Applying the Business Model to Education: Current Failures, Future Possibilities

In recent years, there has been a growing trend to view educational institutions as businesses, assessing them in terms of business models and measures. Just as individuals seek guidance from a life coach and financial advisor to navigate their personal and financial goals, universities and schools are increasingly turning to specialized consultants and experts to optimize their operations and achieve their educational objectives. Similarly, professionals looking to form an arkansas professional corporation can benefit from expert legal and financial advice to ensure compliance and efficient business practices. Consistent with such models, institutions are required to justify their existence based not on criteria such as quality of faculty or resources, but on whether they:

  1. satisfy a current demand,
  2. anticipate a future one,
  3. keep their clients happy,
  4. continuously increase product offerings (courses/programs) and sales (enrollment), and
  5. positively balance their books.

This trend arose partially from the need to move away from the subjective and over-emotional manner in which education has been traditionally approached (vague references to intellectual maturity and greater good) and was encouraged by the increasing reliance of educational institutions on state or private Online Broker “investors,” who demand increasingly measurable, objective, short-term “return on investment.” Also, in my experience, taking the guidance of a seasoned broker is indeed a prudent choice. For those seeking to make an informed decision, I would urge you to get expert advice now. The expertise that I encountered significantly influenced my journey, making it a rewarding and enriching experience.

Conceptual and Practical Problems with the Business Model in Education

In the business model of education, the institution is viewed as the “service provider” and the students are viewed as the “clients.” The only tangible and measurable components of the transactions between the two in the current version of the model are the fees the students pay to attend an institution and the degree (“product”) students receive at the end of their residency at the institution. Leverage the potential of free seo tools to fine-tune your website and propel it to new heights.

However, unlike any other business transaction in the US, payment of the fees does not guarantee that the “clients” will:

  1. always be right (by definition, the opposite is most often the case),
  2. receive the end product (the “provider” actually delivers the “product” based on criteria other than fee payment),
  3. be able to return the end product for a refund, exchange, or credit if it does not fulfill the expectations raised by the institution (there is no system in place to hold providers accountable for their products), or
  4. get a refund if they eventually change their minds and decide not to attend the institution.

To stay consistent with their current business model version, institutions would have to either:

  1. provide degrees upon payment (I do get several emails per day advertising just that), eliminating in the process the degrees’ value and therefore the institutions’ reason for existence or
  2. issue refunds to students that do not earn the degrees, permitting noncommittal students to take up resources and bankrupt their business.

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Hypothetical Solution

One could envision a two-stage model in which the provider-client roles switch half way through the paying-fees-receiving-degree process.

Stage 1: Institutions as Service Providers, Students as Clients

In this stage, students pay a fee. In return they get access to resources that facilitate and structure learning, such as:

  1. qualified, accomplished, passionate instructors,
  2. comprehensive, manageable, and timely curricula, and
  3. physical and virtual facilities that promote retrieval and dissemination of high quality information related to the educational area they paid for.

These resources are clearly spelled out in the institution’s mission/advertising/contract with their “clients” (through admissions policies, for example). After the service has been provided (e.g. at the end of each quarter), clients have the right to evaluate the service they received and examine whether it fulfilled the admissions contract. If it has not, they should be able to request remedies such as:

  1. improvement in instruction/curricular resources and
  2. re-offering of a course for a reduced or waved fee.

If these requests are not satisfied, students should be entitled to a refund. This is where the first stage of the transaction ends.

Stage 2: Students as Service Providers, Institutions as Clients

In this stage, institutions “pay” students with a grade and/or degree. Degrees are the currencies of educational institutions. Their value has been earned through the universities’ work and, like all currencies, degrees carry a proof/promise of value and can be “handed over” in return for employment (among other things).

Once students have completed stage one and have accepted the educational service they received as fulfilling the admissions contract, the institution demands that students demonstrate that they deserve the grade/degree. Students do this in the form of:

  1. exams,
  2. tests,
  3. submitted projects, etc.

In stage one, it was up to the students to assess whether the institution provided them with what was promised in the admissions contract. In stage two, it is up to the institution to determine whether or not the students can provide the “service” necessary to earn the degree, which constitutes a certification that the recipient has demonstrated thorough knowledge of the topic the degree is for. To enhance communication and networking during this process, incorporating Digital Business Cards can facilitate the easy exchange of contact information among students and faculty.

Staying within the business context, the reasons institutions would enter stage two and require proof that the students deserve the “payment” (degree) cannot be of the vague, education-for-the-greater-good kind. In other words, it cannot be about ensuring that the students have grown intellectually, are better and more knowledgeable and experienced individuals, and can better serve society, and they can also learn from the Nomad Offshore Academy if they want to start a business and travel offshore. Rather, the reasons for requiring proof before handing out degrees will be about ensuring that the promise this degree makes to the world is true (the promise that the recipient has demonstrated thorough knowledge of a topic and has acquired certain certified skills). The motivation is that ‘true’ degrees result in:

  1. happy employers of the degree recipients,
  2. trust in the institution,
  3. demand for recipients of the institution’s degrees, and, consequently
  4. increase in the institution’s business, the ultimate measure of any business’s success.

Such an approach to education-as-business and to the meaning of a degree would be more consistent with the scope of a true business model. The question that remains is, “Is this what we want education to be?”

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Seven Teaching, Learning and Instructional Design Myths

Let me start by asking you some questions:

  • Do you take notes while listening to a lecture?
  • Do you multi-task thinking that you can get more things done with less time?
  • Do you try to address as many learning styles as possible in the learning material you’re developing?
  • Do ask your students to practice again and again, thinking that more practice will ensure greater learning?
  • Do you use various media when designing learning materials in order to meet the needs of visual learners, auditory learners, and students with disabilities?
  • Do you use the teaching cycle of giving students an example and the asking them to solve a similar problem by themselves? Do you repeat such a cycle as a way to build on students’ skills?
  • Do you think helping faculty master Blackboard would prepare them to learn another course management system?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, read on to get a glimpse of the cognitive load theory and Ruth Clark’s book Efficiency in Learning. If you are as open and “persuadable” as I am, you may join me in identifying some more myths.

To me, cognitive load theory is like an analogy of the computer vs. the human brain: the hard drive is your long-term memory while the RAM is your working memory. The RAM of your brain or the working memory is a determinant in how quickly you can learn. As your brain gets “booted up” for a learning process, there are three kinds of workloads it has to take:

  1. the necessary load or the “intrinsic cognitive load,”
  2. the unnecessary load or the “extraneous cognitive load,” (This includes distractions or confusion caused by bad instruction.)
  3. and the load that helps connect learning with your own experiences or the “germane cognitive load.” The goal of instructional design is to manage the intrinsic load, minimize the extraneous, and promote the germane load.

I believe that instructional design is a science of “common sense”—the most direct channel to make people “get it.” However, there are a few practices that seem to be based on common sense, but are merely myths when you plug in the cognitive load theory. Here are seven of them I’d like to share with you:

Myth 1: Taking notes helps reinforce learning.

Research cited in Ruth Clark’s book indicated that the effort of capturing what the lecturer is saying and recording it in a written format will only add more extraneous cognitive load to your brain. This leaves less room for your brain to process the content of the lecture. So, as a learner, it would be more beneficial to replace note-taking with jotting the key points during or after the lecture. As an instructor, you should prepare lecture notes for your students and tell them that instead of writing down what you’re saying, they should think about it and reflect upon it.

Myth 2: Multi-tasking makes the learner accomplish more.

Multi-tasking will work effectively if all or the majority of the tasks have become automatic behaviors. In other words, the tasks should be something that you have been doing repeatedly, making them embedded into your long-term memory so that they require minimal working memory to process. However, if you really are to learn something, you better free up your working memory as much as possible. So, tell your students that they can listen to the radio while driving, but stop text-messaging while doing their homework.

Myth 3: In designing learning materials, we should address as many learning styles as possible.

Now let me share with you the only note I’ve taken from Ruth Clark’s workshop: “… cognitive commonality overrules individuality.” I jotted it down because it is such a brave statement. As Ruth Clark said, “I am expecting rotten tomatoes thrown at me for saying this.” Not from me, Ruth. Actually, I am in concert with her in disclosing this myth. When you design a learning object or training tutorial, the attempt to ensure “no child is left behind” may actually leave everybody behind. Instead of accommodating every student’s learning preference, designers should focus their energy on addressing the cognitive commonality that has been scientifically approved, such as letting users control the pace of the learning. process. As for individuality, leave the options that can be controlled by the learner. For example, allow the learner to turn on the audio to hear narration instead of leaving it on by default.

Myth 4: Practice makes perfect.

Does this rule apply to things beyond playing musical instrument? Well, research conducted by learning scientists indicates that more errors are introduced when practice goes beyond certain timeframe. I think this is the way that your mind tells you “O-kay, I got it. Stop exhausting me!” So, think about the amount of practice you want to assign to the students. By the way, I wish I could send this information to my elementary, middle, and high-school teachers in China. If I had a dollar for every hour I spent writing each Chinese character 100 times, I’d be a millionaire!

Myth 5: Multimedia improves learning by addressing multiple learning styles.

Insert the images for visual learners, add the audio narration for the auditory ones, and don’t forget the text for people who like to read. (And be sure to make the text big and bold for the visually impaired). Oh, and what about some background music for today’s multi-sensory learners? Thanks to today’s technology, all these requests can be easily accomplished through multimedia. The question is: will this piece of multimedia help people to learn better? The answer is likely to be no because media redundancy distracts learners. It adds unnecessary workload (extraneous cognitive load) to the brain, leaving less room for it to process the information. So, instructional designers who are constantly tempted by various fancy tech tools ought to remember that making things simple and direct remains the rule of thumb.

Myth 6: Giving examples followed by practice, followed by another example, followed by more practice (“example + practice + example + practice + example + practice”) is an effective way to teach.

Although the effectiveness of this method is questionable, this was a method often used by my teachers. Today, I still rely on this method from time to time when I teach. When compared with this formula [(example + practice) x N], research found that another formula which provides various examples before asking students to practice (example + example + example +example…+ practice) proved to be a more efficient way to learn. However, providing students with examples on which to model their own work can be problematic in its own right. I often debate whether or not I should give students a completed sample of an assignment. On the one hand, it may help clarify my expectations. Yet, on the other hand, it may also lock students to a pattern and constrain their creativity. If you share the same concern, let’s try giving students a diverse variety of examples so that they don’t follow one pattern and can practice better and learn more.

Myth 7: Being an expert of one course management system makes it easier to learn another.

Research shared by Ruth Clark shows that when expert and novice chess players were given a random chessboard, the novice group actually remembered it better than the experts. Why? Because the experts are confused by the meaningless layout of the board and are subconsciously going through a process of differentiating the “new look” with the one that they are familiar with. Those who are familiar with the layout and navigation scheme of Blackboard face the same frustration when they have to learn another system that is structured differently. This finding brings an alert to decision makers to think more carefully in selecting or changing technology solutions for users, especially those who are already comfortable using one particular application. (This is true even if they also complain about it.) The finding also echoes Gerry McGovern’s call to end web redesign in his article “Web Redesign is a Bad Strategy.” McGovern advocates that designers put more energy into improving content and simplifying the existing structure instead of building a new one.

What’s next?

Feel free to share any teaching myths or miracles by leaving a comment.

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The Next Best Thing to Your Own Personal Librarian

Daniel’s recent posts focused on social bookmarking tools, which use the power of social networking to help users find websites that suit their interests. On a similar note, I thought I’d share one of my favorite tools, LibraryThing, which serves a similar purpose for books. For those not familiar with this resource, it is an online service that allows people to keep and share their favorite (or least favorite) books. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. Paid accounts allow you to catalog as many as you wish and start at $10 for a year or just $25 for a lifetime!

Even if you don’t keep your own list of books, LibraryThing is a great resource for finding just the right book for a lazy day at the beach or for a classroom assignment. Its strength lies in the tags that members have provided to categorize their entries. As any librarian will tell you, readers advisory—the practice of recommending books based on a reader’s interests—is a fine art. For example, knowing that you like Harry Potter, a good advisor should be able to tell you that you should also like the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Similarly, a good advisor might be able to recommend esoteric literature with a particular theme, e.g., Chick Lit that takes place in Greece.

My favorite way to find books on LibraryThing is to search using tags (which are the same as key words). If you want to combine tags, you can separate your key concepts with commas. This search is called a tagmash, and it can provide you with some interesting results. For example, a search for World War II fiction retrieves some expected and some unexpected results, including: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson.

Once you find a title you want to read, you can connect with your local library catalog via the WorldCat link. Before you know it you will be enjoying a new book that you might have otherwise never discovered.

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My Favorite Social Bookmarking Tools (for Now)

In my previous post, Criteria for Evaluating Social Bookmarking Tools, I talked about some of the key features and usability issues I take into consideration when evaluating web-based bookmarking tools. So, which site do I recommend to faculty? That all depends on their needs and level of tech-savvy.

Recommended Tool for Novices: del.icio.us

At the moment, I recommend del.icio.us to novice faculty who I know will view web-based bookmark management as a big leap into the future. It has a pretty small feature set and the most frequently used options are right where you’d expect them to be.

Recommended Tool for More Demanding Users: Furl

For more adept users, I sometimes recommend furl, although I’m not in love with it either. Furl offers three big advantages over del.icio.us:

  • You can select multiple bookmarks at a time and perform major changes to all of them at once (change their tags, delete them, make them private or public, etc.) This makes managing a big batch of imported bookmarks MUCH easier.
  • You can rate bookmarks with a simple five-star system.
  • You can keep archived copies of the sites you bookmark, although I’ve found this feature always sounds better on paper. The first time you try accessing an archived version of a now defunct page with rich media content (Flash, video, or audio), the rich media will probably either be gone or it will be duplicated so that multiple copies of it are embedded on the same page.

Unfortunately, Furl doesn’t offer a groups feature, and neither does BlinkList or most of the other sites I’ve checked out. Keep in mind that I’m talking about groups you create and manage the way an instructor would want to, not “subscription” lists where you get to see every irrelevant link another member added recently or every new bookmark with a particular tag. I also don’t like that Furl doesn’t let you view your tags as a cloud or even as a simple list on the same screen where you view and manage your bookmarks. The Furl interface feels more like a traditional data-management tool than del.icio.us, with everything in neat little rows and columns. This might be comforting for technophobes, but it’s annoying for everyone else.

Recommended Tool for Feature-Hungry Technophiles: Diigo

Diigo has everything I’ve been looking for in a great social bookmarking/collaborative research tool—except ease of use. The tagging system is still buggy (renaming a tag or deleting it can lead to unexpected results), and the interface has some usability issues that I’ve already discussed with one of Diigo’s co-founders. For instance, tag clouds only display the first 18 characters or so of each tag, preferences on how to view your tags revert to default settings every time the page refreshes, etc. Unfortunately, Diigo is still too frustrating to use for me to recommend it to non-tech-savvy educators, but I hope its shortcomings will be resolved soon. If that happens, I’ll become a major Diigo evangelist. If not, I might have to embrace a more bare-bones bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us and search for a separate tool that just handles collaborative research well. Google Notebook is next on my list of tools to check out for that.

Video-Sharing Network Showdown, Part 1

With the increased use and demand for video in distance learning and the popularity of video services such as YouTube, I wondered what role these video-sharing services could play in an educational environment. Often an institution may not provide internal video hosting or time requirements may not allow the instructor to go through the centralized service and still meet the needs of the class. In these cases, a video sharing service can provide the solution for hosting and sharing the videos.

Clearly YouTube is the most well known of the video hosting platforms—but is it the best for educational use? Several competitors are slowly gaining an increased audience and are attempting to differentiate themselves from YouTube by providing a better user experience and/or unique set of features such as subtitling or editing.

I want to compare the leading video-sharing networks from an instructor perspective and find which one site is best suited for use in an online classroom. The first step was to eliminate the sites that I didn’t think would fit into an educational setting and thus were not worth comparing.

Elimination Criteria

The following criteria were used to eliminate certain video-sharing sites from consideration:

Ad Networks: I eliminated Revver and other sites that were primarily ad networks that embed ads into the uploaded videos and provide no opt-out option.

Site Editorial Control: Sites that must approve content before it is posted were also eliminated from consideration. For example, VideoJug was eliminated because they maintain strict editorial control of all posted videos and will take down any video that does not meet its site requirements of a “How To” Video.

Cost: I will only evaluate free video sharing sites. I excluded pay sites and will not evaluate features that are only available to upgraded accounts.

Which Sites Will Be Compared?

After applying the elimination criteria, these are the sites that were chosen to participate in the showdown:

The Next Step

In my next post, the sites will be ranked from 1 to 14 (1 being worst, 14 being best) based on how well each one meets specific evaluation criteria. Important or crucial categories will be given a multiple to give them extra weight in the rankings. The cumulative scores will be tabulated and the site with the highest score will be declared the winner.

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Criteria for Evaluating Social Bookmarking Tools

What is social bookmarking?

If you’re not familiar with the term social bookmarking, it’s typically used to describe tools that allow users to save links to their favorite sites on a web server. This allows you to access these links from any computer with an Internet connection, making them easier to share than bookmarks or favorites saved on your computer’s hard drive. Social bookmarking tools also make it easier to categorize links and to find new sites that are recommended by people with similar interests. Some social bookmarking tools offer many additional features that are ideal for collaborative learning, allowing users to create groups and discussion forums and even call attention to specific webpage content with virtual “sticky notes” and highlights. However, many of these features have yet to be implemented in a refined and reliable way.

How do I evaluate social bookmarking tools?

That depends largely on how you plan to use social bookmarking. Here are the criteria I use when evaluating different tools based on my needs and what I believe faculty will value:

1) Ease of Use: Do existing tags automatically show up when you start tagging a new bookmark? How many clicks or screens does it take to rename or delete a tag? How many to edit a bookmark?

2) Groups Features: Can I create groups? Can the be private (by invite only)? I don’t want to just subscribe to other people’s stuff…I want a topic-specific group that shows me just the links my groupmates have posted.

3) Page Annotation: Can students make notes right on the webpage? Can they highlight content and make virtual sticky notes or comments on specific regions or bits of content?

4) Page Caching: Will the tool reliably save an archived copy of the text of the page? What about images, video, audio, and Flash? Does the archived copy still reference the live site in order for the media to be visible? (I tried archiving a page in Furl that had Flash content, and the archive duplicated the Flash object so I had two of them stacked on the same page. Furl also seems to look for any media content on the live site, so I’m assuming the archived copy won’t display most or some of the media if the live site goes away.)

5) Support: How supportive are the developers and the user base? If I post a message in the forum, how long does it take for someone to get back to me? How helpful are the FAQs and documentation? (Are there FAQs, for that matter?)

6) Popularity and Longevity: How popular is the tool? This is more important if you’re interested in using the tool to get recommendations from other users. It’s also helpful if you’re concerned that the tool might disappear one day.

7) Export Options: Can I get my bookmarks out of the tool in a standard format like HTML? I think all the tools I’ve tried allow this, but it’s still a good thing to check on before you invest a lot of time customizing stuff in one tool.

8) Multi-tool Bookmarking: Can I bookmark a site in the tool and simultaneously send the bookmark to my browser’s bookmarks or favorites folder and other social bookmarking tools (e.g., de.licio.us, furl, etc.)?

What’s next?

In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the social bookmarking tools I’ve tried and offer recommendations for anyone looking for a better way to save, manage and share their favorite sites.