On Tuesday, October 23, 2012, I had the privilege of hearing Adrian Sannier, Vice President of Production at Pearson, give a talk titled “Education at Scale: The Rise of the Rock Star Teacher.” Sannier described the need for our society to take a new approach to higher education—instead of developing the traditional methods of instruction, we need to focus on developing scalable educational opportunities. He emphasized the fact that Western Civilization has always embraced the concept of improvement, striving to “make things better,” and argues that this belief should be transferred into higher education. He described the Sole Proprietor Creation Model, the traditional model in face-to-face and ¬online education in which courses are developed by one professor, one at a time. He argued that this method is no longer benefiting our society, and we need to take a new approach and embrace technology to develop education on a larger scale.
He then introduced the concept of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. MOOCs are online courses aimed at delivering free, open content with large-scale participation. He described the current state of MOOCs as an adapted version of the view that teachers are the “sage on the stage, with the largest possible stage.” He identified that a new approach is needed; a fusion of more personal methods of teaching and learning into the online environment, incorporating tutors, study groups, learning communities, etc. This new approach would encourage learning for mastery, evoking new, positive attitudes towards learning.
I had the opportunity to visit briefly after Sannier’s speech, with a more focused discussion on how this concept could be applied to our unit at Engineering-LAS Online Learning. We discussed new technologies, such as OpenClass, and their potential and impact on the development of MOOCs.
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| Adrian Sannier surrounded by students and faculty from the School of Education, Iowa State University. Four of the six shown represent Engineering-LAS Online Learning. |