Our OpenGov 101 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a Semifinalist in the Knight News Challenge! Submitted in partnership with Global Integrity, we’re hoping to develop a global curricula to connect the open government community with the tools, experts, best practices, and organizations driving the field forward. While we still have some skepticism of MOOCs as a cure-all for online education and believe there are many ways to improve how MOOCs are executed, in this case we believe a MOOC format makes sense.

We believe the challenge for OpenGov isn’t just making new tools to open up governments, but empowering citizens to use those tools to pursue accountability and transparency. After all, open data has little value if people can’t use it (according to the Harvard Business Review), or as we put in our introduction to our Digital Organizing and Open Government course:

But don’t take our word for it. There are a number of very cool finalists in the remaining 40 in the refinement phase, so head on over and check them out if you like. We’ve left applause and feedback for a few already!

If you’re interested in contributing to our submission, here are three easy ways to get involved:

1) Celebrating #OpenGovDay on April 8.

opengovday

April 8 marks three years since key provisions of President Obama’s Open Government Directive were due. We think this is a big deal worth celebrating – but we want to hear what you think.

This week, tweet @techchange or use the hashtag #OpenGovIs to tell us what open government means to you.

Then – on April 8 – join our Tweet Storm by following and using hashtag #OpenGovDay throughout the day. We’ll be retweeting the best #OpenGovIs submissions to amplify your voice – and we’ll be offering special deals on our new class – Digital Organizing and Open Government.

2) Feedback or Applause on our Submission

While “applause” won’t affect our entry’s chances of winning, it will give us a chance to see who finds our project interesting and give us a chance to reach out. If you have a comment or feedback, we’d love your ideas to refine and clarify our submission for the next phase.

 3) Talk with Your Organization about Partnership for the Day.

Watch this space, but we’re looking for institutional partners for the day. Let us know if you’re interested! Just tweet at us or leave a comment on this post. So far we’re proud to have organizations joining us such as Open Forum Foundation (@open4m), CrowdHall (@crowdhall), OpenGov Hub (@opengovhub), Global Integrity (@globalintegrity) and more!

Reports of the demise of the American educational system have been greatly exaggerated.

According to the New York Times, 2012 was the Year of the MOOC with the emergence of edX, Udacity, and Coursera as education providers, tearing down the walls for top-tier universities and providing free access to Ivy League professors and curriculum to a global audience. In another piece, NYT Columnist Tom Friedman breathlessly predicts:

“[A] day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion.”

But there are fundamental limits on what a MOOC can accomplish at scale when introducing student interactivity. As we covered in a recent post (What Can We Learn from Coursera’s “MOOC Mess”), online education requires tradeoffs. You can broadcast a video or self-paced module to 41,000 students without difficulty, but things get tricky quickly if you start introducing group exercises without planning ahead.

However, there is a growing consensus that these massive courses are simply the future wherein top-tier universities will claim a global audience for rock-star professors while mid-range universities will be squeezed out of the picture. If we assume that the future of online education looks like a MOOC, then that is a reasonable assumption: You and your children will sit at home and watch videos, click through quizzes, and call it an education when you receive your degree. Mid-range universities won’t compete to pay $50,000 per course (the average cost of setting up a MOOC) without a globally known faculty, so why try to compete with the big players?

As currently designed, MOOCs fundamentally privilege existing brands. Universities want to establish multi-year partnerships with large tech firms to leverage their globally recognized name. However, edutech startups are starting to provide another answer for mid-range universities. A recent Guardian article (Are edutech startups plugging an innovation gap in our universities?) revealed a different path forwards for education during an interview with Victor Henning of Mendeley:

The recent boom in edutech startups, says Henning, reflects the fact that universities no longer need either to buy in bulk or build everything from scratch. Instead they should use their time and resources more wisely by collaborating with smaller companies already working on new software solutions, many of which have their roots in the higher education sector.

If true, then this provides another way forward for non-Ivy League universities: Don’t compete as institutions; compete as classrooms. Rather than multi-year deals for hundreds of thousands of dollars to compete for a global market you can’t possibly win, look to empower your teachers with the ability to teach online classes with video conferencing, social networking, and group projects by embracing a host of different tools provided by a variety of edutech startups.

The consensus is right on one thing: The Ivy League universities are going to win on name recognition. They will provide engaging videos to millions around the world that share the one-way “sage on a stage” lectures of their top-tier talent to lock in an unproven MOOC business model. But that’s no guarantee that their professors will be able to provide the most engaging course format. Universities that embrace this current tech chaos by empowering their professors to work with a wide range of startups may just find themselves ahead of the pack.

As we explored in a blog post last July (Three Questions to Ask As Universities Incorporate Hybrid Classroom Pedagogies), professors like Dr. John Boyer of Virginia Tech have managed to push the boundaries of the classroom using widely available tech like Twitter and Skype. While educational tools are advancing at an ever-increasing rate, the pedagogical challenges for incorporating their possibilities have hardly changed. Universities should embrace those challenges, rather than looking for a tool to solve them.

Are you interested in learning with TechChange? Check out our next class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts April 15. Apply now.

We make no secret of it at TechChange: Our staff are huge fans of Coursera. This innovative organization absolutely deserved to win TechCrunch’s Best New Startup of 2012 and are the gold standard in the growing field of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). And so I was really looking forward to taking the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application course. Which is why I was a bit taken aback to receive this email on February 2nd.

I won’t go into this one course’s many problems here, but if you’re interested, Scott Jaschik wrote a superb article for Inside Higher Ed: MOOC Mess. There’s also a detailed breakdown of what went wrong from the student perspective on the Chewing Thistles blog: 24 hours – A long time in online learning. As providers of online learning, we wanted to capture some thoughts about this kerfuffle to see what we can learn about the field as a whole:

1) Collaborating ain’t easy. Much of the course’s criticism centered around using groups and collaboration tools like Google Spreadsheets (which has a limit of 50 simultaneous editors) for a class of 41,000 students. That’s not just a Google problem, as even the more flexible hackpad (our current favorite) has a concurrent editor limit of 250 students. But even if you could solve this problem with a technical solution, the organizational difficulty of structuring and facilitating exercises won’t go away. And that’s fine, because….

2) There are inevitable trade-offs between scale and interactivity. The great part about MOOCs is that they can easily disseminate content to tens of thousands of students — which is important since they can cost upwards of $50,000 to make due to the level of time and video production needed. But once you start to increase the group collaboration, interaction with facilitators, and more, you run up against staff constraints as well as technical constraints. And that’s tough because…

3) Quality control is hard for both content and facilitation. We like to say at TechChange that an online learning experience is really three services in one: A user-friendly online platform, interactive content, and relevant facilitation. Take away any of those pegs and the whole thing falls apart. When your platform consists of pre-recorded videos and automated tests, it’s much easier to manage at scale than when you’re facilitating group activities, which is a problem because….

4) If you’re asking for somebody’s time, it’s not free. There’s excitement about what “free” means to expanding access to education, but time isn’t free — there’s always an opportunity cost. And frankly, if you’re going to have a subject matter expert engage directly with students you’re going to eventually need to compensate that person for their time and expertise. And that’s fine, because many students will be willing to pay for that more interactive experience, which is why you need to…

5) Listen to your students, especially when they’re upset. Unlike Coursera, we do charge our students for access to courses. If you think people are upset when a free product fails, try experiencing the result when they’ve entrusted you with their hard-earned money. That feedback loop can change when universities and educators are the ones buying your classes, but students are the ones taking them. If you’re at Coursera and want to try experiencing this class from the point of view of one of your students, one article well worth reading is: How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it.

Ultimately, Coursera still has a wonderful catalogue of free upcoming courses and will hopefully find a balance between quality control and student interactivity. But perhaps the most beneficial takeaway is the recognition that students and teachers are partners in the process of advancing the field of online education.

Students can always teach “experts” how to better run a course — even when everything goes as planned.

Well, it only took us a full year of facilitating online courses, but we’re finally sharing some of our original content as part of launching our brand new Media Library. Right now it’s admittedly pretty sparse–mainly videos from our mHealth Course and interviews from the mHealth Summit–but that’s precisely because it was those events that convinced us to finally get our act together. Since the end of our mHealth course last week, we received dozens of requests from our 100+ students to share course content with their friends and colleagues, many of whom work in public health. A fitting request, since one of the main themes from the mHealth Summit is that content and partnerships are now trumping technology in scaling mobile phones for public health.

In our online courses we try to follow a rule of thirds for the 7-9 hours of participant time per week: ⅓ original content and animations, ⅓ live events and workshops, ⅓ existing publications/videos. While we’re very proud of the first ⅔ that we create, the last ⅓ has often been just as important in setting the stage for live conversations. It’s also an opportunity to showcase the best-in-class that we see from our partners, ranging from educational health videos like The Story of Cholera, to serious games on poverty like Ayiti: The Cost of Life, and of course the classic post: 11 Concerns about ICTs and ‘Social Media for Social Good.’

In addition to giving back to the global conversation around tech by making much of our past content available to the public, we’re hoping that this will keep us motivated to produce fresh, innovative content in each course. But it’s not just about what we’re giving, but what we’re planning to receive: namely, translating existing videos into other languages using wiki-style translation platforms such as Amara. Stay tuned for regular updates and please let us know what you think in the comments section below!

TechChange is excited to announce a new partnership with Transitions (TOL), a Prague-based journalism and media training organization with a focus on the post-communist countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. Running a variety of programs – from the publication of one of the first online magazines to cover political, social, economic and cultural issues in the region since 1999, to providing young reporters with intensive training on best journalistic practices  – TOL has been a regional leader on media and democracy building efforts.

Bringing their expertise on media and journalism development to their target region through our eLearning environment, TOL will be running their course: “Reporting on Education,”  adapting a course that the Guardian Foundation originally created for TOL and the BBC’s iLearn platform. And though journalist training is a broad endeavor, even when focusing on a particular region, we’re hoping that this course will help to not only train journalists, but also to elevate national and regional policy dialogue on the issues of educational reform, open governance and democratic accountability.

Counting gets underway at a polling station in Moscow following Russia’s Presidential election, 4 March 2012.*

This new institutional relationship and course topic comes at a time when the role of the media in promoting such topics is an ever salient issue, particularly in Eastern Europe. Over the past few months, the Kremlin has tightened control over various aspects of civil society and acted to counter what it views as foreign interference in Russia’s sovereign affairs, moves that included booting USAID, a key funder of media training and other efforts, out of the country.

TechChange has helped organizations address these challenges and co-authored a piece in the Huffington Post (USAID’s Eviction From Russia: An Opportunity for Online Learning as E-Development) expressing that:

“there is reason to believe that using widely-available technology, democracy promotion organizations have the potential to greatly influence dialogue by amplifying local practitioner voices, and giving domestic organizations a channel for collaboration with international experts.”

This is where we are hoping that our partnership with TOL will further distribute valuable content – including across closed or semi-closed borders – and build up the capacity of a core group of journalists to report in an informative and engaging way on the sometimes complicated field of education. After all, the task of training journalists in this case isn’t geared just toward building a better media, but also a better, more equitable education system and more modern and democratic societies. We’re hoping that this first course will be yet another worthwhile addition to this process.

*Photo Credit: Credit: OSCE/Jens Eschenbaecher

Interested in digital activism and citizen journalism? Check out our 104 course on digital organizing, which will be run January 7 – February 1!

This piece has been crossposted from Health Unbound. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit our course page on mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health.

On November 14th the Mobile Phones for Global Health Online Certificate course officially kicks off and as we head into the final countdown we are offering a special preview of what participants can expect from the four-week course!

With 75 feedback surveys completed (thank you to all those who participated) we identified some of the most well-known thought leaders in the field speaking throughout the course.  Students will have the opportunity to engage directly with leading applications developers, and learn from practitioners who have had significant experience in implementing mobile phone based communication systems around the globe. The agenda will include:

Weekly Course Topics:

  • Week 1: Introduction to Mobile Health
  • Week 2: Strengthening health systems
  • Week 3: Moving towards citizen-centered health
  • Week 4: Technology Standards & Interoperability and Learning from other mServices

Featured Speakers:
Patty Mechael, Executive Director of the mHealth Alliance will provide students with an engaging introduction to the field, discussing the evolution of mobile phones for international health, and how these technologies are being used to today to respond to some of the greatest global health challenges.

Kicking off week 2, Joel Selanikio, co-founder of DataDyne, will present on the development of Episurveyor, and how mobile phones are being used to collect, manage, and sort data.

Also in week two, the class will be joined by Isaac Holeman, Chief Strategist for Medic Mobile, who will engage with students on the range of open source applications in the Medic Mobile toolkit – including the well-known Frontline SMS system that allows computers to send messages to large groups of people at a low cost.

A number of other guest speakers and presenters will also be featured. Stay tuned as we get closer by checking the course landing page.

In addition to these guest speakers, participants will engage with case studies, multimedia tutorials, interactive exercises, and live demonstrations of such tools as interactive voice recognition (IVR),  SMS (text message) communication programs, smartphone applications, and health information systems for data collection and management. Through this combination of hands-on experience, and engagement with practitioners on the ground, the goal is to provide students with an in-depth introduction to the field of mHealth.

Participate in the Live Twitter Chat and YOU Could Win 2 Free Passes!

Leading up the course, the mHealth Alliance and TechChange will provide an opportinity to for individuals to win a free pass to enroll in the course! Together TechChange and the mHealth Alliance will host a live-Twitter chat from @techchange and @mHealthAlliance using #tc309 on Friday, October 26 at 1pm EDT.

During the chat we will engage all participants in a variety of discussion topic and questions related to mHealth. We’re eager to hear from you about questions that you may have on latest innovations and projects in the field. All participants in the twitter chat will be included in a drawing to win a free seat in our upcoming course: mHealth Mobile Phones for Public Health. We will give a away a total of 2 seats. More details to come but tweet at @techchange or @mHealthAlliance if you have questions, and we look forward to having you join us there!

OpenTok helps us bridge self-paced content and real-time video engagement. If you’re interested in exploring our platform, check out our upcoming course on mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health, organized in partnership with the mHealth Alliance. Class starts on Nov. 12!

 

Generally speaking, most online learning is divided into two camps: Self-paced content (Coursera, Moodle, etc.) or real-time video webinars (Adobe Connect, etc.). The problem is that our experience indicated that we needed both self-paced content to accommodate the mid-career professionals that comprise most of our students interested in technology, as well as real-time engagement to provide direct interaction with technologists and practitioners. Rather than compromise, we set out to build our own online learning platform.

When we set out to re-imagine online learning for our needs at TechChange, we realized that in order for our learning approach to work, we needed to create an environment conducive to collaboration and co-creation of learning. Our ability to beam in experts from all over the world for remote interviews is crucial to to making this type of learning possible. We use a video chat service called OpenTok to power these engagements.

OpenTok is a flexible video streaming service that allows us to integrate live video chat into our learning platform without having to worry about the actual video streaming itself. OpenTok provides a robust application programming interface (API) that allows a developer to integrate OpenTok services directly into your website or mobile application. They also offer pre-built solutions that you can simply embed into a website, but the brilliance of the OpenTok model is in their fully-featured API.

We tried other video platforms before finding OpenTok, but none of them offered the flexibility and feature richness that OpenTok offers. Using OpenTok we are able to allow remote presenters to simply log into our website and start publishing their audio-video feeds to our courses in only two clicks. This has greatly increased the ease of use of the platform and made it possible to convene important conversations between experts and course participants from countries around the world, including: Libya, Pakistan, Kazakstan, Kenya, Thailand, Egypt, and many others

Due to the bandwidth and other constraints we face bringing together this global audience (our courses generally include participants from 20+ countries), OpenTok’s robust API has been key to our success. With OpenTok speakers and participants can easily toggle video and audio streams to conserve bandwidth. We also convene participant panels where small groups of course participants can discuss pressing issues and share their personal experiences. We believe this video interaction goes a long way to creating virtual learning communities and adds greatly to course outcomes.

More recently, we used OpenTok to power our live stream of the International Conference of Crisis Mappers 2012. We received an excellent response to this offering and are looking forward to using OpenTok to allow other conferences and events to further engage with the global audiences that hunger for access to these important discussions. We believe it is especially important to provide access and inclusion to these communities that for any number of reasons are unable to be physically present for the increasing number of important discussions happening at ICT4D events and conferences in D.C. and around the world.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without OpenTok’s incredible customer support and technical assistance. I’ve spent countless hours on their IRC channel getting advice and support from members of their tech team. A special thanks goes out to @digitalsai, @meliho, and @jonmumm and others at OpenTok for all of their technical assistance and invaluable support as we’ve developed our OpenTok integration.

Best practices conferences are critical to the growth of any community. The sharing of ideas and capturing of collective lessons-learned allows for those both in attendance, and those reading any after-action report, to proceed with their respective related projects having gained new insight, or having made new partnerships with other like-minded individuals and organizations. However, just as websites are now building responsive design as “mobile first” and desktop second, it’s time to start thinking about these events differently. No longer should we think only about planning offline events that “we webcast,” but rather about global conversations facilitated by online engagement that have an in-person conversation or presentation at its core.

Patrick Meier, co-founder of CrisisMappers, Digital Humanitarians & Standby Task Force speaking at the ICCM

In no community of practice is this more true than with Volunteer Technical Communities (VTC’s) like crisis mapping, which depend on the goodwill, real-time information, and online cohesiveness that can be properly augmented by online engagement. And keeping in line with both the principles of crowdfeeding and the fostering of global online learning communities, this past week’s International Conference of Crisis Mappers exemplified the benefits of online integration, as mappers and technologist from around the globe gathered both online and in Washington, DC for four days of conversation. By providing the global VTC with the ability to engage via a live webcast and an interactive chat forum, the information shared in the halls of the World Bank shifted from being mostly for the benefit of conference attendees, to truly engaging with the global community of crisis mappers.

By livestreaming the event, the ICCM’s webcast enabled the inclusion of over 950 additional attendees – almost doubling their audience!

 

Looking ahead, it isn’t just the Crisismappers team that would be best served to continue focusing on this level of digital engagement. In many ways they are thought leaders in this field through their engagement with online learning communities. However, other international organizations that focus on issues such as open governance and transparency often fail to lead by example on these issues, holding conferences that are limited to small audiences, and comprised only of individuals who can afford the time and airfare necessary to be in attendance. As distance learning practitioners, we feel strongly that effectively used learning tools can act as a driving force for social change. And in the case of live events – by bringing more voices to the table in low-cost way, simple information sharing mechanisms such as this can enable otherwise disparate communities and engaged individuals to be both teachers and students, sharing in the collective learning experience.

Linton Wells from National Defense University speaking at the ICCM

Today, the barriers to entry with this kind of online engagement are so low, that all takes is a bit of planning and a small amount of technical know-how to get up and running. I would even wager that the cost of breakfast at your event is significantly more than that of ensuring web connectivity and online involvement. And while communities of practice used to be local because business and organizations were local; today, globally minded organizations must ensure global engagement, as technology has reached a point at which there’s almost no excuse for allowing only those within a close geographic proximity access to your event. As we said – leave the bagels, keep the connectivity.*

 

*TechChange would still be delighted to eat breakfast at your local Washington, DC event, including bagels if that’s what is on the menu.

This piece has been cross-posted from The Amani Institute. Read the original post.

You think carefully through the strategy for starting a new educational organization with an online course. You market the course and enroll more about 30 people from over 10 countries, with an exciting line-up of guest speakers. You prepare the content and syllabus for the course, working constantly and well with your partner organization. Everything’s set for the launch.

And then, five minutes into your introductory address, the electricity goes out and you’re disconnected from the web platform, leaving your partner and students wondering what happened to you. #typical #Murphy’s Law

Oddly enough, in the debris of that failed experiment lies an important learning moment about working with technology and working to solve social problems (which is in fact the subject of the course – “Technology, Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship“): no matter how much you plan ahead, there’s so much still outside your control, and just as technology can be a wonderful enabler, it can also be a serious disabler. As so many technologists and tech entrepreneurs love to say, “It’s not about the technology”. The human side is much more important, and we failed by not trying to limit the possibility of such a disabling moment.

We did not repeat our mistake, however. A few hours ago, we conducted a guest lecture in the online course. This time, we found a corporate office building with reliable electricity and internet connectivity. The subject was “Designing Your Tech-Enabled Social Enterprise” and our guest speaker was Adam White of GroupShot. Adam spoke candidly and insightfully about a number of key principles regarding designing tech-based social change initiatives, some common mistakes that people make, and some of the best organizations in this space. But just as pleased as we were with his talk, we were also just simply relieved that it went off without a hitch given that the hosts were based in Washington, D.C., the guest speaker in Boston, and we were moderating from Nairobi, Kenya.

#success #sigh-of-relief

As K-12 teachers experiment with iPads in the classroom, Twitter streams in the backchannel, and TEDtalks as the new textbook, university professors are figuring out what to make of massively open online courses and how it will affect their classroom. After reading the barrage of stories this past year on new innovations in education technology, from the flipped classroom to edX, I began to wonder why K-12 teachers reported feeling empowered by the new technologies while massive open online courses (MOOCs) seemed to pose a threat to all private higher education institutions that’s so indecipherable most are unsure how to react. Why were stories on the flipped university classroom so rare this past year? With our upcoming course on Social Media and Technology Tools for Research in mind, we wanted to find a model that was actually leveraging tech tools in a way that was improving higher education learning on a broad scale.

We found Dr. John Boyer of Virginia Tech, who has been innovating and enlarging his World Regions classroom for the past decade. When he started he was in a classroom of 50 students using an inherited world regions textbook that leaned heavily on Western history. Now he is in a 3,000 seat auditorium, using the 6th edition of his own textbook and a companion website for digital and social media content that more than twenty other universities have adopted. We came across him in the same way that many have–through his plea to Aung San Suu Kyi for a Skype interview (which she agreed to) and the ensuing visits from Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, and Invisible Children’s Jason Russell. “We hope to have President Obama visit, which would make a lot of sense for him. Why wouldn’t he want to have 3,000 screaming university students tweeting and facebooking his interview?” He told me that those celebrity visits are not planned in the syllabus but come about organically, which also reflects the nature in which he adopts technology into the classroom.  From my chat with him I gleaned three questions for university educators to ask themselves as they adapt hybrid classroom methodologies.

1. Will it improve communication between the professor and students?

Effective teaching depends on the way that information is communicated to the learner. Professor Boyer literally brings his curriculum to the fingertips of his 3,000 students on his website, plaidavenger.com. While his textbook may cover very recent issues in its sixth edition, the website covers global news and issues of the week. Students can easily scan video interviews, articles, and twitter streams and they can earn credit by participating in class dialogue over social media networks.

In a class of 3,000, students can easily feel distanced from their professor, but his online office hours and regular availability on Twitter and Facebook provides a safety net of communication. In my worry that he was online all day and night communicating with students he reassured me, “just a very small percentage actually use it and having the safety net of knowing it’s there satisfies the rest.”

2. Is tech interaction built into the syllabus?

As opposed to traditional pedagogies where students start out with an A and then lose points as they respond incorrectly, his students start with nothing and are rewarded for each activity they complete. Grades are determined by gross point accumulation and students can choose the way they want to earn those points. They can go the traditional route and take standard tests, fill out atlas quizzes, and write papers, or they can earn it through interacting with world leaders on Twitter, commenting in global news reports, or listening to podcasts.

According to an article in The Atlantic, flipping the learning model in the university setting in this manner leads to more personalization of the learning process. Professor Boyer’s exemplifies this by allowing the student to choose the assignments (not a single one is required, not even tests) that fit their learning method best. From the start of the semester, students have the flexibility and the accountability to complete the class how they want to.

3. Am I offering technology that students already use or can easily start using?

Virginia Tech is not only at the fringe of the flipping the university classroom, but physically it’s at the fringe of an urban-rural divide. Located in Blacksburg, Virginia, 60% of the town’s 42,000 are students and many come from rural communities. Students may not be used to many of the newest apps or devices. “I would love to start using foursquare to have students check in for attendance but I’m pretty sure only 1% of my students even know what it is,” Dr. Boyer told me. Despite some limitations, he is able to use quite a diverse tech toolset in his class. He uses (most links go to the unique class page) Delicious for bookmarking articles, online discussion forums on the class page, international movies, iTunes U, Skype, UStream for online office hours, Turntable.fm for their class international playlist, and one of my favorites, PollEverywhere, is used to instantly poll to students on what they want to learn that day. These tools offer a plethora of options rather than required tools to use so that the students can involve themselves in the way they like.

Each of these questions asks what kind of options do the students have to learn the material and how they will be awarded for it. The hybrid classroom puts more accountability on the student to take the time to learn the subject matter, but also allows them the freedom to choose how they want to learn it. Dr. Boyer is evolving his classroom depending on the way that his students use technology and not the other way around. It won’t be long until university students are expecting the hybrid “flipped classroom” experience, especially when they have come from high schools that have already been implementing it.

 

If you are interested in international peacekeeping, consider taking our next course, Social Media and Technology Tools for Research, starting Monday, August 20th.