Introduction

New media emulate old media at first.

We will take a quick look at the evolution of books set with moveable type, movies and television then turn to teaching materials.

Today’s textbooks and university programs are by and large digital emulations of the past, but there is a lot of experimentation going on.

We will describe experiments with modular teaching material, student-developed teaching material, peer tutoring and very large classes.

Technology with implications for individuals, organizations and society

Teaching and learning is an important network application area with implications for organizations, individuals and society.

New media emulate predecessors movies

New media often start out emulating old media.

Early movies were made by setting up a stationary camera and filming stage plays.

Shooting on location, moving cameras and many other innovations followed, but years later some movies were still filmed stage plays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assassinat_du_duc_de_guise.jpg

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061184/

New media emulate predecessors: television

Early television shows often had performers standing in front of a curtain or acting on sets similar to vaudeville or stage plays.

New media emulate predecessors: books

Books followed a similar pattern.

In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg’s bible was the first book printed using movable metal type.

It is the distant ancestor of our current textbooks.

But, today’s textbooks would surprise Gutenberg.

The Gutenberg Bible resembled the hand written manuscripts on which it was based.

It did not have punctuation or paragraphs.

A single page was around 12 by 17.5 inches – suitable for contemplative reading in a library.

The illustrations were added for beauty and feeling, not clarification.

Like the hand copied books before it, it was a religious book.

Gutenberg’s breakthrough was in production, not format or content.

Slow evolution of the book

Fifty years after Gutenberg, Aldus improved production by printing eight pages on a single sheet.

This led to smaller, portable books that could be carried or placed in a saddle bag.

Aldus also introduced punctuation, like the commas, periods and semicolons shown here, and italic type, which fit more letters on a page.

But, like Gutenberg, Aldus would be surprised by the variety of punctuation and typography in today’s textbooks as well as innovations like chapters, callouts, indices, tables, diagrams, tables of contents and images with captions.

Digital textbooks emulate print textbooks

Textbooks today are at the “Gutenberg bible” stage.

Textbook publishers have digitized their books, making them available online in various formats.

Many maintain the notion of a book-sized page and often preserve the page numbering of the print version.

These e-books look better than PDF documents, but they are constrained by the previous format.

Like Aldus, they have gone somewhat beyond their predecessor, but remain tied to the notion that the course is contained in a book of pages.

Digital classes emulate face-to-face classes

Many universities are offering online classes, but, like the textbook publishers, they are emulating the past. 

They typically offer the "same" courses online as they teach in the classroom. 

They use the same textbook and ancillary material, but use course management systems to substitute threaded discussion or some other social media tool for in-class discussion and administer conventional assignments and tests.

Digital lectures emulate face-to-face lectures

Schools also repurpose old courses by making video recordings of lectures with slides.

But, like books, movies, television and other media, textbooks and classes will change.

It is too soon for me to predict the future of teaching and teaching material, but I don’t think it will center on digital textbooks, learning management systems and recorded lectures.

Publishers and schools will resist it, but changes in education will come faster than with previous media because of the low cost of experimentation and innovation on the Internet.

Let’s look at a few examples – experiments with modular teaching material, student-developed teaching material, peer tutoring and very large classes.

Examples of collections of independent modules

Here are three modular courseware examples.

The California State University system established the Merlot portal for modular teaching material in 1997, and today it contains nearly 34,000 peer reviewed modules in 23 disciplines.

Commoncraft and TED  Ed produce short educational videos. 

Each is on a single topic and most are under five minutes long.

These are collections of independent modules, but a course can also be constructed modularly.

A collection of modules for a single course

Nature publishing offers a modular Principles of Biology course, that was developed in conjunction with the CSU.

There are 196 modules and a professor selects the ones he or she wants to include in the “textbook” for their class.

I put “textbook” in quotes because it is neither a text nor a book.

Each module is a scrolling multimedia Web page with embedded quizzes.

Nature’s business model is also innovative.

They plan to continuously update the material, and the student purchases a lifetime access subscription rather than a one-time book.

Hierarchically organized modules

The Kahn Academy has over 3,000 short videos on a variety of topics along with system for administering quiz questions and tracking student progress.

A user can jump directly to any video, but they are organized hierarchically.

For example, there are 11 Arithmetic and Pre-Algebra topics. 

The first of those 11 topics, Addition and Subtraction, is shown here.

The Addition and Subtraction topic consists of 16 video lessons.

In this example, the student has demonstrated proficiency in the Addition 1 lesson (blue), and is prepared to go on to one of four subsequent lessons (green).

He or she demonstrated proficiency by answering several questions correctly.

Modules created by students

Many people are experimenting with student generated teaching material.

For example, in Georgia Tech’s Techburst project, students create educational videos on topics of their choosing.

Tech awards prizes to the best videos.

Since tools for creating student generated material are cheap and easy to use, faculty at virtually every university are encouraging students to produce teaching material.

For example, students in a Drake University journalism class produced reviews of 20 Twitter tools.

In this project, the students learned about the Twitter ecosystem and also created something of value to others.

There is a proverb that “to teach is to learn twice,” and that is certainly true.

A person making teaching material for a skill or concept will learn it very well.

Peer teaching and student collaboration

There is a lot of positive research on peer teaching -- both the tutor and tutee benefit.

Many faculty encourage peer teaching and it is institutionalized at some universities.

Take for example the peer tutoring program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell

To be a peer tutor for a class, a student must have a letter of recommendation from the professor, a grade of B+ or better in the class and an overall GPA of 3.0.

Peer tutors can be available during online office hours or using asynchronous communication tools.

Conversationexchange.com provides another example.

To learn or practice foreign languages, people pair up for conversation, chat or email.

Nature and other publishers are establishing mechanisms whereby students in classes that use their material can collaborate with and help each other, regardless of where they go to school.

The CSU is planning a similar program to encourage communication and collaboration among students taking a given class on any campus in the system.

Very large online courses

Others are experimenting with very large classes.

The largest to date so were three Stanford computer science classes offered in the fall of 2011.

The largest had 160,000 students, and its instructor, Sebastian Thrun (shown on the right), is now offering courses through an educational startup, Udacity.com.

The Stanford/Udacity model is interactive.

The student watches a short video presentation by the instructor, takes a short quiz, then continues.

There are homework assignments and exams as well.

Types of teaching material

Most of the teaching material we have discussed has been video or interactive video, but modular teaching resources come in many forms.

Something as small as a quotation, image or diagram that helps students acquire a concept can be a useful resource.

The Internet is an ideal medium for such highly focused material since the marginal cost of adding an item to a collection is essentially zero.

Amazon capitalized on this from the start, recognizing that perhaps 100 best-selling books would account for half their revenue while the other half would come from sales of many thousand books, which sold few copies.

Similarly, the cost of storing a diagram that effectively illustrates a specific concept that is only taught in a single course is essentially zero.

While storage cheap, organizing and indexing material so effective resources are easily discovered is difficult.

This fine-grained modularity also makes it easy for a teacher to improve a resource or add a new one.

As with Wikipedia, a contributor can focus on a single topic without concern for the overall collection.

What are the implications?

The Internet has cause disruption in the music, book, newspaper, magazine, movie and television industries.

The textbook industry is already changing with the introduction of electronic texts, textbook rentals, online access and so forth.

Are universities next?

What will happen if massive classes with hundreds of thousands of students turn out to be good alternatives for, say, half of the undergraduate curriculum?

Will schools that focus on teaching survive?

Will universities be able to fund research?

Will a better educated work force improve the overall economy?

Summary

New media typically begin by mimicking old media.

Books, movies and television provide examples of that.

Textbook publishers and universities are doing the same – using digital technology to emulate old materials and methods.

But, the low cost and ubiquity of the Internet assure us that new materials and methods will be invented.

We still do not know what they will be, but millions of professors and companies are experimenting with digital tools and techniques.

We surveyed some of these experiments with modular teaching material, student-generated teaching material, peer teaching and very large classes.

We also noted that Internet based teaching material could take many forms and be tightly focused.

We concluded with a few questions about the possible impact of all this on the university, but are not yet ready to provide any answers.