Moving Pictures

Annotation Overlays for Ebooks But Not Just by a Random Reader

What if that guy is an idiot?

You know, the one that had the text book before you and marked it all up?

In my college days, I really would try to find used books to save money. I looked through lots of books in hopes of finding one that had been previously owned by a non-active learner--the kind of student who typically doesn't mark up his text books. But if none of those were to be found in the stacks, I'd buy new.

I knew the best way to get the most of out a text book was to mark it up myself. The act of interacting with my highlighter would be part of the process that helped me learn. If someone else had already done that work, I might be the one to miss out. Worse, what if the guy was an idiot? What if he highlighted things that just weren't important and missed the real concepts? Then when I crammed the night before an exam, I'd have no way to weed out the happenstance from the highlights.

Oh sure, I might get lucky and get the book marked up by Boy Braniac, but what were the chances of that? So when Joe Wikert suggested that students might pay extra for the notes by the previous owner, I was dumbfounded.

What if we could...enable students to resell their textbooks for more than what they paid?  How?  By including all their notes in them as e-textbooks.

Really? Pay extra for one random student's notes? Not me.

But create a system of highlights and notes by a lot of former students (anonymous attribution is fine), along with their grades and a list of classes they'd taken to date, and I'm in. Grades would serve as a proxy--a way to keep me from following fools into dark places. But the A+ guys wouldn't necessarily be the ones I'd go after. If the subject was a breeze for them, their markup might be sparse or cryptic, and therefore not that helpful. Similarly, it might be useful to know which students hadn't yet taken an economics class by the time they marked up a finance text book--especially if I hadn't taken Econ yet either. Of course, throw in the social aspect and let me "follow" someone so I can see what else he has marked up. And let me see reviews of the annotations made by a given person (like a sub-text book) so I can decide for myself whether to turn-on or subscribe to that markup. Then let me overlay the markup on top of the markup I did myself so I could learn by studying the differences.

Let's quit thinking of ebooks as digital copies of physical books and leverage the platform of technology. Then it won't matter if the guy who owned the book before I did was That Guy.

Enough with the "Will Colleges Go Out of Business?" Speculation

Thank you, Benjamin Lima, for providing a sane response to the wild speculation that MOOCs are going to put colleges out of business. Lima's article is so good that it's hard not to quote most of it. Be sure to read it for yourself (hat tip: Marginal Revolution). Here are a few things that really resonated with me:

A college education has traditionally bundled several different kinds of goods together:

1. The curriculum: mastery of specific knowledge and development of more general reasoning, analytical, and communication skills.
2. The extra-curriculum: a network of friends and contacts, and experience gained from clubs, sports, internships and other activities.
3. The signaling process: validation of general talent or status by completing all of the above at a "better" or highly ranked college.
4. The college experience: everything that is personally interesting, enjoyable or rewarding about living in a certain place with certain people, and having experiences that are personally valuable to the college student, regardless of their value to anyone else or to society at large—everything from late-night conversations about the meaning of life, to road trips, to pranks, sports rivalries, and "school spirit."

...I think it’s immediately apparent that the first type of goods—the curriculum—is by far the most vulnerable to disruption from the internet. Highly self-motivated students (i.e., Abraham Lincoln) have always been able to teach themselves, given the resources, and the internet is simply going to accelerate and expand this opportunity to anyone in the world who has an internet connection.

...A college course can be unbundled into two separate functions: first, there is the transfer of knowledge to the student, and second, there is the evaluation and feedback of student work.

...With MOOCs, now anyone in the world with an internet connection can download and watch lectures from eminent experts at top universities, for free, and hundreds of thousands have done so. This is indeed a huge leap forward in the area of knowledge transfer.  But the equivalent leap in the area of evaluation and feedback has not yet taken place.

Really, don't miss reading the whole article for yourself. Rightly called out, MOOCs are not disrupting 2, 3, and 4 (the extra-curriculum, the signaling process, and the college experience)--at least not yet. Even the curriculum is in the nascent stages of disruption. That is, there isn't much of a guide toward proficiency in a certain subject yet. Something in Winston Churchill's biography caught my eye as I was reading last night; it captures the lack-of-a-guide problem clearly. Churchill complained to his mother:

"I need someone to point out some specific subject and to direct my reading in that subject. The desultory reading I have so far indulged in has only resulted in a jumple of disconnected and ill-sorted facts."

Saylor.org is making a first stab at guidance, but such an effort has yet to be adopted by more online education providers. The individual course, however, is clearly being disrupted in an awesome way. Knowledge transfer from professors at top-tier school is available to anyone who wants to watch and listen.

Of course, real learning requires a feedback loop, and this is where MOOCs are beginning to experiment. The Great Courses and iTunes U has a lot of breadth in their knowledge base but feedback is conspicuously absent. Udacity and Coursera both use forums for student-driven discussion and direction, and use automated grading and peer evaluations for feedback. Coursera goes a step further by enforcing assignment deadlines as a way to try to keep a peer class together. So MOOCs are driving quickly toward 1, curriculum disruption.

Might MOOCs one day take on 2 and 3? Of course, and soon. Many are broaching those areas now and will be successful.

As for 4, well, it's hard to say. Many college students don't get that even in off-line university experiences today. I got it when I lived on campus; I recall those times fondly. But it was out of reach when I commuted to college and worked 32 hours a week. And my husband never got the experience nor wanted it. He didn't go to college until he was in his mid-30s and the "college experience" just wasn't part of the package he was after.

Still, even if you discount 4 and give a healthy "check plus" to MOOCs for 1, colleges won't be going out of business anytime soon! Rather, the two will become complements in one sense, and goal-directed alternatives in another.

Best Practices for "Forgot Password" Designs

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, if we assume that you still trust them with your credit card even though they've shown a lack of attention to detail by not properly capitalizing "ID" (I mean, I don't think they're really judging my psyche), then nothing is really wrong with this screen. They've neither confirmed nor denied that the username exists in their system. Good.

But something is very wrong with this:

They've sent a password in the clear over an unsecure channel. "It's just a temporary password," you say. "Not that bad."

Really? Check out what Troy Hunt has to say about that approach:

"It makes the malicious lockout of an account dead simple. If I know the email address of someone who owns an account at a website then I can lock them out of it whenever I please simply by resetting their password; it’s denial of service attack served up on a silver platter!"

To learn what you should do, and for other great design approaches for the "forgot password" problem, check out "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Building a Secure Password Reset Feature" on Troy's blog.

 

 

MOOCs Must Consider Behavioral Factors when They Consider Completion Rates

Consider this observation:

"The inability to cope with math is not the main reason that students drop out of high school. Yes, a low grade in math predicts dropping out, but no more so than a low grade in English. Furthermore, behavioral factors like motivation, self-regulation, social control (Casillas, Robbins, Allen & Kuo, 2012), as well as a feeling of connectedness and engagement at school (Archambault et al, 2009) are as important as GPA to dropout."

That's from Daniel Willingham in "Yes, Algebra is Necessary" (hat tip: Marginal Revolution), a response to last week's crazy New York Times' op-ed piece seriously titled "Is Algebra Necessary?" Dr. Willingham makes a compelling argument about the myriad merits of teaching algebra to everyone, and while I recommend his blog post for those arguments alone, it is the snippet I quoted that caught my attention.

Why? Because I believe it is especially relevant to MOOCs. For the most part, students taking a massive online class are not under the gun to complete it because it is part of a curriculum they must take, lest they tempt the wrath of their parents. So if it is not the threat of parental disapproval that keeps them enrolled, what will keep them going in the MOOC when the going gets tough?

I don't have the answer, but as I dig deeper into the topic, I'll start with these clues: "motivation, self-regulation, social control, and engagement." As BJ Fogg points out in his talk about motivation waves, it's easier to make something easier to do (e.g., reduce technical barriers) than to try to increase someone's motivation, so I'll focus first on the latter three. I know from my own experience that when I dropped Coursera's Human-Computer Interaction course, I did not have "a feeling of connectedness and engagement." On the other hand, I've had to put more time into Coursera's Finance class than I'd expected, but I'm sticking with it because I do have a small bit of engagement.

Kimberly Spillman, a Coursera student who attended the recent Coursera BBQ, made a similar point to the Chronicle of Higher Education when she talked about meeting new friends through online learning: "My whole world has changed since taking these classes. All of the sudden I'm meeting people that I've never met, and we're talking about the class together, which was motivating me to keep up with the class, and we'd hang out afterward."

Lots of great challenges in this field! Certainly we can build on the foundation already established by Casillas, Robbins, Allen & Kuo; Archambault; and others.