Innovations in online education under the umbrella of expanding access

What follows is a summary of a set of innovations I have crafted in online education that may be grouped under the umbrella of expanding access—expanding the range of influences on the students’ learning and expanding access to the learning materials from courses.

Taking Yourself Seriously: New edition is taking shape

Taking Yourself Seriously: New edition is taking shape. New section and corresponding tools on:

Create Change Co-Coaching (draft publicity material for comments)

Create Change Co-Coaching
(a project of the The Pumping Station)
Participate with 6-8 others in a Studio for a year to become certified as a Co-Coach.

Scenarios for an on-going studio

This post presents the scenarios for a series of 4-week online collaborative explorations (CEs) (and one 4-day workshop) with continuing participation from alums of the graduate program in Critical & Creative Thinking.  The actual process and products of the CEs are private to the group.

The global Paleyian university

For this case borrow the internet further so that offices, classrooms, or the university can be retrofitted. Not rebuilt from scratch, but respecting the infrastructure that is already in place.  (source)

Instead of a retrofit, this design sketch promotes inversion or turning inside out or perhaps gastrulation. (In the embryological process of gastrulation the initial ball of cells invaginates so that some of the outside is now inside and that new inside is in interaction with the outside, creating a new interactions.)  Unpacking that picture, we have three steps: 

Design for Living Complexities: Open course begins mid July

This course explores critical thinking about design in a range of areas of life and its complexities. It starts July 18 and continues for 6 weeks. The recorded presentations and subsequent discussion are taking place on google+. See http://bit.ly/designcct for other options for participation (incl. for-credit graduate course) and links to more details about the course. An overview of the course is below.

Could digital platforms integrate non-digital space?

Or, “on integrating face-to-face dynamics into the structure and expectations of online platforms.”  Here, as a work-in-progress, an initial compilation of possible measures:

Debunking of disruptive innovation: Some social contextual, reflexive, and critical thinking implications

Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation is enormously popular and influential. However, as described in Lepore (2014) and Goldstein (2015) it has little predictive power, nor does it fit the data—even for the cases Christensen used in his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. There was critical analysis very soon after the theory was proposed; as that analysis has strengthened, it has been insufficient to push it into the dustbin of history.

Bringing everything to the table: Where do we go from there?

This year I devoted the first session of both my graduate classes to everyone giving extended autobiographical introductions, for the reasons described in an earlier post. E.g., in the Critical Thinking course, we took 4 minutes to explain “How I came to be a person interested in learning more about critical thinking–how to do it myself and teach/foster it in others.” Each introduction was followed by “connections and extensions” feedback using this form, which asks students to give one point of intersection with the listener’s interests and one direction the listener could imagine the speaker’s work being extended.

Rethinking Critical Thinking

Starting this week, I am teaching a graduate course in Critical Thinking using an experimental format in the hope of clarifying my dissatisfaction with the received views about the “teaching of thinking.”  This extends discussions and activities during the spring, http://cct.wikispaces.umb.edu/CriticalThinkingReview.  In parallel to the course, there will be a series of Collaborative Explorations, to which interested readers are invited to participate: