A Culminating Selection of Work from My Masters of Higher Education Program
Yeah! I have now completed the work necessary to complete my second masters degree. This one is a Masters of Science in Higher Education Administration with a concentration in Online Learning.
Please have a peek at my culminating capstone paper and presentation.
Personalized Learning:
The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths article, posted by my classmate Jill Motyka, caught my attention this week. All during this MHE622 course this topic has been rattling around in the back of my mind. I predict, in the near future, we are going to see more analysis of and course building revolving around what Peter Smith calls ‘personalized learning’ and ‘connected learning’. With all the resources, people, content, etc. available I believe the next natural step is to ‘allow technology’ to bring these together to further the learning for the student -any type of student- and especially college-aged student and adult learners.
Bay Path University’s American Women’s College [TAWC] has their SOUL system of personalizing online learning for their contingency of undergraduate learners and I believe this is one ‘approach to personalized learning.’ However, I think the future will show more approaches that will see more ‘wrangling and curating’ of personalized approaches to learning. I believe these new approaches will even further augment the type of personalized learning TAWC is currently doing.
The wrangling and curating of learning I envision will tap into social networking, big data, and other knowledge bases using the Internet and other technologies. The result of this gathering as Smith concludes will allow us to, “…be able to scale those personalized learning paths—to millions of learners in the coming era.” I also predict that mobile devices and other mobile technologies will aid in distributing this new ‘personalized learning’ to the student.
Working with Adult Learners:
Being a life-long learner and involved, daily, in supporting faculty with delivery of their content to adult learners, the article Six Ways to Support Adult Online Learners, posted by classmate Carol Dykas, seemed interesting and the fact that bullet-pointed articles always attract me. This brief article holds wonderful reminders.
Kelly actually cites Natlaie Peeterse’s findings, “adult learners need to become more aware of how they learn.” Because adult learners come to ‘their learning’ with some prior knowledge adult learners, with some guidance, can become more self-aware and learn how-to learn better. These six tips offer great ideas that I can use when working with online faculty-to remind them to use these ideas with their students and I can use these ideas as I help teach faculty to become better online teachers- it’s a win-win.
Concluding reflections & thoughts about what I have learned overall in the course.
As I reflect back over these very swift moving eight weeks, I feel I have learned much and confirmed much of what I already knew about online learning. Eight weeks ago my initial questions and hopes for this course were to examine current trends in the field and evaluate the impact these trends may have on the future of online education.
I feel especially better able to evaluate the effectiveness of various models of online education and more prepared to articulate the use of a variety of ‘disruptive technologies’ in online learning-and most specifically mobile learning. Many of my questions pertaining to the future, of online pedagogies, still go unanswered, which is normal-who can predict the future. However, having taken this MHE622 course, I feel more confident in articulating my ideas for the future of online education and learning.
References:
Kelly, R. (2012, March 2). Six Ways to Support Adult Online Learners. Faculty Focus. Retrieved December 8, 2014 from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/six-ways-to-support-adult-online-learners/
Smith, P. (2014, November 10). The Coming Era of Personalized Learning Paths (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/coming-era-personalized-learning-paths
Wiseman, M. (2014. October 22). Greetings to My MHE622 Colleagues. [weblog comment]. Retrieved from: http://mwisemanmhe.com/greetings-to-my-mhe622-colleagues/
The Online Learning Consortium 20th Annual International Conference #ALN14 is being held at the Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando at the heart of Walt Disney World. Founded back in 1992 from funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [formerly known as the Sloan Consortium], this year Sloan has undergone some rebranding as @OLC moves into new markets worldwide. This name change signifies where Sloan has been and where it is headed-online.
Leadership & Administration and Faculty & Student Engagement are the primary tracks this year with the all-encompassing Undefined track serving to contain the balance of the hundreds of sessions offered this year. One event coordinator told me there were 2200 attendees with more offerings than any previous year.
I arrived interested in hearing more about:
Day 1 Wednesday, October 29, 2014 did not disappoint.
I started #ALN14 by listening to Jason Rhode of Northern Illinois University speak about Designing Competency-Based Self-Paced Online Workshops for Introducing Faculty to Online Teaching Technologies.
Granted Northern Illinois University [NIU] has a much larger ‘scale’ than Bay Path in their approach to orientating their faculty to online learning-however, they do many things we already do:
A few takeaways I would like to see us implement in our online faculty orientation are:
I attended a session entitled, Building Online Academic Communities with the Commons in a Box, by Matthew K. Gold from City Tech and Grad Center of CUNY. I have been working with WordPress since 2009 and believe it is a great solution for containing an online community [as well as ePortfolios].
Commons in a box is great solution that would give us everything we need to create our own BPU academic online community- and it’s free. We like free.
This would give faculty, student groups, departments etc. virtual space to create:
With the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing Program at the top of my mind, I can easily envision an MFA Cohort page for faculty and students alike, to congregate and share all sorts of information.
Of course, there would be challenges:
Yet, the possibilities are:
This session ended with an interesting quote, by Jim Groom,
‘It ain’t a community without love, feedback, and being there.’
The afternoon keynote speaker Dr. John Medina was one of my favorites of the day. Speaking to an audience of at least 800 people, once he started talking, John barely stopped to breathe. John’s premise revolves around the 12 brain rules. In his talk he spoke about a couple.
Survival: The brain is a survival organ. It is designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival.
Isn’t it interesting how learning often revolves around sitting still, in a classroom? How might we incorporate some of these brain survival rules into online learning? John went on to explain the impact of exercise.
Exercise: Exercise boosts brain power. The human brain evolved under conditions of almost constant motion. From this, one might predict that the optimal environment for processing information would include motion. Indeed, the best business meeting would have everyone walking at about 1.8 miles per hour. At work, we are in our own way, by incorporating our standing desks!
To get a little sense of John’s energy have a look at this quick video. I think John’s book[s] are a must for my library.
This was just Day One!
How did Leanna and Mary’s presentation on Collaborative Creation go?
Stay tuned for more details.
I will be adding content into my ePortfolio as I move through the MHE Program.
