WISE in Qatar (think again) – thousands slaughtered for a kick-about?

Graham Brown-Martin, who knows the WISE fconference folks well, tweeted about replacing the Louise Bourgeois sculpture of a Spider house in the atrium at the QNCC the venue for this years WISE summit with an elephant in reference to the abuse of migrant labour…

Graham Brown-Martin

‏‪@GrahamBM

Perhaps Bourgeois' spider might be replaced for an elephant at the QNCC for future gatherings?

Let me call this a ghost elephant, maimed, butchered and slaughtered for one brief  moment of supposed glory – a World Cup. Thousands dead, literally slaughtered in the desert, for a kick-about.

I know Qatar, have worked there and been to the WISE conference a few times. WISE started as a worthy idea, bringing people from all over the world to discuss the future of education, as it picked up the tab for those who couldn’t afford to attend. But it began to morph into something different, as dissenting voices began to disappear from the speaking roster, largely complaint administrators and institutionalised suits started to appear and the budget shrank.

Passing the graveyards

Two years ago, I passed the stadiums start to emerge like broken pots from the heat and dust, surrounded by predatory looking cranes. These sites have become the graveyards for thousands of workers, in conditions best described as modern slavery. Holing up in a 5-star hotel, and being feted by an army of staff in a conferences centre for a few days, immunises you from the truth – that this is a place built on greed. How can anyone look out from this air-conditioned bubble and accept the fact that people are literally dying so that others can enjoy men kicking around a ball?

FIFA fiasco

The FIFA crisis has ensnared Qatar, exposing the suggested corruption in its bid. Garcia was stonewalled by the Qataris who refused to co-operate. But the FBI has widened its enquiries, as Blazer and now Warner grass up their colleagues. FIFA is so venal that it is now turns on its own, literally eating itself alive. But that is not my main point. Corruption and money is one thing, deliberately denying thousands of innocent people their basic rights to health, safety and life, knowingly murdering them, is way beyond any moral boundary. And for educators to deliberately flock to Qatar, within sight of these graveyards would be nothing more than blatant hypocrisy.

Red card?

There are some good people in Qatar but when a state puts spectacle above survival, it’s time to blow the final whistle. The yellow card was played – a possibly corrupt bid. The red card should now be shown for the killing of thousands for entertainment. I call on any of you thinking about attending the WISE Conference this year to think again. It’s a small sacrifice to make for a good cause, to help stop the death of thousands of poor people.

WISE 2013 – Reinventing education

The World Summit on Education in Doha, Qatar brings together educators from around the globe. They literally fly you in, put you up in a fine hotel, feed you and let you rip. Networking here, and that is its strength, is as global as you can get, as you’re guaranteed to speak to people from every continent. It is arguably, as George Siemens says, “world’s most important education conference”.
‘Reinventing education’ was this year’s theme, an admirable goal and badly needed as we know that the Millennium goals will be missed, that the existing model is flawed, costs too high and that demand is exceeds supply. So what happened?
As I said when I blogged the last WISE conference I attended (this is my 3^rd), “Education’s a slow learner - it may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their institution and sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption. Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.”

4 pillars of education

The plenaries were, well, institutionalised, UNESCO, in my opinion, have become part of the problem and low on solutions. They dominated many of the sessions and regurgitated old reports, clichés and truisms, none worse that their 4 Pillars of Education ‘to be, to know, to do, to live together’. This is fine, but fails on a number of counts. ‘To be’ is a banal abstraction that has no real purchase in education. ‘To know’ is an obvious truism – of course education is about knowing – but knowing what? ‘To live together’ is better but not best taught in school and classrooms. The last, ‘To do’ is good but largely ignored as education gets ever more abstract and academic, treating vocational learning as an afterthought. What we needed was the Samson of innovation to push over the UNESCO pillars and enter the temple of institutional thought to upturn a few tables that have been selling the same tired, old stuff for decades. Sorry - I’ve mixed up two parables in one sentence!

Morin – disappointing ‘discourse’

Morin opened the conference with an abstract, rambling précis of his old UNESCO paper. He’s 92 and struggled to handle his notes and microphone. It was stratospheric, a piece of French philosophy, totally detached from the real world. It’s a type of ‘discourse’ (as French philosophers like to call it) that remains rooted in dualist abstractions and dialectic, with the occasional apercu. But this approach fails to deliver concrete ideas that one could take away and apply in the real world. When asked for some real suggestions and detail, he couldn’t and fumbled through with some more discourse on ‘strategy’. Worse, it set the wrong tone for the summit. One of abstractions and a failure to address real problems.

Literacy & numeracy

But things got much better with a hard hitting session which delivered some surprises for me. First some brilliant insights from Helen Abadzi, that around 18 our minds become less plastic and open to learning literacies. You can learn the letters but it is difficult to see them come together as words. You can experience this for yourself when you learn a new language as an adult. As you rarely reach a reasonable reading speed, of around 60-80 words a minute, you forget the start of sentences before you’ve reached the end. The implications of this research are huge, that we may be wasting too much time and money trying to solve an insoluble problem. The second was that the whole literacy push in Africa and the developed world is being thwarted by poor textbooks and teaching. I have seen this for myself in Cambodia, where a literally unusable textbook was being used in a country classroom. There was a call for the abandonment of traditional ‘English’ and ‘Middle-class’ teaching methods and texts for a literal ‘letter by letter’ approach in the local language, which is rarely as irregular a English. When done well it takes around 100 days. The other issue is teacher feedback, which is often poor and misdirected in schools, focussing on the best not the worst performers in the class. As for numeracy, it’s a different class of problem, as we are all born numerate. New born babies are numerate but not literate. In truth this side of the debate wasn’t covered at all.

Small-minded debate on Big Data

This session bordered on the bizarre. As one of the most important current topics in education it deserved better. What we got were idiosyncratic, personal and to be frank, not very informed, views on the subject. John Fallon, of Pearson, was reasonably articulate and tried to keep to topic, but the other three were amateurish. I saw one ‘analytics’ expert in the room leave after 15 minutes.

For John Fallon we need to collect, analyse and interpret data give opportunities to look at education like never before and transform outcomes. We’re not short of data, it’s just that most of it is inputs such as spend, enrolments, millennium goals, broadband connectivity and so on. As I always say, to measure bums on seats is to measure the wrong end of the learner. Then there’s the outcomes; PISA PIAC, high stakes tests, artificial once year events. What we don’t use it for, said John, is to enhance learning. How do I know what’s going on in students’ minds. Big Data needs to scale. Thousands of individual interactions each and every day, across informal and formal learning. He was the only one on the panel who had any real grasp on the detail.

Divina Frau-Meigs, a sociologist, and self-styled activist for media literacies (stretching the meaning of the word activist), gave an idiosyncratic presentation based on her own flimsy research. At one point she included drawing mindmaps on paper as Big Data. It’s called BIG data for a reason. Her statement that it’s mostly dashboards and data mining missed the point. Emilio Porta an economist from Nicuaragua was obsessed with global data – UN, UNESCO, PISA and so on. He couldn’t see the flaws in having created a sort of arms race as the leaning Tower of PISA data is hopelessly skewed. htp://buff.ly/1aCLCSb Politicians distort and exaggerate these stats for their own ends. This was a very low level chit chat about a complex and serious subject. I’m not sure that any of the panel had the expertise to do it the justice it deserved.

Mindgraphs - Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling has a great TED talk on the animation of statistics. But what matters is what those statistics tell us. Rosling stunned us with his assertion that our common perceptions about population, poverty and education are worse than that of chimps! He did this with enthusiasm and humour.

What is the global literacy rate?

80%

60%

40%

20%

(answer at bottom)

Again and again he showed us that our common perceptions are misconceptions. Population is not increasing exponentially as birth rates have and are falling and the number of children in the world has stopped growing.

On education he also scotched a few myths around figures quoted by notables on the panels. What is worse, he asked POVERTY or GENDER in education? Poverty is the clear answer. Above all, we no longer have developed v developing nations but a range. Rosling should have been the opening keynote, he set the tone for a proper debate, based on real figures.

What if Finnish teachers taught in your schools?

Pasi Strahlberg posed a few questions to show that you must tackle improving your educational system holistically. It is not JUST about quality teachers, the mantra we so often hear. It’s a wide range of social issues around scrapping the private sector, not rushing things and avoiding early years ‘schooling’. Let them play until they’re 7 or 8. Don’t get obsessive about testing. This flies in the face of almost everything we do in education in the UK. We have become trapped in an arms race, where the solution to everything is more ‘competition’, more ‘schooling’, more ‘league tables’ and more ‘testing’. I also noticed that this was in direct contradiction to Julia Gillard’s prescriptive ‘testing’ approach.

Monsters and misconceptions

This was a revelation, quick fire talks on all sorts of topics and solutions, some good, some great, some awful. Let’s get the awful stuff out of the way. The talk by the Observer journalist was an anecdotal rant about how women rule the world and hapless men need to listen to them, as ‘men can’t collaborate, women do’. This was a statement so general and awful that it deserves a response. I played football nearly every night as a child, I’ve managed companies, worked in teams and have little to learn from a hackneyed journo, who has spent most of her life in solitary confinement typing out articles on subjects to a deadline. She obscured an interesting point about the feminisation of education in early years and primary by caricaturing men. OK, got that out of my system.

To counter this, we had superb presentations on hard hitting topics, like child marriages, self-sustaining schools in Uganda, MOOCs in China, Amazigh education in Morocco and the Khan Academy. This quick-fire stuff needs to be promoted and given more status, maybe themed. I particularly enjoyed the iThra talk, about an after school science programme. He had a stunning quote, “The education system is a monster, by fighting it we would have become monsters ourselves”.

Mozilla – tinker, share, make

Mark Surman showed us how to present. Face the audience, stand up, look people in the eye, speak knowledgeably but from the heart, don’t use notes and deliver a clear message. Compare this to Morin and others on the many panels that delivered the same old platitudes. Motivate, engage and excite learners. Get them to tinker, share and make things. It’s a learn by doing model that allows young minds to understand the technological world in which they live and use that technology to learn, do things and make things. What gave his message clout was the fact that he was doing this through the Mozilla Foundation, around the world, in Mozfests and Maker events.

Educators are always going on about 21^st C skills. For Surman the 4th literacy is web literacy, as the web is the new classroom, 21st century skills - 5 Cs (Classroom is not one of them)  communicate, create, culture, collaborate, community on the WEB. These skills are not well taught in schools and universities, where learners are herded into classrooms and lecture theatres, online communication tools and devices often banned and creativity rare, often squeezed by the obsession with STEM subjects. Educators are also always trying to force storytelling. Young people tell stories daily - it's called Facebook. Lifelong learning is Google, Wikipedia, Social networking and YouTube - life is not a course it's informal learning.

MOOCs

Excellent input from the knowledgeable George Siemens and the Chief Scientist for EdX. These guys know their stuff but the other two participants clearly knew nothing about MOOCs and astonishingly, had never taken a MOOC. How do I know this? I asked them and the chair. Neither had taken a MOOC. They both spoke like amateurs because they were amateurs, trotting out clichés about human interaction and drop-out without any grasp of the detail. Siemens was clearly frustrated by their uninformed negativity and explained why drop-out is not the problem people imagine it is, that pedagogy is varied and evolving and that the experience is richer than people imagine and, above all, people like them and use them. For the first time in 1000 years education that delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want and enjoy.

MOOCs are a wake-up call for Higher Education. MOOCs flip universities. Siemens is right, MOOCs are a supply response to a demand problem. We’ve seen more action in 1 year than last 1000 years and MOOCs will produce dramatic systemic and substantial change. Certification is NOT the point in MOOCs - only 33% wanted certification in Edinburgh MOOCs and there are plenty of ways they can be monetised.

Human interaction is an issue but in the 6 MOOCs I've taken this has been great - teaching seems intimate, peer-to-peer interaction strong, forums lively and physical meetups possible. Siemens got a little tetchy when drop-out was mentioned – rightly so. The sceptics seemed determined to look at everything within the deficit model. What about the hundreds of thousands of drop-ins? I’m absolutely amazed that so many have taken so many courses from so many places. Online experience need not be inferior. As Siemens said, let's hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!

There’s real fears around dominance by the private sector, but if that delivers cheaper, faster, better education, so be it. In my opinion, however, the future of MOOCs is: open platforms, open content, open pedagogies and the opening of minds. African MOOCs may unlock a billion more brains HOOKs VOOKs - High school and Vocational MOOCs are also being delivered as this is not just about HE and degrees. The MOOC session by far best at WISE talking about real reinvention and a real phenomenon.

Conclusion

This is my third WISE summit, and as usual, I met some amazing people. Thanks George Siemens, Mark Surman, Cathy Lewis Long, Derek Robertson, John Davitt, Davod Worley, Jef Staes and all of the new people I met in Doha. The Souk was a hoot (try the Iraqi restaurant there), the gala dinner hilarious (the lack of alcohol made us almost hysterical) and on the rides on the bus to and from the conference I had some of the best impromptu sessions.

Overall however, you can see the problem, a failure to engage with the real problems head-on; costs, relevance, technology, that faculty and existing teaching systems biggest barrier to progress in learning.  86% of the delegates want reinvention of education but time and time again the panels reflected and reinforced old ideas and practices, with the audience clapping every time the word ‘teacher’ was mentioned. Teachers matter, but until we recognise that teaching is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning and look for some other additional solutions, WISE will forever be focussing on the wrong thing – teachers, not learners. The fear, that students may ‘manage to learn without me’ and of technology in general, is holding us back. Next year, less administrators, more innovators. The good news is that the Qatar Fundation has been doing brilliant work across the globe and announced a focus on innovation this year, with financial support for such innovation. They may be on to something here.

PS

Session on University Rankings was in Room 101!

 (Answer 80%)

Education’s a slow learner (lessons from WISE 2011)

1200 leaders in learning from 120 countries at WISE2011, all flown into Doha by the Qatar Foundation to shape the future, with a focus on innovation. Did they succeed? Yes and no. It takes more than three days to create an Education Spring. Here’s my take.

Education’s a slow learner

It may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their institution and horizontal sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption.

Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.

It took a politician, Gordon Brown, to show we educators how to communicate, teach, frame a problem THEN a solution. His speech was masterful, laying out the many dimensions of the problem, informing through humour, moving the audience with heart rending stories then he hit us with a vision, a clear goal and details on funding. All children in school by 2015, with massive injection of funds by the private sector, public sector, religious institutions and not-for-profits. He put great emphasis on tech companies such as Google, Apple and so on, which was novel.

Generation gap

Few were using Twitter, Facebook was a mystery to most and fewer still blog. The stage was often filled by older people in dull suits who all agreed with each other, that education was a glorious and great good. If only our leaders could see this, give us more money, then all our sins would be washed away. But this doesn’t wash. Things only sprang into life when we got younger learners' voices, like the young Qatari woman who shocked the academics by saying she wouldn’t have got through her medical degree without Wikipedia. She challenged the audience to step into their local school to see if things have got better (obviously meaning they had not).

Real innovators, like Jimmy Wales, were thin on the ground. I would have given him the WISE prize, as Wikipedia is a truly amazing, global, scalable success in learning. He explained that he didn’t have a business plan and just got on with the task, “I’m a carpenter not an architect”.  A recurring theme of the conference was the undercurrent of ludditism. Even the presenters were at it, with little digs at technology. We kept hearing ‘technology is only a tool’, ‘technology is not proven’, ‘it’s not the technology its teachers that matter’. Replace the word ‘technology’ with ‘books’ and you’ll see how odd this is. Valerie Hannon of the Innovation Unit has continued with this anti-technology theme in her blog.

Crisis of relevance

The Arab Spring has taught us educationalists a lesson. The heavy investment in education, especially universities, is turning out graduates with low, relevant skills, resulting in mass unemployment. Across the Arab world of 85m 18-24 year olds, nearly 1 in 5 is unemployed. The immediate (and it is immediate) challenge is to develop skills for employment and security. 1 in 4 are out of work in Tunisia. In Egypt 34% of young people wait for a long time before finding a job. They call it the ‘waithood’ and can be up to 3 years or more. At 7% of GDP on education, Tunisia is near the top of the league table, so what went wrong? Why has so much money been spent with so little success? Ask the graduates. “No one wants the skills we have and we don’t have the skills they want”. E4E (Education for employment) has a real and relevant approach where employability matters with application based learning and good career guidance. Employers want real world experience not just paper qualifications, so you have link education to the workplace. With female job seekers it’s worse , with unemployment at more than 30-35% among female graduates.

There was some agreement on the lack of relevant skills, most employers expressing dissatisfaction with critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communications. The system was stuck with memorisation and lecture based learning. Professors sell their notes and set exams around the memorisation of these notes to increase sales. Asking questions and questioning the knowledge of teachers and academics is barely tolerated. This is not education, this is programming. On top of this there’s a strong stigma against vocational training, especially among educationalists.

Edgar Morin saw modern universities as having failed to respond to modern times. Their disciplines limit our knowledge and lead to separation. We need relevant knowledge, not barren , specialised experts, lost outside of their discipline. The proof? The current financial crisis shows this – academics are impotent and lost. They have lost the ability to communicate properly and come up with solutions.

Educational colonialism

A German Professor of Mathematics told me that he’s just spent 6 months in Ethiopia help set up 40 (not a mistype) Universities. He thought this was lunacy. The country has barely functioning schools and they’ve been fed the line that HE is the answer to their problems. What they need, he explained was more vocational colleges for technicians and functional jobs, not advanced degrees. This is the madness of institutionalised initiatives.

All over the Middle East and Africa, western Universities are playing this game, setting up campuses in education parks. It’s a distortion that they could do without. It sets the expectation that everyone should become a ‘Doctor or Engineer’. That’s the phrase you hear all the time. No, these countries need functioning managers and professionals across a wide range of professions.  On the same panel, a South African claimed that the country needed ’more postdocs and women in Engineering’ (that old trope). Oh yeah?

I attended a completely sterile debate on University rankings. Despite general agreement that a linear sequence does not statistically represent the diversity of the institutions or data, and despite knowing that they don’t represent teaching (yet are used by parents and teachers to choose universities), they are still used by academics who should know better. These are lies told by people who know they are lying. Prof Jeffrey Sachs was clear, don't invest in the American model, now driven by greed selfishness and short-sightedness.

Revolution’s here

The Arab Spring was omnipresent. It coloured everything. Young people want jobs and in the Middle East the current model hasn’t worked. Degrees have been commoditised. What people need is jobs. We need to recognise that technology played a huge role in the Arab Spring, and if it can help topple governments, it can help transform education. The Arab world has one language and could benefit hugely from an initiative that produced good Arabic content, from the cloud, that was device-independent. If the Qatar Foundation could step up to the plate on this one, we’d have real progress.

Some voiced the opinion that the Arab Spring is the best thing that could have happened for education in the Arab world. It could help elevate the agenda to where it ought to be. Why? Long standing institutions, with sclerotic structures and management, are the problem, with deeply rooted incentives to prepare for a test or get a diploma. So, at the heart of any programme needs to be the reform of incentives, comprehensive and ambitious reform, not only in countries that have gone through revolutionary change but other countries by proximity.

A deeply depressing incident occurred in Charlie Leadbeater’s session on innovation. After a brilliant triplet of innovators who were reshaping education by getting it out of the traditional classroom, the Minister of Education for Iran swanned in with a posse of henchmen. Or so we though. It was actually a lackey who read a speech that had numbered goals around setting tens of thousands of Koranic schools and prayer rooms, linking, and I quote ‘knowledge to religion’. This cultural engineering is a disgrace. More education, in this, sense is casting the net backwards.

Out of the box

You must not only think out of the box but get out of the box that is the classroom. Indeed, the best workshop was on three innovations from India, Denmark and Australia. All three had taken education out of the classroom. A school in Denmark, Hellerup Skole, had been built as a ‘house’ then space allocated and appropriate furniture bought. In Australia Stephen Harris had abolished classrooms and reimagined education around different concepts of space. I asked him why his kids were still in uniforms and he said, clearly annoyed, “it’s the legacy of the British public school system”.

I heard of schools under mango trees, walking schools that took place in a different house in the village each day, learning in church halls after hurricanes that had wrecked everything else, pavement kids in India that had school bussed to them as they couldn’t leave their home unguarded. Did you know that 50% of all schooling in Afghanistan takes place in tents?

Of course, the real space that has been colonised by learning is virtual. Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, Khan Academy, VLEs, OER and a huge number of other sites and tools have created an alternative world of learning. Despite WISE attendees being largely lost with technology, technology is easily the most important innovatory force in learning.

Get real

Lifelong learning appears to have been hijacked, at least in Europe, by educational institutions. I attended a workshop on LL that started with nothing but talk of Universities and the funding they receive in Lifelong Learning. Until, that is, the audience revolted and pointed out that institutions are the reason why Lifelong Learning is failing. We know that formal and informal must be recognised. This is not about schooling, but avoiding the trap that schooling leads to – that learning must take place in institutions through courses, with teachers. One could argue that Universities have little or nothing to do with this.

On the topic of realism, Martin Burt runs schools as businesses. The schools pay for themselves. Rather than teaching abstract maths they teach business maths. For him this is not a business project but a business. This is interesting, an appeal that more learning should be REAL and RELEVANT. Until we see knowledge, skills and learning in context we’ll be stuck in a culture that values the academic over everything else. We know this has been a huge mistake. Vocational learning needs a voice.

Get mobile

Despite the obvious barriers, such as small screens, cost, technical variability in devices and basic illiteracy, it’s starting to happen. Mobiles are powerful, personal and portable. The costs are plummeting, with some operators offering zero rates for educational use. In some countries the cellphone has leapfrogged other technology for the poor.

Dr Maths has been used by 30,000 students in Africa, and elsewhere, to deliver text and tutor support in maths. They bypassed schools and teachers entirely relying on word of mouth. They operate in S Africa and found that even in the townships mobile ownership and access was pretty much universal. In fact it is staggering how much poor people will spend on mobiles – up to 30% of their income.

Of course, seeing mobile as just a communication device between teachers and learners restricts its primary advantage – scalability. Tutors and teachers are not scalable. I learnt how Twitter was used for language learning (the 140 letter constraint is the trick). Siri offers a breakthrough here with voice recognition and AI driven coaches, assistants and language learning.

MOOCs: Who’s using MOOCs? 10 different target audiences

Fascinating graphic,a sit shows that nearly 42% of the target audience for MOOCs are not the developed world. It also raises an interesting question. Who is it for?’ are four words that tease out a MOOC strategy or lack of strategy. For most it is a marketing exercise in terms of the brand, a way of reducing internal costs on high volume courses, a way of recruiting potential students (directly or through their parents). Yet others see it as a way of flushing out funding from Alumni or presenting an ‘accessible’ face to Government.

For MOOCs, several target audiences have emerged:

1. Internal students on course – cost savings on volume courses

2. Internal students not on course – expanding student experience

3. Potential students national –major source of income

4. Potential students international – major source of income

5. Potential students High school – reputation and preparation

6. Parents – significant in student choice

7. Alumni – potential income and influencers

8. Lifelong learners – late and lifelong adult learners

9. Professionals – related to professions and work

10. Government – part of access strategy

Lifelong learning MOOC

This is the big one, as it produces the big numbers. There seems to be a genuine thirst for courses on a wide range of subjects for people who just want to learn more. This is heartening. Rather than locking in learning within expensive institutions, we may be on the edge of a cliff from which new forms of learning can soar. What’s surprised people is the diverse nature of this group, as they come from lots of different countries.

The set of people who are external is huge and diverse in terms of age, national v international, nationality, ethnicity and first language. You really have to focus down with some profiling (define a typical user) or risk negative reactions from some groups. Most Coursera course are aimed at an external audience but who is this audience? If your course is for people with busy lives, is it wise to offer such strictly synchronous courses?

Internal + external MOOC

Do you want your existing students, either slated for the existing course or others, to do your MOOC? If MOOCs are to fulfil their promise of changing the way we teach and learn and reduce internal costs, this may be necessary.

Sebastian Thrun’s famous MOOC did take existing students, none of whom were in the top performing 400 students. NovoED aim to produce group MOOCs aimed at both internal and external students. It has happened, will happen, and if MOOCs are to change the face of HE, it must happen.

The University of Alberta’s Dino 101 Dinosaur Paleobiology MOOC hopes to attract huge numbers and I’m sure it will. Due for release in September 2013 it’s billed as being “led by Phil Currie, the world’s premier dinosaur hunter”. This is much smarter than the blatant AUE approach, as it is aimed at three audiences:

·         Free to anyone (marketing)

·         University of Alberta students can do it and get a credit (core business0

·         Students from around the world for course accreditation for a modest fee

This is more strategic as it takes the one asset and targets three audiences. They’ve also cleverly sneaked in another marketing objective – tourism, “It will also help highlight the best of Alberta’s rich dinosaur assets”. Smart thinking.

Outreach MOOC

Many MOOCs are more marketing than learning. There one species of MOOC, the outreach MOOC or more accurately the marketing MOOC, that is sprouting up everywhere. These MOOCs are aimed at marketing your brand to new students, parents of potential students and alumni, all potential sources of income, hence the use of the word ‘marketing’. I know academe hate the word ‘marketing’ unless it’s a course in their revenue-rich business school but this is a marketing MOOC.

A good example is the Australian National University, who is building an edX MOOC aimed at high school students, alumni, adult learners and parents, the first two topics are 6 week courses on Astrophysics and Engaging India (English & Hindi). She admitted her University had no real strategy for MOOCs but thought this was a way of testing the water. At least she was honest, as I see precious little strategic thinking around MOOCs but lots of groupthink and bandwagon behaviour.

Professional MOOC (VOOC)

A lot of IT courses are clearly aimed at the skills market and professionals who want to get a job or promotion. Udemy is full of such courses. There’s nothing new here, other perhaps, in them being free, though many do have a cost. This type of course has been long available on the web. An interesting example is the Google MOOC, aimed at a specific skill, improving your search skills. We can expect many more of these, MOOCs or Vocational MOOCs (VOOCs) that tackle a specific skills or issue.

Marketing problem

Many MOOCs want to hit a number of these audiences but this is not easy as they have different needs in terms of approach, commitment, start times, accreditation needs, technical issues and support. Knowing your target audience from the start matters, as it influences the choice of platform, as well as design and nature of the content. Initial data suggests that large numbers of people from around the world, who do not have easy access to Higher Education, have taken MOOCs (41%). The language level for those with English as a second language may therefore have to be considered, as well as level of difficulty, relevant examples, appropriate peer activity, group needs, synchronous or asynchronous, and so on. You may also want to be clear in the registration process about the data you want to identify and gather for later analysis.

Conclusion

The problem is that the decision makers often don’t have the marketing skills to differentiate between different addressable audiences. External adult learners may not want a long-winded, over-engineered, six to ten week course on anything. Life’s too short. Yet academics are used to producing courses of this semester length. What many may want are mini MOOCs. They may want them to be asynchronous starting and ending when convenient for them. This, of course, is exactly what’s happening. All in all, however, the good news is that MOOCs are forcing HE institutions to change. MOOCs may very well be the force that makes them more open, transparent and relevant. There will, of course, be a backlash, but the digital genie is out of the bottle - MOOCs are here to stay.

AI is now opening its eyes, like Frankenstein awakening to the world

The AI frenzy hasn’t lessened since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. The progress, widening functionality and competition has been relentless, with what sounds like the characters from a new children’s puppet show - Bing, Bard, Ernie and Claude. This brought Microsoft, Google, Baidu and Anthropic into the race, actually a two horse race, the US and China.

It has accelerated the shift from search to chat. But Google responded with Bard, the Chinese with Ernie’s impressive benchmarks and Claude has just entered the race with a 100k document limit and cheaper prices. They are all expanding their features but one particular thing did catch my eye and that was the integration of ‘Google Lens’ into Bard, from Google. Let’s focus on that for a moment.

 

Context matters

Large Language Models have focused on text input, as the dialogue or chat format works well with text prompting and text output. They are, after all, ‘language’ models but one of the weaknesses of such models is their lack of ‘context’. Which is why, when prompting, it is wise to describe the context within your prompt. It has no world model, doesn’t know anything about you or the real world in which you exist, your timelines, actions and so on. This means it has to guess your intent just from the words you use. What it lacks is a sense of the real world, to see what you see.

 

Seeing is believing

Suppose it could see what you see? Bard, in integrating Google Lens, has just opened up its eyes to the real world. You point your smartphone at something and it interprets what it thinks it sees. It is a visual search engine that can ID objects, animals, plants, landmarks, places and no end of other useful things. It can also capture text as it appears in the real world on menus, signs, posters, written notes; as well as translating that text. Its real time translation is one of its wonders. It will also execute actions, like dialling telephone numbers. Product search is also there from barcodes, which opens up advertising opportunities. It even has style matching.

More than meets the eye

OK, so large language models can now see and there’s more than meets the eye in that capability. This has huge long-term possibilities and consequences, as this input can be used to identify your intent in more detail. The fact that you are pointing your phone at something is a strong intent, that the object or place is of real, personal interest. That, with data about where you are, where you’ve been, even where you’re going, all fills out your intention.

 

This has huge implications for learning in biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, lab work, geography, geology, architecture, sports, the arts and any subject where visuals and real world context matters. It will know, to some degree, far more about your personal context, therefore intentions. Take one example, healthcare. With Google Lens one can see how skin, nails, eyes, retinas, eventually movements can be used to help diagnose medical problems. It has been used to fact check images, to see if they are, in fact, relevant to what is happening on the news.  One can clearly see it being useful in a lab or in the field, to help with learning through experiments or inquiry. Art objects, plants, rocks can all be identified. This is an input-output problem. The better the input, the better the output.

 

Performance support

Just as importantly, learning in the workplace is a contextualised event. AI can provide support and learning relevant to actual workplaces, airplanes, hospital wards, retail outlets, factories, alongside machines, in vehicles and offices - the actual places where work takes place - not abstract classrooms.

In the workplace, learning at the point of need for performance support can now see the machine, vehicle, place or object that is the subject of your need. Problems and needs are situated and so performance support, providing support at that moment of need, as pioneered by the likes of Bob Mosher and Alfred Remmits, can be contextualised. Workplace learning has long sought to solve this problem of context. We may well be moving towards solving this problem.

 

Moving from 2D to 3D virtual worlds

Moving into virtual world, my latest book, out later this year, argues that AI has accelerated the shift from 2D to 3D worlds for learning. Apple may not use the words ‘artificial’ or ‘intelligence’ but its new Vision Pro headset, which redefines computer interfaces, is packed full of the stuff, with eye, face and gesture tracking. Here the 3D world can be recognised by generative AI to give more relevant learning in context, real learning by doing. Again context will be provided.

 

Conclusion

Generative AI was launched as a text service but it quickly moved into media generation. It is now opening its eyes, like Frankenstein awakening to the world. There is often confusion around whether Frankenstein was the creator or created intelligence. With Generative AI, it is both, as we created the models but it is our culture and language that is the LLM. We are looking at ourselves, the hive mind in the model. Interestingly, if AI is to have a world view we may not want to feed it such a view, like LLMs, we may want it to create a world view from what it experiences. We are making steps towards that exciting, and slightly terrifying, future.

Google has several cards up their sleeves...

What can we expect from Google’s Gemini?

Google have several cards up their sleeve on Generative AI:

1. They invented it!
2. Awesome AI resources
3. Google Search
4. Google Scholar
5. Google books
6. YouTube
7. Google Translate
8. Google Maps
9. Global reach, data centres and delivery
10. Above all they have DeepMind

 

Gemini is their big response to OpenAI and has a family of foundational models, at three sizes:

 

Ultra – professional version of Bard

Pro – through Bard and Google products
Nano (on device - mobile version)

 

An important word here is ‘multimodal’, as their model has been trained on and is capable of processing most media types, including text, images, video, audio and code. So far Generative AI has largely been a 'calculator for words'... but this lifts it into another realm. It is multimodal from the ground up (input not necessarily output). 

However, one must be careful in making the assumption that this moves it more towards how humans think. Our multimodality is quite different, especially the ways we deal with sight and sound. There is little crossover.

They make claims about “sophisticated reasoning and its ability to process complex information in different formats, also the analysis and extraction of data from research articles, being able to really distinguish the relevant from irrelevant. On benchmarking, it has already outperformed human specialists in MMLU (massive multitasking language comprehension on topics like math, history, law and ethics, at 90.0% against 86.4% of GPT-4.

 

This is all very exciting, as it shows how competition is accelerating progress. Google has taken a cautious approach by rolling out these products across next year. Despite their ability to read multimedia, the initial Gemini models will not – at least initially – produce images or videos.

Unlike OpenAI, they have an advertising business to protect and need to be careful. They know that the writing is on the generative wall for search. As usual, they are going for integration into products approach, a rising tide rather than a single flood. Seems wise. After a tumultuous year, we are entering a more stable product development phase. Google will not see any Board bun-fights. Although there will be some surprises in store for sure.

Google have a universal, global mission, to harness our cultural information and make it available to all. Year one was revolution, year two will be evolution.

Watch video here.

MOOCSs: 20 ways to monetise

MOOCs aren’t all about money but when it comes to their future, money does matter. Calls for the monetisation of MOOCs are reasonable, although a little at odds with the failure in the past to look for the monetisation of Higher Education as a whole. In many ways MOOCs are a response to the ever-rising costs of higher education that has led to record levels of student debt and the worry that defaults may be on the horizon.

No one should deliver a MOOC without considering income but pure ‘monetisation’ is the wrong term, as a MOOC is an activity that needs to be seen in terms of both costs and income over time. So I’ll come at this as if it was both an income and cost issue, namely its impact on your profit & loss account. Note also that an institution could position its financial goal as an investment, aim for break-even or go for profit. Monetisation is ot just about profits.

1. Investment

A MOOC can be seen as a strategic investment by an institution and be paid for straight from its existing budget. The rationale for this can be a number of things that we’ll come to in terms of reducing costs and other revenue streams. For the moment, one could simply fund such an initiative from your teaching, technology or marketing budget. There is also an argument for funding it as research. Interestingly, some institutions clearly see themselves as leading the charge and developing MOOC software for use by others.

2. Not-for-profits

Not-for-profits have been very active in this area. As a Trustee of a major education charity, I have supported a very large charity investment in a single MOOC in the UK. Well known charities in the US have also been very active. Mitra’s million pound TED prize is going towards a MOOC of sorts (school in the cloud) and the WISE $500,00 prize is another possible sources.

3. Government

In many countries this is the primary course of funding and we have already seen government funding go into Futurelearn, via the Open University, in the UK, albeit in a rather opaque fashion. Tapping into government funds to increase access, I’d suggest is a good model for killing two birds with one financial stone, rather than woolly ‘access offices’.

4. Private equity

They have been active in the US, most notably with Udacity and Coursera, but also in other initiatives. These investors take calculates risks and this is one way for the system to hedge its risk.

5. Private donations

Institutions often tap into alumni for donations that go into expensive, and sometimes ill-advised, capital projects, usually buildings named after the donor. An alternative is emerging, where donors contribute towards courses. This is a fine idea, especially if the donor is an interested party, with some background and credibility in the subject.

6. Sponsorship

Google, AT&T and others have been active in sponsoring MOOCs that seem relevant to their mission. There is every reason to see this as a substantial and useful source of revenue. It is common the arts and arts education, so I see no reason as to why it should not be used in education.

7. Students pay

Udemy use this model and with reasonably low costs that attract students who see value for relatively little money. Freemium models may move towards fees for popular and sought after courses or a more n-depth learning experience after a taster.

8. Certification

This is top of the list, as a portion of MOOCers will want certification and be prepared to pay for it, at various levels. Given the large numbers of potential participants, even at a relatively modest price point, this could be lucrative. Remember that, once the fixed, up-front costs have been paid, the on-going cost-per-student are small. Coursera’s Signature Track fees are $30-100.

9. Proctored assessment

Many MOOCs offer online and offline assessment, on a shared revenue basis, with the likes of ProctorU and Pearson VUE. This is an additional high-value proposition that can attract prices greater than that of volume certification.

10. Books/materials

Some MOOCs have already linked the course to compulsory or optional course materials such as existing textbooks but there’s also potential sales from specialised course materials, such as software and equipment.

11. Summer schools

Universities have pitifully low occupancy rates, one reason for their high costs, so offering ‘summer schools’ or other ‘holiday period’ ;earning experiences could be one way to generate income, especially from the intellectually curious, who are less interested in certification. The Open University, in the UK, has been doing this for decades.

12. Recruitment

Recruitment referral (with student’s permission) is an existing revenue stream, especially in IT and other technical MOOCs, where high-end, practical skills are sought from a Global pool. The referral comes, of course with the employers knowledge of what the MOOC delivers and demands of its students.

13. Advertising

Any online delivery that attracts large numbers of eyeballs, can generate advertising revenue. In this case the advertisers know exactly what sort of audience they’re attracting, and as MOOCs develop, this data will become invaluable. It’s not just the number of participants, now in their millions, but the intense amount of times and time they spend on the course.

14. Future indigenous student income

MOOCs aimed at high-school students will increase your chances of getting those students into your institution or at least getting the best of those students.

15. Future overseas students income

Overseas income is a £5 billion industry in theUk and could rise to £16.9 bllion by2025. These have become an essential source of income for many institutions but as countries, especially in India, China and the Far East. develop their own, large, world-class institutions, and visa restrictions bite, revenues may fall. MOOCs have remarkably diverse audiences, with students often coming from every corner of the globe. This must be a way of attracting more students to study and pay fees at your institution.

16. Parents of future students

These are the people who pay top dollar for education and often play a pivotal role in what institutions their children apply to. MOOCs targeted at this audience make perfect sense. It gives the parent a feel for the institution and even the academic(s) teaching there. These are the ‘influencers’ that marketeers love to target.

17. Future alumni contributions

MOOCs are already being targeted at alumni, as in many countries, especially the UK, the vast majority of alumni remain an untapped source of income. This is a way of staying in touch and marketing to alumni in a way that is relevant to both parties, intellectually and not just financial begging.

18. Brand capital

A University sees its staff come and go, its students come and go, its research owned and delivered by publishers and others. The core ‘value’ is in the brand, that’s what endures and has to be built, enhanced and protected. MOOCs undoubtedly enhance brands as they are a form of massive, indirect, online advertising.

19. Reduced capital costs

Universities have now realised, despite all the warnings, that they have been spending far too much money on bricks and not clicks. The race is not now who has the biggest campus packed with the most buildings but the online war for students. To continue with endless capital projects at the expense of MOOCs, and other online initiatives, is simply to load up on-going maintenance and real-estate costs. Just think what one could do if tere were a moratorium on building in Higher Education.

20. Reduced faculty costs

Many faculty don’t like teaching seems – OK I’ve said it – but it’s true. Many yearn for a reduction or freedom from teaching. MOOCs are one way to lessen the load on faculty.  Take some high-volume, undergraduate courses and put them online (or partly online).

Conclusion

I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a few other potential income streams and welcome additional suggestions. I’m also sure there are arguments to be made on costs and income around lower drop-out rates for students that prepare by doing a MOOC. There may even be a way of using ‘access’ funds. Whatever the future for MOOCs, it strikes me that money is not a big problem. The cost-per-student metric shows that MOOCs deliver volume therefore lower costs. This is the scaling up that technology inevitably brings leading to lower delivery costs. It has happened in almost every other area of human endeavour and its about time it happened in education..

How I got blocked by Tom Peters - you must bow to the cult of Leadership or be rejected as an apostate

Odd thing this ‘Leadership’ business. I’ve been writing about it for ten years and get roughly the same reaction to every piece – one of outrage from those who sell their ‘Leadership’ services, either as consultants or trainers. In these cases, I refer to the wise words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

But a far more interesting spat ensued when I criticised some of the best-selling books that got this whole Leadership bandwagon rolling, namely In Search of Excellence and Good to Great. Tom Peters himself joined the fray, as outraged Leadership consultants huffed and puffed. Some showed real Leadership by simply hurling abuse, accompanied by GIFs (showing outrage or dismissal), doing the very opposite of everything they claim to admire in all of this Leadership piffle. What I learnt was that there is no room for scepticism or critical thinking in the cult of Leadership – you must bow to the God of Leadership or be rejected as an apostate.

To be fair, Tom Peters retweeted the critical piece and my replies, so hats off to him on that front but his responses bordered on the bizarre.

So far, so good. But I wasn’t blaming him and Collins for the crash. What I was actually saying is that a cult of Leadership, sustained, as Jeffrey Pfeffer showed, by a hyperactive business book publishing and training industry, produced a tsunami of badly researched books full of simplistic bromides and silver bullets, exaggerating the role of Leaders and falsely claiming to have found the secrets of success. This, I argued, as I had personally seen it happen at RBS and other organisations, eventually led us up the garden path to the dung-heap that was the financial disaster in 2008, led by financial CEOs who were greedy, rapacious and clearly incompetent. They had been fattened on a diet of Leadership BS and led us to near global, financial disaster.

Hold on Tom, I wasn’t saying you two were singularly responsible. I was making a much wider point about the exponential growth in publishing and training around Leadership, like Pfeffer in his book Leadership BS, showing that it had, arguably, led to near disaster.

As the cult of Leadership took hold, I knew that something was awry when I dared criticise IBM at the Masie Conference. Elliot was chairing a session on enterprise training software and I pointed out that IBM had sold such a system to Hitler. In 1939, the CEO of IBM, Thomas Watson, flew across the Atlantic to meet Hitler. The meeting resulted in the Nazis leasing the mechanical equivalent of a Learning Management System (LMS). Data was stored as holes in punch cards to record details of people including their skills, race and sexual inclination and used daily throughout the 12 year Reich. It was a vital piece of apparatus used in the Final Solution, to execute the very categories stored on the apparently innocent cards - Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and homosexuals, as documented in the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. They were also use to organise slave labour and trains to the concentration camps. He went apeshit at me. Why? IBM were sponsors of his conference. lesson - this is about money not morals.

I remember seeing Jack Welsh, of GE, pop up time and time again at US conferences and talk about how it was necessary to get rid of 10% of your workforce a year and a whole host of so called gurus who claimed to have found the Leadership gold at the end of the rainbow. There was just one problem. The evidence suggested that the CEOs of very large successful companies turned out to not to be the Leaders their theory stated they were. Indeed, the CEOs of financial institutions turned out to be incompetent managers, driven by the hubris around Leadership, who drove their companies and the world’s financial system to the edge of catastrophe. Bailed out by the taxpayer, they showed little remorse and kept on taking the bonuses, mis-selling and behaving badly.

In the 90s and the whole post 2000 period we then saw the deification of the tech Leaders – Gates, Jobs, Dell, Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Who wants to be a billionaire? became the aspiration of a new generation, who also lapped up the biographies and Leadership books, this time with a ‘start-up’ spin. Yet they too proved to be all too keen on tax evasion, greed, share buybacks and a general disregard for the public good. Steve Jobs was a rather hideous individual - but no matter - the hopelessly utopian Leadership books kept on coming.

Jump to 2018 and Trump. How on earth did that happen? Oh, and before we in the EU get on our high horses, Italy did the same with Berlusconi. Even now, Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman, has become the President of the Czech Republic in 2017. But back to Trump. He’s riding high in the polls but let’s look at how he got to become President. First the whole ‘I’m a successful business Leader’ shtick that gave him a platform on The Apprentice, then the campaign on the premise that he, as someone who was better suited to the role than traditional politicians, was the real deal, ‘the deal maker’. He even had his own sacred ‘Leadership’ text – The Art of the Deal.  The polling is interesting – his supporters don’t care about his racism and sexism, what they admire is his ability to get things done. They have elected, not a President, but a CEO. This is the apotheosis of the cult of business leadership, the American Dream, reframed in terms of Leadership BS, turned into a nightmare.

And on it went, our Leadership guru descending into sarcasm and abuse. This is exactly what I have been writing about for the last ten years, the hubris around Leadership. Is this what Leadership is really about -  going off in a hissy fit when you are challenged? It sort of confirms what I have always thought – that this Leadership movement is actually a Ponzi scheme – write a book, talk at conferences, make a pile of cash…. lead nothing but seminars, then take absolutely no responsibility when your data turns out to be wrong or the consequences are shown to be disastrous.

We have fetishised the word 'Leader'. Everyone is obsessed by doing Leadership training and reading 4th rate paperbacks on this dubious subject. You're a leader, I'm a leader, we're all leaders now - rendering the very meaning of the word useless. What do you do for a living? I’m a ‘leader’. Cue laughter and ridicule. Have you ever heard anyone in an organisation say, We need to ask our ‘Leader’? Only if it was sneering sarcasm. It was invented by people who sell management training to fool us all into thinking that it's a noble calling but is it all a bit phoney and exaggerated and often leads to dysfunctional behaviour. 

As James Gupta said, on this thread, “Leader, innovator… yes they are legit and important roles, but if you have to call yourself one, you probably ain’t”… then even wiser words from a guy called Dick “If your job title is a concept then maybe it’s not a real job.”

In the end Peters blocked me – even though I never followed him??!