Serendipity35

In microeconomics and management, going vertical or vertical integration occurs when the supply chain of a company is owned by that company. For example, if a car manufacturer also produces its own steel, tires and batteries.

This is in contrast with horizontal integration, wherein a company produces several items which are related to one another.

Higher education has been a vertical enterprise for centuries. We keep knowledge creation, teaching, testing, and credentialing all under one company/college banner.

These are terms from economics and business. Are they applicable to discussions about education?

Horizontal integration often occurs in the business world by internal expansion, acquisition or merger. Of course, that might happen in education too, but there are also signs that it is happening in other ways.

When MOOCs were the big news five years ago, some people saw this as a shift from a vertically integrated model to a horizontally integrated one by decoupling teaching and learning from the campus testing and credentialing.

In looking for further examples of vertical and horizontal integration in education, the examples I found were mostly in medical education. 

"Vertical and horizontal integration of knowledge and skills - a working model" (Snyman WD, Kroon J.) looks at an integrated outcomes-based curriculum for dentistry at the University of Pretoria in 1997.

In "Horizontal and vertical integration of academic disciplines in the medical school curriculum (Vidic B, Weitlauf HM) looks at pedagogical shifts caused by the rapid expansion of new scientific information and the introduction of new technology in operative and diagnostic medicine.

In more general terms, assessment alignment is often the reason for both horizontal and vertical alignment in education. Alignment is typically understood as the agreement between a set of content standards and an assessment used to measure those standards. By establishing content standards, stakeholders in an education system determine what students are expected to know and be able to do at each grade level.

Probably, it is best when education goes both vertically and horizontally. 

Horizontal information exchange can be teachers sharing methodology, students sharing information, students helping each other learn.

When a curriculum is truly vertically aligned or vertically coherent, what students learn in one lesson, course, or grade level prepares them for the next lesson, course, or grade level. I know teaching is supposed to be structured and logically sequenced so that learning progressively prepares them for more challenging, higher-level work. I saw that structured sequencing more in my K-12 teaching than I do in higher education which is more siloed. 

Let's work on going more horizontal, higher ed.

Deep learning is a hot topic right now, but it is not lightweight or something I would imagine learners who are not in the computer science world to take very seriously. But I stumbled upon this video introduction that certainly goes for an edgier presentation of this serious subject and obviously is trying to appeal to a non-traditional audience.

That audience would be part of what I refer to as both Education 2.0 and also that segment of learners who are The Disconnected.  I see these disconnected learners as a wider age group than "Millennials." They are the potential students in our undergraduate and graduate programs, but also older people already in the workplace looking to move or advance their careers. The younger ones have never been connected to traditional forms of media consumption and services and have no plan to ever be connected to them. And that is also how they feel about education. You learn where and when you can learn with little concern for credits and degrees.

The video I found (below) is an "Intro to Deep Learning" billed as being "for anyone who wants to become a deep learning engineer." It is supposed to take you from "the very basics of deep learning to the bleeding edge over the course of 4 months." That is quite a trip. 

The sample video is on how to predict an animal’s body weight given it’s brain weight using linear regression via 10 lines of Python.

Though the YouTube content (created by and starring Siraj Raval) is totally free, he also has a partnership with Udacity in order to offer a new Deep Learning Nanodegree Foundation program. Udacity will also be providing guaranteed admission to their Artificial Intelligence and Self-Driving Car Nanodegree programs to all graduates. 

Is this a good marketing effort bu Udacity? Will it reach new and disconnected learners? Will they simply use the videos and resources to learn or make that connection to some kind of degree/certification that might tell an employer that they know something about deep learning? I don't have the deep learning program that can predict that. I'm not sure it exists. Yet.

RESOURCES

This is the code via GitHub for "How to Make a Prediction - Intro to Deep Learning #1' by Siraj Raval on YouTube

This lesson uses simple linear regression. "Simple" is a relative term here, as many people would not find it simple, as in "easy." It is a statistical method that allows us to summarize and study relationships between two continuous (quantitative) variables. This lesson via Penn State introduces the concept and basic procedures of simple linear regression.

You might also want to look at this tutorial on the topic via machinelearningmastery.com.

The death of the MOOC has been declared since 2013 (the year after it was the "year of the MOOC") but they seem to come back to life again.

Udacity vice president Clarissa Shen said recently “they are dead.. a failed product, at least for the goals we had set for ourselves, Our mission is to bring relevant education which advances people in careers and socio-economic activities, and MOOCs aren't the way.”

Back in 2013 after only a year, Udacity’s co-founder, Sebastian Thrun, announced a “pivot” away from MOOCs. But Udacity still offers  a form of the MOOC in its paid sequences of courses called “nanodegrees” that it produces in cooperation with large tech employers and still offers free versions of its course videos for those who don’t want or need a certificate of completion.

 

In 2008 when I read about a professor making his course "open learning," I wasn't prescient enough to see the rise of MOOCs or any coming revolution in learning, especially online. 

The term MOOC, for Massive Open Online Courses, became the popular terminology for the concept behind that 2008 experiment. Almost everyone was saying it was a revolution that would disrupt universities. Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity, famously predicted that in 50 years there would be only 10 higher education institutions.  That didn't happen. 

I wrote a book chapter with my wife a few years ago about whether or not the "MOOC Revolution" was in fact a revolution or rather an evolution of learning and learning online.  And recently I saw that Jeffrey Young, author of that 2008 piece, has posted this year asking "What if MOOCs Revolutionize Education After All?"

His new post and podcast on EdSurge focuses on Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, who thinks a lot about how people learn particularly because she has been teaching a lot of them in one of the most popular online courses ever. "Learning How to Learn" has had more than 2 million participants and teaching it has her believing, despite the cooling of the MOOC Revolution hype, that free online courses might still lead to a revolution in higher education.

 

Professor Oakley thinks that MOOCs will enhance classrooms and also serve as competition, which will force schools to jump over a higher bar.

In our chapter on MOOCs, we said that "Most technological change involves massive disruption whereas economic ‘bubbles’, like the trillion-dollar student loan bubble in the U.S., tend to burst, not slowly deflate. Initially, the disruption of the MOOC may have appeared to be a rapid revolution just a few years ago, but it seems more likely to become a gradual evolution over the course of the next decade." I think that prediction is holding true.

Through this blog and a LinkedIn group called "Academia and the MOOC" that I started in 2013, I have met many people from around the world who are using MOOCs. The group is for or anyone interested in how MOOCs have impacted education and how they might in the future, and it began with members of the MOOC of the same name hosted in the Canvas Network in Spring 2013 and taught my myself, my wife, Lynnette Ronkowitz and Mary Zedeck.

On of the people I have met virtually is Muvaffak Gozaydin. He contacted me last fall about a "crazy idea" he had to provide no-cost graduate degrees using MOOCs. He contacted me again this summer to tell me that his crazy idea was launching. He wants to offer "professional learners" the opportunity to get an MS degree online by selecting courses offered already courses from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Yale and other top schools. His site is at mguniversity2017.org and he has organized it to direct students towards a course catalog for five degrees currently. His project is not accredited in any country, but all the universities and courses offered are accredited and he hopes that holders of "degrees" from MGU can use them to find or advance in jobs internationally. 

Is his idea crazy? He asked me that again this year before he launched his site. It reminded me of something Dhawal Shah, the founder of Class Central, has said recently: "...there’s been a decisive shift by MOOC providers to focus on 'professional' learners who are taking these courses for career-related outcomes. At the recently concluded EMOOCs conference, the then CEO of Coursera, Rick Levin, shared his thoughts on this shift. He thinks that MOOCs may not have disrupted the education market, but they are disrupting the labor market. The real audience is not the traditional university student but what he calls the 'lifelong career learner,' someone who might be well beyond their college years and takes these online courses with the goal of achieving professional and career growth."

That last sentence was one of the conclusions of our book chapter. Maybe the revolution is bigger than disrupting universities. Maybe the revolution is about learning and not only in schools at all grade levels but also in business, industry and professional learning. All will be disrupted.

Shah, Gozaydin, Thrun and others have concluded two things about the MOOC revolution:  1) The real audience is the professional learner working in a field and with an undergraduate degree who wants to advance.  2) There are already plenty of online courses available from top universities and other providers to offer in packages (call them degrees, certificates, mini-degrees etc.) either free or with a fee smaller than that of a traditional university that carries some evidence of quality and completion.

The biggest issue with the truly open and free online courses, massive or not, has been since the beginning using them for advancement, either towards degrees or professional advancement. If you are looking to advance your own knowledge and skills without concern for official "credits," the MOOC is ideal. 

You can find more than 1,250 free courses listed at openculture.com, but what does a learner do with those courses? Minimally, which is not to say inconsequentially, is that Gozaydin has done the work of organizing the many scattered MOOC offerings of the world into five intelligently planned paths for learners to coursework from the leading universities all on one web page.