In the last few months we have seen the launch of edX, Coursera, and TED-Ed.  All three with the institutional backing to become major players in online education for the near future.  It’s an exciting time for anyone with a love of learning.

Education is evolving and classrooms are changing.  I believe we are heading into the next generation in online instruction, here are just a few of the signs.

Prestigious Universities Offering High Quality Web Optimized Courses for Free

The first generation of online courses mimicked the offline course experience.  Lectures were often the same length online as they were offline.   Assignments and tests also followed a similar structure as their offline equivalents.

In this next generation, lessons are broken down into smaller pieces with lectures, assignments, and assessments in a more web digestible format.  There is a general timeline but students are allowed to choose the best time to watch the lectures and complete the coursework.  Course discussions happen in an online community kind of way.

The Universities putting out these courses have been promising that they are on same level as their offline kin, just free and open to the world.   Makes you wonder how long it will be until you can string courses together to develop your own home school higher ed program.

edX

EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

Coursera

We offer high quality courses from the top universities, for free to everyone. We currently host courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania. We are changing the face of education globally, and we invite you to join us.

Content Structured to Allow Teachers and Students to Customize Learning Experiences

Since it’s online launch, TED has been a great source of material to pack into lessons, now they’re taking it to the next level.  TED-Ed offers the chance to mix any YouTube video with assessments and package it for your students.  It’s like Khan Academy but with many, many, more instructors.

TED-ED

This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student.

Khan Academy

With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we’re on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

Platforms that Give Everyone the Chance to Teach Online

You don’t have to be a teacher or a programmer to teach a class on the web.  Tech that makes it so any expert can easily start their own course allows for the development of more specialized online educational content and adds a level of competition for the basics.

Udemy

Udemy’s goal is to disrupt and democratize the world of education by enabling anyone to teach and learn online.

Just as blogging democratized the publishing industry (enabling anyone to instantly become a journalist), Udemy seeks to dramatically change education by empowering millions of experts around the world to teach & share what they know.

Gamified Learning Platforms

Educational computer games have been around since the early days of the PC.  Gamified platforms are something different.  Instead of games setup to educate, gamified platforms are courses setup with game elements (scores, levels, leaderboards, etc.) designed to help students become engaged in the material and keep them moving forward.

Codecademy

There isn’t a great Codecademy ‘About’ video on their site but I found this interview with the founders on Mashable.  They don’t start talking about Codecademy until the 2:30 mark.

Codecademy was created out of the frustrations Zach and Ryan felt with learning how to program. Tired with less effective text and video resources, Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn programming by actually coding. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to code.

Being a tech savvy research analyst, I’ve created my fair share of web surveys using all sorts of applications.  The free programs (with the exception of LimeSurvey) are mostly stripped down trial versions of plan based applications.  The next, and most mainstream, line of applications usually fall within the $20 a month price range, a la Survey Monkey (did anyone else notice that they bought out Zoomerang?).

You can create solid surveys at the $20 level but, depending on your circumstances, sometimes you need a little bit more.  Here are nine features that will likely push you to upgrade your service or try something new.

Custom Links

We all hate to come across as an amateur so using the default link can sometimes be out of the question.  Also, having monkey in your link can seem a bit silly.  Of course Survey Monkey knows this, that’s why you have to go up to $65 a month to replace it with their research.net domain.   While you can have your own URL for around 20 bucks a year, if you want to map it to your survey, you’ll need to upgrade/change your survey service.

Encrypted URLS

Concerned about your respondents’ privacy?  Seriously, is this even a question?  Not only should you worry about protecting the data once you have it, you also need to worry about the act of their submission.  There is a reason why every online store uses HTTPS links for their shopping carts, and that reason is encryption.

Respondent Logins and Passwords

Creating unique respondent logins and passwords is the most efficient way to ensure that respondents can stop and continue the survey at a later date.  It also makes it nice and easy to track individual responses and connect to previously collected data.  There are ways to do all of this with the $20 plans but the methods have their quirks and can lead to technical issues.

Preloading Data

With the $20 plans you can usually preload a little bit of data if you use their service to send out invitation emails.  Preloading is most important if you would like to pipe in responses based on previously collected data.  Of course preloading data has limited utility if you can’t pipe.  Which leads us to…

Piping

With basic survey plans, piping (pre-filling responses/questions based on specific information you already know) is often limited to data you collect within the survey.  But if you mix preloading with piping you have the opportunity to completely tailor the survey to individual respondents.

Complex Questions

Most of the time (or all of the time?) you are better off with simple questions.  The problem is, many researchers and evaluators are used to creating massively complex questions built to produce fewer questionnaire pages.  A rule of thumb when designing for the web, reducing the time it takes a respondent to complete a questionnaire is  much more important than reducing the number of pages.  Complex questions just don’t work as well on the web.

With all that said, there may be a time when you need to build a question with multiple response types (i.e. multiple select/open entry/ranking).  Most $20 plans do not let you do this.

Advanced Survey Logic

All logic is not created equal.  The basic plans usually give you simple logic (i.e. if they say yes here jump to page 4).  At the next level you get to create custom rules on each page saying which questions/responses the respondent will see based on previous questions, or even preloaded data.

Question Randomization/Elimination

With a $20 plan you can often randomize responses. If you need to randomize the questions (or randomly eliminate the questions), it’s time to jump up to the next level.

Self Hosting

Depending on the client, or your company, having the ability to let your data reside on an external server is not always an option.  The big companies gloat about their security, but trust is not an easy thing to give. Keeping the data to yourself will often cost you more than $20 a month.

Preservation of an ever changing digital world is a serious challenge.  While traditionally published books can sit on shelves for years, and physically preserved for centuries, digital works can be deleted in a flash and constantly altered.  For those that believe in the value of history, preservation of these works is a challenge worth taking.  One such organization is the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

One of the cool things about the Internet Archive is their very handy Wayback Machine.  Type in a website link, click a button, and go back to the internet’s days of yore.  Here are five lessons I’ve learned after playing with the site for a few days.

The government moves slowly, so when they move forward, pay attention, the case of the Census

The Feds are often criticized for being slow to pick up on new technology, which I think is a little unfair.  The truth is, it takes time for tech to become tried and true.  Government agencies often cannot afford to be innovators because it puts too much at stake.

If you take a look at the screenshots I put together below you’ll see a website that undergoes very little change from 1999 – 2011.  In 2012, the home page came to life.  There are many techies are out there waiting on the next big thing.  But, if you pay attention, you’ll start to notice the last big thing finally hitting the mainstream.   My hunch, expect to see other slow and steady movers livening up their web presence.

It’s time to bring associations to life, the cases of AEA and ASA

While both AEA and ASA have jumped into the social realm (AEA much more so than ASA) both websites are still caught up in the billboard-esque middle ages of design.  Just compare these two sites with the Census example above, where do you think they belong?  Integrating social web into the main page is more than just inviting conversation and breathing life into a design.  It offers the opportunity to provide focus while preserving broad access to tools and other member benefits.

We are putting too much faith in corporate information providers, the case of GeoCities

In 1999, Yahoo purchased the third most popular site on the web, GeoCities, for Three Billion Dollars.  A mere ten years later, the site was shutdown.  I’m a huge advocate for the use of free blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger but what happens if one of them decides to close shop?  Without the work of sites like the Internet Archive a lot of our digital history can be wiped away completely as a result of a business decision.

We need to put more effort into archiving academic works in our own domain.   Our tendency has been to link, not reproduce, the works of others online.  But there is an inherent problem with that approach as it often leaves only a single copy.  In the digital domain, republication helps with preservation.  I’ve taken this issue to heart, expect it to come up in discussions surrounding upcoming improvements to Eval Central.

Start with a realistic goal, the case of Wikipedia

Wikipedia started in January of 2001 with the idea of producing a complete encyclopedia from scratch.  Their original goal was to make over 100,000 articles (in evaluation we call this a measurable outcome).  After the first six months they had around 6,000 articles.  Over the next year they added an additional 30,000 articles.  Then over the next six months, or two years after they began, they hit that original 100,000 article target.

I love that Wikipedia started with a target.  The 100,000 is tangible and provides direction during the initial slog that accompanies the beginning of most legitimate projects.  Notice in the excerpt timeline below that they dropped the target from the front page before September 2002 when they were really starting to hit their stride.  The presence of an achievable goal doesn’t stop the ball from rolling, and when things start moving, nobody says you have to keep the target.

As of today Wikipedia has close to 4 million articles in English alone.

Companies that are successful can paint a rosy picture of their past, the case of Tableau

I plugged Tableau into the wayback machine because of something written on Tableau’s “Who We Are” page.

Put together an Academy-Award winning professor, a brilliant computer scientist at the world’s most prestigious university, and a savvy business leader with a passion for data. Add in one of the most challenging problems in software – making databases and spreadsheets understandable to ordinary people. You have just recreated the fundamental ingredients for Tableau.

I like Tableau a lot but they seemed to be laying it on a little thick.  After looking at the history it appears as though the recipe for Tableau also included instructions to simmer for years.  It’s comforting to know that successful things still move slowly.

Who We Are and even Who We Were changes with time.  Today we may look at ourselves as leading a ho-hum life but depending on what we accomplish in the upcoming years maybe we can redefine our past image as well.  Well, as long as it’s not archived.

How often do you find yourself participating in a webinar where the presenter drones on for an hour then finishes with no time for questions?  You start to wonder, why not just record the thing and let the audience decide when they want to watch?  Oh, that’s right, because if the recording is just a presenter droning on for an hour, nobody will ever want to watch.

Giving a presentation live over the web is overrated, especially if you are not offering live discussion.  You’re much better off creating and posting a short and to the point web video.  If it’s good enough, discussion will happen, just over time and in the comments section.

Highlighted in this post are four web friendly alternatives to the standard webinar, consider them the next time you plan to present online.

Web Ready Live Talks

Right now you could setup a camera and give it a presentation, but would it be compelling?  Unless you’re an actor or pundit, giving a presentation to a camera is tough. I think it’s one of the things that makes the TED approach so successful.

Presenting to an audience changes the whole feel by allowing the presenter to connect with actual human beings.  If the ultimate goal is a web-ready presentation, keep the format short ( <20 minutes and often <5).  Also make sure you capture quality video and audio.  For tips on how to do this, check out the Vimeo Video School.

I’ve chosen Clay Shirky’s SOPA/PIPA presentation to make a point.  You don’t need a TED sized audience to make use of this approach.

Animation

What would you rather see while listening to a presentation; a giant talking head, slide after slide of bullet points, or an animation?  As a self proclaimed doodle revolutionary, my choice is obvious.

Like video taping yourself, recording an audio monologue is also tough.  RSA Animate videos utilize lecture audio with a doodled video.  If you want to take this approach I suggest starting with a recorded conversation or lecture.  People appreciate authenticity and you don’t get the same passion out of professional voice actors.

There are lots of animation programs out there, including several iPad apps.  You don’t need to take on Pixar, just add a little value to the voice.

Documentary Style

If you decide to go video you don’t have to settle for just a simple recording.  Splice in a little music, add in a few video clips, and then overlay some text and your video will start to take documentary form.  Check out creative commons for some remixable materials.   Again, I’m going to plug the Vimeo Video School; it’s full of solid advice on lighting, setting up your shots, and choosing the right equipment.

The following example by one of my heroes comes from Ericsson’s 2020 Shaping Ideas campain.

Motion Graphics

You can think of a motion graphic as a video infographic.  By using software like Adobe After Affects, you can give your visualizations new life.  While all of the approaches on this page take a certain level of expertise to get it right, this approach is likely furthest outside the comfort zone of most researchers and evaluators.  But it’s definitely not out of the realm of possibility if you have the will or the budget.

The following was developed by Column Five Media.  If you like it, I suggest checking out their site for more examples.

This will be the last week of daily posts (at least for the near future). This blog will stay active. I’m just going to devote more energy into the creation of better posts. So, stay tuned, I have some big plans.

One day historians are going to look back at this era as the time in which the notion of intellectual property met its toughest challenge (or maybe even the time in which it was turned on its head).    We see skirmishes taking place in the ongoing tech patent cold war,  political battles against “piracy” in the form of SOPA, and the creation of new standards that have sharing at their core with Creative Commons.

Large companies can wield the power of their copyrights and patents to demolish small companies.  It’s tough to fight something with so much power.  But the web offers at least an awareness mechanism.  This currently-in-development documentary, being funded through kickstarter, is a story of a little guy choosing not to go down quietly.  For the “A Defiant Dude” trailer, look below the cartoon.

Email blasts are often not enough to get people to respond to surveys, but we often settle for this type of mass communication when launching on the web. If you want/need a high response it’s all about continuous individualized follow-up. Oh, and being nice helps too.

Today’s cartoon inspired by poet Billy Collins’ Ted Talk (embedded below). I feel like animation is witnessing a rebirth as speakers seek ways to enrich their online presentations. Definitely watch this talk, he’s a funny guy.

Brain Pickings posted a short video conversation with Ray Bradbury the other day. Something he said at the end of the video inspired this cartoon.

I was leafing through the house republican budget the other day, it is chock full of charts. Lots of examples of how to visualize political bunk. One of the first charts seemed a little silly, so I thought I would annotate it with a few of my thoughts. If you would like to play at home, I’ve included the original below my annotated version. Just right click, save as to your computer, and open it in a graphics program (i.e. ms paint, etc.).

Original