Immersive Learning

If anyone’s interested, I started a four-part series over at EdSurge that talks about the potential markets for MOOCs, now that we’re getting past that stage of considering them the destroyers of the academy as we know it.

Meanwhile, I’d like to talk about a different mode of self-education that I discovered during the course of my One Year BA.

If you’ve watched that Fullerton talk, or attended any of the presentations or panel discussions in which I’ve discussed the Degree of Freedom project, you’ll have noticed a set piece based on a series that argues for and against considering my One Year BA as the equivalent of a four-year residential degree.

In the against piece, I talk about the amount of work last year’s course of study required, highlighting that while writing 14-15 papers was probably more than I did in any given year during my original residential BA program, it certainly didn’t add up to the amount of writing required over the course of all four years of that program.

But if you consider my One Year BA being based on a double major (philosophy, where I did my final exam, and MOOCs where I wrote my senior thesis), then the writing calculus looks quite different.  For while peer-graded essays probably added up to 15-20,000 words of writing total; between blogging, course reviews in the weekly newsletter, podcast scripts, outside articles on the project, and my upcoming MIT book, we’re probably looking at an amount of writing that closes in on half a million words.

While I hadn’t considered it in these terms before, all of last year could be thought of as an immersive learning experience that involved totally throwing myself into a subject (in this case MOOCs) and constructing a situation that required writing about that subject daily.  And while in my formal course work other people (professors) made the decisions regarding how each subject would be approached, in the case of an immersive learning experience built around blogging, the need to come up with something new (and, hopefully, interesting) to say every day triggered an ongoing search for fresh topics to research, understand and write about.

Recently, I mentioned a friend’s educational project that involves asking kids to blog on a daily basis and structuring their blogs in such a way that they will receive feedback that will encourage regular practice at public communications.  And while I haven’t been able to convince my kids to add this to their busy schedules (yet), I can attest to the fact that a commitment to daily blogging can translate into a powerful learning experience.

Another benefit of an intense focus on a single subject is that it forces you to see how that subject might intersect with related subjects.  For writing about MOOCs over the course of twelve months (actually longer now) required thinking about and beyond them in the context of other intersection topics such as general online learning, open education and broader educational issues such as accreditation, pedagogy, signaling unconventional learning and the economics of higher ed.

I know there is some controversy over the whole cliché around mastering something by doing it for 10,000 hours.  And while I don’t plan to dive into that debate, it should come as no surprise that thinking and writing about a topic, ideally in an environment where one is surrounding oneself with that topic on all sides for a long stretch of time, does translate to a powerful educational experience (probably akin to what you would get in graduate school).

So while my son’s recommendation that I next move onto a 24-hour PhD remains just a joke, upon reflection it does seem that even if my course work from last year translates to less than a four year undergraduate degree, the immersive public writing portion of that program might add up to more than one.