I’ve been a bit frustrated in the past (actually, I still am) that the history of open courses has not been fully reflected in conversation about the Stanford AI class. People like David Wiley, Alec Couros, Stephen Downes and others have been running open courses since 2007 (this insidehighered article does touch on the history). Audrey Watters captures my thinking when she states: “What does it mean — culturally, pedagogically, politically, financially — that Stanford garners so much buzz for its free online courses while other MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) go unheralded?”. However, I’m sure there are educators pre-2007 who are saying “hey, we’re not getting credit for our work with open courses!”.

But that’s a personal ego gripe. It’s encouraging to see educators and trainers exploring the scaling capacity of learning through the use of technology. I enjoyed listening to the reflections of Sal, Sebastian, and Peter. They are excited, as many of us teaching open online courses are, about the capacity for accessible learning opportunities to increase student control and empowerment. Many of their proclamations (decoupling assessment from teaching, the creativity of learners when they don’t face organizational barriers, the power of the online experience) will be familiar to many who have followed our open courses. Interestingly, Thrun stated that online learners did better (by a factor of 2 with those making top grades) than in class learners.

It’s good to have growing diversity in researchers and educators offering alternative course models. As more people experiment with open online course, new tools will be developed and recognition of the value of open learning will also (hopefully) increase.

Analytics also hold promise for providing increased quality of learning for individuals. We experience benefits of analytics in many areas of our lives, including music, books, and social network friend recommendations. My interest in learning analytics, however, doesn’t blind me to potential risks. We should be concerned and alert as analytics discussions turn to education. Learners are not widgets to be optimized and shifted around in assembly lines. By the same account, analytics can yield value in improving learner success in the current education system, and, more critically, providing perspectives on how we should improve the system itself. The slides below are from a presentation I delivered at EDUCAUSE 2011:

The internet has a different value scheme than what we encounter with physical products, particularly in relation to input costs. For each physical book that I purchase, I have to pay for input costs (paper, printing, shipping). These input costs don’t exist with digital content. The web is, at least partly, a huge content duplicating machine. It costs me almost nothing if you copy resources from my site. My input costs consist mainly of the time I spent producing the resource and bandwidth of the server costs of someone accessing and downloading the resource. Because duplication requires negligible tangible cost input, content that I produce can really only be valued based on intangible value. Intangible value, however, can be assigned through various means: money, speaking invitations, reputation, influence in my field, and so on.

Digital educational content in itself is not worth money. It is easy to duplicate. One of my favorite images in capturing this is the Encarta price curve of death:

When Encarta was gearing for release, early prospective customers stated they would be willing to pay $1000 to $2000 for the product. Microsoft set the price at $395. When they eventually cancelled Encarta a few decades later, it was selling for $22.95.

Companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill are aware that content value is approaching zero. They’ve opted to raise value through a process of integration: content, evaluation/assessment, system to host the content, instructor resources and videos, and so on. Pearson sells a learning experience, not content. Which is why they’re rebranding themselves as the world’s largest learning company. These companies are betting on integration of services as a value point.

But what is the value point for learners?

Should students go to university considering the incredible increase in tuition and associated costs? The College Conspiracy video, with over 2 million views, argues that higher education is basically a scam. Similarly, the Higher Education Price Index (.pdf) details higher education costs and inflation, consistently exceeding other segments of society. TD Economics counters naysayers and argues that higher education is the best investment you can make (.pdf):

The sizeable debt that students often have to bear on graduation from postsecondary education, combined with the recent weakness in the youth labour market, have led some to speculate whether a diploma or degree is worth the cost. This perspective is fallacious. Investment in post-secondary education remains the single best investment that one can make. Higher education raises the prospects for employment, is more likely to result in full-time employment, reduces the odds of unemployment, lowers the duration of unemployment if a job is lost, and helps to facilitate retraining and/or skills development – all of which raises annual income, which is compounded over your entire lifetime. The end result is a higher standard of living, not just for the individual but also for their family. It also brings gains to society.

UNESCO states that (.pdf) higher education continues to see enormous student increases, with over 150 million students enrolled in 2009 – a 53% increase from 2000. India needs to build about 800 new universities by 2020. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, opened in 2009, cost as much as $20 billion to build and staff.

Higher education is valuable for individuals and for society.

It is certainly critical for improving quality of life for individuals through science and medicine. Higher education should also serve a personal role in helping people discover ideals, even truths, by which to organize and live their lives. I see the university as one of the power structures of society, the others being government, businesses, press and (increasingly) social media, and religious institutions. Universities serve to hold to account the other power structures of society. I’m constantly amazed that people with liberal leanings are sometimes the most aggressive in dismissing universities. Anyone with progressive or liberal perspectives (I’m not referring to politics) will lose the most if universities fragment and lose their societal influence. If I was a diehard capitalist – for the record, I don’t have enough money to quality – focused on creating a context where I could pursue profit making with limited regulation, I’d love to see those meddling universities subdued through a divide and conquer approach. Better yet, I’d love to take over the role of universities and use the learning experience of others as a personal profit generator.

In an age of YouTube and open education, what possible value can university offer learners? Research and athletics – at least in the US – are commonly stated as important contributors to university value. However, we could do far more research if the state didn’t have to pay for students. Scrap students, invest it all in research. In terms of sports, the shame of college sports left a bit of a bad taste for me. I don’t buy that either research or sports need to be connected to universities.

Let me posit a duplication theory of education value: if something can be duplicated with limited costs, it can’t serve as a value point for higher education. Content is easily duplicated and has no value. What is valuable, however, is that which can’t be duplicated without additional input costs: personal feedback and assessment, contextualized and personalized navigation through complex topics, encouragement, questioning by a faculty member to promote deeper thinking, and a context and infrastructure of learning. Basically: human input costs make education valuable. We can’t duplicate personal interaction without spending more money. We can scale content, but we can’t scale encouragement. We can improve lecturing through peer teaching, but we can’t scale the timely interventions and nudges by faculty that influence deeper learning.

Universities that thrive in the future will be those that recognize the need for new value point positioning. Some will pursue an integration approach to value creation, others will rely on world-class faculty, and still others will rely on huge research projects or successful sports teams. Those will be anomalies and outliers. The vast majority of universities that will educate humanity in the coming decades will be those that structure their value point on elements that cannot be easily duplicated and scaled, or at minimum, require input costs to do so.

This might seem like a trite observation. But consider for a moment how dramatically a university would change if it adopted a duplication theory of value. Content would be open. Teaching would be open. The relationship between on-campus and online would change as well. Hybrids are the way to go. Most of the economic input costs of the university would (should) be directed to those areas that impact learners. Teaching, learning actually, and personalization of content and feedback would be central to the university. I’m sounding a bit utopian, but I can’t think of a different model on which to base higher education. The future of higher education has almost become a separate area of passion for me (Kathleen Matheos and I did an article on systemic change in education), so I’d be interested to what others think. What is the foundation of education moving forward?

If it’s data you seek, then Education at a Glance 2011 will give you almost 500 pages to consider, including teacher salaries, the impact of student background on performance, educational attainment and employment, educational access, and so on. I’ve used the chart on teaching time (from previous versions of this OECD report) in my presentations in the past. The interesting aspect of this chart is that teaching time – much hallowed in most schools – actually decreases in high performing systems in countries like Finland. As the report states:

The proportion of working time spent teaching provides information on the amount of time available for activities such as lesson preparation, correction, in-service training and staff meetings. A large proportion of working time spent teaching may indicate that less time is devoted to tasks such as student assessment and lesson preparation.

An education company being acquired is hardly novel – we are entering a period of dramatic change in education and the change will largely be led from outside of the education system.

$1.64 billion – that is novel.

Why is Blackboard worth that much? If you speak with academics and students, the product and company is almost universally disliked. This largely stems from their D2L lawsuit a few years ago and the concerns that generated around patents in the educational technology market.

Providence Equity must have been aware of this end user negativity before they purchased Blackboard. Which means they are seeing the investment from a perspective that I don’t recognize. And it has been bothering me.

Providence has three areas where it can generate value for its Bb purchase:

1. Integration of tools as a competitive advantage: The LMS market requires integrated tools – as I detailed here – in order to add value in what is a Moodle-dominated LMS market (globally).

2. Integration of existing companies within the Providence investment portfolio to leverage advantage from Bb. Have a look at their education-dominated investments. None of these companies seem to target end users. They are generally listed as:
- Technology-based learning solutions focused on student training and testing results in healthcare and other vocational fields.
- subscription-based online education products.
- or vaguely, the largest independent education company in Sweden
- leading provider of technology solutions and services to the K-12 education market.
- leading provider of private post-secondary education in North America.
- leading provider of technology-oriented post-secondary education in the U.S.
- leading provider of university access and preparation programs and English language courses to international students, as well as a provider of vocational courses mainly to Australian students.
(at this point, you talk to your PR people and say “hey, look, you’ve used your quota of the words “leading provider” on our website – can you hit a thesaurus please?”)
- global leader in integrated software and processing solutions and is a leading provider of information availability services.

3. Content-centric value that fosters an educational ecosystem with Bb at the centre – such as recently announced partnerships with educational publishers. Before long, Bb will deliver courses and assessment in their entirety to the cash-strapped education sector. Plug and play faculty. Offering degrees, as Pearson is doing in UK, is a logical step – even if only done in partnership with existing universities.

Blackboard’s strategy, as detailed above, focuses on product integration, full-spectrum education (content provision to testing), targeting the needs and concerns of senior-level decision makers (management focus), and fostering ecosystems where other companies enhance Bb’s centrality by providing content and related services in the Bb platform.

Bb is not focused on learning and teaching in their strategy, though I’m sure their language to faculty will include teaching language. Where words can misrepresent focus, investment history presents a clear reality: the focus is on shaping the education field and targeting leaders and decision makers within the field.

And, if you’re an entrepreneur trying to make a profit by offering a service to a troubled sector, Providence Equity has taken the right approach. In the US and UK in particular, higher education is at the early stages of a massive shift from public ownership to private ownership and entrepreneurial solutions. As the funds flow to innovators – or in Bb’s case, value hubs – tremendous wealth will be created for the risk-takers. In language and ideology that I’ve heard in numerous discussions over the past five years “education is the last industry to globalize”. Providence is one of the early companies out of the gate. Pearson, U of Phoenix, Capella, Laurette, and others are marching in a similar direction.

Let’s tackle this in a bit more detail.

Connecting with others is a satisfying experience. Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter greatly reduce the friction to connectedness. I’m still periodically surprised when I come across a former colleague, friend, or classmate on Facebook. Friend suggestions on social networks can sometimes jolt me into an afternoon of reflecting on experiences in grade 6. Connectedness is crazy stuff.

Where things get a bit more confusing with PLNs is when we fail to advance beyond those warm fuzzy feelings about being connected to others with more substantive knowledge and action. Being connected is at best a conduit – a suggestion or hint of potential value in information exchange or general interaction. Perhaps we share YouTube videos, interesting articles, and break into the odd spontaneous debate with political extremists (both lefties and righties are good for much mileage on this topic). Or perhaps we get together and create something – an article, a list of resources on a topic, and so on. These are important “social glue” activities in strengthening and maintaining our connection with others in our PLN.

But, to use a dating metaphor, this is really only the love & infatuation stage of a PLN relationship. Once we get past the thrill of “ooh, I love my PLN”, we can get down to something more practical (and yes, boring). What’s important with a PLN is not “what it does for me” but rather how I can use it to change things in education, society, or the world. Learning networks give us potential for action. For many educators, these networks function on a gift-economy basis. We’re involved in a type of social contract where we share freely with others and, in turn, we receive freely from them. Once the sharing stops, the network collapses. Which is why I’m pushing back against this notion of “what does my PLN do for me?”.

Consider your PLN – perhaps you have a dozen (or many dozen) Twitter followers. Or a handful of readers for your blog. Or a few hundred Facebook friends (for the record, Facebook friends are the Pesos of friend currency – the numbers look big but are largely useless). Think for a moment. What can you do with and for those people in your PLN? Mobilize for a cause? Run an open course? Create something of significance (an image, a video)? For example, Alan Levine is good at producing idea artifacts for his network, such as his Twitter Life Cycle. His work in creating and sharing this image has helped me in many a discussion with educators about how Twitter works. Wendy Drexler’s Networked Student has been viewed by over 80 000 people. Creation, collaboration, and sharing are the true value points of a PLN. It’s not what it does for me, but rather what I am now able to do with and for others.

Being connected, without creating and contributing, is a self-focused, self-centered state. I’ve ranted about this before, but there is never a good time to be a lurker. Lurking=taking. The concept of legitimate peripheral participation sounds very nice, but is actually negative. Even when we are newcomers in a network or community, we should be creating and sharing our growing understanding. We noticed this time and again in CCK08/09/EdFutures/PLENK: a resource (image, blog post) created by someone trying to understand a topic is often more valuable than instructor-provided readings. Why? Well, novices and experts have different approaches to topics and tasks. A novice who is grappling with an idea is likely better able to connect with another novice than an expert who advances a more nuanced, pattern-based assessment of a topic.

Online, we are obsessed with size and numbers (Twitter followers, open courses, number of blog hits, Google alerts on ourselves/blogs, etc). But you don’t need to run an open course with large numbers of participants to make an impact. An open course for five people is just fine. It’s the act of giving, not the subsequent impact, that is most significant.