Graduate students represented 17% of the total college population in the fall of 2021 but 23% of the online population.15 The sample for this survey was weighted to make up approximately 60% graduate students, ensuring a large enough sample for meaningful conclusions for this segment of the online learning market.
good to know
Moreover, these students were equally open to online learning before the pandemic but are more likely to think about transferring to an on-campus program in the future. They’re also likelier to be open to in-person class sessions. Compared to learners who aren’t interested in synchronous online learning, they’re more likely to value their institution’s strong reputation and proximity to where they live.
this seems like a split in the online learning audience - here, they argue that it's because of experiences of remote learning - but it does present a possible design challenge. Offering occasional, optional live sync, might be the compromise that threads the needle.
Most learners favor eight-week terms, with 35% preferring to complete two courses over eight weeks. This is followed by one course over eight weeks (28%)
that's in line with how we're designing MPA
his year, enrollment growth is most robust in undergraduate- and graduate-level certificate progra
interesting
Differentiate your program with opportunities for customization
with 30 credit degree programs, I wonder if this looks more like, make sure that learning within the courses allows students to pursue their related interests, and also potentially offering micro-credentials that allow a deeper dive into a speciality
more likely to want to complete all or most course-related activities on a mobile device compared to older students.
points to a need for mobile-responsive design
instruction quality
hoping we can address some of this with the online teaching training course that we're working on, in addition to the insights that folks get during the design process
On the flip side, negative opinions fell by half.
that's kind of huge!
Additionally, within online programs, learners are concerned about clarity around expectations (27%), lack of interactions with instructors (27%), and a need for more engagement with peers (19%). Colleges and universities can alleviate these worries with well-prepared, supported instructors and policies around expectations and interactions. And for prospective learners, clear messaging and purposeful marketing about classroom interactions and expectations can dissuade concerns.
Super duper important and fits with what we've been saying about being clear and transparent about expectations on the marketing materials. I think also doing things like really clearly telling folks what types of interactions they can expect, with peers and instructors. I also used to have a slide in my welcome video that was "Where is the instructor?" where I talked about how it might seem like I'm not there since they can't see me, but I'm there in the discussion boards, in feedback on assignments, in office hours, etc - just straight up addressing that at the start.
Seventy-nine percent of surveyed online learners are open to a synchronous virtual learning session at least one time per course, reflecting last year’s findings.4 Even as the pandemic subsides, learners’ experiences with synchronous video technology, such as Zoom, appear to have inspired greater acceptance of synchronous learning opportunities in online programs.
Similar to a finding in last year's version of this report. The persistence of this trend does make me wonder about the idea of allowing up to a certain number of optional live sessions (2? 3?). But here again, I would love to know the undergrad/grad breakdown.
line learning is a pathway for former stopouts to nish th
I do wish they'd separate out their findings by grad and undergrad respondents. this finding is clearly undergrad focused.
Few are willing to switch to an on-campus program if the institution doesn’t offer an online program.
further support for the idea of separating out the online and on-ground programs. On-ground students may want to take an occasional online course, but online students are not likely to come to campus.
Education’s real promise is that it is one site among many others in the struggle to transform the social structures that create inequality.
one of the things that I'm reading between the lines is a tension between contexts - for example, contrasting this Backer passage with a line from the next quote: “Such a task is ultimately the work of political education and activism. By definition it takes place outside the [ind. school]” (Kelley). it seems to point to a fundamental question, can school be a site of transformation? (although now I'm noticing that the Backer's quote says "education" and Kelley's says "school," and those are two different things I think. so that's something I need to think about some more.)
Nespor (2008) problematizes an extra-local focus that can be part of some pedagogies of place for the ways in which it “obscures the critical questions of how places are constituted and connected to one another” (p. 481). Kara situated students’ lived experiences and knowledge within a larger national, even global, context.
wow - yes - love this, understanding space and place as expanding circles that begin with the extra-local and ripple outward
We should examine anew if place is a suitable proxy for space and if either approximate status in a digitally-mediated world.
I would love some help unpacking this... it feels really important... how is space different from place, from a digital sociological perspective?
By then, communication studies and internet research had dominated in the study of the internet
that's interesting - how did this scholarship frame the trajectory of the conversation around the relationship between technology and society? I guess I'm wondering, (how) would the conversation have been different, had digital sociology research been part of the early conversation in a larger way?
And yet, instructional design at its core, has not changed much. Neither has the technology upon which it floats.
When I think about how to change the practice of instructional design, I think about pathways into instructional design. One pathway is via a masters degree in instructional design, and I don't hear this pathway talked about much (maybe because it's a less common pathway). But I think there's lots of possibility there for making inroads toward a critical ID practice, for the primary reason that many (most?) ID graduate programs are housed within Colleges of Education. I was faculty in one of these programs for 10 years, and I was increasingly baffled by how such a traditional, behaviorist-driven program could exist in a COE in which every other teacher training program embraced and taught student-centered, social-justice oriented approaches to teaching and learning. Certainly the fact that faculty in these programs were themselves trained in traditional ID contributes to this. But wouldn't it be amazing if the invisible barrier between graduate ID programs and other programs in colleges of ed was breached, so that ID wasn't artificially isolated from pedagogical theory and practice?
so too will the digital pedagogue happily hack the LMS, opening it to the wider web,
does this sometimes take a level of technical know-how or sophistication that acts as a barrier for some of these instructors? (a great opportunity to talk to your friendly critical ID!)
It was born a relic — at its launch utterly irrelevant to its environment and its user.
Just thinking out loud here, but wondering whether it was actually a relic at the time of its birth, or whether it played to the lowest common denominator because that was (is?) in fact the most common type of teaching. In other words, the LMS not so much created a classroom structure, but replicated a typical classroom structure. The implication is that classes taught within its structured landed with a thud not (only, anyway) because of the LMS, but because of the pedagogy and the fact that the LMS allowed teachers to continue to teach in pedagogically unsound ways.
Pedagogy concerns itself with the instantaneous, momentary, vital exchange that takes place in order for learning to happen.
This makes me think about Shulman's attempt to define the core knowledge bases of teaching, which I understand as: teachers need to have both deep knowledge of their subject matter, and deep understanding of pedagogy (teaching as subject matter); and, that teaching is what happens when a teacher draws on those deep understandings to make adjustments - improvise - in the moment and moment to moment.
advent of online learning and instructional design brought the classroom onto
here, my training in instructional technology is showing :) but - it's interesting to me that instructional design is often conflated with online learning design. As a field, instructional design has been around since the 1950s, with roots in behavioral psych and initially applied to designing military training. As Sean and Audrey Watters and Neil Selwyn and others have written more eloquently elsewhere, I think that piece of historical context is really important to a critical understanding of ed tech today - the tradition of behaviorist training lives on.
Digital pedagogy is largely misunderstood in higher education.
in DLINQ @ MIddlebury we've been playing with different ways of framing it for folks as:
early courses could take (much) more time building a more authentically student-designed infrastructure and planning out how those infrastructures could work interoperably in future courses.
agree that a deeper sense of the issues may take time to develop with students. wondering if one possibility might be to circle back at the end of the semester to revisit the conversation with students and ask them to weigh in on their tool selection if they had to do it again.
I presented some key articles and let them choose to design ePorts or opt-out and stay in Moodle.
even though all the students in this class opted to use ePorts, offering the choice still feels really important from a student agency perspective
I think I can safely say that this means I had a pretty random sampling of my university’s first-year students, not particularly attached to the idea of rethinking education.
not only not actively interested in the topic, but I can imagine some of them were anxious about the idea of building a course from scratch? Curious if this was the case, and how did you help those students transition to this (potentially new-to-them) model of learning?
r how students can be empowered to move into the driver’s seat
another practice that relates to your points #2 and #3 is bringing students into the process of creating content for the class
accessibility and universal design,
love how you foreground #a11y in the OpenPed conversation
While following certain parameters set by the university regarding learning outcomes and goals for the FYS program, I ran the course as an experiment in radical OpenPed.
I'm wondering what the institutional context is/was for your extreme makeover? What groundwork existed already that supported (or constrained) your transition to extreme OpenPed? What (if any) tensions did you encounter in pushing your OpenPed to the extreme?
Collins (2010) explained that power relations in communities are organized around core ideas that combine “taken-for-granted, commonsense, everyday knowledge . . . and technical, formal knowledge” (p. 8) of elite groups.
I appreciate the way the authors use Collins' ideas around power to extend Wenger's CoP... Wenger talks about power to a certain extent when talking about roles w/ CoP (like brokers, who operate on the margins of multiple discourses). Reading this section, it's clear that Wenger's CoP alone is insufficient to think through how power operates within communities.
experiences in alternative professional learning spaces beyond their districts and schools.
I'm wondering where literature on teacher professional learning via online spaces such as social media fit into the authors' thinking? (e.g. “Together we are better”: Professional learning networks for teachers - note: paywall - or Learning in 140 Characters: English Teachers' Educational Uses of Twitter)
professional learning com-munities (PLCs)
the word "community" here suggests that this model has at least some interest in including participant voices in the way that the experience is shaped and unfolds, no? although certainly that is not always the case in practice.
We intentionally use both the terms professional development and professional learning to emphasize that the former carries a problematic history of what is “done” to teachers to develop their practice in ways predetermined for them by those in positions of power, while the latter is associated with forms of teacher learning in which teachers can experience greater agency, collegiality, and collaboration in learning in and about their practice (
I appreciate this distinction. I develop university-sponsored professional learning opportunities and am always looking for ways to support learner agency within these formal structures (much as we seek do to for students in our classrooms!); looking forward to learning from these teachers' experiences.
the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us.
this is really powerful.
Roof as a “white supremacist lone wolf” and commented, “we don’t know why he did this.”
sure, lone wolf. I'll just leave this right here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/morgan-roof-dylann-roof.html
usually portraying them sympathetically.
this makes me think of the NYTimes story post-Charlottesville, about the Nazi sympathizer, and critical pushback against normalizing this person: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/reader-center/readers-accuse-us-of-normalizing-a-nazi-sympathizer-we-respond.html
his systematic racist representation is evidenced by Fox News commentators, who blamed gangs, schools, and the welfare system for the Baltimore uprisings
evident too in the choice of word to describe the events - riot vs. unrest vs. uprising
by becoming authors of their own stories
I was listening to our local (Baltimore) NPR station yesterday and heard a story about a film project happening with 8th graders at a school in the Morrell Park neighborhood. The filmmakers were working with young people to help them tell their stories. The thing that stuck with me, though, was that when the filmmaker was asked about resistance to the project at the school, he told a story about how one of the teachers said that her students don't have any stories to tell. I was so floored by that statement, which is so problematic on multiple levels. Totally discounting their personhood.
the norm of accuracy motivation
what is "the norm of accuracy motivation?" maybe I'm reading too much into this - The Norm instead of the norm...?
is that we rely on self-reports ofreceiving media literacy learning opportunities, and we lack details on themedia literacy learning opportunities that students received.
ahahaha. Ok, that's the peril of annotating during the first read through. glad to see that they address this concern.
media literacy learning opportunities
like to know more about what these look like. if this was self-report on the part of the students, did they have guidance as to what constituted a "media literacy learning opportunity" or "exposure to media literacy education?" To take this further, it would be helpful to know more about specific strategies or practices within these learning opportunities that were successfully used to develop skills around accuracy.
youths’ par-tisan beliefs bias their judgments of arguments and of truth claims regardingcontroversial issues
is this because educational researchers don't see youth as politically active/interested?
Youth audiences evaluating a website’s credibility may rely on criteriasuch as the site’s surface characteristics
at my university, the library teaches a version of the CRAAP test, which lays out the following criteria for assessing the credibility of a website: currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose. I believe that this approach was meant to counter this practice of relying on surface characteristics - a nicely designed website being more likely to be believable - but I can see how the CRAAP test criteria on their face only scratch the surface, and may not in fact go far enough in the age of misinformation.
2008 to 32% in 2012
Likewise, a bit older. If newer research doesn't exist, I wonder why? Seems like an interesting and useful strand to pursue.
how various subgroups experience and benefit from education technology
this brings to mind that controversial NYT article about brand-name teachers (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/technology/silicon-valley-teachers-tech.html?_r=0), which points to the really important question overarching all this work: who benefits from ed tech?
Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that technologists often imagine their students as “roaming autodidacts,” described as “a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disem-bedded from place, culture, history, and markets” (214).1
yes, this. there's no such thing as the "typical learner."
16, Matt Rafalow studied three high schools in Southern California, which all had the same levels of technology access, but served different populations of students. He found that schools serving elite students saw creative and playful uses of technology as essential. By con-trast, schools serving middle- and lower-income students found these more empowered uses of technology threatening or irrelevant, and focused on more basic skills.
So I think that the culture of high-stakes testing in schools needs to be part of the conversation around understanding why we see these disparate ways of using technology to support learning. Schools that are considered "low performing" have enormous pressure to perform well on the standardized tests.
MOOC participation. They found that those in wealthier countries are much more likely to complete MOOCs and receive certificates
regarding this phenomenon in MOOCs, I'm wondering what role individual preference for online learning plays in these results? some research in online learning suggests that online learners need to be highly self-directed and motivated. are the authors suggesting that these characteristics have some relationship to wealth?
W hile affluent students often have tech-sav v y parents and the latest technology at home, less resourced students cannot count on these supports. This disconnect can be exacerbated when developers and reformers build technology literacy and capacity in school.
this is often an argument for having robust technology-supported teaching and learning in schools: because less resourced students may not have access at home to all of the tools and practices valued in a participatory culture, it's imperative that schools offer access to them. I'd highlight that building capacity needs to revolve around tools and practices, right - not just access to technology but knowledge of the ways in which the technologies can be leveraged in ways that are valued in a participatory culture.
technology have often faltered because technologists failed to anticipate broader social and cultural force
a determinist orientation toward technology
Schools serving privileged students tend to use the same technologies in more progressive ways than schools serving less privileged students.
see also work by Mark Warschauer and colleagues: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gexxlUYAAAAJ&hl=en
Maha Bali and Autumm Caines wrote a review of this report, and raise some interesting points to consider: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/equity-in-edtech-a-report-review/64513
Hi everyone, this recent report from Justin Reich and Mimi Ito has a lot of resonance with the Marginal Syllabus topic for this year. Wondering if others might like to annotate with me? Please feel free to join in!
YPAR, whether it takes place in schools or community organizations, gives young people opportunities to connect with each other as well as to adults, resources, and experi-ences that enable them to realize their civic potential and take action on issues that matter to them (Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006).
this gets at some of the conversation about earlier parts of the article around the need to connect virtual participation - namely, clicktivism-type participation - with (online and/or f2f action).
the online context is not inherently political.
wait - but aren't they little p political? and political in the sense that online spaces are created by people, who have ideologies and positions etc?
describes the value of understanding the “little p” politics that youth engage in regularly (p. 162).
agree with this, but wondering what implications for educators (if any) who may have little understanding of the cultural practices and norms of these online spaces, and thus may not be able to help students connect the dots (if we're seeing as participate in little p politics as a bridge to discussions of big P politics which...maybe we're not?) (lots of questions!)
Looking beyond traditional measurements of civic action, youth are participating in civic activities that dive deeper into issues of equity and localized politics and that represent broader contexts for civic action.
One of my former doc students who graduated last year worked with youth at 2 community technology centers to understand the ways in which technology helped to open pathways to civic engagement. When she asked them to define or talk about civic engagement, their responses entirely focused on their local neighborhoods. Civic engagement was, for them, local and contextual.
Schools, rather than helping to equalize the capacity and commitments needed for democratic participation, appear to be exacerbating this inequality by providing more preparation for those who are already likely to attain a disproportionate amount of civic and political voice.
interestingly, this rich-gets-richer finding is similar in studies of technology in schools...
fully in civic communities at local, national, and global levels regardless of age or legal residency
What does it mean to be a citizen? in what ways does the term overlap with legal status, and in what ways does it not? That's a powerful question!