Serendipity35

In a post by Clay Shirky, Napster, Udacity, and the Academy, he compares the disruption in the music industry to what is going on currently in higher education.

Remember when the music industry got blind-sided by Napster and other file-sharing sites? Free downloads of content. Industry reaction? Try to shut them down and continue operating as always. That didn't work. Then legitimate companies moved in (iTunes, LastFM, Spotify) and started making money selling the content legitimately and cheaply. They offered albums in mp3 pieces without the packaging and without having to buy the whole album. And the industry changed all around the music old guard, and they are still trying to figure things out.

If you look at what has been happening the past few years in higher education that has been most disruptive, it has been the offering of course content and courses for free. It started with the open courseware movement of MIT and others schools, plus iTunes U and upstarts like P2PU. And the rest of higher ed continued on as always. Then came new companies intent on offering massively large courses that were open to all online and free. And some schools and even a state tried to shut them down. Then legitimate new companies entered (Udacity, Coursera) and began working with some of the top elite universities (as iTunes U had done in 2007) to offer these courses (MOOCs) and without having to register for a degree program or pay for all the packaging (credits, fees).

And higher education is changing, and colleges are just starting to try to figure things out.

But educators are smart. Smarter than the music industry, right?  According to Shirky, "We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did."

If you haven't heard, the "flipped classroom" is a big concept in education this year, especially in the upper grades of K-12. It's the idea of using technology like online video instruction, laptops, DVDs of lessons etc. to flip/reverse what students have traditionally done in class and at home to learn. For example, listening to lectures becomes the homework assignment and teachers use the class time for more one-on-one attention in class and students can work at their own pace or with other students.

Though an article I read traced the flipped classroom to a 2008 experiment by two Colorado chemistry teachers, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, it's not so different from other concepts we have seen in educating with tech. Their idea that students need their teachers there to answer questions or to provide help if they get stuck on an assignment, but they might not need teachers present to listen to a lecture or review content. Wikipedia gives a higher ed origin for flipped teaching, but it is a bit
different model using computer-based instruction. The origin isn't as important to me as the re-emergence of the idea now. Today, it seems that video & bandwidth is the key (as it is in most
media).

When I was at NJIT and we launched our podcasting initiative and became one of the first schools on Apple's iTunes U, we were trying some of the same things. Have students watch and listen to a lecture before class and use the time in class to follow up with discussion and questions.

Of course, professors have been doing that for a long time with readings. And the two forms of content have the same problem. What if students don't do the reading or watch the lecture? I hear many professors complain that students 1) don't buy the book(s)   2) even if they do, they don't read them  3) if they do read them, they don't seem to retain or understand any of what they read.

You might assume that students are more likely to watch a lecture than read a chapter, but I don't think the evidence for that is clear.

Those two teachers have a book, Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day and there is a Flipped Learning Network, a nonprofit organization launched this spring to train teachers from schools across the socio-economic spectrum in the strategy.

A article I read this week about an attempt to flip a classroom in a Portland, Oregon elementary school, points out one major obstacle. "Flipped Classroom' Model's Promise Eludes Poorer School Districts" shows that the teacher discovered that none of her students had computers at home. She had just one in the classroom.

Sometimes we make the assumption that there is ubiquitous computing and (high-speed) Internet access amongst our students. That is particularly true with college students who we imagine all being plugged in via their smartphones 24/7. The article points out that anecdotal evidence suggests that flipping classrooms is a more popular practice in wealthier suburban communities where nearly all students have Internet access at home and schools are more likely to have computers in classrooms.

Another criticism of the flipped classroom is that it still relies on lectures by teachers. Remember that over-used mantra of "guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage?" What happened?

In higher ed, blended learning (AKA hybrid learning) is probably the closest thing in place now to the flipped classroom. It too attempts to move some of the learning online, or at least out of the classroom space, and using the face-to-face time for what works best in that setting.

When I was designing hybrid courses, I always told faculty right off that they should do in the classroom whatever worked best in the classroom. If that meant having their truly dynamic lectures live and moving the discussion online, then do that.

Apple's iTunes U has never been social. Apple doesn't really do social. (Well, there was Ping, but that was dead on arrival.) But there is a new feature that is meant to allow users to learn with others, ask questions, and work more collaboratively in the iTunes U environment.

This social layer is already used in various ways on sites like Coursera, Edmodo, Knewton, Rafter, Codecademy and Udacity.

For this new social effort, Apple is partnering with Piazza. An article on the Forbes site, describes Piazza, not very flatteringly, as "a free student question and answer service" that adds the social layer to an otherwise one way "course" experience.

Piazza, as with most ogf the previously mentioned sites, is a newer startup that launched in January 2011. It allows students to
discuss topics in a course and has been free. Professors
or students can set up a page for a class. The only difference in the Piazza with iTunes
connection is that those courses will be public rather than closed to the students in a traditional class.


The first iTunes U course that is being used for this added layer is not a surprise. It is the "Coding Together: Apps for iPhone and iPad" class offered by Stanford. It is already one of the most popular classes on iTunes U, with over 10 million downloads. (The registration is open through July 6, if you want to try it out, but the class runs from June 25 to August 27.)  Of course, the new social tools are available for any course in iTunes U.

One of Apple's announcements earlier this year that did not get a lot of attention was that K12 Institutions can now sign up to deliver content in iTunes U.  Most of the attention in January went to the news that textbooks were coming to iBooks and that author software to create your own books would be supported, along with a dedicated iTunes U app, which "bundles" courses in a manageable, multimedia package.

The K12 news could be more of a motivator for change than the textbooks in the K12 space. I can see some teachers creating textbooks, but creating podcasts and support materials for iTunes U will be much easier. In fact, many educators may already have some of those materials created and ready to upload.

Of course, K12 is very different than higher ed - especially when it comes to issues like permissions for using students and student work and the probable "review process" that will be required by a school district.

To get started with iTunes U, K12 school districts, universities, and colleges in 26 countries can start at eduapp.apple.com