Presentations by Dr. Cathy Mincberg
♦ Online Learning for the iGeneration - eSchool News
Webinar
Cathy Mincberg, the Chief Academic Officer and VP for KC Distance Learning (also known as Aventa Learning) and Gregg Levin, VP for School Solutions for Aventa Learning discuss why the generation of students in K-12 today needs online learning options. They also discuss a major survey of students about learning preferences.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1CPjwcBAWU
♦ Gates Foundation: Is Online Learning a Solution in Search of a Problem?
Click Here to Download in PPT format
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Creating a Literacy Spine by Design
Santa Monica, CA
February 18-19
Panel: What Will Disrupt Literacy Learning/Instruction as We Know it?
Presentation by Dr. Cathy Mincberg, Chief Academic Officer, KC Distance Learning
Is Online Learning a Solution in Search of a Problem?
My experience in supervising technology departments for over 10 years is that this nation has spent billions on student technology will virtually no academic gain to show for it. Like many of you, I was a skeptic about the instructional value of technology at the classroom level.
So, until I became deeply immersed in online learning, I would have answered the question – “is online learning a solution in search of a problem? – as yes.
And then I read Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen and learned about disruptive innovation and watched students learn online.
Dr. Christensen and his colleagues are experts in studying the effects of disruptive innovations in business and developing predictive theories about how they work.
An example of a classic disruptive innovation is the appearance of transistors that could be used in radios. They were small but the sound quality in this innovation was terrible and costly.
RCA produced beautiful sound quality with huge vacuum tubes in large living room size radios. RCA’s customers would never have tolerated the poor quality of the new fangled transistors.
So, Sony did what companies do with an expensive and lower quality innovation, they find a market that isn’t being served – in this case – teenagers who loved their music being portable, away from their parents, and had some cash in their pockets.
Over time transistors improved until they could compete with the quality of radios with those huge vacuum tubes and RCA was out of business.
Christensen observes that no company has ever both kept the old technology and nurtured the new disruptive technology and survived - - - except education.
Education has a long history of adopting the new innovation, while still keeping the old and evolving. Moving from the one room school house to universal high school education for all is a good example. But can education continue to adapt to new innovation?
To better understand how innovation can disrupt a current practice, it is important to know a bit more about how and why students learn. Disrupting Class presents that students are motivated to learn in 2 ways: extrinsically and intrinsically.
In poor countries, students study to keep their families alive. Poverty is an extrinsic motivation to study a subject that doesn’t naturally interest the student.
In prosperous countries, students study because the subject interests them, intrinsic motivation.
Korea and Japan, long the producers of students studying engineering, math and science now see diminishing numbers of students studying these subjects just as has happened in the US.
As those countries have become more prosperous, they have been displaced by India and China as producers of large numbers of technical students. Christensen’s point is that online learning, because it can be modified to teach students in the way they best learn, can provide the motivation students need to study subjects that aren’t naturally intrinsically motivating.
Online learning is a disruptive innovation, which has found a market in students who are not being served (like those teenagers who were not well served by large vacuum tubed radios) well by the old bricks and mortar model of education.
Today there are 50 million public school students in the US. (start slides here)
1 million students are online - increasing at the rate of 20% a year.
What is it about online learning that motivates students to use it?
• Able to take college level courses
• Work at my own pace
• Take courses not available at my school
• Complete my HS requirements
• Get extra help in a subject
• Reduce scheduling conflicts
• Easier for me to learn
There are 8 intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist) and within each intelligence there are different learning styles such as auditory, visual and kinesthetic , as well students are slow – on pace – or fast learners. And just to complicate matters, a person may use different learning styles for different intelligences.
When instruction is delivered just the way a student needs to be taught, the experience becomes more intrinsically motivating.
Imagine being a teacher in a classroom and trying to meet each student where he or she learns best.
Online education can differentiate a huge amount for students for the first time, providing more of that intrinsic motivation.
Online learning can use the captivating allure of immersive environments and the draw of gaming elements to keep students engaged.
In fact, at the current rate, which parallels the Sony experience with transistors in radios, by 2020 over 50% of all classes will be delivered online.
♦ American Enterprice Institute Conference: More Than Just Schools: Rethinking the Demand for Educational Entrepreneurship
December 7, 2009American Enterprise InstituteWashington DCDr. Mincberg served as discussant for the Implications for Policy and Practice panel commenting on white papers prepared by:♦Curtis Johnson - Co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns♦Burck Smith - StraighterLine♦Jon Fullerton - Harvard Graduate School of Education
Entrepreneurship in K-12 schooling has generally focused on efforts to boost the supply of familiar things: more good schools, more talented teachers, and more effective school leaders. Consequently, the best known and most celebrated endeavors have tended to be "whole school" solutions. Too often missing, however, has been careful analysis of how differentiated solutions or innovative tools might enable education providers to meet the demands for schooling in smarter ways.
AEI's director of education policy studies, Frederick M. Hess, and Bruno Manno of the Walton Family Foundation will discuss more promising approaches to entrepreneurship in teaching and learning with a roster of esteemed education leaders, entrepreneurs, and policy experts.