Second, Millennials want to learn what they need to learn faster. We must create a higher education learning environment that 1) motivates students to learn, 2) accelerates their learning, and 3) gives students many more learning options that appeal to different learning styles particularly learning by discovery and exploration? There are lots of current structural obstacles to speeding student learning such as the credit hour system (time-on-task) that need to be removed or modified. Speeding student learning is a real problem in an environment where knowedge is growing in most fields faster than our ability to learn and use it.

Thanks for your contribution.

As education changes, so must the way we conceive of and develop products for education. From textbooks to simulations, content and product providers of all kinds (publishing companies to private schools) must rethink the way they do business. In this …

I don’t believe, though, that Table 2 is as accurate. Actually, as one who has taught online courses since 1999 and teaches other faculty, online classes can definitely be connected, personal, and participatory. Forums and chat discussion groups create more connectedness than I ever saw in 25 years of teaching in the classroom. If the assignments focus on student’s productive creativity with the materials given, online courses can be very personal and not just a regurgitation of those materials. And what is more participatory than letting the students create the content for a course–online quiz questions, reports, wikkis, etc.?

Online courses, just like traditional courses, have the potential to have the characteristics of Table 2. Too often, though, as you say, they do not. Openness is one answer. An emphasis on teaching and learning for faculty is another.

This is very interesting. I’m glad to see this movement, and I’ll have to take a look at the OpenCourseWare.

It occurred to me that in addition to what you’ve mentioned, there’s the environmental aspect. What if we all aren’t spending $XYZ in fossil fuels to get to class? (I didn’t see this in your post, I apologize if it’s in there already.) You still need electricity, of course, but that can be wind or solar powered. I haven’t seen many wind-powered cars, except on the reallllly windy days.

I’m not sure how much of your emphasis is specifically on open source software, such as switching from Microsoft Office to its more-than-capable free replacement, OpenOffice.org. Perhaps “we could save this many million dollars every year” will appeal to those who might not be swayed by the other very logical, innovative arguments. I thoroughly agree with your statements but people who aren’t open to new ideas sometimes are open to the old standard, money.

Good luck!

An incisive, clear, and well reasoned clarion call to those who may well be unaware of the revolution that is accelerating.

I might offer the following to your examples/table 1.

Perhaps include in the title Education (as examples in your first 4 cases include our field)

For the last 2 examples I might offer for personal the example of path directed learning.

You might consider in your second section, particularly table 2 substituting Distance Learning for online learning. Given the pace of change in technology and learning you might not want to limit your paradigm to the internet, their may well be other forms of transmission that do not rely upon the web.

Kudos for a thought provoking analysis.

The relevant experience I do have and which forms the lens through which I see the situation is several years of organizing thousand of open webpages of academic type knowledge into thousands of subjects. Perhaps this does not fall within the scope of what you want to say to the Commission. If it does, I would suggest changing the 4th characteristic to Isolated/Interactive. I realize MIT OCW is pretty much one-way, but I suppose the pure version of this characteristic is two-way like a wiki?

The ideas themselves become immediately cognitively interactive when, for example, webpages about irrigation technique from Utah State, an agriculture expert working on the Nile River, and an agricultural university in China are each linked into a doctoral student’s webpage on growing cotton. Rich new insights and ideas emerge and interact in new ways.

It is not only the open access to content that empowers the teacher and learner. Dependent upon that openness is aggregation that sets loose the sort of mechanisms that make Google effective. Related ideas converge and new ideas emerge. A terrific example I found recently was The Interactive Fly, where ideas buzz back and forth among the links and columns:
http://flybase.org/allied-data/lk/interactive-fly/aimain/1aahome.htm

Grist for the mill, Judy

David Wiley prepares his testimony to the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. And, happily, makes it availble to us first. It’s a good account overall; I have only one major suggestion for him. I would add another line to the table describing the ways in which the world is changing, somingthing like: managed – autonomous. Or: directed – self-directed. Because I think the new technology empowers in important ways. But I certainly agree with the rest of the items in the table, and especially with this: “openness is the gateway to connectedness, personalization, and participation.” David Wiley [and I] are of one mind, I think, when it comes to openness. But – and this is an open question – is he [as] willing to demonstrate the same degree of belief that people can manage their own destiny, if only given the chance, as I am? Because this, I think, is what will shape the next great debate in learning.