AAEEBL Batson Blog

Georgia Tech, Udacity and AT&T: A Claim Too Far? Why ePortfolios Are Necessary to Big Learning

Trent Batson — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:54:54 GMT

Georgia Tech, Udacity and AT&T: A Claim Too Far? Why ePortfolios Are Necessary to Big Learning

Inside Higher Education published an article last week, “Massive, Not Open,” that adds another layer, another model, and another business partnership to the already multi-layered MOOC phenomenon, or “Big Learning,” a more encompassing term for what’s happening in and beyond education. Here are some excerpts from that article:

“The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.”
“ . . . University officials said the new degrees would be entirely comparable to the existing master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech, which costs about $40,000 a year for non-Georgia residents. [italics added]
“Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master's program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.”
“At the moment, we’re just doing this in computer science,” said Provost Rafael Bras. “We’ll wait and see. I believe this is quite appropriate for professional master’s degrees but I also believe it is less appropriate for non-master’s degrees and certainly for other fields.”

And, Udacity will hire mentors itself to offer more individual attention to the 10,000 online students. In addition, Georgia Tech will be seeking the kinds of prospective students, such as those already in a career or in the military, who would be motivated to advance their careers.

The course, in addition to inviting enrolled students, will also be “open” to any learner as a regular MOOC – free to those students but with only a certificate of completion in recognition of visiting the course.

What Does this Announcement Mean?

This course represents what Georgia Tech calls “MOOC” 2.0. But, if it is not “open” as MOOCs have been up to now, why call it a “MOOC”? As MOOCs evolve rapidly, they seem to represent a new phase in education that I call “Big Learning.” Big Learning is aimed not just at the traditional undergraduate learners, but at all those affected by the knowledge economy – in other words, Big Learning is for the Big Market – that is, all of us. And not just all of us in the U.S., but all of us in the world who can get access to the Web. “Education” is becoming “learning,” a simple enough change in wording but, in reality, a profound change in everything.

The word “education,” as we have known it, is associated with stable knowledge: knowledge as a commodity, as a thing, parceled out by the credit hour. When knowledge is stable, it makes sense to teach and to create something called “education.” When knowledge is rapidly changing, it makes sense to learn and create learning organizations. There is no doubt knowledge is rapidly changing, and the MOOC movement, or “Big Learning” as the umbrella term, is simply an adaptation to a new reality. It may or may not be an appropriate adaptation. MOOCs have been around for 5 years, but only in the past two have they become big business.

Already, we see bumps and hiccups in Big Learning. Will Big Learning find a viable set of models? Will Big Learning find a way to incorporate the values of traditional liberal arts education? Will Big Learning find a way to incorporate eportfolio values of learner-centered learning, documenting authentic (real life) learning, of longitudinal reflection and integrative thinking, or of creating an online deep identity for career success? Or will it fall into the “trough of disappointment” (Gartner) and need a second try?

This statement by Zvi Galil, the Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech, suggests an answer:

“’You know there is a revolution going on, right?’ Galil said in a telephone interview. ‘And we have been a part of this revolution, but I thought we could be leaders in this revolution by taking it to the next level, by doing the revolutionary step.’ That step, he said, is using technology to radically increase the scale of a for-credit offering while sharply reducing the price.”

If current institutions that are still called “educational institutions” can indeed scale up, reduce cost, and help learners advance in life (at least through this masters-degree offering), then Big Learning is here to stay. After all, addressing the cost issue in higher education is very compelling.

How Will This Course Be Comparable to an On-Campus Course?

This is the question of the day. If higher education has found the answer to scale up at cost to meet the pressing need for learning today, then we are in a new era. However, if higher education has merely found a new way to degrade the value of a college degree, then Big Learning is a self-defeating movement. Will the course at Georgia Tech provide the same learning value as a traditional master’s level course in computer science? Will a degree from Georgia Tech earned entirely through Big Learning, as opposed to online or on campus, be as readily accepted?

How derivative can a course be and still retain the prestige of the University brand? Will students be as driven and as engaged when they are separated from the instructor by one more layer of bureaucracy? Will the involvement of for-profit entities (Udacity and AT&T) compromise valid assessment of the success of this program? After all, “non-disclosure” and “for-profit” go hand in hand.

As these Big Learning graduate students view videos, take tests, do readings, engage in the forums, interact with peers in the course, complete assignments, and enjoy their limited time with mentors, how can they pull together the various parts of this experience? How can they maximize their mentor time?

Big Learning may be meeting the challenge of the Big Demand for learning that will only grow in our current time of shortening cycles of fundamental change, but it is not meeting the challenge of integrating learning.

In the MOOC course I took earlier this year, all my comments in the forum were in Coursera digital space and all my quiz results remain their record. It feels as though I was not “there.” I never got to know anyone. Was the course a dream? Was I really there? I did not finish the course, as most open enrollees do not, so I don’t even have a certificate of completion. I don’t remember even one name of an instructor or fellow student even though I did participate to almost the end of the course.

Now, what if I had been keeping an eportfolio record of my learning experiences, had used my eportfolio space to capture elements of the course or as a potential collaboration space with other students? What if the eportfolio was a required part of the course and, had there been mentors in my course, I could then have communicated with my mentor via the eportfolio and maximized my one-on-one time with her? What if, in my eportfolio, I included photos of work I did that was relevant to the course, or video, or gifs or voice memos, etc., and catalogued my evidence for easy retrieval? And, finally, what if I could produce a great website, using my eportfolio application, with links to relevant stuff in my eportfolio repository?

In other words, what if Coursera had offered us a chance to augment the course with our own work related to the course: work that might have been required or might have just been at my own initiation? How could Coursera have added the element of social constructivism that was the original idea behind MOOCs?

Big Learning Courses: Some Adult Assembly Required

Big Learning must face the issue of who is the active agent, who is at stake in these courses or programs? Even more than in traditional online learning the teacher’s role is diminished. If the Georgia Tech graduate students in computer science taking the new MOOC program want their degree to have lasting value in their career, they will need to extend their own self-initiated learning activities related to the course and document those activities. If Georgia Tech wants to support the prestige of the MOOC degree and make it truly comparable to the regular degree, the institution must look beyond what Udacity offers to see how higher order learning can reliably occur at this scale and how the students can demonstrate the results of their higher order learning. What does Georgia Tech need to do in addition to what they have planned?

The onus for learning is unquestionably much more on the learner in this planned new program. But this is the order of the day. The learner, a label that can justifiably be applied to all of us, is at stake in everything she or he does or is involved with, to stay up on the latest.

Is Big Learning not then in step with the times? By placing much more responsibility for learning on the learner, isn’t Big Learning inviting, almost requiring active, learner-centered learning?

Udacity and Georgia Tech should both recognize the need to add more validity and substance to their Big Learning offerings. Adding such big numbers while reducing costs must mean something is missing in this new program. If the learner has more responsibility for learning, then the learner must have guidance and support to add their own value to the courses. Students in these courses need more opportunity for social connectivity, working groups, documentation of their work, integration of their work that can be displayed on Web pages with links to evidence, and therefore validation of the value of their work for career success. Or, in other words, they need an eportfolio arranged for by Udacity or Georgia Tech.

This blog post does not necessarily represent AAEEBL policy or positions.

Our Annual Conference is from July 29 to August 1 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston: read more (and register): http://www.aaeebl.org/2013program

“Big Learning:” Can the ePortfolio Movement Survive The Great MOOC Shift?

Trent Batson — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:47:31 GMT

Wikipedia - Looking Back and Forward

MOOCs are the buzz, and the buzz this time is so loud it drowns out everything else. How will MOOCs affect the eportfolio community?

Not a Fad

The MOOC, in hindsight, was probably inevitable. We had “big data” as an example of the paradigm-changing power of scaling up massively. “Big Learning,” a term used by companies, initiatives, and conferences already, is perhaps a good parallel descriptor of how learning may be changing in every constituent paradigm (even high impact practices) within the large universe of “learning.” Big data is changing how research is done and now may be changing how learning occurs at an equally deep level.

MOOCs are not a fad. How the MOOC idea is applied may morph quickly. Maybe even the term itself will evolve. But the enabling technology applications are there, the backbone, the storage, the bandwidth for high resolution, the companies and investments, the promise and, perhaps most importantly, the demand, are all there. What at first seemed overblown and flawed has quickly become a broadly transformational movement. MOOCs are big learning.

The knowledge economy needs big learning. College graduates still do better in the job market than those without a degree, although the jobs may not be at the level the graduates hoped for. The unemployment rate for college grads in general is more or less back to normal while the unemployment rate for those without any college at all continues to rise. Jobs that previously did not require a college degree now do. No matter how flawed we educators may realize our current system is, education still is the life blood of our society.

Diverting Attention

We in the eportfolio community have confidently described eportfolios as transformative up until now. They support DIY learning and active learning and learner-based learning and all the trends we believe are appropriate for today’s economy and culture. Yet, on many campuses, whatever attention was dedicated to eportfolios, in teaching and learning centers, in faculty development offices, in academic computing, among campus leaders, and so on, is now to some extent or another diverted to the MOOC idea and to online learning.

I cannot read this diversion as a dismissal of the eportfolio idea, but just as postponement. Yet, postponement is loss of momentum and memory. It is one thing to say that those now striving to get MOOCed will necessarily return their focus to eportfolios in the changed landscape, but it is another to say they will easily pick up where they left off.

The effect on the eportfolio industry is even more profound than in academia. This period is, once again, for better or worse, all about delivery of course content. But, not in the classroom. In the Cloud. What does this new fully-featured virtual classroom offer? What are its dynamics and needs? What business models work in big learning? What is the relationship between campuses and MOOC companies, for profit and not-for-profit? These questions and many more are being worked out as the ground continues to shift and new questions come up.

The Great MOOC Shift; Whither Credits?

Companies that provide both an LMS and eportfolio must focus on the LMS as a delivery platform and how to re-architect the entire enterprise to adapt to big learning. MOOCs deal with thousands of individuals who are not registered students at any one particular institution. This is like the Oklahoma land rush – racing to stake your claim in a large territory. Can the industry deal with millons of individual accounts that are not brokered through institutions?

Is this the Great MOOC Shift from institutionally-centered learning to learner-centered learning? Is this what big learning will mean? Or will our powerful higher education establishment find a way to keep the institution as the arbiter and deliverer of even open education resources, including MOOCs? Will degrees and credits remain viable and in control as the business model in the world of big learning?

A core reason why credits, at least, may be untranslatable into the world of big learning: at the core of whatever justification there is for credits is the idea that all students get the same “treatment.” They all undergo the same learning experiences in the same way. If the experience is different from a lecture, as in a lab, higher education has traditionally offered one more credit. So, there is a tiny recognition in the credit system that different learning experiences should be valued differently.

But, what if, as is becoming obvious in big learning, learners have very different learning experiences, or even unknown learning experiences, but are all aiming for certification of their learning? This conundrum, that the credit system has lost whatever validity it had, is recognized formally in the emphasis over the last decade on outcomes. Outcomes show real achievement, right? Outcomes are “real world”?

In reality, however, “outcomes” often simply mean that a student has received credit in a particular unit of a course, or in a series of courses of increasing complexity over years. How can outcomes be an antidote to credits when credits validate outcomes? Are we running around in circles? Or did the credit monster eat outcomes?

If, even within the current rather structured educational environment, the business model of higher education is beginning to look like only a business model with no credibility as a measure of learning (do a certain number of credits really reflect how much every student has learned?), how is this business model doing in big learning? In big learning, “delivered” in the cloud, or in the cloud plus on the ground, the myth that all students have the same learning experience evaporates.

Absurdity Extended in Online Learning

This problem of knowing that learning is occurring for the registered student has always been a problem for online learning. So, testing centers are set up, and biometric technologies employed to be certain the person “on the other end” is really that person. This is an effort to extend the myth that the true measure of learning is to be present for a certain amount of time and then prove that you can at least remember something on the surface of what was “delivered.” This is behaviorism carried to its logical absurdity. It would seem that since big learning’s first instinct is to extend the traditional classroom, it would also try to extend the myth that presence equals learning. And therefore, that learning can be measured in hours.

The ameliorative of MOOC supported group work, local mentors and other on-the-ground activities is a powerful counter-measure, of course. But, in the end, certification of learning boils down to credit hours in the current picture.

For now, big learning – on campuses and in the MOOC companies and in our culture -- has to focus on the logistics, politics and finances of learning at such a scale. In the rush to “get out there,” is there the luxury to address issues of evidence of learning? It might seem that on many campuses, among the MOOC companies, and in the industry, there is no time for eportfolios at the moment.

The ground is shifting and people are grabbing for solid structures based on decades of practice. Can we just survive the Great MOOC Shift? Can we find opportunities? On the business side, the ground may be shifting even more than in higher education. Many campuses may be unaffected, after all, but probably all technology companies serving learning will be affected.

AAEEBL’s Role in The Great Shift

AAEEBL cannot ignore “the Great Shift.” In theory, this is the time eportfolio advocates, researchers and practitioners have been waiting for. AAEEBL is dedicated to a particular kind of learning, whether realized through eportfolio technology or not. In the Great Shift, thinking may change. The value of eportfolios may suddenly be recognized. But, AAEEBL cannot wait for this to happen but must advocate in whatever ways are open to us.

AAEEBL must encompass this move to big learning in specific ways. AAEEBL must be as much about MOOCs and MOOC technology as about eportfolios. It is the real-world learning, valid assessment, and career success that is important to the AAEEBL community and not what the enabling technology is called. As the Great Shift occurs, entirely new parameters, vectors, relationships, business models, and opportunities of all kinds open.

Home Base

The eportfolio industry is adapting. Some in this industry may build out their LMS’s in ways to accommodate big learning and may find a new need to focus as well on their eportfolio offering. They may find that the two are inseparable in the world of big learning. Some in the industry may offer neither a full LMS or eportfolio but only some important features of one or the other. But with open architecture and APIs, functionality may be found in a number of places – that is, you may have a “home base” interface but the back end may be borrowing functions from a number of applications. You may not need a platform but just a fully-connected home base application.

This idea of a home base in the virtual world of big learning may apply not only to your technology but to your home institution. Your home institution may also become your “home base” for finding learning resources borrowed from other institutions. To some extent both “home base” situations are already happening. Some institutions have traditionally allowed their students to take courses at equivalent nearby institutions when they did not offer that course themselves. Now, the courses are available online, but the principle is the same. Big learning, by extension, could make the “home base” idea the default, or the normal, situation: your home institution helps you choose learning opportunities from the universe of open learning resources to supplement what you take on the campus itself.

AAEEBL must broaden the scope of its conferences, publications, and projects to encompass big learning topics and issues. Authentic, experiential, and evidence-based learning – the words that give rise to “aaeebl” -- may require eportfolios but eportfolio deep learning may fully play out in the arena of big learning. The eportfolio community has embraced change right from the start and now must itself change.

Notes: AAEEBL.org is moving to YourMembership during the spring and summer months. This is a community-growth online site, a social site where some of the work of the organization can occur; it is our association management environment. We see this as a way for AAEEBL to grow and the eportfolio community to gain visibility and influence. Only with an environment like YourMembership can AAEEBL truly scale up. Judy Williamson Batson, our Vice President, is leading the migration and is trying to focus almost exclusively on this very complex process.

Note 2: the cost of registration at our annual conference in Boston for members has gone down: the discount for the first three member registrations from an AAEEBL institutional member has increased to $250. Also, the conference is located in the middle of Boston where dining choices are much more numerous than at Seaport.

AAEEBL is negotiating new alliances with other associations for events in 2014. We are happy to be adding more services for the whole community.

New AAC&U Research: Employers DO Want ePortfolios

Trent Batson — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:00:11 GMT

A study just published by AAC&U, conducted by Hart Research Associates, available at the AAC&U web site, includes one finding of huge importance to the eportfolio community:

"in addition to a resume or college transcript, more than four in five employers say an electronic portfolio would be useful to them in ensuring that job applicants have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their company or organization." (page 4).

The Study, It Takes More Than A Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success, is important, and I plan to write more about it, but I wanted to get this one statement out quickly to alert all in the community how quickly the picture is changing. Yes, students do need an eportfolio to get a job.

The ePortfolio Idea "Forking"?

Trent Batson — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:13:13 GMT

Is the eportfolio movement about creating transformation or increments? Do we value eportfolio implementations that (merely) enhance current practice? Can the movement be satisfied with slow change? Is any kind of eportfolio use, as long as the term “eportfolio” is used, good?

These are questions I wrestle with. My whole being wants a new world of learning where all learning designs reflect what we know about how humans learn. Yet, my whole being is also happy when I hear any story at all about academic use of eportfolios. But, what if all we end up doing after many years is just adding another kind of assignment (incrementalism)? What if eportfolios, in the end, are not any different from LMS’s and, in fact, the two kinds of applications become one – the “LMSio”(subsumation)?

I hear the term “project creep” and I think about “eportoflio creep.” Do most people think of “eportfolio” the same way as they did 5 years ago? Is purity slipping?

AAEEBL

AAEEBL is about developing learners and transforming institutions. AAEEBL is an association that is not “of” something but is “for” something – in our case, authentic, experiential and evidence-based learning. It is an association geared to support change.

The challenge, then, is to “keep our eyes on the prize,” but value whatever incremental eportfolio uses occur. Increments cannot become the all; nor can transformations.

I am regularly faced with this issue not just in theory but in the moment. The general concept of “eportfolio” is hot not in the sense of headlines right now, but in the sense of eportfolios being attractive as a business venture. In my role as President, I talk with eportfolio providers and potential providers weekly. The trends are quite fascinating right now.

Two companies, one of whom is a new AAEEBL Corporate Affiliate, and another that may become an AAEEBL Corporate Affiliate, follow what seems to me a new business model. Both of these companies grew directly out of universities as graduates of those universities themselves faced the job market and exquisitely felt the emotions of finding a place in today’s economy. They are products of the recession job market.

They used this first-hand experience to create companies that help students get jobs through eportfolio technology. Interestingly, the eportfolios are free to students but access to the eportfolios – companies looking for job candidates – is limited to companies that pay. Revenue is from the candidate seekers, not from the candidates. The students, of course, provide access for potential employers only to their showcase eportfolio. Employers then get to search a database of student eportfolios to find candidates. (The eportfolios are fully-instrumented eportfolio platforms to use while in college).

This is not unlike other employment or jobs sites, such as Monster or LinkedIn. But these two companies do not provide eportfolios to students in college. It seems to me the genius of these two new eportfolio companies I'm writing about is their reaching out directly to students on behalf of companies.

One of the companies is Seelio, out of the University of Michigan. Seelio is a new AAEEBL Corporate Sponsor.

I know that all eportfolio providers are focused on employability. In fact, we recognize that one of the chief values of eportfolios is to meet the demand that has arisen forcefully in the past few months to “show me evidence of what you can do.” Seelio is not distinctive in focusing on employability, then, but they are distinctive in their business model.

In the U. S., the eportfolio community rides two horses – learning and assessment. When AAEEBL has held conferences that include tracks on employability, we don’t find a great response. But, we should. I am encouraged to see a new push to advance our community’s interest in employability. It is also good to see a concrete bridge between students and employers – beyond internships and temporary employment – to perhaps help campuses better align learning with the current economy.

Back to the Terminology

As I talk with new potential Corporate Affiliates, I do have to answer for myself, for AAEEBL and for the potential Corporate Affiliate, the question of whether that company is offering technology that can benefit learning and education. For example, another new Corporate Affiliate has a large Web-hosting business. They are interested in eportfolios?, you might ask, as I did.

Turns out, they do have a group within the company that has a strong interest in education and their efforts are in fact to improve learning. BlueHost has become one of our newest Corporate Affiliates in part so they can understand the needs of learners better.

The same transformative story can be said of many eportfolio providers, as they themselves modified their business strategy: they may have offered just an educational tracking system that evolved into an eportfolio system, or just an assessment platform that added a learning module, or a creative eportfolio that added an assessment module. Or they may have been a well-known publisher that saw an opportunity to enter the eportfolio business within the community they have published for over decades. Or, broadened their market space to K-12 or from K-12 to higher education.

In other words, the concept of “eportfolio” is not abuzz amongst the blogerati, but it is abuzz among those looking for a good business opportunity. AAEEBL’s job is to help guide them toward recognition of providing value for academia and for learners everywhere.

The Value of AAEEBL for the ePortfolio Concept

As AAEEBL is increasingly known to represent the global eportfolio community, albeit in collaboration with all other eportfolio initiatives in the world, it is also increasingly apparent how important our Association is to sustain the core eportfolio idea.

We cannot dictate terminology. But, terminology follows experience. If all those coming to the eportfolio community learn why eportfolios are valuable – the core eportfolio idea -- then they themselves will be the guardians of our terminology. Their experience at eportfolio conferences, at webinars, through reading publications, and through email and phone and Skype and all the communication mediums within our community, their experience within this coherent community will determine terminology.

The community, organized around your Association, AAEEBL, has a strong voice. The eportfolio idea is suddenly very attractive as a business venture. We now need our Association more than ever, so that the eportfolio idea does not “fork.” The word “fork” usually refers to open source where the reference code gets left behind by derivative code and the community goes off in all directions. The value of collaboration is lost.

We can help prevent the forking of the eportfolio concept through our Association. We are here because of what we see as value for learning and we are here, all of us, to reinforce each other’s efforts. This works as long as we are a cohesive community.

Common Misperceptions of MOOCs and Open Learning

Trent Batson — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:54:55 GMT

We read in a New York Times lead editorial --http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-college.html?hp&_r=0 -- that online learning does not work very well. Or we read or hear, from numerous sources, that MOOCs (as one form of online learning) are either the wave of the future or, maybe, the end of college as we know it. Confusion reigns. How should we think about the accelerated growth in online learning opportunities and MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses?

A widely-held but false assumption about education can perhaps help explain the confusion: many people seem to believe that, because we have had essentially one dominant model for formal learning (with slight variations) for centuries, we will similarly continue with a new, single, dominant model of learning once the dust settles. MOOCs come along, draw massive numbers, receive significant venture capital, are associated with a number of elite universities, and commentators make it seem this is the next silver bullet, the next singular model of learning. Part of the near hysteria about MOOCs may be grounded in either/or thinking: we either have the traditional classroom model of today or we all do MOOCs. We may be laboring under the false assumption that learning can happen only one way; no matter what direction we go in with formal learning, we will have just one dominant model.

As you may remember from a blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I am taking a MOOC course, offered by Coursera and Johns Hopkins University called Introduction to the U. S. Food System. We are in the fourth week of the course. By taking the course and doing the required work, I have learned much about the MOOC experience and how it might evolve.

MOOCs are showing us something significant but unless we understand what it is they are showing us, attempts to replicate MOOCs will falter. Creating a MOOC is not easy. Nor is it easy to understand the general idea of “open learning,” the hallmark of MOOCs. In fact, the only way to understand MOOCs and much of what is going on in the general learning landscape today is by first understanding “open learning.”

Open learning is generally associated with the Web and in particular with the phase of the Web (roughly since 2004) called “the social Web.” The social Web is social in more than one way: first, the popular interpretation is of “social” as people being able to hook up and post and make friends and “like” and so on. But there is a technical sense of the “social Web” as well: data and functionality “socializing” with each other. On many Web sites, you’ll see the icons for Twitter and Facebook and a few other icons. You can link to Facebook from the Web site you are on without having to actually go to Facebook. This inter-linking of applications is the second social aspect of the social Web.

You can “be” one place but use data from another “place” on the Web, or use functionality from another place. The term “Web” is appropriate because both people and applications can connect in many ways not possible before the Web.

Another way to understand the social Web and open learning is that people now have almost infinite opportunities to interact with other people and with knowledge sources. The social Web set the stage for “open learning.”

Open learning is a profound concept and phenomenon. Though the phrase sounds simple, the implications are so complex it takes a while to understand.

The one implication I am concerned with regarding MOOCs is just this: with open learning, all connected humans have multiple sources of learning. This is true right now. But because most learners are not yet adjusted to guiding their own learning, they cannot yet take advantage of the riches of open learning. To be your own learner/researcher is not easy, nor are students in formal learning situations usually taught to be their own researchers. They know one way to learn in most cases and so do most academics. This legacy “one-way” mindset limits awareness of the multiple ways that learning can occur and how new learning designs can be varied and enticing.

The notion that learning depends on passive reception of formed knowledge is so deep in our cultural consciousness that the idea of open learning must seem like a chimera – a vision with no substance.

The MOOC comes along, is a familiar lecture and quiz model, but is open to all, and thousands leap at the chance to take a MOOC course. MOOCs are nowhere near as good as those thousands think, nor are they as bad as commentators say. We cannot miss the lesson of the MOOC or we will have missed the chance to further develop a major vector of learning.

MOOCs are “bad” in these ways (I am basing my analysis on my one MOOC course experience and on the dozens of articles I’ve read about MOOCs):

They are the standard passive learning model of lecture and quiz.
Students have only online contact with each other
The “massive” numbers of students means there is little chance of developing even the usual online friendships.
Most students do not complete MOOCs.
And, they do not engage learning as researchers would advise: MOOCs seem to ignore the discoveries from research into how humans learn best.

These are the obvious negatives about MOOCs. But I have found some very positive aspects of the MOOC I am enrolled in as well:

Though the course I am taking is in fact lecture-based, the lecturers are very good. They “deliver their content” (pardon this antiquated and anachronistic phrase) very well. The visuals are helpful. The technology is smooth and transparent; the videos have good production values. As an advanced learner, I am learning.
The video lectures are only around 20 minutes long, indicating that Coursera and Johns Hopkins are aware of the limits of attention span for online lecture. One lecture may be broken into 2 or 3 coherent segments. The short time for lectures may also reflect Coursera’s awareness of students having to catch a lecture between other tasks of life.
The lectures have interspersed quizzes so we students cannot just run the lectures while we do something else and get credit for “watching” the lecture.
The associated reading materials are varied and engaging; they were chosen wisely. I am reassured that a lot of work has gone into course preparation. The materials are not textbooks, but PDFs or Websites related to the course subject.
The quizzes do test memory but they also point to what the lecturers believe are important pieces of knowledge to understand. We students can take the quizzes three times so we can learn from the quizzes. Using quizzes in this way is a step up from the usual “one and done” model.
The forums are fairly active. Different people start topics that relate to each week’s general topic. Students can see which topics are most popular and then go to that topic, so in effect there is a moving conversation from week to week, organized around the topic of the week.
When students comment about a problem, the course staff responds quickly and appropriately. The negative is that technology problems did crop up, but the positive is that they were attended to almost immediately.
The knowledge presented in the course is complex, no holds-barred, and wonderfully assembled with charts and graphs and visuals to help with understanding.

In other words, I’ve been lucky to be in a well-organized MOOC, well run, with excellent material and lecturers. I have been able to get a taste of the Johns Hopkins experience.

In general, the technology in this MOOC is more sophisticated than I expected. It is also easier to use than I expected. I am using broad band so I cannot judge how my course would have deployed over a modem; however, I did have a chance to indicate what connectivity I had as I registered, so I can only assume an adjustment was made so that those with slower connections were able to receive the course satisfactorily.

But MOOCs obviously do not, alone, represent the formal education of the future. For young learners, this course could only be an appetizer to encourage enrollment in a more active-learning course.

We cannot judge MOOCs based on the false assumption of singularity I mentioned at the beginning of the article. They don’t have to be the wave of the future to be important. MOOCs, however, may well be one more key part of the new panorama of multiple learning options. MOOCs have proven that technology can support a learning opportunity for tens of thousands of people. This is no small achievement.

MOOCs can be modified over time to make it easier to include some social pedagogy or experiential learning, and of course the MOOC organizers can offer eportfolio technology to transfer more of the authority and activity in the course to the students. MOOCs, as they are now structured, seem thin and retro in learning design. Still, they demonstrate at the very least how powerful our media are now. They have pushed out the envelope in an important way, opening new territory for learning interaction. That they are not close to perfect yet is no reason to dismiss them.

Thanks to Stephen Downes, Bryan Alexander, Dave Cormier and George Siemans for their pioneering work with MOOCs just a few years ago. http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/1.+History+of+MOOC%27s

As the cited article indicates, the open education movement was given a big boost by the Kumar and Iiyoshi book on Opening Up Education in 2008, published by MIT Press, in which I had a chapter. The book citation: Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, eds. Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar, MIT Press, 2008.

The idea in my chapter in Opening Up Education was about the problems of “abundance.” MOOCs are now part of the abundance I wrote about. The chapter, written with M. S. Vijay Kumar and Neeru Paharia, is “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance.” This chapter anticipated the overwhelming abundance we now struggle with.

Our problem with abundance has a number of facets:

Learning opportunities are growing most rapidly in virtual spaces on the Web. We have yet to fully understand how best to use these virtual spaces. It is hard to develop trust with people we cannot touch and can only hear and see through media.
Trust, to some extent, depends on familiarity. We have yet to settle on the usual human “rules” for interaction in virtual spaces; we know these “rules” by what feels right to us. It is hard to know what feels right when the nature of the spaces continues to change.
We need to figure out how the various new learning models fit together. Can a curriculum be made up of combinations of learning experiences? Of course it can – but can those combinations include some that are not created by one institution? What about learning experiences not monitored by faculty? Can we develop skills and guidelines to assess learning based on evidence and not based on monitoring?

Can we learn to be comfortable with open learning abundance? Can higher education move away from its legacy of lock-step education and begin to offer self-paced learning and other open learning options on the way to a credential? Can colleges and universities learn to assess learning based on evidence instead of close personal monitoring? MOOCs are shaking the establishment at the moment and will probably continue to do so. They are not the one single indication of where education is heading, but the turbulence they are creating is another indication of how quickly technology can change all parameters and vectors overnight.

Emergence of the Placement ePortfolio or “We need a Reference ePortfolio Definition”

Trent Batson — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:33:22 GMT

Some of you may have noticed a new trend: the emergence of the “eportfolio” dedicated solely to placement.

I have talked with one of the providers of this new form of portfolio over the past few months and just recently was pointed to another one. The first is Seelio (http://seelio.com/) and the other is Portfolium (http://www.theportfolium.com/). I would be surprised if there are not more around.

What I can gather from a brief glimpse at Portfolium is that they help the student develop a sensational multimedia Web site with links to artifacts. Once the student or learner has the Web site with links, they can look through the posted jobs from Portfolium. (When searching for “Portfolium” use the term “theportfolium.com”).

Seelio offers a similar kind of service but is also working to create a learning and assessment eportfolio.

The concern for AAEEBL and the community, however, is the further confusion about portfolio terminology. The placement portfolio takes the term portfolio into an unfamiliar territory – or maybe all too familiar: making it seem that a “portfolio” is merely a Web site presentation.

I have also heard a number of provider reps for regular eportfolio systems say that “the student can create as many eportfolios as they want to.” When I asked one rep what that meant, the rep made it clear to me he was referring to Web sites. The student, that is, could make as many presentations – such as a capstone eportfolio – as they wanted. The idea that a portfolio is only a Web site trivializes the entire core learning values that are at the center of AAEEBL and the eportfolio community world wide.

The problem is that, right now, there is no reference definition for “eportfolio.” A “reference definition” means the standard definition a community agrees upon. The Wikipedia definition does not serve our current needs very well in that regard. Therefore, the AAEEBL community needs to address this issue. We need a group from the membership to provide one standard reference definition at least for the U. S., but preferably for the world.

We need terminology and a definition for this new placement portfolio, for a capstone portfolio, for an institutional assessment portfolio, a learning portfolio and so on. We cannot control human discourse, nor would we wish to. But we can at least let people know they can go to one URL to see a definition ratified by AAEEBL.

Notes from the Cloud: My MOOC Experience, Part 1.

Trent Batson — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:14:02 GMT

When Tom Friedman writes in the New York Times about MOOCs, you know they’ve reached the level of national conversation, not just in education circles but “out there.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all

How do we, the eportfolio community, consider, evaluate, understand, or encompass MOOCs?

I wrote an article about MOOCs and eportfolios a couple of weeks ago: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/01/16/the-taming-of-the-mooc.aspx

Go to http://hastac.org/blogs, search for “MOOCs” and you will see dozens of articles about MOOCs. You can do the same at the New York Times site – http://nytimes.com. Or at the Chronicle -- http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5/

MOOCs are at the point where I felt I should register for a MOOC course. So, I did. I am new to the course, but I have some reactions to the course already.

I admit that I have been suspicious and nearly dismissive of MOOCs as “lectures writ large.” So, I went into the registration and discovery process for this particular MOOC, “An Introduction to the U. S. Food System,” taught from Johns Hopkins, with doubt.

What happened:

First, I was surprised at how easily I could find and sign up for this Coursera course. My registration was surprisingly simple and quick. I got email notifications and instructions. The home page interface for the course is immediately usable.

I was able to watch an introductory lecture with no glitches and good video production quality.

The readings, so far, are riveting and astonishing. As always, I find a well-designed course provides a library of readings that would be hard to come by otherwise. Having an expert in the field tell me, “these are the articles you need to read to understand the problems we will address in this course,” is invaluable.

I have, therefore, already become terrified by the food situation in the world!

I have the option, and was encouraged, to join the Forum. Well, forums have their problems: the number of new topics quickly grow and the conversation is therefore fragmented down a whole number of cul-de-sacs. Who is talking to whom? Sometimes, it is possible to track down an actual discourse thread and join that particular one. But, no matter what, the Forum for this course, with 12,000 students, is not only chaotic in organization but overwhelming in number.

I could probably study the forum and track down a few comments that interest me and try to talk to those people. And, I may do that.

I will need to take quizzes and stay on top of the lectures assiduously since the course lasts a mere 6 weeks. It could end while I am still catching up. If I pass all the quizzes and complete all requirements, I will get a certificate of completion.

Why do people take this course? I can’t quote the forum directly without permission from those who are posting, but I do see that many of the students are already in a related field to the subject of the course. Some say they hope to build on what they already know. Others say they may want to enter a course of study related to this field. And others have a strong agenda about sustainable food production and want to be heard. I was reluctant to admit, although I did, that I eat meat.

So far, I find the course much better than I expected. But, then, students are often very positive in the few week or so of a course before real work begins. Still, from a disinterested viewpoint, I am already forming opinions.

First, MOOCs are probably the real thing. The course is only a week or so into the 6 weeks and I will be very interested to scan the comments as the course moves along. But right now the course seems solid.

Second, technology and access are at the point where the technology is invisible. Everything worked easily and quickly. I did have to sign up for a free subscription to a journal to get to one of the readings, but that was a one-minute process. And the course information noted that I would have to subscribe to this particular journal.

Third, for those already familiar with the field of food productino, this format provides a good learning opportunity. Or for those, like me, a serious dilettante, er, renaissance man, it is equally valuable.

Fourth, I would feel uncomfortable taking a course like this in a brick-and-mortar classroom. I would seem out of place, a seasoned professor with a Ph.D., joining an introductory course. For me, then, the MOOC is ideal. MOOC advocates claim that these kinds of courses open learning opportunities to those who could not otherwise have any opportunities. It had not occurred to me that I was among that number.

Finally, the lecture format comes under fire. “Is this the best we can do?,” asks Cathy Davidson of HASTAC. I can in fact watch the lectures a number of times, or parts of the lectures. I can take the quizzes a number of times, using the quizzes as a learning opportunity – I hope they are telling me what is important to understand from the readings.

More generally, my strongest response to the “MOOC Mania” (Chronicle) is “this is not the replacement for college, it is just one more learning opportunity in the world of open learning.” We will not replace a predominant single model of learning with another predominant single model of learning. We are instead going from a near singularity to multiplicity. The burning question is not "will MOOCs put anyone out of business," but "how will MOOCs fit into our extant educational processes?"

Where are eportfolios in this? No where.

This very blog is my own eportfolio entry about my MOOC experience. Why don’t the students in my course have the opportunity to elect to pay for an eportfolio, if they choose to do so, to add greatly to the value of this experience? As I said in my Campus Technology article, the most obvious component of the MOOC – the eportfolio – is missing. Coursera should arrange to provide accounts through an existing eportfolio provider. Students in the course could choose, themselves, if they wanted to purchase an account.

Granted, the extra overhead to build in an eportfolio option is not insignificant. But I do hope to see some of the organizations providing MOOCs, including universities and colleges, offering that option.

More on this experience soon. Let me know what your own experience is.

DIY, MOOCs, Badges, Open Education: How to Tell the Difference Between a Fad and a Trend?

Trent Batson — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:38:45 GMT

Now that Coursera has created a business plan, we may be able to call MOOCs a trend and not a fad. The business plan is to sell access to the list of those MOOC enrollees who opt in to companies looking for employees.

You wondered how the MOOC companies could sustain themselves by offering free courses? Well, this new plan is one answer.

The sudden explosion of MOOC mania says many things: first, it could of course just be a phase, but if it is not a phase depending on a particularly bad job market for survival, then what does it say beyond "watch out, higher education"?

As Clay Shirky said at EDUCAUSE, MOOCs are not the way to understand what's going on now: it is better to understand the larger cultural context, that of "openness." Openness is re-shaping all existing knowledge-making processes. MOOCs are only one indicator of the power of openness.

What is really going on with the Coursera business model? Primarily, they are extending the potential learner pool way beyond the young learner who is already enrolled in high school or in a 2-year program. Coursera is plumbing the culture for learners of all ages and situations in all countries; it and the other open-education phenomena are helping to create a learning market orders of magnitude larger than the traditional market.

Something that enlarges the market significantly is not just a fad.

Openness, where learning resources are everywhere and often are free, redefines how education should function. No doubt, existing educational institutions will remain vital and may even transform sufficiently to incorporate openness but will need to allow the academic side, not the business side, re-define learning structures.

There is no doubt that this is the age, also, of eportfolios. Openness in some ways depends on individuals owning eportfolios: away from a standard and consistent curriculum structure, the eportfolio offers a replacement structure. The eportfolio is a "retroactive curriculum": "this is the knowledge structure that resulted from my various unstructured learning experiences." "This is a record of how I discovered knowledge and then ordered it."

This is generally called DIY learning -- do it yourself.

The talk about "dropping out" is now being re-framed as positive, as learners taking charge of their own learning (DIY). Successful people in Silicon Valley wear the "drop out" badge proudly. Dropping out is not for everyone and perhaps for only a very few select people. But this changing cultural view of the necessity of college is in keeping with openness.

DIY demands an eportfolio. If you are creating your own record of achievement, you need your own permanent, cloud-based eportfolio.

The trends toward DIY, badges (micro-credentialing based on peer riview), and MOOCs are all indicators of the move to openness that has roots starting in the 1990s and earlier. I hear educators scoff at badges and MOOCs. But, they are, in fact, important indicators of cultural trends. And, from the perspective of AAEEBL, these trends are pertinent and vital for our work.

"Some cool tools; add a lot of pizass to student eportfolios . . . "

Trent Batson — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 15:14:16 GMT

Hi, all -- I received permission from Angela Koponene at the University of Houston Downtown to re-post her own post from my eportfolio forum. Note the two "cool tools" she mentions. Also, interesting what's going on at her University. Thanks, Angela.
-- Trent

Angela Koponen, PhD
November 9, 2012 at 1:55 pm (Edit)

Trent,
I’m currently researching ePortfolios for my university, University of Houston Downtown. I read your articles in Campus Technology and use them as I research to share with UHD’s ePortfolio’s planning committee. We are planning to launch a program that will be used by all of our nearly 14,000 students. I came across some cool tools that can be used free of charge which have the potential to add a lot of pizazz to student ePortfolios. Let’s share with your readers:
ANIMOTO – create extraordinary videos from your photos, video clips, words and music.
http://animoto.com/sample-videos,
GLOSTER – Online Multimedia Posters – http://edu.glogster.com/what-is-glogster-edu/.

Always fun to share!

Back to UHD – We will be looking to use the ePortfolios across campus to 1) record academic performance, 2) respond to core and general ed standards and requirements, and 3) as tools for job seekers and career building. For 1 and 2, I won’t go into details here. For 3 I see this as currently needing to be driven by job applicants rather than employers. My personal experience is that having an ePortfolio can’t hurt (unless it’s a disaster), but that employers find it very impressive when available to them. In general, applying for jobs online is a tedious and trying experience, involving uploading resumes, cover letters, and filling out painfully long applications. Employers interested in a particular candidate can learn so much more about an applicant by viewing and analyzing their ePortfolio that they ever will from there job applications, resumes, or other traditional tools. Ideally, in my opinion, an online job application should only ask a few basic questions like do you have these experiences and education as key, preferably in the form of drop-down boxes. Most of the rest should be included is a really good searchable ePortfolio, the “show me” part of the application. So, one of the few questions asked should be for the link to the ePortfolio. I wish I had an opportunity to experiment with that approach. I’d be glad to partner with anyone wanting to try that experiment.

I find that ePortfolios can be so powerful and rich in content, that I look forward to continuing my investigations and eventual implementation on our campus. The AAEEBL web site has been very helpful. Keep experimenting on your ePortfolio. I look forward to updates on your progress.

Angela Koponen, PhD
Director of Co-Curricular and Operations Assessment
University of Houston Downtown

Informed Pessimism: No More Industrial Revolutions?

Trent Batson — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:39:43 GMT

From the NY Times: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/no-more-industrial-revolutions/?hp

This post, a scholarly blog, rubbed me the wrong way. The point is made convincingly -- we are past the big "bumps" or "bubbles" in terms of sudden 30 to 50 year GDP growth based on industrial revolutions. But it is convincing only if you believe that we humans in the connected world can only do industrial revolutions. Seems to me we humans did an agricultural revolution a few thousand years ago. There would have been no industrial revolutions without the agricultural revolution.

What about the revolution we are in now? This blog writer seems to think the computer revolution has already run its course, at least in terms of computers spurring a rapid growth in wealth.

Most of you, like me, are directly involved with the computer revolution. Do we agree that the big changes are over, and that the doc com bubble that burst in the year 2000 was the last computer wealth bubble?

I certainly don't know, so I have no answer. But I do know what I believe. It all depends on how one understands humanity's move to digital everything.

Immediate changes in efficiencies doing what we already do, and doing what we do within existing cultural memes, was easy and is still easy. Efficiencies in existing processes is the phase we are in now: efficiencies in marketing, delivery of products and services, efficiencies in communication, in archiving, searching, displaying, efficiencies in social organization, efficiencies in research and big data, in aggregating knowledge and so on. We do everything faster and with less need for humans to support each embedded process. Even our machines are now more efficient because digital technology manages how they work. Buildings are designed and built that could never have been built without CAD and CAM.

But is that all that we can expect in this digital age? In education, we are beginning to see efficiencies in the creation of learning opportunities -- such as MOOCs. But MOOCs, albeit provided by gifted educators and superb graphics complemented by social networking, are still teacher-centered and not outside the learning paradigm we are all familiar with.

Still, MOOCs and other trends -- assessment of prior learning (or recognition of prior learning), eportfolios as a way to evaluate achievement with much fuller data, micro-credentialing (badges -- really a form of peer review at the student level), high-impact educational practices, social pedagogies, new recognition of how people actually learn best, the flipped classroom, and so on -- do in fact indicate an important new phase of the computer revolution.

This new phase is what we might call "the university of the whole." Our economy is now a knowledge economy. The economy has become a learning economy. And institutions of higher learning are moving toward human processes and structures that are appropriate for "the university of the whole."

The university of the whole is where the real and lasting and profound knowledge revolution is taking place. No, this is not an industrial revolution, this is a revolution in how people think. This is a revolution at the source of all revolutions. ePortfolios are already native to "the university of the whole." We are all, in the eportfolio community, going there (to the university of the whole) and already there. Welcome.

Chronicle Article: “Mooc Mania.” Badges and Alternate Credentialing

Trent Batson — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:28:06 GMT

An article in the Chronicle today, Oct. 1, 2012, confirms, in case you were wondering, that the MOOC and badges movement (or “mania”) continues unabated.

According to the article -- http://chronicle.com/article/Massive-Excitement-About/134678/ -- written by Katherine Mangan – “led by some of the nation's most prestigious research universities, new players are signing on each month to teach free, online courses that have drawn tens of thousands of students worldwide.”

I have written a couple of blogs about the advent of alternative learning opportunities and the challenge of credentialing learning out of sight of teachers or mentors and outside of a standard curriculum. The popular answer is badges and certificates. My question is, Where do you put those badges and certificates and how do you show evidence of their value?

In a recent article I published in Campus Technology -- http://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/09/19/12-important-trends-in-the-eportfolio-industry.aspx -- I mentioned that a number of eportfolio providers are strategizing about how to incorporate badges and certificates into eportfolios. They are also looking at the “DIY learner” who may or may not be affiliated with a learning institution.

It would seem that the burgeoning trend toward alternate learning, either within or without institutions, should be ideal for eportfolios. Yet, as in the article, and others about MOOCs and badges and certificates, no author mentions eportfolios. How do we get the word out? It seems those pushing MOOCs and badges have a problem – credibility – and we in the eportfolio community have the answer. How to let them know?

With Randall Rode of Yale, I’m co-leading a NERCOMP workshop on “Alternative Credentialing: Badges and ePortfolios” on November 1. See: http://nercomp.org/index.php?section=events&evtid=194. Join us if you are interested. This is one effort to get the word out that the eportfolio movement and the MOOCs-badges-certificates movement are on parallel tracks but should be on the same track. How can we do more?

Definition of "ePortfolio"

Trent Batson — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:10:32 GMT

As AAEEBL, we are occasionally asked for a definition of “eportfolio.” Fair enough.

My own is:

“ePortfolio technology enables learners to manage the complexity and variability of learning designs and opportunities in formal and informal settings in order to gather evidence of their resultant deep learning.”

The two key terms in this definition are “complexity” and “deep learning.” These are the two essential poles of eportfolio experience: complexity because information technology has carried knowledge creation and use beyond simple human abilities and into a realm of super-complexity beyond the management of humans without technology. And, “deep learning,” because today’s world demands that learners be able to do, not just memorize. Deep learning is contrasted with surface learning.

My argument, and I am fully open to comment about this definition, is that other definitions – such as the classic definition of eportfolio as a process of reflection, or the definition of eportfolio as a genre, or other definitions – are all derivative of the core value of eportfolio use, which is deep learning.

ePortfolios are, of course, used for assessment, to incorporate rubrics, are used for accountability, for workforce development, for creating a digital identity, for recognition of prior learning, for creativity, for person purposes, for fun and on and on.

My contention is that none of these other uses would have arisen, or been sustained, if not for the ability of eportfolios to enable learners to manage complexity and engage in deep learning.

This definition is my personal definition. I have spent 10 years thinking about this core essence of eportfolio thinking, advocacy and use. This definition has not been vetted among the AAEEBL hierarchy, so it cannot be construed as AAEEBL’s official definition.

But, it might be a useful exercise to invite comment and see what others think. You can comment in this space or send me email at trentbatson@mac.com

Thanks

Trent

ePortfolio Positions for Association of American Medical Colleges

Trent Batson — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:24:50 GMT

Hi, all -- Dana Bostrom of the AAMC asked if I could spread the word about the three positions described below. So, this is me spreading the word. AAMC is an AAEEBL member and are quite sophisticated about eportfolios and their particular use in medical education. I hope these positions may interest some of you. Please contact Dana, not me, if you have questions: dbostrom@aamc.org

Best Regards to all
Trent

Hi Trent,

I’m hoping you can help us spread the word with interested candidates, or others that can help, for the new positions we are hiring for our electronic portfolio connector. I’m currently holding the “director” title, but I am intended as an AAMC “loaned executive” and will rotate off the project when we hire the new director. This director is meant to be permanent, and the other 2 new positions will be really in charge of managing the adoption of the product in our 2 key areas. I’m glad to answer any questions; we also have a recruiter at AAMC who can answer questions and conducts all the initial screens and interviews.

Medical School Relationships
http://sj.tbe.taleo.net/SJ12/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=AAMC&cws=1&rid=74

Director
http://sj.tbe.taleo.net/SJ12/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=AAMC&cws=1&rid=76

Hospital Relationships
http://sj.tbe.taleo.net/SJ12/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=AAMC&cws=1&rid=75

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Dana

Dana Bostrom

Association of American Medical Colleges
2450 N Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037-1127
T (202) 741-6450 F (202) 828-0659 E dbostrom@aamc.org
www.aamc.org
Tomorrow's Doctors, Tomorrow's Cures®

ePortfolios: Managing Complexity to Catalyze Deep Learning

Trent Batson — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 19:53:29 GMT

ePortfolio technology is pervasive and is becoming well known. Yet, not even eportfolio leaders have an easy time talking about eportfolios. People ask these leaders “what is an eportfolio?” and they get widely varying answers. Attend ePIC in London during July and you may understand that eportfolios are about developing a digital identity (and many other capabilities) or attend a Centre for Recording Achievement residential seminar and think eportfolios are about demonstrating achievement or attend an ePortfolios Australia Conference and you might then understand eportfolios to be about assessing prior learning or workforce development. Attend an AAEEBL conference and you might then wonder if eportfolios are instead about learning, assessment and accountability.

The problem is that people define eportfolios by their uses of the technology. None of the above definitions is wrong, yet each is derivative of the core value of eportfolios: eportfolios manage the actual complexity of learning far better than we have ever been able to do and, because they manage this complexity, they are able to “catalyze” (quoting Randy Bass in a conversation) deep learning.

Thus the essence of eportfolios is that they catalyze deep learning. This is not to dismiss the other uses we mentioned earlier. However, we can say that none of the derivative uses would be meaningful or important if eportfolios didn’t enable deep learning. The deep learning (by whatever name – active learning, social learning, authentic learning, transformational learning, situated learning, and so on) is the sine qua non: without deep learning, eportfolios would not have those other uses. If digital story telling didn’t result in deep learning, why do it? If using eportfolios for workforce development didn’t result in deep learning for better employment, why use them? If using eportfolios for accountability didn’t lead to deep learning, why use them (and, indeed, this is a germaine question)?

The term “complexity” is in contrast to the simplistic system of classes, lectures, credits and grading; of listening, memorizing and testing. One size does not fit all, one pace does not fit all, and mostly listening may not fit almost anyone.

How can we imagine a system that allows for more complex learning?

Using eportfolio evidence as both the means of learning and the means of assessment allows us to see more of the truly complex nature of learning:

Evidence of learning is captured all the time, since learning is going on all the time.
Evidence of learning is continuous, not segmented as in courses.
Evidence of learning is captured regardless of enrollment in an educational institution
Evidence of learning is mobile, as is the learner.
The evidence is manageable and can be used to make the case for a grade, a badge, a certificate, a degree, a job, a promotion, another job and so on.
The learner owns the evidence, greatly increasing the stake the learner has in making it useful, which in itself is a cognitive challenge.
The evidence helps the learner to make connections among learning experiences and to thereby reflect as all learners do.

The list can go on, of course. However, the point is that learning has always been complex but educational institutions tended to be blind to the complexity and wanted to define it and control it. The actual complexity of learning could not be captured or understood so educational institutions instead became about content.

It is not that eportfolios create the complexity of learning, it is that eportfolios can work with the complexity and help the learner. ePortfolios don’t shy from “messy” learning. ePortfolios do not start at 9 am and end at 9:50 am – they are always open. ePortfolios don’t have to assign credits to your interesting thought as you walk to school, instead they allow you to create a voice memo about that thought and upload the voice memo to your eportfolio. And then you and others can see for themselves the value of that thought. ePortfolios don’t assign you to see something in a tree, instead when you do see that something, you can take a photo and put that into your eportoflio.

Learning is going on all the time; it is complex, social, fluid and impossible to capture since it is social and complex and fluid. But it is possible to capture evidence of learning.

With eportfolios as the guiding enabler to think about learning, educators can start with the learner and learning groups. And then see how the complex learning that is already in process can be guided toward learning goals. We no longer need to simplify everything to work with learning. The magic of eportfolios is allowing learners and educators to navigate complexity; the complexity was there all along and now it can become more visible.

But, what is the deep learning that managing complexity can lead to? The tradition since the mid-1970s has been to contrast “surface learning” and “deep learning.” Surface learning is traditional school learning: memorizing enough to get by on the test, whereas deep learning is working with ideas and being able to apply those ideas in new situations.

Deep learning starts with experience and is followed by developing perceptions of that experience through reflection – how was it different? What was notable? Do I understand what happened? Looking back, do I see that experience differently than when I was having that experience? And so on: these reflections lead to developing perceptions about the experience. It is then, through working with others who have expertise in the field, that the learner can develop scholarly conceptions.

Say the experience was an interview on the campus with other students as part of a project in anthropology. The students would have had informational background sufficient for them to know how to structure the interview and how to capture it. But what to make of the responses they received? How to interpret them? Were they important? Were they even relevant?

Once the students completed their round of interviews and began reviewing and coding the video or audio recordings, they would themselves notice patterns. But it would be only when they seek to make meaning of what they’ve collected and coded that they encounter disciplinary ways of knowing. What claims can they make? How do they construct a disciplinary argument from their evidence? Now they are at the conceptual level and fully into deep learning.

I remember when the boundaries of “chaos” were pushed back: no, that was not chaos after all, we just needed computers to help us see the predictable patterns. We learned about fractals and the amazing patterns in our world we had not seen before. The complexity was there, but we just called it chaos and had to pretend it didn’t exist.

Physicists talk about “dark matter” and “dark energy,” other terms for that which we collectively just can’t figure out yet.

The chaos and dark energy of natural complex learning is no longer beyond us. Just as digital technology allowed us to understand a bit more about the complexity of “chaos,” so does it allow educators and learners to use the complex learning that is already in process in every learner. Don’t try to circumscribe it and pretend that learning outside of formal learning is irrelevant – that isn’t necessary any longer. We don’t have to live in an unnecessarily simplified world of learning any longer.

In the end, eportfolios help us manage the complexity of natural learning so as to catalyze deep learning. This is the essence of the value of eportfolios in our world today. They support variable learning designs. They allow learning to be learner-initiated and to be as much about discovery as guidance.

As If Technology Makes No Difference: Bain Report and POD Response

Trent Batson — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:53:29 GMT

Nick Carbone at Bedford St. Martin's responded to a query on the POD list at Notre Dame by pointing to this article:

http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/financially-sustainable-university.aspx

No, not THAT Bain. The article is intense, portraying a cost scenario for higher education showing that, outside of elite colleges and universities and/or those with huge endowments, higher education institutions in the U. S. in general are reaching an unsustainable imbalance of increasing costs and decreasing revenue.

The only role that this Bain report mentioned for technology is online learning. A couple of comments made on the list in response demonstrated an equal unawareness that technology would play any role in addressing the financil imbalance described in the report.

One responder said that as we move away from lecture as the singular model of learning, we only add to the cost because high-impact practices actually are more labor intensive.

A relevant personal note about my own high-impact practice: in 1985, I moved my first-year composition class to a computer lab in which the computers were wired together in a LAN (local area network), a brand new technology at that time. We found a primitive chat system and we all began writing together in a writing studio approach: students writing (writing!) to each other and me in authentic communication with a real live interlocutor for a real purpose. We had found a way to do pre-writing in a social setting. Large grants followed to expand this early high-impact practice and multiple assessments showed that my students, using this networked classroom approach, improved in their writing much quicker and more deeply than the traditional classroom approach.

I worked less, the students worked more and learned more. A classic example of active learning and deep learning.

Technology, in this case, allowed me to do what I could not do otherwise -- hand off the work to the students and guide them to engage in their own learning.

Many others at the time adopted this approach – it was, in fact, an early high-impact practice. It might now fit under the rubric "writing intensive courses."

This is just one example of how technology can alter the learning equation between teachers and learners. You who are reading this blog almost certainly know of how eportfolios can alter the equation as well.

In the news we hear of MOOCs (massive online open courses) and of open educational resources (OERs) provided by the top universities in the U. S. We hear of these same universities offering full courses online; of MITx offering a version of an MIT degree online. For a time, badges were in the news, and the badge movement is still alive and well. Entire new learning institutions are being formed that are structured to challenge enrolled students to accept much greater responsibility for their own learning.

But the point is not that any one model of learning will sweep the field. Instead what we are seeing is a multiplicity of learning models and designs and opportunities. And behind all of this is the very basic fact that information technology allows us to manage complexity.

The time when teaching and learning certified as important followed only one model (with slight variations) is over. We defined and accredited the method of teaching and not the results. That method is shattering but the tendency among educators is still to accredit the method (time spent engaged in that method) and not the learning. We move to high-impact practices and we change our terminology from "teaching" to "mentoring" and nothing has really changed. We still assume the "treatment" or the "intervention" or the "behavior" is important and all that we can value or count.

We still, in other words, deeply believe that the time spent undergoing an observed treatment measures learning. It seems hard for many of us who have served as faculty (and perhaps as faculty promoted to administration) to believe that learners can learn on their own. It seems hard to trust students: we created a learning paradigm -- the traditional classroom -- that was individualistic, competitive, and behavioristic (far from how researchers understand how students learn) -- and saw how students increasingly chafed under this learning paradigm by disengaging and cheating in many cases, and then concluded that students can't be trusted.

It is not as if learners need no structure: just the opposite is true. But the structure should be the outcome, the goal, the solution, not constant scaffolding. And it is not that they need no foundational knowledge at the beginning or that they do not need light mentoring during the process of working on the problem or the case or the question. But, even so, the "labor-intensive" is on the part of students, not faculty.

As we in this community know, learners now can create a body of evidence, managed in an eportfolio, that becomes the basis for assessment or evaluation. This obviates the need for constant observation or supervision.

Whether learning entirely on your own with MOOCs or online degrees or choosing from OER's or whether you are at an institution that is organized to create learning communities and to support undergraduate research and other HIPs; or learning by reading books and online journals; or any other learning method, an eportfolio can capture your evidence of learning. The "labor intensive" is your own.

As long as higher education institutions continue to believe learners must be guided and observed at all times -- a pedagogical in loco parentis approach -- cost issues will find no relief in the area of "instruction," the term Bain uses.

In the end, the Bain study is very useful by making so clear that the current model of learning in US higher education is unsustainable for all institutions except the elites and the wealthy. But the report reveals not the slightest awareness of how information technology can alter the entire picture. The writers of the report assume the current culture of behavioristic learning models will not change; they assume the "cost of instruction" will and should go up.

Therefore, the report describes a problem but fails utterly to understand this basic fact: information technology, because it manages complexity that we cannot do without information technology, gives us the ability to move to a higher sphere of learning multiplicity. We can operate "above ourselves." We can try teaching-learning paradigms that result in deeper learning by using the resources we already have. Higher education now has options; it has the power to re-engineer as never before. Go beyond the essential pessimism of Bain; design learning experiences based not on what we've always done but based on current learning research in cognitive psychology, anthropology, social sciences, linguistics, educational psychology and other fields.

We can do it.

What Transformation, Exactly, Do We Seek in the ePortfolio Field?

Trent Batson — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 19:52:50 GMT

After eleven years of full immersion in eportfolios, I am still pondering what transformation we, the eportfolio global community, are aiming at. What do we want? Has that changed in the last 15 years? And are we making progress toward whatever goal we have in mind?

Personally, I started at the course level. I used a portfolio approach in the 1990s to teach and experienced the dramatic uptick in student engagement first hand that many of you probably experienced.

When I then, a few years later, assumed responsibility for finding and rolling out a campus-wide electronic portfolio system in 2001, I still had in mind the course portfolio model. Even when I was chair of the board of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI), funded by the Mellon Foundation, a couple of years later, I retained a learning orientation and a course portfolio mental model.

I imagined eportfolios being used in numerous courses to change the nature of those courses from a teaching focus to a learning focus. The sudden capture of the eportfolio field by institutional assessment offices and their compatriots in accrediting agencies across the country left me stunned. But, out of necessity, I came to learn about rubrics and learning outcomes, and an institutional perspective on eportfolio deployment.

Was the focus on learning outcomes a distraction or the camino real?

In 2008, Bret Eynon at LaGuardia Community College, asked me to consult about hosting an eportfolio conference at LaGuardia in April of 2008. Having seen how many people were attending OSPI conferences around that time, I advised Bret that we might need to plan for significant numbers of attendees. When, in fact, the LaGuardia conference drew over 500 people hungry to meet other eportfolio advocates and practitioners, I realized the U.S. needed an annual eportfolio conference. That summer, at Park City, Utah, Helen Chen, Tracy Penny-Light and Darren Cambridge encouraged me to start an eportfolio association.

I saw the association – what is now AAEEBL – as a way to return the eportfolio industry and the eportfolio academic establishment to a focus on learning. In May, 2009, AAEEBL was launched.

In the ongoing conversation among eportfolio advocates, practitioners and leaders, the words “reflection” and “integrative learning” dominate. A Wordle would have those two words in big caps and in bold.

Are these two words (reflection and integration), and the scholarly examination of reflection as a mental habit of the learned, sufficient to understand the transformation we seek? Having my own doubts about the power of a focus on just reflection, I began to survey learning research over the past 30 years. Were there models of learning we could merge with eportfolio theory, or with “folio thinking” (Helen Chen)? Could we discover our roots through a better understanding of a broad theoretical and research-based set of ideas and models? Could eportfolio have a broader foundation?

The short answer is, of course, yes. Reading books and articles about learning published over the past 30 years, anyone in our field would find a treasure trove of discoveries about learning that invites eporfolio implementation. It is as if all research regarding learning for 30 years was written in anticipation of information technology and eportfolios.

During the short life of the eportfolio community and market, the entire connected world has been shaken to its foundations by information technology. People point to “globalization” as a factor in the change, but would globalization be possible without information technology? Or, people point to a foundational shift from manufacturing to service – 80 percent of our GDP comes from the service sector. But would this shift have occurred without information technology?

The world as it is now, after the foundational change, begs for learners who will continue to learn for life. ePortfolios facilitate the development of learners appropriate for the world as it is. ePortfolios facilitate institutional change so that learning institutions (i.e., K-12, colleges and universities) can help create learners fit for the world.

Given this new world, what is our goal as a field and a market sector?

In the learning literature, we find dozens of intriguing ways to visualize and organize learning. In learning institutions, we see emergent practices – the high-impact educational practices (HIPs) identified by George Kuh in his seminal AAC&U publication in 2008. Randy Bass at Georgetown University alerted AAEEBL attendees in Boston in 2010 at the inaugural AAEEBL conference of the obvious connections (to him) between high-impact practices (first-year seminars, undergraduate research, learning communities, common intellectual problems, writing intensive course and so on) and eportfolios.

High impact becomes mega impact if you add eportfolio to HIPs.

Another way to view our goal is through the lens of “deep learning.” All models, all current learning designs, all eportfolio practices, in one way or another, aim for deep learning. Deep learning is contrasted with “surface learning” (listen, memorize, test). Surface learning engages learners through a fear of failure (getting an F). Deep learning practices must be designed for intellectual engagement: prompting an innate desire to learn.

For this moment in time, I find the deep learning literature and the concept itself helpful. The term itself contrasts the past and the present. The tide is turning toward a focus on deep learning and away from surface learning. “In a time of stable knowledge, teach; in a time of rapidly-changing knowledge, learn.” (Carl Rogers).

But the tide, turning or not, is slowed by current thinking about institutional success. As colleges and universities become businesses, albeit non-profit businesses, expert in marketing, building “customer relations,” deeply involved in the business of sport, in the business of branding (all good in many ways), a mindset has pervaded the academic enterprise: “retention” and “graduation rate.”

Having been a faculty member for decades, I was always aware of the tacit emphasis on retention. I saw the resultant grade inflation, realized that if I was known among students as a hard grader, my classes would shrink, and found it hard to actually fail a student.

But, at the same time, I thought “I am depriving my students of the opportunity to fail.” And I was.

Depriving a learner of the opportunity to fail is depriving the learner a chance to learn.

In the learning literature, researchers speak of “how adults learn best.” Do our colleges and universities – in general – treat students as adults?

By scaffolding so heavily – “here is the knowledge on a plate, just remember it” – and by preventing our students from failing (alas, many succeed in failing anyway) because we need to “retain” them, we are not allowing our students to be adults.

What do adults face in the world? A problem to solve with little or no help. Infinite chances to fail. The challenge to create their own value in an organization. Keeping a constant eye on the next job they will seek. A demand to keep learning and to learn rapidly. The need to work in a team. They need to be “deep learners.”

Many colleges and universities do recognize the new realities and are making appropriate changes. But college graduates are not doing as well in the world as they did before 2008. The pace of change should probably accelerate. MOOCs and badges are not the only challenges; an emerging reluctance among students to take on student loans is a bigger one.

Finally, then, is our goal to help accelerate the pace of institutional change through eportfolios toward developing deep learners who can succeed in life?

Technological Determinism? Do ePortfolios Themselves Make Students Reflect?

Trent Batson — Tue, 29 May 2012 19:10:06 GMT

Batson Blog 5-28-12

One of the hardest aspects of working with technology while retaining academic and scholarly objectivity is “what can I attribute to the technology itself?”

When someone writes about what “eportfolio” does, the phrase sounds like technological determinism. It is hard to write about technology and learning and not sound deterministic. It is especially hard to avoid deterministic language if you hope for a particular outcome from deploying a technology.

An example: In the early 1980s, some of us involved with the nascent technology movement in education bought into the idea that word processors, because they made revising easier than with paper, would lead students to do more revising. How naïve! Simply having the opportunity to revise more easily does not mean students know how to think about revising.

If computers have taught us anything, it’s that we and our brains are infinitely more complex than we thought (how optimistic we were in the mid 1960s about natural speech recognition, how we thought the new field of cognitive science would reveal how we think, how overly optimistic artificial intelligence advocates were, how we realized we humans had conveniently included in our study of the natural world only that which was not “chaos”).

No matter the “affordances” of the technology, no matter how much easier a previously laborious process has become, humans still need to master the thought process behind something such as revising. We learned, unfortunately, that in the early days of word processing, students only did surface revisions with their new technology, such as correcting spelling and capitalizations but not much more if left un-coached. The technology did not determine that students would understand how to revise their writing. Do we assume, now, that eportfolios will determine that students will understand reflection?

Technological determinism was a belief that the trajectory of technology development is predictable; and it was a belief that technology development would continue on that trajectory once a major technology was launched regardless of cultural influences. Thankfully, not only are people not that predictable, but neither is culture.

If technology developers truly believed in technological determinism, they would not concern themselves with user preferences; they would not concern themselves with the market. Nor would they concern themselves with serendipitous discoveries as the technology was being used. In short, technological determinism was cousin to behaviorism and we know what happened to behaviorism.

Information technology has in fact altered our world irreversibly (short of a major disaster). It’s not that technology doesn’t bring about change. It would be absurd to think so. It’s just that we don’t know what the change will be. Without predictability, “technological determinism” is meaningless.

Peter Elbow, in his new book Vernacular Eloquence (2012), says of technological determinism:

I can imagine someone charging [David] Olson [Literacy, Language and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing, 1985] with technological determinism: the idea that the technology of literacy all by itself changes human consciousness and thinking. [p. 50]

He goes on to quote Brian Street (“New Literacies, New Times; How Do We Describe and Teach the Forms of Literacy Knowledge, Skills and Values People Need for New Times?” 55^th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference.):

One response to the growing role of technologies of communication in our lives is to overstate their ability to determine our social and cultural activity. This tradition has been evidenced in earlier approaches to literacy, where over-emphasis on the “technology” of literacy . . . has led to assumptions about the ability of literacy in itself, as an autonomous force, to have effects, such as the raising of cognitive abilities, the generation of social and economic development, and the shift to modernity. [p. 51]

And, about the “new technologies,” again quoting Street:

While these forms evidently do have “affordances” [Gunther Kress, Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy, 1997], it would be misleading and unhelpful to read from the technology into the effects without first positing the social mediating factors that give meaning to such technologies. How, then, can we take sufficient account of the technological dimension of new literacies without sliding into such determinism?

In other words, we cannot know which ways people will use technology. And since technology’s existence depends on people using it, the technology must evolve in alignment with use. Neither humans alone nor technology alone determines the outcome of the interaction between humans and technology. Both humans and technology, together, determine the human changes (in behavior) resulting from the potentialities in the technology and determine, also, the technology changes resulting from which potentialities human choose to use.

This co-evolution of people and technology is the challenge facing designers of educational technology: trying to design too tightly to control usage may just make your technology unpopular. Learners don’t all learn in the same way or at the same pace. Maybe the best design is the simplest, like Google’s famous empty home page. Or maybe the best design is one that allows for easy customization like the new open architectures. The social Web has conquered the connected world by offering the simplest interfaces and the ability to add features almost at will.

We cannot design an eportfolio to get students to arrive at a specific learning outcome or goal. For example, one good way to help young students write well is to let them write badly – such as in the practice of “free writing.” Indirection is a key principle in learning.

And to avoid the trap of technological determinism, AAEEBL is not named for a technology, but for the new forms of learning in this century. ePortfolio technologies, as wonderful as they are, will not determine how these new forms of learning evolve. Our thinking, our discoveries, our tacit awareness and abilities, our imagination, or just dumb chance will determine how we use information technology, not the other way around.

The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), in 1996, to honor the 50^th anniversary of the creation of Eniac (an early computer), published a retrospective book. In the book, one author explained how, despite some obvious blunders in predicting the path of technology development over those 50 years, such predictions were correct enough to justify continuing to make such predictions. The same could not be said, this author pointed out, of predicting how humans will use technology. Such predictions were invariably wrong.

A good principle for design – the cow path approach – is to design for what people choose to do. Wait until students create paths on a new campus and then create sidewalks where the paths are. Can an eportfolio tool be created to allow for cow path design?

This is the key to our ironic plight at the moment: we have so many affordances – too many shoes to choose from – that whatever slight predictive ability we had a while ago has been washed away. The best design for applications now is one that is the least deterministic. The deterministic battle was lost long ago. Learning has left the barn.

Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing, by Peter Elbow

Trent Batson — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:35:50 GMT

Peter Elbow will lead a 3-hour workshop on Monday, July 16 at AAEEBL's annual conference. This workshop is just one reason why you should join us at our conference.

Elbow’s latest book, Vernacular Eloquence, published this year by Oxford University Press, helps us understand how spoken and written language are changing in our new digital culture.

Peter Elbow has helped shape our understanding of writing since the early 1980s (at least) with his publications, Writing Without Teachers, Writing With Power, Embracing Contraries, and Everyone Can Write.

As a writing teacher myself, sometimes I only needed to read a phrase from Elbow and my world would open up. He has a knack for seeing both the obvious and what no one else sees.

Peter Elbow, an early influence on eportfolio practices and theory, is leading a 3-hour workshop at the AAEEBL Annual Conference in Boston, July 16 – 19 at the Seaport World Trade Center. His workshop is on the Monday pre-conference day, 8:30 to 11:30. You need to register for the conference to then register for this pre-conference workshop: http://aaeebl.org/2012conference

Everyone involved with eportfolios should attend this workshop. It is a rare chance to spend time with a legend. Using eportfolios necessarily requires students to write and to write in different contexts, both formally and informally. In any course, no matter the field, using eportfolios increases opportunities for students to write; the value of good written communication is amplified in an eportfolio-based learning design. Elbow explores how our concept of “literacy” and our actual literacy practices are changing quickly, and he sees these changes as positive.

I have started reading this book and keep saying to myself “finally! Someone has thought through these issues and is making sense.” We now “speak” in writing in forms such as Twitter and Facebook, blogs, email. The controversies around how technology is altering our communication forms leave us grasping for appropriate terms or reasonable perspectives to understand these changes. Having just read a part of this magnificent book, I already feel better. I have somewhere to turn for a better understanding and for the realization that the popular issues around writing at this moment actually have a long history. Reading this book, we not only learn more about current changes but about the whole nature of writing over time.

Rarely do conference-goers experience a plenary workshop. Usually, a plenary speaker would just speak for an hour. In this case, Peter Elbow has been generous enough to do a 3-hour workshop and then spend another hour with us on Tuesday afternoon in an informal “conversations” session. You’d have the chance to attend his workshop and then, the next day, join with him again to discuss your thoughts or questions from the workshop.

Ideally, you would read Vernacular Eloquence between now and July 16, and then have a chance to engage in conversation with the author from an informed viewpoint during the workshop and the next day during the Conversations session.

One of the most pointed criticisms employers make about college graduates is “they can’t write.” Ouch. In Vernacular Eloquence, we find out possible reasons why this is true.

What Evidence is Needed for the ePortfolio Field?

Trent Batson — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:46:48 GMT

This blog is meant less as a statement than a question, as indicated by the title.

As I hear from many quarters, it is now time for our field to start defining a research agenda. It is now time to start providing evidence for our claims. It is even time to re-think our claims and perhaps re-shape them as we learn more about our emerging field. The International Journal of ePortfolio published its first issue only 10 months ago -- other research projects centered on eportfolio use have been underway for a decade or more. AAEEBL is 3 years old this month. ePIC is in its 10th year, ePortfolios Australia will hold it's 3rd conference next fall. ePortfolio as a field, a technology, a set of practices and a community is coming into its own. AAC&U continues to offer its own annual ePortfolio Forum that continues to grow each year. ePortfolio California, EPAC and AAEEBL held a year-long series of Webinars that drew substantial attendees.

But, at the center, what are we about?

Even before we can begin to consider the research questions and the evidence appropriate to our field, we should agree on a vision of our field.

We've identified ourselves with a technology, which is both essential and perhaps inevitable, but still fraught with potential issues. What if, for example, the technology itself evolves to the point where the name "eportfolio" disappears? That's one danger of identifying our field with a technology. A more obvious danger is the possible perception that our field is a technology field and not a learning field. But, for the moment, that is our terminology.

AAEEBL was intentionally not named "the eportfolio association" to focus on learning and not on a technology. Helen Chen adopted the term "folio thinking" as an alternative. In the case of AAEEBL, we then faced the initial challenge that people searching on the Web for eportfolio information would not find AAEEBL. Fortunately, that is no longer true as the terms "AAEEBL" and "eportfolio" are now associated in the "mind" of the Web.

But the term "eportfolio" [however spelled] is itself used loosely within our community. We often personify "eportfolio" as an actor in learning as in "eportfolio helps students learn to reflect." Or, "eportfolio has had a big impact on how we design our courses."

Or, recently, we have heard that "eportfolio is a high-impact practice" as if eportfolios are always used in a certain way. We in the field understand these loose usages of the term. To always qualify the term "eportfolio" would make our discourse cumbersome. Yet, this loose usage does not, in fact, have a well-defined reference.

If, as the saying goes, eportfolio is everything, then it is nothing.

It would seem to me that before we can define a research agenda, we need to define what our reference is. A research agenda for what? Are we studying the adoption of innovation? Doesn't seem so. A certain kind of learning design or process? Perhaps. A new kind of assessment? A new process of identity creation? And if any of these are close to what we believe we are doing, what research methodology is most appropriate?

It may be, of course, the eportfolio studies is really multiple sub-fields -- one sub-field that's can be understood by applying learning theory and research, another that can be understood through the lens of assessment theory, another through the lens of educational theory, or anthropology, social science, cognitive science, rhetoric and composition, linguistics . . . It would seem that our field could adopt a number of research methodologies to study the changes in process associated with eportfolios.

Reading reports from projects such as The Inter/national Coalition for ePortfolio Resarch and LaGuardia's Connect to Learning Project, we find questions about the impact of eportfolio. Very important to ask these questions and provide evidence. But, we have not built a taxonomy of eportfolio designs that we can easily refer to so we know that such and such a result stems from a very particular eportfolio learning design. I'm commenting on the current state of our field, and don't intend any criticism of these two important projects.

And what is "eportfolio"? Ah, at the heart of the matter we have a tradition from composition studies that evokes a certain use of eportfolios and envisions them as a genre. Fair enough. But does describing eportfolios as a genre lead to a broad set of research questions and to a broad application of research methodologies?

Just to throw out an idea: what if we thought of "eportfolio" as a kind of learning? And what if we called that kind of learning "recursive learning"? Integrative thinking, reflection, showcasing, curating and so many activities associated with eportfolio really involve recursion of one kind or another. Here's an example of recursion:

"Writing is a recursive process in that the writer can return to a previous stage of the writing process while working on a later stage. In other words, while you are revising a manuscript, you may find yourself thinking of new ideas that could be included in the text. So you can also be planning or brainstorming while revising."
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4280554

"Social recursive learning" adds another layer to this concept.

The process of managing or curating one's eportfolio is itself recursive because, as you cull evidence, or select evidence, you may see new connections and therefore be employing recursive learning.

If this concept cannot be all inclusive or fails in some other way, fine, no problem, but there is no doubt we need a conceptual core, a center.

Only with a core concept in our field can we develop essential research questions and therefore begin to build a coherent body of evidence.

The War is Over: LMS and ePortfolio merging

Trent Batson — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:45:52 GMT

Having just gone through a 90-minute demo of Sakai OAE, my head is spinning. For more than a decade, the distinctions between LMS’s and eportfolios have been clearly defined:

LMS’s are course based; eportfolios are learner-based
LMS’s are faculty-centered; eportfolios are student-centered
LMS content disappears after the course; eportfolio content persists
LMS’s are owned by the institution; eportfolios are owned by the student
LMS’s support the status quo; eportfolios anticipate the future

And so on. In conversations I’ve been involved with, LMS’s almost took on the reputation of a “necessary evil.” Still, there was no sign of them going away. And eportfolios, it seemed, continued to hold the place of the minor player on the stage of educational technology.

Now, the distinctions just listed between LMS’s and eportfolios may be disappearing. One could almost say – though only as a reflection of bias in my case – that the eportfolio gestalt has won the day. LMSs may be taking on the characteristics of eportfolios:

In OAE, all users have equal privileges – students and faculty – except within the tiny “membership” category of a course (one can have dozens of memberships, all treated equally) where there is a slight tilt toward the instructor.
Still, the new architecture behind Sakai OAE (“Open Academic Environment”) is “learning centered” – that is, not course centered.
OAE easily incorporates “widgets” which might be better termed “apps.” Within rSmart Academic (based on OAE with extra functionality), you’ll find a kind of “app store” with technologies that can be incorporated into the institutional instance of OAE.
Content can be placed in a library that can be shared on campus to all or to a select group. The library persists over time and thus takes on the nature of a local OER repository (OER – Open Educational Resources).
Through one’s “profile,” users can create, now, an “almost-eportfolo.” The profile can in fact be used now for promotion and tenure documentation. New features are being added as OAE continues to be developed in the community that will flesh out the eportfolio capabilities.
OAE now encompasses life and all learning. It reflects the fact that the culture now owns learning.
Probably the most profound statement that OAE makes epistemologically is that “knowledge,” as in the libraries and in the Piazza discussion forum, is a continuing process. Knowledge is not a thing that can be chopped into segments as in the classic course structure but is a flow.

This is an architecture that eliminates the distinction between LMS and eportfolio. By enlarging the problem space almost infinitely (because it’s open to including apps from the Web), it is more than the sum of LMS and eportfolio, but something much larger.

OAE does not yet have the learning outcomes backend that Sakai CLE has. It is still evolving. That’s why NYU, University of Michigan, Indiana University, Berkeley, Cambridge, and Charles Sturt University (AU) still use CLE even while they pilot OAE.

What we see is a conceptual breakthrough in LMS thinking that brings LMS’s closer to the epistemology behind eportfolio technology. This new thinking – and I know it is not limited to the Sakai development community – is a watershed moment in the history of educational technology. We see both the influence of the social Web and of our accumulated knowledge about learning in this new architecture. ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.

Full disclosure: I was the chair of the board of the Open Source Portfolio Initiative, which produced OSP (which was inserted into Sakai) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and from rSmart, and leadership from Indiana University.