the horizon report in action: emerging technologies today and tomorrow (213410374)

8/12/2019 The Horizon Report in Action: Emerging Technologies Today and Tomorrow (213410374)

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EDUCAUSE

The 2014 Horizon Report

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I’m Marc Hoit. I’m at – Vice-Chancellor at North Carolina State University and I welcome you to another

EDUCAUSE Live. EDUCAUSE Live webinars are supported by Dell, and to learn more about Dell’s

support for higher education please check out Dell.com/hied. You’re probably familiar with the interface.

Most of you have been on with us before, but let me encourage you to make this an interactive session.

On the left hand side of the interface is a chat box where you can submit questions, share comments,

resources, and messages to each other. If you need some technical help you can also, on the

participants’ box, right click and you can send a message directly to technical help if you’re having issues.

We also are following questions that are tweeted using the hashtag #EDULIVE, so please feel free to use

that also. As always, this session and recording and slides will all be archived so that later today you can

get a copy of the website and go see that and share that with other folks so you can help spread the

word. If you should experience any audio difficulties please click on the, again in the lower right hand, and

do the FAQs to check out and make sure okay, and check out the call-in number under it or send a

message to technical help.

So let’s get to today’s webinar. Today’s higher education IT professionals workforce have been asked to

adjust to a culture of increased IT consumerization, more sourcing options, broader interest in IT

transformative potential, and decreased resources. Disruptions that include BYO, era, cloud computing,

new management practices, e-learning, and sustained budget cuts have potentially long-term impacts on

the IT workforce. ECAR studied the characteristics of the current IT workforce and environment for CIOs,

managers and non-managerial staff. This ECAR research incorporates results from comprehensive

surveys on more than 2,000 IT professionals to provide a description of the current state of the IT

workforce; how it has changed in the past three years, and what changes may need to be implemented to

retain and strengthen IT staff.

Before we begin, let me introduce our speakers. We have a group of them, all strong representatives of

the ELI. We have Malcolm Brown, who is the Director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative; Veronica

Diaz, who is the Associate Director of the Learning, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative; James Harvey, is the

Associate Dean of Students and Associate Professor of Marketing at George Mason University School of

Management; and Philip Regier, who is the Executive Vice-Provost and Dean at Arizona State University.

I’d like to welcome you all to another EDU live, and hand it over to Malcolm to get started.

Thanks very much, Marc. Hi everyone. This is indeed Malcolm Brown and I’m joined by my colleague

Veronica Diaz.

Hello everyone and I’ll be talking in just a little bit.

And thanks to all of you for taking time from your busy schedules and joining us today. Now, as

advertised, we will be taking a close look at the 2014 Horizon Report for Higher Education. Now, what’s

on this slide is our table of contents for the webinar today. To start off, we’ll to take a look at what’s new

since the Horizon Report for 2014 has undergone a bit of a makeover. Next, we will cover the

methodology behind this report as that is an important part of the Horizon Report’s context, but also a part

of its credibility.

The next step will take us to the trends and challenges. It is here that the new approach to the Horizon

Report is most evident, so it will be worth taking some time to consider them. These trends and

challenges are integrated more thoroughly with the technologies than in past years, which provides a

perhaps more organic relationship between these three components: trends, challenges, and the

technologies. I will then catch up with the technologies and see why the word here development is in



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quotes. And finally, as Marc mentioned, we are fortunate to have with us today a pair of speakers who will

showcase innovate work that they are doing that relates directly to the trend identified in the report. So we

have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get going.

Now, we will be tossing some polls your way throughout the session as this is a great way to tap into our

collective insights, so I’d like to ask that the first poll be posted. And this is a poll for those of you who are

Horizon Report veterans so to speak. The question is, which of the sections do you find the mostvaluable? So please take a moment and pick the one that you find the most valuable. Now, I’m going to

push on to the next section of the report and we will return to the results of this poll in just a moment, but

please continue to participate in the poll and register your vote if you haven’t already done so.

So, what’s new in this year’s report? Perhaps the quickest way to get a sense of that is to take a look at

the table of contents. So here are all the components of the Horizon Report, and if you are a student of

past reports, you may think that at first glance there is not much that has changed. But, all the sections I

am marking here with this red mark have seen changes to some extent or the other. So, let’s take a look

back at the poll and see where people weighed in. This is interesting that the, this is not what I would

have expected actually, that the winner so to speak is the trends, and it’s not necessarily the

technologies, but I also see there’s a strong element of people who think that it’s all the above. So that’s

very interesting. Thank you for sharing and participating in the poll.

All right, so, here is the table of contents from last year’s report. Now, it looks familiar, doesn’t it? With the

trends and challenges and technologies classified according to the familiar adoption horizon. But now

let’s compare it to the table of contents for this year’s report. You will notice that the trends and

challenges have been assigned to one of three groups. So like the technologies, they are now grouped

according to three horizons as well. The Horizon Report describes the trends horizons in this way “fast

moving trends who will realize their impact in the next one to two years, and two categories of slower

trends that will realize their impact within three to five or more years. The same approach has been taken

for the challenges, and here is how the upper report describe s the challenge horizons, “Solvable

challenges are those that we both understand and know how to solve, but seemingly lack the will. Difficult

challenges are ones that are more or less well understood, but for which solutions remain elusive, and

wicked challenges, the most difficult, are complex even to define, and thus require additional data and

insights before solutions will even be possible.

Now another element that is used in this year’s Horizon Report is this report that was issued by the Joint

Research Council of the European Commission, published in 2012. According to the Horizon Report, this

particular report on the creative classrooms project was used throughout the Horizon Report to tease out

the implications of the technologies and trends and challenges for policy, leadership, and effective

practice. In other words, this JRC report and the model it contains served as a kind of lens to make visible

these policy, leadership, and practice dimensions of the report’s findings. Now, obviously this is not the

point, or the time, we don’t have the time to go into the JRC report in great detail, I invite you all to pick up

a copy, and I’ll be showing you all where to get a copy in just a moment, but the aim of this JRC report is

to provide the key components, or list the key components of technology innovative learningenvironments. Furthermore, this report states that the terms classrooms is used in the widest sense as

including all types of learning environments in both formal and informal settings.

Very quickly, the JRC report identifies eight key dimensions they see are very, very important for what

they call creative classrooms, and then they list a roster of 26 of what they call reference parameters that

relate to that. Now, this is all a little complex, and I realize there is not time to go into it now; however, if

you will follow this URL, you will be able to pick up a copy of the report and read it when you have the



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time to do so. I do recommend reading the report, has some great ideas in it. And with that, I’m going to

turn things over to Veronica.

Thanks, Malcolm. So, The Horizon Report is put together with the assistance of the Horizon Report

Advisory Board which has over 53 members from the U.S. and several other countries like China, Brazil,

Ger many, India, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Japan, and if you’re interested in

serving on the Horizon Report Advisory Board you can contact NMC. They periodically take a look aroundto see who might be interested and are always looking for new members. There is currently seven

categories of technologies that the NMC monitors continuously and those are consumer technologies,

digital strategies, enabling technologies, internet technologies, learning technologies, social media

technologies, and visualization technologies, and these are not a closed set, but rather they are intended

to provide a way to illustrate and organize emerging technologies into pathways of development that are,

or may be, relevant to learning and creative inquiry. And new technologies are added to the list in almost

every research cycle of the report and the categories serve as lenses for thinking about innovation. And

I’m going to be posting links here in the chat as we go through to give you more information and pl aces to

go for more information.

So, there is a fairly comprehensive process for collecting information for the report, and the Advisory

Board guides the entire process. The Horizon Report team provides an initial list of news clippings that

are culled from a variety of sources and we monitor those on a regular basis. The Board then goes

through these and adds more or adds comments or how or why they think they may or may not be

important, and they also vote on an entirely full set, and they identify items of high interest to the higher

education community. And if you’re interested you can follow the Horizon Report and the development

process on twitter by following the hashtag NMCHorizon on twitter. Here you see kind of a snapshot of

the Horizon Report’s Advisory Board responses to just one of the research questions, and we’ll discuss

those next, but it’s a very active and highly participatory process, and it’s our way of collecting information

across higher education organizations around the world.

Now, I want to give you a quick look at the research questions that guide the report and following the

extensive review of the literature, the Board engages in the central focus of the research, which is the

research questions. These questions are designed just to elicit a comprehensive set of interesting

technologies, challenges, and trends, and one of the Board’s most important tasks is to answer these

questions as systematically and broadly as possible to ensure that the range of relevant topics is

considered, and once this work is done, a process that moves pretty quickly over just a few days, the

Advisory Board moves to a unique consensus building process that is based on an iterative Delphi based

methodology.

So the first question is, which of the key technologies catalogued in the report listing will be most

important to teaching learning or creative expression within the next five years? And I want to make a

point here that although this question asks specifically about technologies, we’re seeing many of t hese

important developments in Ed Tech focus on the application of technologies to support learning. For

instance, if you look at the categories of the topics that were tracked in the 2014 report, you’re going tonotice that many that are supported by technology, that are supported by technology, but are not actually

a technology, such as the flipped classroom, or maker spaces, or even gamification, and I think this is an

important and a positive development for those of us that are in teaching -- in the teaching and learning

space.

Question two asks what key technologies are missing from our list. What would you list among the

established technologies that are arguably important for all institutions that should be considered more



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broadly to support or enhance teaching and learning? And question three points to the key challenges

related to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry over the next five years. Question four finally asks, what

trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the educational i nstitutions’ core missions? So really

tying it back to some of those core issues. And here’s the project timeline with each step at a glance. And

I guess that’s back to you, Malcolm.

Thanks Veronica. So if you do have questions for us, or for our presenters later, please feel free to enterthem into the chat and we’ll address them when we have a moment. So, I’d like to go on to talking about

the trends and challenges section of the 2014 report. Now, as I indicated in the introduction, the trends

and challenges section of the Horizon Report has been revised since last year. And since they really do

describe the context for educational technologies it’s worth spending a few minutes to take a closer look

at these. You will also note that if you compare the 2014 trends and challenges to what’s appeared in

previous issues of the Horizon Report you will see not only have the trends and challenges been re-

envisioned, but the trends and challenges themselves have been renewed. It’s a very, very different look

and feel altogether.

So, first a word about what a trend is and what a challenge is. Trends are accelerators. They drive

technology investment and deployment decisions. Challenges, by contrast, are impediments. They are

elements in the environment, or perhaps in the campus culture, that can work against the adoption and

deployment of educational technology. Such impediments also, of course, slow down the rate of

innovation and the adoption of key new best practices. Now obviously, both trends and challenges have

implications for campus leadership, for policy, and for campus practice, and it seems like you can’t have

one without the other. Hence, in order to move forward, we must take both into account. Obviously, if we

think of trends in isolation the picture may look too rosy; taken all by itself, technology always seems cool,

and we might conclude superficially that the coolness factor alone will serve to move the adoption of

innovation forward. Conversely, if we dwell only on the challenges, we run the risk of becoming like

Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore where everything is so discouraging that there seems to be little sense in

undertaking anything. So the Horizon Report offers us good counsel to keep both the trends and the

challenges in view, and to take them into account when addressing leadership, policy, and practice issues

all relating to educational technology.

So, on the slide that is on the screen now, this is a listing of the trends according to their categories or

horizons as laid out in the 2014 report. There is not a lot of time today to go into all of these in detail, so

I’m just going to remark on a few of them. The second one, in the first horizons, the learning integration;

this is the integration ubiquity of hybrid and collaborative learning. And really, if you think about it, online

learning permeates all of teaching and learning, whether it be pure online learning in the sense of online

degree program or a set of courses, all the way down to blended learning and hybrid courses. So the

online dimension really has become ubiquitous in throughout our teaching and learning. This means that

there is more collaboration using social media than ever before. It also allows a freedom of interaction

and personalization that has never been possible before. It enables more pure peer learning than has

ever been possible before. And finally, it offers perhaps a path to more easily scale innovation than has

been true in the past. This is why this is the trend, and this is why this particular trend, the Horizon Reportrecommends to us is so close in terms of a fast moving trend in other words.

The other couple of trends just to note here is, are the two in the long-range ones, the agile approaches.

What’s interesting here, and what the Horizon Report documents is that teaching and learning now, some

teaching and learning programs or approaches are beginning to mimic start-ups. That is, they are having

student projects within the course mimic or pretend they are participating or competing for technology



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funding. And some are actually even going beyond that and they are taking these models, these models

that the students generate and actually seeking actual dollars for those ideas. So this is just one example

of the agile approaches that some schools are taking in order to think about where the innovation and

where the opportunities lie. Similarly, for the evolution of online education, the count of students, as we

know, taking online courses is continuing to increase and the critical components for online education

continue to be engagement via interactive features and a sense of community, and as well as a strong

instructor presence. We’re going to be seeing adaptive technology play a critical role in online education,

and libraries as resources will also play a critical role, such as Stanford has done with their iTunesU

resources.

Malcolm?

Yes, go ahead.

I was going to say why don’t you go ahead and introduce the poll and while they’re filling out the poll I

have a couple questions.

Okay, that would be best. Sounds fine. So, here’s the next poll. Haven’t had a chance to describe all the

trends, but based on what you can see from them, which one do you think is the most important one forhigher education? Go ahead, Marc, please.

So, while they’re filling out, one of the questions was, student as creators in the three to five year range

and the question was, well, isn’t that already happening? So, can you give an explanation of what your

definition of becoming, is the trend becoming full force, why three to five years? Does that mean 50

percent use it, or I mean, what’s the measurement, or what’s the idea?

Well, I think, yes, I mean, it can’t be denied that, particularly with the digital media that students have

been creating contents for years. And again, by putting it into that horizon, it’s not saying that it’s not at

work today, the Horizon Report is suggesting that the full impact will be within the time range suggesting.

One of the dimensions of this that the Horizon Report looks at is maker spaces, in that part, in that sense

the student as creators in that kind of hands-on analog sense, that is something that is gaining steam butwill take a while before it sees ubiquity I think across all higher education.

And so one last quick one. Somebody asked earlier, so we’ve been seeing you, not you, but ELI, put out

in the Horizon Report, put out trends, and I know we’ve all used them in presentations and changes, have

you done a historical view of how, what’s your accuracy of prediction and how that worked? Done any

research on that?

That’s a really good question. Well, this is the first year that the trends have been put into these horizons,

so trying to do a prediction, there’s no longitudinal way to kind of do that for these, and it’s often asked

about, well, what about the technologies, you know, how good has the prediction, you know, could you

win at the stock market if you were this accurate or not? I think the prediction of the adoption, the wide

scale or ubiquitous adoption of these technologies is pretty tricky and there has been some backwardsand forwards, so it’s not as if the Horizon Report is accurate each year and on target each year. I do think

that for me one of the main values of the Horizon Report is a conversation starter or a conversation

enabler, it really kind of lights a campfire, so to speak, around which we can have good conversations

about things. But there have been some folks who have looked at some of the accuracy and there were

some folks, I mean, there was one article, I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head that



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does -- made a more systematic review of the accuracy of the Horizon Report with respect to the

technologies. It came out feeling actually pretty good about what the Horizon Report does.

Great, I’ll let you head back to the poll response.

Oh, okay. The poll response is, so we have a clear winner here with the integration of online, and that

would seem to be not terribly surprising as well as a strong component for the data you’ve been learning. That seems to be in keeping with wha t’s on most people’s minds. So, thank you again for participating in

that poll.

And finally, just to quickly just finish up with the challenges, again, these are the six challenges grouped

according to their categories, as I mentioned at the outset. Again, I’m just going to comment on a few of

them. The one that I find interesting is the one on rewarding teaching, or rewards for teaching. The report

points out that all manner of faculty, from adjuncts, to lecturers, to faculty with tenure can do good

teaching. But what’s interesting is that the report brings up some studies that say that faculty has

experimented but teaching is getting so complex now that even veteran instructors can feel a little bit,

have their confidence shaken a bit given the new complexity. So that’s kind of a trend within a trend, if

you will. They document a study in the U.K. noting that there is an actual decrease in the interaction rates

with faculty. Derek Bok at Harvard has, did a study that they mentioned saying that the grad training tobecome instructors is not sufficient, that teaching today is more difficult than ever, and with the new mix of

adjuncts and faculty with tenure we will need to be thinking very, very carefully about teaching rewarding

and how all this comes together.

Also, in terms of scaling innovations, the Horizon Report points out that accreditation can in some cases

actually reinforce traditional teaching practices, so that might be a challenge we might need to think

about. There are new paths, we all know that are new paths, degrees being forged all the time. There are

capacity issues that we need, that’s another challenge within this challenge that might impede integration.

And new visions for how to scale, particularly across gateway courses, is a challenge that we continue to

face. So these are some of the, I think, the interesting challenges and so we’re going to have another poll.

Now having looked at these challenges for a bit, would you please weigh in on which one do you think is

the most pressing one for higher education right now? Which of these challenges that have beendocumented in the Horizon Report do you think are the most challenging?

Malcolm, while they’re filling it out, another real quick –

Yes, Marc, please.

I got to watch your timing, but there was a comment that said something about, that students as creators

is more than a tech process, and I think that’s kind of true of a lot of these things. Some of them are

pedagogy, some of them are process, some of them are technology enhanced processes. Do you make a

differentiation in those things or is that just the gestalt of the answers?

Yes, that question is extremely well timed because I’m going to hand things over to Veronica in just asecond, she’s going to have more to say about that. My take that if you take a look at what’s described as

technologies in the Horizon Report, you’ll see a bit of a difference. There’s the flipped classroom, which

itself is not a technology, it’s really a practice that unites or brings together various technologies, so I think

the picture in terms of educational technologies, and what we focus on is changing a bit. So, anyway, I’m

going to wrap up here now. Okay, so digital, so let’s see, _______ is seen, or pathway development is

seen as, I guess, the leading pressing challenge here, and the rewards for teaching is in second place. All



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right, well thank you very much everyone for participating in the poll. It’s always useful to see what

everyone is thinking. And now, I’m going to turn things over to Veronica.

Thanks, Malcolm, and we will be talking a little bit about faculty development towards the end of the

webinar today, so that’s great that that came up so early. So I wanted to mention that the responses to

the research questions that I showed earlier are systematically ranked and placed into adoption horizons

by each of the Advisory Board members and we do that using a multi-vote system that allows members toweight each of their selections. And each member is asked to also identify the timeframe during which

they feel the technology would enter mainstream use. And speaking of mainstream use, a question came

up about this earlier, that is defined as about 20 percent of institutions adopting it within the period

discussed. So these rankings are then compiled into a collective set of responses. The ones around

which there is the most agreement is quickly apparent, so there is lots of agreement among the Board

members. And from the comprehensive list of technologies, the 12 that emerge at the top of the initial

ranking process, four per adoption horizon, are further researched and expanded, and then the short list

is identified, the group begins to explore the ways in which these 12 important technologies might be

used in teaching and learning, and that’s kind of how we arrive at the technologies.

If I could just get this poll to come up, you saw kind of what the technologies are that the Board identified,

but I wanted to know which of the six technologies you think will have the greatest impact on teaching and

learning, so I will let that poll open up there, and just take a second to think about what you’ve seen and

your own institutional context, and see if you’re kind of in line. This will be an interesting little test. We’ve

got about 350 participants in the room today, so a little microcosm of teaching and learning and higher ed

hopefully. All right, so it looks like you are pretty much in agreement with flip learning and a close second

coming in at learning analytics. Okay, all right, great, thanks Loren.

So this past February at the ELI annual meeting in New Orleans, some of you may have attended, the

ELI conducted its first Horizon Report video competition where we asked anyone from the teaching and

learning community to submit a three minute video showcasing their work in one of the Horizon Report

technology areas. We received, in a very short period of time I might add, nearly 2,000 votes in response

to the technology videos that were submitted, and I wanted to share some of those with you today. So

without any further delay, Loren if you would pull up this video for us and we’ll all just take a couple

minutes to watch it. While that’s loading I’ll mention that this is Marist College, their learning analytics

video submission, and this was the top, the one that received the top votes.

To our next video, I wanted to show a side-by-side view of the horizon technologies in their horizon order,

and also the community submissions of the videos by the topic. In other words, we received more

learning analytics submissions than any other, then the flipped classroom, and so on, and this gives us a

little bit of insight into where the community is relative to emerging technology adoption. So, now we’re

going to take a look at Ohio State University’s video on the flipped cl assroom, and this came in in second

place, so, Loren?

I’m assuming it’s loading, so Veronica, maybe I’ll ask you a quick question while we get it to load.

Yeah, sure.

There was a slide earlier that talked about digital fluency and the question was, is does that go across all

devices, not just [audio difficulty]



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Learning, so let me see here. I’m getting a note from Loren. They are reloading the pod so it should be

playing in just one second.

This is Malcolm, Marc also just responding to your question here, digital fluency is not only just being

adroit with the devices, obviously, but it’s also being able to use, find the right information and use it in the

right and creative ways in order to move forward with academic projects.

[inaudible, unable to hear speakers, video playing]

I got the idea to do a flipped classroom when I took part in an iTunesU boot camp at a Cupertino Apple

Headquarters, and then I started playing with the iTunesU platform and I realized it gave me a lot

flexibility in terms of how I could present my course content to my students in a way that I think they would

learn better and more effectively.

So it is focused on the use in an academic learning environment if you will.

Yes.

Okay, thanks.

From the point of view of the Horizon Report, most definitely.

Great, and it seems that this one particular video is struggling. Let me ask –

Yeah, and I –

Well, I can ask another question or we can skip to the next slide, Veronica?

I actually had the opportunity to use the iPad yesterday. I went to the Union to cover a story and I brought

the iPad with me and I was like able to sit and take notes on the iPad, and pictures and video.

The combination of the iPad with iTunesU and the flipped classroom has allowed my students to –

Oh wait, here we go.

Isn’t technology fun sometimes.

I got the idea to do a flipped classroom when I took part in an iTunesU boot camp at a Cupertino Apple

Headquarters, and then I started playing with the iTunesU platform and I realized it gave me a lot

flexibility in terms of how I could present my course content to my students in a way that I think they would

learn better and more effectively.

I actually had the opportunity to use the iPad yesterday. I went to the Union to cover a story and I brought

the iPad with me and I was like able to sit and take notes on the iPad, and pictures and video.

The combination of the iPad with iTunesU and the flipped classroom has allowed my students to take

their learning wherever they go.

Marc, while [inaudible]

Our whole class today, we’ve just been working on our stories, and going out, like today people actually

went out and they did some looking for stories and stuff like that –



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Actually, I’m seeing the video.

Yeah, the video is playing.

And not really able to do that if you don’t have the flipped classroom because we already went over all the

actual textbook information before we came in.

For example, if I go to yesterday’s and I watch this video, you can click here to take notes while you’re

watching it, and if I click here, it has like the little notes that I took while the video was playing.

We had one student who --

It seems like there’s still a lot of video problems [inaudible]

--came in during class and she said she had a story idea that was taking place at our student union and

we didn’t –

Sure that’s fine.

--even say another word to her, we just said –

Great, so there was a question that came in about the quantified self. The quantified self refers to kind of

a movement that started in the health sciences I would say where there’s lot s of devices that people can

now kind of attach to their bodies to get a sense for different things like your heart rate, how much you

walked in a day, things like that. But now, that movement is kind of working its way more into higher

education where students are wanting to quantify, measure, observe, monitor things around their

teaching and learning behaviors. So we’re seeing a little bit of that moving into higher ed and one

example of that could be learning analytics with dashboards that are student facing and things that allow

students to monitor their own experience.

So I think that’s one way in the way we’re seeing that transfer from what was a kind of a consumer

technology to more of a teaching and learning technology, and here, we’re seeing some o f the results ofthe poll which asked about the technologies that you’re working with it at your institution, and it looks like

flipped is number one, and learning analytics is a close second. So, you’re pretty much in line with the

Horizon Report, so that’s of assuring. That’s great.

Okay, and then we can go ahead and move on to the next slide. The next slide is one other video that is

on maker spaces, which is kind of a quickly I guess maturing, rising area, so I’ll let that video play, let’s

see if that works okay, and this was the submission from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign on 3D

printing, but it’s also got some maker space stuff in there.

[video playing in background, very quiet audio] MakerLab. Here at our lab students convert their ideas

into actual physical objects. So everything you see here in this lab was made by an individual, not by a

large company.

So we set up this lab about a year back with the objective of getting business students involved with

students from across campus to learn by making, so our model is learn, make, and share. And we

encourage to learn prototyping, learn designing, and learn by making the models on 3D printers.

Here in the lab we’re teaching a unique course called Making Things; it’s an undergraduate cour se,

brings together students from art and design, engineering and business, and these students will



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conceptualize, design, prototype, manufacture, and market a new product. As far as we know this has

never been done before in the business school. We’re quite excited about this.

We’ve had students come in and make robotic arms. We’ve had faculty come in and make custom

research equipment. We have had bioengineering students come in here and make testing equipment,

and we’ve seen great projects come out of the lab over the last year. So the concept of rapid prototyping

mixed in together with this wonderful technology of 3D printing allows for a lot of experimentation.

Instead of having to by an object that’s made in China in a large factory in a faraway place, we can make

it right here in Champaign in your living room on your desktop.

Great, thanks Loren, and you can view all of these videos and all the submissions that were made to the

competition at the URL that I posted there in chat. All right, so we’ve got one last poll here in this section

and it asks, what are the most significant obstacles in implementing these technologies? We know that

there’s lots of challenges, some of them are costs, others are, you know, getting people to understand

how to use them effectively in the classroom, and so we just wanted to get a sense from you all what you

think the most significant obstacle is in going with some of these technologies. Now while you’re weighing

in there was a question that came in about the flipped clas sroom, and I think there’s lots of different

interpretations of the flipped classroom. At its base I think it means that some of the content that wouldhave typically been covered in class is now distributed to an outside of class mode. That could be viewing

a lecture online, it could be doing something outside of class time. The point of it is so that in class time is

spent in a more effective way, doing the things that you have to be in person to do effectively. So again,

that could take lots of different shapes and forms, but it doesn’t always have to be the strict interpretation

of videos being done online.

Okay, so looking at the poll here, it looks like lack of support and time to implement is number one, and

cost is number two. Okay, great. Thank you. Very, very interesting results. And with that, I will turn it back

over to Malcolm.

Thanks very much Veronica. I, we’re now at a transition, we’re going to now bring on our guest speakers,

so the first speaker is Professor Jim Harvey, George Mason University, and his presentation is anillustration of the fast trend of the integration of online high rhythmic collaborative learning. So Jim, I invite

you to take it away.

Thanks Malcolm, and hello to everyone. This is Jim Harvey, Associate Dean of Students and Associate

Professor of Marketing in the School of Management at George Mason University. George Mason is a

public institution in the state of Virginia that probably nobody ever heard of, and in fact, we’ve got the

largest enrollment in the state with 33,000 students and 6,000 students in the School of Management.

Basically what I want to talk about for the next 15 minutes is a course that several of us developed. It’s a

required marketing course that is taken by every major in the School of Management that addresses

several of the trends that have been talked about today, including flipped classrooms, collaborative

learning, and learning analytics. Rather than try to go out and develop all this myself, or ourselves, we

adopted the McGraw Hill platform of Connect and LearnSmart, and we’ll talk more about that later.

The basic premise of this course is that because George Mason has a lack of classroom space in the

evening, a couple of us felt that if we could take the same classroom and teach two classes at the same

time by alternating that we’d save some space for the university. So in this presentation what I’m going to

do is to summarize what we’ve attempted to achieve and the measures and the outcomes we use, and

some of the publications about distance learning and the pieces that stem from this work. As I mentioned,



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George Mason is in Northern Virginia, about halfway in between Dulles Airport and Capitol Hill. We have

a lot of international students which makes teaching particularly interesting, but we also have a lot of first

generation college students, and a whole lot of traffic. If Northern Virginia were a country we’d be the 24th

largest country in terms of GDP. What used to take 20 minutes five years ago now takes an hour to get

across town, so time is very important to our students, to our faculty, and particularly, the students that we

serve for most of them working 20 and sometimes, 20 hours or more and sometimes working full-time

outside of class.

So what I hope to do over the next 10 to 15 minutes is to provide a broad overview of this effort, of how

we developed a hybrid distance learning initiative and then summarize the way we assess the

effectiveness of the project. I wanted to also provide a few pieces of the academic literature that we relied

on. The objective of the initiative included providing students with greater time flexibility, provide the

university with improved space capacity, and in the notion of flipping and student analytics, we wanted to

free class time from focusing on declarative discipline knowledge. We wanted to reserve class time for

more synthesis, problem solving and collaboration. The findings of our assessment showed that there

was a significant positive relationship between the online student performance and test results. And I also

want to talk about some literature review, that we reviewed that we also found to be true and that was that

there was a strong positive effect of collaboration. So every other class met online and every other class

met face-to-face. The hybrid portion of the course used McGraw Hill Connect and LearnSmart exercises,

and that was our operational definition of flipping the class. A lot of the online exercises not only looked at

the notion of declarative knowledge, but there was also some problem solving and integration through the

use of online videos, followed up by multiple choice questions.

Another portion of the online exercise included a product McGraw Hill has called LearnSmart, which is

actually an adaptive learning algorithm. What LearnSmart does is to make the questions more difficult if

you get it right and to finish your assignment sooner if you got it right, but if you got it wrong to give you

easier questions and to provide you with individual feedback at the end of the assignment. The course

also required teams to work together to create a rudimentary semester project that we call a marketing

plan. The collaboration opportunities and platforms that we used and relied on included Skype, Google+

Hangout, and Blackboard Collaborate.

Slide four gives you a student view of the assignments for the week and so students would enter each

one of these dates and each assignment was time stamped so we know exactly when they entered the

assignment, how long it took to complete the assignment, what their score was, and then, as I mentioned

earlier, students were given feedback on the success.

Slide five gives you an example of the type of drag and drop approach to declarative knowledge that

students were assigned, and in this case, the question is, well, what’s the difference between marketing

products and marketing services? The ConnectOnline exercises provided items that required students to

learn the discipline through these drag and drop opportunities.

Slide six shows that some of the online exercises were a little bit more challenging, a little bit more

sophisticated to include video analysis followed up by multiple choice questions, breakeven analysis, and

so forth. As I mentioned earlier, the nice thing about this platform from a learning analytics perspective is

that each student was given a list of items within the chapter where they were strong and where they

struggled, and then the professor was given an aggregate result of student performance, so that when we

did meet face to face I had a pretty good roadmap of where time needed to be spent to address problem

areas.



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Let me turn to the literature just briefly that we relied on and I suspect based on what I see by the

demographics of the audience that this is probably old news to you; it’s not, it was pretty interesting to me

though. I found a study that was done by Zhao, Lei, Yan, Lai, and Tan from a variety of universities, but I

think the lead author is from Michigan State, that discussed one of the key questions, and that is, is there

a difference or not between distance learning and face to face? This is the so-called no difference

hypothesis, and in this study what the researchers did was to conduct what’s called a meta -analysis of

over 500 studies of distance learning to try to test that hypothesis. And in fact, what they found was that in

terms of student performance there is no difference between distance learning platforms and face to face

platforms. But of particular interest is that if you look at, as the authors did, some of the sub-stratas of the

data, they found that when the study was conducted by the instructor who was doing the distance

learning, the distance learning effort showed greater student, more positive student results.

The second thing that kind of led our study was embedded in this study as well and that is that distance

learning programs with a combination of technology, as well as face to face, what we call hybrid or

blended actually had the most positive outcomes. So this literature was brief guide, provided a brief guide

for some of the work that we did. We also looked at some of the best practices literature and I just

commend that to you, and I want to emphasize a little bit more at the bottom of slide eight and go on to

slide nine.

In 2006 Hall wrote about the notion of learning nets, and you’re probably familiar with that. I was not

familiar with it, but this really kind of emphasizes the notion of collaborative learning, that when you get

students interacting with one another and create these learning nets that foster peer collaboration,

student performance improves significantly. So here we have the first assessment that we published on

this work, and that is the relationship between online performance and in-class exams, and as you can

see, it’s a fairly nice curvilinear relationship with a reasonably significant amount of explained variations,

but basically, as advertised, a positive relationship between work online and work in the class.

Another piece of literature that I encourage you to read if you have the time is done by Purzer in 2011,

and this is a study that was conducted by, using engineering students, and Purzer did a very elaborate

controlled experiment of engineering students that looked at the issue of collaboration, and what Purzer

found is that there should be, and there was a significant positive relationship between class performance

and the support that the leaders and, received from others. So we felt like we were really kind of on solid

ground in terms of predicting that collaboration should have a significant effect on student performance,

and so we decided to test that as well. And in fact, consistent with Purzer’s work, we found that of 400

students about 48 percent of them self-reported that they did a lot of work with other people and a

significant portion, about 36, 38 percent of the students said they are kind of loners, they didn’t really

collaborate with others, and basically what we did was run median splits on those self-reports. And we

found that students who did in fact collaborate found that the class is more interesting, that they were

more engaged in the course, that the course was more worth the money, that the online assignments

help more with the semester project, that the textbook was more interesting, and that they felt better, that

they understood the course better.

So to summarize, the current approach that we used in this course showed that there are some

demonstrated benefits of a blended approach and that in fact, if you could get students to collaborate they

had a higher level of course enjoyment and course performance. Well folks, that’s essentially the end of

my presentation. I look forward to having some questions and comments that you have about it that I

could clarify. Mason is a great place to teach, it’s a great place to learn, we’re close to the capitol of the



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United States. We have students from about 125 different countries, it’s a very, very interesting place to

live and to work.

So Jim, it’s Marc, there are a couple interesting discussions that were going on on the chat board while

you were talking, and one of them, the question is, and I’m going to soften the question a little bit,

wondering about your faculty’s reaction to delegating some of the content over to a textbook company. As

in it seemed like many of the assignments and some of the things that they did online were developed bythe textbook company and fit with the textbook as opposed to be instructor developed. Is that a right

assumption, and were there problems with it with the faculty or?

That assumption is absolutely correct and that is a great question, because that’s been a significant topic.

Basically the dilemma for the professor is, do we go out and hire a bunch of course development people?

Do we do it ourselves? Do we rely on professionals from the publisher? And I can tell you there are a lot

of my colleagues who do not like this idea at all. Now what approach I take on this is that point number

one, is that it seems to work fairly well. I think also we need to be mindful of the fact that students tend to

self-select themselves into distance learning platforms, and so students who are a little bit more highly

motivated, people who like the time flexibility know that this is a distance or hybrid or blended section and

they opt in, and those who don’t care about it opt out. It really is however, I think, a reminder that

something I really believe in is that when you take a course, you don’t take a course from a textbook, you

take a course from a professor. And so on the face to face components of the class what I try to do is to

work through whatever issues the students have about the declarative knowledge of the discipline, but try

to craft the class in terms of the perspective that I see about the discipline and practice of marketing. So,

you’re absolutely right, this is not particularly well liked, but I can tell you by some folks, some of my

faculty colleagues, that the cost of producing at the level of professionalism that this particular vendor

provided is way beyond our budgets.

And that’s kind of, your comment about the professor is interesting, there was one of the discussions

going on of someone who took a course using this type of technology and it was more of a self-paced and

missed the interaction, and I think that’s one of the intr iguing parts about the flipped classroom is, instead

of maybe go home and read the textbook, it’s go home and watch the video, but the conversation, the

discussion, the learning, the self-created knowledge can happen in the classroom, so that’s good. I’ve got

a second question was, that the fee structure, was it a normal, excuse me, was there an added fee for

this, or was the textbook a purchase that included that, or how would that work?

That’s another very, very good question, a very complicated question because in fact, this particular

vendor has a relatively complex pricing structure. What most of our students do is that they purchase

what’s called the eBook and so, within the eBook this so -called add-on is included. If they on the other

hand choose to buy a brand new hardcover book, the Connect exercises and the online exercises are an

additional $40. It’s a significant increase in the cost to the student. And so what I find is that a lot of

students just don’t buy the textbook and they buy the online ex ercises. And they will share a textbook, or

they’ll rent a textbook, or they’ll get a textbook from India, or other ways to save some money.

That’s great. One of my big issues with e-textbooks is do the students get to have access to the e-

textbook at a future time or once the course is over are they frozen out?

Once again, that really varies publisher to publisher, and my understanding is that McGraw Hill gives you

access for six months. The other benefit of the eBook is that it’s searchable text and so st udents find that

once they get used to the e-format they’re able to move through the textbook a lot faster to find the topics

that they’re interested in.



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So I want to give you the one last question and then I think it’s probably time to move on because we got

another speaker. How does, have you done anything different to your classrooms to, because now that

there’s collaboration going on, have you changed your format of your classrooms, different style

classrooms, made any changes?

Well, it really depends on whether I’m teaching the blended format or not, but within the context of the

blended format I do everything I can to encourage collaboration. So from day one I have the students on[technical difficulty] can you hear me okay, Marc?

Yeah, you dropped for a second but we’re good.

Yeah, I pushed the wrong button. From day one I get the students in the front of the classroom using the

technology and assigning them to teams. And so there’s a distinct team format in my approach to

teaching. They have a semester project that they have to work on together. They are provided a template

to look at a brand, look at an industry, look at trends within that industry, and at the end of the semester to

post their presentation on YouTube. So, collaboration is very important, but I try my best to encourage it.

That’s great, and I think, Malcolm, you’re going to lead off with the next speaker.

Yes, very, very quickly as soon as we get the Phil’s slides up. So, thank you very much, Jim. That was

very, very interesting and I think an important study, and important work you’re doing in terms of not only

trying out these innovations, but actually trying to measure their impact which is always useful. So we’ll

bring up Phil’s slides now, and Phil, just to enter, just repeat Marc’s earlier introduction, Phil is the

Executive Vice-Provost and Dean for ASU Online and Extended Campus at Arizona State University. So

without any further ado, Phil please begin.

Thank you very much, Malcolm. To begin, I do want to thank both Malcolm and Veronica and

EDUCAUSE. I think these are great sessions and I certainly look forward to this one. I have six words in

the title here, personalized learning using continuously adaptive technology, and I have to tell you that

three years ago I didn’t know what at least four of those words really meant in this context. What I’m

going to talk about, and personalized learning is a continuum, and personalized learning simply means inmy estimation using technologies in ways that allow a different educational experience for students

depending upon what they know. Now, that can be something as simple as gating a course so that a

student can’t continue until they demonstrate mastery of material, which requires no adaptivity, or it can

include something at the extreme end which involves big data, large data sets, understanding how

students move through courses by understanding correlations across different students and different

patterns. And what I’m going to talk about today is one of those extreme versions where we are talking

about using a big database in order to move through a course, and in order for students to understand

how to move through a course.

The course we’re talking about, and I’m actually discussing three courses here, were the freshman math

courses at Arizona State, which we completely revised beginning in August 2011, so we’re now into the

middle of the third year of providing freshman math courses with a new technology. The advances thatwe made were actually not just done at ASU. It was a partnership between an adaptive learning company

start-up at the time named Knewton, that’s K-n-e-w-t-o-n, which is a limited liability corporation in

Manhattan. And as soon as we had a relationship with Knewton it became apparent that we also needed

a content provider, and so Pearson, the textbook company, or they refer to themselves as a learning

company, was also heavily involved in this.



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What I want to do today is understand a little bit about what personalized learning is, I’ll discuss some

elements of what we refer to as the continuously adaptive model, but I think that you can generally think

of it as big data. And then I want to discuss the role of the faculty member in these courses, because one

thing we focused on initially was the technology and we gave short shrift to the role of the faculty

member, and it’s clear to me in working through this after several semesters that technologies are exactly

what they are. They are tools and they reside within a learning ecosystem, and if you don’t focus on the

role of the faculty member and the role of the student, the technology by itself is not going to advance you

in any significant way.

And so, the next slide I have, and Loren if you’d bring up this slide now, I think I can talk over this, but this

is an animation. And Loren is bringing it up, and Loren, if I talk over this, can people hear me? Okay.

Yes, you should be able to.

Good, thank you. So here’s what’s going on, this is actually the track of students through a developmental

math course at ASU in August 2012, and what you can see at the bottom is the passage of time from the

beginning of the semester, beginning of the semester in September to the end of the semester in

December. Each one of those things that looks like little white fleas is a student and each one of the

circles is a bundle of concepts, and within the circles are small learning objects. The different colors justrepresent different categories of topics like statistics, ratio and proportions, functions, et cetera.

And so if you could play it once more Loren, the point I want to make here is that there are as many

pathways through a course as there are students in the course. In this particular course, it is both self-

paced, meaning students can begin and complete as quickly as they can get th rough the material, and it’s

also self-directed, which means that as soon as they begin they unlock bundles of material and they don’t

have to go through the course sequentially. And when you open up a course and allow students to move

through the course in that way, what you find, as I said is, there is not a pathway through the course.

There are as many paths as there are students in the course. Thanks Loren.

And now going back to the slides. Our objectives here were to improve critical reasoning and subject

matter mastery. We really wanted to improve what faculty members knew as they were going through thecourse, and we wanted to improve retention and student satisfaction. There was an obvious rush to

change, and by the way, we began with these math cour ses because that’s where everybody tends to

begin. I mean, if you can’t use technologies to improve math, you probably can’t use technologies to

improve stuff going forward in general. So we started with math but we actually next August are also

going to roll this out in a biology, physics, chemistry class, e-comm courses, and eventually, probably a

year from, or next January, probably in psychology as well. But we began with math for obvious reasons,

and by the way, the reason we’re beginning with all of t hose courses, is that they are large kind of

freshman killer courses. They have high failure rates, meaning high numbers of students either withdraw

or they get Ds or at Arizona State they get Es, which is an F at most places.

In the case of the math course, as you can see, we went from 28, just look at the college algebra, we

went from 48 percent of the students basically failing or getting a D or withdrawing from college algebrafirst time they attempted it to 38 percent in one year. So a 10 percent improvement, actually about a 20

percent improvement in a reduction in the failure rate which was impressive and which is really the

reason why we decided based on these results after just a year of doing this we were going to move

forward with it going forward. In terms of why start with math courses, again, I think if you looked at your

data at your institutions you’d find exactly the same thing, and it doesn’t have to be college algebra. It’s

whatever the first course that a student places into, so if it’s college algebra, fine, if it’s calculus, fine, if it’s



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developmental math, fine. But the fact is if a student either can’t get through that course, so they get

below a C or they withdraw, then your chances of retaining those students are dismal compared to

students who get a C or better. And by the way, that’s true even if you look at the calculus class. So you

have students who place into calculus, but for whatever reason they don’t get through the calculus

course, your ability to retain those students is going to be very poor going forward. That’s why we started

with math.

I want to talk a bit here about modes of personalization and a lot of what we do, and what we came to

understand about adaptive learning is based on what we call the ICAP model of learning, and basically

ICAP refers to, that’s an acronym for interactive, constructive, active, and passive learning, and as you go

from passive, to active, to constructive, to interactive all of the educational and learning science literature

indicate that you will get better student outcomes. So worse is passive, better is active, next is

constructive, and so a lot of what we were trying to do was make students active and constructive

participants in their own education. So it’s very similar to what Jim was talking about earlier in regard to

learning nets. If you can get students to be constructive, to generate new knowledge, or to interact with

each other, the learning outcomes time and time again are going to be better.

We started, of course, with large lecture halls. Now, in math we weren’t teaching in large lecture halls but

we were lecturing to 65 students at a time and the impact was exactly the same, it’s passive learning.

Now, here’s the great irony, faculty members tend to believe that face to face is a more personalized

mode of connecting than using technologies like flipped classrooms, but in fact, the technologies allow a

much greater degree of personalization than a faculty member ever has in a lecture room. When I’m

lecturing to a group of students I am treating every one of those students exactly the same way. We give

a midterm, students find out two or three times during the semester how well they’re doing, and guess

what, the next Monday, we move on. Education, the type of resources that we’re us ing and the type of

resources that adaptive learning technologies allow you to use actually allow the learning experience to

be personalized for the different students.

So, Phil?

Yes.

I’ve got a quick question for you, a couple of questions come in and I think we’re good with time.

Go ahead.

So, there were some questions in there about Bloom’s taxonomy and higher levels of learning and you

addressed it just beautifully in this last slide about constructive and interactive.

Right.

So, I think that one’s answered, but how does that address the, if it’s self, self -learning, where’s the role

for a faculty member and how does that shift or adjust –

Yeah, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to put that off –

Sure.

Because I have a couple of slides at the end.

Okay.



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The role of the faculty member really, I believe, is elevated in these. Now, a couple of things are

necessary, but if you don’t mind I’m going to talk about the role of the faculty member in a couple of

slides.

Not a problem.

And so, did you have another question you wanted to ask, Marc, or should I move on?

Actually, I did.

Okay.

The other couple questions that came on were collaborative learning, the fact that now if this is self-paced

it’s hard to get groups together and have people do things in groups.

Right.

And again, if you’ve got another slide on that, we can shift, but otherwise how does this fit?

No, actually, that’s a -- that’s a -- that’s a great question. When we started this we didn’t understand the,you know, what we wanted faculty to do was kind of poorly defined, and what, the way our courses work

is that all students are required to go to a computer lab once a week, and then students meet in a

classroom once a week. And in the computer lab, and you can see on the slide I have now, these are all

computer lab shots, it’s really amazing, because I’ve been in computer labs before and they tend to be

relatively noisy places. When you go to these computer labs, and I think it’s because of the continuously

adaptive and personalized features of this, it’s dead quiet in there, and students will raise their hand. In

this case an instructor walks by and talks with students, and the attendance is very strong right until the

time that the student is out of the course.

Now, what we are experimenting with, and what we’re going to do, and what we do increasingly in the

course going forward is grouping students. And that was something that we didn’t understand quite at the

beginning, but instructors have a dashboard and this is incredibly important. This is one the big insightsthat, you know, it was kind of a side benefit. An instructor dashboard allows, and students are grouped

according to where they are in the course, and so, in that instructor session where students come, and by

the way, they are in groups of 100 now, an instructor can quickly see that eight students at the bottom of

the course who need the most attention, they’re the ones who are farthest back, and so they can group

those students, move them into a different section of the classroom and work with those students

separately. The students who are advancing rapidly can work together and work on some higher level

problems and the students in the middle may need a mini lecture, again, they’ll be grouped according to

their competency level in the course.

And so, but you’re right, what happens sometimes is that students are so far ahead that they’re out of the

course, and so we kind of started a process whereby if a student was at least two lessons ahead in the

adaptive portion of the course, or the computer section of the course, some of the instructors don’t have

the instructor, the students come to class. But for the most part we have all the students come to classes

all the time and we simply group them by competency and then provide them different interactivities

based upon where they are in the course. This is, and this is going to become much more important when

we go into the bio-chem, physics, and e-comm courses next year where we’re really going to concentrate

much more on the personalized and group problem solving session as an important component, as an



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important, I don’t want to say ancillary, but as an important component of the student learning that goes

on in the course in order to advance the critical thinking skills of the student.

Very quickly, a couple of things that are important here is the technology does not allow students to get

through any possible important concept without mastering it. That doesn’t mean that all students get As,

although that would be the natural outcome of a continuously adaptive learning model, but it does mean

that if you’re in a college algebra course, you can’t go into a pre -calculus course with a 70 percent incollege algebra, but not knowing the most essential features that you need in order to pass the pre-

calculus class. And so we got away from students getting through a course with big holes in their

knowledge and moving forward.

In terms of pedagogy, again, it is flexible pacing so students can accelerate their progress, and I’m going

to show you a graph later on that shows how students actually got through the course, and we are always

monitoring the student. So at all times the student and the instructor know exactly what the student has

mastered, the instructor can see the individual student dashboards. In addition to having an instructor

dashboard that shows what students are on track and off track, the student has a, the instructor also can

drill down and see the individual student dashboard and see where they’re stuck.

In terms of the technologies, we kind of group it in three places, there are adaptive systems which dealwith how the contents deliver to the students, there are tracking systems which allow the instructor to see

the, and the student to understand their progress, and then there are grouping systems which allow the

instructor to understand how best to address the different students in groups in their course.

This is just a graph showing the level of complexity, this is a graph, a knowledge graph for the

developmental math course. You have to have every concept and show its relationship to every other

atomic concept in the course in order to make a truly adaptive learning class and this is a complex thing,

but once it’s done, it’s done and it functions for a long time.

Just in ter ms of best practices, and I want to do, I have just a few more slides, one thing that we didn’t

understand again at the beginning is the importance of fostering a support structure for faculty as well as

students. And so we know have group trainings where instructors share the best practices, and by theway, the instructors have taken this over at this point. There was resistance at the beginning; there is

virtually no resistance now. They see that it actually improves the student experience and that’s wher e we

wanted to get to. And we do have a mentoring system for new instructors because you don’t want to drop

new instructors into the – a program like this and hope that they can figure it out.

We have – this has allowed us to make a set of data driven decision makings – data driven decisions,

and so if you don’t mind I’m going to explain this very briefly. But what these four charts are, are four

different sections of the course. The green is students who are on track, and so as you move from the left

of a chart to the right of a chart what you are seeing is progress through a semester. Yellow and red

demonstrate students who are a little off track and a lot off track. So in terms of being able to evaluate

which instructors are doing really well in this environment, you know, the instructor on the left needs

additional training, the instructors on the right do much better at keeping their students on track during thecourse.

This, by the way, shows when students actually completed, this is a college algebra course for last year,

and you can see that a significant number of students, about 60 percent of the students actually complete

the course before the end of the semester, and that’s something that allows, the greater efficiencies, we



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have had to change how we plan the lab space, and it also, obviously, caused us to rethink the

completion policies for the course.

In terms of the role of the faculty, if you start at the bottom of this slide and work up, we’re starting from

lower order stuff to very high order stuff. At the bottom what instructors hate doing is kind of taking

attendance and collecting homework and problem sets and grading it and lecturing, and as you move up,

you know, they prefer to answer questions, lead interactive exploration of topics, and develop newlearning methods and materials. What we have allowed faculty to do as a result of this is spend a lot less

time, a lot less time on the bottom four bullets. They do almost no work on the bottom four bullets. What

they are working on is especially the interactive exploration of concepts and answering questions.

Now this means that the role of the faculty member changes. They lecture almost not at all compared to

what they used to do. They might lecture for five minutes a class. They lead problem solving activities

with students. They have in general, you know, it allows them to teach, to identify the students who need

the most help at the point they need the help and work with the top students in the class in order to push

them in a way that’s not possible when they can’t either identify the top students or they don’t have time

to work with the top students because they have to lecture and they’re most of their time lecturing. So I

actually think that is my last slide, and I’m sorry, I think I went a little bit over, but if anybody has any

questions, or Marc, if you’d like to ask something, please go ahead and do so.

Yeah, I would, and then we’ll get back to the group. So I’m going to do one last question for you because

there’s been an interesting discussion on everything from how many students have devices to can they

get access to your discussion on the role of the faculty member, and it’s kind of an interesting transition

that using that data to help. My question is, kind of, it’s hard for me to understand if the students are doing

so much of this online with the learning resource, how you’ve integrated and made that hybrid classroom.

Near the end you talk about it a little bit more. So, is it really more of a hybrid situation that the students

are learning the concepts and you have the higher order thinking and activities in the classroom?

Yeah, it is.

Is that the way it’s understood?

It’s hybrid but – it’s hybrid but it’s not flipped in the traditional sense. You know, it – students do get the

concepts and they do, I’m sorry, students get the content online and that, you know, we make students go

to a computer classroom, but the fact is, they can access that from their dorm room 24/7. The reason we

make them go to a classroom is because they’r e freshman students and we found early on that they

benefit from the discipline that’s associated with going to a class. So we make them do that until they’re

through the class.

But then when they go into the classroom the role of the faculty member is really much more around, for

example, they – the faculty member now knows that for example maybe 20 or 30 percent of the students

have trouble with a particular concept. He can do – he or she can do one of two things; they can group

the students, those 20 to 30 percent of the students in a section of the classroom and just work with themon that, he can do a mini lecture with those 20 or 30, he can do a mini lecture with the entire class where

he spends five or eight minutes talking about a particular concept that is causing a lot of people in the

class trouble. But typically what instructors do now is they divide the class at the beginning into different

groups and give students different activities to work through, and then the instructor will walk around the

classroom and make sure that the students who need help get the most help from the instructor and the

students who need the least help are progressing and being given more challenging material.



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Thanks, Phil. So what I’d like to do, we have about six minu tes left and I need a couple to close up, so I

got – I have a question essentially for everybody, and Malcolm, since you’ve kind of been orchestrating,

I’m going to let you start out. There was a question, and I know it’s hitting all of our campuses, on

accessibility, and as we start using some of these technologies and everything from video and captioning,

to interactivity, to hang outs, to all the things we’ve talked about, some of those issues become fairly

challenging. So, are there – are there any responses, answers, ideas that you’ve been coming up with or

that came out of the Horizon Report that might help lead the directions for some of those things.

Can I comment on that from George Mason?

Please.

Just briefly, what little I know about that is that that is a very big issue at our university, we have an office

– we have the Office of Disability Services, and they are very concerned, working on it, go to the George

Mason, GMU.edu website and see what they’re doing. I know that I’ve had visits to my off ice from that off

– representatives from that office. It is a very big issue.

Okay, and then I just noticed Veronica has a close-out piece, so Veronica, if you’d leave us off, and

please leave me about a minute and a half before so we can close out.

Sure thing. I wanted to show as a close-up here just in a little more detail an image that we saw earlier in

the webinar and it’s the expanded creative classroom research model, and this model, while I think is a

good one to aspire to, and we’ve heard some good examples of this in action, it’s extremely ambitious

and arguably requires an entire institution to support it in order to achieve it. And one thing that’s pretty

evident in this model is the level of skill and effort required of the faculty. In fact, looking at the Horizon

Report as a whole, here is kind of that cover sheet of the table of contents, we see some

acknowledgment of the importance of support and engagement from the instructional side of the house,

and from ELI’s perspective, we know how important faculty development efforts can be. And for that

reason, we are turning some significant attention to the topic of faculty development in 2014, and here

you see a three-part faculty development program that we are launching actually on Monday with a

seminar on determining the effectiveness of faculty development programs to be followed by a focussession which is, these are all online events by the way, and then culminating in June with a short course

on faculty development, and you can read more about that on our events site.

I also want to mention that this is a three-part program, and those who are actively engaged in it are

going to be recognized with a faculty development mastery badge, and we hope that this will help to

signal individual achievement in the area for those that participated, but also show the significance of the

subject matter to the teaching and learning community. And just really quick, to close, the focus session is

– has been guided by a team of expert faculty developers if you will. And I wanted to show you just really

quickly some of the key topics that the advisory group in this area from the community kind of raised up

as the top issues, and kind of new things too, very different from sort of the old faculty development stuff

that you might be familiar with, and so these are some of the areas that we will be focusing on during the

online event in April – April 1, 2, and 3.

And then just really quick, in closing, I wanted to put this poll out to folks, and maybe we can do this while

Marc is making some comments, but I wanted to weigh in with the community, this is a little tricky, a little

wordy on the polls, my bad. Looking at these areas, which of these are most significant to you in your

work? And as you’re chiming in on that I’ll be keeping an eye on it, and maybe Marc you can get to your

closing remarks.



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That’s perfect. On behalf of all the intent – attendees and all of us listening, I want to thank the presenters

and the conversation; it was an excellent coverage of a pretty complicated subject. So, thank you all and

thanks to the participants for joining us from all around the web. Before you sign off, there are two links in

the left hand chat window; one would be where you can find the archive. As you know, all of our sessions

are archived with the slides, the speakers, and the chat sessions. Also, there’s a survey, we’d appreciate

that, so we can continue to provide with content that you want to hear about, and those surveys are

important as you know. That’s that part of that feedback loop that for adaptive learning, well, here we are

doing that.

As you marked your calendars, March 20 th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Christopher Brooks, Senior

Research Fellow with EDUCAUSE and JD Walker, Research Associate at the University of Minnesota will

be presenting a seminar on Sifting Through Data: Completion, Motivation, and Learning in the Minnesota

MOOCS. This has been a production of EDUCAUSE Live, production from EDUCAUSE to Higher

Education Technology Association. On behalf of EDUCAUSE, I’m Marc Hoit, and I want to thank you for

joining us for another EDUCAUSE Live, and we’ll listen to you next time. Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.

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