#iNACOL14 Recap

Palm Springs -- absolutely beautiful. Even the airport was beautiful.

Renaissance Hotel -- great service, excellent rooms, and overall well done. (do not believe that was a UFO out the window)

As for iNACOL itself, there were two comments that seemed to be prevalent from the attendees I spoke to:

"I wish there were more in-depth sessions. The ones I attended have been to surface-level."

"Too many sessions overall. It felt like session overload."

I personally would agree with the first quote - at least the ones I attended, but not sure about the second one. I can understand from the iNACOL perspective that they were probably trying to cover as many bases as possible by offering a wide array of sessions.

Several of the marketing-based sessions I attended were definitely a Marketing 101 perspective. I just happened to disagree with much of what they were saying because I believe the marketing of the virtual or blended programs leads to much of the retention issues that occur. And, these marketing sessions appeared to continue down the thread of simply looking at demographics to find new students.

Yet, when I asked about their attrition rate year-over-year, it hovered in the 50-60% range.

And, for those who happened to have attended this session, please understand: a logo is not your brand. Just having a pretty logo will not bring people to your school.

Some of the better sessions I attended were the ones where the presenters said "this is what we are trying to do" instead of "look at us and what we are doing." 

More people seem to have questions than answers.

Buzz words for the next several years: blended, adaptive, competency-based, disruptive.

Everyone is trying hard to wrap their heads around blended and develop a consistent definition of what blended learning should look like. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out over the next several years.

houston@figment-consulting.com

#iNACOL14

The 2014 iNACOL Symposium here in Palm Springs has hundreds of talks and breakout sessions going on now through Friday. There are some fascinating discussions going on, and we even had Sal Khan of Khan Academy cast a big vision in regards to Khan Academy.

Blended, virtual, online, adaptive, competency-based, LMS, OLS, integrated, flipped, disruptive -- each one a thread pouring through the sessions with technology as the centerpiece.

And while I did not catch the young lady's name this morning in the opening session, it was interesting what she had to say. She was an online school teacher, on the panel with the other speakers, and the microphone was passed to her for a response to a question related to her experience, and she said:

"I realized that I was not of much value, that I was more spending my time on just guiding instead of teaching."

Hopefully, technology has an answer for that too.

houston@figment-consulting.com

The problem with Khan Academy

There is none really. Sure it has flaws and there is always room for improvement but overall there is no problem with it.

It is up to the virtual schools, the online providers, and even the regular brick and mortar schools (and charter schools) to learn how to exist with Khan Academy. And, in doing so, their offerings can become better - both academically and experiential.

There will even be some who incorporate Khan into the mix by embracing what it has to offer rather than try to simply overcome it. This is called cooperation.

Author and blogger Seth Godin says it much better than I could, "The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way."

The real problem therefore is not with Khan Academy, rather it is that too many see it as competition instead of opportunity. Change your perception and a world of potential is opened up to you.