On Education

Online education in Washington State

Via onlineschool.org: Online Schools in Washington State : WA Colleges, Universities & Degree Programs. This is a very interesting resource—a set of links to online courses and programs, all on one page. (But click on the OS logo for links to more pages.) From the introduction: 

While home to many major research universities and private colleges, online schools in Washington are now offering new avenues for self-directed learning. Many brick and mortar institutions have created hybridized education programs that combine occasional on-campus visits with traditional distance learning practices. 

Programs formatted this way give students the opportunity to interact with professors and students in a face-to-face forum while also maintaining the flexibility provided by the online school paradigm. 

The concept of an online high school is also becoming more acceptable and widespread across the United States, and Washington’s “Virtual Academies” high school has demonstrated the effectiveness of this setup. 

These programs promote extracurricular activity among younger students and are taught by state-certified teachers, making them incredibly robust—in fact, they have special accelerated curricula to accommodate for a wide range of learning styles and speeds. 

The State Board of Education recently recognized the Washington Virtual Academies high school program with the Washington Achievement Award, which honors the state’s best performing schools.

Crowd-sourced teaching and learning

Via The Globe and Mail, a very interesting article: Physicist's crowd-sourcing philosophy gains traction in the classroom. Excerpt:

Nobel laureate Carl Wieman was already toying with ways to fix university-level science teaching in 2007 when the University of British Columbia came calling with an offer he couldn’t refuse: a chance to test his theories on a grander scale. 

The world-famous American physicist packed up and left the University of Colorado, arriving in Vancouver with fellow physicist (and his wife), Sarah Gilbert. About $10-million in donated funds awaited to launch the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative. 

Dr. Wieman’s central tenet is that “it’s what’s going on in the students’ brains that matters,” and that 20 years of cognitive science say those brains go farther in classes where students tackle tasks and problems together. It’s the educational equivalent of crowd-sourcing and a philosophy gaining currency at all levels of education. 

These ideas are not entirely alien to other universities across Canada, but the UBC initiative is the country’s most co-ordinated and generously bankrolled effort. It is aimed at cracking a common conundrum, namely the creeping suspicion that the entrenched stand-and-deliver style of so many lectures is not grooming the kinds of collaborative, entrepreneurial, critical and adaptable students the world needs. 

“The fundamental paradigm [has long been] it’s what the person up in the front of the class is doing,” Dr. Wieman said. “That’s not what determines learning.” The key is less what students learn than how they learn it: The Googles of the world have decentralized knowledge, meaning the teacher’s role is now much more about helping students assess information and apply it.

The article goes on to describe an approach I called "swarm learning" in a Tyee article back in 2008: a group self-teaching method using computers. It turned out to be surprisingly effective.

Plagiarism for Beginners

The Tyee has published my article Plagiarism for Beginners. Excerpt:

Welcome, class of 2014. You're about to enter post-secondary armed with your smartphone and laptop, and every campus is now wireless. This is a good time to think about the hazards of plagiarism.

The word comes from plagiarius, Latin for kidnapper, and plagiarism is a kind of intellectual kidnapping -- stealing ideas instead of people. Every college and university website has a page about plagiarism policy.

Every prof, on the first day of classes, will lay out that policy. This speech will terrify you without making any sense at all. After the third or fourth prof has given it, you will glaze over and start texting your buds: plagerism wtf?

Terrorists Adopt Online Education

I've just read an article in the Washington Post: Terrorists Move Operations to Cyberspace.

In it we learn that Al Qaeda, deprived of its face-to-face education facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is going heavily into online education:

Among other things, al Qaeda and its offshoots are building a massive and dynamic online library of training materials -- some supported by experts who answer questions on message boards or in chat rooms -- covering such varied subjects as how to mix ricin poison, how to make a bomb from commercial chemicals, how to pose as a fisherman and sneak through Syria into Iraq, how to shoot at a U.S. soldier, and how to navigate by the stars while running through a night-shrouded desert. These materials are cascading across the Web in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and other first languages of jihadist volunteers.

Given that most of their students are likely to be highly self-motivated, I would not be surprised to hear that Al Qaeda's completion rates compare favourably with those of many other online educational institutions. In many online programs the lack of the physical presence of the teacher and other students causes many students to drop out. Staring at a computer screen just isn't the same as sharing the social interactions of a classroom.