Weigel, Van B. (2002). Deep learning for a digital age: Technology’s untapped potential to enrich higher education.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

PREFACE

This book:

• Argues that in order for technology to be used in higher education, it should “…enrich and extend the student’s exploration of new territory”.
• Argues for “depth learning”, which involves both a decentralized, “bricks and clicks (blended) approach to learning and the use of “knowledge rooms” (collaborative virtual spaces).

The Internet is unique in that, unlike most new technologies, it has the potential of improving both quality and accessibility (“richness and reach”).  Unfortunately, most institutions are concentrating solely on the “reach” side of the equation.

CHAPTER 1: BEYOND THE VIRTUAL CLASSROOM

Elearning should be viewed with the same healthy skepticism as that directed at dotcoms “post-meltdown”.  While distance education has improved educational reach, it so far has failed to do much in the way of “bringing depth and dimensionality” to learning.  It also largely lacks passion---the ability to make you fall in love with a subject.

 Deep Learning and the Construction of Knowledge

• Deep learning is constructivist in nature, owing to persons like Dewey, Piaget, and Vgotsky.  We don’t absorb knowledge, we construct it. 
• Learning means actively searching for new knowledge.
• Constructivism involves healthy doses of play
• Knowledge constructions called schemas are the building blocks of constructivism.
• Assimilation is the process of incorporating new knowledge into existing knowledge structures; accommodation is the process of changing knowledge structures to coincide with new information.
• Vgotsky’s zone of proximal development refers to the meeting between a learner’s own spontaneous concepts vs. more formal scientific concepts.  It emphasizes the social advantages of collaboration with more able peers.

Defining Deep Learning

• Def.: learning that promotes the development of conditionalized knowledge and metacognition through communities of inquiry.

• Conditionalized knowledge: knowledge that specifies the contexts in which it can be useful.

• Metacognition: ”thinking about thinking”; i.e., monitoring and reflecting on one’s level of understanding.

• Communities of Inquiry: intersecting communities of practice (i.e., groups of individuals who organize themselves around topics of interest).

Cognitive Apprenticeship

Seely-Brown, Collins, & Duguid (1989) noted that the process of learning to think is akin to that by which artisans learn to use a tool.   The notion of “cognitive apprecticeship” argues in favor of teaching thinking via a modified form of the apprenticeship model.

Six Teaching Methods that Facilitate Cognitive Apprenticeship

1)  Modeling: the teacher “puts his/her mind on display”

2)  Coaching: teachers observe students in the performance of a task, offering feedback

3)  Scaffolding: helping a student complete a task slightly more difficult than the student is capable of completing on his/her own.

4) Articulating: drawing students out verbally, helping to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge

5)  Reflecting: debriefing, replaying  and discussion after an activity

6)  Exploring: students tackle new areas on their own

Deep Learning and Intellectual Curiosity

• Curiosity is a skill learned through observation and practice---i.e., one learns to be curious by being in the company of the curious.

• Lectures (including PowerPoint presentations) rarely spur curiosity.

• Often, students can get away with cheating (e.g., buying a term paper off the Internet) because their assignments are so unimaginative.

Deep Learning and Embedded Assessment

Assessment that focuses on summative assessment denies students meaningful opportunities for challenge and growth.

Tips:

1) Embedded evaluation should be given and received in a gracious manner (sometimes no easy task!).

2) Assessment should have both public and private dimensions.

3) Neither individual nor group evaluations should be anonymous.

The Shortcomings of Standard Assessment

Though distance education is well poised to lead the way in development of project-based assessment tools, it heretofore has emphasized standard assessment tools.

Transforming the Classroom Into Knowledge Rooms

A knowledge room is a virtual collaboration space where students gather for:

• Research projects
• Skill development
• Seminar discussions
• Formal debates
• Creative expression

Knowledge Rooms are designed to supplement, not supplant, the classroom.

Five Types of Knowledge Rooms

The author discusses five types of knowledge rooms:

1)  Research Center: each built around a specific course-related problem. Each is designed for 3-6 students. Students are assigned project leadership on a rotating basis.  A resource library can be included in the research center.

2) Skill Workplace: Includes an Office (which houses the resources necessary for that skill) and Exercise Rooms (places to practice the skill).  Includes help desk access and may include a Skill Gallery for exceptional work.

3)  Conference Center: includes a suite of Seminar rooms, each devoted to a specific topic.  Each seminar room features a content centerpiece to focus discussion and stimulate critiques and reflection (this keeps seminar rooms from degenerating into stream-of-consciousness responses).  Because these are archived, the best snippets can be used for intergenerational learning.

4)  Debate Hall: virtual space for aynchronous debates. Like traditional debates, each is structured around a proposition and features rounds by affirmative and negative teams.

5)  Portfolio Gallery: exhibits student work and solicits reviews from classmates.

Software for knowledge spaces: Lotus QuickPlace ($17 per academic user), Groove (free).

The author thinks that the behaviorist approach of breaking skills into individual components has been harmful in that the pieces are rarely combined for actual skill practice.

Depth Education: A “Bricks-and-Clicks” Model

• It’s not “all-or-none”---you can implement one or two learning rooms in a conventional class and build from there.

• Despite technology investments, blended classes can save money through savings in facilities costs.

• Successful Internet retailers like Amazon.com can be studied as models of bricks-and-clicks.

• Emerging literatures in both corporate and academic arenas are concluding that blended learning is best.

• Case study: The Wharton School of Business’s “webCafe”.

Discovery, Discernment, and the Classroom

Two things are difficult to replicate in distance education:

1)  The teacher’s passion for his/her subject and for intellectual inquiry

2)  The unique “chemistry” of each class.

The Academy and Technological Resistance

For depth education to succeed, there must be a spirit of experimentation in the classroom. However, academies of higher education are the longest-lasting and most traditional of institutions, and some initial forays into new technologies that were fueled by vendor hype ended badly.  Some even liken academics’ resistance to technology as akin to the medieval guilds’ resistance to the technological developments that launched the Industrial Revolution.

CHAPTER 2: THE COMMODITIZATION OF INSTRUCTION

“Information transactions” akin to monetary transactions have become a common defining feature of learning.

Distance Education as Deus Ex Machina

The stampede into online education has included vendors of course management software like Blackboard and WebCT, for-profit universities, and publishers, all of whom promote distance education as a rescuer. 

The Case for Sobriety

However, after similar heady optimism, the dot com “bust” of the early 2000s should serve as an object lesson.

Commoditization as a Long-Term Trend

• Commoditization: the process whereby products or services become so standardized that their attributes are roughly the same.  Commodities, because of their standardization, come to be viewed along a simple price dimension.

• College and university education is becoming a commodity, aided by a minimalist definition of what constitutes “education” and the increasing use of adjunct faculty to reduce the cost of instruction.

• Full-time faculty have been largely silent about the oppression of their part-time brethren, many of whom “make less money than the people who clean the classrooms they teach in”.

• Effective teaching remains less valued than research, so the smartest strategy for a teacher is to invest oneself minimally in the classroom.  It also leads faculty to feel more kinship with international colleagues in their disciplines than they do with fellow teachers across the hall.

Computer-Based Instruction and Commoditization

Some of the initial fanfare surrounding the beginnings of computers in the classroom regarded their ability to supplement or even replace faculty.  Instructional design that emphasized small chunks of content followed by tests promoted a “rote” view of education.

Technology and Creative Destruction

• Joseph Schumpeter (1942) explained “creative destruction” as the process by which entrepreneurial innovation in a capitalist system upsets the status quo, thereby driving progress.

• The Internet, by enabling us to reproduce unlimited copies of content virtually for free, has devalued content whose value was based upon scarcity. The result? Content will be FREE, leaving educators scrambling to justify their existence by value-added services.  Futurist Esther Dyson urges people to get in the habit of acting as if proprietary content were already free, thus focusing on ways to add value to it by offering services.

• The MIT course initiative is a harbinger of the future---a huge effort to put all of MIT’s content on the web, accessible for free.

The Trade-Off Between Richness and Reach

• Richness is quality, reach is the number of people who can participate.  The Internet “blows up” this trade-off. Consider Amazon.com---twenty times more books than the largest bookstore, while still retaining some of the personalized service of a small bookstore.   Or look at Dell’s ability to build thousands of personalized computers using only eight days’ worth of inventory.

• College and universities, unfortunately, have been focusing almost exclusively on the “reach” side of the equation both initially with huge lecture classes and now through distance education.  They are vulnerable to commercial firms offering richer courses at lower prices.

• In the past, colleges and universities have fended off such “raiders” by exercising their monopoly on accreditation and their ability to deny transfer credit.  They are losing both.

The Broadband Virtual Classroom

• Broadband will allow for greater richness.  Multimedia content and real-time surveying should help alleviate high attrition in distance ed classes by more closely replicating the “look and feel” of conventional classroom while allowing for more interactivity.

• When broadband reaches its potential, the currently-successful “post-a-lecture” and “host-a-discussion” forms of distance education will be “left in the dust”.

• Imagine the potential of broadband education for a firm like Home Depot----thousands of step-by-step “how-to” tutorials.  When use of this technology by commercial firms becomes common, people will demand similar abilities from educational institutions.

Mass-Produced Distance Education and Economies of Scale

• Let’s say a broadband class charges a tuition of $100.  If a thousand students take it, that’s $100,000.  Let’s give the star lecturer $20k and give each of ten content experts $2k each ($20k total).  Then add in one TA for every 25 students (that’s 40, paid $1k each for a total of $40k.  We still have $20k left, and infrastructure wouldn’t cost that much per course.  Raise tuition to $125, and overhead becomes $45k.

• Note that if the institution does a good job, then students get the same quality of education regardless of whether there are 20 students or 2,000.

• Other services (e.g., books, access to an online library, counseling, tutoring, technical assistance) could either be rolled into the tuition or offered on an a la carte basis.

• It’s these economies of scale that WILL drive the commoditization of education.

• The best lecturers will become highly-paid “superstars”, while those with less stellar lecture skills will typically serve as content experts for about 12 courses per term (yielding, in our example, $48k per year for 10 months’ work).

Free College Degrees?

• Forget $100-$125 per course---tuition could eventually become FREE.  Here’s how:

• A bricks-and-mortar institution costs $150M and up.  A first-class web site could be built for $15M. Linkages with e-commerce (i.e., ad revenue, brief consumer surveys, shopping portals) could provide this money.

• Educational services could be delivered in a fully-digital format virtually for free.

• Right now, e-commerce subsidies cannot cover the $100-$125 cost per student per course.  But if competition drives this cost down to $50 or less, then sooner or later someone will offer the courses totally for free, and the resulting competition will rapidly drive per-student costs down.  “Zero-tuition” deals will become bundled with other offerings (e.g., cable TV and pay-per-view movies, equipment purchases).

• This could even be accomplished without blatant commercialism by being underwritten by corporations who benefit from well-educated employees.

• Zero-cost tuition will spur the development of personal service industries surrounding education.  So in other words, if you can’t make money off of tuition, you’ve got to make it from value-added services.

• The same kind of intense competition that has characterized the purchase of goods over the Internet will eventually come to higher education. This will result in the rise of “comparative shopping” web sites as well as “review” sites similar to epinions.com.

Making Peace with Commercialization

Of course, many will object to such commercialization.  In response, the author notes that commercialization of higher education has already happened in that if a degree was not commercially advantageous, few would pursue it strictly for intellectual benefit. In other words, almost all of our current students are there because they think a degree will confer career and monetary benefits.

The End of Education as We Know It?

If all this does come to pass, how will current educational institutions compete?  After all, current tuition at private colleges averages over $16k per year.   They will have to become experts in value-added services.

Strategic Options for Higher Education

• Top-Tier institutions are likely to emerge unscathed, as their prestigious brand names will continue to justify higher prices.

• About 75-150 second- or third-tier universities will also profit via high-quality online course offerings (most likely developed in conjunction with publishers or third-party firms). These will grow into global universities.  Market shakeouts may reduce their numbers to 30-50.

• Everyone else will survive only if they can find a niche for value-added services.

Community Colleges

Community colleges are likely to profit under the new system:

• They have been among the first to embrace new learning technologies
• Their relative lack of prestige means that they will suffer less from the commoditization of instruction
• Their use of knowledge rooms could enhance their status and respectability.

The Saga of Britannica

• Britannica has been in existence over 200 years.
• A few years ago, a full set of bound Encyclopedia Britannica encyclopedias cost about $1,600.
• Competition from Microsoft Encarta and other CD-based encyclopedias, which cost under $100, led Britannica to offer online access to their resources for $2,000 per year.
• Four years later, Britannica’s sales had declined 50%. They offered subscriptions to home users for $129 per year and a CD-version of the encyclopedia for $200.
• By late 1999, Britannica began giving an ad-sponsored version of its product away on the Internet for FREE.

Well, I hope that’s enough to give you the flavor of this book.  The second half of the book consists of:

CHAPTER 3: TRANSFORMING THE CLASSROOM INTO KNOWLEDGE ROOMS

CHAPTER 4: NEW HORIZONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION