Serendipity35

College students will return to campuses the next two weeks and K12 teachers will be getting their classrooms set up for the new year (like a cresting wave, this occurs starting with primary teachers who are in & out all summer and ends a few days before day one with the high school teachers). September approaching usually puts me in a looking ahead mood and I figure that when I have no more hope that we can change things THIS year, it will be time to retire from education.

Two reports I encountered recently are referenced here.

Kineo, an eLearning firm from the U.K. and Intel collaborated on a project called The Future of E-learning in Universities to identify how 21st century universities will use e-learning to achieve their goals. You can download a PDF of the presentation.

A few points close to my heart:

1. The vendors of VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments - AKA an LMS to those of us on the U.S. side of the pond) are consolidating.
2. Open source "vendors" are being increasingly utilized and threaten the commercial market on a global level.
3. The 3 big players are the commercial product Blackboard, and the open source Moodle and Sakai.
4. Open University's deployment of Moodle is the largest Moodle deployment in the world with an investment in excess of £4 million.

The second report is A New Learning Paradigm from Educause. It says we are still using an obsolete Industrial Age model of education - one that is teacher-directed, lecture-based. Their call for a new system has a number of components and concepts that have been around for all the 30 years I have been in education and a few new turns. The recommendations can hardly be called visionary, but a school that used all of them could be labeled that. Their new system design is called the Community Learning Center (CLC) and would be one that "allows individuals to meet their unique learning requirements, increasing productivity so that learners are educated and ready for the workplace at age eighteen."

Here are some of those components:

• Self-Directed Learning
• Multi-age Grouping
• The Open Learning Environment
• Teacher or Professor as Facilitator and Learner
• Assessment Integrated with Learning
• Purposeful Work
• Apprenticeships for Developing Skills and Entrepreneurial Attitudes
• Technology as an Enabler of Self-Directed Learning and Self-Organization
• Lifelong Learning