New media emulate old media at first.
Introduction
Internet era teaching material
Skills: none
Concepts: evolution of media using books, movies and
television as examples, Internet-based experiments
with modular teaching material, student-developed
teaching material, peer tutoring and very large
classes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
3.0 License.
We will take a quick look at the evolution of books set
with moveable type, movies and television then turn
to teaching materials.
Today’s textbooks and university programs are by and
large digital emulations of the past, but there is a lot
of experimentation going on.
We will describe experiments with modular teaching
material, student-developed teaching material, peer
tutoring and very large classes.
Technology
with
implications
for
individuals,
organizations
and society
Where does this topic fit?
• Internet concepts
– Applications
– Technology
– Implications
• Internet skills
– Application development
– Content creation
– User skills
New media
emulate
predecessors
movies
Teaching and learning is an important network
application area with implications for organizations,
individuals and society.
New media often start out emulating old media.
Early movies were made by setting up a stationary
camera and filming stage plays.
The Assassination of the Duke de Guise (1908)
Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolff? (1966
Shooting on location, moving cameras and many
other innovations followed, but years later some
movies were still filmed stage plays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assassinat_du_duc_
de_guise.jpg
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061184/
New media
emulate
predecessors:
television
Early television shows often had performers standing
in front of a curtain or acting on sets similar to
vaudeville or stage plays.
Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, 1953
New media
emulate
predecessors:
books
Ed Sullivan Show, 1964
Gutenberg Bible, 1455
Books followed a similar pattern.
In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg’s bible was the first
book printed using movable metal type.
It is the distant ancestor of our current textbooks.
But, today’s textbooks would surprise Gutenberg.
The Gutenberg Bible resembled the hand written
manuscripts on which it was based.
It did not have punctuation or paragraphs.
A single page was around 12 by 17.5 inches – suitable
for contemplative reading in a library.
The illustrations were added for beauty and feeling,
not clarification.
Like the hand copied books before it, it was a
religious book.
Gutenberg’s breakthrough was in production, not
format or content.
Slow
evolution of
the book
Aldus Manutius,
over 50 years later
Fifty years after Gutenberg, Aldus improved
production by printing eight pages on a single sheet.
This led to smaller, portable books that could be
carried or placed in a saddle bag.
Aldus also introduced punctuation, like the commas,
periods and semicolons shown here, and italic type,
which fit more letters on a page.
But, like Gutenberg, Aldus would be surprised by the
variety of punctuation and typography in today’s
textbooks as well as innovations like chapters,
callouts, indices, tables, diagrams, tables of contents
and images with captions.
Digital
textbooks
emulate print
textbooks
Textbooks today are at the “Gutenberg bible” stage.
Textbook publishers have digitized their books,
making them available online in various formats.
Many maintain the notion of a book-sized page and
often preserve the page numbering of the print
version.
These e-books look better than PDF documents, but
they are constrained by the previous format.
Like Aldus, they have gone somewhat beyond their
predecessor, but remain tied to the notion that the
course is contained in a book of pages.
Digital classes
emulate faceto-face
classes
Many universities are offering online classes, but, like
the textbook publishers, they are emulating the past.
They typically offer the "same" courses online as they
teach in the classroom.
They use the same textbook and ancillary material,
but use course management systems to substitute
threaded discussion or some other social media tool
for in-class discussion and administer conventional
assignments and tests.
Digital
lectures
emulate faceto-face
lectures
Schools also repurpose old courses by making video
recordings of lectures with slides.
But, like books, movies, television and other media,
textbooks and classes will change.
It is too soon for me to predict the future of teaching
and teaching material, but I don’t think it will center
on digital textbooks, learning management systems
and recorded lectures.
Publishers and schools will resist it, but changes in
education will come faster than with previous media
because of the low cost of experimentation and
innovation on the Internet.
Let’s look at a few examples – experiments with
modular teaching material, student-developed
teaching material, peer tutoring and very large
classes.
Examples of
collections of
independent
modules
Modular courseware
Here are three modular courseware examples.
The California State University system established the
Merlot portal for modular teaching material in 1997,
and today it contains nearly 34,000 peer reviewed
modules in 23 disciplines.
Commoncraft and TED Ed produce short educational
videos.
Each is on a single topic and most are under five
minutes long.
These are collections of independent modules, but a
course can also be constructed modularly.
A collection
of modules
for a single
course
A modular course
(with a unique business model)
Nature publishing offers a modular Principles of
Biology course, that was developed in conjunction
with the CSU.
There are 196 modules and a professor selects the
ones he or she wants to include in the “textbook” for
their class.
I put “textbook” in quotes because it is neither a text
nor a book.
Each module is a scrolling multimedia Web page with
embedded quizzes.
Nature’s business model is also innovative.
They plan to continuously update the material, and
the student purchases a lifetime access subscription
rather than a one-time book.
Hierarchically
organized
modules
The Kahn Academy has over 3,000 short videos on a
variety of topics along with system for administering
quiz questions and tracking student progress.
A user can jump directly to any video, but they are
organized hierarchically.
For example, there are 11 Arithmetic and Pre-Algebra
topics.
The first of those 11 topics, Addition and Subtraction,
is shown here.
The Addition and Subtraction topic consists of 16
video lessons.
In this example, the student has demonstrated
proficiency in the Addition 1 lesson (blue), and is
prepared to go on to one of four subsequent lessons
(green).
He or she demonstrated proficiency by answering
several questions correctly.
Modules
created by
students
Student generated material
Many people are experimenting with student
generated teaching material.
For example, in Georgia Tech’s Techburst project,
students create educational videos on topics of their
choosing.
Tech awards prizes to the best videos.
Since tools for creating student generated material
are cheap and easy to use, faculty at virtually every
university are encouraging students to produce
teaching material.
For example, students in a Drake University
journalism class produced reviews of 20 Twitter tools.
In this project, the students learned about the Twitter
ecosystem and also created something of value to
others.
There is a proverb that “to teach is to learn twice,”
and that is certainly true.
A person making teaching material for a skill or
concept will learn it very well.
Peer teaching
and student
collaboration
Peer teaching and collaboration
There is a lot of positive research on peer teaching -both the tutor and tutee benefit.
Many faculty encourage peer teaching and it is
institutionalized at some universities.
Take for example the peer tutoring program at the
University of Massachusetts at Lowell
To be a peer tutor for a class, a student must have a
letter of recommendation from the professor, a grade
of B+ or better in the class and an overall GPA of 3.0.
Peer tutors can be available during online office hours
or using asynchronous communication tools.
Conversationexchange.com provides another
example.
To learn or practice foreign languages, people pair up
for conversation, chat or email.
Nature and other publishers are establishing
mechanisms whereby students in classes that use
their material can collaborate with and help each
other, regardless of where they go to school.
The CSU is planning a similar program to encourage
communication and collaboration among students
taking a given class on any campus in the system.
Very large
online
courses
Others are experimenting with very large classes.
Massive online courses
The largest to date so were three Stanford computer
science classes offered in the fall of 2011.
The largest had 160,000 students, and its instructor,
Sebastian Thrun (shown on the right), is now offering
courses through an educational startup, Udacity.com.
The Stanford/Udacity model is interactive.
The student watches a short video presentation by
the instructor, takes a short quiz, then continues.
There are homework assignments and exams as well.
Types of
teaching
material
Long tail resources
Most of the teaching material we have discussed has
been video or interactive video, but modular teaching
resources come in many forms.
Something as small as a quotation, image or diagram
that helps students acquire a concept can be a useful
resource.
The Internet is an ideal medium for such highly
focused material since the marginal cost of adding an
item to a collection is essentially zero.
Amazon capitalized on this from the start, recognizing
that perhaps 100 best-selling books would account
for half their revenue while the other half would
come from sales of many thousand books, which sold
few copies.
Similarly, the cost of storing a diagram that effectively
illustrates a specific concept that is only taught in a
single course is essentially zero.
While storage cheap, organizing and indexing
material so effective resources are easily discovered
is difficult.
This fine-grained modularity also makes it easy for a
teacher to improve a resource or add a new one.
As with Wikipedia, a contributor can focus on a single
topic without concern for the overall collection.
What are the
implications?
The Internet has cause disruption in the music, book,
newspaper, magazine, movie and television
industries.
The textbook industry is already changing with the
introduction of electronic texts, textbook rentals,
online access and so forth.
Going out of business?
Are universities next?
What will happen if massive classes with hundreds of
thousands of students turn out to be good
alternatives for, say, half of the undergraduate
curriculum?
Will schools that focus on teaching survive?
Will universities be able to fund research?
Will a better educated work force improve the overall
economy?
New media typically begin by mimicking old media.
Summary
Summary
Books, movies and television provide examples of
that.
Textbook publishers and universities are doing the
same – using digital technology to emulate old
materials and methods.
But, the low cost and ubiquity of the Internet assure
us that new materials and methods will be invented.
We still do not know what they will be, but millions of
professors and companies are experimenting with
digital tools and techniques.
We surveyed some of these experiments with
modular teaching material, student-generated
teaching material, peer teaching and very large
classes.
We also noted that Internet based teaching material
could take many forms and be tightly focused.
We concluded with a few questions about the
possible impact of all this on the university, but are
not yet ready to provide any answers.
Self-study questions
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Find a Merlot module that is relevant to a course you are currently taking. Write a brief description of the module
and state whether it would be helpful to you? If so, show it to your professor.
Find a Kahn Academy module that is relevant to a course you are taking or took in the past. Write a brief
description of the module and state whether it would be helpful to you? If so, show it to the professor.
Would you be willing to pay $49 for a lifetime subscription to a regularly updated textbook for any course you have
taken? Which one?
List the advantages and disadvantages of Nature’s electronic text compared to a traditional biology textbook.
List the advantages and disadvantages of Nature’s electronic text compared to an electronic version of a traditional
biology textbook.
What will be the implications for individuals, universities and society if it turns out that online courses with
100,000 students are effective?
Resources
•
Review of Nature’s modular biology text: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2011/11/post-gutenberg-e-text-for-biology101.html
•
Merlot: http://www.merlot.org
•
The Kahn Academy: http://www.merlot.org
•
Techburst videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA9F9FCE212B121CF
•
Techburst home: http://c21u.gatech.edu/techburst
•
Drake University students collaborate on software reviews:
http://drakejournalism.com/socialclass/2012/02/09/20-twitter-tools-reviewed/
•
A modular digital literacy course: http://cis275topics.blogspot.com/2011/04/modular-it-literacy-course-forinternet.html
•
Digital literacy – evolution, curriculum and a modular e-text:
http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/presenatations/modularbiotext.pptx
•
The legacy of Aldus Manutius and his press: http://net.lib.byu.edu/aldine/
•
Stanford and other massive online classes: http://cis471.blogspot.com/search/label/mooc
•
Udacity: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities/
•
MIT plans: http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N60/mitx.html
•
Review and assessment of the first Stanford classes: http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/11/what-can-we-learnfrom-stanford-university%E2%80%99s-free-online-computer-science-courses/