Keep Shining

Elizabeth Miles (@ikenceo) was one of my first contacts on Twitter back in the day, always warm and inviting. Our connection was through law and technology initially, however we rarely talked about either. Our conversations were always about children, Peppa Pig, learning, animation, the arts, the importance of creativity. A passionate lady with a large heart. I'm glad we met in real life a number of times at Tweet Ups and always had a great natter. It was through these conversations we struck upon her love of a rare piece of Disney animation by Salvador Dali that was in the depths of the Disney vaults and I too had seen snippets when I worked at Disney, it was great to find the piece for her, it's the only thing I was able to do for her.

Walt Disney y Salvador Dali - Destino HD from Ivan Wenger on Vimeo.

I'll miss Elizabeth, somebody so giving and open that I felt I knew her better; from our online chat and few real life meetings, than some people I have known for years. One last #FF video to say goodbye and here's hoping your warmth keeps shining down.

FF Sunshine from Jon Harman on Vimeo.

Arthritic Stigmata

My historical disdain for education has amused me over the years, particularly the irony of ending up working in legal education, if I could go back in time to explain this to my 14 yr old self, he would stare at me in slack jaw wonderment. Why? Because in my formative years I held a strong distaste for both education and lawyers. I'll come to the lawyer bit in a moment, but let's first zero in on the education bit.

Today I was diagnosed with degenerative arthritis in my my big toe, initially it made me feel old beyond my years and then I fixated on the injury that had led to this. My doctor explained that arthritis in someone as "young" as me was likely the result of a childhood injury, had I broken my big toe in childhood?

Bang! I was instantly taken back to the incident with 12 yr old me, we had been instructed by our teacher to move some antiquated school desks in our classroom. Believe it or not, in the mid eighties I was working on a wooden desk with an ink well from the Victorian era. As we moved the desks, somehow mine toppled over and landed on my toe. 

Crack! What followed was excruciating pain, I remember crying in agony. My teacher then proceeded to taunt me about being in pain, deriding me in front of the class about not being able to handle it. I asked to see the nurse and he denied that of me and subsequently made me hop the 2 miles home after sitting for 3hrs in excruciating pain. Other old school friends have confirmed this memory today, along with a list of other atrocities (putting a metalwork ruler across a fellow students knuckles and then sitting on it), just so I know that I have not exaggerated this. 

When my mother complained to the school about the teachers behaviour it was rigorously denied. That was the moment that I lost faith in education, the moment I realised it wasn't about learning. I just switched off and spent more time taunting teachers who seemed intent on constantly telling who and what I was. It's been at the back of my mind ever since and now I have a constant throbbing in my toe to remind me on a daily basis, an aggravation of sorts. 

A short time later I had an after school job which was essentially a posher version of a paper round, I was a post boy for a small solicitors office. 

I disliked them with a passion too. Until I worked in that office, I never had any idea the level of contempt people could have for another fellow human being. Rude, obnoxious and vile. 

It was the first time I was hyper aware of the class divide, I was Ronnie Corbett to John Cleese in that famous class sketch.They weren't just rude to me, they were as bad to their clients, immensely patronising and demeaning. The nail in the coffin was when one day I had been held up because they hadn't signed some documents that had to be at the DX office within 10 minutes and it was a bike across town.

I sped along down the hill, slipped on the pedal, caught my foot in the wheel and went over the handlebars. Crack! Smashed my collarbone on the kerb and knocked myself out. I was rushed to hospital in an ambulance and came to as they wheeled me in.

When we got home there was a message on the answer machine from the firm stating that they had heard I'd been in an accident and it was imperative to know - did I get the post to the DX? No enquiry at all as to my well being.

I was particularly proud of my mum's Tuckeresque tirade of abuse in response the next day and I was fired with immediate effect.  Which was a shame as I still had the keys to their DX box, the only ones apparently. I'm both slightly ashamed, but also proud of my 15 year old self at depositing the keys off a bridge into the River Wensum. Another broken bone, another dislike chalked up on the board. 

So by the age of  15 I had a formative assessment of the legal industry and education as two equal levels of Dante's Inferno that were both seemingly underpinned by high levels of arrogant patronising attitudes.

So how on earth did I end up here?

This is the rather strange flip side to the coin. I realised in my career that whilst I despised the machine of education,  I loved learning, it was a wondrous life affirming thing and I also discovered a favourable leaning to copyright law and contract law in a geeky way.

I didn't realise I loved learning until I eventually scraped my way to University and aligned my passions with an excellent learning environment. We called my Uni - "a rubber roomed environment" - meaning somewhere we tried, we failed and we practiced until we became skilled. A course designed by a Disney imagineer who was years ahead of others in education. As I studied broadcasting I became fascinated in the business side which enveloped a vast array of commercial contracting and I discovered a great book: Art of the Deal by Dorothy Viljoen which opened my eyes to the beauty of commercial law.

By the time I ended up in legal education I had overcome my initial dislike of law and education and found a new glimmer of inspiration, that said I saw a lot of echoes of my original dislikes around and thus have set about trying to disrupt and change where I can, I like the term my Oxford mentor gave me "positive deviant". 

So as I sit here contemplating my aching toe and wondering if my collar bone will go the same way, I reflect on the bizarre nature of having this arthritic stigmata that spurns me on to change legal education wherever and however I can.

The Perfect Storm in Higher Education

The Global Higher Education Bubble:

In 2011 Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and widely recognised as someone that predicted the web, equity and housing bubbles in the US, announced that a new bubble had taken the place of housing; the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he said. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talked about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life.  It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

Thiel’s theory was further expanded upon in the book “The Higher Education Bubble” by Glenn H. Reynolds




This is pre-dominantly a US problem with HE economics being way out of kilter with the situation in the UK with its fee caps and mainly public HE model keeping the bubble in check as such. However, there is much debate around whether the marketization of higher education in the UK will ultimately lead us to similar issues here

Currently the impact of marketised education has only started to pinch at the traditional university model and many are struggling with a sense of direction to travel. Regardless, the issues that the US HE bubble has started to unearth and explore in its attempts to tackle the problem of rising costs and diminishing returns on investment within its model, has exposed a number of crucial issues about the methods of HE provision. Issues that students are now starting to be aware of:



This phenomena was explored in detail in the book Academically Adrift by Arum & Roksa that researched students on campus and came to a stark realisation that 45% of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college in the US. 

New Business Models, New Pedagogies:

For the last 20 years educational research and theory has progressed at great pace, along with deeper understanding of brain science and its role in learning through neuroscience and we know that the systems of University education have not evolved with this development.

Don't Lecture Me by Donald Clark

Making Learning Memorable by Dr Itiel Dror

What Learners Need by Dr Jeff Borden

Couple this with the increasing needs of business to have higher levels of skills and knowledge development and employees with higher learning capabilities are we seeing a perfect storm forming?

By 2025, the global demand for higher education will double to ~200m per year, mostly from emerging economies (NAFSA 2010)

It is perceived that with the global demand increasing and the pressures on the economic models of university mixed with pedagogies that are not delivering, there is a mammoth mountain for Universities to climb to change shift.

Gibbs and Coffey (2004) highlighted the need to increase tutor capability and understanding of teaching and learning models and further covered in Teaching as a Design Science by Diane Laurillard. To meet the future requirements of learning; the approaches to learning models needs to step from the theory to the practical and with the increased numbers of students needing to be taught within an economic framework that does not create a HE cost bubble the traditional delivery methods and ratio of 1:25 (tutor to student) needs to change.

Technology Enhanced Learning-based pedagogic innovation must support students at a better than 1:25 staff-student ratio

Universities will need to understand the pedagogical benefits and teacher time costs of online HE. Know what are and how to use the new digital pedagogies that will address the 1:25 student support conundrum. However, who will innovate, test, and build what works at scale online, with technology and blended approaches? Can each university attempt to tackle this problem individually?

A higher proportion of fixed costs and scaling up improve the per-student preparation costs but

scaling up will never improve the per-student support costs unless we come up with some clever pedagogical patterns and learning designs that support at better than the 1:25 ratio. 

Enter the MOOC:

Large scale online learning has emerged in the form of MOOCs with implicit endorsement by the world’s most elite universities. Coverage of the ‘massive open online courses’ phenomenon was ubiquitous in the specialist HE press and blogs, and it spilled over into the quality mainstream media. In one year, MOOCs travelled the cultural cycle of hype, saturation, backlash, and backlash-to-the-backlash. The landscape is broadening out from the initial three platform providers (Coursera, Udacity, edX) and further addresses a core issue identified earlier: the long term process of integrating MOOC completion certificates into formal university credit.

That process is a game-changer in terms of what ostensibly drives MOOCs. Can it still be

about widening access when the most important developments suggest it is part of the

search by universities for new business models and competitive positioning?

In “Would you credit that? The trajectory of the MOOCs juggernaut” (2013) The Observatory for Borderless Education analyse existing business models that are emerging from the collaboration between Universities and MOOC platform providers, illustrating a shifting pattern that is consolidating around the ideas of University brand coupled with outside in services of MOOC platforms delivering the taught material and learning technology along with publishers like Pearson providing assessment solutions for mass credit.

MOOCs are causing widespread consternation amongst educators and therefore being a true disruptor in the educational space, many panicking about missing the boat. However, there is no panacea to the forces at play and MOOCs are far from delivering the magic bullet. Most analysis of the pedagogic principles of MOOCs illustrate that they follow the same broken didactic model of the lecture format and have large scale problems with student retention and engagement. The global demand for HE requires investment in pedagogic innovation for MOOCs to deliver.

However, it is highly likely that this is phase 1.0 and MOOCs 2.0 will emerge with better pedagogic and economic models and to disregard their importance in the perfect storm of Higher Education strategy would be a mistake.

They have opened the eyes of those that preside over the traditional model of University and made them realise that learning and student services can and are being decoupled from time and place constraints along with a plethora of different approaches to learning coming from the learning theory camp. None of them want to be caught napping as the disruptive forces enter the education sphere in the way that those presiding over the music, publishing and entertainment industries did.

Learning Design, Models and Scalability:

The great struggle for any University faculty is how to effectively design and model a course or curriculum for effectiveness, efficiency and scalability.

Learning design refers to a range of activities associated with better describing, understanding, supporting and guiding pedagogic design practices and processes. It is, therefore, about supporting tutors in managing and responding to new perspectives, pedagogies, and work practices resulting, to a greater or lesser extent, from new uses of technology to support teaching and learning.

Learning design aims to enable reflection, refinement, change and communication by focusing on forms of representation, notation and documentation. This can:

• make the structures of intended teaching and learning – the pedagogy – more visible and explicit thereby promoting understanding and reflection

·    serve as a description or template, which can be adaptable or reused by another tutor to suit his/her own context

·    add value to the building of shared understandings and communication between those involved in the design and teaching process

Learning design can take place at a number of levels: from the creation of a specific learning activity, through the sequencing and linking of activities and resource, to the broad curriculum and programme levels. Conceptually, there is a growing appreciation, borne out by research at The Open University and elsewhere, that learning design has an important role throughout the teaching and learning process; from design and production, through the delivery of learning and sharing designs with students, to evaluation and sharing practice.

The term learning design can refer to:

• the process of planning, structuring and sequencing learning activities,
• the product of the design process – the documentation, representation(s), plan, or structure) created either during the design phase or later.

While some people prefer to use other terms, such as ‘educational design’, ‘instructional design’ or ‘curriculum/course design’, all the terms tend to focus on the importance of ‘design’. This is regarded as a good term around which to reclaim scholarship of teaching and rethink pedagogy for a digital age and in the new information economy (Beetham and Sharpe, 2007).

A learning design approach to course development then enables what is referred to as Curriculum Business Modelling as pioneered by JISC and the OU. The Curriculum Business Modelling approach allows for:

• Course development practices are able to become more transparent.
• Course development teams are able to consult CBM exemplars when considering new curriculum developments.
• Course Development Teams are able to develop better articulated, more adventurous and more cost effective course/remake proposals, drawing on exemplar best practice.
• Course teams are able to start early course planning by articulating key characteristics of the student learning journey and outcomes and the overall architecture of a course rather than the content or detailed components.
• Course teams are able to make greater use of more open course architectures and adopt more flexible and agile approaches to course development including more use of ‘found’ (vs. ‘bespoke’) materials.
• As course teams work they are able to monitor the pedagogic profile and student workload and check out and play with a ‘good enough’ financial model.
• When courses are reviewed after the first presentation, and at subsequent points, a series of ‘at a glance’ reports enables important features to be explored and clearer decisions made on sound evidence.

The CBM Framework devised by JISC/OU project Learning Design Initiative sets out a model comprising of 4 key views to describe and analyse courses.

CBM project workshop from Martin Weller

The Curriculum Business Modelling approach to course development compliments a more detailed learning design approach that links in with an XML based learning media production approach, when synchronised correctly an institution can apply more lean and agile approaches to course development within a clear system.

With this approach an institution can prepare the ground for the emergence of Learning Analytics to further its transparent view of learning effectiveness, along with assisting in the scalability issue of 1:25 ratio of support.

Learning Analytics is an emergent field of research that aspires to use data analysis to inform decisions made on every tier of the educational system. Whereas analysts in

business use consumer-related data to target potential customers and thus personalize advertising, learning analytics leverages student-related data to build better pedagogies, target at-risk student populations, and to assess whether programs designed to improve retention have been effective and should be sustained. For educators and researchers, learning analytics has been crucial to gaining insights about student interaction with online texts and courseware. Students are also benefitting from the deliverables of learning analytics, through the development of mobile software and online platforms that use student-specific data to tailor support systems that suit their learning needs. One of the most promising payoffs of this data is its potential to inform the design of instructional software and adaptive learning environments that respond to a student’s progress in real-time, fostering more engagement in course material. 

So are Universities going to be able to absorb all of this, ensure they have the people and resource capabilities to deliver it? The answer is likely no in many cases, many are left scratching their heads because their specialism is actually academic research rather than teaching and learning, let alone learning media and learning technology. This is why we are seeing a mix of publishers and educational start-ups moving into this space. Companies like Coursera, Knewton and Wireless Generation to name a few are taking the learning platform space, but there are wider opportunities.

Outside-In Services:

For-profit institutions were the first to recognize the adult learner market opportunity, developing and marketing online programs designed specifically for working adults who had previously ruled out the possibility of a post-secondary degree. Apollo’s University of Phoenix and several other for-profit institutions blazed a trail in online, post-secondary education. Today, Apollo single-handedly enrols more students in the U.S. than the ten largest non-profits institutions combined. However, student recruitment practices and evaluation of educational provision from the likes of University of Phoenix resulted in Senate hearings and a damning Senate report causing reputational damage of such institutions. 

The non-profit sector had taken notice though of the numbers and sought to steal a march on this market section using their brand reputation for a quality mark. They knew that they could not scale internally to meet this demand so they partnered with specialist enablers providing outside-in services that offer a whole value-chain of blueprints and processes such as: course development, IT support, recruiting/ marketing, processes and cycle times. These strategies are quite different from the traditional non-profit strategies.

The key enablers are:

Embanet Compass

Deltak

Bisk

They all follow a similar model that predominantly focuses on enabling online education, though the model is not restricted to it.

The expansion of these type of enablers has mainly been a US phenomenon due to the high costs of US HE and the pressures it has faced. These pressures are coming to the UK HE market, as highlighted in the OU report Innovating Pedagogy 2012 “the innovations are not independent, but fit together into a new and disruptive form of education that transcends boundaries” and few are thinking about future service provision in this space. At a recent HE conference run by The Guardian it was admitted “When asked about what improves prospects of promotion, academics answer first research, then shouldering additional administrative responsibilities; teaching only comes in third. This is inevitable given the current funding mechanisms.” Therefore is the UK University model ready for the perfect storm that it faces? David Willetts wants UK Universities ready for the challenge:

“Online learning is a game changer and we must take every opportunity to invest in it; it’s a key means of expanding internationally and I want to see successful universities operating in country after country.”  Statement Here.

If tutors and designers in faculties see their courses as unique creations which re-make the field of enquiry each time they are taught they cannot progress to the next step and achieve the scalability required to meet the demands of the marketplace.

Their wider universities will also have to question whether this process serves as an effective and affordable teaching and learning methodology.

The question is: Could we reduce the cost of such learning design and material production by an order of magnitude? Are the endless creations of faculty tutors/ designers necessary for the eventual goal? 

My personal belief is that faculties within Universities will have to redefine their approach or be priced out of existence. Only history, not argument, will show whether this belief is well founded.

* 2 days after writing this post, IPPR research announced their paper An Avalanche is Coming which touches upon similar themes and more detailed research, it makes for interesting reading. 

Work Globally, Live Locally - Disruption

This morning I awoke to see more news on the phases on the HS2 train project and can't help thinking that by the time it is built, how we work will be very different and the need to commute to large urban settlements to sit at a desk in an office or cubicle will seem somewhat redundant. The way we think about jobs, careers and the economics of these is where I see mass disruption occurring, breaking the shackles of the industrial age which are embedded in our management culture, our education system and our growth strategies. They're broken though, and we are trying to hang onto them in the same way HMV tried to cling to the high street. The next generation are already wising up to how broken this system is, when are we going to....







 More later on these trends.....

Work Globally, Live Locally - A New Beginning

For a while now I have been musing on an idea of "Work Globally, Live Locally" as a new model of living and approach to work, breaking free of big economic hubs of urbanisation and commuter pain. I'm still forming my manifesto, which may end up like Jerry Maguire's memo - but we'll see.

In the meantime, have a flick through PSFK's Future of Work Presentation, it will be one of the things that I base my thoughts on.

PSFK Future of Work Report 2013 from PSFK

Paper Bullies

There has been a lot of bullying behaviour on Twitter et al recently and it made me think of a story from a New York Teacher:

A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stamp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty it was. She then told them to tell it they’re sorry. Now even though they said they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bully’s another child, they may say they’re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home.

Please take time to pause for thought when getting caught in heated debate online or teach your children this valuable lesson.

Retrospective Rationalising

Hmmm, there seems to be a new idiot zeitgeist surrounding the topic of rape at the moment, either to somehow build a straw man argument around abortion in the US or to defend Julian Assange in a bid to perpetuate what seems the most convoluted conspiracy theory I've heard in a while.

I'm not going to try and cover the facts of these recent cases as they have been covered expertly by countless others in far better posts.

I want to turn my attention to this phenomena of various people, predominantly men, trying to redefine rape. Why do they do this?

I'm hyper aware as a man myself I am potentially walking into a minefield here, but I think it is quite simple - no simply means no, before or during.

So why all these re-classifications by people? I think it is what I would call retrospective rationalising. What do I mean by this?

Put simply I am convinced many men in their past have been in a scenario that was either extremely borderline or was rape. This is probably quite hard for them to reconcile.

I think this is because of the fact that rape narratives for so long were of the violent stranger definition, therefore all other forms of non consensual sex don't or rather can't fit into the "legitimate rape" category because to do so would make countless men who do not consider themselves rapists to realise they have raped or nearly raped in their past, hence the post rationalisation we are seeing.

Bold and sweeping generalist statements I know, but let me explain my rationale.

I can already think of a handful of situations in my own formative years where I could have come quite close to crossing that boundary in a terrible mess of hormones, opportunity and drunkenness. I'm thankful I didn't but I do recognise the possibility of it amd that is scary. I think there are countless others who know this too, but won't admit it and won't recognise that it would be rape.

That's a sad indictment isn't it? That as men we have not had this conversation about where the boundaries are and what it means, recognising that our testosterone is a powerful driver that we have to control, particularly in adolescence or the discussion has been had and we didn't listen.

Thankfully I never had too much über testosterone flowing through my body and thus became deeply irritating in sexual encounters by asking multiple times for clarity on consent - if I could have had a contract I probably would have because in my brain it deeply concerned me about either being coercive or pushy in this arena as so many teenage men probably are.

I think I thought about it a lot because I had the unfortunate encounter of being in a public toilet and listening to a group of lads conspiring to gang rape my sister when she was 15. They didn't know I was her brother.
I don't think they realised they were conspiring to rape her either, just spike her drinks until she was unconscious later at a party and then all have "a go on her", they were deliberating which order they were going to do it when I intervened and pointed out I was her brother.

Sadly I have heard a number of similar discussions like this over the years, this I think is more common than most realise.

Too many men also think the predatory approach is all part of the game, there's an element to this approach that also starts to validate rape in their minds too.

I've been on the receiving end of predatory males persistence before, I've started politely to state that "I'm sorry, but I'm not gay" to still be lightly molested by grabbing and once having my exit blocked and locking of the door, I thought then I was going to be raped myself and that feeling of violation of your consent and your personal space is unforgettable. Sadly I think women have many more stories of incidents like this with men than I do.

So I think there are many things in the melting pot, there was a severe lack of discussion about rape being about non consensual sex and the different forms that takes and may still be. Too much emphasis on rape as a violent stranger assault narrative.

Not enough discussion or education with young men about respect and consent in sexual encounters.

So when I hear people re defining rape in the ways I've heard of late, I tend to think that they have a situation in their past which is consciously or subconsciously making them retrospectively rationalise the subject.

These are just thoughts and happy to hear your thoughts.