New Innovative Startups

One of things I like to research are the innovative projects that are being funded by Venture Capitalists. TechCrunch wrote an article recently on the best YCombinator Startups.

One of the challenges of integrating voice into an application is complexity to do so. A new startup, wit.ai, seems to have solved this problem with an API to integrate voice commands into your app. This will be fascinating to watch the viability of this company going forward.

There were other projects but I found interesting the number of Health IT projects. Right now Health IT is pretty hot so it is not a surprise funding is happening with Health IT projects.

I am always on the look out for new innovative education technologies. Clever is an interesting application that looks to help integrate multiple legacy systems. See it at getclever.com.

References.

Best Y Combinator Startups
Clever: Ed Tech Startup

Course Design

If our job is to prepare students for the workforce, we must balance teaching the knowledge and skills to students. Students must be more active in their learning. The days sitting in a class listening to faculty lecture needs to be a thing of the past. We need to focus on courses that are centered on projects and not fake projects but real projects that will help students prepare for the workforce. So, class could be structured as follows -

The Project Context

Weeks 1-3 Proposal/Requirements
Weeks 3-8 Design/Implementation
Weeks 8-9 Testing/Deployment
Week 10 Project Delivery

There are some key principles that the students need to master. Faculty can provide reading assignments and videos that provides the foundation knowledge needed to do the project. You will find that students will be more motivated to learn because they will need information to do the project. The concepts support the project instead of the project supports the concepts. There is a tendency to add a lot of concepts and you end up just mentioning them with no depth to learning. This forces you to only cover what is needed to do the project. The focus of the course is the student has been hired by X to do Y. Information about the context of the project gives all the information needed to understand the domain the project is in. The context is as much information about the company and other details needed to do the project. We want to students to simulate working and have deadlines for students to meet. Week 10 is presenting the final product/paper to the client. Students learn to write technical documentation such requirements documents, etc. This is reinforced in each course. Some courses might provide a requirements document and the course is focused is on delivering a product. Some courses might be just to deliver a requirements document. The goal is to make the work real to students who are working in a term. For some faculty, this technique seems very foreign.

I always get but the students do not know anything. Well, they are increasing not learning concepts anyway in a traditional model. They are forgetting everything in a few months anyway.

We are not doing our jobs as educators. We need them prepared to work. The classroom needs to be redesigned like the workplace and provide tasks/projects that students work on just like they were in an actual workplace. You will find a more engaged student and more satisfied with the course at the end. From January through March, we piloted several project courses (one undergrad and one grad). 100% of the students would rather have a project course than a traditional course. I have done these types of courses for a long time with great success. It is not easy and requires more work by the faculty but we need to do something different if we want different outcomes.  More to come ...

College Enrollment Declines

John Ebersole in a Forbes Article in December wrote -

"According to data released by the Census Bureau earlier this year, college enrollment for fall 2012 was nearly half a million lower than the year prior. This decline, it reported, was driven by students 25 and older who accounted for almost 90 percent of the decrease."

I have a hypothesis of the decline for 25 and older students in education. In the IT workforce, experience and skills outweigh education today. I have talked to a lot of employers and friends and there is a consensus among them that is startling to me as an educator.

If education can not help students with the experience and skills, why would people enroll in school? Why would someone rack up debt if there is nothing for them at the end of a program? What is the ROI for someone to attend school?

People attend school to help them move up in their careers or into careers. If the school can not help them with that I can see why enrollments are down. We have to do a better job in understanding the ROI of students and why they come to school in the first place. I think there is a disconnect between education and the workforce and gulf is getting larger.

Thankfully, there is a solution and we have to transform learning to improve the situation. We have to provide the experience and skills in a program of study. We can not just educate; we must educate and train. We must listen to the needs of students and employers and be the bridge between the two. We can not put our heads in the sand and hope the world changes towards us. That is not going to happen. We must lead! We must transform! We must help and not be a barrier to success! Our success is our graduates success!

References

An Upside Down Economy - Education Cycle

Digital Badges - Are they a solution to the credentials issue?

Digital Badges

     There is a credentials issues in IT education. For employers, grades are meaningless today. They do not tell them what a student can do today. They want to know what the competencies of graduates are and what level they are at. A resume does not really tell an employer much except what is told to them by their candidates. A resume lists the experiences and skills they have BUT not what they can do.

     There is a movement called Digital Badges. Digital Badges is a technique that allows someone to document the skills someone has. The concept is similar to the Boy Scouts Merit Badges. I am hopeful that badges could be a solution but I am concerned that badges are given out when someone completes a task or series of tasks. How do we know what is learned in these tasks? Someone could do the tasks but not learn a lot.

    I believe a combination of the prior learning assessment (PLA) and badges could help this out. Experience is what employers want today and PLA is a way to measure that learning has taken place. So, I would like to see more accountability in how badges are awarded and not just awarded for completing simple tasks without some assessment of the learning taking place. This does not mean that we will just create a test and when they pass we award the badge. It is much more than that. Students must demonstrate the skill and also the knowledge gained in learning that skill. This will provide some accountability that the badge the student has earned truly illustrates the knowledge and skills learned in that badge that was earned.

References

Digital Badges