Jun
3
After the Textbook is Over…
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Now, class, this is a moment of real liberation. You are now free to learn on your own or collaboratively using new methods of learning which are as old as the hills and which depend on the acknowledgement of two Lessons:
LESSON 1: all learning is narrative. Unless it is conveyed in a story form we have no way of relating odd facts to each other.
LESSON 2: all true learning is enjoyable, whether it is done alone, in groups of learners, or by learners grouped around an inspired teacher.
We are now watching the far from inspiring sight of the world’s educational publishers, at all levels, trying to breathe fresh breath into the calcified corpses of print textbooks by recreating them as eTextbooks. This will fail. While we cannot recreate learning itself in the digital environment we can provide an entirely new learning experience, and it is an insult to the intelligence of learners to give them a book-look-alike format that apes print without adding value from digital. And to say that notes and bookmarks are significant value is rubbish. Only if you build a textbook ab initio online (Nature’s Principles of Biology is a case in point) can you claim some credit from instant updating and lifelong ownership. I spent a year of my life – 1969 – 1970 – editing and structuring Biology: A Functional Approach, which became a bestseller at its level for a decade. The narrative created was around deserting the study of plants and animals as classifications and species, the rote learning of a previous generation, and building a storyline around the way life on earth functions – from respiration to reproduction. A narrative about how life works. But that was telling stories then, in the great age of print. This week, I have seen two glimpses of the future, one expressed as as business organization, and the other as highly innovative technology. Both of them undermine completely the idea that the future has anything to do with the reconstituted formats of print.
In the first instance I found myself this week in the prestigious Mayfair offices of Direct Learning Marketplace (www.DLMplc.com). This, in the jargon of the investor, is a “buy and build” vehicle for acquiring future-facing business assets in the field of business education. Driven by the entrepreneurial energies of Andy Hasoon, it has at its core an idea about learning which is one sustainable arm of the two-pronged approach to what I now believe are the only viable metodologies for recreating learning in a networked society. By his purchase of Pixelearning, a Coventry company long on my map as an ideas centre in serious gaming, Andy signals an intention to place games at the heart of the learning experiences that he is tackling across the hugely fragmented territory of training, development, in-servicing etc in the business and industrial context. And since scale is a vital component here, and he works in a country with a gaming design tradition to be proud about, the acquisition approach is very appropriate. So to those traditional book publishers who have always said to me “Gaming is interesting but you can never build a big business around it”, I can now say “watch this space”!
And alongside gaming lets place the other future development strategy. In the 1990s, as a external director at Dorling Kindersley before it was bought by Pearson, I revelled in the development of CD-ROM-based multimedia learning experiences. The fact that this year, with the arrival of ePub3, we are at last able to do online what we could then do on disc in 1995 is surely a signal for something to happen. And it has, in Boulder, Colorado. There, a team with huge experience in multiple media development for education, led by Jeff Larsen, Larry Pape and Kevin Johnson, have begun to create video-based narratives that to me exemplify where we are going with tablet-based experiences. Their focus has been the iPad, and their initial field of engagement has again been business education (says a lot for how stroppy businesses can be when served “same old, same old” by training companies?). If you have reached this point please go immediately to http://www.inthetelling.com/tellit.html and then play the demo video (also on YouTube, where we, as learners/students, download 4 billion videos a day!). Here you will see a narrative core in video on one side of the iPad screen, with chapters, references and linkage on the other. Here you will also see navigation to other related resources. This is a licensable technology, backed by Cloud-based storage and streaming, and surrounded with the developer tools needed to create narrative based video learning on the TellIt technology.
And I thank this team for something else as well. They have avoided the over-hyped, near-meaningless term “multimedia”, which lost its meaning and its way in the dotcom boom/bust, and settled for Transmedia to express what they are doing. This is a good term for a new age of narrative-led, video-based, learning experiences and I hope it catches on. And one last note: everything spoken of here fits wonderfully onto the infrastructure of LMS/VLE/digital repositories that we have oversold to schools and learning institutions, and which now comes into its own. Alongside and around the installation of that infrastructure we also failed to persuade teachers, as well as learners, that learning could be recreated in the network, and improve in the process. Here are two initiatives – in games and video narrative – which at last make good that promise.
Mar
12
Evidence-Based Education
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Paradox: nothing is more measured, assessed or examined than education, but we still seem to know remarkably little about how people “learn” in full sense of the word. And while the world is full of learned academics with impressive qualifications in “cognitive processing” and the like, try to build a “learning system” for humans and you encounter immediate design problems. Indeed, it is easier to teach machines to learn. So each generation seems to approach the problem – that each of us learns differently, under different stimuli and at different ages – in a different way. Once it was a matter of coursework and textbook. In this age, the Age of Assessment, satisfactory proof of learning is accomplished by testing. Never mind that the learner may have no resulting ability to deploy his or her learning in any other context than a test; we are developing people who can jump immediate hurdles and may not be able to successfully navigate the great oceans of life in front of them. This applies to schools and universities, but also to the rapidly growing vocational and training sectors.
Over in the medical environment, we have had evidence-based practice for over a decade. This is now becoming a discipline in its own right, combining systematic review of literature (for example, the Cochrane Collection) with statistical analysis, meta-analysis and risk-benefit analysis to produce, in combination with the patient record, some really effective results in diagnostic terms. These are now widely deployed in different configurations by information service solution providers like Elsevier, WK Health and Hearst Medicine. As genetic analysis and custom drug treatment become more common, this will no doubt develop, but as we have it today, the information service players are fully plugged into the system. How different to this is education!
Despite the huge collection of indicative statistics, there is still no feedback loop in education which tells teachers what works with certain types of learning profiles. As they develop and test digital learning environments, private sector learning systems developers (not just systems houses but content developers too) are getting significant feedback on the efficacy of their work. Schools store an ever-growing amount of performance data, and much of this can be related to learning systems. Examination boards have yet more (Digression: my most depressing moment in education this year – going to a parent’s evening with a sixth former studying classical civilizations. Question to teacher: what do you recommend as additional reading (I have shelves full of possibilities); Answer: we do not recommend reading around the subject. It only confuses people to have several interpretations and inhibits their ability to secure high pass grades!). And yet all of this content or evidence is disaggregated, not plumbed for learning experience significance, and there is no tradition of building ideas about what input might secure learning gains – just give the learner another diagnostic test!
These notes were sparked in the first place by the announcement last month of the creation of a Coalition for Evidence-Based Education by the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York. I also know of the TIER project in the Netherlands (involving the Universities of Amsterdam, Groeningen and Maastricht) and have great respect for the ongoing work of Better magazine, created by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Research and Reform in Education. But all of these seem to me as much concerned with applying evidence to changing policy at government or school administration level, as they are with developing practitioner tools. And they exemplify something else – there is not a publisher/education solutions supplier loose around any of them. True, no one ever field-trialled a textbook (though I once did this with a UK Schools Council course in the 1970s called “Geography for the Young School Leaver” – and it had dramatic effects on the presentation and construction of the learning journies involved). Yet here we are in the age of Pearson’s MyLab or the Nature Education’s Principles of Biology online learning experience. The age of iterative learning devices, wired for feedback and capable of recording both anonymized statistical performance data and giving diagnostic input to a single user or teacher on what needs support and re-inforcement in a learning process. Yet I know of no developer who trades use with feedback in terms of co-operating with government and schools in trialling, testing and developing new learning environments. And given that these are iterative – they tend to change over time as refinements are made and non-statistical feedback is procured – I know of no schemes which are able to demonstrate the increasing efficiency of their learning tools.
ELIG (the European Leaning Industry Group) has issued members of its marketing board, like myself, with an urgent requirement to uncover good case studies which demonstrate the efficacy of learning tools in practice. I can find plenty, but they are all based on the findings of the supplier. I can even find some where a headmaster says “exam results increased X% while we were using this system” – but they never indicate whether this was the sole change that led to the finding. If I were a teacher with a poor reader with real learning difficulties, where do I go for the ML Consult or UpToDate medical review equivalent – a way of defining my pupil’s problem and relating it to success with others with similar problems, and the learning systems feed back on the systems that worked? The answer is that you do not go anywhere, since education, one of the most lonely and secretive jobs in the professional world, is still not quite prepared to enter the digital age with the rest of us. And its suppliers, sharing something of that culture, still operate in an isolated way that also predates the new world of consolidation and massive systems development now beginning in this marketplace. And the Learner? Processed or Educated? It all depends on the feedback loop.
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