The Ed Techie

Give me an M!

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The second of MOOC musing posts:

On Twitter recently Alan Levine bemoaned that there was too much emphasis on the M in MOOCs, and I think it's the M that worries Jonathan Rees. Kate Bowles has a well reasoned post on some MOOC concerns also. I wonder if there is some truth in this – it is the manager’s dream of the infinite lecture hall that characterised early e-learning until people found out e-learning wasn’t very cheap in the end. But for a MOOC, learners aren’t paying so they can’t complain about the infinite lecture hall approach, but they will be monetised somehow (whether through accreditation, data, adverts, etc). And for that to work the M in MOOC has to equal massive. Moderate or minor won’t do.

 Let’s take each of those initials and think them through:

M – Massive. As mentioned above the massive element is appealing if you are a commercial enterprise. But if you are offering MOOCs out of interest, then they may not be massive. When Dave coined the term (it was Dave wasn't it?) I think it was more a reflection on what had happened in CCK08 – that these large numbers of learners had congregated. It was an observation rather than a prescriptive element. Open courses don’t need to be massive, and focussing on this element because it’s where the money lies, may lead to less interesting topics being proposed because they won’t achieve the mass required to kick in the money. And that’s a shame because one of the potential benefits of MOOCs is a form of liberation of the curriculum – it need no longer be dictated by what courses are profitable and meet a sufficient need. It would be a failure of imagination to apply the same constraints we currently labour under.

Open – as I mentioned in my last post, one of the disappointing aspects about the new open courses is that they are not truly open. Real openness has a number of benefits – others can take elements of the course and use it in their own courses, the course itself acts as a learning resource that anyone can dip into at anytime, it allows open research through data analysis, learners are encouraged to use their own tools rather than the artificial course system. Not being fully open loses much of the subtlety in MOOCs that made them fun in the first place.

Online – Steve Carson suggests we should call the new breed MOCs, for Massive Online Courses. But they are free, so this acronym would miss the key element that differentiates them from all the elearning we’ve been doing over the past 15 years. I had a Massive Online Course in 1999 but it was the open element that was missing. This is the no-brainer in the acronym I guess. They need to be online to really be free and work, but what might be interesting is the combination of MOOCs with local, face to face support. One could imagine a general introduction to teaching MOOC for example, which covered pedagogy, core subjects etc but accompanied by local support which placed teachers in school, added local contextualisation (eg curriculum requirements in that country) and so on. So Online needn’t mean ‘Only Online’.

Course – after a decade of OERs, it’s interesting that we’re coming back to educator constructed courses. The vision might have been of learners constructing their own personalised courses from the vast array of content out there. And while this does happen to an extent, and social tools will help it happen more, it’s also the case that one of the core functions the educator provides is to structure content into a sequence that learners can follow and have trust in. The bargain they make is this – if I do the course you have constructed then I will come out with a certain understanding of the topic. 

I guess the moral is, be careful of the acronym you dream up as someone will analyse it in excessive detail one day...

MOOCs Inc

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I thought I’d write a couple of posts around MOOCs, and in particular, the sudden awakening of senior management, media and companies to them. I don’t think this post is really saying much more than ‘hmm, interesting isn’t it?’. Having been involved on the periphery of MOOCs for a while, and knowing a lot of the real pioneers on first name terms (George, David, Stephen, Dave, Jim, Alec – see, I do know their first names), it’s been interesting to see the sudden adoption of MOOCs by others, most notably those in the US.

What we have been witnessing is the mainstreaming of the original MOOC concept. I feel kind of privileged in a way because it’s very rarely that you are close to something and see it go through this change. So it’s worth acknowledging that we are seeing this change, as so many times these things happen and later you think in retrospect, yes, that was the point that it altered.

With the Stanford AI course, then the announcement of Udacity, EdX, coursera, and Curtis Bonk’s course, it seems that barely a week has gone by without some major new announcement. As an advocate of open education I should be pleased about this, and I to a large extent I am. But I also have some niggling reservations.

The main change we are seeing is a form of institutionalisation of the MOOC approach. The previous generation was characterised by individuals – so, for example, Alec has run his course as an open one because he wanted to and could get away with it, not as a part of an institutional program at Regina. The next generation is seeing a more formal structure for delivering open courses. For Jim Groom now read MIT.

This is inevitable I suspect, at some point an idea becomes mainstreamed if it is to scale up. It also has a number of benefits. For a start it legitimises the open course approach to many, so it’s no longer “that bunch of Canadians” and therefore nothing to do with me. Secondly it streamlines the process by providing a template, platform and structure. This lowers the cost to entry in terms of the technical knowledge required. The third benefit is that it provides learners with a more robust and systematic approach. Some of the MOOC stuff previously has been experimental in nature and this has led to frustrations on the part of some learners. Lastly, and we can debate whether this is a benefit, it allows for models of commercialisation to be tested and employed. Ultimately this may make the MOOC approach more sustainable.

The upshot of all this should be that more open courses are available to more people. And that’s a good thing, which should be applauded and supported.

But I’m an academic so it’s my job to hedge things, so for all of these benefits, there are some downsides to this new phase of MOOCs.

I can’t help mourning the lack of the more experimental approach. For me, that was one of the great benefits of a MOOC – it allowed you to explore new pedagogy, technology, subject matter without being tied into the conventional restraints of a fee-paying curriculum. The new institutional MOOCs look very conventional in their approach and subject matter. But I suppose there is nothing to prevent the experimental ones still continuing.

My second misgiving is that while they are free, they are not open in the sense of being reusable and openly accessible. In general you have to sign up and get access to the course. It would be much more useful to be able to have access at all times and reuse elements in other courses. Free is very good, but interesting things happen when they’re open.

And lastly is the commercialisation element – I listed this as a benefit also, so it is ambiguous. If the model is that learners can pay if they want formal accreditation then that seems reasonable, as this will probably require some human input, and provides a means of funding course development. But when the MOOCs are set up as a commercial enterprise from the start you wonder how long before they are engaged in Facebook type data selling, for instance.

I also wonder if there isn’t an element of ‘if it wasn’t invented in the US it hasn’t been invented’ about much of this, and 10 years from now people will be writing papers that cite Stanford as the initiator of open courses.

Anyway, as I said at the start, interesting to watch it unfolding.

 

Blogging was the best decision

I have an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was asked to write a piece about the role of blogging in academic life. In many ways this is a tad quaint, blogging is hardly the new kid on the block (indeed it is now ripe for the X is dead meme). But maybe that's the point, it's been around long enough that we can assess its impact in real terms, and not just as the new shiny thing. My approach was to take blogging as a representative for new forms of scholarship, and how it had impacted upon my practice. 

There is nothing in it that will be a surprise to readers of this blog (it doesn't contain unusual cake recipes for instance), but it was quite nice to reflect on blogging from some position of maturity (by which I mean having been blogger for a few years now, not that I am mature, which of course, I'm not). The gist is probably in this paragraph:

In terms of intellectual fulfilment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap.

Losing the glue of scholarship

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This thought has been bubbling away with me for a while, so I'll try and express it here, but it may be patchy (yes, yes, no change there).

The financial crisis and rising tuition fees (particularly in the UK, and Europe will probably follow given the state of their economies) has placed a number of pressures on higher education. One of the outcomes is that greater accountability and transparency is demanded. That's only to expected and is reasonable - if students are paying high fees which pay academics salaries then we need to demonstrate that those academics are engaged in meaningful work. And as employers struggle with less money, they will place more demands on their staff, so will ask them to account for their time to a much finer level of detail.

Many people outside of higher ed will shake their heads and think 'we've all had to do that for years anyway.' I have some sympathy with this view, academics have often had a cushy life and hidden behind vague work related tasks with little connection to outputs.

But as this begins to bite, it's surfacing a number of tasks which we have always performed as part of scholarly practice, but which are hard to link to a direct output or return on investment. Consider the following:

• Reading around your subject area - academics will read journal papers, books, blogs etc as part of their everyday practice, just to stay current in their field. This may not have a direct, or immediate link to teaching (ie you are not researching something in order to teach on a specific course) or be related to a specific research project. It's just part of what you do. 
• Peer review - I often get asked to review papers for journals. If they meet my open access test, then I usually say yes. But there is no direct return on this.
• Experimentation - in the field of educational technology in particular (but also in other disciplines I suspect), experimenting is essential. The key to this is that you don't know if it will be successful or what it will lead to. You trust your academic instincts that it's an interesting thing to do. Much of playing with new technology would come under this. So when I've played around with MOOCs for instance, giving talks or running a small one with George. A few years later, I'm now being asked to contribute to a strategic appraisal of MOOCs for the university. But I couldn't have predicted this, or stated it as an outcome.
• Giving presentations - on an almost weekly basis I get asked to give a presentation, usually at another university for a staff development day. I decline most of these because I am running a big internal project at the OU and have a number of other roles, so I'm nearly always in meetings. And even if I wasn't, I believe that I should prioritise doing work for the place that pays my wages. In order to do these talks now I have to take leave, and without wishing to sound mercenary, if I'm going to spend a day giving a talk instead of with my family, I'll only do that if I get paid. Many such staff development days don't have a budget, and operate on reciprocal good will.

This raises two very important questions for me with regards to how scholarship functions:

1. Are these kinds of tasks the unseen glue that binds scholarly activity together? So, if we lose, or at least drastically reduce, them does it fundamentally undermine the whole practice, or will we just find other ways of achieving them (for instance giving a talk remotely is a lot more efficient than travelling to the venue).
2. Does it demonstrate that they are tasks which should have an associated cost, and we've just been hiding that hitherto? If we value the tasks then maybe we should attach a cost to them, then we can properly account for that time. Or are they such nebulous tasks that this wouldn't work and we need to trust academics to spend a degree of their time doing 'scholarship type stuff'.

Many universities do have an allocation of staff time that covers most of the above, and is labelled something like 'personal research time'. But I think we'll see more of a squeeze on that time and a greater demand for identifiable outcomes from it. So I guess we'll find out how important this glue really is.

 

Education & the language of change

Occasionally a blog post comes along in your field which you feel is seminal, a must-read. Think Scott's just share or Jim's glass bees post. Last week it was George's turn, and his post on the commercial pressures and interests around education is thought provoking and honest as he wrestles with the issues. If you haven't read it already, then please do so.

One element I wanted to expand upon was the language of change that is employed by many both within higher ed, and in companies with an interest in it. The common phrase now is to declare that education is broken. I commented on George's post that this is really beginning to irritate me. I don't deny that there are issues in education that need addressing, but by labelling it as broken, the response then becomes obvious "well let's fix it". And I'd be surprised if the person telling you that education was broken didn't just happen to have a fix in their back pocket.

Mike Caulfield sums it up in the comments better than I did, by talking about a rhetoric of crisis and a rhetoric of opportunity. Our responses to these different uses of language can be profound:

"The rhetoric of opportunity is better than the rhetoric of crisis for a number of reasons. In a rhetoric of opportunity, things which are improvements move forward, things which are not do not. A rhetoric of opportunity doesn’t denigrate the people who are doing wonderful things now, and it doesn’t pretend that what we have now is any worse than what we grew up with."

I am not advocating a linguistic determinism here, but the way we talk about a subject has implication for our actions. For instance, in this study Thibodeau & Boroditsky found that the metaphors used to frame a problem influenced the solution that subjects proposed, so if crime was couched in terms of a virus or a beast like metaphor, would shape how people thought it should be handled. And interestingly, when asked to justify their solution they do so by using data and reasons that back up the original metaphor, even if they are unaware of the metaphor in the original text.

A similar pattern is happening with education - the metaphors and language we use is influencing the manner in which we progress. 

Like George, I have nothing against entrepreneurs, I feel that their agility can complement the rather slow nature of higher education. But I do resent companies or individuals trying to frame the problem so it places them in the powerful position of the new gods. There is one phrase anyone with a solution to a problem fears more than any other: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". In order to justify a cure, you have to convince people of the brokenness of the current situation. And again, this is not to suggest education doesn't have issues, but I prefer Mike's notion of a rhetoric of opportunity.

I don't have an easy solution, indeed I would suggest you avoid anyone who does claim to have a simple solution to the multi-varied, messy domain of education. But I feel very strongly that education is doing lots of things right, and it isn't a problem waiting to be fixed. It's a set of challenges and opportunities, which both those inside and outside of the current system can address.

For now, join me in this pledge - if anyone says education is broken, I will walk out of the room.

[Update - almost as if they were trying to prove my point, David Kernohan pointed me at degreed.com which is asking people to take a photo declaring "Education is broken. Someone should do something." That someone being them presumably with their shiny dot com]

 

The role of respectable idiots

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I gave a talk at the Higher Education Academy 'New Places to Learn' seminar yesterday about openness and the institution. I was proposing that in order to facilitate openness you need a combination of a top-down and bottom-up process. So for example, OER projects such as OpenLearn, combined with creating the space for academics to generate and share their own content (eg by recognising digital artefacts in promotion).

One aspect I raised for creating the environment within which academics engage in openness of their own free will is the role of the 'respectable idiot'. This is a person who has a degree of respect within the institution as a 'proper' academic. This is crucial, they can't be someone who is seen as 'out there' and unlike other academics, as they'll just be dismissed as 'not like me anyway'. So they're respectable, but they're also prepared to engage in some of the experimentation and playfulness that exploring new media requires. This may mean messing around with video, or keeping a part-personal blog that doesn't use the academic voice, experimenting with format, etc. They're prepared to put a bit of their reputation on the line. The role of these people then is to act as bridges between the more radical experimenters and the main body of academia. By being respectable they demonstrate that this is a legitimate activity.

Perhaps immodestly, I think I'm a bit of a respectable idiot in the OU. And many of the people I like and follow on-line would fall into this category too. So, if you're looking for ways of encouraging uptake of new forms of scholarship in your institution, then you can do worse than finding and then shining a light on, your respectable idiots.

What I learnt from a photo a day

I've blogged on this before, after I had done my first year of a photo a day, using Flickr. I stopped that in July 2011, and found that I wasn't taking any photographs. So after some encouragement from Karen Cropper to try blipfoto, I started again in Oct 2011.

Today I ran a session at the OU along with Juliette Culver on what I learnt from a photo a day. It was a fun workshop and went down well. The slidecast is below, complete with sh**e photographs.

 

What I learnt from a photo a day

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10 Digital Scholarship Lessons in 10 Videos

I've given a talk with this title 3 or 4 times recently, so thought I'd best get around to blogging it. In the presentation I caution that you shouldn't really trust people who give lessons about the future - they're usually trying to sell you something. But lessons is a nice way to frame it, so treat them more as opinions I've come to over the past couple of years.

Lesson 1: It's not just for geeks

It is easy sometimes to get bogged down in conversations about the latest technology, API calls, RSS feeds, linked-data, etc and it seems very technical. Sometimes this has the effect of making academics think 'it doesn't relate to me'. But we shouldn't let the geeky talk (which is necessary sometimes) cloud the fact that we are looking at changes to very fundamental scholarly practices.

Lesson 2: Researchers are in a dilemma

Researchers are caught between the potential of new approaches and operating within a conservative context. A range of studies have shown recently that researchers are often cautious in their use of new technology and rather risk adverse. 

Lesson 3: Interdisciplinarity is in the network

While many people point to the importance of interdisciplinary work, it is actually difficult and costly to realise. The 'light' connections we have and ease of republishing means that interdisciplinary results can be achieved easily with low cost.

Lesson 4: We're all broadcasters now

Broadcasting and large scale public engagement used to be the reserve of those on TV or radio. As I've argued before, scholars produce a lot of content, which with minimal effort can be converted into shareable, digital resources.

Lesson 5: We're operating in an attention economy

When content and connections are abundant, then we lose the monopoly on attention. I think playing the attention game doesn't come easily to academics and is viewed as somewhat beneath them. But nevertheless this is the environment the digital scholar operates in. It can be quite subtle things such as a good title, or using interesting images in a slideshare presentation, or making use of different media, posting at a favourable time of day, utilising the network, etc. But increasingly we are competing with an excess of demands on everyone's attention and merely assuming the quality of your research or teaching will win out may not be enough.

Lesson 6: We can rethink research

I covered this in an earlier post, but to reiterate, we are often operating within a mindset of how research is performed, funded and disseminated which doesn't take into account new possibilities.

Lesson 7: New skills will be required

I didn't want to produce a checklist of digital literacies, but the following are the types of skills that will be useful (but not essential to have all of them): video creation, site analytics, curation/filtering, writing for online, liveblogging/amplifying, data visualisation.

I would probably have an entirely different list next year, but just looking at this set you appreciate how few academics are really adept at most of them, and also how unrepresented they are in formal recognition systems. But nevertheless they will become increasingly significant I'd argue, for instance research councils will be looking for alternative means of disseminating research findings, or the use of analytics to inform teaching or research.

Lesson 8: It'll impact even if you ignore it

Here I replayed the network weather argument, using the academic conference as an example of a fundamental practice that is changing because of the impact of technology, regardless of whether you personally use them or not.

Lesson 9: It's about alternatives

I can't stress this one enough. It is tempting to portray it as a case of the old model dying, being replaced by the sexy new one, and hey, if you're not on the bus with the hipsters, you'll be swept away. But the real picture is much more subtle and complicated than that. It is not the case of existing practices being killed off, but rather of us having a richer set of alternatives to choose from. The monopoly of the incumbent forms may be killed off, but not necessarily the forms themselves. Peer-reviewed journals are a good example here - they're no longer the only game in the scholarly communication town, but they still have a role.

Lesson 10: Don't focus just on risk

According to Tversky and Kahneman, we are programmed to focus on risk, but not so good at seeing benefits. In his book from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton has this quote from James Boyle, which sums it up:

“We are very good at seeing the downsides and the dangers of open systems, open production systems, networks of openness. .. Those dangers are real… we are not so good at seeing the benefits and the converse holds true for the closed system.”

So people often think of all the bad things that might happen, for example if they post stuff online someone might pinch their ideas, or it might take time, or there may be issues around rights, etc. But they're not so good at imagining positive outcomes, such as it might connect you with more peers, lead to new forms of collaboration, improve citations, be a useful teaching tool, or just be fun.

I used a video to set off each lesson, so here is the slidedeck, with the videos removed but a link to each one. 

UPDATE: And if you want to see me doing it live, then here is the presentation with videos at LSE.

 

Ten lessons in digital scholarship

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JIME relaunch

Last year I took on the role of co-editor of JIME (The Journal of Interactive Media in Education). JIME was founded in 1996 and was one of the first open access journals, and operated an innovative open peer review system. But it had been a bit neglected over the last few years, so we shifted it to OJS, worked through the backlog of review papers, tidied up the scope, reappointed an editorial board, and now I'm pleased to announce a new issue.

This is a special issue focusing on OER, with guest editors Ester Ehiyazaryan and Alannah Fitzgerald. It's a very good issue, even if I say so myself. It features an opening article from me (what more do you want?) on creaitivity and openness in education, and then moves into 'proper' research work with papers looking at OER in Africa, motivations for reuse, and obstacles in finding OERS. I'm sure there'll be something there of interest to readers of this blog.

And now that JIME is up and running again, we are seeking new submissions. We're operating a fairly traditional model, so academic papers, peer-reviewed - take a look at Focus and Scope for the type of thing we're after. We will be doing some more experimental special issues, eg multi-media, later also. I hope to see you there.

No country for old ideas, this

So, I've been in New Delhi this week as a keynote speaker at the EdgeX conference. It was great to catch up with George, Dave, Stephen and Grainne, and to meet Jay Cross, Clark Quinn and LesFoltos. Viplav Baxi and the team were the most amazing, hospitable hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to be here. I thought I'd share a few of my own perceptions from the visit, although one has to accept they are based on a very limited scope of India, but for what it's worth.

Start-up fever - It feels like a very exciting place to be at the moment. The opening speaker said he felt blessed to be living here to witness change and a form of social democratisation experiment in such a vast scale. And the oft-repeated mantra was that education was key to this. Social entrepreneurship is seen as the means to achieve this. Just about everyone I spoke to had a start-up company. If you hadn't initiated one start-up before breakfast it was a slow day. And while this is undoubtedly driven by the desire to make money, it was also seen as the way to get things done, and the social good element seemed to be a strong driver also.

Scale, scale, scale - It is the numbers in India that make drive a lot of this. We were variously given figures of 150 million to 500 million people who needed to be educated over the next couple of decades. Those kinds of numbers are probably not going to be satisfied by a single solution. And so all manner of educational businesses and inititiatives become viable, because a small slice of that is still a big number.

Beware the undead - there are a lot of US and UK universities hovering around India, trying to sell their model as a solution. With higher education on its knees in the west, this big market attracts the half-dead universities to suck on its new blood. Ok, I'm overplaying it. I think there are undoubtedly mutually beneficial collaborations that are being established, but as George exhorted, "stay Indian". There are aspects of the Indian context that are unique and simply importing a model wholesale won't work.

Beware the bubble - while it did feel like a very exciting time, the reality of India is never far away and it may be that the task is just too great to be sustained. The last time I felt in the midst of such collective fervour was when I was at a tech conference in the US at the start of the web 2.0 explosion. I remember having breakfast and on a table of 8, being the only person without two start-ups on the go. This kind of enthusiasm is liberating, and can produce great things, but it tends to run out of steam, so I would just caution against a potential bubble here. Having said that, if I was a) younger and b) more business minded, I'd be in India now.

I met some great people, and learnt a lot, so I'll be fascinated to see how it develops. At the moment, I'd sum it up by saying it's a place where a youngish man can tell you he has 800 acres of a new city to develop a university of his own design and you don't dismiss him as delusional.