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Teaching Effectively
Online
Lesson
Eight: Copyrights and Instructional Entrepreneurship
http://lone-eagles.com/teaching-lesson8.html
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homepage
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Required Submissions
Checklist for Lesson 8 ____Read
through this lesson,
including items marked “Read,” as separate from those marked optional. ____View the
short videos also marked “View” as separate from those marked optional. (2
hours) ____Post to
the class listserv teaching-L@netpals.lsoft.com Reflect and
Contribute… 1.
Your idea for a final project along with any resource needs you would like help
with from your classmates, and include whether you responded to peer requests by
sharing resources. 2.
Your candid thoughts on the themes and issues presented in this lesson. 3.
Having completed this course, what matters most to you now, and what are your
goals for next steps? (one hour) ___Privately email your
instructor
your own individualized learning plan (ILP) What
are your next step priorities, now that you’ve completed the eight lessons? State
what assistance you might still require in order to meet your personal goals. Confirm you have completed all required
tasks, including submitting your final project via the class listserv to share
with others. Offer your final feedback on this lesson
and the overall course; your candor is specifically invited. If you were to
start over, what would you plan to do differently? What would you suggest the
instructor do differently? (one hour)
Instructional
Entrepreneurship Trends; Looking Forward:
Looking forward five years; online, everyone
will accept as common knowledge the simple fact that since everyone can see
what everyone else is doing in order to learn from others what works best, it
makes sense to be continually learning from each other. The accelerating pace
of change dictates that we all work together to keep everyone up to the same
instant of progress on a global basis since we are all interconnected at all
levels. Just-in-time inquiry-based learning skills are recognized as essential
to daily on-the-job problem-solving. Attention spans
are shortening, as is the shelf life of useful knowledge. New knowledge is
evolving at exponential rates, and often what matters most, is what we do not
know that we need to know. New school and community synergies will create a
functional local learning society where the exponential value of smart
collaboration, both locally, with other communities, and globally, will be
regarded as a given.
Instant access to validated best
practices for any situation will be a concierge service that is highly
competitive. The value of our time will be regarded as a priority, not to be
wasted on unnecessary learning, second rate
instructional resources, or obsolete methodologies. Our lifestyle choices will
determine our priorities, automating as many routine tasks as possible, to buy
more time for what we value the most. Fun, social, learning will become the
most popular Edu-tainment social activity of choice
as greater and greater global demonstrations of mass innovation continue to
excite the collective global imagination for imagining even greater global
impacts.
Alternative certification online training
programs based on authenticated outcomes will be central to the global
knowledge economy, where anyone can become an instructional entrepreneur based
on their ability to deliver insight, motivation, encouragement, a sense of
meaningful purpose, effective collaborative engagement, and fast-track visible
outcomes using combinations of cloud-based services, apps, mentors, and
web-based visualization tools.
In the
Meantime, We have to BE the Change
Teachers with
technology and online teaching skills are being hired by Elearning
corporations. As schools lose their best technology
teachers, and lose students to commercial Elearning
businesses and alternative schools, the importance of partnering with their
communities and local businesses to reinvent their relevance in the face of
accelerating change will determine their sustainability. Students will have the
option to learn without classrooms.
Teachers are finding they can effectively
self-promote themselves as independent consultants, lifestyle instructional
entrepreneurs, and offer online learning and support services, via blogs,
websites, and social media. Anya, our textbook author, is a great example;
VIEW: http://diyubook.com
Note that the Gates
Foundation has funded her, in addition to the Khanacademy.org, citing both as the
future of education, which might suggest we pay close attention. Typically, the
blog roll on the sidebar of most edu-consultants
blogs points to their pick of the best of the best – as their way of showing
off that they know who is who! Example Anya’s blog roll at http://diyubook.com/about-anya/ and Howard Rheingold’s video blog (vlog)
http://vlog.rheingold.com/
Reforming K12, to Starting Something New?
Read: Ptolemaic Schools – Why Reform Won’t
Work
http://www.skipvia.com/blog/?p=317
Build new, don’t reform old.
To be, or not to be?
Skip’s
article basically says there are too many forces invested in the status quo for
serious reform to take place within our massive educational ecosystem and
something new and separate is needed. Might an inclusive local learning society
be already evolving?
Skip Via’s Youtube Channel
(Optional)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=q6WVEFE-oZA
Teaching 2.0 –
Are We There Yet? (Optional)
http://community.uaf.edu/~skipvia/blog/?p=59
Skip’s blog
Review: Great Examples of
Educators as Independent Consultants
http://landmark-project.com/ www.davidwarlick.com
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/
http://novemberlearning.com/blog/
How Birds of a Feather Are
Flocking in 2012
You
will find that birds of a feather find each other rather quickly online these
days and tend to link up to share resources on an ongoing basis, whether via
RSS subscriptions to other blogs using Google reader, or via twitter, or via
Linked-in.com or Google+ and on and on.
Find
one top social media in education consultant and if you are paying attention
you are likely to find all their best peers neatly listed.
As
it becomes more and more obvious that educators should be working together as
opposed to not, we can expect to see bigger and bigger success stories, note
Alan November hosts his own conferences, http://novemberlearning.com Jason Ohler www.jasonohler.com
offers a free Ebook on digital storytelling ( http://jasonohler.com/storytelling
) and has several print books for sale. Jason retired from the University of
Alaska, SE, recently, but he is still mighty busy. Last I heard he had 10
international keynote presentations lined up. See where Jason has presented
internationally at http://www.jasonohler.com/about/portfolio.cfm#keynotes
You
saw a edublogs.org award winner http://freetech4teachers.com and Steve Hargadon’s http://classroom20.com
ning
site and how he is leading multiple global initiatives. Listings of other global
education sites were shared, most started with an educator and an idea,
including http://epals.com
The opportunities are growing rapidly for
literally everyone that learns how to effectively teach others online. At udemy.com
you can put your own price on your own video course, and if you charge $5 and
hundreds sign up, if it is a self-directed course you are likely to make far
more money than if you charged $150. And if you design for other than the
self-directed format then the number of students who can enroll is limited by
your own personal time and energy.
Amazon.com has seen ebooks
sold for 99 cents that bring in tens of thousands in profit. Lady Gaga posted
an album for 99 cents and sold so many she still made a lot of money. Apple’s Ibooks uses an Epub format to be
compatible with Ipads and Iphones.
Anyone can self-publish as long as they agree to Apple’s hefty commission
agreements.
Social media best practices are being
taught as promoting free ebooks, posting free quality
content to initially attract a group following, supported by strategies
involving integration of dozens of sophisticated tools, and more.
Example: http://www.challenge.co/training
If you have been watching for
similarities on blogs and websites of educators turned consultants, leveraging
instructional entrepreneurship via social media tools and marketing techniques,
then you’ve seen common patterns emerge.
Youtube
will monetize your youtube video channel, just as Facebook, Google, and nearly everyone other online business
would like to help you learn to make money so they can take their cut from you,
and millions like you, to measure their continued profit in the billions. The book
“Socialnomics” can tell you more.
Take a moment to think back to what you knew when you started this
course, and your reaction when you first viewed the “Did You Know” video. Think
about your role now as promoting innovation diffusion, but also your own
experience feeling overwhelmed by new ideas, skills, tools, and creative
opportunities. How alone, or supported, did you feel at first, and as this
class progressed? Think about the intersection between local and global
citizenship, world values, video journalism, digital storytelling, and how
great educators might somehow find new ways to stay current in a world of
accelerating change.
Instructional Entrepreneurship Issues to
Consider
If
a good educator can suddenly deliver instruction to anyone, anywhere, anytime,
it raises many issues, opportunities, and perhaps even moral obligations. Who is your target audience, a classroom of students, and their
parents, and the broader community? If your superior instruction can reach
others statewide, nationally, and globally, and if you can take full control of
your lifestyle, copyrights for what you create, and what standards of
excellence you alone will decide to follow, will you know what steps to get you
from here to there?
Political Issues
If you're offering an online course for college credit, you are
likely to find yourself involved in the politics of competition between
institutions of higher learning. Traditionally a given college has a defined
geographical region and other colleges once agreed to keep to their own such
regions. Today, any distance learning course can be
taught anywhere, threatening these traditional boundaries.
Since college funding revolves around the number of students
receiving instruction, turfism is a hot issue. It is
important to be aware of who your online course may
threaten and to attempt to coordinate your offerings to make friends before you
create enemies. You should consult those in charge of extension courses at the
college or university you're working with regarding any potential problems.
Competitive
Pricing for Online Instruction
Courses offered through college continuing education offices
generally pay poorly, but the option exists to set the price as high as the
market will bear. Once more people have the equipment, basic online skills and
understand the cost savings of not having to travel or reside elsewhere, the demand for online instruction will grow. The
convenience of taking a course from anywhere, anytime, directly to the home
will eventually be available to most of seven billion citizens globally.
Teachers will be increasingly tantalized by the entrepreneurial potential good
online teaching will create. If you save people time learning what they need to
know, and make it an enjoyable experience, you should do very well. Ex. www.quiltuniversity.com is a dozen women offering for-profit online courses.
Marketing an
Online Course
If you can use Internet technologies to teach well, with less
effort and time spent than your competition, you're likely to succeed if you
can initially get the word out regarding your offering. A lone teacher
attempting to promote an online class faces a difficult task. Partnering with
colleges and other educational organizations for promotional purposes and
accreditation makes good sense. Using the Internet's potential for advertising
will also be a solution for many teachers. There are a great many online course brokerage services, and
online degree brokerage services.
Ed2go.com
offers hundreds of continuing education courses via 1400 universities, who pay
for a customized web site that makes it look like these are their courses. The
end result is you can learn Ecommerce from a continuing ed online course from your regional university even
if none of their faculty have any expertise in Ecommerce.
The
growth of the University of Phoenix, and many similar Elearning
businesses is well documented in our class text, and the author’s use of social
media is well demonstrated at http://diyubook.com
with a new site http://p2pu.org and that the Gates
foundation is now funding Anya’s innovations as a result of her effective
social media marketing, presents a model of success for the rest of us.
Review:
See Anya’s blog roll, which social media feeds she offers, and learn all you
can from her marketing decisions, noting her extensive experience as co-editor
for Fastcompany.com Here is Anya’s latest article, addressing K12 as well,
and this is the last one from me, so now you will be on your own?
Read: Why Google is the
Most Important Learning Tool Ever Invented
http://www.fastcompany.com/1791620/why-google-is-the-most-important-learning-tool-ever-invented
Quality
Control and Alternative Certification
If anyone can create an online class, some measure of course
quality will be needed. It is likely high quality courses may be produced by
non-teachers, and low quality courses will be created by
certified teachers. College credit is becoming less important as
alternative accreditation programs are rapidly proliferating. Outcome-based
results appear to be most in demand. This suggests the potential for all
citizens to become both learners and teachers all the time on a global basis,
with peer-assessment being the key measure of success.
Teacher
Entrepreneurship and Conflict of Interest
Your school might claim conflict of interest if you're spending
too much time, in their view, teaching online, particularly if you're profiting
financially. Due to residency
requirements, many degree programs allow only a few credits out of a four year degree to be obtained via distance learning. This
is changing rapidly. It will be feasible to learn or teach from anywhere,
anytime. There is the risk that master teachers will abandon the traditional
classroom in favor of higher salaries and greater personal freedom.
Will "teach-from-any-beach-in-the-world" programs become
more attractive to teachers than the traditional school environment?
____Read: Teach from Any Beach http://lone-eagles.com/articles/eagle.htm
Royalty
Sharing with Commercial Education Providers
Corporations are collecting innovative instructional online
resources from educators in a royalty-sharing arrangement, since no corporation
could ever internally match the volume of innovative curriculum teachers are
already creating! Teachers in the past typically lacked a productizing and
marketing vehicle to disseminate their curriculum, but this is changing as our
class text on the Coming Transformation of Higher Education emphatically
demonstrates with dozens of for-profit examples.
We're already seeing many businesses adding a human mentoring
component to their online services. See http://www.about.com which is a directory like Yahoo, but with human experts for each
topic area who invite your questions. Fee-based tutoring services are beginning
to become popular. Search for "tutoring," and you'll see many
business models focused on tutoring services.
Science and math experts with Phds are available
online from India and elsewhere at reasonable rates $10/hour to mentor your
students via 2-way video, but one of a growing number of such services. http://lone-eagles.com/mentors.htm
Eleutian.com (search for their videos on youtube)
has hired over 700 certified educators to teach English globally on five
continents via Skype from tiny Wyoming towns with fiber optics. Online training
with 7 days means you can start next week. Their competition is uncertified
instructors in the Philippines who speak good English and will work for $1 a
day. Livemocha.com is a free language mentoring site, where many volunteers have begun to
charge for their services. Everything is changing, and watching what’s working
for others like you, is strongly recommended as “IT MATTERS!”
The Positive
and Negative Viewpoints
The best positive vision would be that learners worldwide would
find rich learning opportunities created by the best teachers worldwide,
available in SDL, mentored and guided formats. Teachers worldwide would find a
huge global market for their learning materials and would relish both the
satisfaction of meeting the learning needs of potentially vast numbers of
learners, and realizing a substantial improvement in their personal income and
lifestyle options. The following is a prediction of the impact of Internet and
online education I was asked to author for a national community networking
listserv, as my viewpoint of the positive potential:
A Best-Case
Scenario
A new global culture will appear, combining caring and
connectivity, led by youth and seniors. Youth will prove to be key change
agents and technology leaders in all cultures. Unmet needs will be matched with
excess resources with radically increased efficiency. World cultures will learn
to celebrate their diversity without censoring knowledge of alternative
worldviews. We'll all have access to all our joint knowledge through a
combination of social and technical systems.
Niche knowledge specialties will become a viable vocation for
individuals, in collaboration with others, keeping the world's knowledge base
current. Multiple tiers of appropriate human assistance and expertise will be
available to all, for the asking. Context will enhance content and
"less-is-more" will be the measure of value.
"Information condenses to Knowledge
which condenses to Wisdom, and Value is created in an information
economy."
Everyone will become both learner, and teacher; imparting such
earned wisdom. Successful mentoring of others will be the measure of individual
success, in association with creating effective self-directed learning opportunities which can scale to benefit billions. The BEST
resources to benefit the MOST people at the LEAST cost will be identified, to
be customized by local citizens, for the local context, as an ‘instructional
entrepreneurship’ service.
It will be recognized that "Imagination is more important
than knowledge," as Einstein first said. An individual's potential impact
on global issues and citizens will be recognized as limitless.
We'll come to emphasize our abilities to imagine better ways to
use the social and technical interconnections between people and knowledge.
We’ll redefine "community" as those to which we give our time. The
global cultural goal for the human family will be actualization of our joint
full potential.
Transnational activism will evolve to engage daily votes on global
issues which will involve more citizens daily direct
participation than any past elections in human history. Ideational leaders will
emerge, articulating the pulse of human emotion and thought in the face of
limitless possibilities, on a daily basis.
A Worst-Case
Scenario
How courses and curricular materials will be marketed has yet to
evolve. Will independent instructors be able to market their courses successfully
to this world market, or must they hire on to a juggernaut institution who can market their courses for them?
Perhaps, only the best learning materials will become successful,
benefiting a few teachers while putting most teachers at a disadvantage of
being unable to compete with these exemplary resources. Will there be enough
opportunities for all teachers, or will the scalability mean that only the very
best courses will be successful, leaving most teachers without a genuine
opportunity? Teachers will be replaced by inadequate online teaching
alternatives, and students will be without the human attention they need to
develop as citizens.
Copyrights and
Customizing Courses
Have
you seen the sign in the library that says its illegal to xerox
copyrighted print materials? It is behind the line of students and teachers xeroxing copyrighted materials as part of their daily
routine. Did you know its illegal to use your VCR to copy TV programs if you
keep them beyond 45 days? There are grey areas between what the law says, and
what common practice is, even for responsible citizens.
Where
you draw the line between right and wrong for yourself and your students can be
defined by reading the suggestions of others at Stanford University’s
Educational Fairuse site. http://fairuse.stanford.edu
Here's a handy chart summarizing copyright issues for educators:
http://www.halldavidson.net/copyright_chart.pdf
When
students create a web page with their own pictures, words and ideas, they need
to understand what intellectual property rights they hold and how to similarly
respect the intellectual property rights of others. When your students save
images off the web for use in their own web pages, are they stealing? Many
copyright-free image, and animation archives exist on the web, as listed at http://lone-eagles.com/webdev.htm
If you have access to a public domain course you might contract to
customize that course for a specific purpose or organization, thus creating a
marketable original work. At what point does your reworking of a public domain
class constitute an original work? If less than 25% of the original material is
included, you might be justified in legally claiming originality. There are
still grey areas regarding the legalities of exactly what you can
"borrow" from the work of others, and just what others can borrow
from your work.
If you work for a school or University, they will likely own the copyright for
your fine work, even that which you authored at home as their employee. You
should know your rights and policies and not risk presuming what they may
legally be.
Since the Open Source, Open Courseware, and Open Knowledge global
movements are now in full swing, an alternative copyright solution has emerged. The Creative Commons
License www.creativecommons.org
In short, this authorizes others to use your work as long as it is
for non-commercial purposes, and as long as they give you credit for what is
yours. Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.
Some things cannot be copyrighted, like a list of links. Many
websites specialize in copyright free resources such as photos, animations, and
more; a few examples can be found at http://lone-eagles.com/webdev.htm with more accessible with simple searching phrases like
‘copyright free photos.’
Conclusion:
Where are we in the current evolution of online instruction? It is
already a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar industry, as billions of citizens
worldwide find the means to access the Internet through new satellite and
wireless technologies...in a world where half the population has yet to make a
first phone call. The cultural impacts on 15,000 cultures could be disastrous,
or wonderfully empowering.
The hope is that since more and more citizens will be involved
with the Internet directly, real benefits for real people will result from
common sense application of the wonderful potential the Internet brings to all
of us for learning and sharing what we've learned. The more teachers are
thoughtfully involved with steering the evolution of the instructional use of
the Internet, the more hope we can all share that the future will be bright.
Finishing This Class: Your
Debriefing
You
have an eight-hour final project to propose to your instructor for approval and
suggestions, to be web-based and related to your priority interests. Once your
instructor received this final required submission your Pass for the Class will
be sent to APU, which processes grades very quickly and will send you
confirmation via email. New easy group instruction sites and online course
systems have been offered: udemy.com, p2pu.org even Blackboard’s own free http://coursesites.com Community engagement tools have
been offered; wiki, ning, google
groups. Free rich media tools have been presented; jing, goanimate, gamesalad, and dozens more. And as new class participants continue sign up, we can
expect a continual flow of newer and even better resources to be identified and
shared.
You
are welcome to remain on the class listserv, to continue to receive resource
updates from your instructor, and present and future participants. You are
welcome to continue to ask questions and interact via the listserv with both
current and future class participants.
You
will still have access to the class wiki, but might want to start your own wiki
and cutnpaste the resources you want to have control
over from all wiki pages related to this class. The instructor will be adding
new wiki pages with the best resources shared in this class, and others, at http://web2fork12classrooms.pbworks.com You have unrestricted access to all Lone Eagle online
resources. (Over 700 web pages) This includes the content of other Lone Eagle
courses as listed at http://lone-eagles.com/teachercreated.htm
(But
you will still have to pay APU for recert credits.)
You
will still have access to the class Ning, and our
Google Group, but remember neither of these are public.
You
are invited to continue to ask for assistance from your instructor, and are now
in the elite group of those who understand that the power to change the world
is at your fingertips. Make It Happen!
Conclusion:
During
this course, noting only a fraction were able to stick to doing a lesson a
week, it was clear some had higher capacity than others to absorb new
information, follow instructions, and to quickly ask the instructor for help,
before allowing frustration to become an issue.
The informality of this course was
embraced by some, and
others found this uncomfortable – wanting to know their grades, and assurances
related to the traditional formal structure of courses and classes. This
understandable tension is due to the reality that we are all transitioning from
a traditional formal structure of learning to a new structure, as….. (to state it one last time)
Everyone both learner and
teacher, both consumer and producer,
all
the time!
Final Instructor Feedback
on Your Lesson Feedback
My
own learning is that I see it as inevitable that educators are going to need
ongoing updates targeted to their individual abilities, interests, and both
strengths and particularly weaknesses. Measuring their geekatude
abilities and metering the right amount of new information both in volume, and
at the level they are ready for, will prove essential. Individualized learning,
with a process to accelerate one’s learning motivations and abilities
integrating many new tools and methods appears to be the direction forward for
education at all levels. We all really are going to need, and want, the best
“best practices” delivered daily, to include classroom ready rich media units
and updates so we can spend less time on class preparation and more time
individually mentoring our students…as the Khan Academy video suggests is not
only possible, but is quickly becoming a preferred best practice.
Lesson Feedback: Optional,
but much appreciated.
You're invited to privately email your
instructor:
1.
What areas, if any, did you have trouble with during this
lesson?
2.
What questions remain now that you've finished this lesson?
3.
Approximately how much time did you devote to this lesson?
4.
What improvements would you like to suggest?