It’s been two weeks since our Dean’s Symposium on Online Learning Quality, and in some ways it’s taken me that long to recover and be ready for follow-up.

The whole symposium was recorded, and may be watched here:

http://learningforlife.fsu.edu/deansSymposium

I had the honor of being the warm-up act for the day, providing an introduction of sorts in which I shared bits of my personal story of online learning and touching on some of the major concerns and issues. I was pleased that our panelists and keynotes throughout the rest of the day followed through on those themes and threads that I introduced.

Some highlights:

• Deb Adair of Quality Matters stressed the need for a common definition of quality in the context of online learning. There are so many out there right now (we all have our own), which poses some challenges for effectively discussing, designing, and implementing quality. She also noted that while QM focuses on quality in course design, they likely will not take up the facilitation component — although all speakers of the day seemed to agree that facilitation is critical. There are some political challenges in tackling quality facilitation — one thing we know about excellent facilitators is that they don’t all look alike, and instructors typically don’t react well when they feel they are being taught how to teach.
• Andrew Ng of Coursera discussed some of the pedagogy behind their courses. As a commenter noted at the end, it was nice to see non-ISD folks implementing some of the tried-and-true instructional strategies of the ISD world.
• Resources seem to be scarce all around, and course development — particularly when one must pay for faculty time and do sophisticated media development — can be costly.
• Everyone seemed to take an even-tempered view toward MOOCs. They’re now part of the educational landscape, but just how much of a place they’ll find in formal (degree-seeking) higher education remains in question.
• Andrew Ng’s stats on MOOC enrollees showed that the vast majority already have a bachelor’s degree (I think it was around 80%) and about half of them have an advanced degree (so, around 40%). To me, these numbers confirm that MOOCs are well suited for continuing education and informal learning.