Category: Education

If you are looking at getting a degree through Harvard’s Extension school make sure you check out the residency requirement for your program. The ALM in IT degree requires you to spend one semester on campus. The summer session counts as a semester and it is only 8 weeks long.
Continue reading “Harvard Extension School Residency Requirement”

The United States Census has some interesting facts on the education rates of each state. The chart below shows the percentage of adults over 25 years of age who have at least a bachelors degree. The top position goes to the District of Columbia, but since it is such a small area, it probably isn’t really fair to compare it with the other states. If we don’t count D.C. then the most educated state is Massachusetts where you stand a 36% chance that anyone you happen to meet has graduated with a four year degree.

Continue reading “Most Educated State in the US”

Capella announced that it is going to go public. Capella has always looked like an interesting university. They are a commercial enterprise and based on their requirements it seems that they probably rank a little higher academically than University of Phoenix.

“Capella Education Co. of Minneapolis, one of the few private education firms to offer college degrees exclusively through online courses, said Monday it plans an initial public stock offering that could raise up to $86.25 million.”

“Capella, the parent company of Capella University, will use proceeds from the IPO for working capital and general corporate purposes, which could include expansion, developing new courses and acquisitions, the company said.”

It will be interesting to see how they put this money to use. Developing online courses can be very expensive. If they are able to create a solid infrastructure for creating courses, it could help them leap ahead of the competition. Currently the two places that seem to be successfully doing online education are Harvard and Standford. Their online classes mirror live classes and they do a good job of keeping the experience the same (as much as possible) for both the online and real time students.

Online learning is a growing market into which private companies have raced since the late 1990s, partly because traditional colleges and universities were slow to adapt to online teaching.

One of the reasons traditional institutions have been slow to react is because of the expense of being cutting edge. It is a lot less expensive to put a class online that it was a few years ago, but it is still a major undertaking. I think most colleges and universities are looking at it, but most don’t have the money to successfully pull it off.

Capella attributes its growth partly to growing acceptance of online education and to its relationships with companies, colleges and branches of the U.S. military that have endorsed its online services to their employees or students.

I think this is the key. Capella is not inexpensive. Most people aren’t going to take classes unless they are paid for by their employer. If Capella can sell themselves to large companies as a way for their employees to take classes without needing to be gone from work, they can get a tremendous number of student. I was at a Franklin Covey training session where I met someone who works for GM. He said he was working on his PHD through Capella. I got the impression that a good number of GM employees are doing this as well. A good number of them will probably never complete the degree.

I am concerned about institutions that opt for a cheap way of doing online education where it is basically correspondence school using the internet instead of USPS. A lot of these classes rely on relatively light reading assignments and much of the student’s time is spent on message boards with other students. I don’t think that the message boards is necessarily a bad way to learn and interact, but I think it can keep people from really learning how to concentrate on a subject for a long period of time.

You should be able to assume that a college graduate can stay engaged in a day long seminar because they should have learned that level of concentration in order to get their degree. If their educational experience was primarily reading and responding to short posts, they may never develop the skills necessary to assimilate 3 hours of information from a dense lecture.

Another problem with some of the modern teaching theory is the idea that if you just make a bunch of people interact with each other, their life experiences will rub off and everyone will be smarter. In some cases this is the idea behind using the message boards. I think it is valuable to learn from your fellow students. In fact that is one of the reasons that I really like learning in an actual classroom. But I think that learning that is primarily based on talking with other students about their experiences in life falls short of true education. In most fields of study that have been around long enough to reach some sort of structure, simply talking with other students won’t allow you to cover the material very quickly. A group of freshman music students are unlikely to really understand the fundamentals of music theory just by chatting with each other. That isn’t to say that chatting won’t produce some valuable interaction, but they aren’t likely to learn the majority of what they need to know this way.

I think online courses are most effective when they mirror an actual class with videos of the teacher lecturing. I don’t think this is how Capella is currently doing their classes.

I think the best thing that a company like Capella could do is partner up with existing institutions and re brand the lectures from the top lecturers in each field. Teaching fellows could help facilitate the day to day questions and course management. The professors themselves would need to be available in some capacity as well. If this was done correctly the academic experience from Capella could be better than going to a physical university because students would get to study under the best teacher for each class. Recent high school graduates would still want to go to a physical college or university because the social education is just as important as the academic education, but older students looking to continue their education could have a greater trust in the academic soundness of their university even if it is only a virtual one.

Article: Capella Education going public

Last year Duke gave iPods to all of it’s incoming freshmen. An article came out today that gives a small overview of the program. It sounds like the iPod program wasn’t really studied. They basically just gave everyone iPods to see what would happen. The article has quotes from teachers saying that the iPods helped keep students engaged.

Professors reported that students seemed more engaged in classes where they could use the iPods. They also cited strong student use of the audio capabilities of the iPod in their presentations, and more accuracy in quoting from interviews they did using the iPods.

I guess that is great and everything, but I’m afraid that if iPod’s are what makes the class “engaging” then there is probably something wrong with the class. While I can appreciate the value of being able to record a conversation to reference it later, we’ve had this capability for some time in an obscure device called a tape recorder.

Just for the fun of it, take a look at how the article would look if we replaced the word iPod with tape recorder.

When tape recorders go collegiate
By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

When Kenneth Rogerson walked into his newspaper journalism class on the first day of the school year, the professor could barely contain his excitement.

After a quick introduction he broke the big news: “We got the grant,” he told his class. “You all get tape recorders.”

As if on cue, the students exhaled an audible “whoa” and exchanged elated glances. Duke University in Durham, N.C., had already made many a headline as the first school ever to provide all incoming freshmen with their own 20-gigabyte tape recorders – enough space to store up to 5,000 songs.

Ok so now it sound silly. But why? Pretty much all of the uses described in the article are things that can be easily done with older technology. This is a fundamental problem with the way that technology is implemented in education. When the focus is on a new piece of technology instead of new educational processes, we end being excited about mundane capabilities as can be seen by the following (modified) quote:

Professors reported that students seemed more engaged in classes where they could use the tape recorders. They also cited strong student use of the audio capabilities of the tape recorder in their presentations, and more accuracy in quoting from interviews they did using the tape recorders.

It still sounds silly with tape recorders instead of iPods, but the substitution helps clear the head of technology utopia and puts the focus on what is actually being accomplished instead of what devices is being used. So students are using them in their presentations. That is really nice, but I bet if they gave every incoming student a fog machine professors would start to notice the use of fog in some of the student presentations. If it was encouraged, professors would probably even say that there was a “strong use” of fog in the student presentations. This doesn’t mean that the devices are helping education.

I think that technology is extremely underutilized in education, but usually this isn’t because of lack of technology. Duke’s experiement is interesting, but without a solid infrastructure in place I’m not sure what results they were expecting. They weren’t really giving students anything that they couldn’t do with a tape recorder. Technology only becomes wildly beneficial when the infrastructure is in place ahead of time. For example, putting a computer in every dorm room would be beneficial, but it is 100 times more useful if the dorms have network wiring, access to the internet and library databases, and the college puts all of it’s class assignments and resources online. In fact if a university concentrates on the infrastructure, the students will bring their own computers.

I think Duke should concentrate more on creating an infrastructure that provides content for devices like iPods. Here are some of my suggestions:

• Record Every Lecture — These could be made available using podcasting tools, so students could “subscribe” to classes and they would be downloaded automatically. They could review it from their computer, iPod, hand held computer, etc. Students could increase the playback speed to review a lecture quickly just to refresh their memory or play it back in their sleep to try to benefit from subconcoius learning. (Ok maybe that is a stretch, but I would have tried it in college.)

  If the university made the content available to the general public, you’d have people listening to the lectures on their way to work, while exercising, etc. They could even limit it to alumni which would help keep them connected with the donor base.

• Publish Interviews — Record and make available interviews and conversations related to the class. For example say a journalism professor posted a 10 minute telephone interview with a well known journalist for the New York Times discussing ethics. Content like that could provide a wonderful starting point for a class discussion or just as a way to introduce the topic. Over the years the school could build a very large repository of content.
• Share Lectures with Other Universities — Imagine that biology students at Duke University are studying how DNA is formed. If they could quickly access a lecture from Princeton covering the same topic it could greatly increase their understanding of the subject just by hearing things in a different way.
• Suggested Listening Lists — If a school built up a large repository of audio content and indexed it properly, students could be given suggestions on what to listen to. This could be based on their current classes, but it would be even more interesting if it was based on what questions they missed on quizes and exams. Students could subscribe to their personalized RSS feed with audio enclosures. As the semester progressed they would be given various items to listen to based on areas where they demonstrated a lack of understanding. They could download the items automatically to their computer, iPod, or whatever device they used and listen to them in the evenings, in their car, while exercising, etc.

All in all I think it is an interesting experiment. It is always interesting to give people technology and see what creative things they do with it. If Duke comes back next year with a solid plan for creating a better infrastructure to support portable media devices to help facilitate learning, then I’d say the experiment was a success. If not I’d say that they are chasing shiny objects instead of focusing on real improvements to the educational process.

Regardless, the iPod experiement was probably well worth it. The publicity they recieved with their target audience was worth a lot more than the cost of the iPods. If that was their intention, then the program was a great success.