Some thoughts on Stanford's GSE Course Educ403x.

The Graduate School of Education at Stanford created a "course" that explores what they call Education's Digital Future.

All material used in the course, suggested readings, videos of guest speakers, and basically all material that makes up the course are available at their website. There are some gaps, but I admire their attempt to honor the subject matter of the course by making it available...well, online.

Those involved in creating the forum have created a challenging and important arena in which bright minds can explore the changing landscape of digitially-enchanced instruction. They seem to have created an ongoing conversation to explore the changing intructional environment in Higher Education.

In their words:

The digital future of education has not yet been determined. We are building it now. That task raises very large questions. How do people learn best digitally? What does educational equity mean in a digital world? Who will profit in a greatly expanded market for digital educational products, and who will make the rules for this marketplace? How will quality standards for digital learning be determined and enforced?

We do not pretend to have all the answers. We do hope to ask the right questions. We know that many of the most important questions are not just technical. They implicate the politics, ethics, and very meaning of education at a new moment in the history of modernity.

Fascinating stuff here. I'm starting with the inaugural Fall 2012 course and working through. Some sessions are archived in their entirety (presentation slides, summaries, suggested readings), whereas others are simply summaries. It's not perfect, and I find their seemingly deliberate ommition of material "interesting" given the topic of conversation (is this archive simply a taste? Must one have Stanford affiliation for full access? Must one be physically present during live sessions for full access?).

Adrian Sannier

If you'd like a crash course in what they seem to want to cover in Fall 2012, this is a good start. Adrian Sannier, (now former) senior vice president for product with Pearson, gives a TED-style talk for the Educ403x crowd called “Education at Scale: The Rise of the Rockstar Teacher.”

His vita is impressive: CIO at Arizona State University, professor in the Division of Computing Studies at ASU, served as the Stanley Chair of Interdisciplinary Engineering and Associate Director of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University.

In the talk, he's engaging in a shout-at-you type of way, and as a now high-ranking rep of Pearson, his stake is admittedly high. He offers valuable insight, however, into the private world that is knocking at some doors and running past others in the world of education and funding.

My favorite part? The Q&A at the end. A chance to converse, to pick apart, to find points of disagreement. Interestingly, in the forum Sannier responds to many students and faculty in ways that make it seem he either

a) didn't understand the question or

b) would rather dodge it with a barely-on-topic reply oozing with the enthusiasm of a business pitch.

I enjoyed the segment because it allowed me to formulate my own questions. For example, we're I there, I would like to ask:

"Will you address the issue that many universities are concerned about and quietly voicing that those undergraduate courses many online education providers aim to replace are revenue streams that universities depend on for everything from higher-level research to undergraduate scholarships, and if that revenue is diverted elsewhere, no amount of alumni donations will protect them from potential institutional quality depletion. Should universities simply start rethinking their "business model"?

And so on.

Below I've included a link to the video via YouTube.