Brandon Muramatsu

muraPOI: December 5, 2011

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  • Want Innovation? Remove the Barriers: Peter Stokes at Inside Higher Ed writes about innovation in higher education. I understand why one usually needs to start a new organization (whole company) to innovate, I hope that we can buck that trend and pivot with some things we have coming down the pipe at OEIT.

    “Incumbent leaders in mature industries engage in what Christensen calls “sustaining innovation” – the development of new features and benefits that make a product or service more useful, but not dramatically so.”

    And goes on to say:
    “The real innovation – in price, in ease of use, in access – will occur when our colleges and universities face some real competition, and that will only come when we allow some new, entrepreneurial providers into the market.

    If you want innovation, I say, remove the barriers.”

    And argues:
    “If traditional higher education wants to innovate – if it realizes that it must – then that innovation will have to take place in the margins, free from the demands of traditional culture, regulation, and financial models.”

    (Google Alerts, “open education resources”)

  • Lessons for Online Learning: This article focuses on K-12 online learning, but has a couple great quotes to guide what we do in higher ed.

    “Finally, there is nothing magical that ensures either charter schools or virtual education will be innovative and different. Each provides the opportunity for something new and potentially powerful: charters through a new governance model, virtual learning through a new instructional model….

    The danger is that despite the dramatically different delivery model, virtual education will end up much the same—with no better outcomes than our current system.”

    That’s the rub. It’s going to take hard work, and a change in thinking to make what we do to support virtual (aka “online”) learning work.

    (Education Next, Spring 2011 / Vol. 11, No. 2)

  • Why Schools of One Are Our Future: A. Graham Down of Education Next writes a book review of “Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change” by R. Barker Bausell. Some observations I found interesting:

    • “Irrelevance of most teacher college instruction to the real classroom is striking: clinical approaches are discounted in favor of misguided theory.”
    • “Irrelevance of many standardized tests to the curriculum that is being taught.”
    • How to get to a better future state? “Dr Bausell envisages a world where the obsolete classroom model gives way to a laboratory “in which digital tutoring constitutes the bulk of the instruction delivered.” He concedes that for a change to take place of this magnitude, both the federal government and a plethora of philanthropic sources would have to provide the initial funding.”

    (Education Next, Feburary 23, 2011)

  • Eureka. It’s a lab – not (just) a platform.: My colleague Philipp Schmidt talks about how P2PU might evolve into a lab (or a “platform”) for learning innovation. They’re certainly doing some interesting things with peer learning. I hope the courses continue, if/as they evolve into an open lab for learning innovation. From a platform perspective, about two years ago I was working with Philipp as he started to build the software platform for P2PU–at the time he remarked that he didn’t think he’d have to be a software developer in order to realize P2PU. Similarly, I’m hoping not to have to do that for some of my work at OEIT–unfortunately I think I’m going to have to do it.

    (Google Alert, “Open Education”)

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    Open Courses
    Source: Brandon / Online College Classes, cc-by-nc-nd

    Open Courses

    A History of MIT’s OpenCourseWare & What It Can Do For Higher Education [Infographic]: Lauren Landry at BostonInno writes a story around Online College Classes’ infographic on MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The history part is great–I think she misses the real potential for what OpenCourseWare really could do. More soon, I hope.

    (Google Alerts, “opencourseware”)

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