The Total Learner Experience

8 Tips for Designing an ARG (as a Learning Experience)

In November 2009 myself, Brandon, and Dolly published an article about Alternate Reality Games in the eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions e-magazine (download a copy here).

Since the article was published, several instructional designers have asked us to pull out some practical tips on how they can get started designing their own ARG. For this post, we thought we would reference eight key tips from the article that provide a starting point for you to consider as you embark on your ARG design.

1. Establish Clear Goals	Document what are you trying to achieve with the game. What are you trying to get your audience to experiment with or learn? After all, participants should be learning something while having fun. The Threshold, a game designed by Cisco had clear goals from the beginning, generating very positive feedback from players: "The Threshold was a four-week long alternate reality game designed to build teamwork, build awareness of Cisco products and services, and to provide an entertaining and fun experience."
2. Tell a Meaningful and Entertaining Story	Make your story relevant to your audience and engage them in the unfamiliar by tapping into what is familiar to them. Don't get too carried away with the story to a point you forget it's all about the audience. The designers at LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, Australia) felt that an intriguing story about the school's production studio would motivate new students to participate in their game. The "Safesets, Sabotage and Madame Blash" mini ARG (mARG) is an excellent example of a game that has a relevant setting and background story that is sure to entice players.
3. Don't Become Overly Attached to Your Story and Characters	Be quick to adapt to your audience's responses. Let them participate in the design process as the story unfolds. Interact directly with them (via non-player characters), respond to their reactions, be prepared to change strategies, puzzles, and/or storylines to conform to how the audience is changing the game. The Cloudmarkers were a self-organized group of players involved in the famous ARG "The Beast." They initiated a Yahoo! group in order to discuss the latest findings in the game. Their discussion was closely followed by the developers and, since ARGs are normally developed as they are delivered, the developers would often include members of the group in the game plot as it unfolded.
4. Plan, Plan, Plan	Even though you need to be flexible, lay out a plan of the events and outcomes. For instance, create a flowchart of the action items such as clues, puzzles, characters interactions with the players, next moves, etc. This will make it easier for you to visualize and strategize how the game is going to be played and will give you a better idea of when, what and how to adapt. Here is an example of a flowchart being used to plan the actions in Ascendency Point, a live event for the game Perplex City.
5. Create a Reward System	No matter how cool your game design is and how engaging your characters and story are, chances are you may still have difficulty getting people to participate. Instill competitiveness and collaboration by offering rewards. Make it fun. In the Duke's Quest ARG we created, it was a challenge to get players involved without a reward system. This can be a challenge when organizing small group ARGs which tend to involve even those who might not be interested in games just for "fun's" sake. A reward system might be that extra incentive they need to get involved. The Dark Knight ARG (developed for The Dark Knight movie), had a message from the Joker requesting players to submit photos of themselves in Joker make-up in order to receive a mystery package in the mail.
6. Leverage Social Media	Consider using social media utilities to both design and deliver the game. Services such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others can serve as a medium for puzzle delivery and for players to interact with each other and non-player characters.
7. Have Closure	It's OK to have cliffhangers for a next instance of the game, but make sure your game has closure. Players need to feel like they've achieved something at the end. This can be a live event at which players gather with characters for a final announcement, conclude the game going over their achievements, distribute rewards or even set up expectations for a segue.
8. Play an ARG	It is true, the best way to design something effective might be to actually get your hands dirty. If you want to know how to design a good ARG, play an ARG. By actively joining a game you may learn how to relate to your audience's feelings and expectations when designing your own ARG. You can find active ARGs and read up on old games on websites and communities like ARGnet.

I hope these tips can help you get started designing your own ARG. The potential for active engagement is inherent to ARGs and may help you deliver a truly effective and experiential learning activity. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on ARGs in general. Please feel free to contact me or add to the comments here with your responses to these questions:

• Have you designed or played an ARG before?
• Was it specifically designed to teach or motivate the audience to experiment with technology or a concept?
• What are your best practices and advice for those interested in using ARGs for learning?

The iPad's Potential for Education

With the unveiling of the iPad, Apple will more than likely re-invent mobile computing once again. The real magic behind the iPhone became the App store -- it unleashed an endless supply of software -- making the smart-phone much more than just a phone... it became a "weightless office" in the palm of your hand.

The iPad widens the mobile computing ecosystem's possibilities to include usable applications for education. The iPhone is the first seemingly learner-centered mobile platform -- the gesture-based touchscreen combined with a screen size amenable to displaying content, and the Safari browser accesses the internet just like a "regular" computer. However, with its 9.7-inch multi-touch, high-definition screen, a powerful processor, and convenient and flexible form function, the iPad now becomes a perfect mobile learning device: instantly access textbooks, make annotations, connect to social learning communities, download apps with new learning content, upload your own content, watch videos, listen to podcasts, prepare assignments, etc. Sure, all these things you can do on a computer laptop... but imagine the ease of use with a device that is much more portable, feels natural in your hand, and is flexible in a multitude of "real-life" situations. No longer will you question whether or not to drag along your laptop with you -- your iPad now will be a constant -- just like your pen or pencil.

iPad-related innovations for education will widen the discussion about how we educate as well. With access to the SDK, students can build their own learning apps, or professors may be able to customize apps to present their own content in iTunesU. Even now, many are doing that and even making their content accessible to non-students.

The platform becomes a fertile playground, either for expanded functionality beyond the iPhone, or for innovations in how content is presented, and how it becomes more interactive and experiential. With location awareness, the ability to mobilize learners in remote locations can help engage distance learners as well. At first glance, you may think of the device as just another gadget, a laptop with less functionality. But remember, many naysayers doubted the impact of the iPhone. What Apple does best is understand how real people use technology, and what their expectations are from their device. A platform like the iPad releases the constraints that regular laptop technology foists upon us -- the iPad is nimble, reacts to real situations, and is so easy to use that it feels natural in your hands. That is the difference, and that is how this platform will speed up adoption of mobile learning.

Now, educators need to start figuring out how we build effective learning apps for this platform.

Creating Effective Training Evaluation

Dolly: Brandon ranted about ineffective evaluations while I was holed up under the 2 feet of snow here. The snow is still here, but my Internet is finally back. His comments about evaluation made me wonder what I consider effective evaluation to look like. Cumulative evaluation should be as authentic as possible. If you want someone to be an effective salesperson, you'd better identify what competencies are required and then have them replicate and practice as best they can in the classroom environment.

Brandon: Good point. I concur. However, more and more organizations are hit with the high-cost of travel and the inefficiency of removing people away from their jobs for instructor-led training. We need to provide effective strategies for authentic evaluation in an online format.

So I can think of two ways to recreate these situations in the digital world: virtual simulation and/or role-playing. Learners will have different profiles. Does someone who is technically minded need the same practice as someone who is naturally a people person? Both these individuals need to come out with the same skill sets at the end, but perhaps they need different practice. Formative self assessments combined with flexible course sequencing can allow individuals to focus on their areas of real need.

That just describes a sales training course I completed using Thiagi's 4-Door Model. It allowed the learner to "self-adjust" the content based on their own self-leveling of knowledge. It does beg the question though: how do you "branch" an evaluation based on different learner profiles? Can you have an effective evaluation instrument via a dynamic system that presents a contextual series of assessment items based on the learner's individual profiles? 

I think that you can have a self-assessment that gives the learner guidance in their own strengths and weaknesses.

OK, so you're talking about self-assessment. What about an actual skills certification? One that can affect a learner's job status, salary, or in the case of compliance or regulatory situations, a learner's knowledge that could have life or death consequences? Can a dynamic evaluation instrument provide the appropriate assessment of knowledge?

I don't know what you mean by "dynamic evaluation instrument".

"Dynamic pooling" is when the system displays content based on a learner's input at the time of input.

What you are talking about now is less about the assessment/evaluation used and more the consequences related to that assessment or evaluation. The SATs are pretty weighty and they've been using a dynamic response for years. A student gets progressively harder questions until incorrect responses are entered. Then a cycle commences where easier and harder questions are given to the student until the logarithm determines what the student's level of mastery is. I'd say that stakes are high, but the College Board feels comfortable using this dynamic response.

Right. So I'm saying we need a similar system in corporate learning where appropriate assessment techniques seem to be a missing factor. In eLearning, there is a cycle of ineffective self-check systems instead of situational problem-based assessments. For example, a colleague was discussing with me the usage of "misconception" problems in assessment. They can present more authentic situations such as posing the problem in a scenario and requiring the learner to identify the parts of the scenario that are wrong or inaccurate. Even using open-ended question types where the system evaluates based on a keyword or series of keywords can be quite effective. How are we truly able to measure whether knowledge or skills are transferred if we're not willing to properly evaluate?

I like that because some people are just natural or trained to be good test takers. That kind of exercise actually accurately tests knowledge that they have, rather than their ability to suss out a poorly written stem or item. I know you are all about performance. Shouldn't people's training be based upon actual deficits in their performance and knowledge? And if they are high performers or can demonstrate mastery of course materials, shouldn't they be rewarded by being allowed to choose their own training regimen, anyhow?

Now is the Time to Do Less of More

This week we struck up a conversation about the general state of eLearning design in the corporate world. We ruminate over our belief that companies should consider doing less of more:

BRANDON: So I thought this week we would discuss the overwhelming number of requests for "training" that come from business units and stakeholders. It seems like some people think "training solves all the problems."

I've been on the inside and the outside of several corporate learning organizations over the years, and one trend that I've seen explode recently is a "factory mentality" designed to "templatize" training. I've seen these factories operate almost 'round the clock packaging "rapid eLearning" courses with little regard for formative or summative analysis, or interaction that motivates a learner to participate. It's really a "page turner" world out there in many instances. Some of this is pure economics -- many learning organizations are funded by business units. If a business unit allocates a specific amount of dollars for "training" they expect those dollars to actually be spent, regardless of the necessity or quality of the training.

Why have training if it's not good? I've counseled the organizations I work for/with to do "less of more". I firmly believe if most training organizations just stopped producing about 40% of what they are doing today -- just stopped cold turkey -- no one would even notice.

DOLLY: I think one reason that training can seem so irrelevant is because it is so divorced from the day to day activities that the jobs actually require. So, these people who are in sales for instance, talking and corresponding with clients everyday, come to training and spend 4 days listening to someone speak at them. These week-long explorations of Powerpoint slides don't engage the learner. They just become data dump sessions.

  Yeah, I agree. I personally think sales training should be high-touch, situational, and as contextual as possible. It seems to me that there are two avenues to drive down when producing sales training: basic "transfer of information" about products, services, etc., and scenario-based/role-play simulations that place the participant in authentic situations. At Sun, we leveraged the community for the transfer of information component by providing a user-generated content platform. Sales people ate it up. They could get small chunks of product information or sales techniques from experts in the field and download it to their mobile device. We then had "Sales University" for the mandatory accredited training courses.

And the thing is, if people are just going to be sitting in darkened rooms, why bother going to the expense of shipping them across the country? If it's just memorization of information, there's plenty of fairly easy and cheap ways to get that across in an online setting. However, both face to face and online activities can be so much more engaging and rich.  

Agreed. One thing that seems to be missing is an evaluation of actual sales skills done in a formal manner. If we're training these folks to sell, then we need to really look at each individual and evaluate their readiness to sell. It's one thing to lecture them, have them role-play, provide feedback, and then send them on their way. Where do we assess their readiness to do their job? Is that for their manager to determine outside of the training? If so, is training's role just to "provide the foundation"?  

And  evaluation doesn't have to be a test. It can be a demonstration, a portfolio or series of smaller activities built into the curriculum.  

Yes, one vendor I worked with provided role-playing scenarios in an online format using computer webcams and FlipCams. Participants would video themselves doing their pitch, and then upload it for the cohort and the facilitator to critique. 

In my eyes, that's a perfectly valid evaluation, as long as the learning objectives were to improve their sales pitch, not to learn the capitals of African countries. The whole point is to have evaluation that supports your objectives and curriculum. Excellent evaluation can be painless and seamless.  

What's the Difference Between a Game and an Educational Game?

Continuing our conversational posts, Dolly and Brandon went into Google Wave and discussed their opinions on the difference between a game and an educational game. The distinctions are key for instructional designers to consider when deciding to design a game for a learning intervention. Until we can embed Waves into Typepad, we lay out a simple reconstruction of the Wave conversation, with Dolly kicking it off:

DOLLY: Games vs. educational games. I know, one's fun and the other one is not! Really, though, what are the differences? I think intentionality of design is a key point, because I think that all games -- indeed all experiences -- are educational. Bernie deKoven talks a lot about children's games providing an opportunity to roleplay and work out developmental issues. I know I learned a lot about what a ruthless sort my brother is when he beat me repeatedly at every board game created. So, if we accept that every game has learning opportunities, how do we make sure to include the fun?

BRANDON: Both can be fun, right? The basic difference is an educational game is designed with specific learning objectives and should be able to assess whether learning occurs.  

I think assessment is key. That's the external component that is often artificial. So many times assessment of learning within games have two basic problems:
 

1. It's completely external and separate from the game play.
2. It's too "safe"-- Alex Trebek doesn't give you second chances in final jeopardy. It's FINAL!

I was thinking about that whole shift in board games with the advent of Cranium. Their whole goal was to remove the idea that there was one winner who had all the fun, but that players of multiple intelligences could play and those people could have fun. Bonding, instead of board throwing!

Hmm... Good point -- Cranium could be looked at as a "learning game" although it doesn't have traditional learning objectives, right?

Well, if you look at their objectives they are met. And their learning objectives fall nicely within affective measures and an arts curriculum.

For example? 

Well, the goals of the game include team cooperation and communication through graphic arts and music.

"Game" is such a broad term. A game must include some element of Play, I presume. I also assume a game designed with a learning outcome in mind has structured play (as opposed to unstructured play -- like when a kid plays with blocks).

Garvey said that a game is institutionalized play. Look at football. It's a game, clearly. We wouldn't say that it's educational, but you can learn it (and those who learn it best find it financially rewarding). Also by using it as a metaphor you can teach life lessons and/or management strategies, or you can teach math from the stats of the game.

So this leads me to think about the "game perimeter". Most games have boundaries, right? We step into the perimeter's "magic circle" to play the game. In the corporate workplace, the "magic circle" is the game's play boundary the instructional designer/game designer creates. The trick for instructional designers is to craft what learning occurs while the player is in that circle... so does that mean that the assessment needs to occur inside or outside the perimeter?

I think the best assessments are seamless and inside that perimeter. Examples could be performance-, point- or victory-based. 

So are we saying that the differences between a game and a successful educational game can be minimal if assessment can be more embedded and genuine?

Sure.

10 Ways To Use Facebook for Training

Brandon: You know as I work to create social learning micro-sites on the internal corporate network, it sometimes hits me that in a lot of ways I'm just re-creating what Facebook has already hit a home run with. So, Dolly, the question for you today is: How can I leverage Facebook for training? 

Dolly: What content is best suited for Facebook? Is Facebook for content or is it for social networking and engagement? 

Well it seems that technical training, soft skills training... really any type of learning content would work. The power of the platform seems to be around the integration of peer-to-peer dialogue and sharing with the context of learning. Facebook users are collaborating by default because they are exchanging comments and creating dialogue interactively. What we need to do is make this engaging activity applicable to work/training.

Shall we brainstorm? What are the features of Facebook are conducive to training? 

OK, so let's make it a contest. Let's list 10 ways we can use Facebook for training. I mean we're professionals right? With imaginations like ours, we should be able to easily list 10 ways! Here's one way:

1. Discussion threads. People seem to love engaging in dialogue about relevant subjects. A simple discussion board functionality is key in attracting learners to a higher level of engagement.

Facebook recently took out the updates about when people commented on others' walls. I liked that and was sad to see it go. It allowed me to see what my friends were saying -- even if it was directly relevant to me AND it often introduced me to new people that I liked. You never know what tidbit of seeming off-topic information will inspire a new idea. 

 2. Class notes and links to supporting information. In academic settings I've seen many professors, trainers and facilitators add their syllabi, notes, and links to websites. I'm using Microsoft Sharepoint now to create a wiki where I will host pre-work content and activities for a workshop I am designing. A Facebook-like platform is great for this, although versioning control would be a nice-to-have. 

Sharepoint? 

Sharepoint is Microsoft's collaboration platform. A lot of people are using it for collaborative learning environments. Check out more about it here.

3. Course feedback. Students can provide feedback about their favorite or least favorite aspects of the training.

This is where a "two-way" information stream can provide excellent near real-time feedback. An instructional designer could easily move to a more "agile" design process by using Facebook's social utilities to gain "instant" feedback on instructional content. I've been using similar methods for several years by building database systems. Facebook has this functionality built in! 

4. Student Reflection. Students are required to post some "takeaway" from any training that they just completed in their status, which can help their community at large.

5. Events. If you can get out of the whole departmental competition thing, it could be really interesting to have online "events" that everyone was invited to facilitate cross-company brainstorming for new initiatives.

6. Build your personal network/brand. It's important for individuals to be able to broadcast their expertise and interests. Facebook-like platforms could become similar to an "auctioning" of skills. IBM does this now with their internal Blue Pages. Employees are encouraged to list their skills, expertise, and availability. People can search using keywords to find suitable candidates for their projects.

I like this idea. We haven't talked about LinkedIn, but it seems like this might be an internal version of that.

7. Post-classroom events (extended learning). We used this recently on a leadership training program. Although the primary component of the training course was a 3-day classroom experience, we designed pre-work activities for the cohort to participate in online, and, to ensure retention and reflection we also designed post-classroom activities. The cohort remained engaged, and continued to work on the post-class activities. One benefit were the "breadcrumbs" left behind by the cohorts... subsequent cohorts could learn from them.

 8. Games. We could do a post of different types of games. But clearly all sorts of games are popular on Facebook. I don't play, but I know that Mafia Wars, Farmville and the like have some real appeal. I could see seeking out people who had certain skill sets to form your teams. You and I play Scrabble and its knockoffs. Facebook serves as a portal to every kind of game imaginable. I could also see some scavenger hunts for content and personnel.

How many games on Facebook are designed for learning though? Quite a few I think... it's just not real obvious.

I FIRMLY believe that every activity people participate in teaches or reinforces some learning or knowledge (even if only a physical response). Even if games are not designed with education/instruction/learning in mind, they still have features that can be exploited and minded to fold in formal/planned learning opportunities. I mean, somehow they have made the most inane, tedious tasks on Farmville completely compelling. Who knew? Which leads me to think about another way to use Facebook for training:

9. Quizzes. What kind of programmer are you? What does your desk say about you? What kind of cubicle mate are you? While these are humorous, I could see some actual useful ones, like providing Myers Briggs profiles and the like. Oh, and here's the 10th (I beat you to it)!

10. Fandom. I was interested to see that the number one corporate identity on Facebook is Coke. Their presence was first created by a zealous fan. The page has become their corporate identity, and hugely popular. A lot of times employees can be the biggest fans of a company and hold the most knowledge. Creating a safe environment to tell the positives of the company can offset some of the griping that we all need to do sometimes.

Yes, but some companies are paranoid about their "intellectual property" being made public. It's akin to the music companies obsessing over DRM -- the one thing a company needs to understand about today's information revolution: you can't control everything ... so focus on influence rather than control. Comcast learned this quickly, and adopted Twitter to broadcast network statuses to its customers. Now it uses Twitter for customer support.

 I see we keep returning to the theme that companies need to have a more flexibility in this era of accessible info.

Well there are 10 ways... but there are many more. The big question for companies: are you going to build internal social platforms, or leverage the public ones? It seems like many companies will want to keep their social networks behind their firewalls. This may work in the short-run, but newer generations of workers (Millennials and the 2020 Gen) will want to be able to blend their public and work networks and profiles. That will make for an interesting dialog... maybe we can discuss that one soon? 

  

The Inherent Power of the Motivated Learner

When learners are motivated, anything can happen. My job (as an instructional designer) is to design something that helps the learner achieve that special feeling of wanting to learn, and then broadcasting what was learned to their personal network. Naturally, applying the learning on the job is the key result I can only hope for.

I want to challenge people, get them to raise their game, get them to feel like they can work wonders. Too many corporate learning organizations are operating like factories -- pumping out scads of "content" in basic multimedia format (I refer to them as "narrated bullets"). Too many learning orgs are bypassing more creative approaches to motivating learners and relying on the "pump and dump" method of basically regurgitating marketing messages with a few "knowledge checks" thrown in for comfort food.

All the companies that foisted the simple "PowerPoint conversion" software on the world of instructional design are the key component in the factory "problem."

In this world of information overload, we need to back-up and realize that the #1 approach to take when trying to motivate learners is to construct as authentic a learning experience as possible. Without the ability to properly understand, analyze, and then design the appropriate intervention, we should really question what we're doing anyway. I've proposed that we do less of more when designing new training programs.

Just because a product group releases a new version doesn't mean the audience needs an entirely new training program. With the advent of social media utilities, the rise of "near real-time learning" will serve the learner and the organization more in the long run. By offering creative, learner-centered designs, motivated learners will find it more appealing, engaging, and relevant to interact and hopefully apply what they are learning.

The question for today's corporate learning organizations to ask is simple, "How will you stay relevant when most of what people learn is not through formal training?" Furthermore, "How can you provide the near real-time experiences that will matter most?" A motivated learner will act to get the information, training, and interactions they need (wherever it may be). Are you able to design the type of learning program that will support a truly motivated learner? Are you staffed properly to creatively design what matters most to learners today (and tomorrow)?

Alternate Reality Games: Leveraging Collective Intelligence for the Enterprise

Read our new article on how to effectively use the emerging genre of alternate reality games in corporate training to increase learner collaboration and sharing. You can read the article from the eLearning Guild's newsletter, or download it.

Notes on Social Learning

I've been attending quite a few webinars and presentations on social learning and hearing a lot of different approaches, best practices, and tips about implementation -- as well as watching demos of software tools and frameworks designed to help organizations implement collaborative learning environments.

I attended a webinar hosted by HCI about "Social Software in Enterprise Learning: Getting Started" and presented by David Mallon from Bersin. Here are some notes I took:

• Mallon discussed how enterprises should encourage and enable employees to create and use "social graphs" -- networks of people based on varying "node identifiers" such as location, expertise, availability, etc. Similar to what IBM does with its Blue Pages, social graphs make it easier to locate and recruit people with the skills and/or knowledge needed for projects. Social graphs augment a person's ability to search and locate expertise. They then create pathways to connect people. Helping an employee make use of their social graph is in the best interest of the enterprise, and really is about harnessing the company's collective wisdom. 
• The discussion then moved to creating "Enterprise Learning Frameworks" (ELFs -- my acronym) -- an end-to-end map and description of a learning organization's primary components. Mallon discusssed the 70/20/10 model (70% of learning occurs informally, 20% is peer enabled, and 10% is achieved through formally curated systems). Now, with the ELF in place, the 70/20/10 model is changed to an 80/20 model where 80% of learning occurs informally through a Social Learning Environment (SLE) constructed by the organization. We all know that a company can't programmtaically meet all its learners' needs, so a SLE puts data and knowledge in the hands of the performer when they need it. The SLE helps the organization enable more self-directed, self-service, "in the moment" learning opportunities.
• Mallon discussed that there are three components of Informal learning in a SLE (I prefer to call this a "purpose-driven system that encourages informal learning"): on-demand, social, and embedded. On-demand content is made available by SMEs and/or other content-experts in a "rapid fashion" -- it could also be curated content, but the point is to make it available in a format and manner that suits the learner's situation at the time of need; the social component includes elements that help the learner expand their networks; and the embedded component include tools that are smart enough to know learner context (in a software system, on a device, etc.), and is implicit -- it helps the learner understand the success or failure of the task being performed -- potentially through a feedback mechanism.
• The ELF should also include access to tools and technologies for learners to create or modify their own content. Mallon stated that an ELF by its nature incubates a culture of learning across the organization -- a must-have before a vibrant SLE can be fostered.

Here are some best practices for beginning to implement an ELF with a SLE:

• Start simple
• Have a clear purpose
• Inventory your organization and see where collaboration and social learning already occurs
• Ask yourself "why community, why social learning"?
• Always be clear with what are you trying to accomplish
• Study your audience very well
• Architect participation: it doesn't happen on its own Your SLE will require what I call an "active agent" -- This is not a task to be performed by just anyone in the organization -- it is a next-gen skillset.
• Ensure you have a content curator
• Understand that 1% of the network contributes the most, 9% occasionally contribute, and 90% sit around and watch. Use the 1% to your advantage.
• Don't forget culture. The "learning culture" is a major element to a SLE. Help to culitvate a SLE in which sharing knowledge is welcome.
• Don't forget the 4Cs: Conversations, Content, Connections, and Collaboration: the primary elements of a SLE. 
• Don't focus on tools first, focus on the behavior needed, then find the technology to support them.

Moving to the Online University Experience: Part One- Variables and Prestige

A friend and colleague approached me because my alma mater is interested in pushing into the world of online courses. I began thinking about what I think is critical about the university and college experience. Reflecting on all the numerous reasons why people go to college, I developed this list:

• It's what's done
• to make more more money
• to avoid adulthood, or the real world, or whatever you want to call that delaying tactic
• to pursue their interests
• to network
• to be qualified for the position they desire
• to remain competitive
• for the prestige and social status
• to learn
• personal satisfaction

I think that these reasons can also be applied to graduate degrees as well. Of course all these factors and more influence which institution a student might choose as well. These variables include:

• Location
• Price
• Flexibility of courses
• Relative academic rigorousness, relative emphasis on socializing, demographics of student body-- including race, age, social status, economic status
• Trajectory of graduates

I think where you go to school matters, but not necessarily for the reasons people always give. More than anything the college becomes a kind of identifier of the sort of person they might be, just like another accessory. Regionally, I know what a choice to attend a particular college or campus might say. Nationally, we may tend to share those judgments. Reflect on what you might think about a individual you meet who graduated from Berkley or MIT or West Point. Even without knowing anything further about the individual you might make assumptions about their politics, interests, "style", or major.

 For all their supposed rigor, The US News and World Report and other magazines' annual college rankings feel fairly subjective and ultimately ring a bit false. I'm not super excited to have a veterinarian who claims to have matriculated at Yale perform surgery on my pup. Ultimately, I don't really care what college a person has gone to as long as they perform their role well.

Others may not share that view. Online colleges need to stake out their expertise and proclaim what their requirements for enrollment are. I'm not impressed by online colleges advertising on every random social networking. Online colleges need to identify not only how they serve their audience, but how their audience, their graduates, serve us. 

Next: What's valuable about the college experience... How do we replicate it and improve it online...