Online courses and MOOCs may be a poor substitute for in-person learning with a charismatic teacher, but they are light-years better than nothing, and are particularly relevant for higher education and specific skills, when students are self-motivated.

Universities, professional organizations, and educational nonprofits should keep these audiences in mind when developing new, free curricula.

It’s a huge audience. Billions of people lack the knowledge and skills gained by a college education. The following map shows the fraction of people enrolled in college or university, relative to the number of college-age teens and young adults:

Most countries fail to give their citizens a college education. Any country in the map which is not dark red is not college-educating a large proportion of it’s citizens. (The statistics exceed 100% when there are many adult-age students in school.)

But as more and more of the population is online, particularly via mobile devices, there are real possibilities for online learning.

In an extreme example, tiny Swaziland (landlocked within South Africa) has 1.2 million citizens, but only one university (serving <6000 undergrads, relative to ~120k young adults of college age). Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Swaziland’s school system allows few students to advance to secondary school or college. Of the 20 kids in the above photo, maybe one kid will go to college. However, in 2011, 18% of the Swaziland population was using the internet. Could they learn online?

Similarly in Asia, Bangladesh has ~150 million citizens. 43% of the population over age 15 is literate. There are 88 universities, educating 277k post secondary students — only 13% of the college-age citizens. Internet is used by 22% of the population (33 million people), mostly via their mobile phones. (Mobile internet is the only internet most places outside the capital Dhaka.) Can Bangladeshis learn meaningful skills online?

Some could. If we make more online courses available.

More statistics

The education statistics in Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia are particularly grim. College educations in Malawi, Niger, and Chad hover around 1-2%. Madagascar is 4%. This is highly correlated to the wealth of a country.

This measure, the Gross enrollment ratio (GER) is the ratio of the undergrads to college-aged citizens. Here is a graph of GER vs. per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of the economic strength of a country:

The overal diagonal trend is that richer countries send more of their students to college. Curiously, there are outliers, such as wealthy Qatar which has only 12% tertiary GER due to other social factors which suppress education in their society.

Another way to look at this is to see how many high school students continue to college. In no society does everyone go to college. The following graph compares the fraction of society that goes to high school vs. college, in countries worldwide:

In the orange triangle above, potentially college-educated adults have their dreams squashed. For example, in the Arab world, 69% of society goes to high school and 23% to college; in developing sub-Saharan Africa, 41% of the population goes to high school and 8% go to college; in east Asia and the Pacific, 80% go to high school but only 30% go to college.

Technology itself is not the answer

Brazilian class using One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computers.

Of course, any dream that technology can conquer educational disparities needs a serious reality check. One of the more notable failures is the One Laptop per Child project, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Nicholas Negroponte. Despite their claims that by distributing $100 laptops, “we have seen two million previously marginalized children learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities.” In 2012, two separate studies — one in Nepal and the other in Peru — concluded that kids using the computers gained little or no benefit in terms of improved language or math skills or school attendance.

But that does not mean we should not try. Cheap laptops, tablets, and internet-connected smart phones are proliferating at an amazing rate.  More online courses, with substantial, meaningful content — delivered to these students online — can make a difference for increasing numbers of learners who otherwise lack any real options.

The internet has demonstrated profound power to reshape societies, with social media fueling the protests of the Arab Spring. When classrooms are unavailable or limited, online courses are a huge deal. An online course has a clear curriculum, delivers content with text, audio, videos and/or interactivity, and provides some type of assessment. — And can potentially make a difference to millions.

Source: Graph of tertiary enrollment and other stats from UNESCO. In the GER map, countries in white don’t have current statistics from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

These Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) create “a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. And it’s not the only tension inherent in MOOCs,” writes A. J. Jacobs in the Sunday Review. Jacobs recently signed up for 11 courses (of which he completed 2), and graded his experience:

• B+ for the professors, who tended to be charming and theatrical, trying to make the best of the virtual environment. There’s no patience for crummy professors, as in a math course canceled in 2012 by Udacity.
• A for convenience, which is unmatched as students can learn from home, while commuting, worldwide. Start and stop anytime.
• D for student-teacher interaction, which is virtually nonexistent. It’s one-way delivery from pop-star teachers, a virtual lottery to get a professor to answer a specific question.
• B- for student-student interaction, which is vital for cementing the newly-learned knowledge, but even the best online discussions lack the immediacy of real life. There’s also a signal-to-noise problem, as well as trolling.
• B- for assignments, which are heavily multiple-choice quizzes (great for computers to grade, bad for measuring learning), rampant with cheating, and lackluster when peer-review is used for essays.
• B overall, which a generally positive experience, but minimal practical application when taking diverse subjects, and the courses don’t convey any credentials.

The hot air surrounding the rise of MOOCs is beginning to subside, and the ideas will percolate other fields.

On the academic end of the spectrum, traditional academia must and will respond to the pressures that are disrupting their industry. MOOCs are different in many ways from the “distance education” of the last few decades. How will universities compete with free? How will they justify being on-campus as the virtual experience improves? How much can the traditional, intimate classroom model of learning be bastardized before it looses all meaningful value, reduced to little more than watching TV?

This 18 minute TEDx talk by Michele Pistone discusses the future of higher education, and its historical origins:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsiQ6-JTOWM

(Read more comments on Pistone’s talk.)

Of greater interest to this blog, is informal and professional learning. This is the opposite situation, as MOOCs have much to teach us. If you are involved you outreach, take inspiration from MOOCs about:

• Approaches to improving online learning (adding assessment, interactivity and community)
• Adding social aspects (online forums, exploring peer review, and seeing what formats prod students to engage)
• Implementation (user interfaces, software, marketing angles)

It’s all about packaging. The underlying elements (articles, videos, forums, etc.) have been on the internet for some time, and many organizations already have these ingredients at hand. What differentiates an “online course” is how it’s all combined, the outcomes (both learning objectives and certification), and the overall cohesiveness of the package.

How can you deliver learning with online courses? (And do you want to?)

For some more background, see also our articles on “What is an online course?” (Jan 2012), “Online courses for learning skills: MoMA, NYT & knitting” (Jan 2012; BTW: NYT recently canceled their online courses),  “Higher-ed courses with massive enrollments: A revolution starts” (Jan 2012), and “Online college courses, with and without the degree” (Feb 2011).

Tom Segal is an analyst for a venture fund focused on education technology.

To counter the argument that questionable ethics play a role, Tom Segal points out that “schools deal with for-profit institutions at every level.” He argues that expanding educational technology to the private sector also creates competition which in turn would allow schools to choose the best technology. Nonprofit institutions limit the amount of money that can be put into innovative development. Technological advances will not occur as quickly and with as much innovation unless the private sector is able to become part of the process.

Segal is focused on for-profit vendors selling technology to the schools — not on the wholesale commercialization of schools.

Jon Bower responded, “While we are starting to engineer education processes around student learning, much of the instruction process is still an art. Creating good processes and embedding them in technology is difficult, as companies from Brøderbund Software to Kahn Academy have learned.”

Go to article “Incentivizing Innovation in Education; or A Role For For Profits in Education” >

See the site: Google Art Project

Google’s project also includes their “street view” to provide walkthroughs of 46 museums, with more on the way. Google’s team took 360 degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of over hundreds of rooms within the museums. The gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps. Here’s walking around the Acropolis Museum:

Young Knight in a Landscape

Zoom. Zoom. 

All the images can be zoomed, some to a stunning degree. For 46 objects, visitors can see extraordinary detail using super high resolution or ‘gigapixel’ photo capturing technology, enabling the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye.

At right is ‘Young Knight in a Landscape‘, (1510) by Vittore Carpaccio from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. This is what you can see on the museum’s current web site:

But check out the level of detail which the museum gives you via Google’s Art Project:

More range. More access. 

Amit Sood leads Google's effort to bring the world's greatest museums online. This started as his "20%" project.

Their online collection spans a wide range of institutions, large and small, traditional art museums as well as less traditional settings for great art. “The Art Project is going global, thanks to our new partners from around the entire world. It’s no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi,” said Amit Sood, Head of Art Project, Google.

Google suggests you check out the White House in Washington D.C., the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, or the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi.

Videos, hangouts, online learning.

The expanded site has more powerful browsing (e.g., by period, artist or type of artwork), and integrates Google’s “hangouts.” Their videos (e.g., stories from curators) are collected in a central ‘Art Project’ YouTube channel.

In a smart move, Google also worked with Khan Academy’s smARThistory, who made 90 Khan Academy videos expressly for Google Art Project version 2. See them here.

Other uses of the technology

Google is using the same technology to host content on a few other institutions’ sites. Under the auspices of the Cultural Institute, Google is producing high resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities.

What does this mean?

Access is growing. Museums are rethinking control vs. outreach. Is it better to limit access to real-life visitors who buy tickets and shop the museum store, or make culture freely available? It is better to lock down access to promote image licensing as a revenue stream, or release publicly hoping that free access will open doors for newer business models?

Over 12k students received a 'statement of accomplishment' from Ng’s Fall 2011 course.

Over 100,000 students signed up for his free, fall 2011 course on machine learning. The impacts were huge. Over 12% of the students completed the course, and received a statement of accomplishment. Ng says he “heard many stories from students about how they’re using it at work, about how it’s inspired them to go back to school, and so on.” In contrast, Ng’s normal, for-credit course at Stanford, one of the most popular on campus, would enroll 350 students.

It’s part of a new revolution in higher education, and it’s serious learning. They deliver complete courses where students are not only watching web-based lectures, but also actively participating, doing exercises, and deeply learning the material. Students are expected to devote ~12 hours a week to the course, to read and watch course materials, complete assignments, and take quizzes and an exam. Online students did not receive one-on-one interaction with professors, the full content of lectures, or a Stanford degree — those who completed the course received a statement of accomplishment. Course materials include prerecorded lectures (with in-video quizzes) and demos, multiple-choice quiz assignments, automatically-checked programming exercises with an interactive workbench, midterm and final exams, a discussion forum, optional additional exercises with solutions, and pointers to readings and resources.

Ng promotes the Fall 2011 course, on machine learning:

Other Stanford professors experimented with massive enrollments in free, online courses.

In Fall 2011, professor Jennifer Widom offered a version of her introductory database course. Over 90,000 accounts were created, 25,000 students submitted at least some work for grading, and 7% of students (6,500) did well enough to receive a “statement of accomplishment.” Most of the material was a subset of what the Stanford students did. Widom created different exams for the public students, and led weekly video chat. One bonus, Widom notes, is that they made everything “100% error-free as the 90,000 public students found every conceivable bug.”

Similarly, over 160,000 students enrolled in professor Sebastian Thrun’s college course on Artificial Intelligence in Fall 2011, co-taught with Google’s Peter Norvig. They graduated 14% (23,000 students) from 190 countries.

Thrun promotes his latest course, on building a search engine:

The success of these courses have convinced Thrun and Ng that online courses are the future.

Since the success of his course, Thrun has spent roughly $200,000 of his own money, and raised venture capital, to create Udacity, a new online institution of higher learning independent of Stanford. (He had resigned from Stanford in April 2011 to focus more on his work at Google, where he has a senior position.) Last week, Udacity announced two classes — building a search engine and programing a self-driving car — with plans to eventually offer a full suite of computer science courses.

Udacity will be set up as a teaching institution, not a research institution. “At Stanford, priority is your research career,” says Thrun to Reuters. “That is counter to teaching 100,000 students, who generate 100,000 emails.” Stanford is the institution being disrupted, it’s not the institution doing the disrupting. Similarly, Thrun isn’t doing Udacity in direct association with Google. He told Reuters that that Udacity does fit quite easily into Google’s mission of making the world’s information available for free. “Having a clean slate is a better way to start … The last thing I want is people asking whether Google is disrupting education. Better to ask if Sebastian is trying to disrupt education.”

To read more about Udacity, and speculation on it’s impacts, see two recent articles:

• “Udacity’s model” by Felix Salmon, the finance blogger at Reuters on 31-Jan-2012.
• “Lessons and Legacies from Stanford’s Free Online Classes” by Tina Barseghian a blogger for KQED MindSift on 31-jan-2012.

Similarly, Ng and Stanford professor Daphne Koller have funded and launched a new company, Coursera, and are currently hiring staff, with “16 courses launching in winter and spring, with more on the way.”  These new courses are intended provide people with “access to world-leading education that has so far been available only to a tiny few. We see them using this education to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in,” they say on the interim Coursera site.

The focus on ‘world class’ education on a post-secondary level is a distinct difference from other successful online learning sites, such as Khan Academy, which also reach massive numbers of students. Khan has 2,800+ video lessons on academic topics that range from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 290 practice exercises. So far, Khan Academy has delivered these lessons over 116 million times, and is a popular tutoring site for K-12 course subjects like algebra. Khan Academy is also pushing the boundaries, recently expanding into humanities and cultural subjects, but they are still focused on concise lessons that consume a few hours at most, not a full course or degree.

Here’s an example of a Khan video about the geology of the Hawaiian islands:

There are other experiments with eliminating direct communication with an instructor. For example, University of the People, launched in 2009, is a tuition-free, online university targeting developing countries. The University has accepted 1,200 students (3% of applicants) from 121 countries so far, and charges a $10-50 enrollment fee, depending on the GDP of the country. They use existing, free online materials (not audio/video because of low bandwidth in the 3rd world), paired with extra structure and discussion.

MIT recently announced plans to launch an open platform for free online classes, MITx, offering certification for those who demonstrate mastery. This is an expansion on MIT’s last decade of work in creating a robust free online library of its course materials called OpenCourseWare (OCW), which includes 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people. In May 2011, New York University began allowing students from University of the People to use their online credentials to apply to study at its Abu Dhabi campus.

This new breed of online courses — run by stellar educators with intense technical abilities, striving to serve massive numbers of students — is exploding the possibilities of online education. These courses eliminate traditional constraints: Students do not come to a physical classroom, they do not have class at the same time, and they do not pay for their courses. The instructors also have a lot of slack, in terms of the technical ease-of-use. Computer science assignments are good candidates for online assessment, and the self-selected pool of students is technologically savvy.

As these massive online courses evolve, the traditional education industry will have to respond.

See also my related post, on online courses for learning skills, which I recently wrote about. That article looks at courses at MoMA, NYT, and several for knitting. It’s different because the courses focus on delighting learners with personal — not professional — skills.

“The debate about which is better, face-to-face learning or online learning is fast becoming obsolete,” says Jennifer Berghage, an instructional designer at Pennsylvania State University. The common goal is that “an online course should be, above all, engaging, so that the learner enjoys the learning and is able to not only assimilate it but retain it and apply it.”

Online courses are revolutionizing formal education, and have opened a new genre of outreach on cultural and scientific topics. These courses deliver a series of lessons to a web browser or mobile device, to be conveniently accessed anytime, anyplace.

An “online course is designed as a built environment for learning. It’s constructed as an experience that can be followed sequentially or can be accessed throughout the designated time period,” says Wendy Woon, director of education at the Museum of Modern Art.

It’s a directed learning process, comprised of educational information (articles, videos, images, web links), communication (messaging, discussion forums) and some way to measure students’ achievement.

“There is no single formula for what constitutes an excellent online course,” says Berghage, though in good courses the “student feels a great sense of community and investment in the endeavor.” But an online course is more than the presentation of information or lectures. “Online courses require interaction, direction, and feedback,” says Jean Mandernach, a psychology professor and director of the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching at Grand Canyon University.

The following are some overall dimensions to consider for teaching your target audience or professionals in your field, and possibly creating a new revenue stream.

Academic/professional 

In academic (K-12 and higher ed) and professional (e.g., continuing education) settings, the student’s primary motivation is to advance their professional or academic career. Courses are designed around the objectives of the school administration.

The number of students in kindergarten through 12th grade in the U.S. taking an online course as part of their school was estimated by the U.S. Dept. of Education to be 1.8 million enrollments in 2009-10, 74% of which was High School. Of those, 62% were to recover course credits from classes missed or failed, 47% were dual High School and college credit, 29% were AP, and 27 were career and technical education. In Canada, ~4% of  K–12 students were engaged distance education. Full time K-12 cyber schools are also gaining popularity, currently estimated to be 225,000 in the U.S. In China, more than 200 online schools serve 600,000+ students (iNACOL PDF).

Soldiers stationed overseas can complete their coursework via online courses.

Enrollment is higher for higher-ed, where 31% of U.S. students (over 6.1 million students) took at least one course online in fall 2010, and annual growth continues at ~10%. Some higher-ed degree programs are entirely bought online, and are ranked by U.S. News. For-profit institutions such as University of Phoenix, DeVry University, and American Public University draw the highest enrollments, and have helped scare and propel the industry online, but have not yet earned academic respect.

Social studies teacher in a recorded video.

For academic online courses to work, parents and students have to be extremely self motivated. “Unfocused, passive learners do much better in an environment where the adult owns the responsibility for the learning,” says David Haglund, Principal of the Riverside Virtual School.

Some K-12 school systems create their own courses, but most contract them from private companies like K12, and Connections Academy, a unit of Pearson. Some courses are fantastic, but many are poor, or worse. The NYT drew attention to the shortcomings of online learning and of K12 last month in “Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools,” and the WSJ recently profiled two families using virtual schools, with and without success. In higher-ed there are also commercial providers, e.g., Straighterline charges $99 to register for a month, plus $39 a course, and thousands of less-selective schools now accept 23 of their accredited courses for transfer credit.

Professional learning and continuing education are great for online courses because students are motivated and focused. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com  target the professional skills market. Training marketplace OpenSesame aggregates training content from 100+ providers with 10,000+ courses. “We’re creating Amazon.com for courses,” said Tom Turnbull VP at OpenSesame.

Personal learning & happy students

For outreach, the best models of online courses are coming from the realm of personal learning. These courses are free of the constraints of K-12 and higher education, and are designed to delight and satisfy students.

Substantial numbers of learners have taken online courses offering personal knowledge. This kind lifelong learning is for “anyone who wants to continue learning and building new skills once their formal education is done — no matter where they live, what their degree of education, how old they are, or whether they do it formally in the classroom or use less traditional resources,” says Dan Colman, founder of Open Culture and director of the Continuing Studies program at Stanford.

There’s an expanding market for personal learning. DailyPath delivers “actionable lessons” by email, MightyBell lets users post experiences and goals that others can achieve by completing a series of steps. Craftsy offers delightful video-based courses on crafty topics.

Credit or not

Credit introduces many constraints, with standardized curricula, accreditation, and requirements to work with the ‘learning management systems” large institutions use to manage students and teachers. When credit is offered, the course builds toward student’s graduation, qualification or long-term career goals, thus, students (or whomever funds their education) are willing to pay substantial enrollment fees, and endure crummy experiences.

If credit and grading are not a concern, there’s a lot more flexibility. Several schools have been experimenting with putting quality audio and video recordings of charismatic professors from top colleges online. These can be viewed in a web page (e.g., YouTube), or downloaded to listen later (as iTunes podcasts). iTunes makes it easy for learners to access 350,000+ free lectures, videos, films, and other educational resources. To find the gems, Colman’s Open Culture site indexes 400 free online courses from top universities.

Stanford Engineering professors recently offered three of the school’s most popular computer science courses for free online in Fall 2011. These included assignments and online discussion, and thousands of students who completed the course received a statement of accomplishment.

Measuring up

In formal learning, assessment is the currency of progress. Good scores on assignments and tests are central. Creative teachers have invented other ways to assess learning, often by having students create projects and presentations.

Assessment is more challenging in a virtual world, where it’s harder to measure quantitative and intangible aspects of learning, and it’s easy for student to cheat with conventional assessments. Assessment should include “intangible aspects, and should also offer multiple means of demonstrating learning, including individual and group projects and online presentations,” says Liz Pape, president of VHS, a nonprofit virtual school and consultancy.

The more interesting question is how to incorporate assessment into personal learning, when there’s no credit. Assessment, if done in an appealing way, can encourage students, help them track their progress, and gain a sense of accomplishment. See my recent article on gamification for a variety of ideas on how to follow student’s achievements and progress.

Assessment is also vital feedback loop so you can improve your course.

Human touch

The more human, or human-like interaction the better.

With the instructor — Feedback from the instructor on an essay, assignment or quiz, or answers to questions prompted from a lecture. Online, the feedback can be private (by email or direct message), or public (discussion forum). The instructor can moderate the online discussions, “inserting some comments into the discussions to keep students on task, add clarity to a discussion, or ask another question to get students to think deeper,” says Pape.

With other students — Students can interact with the rest of their cohort in the discussion areas of a course. “This kind of course cannot be self-paced, because you need all the students interacting together around the course content at approximately the same time,” says Pape. Students enjoy working with other classmates in discussions, or perhaps group projects. Online discussion allows more students to discuss than could in a short in-person class, gives a space for timid students to speak up, and helps mute overbearing or bullying students.

A personal style — Lectures should give a personal feel, as if directly talking to the student via video chat. One approach is to use second-person phrases that directly address “you” the student, as in, “Now I’m going to show you…” and “so you’ve made a new discovery, that…” Use of second person has a long history in guidebooks, self-help books, do-it-yourself manuals, and other forms of writing that intend to address the reader without the instructor actually being present. Likewise, online assessment can lend a human touch, “Nice job! You got 3/4 correct!”

The sky’s the limit?

There are some practical limits. For example, an instructor can only provide personalized feedback to a relatively small number of students. Five minutes per question, for 25 student questions, is over two hours of work. If the feedback requires more critical analysis, online teaching quickly becomes a full time job. There are also practical limits as to the size of online discussion communities. Too small, and there’s no discussion, but over a few hundred students, and conversation gets swamped. For some courses, it’s appropriate to answer the most popular questions. Google’s moderator service allows students to vote on the most popular questions, allowing thousands of students to participate in choosing questions. Questions about assignments or technical issues can be public questions.

Despite these scalability hiccups, growth of all kinds of online courses will be explosive. The big money will be in for-credit courses, but there’s still huge potential for personal knowledge courses in areas of arts, culture and science.

Harvard professor Clay Christensen, well-known for his academic work on disruptive innovations, wrote a book, Disrupting Class, looking at changes in how people learn. In a recent interview, he said:

I think that not only are we ready but adoption is occurring at a faster rate than we had thought… We believe that by the year 2019 half of all classes for grades K-12 will be taught online… The rise of online learning carries with it an unprecedented opportunity to transform the schooling system into a student-centric one that can affordably customize for different student needs by allowing all students to learn at their appropriate pace and path, thereby allowing each student to realize his or her fullest potential….”

Sources: Lede robot illustration adapted from Stanford School of Engineering Initiative.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvPuDzsodas

See AASL list of 25 ‘Best Websites for Teaching and Learning,’ and their press release. Or go to the SpicyNodes site.

Science museums matter

Aside from the news media, which now has less science coverage as the journalism business contracts, museums play a vital role in how the public learns about science outside of school. New data show that science museums play an important part in this informal learning.

Despite enthusiastic scientists who are using social media, leading citizen science, and supporting other kinds of outreach, the vast majority of scientific information is ensconced in journals and conferences.

To connect this knowledge to the public, it’s common practice for closed-access journals to give journalists free (advance) access to new articles. But the same courtesy is not provided to science museums that would also benefit from new articles, as well as a back library of older articles. And science museums rarely budget for journal subscriptions.

This is a shame, as science museums can strongly influence the public’s knowledge and attitudes about science and technology, and to a surprising degree can cut across racial, ethnic, educational and economic barriers. (See OSU press release.)

Science museums lack journal access

Scholarly knowledge is hidden in closed-access journals. Vital and current knowledge is behind paywalls, out of reach of educators. This reduces the quality of new exhibitions and harms the chances of new funding.

Charlie Carlson, senior scientist at the Exploratorium, says this lack of access is unfortunate because “scientific journal access would be extremely useful in covering, describing and presenting the latest scientific developments and discourse. This seems a bit like a no brainer.”

Martin Weiss, a science interpretation consultant for the New York Hall of Science, says he needs journal access to research and prepare content for exhibitions. Since he does not have access himself, “when I really need something I prevail upon colleagues who have university library access for PDFs.”

Jeff Courtman is director of exhibit development at Museumscapes, an exhibit design and fabrication firm, and has worked in the museum field for over 25 years, mostly in science centers. During that time, he lacked ready access to science journals. But ironically, now that he’s switching fields and is a student again (working on an Masters degree in mental health counseling) he has access to a broad spectrum of journals via his university.

The converse is true for science organizations who don’t have access to education journals. Sue Ann Heatherly is an education officer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). She has access to science, astronomy and engineering journals, but not to fee-based science education journals. Heatherly says she “can ask my organization to purchase articles for me, but that’s not the same as the ‘random walk’ one needs to do in the early stages of finding relevant studies.”

Heatherly says that as an informal education practitioner, she should be reading more of the research on learning and “not flying by the seat of our pants when developing educational programming. I’m working now on a rewrite of the failed proposal and I have learned so much from digging into the research as I always do.” She doesn’t have an alternative, “I’m trying to gain privileges at a state university — so far no luck. Right now, I read abstracts, and purchase a few articles.”

Open access & blogs

The good news is that museum and educational staff increasingly rely on open access journals and blogs for access to new information about scientific advancements & research, as well as social science research about learning. (See my recent articles about open access journals; and rise of blogging.)

In lieu of institutional journal subscriptions, Carlson personally pays for his own subscription to Science, uses someone else’s subscription to Nature, and reads the open access PLoS journal. Carlson is an avid reader of blogs, and enjoys the provocative themes of New Scientist and Wired. Still, he says that while he loves the blogs and magazine, “I very much like to reference the original materials and see the original papers.” He says, “science bloggers have picked up the slack and they bring freshness and new perspectives, and frequently their perspectives provide valuable observations and insights.”

Courtman was originally trained as an artist. But blogs and free online news have helped him look for new connections and discoveries. He says, “I appreciate sites like physorg.com because it gives me the top-level view.  I don’t have to be a science expert to understand and if something piques my interest — perhaps I begin wondering about a connection — I can dig deeper.”

Relying on science advisors and stale knowledge

Weiss has a strong science background, but says, “I don’t think the majority of science centers have staff to be able to utilize [science journals]. For them the science advisors are sufficient.” Creating new exhibitions is a complex business, involving many staff, and the science is only a small piece. Weiss says that not all of the staff who are preparing programs or exhibitions “need or really want to have access… we use expert advisors to vet information for us.”

Only a small subset of staff at science museums actually want to read science literature, Carlson says. “It seems to me that getting the focus of informal science education back on the science and process of discovery would be a first step.  When I started the focus was science and investigation, now it’s education and science is the vehicle, and it should be the other way.”

There may be too much focus on methods instead of substance. Carlson says that informal science education professionals tend to focus on “educational technique and methodologies rather than content, principles, and critical thinking. Basically, science is not deemed critical to the mission, which is unfortunate, since it’s actually central to the mission and essential to the development of new content.”

Carlson says that excessive focus on methodology “inherently diminishes the role of scientific discovery. Most information discussed in the informal science education field comes from secondary and tertiary sources where it has been preprocessed and sometimes distorted. And then it’s impossible to get to the sources. Carlson says, “I think that there can be a stagnation without access to journals. The New York Times [science section] will take you only so far.”

Collective bargaining power?

If museums can’t afford the rates from commercial journal providers, can they band together to get a better deal? The membership society of science centers, Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), has not used its bargaining power of 600 member museums and centers in 45 countries to negotiate journal access to get a good deal for this overlooked corner of the market.

The merchandisers fills in

Where there’s no money for knowledge, the merchandizers have a field day. One alarming example is the content in the $2m Harry Potter exhibition which recently circulated several top museums, and had it’s content provided by Warner Bros. Consumer Products division, which handles licensing and merchandising deals, like action figures for fast food kid’s meals. See my article on blockbuster traveling exhibits.

Without science as a mandate, that Harry Potter exhibit missed a ton of opportunities to bring in the science of potions, flight, or invisibility. By contrast, when the U.S. National Library of Medicine created a small format (a set of panels) traveling exhibition, “Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine,” which travels to libraries for less than $500 cost, they included much more science.

Update: 27-Apr: Minor typos fixed.

The premise of the “You Make Me Sick!” online game, which won a $50k prize last week from the National STEM Video Game Challenge, is that middle school kids invent an pathogen and fight the immune system — learning science along the way. The game steps players through several stages: briefing them on the habits and weaknesses of a target human, devising an evil pathogen (e.g., a virus or bacterium with different transmission means, shapes and characteristics), and playing a short arcade game in the lungs or guts of the human — battling the pathogen against immune cells.

About the game

The charming game hopes to engage kids in the process of infection, and familiarize them with attributes of pathogens and how infections occur.

The game is designed so that kids who don’t like to read or have trouble deciphering text can learn some microbiology. Dr. Matthew Marino, an assistant professor of special education at Washington State University worked on the education aspects of the game. Since learning abilities are a continuum, Marino says, “Our hypothesis is that if you build a game that addresses the unique challenges students with disabilities face, all students will benefit because the design will account for the wide range of diversity that is present in every class.”

The game fits typical curriculum standards of middle school (ages 11-14) science classrooms, and is intended to “motivate, engage, and teach a diverse range of students about science.” It’s online, running in web browsers with Adobe Flash version 10, and works on virtually all web browsers in the U.S. The game play itself is a little confusing and the arcade functions are cumbersome, but the overall design successfully draws gamers through, to experience the interplay between the pathogen and the host’s immune system.

The business model

The game is currently free, though the publisher, Madison, Wisc. based Filament Games, plans to bundle a suite of middle school science games spanning life, Earth, and physical science, and put them behind an “affordable” paywall.

The primary source of funding is from the U.S. Department of Education, via their Institute of Education Sciences’ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The SBIR program funds commercial ventures that “directly or indirectly lead to improved student learning and academic achievement” but which can’t self-fund because they require too much research or the revenue potential is too small. The contract was awarded to Filament, for $838k. They have 2.5 years to make “six life science computer games on topics including cells, heredity, evolution, bacteria, plants, and the human body.” Filament was also awarded a $150k SBIR from NSF to make games targeting the physical sciences.

Still, it’s a labor of love. The SBIR contracts don’t fully compensate for the team’s time. Marino says, “the project is taking a great deal of time and energy. I stopped keeping track of the hours. It was depressing but we’re doing it for the students and that is our reward.”

Video game prize

The game leapt to notoriety because it won $50k in a science video game competition last week. The prize was organized by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and publisher E-Line Media, riding on publicity from President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” campaign. One part of the prize challenged middle-school students to design video games on any topic (some of which dealt with science themes). Brian Alspach, vice president of E-Line Media is excited about kids doing game development, saying “we believe that the very act of designing a game has powerful implications for STEM learning.” The second part of the prize challenged emerging and experienced game developers like Filament.

The prize organizers had the support of the White House, which promoted the contest on their blog, as well as several nonprofits who promoted the contest via their existing channels. Thanks to that free publicity, the youth prize had 525 entries from imaginative kids (see the youth winners); and 50 entries from emerging and experienced game developers. Last week, Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, announced a dozen youth winners, and two developer winners.

For Filament, the $50k was an unexpected windfall. Their SBIR contract was awarded in July 2010, two months before the challenge was announced, so they had started development already. Filament submitted their web-based game on a whim, since it did not fully comply with the rules of 4-person teams creating mobile-based video games for young children, grades pre-K through 4^th. (Filament’s game is not mobile, targets older children, and had a 4-person development team plus several others who chipped in with planning, design, artwork and the soundtrack.) But it turned out that the contest rules were flexible, and contest officials loved the game.

The competition was funded by sponsors (AMD Foundation, ESA and Microsoft): $50k for Filament, $50k to a team of graduate students, plus a dozen laptop computers to the youth winners and $24k for schools.

Games for learning

The success of the approach for this game is still unknown. The series of games are designed around the Universal Design For Learning (UDL) framework, which the team hopes will help meet the needs of all students. But Marino says, “the teaching methods within the game need additional empirical research.” “There is very little research about how to transfer empirically validated strategies from the classroom into a game.” They will test the games by comparing learning outcomes among kids that play the game vs. kids that are taught via conventional means.

Meanwhile, Marino and Filament are continuing with the game pipeline. Their next game, “Prisoner of Echo” is about sound, and comes out next month.

Check out the “You Make Me Sick!” online game yourself!

Update 7-Apr-11: Clarified details about Filament’s contest submission; corrected SBIR contract details.

Students become disengaged and learn less when information is presented passively, such as through lectures or static text.

Although your web site may contain a wealth of educational information, the way the information is presented may not be engaging your visitors. When learners aren’t engaged, they don’t assimilate the information presented.

Some subjects are naturally difficult to teach – such as how to fly an airplane – while others can be perceived as tedious – such as memorizing the solar system. Using static words, photos, and illustrations can make it difficult for learners to assimilate the information presented.

Incorporating interactivity into the learning experience allows you to more easily teach certain subjects. How could pilots be trained, for example, if they only had manuals to guide them and didn’t use flight simulators?

Interactivity also changes the dynamic of learning, from one of passivity to one of engagement. The Constructivism theory of learning supports the use of interactivity for what is termed “scaffolding,” where students use their existing knowledge to help them bridge the gap and grasp information that might be slightly above their current ability. Therefore, students are motivated to increase the breadth and depth of their knowledge by actively participating in the learning process. Rather than studying a manual about flying in bad weather, for example, students can introduce thunderstorms into their interactive learning experience and actually test their piloting abilities.

Learning to fly a B-29 bomber using a flight simulator not only engages students by mimicking the realism of piloting the aircraft, but it also allows students to study the aerodynamics and physics of flight, as well as to introduce a myriad of variables, such as flying in bad weather.

Presenting educational information in an interactive form enriches the learning experience and leads to better assimilation of information.

According to Social Cognitive Theory, interactive learning allows students to gain confidence through practice. A spacedog can practice spacewalks using simulators to overcome his fears before his first spaceflight.

Problem

How do people’s experiences, environments, and behaviors affect how they learn?

Theory

Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) describes learning in terms of the interrelationship between behavior, environmental factors, and personal factors. It also provides the theoretical framework for interactive learning used to develop both Constructivism and Cooperative Learning.

According to SCT, the learner acquires knowledge as his or her environment converges with personal characteristics and personal experience. New experiences are evaluated vis-a-vis the past; prior experiences help to subsequently guide and inform the learner as to how the present should be investigated.

Because SCT is based on understanding an individual’s reality construct, it is especially useful when applied to interventions aimed at personality development, behavior pathology, and health promotion. For example, SCT could be used to help a patient quit smoking in so far as a smoker may be more willing to learn from an ex-smoker who may share experiences that resonate with a patient’s unique personal history. Ideally, the patient’s affinity with the ex-smoker, when combined with a supportive environment,would help him or her butt out for good!

Discussion

The SCT-based framework for designing, implementing and evaluating online learning programs include the following:

Observational (vicarious) learning:
Because learning is expedited when individuals are able to observe the behaviors of others who are similar to them, online learning can incorporate video clips of people with similar backgrounds who provide commentaries and stories from their own points of view. Because the material resonates with the social and cultural sensibilities of the user, it makes the learning experience more effective and increases the probability of the knowledge being put into practice.

Reproduction:
Facilitating reproduction involves providing individuals with readily available means to put their newly acquired knowledge into practice. In the instance of an online health education module, patients could practice creating questions that communicate their concerns to health practitioners or educators. Achieving reproduction success simultaneously encourages self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy:
Learning is a function of the extent to which individuals are able to reflect upon and internalize their own successes and failures. Self-efficacy is achieved when the learner identifies his or her ability to perform. Using interactivity in online learning provides a mechanism that allows the learner to apply knowledge accurately and reliably and therefore increase his or her confidence. For example, it is possible to read a book about driving a car, but it is not until the learner actually drives successfully that learning is complete. Interactive, online educational materials can provide extensive, repetitive practice until mastery – and thus self-efficacy – is achieved.

Emotional coping:
Coping mechanisms are learned in a stimuli-response environment conducive to self-efficacy and observational learning. In online education, emotional coping can be facilitated by incorporating multimedia demonstrations of culturally sensitive examples of both appropriate and inappropriate methods of coping.

Self-regulatory capability:
Self-regulation is what allows a person to control his or her response or behavior when confronted with externally imposed stimuli. Feedback is an externally imposed control that works with a person’s self-regulatory capability in order to make adjustments to behavior. Online learning materials can use feedback techniques to reinforce behavioral change and help learners achieve self-efficacy. For example, when performing a task correctly, the learner can be advised that his or her performance is correct. Conversely, immediate corrective feedback can be given when needed. As the learner’s ability increases, the feedback can become more detailed and sophisticated, which allows the learner to refine and master the task. When learning to drive, for example, the student initially needs to get the vehicle on the road. As the student progresses, however, he or she needs to achieve specific speed limits and signaling requirements to achieve safe and efficient driving habits.

Reference: Bandura, A. (1986) Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

The core of Constructivism is learning by doing. The next time this cat wants to go fishing, he’ll try a different approach.

Problem

How do people go beyond their personal experience in order to learn and implement new concepts and ideas?

Theory

Constructivism has its roots in the same cognitive psychology that uderlies Social Cognitive Theory. Its two principles are that students do not passively receive knowledge, but rather actively assimilate it, and that students construct new ideas or interpret concepts based upon their current and past knowledge. Because Constructivism has no fixed rules, other than offering an alternative to the traditional, teacher-centered classroom by creating student-centered learning, a number of theoretical variations have developed, including: Generative Learning, Cognitive Apprenticeship, Problem-Based (Inquiry) Learning, Discovery Learning, and Situated Learning.

Regardless of the branch of Constructivism, learning is viewed as a very personal endeavor, whereby internalized concepts, rules, and general principles may be applied in a practical, real-world context. In a constructivist classroom, interactivity through hands-on experiences and practice is at the heart of the curriculum.

Discussion

Constructivists build on the concept of scaffolding, whereby students constantly use their existing knowledge to help them bridge the gap between known and unknown information. This method allows students to grasp information that may be slightly above their current ability level by using what they know to inform what they need to know.

In scaffolding, there are three categories of skills addressed: skills that a student cannot perform, skills that a student might be able to perform, and skills that a student can perform with assistance. It is critical, therefore, that those who develop curriculum define the skill category and audience for each set of educational materials.

Using Constructivism theory in an online setting, the web page is the teacher and the goal is for visitors to build their understanding by completing interactive lessons. The content developer defines the subject matter and the web site acts as a facilitator that encourages students to discover principles for themselves and to construct knowledge by working to solve realistic problems, often in collaboration with others. For example, a designer might:

1. Create real-world environments that employ the context in which learning is relevant;
2. Focus on realistic approaches to solving real-world problems;
3. Develop a mechanism whereby the web page acts as a coach and analyzer of the strategies used to solve these problems;
4. Stress conceptual interrelatedness, providing multiple representations or perspectives on the content;
5. Set instructional goals and objectives that are negotiated and not imposed;
6. Design evaluation mechanisms that serve as a self-analysis tool;
7. Provide tools and environments that help learners interpret the multiple perspectives of the world;
8. Allow the learner to mediate and control the learning experience.

References:

• Vygotsky, L.S. (1980) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press:
• McCombs, B.L. & Whisler, J.S. (1997) The Learner-Centered Classroom and School: Strategies for Increasing Student Motivation and Achievement. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass