UPDATE:
I’ve found some great collaborators. Amazing, actually.
What I need now is a research intern or two! If you have some time to research the landscape of educational innovation and make this graphic as up-to-date and comprehensive as possible, please holler at me. I promise useful and interesting work.
The Edupunks’ Atlas. This is an extension of the Edupunks’ Guide, supported by the Gates Foundation.
Higher education is a vast and complex enterprise comprising varying missions, models and types of participants. Time and again, discussions over the future of the enterprise between, say, Ivy League classics professors and for-profit purveyors of online community college courses get bogged down in mutual incomprehension. In numerous presentations over the past two years, I have presented as a framework, adapted from my book DIY U, three major buckets of benefits that higher education provides to students: Content, Socialization, and Accreditation; and three major challenges to traditional models: Cost, Access, and Quality/Relevance.
The Edupunks’ Atlas of Lifelong Learning will use this framework as a starting point to create a beautiful full-color graphic map of the current landscape of higher education innovations, and variations on the theme. The Atlas will be made public at edupunksguide.org and as a free shareable graphic. The field is moving fast so I hope to create a framework that can be updated.
This is a speculative description of how I’d like it to work:
Each spot on the map will have a name and link to an organization and thick or thin lines will connect
related organizations. The overall effect will be a graphic way to understand where a given
innovation falls within the universe of options in further education. Over 200 organizations will
be represented on the atlas.
Dimensions shown on the map could include any or all of the following:
Traditional<—->Experimental
Experiential<–>Hybrid<–>Online
Size/share of market
Benefit Mix e.g.; Content-Socialization-Accreditation (ASU Online); Content (Open Courseware);
Content-Socialization (MOOC, P2PU); Socialization (OpenStudy, CityYear); Socialization-Accreditation
(Github); Accreditation (LearningCounts.org)
Within Accreditation:
Unit of Study e.g.; (Lesson–>Course–>Certification–>Degree)
Traditional, Nontraditional (Badge, Portfolio), Informal
Funding model e.g.; Nonprofit-within existing university, Nonprofit-state-funded, nonprofit-
mixed, For-profit-publicly traded, For-profit-venture, Nonprofit-venture
Audience e.g.; High-Schoolers Transitioning; Elite-Grad; Elite-Undergrad; Mass-Traditional Age; Mass-Adult Learner; Mass-
Returning; Mass-Educated Adult
Business model e.g.; Tuition&Philanthropic; Tuition-only; Free-philanthropic; Freemium;
Platform (data-advertising); Vendor
Content policy e.g.; (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, Traditional copyright)
Pedagogical model e.g.; (One to many; many to many; Independent learning; Experiential;project based)
And maybe a few more I’m not thinking of.
I need to find an awesome designer with interest in this field to help me think through and realize this graphic. You will be paid of course and get exposure as well. If interested please contact me at diyubook@gmail.com with samples of your work.
Thanks!!
