A learning system to meet the knowledge needs of a complex era

George Siemens, PhDJuly 17, 2013

edX

August 5, 1949

April 14, 1994

Assertions:

1. Knowledge needs are today defined by complexity and interconnectivity

2. Emerging employment opportunities are knowledge-based

3. The idea of a university is expanding (complexifying)

4. Knowledge institutions mirror the architecture of information

The Conference Board & McKinsey & Co

McKinsey Quarterly, 2012

Increasing diversity of student profiles

The U.S. is now in a position when less than half of students could be

considered fulltime students. In other words, students who can attend campus five days a week nine-to-five,

are now a minority.(Bates, 2013)

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2013

OECD 2013

The last decade, two defining trends:

1. Participatory culture and social/technical connectivity (Rise of the Individual)

2. Transparency and surveillance culture (Rise of Data and Analytics)

Expanding knowledge needs requires expanding learning opportunities

The process of learning/unlearning/knowledge development is still happening through legacy models that do not account for today’s nature of information and knowledge development.

When we create, it can be analyzed and new patterns can be discovered

(understood, evaluated, interrogated)

Information fragmentation…loss

of narratives of coherence

The problem: Once we’ve fragmented content and conversation,

we need to stitch them together again so we can act meaningfully

Knowledge in pieces

diSessa, 1993

Reducing the basic units of education:From courses/workshops/modules to competencies

Agents in a system possess only partial information

(Miller and Page 2007)

…to make sense and act meaningfully requires connections to be formed between agents

Coherence is an orientation about the meaning and value of information elements based on how they are connected, structured, and related

Antonovsky 1993

Networked information doesn’t have a center

So we (socially) create temporary centers:Shared sensemaking

So we (technologically) create temporary centers:content and conversation aggregation

Stitching things together:

Sensemaking and wayfinding through complex information flows and trends to extract what is important and relevant

“Learning and knowledge creation is often distributed across multiple media and sites in networked environments. Traces of such activity may be fragmented across multiple logs and may not match analytic needs. As a result, the coherence of distributed interaction and emergent phenomena are analytically cloaked”

Suthers, Rosen, 2011

What we are seeing is the complexification of higher education

Learning needs are complex, ongoing

Simple singular narrative won’t suffice going forward

The idea of the university is expanding and diversifying

Much of what MOOCs address is the shadow education system. They are not actual competition with the existing education system

https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/home

“Both student and teacher are unhappy when chained to curricula and syllabi, to tests and mediocre standards. An atmosphere of uninspired and uninspiring common sense may well produce satisfactory mastery of technical “know how” and testable factual information. Such an atmosphere, however, stifles genuine understanding and the spirit of adventure in research.”

Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University 1959

MOOCs/DS106: Changed relationship between teacher/learner

Distributed, chaotic, emergent.

Learners expected to create, grow, expand domain and share personal sensemaking through artifact-creation

An education system that fails to emulate the characteristics information in an era is

doomed to fail. Information today is:

OpenDistributedScalableSocialGenerativeNetworkedSelf-organizedAdaptiveGlobal

Participatory Pedagogies(Collis & Moonen, 2008)

(Askins, 2008)(Harvard Law School, 2008)

Distributed content and conversations

State of Wisconsin, 2012

Anderson, T. & Dron, J. (2011). Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12(3), 80-97, http://goo.gl/j3mRF

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Group work in MOOCs

Kuhn: accumulation of anomalies, create “phase changes” (sorry, hate the ‘p’ word):

dramatic change, alteration of core premises, development of a framework to account for sub-changes

Carlota Perez: techno-economic change

Education systems track the architecture of information of an era

7 Primary Tensions in open online courses

Automation vs. Creation

Social vs. Scripted

Structured vs. Self-Organized

University-based vs. Informal learning

Assessment/recognition vs. Personal growth

Functioning in existing system vs. Transforming existing system

Learner owned vs. Organization owned interaction spaces

Twitter/Gmail: gsiemens