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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11755300354144905692016-07-24T12:51:12.681+02:00The corridor of uncertaintyAssorted thoughts and reflections on technology in education.Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-54108873156963814902016-07-06T09:23:00.000+02:002016-07-06T09:23:39.888+02:00Roadmaps for online learning

"Navigator" (CC BY 2.0) by Tabsinthe

There is no shortage of trend reports and guides on the future of online learning but sadly too few institutions who are using them as a base for their strategic planning. The challenges ahead for higher education are complex and require new approaches and innovative solutions in a sector that is so deeply rooted in tradition and history. This tradition coupled with the high level of respect and credibility that university qualifications still command makes it all too easy to think that a business-as-usual strategy is the safest course to plot.

The Canadian educational technology support organisation Contact North published earlier this year an excellent trend overview entitled The future of online learning. This describes the increased complexity of today's educational landscape with new actors, models and credentials jostling for attention and challenging the traditional setup. At the same time universities are under increasing financial and regulatory pressure to be more efficient, result-oriented and accountable with a wider than ever range of students with high expectations in terms of personalisation, flexibility and work relevance. The report examines what this means for higher education institutions and notes that a new ecosystem is developing to cater for a much more diversified and demanding target group. The gold standard of the university degree will be challenged and augmented by new types of credentials including micro-credentials like badges. Short and flexible programmes with strong links to workplace experience will allow many to combine work and study without the need to spend several years on campus. This will demand new methods for assessment, recognition of prior learning and the development of new forms of quality assurance. This doesn't mean that the traditional university model is going to be overthrown but it does mean that there will be more alternative paths to learning.

Source: UOC eLearn Center, Witthaus, Padilla, Guàrdia and Campillo (2016, p.6).

An example of how to use these trends and feed them into a university's strategic development is seen in the results of the FUTURA (Future of University Teaching: Update and a Roadmap for Advancement) project. This describes the process of applying trends in online learning to teaching practice and university strategy at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); read more in an article from the UOC's eLearn Center, IDEAS: a new framework for next generation pedagogy.

FUTURA identified pedagogical trends and innovations globally, and analysed related institutional examples. The FUTURA report proposes a framework for describing current and emerging practice in teaching in online higher education under the acronym, IDEAS.

The IDEAS model (explained in the image on the right) provides a sound basis for re-examining pedagogical development at any university and reinforces most of the conclusions of Contact North's analysis. Everything described here is already taking place but mostly in a fragmented way through projects or innovative faculty with few institutions developing a comprehensive strategy. I suspect that the prime movers are distance education universities since their focus is online but campus universities ignore this at their peril.

These alternative paths are already attracting an increasing number of school leavers who are becoming less likely to head straight to university campus. A new article in eCampus News, Could these 3 burgeoning nontraditional pathways be a boon for traditional institutions? describes how many American students are trying one or a combination of the following before considering campus:

a gap year or two with internships and self-directed learning

online studies via open courses

getting hard skills by practical experience

"College costs keep growing and student debt is over one trillion dollars," explained Richard Wang, CEO at Coding Dojo in a statement. "These alternative education options can help keep student debt under control, while providing individuals with real-world experience and skills employers are looking for in job candidates."

Trends are becoming reality though not always in a revolutionary and disruptive way. New opportunities and pathways emerge often largely unnoticed until they reach a level that cannot be ignored. I have previously likened these changes to a glacier; the landscape is being radically changed but the changes and the pace of change are not always evident to those who are standing on the glacier itself. Only when the glacier melts will we see the full extent of the change. Those institutions who realise they are on a glacier and start changing now will be able to meet the challenges ahead. The most dangerous option is business as usual, thinking that the ground under our feet is solid.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-22871574325184598142016-06-30T19:23:00.001+02:002016-06-30T19:23:51.262+02:00How would you like your course?

CC0 Public Domain on Pixabay

Pretty well every MOOC provider today builds in some kind of arena for interaction and collaboration and although many participants still operate in self-study mode there are many who see the course as a networking opportunity and simply learn better in the company of peers. Interaction and collaboration have long been seen as the key to raising the completion rates in MOOCs. The problem is that we all have our own preferences when it comes to interaction; some enjoy synchronous video or audio meetings whilst other prefer asynchronous chat or discussion threads. We also have cultural differences in how willing we are to discuss with strangers and seeing learning as a collaborative process. Add to this the linguistic difficulties many non-native English speakers experince especially when entering an advanced academic discussion with highly eloquent native speakers. Just offering an arena and hoping people will discuss simply doesn't work. But maybe if we first ask the participants how they would like to learn?

A new study from Penn State University, highlighted in an article on Campus Technology, Grouping MOOC Students by Communication Mode Doesnt Help Completion, offered MOOC participants a choice of how they would like to interact with peers in their MOOC and put them into study groups according to those preferences.

A team of seven researchers undertook an examination of participants in a Penn State MOOC, "Creativity, Innovation and Change," which was delivered on Coursera and drew 200,000 people from 190 countries in 2013 and 2014. Volunteers in the course were asked to fill out a pre-course survey online to provide demographic information and designate their learning preferences: Did they prefer to be part of a group that used asynchronous text posts, synchronous text chats, or synchronous video and audio as their primary channels for communication?

The results were not particularly encouraging as far as raising completion rates was concerned but the study does offer new insights into interaction preferences. For example participants over 40 were more likely to complete the course than younger participants and female participants were more interested in study groups than males. Further study in more courses will hopefully be made.

Statistically significant relationships were found between learners' preferred communication modes and their level of English proficiency, gender, level of education, and age. Although placing learners in groups based on their preferences and introducing them to each other did not improve course performance or completion, our findings on preferred communication modes, combined with more formal instruction of how to function as group members may prove to enhance learning and engagement in MOOCs.

Since MOOCs are free and without formal demands it is unlikely that completion rates will ever be particularly high but I'm sure that creating a sense of community is a key factor to helping more participants stay the course. One area that needs to be developed is not just asking about collaboration preferences but providing support on collaborative literacy. Many people simply don't know how to work collaboratively, especially online and some kind of pre-course guide on how to get the most out of your course followed by a choice of participation options could help a lot. Study groups could be offered around synchronous or asynchronous interaction, self-study, geographic location, native language or a mix. Can we somehow offer supportive and safe study groups as a complement to massive openness then maybe that will lead to more people benefitting from this type of education.

Reference
Exploring the communication preferences of MOOC learners and the value of preference-based groups: Is grouping enough? Qing Zhang, Kyle L. Peck , Adelina Hristova, Kathryn W. Jablokow, Vicki Hoffman, Eunsung Park, Rebecca Yvonne Bayeck. Educational Technology Research and Development pp 1-29 (March 2016).Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-64747917638896674412016-06-19T16:17:00.000+02:002016-06-19T16:17:09.079+02:00Where do old MOOCs go when they die?

"Glassford Graveyard" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by JaredEarle

After a MOOC is over the course material and the learners' own material are available for future reference but the the question is for how long? How long can old courses be archived and should there be a best before date? Questions like this have arisen after Coursera's announcement that they are migrating to a new platform. The new platform will certainly offer many new features and better user experience but there is a little catch as outlined in an article on Class Central's blog, Coursera is Removing Hundreds of Courses. Here is a Guide To Get Them While You Can. The old platform will be shut down completely on 30 June and not all courses will be migrated to the new one. Class Central claims that hundreds of courses will be affected whereas Cousera's blog reassures users that losses will be minimal:

There are a few dozen courses on the old platform that will not migrate to the new platform, and thus will not be available after June 30th. These include courses that are out of date (e.g., medicine and technology courses that do not reflect recent research and development breakthroughs), courses that have been updated and relaunched under another title on the new platform, and a few courses that our university partners have chosen to discontinue for other reasons.

The Class Central guide however advises users who want to save the course material and own work from the endangered courses to do so as soon as possible since there is no indication from Coursera as to whether they will be migrated at all. There's a good step-by-step guide for downloading the courses so if you want access to any old Coursera courses, please check the guide as soon as possible.

MOOC critics will certainly voice concerns about the risk of courses and learners' material disappearing like this (though it must be stressed that it is unclear exactly whether the courses will disappear of not). Certainly the risk of all "free" services is that you are at the mercy of the service provider and there is always the risk that terms can change at short notice, price tags get added or the provider goes bust. Coursera are making a major upgrade of their service and have decided, along with the responsible universities, not to migrate courses that are no longer relevant. Maybe MOOC providers should have an archiving policy clearly stating how long material will be available and what rights the participants has in terms of accessing their material after the course is over and making it easy for them to download what they want to keep for the future. Alternatively let the responsible university take care of archiving.

Then again is this so unusual really? How long are students able to keep their LMS log-in after their degree is completed and can they easily download the course material? Universities are legally bound to archive old courses for several years but I'm not sure if any have archiving policies for MOOCs. As long as MOOCs are free and non-credit then maybe you can't expect them to be accessible forever but now that credits and other credentials are being awarded as well MOOCs being presented for recognition of prior learning it's time to develop archiving policies. A course shouldn't simply disappear.Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-70403081711767062512016-06-12T14:26:00.003+02:002016-06-12T14:26:58.158+02:00Taking charge of your professional development

"Los Feliz Charter School - Furniture Ass" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Jory™

For many education professionals competence development is still mostly locked into attending internal training sessions either on campus or at a conference centre before the start of the new academic year. Sometimes these sessions are excellent and many can gain inspiration from them but often they miss the mark. The session can never be relevant for everyone; some already know what is being taught and others find it completely over their heads. Competence development is highly personal and so a classroom approach is always going to fall short. Maybe the most valuable group trining initiatives are workshops on how to take charge of your owbn professional development. Instead of waiting for a suitable on-site course to be arranged we can all benefit from learning how to find educational resources, join communities of practice, develop personal learning networks, find open courses to join amd develop skills in online collaboration. The range of opportunities is vast but sadly very few teachers are aware of them so awareness raising workshops are a good start.

Steven W Anderson writes about this in a recent post, Taking Control Of Your Professional Development. He recommends teachers to widen their horizons by reading educational blogs, attending free webinars, joining Twitter chat sessions and attending edcamps. The links he provides are all USA-oriented but similar resources and communities are available in most countries. The key skill in professional development is learning how to learn online. Professional development is available to all if you know where to find it.

The fact of the matter is educators, no matter their position, can no longer rely on their schools and districts to provide the targeted professional development every educator needs and deserves.

There are of course many more sources of inspiration and here are my additions to Steven's list.

Social networks.
Search for teacher groups on Facebook or Google+, both in your own country and internationally. There are thousands of professional groups that you can join but the trick is to find the ones that are relevant for you and are active. Check the group and see how active it is and whether the discussions are relevant for you before asking to join. Most professional groups are protected to some extent and you have to ask for membership but most let you view their activity without being a member. If the administrator sees that you are serious you will be admitted. Here it is important that you have a good profile description and photo that show you are real. Spammers normally have bizarre profile photos, no friends and no signs of interaction with others.

There are many benefits of participating in such professional groups. You widen your professional network, participate in a wider discussion and if you share your knowledge and help others new opportunities will emerge such as invitations to join a project, develop a course, write an article etc. Many people join communities as passive members but the fact is that the more you put in the more you get out. Get involved and see where it takes you. If the group gets too quiet just leave and find a more lively group. If you're wary of Facebook or Google+ then there are thousands of professional groups and networks on LinkedIn. Just search and join the ones that appeal.

Open courses
There are thousands of free open courses out there and not all are called MOOCs. There are lots of open courses for teacher development and the best place to start is to search on MOOC aggregators like Class Central, EMMA or Openuped where you can find courses from most of the major consortia. Some courses are mostly guided self-study but most offer discussion forums and other opportunities for interaction and once again getting involved means you can build your international contact network. The main thing to remember is not to take these courses lightly. Many demand at least 8 hours of study per week and if you want to learn you need to make an effort. Still too many people assume that an online course is for some strange reason a light option.

There are also many open online courses that don't mention that four-letter acronym, offering both self-study and collaborative models, such as Peer 2 Peer University, OERuniversity, Udemy and many more.

Open educational resources
There is of course a vast range of OER that can provide inspiration and professional development. The difficulty is that all this courseware is distributed over hundreds of repositories and it's hard to make fully aggregated searches. Furthermore OER tend to be single resources that don't link to related material so putting them together into a coherent self-study course structure may not be easy. If you looking for resources in English try searching for "teaching" or "pedagogy" in the Open Education Consortium search function. Another source of lectures and course material from thousands of institutions worldwide is iTunesU and you can download the material free to any device though you first need to download the iTunes app. Furthermore many universities share their lectures and course material on open courseware sites like MIT Open courseware, Open University's Open Learn etc. There are of course similar resource banks in most countries and in many languages.Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-51162040821124205982016-06-06T09:00:00.000+02:002016-06-06T20:15:51.671+02:00When does a MOOC become a regular online course?

"MERGE" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by jlgriffiths

What's the difference between a MOOC and a regular online course? The answer seemed obvious a couple of years ago and most institutions made it very clear that the two should not mix. MOOCs had no entry requirements or tuition fees and only gave certificates of completion, often without even the logo of the university on the certificate, to ensure that they should not be seen by employers as university qualifications. Today, however, as more and more universities are offering MOOCs for credit by offering proctored examinations either on a campus or online, the two forms are beginning to merge. In addition the main consortia are packaging courses into specialisations or nanodegrees with graded final project assignments that lead to new forms of credentials that are not credit equivalent but may form a new layer of credentials below degree level.

University of Leeds and the Open University recently announced that they will be offering MOOCs for credit through the FutureLearn consortium according to an article in the Guardian, Moocs to earn degree credits for first time in UK at two universities. This will costs you a bit but less than taking the course on campus.

To complete programmes that attract an academic credit or offer a qualification, students may have to pay and pass an assessment module. Universities will award credit against the grade achieved which will then count towards a degree ... In the Leeds offering, for example, each course certificate will cost £59 and there are five taught courses; the sixth assessment course, which leads to 10 credits, is priced at £250 – making a total cost of £545 – which will also cover access to online library content.

Arizona State University have a scheme called Global Freshman Academy on the EdX platform giving students the chance to replace their first year of study with a selection of MOOCs and those who pass can then apply to start their campus programme from the start of year two. Here we see MOOCs doing the job of regular online courses so where's the difference? The outcomes and content are converging but the openness of application process is what differentiates the two forms. ASU are opening up entry to study by allowing anyone to start their MOOCs and then seeing who succeeds before accepting them on to year two. Similar thinking lies behind the two UK examples.

Basically regular for-credit courses are starting to absorb some of the MOOC concept. The effect could be that students will be able to test higher education by taking a selection of first year courses and deciding during the course whether they want to take the examination for credit. The selection process is thus moved to the the end of each course. Many will still choose to complete the course without credit as pure competence development whilst others will opt for credit and continue towards full-time study. The entry to university studies can either be a full commitment from the start with full-time campus studies from year one but also an alternative path that is more open and flrxible and most importantly less expensive. Four year campus studies is simply too expensive in many countries and inconvenient for many older students who do not wish to move from their home areas due to work and family. For them any way of cutting the time on campus and increasing flexibility is very welcome.

I expect to see more for-credit courses taking a MOOC approach to recruitment by opening up admission and then allowing the most motivated the option of paying to take the examination. This doesn't mean that regular online courses will simply become like MOOCs but they will adopt some of features just as MOOCs (or whatever they will be called in the future) will adopt many featurs of regular courses. The interest in MOOCs as pure lifelong learning will continue but only if the institutions providing them can find a sustainable financing model and an alignment with the mainstream would seem the safest route.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-81633200855187861942016-05-29T09:00:00.000+02:002016-05-29T09:00:28.512+02:00What do the students think? It depends on what you mean by student.

"DSC_7028" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Kuwait-Ra'ed Qutena

What is a student? Despite the growth in lifelong learning I think the word still conjures up the traditional image of the 18-22 year-old studying on campus. They have invested heavily in the traditional model of higher education and decided to devote 3-5 years of their lives to full-time study where they expect the full package: lectures, tutorials, campus life, parties, network building and hundreds of hours writing essays and reading course literature. This is still how society views higher education but universities today also cater for a rapidly growing number of learners who are well over 25, don't go near a campus and do not even identify themselves as students. These two categories have very different perspectives on learning; one group see their studies as a full-time occupation that they have invested heavily in and the other see their studies as an extra element in their busy lives but not the most important.

So many studies want to measure student attitudes to online learning but it all depends which students you ask. This is clear from a new report by Blackboard, Redefining Value for Online Students, that asked a wide range of students about their experience and views of online courses in comparison to their campus courses. I cannot see whether all those questioned were full-time campus students but from the answers I suspect they were. The answers are summarised in the report as follows:

1. When students take a class online, they make a tacit agreement to a poorer experience which undermines their educational self worth.

2. Students perceive online classes as a loophole they can exploit that also shortcuts the "real" college experience.

3. Online classes don't have the familiar reference points of in-person classes which can make the courses feel like a minefield of unexpected difficulties.

4. Online students don't experience social recognition or mutual accountability, so online classes end up low priority by default.

5. Students take more pride in the skills they develop to cope with an online class than what they learn from it.

6. Online classes neglect the aspects of college that create a lasting perception of value.

The students in the survey repeatedly compare online courses with campus and often focusing on the dangers of self-study such as social isolation and the lower levels of support and group dynamics. Certainly there are plenty of online courses that fit this description but there are also many campus courses that are deficient in similar ways. Well designed online courses can certainly offer an engaging and supportive learning environment where groups can interact both synchronously and asynchronously. Online groups can also become extremely close and many choose to continue their collaboration after the course has ended. Sadly the students in this survey do not seem to have experienced this side of online learning and base their judgements on poorly designed self-study courses.

In my experience many campus students are rather conservative in their attitudes to online learning, probably because they are not the main beneficiaries. They see online courses as a threat to the campus experience they value so highly and are understandably worried that online learning means even less contact with faculty and more self-study. In addition the old reputation of online courses being a poor second choice alternative seems hard to erase. Most online learners however combine study with work, family and a social life that is not based around classmates. They don't identify themselves as students and generally have a fairly low sense of loyalty to the institution offering the course they study. Online studies are their only option and they judge their courses on their own merits rather than comparing them with the full-time campus model.

The conclusions of this study do show that the public image of online education is still rather poor and is still seen by many as a second rate option. Clearly quality can be raised especially in terms of how technology is used to facilitate collaboration, interaction and support. Ironically the reason many online courses are seen as one-way communication and self study (especially many MOOCs) is that many of them have simply adopted the information transfer pedagogy so often used in traditional campus teaching. Digital arenas can actually offer much richer opportunities for collaboration and discussion than physical spaces and when they do so the results are excellent. The fact that many courses fail to fully exploit these features is not the fault of the technology but the low awareness of the opportunities technology can offer.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-40729004629480181692016-05-22T17:59:00.000+02:002016-05-22T17:59:13.496+02:00Cat and mouse - cheating in education

"Cat and Mouse" (CC BY 2.0) by katie_mccolgan

Every week there are reports of cheating in school and university exams and assignments and it's easy for some to inperpret this as a purely modern phenomenon enabled primarily by digital technology. Is cheating really on the rise or has technology enabled us to detect it more easily? What makes people go to such lengths and expenses to cheat the system? A recent revelation here in Sweden showed that some people were paying well over €10,000 to cheat on their university entrance exams. If you have the cash you can get someone else to write your essay for you and they will also guarantee that it will pass any plagiarism detection system. University entrance and qualifications are hard currency and whenever there are clear rewards on the table the temptation to cheat will always be there. It's certainly prevalent in business, politics and sport so it's naive to think that education should be exempt.

Cheating and counter-cheating is becoming a frantic arms race as each side tries to out-trick the other. Online examination proctoring services are flourishing such as Proctor U and Software Secure. These solutions offer secure online examination by locking down the students' computer and using multi-factor identification, screen, webcam and microphone surveillance and keystroke analysis. In the traditional campus exam hall students can now use their laptops but in most cases they are offline, locked into the exam administration system and monitored. However for every new solution to increase exam security there are counter moves from the cheaters. A classic case of cat and mouse.

This cat and mouse game is discussed in a new post by Donald Clark, Lecture, essay, cheat, repeat… plagiarism, why it's endemic and 10 ways to avoid. He sees the traditional reliance on summative assessment as the main problem. Predictable exam questions can easily be memorized and it's easy to get ready-made answers to many common titles, especially if you're willing to pay for it. He suggests several alternatives to summative assessment methods.

Essays are sometimes appropriate assignments if one wants long-form critical thought. But in many subjects shorter, more targeted assignments and testing are far better. There's a lot of formative assessment techniques out there and essays are just one of them. Short answer questions, open-response, formative testing, adaptive testing. I'd argue that student blogs are often better than essays as one can see progress and it's not something that's easy to plagiarise. Truth be told, HE wants it easy, and essays are easy to set. They also have to accept that they are also easy to cheat.
One simple trick Clark suggests is googling your essay question and see if the answers are already out there. We simply have to set assignments that aren't so easy to cheat. If you do set an essay then provide formative assessment by reviewing the drafts to see how the work is progressing. Interviews, face-to-face or video, can give an excellent idea of the student's ability and are very difficult to cheat in. The investment from the teacher's part is often less than that of marking written papers. despite this very few dare to move away from the examination methods that are so clearly easy to cheat. Clark blames institutional inertia and tradition for the situation:

This has reached crisis point. Everyone knows it but there's a conspiracy of silence. Universities are scared to admit the scale of the problem, as they trade on reputation. We've created this monster but institutional inertia is incapable of solving the problem, as they refuses to change.

Clearly no-one benefits from playing cat and mouse and although we'll never eliminate cheating from education there must be better ways of assessing students' ability. The essay or scientific article has for so long been the prime medium of academic communication but maybe we should widen our scope and include other forms of expression for assessment, moving the focus to a richer assessment mix of formative and summative methods as well as using peer assessment and assessment of practical work experience. By widening the focus like this we can at least make cheating extremely difficult.
Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-42399961920731381902016-05-15T11:45:00.001+02:002016-05-15T11:45:38.768+02:00Teaching with robots

"Electric Neuron" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by philosophy_rebel

The potential of big data and learning analytics to radically change our approach to learning and education is moving from the trend reports to practical applications. An article in the Wall Street Journal, Imagine Discovering That Your Teaching Assistant Really Is a Robot, describes how a class at Georgia Tech got prompt and useful feedback in discussion forums from a teaching assistant called Jill Watson and noone realised that she was a robot until the professor revealed the truth at the end of the course. Students post an awful lot of questions and ideas during a course and even if teaching assistants are hired to help with feedback it's hard to keep up. Most student posts require fairly simple responses, often about deadlines, assignment criteria or asking for confirmation that they are on the right track. The motivational effect of getting prompt replies is well documented and today's artificial intelligence can provide this round the clock.

"Our TAs are getting bogged down answering routine questions," said Mr. Goel, noting that students in the class typically post 10,000 messages a semester.
Mr. Goel estimates that within a year, Ms. Watson will be able to answer 40% of all the students' questions, freeing the humans to tackle more complex technical or philosophical inquiries such as, "How do you define intelligence?"

Jill had been rigorously programmed by analysing questions and answers in course forums and was programmed only to respond to questions that "she" had a 97% certainty of an appropriate answer. More advanced questions were left to humans. The only hint that Jill wasn't quite like other teaching assistants was that she was so prompt in answering and never seemed to sleep. The students were all positive about the machine responses and many were convinced that Jill was a highly competent PhD student. The robot assistant was convincing though it would be interesting if students would have been equally positive if they had known from the start that they would have a robot facilitator. Of course we prefer human assistance and we all have experience of less advanced and extremely limited chatbots on commercial websites but the alternative for the students in this case could be much less feedback and longer waits for information.

Artificial intelligence is already taking over many mundane and time-consuming tasks in education. Automated feedback on written assignments has also been tested with positive results (see my post from a couple of years ago) and much more advanced applications are in the pipeline as learning analytics matures. Machine translation and speech-text-speech applications are improving and becoming more reliable. Add these elements to the MOOC model and we get scaleable, personalised, collaborative and flexible education where teacher and machine support complement each other This doesn't mean that we'll all learn solely through digital devices and it doesn't replace face-to-face meetings and interaction (arguments I only hear from tech skeptics). It means that we can widen the reach of education and offer alternative paths, integrating education with work and enabling people to learn without uprooting themselves to a university campus (unless you really want to do that).

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-71344639280958597472016-05-05T08:55:00.000+02:002016-05-05T08:55:51.983+02:00More than three and a tree - What is a university?

"Campus life" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by University of Central Arkansas

The photo above represents the public image of most universities; 18-22 year old students on campus. Practically every university website features photos like this and most see campus as their core business. The trouble is that when every institution uses very similar images matched with very similar slogans and mission statements it becomes very difficult to tell the difference. Is this image really a fair representation of what a university is today and what it could become? An article in Inside Higher Ed called Your Future Starts Here. Or Here. Or Here, pokes gentle fun at stereotyped marketing, referring to a book called Three and a tree published a few years ago.

A college suffers from Three and a Tree (or TAAT) when its brochures feature pictures of "three students of varying ethnicities and gender, dressed head to toe in college-branded merchandise."

The book is a guide to university marketing and offers an escape from the stereotyped and rather shallow approaches still favoured by many today. Since a traditional campus degree is one of the most expensive investments you make in your life you will be looking for a university that offers something special. The vast majority of institutions have interchangeable visions and strategies and so there are enormous gains to be made from more targeted marketing. One particularly interesting proposal is creating a separate web site for recruitment that focuses on the questions that prospective students have. University web sites try to include every aspect of their activities on their website with the result that prospective students drown in information. So the conclusion is to create a dual site university with one student recruitment site plus the main information site for everyone else.

However the book doesn't really tackle the greatest potential market for higher education; professional development and lifelong learning for those well over 22. I haven't seen many websites that integrate images of older students (professional development, distance learners, lifelong learners etc) into their mainstream marketing. The three and a tree imagery still dominates. At many universities today an increasing number of students are very seldom, if ever, on campus though you would never guess that by browsing through the website, the videos or the brochures. This extremely important target group is at best relegated to a sub-heading somewhere in the menus.

So what actually constitutes a university today? It's so much more than just the impressive administrative building, the lawns or the lecture halls. This is discussed in a blog post by Mark Smithers entitled Because universities are more than just girls under trees. He also wants the focus to move from student recruitment to a much more complex concept.

Now don't get me wrong, teaching students is a core function of a university but for me personally universities are about much more than that. At their heart they are communities of scholars or learners at different stages in their learning. These communities can be virtual, physical, blended. They can be in any form; what is important is not the space but the ideas.

University is not a place it's a community of communities linking people across generations and professions. There may or may not be an impressive campus but that is just the tip of the iceberg. What unites all connected with the institution is not so much the physical location but the networks and collaboration that are the real lifeblood. Once you realise that, the clichéd stock photos become redundant and a new image emerges that is much more inclusive and representant of reality. The real impact of a university reaches all through society and the campus becomes simply one aspect (still important) of a complex eco-system. It's time that complexity was communicated more clearly.
Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-7315341790772816962016-04-25T08:00:00.000+02:002016-04-25T08:00:19.123+02:00Meeting the tech-skeptics

"Focused portrait DSC_0009" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by farouq_taj

Why do so many educators still feel daunted by technology and avoid using digital media as far as possible in their teaching? Of course you can teach very well using only traditional methods and and I would never say that those methods should be abandoned. However since our students are preparing for life and career in an increasingly digital world they need to develop the necessary skills and literacies and if we do not address these in our teaching our courses will not be fully relevant. Digital tools can enhance classwork, extend discussions and practice outside the classroom and facilitate collaborative learning. So why is there still so much reluctance to engage with technology, despite years of initiatives, funding and development?

An interesting project called Unfolding the arms took a new approach to understanding why many educators avoid technology. The project title refers to the posture we all use when we simply don't want to do something, folded arms, and the aim of the project was to find ways of unfolding those arms and finding a way forward. They interviewed a number of teachers who were negative towards using educational technology and tried to analyse why.

So this is our idea. Talk to six (or seven, or eight) educators, who feel any sense of dread, impostorship or resistance when thinking tech. Ask some carefully crafted, genuinely open questions, shut up and listen ... Then, whilst the data is being analysed, offer each person generous enough to give of their time some one-to-one coaching with the Digital Nurse, to help them break through something that's holding them back. Finally, ask them how they are doing and present the findings in some technology-enhanced way.

Two major lines of resistance were described, The first is termed Untrue Limiting Assumptions often centred around the belief that you are "no good at technical things" or are too old to start. Then there is the Impostor Syndrome, the fear of being "found out" and therefore avoiding the issue completely. I think many are well aware that they have fallen so far behind that the effort of trying to catch up now seems simply impossible, especially due to all the other pressures they have and the lack of time for competence development. The key to this experiment was letting the interviewees talk and voice their concerns and then letting them talk to a digital nurse who would offer help for them to overcome some of the easiest hurdles. Getting one-to-one support and taking small practical steps at a time seems to be a way of winning round many skeptics. Often the root cause is a lack of confidence and a fear of not being good enough. Many had tried to use digital tools but had encountered problems or complete failure and this created an aversion to the whole area. If no support is available, teachers who feel alone in the face of daunting technology will understandably retreat to traditional methods instead of persevering. The article focuses on digital resilience as a prerequisite and this only comes when professional, hands-on support is provided.
Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-30181542021438998532016-04-19T08:10:00.001+02:002016-04-19T08:10:51.811+02:00Is free sustainable?

"FREE" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by JwvanEck

I use and recommend all sorts of excellent free online educational tools and resources but only very seldom am I willing to pay for the premium version. I think teachers in general are happy to use the free versions but become extremely wary of paying even small fees for the full version. Somehow there is the feeling that everything on the net should be free and there is little thought for how the people who create the tools and services are going to support themselves. Giving away something for free sounds wonderful but how do you pay for development, support and simply making sure that it keeps working? Unless the product is supported by government funding or a benevolent financier it won't take long before you have to work out a business plan. But why should we pay when there is always a free version somewhere out there?

This issue is raised in an article on EdSurge, What Does Free Mean? questioning why educators are so reluctant to pay for a tool or service they use regularly. If we base so much of our teaching on free services there's no guarantee they will still be there next year, or even next week.

Many edtech products are cloud-based, but that doesn't mean the companies that build them run on air. Educators should recognize that free tools may not survive for long. Without fully understanding how free tools are sustained, they run the risk of adopting and relying on technology that may change significantly—or not exist in a year's time.

I freely admit that I have a lot of material stored on free accounts that could easily go up in smoke any time. Over the years a few of them have suddenly decided to become pay services since the freemium model simply wasn't sustainable. The result was that I had to move my material as fast as posible to another, free, service. But if our favourite tools are going to survive they need a sustainable business model and in the end we are going to have to pay something for them, unless they come from the likes of Google or Facebook where it is often claimed that you are the product. The article argues that schools and colleges need to consider costs for digital tools in the same category as more traditional tools for the classroom like textbooks, paper, pens and so on. Educational software is a vital element in teaching today but since we mostly use the free versions it never shows up on the expenses list and therefore is undervalued and taken for granted. Things that cost are seen as more valuable.

I believe teachers should be empowered to have more say in what technology tools are purchased. They should be allowed to advocate for the tools that work in their classroom - and perhaps even be given a budget for making purchasing decisions. ... This sort of empowerment can change teachers' mindset about paying for the tools that will, in the long run, also help support the work of entrepreneurs that are developing them.

Maybe it's time to consider paying for the services we appreciate because if no-one does so they may disappear, taking our content and ideas with them.Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-51199946214130126482016-04-10T13:02:00.000+02:002016-04-10T13:02:08.811+02:00Learning in the blender

"first smoothie" (CC BY 2.0) by velkr0

I've always been a bit uncomfortable with the term blended learning. It refers to courses that combine both classroom and online teaching and I sometimes feel that its popularity is because it represents a safe compromise between the two forms of delivery; exploiting some of the flexibility of online delivery with the familiar traditions of campus. For those who are skeptical of fully online courses, blended learning is a safe option. I'm not against blending online and classroom, far from it, but I don't think the blend we really need is centred around physical/digital delivery.

I enjoyed reading a new article by Sir John Daniel, Making Sense of Blended Learning: Treasuring an Older Tradition or Finding a Better Future?, arguing that the blend we should examine more closely is not simply about rooms and virtual spaces. Today there is very little difference in student performance between well-designed online courses and their traditional counterparts. In some cases the online environment can in fact foster deeper discussion and greater sense of community. The key quality element is in the course design, not in the delivery form, and Daniel proposes that the real blend we are looking for is getting the right mix between independent and interactive activities (regardless of delivery form).

Independent learning takes place outside the classroom, even on the most traditional campus course, and today that means mostly online. Students need to learn how to study independently, find resources and investigate further than the prescribed reading lists. Learning how to learn is a key literacy. However independent learning is only half of the blend and courses need to include interactive learning, both with peers and especially with qualified faculty in seminar or tutorial form. This can take place both face-to-face (F2F) and online and the choice of arena will depend on the context. If it is possible to gather the group for F2F meetings then do so, but make sure the meeting is really interactive and not simply information transfer. If F2F is not feasible then use appropriate online arenas. Here even the term F2F is appropriate because when I have online meetings at least with smaller groups I can see everyone face-to-face, sometimes with excellent video quality. F2F today does not necessarily imply sharing the same physical space.

There is of course no magic blend, especially not in terms of technology, but Daniel identifies four vital principles:

Focus on learning outcomes. The blend of interactive/independent and F2F/online must fully support the learning outcomes. If that can be achieved fully online then that is fine as long as the quality of the learning process is assured.
... in optimising the blend of online and interactive experiences the focus should be on attaining the learning objectives of the courses/programmes and not on wider purposes, such as how to sustain the campus, important though such aims are.

Practical and laboratory work. Of course this aspect demands work at a physical location but with so many online simulations and virtual labs available the actual time in a physical lab can be reduced to a few intensive meetings.T

Teamwork and division of labour. Course design and delivery is not a solo project but teamwork involving different areas of expertise.

Keeping costs down and quality up. These are perhaps the most important elements in the blend.

I urge you to read the article to grasp these points more fully but the rationale behind reviewing terms like blended and hybrid learning is summarised as follows:

What this new age requires is hybrid learning where the whole system is redesigned to create a happy blend of student-teacher conversations and online learning. This essay has highlighted, in particular, two important ways to make higher education more effective for the 21st century. First, students need to engage more fully with independent work. Online technology can help them do this ... and must be used intensively to free up time for students to prepare assignments and for teachers to use their interactions with students over their assignments as a prime vehicle for teaching. Second, teachers must help students, via apprenticeship-style sessions and commentary on their assignments, to develop skills and acquire academic knowledge.

My main conclusion from this article is that the blend we should be discussing is not a simple matter of F2F versus online, but a more complex mixture of independent and interactive learning where delivery form can vary according to context and where the learning outcomes are the driver.
Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-60803227209050596412016-04-02T20:19:00.000+02:002016-04-02T20:19:24.027+02:00Open education for all - but so few know about it

"Tongji University Library" (CC BY 2.0) by mripp

When I attend conferences and meetings it seems we're working with widely accepted concepts but as soon as I leave that intimate arena I get a reality check; most people have never even heard of MOOCs, open educational resources, open access and so on. Even students seem only to have limited experience of the vast range of online learning resources and open courses available.

The problem is that the people who use all these online resources are mostly those who are already well-educated and digitally literate. The often stated target group for open education, those who have so far been excluded from higher education due to financial, social or geographical barriers don't even know that it exists and even if they do they are often unable to take advantage of it. This is the theme of an article on Quartz, The Americans who'd benefit the most from online education have no idea it exists, that reports on a new Pew Research Center report (Lifelong learning and technology) on the use of the net in education.

This presents a paradox, the study's author John Horrigan tells Quartz. The more rich and educated you are, the more technologically savvy you are, and the more you know how to use digital learning tools. While many low-income and low-education Americans would benefit from e-learning, they don't have the income or education level to access it.

Despite the massive hype around MOOCs over the last 5-6 years only 5% of Americans are familiar with the concept. Even something as mainstream as distance learning is familiar to only 16%. Open education attempts to offer access to higher education to those previously excluded from it but they simply don't know these opportunities exist and even if they did they lack the skills to take advantage of it. Most Americans in the survey consider themselves as lifelong learners but learning is still strictly traditional in the form of adult education classes, reading books, joining clubs and training at work. Interest in learning is high but awareness of online learning is low, in stark contrast to a lot of Silicon Valley hype.

Of course it doesn't matter how learning occurs, the most important finding in the survey is that the majority of those questioned were involved in some form of learning. The question is why online learning has still not made the breakthrough in terms of mass uptake. Learning is available at a click wherever you are and whenever you want it but first you need to know how. The people surveyed go to local classes, read books, ask friends for advice and use trial and error to learn new skills and should of course continue to do so. However the vast opportunities for learning available through digital media would give them so many new opportunities that are totally impossible using traditional media. The breakthrough for online learning will come not through marketing and hyped news reporting but through local support and incentives through schools, libraries, community centres and other local institutions, helping people learn how to learn.
Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-10918969468179554762016-03-22T19:57:00.000+01:002016-03-22T19:57:04.455+01:00Digital life after death

"sunrise and silence" (CC BY-ND 2.0) by x1klima

A few weeks ago a colleague of mine passed away after a short illness. A sad event for all who knew her but for me this was the first time that someone I knew prepared us for her passing via Facebook and Twitter. The first I knew was a Facebook post with a photo of her from the hospital bed and the stunning news that she was preparing for a journey of no return. There were a few other posts until the tragic announcement of her passing was posted on her account. These posts haunted me for days and even though we'd only met face-to-face twice at conferences our discussions on social media created a bond that would never have been possible in pre-digital days. Those who criticise Facebook as simply a channel for trivia and self-indulgence fail to acknowledge the enormous potential for sharing, strengthening friendships and simply keeping in touch with each other. I felt part of a farewell process and all the messages of support and sympathy that accompanied the posts on Facebook showed how powerful the medium can be.

This is echoed in a BBC article by Brandon Ambrosino, Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard, where the author describes how Facebook keeps the memory of a departed aunt alive by providing a digital memorial which can be visited by family and friends. There are today tens of millions of dead Facebook users and the number increases by an estimate 8,000 per day. If no-one is able to access your account and turn it into a memorial page then your digital life will continue with Facebook reminding your contacts of your birthday and so on, something that can be distressing to many. Just as we all need to take active responsibility for our digital footprints when alive we also need to plan for our digital death. You need to pass on your passwords to your next of kin and leave instructions on what they should do with your different accounts. If managed well your Facebook page becomes a place of remembrance providing insights into your life and personality that no other medium can emulate.

As I've told my mother, my grandchildren may be able to learn about her by studying her Facebook profile. Assuming the social network doesn't fold, they won't just learn about the kinds of major life events that would make it into my mom's authorised biography. They'll learn, rather, the tiny, insignificant details of her day to day life: memes that made her laugh, viral photos she shared, which restaurants she and my father liked to eat at, the lame church jokes she was too fond of.

Social media have taken a central role in our lives and consequently become an important aspect of our deaths. We can choose to ask a relative to simply delete everything or we can ask them to preserve your memory as a place of solace and grief for those who live on. As I write this post my departed colleague's Facebook account has posted an invitation to a remembrance meeting of friends and relatives. I can't attend but I still feel part of a process that would not have been possible without social media, indeed a friendship that would never have existed without the net.

In Facebook, all places are present, all times are now. My Aunt Jackie exists in this medium just as I do. In a way, there is no moving on without her. There's no moving on without any of the millions of dead Facebook users.Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-42269884898414538932016-03-20T16:56:00.000+01:002016-03-20T17:18:11.137+01:00As you can clearly see on my next slide ...

"Keynote" (CC BY 2.0) by darxmac

I feel sorry for PowerPoint, the butt of so many jokes and unloved by so many conference delegates and students. It's so easy to blame the tool for our own shortcomings and most cases of the famous death by PowerPoint are due to users' lack of ability to exploit the functions available in the tool. Some people proudly announce that they have not prepared any slides for their talk and I often sense a murmur of approval from the audience glad to find someone who dares to go back to basics. The problem is that a talk without any visual support demands tight structure and considerable rhetorical skill and few speakers who decide to go "unplugged" realise this. I've heard many such presentations that ramble from one anecdote to another and I've completely lost the thread, if there is any, after five minutes. I retire gratefully into my laptop and attend to other matters while the presentation wanders off into the fog. Had the presenter used even a few slides they might have been able to communicate some kind of structure but without it we're lost. Unless of course the speaker is a true orator.

An article in Times Higher Education, Learning to live without PowerPoint, makes the case for researchers freeing themselves of their digital shackles and presenting their findings unplugged. The problem is that when your slides are your presentation and you simply read the text slide by slide any technical problem like a faulty projector means disaster.

When we are training our PhD students in the art of presentation, are we giving them the necessary advice – the confidence – that will allow them to avoid an addiction to PowerPoint and ensure that they may experiment with using it less or not at all? At the very least are we making sure they are adequately prepared to still deliver a meaningful presentation even when the computer stops talking to the projector?

PowerPoint can give many speakers a false sense of security if they use the slideshow as a script. Many researchers cram enormous amounts of text or data onto each slide so that the audience focuses all attention on trying to decipher your information overload instead of listening to the speaker. You may have wonderful graphs in your research article but in a presentation try to simplify the graphics and highlight the most important points. Those who want the details can read the article later; the aim of the presentation is to raise interest in your research.What you have to say should preferebly be there in your head or on a piece of paper in the form of bullet points or a mindmap. The slides simply reinforce your message and provide structure through appropriate images and keywords. In this way it is still possible to give the presentation if the technology fails even if it will lack the attention-grabbing features that a good slideshow can provide. If used wisely a slideshow is still a highly effective tool to getting your message across but sadly most people only use a fraction of the tool's potential. For tips on how to get the best out of PowerPoint have a look at Jonathan Wylie's post, PowerPoint Myths: Busted!

However there are more subtle agruments against presentation tools like PowerPoint. Andrew Smith wrote an interesting article a while back in the Guardian, How PowerPoint is killing critical thought, arguing that the pedagogy of the presentation comes from the business world. The classic presentation full of bullet points is a way of leading a customer through the sales pitch and convincing them to buy rather than inviting an open discussion. PowerPoint encourages a process of persuasion rather than dialogue.

Bullet points enforce a rigidly hierarchical authority, which has not necessarily been earned. One either accepts them in toto, or not at all. And by the time any faulty logic is identified, the screen has been replaced by a new one as the speaker breezes on, safe in the knowledge that yet another waits in the wings. With everyone focused on screens, no one – least of all the speaker – is internalising the argument in a way that tests its strength.

Slides with convincing bullet-points are hard to argue against and a potential dialogue is turned into one-way communication. Many advocate using images to accompany your talk with an absolute minimum of text. I must admit I have cut down on the text content in my slideshows and prefer now to have interesting photos plus a few keywords and talk around them.

However I think there is more to this problem than simply blaming the presentation tool. The setting, usually a lecture theatre or a classroom with people sitting in rows, is for me the real barrier to dialogue It's simply not a good place to start a discussion, not matter whether the speaker uses Powerpoint or not. Another factor is tradition; if everyone is in lecture mode then it will be one-way communication and few in the audience will dare to speak out of turn or disturb the speaker's flow. The lecture is an academic tradition that is proving extremely hard to break. I'm sure that PowerPoint can be used in more imaginative ways in new settings that are more conducive to dialogue. Don't shoot the piano player.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-89589568809080421592016-03-08T10:18:00.000+01:002016-03-08T10:18:11.624+01:00Collaborative overload - pleasures and dangers

"Multitasking" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by foreverdigital

The more you build your professional network, share ideas and resources and participate in projects the more work you get. Networking enhances your reputation and more people ask you for help, invite you to join new projects, collaborate in exciting new initiatives or speak at conferences. The spin-offs keep coming making you feel respected and part of a larger context. This is exactly what I have experience over the last few years and it has lead me into new areas, meeting lots of interesting and talented colleagues from all over the world. I have benefitted immensely from sharing, networking and collaborating, both professionally and personally.

However there is a downside to this and that is raised in an interesting article in Harvard Business Review with the simple title, Collaborative overload. Highly collaborative people get drawn into so many peripheral activities that they are often unable to focus on their primary work and as a result they become ineffective from their employers' point of view despite being highly effective in all they activities they are involved in. The more you collaborate and help others the more work you get.

In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. As people become known for being both capable and willing to help, they are drawn into projects and roles of growing importance. Their giving mindset and desire to help others quickly enhances their performance and reputation.

Good collaborators become highly sought after and find themselves involved in ever more projects, meetings and groups both inside and outside the organisation, inevitably spilling over into evenings and weekends. This can of course lead to stress and even burn-out. We all enjoy helping others and are often flattered when colleagues respect our expertise. Sharing a few links or quick words of encouragement are easy but the real time drain is when you have to provide hands-on assistance. Many people become unofficial help desks in their department, solving acute problems that really should be solved by others. For example many educational technologists get trapped into "putting out fires" rather than really adding value to their institutions use of technology. The article recommends managers to help their top collaborators be more selective and avoid the trap of being everyone's problem-solver.

Collaboration is indeed the answer to many of today's most pressing business challenges. But more isn't always better. Leaders must learn to recognize, promote, and efficiently distribute the right kinds of collaborative work, or their teams and top talent will bear the costs of too much demand for too little supply.

However, this advice applies to collaboration in large companies where employees' time management and activities are monitored and analysed in a way that is completely alien to universities or schools. The education sector is full of volunteer work that takes place under the radar with teacher networks, unofficial projects and suchlike and once you get involved here the boundaries between work and leisure completely dissolve. I have devoted enormous amounts of my free time to stimulating projects and collaboration that have developed me professionally but which often lead to even more spin-offs. Today I belong to many groups and networks and have loyalties towards them that are completely outside the scope of my work. The difficult part is being able to see when all the collaboration becomes a permanent feature that prevents you from focusing on your most important duties. I try to keep a balance but I see the dangers of collaboration overload. How about you?

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-55133975990413675672016-03-06T12:38:00.000+01:002016-03-14T08:04:12.034+01:00Platform diversity in online learning

"Andrew and Jerome juggle" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by salomon888

How many different platforms should you offer in an online course? Should everything be included under one roof in a learning management system (LMS) or can we offer a number of social media where discussions take place, leaving it up to the participants to decide which spaces in which they wish to be active? Traditional e-learning favours the one-stop shop of the LMS (Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas etc) where one log-in gives you access to everything you need to complete the course. However we find that many participants prefer to discuss the course, for example in their own Facebook groups, rather than using the LMS discussion forum and to cater for this tendency many course providers offer a choice of arenas for interaction and collaboration. Most LMS now offer integration with social media to allow for platform diversity. However when courses offer a diversity of arenas they run the risk of confusing participants who find it hard to move between the LMS, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others and it becomes impossible to get a clear view of the course as a whole. The one-stop-shop solution runs the risk of being too controlled and resstrictive (and often less open) whereas the eco-system alternative risks confusion and lack of overview.

This problem is highlighted in an article in eCampus News, Can social media enhance the MOOC experience? which describes a study on the Carpe Diem MOOC that was run in 2014 by Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. The MOOC used Blackboard's CourseSites as platform and blended this with discussion and support via Facebook and Twitter. Participants could get support and engage in discussions on social media as an alternative or complement to the central platform. The interaction between participants on this course is analysed in an article by Gilly Salmon, Bella Ross, Ekaterina Pechenkina and Anne-Marie Chase, The space for social media in structured online learning. Research in Learning Technology. The findings are not surprising but raise important issues for all involved in online course design. You would expect that many of those following a MOOC like this one would be comfortable negotiating multiple platforms but the study reveals that over 40% of survey respondents did not use Facebook or Twitter at all and focused solely on the activities in the LMS. As one respondent put it:

I did not use Twitter or Facebook. Those are social sites. For professional work, I prefer it to be on a professional platform.

Many are reluctant to mix private and professional roles in Facebook and many see Twitter simply as a medium for gossip, celebrities and publicity rather than as a professional networking tool. The benefits of using social media for professional development are not widely accepted and many learners are wary of them.

I am involved in running an online course called Open Networked Learning together with colleagues from 4 other universities. The course is offered as professional development for teachers in each of the participating universities but is also open to learners from other institutions. As a result an internal professional development course becomes an open international course with a wonderful multi-cultural mix. To avoid discussions of which university's LMS we should use we choose Google+ as our platform complemented by a WordPress site with all course information and resources. In addition we use Twitter (#ONL161) for chat sessions, Diigo to gather useful bookmarks and each participants reflects on their learning on their own blogs. One of the main ideas behind the course is using multiple platforms and tools and investigating the potential of these to enhance learning but the downside is that many participants find this diversity confusing and this leads to some dropping out. We try to compensate by offering lots of support from a network of facilitators and co-facilitators but it is still a major issue that juggling between platforms makes it hard to see the bigger picture.

I suspect most of us really prefer to have everything under one roof since the course is one of many activities going on in our lives. We have some participants who succeed in juggling with all the platforms but the majority focus on maybe a couple, primarily the study group's own community in Google+ and then less attention to the other spaces. The delicate balance is to promote diversity whilst avoiding overload, offering a choice without dictating and providing timely support to those who feel insecure.

The main conclusion of Salmon et al is to see value in including social media as alternative arenas but make it clear that learners have a choice whether to use them or not.

When designing for MOOCs or online learning, participants' preferences for social media use should be taken into account ... One solution is to offer a few different platforms, in addition to the LMS, but not require that learners use them if they feel uncomfortable. Alternatively, ask learners to create professional identities on social media for all formal learning and professional development uses.

Reference:
SALMON, Gilly et al. The space for social media in structured online learning. Research in Learning Technology, [S.l.], v. 23, dec. 2015. ISSN 2156-7077. Available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/28507. Date accessed: 06 Mar. 2016. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.28507.Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-13981308963331814622016-02-28T17:39:00.000+01:002016-02-29T10:23:09.386+01:00MOOCs going mainstream? Reflections from eMOOCs 2016

University of Graz

Social learning, secure online examination, new pathways to credentials, unbundling and the application of learning analytics. These are some of the main themes of lat week's eMOOCs 2016 conference in Graz, Austria, that I attended together with MOOC practitioners mostly from Europe but some from further afield. Earlier conferences attracted many policy makers and managers but now the focus was very much on sharing experience and moving MOOCs to a new level. The overall tone of the conference was that MOOCs are beginning to mature and the earlier criticisms of instructivist pedagogy, low completion rates and hyped glossiness are now being addressed. Many MOOCs now offer virtual proctoring to enable MOOCs for credits, micro-credentials though badges are improving learner motivation and the focus is now on social learning rather than self-study. The business models of the main consortia are built around a freemium model with only access to course material available for free and a host of layered value-added options available at a price.

The conference featured two inspirational keynote speakers, Anant Agarwal (Professor at MIT and CEO of EdX) and Pierre Dillenbourg (Professor at EPFL Lausanne), and the rest of the time was devoted to practitioner experience, research findings and workshops. Agarwal gave an infectiously enthusiastic presentation of the EdX consortium's progress and future direction, stressing the need for MOOCs to break the sonic barrier of credits. This demands of course increased accountability. MOOCs should be as good if not better than traditional courses and this is achieved by innovative solutions, virtual proctored exams, social learning, project teams, tutoring and teacher grading in combination with peer assessment and guided studies that have become a hallmark of the genre. Verified certificates have increased course completion rates to around 60% whilst more advanced verification and course packages have given even higher rates.

Conference begins

Offering MOOCs as a stepping stone to campus studies is already in place, notably the Global Freshman Academy initiative between EdX and Arizona State University. This involves replacing the freshman year with MOOCs with open admissions. When you sit the course exams you only pay for credit if you pass. Admission to campus studies from year two is available for those who pass their year one courses and pay for the credits, what Agarwal referred to as inverted admissions. The big question here is whether more universities will accept this concept and give learners access to year two of a degree programme on the basis of credits gained from other universities' MOOCs, even with proctored examination. A similar concept is that of micromasters, bundles of MOOCs with tutoring, project work and proctored examination, which are being developed in cooperation with major companies (see also for example Coursera's specializations concept and project-based courses). These micromasters can be counted as half of a regular masters degree thus allowing learners to complete their masters degree at half the normal price. The partner companies are on board but it remains to be seen whether this approach will gain acceptance throughout the higher education sector and widespread employer recognition.

The frequently voiced concerns about the credibility and security of online examinations may well be addressed by the practice of virtual proctoring through companies such as Software secure and Proctor U. These companies have centres where virtual proctors monitor thousands of online examinations using webcam, microphone and screen surveillance. Student computers are locked down and only allow the examination application and the webcam will register any activities like checking a mobile under the table. The software registers all exceptional behaviour and movements both on screen and in the room and these can later be investigated if there is any suspicion of cheating. This is already in practice in MOOCs for credit as well as in regular for-credit online courses though as far as I could gather had not really been tested extensively in Europe. I can imagine that European universities will be unwilling to risk such extensive surveillance data being stored outside the EU but I'm sure there will be a solution. The claim is that this technology will make online examinations at least as secure as traditional on-site exams (ie. not completely cheat-proof but probably good enough).

The conference closed with a thought-provoking speech by Pierre Dillenbourg who called on European universities to agree on how to recognize each others' MOOCs and open the way for real virtual mobility through a kind of virtual Erasmus programme. He argued that we already have the key ingredients in place; we have a common academic currency in terms of the Bologna agreement and ECTS, we have publicly funded universities giving around 4000 potential testing centres and we have cultural diversity so why can't we offer credits for MOOCs? He urged universities and university associations to start discussing this and there were several representatives in the hall who immediately agreed to investigate further. The conference Twitter feed immediately informed us that there is already a cooperation in place between a few universities for exactly this sort of virtual mobility called Opening universities for virtual mobility.

My one concern with all this is that that the potential of MOOCs to truly open up education is being tamed and adapted to fit nicely into the traditional model. The focus now seems to be on the value-added layers and the promise of examination and credits. The wider potential of open networked learning I believe will be the task of non-traditional educational organisations rather than the higher education sector.

There were of course many other extremely interesting presentations and discussions and I may well return to them in a later post as I may do about my own contribution.

Download the full proceedings of the conference.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-77088625579179564702016-02-17T08:00:00.000+01:002016-02-17T08:00:14.591+01:00Amazon goes OER

"openness" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by coolnalu

Are we in the midst of a major change in the distribution and sharing of open educational resources?
Just as I had published my previous post on the platform panOpen, I read that even Amazon are entering the OER arena. Amazon have announced a new platform called Amazon Inspire that will allow schools to search for, share and manage resources in an environment that will to some extent resemble the massively successful Amazon website. They promise that the service will be completely free for all schools and a beta version will come online for pilot testing in the next few weeks.

An article on Edweek Market Brief, Amazon Education to Launch New Website for Open Education Resources, describes the platform:

- Users of the site will be able to add ratings and reviews, and to receive recommendations based on their previous selections. Educators will be able to curate open resources, self-publish material they have developed, and put a school's entire digital library that is open and freely available online.

This sounds very similar to the platform offered by panOpen except there's no mention of the twist that they offer; charging students for access and offering revenue sharing to contributing teachers. The difference is of course the sheer clout behind Amazon in terms of being able to sweep the board if their idea hits the soft spot. Schools and teachers can upload their resources and make them available to all, assumedly with Creative Commons licenses, and Amazon offers powerful search, analytics and safe storage. The problem with OER has always been the lack of consistent metadata making many resources extremely hard to find as well as the lack of efficient search tools that can harvest suitable material from the myriad of OER repositories that exist. If anyone is able to pull it all together then Amazon seems like a good bet given the success of their business so far with recommendations based on previous searches and preferences.

Matt Reed in Inside Higher Ed is enthusiastic about the new venture, Amazon OER? He sees a similarity between Amazon's interest in OER and Apple's interest in podcasting when it launched iTunes and the iPod. Most of the podcasts available on iTunes are, like OER, largely free and produced by enthusiasts but the impact of some podcasts is global thanks to the power of the iTunes platform. Similarly hundreds of universities already offer over 2 million lectures free to download on the iTunes U channel.

In the best of all possible worlds, the podcast analogy comes to fruition. Apple was the first to bring podcasts to scale, and itunes is still the most popular place to find and distribute them. But there's no shortage of alternatives. (I'm a fan of Pocket Casts, fwiw.) It's easy now to listen regularly to a host of podcasts without ever dipping a toe in the Apple universe. If enough alternatives come along to Amazon that it can't control the market, even if it remains prominent within it, we could all win.

The inevitable question is what Amazon gets out of offering this platform. There must be a business model in there despite their insistence that they will never put it behind a paywall. The logical conclusion is that they will try to sell commercial resources based on your preferences and this was indeed the logic behind Pearson's Open Class venture a couple of years ago. It will be up to the user to decide whether the openr resource is better than the commercial one but I don't think it needs to be an either-or issue. In some cases the commercial resource will offer opportunities that no open reosurce can match and then the price is justified. There must be room for commercial high-quality material as long as we can make wise choices. The other attraction for Amazon must be big data. A platform like this if it takes off will get millions of clicks and the user data must be worth quite a bit for developers. Amazon, like the other giants (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc), are drilling for the new oil, data. The rewards are in how you refine that crude oil into new products and services.

Could 2016 be the year OER go mainstream and at what cost?

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-61302717954758439412016-02-14T11:26:00.000+01:002016-02-14T11:26:22.657+01:00Open for business?

"Business Hours" (CC BY 2.0) by madnzany

Openness is in the eye of the beholder and new variations on the theme seem to pop up every week. The open component in a MOOC has become very flexible indeed, sometimes meaning something as restricted as being accessible only to those who register and log in. MOOCs are now commonly offered in layered versions with a plain vanilla view-only version available free of charge. The problem with open and free is how to build sustainability beyond grassroots volunteer work. Open education depends on enthusiasts and volunteers who earn money somewhere else and are willing to work extra for the sheer enjoyment of it. Is there a business model for openness and how can you reconcile that with the original concept?

The field of open educational resources (OER) depends on educators sharing their openly licensed resources on public repositories, mostly without reward or career recognition. Is there a business opportunity even here? One answer to that question is a platform called panOpen where open textbooks and OER can be gathered and offered to students in a convenient package of services. Many of the resources are aggregated from other repositories but panOpen offers a convenient channel with attractive functions for educators such as LMS integration, data analysis, gradebook syncing, quizzes and note-taking functions. The twist to the concept is that they offer revenue sharing to educators who provide new content to the platform, no doubt attractive to those who commit months of work to write an open textbook. Teachers or schools can upload content, adapt existing resources (according to the Creative Commons license terms) and create customised repositories for their students. The platform guarantees quality by peer review of all resources and users are encouraged to add own reviews and comments to material.

The business model for all this is to pay educators for their work and charge students for access. Students pay $25 per course for access and this income is hoped to sustain the teacher commitment to add new resources. This has of course caused a stir in the open education community since open resources suddenly have a pricetag. This is especially tricky for material that has the Creative Commons Non-commercial requirement . Open is no longer free. PanOpen explains this as follows:

"Open" does not necessarily mean "free." Not all OER materials are free and likewise, not all free materials are considered OER. Usage rights - not cost - primarily define OER. That said, when there is a cost, OER are typically significantly cheaper than textbooks - a factor students especially appreciate.

The argument is that the resources are available elsewhere for free but that panOpen provides the aggregation, LMS integration and quality control and that is what the students pay for. Compared to buying their textbooks the costs for students are radically cut. In an article in Inside Higher Ed from 2014, OER Beyond Voluntarism, panOpen founder Brian Jacobs states the rationale behind the new venture.

A better way forward is to compensate the stakeholders -- faculty, copyright holders, and technologists, principally -- for their contributions to the OER ecosystem. This can be done by charging students nominally for the OER courses they take or as a modest institutional materials fee. When there are no longer meaningful costs associated with the underlying content, it becomes possible to compensate faculty for the extra work while radically reducing costs to students.

The definition of open takes yet another turn as new business models are tested in an attempt to build a sustainable framework for OER. We will undoubtedly see many more new interpretations of the word in the future, some of which will succeed whilst many will flop. Somewhere along the line someone has to pay for the work involved, as part of teachers' regular work or by incentives from the educational authority or another organisation like panOpen. What is evolving is a layered approach to OER whereby you have open and free access to all resources if you are willing to search through various repositories but you may have to pay to access value-added services such as those offered in panOpen. If you want a good analysis of the future of openness in education you should have a look at Martin Weller's excellent book The battle for open (free to access online).

See also an article in Campus Technology: New OER-Based Learning Platform Provides Alternative to Traditional Textbooks.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-32753387343599773672016-02-01T10:00:00.000+01:002016-02-02T08:01:03.376+01:00Swedish MOOC report is published

"Network" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Anacin Extero

Slightly revised version 2 Feb 2016.
Sweden has been rather late in reacting to the MOOC boom and only in the last two years have a handful of universities started offering courses both on the major MOOC platforms Coursera and EdX but also more home grown channels. Last spring the government commissioned the Swedish Higher Education Authority the task of writing a report with recommendations on how MOOCs could be promoted within the framework of Swedish higher education, outlining opportunities as well as barriers. I was invited to join the reference group for this report and on 27 January it was time to publish the report with an accompanying seminar for invited guests in Stockholm. The report is at present only available in Swedish so I will provide here a summary of the main findings as well as adding my own comments and conclusions.
Download the report here (in Swedish).

Background
The report was based on a survey that was sent to every state-funded higher education institution in the country during autumn 2015 asking about experience with MOOCs so far, plans to launch MOOCs, motives for investing in MOOCs (or not) as well as potential benefits and drawbacks. Six institutions have so far officially offered MOOCs but there are several others who have offered massive open courses without actually labeling them as MOOCs. There is still considerable uncertainty as to what exactly a MOOC is. Swedish universities have for the last 20 years offered a wide range of short online for-credit courses (usually 7-15 credits) as part of the higher education system. There are no fees but you have to apply for admission and fulfil the prerequisites for admission. Many understandably see MOOCs as simply massive versions of what we have been doing for years and wonder what the fuss is all about.

The question to be answered in the report is really about whether MOOC development should be financed by tax-payers' money, how they can be incorporated into the educational system and if so how much funding should go to this new area. The report offers the following recommendations to the government (my own abridged translated summary).

The report is positive to the development of MOOCs within the state-funded education system and Swedish institutions should be encouraged to develop open courses in line with international development. The main reasons for this are to showcase and raise the international profile of Swedish universities and higher education, reach out to new student categories and contribute to lifelong learning. Furthermore, it is hoped that MOOC development can lead to improvements in universities' regular online courses, both technically and pedagogically. The report also recommends a greater focus on pedagogical development in e-learning.

Proposals to the government

Institutions should be free to develop MOOCs and other open courses and therefore new regulations concerning this form of higher education should be drawn up. However MOOC participants cannot be considered as students in the legal sense of the term and there is no question of participants gaining credits from Swedish MOOCs.

Institutions are allowed to use a certain amount of their state financing to develop and run MOOCs. It is up to each institution how much of this should go towards MOOC development.

All institutions should be able to develop open online courses and to achieve this funding should also be available to cover professional development in digital pedagogy.

Although MOOCs are free it should be possible for institutions to charge fees for certificates, as often required in many international MOOC consortia.

Proposals to higher education institutions
Existing experience of developing and running MOOCs should be shared between institutions. The report identifies three possible lines of development for open online education:

Institutions who wish to develop and offer MOOCs should be free to do so.

Institutions may also develop hybrid courses which are available both as part of regular for-credit courses and as open non-credit courses (MOOCs).

Institutions should be encouraged to collaborate to produce open, national versions of introductory courses and skills courses that today are duplicated by many institutions. The common online course material can then be complemented at each institution by on-site seminars and support.

The authority believes that these recommendations will lead to higher quality and increased efficiency however it will be up to each institution to decide the extent to which they will follow the guidelines.

Discussion points
This report offers universities the opportunity to develop MOOCs and join international consortia but does not dictate exactly what they should do or how they should do it. The authority simply wants to remove potential barriers to MOOC development in Sweden but leave the strategic decisions up to the institutions. Many are wary of entering the MOOC arena due to uncertainty about legal aspects such as where course material and student information are stored and how that information can be used by third parties. These issues are still unresolved but maybe the coming debate around the report will result in some new initiatives.

The report finally gives MOOCs official recognition in Swedish higher education and that the further development of such courses can benefit regular degree programmes, reach out to new groups of learners and showcase Swedish education on a global level. I suspect however that the report will loosen the lock on Pandora's box and that there will then be a number of important issues to resolve such as openness, sharing, recognition of prior learning, competence-based degrees etc. The report does not offer any new guidance in terms of copyright issues (that was not within the scope of the commission) but points out some of the areas that need further investigation and urges universities to work together to find a common praxis. This, I think, is a pity because I don't think that type of collaboration will happen without a catalyst from above. I believe we need a national policy on openness recommending that educational resources financed by the state should be available to all under a Creative Commons license. Without that we will continue to produce hundreds of variations on the same theme and reinvent the wheel at the taxpayers' expense. However, the report opens the door to universities collaborating to produce national MOOCs in subject areas that are common to all students, eg study skills, academic writing, scientific methodology.

One of the trickier points in the report is allowing universities to charge fees for MOOC certificates. This breaks a central principle of Swedish higher education, that it should be free from tuition and examination fees. Many will feel that this move could set a dangerous precedent but the reason for the change is to allow universities who are part of the major consortia like Coursera, EdX and FutureLearn to follow consortium policy. Most MOOC consortia today charge for certification and allowing learners with Swedish universities to get free certificates would create conflict within those consortia. This issue is likely to become even more complicated with Coursera's recent moves to make many of its courses fee-paying by default with free participants only entitled to view a restricted amount of the course content (see article in Inside Higher Ed, Limits of open).

In addition many institutions are worried about the implications of awarding certificates in their name to MOOC participants where it is almost impossible to verify that the participant has actually done the coursework themselves. Secure forms of online examination are still an issue and as a consequence the recognition of MOOC certificates for students applying for regular university courses presents challenges that require national and international coordination.

Finally many of the unresolved issues here boil down to a crucial issue; quality. If we can agree to implement existing quality assurance guidelines on all open online courses we can establish criteria by which to assess the validity of courses and set requirements for recognising certificates.

An English summary of the report will be available in the near future but otherwise you'll need to run the present version through Google Translate to get the gist of it. I hope my summary here has at least given you the main points.Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-78048420773381459052016-01-27T15:50:00.000+01:002016-01-27T15:50:10.194+01:00The distraction society

"distracted" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Southernpixel - Alby Headrick

We live in a world where distraction is default and uninterrupted concentration a luxury that few are able to find. I'm writing this in a cafe with rather irritating and hard to ignore music in the background (it's almost impossible to find a silent cafe) as well as screens showing brightly coloured adverts and the usual billboards and logos on everything. Add to this the siren's call of my mobile buzzing to alert me to a new e-mail, text or update and it's clear that you need enormous willpower to shut out the distractions and really concentrate. We've become so used to distractions that we don't even realise their effect.

A post in Inside Higher Ed, Digital Distractions, describes the findings of a new article on digital distractions in class and student attitudes to them, Digital Distractions in the Classroom Phase II: Student Classroom Use of Digital Devices for Non-Class Related Purposes (Journal of Media Education). Most students admit there are disadvantages to multitasking in class, even resulting in lower grades, but simply can't stop themselves, citing the main reasons as wanting to keep updated and fighting boredom. However the vast majority believe that they can handle the distractions and are completely against banning devices from the classroom. The comments to the article show divided opinions among teachers from those who advocate banning mobiles completely in class to more pragmatic attitudes of allowing but trying to promote more enlightened use. I think the answer lies in the whole class agreeing on a common class culture of how to deal with distractions even if this can take time to establish. The difficulty is that society is built on distractions, digital or otherwise, and its a mindset that is hard to break.

Digital media and devices have indeed increased the distraction level significantly but there are many more forms of distraction built into today's society so the digital element is not the villain of the peace but simply a symptom of a wider trend. Digital tends to magnify existing trends in society but is not the root cause. Ubiquitous music, news updates, advertising and the ludicrously overwhelming range of shops, products and services that clamour for our attention mean that distraction is now default, especially for those born in the last thirty years or so. We simply accept distraction as perfectly normal and the problem for education is helping students to find ways of escaping and consciously creating their own bubbles of concentration. In all levels of education as well as in workplaces we need to discuss issues like distraction, attention, focus and work on consciously creating such concentration bubbles for ourselves where we allow ourselves time to think and concentrate. This is a real 21st century skill and takes time and courage to develop.Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-3358777441293914752016-01-23T15:12:00.002+01:002016-01-23T15:12:37.852+01:00Credit for peer review

"365: day 141" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Nick in exsilio

As researchers gain more visibility by publishing articles in open access journals and expand their networks through social media and research communities it's time the reviewers also received more public recognition. Peer review is the foundation of all scientific research but those who do the work get little reward for their efforts apart from a thank-you e-mail from the publisher. Being asked to review for a scientific journal is a considerable merit but it has so far been difficult to show publically. Reviewing is a demanding and time-consuming unpaid task often squeezed into reviewer's evenings and weekends. Can peer review be made more open and can reviewers get visible credit?

One solution to this that has been in operation for a few years now is called Publons. This is a community of over 50,000 reviewers who can register their verifiable peer review assignments and make their experience visible in their profiles (so far 281,239 reviews in 16,192 journals). Publons' aim is to allow members to:

Record, verify, and showcase your peer review contributions in a format you can include in job and funding applications (without breaking reviewer anonymity).

Most reviews are of course anonymous and cannot be published publically except when all parties agree and such cases can be read on Publons. Otherwise the service is based on the recognition e-mails from the publisher which are also verified in cooperation between Publons and the major publishers. Registered reviews can also have their profiles automatically updated if the review for a publication that is a Publons partner. The result is that reviewers have a verified profile that can be used in funding applications or when applying for a new position. You decide how your information is presented and the level of detail.

Services like this are giving long-awaited recognition to the vast amount of previously invisible work that lies behind every published article and even if there are still no financial rewards at least reviewers have reliable evidence of their expertise.

Read more about Publons in an article from Nature, The scientists who get credit for peer review.
Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-12068666511310855002016-01-03T09:00:00.000+01:002016-01-03T09:00:09.394+01:00MOOCs and crowdsourcing

Crowd (CC BY 2.0) by James Cridland

Crowdsourcing is a method of sharing work between a theoretically unlimited amount of people and allows enthusiasts from all over the world to collaborate on a project. The most famous example is Wikipedia where millions of people have contributed to varying degrees to produce the largest reference work ever and now available in hundreds of languages. Projects like this would be impossible using conventional methods but have succeeded through contributors' dedication and willingness to contribute to a common purpose, without a thought of financial gain. If open crowdsourcing (there are more commercial variations too) can achieve so much could there be implications for massive online learning? Many crowdsourcing projects involve massive collaboration over a limited space of time to achieve a clear objective and the similarities between this and a MOOC are striking.

This is the subject of an intriguing new article by John Prpić, James Melton, Araz Taeihagh and Terry Anderson, MOOCs and crowdsourcing: Massive courses and massive resources (First Monday, Volume 20, Number 12). The original connectivist cMOOCs explored the potential of large groups of hundreds or even thousands of learners exploring a subject together, sharing knowledge, co-creating new resources and forming networks to investigate further. This type of educational ecosystem sometimes lasted well beyond the confines of the original course and became a variation on the crowdsourcing concept. The later more massive xMOOCs (Coursera, EdX, FutureLearn etc) form massive communities but seldom extend beyond the framework of the typically 6-8 week course format.

The article outlines a number of similarities between cMOOCs, xMOOCs and open collaboration crowdsourcing such as how IT is used for collaboration, different levels of openness, different types of crowd (general or specialised) and the size of crowd. The authors investigate potential areas of development for MOOCs based on crowdsourcing. One interesting avenue is to crowdsource feedback and formative assessment where large numbers of volunteers could each provide valuable interaction with learners as microtasks.

For example, already existing rubrics could be transposed into microtasks, or one entire microtask, to be put to virtual labor market crowds for evaluation. Then, given that virtual labor markets allow the massively parallel undertaking of tasks at low cost, virtual labor market evaluation of student work could provide almost instant assessment feedback. Though some may doubt a crowd's ability to render accurate assessments, the research indicates that in some very complicated venues a crowd can perform as well or better than experts (Lee, 2013; Mitry, et al., 2013; Mortensen, et al., 2013).

Considering the dedication shown by Wikipedia contributors without any tangible recognition or payment as motivation there could be potential in crowdsourcing MOOC evaluation. However given the commercial nature of the main MOOC consortia (compared to the non-commercial, open, sharing culture of say Wikipedia) any MOOC solution should include some system of micropayments as motivation. Alternatively I can see space for microcredentials such as badges for those who volunteer to help MOOC learners. Students could earn badges for contributing to a MOOC that can enhance their CVs, showing professional engagement and proof of facilitation and assesment skills. This idea is no threat to teachers since they have no chance of even attempting to provide personal feedback to learners on a course with thousands of participants. Today's automatic testing provides basic feedback but direct contact with a human facilitator could provide the spark that can enhance completion rates. The challenge for MOOC-providers is to harness the potential of crowdsourcing and develop facilitator communities, possible by recruiting successful participants from previous MOOCs and providing attractive incentives.

Could a MOOC be run as a crowdsourcing project, offering a collaborative space to allow large communities to investigate and discuss a common topic? Where do we draw a border between a MOOC and a community or do we even need to define borderlines? Maybe the C in MOOC could stand for either course (a structured and limited format of guided instruction) or community (a less structured arena for collaboration around a common topic). The ideal scenario would be that a successful course seamlessly evolves into a dynamic community that takes over after the course ends.

Alastair Creelmanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1175530035414490569.post-1216294225991515912015-12-16T19:55:00.000+01:002015-12-16T19:55:49.918+01:00MOOCs - the price of recognition

 by louisvolant

The freemium model (try out for free but then you have to pay) for MOOCs is gaining ground rapidly and price tags are appearing on everything except basic access to the material. Until now you could get a free certificate on completion of a MOOC but not anymore according to an article in Class Central, MOOC Trends in 2015: The Death of Free Certificates. Udacity, Coursera and FutureLearn all charge for even the basic course completion certificate and now EdX have announced that they will follow suit. Of course the free certificates did not really translate into credential hard currency but were a nice recognition of course completion. Now it seems the major MOOC consortia see even the most basic certificates as a source of income, indicating that investors are looking for higher returns after the initial free education for all rhetoric has died down. It can also be an attempt to answer the criticism that certificates for simple course completion were not worth the pixels they were written on, given that there are no guarantees that the person receiving the certificate actually did the work. Does the payment of a fee raise the value of the credential? If I have to pay for something that was previously free there should be added value.

It seems that we have reached an interesting point in the MOOC saga. The open and free part is shrinking and without completion certificates the plain vanilla MOOC becomes a collection of not-so-open educational resources that you are welcome to use for your own development but without any kind of recognition. Mainstream MOOCs are now officially commercial operations but you can access the material if you want. There's certainly nothing new here since many universities have shared their resources as open courseware for many years (MIT OCW, OpenLearn etc) and you are free to access the material whenever you want. The MOOCs provide a structure for you to follow but if you need recognition you will have to pay. In some cases the price of recognition is increasing with certificates (of varying levels of dignity) ranging between $25 - $300 per course. It's still cheaper than the for-credit options but then again the credits are valuable hard currency compared to MOOC certificates.

Paying customers are more likely to complete the course and as we move to a more layered model for MOOCs we will see completion rates based only on the numbers of paying participants whilst the free learners merely demonstrate the level of general interest. As I have written before I think it really is time to stop using the term MOOC and find more realistic descriptions. On the one hand we have a largely commercial field offering massive online courses for fees with a variety of certificates and even credits. On the other hand we have the field of genuinely open courses run as collaborative projects or as part of a community. These are open in terms of access as well as offering material for reuse and adaptation. They may not be as glossy and polished as the commercial courses but they are non-profit and run on enthusiasm and pioneer spirit. Both options serve a purpose and will continue to evolve but let's stop confusing the two and pushing them both into the uncomfortable box labelled MOOC.Alastair Creelmanhttp://email@example.com