The Employability Narrative
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/12/19

Audrey Watters has spent the last week working on articles for her annual Top Ed-Tech Trends series. Today's newsletter (to make up for yesterday's missing newsletter) summarizes four of them.

One of the value propositions of my own LPSS Program was to address 'the skills shortage'. It's a narrative, of course, and nothing like the whole story behind our work. But it's a narrative that was pushed back and forth all year. Is there really a skills shortage? Should schools, colleges and universities be the means we employ to address the skills shortage (as opposed to, say, simply paying people more, which is what a free market would do)? We take are told graduates aren't ready for the workplace. Education helps, though, but as Watters notes, even an elite university degree doesn't protect a black student from racism. And what should people learn? To code? To be good citizens? To appreciate Star Wars? Some of Watters's sharpest critiques are reserved for this topic. And well they should be.

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Credits and Credentialing
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/12/19

I have long believed we are headed for a post-university-degree era in learning, an era where there is a proliferation of credentials offered by a wide range of agencies. Though as Audrey Watters remarks, "What’s always striking to me is that alternate forms of credentialing are posited as a new thing, as a brilliant innovation (of course!) devised recently by tech and ed-tech companies." True, oh too true. And from what I can see, they would simply toss us into an Uber-like era of 'disruptive' credentialing (which will leave us wondering whether we can trust any credential at all). Kind of like what GapJumper is doing. Nor will we be able to trust the credential accrediting agencies, which can be as shady as they come. Nor do I have any joy at the prospect of (say) the University of Microsoft. People call for an "open credentials marketplace" as though such a thing would never be subject to collusion and monopolization. No, the truly disruptive post-credential credential won't be a credential at all.

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Beyond the MOOC
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/12/19

Sure, some say “when the MOOC is Over, turn out the lights…" And yes, the phenomenon of MOOC as buzzword will pass. But the phenomenon that is more durable, if less hyped (and definitely less well financed) is open online learning. MOOCs (as defined by rich people from Stanford) are very well funded: "three startups probably most closely associated with the MOOC craze – Udacity, Coursera, and Udemy. These three have now raised $160 million, $146.1 million, and $113 million respectively." But massive open online learning - as pioneered by not-rich people from Canada - received very little (if any financing). But when we look back on this era, it won't be the day-to-day miscellanea we are reading about today. It will be about that time when formerly expensive educational materials became available to everyone.

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The Compulsion for Data
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2015/12/19

"It’s disheartening to recognize how profiling, tracking, and surveilling students with new technologies fit quite neatly into longstanding practices of the education system," writes Audrey Watters. "Disheartening, but true." In this long post on big data and privacy she explores both edges of the issue: how, on the one hamnd, big data gives us no magical insight into learning, and how, on the other hand, it is used as the premise to enable widespread intrusions into personal privacy. The trend is not favouring students. "You have to put your face up to it and you put your knuckles up to it,” Ms. Chao said recently, explaining how the program uses webcams to scan students’ features and verify their identities before the test." How long before this becomes necessary to rent a car, check in at a hotel, board a flight, buy beer, get a credit card....

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