The corridor of uncertainty

Don't believe the hype 2

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:34:00 +0000

Don't get me wrong, I'm enthusiastic about the new opportunities for learning that the net and social media offer. However there is a danger that in our enthusiasm to embrace the new educational landscape we enjoy hearing what we want to believe and choose not to take conflicting opinions too seriously. Those who can express our hopes an beliefs in an inspiring manner can win a massive wave of support and attain guru status and this is of course fairly typical human behaviour. So when people like Sugata Mitra, Salman Khan or Daphne Koller so convincingly challenge the traditional educational system and offer the hope of new solutions it is easy to get swept away in a wave of enthusiasm without stopping to challenge our beliefs.

Now I too am inspired by these and many other leading figures in the educational debate and am really looking forward to hearing two of them (Robinson and Mitra) at the EDEN conference in Oslo in June. However it's worth digging around to see if there is another side to the argument. Maybe children don't really learn so effectively completely on their own, maybe flipping the classroom is not really the solution to motivating kids and maybe the growth of MOOCs is not as open and free as we would like to imagine.

Two articles in the past couple of months provide necessary wake-up calls for us all. Firstly Donald Clark's article, Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt, casts doubt over some of Mitra's claims about self-learning children. It's not quite as simple as it sounds and Clark presents evidence that there were commercial interests behind the famous hole-in-the-wall project and that it does not prove that schools are irrelevant. Read the article and consider.

There's also a timely article by Irene Ogrizek, Daphne Koller and the Problem with Coursera, which questions the motives behind Coursera and other commercial MOOC providers. She's not the first to question the commercial motives behind the MOOC-explosion but notes that Coursera and other MOOC consortia present a convincing case for democratising and opening up education but we forget that they are for-profit commercial operations with a duty to provide ROI to their investors.

"Coursera is a for-profit company that has joined with top universities to deliver free online courses. The “free” part sounds great until we realize that the real intent of companies like Coursera is to transition into producing monetized, for-credit university courses. To many academics this represents a conflict of interest that compromises the independence and integrity of higher education institutions."

Read these tow articles. It's worth remembering there any many sides to every story.

It's a MOOC, Jim, but not as we know it ...

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:10:00 +0000

CC BY-NC-SA by jeveaux

Every week I think maybe I can avoid writing about MOOCs but it seems impossible since the phenomenon totally dominates all discussion of online learning. Sometimes you get the impression that online education has only just been invented and that the only way to do it is by aiming at a mass market. There's plenty of good online learning that isn't MOOC-shaped and some of it is far more pedagogically innovative and collaborative. The definition of a MOOC that is embedded in the name is getting increasingly blurred and it's getting very hard to see where the border goes between a MOOC and a regular university course.

This week's announcement of a whole degree program, an accredited Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS), to be offered by The Georgia Institute of Technology, Udacity and AT&T certainly blurs the definitions considerably.

"All OMS CS course content will be delivered via the massive open online course (MOOC) format, with enhanced support services for students enrolled in the degree program. Those students also will pay a fraction of the cost of traditional on-campus master’s programs; total tuition for the program is initially expected to be below $7,000. A pilot program, partly supported by a generous gift from AT&T, will begin in the next academic year. Initial enrollment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates. Enrollment is expected to expand gradually over the next three years."

They aim to offer different participation levels with different price tags so that some students will be studying online for credits and paying for it whereas others will be participating in only the courses they choose and paying a small fee for a certificate but no credits. This is a far cry from the original idea of a MOOC as an experimental educational arena where learning takes place in networks and students define their own learning objectives, creating content that is then processed and adapted within the network. OMS CS looks very much like a regular online degree but at a much lower fee. The difference is that much of the university teachers' workload is transferred to mentors at Udacity and students will probably have to be much more self-reliant than their more expensive campus colleagues. Some fear that this is the academic equivalent of low-price air travel and are concerned at how academic standards can be maintained.

The big news for some is that suddenly a MOOC has a price tag but I'm surprised it took this long. The freemium model is coming to a MOOC near you very soon. Access to the material may be free but if you want tuition, guidance, validation, examination and quality assurance you will have to pay, one way of another. However the sense of revolution and innovation that the original MOOCs created is rapidly disappearing as the new interpretations of the concept develop business models. It's all beginning to look very similar to the system it was supposed to be challenging and considering that the main drivers are the leading universities in the world that should not be any surprise either. Read more about this in an article on Inside Higher Ed, Massive (But Not Open).

Many fear that MOOC consortia will soon reveal their true colours once they've captured the mass student base and are fearful of the way we are being won over by the lure of "free". Bob Meister (University of California) has just written an open letter to Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera entitled Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? voicing concerns that the free education offered today is a way of gaining a customer base and a volume of data that can then be turned into for-profit services. The vast amount of investment being made into the MOOC market will be looking for some solid returns in the not too distant future and even if some of it remains free for the student it is worth remembering the adage that if you are not paying for it then you are the product.

I think we will see a development where the division between the different MOOC models will become even more pronounced. The academic innovators and researchers will continue to offer free, challenging connectivist MOOCs based on collaboration, creation and sharing whilst the institutions and consortia will find hard business models for more traditional online courses with a variety of fee options aimed at mass audiences. And the term MOOC will disappear into the buzzword junkyard.

Grabbing attention

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 09 May 2013 06:35:00 +0000

by williamhartz

I often return to the subject of attention, often because I have a problem with it myself. I have great difficulty switching off both digital and physical distractors when I'm working and could get much more done if I could resist the sirens' call. I don't believe this is a new phenomenon but the lure of social media has certainly exacerbated the problem. It has a lot to do with where your motivation comes from and the fact that if you want to be distracted you will be. If you have a task you are extremely committed to then it is much less likely that you'll bother checking e-mails, Facebook, Twitter or news feeds. If it's a task you have to do but are not particularly interested in then it's hard to focus and the task takes at least double the necessary time.

Online learning offers great flexibility and is often the only form of education available to people with full-time jobs as well as family and other commitments. However it demands high levels of self-discipline and the ability to focus and many are simply not good at that. Even when you sit down and try to focus on your studies, say a recorded lecture or an article to read, the distractions are always temptingly close and work that could easily be done in one concentrated hour can easily take two or three.

So when designing an online course are there methods for helping the student to focus on the task in hand? This area has been the subject of research by Daniel Schacter and Karl Szpunar of Harvard University and summarised in an article in Harvard Science, Online learning: It's different. The idea of breaking up lectures into small digestible segments is commonplace today but their research shows that it is not enough. You need to have regular tests of some sort between the chunks of information, not too challenging but tricky enough to make them focus.

“At the very least, what this says is that it’s not enough to break up lectures into smaller segments, or to fill that break with some activity,” he said. “What we really need to do is instill in students the expectation that they will need to express what they’ve learned at some later point. I think it’s going to be a very sobering thought for a lot of people to think that students aren’t paying attention almost half the time, but this is one way we can help them get more out of these online lectures.”

This approach applies just as well to classroom as online learning and although it doesn't sound particularly surprising they claim there is very little research in this area so far. It seems a rather primitive behaviourist carrot and stick method but we need only look to the world of gaming to see how motivating small rewards can be and the total concentration and immersion that gamers experience. Khan Academy for one has been built around this principle with short input films, tests and a system of badges and levels to show progress. Although these are important considerations I still think the article focuses on only one aspect of online learning and misses the big picture.

This article seems to focus too much on the need to force students to focus and see the testing as a form of stick rather than carrot. I think there is enormous potential to adapt the reward principles of gaming in an educational context but the focus in the article is on traditional knowledge transmission and does not deal with learning as an interactive process. The online learning focused on in the article is the traditional self-study linear model rather than collaborative networked learning arenas where digital skills, source criticism, networking and peer review are essential. The challenge is to move from external motivation where students are forced/encouraged to focus to instilling internal motivation where they actually want to focus and the distractions simply evaporate.

A MOOC on cheating

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:58:00 +0000

by Mr_Stein

Cheating in online courses always attracts a good deal of media attention and is often accompanied by cries for tougher measures to counter cheating as well as criticism of online learning in general. So if we are going to deal with this issue how about organising a course on the subject? This is exactly what is now offered by Bernard Bull of Concordia University Wisconsin - a new MOOC called Understanding Cheating in Online Courses. It's a course for educators to investigate different types of academic cheating, how to spot them and especially how to design courses that make cheating either very difficult or irrelevant. Not surprisingly the course is already full (1000 students) but is most likely to be repeated given the current interest.

"Participants in this eight-week open course will examine philosophical and psychological perspectives on cheating; consider instructor, institutional, and student perspectives on cheating; learn about specific strategies and practices used by students to cheat in online courses; and develop a plan for cultivating a culture of honesty, integrity, and accountability in online courses. The end goal of the course is for participants to gain a deeper understanding of cheating in online courses."

As with most MOOCs there are no credits available for the course (not worth cheating basically) but there are a number of badges available for successful completion of the modules. However it may inspire other universities to include for-credit courses in this field since we need to investigate and understand more fully what we really mean by cheating and whether we even invite cheating by choosing certain types of instruction methods.

In a networked world where we borrow, remix and reuse other's work in increasingly sophisticated and creative manners we really need to revise our ideas on "cheating". Copying and imitating others is a vital part of learning, as long as we clearly show that we are doing just that. When you don't know how to approach a problem at work you consult your network to see if someone has the answers or at least some assistance. At work this shows initiative whilst if you did that with an examination task it would be cheating.

Read a good overview of the course in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, MOOC Teaches How to Cheat in Online Courses, With Eye to Prevention.

MOOC quality project

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Fri, 03 May 2013 08:54:00 +0000

How can we assess quality in a MOOC? Is it even possible to have quality assurance in an educational form that is constantly developing and is already split into several distinct categories?

Over the next couple of months I will be helping to run a blog called The MOOC Quality Project under the banner of EFQUEL (European Foundation for Quality in E-learning) together with colleagues Ulf-Daniel Ehlers and Ebba Ossiannilsson. The project will feature leading experts in the field of open education who will take turns in writing a weekly blog post on how they see the issue of quality in MOOCs.

- The MOOC Quality Project, an initiative of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (www.efquel.org), attempts to stimulate a discourse on the issue of Quality of MOOCs. A series of blog posts of worldwide experts and entrepreneurs will address the issue from each particpant’s viewpoint. After each blog post we will allow a one week period of time to react and comment on the post made available. At the end of the week the discussion will be shortly summarized and made available to all.

We hope that the articles will stimulate discussion and we will use the findings as the basis of a session at the conference EFQUEL Innovation Forum 26-27 September in Barcelona.

This subject is extremely relevant in response to the extreme hype surrounding MOOCs and the expected skeptical reaction. How can we apply quality assurance methods in this field since MOOCs differ significantly from "regular" courses? First of all there is no clear definition of a MOOC. Many of them are not so massive, few are genuinely open and some are not really even courses in the traditional sense. Donald Clark recently listed the diversity of MOOC models in his post MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC. There's a huge gulf between the open connectivist learning networks of the courses run by the likes of George Siemens and Stephen Downes and the more traditional lecture-based model offered by Coursera. So it's difficult to discuss quality in MOOCs in general terms, it depends on which type of MOOC.

One key quality factor is missing in MOOCs, namely the target group. Courses normally have a clear target group and can measure success by how well the course meets the needs of that group. There is no real target group in a MOOC, everyone is welcome. The participants' aims and motivations differ widely and many have no intention of even completing the course. How do we then assess the quality of a course that will mean very different things to many different people?

At a basic level a MOOC offers free access to a collection of educational resources that together form a logically linked progression. Quality here is the value and relevance of the resources and how they are linked. Many MOOCs have little or no qualified tutoring or guidance, only offering online arenas for student communication. These arenas can be quality assessed for their functionality but little more since what goes on there is out of the control of the organisers. Maybe the real quality issues of the MOOC phenomenon lies in the "value-added" services that are on higher layers than the course material. If tutoring, guidance, validation and examination are available at a price then these add-ons can be more easily assessed and quality guidelines set up.

It'll be very interesting to read the views of the experts in weeks to come!

Just because you can

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:06:00 +0000

by Cycrolu

When I went on holiday 15 years ago or more I thought a couple of 36 photo film rolls were easily enough to capture those important moments. The cost of developing those photos meant that every camera click was carefully considered. Today I take hundreds of photos, not because I have to but mostly because I can. I delete the worst ones but I keep about 90% of them even if I know that very few people in the world, if any, are likely to want to see them. We all sit on vast collections of photos and video footage that are hardly ever viewed. Since digital storage is free or inexpensive it's easy to save everything, just in case.

Maybe we spend so much time filming and taking photos that we actually forget to simply enjoy the real experience. Whenever you go to a major tourist attraction the place is swarming with people all taking thousands of very similar photos of the same place, from much the same angles. I'm in there with the best of them but I sometimes wonder why. I suppose it's the need to prove that you were actually there and in recent years to prove that to all your friends on Facebook. I do often enjoy seeing friends' photos on Facebook, especially if they've been somewhere interesting. Sharing memories and experiences is what drives social media and fulfills the need to create bonds and common reference points. However maybe we have to step back now and then and wonder if we really need to take all these photos and films and whether we are sometimes more focused on that than actually enjoying the experience.

An article on CNN, At concerts, put that cell phone down, complains of the forest of mobiles held up at concerts with everyone taking blurred photos and recording poor quality films of the performance. YouTube is full of dreadful concert video clips that no one ever watches and the author wonders why we do it.

"It's difficult to explain just why we do it -- why having a very basic camera in our pocket compels us to shoot photos and videos of live music that, deep down, we know we'll never look at.
Part of it might be the delusional notion of preserving a memory, but it's probably more about showing everyone in social media that you're actually out of your house doing something culturally important. As opposed to staying in and slathering your body with ranch dressing."

The article cites a recent example of the rock group the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who put up signs at a recent concert appealing to fans to keep their mobiles out of sight. Let the people behind you see the show. The chances of you getting any decent footage are slim and it's simply an unnecessary irritant.

"Of course, if you have a quality camera and can get up close, there's definitely an art in concert photography. And people certainly appreciate that.
But for everyone else, let's all agree to give it a rest. Do it for you. Just experience the music, take it in, and we'll talk about our favorite moments over late-night food."

Change the focus

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:47:00 +0000

by thejuniorpartner

When I was a student just about everything I wrote was for a very exclusive audience; generally one person, a teacher or examiner. No-one else would ever read it. I wrote purely to be assessed and it wasn't a very stimulating, fulfilling or realistic process. That's why today's students are writing assignments that are published publicly on the net or made available on the university's open access archive. When you know your work will be available to all you automatically raise your game, suddenly the assignment is real and not a test. Shift the focus and change the view.

A similar change of focus can inject much needed energy to the tired ritual of course evaluations. A short article by Brian Croxall, Improve your Course Evaluations by having your Class Write Letters to Future Students (Chronicle of Higher Education), describes how he choose a new angle for the end-of-course evaluation. Instead of handing out the standard evaluation form he asked the students to write a letter to next year's students giving them advice and tips about the course and the teaching. By changing the focus from writing to a faceless administrator to a group of fellow students the task suddenly became meaningful and the feedback was much more enlightening. The quantity and quality of the feedback was improved.

"... I found that the students wrote, on average, far more on these evaluations than they have on past ones that I have provided. And in writing something directed at fellow students rather than me or some faceless, unknowable bureaucracy, I’d say that the students were much more candid. This means that they are more direct in talking about my strengths and weaknesses. And while it’s nice to hear the former, it’s the latter that will actually help me do a better job the next time around."

A slight change of focus can often make a big difference.

Test for success?

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:14:00 +0000

by jackhynes

There are many paradoxes in education today. For example, on the one hand there is an increased focus on standardised testing and educational league tables that compare schools and universities based solely on test scores and on the other hand the need to foster entrepreneurship and creativity in schools. There is considerable evidence that success in tests does not correspond to creativity and innovation. However, the more national authorities focus on success in, for example, PISA the more teachers will need to teach the test and that in turn leads to students focusing not on learning but on cramming facts to pass the tests.

There is of course intense competition between nations as markets become more global and every country tries to stay ahead of the competition by being more innovative. But maybe standardised testing in schools and colleges is counter-productive. This is the essence of an article by Katrina Schwartz, In an Era of Global Competition, What Exactly Are We Testing For? which discusses the research Yong Zhao, professor of education at University of Oregon. Zhao has compared students from countries with high test scores in mathematics, like Korea and Japan, with countries with lower average scores and discovered a negative correlation between high math scores and confidence. The "successful" students are not particularly interested in the subject they are supposedly excellent at and have low confidence in their ability. They have focused on memorising the facts needed to pass the test rather than applying them and thinking creatively. In schools where students can choose more freely and have more control over what they learn and how they learn there is greater commitment and higher levels of creativity, even if they may not perform so well in standardised tests.

What is the focus for educational institutions then? Should education start with a curriculum of facts that every student must know or does it focus on the individual and build on her/him? It would seem to be a choice between conformity and creativity. We need to learn how to learn rather than learn to pass tests.

“The new education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content,” Zhao said. “We start with individual differences; we start with their cultural strengths.” Beginning with the individual and building upwards from there allows each person to become uniquely great at something. And when students are passionate about anything, they can then be creative and entrepreneurial. For Zhao, the new model has to be about creating a new middle class based on creativity.

To do that, he suggests giving students more autonomy over their learning and emphasizing the importance of making authentic products that solve problems. He also emphasizes a global learning community that can collaborate to fill the gaps that each country, school or teacher experiences.

The problem is that tests focus on facts and acquired knowledge but do not test the skills that today's employers value most: creativity, entrepreneurship and collaboration. If we really want to promote these skills we need to find new methods of assessing real skills and practical competence and let students follow their natural talents and learn in the manner that suits them best.

Buzzword pruning

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:17:00 +0000

by C.K.H.

A lot of buzzwords have really passed their sell-by dates and maybe its time to bid them a fond farewell. We've been sticking 2.0 on to lots of words for at least 10 years and it simply isn't cool anymore. Cyber- is another term that has lost its sting. Talking to friends on Skype or Facebook is not cyberspace, I'm simply talking to friends. I also feel that we should tone down the e- in front of learning since it's about time we saw the e- as default and that education should of course make use of the technology and communication opportunities that are used in society in general.

A blog post by Richard Byrne, 21 Reasons to Stop Saying "21st Century Teacher" makes a good case for dumping another overused term. Since we are now 13 years into the 21st century it doesn't sound impressive anymore and the skills and teaching we are referring to are firmly rooted in the present decade and cannot be seen as typical of an entire century. We still have 87 years left of this century and a lot will happen in that period. Would we describe skills or technologies from 1913 as typical of the 20th century?

The post is also poking fun at all those list articles with titles like 5/10/20/21/30 awesome uses of the latest technology. Let's check our language use from time to time and do a bit of buzzword pruning.

Wait a minute ... isn't buzzword a buzzword?

Who are MOOCs really for?

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 10:31:00 +0000

CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by catspyjamasnz

I've written before about the irrelevance of looking deeply into completion rates of MOOCs. Due to the fact that MOOCs are free and (relatively) open they should not be compared to regular university courses. The typical completion rates of around 10% obviously alarm those who view MOOCs as alternatives to for-credit courses. However, given the fact that such a completion rate for a course with 50,000 students would still give more successful students than several years of campus courses, they maybe don't do so badly after all. What so many articles seem to miss is the fact that the target group for MOOCs is not traditional university students at all. I would like to see some studies on the demography of MOOCs to see who's really using them and I suspect that the traditional student group of 19-25 year olds is not as well represented as you might expect. MOOCs do not really compete with higher education, they make higher education material accessible to people who would never otherwise have access to it.

This is the theme of an excellent article by Oscar Becerra, The One Laptop Per Child Correlation With Massive Open Online Courses. He starts by stating that "MOOC Target Audience are Currently “Non-consumers” of Education", meaning that MOOCs should be seen as an exciting extension of higher education allowing millions of people to explore new fields that were previously closed off to them. Whether these people complete their courses or not is not really very interesting, it's what they feel they have learnt from the experience.

"What we need to bear in mind is that the MOOCs are trying to make better quality education available to a great mass of people who are currently “non-consumers” of education and such quality is currently superior by far to whatever they may be getting right now. The MOOCs are not aimed to people who are willing to cheat but to those willing to learn ...
... we may say the MOOCs and online education offerings available today are “good enough educational offerings” helping ordinary people who are willing to learn to reach goals that had been out of their possibilities so far."

MOOCs are not regular university courses and we shouldn't compare the two. You do not get the same levels of tuition and guidance and you need to be highly self-sufficient and digitally literate to be able to benefit from them. But you can learn a lot from them if you apply yourself and that in itself is a justification. At the moment I suspect the majority of MOOC students are graduates and professionals who are trying out the new arena out of curiosity. People like myself basically. We are often only interested in looking at methods and content and seldom stay for the whole course (I'm guilty as charged here). This group is highly self-sufficient and many are educators themselves with little interest in credits even if they were available. I'd be interested in seeing how the demographics change as the hype dies down. I suspect that the curious academic category will fall off and the group of new learners, people outside higher education, will increase. They are the real target group of MOOCs but they are not in focus at present due to the vast numbers of "curious academics" so maybe we should reserve our judgement on the MOOC phenomenon till the dust settles.

The music of teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:06:00 +0000

by MITO SettembreMusica

Teachers and students have a vast range of resources to use: books, audio recordings, films, tests, simulations, games, photos, diagrams etc. The teacher's role is putting selected resources into context and finding methods to help students to reflect on and develop that input. However, although we have documented and stored so much content we have not succeeded in documenting or recording actual teaching methods in a standard format.

Teaching resembles in some ways the performance of music. You have lots of instruments that can be used and integrated in complex or simple structures and there are a wide range of styles to choose between. Courses can be orchestrated and can involve soloists as well as different groups of musicians or combinations of instruments. The difference is that music has a standard form of notation (at least western music) and is therefore accessible through the centuries. Teaching on the other hand has no form of notation, no way of expressing how a lesson or course is orchestrated, so that other teachers can draw on previous practice. Teachers often have to work in their own silo reinventing the wheel rather than being able to draw on other's experience.

We've created open educational resources (OER) but the big question is how to fit them all together. Maybe we need to develop a language for open lesson plans with a standard notation form that all teachers understand and can interpret. A choreography for teaching, Not to slavishly follow but for each teacher and class to interpret and adapt.Teaching is becoming increasingly complex today and it feels like time to develop methods to transfer teaching practice.

This is where Learning Design comes in. I've just read an interesting paper called the Larnaca declaration on learning design that describes various attempts at devising a notation for teaching (download the paper from the website). One such attempt is called LAMS Learning Design system (see example below). The lesson plan is represented by a diagram with a number of linked icons. Each icon tells what type of activity is proposed and each icon is linked to further embedded information on the details of the activity and even xml-code for educational technologists to be able to implement this activity in say a learning management system. The example below shows the organization of a roleplay and has a linear format but other learning designs could have more complex structures.

CC BY-NC-SA James Dalziel at http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=690433

The article contains several other attempts to find a graphical means of describing the structure of a lesson and the potential for this is enormous. Not simply to describe how a one teacher has devised an effective method for helping students to grasp a particular concept but that now other teachers can easily interpret this plan and use it themselves. Just as a piece of music can be played in a variety of styles and interpretations so can a learning design be interpreted in various ways, depending on the teacher and the class context. Some forms of music, like jazz, depend greatly on improvisation whereas classical music stays more true to the written score. The same may be true for teaching using learning design. The key is recording and transferring good practice. If we can also find ways of linking to relevant open resources we can create complete lesson plans.

Time for open learning design to build on open educational resources.

Can you own a digital purchase?

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:23:00 +0000

by Jemimus

If I buy a book, a music CD or a DVD movie I own it and when I get tired of it I am free to sell it to someone else. This principle of ownership seems simple enough but in the digital world it suddenly ceases to apply. An article by Dan Gillmor in the Guardian, In our digital world you don't own stuff, you just license it, describes a recent American court ruling against a start-up, ReDigi, who proposed to start a market for people to resell digital music.

"Had the users of the startup, ReDigi, been selling used CDs via any number of online stores, there would have been no issue. But the music in this case was stored in computer files, so the doctrine of "first sale" – your right to resell what you've bought – didn't apply.

ReDigi tried hard to live up to the spirit of copyright law. It created a system where the uploader of a "purchased" iTunes song would lose access to the music after the file was transferred to the new "buyer's" computer. Yeah, right, said the record company and the judge – there's no way to ensure that the "seller" wasn't keeping the song anyway."

The same problem applies to e-books, e-magazines and all types of digital content. Because it's so easy to make perfect digital copies the companies argue that you can't really own digital content, simply the right to access it yourself and that right is not transferable. Many libraries have encountered difficulties in lending e-books and often have to pay considerable sums to be able to lend such content.

June Breivik points out another absurdity with digital content in a post about how e-books are often much more expensive than the printed equivalent (blog post in Norwegian).

Is the high price some kind of compensation for the fact that once bought the content may be copied? The ruling against ReDigi would suggest that we need to rethink our principle of ownership when it comes to digital products and that you merely pay for the right to borrow rather than own. Many digital content services are subscription based and if you stop paying the subscription your content is no longer available.

But if I pay money for something that I don't really own and do not have the right to resell, the price for this service should logically be much lower than the purchase of the physical equivalent which include reselling rights? It seems that the content companies are still uncomfortable with digital formats and are applying an analogue business model that doesn't quite fit. I don't have the answer but new models are needed to avoid absurd examples like the above.

The future of education is diversity

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:01:00 +0000

by Mark Brannan

There are a lot of articles about the future of education/schools/universities full of claims and counter-claims about exactly which technology or method will prevail. I think the answer is that education and learning will take place in a wide variety of settings from traditional classrooms to virtual worlds and in many modes from independent self-study to small collaborative projects to massive online courses. In the past education was more limited to face-to-face meetings at set times or to correspondence courses with long response times. Today there are so many options available to satisfy all preferences. MOOCs are not going to replace regular university courses, they simply add new options and new arenas for learning for those who learn well in that type of setting.

There are plenty innovative platforms for learning. One such that has just caught my attention is the London based site The Amazings. The idea here is that people with a passion for a practical skill can offer classes to anyone in the area via the site. The focus is on older people (over 50) being able to offer their knowledge and skills to the community and earn money for it. These classes, workshops and courses range from £15 to £140 and are all face to face sessions in the London area though they plan to expand to other cities as demand increases. The teachers are not necessarily qualified but are all enthusiasts who want to share their knowledge. Classes take place in all sorts of places but never in a classroom. Their tone is refreshingly honest and hype-free:

"Who are the classes for?
Anyone who wants to learn but hates formality. We want to make learning more fun, more friendly, more social, and more personal. If you want certificates or diplomas, keep on walking. If you're interested in learning for its own sake, we've probably got a class for you."

Read more about the Amazings in an article in the Independent, Meet the Amazings! Keeping knowledge alive. Here's a short video that presents one of the courses, how to play steel drums:

At present there are very few online courses in the Amazings but a similar service that has been around a while now, Skillshare, offers a wide range of online informal courses as well as face-to-face sessions in various cities (mostly in the USA).

People helping other people to learn, online, in person, anywhere, any time. If you can't meet physically you meet online. It's all about people communicating, helping, learning. There is no best method, no killer app, no disruption. It's about diversity, choice and flexibility.

Boredom is good for you

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0000

by joshme17

Is boredom is becoming an endangered state of mind? We have almost abolished boredom from our lives today because the second we feel the slightest hint of it we check our mobile for a game, an app, some music, a film or at least check Facebook or Twitter for updates. We used to get very bored waiting for buses or trains but not any more. Everyone is absorbed in their own private soundtrack. We all demand entertainment and contact 24-7-365.

Boredom and its colleague silence are not a popular couple these days and we try to eliminate them wherever they might appear. When was the last time you sat in a cafe, pub or restaurant that didn't have background music (often foreground music)? Runners and walkers are cocooned in their playlists. Do we ever allow ourselves to be alone, in silence and without any particular plan of what to do next?

An article from BBC News, Children should be allowed to get bored, describes research carried out by Dr Teresa Belton (University of East Anglia) on children and boredom. She has interviewed people about how boredom affected their creativity as children. She found many who were inspired to creative activities through boredom and silence:

"Enforced solitude alone with a blank page is a wonderful spur."
"As I get older, I appreciate reflection and boredom. Boredom is a very creative state."
"She happily entertained herself with making up stories, drawing pictures of her stories and going to the library."

Many people today are willing to pay for retreat weekends free from noise and distractions, hoping for inspiration and balance. Silence and a lack of stimulation are becoming exclusive commodities. Maybe it's time to reassess boredom and see its positive side.

Digital resilience

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:46:00 +0000

I've just read a post by Bill Ferriter entitled Technology will kill where he stresses the need for us to become digitally resilient. This resilience is characterised by:

"The refusal to quit when confronted by blocked websites, antiquated tools, or technology decisions that are not aligned with a new vision for teaching and learning."

The post was in response to the frustration of seeing a long-trusted service, in this case Google Reader, getting suddenly killed off because it was no longer viable. This is of course one of the hard facts of life in the perpetual beta world of free social media. They're only free as long as their owners have a valid business case and whenever the business case weakens it either gains a price tag or they pull out the plug on it. Digital resilience is about the ability to quickly adapt and find a new solution or even have a plan B in the wings.

Another side of this resilience is having the patience to try again. Many of us try a new technology once and when it doesn't work perfectly, we decide that it wasn't as good as it was cracked up to be - "I told you it wouldn't work." Many have unrealistically high expectations of technology; that it should be completely intuitive and can be mastered with a minimum of effort. Maybe the industry is to blame for pushing the user-friendly argument rather too often and forgetting to add that user-friendly doesn't mean that the device or tool requires no skill. Learning takes time and involves a lot of trial and error. Mastery demands sweat and sometimes tears. Although many digital tools are fairly easy to learn at a rudimentary level you need to work hard to really produce impressive work.

Digital resilience also means having the confidence to use technology even if colleagues are skeptical and there is little support. Finding ways around obstacles and having the patience to test and fail till you get it right.

Bill's post includes a video that isn't quite in tune with digital resilience but does show how technology is quietly rendering many familiar tools, devices and methods obsolete often completely behind our backs. Worth watching here as well.

Great expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:50:00 +0000

by Beaulawrence

I'm following Open University's MOOC, #H817open, and one recommended article gave us a chance to get a flavour of how the whole OER movement began. An article from 2001 by Stephen Downes, Learning Objects: Resources for distance education worldwide (IRRODL Vol 2 no 1, July 2001) explained the logic behind sharing educational resources (in those days referred to as learning objects) and gave a clear financial incentive for schools and universities to start sharing. Why should hundreds/thousands of teachers all over the world spend valuable (and expensive) hours producing very similar resources when one excellent resource could be produced and then shared?

"The economics are relentless. It makes no financial sense to spend millions of dollars producing multiple versions of similar learning objects when single versions of the same objects could be shared at a much lower cost per institution. There will be sharing, because no institution producing its own materials on its own could compete with institutions sharing learning materials."

The financial incentives for sharing instead of producing expensive digital resources seem so clear in this article. So here we are twelve years later and sharing of open resources has still not become mainstream practice despite Downes' convincing financial incentives. Masses of resources have been created and are easily accessible but still most teachers prefer to create their own resources or use the prescribed textbooks from major publishers. Given the potential financial incentive to share resources why has OER not become more widespread?

There is no real culture of sharing in education. Many teachers still feel obliged to design, manage and have full control of their courses. Many colleges base teachers' salaries on lecture hours thus perpetuating that particular form of teaching. Using other people's resources is not fully accepted and content is still closely guarded rather than shared. The key to establishing a culture of sharing is clear leadership and support to teachers.
Too many shades of openness. There's a nice short presentation by Derek Keats called How most Open Educational Resources fail to meet the UNESCO definition of OER that demonstrates how the majority of "open" resources are actually restricted. Material from the major universities, including iTunes U and most MOOC material, is of course available and accessible but most of it is still copyright and cannot be reused or adapted. Even some Creative Commons material is restricted by the No derivatives and Non-commercial conditions. Truly open resources must be free to reuse and adapt.
Lack of trust. Resources from credible institutions like major universities tend to be restricted whereas the truly open resources do not have a stamp of trustworthiness, often produced by individuals rather than institutions. Quality assurance needs to be developed to give credibility to OER.
Convenience. Standard textbooks and prescribed literature are designed to fit into national curricula and are linked to learning outcomes. The same goes for online material supplied by major publishers. Putting all this together finding appropriate resources from the vast pool of OER is simply more work than many teachers can afford to take on, especially given teachers' overload of administrative duties.
Lack of incentives. Teachers who produce good resources can win praise from other teachers in the OER community but it doesn't increase academic reputation. Careers are dependent on getting articles published in academic journals and running courses with high pass rates and good evaluations. Creating OER does not lead to any career rewards.

For more on this theme read an article by Gerd Kortemeyer in Educause Review: Ten Years Later: Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education, and Why We Should Care.

Is it a course? Is it a textbook? No, it's a MOOC!

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:13:00 +0000

by Flicktone

It's hard enough trying to evaluate regular education because learning is not easily measured; if indeed we can even hope to do so. We can of course test to see what people have remembered or whether they can explain concepts in a clear and logical manner but how do we know what they have actually learnt? So if evaluating traditional education is tough how hard is it to evaluate a MOOC? A bit like nailing jelly to the wall as a colleague once said, though I can't remember when.

MOOC providers may believe that they are offering a university course and duly organise it as such but do the participants share that belief? If you sign up for a regular university course you make a commitment, invest money and time and expect a reward for your efforts. You buy into the course concept, accept the university's terms and step into line. Everyone understands what they're involved in and accepts the rules. When you sign up for a MOOC, however, you don't buy into the concept in the same way. You join the course for your own reasons, have your own objectives and preferences and are often uninterested in the certification that may or may not be available at the end. Many have no intention of completing the "course" at all, they're simply curious to see what the fuss is all about. When there is no consensus as to what the MOOC is, an evaluation becomes extremely difficult.

Stephen Downes' post, Evaluating a MOOC, claims that we can't evaluate MOOCs with the same criteria as traditional courses since they aren't actually courses. They are many things to many people.

"I think the best way to understand success in a MOOC is by analogy with, say a book, or a game, or a trip to the city.
The person taking the MOOC is like a person reading a book, playing a game, or taking a trip to the city. It is impossible to talk about 'the objective' of such an activity - some people want to learn something (and others something else), others are doing it for leisure (and others as part of their job), others to make friends (and others to get away from their friends for a while), etc."

A successful MOOC creates enough momentum to continue after the "course" is complete. Since the motivations of each participant are so different it is more relevant to evaluate the MOOC as an entity and look at what the community has achieved and how vibrant and self-sufficient that community has become. MOOCs will develop into new forms and new terminology will emerge to differentiate between them. Some will be traditional courses with a syllabus and learning outcomes and will expect students to accept the rules of engagement whereas others will be more fluid and become learning communities with learners coming and going, some staying for months and others simply dropping in for inspiration.

"MOOC success, in other words, is not individual success. We each have our own motivations for participating in a MOOC, and our own rewards, which may be more or less satisfied. But MOOC success emerges as a consequence of individual experiences. It is not a combination or a sum of those experiences - taking a poll won't tell us about them - but rather a result of how those experiences combined or meshed together."

The important point is that evaluation is only possible when we know what it is we are evaluating and that all participants are aware of what they are engaged in. Confused? I still am but I'm trying to work it all out.

Time to dump the remote controls

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:13:00 +0000

by redjar

Every electronic device you buy for your home comes complete with its very own remote control. My home is full of them, some used every day whereas others are hidden away and forgotten. We've even got a few so-called universal remote controls that are supposed to replace all the others but we've never really figured out how. So there are still four controls on the coffee table and we're still waiting for the solution to the problem.

So I was pleased to read an article on Digital Trends called Why mobile devices spell certain death for the universal remote control. The future belongs to mobiles and tablet and it only makes sense to use them to control our household gadgets via a smart app. One mobile device for everything seems the way to go.

"In the modern world, apps have supplanted dedicated devices. Why own five products with five different purposes when you could own one product with five million purposes? Connected mobile devices with app functionality have forced plenty of competitors into obsolescence and the universal remote will soon lie somewhere on that laundry list."

Can't come soon enough for me.

OER - from resources to mainstream practice

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

There is a vast range of open educational resources to choose from if you know where to look and how to search. For most teachers however the main barrier to using OER is the difficulty in finding the right material and assessing its quality and appropriacy. Institutions are reluctant to fully embrace OER since there are few established policies and quality guidelines and inventing these from scratch is simply too time-consuming. The move from a structured world of published textbooks based on a national or regional curriculum to an unstructured ocean of free resources of uncertain quality and with little or no pre-packaging is simply too daunting for most academic leaders to face.

For OER to really make an impact on mainstream education the resources need to be packaged together in related groups of resources or forming a learning path towards a particular learning outcome. This linkage and packaging could be achieved by classifying and tagging resources so that teachers can search for a package of related resources around a common specific theme.

Something along these lines is what newly founded Lumen Learning is offering schools and universities. Founded by open learning pioneer David Wiley of Brigham Young University and education technology strategist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning offer to help replace expensive textbooks with open content that is specifically tailored to the learning outcomes of the school's curriculum. The new company's services are described as:

Finding quality content and mapping it to course learning outcomes.
Incorporating OER into academic strategy and curriculum decisions.
Training and supporting faculty.
Improving student outcomes.

The challenge they face is proving that OER can be trustworthy and of high quality, that they can actually replace traditional textbooks and also save the institution and its students a significant amount of money. Institutions are highly unlikely to be able to carry out the above tasks on their own and the niche for Lumen and similar companies would seem clear. If this process works out cheaper than today's textbook-based regime then all the better.

Lumen will earn money from offering these services but they promise to publish the results of their work openly and thus benefit the whole open education community. If this is the opening for OER to gain mainstream acceptance then it will be a welcome development.

Read more about Lumen in an article in Inside Higher Ed: Company Sees Opening for OER

Another MOOC model

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Most MOOCs are being developed and run on universities' regular budgets with a very uncertain return on investment. But what if someone offers you funding to develop an open course? Suddenly the risk factor is reduced and maybe more reluctant universities can be helped into the open arena as well as possibly stimulating higher quality. That's the reasoning behind the latest installment in the MOOC saga.

This week the open learning platform iversity and the German Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft have launched the MOOC Production Fellowship. This initiative offers ten fellowships of €25,000 to institutions or teachers who wish to develop innovative new MOOCs. It's a competition to find the ten most innovative and sustainable MOOCs and the reward should inspire many universities to develop something really worthwhile. The aim is to have at least five new MOOCs online during the autumn of 2013 with the rest following in spring 2014. The MOOCs can be offered in any language but the applications must be either in English or German. The lucky winners will be able to offer their courses on the iversity platform but the university retains the rights to the material and the option to commercialize the course if they feel so inclined after it has been offered as a free MOOC in 2013-2014.

The applicants will present their ideas for public scrutiny and the fellowships will be awarded through a combination of crowdsourcing and the views of an expert panel. Full details of how to apply and some general guidelines of what the MOOCs should include are available in the details page. There's also a publicity video included below. Unfortunately it makes the common mistake of attributing the discover of MOOCs to the Stanford AI course of autumn 2011 rather than the original concept started by Siemens, Downes and Cormier back in 2008.

If the injection of some start capital that places clear demands on quality and pedagogic innovation then this sort of initiative may well stimulate more creative variations on the MOOC theme. It will hopefully also appeal to European universities who are interested in the concept but need a push to get started.

Your first degree course is a MOOC

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:45:00 +0000

The quest for a sustainable business model for xMOOCs (those open courses offered by major universities) continues with a variety of possible solutions such as offering examination (and a chance to earn credits) or extra tuition for a fee as well as selling student contacts to headhunting companies. However the latest model to emerge would seem to be highly attractive to mainstream universities.

MOOC2degree is a new initiative that offers the first course of a degree program as a MOOC in the hope of recruiting students on to the full program. A consortium of seven US universities under the coordination of Academic Partnerships are already on board and intend to use MOOCs as a shop window for their regular programs. The MOOCs will be free, open to all and will actually give you credits if you sign up for the full degree program. Whether students who do not register to continue will be able to keep their credits is not clear to me but the business case here is perfectly clear and justified if it can help the university recruit more students.

"With MOOC2Degree, Academic Partnerships has collaborated with public universities to offer credit-bearing MOOCs as a first step and a free start toward earning a degree. Through this new initiative, the initial course in select online degree programs will be converted into a MOOC. Each MOOC will be the same course with the same academic content, taught by the same instructors, as currently offered degree programs at participating universities. Students who successfully complete a MOOC2Degree course earn academic credits toward a degree, based upon criteria established by participating universities."

Have a look at the introduction video from MOOC2degree.

This is very mainstream and is simply a way of recruiting to regular university degree programs and that's exactly why I think it will appeal to many universities. It's not really new either because universities like the UK's Open University have offered their courses openly through OpenLearn for several years and many students have been inspired by those free courses to sign up for the fee-paying versions. Many students on MOOC2degree will also decide to sign up for the full degree but at the same time those who simply wanted to learn without needing the credits can also benefit from the experience. It's not very disruptive (oops that word again!) and but it doesn't pretend to be. However by embracing the principle of massive online courses the participating universities will be forced to thoroughly revise their online strategy and look carefully at the pedagogy of online courses to make sure that the MOOC experience is dynamic and stimulating enough to make students willing to pay for more.

Read more in an article in eCampus News (March 2013), A new business model for MOOCs

Make your browser more social

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:24:00 +0000

I use Skype every day for meetings and chat sessions with colleagues all over the world. However wouldn't it be good if such web conferencing tools were completely integrated in your web browser?
A promising development is WebRTC a technology that allows you to start video calls inside your browser and where the video window follows you even when you switch between tabs in your browser. No more Alt-Tabbing between applications and that seems like progress. WebRTC is an open code package that application developers can use to develop new web tools. It's still underdevelopment but the potential is clear. Let's see who develops the best solution.

Here's an introduction film to show what is possible though remember that this is just a basic example.

Beyond the hype

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:46:00 +0000

by elizaIO

MOOCs are at the top of the hype cycle at the moment and the rhetoric is often rather exaggerated to say the least. Almost every day there are eye-catching headlines about how this is going to revolutionize/disrupt/replace higher education and how this trend is a major game-changer or paradigm shift. I admit those phrases have passed my lips as well but maybe it's time to tone down the hype and start look at the more practical implications.

Martin Weller gives us an excellent reminder to avoid unnecessary exaggeration in the education debate in a short post called Disrupting Disruption.

"Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don't worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it's revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides practical."

Another danger in the hype is that instead of inspiring traditionalists to take notice of new approaches to education, the exaggerations make them even more convinced that MOOCs or whatever else is being hyped are simply a passing fad and should not be taken very seriously. Let's calm the rhetoric and see MOOCs or whatever they will be called in the future as interesting experiments to widen the scope of education. They may add new dimensions to the existing forms of education rather than replacing or disrupting. Let's see it as part of a development rather than a revolution.

Challenges of the online classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 11:22:00 +0000

Photo: MCGunner on Imgur

The photo on the right was taken by a medical student and has been spread widely on the net over the last few weeks. See for example an article in Edudemic, Is this now a typical classroom?

CC BY Some rights reserved by Brett Jordan

It shows a increasingly common sight in university lecture halls where the lecturer way down there can easily become a minor distraction to the students at the back. The photo below right has been around for a while now but shows the teacher's view of such a class. It's easy as a teacher to look up at the sea of laptops and believe that they're all checking your links and taking insightful notes. Many of them are but others are not and that's really nothing new and should not even be a surprise to those of us who went to university before internet and who spent many lectures daydreaming, reading a newspaper, doodling or writing notes to neighbours.

Distractions have always existed but computers make it more obvious and seem to many as an intrusion. As a teacher it can certainly seem intimidating to face the sea of laptops pictured here and wonder if anyone is actually listening. But the main issue is that we have to really think about why we want to gather students in this sort of room at all, given that they can access lectures, articles, films etc from anywhere. What does the classroom offer that cannot be done with a webinar or social network? In particular, what does the traditional lecture hall offer that makes attendance unmissable? How can we make the face-to-face contact really work in this environment? Or maybe we have to see that lecture halls only really work for one way communication and that they should be reserved for really special lectures. Maybe live lectures will become special occasions rather than everyday chores and when you go to one you know it's going to be special. The rest are already available whenever you want on the net.

Working nine to five ...

noreply@blogger.com (Alastair Creelman) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:00:00 +0000

by brianhendrix

For many years we've seen articles about hi-tech companies creating stimulating creative workplaces as well as encouraging employees to work in coffee shops or at home. Greater freedom and flexibility fosters greater creativity and responsibility, or so the story goes. However when the going gets tough the flexibility tends to disappear and companies revert to the controlled and familiar workplace of the 20th century. Deep down organisations are not really comfortable with independent home- or road-working employees and there's a strong belief that everyone should be in the office when they're working.

According to an article on CNN, CEO right: Yahoo workers must show up, Yahoo's new CEO, Marissa Mayer, wants employees back in the office instead of working from home or on the road. Things are indeed extremely tough for Yahoo and she believes that it's time to get everyone back in the building and in their cubicles from nine to five to be able to focus on getting back on track. The article claims that despite advances in videoconferencing and social media top management still spend about 80% of their time in face-to-face meetings. I would suggest that top management are often the last people to embrace new means of communication such as social media, preferring the traditional channels and structures. I'm not sure face-to-face is always as productive as it's often claimed to be. Although some face-to-face meetings can be very rewarding and productive I find many of them an unnecessary waste of a lot of time and a shorter e-meeting would have solved the problem much faster. In an asynchronous net discussion everyone has a say and there's time to think before you write, a luxury you don't have in a f2f meeting. In some cases we probably don't even need to have a meeting.

Is this a knee-jerk reaction that you have to be gathered in the same building to be able to work together? Is it a desire for more control, making sure that everyone is "on duty"? Does it show a lack of trust in the workforce? I think it's an instinctive and understandable back-to-basics move in the face of a serious situation. However the article in CNN reveals a lot of common stereotypes about flexible working - that people working from home have an easy option or may not be focusing on the right tasks (are office workers really more focused?). The article only mentions e-mail as communication channel for home workers, nothing about the successful use of e-meetings, communities, collaborative writing, crowd-sourcing, video forums and so on.

Flexibility can and does work if people feel empowered and motivated. Sometimes the strictest boss on earth is the one inside your head and I've found working days at home to be much more productive than many in the office.