1. A learning system to meet the
knowledge needs of a complex era
George Siemens, PhD
July 17, 2013
edX

2. August 5, 1949

3. April 14, 1994

4. Assertions:
1. Knowledge needs are today defined by
complexity and interconnectivity
2. Emerging employment opportunities are
knowledge-based
3. The idea of a university is expanding
(complexifying)
4. Knowledge institutions mirror the
architecture of information

5. The Conference Board

6. McKinsey Quarterly, 2012

7. Increasing diversity
of student profiles
The U.S. is now in a position when
less than half of students could be
considered fulltime students. In
other words, students who can attend
campus five days a week nine-to-five,
are now a minority.
(Bates, 2013)

8. Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities, 2013

9. OECD 2013

10. The last decade, two defining
trends:
1. Participatory culture and social/technical
connectivity (Rise of the Individual)
2. Transparency and surveillance culture
(Rise of Data and Analytics)

11. Expanding knowledge needs
requires expanding learning
opportunities

12. The process of
learning/unlearning/knowledge
development is still happening through
legacy models that do not account for
today‟s nature of information and knowledge
development.

13. When we create, it can be
analyzed and
new patterns can be discovered
(understood, evaluated, interrogated)

14. Information
fragmentation…l
oss of narratives
of coherence

15. The problem:
Once we‟ve fragmented content
and conversation,
we need to stitch them together
again so we can act meaningfully

16. Knowledge in pieces
diSessa, 1993

17. Reducing the basic units of
education:
From courses/workshops/modules
to competencies

18. Agents in a system possess only partial
information
(Miller and Page 2007)
…to make sense and act meaningfully
requires connections to be formed between
agents

19. Coherence is an orientation about the
meaning and value of information elements
based on how they are connected,
structured, and related
Antonovsky 1993

20. Networked information
doesn’t have a center

21. So we (socially) create temporary
centers:
Shared sensemaking

22. So we (technologically) create
temporary centers:
content and conversation
aggregation

23. Stitching things together:
Sensemaking and wayfinding through
complex information flows and trends to
extract what is important and relevant

24. “Learning and knowledge creation is often
distributed across multiple media and sites
in networked environments. Traces of such
activity may be fragmented across multiple
logs and may not match analytic needs. As a
result, the coherence of distributed
interaction and emergent phenomena are
analytically cloaked”
Suthers, Rosen, 2011

25. What we are seeing is the
complexification of higher
education
Learning needs are complex, ongoing
Simple singular narrative won‟t suffice going
forward
The idea of the university is expanding and
diversifying

26. Much of what MOOCs address is the
shadow education system.
They are not actual competition with the
existing education system

27. https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/home

28. “Both student and teacher are unhappy
when chained to curricula and syllabi, to
tests and mediocre standards. An atmosphere
of uninspired and uninspiring common sense
may well produce satisfactory mastery of
technical “know how” and testable factual
information. Such an atmosphere, however,
stifles genuine understanding and the spirit
of adventure in research.”
Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University 1959

29. MOOCs/DS106:
Changed relationship between teacher/learner
Distributed, chaotic, emergent.
Learners expected to create, grow, expand
domain and share personal sensemaking
through artifact-creation

30. An education system that fails to emulate the
characteristics information in an era is doomed to
fail.
Information today is:
Open
Distributed
Scalable
Social
Generative
Networked
Self-organized
Adaptive
Global

31. Participatory Pedagogies
(Collis & Moonen, 2008)
(Askins, 2008)
(Harvard Law School, 2008)

32. Distributed content and conversations

33. State of Wisconsin, 2012

35. Anderson, T. & Dron, J. (2011). Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy, International
Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12(3), 80-97, http://goo.gl/j3mRF

36. Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in
higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

37. Group work in MOOCs

38. Kuhn: accumulation of anomalies, create
“phase changes” (sorry, hate the „p‟ word):
dramatic change, alteration of core premises,
development of a framework to account for sub-
changes

39. Carlota Perez: techno-economic change

40. Education systems track the
architecture of information of an era

41. 7 Primary Tensions in open online
courses
Automation vs. Creation
Social vs. Scripted
Structured vs. Self-Organized
University-based vs. Informal learning
Assessment/recognition vs. Personal growth
Functioning in existing system vs. Transforming existing system
Learner owned vs. Organization owned interaction spaces

42. Twitter/Gmail:
gsiemens