U.S.-China conference highlights similarities among innovators in ed tech around the world. How should colleges react?

In mid-March of this year, some 250 higher education faculty, administrators, programmers and others involved in the educational technology policy and development areas gathered for the fourth annual U.S.-China Smart Education conference at the University of North Texas. It was a fascinating merging of cultures and subjective perspectives centered on some of the distinctly objective aspects of coding, hardware and standards.

UNT was the perfect host for this event, sharing their technology growth vision; engaging their information and technology faculty members and students, including those from China who could offer informal translation services for the rest of us; and a Texas venue that offered plenty of western music, high-flying camera drones over the Texas Motor Speedway and an immersion in Texas culture.

The technologies that were focused on were state of the art in augmented and virtual reality supported by artificial intelligence. Clearly the attending faculty members from universities across Asia, Europe and North America valued the qualities and potential of rich media to support teaching and learning. We talked pedagogy, engagement, adaptive delivery and related strategies that could best be floated on these vehicles of technology. Simulations and immersion activities were among the key applications most frequently discussed. We eagerly queued up to test the demonstrations that so richly filled the array of goggles shared by vendors.

On my flight home, I pondered the takeaways from this conference. Certainly, there was a universal enthusiasm among those attending the U.S.-China conference for the ways in which these technologies can bring learning experiences to those at a distance. In many ways these technologies can be transformative by personalizing learning and advancing adaptive learning, and by creating a vast array of simulations that capture nuances of personal interaction in limitless contexts. In a down-to-earth practical working example, the simulation of Developing Leadership Skills With Virtual Reality by Carrie Straub of Mursion effectively showed in real time how we can simulate and improve supervisor-employee exchanges.

Yet, because of the complexity of developing many of these technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, the most important role rests with the corporations that develop the technologies. The immense power of artificial intelligence and its independence from explicit programming for every situation requires that effective parameters are put in place to assure products do not go off the intended tracks. To the extent that corporations rather than the universities will control the basic assumptions to be applied within the AI algorithms, we are put in the position that our programs will carry cultural, racial and gender assumptions that may not be consistent with our own. Amy Webb, in her popular new release, The Big Nine, examines the role of the six American and three Chinese companies that are competing for leadership in AI. They share a profit motive, but they have diverse cultural and corporate approaches that should give us pause to consider where they will lead us. In an excerpt from the book published in Fast Company, Webb explains the importance of internal corporate governance in the development process:

The Big Nine should develop a process to evaluate the ethical implications of research, workflows, projects, partnerships and products, and that process should be woven in to most of the job functions within the companies. As a gesture of trust, the Big Nine should publish that process so that we can all gain a better understanding of how decisions are made with regards to our data. Either collaboratively or individually, the Big Nine should develop a code of conduct specifically for its AI workers. It should reflect basic human rights and it should also reflect the company’s unique culture and corporate values. And if anyone violates that code, a clear and protective whistle-blowing channel should be open to staff members.

There is much at stake in the development of AI. The “big nine” corporations are the linkages that ideally will bring cultures together and create a compass for development in this field. Action must be taken now to assure that the underlying assumptions are in the best interests of the learners. A first model for a governance framework for AI has been developed by the Personal Data Protection Commission of Singapore. The 27-page instrument is well worth reading to gain a better understanding of AI and its implications.

This document and these sort of events can spark discussions on emerging technologies and how our adoption could be undertaken broadly across campuses to stimulate discussion, debate and begin the process of setting a framework at your own institution for research and development in this field. A framework customized for your university should be in place before occasions arise in which it will be needed (in some cases, those occasions have already arisen). So, begin today to consider these issues; to delay risks unforeseen consequences for your institution and beyond.

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s Inside Digital Learning on April 17, 2019.

The long-standing tension between “free and open” and for-profit business models is now playing out with textbooks and open educational resources.

Over the decades, there has been considerable debate over just who first uttered the phrase “information wants to be free.” It is widely reported that this arose in a discussion between Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. These pioneers in the digital age recognized the coming struggle between “free and open” materials and “for-profit” publishing and dissemination.

This came up in an era of the pre-web internet, and relatively early on in the personal computer revolution. The early programmers and inventors recognized that information would soon be very easy to uncover, but there still was value in compensating the work of acquiring and assembling the information. Brand raised the tension between the value of information and the dropping cost of accessing that information, to which Wozniak is quoted as saying “information should be free but your time should not.”

Decades later, the tension continues. We have seen the meteoric rise in the cost of textbooks at a rate of more than four times inflation in the past decade and the advent of access codes for associated online materials that expire at the end of the term. The expiring codes undermine the rental and used-book marketplace that helped some students afford their texts.

A study by the National Association of College Stores shows the beginning of a possible trend toward the decline in the cost of purchase of required class materials, with an increase in the number of students reporting that they downloaded free online materials. Unreported are the numbers of students who simply skip buying books and other required materials. Librarians at colleges and universities have stepped in across the country to offer text materials in open reserves prompted by their concern for those students who do not have affordable access to texts. For example, at Alverno College in Milwaukee, more than half of the students reported that they had not purchased a textbook because of the cost. The Alverno library put texts on open reserve and tracked their use.

Open educational resource initiatives have sprung up nationally. These generally have taken the form of stipends and release time for faculty members to develop and assemble resources to replace their required texts. In 2015, the University of Maryland University College made a commitment to providing open resources across the undergraduate and later the graduate curriculum. Some larger initiatives have crossed college lines to provide resources to groups of colleges and universities. SPARC maintains a list of initiatives and resources.

One of the most successful initiatives is OpenStax, hosted at Rice University. OpenStax reports that in 2018 students saved more than $175 million in textbook costs using their open products. Now 20 years in evolution (the program began as the Connexions Project at Rice in 1999), the initiative continues to gain momentum and extends to more and more faculty authors and collaborators.

As recounted by University of Idaho president Chuck Staben in Inside Higher Ed, the university is testing a new incentive model for faculty to acquire or develop open resources to replace traditional, expensive textbooks. “Our plan is to give some of the estimated yearly savings from OER use to the department, our teaching and learning center, and our library (5 percent/2.5 percent/2.5 percent, respectively),” Staben said.

The Idaho president adds, “Providing even 5 percent of the projected savings from OER adoption directly to the department as flexible money would be highly motivating to many departments; the teaching center and library are incentivized to support adoption and access.”

Information wants to be free — even more so in 2019 than 35 years ago. Students are on board. Recent studies have begun uncovering the link between OER and engagement, learning outcomes and student success.

In sum, reasons to consider moving to open educational resources:

• Success in student recruitment and marketing because of lower costs
• Improved student retention due to more students accessing the required materials
• Improved student learning outcomes as indicated in recent studies
• Implicitly finer faculty control and familiarity with resources they produce

Do you have data showing how many students have not purchased required materials each semester?

Have you investigated learning outcomes or final grades of students who did not purchase the text? Such research does involve careful crafting to protect student privacy, but it is important to determine if learning is at risk.

What OER initiatives are underway at your university?

Who should lead the initiative at your college to customize and reduce the costs of learning materials for your students?

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed’s Inside Digital Learning on April 3, 2019.