The Computing and Digital Media (CDM) [School of Computing Research Colloquium] recently hosted Dr. James C. Lester of North Carolina State University, who spoke about what I believe will be the future of online learning, and probably learning in general: “Narrative-Centered Learning Environments.”
Here’s the abstract:
The long-term goal of the intelligent tutoring systems community is to create adaptive learning technologies that bring about fundamental improvements in education. For the past several years our lab has been investigating a family of intelligent tutoring systems that have a dual focus on learning effectiveness and student engagement: narrative-centered learning environments. Narrative-centered learning environments integrate the inferential capabilities of intelligent tutoring systems with the rich gameplay supported by commercial game engines. In this talk we will introduce the principles motivating the design of narrative-centered learning environments, describe their roots in interactive narrative, explore the role of computational models of affect recognition and affect expression in their interactions, and discuss their cognitive and affective impact on students through empirical studies conducted in public school systems.
The abstract sounds promising, and I can attest the presentation was truly stunning. This groundbreaking work is being brought to life by an immensely talented team, and I highly recommend checking out IntelliMedia, the group responsible for Crystal Island and the research that determines the direction their development takes.
A couple months ago, I also read a blog post titled “Online education and Online Degrees Are Dead; Now Let’s Move On to Something Real” authored by Dr. Roger Schank, another fantastically smart person in the education space. In his post, Schank discussed his disappointment with the way universities are bringing education online. He cites examples like MIT, Udacity, Coursera, and basically indicted every other university I can think of, including DePaul, declaring the model of putting lectures online as “dead.” As a solution, he suggests we move to what he calls, “Mentored Simulated Experiences.”
I agree with both Dr. Schank and Dr. Lester, that education will be foundationally changed by the implementation of artificial intelligence, effective simulations, and computer training systems, but what struck me is that both approaches focus on mentoring. Both experts agreed that one-on-one or few-on-one mentoring situations, which immediately address the specific needs of the individual student, are very effective.
Both these individuals are wickedly smart, have funding, and their organizations are led by a unifying vision, unfortunately, these criteria are a long way off for most of us. It’s no secret that higher education is struggling with financials and bureaucracies, both of which make it difficult to pivot into a world of truly immersive online education, but the idea of mentorship has really stuck with me. Mentorship takes education back to its roots: practical apprenticeship.
In his most recent book, Antifragile, Nicholas Nassim Taleb also eschews the traditional university model while embracing the apprenticeship model of learning, and with three very intelligent people in favor of mentoring and apprenticeship, I’m sold.
So how do we apprentice our online students, mentor them, and guide them to knowledge in online courses?
First, you find experts in practical fields. Fortunately, higher education has a lot of these.
Enter Mike Chase, one of the adjunct faculty members in CDM, and an expert in Content Management Systems (CMS). Mike’s class covers a number of CMSes and he is great at articulating how to accomplish tasks or pointing out where students went astray. Face-to-Face students typically ask questions in class or after class and Mike transitions to his mentor role.
So, we have an expert who can mentor, but how does he keep the online students from experiencing a gap in this personal, one-on-one mentorship? Mike came to me with this problem, as Drupal, one of the CMSes he teaches, is particularly challenging and requires a lot of mentorship for both face-to-face and online students. We discussed a few options:
- Online office hours via Skype or Google Hangouts are a great solution, but online students typically need flexibility due to work or other time-related obligations. Mike works as well, and neither he nor his online students are necessarily able to arrange synchronous sessions to discuss Drupal assignments in time for the deadlines. Furthermore, doing individualized tutoring for students is not scalable, especially after work, so we were looking for a way to scale the instruction.
- Walk-through tutorials are okay for scaling, but would require a lot of screenshots writing. This approach might miss the area of confusion. They’d also need to be redone when the CMS has a major update, which happens relatively often. Frontloading this sort of work would also not be sustainable, as Mike covers a number of CMSes in his class.
The solution Mike and I settled on, was creating short video tutorials to walk the students through the different steps of the projects. Then, when Mike’s students email him questions he responds with short video recordings that walk the students through the area of the exercise they are missing. This allows students to see which button to click (there are a lot of buttons) and what to click next (it’s not always where you’d think). He can also send these videos to other students who may be having similar problems.
So far this method has been very effective, and Mike has been able to save himself time and mentor students while seeing great results in his students ability to accomplish their tasks. If there’s a problem that can’t be resolved by short videos, it’s usually time to break out Skype or Hangouts.
This approach has been even further cemented as the direction to use according to a post on an Instructional Design group on LinkedIn. (I apologize for the lack of attribution, I can’t seem to find the thread or author.)
The era of baby boomers who grew up equating online learning with page turners is fading fast. The next generation of digital natives won’t put up with that model of learning development and delivery. Short burst instructional videos are rapidly becoming the de facto learning model.
Developing measurable learning objectives, a great curriculum, and effective assessments are all essential building blocks for effective learning both online and offline, and the relation of those topics to higher-education is another blog post entirely.
The way we bridge the knowledge gaps between objectives, curriculum, and assessment is mentorship. Fortunately, mentorship is one big online learning gap I think we can effectively address thanks to technology tools.
Here are a couple great tools for mentoring online students:
Personally, I’ve been using QuickCast to help CDM faculty learn Desire2Learn (D2L), and I really love the clarity it has brought to the opaque “click here, no here” email dialogs I used to subject my faculty to.
If you’ve found other ways of mentoring your students online or other have thoughts, please share them in the comments!