In February 2006, I flew ten professors and e-learning folks from around the state to Cupertino to listen to the Apple team for higher education, led by the legendary John Couch. John unfolded a vision of iTunesU that was pretty compelling, and the SUNY folks were initially dazzled. Here’s what impressed them:
- Podcasting is stupid simple (my favorite kind because it means I have a hope of using it).
- The ubiquity of iTunes and iPods opens a channel to students that’s hard to resist. iTunesU holds out the promise of getting ‘em where they live, extending the reach of the classroom to students’ backpacks, dorms, strolls on campus ….
OK, OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably also add a third convincer:
- Cupertino weather was nothing like Buffalo’s, Albany’s, Binghamton’s or even sunny southern New Paltz’s. We had a seductive dinner at a superb restaurant in Saratoga, CA, some silky Napa wines. And when we got down to business, the gleaming Apple campus in the dazzling corporate conference and media center seemed pretty, uh, gleaming and dazzling.
Now the very things that made John and his team’s pitch seductive also make iTunesU problematic for knowledge sharing
We’re talkin’ ’bout U,U,U,U,U, …. But What About Me?
- No dialogue: Podcasting and vodcasting don’t encourage the interaction that fuels really good learning. As one professor noted, What the heck is the difference between vodcasts and podcasts and good old VHS tutorials and books on tape? Podcasting is another form of talking-heads lectures.
Thanks for the dinner, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch
- When a professor puts his lectures out as podcasting, he’s creating value, both intangible (knowledge, baby) and tangible (more students now need to use iPods and you know how seductive those little suckers are). Podcasts have to be served from the iTunes corporate servers or from campus servers configured with the Apple proprietary hooks on them. When you tug at the thread of how to get this stuff from institutional servers to the corporate servers, questions, shall we say, arise.
What does work, as studies of distance learning show, is engagement, or to put it more simply, people paying attention to other people in the virtual classroom: teachers commenting on student posts, students commenting on each other’s posts, and, as I found out from talking to lots of online professors, students acknowledging the profs with the kind of back-and-forth that text messaging, discussion threads and comments make so easy online.
WHat brings students and professors back to the virtual classroom over and over again? Amazingly, some students who were even living on campus chose to take the online course over the on-campus course? What motivated that? Was it simply the convenience of taking the course in your pajamas and not having to cross the quad in those Oswego or Buffalo blizzards?
How to really motivate knowledge sharing
Beyond getting grades and degrees – the old school touchstones for motivating students to learn – studies of e-learning at SUNY and elsewhere shows over and over again that people are universally compelled and enticed to share what they know by other rewards, too.
Like simple, sweet recognition. Touch me, touch my mind.
For me, the proof is in the pudding: professors also told me that one of the top things that brought them back to online teaching was the dialogue with all their students. It had to be something, because most studies show teaching online is more difficult and time-consuming than showing up for those three hours a week on campus for a traditional class.
So anytime you can identify an impulse this strong in these many people – millions of people learning online – then you have the basis of a good business. Scratch an itch.
I have no doubt that iTunesU will continue to expand, especially as Apple adds comment threads other socially dynamic tools to their version of the virtual classroom. But it seems to me that it has to bend its core business to accommodate the core desire in knowledge sharing, which is SHARING very dynamically and being recognized for it.
Imagine building a business from the ground up on that premise: building tools for people to express everything in their heads and then sharing and recognizing each other with social tools. That seems like a better backscratcher. It was on this foundation that we built SpongeFish. If the question about elearning is “Where’s the me?” then SpongeFish is the attempt to answer that question.
