The New Community College

Cloud Education

Your Community College Campus

Many people have been holding their breath waiting for the disruption of higher education. The sheer weight of words on the failure of higher education to leave the early 20th century is amazing. When will the shoe drop? Will some state university system break away from the pack and go for it? Will some operator of bootcamps for technology suddenly explode into dominance like Netflix or Amazon? Will the big Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) suddenly fulfill their promise? The suspense is palpable.

The problem is inertia. Barb Oakley, a professor at Coursera who has taught on traditional class structures says, “Moving a university is like moving a cemetery — you can’t expect any help from the inhabitants”. This quote is from an article in a series in Quartz on The Vanishing University. Definitely worth the read for the whole picture. But what does this mean for the common community college? What will this change look like and when will it happen? It is happening slowly now but the break will be, I think, driven by declining enrollments and students simply opting in greater numbers for alternative systems. Even state community colleges can’t continue without students.

The Change is the Cloud

The expansion of early online courses has evolved into two major branches. Purely online courses are now generally created as MOOC style courses for delivery of course content online with a range of automated interactive components. This has made it possible for a new generation of students to discover that they don’t need the traditional educational structure as they can achieve most of their educational goals by finding and consuming online courses and training videos. This is clearly the future of most adult education and a growing part of high school and community college education. The fact that most of these materials are free online guarantees the preference for this educational form. If credit or certification is needed these courses usually provide an accredited institution that can provide this. Note that this is and will be an optional service.

For a growing range of occupations, particularly in IT and related technologies, experience and portfolios of work are of greater value than general certificates or degrees. This is closely tied to the movement away from permanent positions to the gig economy that will be further accelerated by automation of many current middle management jobs. There will always be traditional professional positions that require formal degrees and certification and areas of specialized knowledge that will need additional classroom or lab work. Both virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR) will have a growing effect on this.

For the instructor, the creation of online course content frees them from the semi-mindless repetition of the same material semester after semester.

Flipped/Hybrid

The second branch has come out of the transformation of the classroom into a media environment with growing delivery of course content from either public or university cloud. This is the flipped or hybrid course environment. While this, too, has been successfully ignored by most educators those that have made one or more course conversions to this learn the benefit and efficiency for both themselves and for students. For students, this provides the ability to repeat and review information just as they once used text books to get expanded course content but relied primarily on lectures for explanation and prioritization of information for assessment. In a community college environment where most students are faced with remedial education or are not from backgrounds that are conducive to formal educational success this can make all the difference in completion. For students taking advantage of lower costs at community colleges this can provide the opportunity to move ahead quickly and pick up additional materials and mentoring from assigned faculty.

For the instructor, the creation of online course content frees them from the semi-mindless repetition of the same material semester after semester. This allows the conversion of classroom time to project collaboration, mentoring, tutoring, and exploration of new content. Obviously, any course done this way can be quickly made a fully online course for students who wish or need that option.

Augmented, Virtual Reality (AR/VR) and Artificial Intelligence

While schools and colleges have been slowly migrating content online, the full Information phase change continues to disrupt human activities. Up to now the focus of disruption has been service related businesses, communication, and social organization with politics as the latest casualty. Education, as yet, has not been directly affected except in administrative operations. The AR/VR change will target education directly. Education has always followed two basic paths, doing and describing. While these two paths are normally intertwined, many skills must be taught by doing. While description and discussion are equally important and are exclusive for abstract disciplines, i.e. humanities, it is always understood that seeing and doing are the best methods of learning. The creation of the classroom lecture (and, hopefully, discussion) format has been the only practical alternative. Virtual technology changes that.

Aggressive departments or IT support units are and will begin operating AR/VR technology aimed at moving faculty from simple online content to virtual reality lesson components. Mass market technology for this has only be available for two years but is following the phase change pattern for education. Augmented reality is the easiest for inexperienced people to understand but is, simply, an aspect of virtual reality applied to any environment.

The first stage of this Virtual Reality change is the addition of 360 degree videos into course content.

The first stage of this change is the addition of 360 degree videos into course content. This is available through both YouTube and enterprise Office 365 Video (now Stream). Using 3D development tools, e.g. Unity 3D, allows the inclusion of information as an overlay for the video. Further development allows the modification of reality virtual scenes or actions. As this evolves classrooms will shift from purely physical to virtual allowing on site classes and the inclusion of students from any physical location on the planet.

The next stage of disruption, already being anticipated by individual pacing of remedial English and Math courses tied to automated student retention tracking, is fully personalized education based on AI monitoring of student data. This will tie detailed data tracking to individual performance and producing increasingly customized pathways for students. Content and instructor involvement will take on greater diversity with a wider range of content required.

New Students

For community college campuses it is essential to expand enrollment. While this will require new designs in courses and new programs more appropriate to the emerging gig economy, the ability to provide increasingly sophisticated content is critical. By making campus attendance increasingly optional, problems with physical access, parking and, working schedules, can be dealt with proactively.

Many community colleges have already made significant strides in capturing the online, lower division or community college student population. To survive in difficult times community colleges need to provide new and improved online performance to make their programs attractive. The key is for community colleges to begin implementing the technical resources to make this possible.

Storage and Delivery Applications

The technology to support cloud based education on a virtual campus needs virtual technology with storage, virtual desktops, collaborative environments and document storage. Most of this is already being supplied free or at low cost by Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, and others. So each community college needs to have a full Virtual Data Center providing high speed networking, over hundreds of terabytes of online storage, video storage via YouTube and/or Office 365 Steam, simple to sophisticated collaborative applications (Google Suite, Office 365, MS Teams, Skype for Business, OneNote, and SharePoint Online). This emulates the sophisticated enterprise suite of cloud services that students are using or will use in corporations, NGOs or government departments. These service need to be given to each student but that can be accomplished, as noted above, by the provisioning of virtual desktops or application and storage suites that are secure and operate on any type of connected device, laptop, tablet, or phone.

Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) capability makes a single, secure desktop with all applications available from any internet connected machine on or off campus. Off campus desktop access is a matter of having an internet connected computer for secure access from any computer public or private. And faculty do not need to be on campus if students are online.

Course Content Production

The accelerating sophistication of technology also allows design and installation of highly automated, self-service, video production studios for both audio narration of PowerPoint presentations and full lecture course production. Vendor such as Newtek provide full recording and streaming video production systems in a single package. For roughly $20k even a very small college can setup a number of virtual studios with multi-screen presentation and video display in a news desk or lecture room studio that needs only a small office to emulate a full network production studio or the bridge of the starship Enterprise or the Colosseum in Rome. There is no need to watch a lonely instructor showing a PowerPoint in a dusty classroom. And you can watch it at any time and repeat until all of the points made are clear. In fact you may not need a campus or classrooms at all very soon.

Courtesy of Microsoft Hololens

Previously video production needed special video networking to link cameras and control room production equipment. A new video network protocol NDI now allows cameras to be installed and linked over standard network for a campus. This means on location cameras can be integrated into content production, online class sessions and live streaming to auditoriums or classrooms as well as on the internet. A new generation of community college instructors are beginning to learn professional video production techniques that have made simple with nearly complete automation. There is no excuse for boring course content presentation to spur discussion in class or online.

Blending Classroom and Cloud Course Content

As discussed in the first section of this document, online course content is the essential component of all future adult education. Online course content does not require a full online course. It allows a much richer classroom experience designed specifically for students challenged by traditional formal education. There are many ways to do this but all of them are better than traditional courses in a traditional delivery format. And as Augmented and Virtual Reality are incorporated show tell will become go and see virtually by anyone from anywhere. This is will produce a complete blending of virtual and physical in sophisticated learning environments courtesy of your neighborhood community college.