revenue base, and is concentrated around Healthcare, Global Trade (Lloyds, in print since 1724) and market research (Datamonitor). He spoke lovingly of the campaign for data discovery. Data flows naturally from the business – Lloyds report 65 million navigational positions on 72,000 commercial vessels each year – but everywhere it is locked up in spreadsheets, search results, structured databases, reports, filters etc. The message was clear: re-platform to enable access to data, allow modular and customizable research, and then drive directly towards integration with customer workflow. His current methodology is the Tableau data visualization tool, but this perhaps is less important than the principles involved: turn your customer into your collaborator, put personalization at the heart of the matter, and recognize that the user is now, in every sense, the Publisher, and you are the enabling service provider.
Regular readers here will know that a drought of such undiluted Kool Aid will have made your correspondent tired and emotional – or at least in need of a strong drink. And indeed some other presentations also drove in that direction. Bryan Glick, editor in chief of Computer Weekly, clearly took the right step when he and his colleagues deserted print in April 2011. But new owners TechTarget, while they have 200k Computer Weekly subscribers digitally rather than 90k in print, have a business with a revenue base closer to £5m than the £20 m they had in print at its late 1990s peak. The way to address this issue lies, as the previous paragraph indicates, in the service base rather than in events (good as they are) or other traditional industry diversification expedients. What happened to the Computer Weekly community, one wondered, and of its product data from those innumerable and interminable industry press releases? Or is this business that the new owner does in other ways in other places? To a certain extent the industry must get used to “Get Smaller – with bigger margins”, but that can only be tolerable if the full service supply opportunity is also being exploited. In this whole debate, only Charles Thiede mentioned the Internet of Things – a clue to how fascinated the magazine community, especially in B2B, has remained with the editorial and production process for news, and how detached they still remain from where their client interest really lies.
John Kennedy of IBM tried to improve the customer focus at the end, and Christian Ropke, Managing Director of ZEIT ONLINE, wanted to re-assure us that in a well-managed newspaper economy, loyal to print, like Germany, then online could run alongside print and succeed in pleasing differing tastes of the same readers. His 25,000 subscribers are 5% of print and generate 33m uniques a month. When he inelegantly proclaimed that “The Shitstorm Never Came”, I was left wondering. In the comfortable offices of Die Zeit, would anyone notice? Out there in commercial property, or shipping or technology sales life may seem quite a bit different.
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