I just had a great meeting with Keith Hughes. You can find his course videos on YouTube here. Keith is a passionate teacher who clearly invests considerable time and energy in his craft. I found him because I was trying to hunt down solid US History course materials. I couldn’t find much in the usual spots, so I turned to YouTube. I reviewed a few of his lectures, did some more investigative work and found his course notes as well. I reviewed some of these documents and figured I needed to give him a call.

I gave him a quick demo and the response couldn’t have been better. Keith’s reaction to NIXTY is the kind of response we live for. Basically, I showed him how to quickly build out lessons by uploading/converting content, embedding videos, adding tests to assess learning etc. and he was clearly impressed. He also readily saw how the test manager and gradebook would save him boatloads of time. My favorite question he asked was, “When can I get started?”

We then switched gears and talked a bit about ways that NIXTY can help educators generate extra income as well. I recommended he build out a free course and a premium course. The free course would be open to anyone, whereas the premium course would be private and accessible once the student pays a small fee (e.g., $10). We are in the process of building out his first US History course now.

I’m thankful for educators like Keith Hughes. They clearly care about their students and they invest in helping others. Our goal at NIXTY is to empower these educators and expand their reach so that more students get an opportunity to learn from them.

Fred Wilson of avc.com has a great post up that you can find here:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/02/own-your-online-brand.html

His primary point is that you need to proactively manage your online brand. You need to deliberately define yourself online, before someone else inadvertently or purposely defines you in a less than positive way. Our ePortfolio is a great way for people to manage their online brand. It consists of a free website, cv/resume builder, work display (place to upload documents), and recommendations tab. In short, it is everything you need to make sure people know who you are. Adding work examples (documents, papers, video) and getting blurbs from trusted others are just a couple of other great ways to build your brand online.

We’ll be launching soon, so stay tuned and get ready to launch your personal brand!

P.S. you can see ePortfolio designs here:

http://nixty.com/blog/2009/09/22/eportfolios/

Sal, the visionary behind the Khan Academy, was just featured on the PBS News Hour. We are in the process of building out Khan Academy on NIXTY. Great to see him getting this kind of press. It is well deserved. You can see the piece here:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/02/khan-academy-how-to-calculate-the-unemployment-rate.html

We are still in pre-beta, but are in the process of building out/seeding over 200 open courses. Additionally, we’ll have approximately 20 CLEP courses available at launch. CLEP courses are free courses that prepare people to test-out of freshmen and sophomore college courses. Students can study and then pay $72 to take the test. If they pass the test, then the college grants them 3 credits or more (some foreign language CLEP courses are equal to 12 credits). Testing out of courses is becoming increasingly popular because of rising education costs.

You can find out more about CLEP courses here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Program

Wouldn’t you love to read that headline?

I would. Publications are great and a key part of making academic progress. However, they often stand too tall and overshadow the less valued aspects of the professorship: teaching and service.

We at NIXTY believe that tenure review committees should view publishing a course to the Web as equal to a scholarly publication (journal article).

Why?

Publishing a course to the Web:

1.    Is a great work of service. It takes considerable amount of time, energy, and money. Costs to convert a course to be published on the Web can range from hundreds of dollars to over $15,000 per course.  Faculty should be incentivized to create their courses in a way that minimizes copyrighted material and streamlines the process of making the content publicly available. If open courses were counted toward tenure, then faculty would deliver…and they’d deliver BIG time.

2.    Draws traffic to the university.  One argument about the value of publications is that they reflect positively on the professor’s university. Well, an article is often only read by tens of people, whereas an open course can be harnessed by tens of thousands of people. Which option do you think is going to yield better results for the university?

3.    Can be measured more effectively than writing a journal article. Journal articles are often valued by the number of times they are cited in other journal articles. This method is imprecise and can be inaccurate. Publishing a course to the Web can be measured in a much more meaningful way. Professors (and tenure committees!) could see how many times a course was accessed in a day, week, month, or year. They could track how many times the content was reused. They could analyze the average amount of time a user spends in the course. They could see lights on a map that illustrate where different people are in the world that are working through the course. These types of measuring tools provide an incredible amount of value to a tenure committee trying to make an informed judgment on the candidate’s current and future contributions.

Tenure is a big deal. We are not minimizing the importance of scholarly publications. They are essential. However, that said, tenure committees need to value service as well, especially service that yields huge returns for everyone involved – students, the professor, and the university. Now is the time to start thinking about changing guidelines so that professors are incentivized to share their work with others. Counting it towards tenure would do that and it wouldn’t cost a dime.

I had a great meeting with Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the OCW Consortium. The OCW Consortium represents over 250 colleges and universities that contribute free and open courses (lecture notes, videos, tests, quizzes etc.). She had a number of helpful thoughts for NIXTY that build upon what Mike Caulfield outlined and take things to a new level.

Overall, she was quite positive about NIXTY. She readily saw the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish and thought the system was intuitive and easy-to-use. She indicated that it was great that we are going to launch with close to 100 open courses and thought we had a solid strategy in place. She also had a number of suggestions that would make the service better. These include:

-    Deliberately create a tutor community. OCWs are great, but having people guide you through the courses can really unlock them and make them more accessible.

-    Create a dashboard/metrics for OCW reuse and user type/demographics

-    Begin our OCW build out with the most popular courses and be deliberate about diversifying course content and institution.

-    Click for credit – provide a list of colleges (e.g., Western Governor’s University) that can provide credit for knowledge gained using OCW. For example, you finish English 101 OCW. At the end, there is a list of colleges that provide assessments corresponding to their requirements for English 101. If requirements are passed, then the individual can get credit for their knowledge.

-    Support Developing World OCW – create an easy way for academic institutions in the developing world to publish their content.

We look very forward to becoming a member of OCW Consortium. Courses created/published in NIXTY will have the option of being categorized as OCW. We are delighted to be a contributing member of this growing community.

Had a great meeting in Cambridge with Dr. Iiyoshi the other day. He is the editor/author of Opening Up Education, which is available for free here. We talked about his work at the Carnegie Foundation and his heart for helping educators become better teachers. I shared the NIXTY vision with him and he immediately understood what we are doing and then offered insight and advice as to how we can make it even better. At Carnegie, Dr. Iiyoshi spearheaded a program called the Knowledge Media Lab. One of the goals of the Knowledge Media Lab was to advance teaching scholarship (a.k.a. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) and promote educational knowledge building and sharing with Web 2.0 technologies. They did this by helping create digital representations of exemplary teaching practices and educational improvement efforts by and for educators, celebrating great teachers (they even had an online Educator Hall of Fame called the Gallery of Teaching and Learning, and providing various online tools and resources to help educators excel in their teaching and student learning. At MIT, he is now helping build similar tools and resources such as the Gallery of Educational Innovation. In our discussion about NIXTY, it quickly became apparent that the NIXTY platform could be used to reach some of these same goals.

We do not want NIXTY to simply be a place to find great content. Rather, we want NIXTY to be the premier place to find great content AND great teaching. We drilled down a bit more and started to find ways we could practically reach this goal of excellence in teaching. Initial thoughts include pointing to stellar teachers as examples. This would include examples of open courses that expert teachers develop. Reviewing these work examples will help other educators learn how to better communicate in residential, blended, and online environments. We also discussed ways of including tips in the process of building out a course. For example, if an instructor uploads a set of slides, then an information box could pop out and query them as to a best practice in PowerPoint presentations. These types of tips could be strategically placed throughout the course development process. The goal here is to better the process and method of course development. Another way would be to promote student teaching. The hard division between learners and educators is weakening and NIXTY will help this along by providing a real peer2peer platform. We could start by focusing on teaching assistants and graduate students.

Overall, it was a very enlightening discussion. MIT is fortunate to have Dr. Iiyoshi on board. I count myself as blessed and fortunate to be able to work with him in our future efforts.

Just had a great meeting with Mike Caulfield. He helped me better understand the OCW World and highlighted ways that NIXTY could help address some of the challenges that OCW faces. Before jumping into some of the steps that we can take, let me first sketch out the NIXTY system, so you can see these steps in context.

NIXTY is a global learning platform that provides free and premium ePortfolios, courses, CEs and learning management systems. Institutions can launch a private LMS/CMS just like they would from another commercial or open source LMS/CMS provider. Additionally, there is a public/open side where anyone can launch a course.

Now, back to the main point, NIXTY can take the following steps to better align with the OCW world.

1. Integrate the OCW banner into course development - when a person launches a course on NIXTY, we can make it very easy for them to make it a OCW.

2. Provide metrics on OCW reuse - if a person creates an OCW on NIXTY, then we can make it very easy for people to reuse that content in other courses. Additionally, we track course content at the micro-level, so if people port content out of a OCW course and reuse it in another course, then we can provide them with an overall dashboard to track macro and micro OCW course content.

3. Help faculty convert course content published in their institution’s LMS to OCW content and publish it on the public side of NIXTY so that it is easily accessible. For example, I’m a professor at X University. I build my course out in my institution’s private NIXTY LMS. When it is done I see a button that says “publish as OCW and make available on Web”. If I press that button, then my course content falls under the OCW banner and gets published on the open/public side of NIXTY. As an aside, we are not yet common cartridge compliant, but will be in the near future (we have the common catridge engine built, but it is not yet integrated with NIXTY).

4. Make NIXTY courses publicly accessible to the OCW Consortium search tool, so that content can readily be found/integrated/exported.

These are a few steps that we can take. If you have additional recommendations, then please let me know. You can email me: glen at nixty.com.

We will be meeting with several experts, teachers, professors, homeschool parents, instructional designers and bloggers in the coming months. Our tour starts on 1/4/10 with a trip to the Berkshires to meet with Michael Feldstein. I got to know Michael a bit better through working with him on a special edition of On the Horizon that addressed the future of online learning and learning management systems. He is a prolific blogger and expert in the eLearning space. On 1/5/10 I have the great priviledge of meeting with Dr. Toru Iiyoshi, Senior Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Iiyoshi is the co-editor/author of the groundbreaking book Opening Up Education. In true form, the entire book is available for free at the previous link. Finally, the first leg of the tour ends with a trip up to Keene, NH to meet with Mike Caulfield. Mike is Director of Community Outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

I’m looking very forward to meeting these individuals. I’ll keep you posted as we meet with other experts in the eLearning space.

I also want to thank Michael Horn for his continued support of NIXTY and for connecting us with Bob Moesta of ReWired Inc. and Stacey Childress of Harvard. It is great to be able to consult with people who are kindred spirits.