Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.19.10 | The New York Times’s special Sunday section on education features a lively collection of articles, many of which reflect how technology is shaping learning.

Last week we pointed to this Chronicle of Higher Education story on obstacles to recording and sharing lectures online—not least of which was reluctance on the part of professors. This New York Times story focuses on professors with their own large followings—the “tweedy celebrities of cyberspace.” 

Marian C. Diamond, who has taught anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years, is one such star. Writer Katie Hafner notes that videos of Diamond’s anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, “have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection.”

Still, the process to post lectures is slow—and costly:

Open course material on the Internet may be free, but getting it there definitely isn’t. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the principal financial backer of the open educational movement, has spent more than $110 million over the past eight years, with more than $14 million going to M.I.T. The cost of re-creating the educational experience is high. Only 33 of the 1,975 courses posted by M.I.T. have videos of lectures. Another hundred or so contain multimedia material like simulations and animations. The rest is simply text: syllabuses, class notes, reading lists, problem sets, homework assignments.

Relying largely on money from Hewlett, Yale has spent $30,000 to $40,000 for each course it puts online. This includes the cost of the videographer, generating a transcript and providing what Diana E. E. Kleiner, who runs Open Yale Courses, calls “quality assurance.” By next fall, Yale will have reached its initial goal of putting up 36 courses, and has plans to add more.

The story also covers alternative stuctures, such as Peer 2 Peer University, a free, nonprofit experiment seeded by the Hewlett and Shuttleworth foundations that combines open course material from multiple institutions and develops participant networks:

David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?”

“If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”

P2PU is also working to develop degree alternatives that demonstrate mastery of skills and thinking capabilities.

“We live in a new society,” said Neeru Paharia, a doctoral student at Harvard Business School and P2PU co-founder. “People are mobile. We have the Internet. We don’t necessarily need to work within the confines of what defines a traditional education.”

Go read the full story.

The Times also invited staff writers from different fields to test-drive courses available online from Yale, MIT, Stanford and other universities. Check out this nifty syllabus sampler.

In other areas, technology is helping to save money. Debate teams have long saved all arguments “for” and “against” in large containers that accompany the teams to competitions. But more schools are now switching to electronic organization, with students arguing from notes on their laptops. Emory University, which went paperless last fall with its younger debate teams, “was spending $10,000 a year on printing and related costs and $50 for every paper-filled tub flown to a tournament.”

The Cross Examination Debate Association says about 25 percent of teams have gone paperless this academic year. It will, however, take some time before all documents are digitized and teams embrace the paperless debate. The NYT’s Robbie Brown explains the opposition:

As the dissenting argument goes, college is too late to introduce such a sweeping change. Most college debaters have been using the paper system since middle school. “We don’t think it’s a great idea to switch when they’re competing for the most important tournaments of their careers,” says Luke Hill, a coach for the Northwestern University program, which uses discarded banana boxes instead of tubs. He is adamant that Northwestern will not be changing anytime soon.

While he concedes that paperless debating will eventually catch hold — computers have too many advantages in search and storage — for now, he says, the most competitive teams generally consider it more important to maintain continuity. At a recent round-robin tournament in Kentucky, eight of nine teams continued to use paper. And there is little sign of change among the next generation; the paper system still thrives among middle and high school teams, where debate is more pastime than passion.

Plus: Another educational/marketing use for YouTube: advertising an upcoming course. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that in an effort to generate buzz about his multimedia reporting course, Lehigh University journalism professor Jeremy Littau e-mailed this video to journalism majors and linked to it from Facebook and Twitter.