Donald Clark Plan B

Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises

2013-05-21T10:04:00.000Z

Great report from the University of Edinburgh on their six 2013 Coursera MOOCs. The report has good data, tries to separate out active learners from window shoppers and not short on surprises. It’s a rich resource and a follow up report is promised. Well done Edinburgh – this is in the true spirit of HE – open, transparent and looking to innovate and improve.

Six courses

Introduction to Philosophy: 98,129

Critical Thinking: 75,884

E-learning & Digital Cultures: 42,844

Astrobiology: 39,556

AI Planning: 29,894

Equine Nutrition: 23,332

Ten surprises

Rather than summarise the report, I’ve plucked out the Top Ten surprises, that point towards the future development of MOOCs:

1. Large no of enrolments (309,628)

2. Age spread

3. Huge subject-sensitive gender range (13-87%)

4. Low no. students/ in teaching & education (36.8%)

5. Learners from 176 countries (61% outside US/UK)

6. Close to zero from China

7. Main driver – learning, low interest in certification

8. Sparse use of Forums

9. Big range on SoA across courses (4-44%)

10. Expectations – met more or completely (77%)

1. Large no of enrolments (309,628)

Good numbers but the report wisely points towards a large number of ‘window shoppers’. This is a consequence of being early and they expect numbers to fall with a change towards more serious and sustainable ‘learners’ in the future. However, it points towards massive, unmet demand for for MOOCs.

2. Age spread

Given the level of the courses, it is clear that a wide range of ages want MOOCs. The standard ’18 year-old undergraduate’ profile is blown out of the water with MOOCs. Only 1 in 5 fit this 18-24 model.

3. Huge subject-sensitive gender range (13-87%

One of the great ‘elephant in the room’ issues in HE is the gender imbalance. Different courses have incredible imbalances. This is also reflected in MOOCs. It would be interesting to collate gender data against preferred use of Forums and social media.

4. Less than third students or people in teaching and education. Does this show that MOOC demand does not fit the traditional ‘undergraduate model’? The data here is skewed by the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ course where 51% were in teaching and learning. When you strip this out, MOOCs are certainly open (in spirit) and therefore attract diverse audiences.

5. Learners from 176 countries (61% outside US/UK)

39% from US and UK, but that’s where it was publicised. If anything the real surprise is that the other 61% is from the rest of the world. The broad global pull for MOOCs is clear.

6. Close to zero across courses from China. This casts doubt about MOOCs attracting that lucrative foreign student market.

7. Main driver – learning, low interest in certification

This is a lesson that many MOOC commentators are learning, that MOOCs reflect, not demand for certification but demand for ‘learning’ with only around a third interested in certification or career. . That’s not to say that certification is not important, it’s just less important than educators think. Curiosity about online education and MOOCs, however, is the temporary pollutant in the data.

8. Low Forum participation. This confirms my view that Forums are useful but overegged. On technical courses, I’ve experienced very low use of Forums and discussions, mostly around alleged mistakes by the academics in definitions and the maths. Even in highly ‘discursive’ courses, like Philosophy and the ‘curated’ E-learning course the numbers are relatively small. One of the most interesting data sets is that on the use of forums and social media. “The respondents of the Exit survey were more independent than social learners, with high self-reported time spent on videos and quizzes and less on online social activities.” It is assumed, by social constructivists, that people are desperate for this type of interaction and social learning experience, but many don’t seem to participate.

9. Big range on SoA across courses (4-44%)

Surprised that the E-learning course was so low but, having taken this course, I think it raises some interesting questions about quality and structure. I, and others, found the content a little weak and, although it’s a subject I’m passionate about, it didn’t do it for me.

10. Expectations – met more or completely (77%)

These figures are extremely promising with 77% feeling very good about their experience and 98% seeing MOOCs as having to some extent, exceeded or completely met expectations. Given that this was the first experiment with MOOCs, I’m impressed.

Conclusion

Impressive report, full of fascinating facts and figures. If I were looking at MOOCs, I’d pour over this data carefully. That, combined with the useful information on resources expended by the University, is an invaluable business planning tool. In my next post, I’ll look at the way Edinburgh planned and coped with governance on this initiative - equally fascinating.
Download University of Edinburgh report here.

Futurelearn MOOC: 10 Qestions: When, who, what, cost, funding, courses, look, pedagogy?

2013-05-20T09:02:00.000Z

Paid top dollar to attend a MOOC conference by UK Universities in which Martin Bean (Vice Chancellor of Open University) and Simon Nelson (CEO of Futurelearn) were to give talks. Although the conference was about MOOCs and online learning, most of Simon’s talk was about the BBC. That was fine but not entirely relevant. However, his other public interview on Futurelearn are not short of ambition:

“In three years’ time we hope to be offering a level of online learning that we can’t dream about at the moment” says Simon, “It may sound ridiculous in ambition, but one of my team said to me that in five or 10 years, rather than hanging out on Facebook of an evening, people will feel they can hang around in the Futurelearn product.” I rather like this crazy level of optimism but it needs a sense check. So I asked him some questions….

1. When’s it coming?

The aim, Simon says, is “to have products on the web by the middle of 2013, and a full consumer launch sometime in the autumn”. So we can expect something soon. The question is whether this is too little, too late. He made a great deal of the ‘virtue in coming second’ but we had no choice in the matter. Also, as far from being second, Futurelearn is not even in the first ten – Coursera, Udacity, edX, Udemy, NovoED, Openlearning, Google, OpenupStudy, Open2learn, Iversity, Desire2learn…the list goes on. They may, by launch, not even be in the top twenty. Nevertheless, there may still be wisdom in taking your time and getting it right, a point well made by Simon.

2. Who are the partners?

“British Council, British Museum and British Library.” You clearly need to have ‘British’ in your name to be a partner. British Council could be useful in foreign marketing, and the other two as sources of assets, but none have any business or entrepreneurial spirit. There’s been lots of ‘digital’ initiatives with these partners in the past, lots of ‘digitise this’ and ‘digitise that’ projects, but nothing that’s succeeded in the learning space. None of the players have built a business from scratch. That’s a worry.

3. What about the past failures in this space?

I mentioned UKeU and BBC Jam but could have included the OU’s disastrous expedition to the US, the NHSU and others. To be fair, Simon probably has no knowledge of any of this. He has no experience in education or online learning, which could be a blessing (or a curse). The reason I mentioned these, was that we must not repeat the mistakes of the past. These included the wrong leadership (lacked business and start-up experience), wrong partners (old school), bad technology decisions (idiosyncratic), late delivery and poor, sometimes over-produced, content (wrong developers). One thing I hope will not happen is a repeat of the BBC Jam experience, where experienced, online learning providers were ignored in favour of the so-called ‘digital’ talent of the day. I don't think this should dominate the debate as we need to move on but we do need to acknowledge the researched reasons for their collapse.

4. Does Futurelearn have enough ‘entrepreneurial kick’?

“Time will tell”. Honest answer but this is my greatest fear. None of the partners have ANY track record in real entrepreneurial enterprises. In fact, they are all publically funded organisations. This worries me. Why didn’t we open this up to the companies and experts in the UK who know about innovative pedagogy and MOOCs? We had the knowledge, expertise and software to do this, not from a standing start but from a position of strength. What we needed was not a single throw of the dice but a spread bet to develop the market. Futurelearn has switched the market off in the UK for at least a year. That hasn’t deterred some UK companies. One I know is already selling successfully direct to the US. One other large Maths MOOC is being funded by a charity (watch this space). But monoculture in an emerging market is not often a good idea. Then again, if the product is world beating and UK Universities get behind it, it could just work. I just wonder how they got past OJEU rules?

5. How much is the funding?

“You’ll have to ask my Chairman (Martin Bean).” I know how much funding went into Udacity ($21m), Coursera ($22m), edX ($60m). Why the secrecy here?

6. Where has the money come from?

“Open University, other than that I can’t say. You’ll have to ask my Chairman.” In the absence of an answer, my guess is that Willets has done a deal in terms of Government money, channelled through the Open University and that guaranteed service revenues will have to come from the 21 participating Universities. This makes sense but why the secrecy? This is the ‘Future’ of learning, not the Freemasons – and it’s public money. Again, it’s not such a big deal but if I were a potential customer, I’d want to know how the supplier was capitalised.

7. As the Open University is a publically funded institution, should there be more transparency?

“You’ll have to ask my Chairman.” This was getting awkward. You’ll have got the idea by now that this is BBC speak for ‘no comment’.

8. What courses?

Courses will take 6-10 weeks. Southampton wants to offer Web Science and Oceanography in its first set of courses but there’s little in the public domain on this. My guess is that they’ll obviously avoid competition through duplication and play to the strengths of each institution. There’s some wisdom in having a spread of courses available.

9. What does it look like?

“I showed a couple of screen shots and will put it up on Slideshare.” Thougt he wouldn’t and he didn’t (come on Simon). To be fair, e did show a couple of screens; simple, white background, scrolling with centred text at the top, lots of block text and a picture of the Moon at the top. They looked awful, but this is just prototype stuff, so let’s wait on the real deal. I’d have thought however, that as we’re weeks away from some releases, there’d be some good ‘taster’ content.

10. What’s the pedagogic structure?

Simon hinted at their MOOCs being made up of “Units and Learning Blocks”. A Unit is 2-6 hours of learning time with a clear end goal and assessment. Within each Unit will be a number of Learning Blocks. A block seems to be [video, text, discussion, test]. Nothing radical there but that’s OK – a clear, simple structure is fine. OER content will be used but only when evaluated as relevant and of sufficient quality. I may be wrong here, but reading between the lines he does seem to be moving to a flexible approach where you can choose different approaches. This would be interesting as it would move us beyond both the linear lecture approach of Udacity, Coursera and edX approach without descending into the fragmented mess of extreme social constructivism.

Conclusion

In the US, there’s a healthy ecosystem of entrepreneurial Universities such as Stanford, MIT and Harvard, along with focused not-for-profit organisations such as the Gates Foundation and others, along with knowledgeable investment capital. They came up with the goods. This ecosystem, I believe, gives it an entrepreneurial edge which we ignore at our peril. Nevertheless, Futurelearn may come up with a different set of goods. Simon seemed like a competent guy and Martin Bean’s a good leader, and no fool. The danger is dishing up the usual British solution that lacks edge and commercial push. We need this to work. I just hope to God it’s not another BBC Jam – all fur coat and no knickers.

MOOC on Human-Computer Interaction: videos have 7 fails in HCI

2013-05-18T09:28:00.002Z

Enjoying Stanford’s Coursera MOOC on Human-Computer Interaction but (oh the irony) the screen design and pedagogy of the many videos, is awful. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to use, has good content and I’m getting what I thought I’d get - a reasonable course. It is very video heavy, which is OK; let’s face it most HE courses are lecture heavy - at least they’re not an hour long, I can watch these when I want, repeat them and, in Coursera fashion, I get a bit of formative assessment during the videos, something students rarely get in real institutions. But it could have been so much better.

1. Small screen, low retention.

Now I don’t mean to be picky but having a tiny talking head (see above), literally less than 4.5% the size of the screen on the bottom right, is a BAD idea. Nass & Reeves (ironically from Stanford) did a great experiment with video at different screen sizes, showing that the smaller the screen size the lower the retention. Read the research guys.

2. Too much talking head.

It’s dull, the delivery is often poor and poorly edited (i.e. padded out). It’s like watching a very long news item read on one news story, time after time. Even worse is the fact that it’s a medium shot, showing the whole upper body. Go on a video course guys, you need to see the white of their eyes. Use close ups. To be fair there’s more images, graphs and screens with audio only as the course progresses. Think about ‘attention’ guys.

3. Cognitive dissonance

The too much talking head error is compounded by presenting text headings and blocks of text in a huge font over the rest of the screen.Mayer & Clark’s research showed that you don’t show text and video at same time, as you have to hop back and forth from visual (reading - semantic) to audio channels. Even worse, Scott the presenter reads the text but it’s not the text that appears on the screen. Also, the framing of the video, with text cut in half behind the presenter is cognitive noise we can do without. Watch some TV guys.

4. Paucity of images

What’s odd is the fact that when schemas or techniques or procedures are being described there’s often no images shown. This is like PowerPoint without any pictures, just big headings. In many places the point, event or procedure would have been better served by cutting away to what was being described or relevant images. It gets better in some places. Very strange.

5. Presentation style

As it’s often a little dull, I found my attention tended to drift. I can read faster than the presenter speaks, and when in the first video he started looking down and reading points one by one, the video producer in me rebelled. I get impatient with slow, amateurish delivery, which is why I like the edX and Coursera x1.5 speed feature. In fact, so much of this sounds like the reading of written material that it could have been text. Read something on relevant media mix guys. I like Scott Klemmer, but he’s no presenter, and after a while his excessive hand gestures and delivery style start to grate. This can be a problem for the single academic courses - it's like watching a ten week news programme with only one presenter.

6. Poor editing

The in-video questions are poorly edited in, so you often get a snippet of a sentence from the next sequence. Small point but it makes the production seem a little amateurish. Edit it properly guys. Again Nass & Reeves showed that these unexpected and awkward pauses and edits lower retention.

7. Poor question design

In-video questions are made progressively easier and meaningless. This is learning design at its worst. The same question is posed, with the same options, up to four times. So when you’ve answered 1 out of 4, the next question is 1 out of 3, the next 1 out of 2 and the last a meaningless 1/1. Even worse, is the cardinal sin of two options actually being correct but only one accepted. All of this is bizarre and lazy. Read something on test items guys.

Not all Coursera MOOCs are so poor on video. The University of Edinburgh MOOC on E-learning and Digital Cultures (one of 6 MOOCs attracting 306,000 starters), which ran at the start of the year, didn’t do talking heads, relying on curated video. This caused some consternation with students who expected lectures. This course had much more of a looser structure with discussion, Google Hangouts and social media, none of it moderated by academics. Interestingly, I liked this Edinburgh course less, as I thought it was weak on focus, depth and content. There’s a balance to be struck here and much to do on improving the pedagogy and design of MOOCs. I don't buy the cMOOC/xMOOC thing - it's a simplistic dualism. There a whole variety of pedagogies that lie between straight instruction and social constructivism (I like neither in their pure form).

Conclusion

What Coursera should have done is do what this course recommends, apply the usability test strategies that Krug, Norman and Nielsen recommend. Get in the experts and do ‘voiced trials'. I have spent nearly 30 years designing and producing online learning and would never have got a client to pay for these courses. To be fair, compared to the benchmark of dull one hour long lectures, it’s an improvement and it’s a start. This is a constructive critique of the videos and I must remind you that the course is rich in assignments and practical work. Let’s hope they get some HCI professionals in to make it a little more usable and ‘learner and learning’ friendly. It’s not as if people haven’t done this before.

Education Debate: Bun fight with Baker, Benn, rosen & Gibb

2013-05-15T19:19:00.001Z

A hostile and baying audience, of largely teachers, Nick Gibb (ex Minister for Schools), Kenneth Baker (Thatcherite turned vocational learning evangelist), Melissa Benn (critic of Govism) and Michael Rosen (Gove’s bête noir). My friend Mathew Clayton organised the debate and we spoke about the need to get the juices flowing, by finding adversaries, he did, and it worked.

Nick Gibb wants facts and more facts

Nick Gibb was first out of the blue corner, with the usual statistics around failure – large numbers of children not achieving 5 reasonable GCSEs and low levels of numeracy and literacy. He was proud that he had freed schools from the stranglehold of the Local Authorities and then brought in that weasel word ‘competition’ which he thinks will sort it all out. He felt he had sharpened OFSTED, raised the bar on teacher entry qualifications and slimmed down the primary curriculum, as well as reintroducing a more knowledge-based curriculum. Oh and he loves Latin. To be fair I did agree with his final point about the teaching profession, when left to its own devices, managed to wreck literacy for two decades or more through the use of ‘look and say’ literacy teaching. I witnessed this ‘whole word’ madness in the primary school my own kids attended in the late nineties. The move to phonics is good. However, he made a serious gaff, that Rosen picked up on later….

Melissa Benn wants reform without rancour

She objected to the ‘tone’ of the reform and would prefer ‘reform without rancour’. Fair enough, but this is England, where parents would eat other parents livers to get their kids into the 'right' school and where the teaching profession has never been short of delivering bouts of its own rancour. That was obviously alive and kicking at this event. She did, however, have a good point about ‘demoralisation’. It’s one thing to criticise, another to kick an entire profession in the teeth. Where she came into her own was on the evidence. Here, she thought, the policies were fraudulent. Academies are not better, indeed often worse. Curriculum changes idiosyncratic and regressive, and free schools downright dangerous. She feared a return to the Secondary modern versus Grammar schools and her final recommendation was the Finnish system, a low test, comprehensive system that produces world leading results.

Kenneth Baker wants vocational provision

Baker has turned out to be a bit of a rebel in his dotage. He sounded more like a Trade Union leader than Thatcherite. Pupils will stay on until 17 this year and 18 next year. We haven’t grasped the consequences of this, he claims. We need to reset the break point to 14, not 16 and introduce vocational paths, if we are to succeed as a country. He’s right – school leaving exams at 16 make no sense. Read his book. It’s not half bad. In it he recommends four types of colleges, schools, and academies:

1. Liberal Arts Colleges for academic studies;

2. University Technical Colleges (UTCs);

3. Career Colleges for practical, vocational subjects;

4. Sports, Creative and Performing Arts Colleges.

He thinks this will create a coherent range of routes leading to university, apprenticeships and employment. The problem is parity. As long as we refuse to acknowledge parity of academic and vocational qualifications, these will fail. However, to give him his due, at least he has some ideas around vocational learning. He was attacked by the audience for daring to mention ‘empoyability’. But he’s right. Education is not ALL about employability but education and teaching have long ignored its importance. Germany had copied our system after the war and flourished. Blair, he thinks, put a spanner in the works by killing off the Tomlinson recommendations – again he’s right. Interestingly, he was also against the creation of any new faith schools – good man.

Michael Rosen wants pedagogy not demagogy

Michael put the boot into Nick Gibb, when Nick recommended the new SPAG tests at 11, something introduced in the face of all the evidence that shows that teaching grammar is a waste of time, he read back a hopelessly, ungrammatical sentence Gibb had uttered just a few minutes earlier. Rosen’s point was that language changes. Oh how we laughed! He rightly ridiculed Gove, who thinks he’s an omniscient expert on everything. Imagine a Secretary of State for health telling doctors how to diagnose and treat patients, that's waht Gove does in education. This would be fine, but as Gibb said earlier, teachers were teaching 'whole word' literacy not long ago, a technique akin to voodoo. Medicine is based on science. Education is not well evidenced –witness learning styles, Mozart effect, L/R brain theory, Brain Gym, whole word literacy and so on. All we hear about is teaching, he claimed, and little on learning. Then he stuck the knife in on selective evidence, backed up with some knowledgeable interventions from the audience.

Conclusion

I didn’t wholly agree with any of them but agreed with some of what all of them said. In fact, the most impressive speaker was Kenneth Baker, as he, at least, had a clear idea about shaping the future. He was also keen to focus, not on the top 25% but the rest. Baker was not, as Michal Rosen put it, “depressingly utilitarian” but we do need to ask whether these sort of choices should be made at 14 or whether we widen out the options later. Gibb was backward looking and depressing but right about the failure of teaching and education to really deliver on literacy, when it went off at a tangent with ‘whole word’ teaching but he was wholly misguided with his guff on Latin and SPAG tests. Melissa Benn was right to uncover the selectivity of the evidence by Gove but didn’t really seem to have much of a vision beyond copying Finland. I happen to agree with this but in class-ridden, conservative-parent Britain it’s hopelessly utopian. Michael Rosen was right to focus on learning but lacks vision. Bit of a British bun fight but that was what was needed to make us all reflect. The problem is that UK education game has too many vested interests - independent schools, faith schools, universities, unions, parents and social classes to ever sort any of this out. A national perspective around the future for our young people isn't even on the table.

MOOCs: old narratives v new narrative - open, scalable, diverse & relevant

2013-05-09T13:14:00.001Z

Narratives

There’s been a lots of different reactions to MOOCs and a few fixed narratives have emerged:

1. ‘US Valley’ narrative around Khan, Stanford, not-for-profits, investors, Coursera, Udacity, NovoED and so on.

2. ‘Canadian connectivist’ narrative that MOOCs originated with Siemens & Downes and have been usurped by the ‘US valley’ folks.

3. ‘Out of OER’ narrative, where MOOCs are seen as building upon the Open Educational Resource culture.

4. ‘Traditional backlash’ narrative, that MOOCs dangerously undermine the traditional values and funding of Universities.

5. ‘Silver bullet’ narrative where MOOCs are seen as the future saviour for higher education.

In my view, none are wholly true, yet all have a degree of truth. What we have to do is stop seeing all of these as mutually exclusive and look to the future not the past. This is a phenomenon or movement that, whatever its origins has the momentum that none of the past initiatives seemed to gather. It’s a time to drive forward with debate and discussion, not constantly checking the wing mirror.

New MOOC narrative

My own position is that we need a future-looking narrative that lies beyond all of these. Here’s a thought. MOOCs will not replace or even undermine Universities. In fact, they are likely to make our Universities even more important as the future keepers of cultural capital. No one wants to see our University system fail or crumble. Then again, many want to see aspects of the closed ‘ivory tower’ reshaped into something a little flatter, more open and accessible. There are genuine worries about insularity, quality of teaching, cost, access and relevance. If we can reposition academe as more open, transparent and relevant, that could be to the benefit of us all. There are seven components to this narrative:

1. Open

Being more open, through MOOCs, will engage and re-engage potential school leavers, parents, alumni, adult learners and the majority of people worldwide who may see it as a realistic aspiration. Just as important are those who,frankly, have no chance of ever seeing the inside of a University. The data from MOOCs already show a huge appetite from an untapped audience around the world for knowledge and learning. I suspect that academics, research and reputations of Universities would be enhanced of that knowledge were seen as more open and accessible

2. Scalability

Higher Education does face the problem of increasing costs. In most other areas of human endeavour, increased volume leads to decreased costs. Along comes a solution that promises to ease that problem. Sure the business models have yet to be refined, but they will. Sure there may be less teacher-student face-to-face contact but this is the ‘trade-off’, namely that a MOOC may have less student/professor contact but some of that may be worth sacrificing for openness and access. Sebastian Thrun was teaching 200 students at Stanford, on his MOOC it was 169,000. That would have taken 800 years at his old teaching rate. Even with the 26,000 that completed, it’s 130 years. The benefits of scale and literally ‘massive’.

3. Diversity

The philosophy Professors at San Jose, who recently wrote an ‘open letter’, complained that MOOCs undermine the ‘diversity’ of the student mix. How they came to that conclusion beggars belief. MOOCs are massively diverse in terms of age, nationality, ethnic origins and background. This is precisely is a consequence of them being Massive, Open and Online. This is an important point in learning, as critical thinking may well be enhanced by having a larger, more diverse set of globally-based, learners engaged on courses. It shifts us out of our cultural groupthink and brings in a wider range of experience, example and perspectives.

4. Academic status

Rather than the occasional academic making an appearance through a TV series on art of history, we could see a renaissance of interest in knowledge and learning if they engaged more directly and openly with society. A good example in the UK are Classical scholars, such as Mary Beard and Robin Lane-Fox, who have headed up TV series on Roman history. With MOOCs, many more talented academics will have a chance to reach out to audiences beyond their own yearly intake of students.

5. Relevance

This may also realign university subjects and activities more closely with the needs of their communities, economies and student needs. I live in a relatively small town, Brighton, with two large Universities, yet there is precious little engagement between them and the local population. The vast majority would be hard pressed to name the Vice-chancellors or even a single academic at either institution. As a local employer , who employed many students from both Universities, it worried me over many years how disinterested they were in even minor curriculum tweaks or the fate of students beyond graduation date. Engagement with the local community through the arts, debates, public lectures and reuse of low-occupancy buildings and sports facilities would make Universities more loved.

6. Giving

Rather than the educational colonialism of setting up shop in the developing world with new-build campuses, the developed world could funnel educational aid through MOOCs. This would have greater impact through scale and lower costs. The evidence from MOCCs so far is that huge numbers of people are accessing them from countries where HE is not affordable or even remotely accessible for the majority of citizens. I’d like to see some foreign aid budgets go to MOOCs, especially further down the educational ladder into schools.

7. Reframe away from ’18 year-old undergrad

When something new, and let’s even use that word ‘disruptive’, hits a sector, debate erupts, especially on social media and blogs. This is all good as it helps us think through the many issues that emerge, some predictable, some not so predictable. But one thing has happened that surprises me in the debate is the framing of this new phenomenon (MOOCs) into the old, restrictive model of the 18 year old undergraduate course.

If you believe that the purpose of a MOOC is to mimic the standard undergraduate course, you will be disappointed as many of the participants in MOOCs are not young undergraduates. You will also see drop-out, rather than drop-in, a category mistake that sees anything other than passing the final exam as failure (a BIG mistake). There is also a false assumption that face-to-face teaching is a necessary condition for learning. It is not. We learn most of what we learn, not from direct teaching but informally from all sorts of sources and interactions. This is not to say that teaching is unimportant. In practice, on MOOCs, human contact takes all sorts of forms, from teacher to student, student to student, content to student, peer assessment, physical meetups among students, forums, social media. This is a rich blend of human interaction and, in connectivist MOOCs, it is this very feature that, their connectivist founders claim, makes them work so well. There are demands for more rigour in summative assessment, despite the fact that many learners may not want summative assessment at all and others lighter forms of assessment. MOOCs are taken for all sorts of reasons by all sorts of people from all sorts of places. For many it’s not a paper-chase. Squeezing the debate back into the ‘do I get a credit for this course – if not it’s a waste of time’ is wrong-headed.

God’s in the detail

Sure, there’s the old world that has to adjust to new ideas but we can’t hang on to old practices just because they’ve been around for a long time - we’d never have got rid of slavery! On the other hand we must be careful not to totally abandon old practice and look for readjustments, for example, the recording or inclusion of active learning within lectures. We can surely borrow from the work that’s been done on OER, connectivist MOOCs, adaptive learning and so on. MOOCs are not the preserve of one group, country or group of elite Universities.

To move forward we have to look at the different species of MOOCs, new target audiences, different economic models and the pedagogic detail. There’s more to MOOCs than just cMOOCs and xMOOCS - the taxonomy is much richer and wider. Vast new audiences are also emerging. New players in new combinations are trying new ways of making education cheaper. On pedagogy, we have different forms of recorded lectures (much progress been made here), peer assessment (very promising), forums, groups, adaptive learning, social media, physical meetups arranged by students (this is interesting), summative assessment (lots of options here) and so on. Kites are being flown and no doubt some will go into free-fall, others hover and yet other soar.

MOOCs: Kick ass on final assessment

2013-05-02T19:59:00.002Z

MOOCs make everyone reflect, discuss and experiment with pedagogy in way that is far more agile than the slow and ponderous ‘research’ route. Let’s face it, HE accreditation is odd. You get a two numbers with a dot between them. What use is that? We need far more innovation on what we assess, when we assess and how we assess. MOOCs are starting to give us real answers.

So what models have emerged?

1. No certification

First up, MOOCs are NOT, fundamentally, about summative assessment. It is clear than huge numbers of learners don’t give a toss about accreditation. For them, and I’m one of them, it’s not a paper chase but a learning experience. Many will choose to learn without wanting to sit a final exam or get any form of certification. Don’t assume that everyone is gagging for a certificate from the University of ‘somewhere’ – they’re not. To be honest, as someone who spent years delivering massive learning projects to employers, few of them care a jot about certificates. We need to separate the MOOC movement from the idea of summative assessment being a necessary condition for success. Some free MOOCs offer no certification at all, seeing it as a pure learning experience. Carnegie Mellon have a whole rack of such courses on language learning, science and maths.

For many, however, certification will be desirable. This may be important for students who want to use these courses for progression, jobs, even personal motivation and satisfaction. Certification also matters as a revenue model for the platform providers and Universities. This is where they hope to make money.

2. Certificate of completion

Certification is for completion, the norm in Coursera, simply recognises that the student has stuck with the course, got through all of the formative assessments and assignments and, well, completed the course. This is fine for those who simply want some recognition at the end, without a need for official accreditation.

3. Certificate of mastery

Some edX courses from Harvard and MIT have Certificates of Mastery. They come with a grade but not an official credit. EdX offer a certificate of mastery issued at the discretion of edX and the University that offered the course. These certificates have been free but they plan to charge a modest fee in the future. In an interestingly footnote, edX hold certificates for learners from Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan in line with US embargoes!

4. Certificates of distinction

Different levels of accomplishments are being offered by many MOOC providers. With Udacity, this is the core model, with the following different grades; completion, distinction, high distinction, highest distinction. This is not far off the 3^rd, 2.2, 2.1dn 1^st model. Udacity also offer a "testing kit" to any institution for a low fee if they are interested in providing proctored exams on our courses.

5. University credits

On selected courses for San Jose State University (transferable within the California State University system), where credits are available, you pay $150 and this buys you the course, course support, direct comms with instructors/staff and online proctored exams with credited transcript. There are different grades; completion, distinction, high distinction, highest distinction and a service where resumes are sent to prospective employers.

How and when are these exams managed?

Proctored online

Huge efforts are being made to allow learners to sit summative exams online. It’s a complex but not insurmountable problem. Identity, cheating, security and other issues have to be addressed. Iris, fingerprint and voice recognition are just some of the digital identity methods used. Motion sensing and camera identification are also used. Progress is being made. Note that almost all exam methods are subject to cheating. Even proctored offline paper exams do suffer from distributed leaks, teacher and student cheating. One of the advantages of online testing is that questions can be drawn from randomised banks or different numbers laced into test items, and answer options randomised, to prevent the straight copying cheating that exists in physical, paper exams.

Udacity and Coursera both offer online proctored exams at home (a cost of $60–$90) through ProctorU. With ProctorU, you make an appointment, log in to the website and speak to a live proctor who talks you through the process via webcam. You can select a date, time and you are ready to go. At the appointed time, the proctor gets control of your screen and IDs you by requesting photo ID. The proctor will snap photos of you and ask you personal questions, using public databases. They will also make the student do a 360 degree scan of the room with the webcam and ask to see the monitor and its surroundings on the webcam, mirror or CD, left and right. During the exam, the proctor watches the student’s body and eye movement through the webcam.

Proctored test centres

Udacity and edX both offer proctored exams at Pearson VUE test centres. There’s lots of angst around Pearson’s involvement in proctored exams, through Pearson VUE, but why? They have invested in test centres and can deliver this stuff to large numbers of people at low cost. This is how we pass our driving test. We pay for a course to learn the theory and practice (increasingly learning the theory online), then book a test. National networks of centres allow students and adult learners to sit exams at place and time of their own convenience. This frees learners from the tyranny of time and place.

Pearson VUE has test centres in every US state and over 4400 test centres in 160 countries. These centres have surveillance and biometric systems, in particular a digital fingerprinting system, used by the FBI, that has an almost zero rejection rate.

Innovations

This flurry of activity in MOOCs has produced summative assessment that takes us forward in our thinking:

1. Has different degrees of certification based on demand

2. Caters for different types of learner

3. Offers anytime assessment

4. Offers anywhere exams at home

5. Offers network of test centre exams

6. Sees education funded by volume certification

7. Can be cheaper

8. Pushes Innovation in online testing, like essay marking

9. Makes us see that certification is not always desirable

When people say, there’s nothing new in MOOCs, think again and look at the detail. When we do, there’s some radical changes taking place, not least in exams and certification. The main benefit is in loosening up the whole process and not regarding certification as some sort of one-off, end-of-year, binary pass or fail activity. We can expect more experimentation and innovation, and more is good.

One final note, and this is radical. Why can’t we separate accreditation and testing from the institutions that deliver the learning? It avoids the obvious conflict of interest. Why can’t we have a free Google like service for accreditation? Wouldn’t that be great for learners?

MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC
MOOCs: Who’s using MOOCs? 10 different target audiences
MOOCs: a breath of fresh air, albeit the same air

MOOCs: more action in 1 year than last 1000 years

2013-04-29T17:19:00.001Z

What happened here? MOOC mania seemed to come from nowhere. Faster than Facebook and here to stay, in just a year MOOCs emerged from a unique mix of entrepreneurial spirit, a few leading US Universities, supported by not-for-profits and venture capital. It’s an ecosystem that can take an idea and support it through to a sustainable business. That’s impressive.

Big Bang Khan

Whatever the obscure origin of the word or examples of previous HE online courses, MOOCs mania has its origin in one, big-bang source – Salman Khan. Khan was a necessary condition for MOOC mania. It was he who popularised the short video where the lecturer was literally taken out of the picture. Forget all of that YouTube EDU and iTunes U stuff, basically dumps of dull lectures, it was Khan who got the big numbers by doing something different. OER had also stalled with MITOpenCourseWare languishing and OpenLearn an also-ran; resource dump that simply mimicked all that was lazy and bad about internal HE courses. They were within the paradigm. To be fair, Downes and Siemens were different, and certainly deserve praise for avoiding this old-school approach, but I don’t see any real causal influence on Khan and subsequent MOOC mania. Sebastian Thrun has already paid his dues to Khan.

Why was Khan the catalyst?

This is interesting, as it’s yet another example of innovation coming from outside of the bubble. It took a hedge fund manager to shake up education because he didn’t have any HE baggage. Khan’s developed his ideas through direct contact with learners, not through research project or grants. It was in dealing with his young relatives that he suddenly thought – guess what, I can save time here by doing cool videos. Neither was he hung up on the whole ‘academic hubris’ thing. It didn’t matter that his face wasn’t on screen. He understood that learning maths was about the maths, not the face; semantic memory, not episodic. In short, he dumped the long-form lecture. This was about the learner, not the teacher. His second masterstroke was to slam them up on YouTube. He intrinsically understood scalability, first, in terms of the rapid production of short videos, secondly by making them available on an already existing free platform. Then, something crucial happened, funding from the Gates Foundation ($5.5m), Ann and John Doerr ($110k) and Google ($2m). Lastly, remember the ecosystem here – Khan is a Harvard MIT guy – the institutions that subsequently funded edX.

Universities

One University stands out as MOOC central, that’s Stanford. Paul Hennessey is easily the most visionary leader of any Uni8versity on the planet. The man who categorically does NOT want to build any more lecture theatres (that’s counts as a radical position in HE). What Stanford does, and we in Europe should be envious, is understand how to turn students into aspirational autonomous achievers. It’s in the DNA of that organisation. Udacity owes its very existence to Stanford, in that Sebastian Thrun, inspired by Khan, set up his Stanford course online and that led to the founding of Udacity. Ng and Koller, both Stanford academics, set up Coursera. NovoED was also a Stanford product, originally Venture Lab, started by Amin Saberi and Farnaz Ronaghi. Let’s not forget Class2go,another open source product out of Stanford, that has merged with edX. Harvard and MIT have each put $30m into edX (other money coming from the liks of Jonathan Grayer and Philipe Lafont).

Not-for-profits

Another key player has been inspirational in all this - the Gates Foundation. I’ve dealt with these guys and they’re good. They do their research, identify the sweet spots and take action. It was a matter of weeks that a company I had invested in, Cogbooks, who have real adaptive learning and MOOC product, had been spotted through research, invited to the US and put in front of potential customers. They put a cool $5.5m into Khan, $4m into edX. Then we have the MacArthur Foundation, Hewlett and the National Science foundation weighing in with other supportive initiatives.

Money

The third ingredient is, of course, capital. When you have a world class institution, like Stanford, producing students and academics with ambition, it attracts capital. Capital matters, as it allows you to keep up product development, while keeping your promise on delivery. It also allows you to bring on business expertise and support. Coursera has had $16m from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NewEnterprise Associates. Andreesen Horowitz put $15 into Udacity.

Companies

Lastly, don’t forget existing companies such as Google who put $2m into the Khan Academy and Pearson who have teamed up with both Udacity and edX to offer proctored examinations through Pearson VUE. Desire2learn, a player in the HE VLE market raised $80 million and acquired Wiggio, a group collaboration tool, and Degree Compass, a student support tool. They have entered the MOOC market, with the venerable Siemens and Downes.

Conclusion

It took a drop-out like Gates to turbo-charge the PC industry, a maverick like Jobs to take it much further, Bezos to transform book selling, Torvalds open source and subsequently OER, Jimmy Wales to give us Wikipedia and Khan, then Thrun, to give us MOOCs. As I keep saying, we’ve had more pedagogic change over the last 10 years than the last 1000 years because of these outsiders and technology. It happened because the time is right. HE is in a mess with spiralling costs, old agrarian timetables and old pedagogies. Outside pressure, in the form of entrepreneurial spirit, some leading Universities, with support from not-for-profits and that all important ingredient, capital, has given us, in a year, an alternative to something that has been around for nearly 1000 years. MOOCs are a powerful force for good. They promise to break down the barriers between higher education and the rest of the world, to the benefit of both.
MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC
MOOCs: Who’s using MOOCs? 10 different target audiences
MOOCs: a breath of fresh air, albeit the same air

MOOCs: Who’s using MOOCs? 10 different target audiences

2013-04-25T14:08:00.001Z

Fascinating graphic,a sit shows that nearly 42% of the target audience for MOOCs are not the developed world. It also raises an interesting question. Who is it for?’ are four words that tease out a MOOC strategy or lack of strategy. For most it is a marketing exercise in terms of the brand, a way of reducing internal costs on high volume courses, a way of recruiting potential students (directly or through their parents). Yet others see it as a way of flushing out funding from Alumni or presenting an ‘accessible’ face to Government.

For MOOCs, several target audiences have emerged:

1. Internal students on course – cost savings on volume courses

2. Internal students not on course – expanding student experience

3. Potential students national –major source of income

4. Potential students international – major source of income

5. Potential students High school – reputation and preparation

6. Parents – significant in student choice

7. Alumni – potential income and influencers

8. Lifelong learners – late and lifelong adult learners

9. Professionals – related to professions and work

10. Government – part of access strategy

Lifelong learning MOOC

This is the big one, as it produces the big numbers. There seems to be a genuine thirst for courses on a wide range of subjects for people who just want to learn more. This is heartening. Rather than locking in learning within expensive institutions, we may be on the edge of a cliff from which new forms of learning can soar. What’s surprised people is the diverse nature of this group, as they come from lots of different countries.

The set of people who are external is huge and diverse in terms of age, national v international, nationality, ethnicity and first language. You really have to focus down with some profiling (define a typical user) or risk negative reactions from some groups. Most Coursera course are aimed at an external audience but who is this audience? If your course is for people with busy lives, is it wise to offer such strictly synchronous courses?

Internal + external MOOC

Do you want your existing students, either slated for the existing course or others, to do your MOOC? If MOOCs are to fulfil their promise of changing the way we teach and learn and reduce internal costs, this may be necessary.

Sebastian Thrun’s famous MOOC did take existing students, none of whom were in the top performing 400 students. NovoED aim to produce group MOOCs aimed at both internal and external students. It has happened, will happen, and if MOOCs are to change the face of HE, it must happen.

The University of Alberta’s Dino 101 Dinosaur Paleobiology MOOC hopes to attract huge numbers and I’m sure it will. Due for release in September 2013 it’s billed as being “led by Phil Currie, the world’s premier dinosaur hunter”. This is much smarter than the blatant AUE approach, as it is aimed at three audiences:

· Free to anyone (marketing)

· University of Alberta students can do it and get a credit (core business0

· Students from around the world for course accreditation for a modest fee

This is more strategic as it takes the one asset and targets three audiences. They’ve also cleverly sneaked in another marketing objective – tourism, “It will also help highlight the best of Alberta’s rich dinosaur assets”. Smart thinking.

Outreach MOOC

Many MOOCs are more marketing than learning. There one species of MOOC, the outreach MOOC or more accurately the marketing MOOC, that is sprouting up everywhere. These MOOCs are aimed at marketing your brand to new students, parents of potential students and alumni, all potential sources of income, hence the use of the word ‘marketing’. I know academe hate the word ‘marketing’ unless it’s a course in their revenue-rich business school but this is a marketing MOOC.

A good example is the Australian National University, who is building an edX MOOC aimed at high school students, alumni, adult learners and parents, the first two topics are 6 week courses on Astrophysics and Engaging India (English & Hindi). She admitted her University had no real strategy for MOOCs but thought this was a way of testing the water. At least she was honest, as I see precious little strategic thinking around MOOCs but lots of groupthink and bandwagon behaviour.

Professional MOOC

A lot of IT courses are clearly aimed at the skills market and professionals who want to get a job or promotion. Udemy is full of such courses. There’s nothing new here, other perhaps, in them being free, though many do have a cost. This type of course has been long available on the web. An interesting example is the Google MOOC, aimed at a specific skill, improving your search skills. We can expect many more of these, MOOCs that tackle a specific issue.

Marketing problem

Many MOOCs want to hit a number of these audiences but this is not easy as they have different needs in terms of approach, commitment, start times, accreditation needs, technical issues and support. Knowing your target audience from the start matters, as it influences the choice of platform, as well as design and nature of the content. Initial data suggests that large numbers of people from around the world, who do not have easy access to Higher Education, have taken MOOCs (41%). The language level for those with English as a second language may therefore have to be considered, as well as level of difficulty, relevant examples, appropriate peer activity, group needs, synchronous or asynchronous, and so on. You may also want to be clear in the registration process about the data you want to identify and gather for later analysis.

Conclusion

The problem is that the decision makers often don’t have the marketing skills to differentiate between different addressable audiences. External adult learners may not want a long-winded, over-engineered, six to ten week course on anything. Life’s too short. Yet academics are used to producing courses of this semester length. What many may want are mini MOOCs. They may want them to be asynchronous starting and ending when convenient for them. This, of course, is exactly what’s happening. All in all, however, the good news is that MOOCs are forcing HE institutions to change. MOOCs may very well be the force that makes them more open, transparent and relevant. There will, of course, be a backlash, but the digital genie is out of the bottle - MOOCs are here to stay.

MOOCs: a breath of fresh air, albeit the same air

2013-04-21T22:51:00.000Z

A Secretary of State for Education in the US likened Education to a giant blob. No matter what you did to to change the blob, it always healed up or reformed back into its original shape. Are MOOCs puncturing or reshaping the blob? Or are they just orbiting the blob?

Forces from the outside world, namely technology and hard economics are putting pressure on the blob and MOOCs are, potentially, blob busters. Their potency comes from the fact that they’ve burst open the limitations of old teaching methods and reach out with alternatives that are part of the more general open culture of the web.

MOOCs appropriate MOOPs

Nothing’s new with MOOCs. Massive Open Online Pedagogies (MOOPs), such as short videos, search, wikis, quizzes, forums, collaborative groups, online problems, online assignments, peer learning and peer assessment have all been around for some time and are now being absorbed into MOOCs. I haven’t found a single brand-new, online pedagogic technique in any MOOC. This is neither a criticism nor a problem. The iPhone is a cluster of existing technologies where the sum is greater than the parts. Indeed, Brian Arthur’s in The Nature of Technology thinks that this is an essential feature of technology, the coalescence of existing technologies to create something exciting and new.

MOOCs provide an ideal sandbox for reflection, debate, research, experimentation, outreach and real action on pedagogy, on a scale we’ve never seen before. Every facet of learning is being re-examined and in some cases re-evaluated.

So what sort of pedagogies have been appropriated into MOOCs? Here’s just seven MOOPs (Massive Open Online Pedagogy) that have been used in MOOCs:

MOOP 1 – Short videos

Recorded lectures are still relatively rare, accounting for a tiny fraction of those delivered, but they’ve had a profound pedagogic effect. A soon as they took off the digital genie was out of the lecture hall. The evidence is clear, students want, use, like and benefit from them. The unrecorded, 1 hour lecture (only an hour as the Babylonians had a sexidecimal number system) remains the main obstacle to pedagogic progress in HE. It puts a block on the four main evidence-based features of learning; attention, active learning, adequate feedback and spaced practice. MOOCs use recorded lectures/videos extensively.

YouTube, used by hundreds of millions, has had a profound effect on MOOCs,proving that less is often more as was video sequences long inserted or made available in online learning courses. TED, watched by millions, reinforced the need to make video lectures focused, short, with injected passion and less reliance on PowerPoint. MOOCs quickly learnt this lesson. Then we had the Khan Academy, a huge influence on MOOCs, who effectively removed the lecturer from the screen to focus on the content with narration and, in this case hand-drawn maths. This works because, in maths, you need to work semantic and episodic memory. This pedagogic approach was enthusiastically adopted by Sebastian Thrun at Udacity.

MOOP 2 – Content and the humble hyperlink

Under this you have documents, reading lists, links and so on that use the hyperlink, to give students access to content. The humble hyperlink is the hero of online pedagogy, the simple idea that knowledge can be linked and made accessible by a simple click. Long before MOOCs, the hyperlink had been the mainstay for interactivity. It allowed the expansion of, drilling into or jumping across content, thereby personalising learning. This is the glue that holds the course content together.

MOOP 3 – Online assessment

Online formative and summative assessment, always a stalwart of online learning, became the norm in MOOCs. Conditional branching also allowed different routes to be taken, remedial loops presented and simulations to be constructed, all based on performance. Given the very large numbers of students and paucity of teacher bandwidth, this made sense. Students had to get software-based feedback, if large numbers of students were to progress through the course.

MOOP 4 – Peer learning

Forums and chat are among the oldest Massive Open Online Pedagogies, used since the very inception of the web. In MOOCs, forums and other software assisted forms of peer learning genuinely seem to aid learning. Students do like the experience of getting help and encouragement from other students. Peer learning is scalable. Indeed, it is a pedagogy that benefits from scale. The more learners the better and more efficient peer matching and learning can be. Peer learning also encourages critical thinking, peers are often closer to the problems than teachers with bonding a wonderful side effect. An often forgotten benefit is that teaching is also a powerful way to learn. Above all, we know from the work of Mazur and many others, that it increases learning, retention and attainment. Arora, Peerwise and many others have been used for years in sophisticated, peer learning. In practice, by contract, peer learning is still in its infancy in MOOCs. Coursera’s forums are often described as chaotic and confusing. However, MOOCs are bringing peer learning to the attention of many, encouraging its use.

MOOP 5 – Peer assessment

More controversially, peer assessment in terms of comments, judgements and even marks, are given y peers. Peermark and others have been doing this for some time. It gets round the problem of scaling up students numbers while relying on a small number of academics. The real question is what’s lost in the process of scaling. To be fair, many who have seen this in action (and it’s early days) think it is reasonable and pretty fair. Participants in MOOCs are supportive and keen to be as objective as possible. It’s not as if traditional assessment in HE is in any way efficient or even truly objective. Formative assessment is often scarce, very light and late. It is not uncommon to wait weeks for an essay to be marked and returned. This makes MOOC peer assessment seem like a quantum leap.

MOOP 6 – LMS/LCMs/VLE/CRM functionality

Although they would be loathed to admit it, many MOOCs run light LMS/LCMS/VLE/CRM structures for registration, email, comms, assignments, peer learning, peer assessment, handling large amounts of tracked data and so on. MOOCs are massive and therefore need to be managed by scalable software. None of this is new, as typical LMSs/LMCSs/VLEs have long coped with copious amounts of learners, their management and data.

MOOP 7 - Social media

Social Media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ is a MOOP used by hundreds of millions, so it is natural that they would incorporated into, or at least used parasitically, by MOOCs. In fact, most MOOCs go nowhere near social media but those that do tend to simply have a Facebook page or twitter hashtag and feed. MOOCs are not sophisticated in terms of porosity to outside sources and more sophisticated uses of social media.

MOOCs are aggregated MOOPs

This is just one part of a general move towards the online democritisation, decentralisation and disintermediation of Higher Education. In truth, this had already started with the annihilation of older offline pedagogies with newer Massive Open Online Pedagogies (MOOPs). Most of the components in MOOCs merely reuse what was already established on the web – search (Google), hyperlinks, short videos (YouTube, TED, Khan Academy etc), wikis (Wikipedia, Wikispaces etc), communication (email, chat, forums etc.), collaboration (social media), peer learning, LMS/CRM (mass email and comms management etc.).

MOOCs are not really a single innovation, as all MOOCs are not created equal – they’re all-sorts. Neither are they innovative in terms of pedagogy, as they are invariably assemblages of previously existing online pedagogies. MOOCs assemble different existing MOOP component, and it’s really an. umbrella term for large online courses, and those have been around for a long time. What’s important is that it is a leap forward compared to many high volume, lecture-led, low feedback, low contact courses, that are all too common in Higher Education.

Nothing new under the sun

Ecclesiastes, that most idiosyncratic book of the bible, says ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ and so it is with MOOCs. We have yet to see the serious use of high-end, adaptive techniques, AI, different species of high-end simulation, gaming and the many more adventurous forms of online learning experiences. The use of peer learning has been patchy and the use of social media has been peripheral. To be fair we can already see that the investment and commitment is there to see MOOCs evolve and start to push the pedagogic boundaries. They are a breath of fresh air, albeit the same air.

Bibliography

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The nature of technology: What it is and how it evolves. New York: Free Press.

Mazur, E. (1997). Peer instruction: A user's manual. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.

MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC

2013-04-16T14:02:00.002Z

We're not payin' because this guy...

...this guy's a fuckin' mooc.

But I didn't say nothin'.

And we don't pay moocs.

A mook? I'm a mooc?

Yeah.

What's a mooc?

I don't know.

What's a mooc?

You can't call me a mooc.

I can't?

No!

PUNCH THROWN - ALL HELL BREAKS OUT….

Scorcese's Mean Streets (1973)

What are MOOCs?

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” said William Gibson, that is certainly true of MOOCs. We have MOOC mania but ‘all MOOCs are not created equal’ and there’s lots of species of MOOC. This is good and we must learn from these experiments to move forward and not get bogged down in old traditionalist v modernist arguments. MOOCs will inform and shape what we do within and without institutions. What is important is to focus on the real needs of real learners.

Taxonomy based on pedagogy

To this end, it is important to define a taxonomy of MOOCs not from the institutional but the pedagogic perspective, by their learning functionality, not by their origins. So here's a starting list of eight:

transferMOOCs

madeMOOCs

synchMOOCs

asynchMOOCs

adaptiveMOOCs

groupMOOCs

connectivistMOOCS

miniMOOCSs

1. transferMOOCs

Transfer MOOCs literally take existing courses and decant them into a MOOC platform, on the pedagogic assumption that they are teacher-led and many rely on a ‘name’ of the institution or academic to attract learners. The pedagogic assumption is that of transfer from teacher and course content to learner. Many mimic the traditional academic course with lectures, short quizzes, set texts and assessments. You could describe them as being on the cutting edge of tradition. Coursera courses largely fall into this category.

2. madeMOOCs

Made MOOCs tend to more innovative in their use of video, avoiding talking heads in favour of Khan Academy or Udacity hand on board sequences. They also tend to have more of a formal, quality driven approach to the creation of material and more crafted and challenging assignments, problem solving and various levels of sophisticated software-driven interactive experiences. Peer work and peer-assessment, used to cope with the high teacher-student ratios. Udacity take this approach.

3. synchMOOCs

Synchronous MOOCs have a fixed start date, tend to have fixed deadlines for assignments and assessments and a clear end date. They often around the agricultural, academic calendar. For example, Coursera offer courses on strict startand end dates with clear deadlines for assignment. Udacity started with their ‘hexamester’ 7 week courses with fixed start dates. Many argue that this helps motivation and aligns teacher availability and student cohort work.

4. asynchMOOCs

Asynchronous MOOCs have no or frequent start dates, tend to have no or looser deadlines for assignments and assessments and no final end date. The pedagogic advantages of asynchronous MOOCs is that they can literally be taken anytime, anywhere and clearly work better over different time zones. Interestingly, Udacity have relaxed their courses to enrol and proceed at user’s own pace. Some sceptics point towards this as being a tactic to reduce drop-out rates due to missed assignment deadlines. Note that Coursera offers a completely open self-study option but this does not warrant a certificate of completion.

5. adaptiveMOOCs

Adaptive MOOCs use adaptive algorithms to present personalised learning experiences, based on dynamic assessment and data gathering on the course and courses. They rely on networks of pre-requisites and take learners on different, personalised paths through the content. This has been identified by the Gates Foundation as an important new area for large scale productivity in online courses. These MOOCs tend not to deliver flat, linear structured knowledge but leaning experiences driven by back-end algorithms. Analytics are also used to change and improve the course in the future. Cogbooks is a leading example of this type of MOOC. LINK

6. groupMOOCs

Group MOOCs start with small, collaborative groups of students. The aim is to increase student retention. Stanford, the MOOC manufacturing factory, has spun out NovoEd (formerly Venture Lab) which offers both MOOCs and closed, limited number, internal courses. They argue that some subjects and courses, such as entrepreneurship and business courses, lose a lot in looses, open MOOC structures and need a more focussed approach to groupwork. The groups are software selected by geography, ability and type. They have mentors and rate each others commitment and progress. Groups are also dissolved and reformed during the course.

7. connectivistMOOCS

Pioneered by Geperge Siemens and Stephen Downes, these connectivist MOOCs rely on the connections across a network rather than pre-defined content. Siemen’s famously said “cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication”. More simply, Smith says “in an xMOOC you watch videos, in a cMOOC you make videos”. The whole point is to harvest and share knowledge that is contributed by the participants and not see the ‘course’ as a diet of fairly, fixed knowledge. These course tend to create their own trajectory, rather than follow a linear path.

8. miniMOOCSs

So far, MOOCs tend to be associated with Universities, whose courses last many weeks and often fit the semester structure and timetable of traditional institutions. We have also seem=n the emergence of shorter MOOCs for content and skills that do not require such long timescales. This is mpore typical of commercial e-learning courses, which tend to be more intense experiences that last for hours and days, not weeks. They are more suitable for precise domains and tasks with clear learning objectives. The Open Badges movement tends to be more aligned with this type of MOOC.

Conclusion

Note that these are not mutually exclusive categories, as one can have a transfer MOOC that is synchronous or asynchronous. What’s important here is that we see MOOCs as informing the debate around learning to get over the obvious problems of relevance, access and cost. This is by no means a definitive taxonomy but it’s a start. I’d really appreciate any comments, critiques or new categories.

Latin: Mary Beard and why it has no place in core curricula

2013-04-15T15:52:00.000Z

"Debate is the key word”

So says the venerable Mary Beard in her new book Confronting the Classics. “the classical tradition is something to be engaged with and sparred against, not merely replicated and mouthed”. Exactly. Yet when I dared to criticise the place of Latin in our school curricula, in two separate posts, you’d have thought I was the barbarian at the gates of contemporary civilisation. First, I outlined the research that scotched that old myth about Latin helping you learn second languages such as French, Spanish, Italian and so on. (Latin makes learning a second language more difficult) Second, I outlined the true reasons for Latin being so prominent in our 21^st century schools, many of them made unpleasant reading (10 reasons not to learn Latin).

At the time Mary Beard commented on these pieces in her characteristic, level-headed and rational manner. She defended Latin but thought that Greek may be a better option if you’re after ideas, philosophy, epics and drama. She also gave short thrift to the old chestnuts used by Latinists to keep Latin as a key subject in school curricula, seeing it as a product of a narrow curriculum and unimaginably, dull pedagogy.

ad hoc arguments for Latin

In her latest book she tackles the subject of learning Latin head-on in the introductory essay. Latin was “for generations the gatekeeper of rigid class, privilege and social exclusivity…it gave you access to a narrow elite”. She rejects the hyperbolic claims that Latin improves intellectual and linguistic development, IQ or the learning of French, Italian and Spanish (a much loved dinner-party trope) and claims that most of these sort of arguments that support learning Latin are “perilous”.

Latin a matter or proportionality

“the overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin or Greek from school or University. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek.” This about sums up my position. I am not against the study of Latin or any other dead languages. This is largely a matter of proportionality for our Universities. By all means let a few study Latin. What I am against is too prominent a role for Latin in contemporary school curriculas. Our young people have enough on their plate at 5-18, as the range of subjects expands to include a wider range of science subjects, IT and other vocational skills. A dead language at this stage is merely the dead hand of educational history being played out by interested parties.

Conclusion

“There is only one good reason for learning Latin, and that is that you want to read what is written in it….” This is another key point made by Beard. Let’s forget about all of those excuses for Latin being in some special intellectual category. It is not. Taking the line, as Gove did recently (he had to furiously backtrack), that Latin should be given special status above IT and every other vocational subject on the curriculum is absurd. To do, as Toby Young has done, and make it compulsory, is idiotic.

PS Sense of wonderment

What Mary Beard’s book is largely about, is instilling a sense of ‘sense of wonderment’ in the classical world. I’ve had that since the age of 15 or so, without studying Latin. Beard excels in this task in both print and on TV. This book, in English, is about scholarship ridding us of misconceptions and myths. She does this with panache. Knossos, Pompeii and the Laocoon are stripped of their misleading modern appearances. Those pesky, verbatim, Thucididean speeches are subject to a re-evaluation. Alexander the Great and Cleopatra are placed in the context of later ‘spin’. There is a reassessment of the Galba to Vespasian period, a stirring defence of those bad boys of Rome, Caligula and Nero. Asterix the Gaul is seen as a distortion of Rome’s model of governance. The archaeological evidence for the Boadicean rebellion is reassessed (there’s almost nothing). Great book by a wonderful woman who understands that the Classics are to be cherished and debated, not defended uncritically and fossilised.

Malaysia: Chromebook/cloud provision for 10 million! (not taking the tablets)

2013-04-13T16:17:00.003Z

Malaysia has today announced the national adoption of Google Apps for 10 million (read that again) teachers, students and parents. Primary and secondary schools will get Chromebooks and use cloud services. This is a massive attempt to reform and turbo-charge a national education system through technology and I applaud their vision.

In one stroke they’ve got a solution that solves all of those irritating problems, fiscal, technical and pedagogic, that plagues tablet projects. Chromebooks have quick start-up times, are robust, secure, use a cloud based approach that makes delivery of services and content easy and provides good analytics. At last a country that understands procurement and puts learning needs above shiny objects. I fly there this week, so hope to report back in more detail, but here’s a starting primer.

Devices

Chromebooks are thin, lightweight devices with physical keyboard. This is important in terms of learning productivity, as one can type 20% faster than touchscreen, with less errors, and do far more sophisticated work on essays, coding, pixel accurate graphics tools etc. than tablet devices allow. (see end of post)

The advantage of a low-cost Chromebook is that it boots quickly, connects immediately, is browser-based using the internet and cloud, rather than difficult to manage local storage and apps. This gets both students and teachers into productive learning quickly and life is a lot easier in terms of delivery, tracking, assessment, data and security (virus protection is built in). Remember that this is cloud storage, avoiding local data on the devices, making them much easier to manage and maintain.

Cloud-based learning

Cloud-based design means access anywhere, anytime from any device and with Google Apps, you’re not buying licenses for Microsoft and other software. Students and teachers use Google Apps for email, calendar, documents, data, and much more. As all docs and data are in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about storage and backups, and OS updates happen automatically every time you switch it on. Your school does NOT need servers! Even of a Chromebook is lost, stolen or broken, no learning data is lost. Focus on WIFI and you have your comms sorted (note that Chromebooks can also have 3G add-ons for mobile network access).

Cost

IDC comparative research showed that Chromebooks would save $1135 for each device, as they take 69% less time to deploy and 92% less time to manage. The per-device costs come out at $7.75 per month over three years. This gives considerable costs savings when compared to tablets, desktop PCs and laptops. You can, of course, expect these costs to fall, making it easier to move to one device per teacher and student.

The good thing about this research is that it really did look at productivity in terms of real teacher and administration salary costs in relation to support and classroom downtime. None of the woolly ‘survey-monkey’ qualitative stuff we get from UK tablet trials.

Importantly, the research showed that the devices were highly reliable and reduced expensive teaching and administration time by 82%. This was important as there were often zero help-desk calls and minimal calls on support across the projects. Above all, there was no need to worry about redesign and realignment of existing systems and no problems with losing files. All of this leads to more time on learning and less on dealing with and fire-fighting IT issues.

Problems

The downside is that Chromebooks do not run Windows, so if you have Windows apps, you may think you’re in trouble. Fear not, Google provide Windows virtualisation. Internet dependent devices need adequate and robust wifi, as the applications need to be run online. This can be a problem if the network is interrupted or fails. Fear not, Chromebooks cache work so that you can continue until the connection comes back. You do, however, have to invest in wifi to match use.

Teachers

The advantages for teachers are that the devices start up quickly, are easy to use and require little support allowing teachers to teach and learners to learn. In one UK school, James Wilding explains that they rolled out an enlightened, cloud-based solution as follows:

Teachers first - 3 months to bed down the tech and allow the teachers to adjust

Students next – 3 months

Curriculum provision – 6 months to build –up expertise, habits, processes and effect change management

I say ‘enlightened, as this seems like a sensible approach based on change management, not device dumps. The excellent Ian Nairn, of c-learning. tells me of a school who have ditched their expensive tablets for Chromebooks and the cloud.

Conclusion

This is big news. I also think it is good news. A procurement based on a strong fiscal case, a real detailed analysis of the technology and long-term support, as well as the idea that pedagogy should be in the driving seat. Free and low cost solutions on any device is what cloud-based learning offers. Google Search, Google Docs, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, email, calendars, blogger – the list goes on and on. I’ll report back from Malaysia next week.

Keep on taking the tablets: 7 reasons why this is lousy advice

2013-04-11T09:07:00.001Z

Purveyors of the metaphor ‘Keep taking the tablets’ often fail to realise its downside. Like much over-prescribed medication, it can be pushed by aggressive sales, lack adequate investigation and diagnosis, be too narrow a treatment, lack evidence other than placebo effects and have some nasty side-effects.

I’ve written about tablets in two previous posts 1) Too cool for school: 7 reasons why tablets should NOT be used in education, 2) Tablets: 7 researched ways they can INHIBIT learning This final piece in the triad looks at the bigger picture with seven reasons for being wary of the tablet bandwagon.

1. Aggressive vendors

In an interesting lunch with someone who works for a tablet manufacturer, and has a great deal of experience and expertise in education and technology, someone I respect, I encountered some horror stories that do not appear in the ‘research’. He, like me, despairs of the mad rush towards 1:1 tablets in schools. Both of us own and use tablets and both of us have spent a lifetime trying to get technology used in education but this latest bandwagon effect, is worrying. Vendors are too close to Gove and government, with freebies and special meetings. Beware also the shadowy figures, connected to government, who have an eye on the low hanging fruit of government contracts. Witness Rachel Wolf’s rapid rise from Gove researcher to Newscorp tablet salesperson.

2. Naïve funders

‘Keep taking the tablets’ was the title of the E-learning Foundations Conference. This lack of objectivity by a funding body is simply bandwagon behaviour. A few of the Trustees are no doubt proud of their ability to look at their Board papers on their new iPad – note that they rarely take notes, annotate or do anything productive on their screens and often have the printed papers out at the side. A little technology is a dangerous thing!

3. Poor diagnosis

Procurement is not just a few columns in a spread-sheet. It involves the calculation, or at least best effort approximation, of risk. These risks come in all sorts of shapes – fiscal (purchase, insurance, maintenance etc.), technical (bandwidth, networking, printing, storage, security, technical support etc.), adoption (teacher use in classroom, collection from leavers, illicit use etc.) and change management (governance, leadership issues, parent reactions, teacher CPD etc.). Few do a really thorough job on this and fewer still demand an evaluative approach that builds-in quantitative measures on the evaluation of attainment.

Governors of schools and colleges tend to be older, not particularly tech savvy and certainly not capable of doing the necessary governance checks on procurement. With schools breaking free from being overseen by Local Authorities, that layer of procurement expertise has gone. To be fair, it was never that good, but its disappearance has led to a lot of idiosyncratic buying.

Have all of these tablet taking projects really completed a cost-benefit analysis against a) Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy, b) Notebooks/laptops strategy or c) Flip technology out of the classroom? Have lost-opportunity costs been taken into account? I doubt it.

4. Narrow treatment

Pedagogy matters. Failure to plan and cost teacher training can lead to technology slowing down and not accelerating learning, as hoped. For example, my respected educational technologists witnessed iPads being collected in by a teacher at the end of the class ‘for marking’. There are cases of tablets being distributed to students only and not teachers! Without an implementation plan that involves teachers, before the tablets are distributed, you are simply creating more problems than you solve.

Learning needs are very different horizontally across subjects and vertically through age and increasing complexity. The failure to see the need for long-form writing in English, History and other subjects, detailed editing in coding, need to have pixel accurate control in graphics packages and so on renders tablet use literally useless as one moves across the curriculum. Similarly with increasing demands on productive tasks on learning. The further up the educational attainment ladder the learner climbs the less use tablets become.

5. Placebo research

Why do the well-known, negative disasters and negative findings rarely appear in the research. Medicine is built upon randomised double-blind trials with rigorous research, education is not. Even I the oft-quoted Hull report, one disaster, where iPads were given out yet wifi was only installed months later, was treated as a mere blip. Most of the research is akin to the placebo effects one sees in homeopathic medicine. It’s qualitative, survey-monkey-level research that merely confirms the known fact that if you give kids and teacher a free iPad they like them. This is the allure of consumer electronics, attention not proven attainment.

6. Nasty side-effects

Idiosyncratic tablet projects are pregnant with problems. The technology may bite back as teachers struggle with connectivity, printing, storage and so on. Teachers can come out in a rash of negativity when their practical and training needs are ignored. Students may spend huge amounts of time on relatively shallow learning or other distracting activities

7. Groupthink

This is an old story in education and technology – the over-prescription of untried ttechnology as if it were a wonder-drug. Something new and shiny comes along and before long it’s become a bandwagon, we jump aboard without thinking too much about where it’s taking us, then the wheels start to fall off. Even when the wheels have fallen off you don’t get to hear the bad news, as there’s been so much invested.

Conclusion

I’m not against the use of tablets in schools, I just think that turning it into a ‘movement’ is a mistake and that too many of these projects are poorly planned, badly procured and lack proper evaluation.

Tablets: 7 researched ways they can inhibit learning

2013-03-24T14:18:00.001Z

I've already given a general critique of why tablets should not be used in schools in Too cool for school: why tablets should NOT be used in education, but there is one issue that gets to the heart of the matter. Typing, text and data manipulation is important in learning. Many learners will be expected to write, edit and input data, not only while they learn but also when using computers at work or at home for leisure. Given the increased use of tablets in schools and universities, we must also ask whether typing is better on touchscreens or keyboards. Are we missing the fact that touchscreens may inhibit or even damage learning?

Research

Research comparing touchscreen with physical keyboards goes back over 20 years has consistently shown that touch screens produce slower and less accurate performance when compared with physical keyboards; Barrett & Krueger, 1994; Wilson, Inderrieden, & Liu, 1995; Schneiderman (1998); Ryall (2006); Hinrichs (2007). Benco (2009) at the University of Washington’s Information School, with Microsoft Research, showed accidental touches and a 31% lower typing speed (or 20 words per minute faster). But there’s even more bad news.

1. No feel for keys and boundaries

As there is no feel for key and keyboard boundaries, it is difficult to gauge when you have found the right key, especially at speed, so you can’t make small adjustments. This has been found to lead to slower typing speeds and higher error rates. With no haptic or tactile feedback through a physical keyboard, you fail to feel key and keyboard boundaries.

2. Slow visual checks

You also require visual checking while you type, which slows down typing speed and increases error rates. Barrett (1994) claimed that touchscreens “pale in effectiveness” when compared to physical keyboards, largely because of the lack of feedback and need to visually check the touch keyboard. In learning, you want students to focus on the text and tasks not typing.

3. No home row anchor

‘Home row’ resting means that typists can rest their hands on a physical anchor, the lowest row of keys, to help them calibrate their finger movements when typing. They can then look at the screen without interruption to increase speed, reduce error rate and more importantly, focus on the writing task – meaning , expression and so on.

3. Text editing slow and difficult

A cursor, operated by a mouse or fingerpad is pixel accurate compared to a finger, which makes highlighting, cutting, copying and pasting more difficult and more prone to error. This causes real problems when doing pieces of even basic writing, where learners have to learn through failure and do lots of error correction, rewriting and reordering of words of prose. In more complex pieces of writing it becomes critical. The danger is that touchscreen keyboards, being more difficult to use, hamper progress and limit skills progression in writing.

4. Inappropriate for high-level tasks

Some learning tasks, such as coding, require large amounts of character editing, and would be severely restricted on touchscreen. Mathematics quickly requires high-level symbol manipulation. Additionally, when it comes to creative tools such as graphic, audio and video media creation and manipulation, progress is quite literally impossible with touchscreen. Fingers may also obstruct text that is being manipulated.

5. Tilt matters

Typing on a surface that is flat also brings problems. A notebook or laptop screen sits up at an angle from the keyboard. This angle is typically between 100 and 120 degrees. You may not have noticed but when you go into an Apple store every Macbook is at exactly the same angle. Employees use Simplify Angle, an iPhone app, to measure this angle of elevation when they open the store!

A device that has the keyboard at a 180 degree angle to the produced text is a problemas it leads to awkward lean forward positions or requires the addition of a special add-on, at extra cost, to tilt the tablet. Even then you have to hold your hands in the air and this leads to fatigue, which may result in less produced work and limit the amount of effort the learner will put into a piece of written or other work.

6. Detracts from sustained use

Morris (2010) claims that touchscreens, compared to physical keyboards, puts a brake on sustained use. For learning professionals this is a real worry as students may stop prematurely or reduce performance in a writing task, simply because of the limitations of the input device.

7. Alters linguistic style

Touchscreen may even alter style of expression, Wigdor (2007). It may limit experimentation, more complex sentences and playing around with vocabulary and style, all tasks which are important for skills development. This is even more worrying. Of course, physical keyboards can be added to tablets but at extra cost and one could argue that this just reinforces the argument for buying a notebook or laptop in the first place.

Conclusion

We can use this evidence to identify the point in education where learning may become inhibited, if not damaged, by tablet use. Note that this is not a fatal objection to the use of tablets in education. It is, however, a severe warning about their appropriateness for deeper and mature learning that involves even modest amounts of writing, note taking, data input, use of mathematical notation, image, audio and video manipulation, coding and so on. The danger is that we are being lulled into believing that tablets are appropriate by qualitative reports from students (who let’s be honest don’t mind doing less!). What’s needed is more hard-headed research, not on attractiveness but on attainment.

Bibliography

Morris, M.R., Lombardo, J., Wigdor, D. 2010. Search: Supporting Collaborative Search and Sensemaking on a Tabletop Display. Proc. CSCW 2010, 401-410.

Benko, H., Morris, M. R., Brush, A.J.B., Wilson, A.D. 2009. Insights on Interactive Tabletops: A Survey of Researchers and Developers. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2009-22.

Wigdor, D., Penn, G., Ryall, K., Esenther, A., Shen, C. 2007. Living with a Tabletop: Analysis and Observations of Long Term Office Use of a Multi-Touch Table. Proc. Tabletop 2007, 60-67.

Hinrichs, U., Hancock, M., Collins, C., Carpendale, S. 2007. Examination of text-entry methods for tabletop displays. Proc. Tabletop 2007, 105-112. “Text entry a major deficiency in multiple studies”

Ryall, K., Forlines, C., Shen, C., Ringel Morris, M., Everitt, K. 2006. Experiences with and Observations of Direct-Touch Tabletops. Proc. Tabletop 2006, 89-96.

Barrett, J., & Krueger, H. (1994). Performance effects of reduced proprioceptive feedback on touch typists and casual users in a typing task. Behavior & Information technology, 13, 373-381.

Wilson, K.S., Inderrieden, M., & Liu, S. (1995). A comparison of five user interface devices designed for point-of-sale in the retail industry. Proceedings of the Human Factors & Ergonomic Society 39th Annual Meeting, 39, 273-277.

Shneiderman, B. (1998). Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human Computer Interaction. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Tablet madness: Would Amplify pass a CRB check? And hideous tablet for women

2013-03-20T15:52:00.001Z

News Corp know a fair bit about mobile technology, as they have ‘hacked’ their way to ignomy. You’d think, after the Millie Dowler scandal, and their downright evil attitude towards hacking the mobiles of parents, children and the general public, News Corp would avoid the education market. But no, here they are selling mobile devices to schools. Have they NO shame?

De-Klein

And it gets worse. Amplify is headed up by Jo Klein. If you don’t know Klein, he was the odd guy sitting behind the Murdochs at the select committee on phone hacking (he’s a lawyer) and was hired as a Murdoch ‘fixer’. Note that this inquiry uncovered the close links between Gove (ex Murdoch journalist), Murdoch and Klein. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these hideous devices pop up in government funded initiatives in UK schools. This is how Gove likes to work – behind the scenes.
Wolf
Even worse, in one of the worst examples of Government excess and nepotism, Rachel Wolf, ex-Gove advisor, and odd recipient of government funds, has also joined News Corp and Amplify. This is truly worrying. Why? Rachel has no academic background in education, had barely finished as an advisor, first to Boris Johnson then Michael Gove, when at the tender age of 25, she suddenly received from Gove, a cool half million of funding. This was for a charity she had started just a year earlier, called the New Schools Network, advising on ‘free-schools’. There was, of course, no tender - clearly an inside job. Let’s be clear here - this was a lobbying organisation that received direct government funds to advise on educational policy. I should add that this ‘charity’ refuses to name its other benefactors. I wonder why? Could they include some private sector interests in school networks? Read this.

Cost

The Asus tablet, a 10 inch Asus tablet running Android’s Jellybean OS, costs $299 but you have to buy a 2 year subscription at $99 per year. That makes it just short of $500 per pupil. Or you can buy the data plan at a total 2 year cots of over $700. Are they kidding? Let’s do some maths. You want to gove (sorry give) this to just one class of 30 kids – total cost £21,210. OK, you want to do it in a 1200 pupil school, that’s $848,400.

Tablets of stone

I don’t like this top-down, lockdown, command-and-control approach to devices in schools. This tablet is a bitter pill to swallow as it locks you into the News Corp ecosystem. It is openly marketed as a device that gives you ‘control’. Beware of their ‘curated’ apps and the ‘all eyes on me feature’ (I kid you not) where teachers can switch off all devices with one click. These guys have history, a horrible history of deception and misinformation. We’ve just managed to fight them off in the press, let’s not turn our schools into a similar battleground.

Don’t keep taking the tablets

This whole ‘tablet’ thing is getting out of hand. We’re forcing them down the throats of kids who would never dream of buying one themselves. Don’t let education walk blindly into lockdown tablets like the iPad and Amplify. To compare apples and oranges – both lock you in.

Tablet for women

Now for something even more disturbing, coming out of Dubai, that great city of moral rectitude and women’s rights, comes this hideous device. In many ways this is worse, a tablet that has all the usual stereotypical apps around yoga, perfume, weight, dieting, clothing, shopping and groceries (I kid you not - looks at apps on screen).

Conclusion

I am all for technology in education but wary of shiny ‘tablet’ initiatives that are largely, expensive, technology-led projects. Even worse are tablet projects by organisations like News Corp that, on the grounds of moral bankruptcy, should be kept away from our children and remain on the other side of the school gate. It’s not often I say I want technology to fail but I really do hope and pray that these die an immediate and deserved death.

Top Ten Mistakes in eLearning

2013-03-17T15:47:00.001Z

Stock images with txt

Unedited blocks of txt

Unnecessary animation

Txt plus identical audio

Inconsistent navigation

MCQs on nouns from text

No ‘doing’

Annoying music and sound effects

Corporate crap/Educational hubris

Condescension

Google Glass: 7 amazing uses in learning

2013-03-14T22:56:00.004Z

Google Glass is due to be launched in 2013 and like all innovations will take time to find its feet. Much is made of smartphones and tablets in mobile learning but these are still clumsy ‘hand-held’ devices. Wearable technology, that is simply there in line of sight, may finally have arrived. We know that it will be both voice and finger activated with bone vibration technology for hearing and allow us to learn in the following ways:

1. Record video & pictures

Record a lecture, presentation, slide, conversation, bits of TV or browsing the web. This could be a sort of Evernote function through video, audio and images. This habitual capture of relevant learning experiences is now a key method of informal learning. Note that the prototype also promises a ‘search pictures’ function.

2. Learn by doing

Learning by doing will be eminently possible using playback video, audio, text and images. Initially one can learn skills through exemplar video (see video as MOOP (Massive Online Open Pedagogy)). At the next level a step-by-step walk-through as you perform the task. At yet another level you can perform and video the task for assessment. This will be a boon to those learning vocational and practical skills.

3. Search

Search was the first major MOOP (see search as MOOP). With search you have unparalleled access to the hyperlinked (see hyperlink as MOOP) world of knowledge. It is this ability to simply call up what you need at the very moment you look at or do something that can really enhance experience.

4. Translate

We have long known that language learning is slow and ponderous in the classroom and that it needs immersion, regular practice and reinforcement. Presenting common phrases and vocabulary in context and through spaced practice is one idea. More powerful uses of language could be encouraged through task-based learning, with support on the Google Glass display.

5. Use Google Now

As an extension of Google Search, Google Now enables personalised search and retrieval on cards that are be tailored to your personal learning needs, based on repeated use . It uses Knowledge Graph to analyse meanings and connections that make the presentation of learning material more relevant in terms of pre-requisites and adaptive learning.

6. Communication & collaboration

First, you can communicate with messages. Google Glass also comes with Google Hangout, promising higher levels of interaction with your tutor, teacher, trainer or instructor or other learners in collaborative learning. More specifically, for practical, vocational learning, you can imagine being ‘talked through’ an event or get feedback on a performed action.

7. Reinforcement

Edited down Google Now cards could then be retrieved and used to reinforce learning to shove it from short to long term memory. We may finally have the solution to that age old problem – the forgetting curve. Specific applications could take learner-generated cues from a specific course, lecture or presentation, and present them at spaced intervals.

Powerful mobile pedagogies

This is a pretty powerful set of seven mobile pedagogies. Each and every one has huge learning potential. This goes well beyond the plethora of other basic information applications, such as getting directions, weather, news etc. So, if they can overcome the issue of social adoption, we could be on to something.
Ergonomics
This is the first move to technology that simply taps directly into the senses. You can see the display at any time, You can say things and it will listen and react. You can hear things directly. You can touch to control. With its camera it is always pointing where you are looking - another interface leap. It is the truly invisible in the sense that it is not visible to the wearer. I'm almost never aware of the fact that I'm wearing glasses. This is what makes it special and more interesting than the much talked about iWatch. It's invisibility is its primary virtue. Expect an initial slew of GPS games that you can play in real locations. If you want to see how this could work conceptually, watch this Battlefield game.
However, it does have to content with its high visibility to others. Whether it will become cool or calamitous depends on whether they can tap into the Ray Ban, or other style brands, to overcome its Google-ass type quality. In time, and Google says this is merely the first iteration, we know that it will become smaller and even more invisible, perhaps totally invisible as the battery, electronics and camera are hidden entirely within a normal sized frame.
As you don't need to put it in your pocket or bag or on the table, it has the advantage of being less prone to loss or theft, although we can quickly expect a few grab and run incidents. This is no small advantage.

Conclusion

Expectations for Google Glass are riding high. Some expect this to be the product that Apple wishes it had invented, establishing Google as the new post-Jobs Apple. Whatever the truth, it is a ground-breaking product with enormous potential. It promises to put mobile learning on the map, as it is an always there, hands free device that plays to the idea that learning needs to be part of one’s everyday life and reinforced through habit and spaced practice. For a good review of the product and to see it being used, watch this video.

Negroponte: 10 reasons why his Ethiopian project smacks of Educational Colonialism

2013-03-11T16:41:00.000Z

Nicholas Negroponte has stated publically that he wants to ‘parachute’ tablets into remote villages in Africa. Is he out of his mind? Does he know nothing about the history of Africa? This idea stinks to high-heaven of educational colonialism.

1. Negroponte: the bull that brings his own china shop

It’s not as if Negroponte hasn’t tried this before in Africa. His first failure in Africa, goes way back to 1982, when he and Papert set up Le Centre Mondial to use Apple IIs in schools near Dakar in Senegal. It was a spectacular failure ending in acrimony with Papert, Negroponte and others fell out with the locals and simply walked out. The funders, French Government, wisely killed off the project and the centre. It failed because Negroponte is the sort of bull that brings his own china shop, charging in with solutions that are ill-planned, ill-researched and often inappropriate.

2. What’s to prove?

Much is made of the fact that the Tablets were just left there in their packages. Well maybe not. In fact, the adults were taught how to mechanically recharge the laptops. A special building with solar panels was built for the project in the village. There seems to be lots of interaction between visiting OLPC technicians and lots of obviously staged photographs. Nevertheless, it would seem that the kids were literally left to their own devices. But so what? There seems to be an almost racist assumption behind the doubt that African kids could manage to press a few buttons on a new, shiny, touch-screen tablet. Every parent on the planet could have told you that kids use this stuff without manuals and adult instruction. That’s a given, it merely proves what we already know.

3. Never seen letters?

Serious doubts have also been expressed about Negroponte’s claim that these people have never seen print, even road signs or words on packaging. Many Africans have expressed astonishment at this statement. It’s only 50 miles from the capital Addis Ababa. Beni, an Ethiopian, says, “I know part of Wonchi and it is not as remote as you displayed it.” Another says “I bet there is a good number of people in that village who write and read. I bet these children have their own "school" that teaches them something in "Amhari" or probably even some English….I seriously doubt the very "strange" picture painted here.” Indeed, it’s on the lip of a well-known tourist spot the Wonchi Crater, which has a lodge hotel (previous residence of Haile Selassie) and is a centre for Eco-tourism. There’s even Tripadvisor reviews for the place and lots of pictures taken by tourists as the crater rim is an established trek route, which you can do in a day from the capital.

4. Interventionist

What’s not clear here is how much the reports rely on data from the swapped out memory cards. Just because screens are accessed doesn’t mean the content’s been understood and certainly not that anything has been learnt. You really do have to question the testimonies of the paid OLPC workers who visit these villages and swap out the cards. This is not objective research, it’s interventionist and fails on the very first test for ‘objectivity’. If you drop some spectacular shiny $300 toy into a village, build them a spanking new building and install solar power, all for free, where people survive on a dollar a day, don’t be surprised that they pick it up, touch it, press buttons and see things move and hear sound which you can mimic. This is not surprising at all, it is predictable. Do we imagine that the children in this village are miraculously free from the influence of the adults? If you were a poor adult, wouldn’t you be encouraging the kids to use the shiny toy the rich foreigners gave you, in the hope of more visits, more money?

5. Inappropriate content

Parachuting in US software, Disneyfied stories of Princes and Princesses and programmes with obscure and irrelevant vocabulary has been widely criticised by African commentators. To wilfully ignore context is not just to miss the educational opportunities, it is ‘cognitive colonialism’ of the worst kind. In some parts of Africa, and the rest of the world, this approach would be widely resented. Imagine, say the Chinese, dropping off tablets for poor kids in rural America or the UK, pre-loaded with Chinese only content, apps on the Chinese alphabet and Chinese stories. We’d be claiming ‘propoganda’ quicker than you could open the packages.

6. Ignores context

If they live in such a remote rural location, why are these kids being given English alphabet apps? A visitor reported seeing the kids use the ‘Alphabet Game’ where they were ‘reciting’ A for Apple, C for Cat… O for Octopus – OCTOPUS! The stories were similarly inappropriate, largely Western, with themes such as Princes and Princesses. You get my drift. First, why give these children content in English and not their own language, Amhari? As Meron, an Ethiopian, says, with some obvious resentment, “we have our own language and alphabet.” Second, why give them Western Disneyfied fairy stories and not Ethiopian stories? Third, and more obviously, why not give them content that is relevant to their world, that would have some causal impact on their lives? The educational and colonial assumption is that we are superior and you need our stuff to progress.

7. Anti-teacher

This is a dangerous assumption and comes straight out of Negroponte’s association with Papert at MIT, whose constructivism can be traced back to Rousseau. The idea is that children are natural learners and that we need only get adults out of the way and all will be well. Really? The whole problem here around illiteracy and poor knowledge of health issues is the fact that there’s been no sensible schooling. The problem is a lack of trained teachers and absentee teachers. David Hollow, of Jigsaw, is worth listening to, as he has worked in some of the Ethiopian schools where Negroponte has placed his devices. “Whilst many children enjoyed playing on the laptops, there was limited, if any, integration into the classroom routine. Most teachers objected to the way the laptops were distracting the children, leading to some of them banning laptops from the classroom entirely.”

8. Costs

David also gives a detailed breakdown of costs, in relation to Ethiopia, showing that these projects are incredibly expensive and that money would have been better spent on textbooks or teacher training and salaries. The African commentators on his post certainly seem to agree that textbooks and other resources would be a better way to spend the money. We know that these tablets are around $200 but the total costs of solar power, maintenance and support adds considerably to this. If we take the number of people who live on less than $1 and $2 a day (20% & 40% of world’s population) we see that they would have to spend a huge proportion of their earnings to use this technology. The global average of ICT spending is around 3% of income, so these people can only really afford around $10-$20 at most. And that would have to be seen as relevant. That’s why cheap mobile phones have been such a hit in these countries. It’s affordable and has some obvious economic advantages. Latly, remember how ruthlessly commercial Negroponte's goal is here. He's already had a competitive spat with Intel and wants to sell millions of tehse computers to the developing world.

9. No comparisons

A glaring omission in this so-called research, are comparators. These are expensive projects with expensive kit, new buildings, solar power installations, on the ground technicians, visits every week to the locations, academics flying regularly in and out from Europe and the US. Let’s pause and ask whether other interventions, such as books, small libraries, teachers, buildings, vocational training, radio even one-to-many devices may have been better. Did no one think to compare this intervention with others in terms of cost, learning and impact?

10. Hacked off

Perhaps the most famous, and hyperbolic story that emerges from the ‘experiment’, is Negroponte’s claim that these kids ‘hacked Android’ to switch the tablets camera on. There’s remarkably little information about the supposed ‘hack’ to Android. Backtracking later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had ‘gotten around’ OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. Did he mean touching a few buttons until the camera turned red? Hardly hacking. Did these kids write or change code to do the hack? No. Did they simply change the ‘settings’? Probably. Did an adult do this? Maybe. Did a visiting adult do this? Possibly. Or did they just switch on the camera? Likely. Was the camera working in the first place? Could be. We don’t know because there’s no science here, no real attempt to isolate fact from testimony. There’s a lots of people here with agendas, and clearly few with the objectivity needed in such a project. (PS A quick look on YouTube shows a Camera settings icon on the Motorola Tablet)

Conclusion

I should end by saying that some of the OLPC initiatives, in Rwanda etc, I support to a degree, as I can see a strategy. What I dislike is this YouTube, TED talk 'feelgood' approch to research. What happens when the academics have had their fill, and Negroponte has done the rounds of the international conference circuit and needs a new topic, they’re off abandoning these children and projects. Is this anything more than TED fodder for the egos of US academics? These parachute interventions are easy but not at all informative. Indeed, they may well be counterproductive, leading to the wrong type of spend by Governments keener on photo-opps than real learning. They may even damage the effort needed to implement sustainable learning that is relevant and changes lives. I’m off to Africa this month and again in May, where I hope to learn a thing or two….. I’ll keep you posted.

BYOD: 7 reasons to leave them to their own devices

2013-03-09T13:23:00.001Z

BYOD isn’t a recommendation, it’s a realty. Everyone’s bought one and everyone uses one and everyone carries it around with them. When we organise a meeting or conference, we don’t send people an email telling them what device to bring, neither do we buy or lease a whole load of computers and hand them out. In our Universities few want to revive those expensive projects where every student was given a laptop or iPad. They bring their own.

In business, BYOD is big business. By 2014 Gartner estimate that 90% of employees will have access to enterprise software from at least two devices. Most employees would be frustrated if their employer did not allow access from their owned devices. Note that there's a big difference between allowing devices to access your network and enterprise software and using BYOD in schools to simply access the internet.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) v BEND (Buy Everyone a New Device)

Paul Hynes of the George Spencer Academy in Nottingham operates a BYOD policy that gives access to free, filtered web access (no passwords). He points out that there’s some underlying problems with a tablet-only approach; lockdown, updates, damage, iTunes, the illusion of personalisation, tech problems with displays, printers, wireless, also difficulties in storage and sharing. I’m with him on this and have real doubts about the rush to spendlarge sums on tablet projects in schools. There are several reasons for preferring BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to BEND (Buy Everyone a New Device):

1. Reduces costs

The big BYOD advantage is cost, the total cost of BEND in terms of purchase, leasing, insurance, maintenance and sustainability. Then there’s the often hidden costs of procurement and on-going management of owned kit. It may well be defunct long before its depreciated in your accounts. Parents and students have already spent considerable amounts of money on kit they researched, selected and use regularly. Surely we could use our education budgets better to focus on other things, like teacher issues and learning.

2. Reduces risks

Why would you want to take a punt on untried technology that will bring fiscal, technical, insurance and pedagogic restraints, when much of the kit has already been bought and is in the hands of learners? Create a risk register, with scores for appetite, likelihood and impact, along with ways of making each risk manageable and you’ll see that BYOD, far from increasing, decreases overall risk You also head off parental criticism about wasting valuable school resources….

3. Existing skills

The fact that they know how to use their own kit is a plus and if they don’t know how to do something on their own kit, what makes you think they will on a new and stranger one? In any case isn’t it important to learn how to use your own tools and not other, unfamiliar ones?

4. Motivation

The fact that it is your own kit means it’s less likely to get damaged or lost. There are some horror stories of damaged, knocked and lost kit, with substantial claims on insurance. You automatically tap into the care that personal ownership brings. I’d also wager that you’re far more likely to get students to use their own kit at home, rather than bought kit. One could argue that a wide range of devices may create a range of problems. This is offset by the fact that students are likely to know how to use their own kit and problem solve themselves to get connected, print and save data. They are more likely to own the problems and therefore solve them. Lastly, I suspect that the motivation to learn is more prevalent on owned devices.

5. Learning not leasing

Paul Hynes recommends “10 no-brainer uses with an impact on learning” for teachers and an approach that allows teachers to be confident, manage classes and defend the use of technology. Exactly! Let’s look at learning not leasing. Surely much of the budget would be better spent on teacher impact than capital expenditure.

6. More relevant

BYOD is more relevant in that it is more likely to mimic the real world and the workplace. Few workplaces have iPads or tablets, most have desktops, laptops and mobiles. If we’re creating autonomous adults and learners, surely we must recognise what’s actually used out there.

7. Already happens

At home, school students already use their own devices to do their homework, communicate with their mates about assignments and exams, communicate with the school, even in the school, especially when the school kit is a bit crappy or too slow.

Problems: safety, inclusion & technical

Like BYOD, students can get up to no good. The whole e-safety debate can freeze progress, yet students know the rules and teachers know how to get the rules obeyed. Let’s be clear here, the student should NOT be allowed to access unsuitable content. You need a policy or be brave enough to leave this to the teachers’ discretion. But it’s the same issue BYOD or BEND.

Inclusion can also be an issue, as wealthier students showboat their expensive laptops or tablets. However, we can use the money saved to help solve this problem. Data suggests that this is a bottle -three-quarters-full issue, simply needing a top-up. We can’t let the absence of a few pieces of kit cancel out progress. Some kids don’t have books at home, we don’t then say, let’s not use books in learning.

I should add that I’m not a big fan of parachuting computers in any form into classrooms. Classrooms are spaces where teachers interact with learners, places of dialogue and feedback. The introduction of tablets, notebooks, laptops and mobiles are, without very careful planning, most likely to interrupt and slow down learning. Flip the classroom and let students use these for assignments, homework (oh how I hate that word) and exposition. Let teachers teach and students learn.

Conclusion

Prescribed tablet and laptop projects are part of an old-world view that there is an ideal or optimum technology in learning. To be frank, many of these projects are driven less by reason than desire. You can free yourself from idiosyncratic projects, Apple fanboys, large vendors and horrendous insurance and maintenance problems through BYOD. Most of all, the BEND approach is damn EXPENSIVE. What of almost ALL of that money could be saved or spent on learning, teachers and problem solving? Want to help student learn - leave them to their own devices.

Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt

2013-03-04T13:44:00.001Z

This is a Sigatra Mitra ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ site in India. Literally just three holes in a wall. That’s because it failed. The community can barely remember why they were installed or what happened. They do remember that they were vandalised (a known problem with unsupervised children?).

Here’s another, set in a school playground, the computers long gone. “What we see is the idea of free learning going into free fall” said Payal Arora. When Arora came across these two ‘hole-in-the-wall’ sites, accidentally in India, she discovered not the positive tales of self-directed learning but failure. One was vandalised and closed down within two months, the other abandoned and, apparently, had been mostly used by boys to play games. A real problem was sustainability, as no one seemed responsible for the electricity and maintenance bills.

Doubts
My own doubts arose when I gave a TEDx talk and the speaker after me was an academic from Mitra’s department at Newcastle University. She was well versed in Indian education, and went on to talk at length about feckless third world teachers and state schools, but she was also scathing about the hole-in-the-wall research, not only the research methods and conclusions. This made me more than a little curious. Sugata Mitra is treated by the educational world as some sort of saint. Otherwise smart and reasonable people go gaga for Mitra. Hailed as the ‘hole-in-the-wall hero’, few question his questionable research or even more questionable recommendations. Academics, who would go to the wall to defend the ‘lecture’, will hail the idea of replacing schools with hole-in-the-wall computers, not of course in their own institutions but certainly for poor people. Now I’ve spent the whole of my adult life creating and evangelising online learning but even I draw a line at his utopian vision. Here’s why I have doubts.

1. Funding.

Few realise that hole-in-the-wall funding came originally from from NIIT then the International Finance Corporation, a commercial Indian e-learning company and the for-profit side of the World Bank. I know them well and believe me, this is no charitable institution. As Arora (2010) points out, there is little real independent evidence, other than that provided by HiWEL itself and one must always question research funded by those who would benefit from a positive outcome. The lack of independent research on the sites is astonishing, something noted by Mark Warschauer, one of the few critics who have actually visited a site.

2. Holes in the research

Arora exposed a glaring weakness in the design of the experiment. The 75 days of learning (with a mediator) was compared to the same period in the local school but like was not being compared to like, so the comparison was meaningless. It was not comparing the amount of time spent on the hole-in-the-wall material with the same or similar amount of time in school. This is also true of Mitra's compadre at MIT Negroponte in his Ethiopian work.

3. School in disguise?

“Schools are obsolete” said Mitra – oh yeah? Far from being sited in open places, HiWEL sites are now invariably in school compounds. By being in the school it is difficult to do research that isolates the experience from the school, difficult to disentangle the role of the school (teachers, books etc.) and the hole-in-the-wall computers. Indeed, as HiWEL has explained, they involve ‘teachers’ in their implementation and mediation, making it almost impossible to isolate the causes of educational improvement. One could say, with Arora, that this has become “self-defeating”. The ‘hole-in-the-wall’ has become the ‘computer-in-the-school’. This is a subtle switch - evangelise on one premise, deliver on another.

4. Mediators

As HiWEL makes extensive use of mediators (teachers), the real lesson of the hole in the wall experiments is that teachers, or at least mediators, seem to be a necessary condition for learning to combat exclusion, mediate learning and avoid the vagaries of child-centred behaviour. Yet this is not really what the TED talks and hole-in-the-wall evangelism suggests. Another problem is that by seeing teachers as ‘invasive’, such initiatives can antagonise teachers and educators, leading to poor-support. Arora concludes are that these experiments do not work when not linked to the local schools and that, far from being self-directed, the children need mediation by adults. Arora goes further and claims that disassociating learning from adult guidance can lead to uncritical acceptance of bad content and bad learning habits.

5. Low level learning

Warschauer (2003) is even more critical than Arora. He claims that “overall the project was not very effective”, with low level learning and not challenging. In addition, he found that some of the many problems were the fact that the internet rarely functioned, no content was provided in Hindi, the only language the children knew, and many parents thought that the paucity of relevant content rendered it irrelevant and criticised the kiosks as distracting the children from their homework. Sure they learned how to use menus, drag and drop but most of the time they were “using paint programs or playing games”. This is hardly surprising and seems to confirm the rather banal conclusion that when you give kids shiny new things, they play with them.

6. Peer pressure

Notice two things about this image – no girls and big boys at the screen. You get an odd skew in the data based on the fact that the few successes tell you nothing about the absent children, that got nowhere near the kiosks – these missing children turn out to be the many, not the few, and lot of girls. We should be careful about saying, like Mitra, that schools are obsolete, as they are our best bet in providing universal access and participation. Unmediated peer learning among children can be difficult as “self-organising children” are rarely optimal learning groups. Indeed, they are more commonly, narrowly defined peer groups, built around class, background, locale, a musical style, fashion, even power. The school playground is a competitive space that many children fear. It is, for many, a place of social isolation and exclusion. Most teachers and parents have experienced the evils of self-organised ‘peer groups’ not just on terms of pressure but also of exclusion and bullying. Indeed Arora (2005) has evidence that boys playing games was the real net outcome in Andhra Pradesh.

7. Educational colonialism. Mitra has been criticised for a form of educational colonialism. Who among you in the developed world would abandon all teaching and install ‘hole-in-the-wall’ learning for your own children? We are being asked to believe that the solution to the lack of opportunities in third world education are computers in walls? Are we really going to dangerously divert funding from rural schools into these schemes? Is this poorly designed research and exaggerated conclusions, from an educational department in a European University, used to justify an approach to education that no parent, even in impoverished countries, would consider for one minute? If Mitra has children, I wonder if he’s allowing them to learn in this way?

Conclusion - a little learning is indeed a dangerous thing

Based on scanty evidence, funded by parties who have a lot to gain then shifted away from hole-in-the-wall to computers-in-schools. Like Slumdog Millionaire, the movie inspired by Mitra’s work, it beggars belief. There’s no silver bullet here and we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking this is the answer. The real danger is that we get carried away by under-researched ‘feelgood’ initiatives. Slumdog Millionaire is typical of the utopian nonsense that can emerge. An overly romanticised, rags to riches, Bollywood Cinderella story that is an assault on probability. Is Mitra’s story also one of ‘Slum chic’? Perhaps the most disgustingly contrived moment of the film is when Jamal says 'You wanted to see the real India' and the US tourist, hands him a $100 note saying ‘Now we'll show you the real America'. This, for me, was reminiscent of the TED Prize.

Bibliography
Arora, P. (2010), Hope-in-the-Wall? A digital promise for free learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41: 689–702. http://www.payalarora.com/Publications/Arora-HopeintheWall.pdf

Koseoglu, S. (2011). The hole in the wall experiments: Learning from self-organizing systems. Retrieved from http://umn.academia.edu/SuzanKoseoglu

Mitra, S., & Rana, V. (2001). Children and the Internet: Experiments with minimally invasive education in India. British Journal of Educational Technology, 32 (2), 221-232.

Mitra, S. (2003). Minimally invasive education: A progress report on the ‘Hole-in-the-wall’ experiments. The British Journal of Educational Technology, 34 (3), 367-371.

Mitra, S. (2005). Self organising systems for mass computer literacy: Findings from the 'hole in the wall' experiments. International Journal of Development Issues, 4 (1), 71-81.

Mitra, S. (2006). The Hole in the Wall: Self-organising systems in education. Noida, UP: TataMcGraw Hill.

Mitra, S. (2009). Remote presence: ‘Beaming’ teachers where they cannot go. Journal of Emerging Technology and Web Intelligence, 1 (1), 55-59.

Mitra, S., Dangwal, R., & Thadani, L. (2008). Effects of remoteness on the quality of education:A case study from North Indian schools. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24 (2), 168-180.

Mitra, S., & Dangwal, R. (2010). Limits to self-organising systems of learning - The Kalikuppamexperiment. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41 (5), 672-688.

Warschauer, M. 2003. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Warschauer, M. 2009. ‘Digital literacy studies: Progress and prospects’. In The Future of Literacy Studies, edited by Baynham, M; Prinsloo, M. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 123–140.

Too cool for school: 7 reasons why tablets should NOT be used in education

2013-02-24T13:16:00.002Z

Do pupils buy them? NO

I'm writing this on that netbook. I have an iPad but wouldn’t dream of using it for research, note taking, writing or business. It’s used in our house as a sort of look-up device, more ‘search, see and watch’ than ‘write, create and work’. My kids never use it. When I asked them if any of their mates had bought one, they laughed. No way, “Well pricy for what it is – they all have laptops”. They want something for Facebook, email, sound/video editing, games, coding and bitorrent. Of my two sons, one has a Macbook, the other a juiced up PC. I never use it as I’m mostly writing and communicating – it’s just too awkward and limited.

Do students buy them? NO

Beyond school, college & university students seem to prefer laptops, again for note-taking, essay writing and so on. They want the flexibility of a full-milk computer, not a ‘look-good’ consumer device. Our lecture halls are not full of tablets. Students research, communicate and, above all, need to write substantial amounts of text, even code. Tablets don't do it for them.

Do employees use them? NO

Then there’s the workplace. I’ve yet to see a workplace that has decided to standardise on IPads or tablets, unless it’s for esoteric reasons around ‘agency’ image. Again, at work, people want full-milk, networked computers that allow them to do functional tasks, quickly. When I see an iPad in the workplace it’s usually in the hands of an older person at meetings, where they finger-peck notes (slowly), struggle to download documents and spreadsheets, and are often the very people who demand paper copies of all the working papers before the meeting. I’m happy with my £299 netbook and no paper.

So why this rush to get iPads and tablets into schools?

Putting aside this buying evidence, why the obsession with iPads? I don’t buy the arguments and wouldn’t buy the kit. If, like me, you see education as producing autonomous people who can create a life where they feel confident with technology, gather skills in its use and get the most out of it at home and work, an iPad or tablet is an odd choice and here’s why….

1. Writing

Core to primary, secondary and tertiary education is the basic skill of writing. Children need to be encouraged to write a lot to learn, whether it is note taking, assignments, reports, data manipulation, creative writing or essays. Touch-screen keyboards are awkward with high error rates and the process of storing, networking and printing from iPads is tortuous. This takes us back to the Victorian slate, indeed it is worse than a slate. I have one and find it easier to write on the slate than type into an iPad. Interestingly, you may hold young learners back from writing by providing a device that is so hostile to its creation. To respond by saying that you can buy keyboards for tablets is to admit defeat. It’s saying tablets only work when you turn them into laptops. And the additional costs?

2. Creative work

Tablets are for content consumption, laptops content creation. Just because things look good on an iPad doesn’t mean they’re easy to make on an iPad. The tools of creation in most trades and areas of art and design are very different from the tools of delivery. Try using Photoshop or Illustrator or 3D Studio on a tablet. Try doing pixel by pixel selection, layers and pinpoint adjustments. The screen is simply not big enough for this sort of work. It’s a hand held device not a working tool. Tablets are rare in the world of work and the writing, keyboard skills and skills with tools you may need in the real world of work are unlikely to be learnt on an iPad.

3. IT/ICT/Coding

Whatever the aims of learning IT/ICT/coding in schools, I don’t think the iPad or tablets are appropriate. Learning how to manipulate a spreadsheet on an iPad is painful. Learning to code, ridiculous. Who in their right mind would use touchscreen to code, which involves lots of detailed writing, deleting, inserting as well as a more open environment.

4. Consumer not learning device

Above all, the iPad is a CONSUMER device, read not write. It has a role in learning, especially with pre-school and early years children but beyond that there is no serious argument for large scale investments in tablets. The proof is that when real school kids and students buy computers, they do not buy tablets. They buy computers, netbooks and laptops.

5. Teacher unfriendly

Here’s a school that swapped its laptops for iPads and wantsto switch back, “the staff room is full of regret” and teaching problems were clear. Technically they proved a nightmare. Many teachers and teacher resources are in Word and Powerpoint, which has proved a problem in some schools. Some teachers have had to resort to remoting content, leaving you open to connection problems. There were also problems with the iPads 4:3 output on screens and web/proxy filters. But the big one is storage and the lack of a USB port. This means using more complicated methods such as Dropbox with all the attendant problems. It is not a teacher-friendly device. Without a deep understanding of software and teacher-needs, the advantages for learners may go unrealised.

6. Expensive

iPads are expensive to buy and repair, and are difficult in terms of networking and peripherals. They are designed to be used casually in the home, not in school, the lab or classroom. This is born out in Honywood Community Science School, a recently formed Academy, that bought 1200 iPads at a cost of £500,000 where half are now broken. So there’s a real question over the robustness of the technology in a school and in school bags, where they get knocked, dropped and scratched. What’s more, 20% of those sent for repair were on their second trip, some on their third. Although parents were asked to pay £50, the devices cost £400 each and there seemed to be a problem with getting pupils to look after something which they hadn’t bought. The true cost, when one adds actual repair costs will prove very high indeed.

7. Vanity projects

A very knowledgeable person, who attended a high-level Government meeting that arranged to get tablets into schools, told me that it was painful and shambolic. The school got its donated tablets from the global IT company and they were duly delivered to the school, where the Headteacher hid them from the teachers. The whole exercise was a case study in how NOT to use technology in schools i.e. buy a load of cool kit, deliver it in boxes and hope for the best. This is the danger with tablet projects, the driver is rarely a full needs analysis on the most appropriate technology and that people are driven by Apple hype or Apple fanboy advisors. We need to avoid bandwagon, vanity projects that assume what’s consumer cool for adults is cool for school.

I’ve spent the whole of my adult life encouraging the use of technology in learning but want to make sure that we don’t repeatedly shoot ourselves in the feet with projects that have not taken the above seven points into consideration. To be honest I’m not at all sure about shoehorning technology into classrooms. Let teachers teach or if you do introduce this stuff – use a good portion of budget for teacher training.

Conclusion

Good technology always has an allure and iPads have tons of allure, but it’s an allure that appeals to adults not children. I can see a use for tablets with young children 3-9 and perhaps in special needs. Once beyond the basics of play, the iPad is a luxury that schools cannot afford. Neither are they desirable in terms of the type of learning that schools largely deliver. These initiatives are often technology and not learning-led.

Note that this is not an attack on iPads and tablets. I bought one and like it. It’s a set of arguments against their use in education. Learners at school, college and university do not buy them with their own money. Neither do they use them when given the choice. Even if they were provided, they are largely inappropriate for writing, tools, IT/ICT/coding and other curriculum tasks. That’s because they are essentially output, not input, consumer devices, read not write, with an emphasis on consumption, not creation. Teacher friendly they are not.
PS
I'm conscious that I may be missing something here and keen to hear about research on actual improvements in attainment, as opposed to qualitative surveys and questionnaires.

Sperling: most important man you’ve maybe never heard of in online learning

2013-02-22T15:38:00.001Z

John Sperling (92) is my sort of guy. Dirt poor background, 50s beatnik, merchant seaman, activist and self-made billionaire, who founder of the University of Phoenix in 1973, one of the most successful educational organisations in the world, built on a mixture of online learning and traditional course delivery. As they say of education “If you want to move a graveyard, don’t expect much help from the occupants!” Sperling understood this and as a maverick educator and pioneer in adult and vocational learning, opened up a challenge to traditional education.

You’ve got to love a man who became an entrepreneur at 53, campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis, funds longevity and environmental research, funded the first cloned cat and contributed large amounts of money to the Obama campaign.

Jumped ship

Sperling was born into a poor background, dyslectic and was seriously ill as a child, spending six months in bed. He became a seaman, shipyard worker then academic and trade-unionist. Unsatisfied with being a professor at San Hose State University, he started to create vocational courses but became disillusioned with the view that a University didn’t need more students. At this point he decided to jump ship.

University of Phoenix

Sperling came late to education and resented the traditional model that sees the 18 year-old undergraduate as the archetypical learner. He was also critical of the poor pedagogy and teaching in traditional Universities and wanted to create a modern institution that focused on the student, with new models of teaching. So he cleverly grabbed the University of Phoenix brand and from those ashes created one of the largest Universities in the world.

Faced with ferocious, and as he describes it ‘mean-spirited’, opposition from all quarters of the educational establishment, he forged ahead. This was long before the internet matured but Sperling spotted the opportunity to learn online and built systems that fuelled the growth of the University of Phoenix, which had to fight against traditional educational detractors, even to survive. The success of the project in student numbers, output and business terms has all but silenced these sceptics.

Unusually, for a billionaire, he is left-leaning and driven by a passion for helping poor students get education and jobs. It was Sperling who opened up the educational landscape in the US and elsewhere, so that 12% of all US undergraduates are at private universities and take up 24% of grants for low-income students. In The Great Divide: Retro Vs. Metro America we see a highly political animal, fighting for the Democratic Party and against the old racial, ethnic, religious, political and geographical divides in the US.

Learning from Sperling

What can we learn from Sperling?

Innovation comes from outside. Innovation in education tends to come from outsiders. Sperling was a maverick who succeeded because he was not hidebound by tradition and institutional inertia. With the objectivity of the outsider who entered the system with some worldly experience, he felt it was narrow, overly-academic, had poor pedagogy and not at all meritocratic. Education is a slow learner and needs to be hurried along by external tutors.

Technology scales. He showed that technology, within reason and in a blended context, was the key to reducing cost, personalising learning and capable of meeting the need of students who didn’t want to be campus-bound. Most pedagogic advances have indeed been made from technology, such as search (Google), crowdsourced knowledge (Wikipedia), video instruction (YouTube) and so on. Sperling was among the first to apply online technology to volume courses in Higher Education.

Higher Ed is NOT just about 18 year olds. Adult learning (lifelong learning) has come of age and the 18 year old undergraduate is no longer the sole model for Higher education. Sperling, came to tertiary education late and saw how poorly he was treated. Convinced that there was a mass market in vocational and adult education, he created one of the largest universities in the world, largely on the back of the promise of employment.

Vocational learning matters. Mass youth and graduate unemployment has taken root in many countries around the world and governments now recognise that an educational system too weighted towards academic subjects may do as much harm as good. Economies with a good blend of academic and vocational, such as Germany and some countries in the Far East flourish, while those that have the dead hand of history on their education systems falter. Everyone has to leave school sometime and to leave vocational learning poorly funded is a mistake,

Criticism

The University of Phoenix, with over 500,000 students, is now part of the Apollo Group, an international private educational group, that owns BPP in the UK, and universities in Chile and Mexico. But it is not without its critics.

The University of Phoenix, and its clones in private education, have been accused of luring unsuitable candidates into courses that prove unsuitable, resulting in high drop-out rates. The result is large numbers of students saddled with debt, that don’t end up with any real advantage in the job market. Sperling has responded, by some pretty tough lobbying in Washington, arguing that his model enfranchised huge numbers of people and that drop-out is common in many traditional educational institutions, and that one would expect it to be higher in his demographic.

In his book For-profit Higher Education: Developing a World Class Workforce (1997), a look at three types of funded education; 1) public, 2) not-for-profit and 3) for-profit, he gave an analysis that showed public and not-for-profit education incurred state costs of several thousand dollars a year, compared to the gains of several hundreds of dollars a year for students from for-profit organisations. This is an interesting analysis in that it attempts to lay bare the complete (and complex) cost model. Sperling has a PhD in Economics from Cambridge and understands the cost variables that are often quietly ignored by those justifying ever-higher levels of state funding in education. This has turned into a complex, but healthy, debate in the US around the true cost of education, including drop-out rates, defaults on loans, lost opportunity costs and so on, something that is starting to happen elsewhere in the world, as debt-driven, economic woes stalk the planet. Whatever, your political beliefs, it is vital we address the true economics of education, to optimise the system as we go forward.

Conclusion

Sperling is a provocateur, constantly at odds with the establishment views on education and other topics but has always been committed to students from poor backgrounds. His principles include; ignoring your detractors, taking ‘bet-your shirt’ risks, challenging authority and never setting a goal. This unorthodox approach to education and business has broken the mould and shown that online education works on scale for adults who won’t or can’t conform to traditional timetables and courses. As one of the most successful examples of online learning on the planet Sperling is a true innovator in online learning.

Bibliography

Sperling, John (1997). For-profit Higher Education: Developing a World Class Workforce. Transaction Publishers, U.S.

Sperling, John (2000). Rebel With a Cause. Transaction Publishers, U.S.

Sperling, John (2005). The Great Divide: Retro Vs. Metro America. Polipoint Press.

http://www.phoenix.edu/

Prensky: game on - digital natives, immigrants and aliens

2013-02-21T17:04:00.001Z

Mark Prensky is a lively New Yorker and ex-teacher who set the pace on the use of games in learning with his evangelistic book Digital Game-Based Learning (2001). Prensky claims that today's educators/trainers and learners are from separate worlds. Sure, learners have a short attention span nowadays - for the old ways of learning! His point is that the old ways are inappropriate for the new generation of learners. His argument is that games make learning cool. School and most learning experiences are not cool.

Digital natives’ versus ‘Digital immigrants’

Yes, it was Prensky who was responsible for this useful, and some claim, overused phrase. These terms have become commonplace and Marc has done a great deal to make them common currency in the learning field. Digital natives are those who grew up with computers, texting, searching, games consoles and thrashing about in software – the twitch generation. Digital immigrants are those who have had to enter their world and learn about them later in life. Then there’s the often forgotten, but not uncommon Digital aliens are those who remain outside of the system.

There has been much criticism of this distinction as being too black and white, encouraging the view that all young people have full, online, literacy skills, which they clearly do not. However, the distinction is a useful heuristic device in that it points to the obvious generational shift in terms of the commonplace use of online technology, especially computer games. There has been a demographic switch and demonstrably higher use of technology by younger people. They literally learn technology skills at a very young age, such as texting, posting, messaging and increasingly the use of cameras and images. His arguments about context are clear.

Some prefer the generational distinctions, so loved by marketeers, and argue that these are better researched, such as generation and Milennials. However, many of the critics are academics, like Michael Wesch, who see digital literacy in terms of research not search, citations not everyday use. They claim, astoundinglt, that there is no real difference. This is not born out by the usage stats on social media, txting, gaming and use of mobile devices. Since the debate we have seen the Arab Spring, where social media is now seen as a necessary condition for success, and the massive rise of global social media and mobile penetration.

To be fair Marc has moved on and his redefinition towards ‘Digital Wisdom’ has tackled some of the older criticisms. His argument is that education has a problem with relevance, context and audience. The curriculum, he believes, is antiquated, the world for which students are taught has irreversibly changed to include both personal and workplace technology and the students have new experiences and different expectations.

A more interesting debate lies around the prescriptive need to use technology in learning, to meet these expectations. Bennett (2008) in the British Journal of Educational technology, argued that there is no such need. However, it is Bennett, not Prensky,who makes the Manichean claim of an ‘insurmountable gap’. Her ‘Australian’ claims about low access by primary school children (less than 5%) is unsupported and at odds with the real data. She claims that it is difficult to get data on access, it is not. We know a great deal about who has access to what device, where and their use. Digital technology gives you a surplus of useful, automatically gathered data. In her search for an absolute set of activities practiced by all young people, she sets the bar so high that she is bound to fail. This is a clear case of firig an arrow, then drawing a cahlak cirle round it to say you've hot the target. Sure, there’s variation in use but we know a great deal about this. Take two examples, texting and Facebook. There will be a distribution curve for use of these activities and it is undoubtedly skewed towards younger demographics, similarly with game playing.

I’m with Prensky on this. We have seen huge changes in pedagogy, especially since 2000, with search (Google), crowdsourced knowledge bases, video (Wikipedia), audio (podcasts), hyperlinks and social media. These are all radical pedagogic shifts that require new skills. To suggest that we do not need to change the target and method of teaching is quite simply wrong.

Games and motivation

The real power in the book comes from the arguments he gathers on motivation, and using game techniques to improve learning. Games' designers know a lot about motivation. They have to - or their games won't sell. There is, therefore, real mileage in taking the magic dust of game design and sprinkling it on learning.

His analysis of what makes games tick is exemplary and matched by a similarly strong analysis on learning in relation to simulations. The difficulty, however, is in bringing these two worlds together, and Prensky is not entirely convincing in making these two worlds congruent. Games may not be as widely applicable in education and training as he imagines.

Light on the downside

As one would expect, and as with any book that takes a single, strong line - traditional learning bad, games good – he is light on arguments against games in learning. These include: violence, gender gaps, distractive elements, extra cognitive effort, disappointment and a whole raft of arguments against the use of games in reflective, higher forms of learning.

For example, it is quite difficult to argue that the violence in games has no effect whatsoever on players, then argue that games make great sense for behavioural change, for example in military simulations. Why has the military spent so much on games, simulations and even a free downloadable game with over a million players if it has no psychological effect?

This is a dimension to the 'games in learning' debate that is often underestimated by the games evangelists. Games often have no educational value, and, even worse, can distract, disappoint or even destroy learning.

Distraction - if the learning objectives are not congruent with the game objectives you run a real danger of distracting learners from the learning. Learners become obsessed with progress, scores and other non-learning components in the game, to the detriment of the content. Even in real computer games, players will go to enormous lengths to obtain cheats.

Disappointment - this is a danger where the learner is set up to experience a game which actually turns out to be a rather weak affair. Children brought up on a diet of blockbuster real-time games are often bored by poorly designed educational games.

Destruction - in some cases, games can even destroy learning. This is the argument put forward by Postman. If game-playing induces an expectation that learning must always be an amusing experience, then setting such an expectation risks producing the opposite effect in contexts where amusement is absent. In this way, a games-based approach might undermine other more traditional forms of education and training.

However, it is a matter of pay-offs. The advantages of motivation, learning through failure, level structures, simulations, constant feedback and repeated practice may outweigh the disadvantages. More recenctly we have seen an emphasis on gamification that takes a more measured approach to the use of gaming in learning, taking scoring and some strong pedagogic features of games to sue in learning experiences.

Conclusion

Some also argue that games may turn out a generation with better IQs, better skills, more attuned to technology with a more enlightened learner-centric attitude towards learning than any previous generation. Many also argue that we should harness the strength of games, while setting their weaknesses to the side. In any case Prensky was a pioneer and tireless campaigner for games in learning.

Bibliography

Prensky M. (2001) Digital Game-Based Learning

Prensky M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (From On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001)

Prensky M. (2006) Don't Bother Me Mom - I'm Learning Paragon Press

Prensky M. (2010) Teaching Digital Natives—Partnering for Real Learning Corwin Press

Prensky M. (2012) From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom: Hopeful Essays for 21st Century Learning

Prensky M. 920120 Brain Gain:Technology and the Quest for Digital Wisdom

Bennet S (2008) Journal of Educational technology vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 775-786, 2008

Marc’s home page

http://www.games2learn.com/

Nielsen: When online goes bad - Flash 99% bad, eyetracking data, bad internal search

2013-02-19T11:44:00.002Z

Jakob Nielsen, a Dane, has long campaigned for better usability on the internet. A ferocious critic of excessive and self-absorbed web design, especially Flash, and highly critical of designers who see the medium as a mere form of expression, rather than performing real acts of communication and learning, he offers sage advice on best practice is based on actual user responses (thinking aloun and eyetracking).

Best practice

A key concept for Nielsen is consistency. Users, he claims, crave for consistency. They expect to learn how to use a website or piece of online learning, but don’t expect to worry about the rules changing. The unexpected breaks the user’s confidence in the system making them feel insecure. This is especially destructive in online learning, where the cognitive dissonance disrupts the learning experience. In general, what’s important for Nielsen in screen interfaces is:

Easy to learn

Efficiency

Memorability

Low error rate

Satisfaction

This is why it is important to test, through voiced user trials. Users matter as users are either your customers or learners. Annoy them or switch them off any you switch off revenue or learning.

Eyetracking

As readers scan screen text, far more than they scan written text, Nielsen advises corrective techniques:

subheads

bulleted lists

highlighted keywords

short paragraphs

a simple writing style

de-fluffed language devoid of marketese

His later three year, eyetracking trials confirmed how little text people actually read on websites. Heat maps and gaze plots were used to recommend best practice on page layout, menus, site elements, images and advertising. This was a more objective form of user-watching, and ‘thinking aloud’ which has remained his primary method of testing for over two decades.

Flash 99% BAD

His famous ‘Flash: 99% Bad’ article characterised Flash as a usability disease. He does not criticise the tool itself, only its tendency to work against usability. Flash makes things unusable for three main reasons.

First, it encourages design abuse through gratuitous animation. Since we can make things move, why not make things move? It’s not that animation has no role to play, only that, on the whole, it’s a distraction. Interestingly, this was backed up in detailed research by Mayer. Animation takes up useful cognitive attention and distracts from learning unless it is relevant and purposeful.

Second, it reduces the granularity of user control, reverting to presentation type sequences. Flash sequences at the start of websites are among the most indulgent and annoying feature of the web. This also annoys users and learners and contributes to users switching off attention.

Third, non-standard interfaces are introduced and not easy to use by users and learners who are used to more common conventions. True and disturbing.

These usability problems are not inherent in Flash and use of this tool has improved over the years. Indeed, he developed usability guidelines for Flash (that were mostly ignored). His position remains as follows, “The problem with most Flash is that it’s irrelevant and gets in the way of users. The download time is only one of the many problems, and even with instantaneous download, users prefer to visit sites that contain more straightforward content.

However, much Flash design continues to encourage these types of abuse. In the end Flash, like many proprietary tools, has become a cul-de-sac and seems to be on the way out. It arose because of the weaknesses of HTML, especially in not supporting video. Then, with Apple declaring war on Flash, and Google getting on board, we’ve gone through a period of black squares and requests for plug-ins. HTML5 now means that coders do not have to rely on Adobe’s Flash or Shockwave to achieve results. Mobile has also led to the abandonment of Flash. Nielsen is not the only one that will not be sorry.

Accessibility

Nielsen’s study on Disabled Accessibility: The Pragmatic Approach, showed that accessibility problems should come as no surprise, ‘After all, countless usability studies of websites and intranets have documented severe usability problems, low success rates, and sub-optimal user performance, even when testing users with no disabilities.’ In general, improving accessibility improves usability, which in turn improves performance, leading to cost benefits and savings.

The value of Jakob Nielsen’s prioritised approach is that he undertook real accessibility trials of websites with users with several different types of disabilities on a range of assistive technologies, including a control group. His conclusions could be said to run against the grain, in that he recommends a pragmatic, gradual approach to making existing websites (and online learning) accessible. His advice has largely been ignored by an over-prescriptive approach to accessibility, whereas most have quietly adopted his pragatic approach.

Criticism

It can be argued that users also want aesthetic and other effects which enhance their experience when using screen-based interfaces. His ‘ideal’ websites and home pages do leave one underwhelmed. So they have a point, especially in learning, where motivation and sustained attention are important. There are many tribes in web and online learning design – usability experts. Like Krug, Norman and Nielsen, learning experts, graphic artists, who treasure their aesthetic and design judgements, coders and the customer, who often wants to impress their bosses (and users) with something that looks, well ‘flash’. Most websites and online learning are therefore compromises.

Yet, his work remains relevant, especially in pointing to the excesses of elaborate design. He’s not arguing for ugly content, only usable content. He has no problem with using readable fonts, especially for longer pieces of text. Few notice that Arial is the default font in Wikipedia but it is, and with good reason. On the whole, readers tend to prefer non-serif fonts like Arial, Verdana or Tahoma for screen text. Nielsen’s point is that, in the end, it’s users that matter and successful businesses, like Google and Amazon, keep things simple.

Bad internal search

He claims that the biggest fault in contemporary web design is bad internal search. Poor headlines and page summaries are another bugbear. He feels that too little of the budget is spent on this feature. I have to agree. What users enter into your search box is perhaps the most important data you can gather. It shows what users, and not designers, really want.

Conclusion

Nielsen is not afraid to challenge those who see the internet as a medium for designers as opposed to users. His user-centred research confirms, time and time again, that real people want simpler, more consistent and less elaborate models and content. His advice, informed as it is by research, is invaluable for e-learning and web designers alike. But we should be cautious about seeing everything solely through the Puritan eyes of the usability expert as there are other qualities that matter in some contexts. On the whole however, he’s just plain right.

Bibliography

Nielsen J. (1990) Hypertext and Hypermedia (1990)

Nielsen J. (1993) Usability Engineering (1993)

Nielsen J. (1999) Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

Nielsen J. (2001) Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

Nielsen J. (2006) Prioritizing Web Usability

Nielsen J. (2008) Eyetracking Web Usability

Nielsen J. (2012) Mobile Usability

http://www.nngroup.com/

Norman: tech should be 'invisible' in learning

2013-02-18T14:44:00.001Z

Let's face it we all have problems in using technology and software. My own pet hate is screen projectors, I'm sure you can name a few. This space between humans and technology is messy. Donald Norman’s touchstone for successful technology is that it should be invisible, intuitive and so easy to use that we can focus on the real task. Technology must conform to human needs, not the other way around. We must therefore use ‘user-centred design’ to humanise technology. This is true ergonomically but also true of interfaces which should render technology invisible.

Usability and learning

Usability, or user-centric design, is critical in online learning, as the crippling restraints of working memory mean that any cognitive overload or unnecessary cognitive effort on navigation will, by definition, squeeze out or delay learning. I see this time and time again with confusing menus, icons, whizzy graphics and unnecessary clutter. Distractions destroy attention, so confusion in navigation and usability undercuts learning.

Technology first, invention second, needs last

Although Norman is an academic, he believes that technology drives progress in user interfaces and design, providing lots of incremental changes in functionality and usability. He is no believer in ethnographic oracademic studies that attempt to find out what people do and want. In this sense he is a follower of Brian Arthur and believes that ‘science, engineering and tinkerers’ produce the real progress. Research should focus on user-centred research on actual devices to make improvements, not try to define the future.

The Psychology of Everyday Things

Norman made his name with The Psychology of Everyday Things, where he takes a wry look at product design in everyday objects such as computers, telephones, car windows, dashboards, doors etc. to show good and bad practice. It’s full of examples explaining why people push when they should pull, click the wrong buttons and generally fail to complete the simplest of everyday tasks with physical and online technology.

Don’t keep user in dark

His advice is straightforward and has plenty of relevance in online learning and web design. His first rule is ‘Design for usability’. Usability, or ease of use, is paramount. Don’t make navigation difficult. Make things visible – don’t keep the user in the dark. A good example of how this goes wrong is the poor use of icons in navigation. Programmes sometimes have graphics that look like icons but are not active, merely illustrative. You click on them and nothing happens. Even worse, you may click on an image or icon and something unexpected happens.

Mapping

Mapping is another of his principles in design. To steer a car you turn the wheel to the right to go right and left to go left. This is mapping. Apply this to navigation on the screen. To go forward the arrow should face to the right and left to go back. Pull fingers a[part on touch screens to enlarge, pull together to reduce in size. In general, in navigation, feedback (another Norman design principle) is also important. You need to know when you’ve arrived at a destination.

Use conventions & coherence

In his later works, such as The Invisible Computer he tackles, not objects, but computer interfaces. How do new users understand what to do? First, follow conventional usage, both in the choice of images and the allowable interactions. Convention can constrain creativity, but on the whole, unless we follow the major conventions, we usually fail. Those who violate conventions, even when they are convinced that their new method is superior, are doomed to fail. You cannot successfully introduce a non-qwerty keyboard today, or reverse the window scroll bar convention. For better or for worse, human culture changes slowly, if at all.

Use words to describe the desired action (e.g. ‘click here’ or use labels in front of perceived objects). Words alone cannot solve the problem, for there still must be some way of knowing what action and where it is to be done. This requires a convention of highlighting, or outlining, or depiction of an actionable object. It is also well known that single word labels fail for most people. Thus, road signs often use graphics - an international standard on road sign graphics exists.

Follow a coherent conceptual model so that once part of the interface is learned, the same principles apply to other parts. Coherent conceptual models are valuable and necessary, but there still remains the bootstrapping problem; how does one learn the model in the first place? Use conventions, words, and metaphors to increase invisibility.

3 forms of emotional design

Do screen projectors, alarm-clock radios, lights in hotel rooms annoy the hell out of you? Have you given up trying to programme your household heating system? Norman sees our emotional responses to design in terms of:

Visceral (appearance)
Behavioural (performance)
Reflective (memories and experience)

Interestingly he thinks Americans value 2 more than 1&3, whereas Europeans, at least the cultural classes, value 1&3. This is fascinating. He claims that different people buy things with different fuel mixtures of the three emotions. Different companies design to different types of emotions. Greta companies deliver all three.

As he explains in Living with Complexity, it is not that technology delivers too much complexity. The fact is, we live in a world of complexity, with complex technologies that do complex things. Live with it – that’s reality. The enemy is not complexity, it is dreadful design. You should not be expected to shake out some salt or pepper on to your hand to determine which cellar contains what. Complexity needs to be tamed, masked or made invisible with good design.

Conclusion

Norman’s books can be a bit trying to read as they jump between different styles and approaches. Nevertheless, they constantly illuminate the design process. A consistent critic of inconsistent and gimmicky web design as well as common mistakes in the design of hardware and interfaces, he was a pioneer in seeing user-centred design as a game changing force, not only in real-world objects, but also on the screen. We are only now starting to see the importance of his advice in online learning and web design with interfaces which are truly invisible in the sense that that they allow learners to learn, avoiding the cognitive effort taken to use a cumbersome interface.

Bibliography

Norman, D. (1986) User Centered System Design

Norman, D. (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things

Norman, D. (1992) Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles

Norman, D. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart

Norman, D. (1994) Defending human attributes in the age of the machine

Norman, D. (1998) The Invisible Computer

Norman, D. (2004) Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

Norman, D. (2007) The Design of Future Things

Norman, D. (2004) Living with Complexity