Techfoot

David Warlick: A Tough Day

I never was a big fan of most integrated “webinar style” distance education tools like Elluminate Live or Tegrity, but part of the reason may have been that they require such extraordinarily strong moderators to be successful. My most recent experience was as a guest speaker with a group 50 K-12 administrators and technical specialists, and I’m closer now to being a believer. It’s amazing how many different activities are taking place simultaneously in one of these sessions:

1. Live video of the featured speaker.
2. Each of the 50 people has a microphone and can raise their hand to speak.
3. Online white board and application sharing with private screens and public screens
4. File Transfer
5. Both moderated and public chat
6. The session is being archived.
7. Pollls, Quizes, Emoticons

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach was the moderator of my session, and I was amazed at her ability to juggle all those inputs–bringing people in the conversation, troubleshooting microphone volume problems,giving direction to the other moderators. Dave Warlick participated in the fireside chat for the K12Online conference, and he shared my amazement.

I personally applaud, once again, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, who served masterfully as the session moderator. She was the perfect host. I can’t help but picture her with wires coming out of her ears, and light flashing on her forehead, because she was managing an enormous number of people, and handling the heading and air conditioning at the same time — and our voices, our applause, EVERYTHING ! Outstanding Job!

Twenty-first century education is going to need specialists who can design and manage the complexity of this kind of learning activity. These teaching tools have amazing capabilities, but very few of us brought up in traditional settings have the knowledge or the skills to make the most of them. If you haven’t done this kind of activity before, check out the archive to get a sense of the complexity.

Q&A with head of U. of Phoenix

The University of Phoenix is usually portrayed as the devil by most traditional higher education providers, but the new president seems like a pretty normal guy. With 300,000 and 250,000 graduates, Phoenix is largest accredited private university in the country.

I was surprised at how inexpensive the typical undergraduate degree was; I would have guessed that it was more in line with Syracuse–also a private, accredited university–with tuition and fees of $29,965 annually.

‘Students come to us at different parts in their career, plus our tuition varies by geographical region. But if you’re looking for a homogenized number, probably between $30,000 and $40,000.

With graduation rates of around 60%, Phoenix compares with many large open-enrollment state universities. Students leave for the reasons we would expect:

Pepicello: The two largest reasons they give us are, No. 1, financial and No. 2, life gets in the way. For adult students, obviously that makes sense.

Pepicello is quite candid about why the Unviversity of Phoenix was founded.

The mission of, say, Harvard is to serve a certain sector of the population and their mission is not to grow. And that’s true of higher education in general. The reason the University of Phoenix exists at all is that is that all of those various (universities) and their missions did not provide access to a large number of students who are capable and wanted access to higher education. And that’s our mission.

In general, I’m not a big believer in the “education should be more like business” mythology; in fact, I think that’s the worst thing institutions could be doing. However, I do think that those of us in traditional professional schools should pay attention to some of these new competitors and not just write them off as being part of some evil empire. There are some lessons to be learned there.

Malcolm Knowles

This is a fascinating biography of Malcolm Knowles, full of personal details that add valuable context to understanding of andragogy as a theory and set of guidelines for practice. Several biographies alluded to his background in Scouting, but this was the first I remember reading about the specifics of his winning a trip to the International Jamboree:

His campaign for the scouting prize had not been hit or miss. He had developed a technique that would help him compete effectively. He drew a large chart with a separate square for each day of the nine month contest. In these squares he systematically planned out the activities he would perform during the year to win the badges. Finding a technique that worked for him, he was convinced it could work for others. “My mother trained me to be systematical,” the sixteen-year-old Malcolm told readers of Boys Life, the scouting magazine, as he shared with them the self-directing technology that won him the trip. “Make your chart this way, fellows, and you will see how easily you can get your ‘fifty.’” He laboriously and mechanistically delineated how to do it. “My original chart, “he told the scouts, “was made out of beaverboard, two by three feet. I had it nailed at the foot of my bed, where it was the first thing I saw upon waking.”

The article also contains some interesting background on Knowles’ experience at Boston University.

His graduate program prospered. Student numbers proliferated. The fact that Knowles, with the help of a tiny adult education faculty, was supervising an extraordinarily large number of dissertations and theses, however, did not set well with many Boston University academics who questioned the granting of degrees for self-directed, or as they might have termed it, undirected learning. Knowles was carving out a national image for Boston University in adult education. Soon, though, a new administration dedicated to a traditional view of graduate work and scholarship questioned whether the reputation Knowles was building was the one that the administration favored for the university.

In the midst of his triumph, his beachhead in academe came under withering fire in 1972 from higher ground, the top administration at Boston University. The new president, John Silber, was unimpressed with andragogy. It seemed to him that too few professors were supervising too many dissertations, that the graduate program in adult education was structured more for students to learn from each other than from the professors, and that democratic process was more valued than intellectual discipline.

The article is posted on the site of the Adult Education program at National-Louis University. The program is unusual, if not unique, among US doctoral programs because of its clearly articulated philosophy of practice:

The ACE Doctoral Program, offered within the College of Arts and Sciences, provides a forum for critical reflection on adult education practice. The future of our economy, and of democracy itself, rests on an informed and critical populace. Weekend and residential sessions, together with web-based support provide the resources for educators of adults–teachers, organizers, trainers and “grass-roots” activists who, through their work, seek to contribute to the emergence of a productive society grounded in equity and justice.