The Ed Techie

If education were free, what would MOOCs be?

Here's a thought experiment, if there were no students fees and higher education were free, what would that do to MOOCs? I mean, obviously it'll never happen... oh, wait, Germany just abolished student fees. Yeah, but what do they know about running an economy, right?

So, on with our thought experiment. At the opposite ends of the spectrum we have two scenarios: It doesn't change a thing, as MOOCs are about a different form of learning; or it completely kills MOOCs as their main feature is that they are free.

Then there are some elements inbetween these two extremes:

• MOOCs become more focused on niche subjects not served by higher education - many current MOOCs offer courses straight out of conventional curriculum, indeed if they want big numbers for monetisation then the curriculum becomes narrower. But in a free higher ed system MOOCs can fill some of the demand and gap not met by conventional curriculum. These would be offered by communities, societies, individuals for interest and maybe universities and commercial providers for professional development
• MOOCs are outreach focused. While competition is lessened in a free HE system between universities, there is an increased pressure on them to perform social-good functions (since they're being paid for by the tax payer). MOOCs are a useful means of achieving this, with the emphasis now on open access, and less on shop window.
• MOOCs offer a different granularity. Related to the above, the full 3 or 4 year degree is not for everyone, and MOOCs provide a means of offering smaller chunks of courses. There is less pressure on them to be a taster or freemium model for the full degree in a free system. They operate as smaller units of learning which may be aggregated, but may not, appealing to leisure learners and professional updating.
• MOOCS are experimental. As with the current system there is room for MOOCs to act as a means of experimenting with technology, pedagogy or curriculum. This allows universities to trial approaches and learners to trial subjects, without impacting upon the core degree. The impetus to do this may be lessened in a free HE system however.

My guess is that in a society where higher education is freely available, then the commercial focus on MOOCs decreases. They are competing less directly with an expensive system, and their main selling point of being free is undermined. But I also suspect they wouldn't disappear. In fact, they end up being altogether more interesting I think, and other features about them come to the fore. And that probably tells us quite a lot about the current MOOC debate.

Uncle MOOC

Uncle MOOC will be looking after you for a few weeks...

A metaphor is always a handy way to get a grip on something new (as long as one is aware of its limitations). My attitude to MOOCs changes on a weekly basis, and so does my MOOC metaphor - I'm sure you've got one of your own: the MP3 of education, this year's SecondLife, industrial revolution applied to education, a giraffe smoking a cheroot rollerblading down the Champs-Elysees - it can be pretty much whatever you want. So here is this week's MOOC metaphor.

MOOCs are like the patronising uncle who has yet to have a child of his own. They are great fun for the nieces and nephews, they are inventive, playful, and the kids always look forward to them arriving. But this uncle secretly (and after a couple of beers, not so secretly) thinks he could do a better job at raising the kids than the parents. He may also think they prefer him to their actual mum and dad. "Why don't they do all the stuff I do with them?" he thinks. "I'm great at getting them out of a tantrum, I do my distraction technique and they forget it. I never see their dad doing that," he compliments himself. "I would have a set of rules that the kids would respect and obey, not this slapdash approach," he vows.

And then, of course, he has kids of his own. Suddenly he realises he has to work as well as raise the kids, that his distraction techniques don't work with a tired 6 month old at 3 in the morning, that he has to do it every single day and getting the basic stuff done like feeding, bathing, looking after them is a real achievement in itself. 

This is how I sometimes feel about MOOCs and their relationship to formal education. They are good fun, they offer something new, a lot of learners really enjoy them. But they shouldn't kid themselves they can do the robust, day to day stuff better than the existing system. If they had to, they'd soon find that a lot of their energy is spent on the not-so-fun stuff, because that is required of them. But, like our friendly uncle they do also make the parents think "maybe we should go to the zoo more often," and "he does know how to get the best out of Tommy, I could learn something there". 

So when I see pieces like this announcement that Georgia Tech are offering an online Masters (they don't even have the good grace to blush when they use the term 'MOOC 2.0") it begins to sound not unlike, ooh, I don't know, an Open University (but with cheaper staff support). This makes me think - this is the first signs of MOOCs discovering that it wasn't quite as easy as they thought, but they still like to dress it up as a revolution.

That's my metaphor for the week, I'm sure Dominik has some better ones. What's your MOOC metaphor?

Edukashun is brocken - the Tumblr

To save me clogging up this blog by banging on about the lazy 'education is broken' meme used to justify venture capital, I've set up one of those Tumblr blogs that gathers stuff together here: http://brokeneducation.tumblr.com/

I think there's a slight danger that like Pseuds Corner in Private Eye it ends up including too much. In the case of Pseuds corner it sometimes seems that any attempt to use words of more than one syllable will be lampooned. Similarly, this tumblr may end up including any attempt to talk about the future of education. In general what I want are those pieces where the education is broken meme is trotted out largely as a pretence for some solution the company or individual has to offer. But I'll take anything in this area really. I would like to pretend that one day I'll go through them and do a semantic analysis or cluster analysis of concepts. But I'll probably just make a sarcastic one-liner instead.

Any suggestions for inclusion just tweet me @mweller.

Mildly interesting aside - I often talk about finding the right voice for a blog. This one is the carefully considered, balanced, poorly written one. I found that as soon as I started doing this tumblr blog it revealed a much snarkier, sarcastic me. Some people may like that, others not.

H817Open reflections

My small MOOC open course, H817Open ends this week, so I thought I'd post some reflections on how it's gone.

I'll start by saying what my intentions were for it. The idea was to mix formal and informal learners (as it is one quarter of a Masters level course), to blend OERs and MOOCs (it is in the OpenLearn repository and exists after course end), to use an activity-based 'collaboration-lite' model and to adopt a range of technologies.

In general it went well, the learners seemed to enjoy it, although we saw the familiar drop-off of participation. It was only on a small scale so I don't think I can draw any big conclusions. I've summarised my thoughts in the slidedeck below, so won't repeat them here. If you have time I'd thoroughly recommend looking through the blog aggregator at the student contributions, they're fabulous.

 

I will say though that I'd do it again, and it's been one of the most engaging teaching experiences I've had for a long time, if also one of the most exhausting.

In an earlier post I said the puppy would get it if people didn't enjoy it. Suffice to say the puppy is alive and well, and that is as much as we can hope for:

The MOOC wars

I admit it, I'm slow on the uptake, but I had a lightbulb moment David Kernohan pointed me at Donald Clark's post on MOOCs "More action in 1 year than 1000" (no hype there then). As Brian Lamb has reported a wikipedia edit battle around MOOCs to remove the early MOOCers such as David Wiley and George Siemens from the picture has also taken place. Initially I thought this was just a bit of ignorance, but Clark's post made me understand - it is part of a wider narrative to portray MOOCs as a commercial solution that is sweeping away the complacency of higher education. 

So Clark dismisses the impact of early MOOCers, claiming it was Khan that caused it all: "It took a hedge fund manager to shake up education because he didn’t have any HE baggage." Why? Because it appeals to the narrative to have a saviour riding in from outside HE to save education. If you acknowledge that these ideas may have come from within HE then that could look like venture capitalists latching on to a good idea in universities and trying to make money from it. That doesn't sound as sexy and brave.

This is more than historical pedantry. I'm not saying all mentions of MOOCs must start with an agreed paragraph that acknowledges Downes, Wiley, Siemens, Couros, Cormier. The intention here is to create an explicit narrative, and as narratives are founded in history, it requires a careful construction of this to support the ongoing story. The narrative goes something like:

1. Higher education is irretrievably broken
2. MOOCs have come along from outside and shown how it can be done for free and at scale
3. MOOCs can answer all your education issues and make a profit

Why do people like this narrative? For three reasons I'd suggest:

1. It's sexy and revolutionary
2. They have a commercial interest in it being accepted
3. It appeals to their ego ("I'm such a revolutionary thinker, give me a keynote")

Of course it falls apart at any detailed inspection. Clark calls MOOCs a sustainable model. Are they? At the moment they rely on those boring, haven't changed in a 1000 years universities to pay the staff to create the courses. How sustainable is that when you've had the glorious revolution? Can they really meet all educational needs? The drop-out rate is high as we know, and they tend to suit experienced learners. They meet some needs and can be very exciting, but as the new universal solution they'd create a lot of problems for a lot of learners (which some brave company would then arise to meet). 

Open education wasn't sexy, it was about giving stuff away. Entrepreneurs don't like that model, hence Clark's dismissal of the OER movement (which, at the OU anyway is actually proving itself to be sustainable and part of normal business, but hey, we don't want to hear that). Universities have been around 1000 years - that must be bad, right? If a company had been around for 1000 years, I think we'd be saying it must have a pretty good model. And of course, no innovation ever comes from inside universities.

And all this takes away from the really good stuff in MOOCs. I love MOOCs, they advance open education, they allow experimentation, they do shake up thinking in a good way, they raise the profile of teaching. This is good, exciting stuff. 

On Twitter Mike Caulfield said it reminded him of this clip:

So I know Clark is just trolling for attention and one shouldn't respond, but it's worth highlighting this nonsense when it arises because it seeps in and reinforces the new narrative. Don't be mistaken, there is a genuine battle for the future happening here, and it starts by rewriting the past.

It's only an island if you look at it from the water

David Kernohan has a good piece on education funding and the manner in which MOOCs commercialise higher ed over on his blog (although I disagree with his criticism of Jim Groom and Stephen Downes). It resonates with some discussions I had with people at the Hewlett OER conference in San Diego last week. As readers of this blog will know, I'm no fan of the 'education is broken' cliche.

At the San Diego meeting several smart open education people stated this belief quite passionately, and I voiced my anger at it to the point where it almost came to blows. In the ensuing discussions it became apparent that people bundle together  several things under this banner. At different times it was because i) kids are taught in age bands, ii) that we don't encourage creativity, iii) that American kids have to walk to school through gang neighbourhoods or iv) that the current model is financially unsustainable. 

I would argue that i) is maybe problematic but is what happens when you want to ensure education happens on a massive scale. None of the alternatives I've seen would really operate at the scale of a nationwide system and are often predicated on very motivated children and parents. But I could be convinced otherwise. I would argue this is an administrative convenience at the moment, not indication that something is broken, and if you can show me how to do it robustly otherwise, I'd go along with it.

For ii) I think we are in the really interesting area where we could do some great stuff with good pedagogy and technology. I was impressed with the project based learning they do at High Tech High, and they take a very egalitarian approach to recruitment so I think there is a model here that could be applied elsewhere. Or many other models. This to me is a sign for opportunity.

For iii) I wonder how much people expect schools to do. If your society is this broken, then don't think schools can fix it on their own.

Which brings me to iv) - funding. Quite often this is what people mean when they say education is broken - that it is financially unsustainable. And this is where I think we are on dangerous ground. If we go around as an education community saying this what we are really saying is "please come and privatise education for the lowest cost". They won't claim to do that at the start, the promise will be to offer better education, for less money. But then market forces will hit, they're in competition with other providers, they need to pay back that VC funding, they need to comply with regulations on fair provision of education, they're facing a lawsuit for incorrect assessment... And those promises get trimmed one by one until the model looks pretty bleak and we sit around in conferences moaning 'this system is even more broken than the last one.'

As I mentioned on David's post, if the argument is really about funding, then let's have that debate, but let's have it in the open. Maybe the full commercial model is the only viable one. We can then decide what we lose by this. But maybe other models are viable too. We spent over £20billion in the Iraq & Afghanistan wars for very little return after all, imagine if we'd put that money into education. It's a cliche I know, but always worth considering.

I don't think people have done proper analysis on the ROI for society for having free higher education (if they have please point me to it). For instance, there was a golden heyday of the Arts college in the 70s. Everyone went to Arts college when they couldn't think of anything else to do. And most of our successful bands and designers came from this background. You couldn't directly attribute the money they generated to the education they had (often they dropped out) but it created the right atmosphere for them to flourish. And sometimes young people just need some space to find out what they want to do before getting caught up in work, and this often means they do better, more productive work later.

So free higher education may not be the 'unicorns and rainbows' dream it seems. If we have the proper debate about education funding, at least we can look at these issues. And all of this is to ignore the more general benefits to society of having more broadly educated population. As David suggests, we need to be wary of being useful idiots by playing into this commercial solution because we've made it seem like the only possible outcome. So the brokenness and the solution are intertwined, but as Chief Brody says, "it's only an island if you look at it from the water".

 

Mrs T & the battle for history

(or, yes, another bloody Mrs Thatcher post).

The passing of Mrs T has led to some interesting reactions in our house. My wife, raised in the Welsh valleys, and who saw her village go from a state where everyone worked in the mines to one where no-one did, has found it painful. She hasn't wanted to watch any of the debate or coverage, because it makes her too angry, and she doesn't want to feel that way.

Far from growing up on the periphery of Thatcher's society as she did, I grew up in its very centre, in Essex. And this was just as traumatic. As a sensitive teenager in the Thatcher years I felt isolated and confused. Everyone I knew bought in to the very simplistic notion that only money counted, there was no other metric. They became estate agents, bankers, builders. They laughed at me for going to university and wasting my time. I lacked the sophistication and clarity to argue why I felt there was something wrong with this creed and, while people in London may have had viable alternatives to be part of, in Essex there were none. It was a lonely time until I got to university. All of this came back to me this week, particularly as the parade of 80s ghouls such as Tebbit and Mellor were brought out to pay homage.

So I am unable to make a rational judgement of Thatcher's premiership. As many people have commented Britain was a busted flush at the end of the 70s. Enough of us complain about customer service from BT now, you had no idea what it was like in the 70s. So there was a degree of change that had to happen, a painful transition. But I can't make that balanced assessment - it is a purely emotional response.

And this is what I think the commentators fail to grasp. They are judging just on policy. But it's more than that - when Tony Blair passes I think I'll be capable of making a rational assessment of his time, and I bet people won't be celebrating his death with the same fervour.

The protests scheduled for her funeral and the presence of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" at number 1 are more than childish or ghoulish responses. They are, whether the participants realise it or not, part of a struggle for history. Already we are seeing a rational, balanced assessment of Thatcher occurring which tends to favour her. But this glosses over the human aspect of it all, the pain she caused. These public acts are a way of cementing into history this feeling. When people mention her in the future they will have to record now these protests at her passing, it can't simply be a record of a big ceremonial funeral where she was celebrated.

Just as the poll tax rioters were decried and lambasted at the time, but now those riots form an essential part of the Thatcher history, so the less respectful reactions to her death are part of an attempt to etch into history some of that emotional aspect she has for so many. This doesn't mean that anything is legitimate, but I think to simply dismiss more guttural reactions is to misunderstand their role in the wider context.

My MOOC tech ecosystem

On my open course H817Open I use a mixture of technology, and thought it might be useful to describe these here, and also to indicate what I'd like to do beyond this.

The technologies are:

OpenLearn - This is where the bulk of the content is hosted and also forums. It is provided by the OU for OU content only, so not an open content system. It made sense to use this, but some recent changes have made the page rendering slow, and the design is suitable for a one-off visit to find an OER in that it prompts you to find other resources, it uses up too much screen real estate on this for a MOOC.

WordPress - this is the blog aggregator, based on the DS106 model. Students blog on their own spaces, but they register their blog with us. We then syndicate all the feeds using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I wanted them to use any blog they liked, so I tried using a Google Form that has a Martin Hawksey script to autodiscover the feed. This hasn't really worked as feeds are hidden all over the place and I've ended up adding most in by hand. We ask students to tag posts with #h817open and only posts with this tag are accepted (there is a setting in FeedWordPress for this), so if they blog about going shopping, that doesn't get pulled in. This has worked quite well. For next year I think I would ask learners to restrict their platforms to blogger, wordpress or tumblr as we can then write a bit of code that will automatically discover feeds in the known locations for these platforms.

Mailchimp - I send a weekly email outlining what is coming up and addressing any issues. This has been surprisingly important, and probably the key component. Mailchimp allows you to send emails to upto 2000 subscribers for free. I get a csv file from the openlearn platform and upload this, then create the weekly email. A lot of the identity and tone of the course arises from this email so it's worth investing some time in getting it right (I don't know that I have).

GMail - I set up a generic email account for the course to handle queries

Cloudworks and badges - we experimented with badges and the Cloudworks system has a very neat tool for creating a badge. However it's a bit fiddly in that you have to create a cloudworks id and then a mozilla one.

Blackboard Collaborate - I deliberately haven't scheduled many synchronous events as I wanted a more open course in terms of timings, but I did get George Siemens to give a talk and we have a discussion and review session planned. The OU has signed a contract with Blackboard so we went with this for easiness, but I think I would explore Google Hangouts next year.

Twitter - I ask people to use the #h817open hashtag, but I have to say Twitter has proven to be less significant, or less active, than I expected. I would probably make a specific activity around this next year to encourage use early on.

Google Plus - I didn't create a specific Google Plus community, but learners created one immediately and it has proven to be lively, interesting and supportive. It has beaten twitter as the forum of choice.

Blogs - as I mentioned above, most student activity is undertaken on their own blogs. They can use any platform they like (although note my reservations about this for next year). I've been trying to promote a 'collaboration-lite' model whereby you can work largely independently, but through the aggregator (or Google Plus) you can connect and share as much as you like. I think this has worked for some learners but not others.

So that is my collection of tools - a mixture of in-house and out-there technologies. I met Philipp Schmidt last week and at the same time had a twitter conversation with Martin Hawksey which has set me thinking. What I would like is an open course DIY toolkit. You come along, select which functions you want and it recommends a bunch of open technologies (although not necessarily open source) with examples of where they've been used, and hey presto, you roll your own MOOC. I may work on this soon, but if anyone wants to have a crack, let me know.

Digital resilience in Higher Ed

I've mentioned the idea of resilience before (thanks to Joss & Richard for linking it to open education and giving me the idea). When Terry Anderson from Athabasca visited us last year, I worked on a paper to explore the idea more fully with him.

Resilience borrows the idea from ecosystems, pioneered by Holling, who described it as "‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables".

In our paper we take the concept and use it as a means of thinking about how HE institutions can view the impact of digital technology. As Joss points out we shouldn't think of resilience as 'resisting', but rather an ability for core functions to persist, in a new context. Terry and I take two possible digital challenges (MOOCS, no surprise, and Open Access) and look at our respective institutions responses to them from a digital resilience perspective.

I think it's a framework that could work well as a way of thinking about how well places an institution is and areas they need to address. The scoring is subjective of course, but in a group setting it works well to create discussion. Have a go yourself for your institution (or one of your choice) and any particular challenge.

The paper has just been published in EURODL, and you can read it here. Hope you like it.

Tips for getting your blog aggregated

This is for H817Open students - the rest of you, move along now.

If you have registered your blog with the H817Open blog aggregator (by completing this form) and posts aren't coming through, here are some things to check:

1) Maybe it has come through - it checks every hour or so, and posts them according to the time originally published. So yours may end up on an "Older posts" page straightaway. So have a look through, or use the search box (at the bottom of the page) to search for an identifiable term in your post.

2) RSS where art thou? - in order to aggregate your posts, we need to find an RSS (or atom) feed. This is how blogs are picked up by blog readers. Some blogging platforms hide this away and it becomes a case of detective work to find it. If you can't find your RSS feed, then it's likely we can't either. Wordpress, Blogger and (usually) Tumblr all have reasonably easy to find feeds. If yours is hidden, search for help on your platform and then find it and register the feed with us.

3) Tag it up - you need to tag your post with #h817open - this doesn't mean putting this term in the title or in the body of the text, but rather applying a tag. In blogger these are called labels. Again, search for help on your blogging platform if you aren't sure about tags.

4) Open, not closed - some blogging platforms, particularly the OU ones, have a setting where only certain people can read it (eg other OU people who are signed in). The blog aggregator can't access it if a password is required, so it needs to be made public.

5) Don't blog it - It isn't essential to register your blog and have it syndicated, you can point people to posts in the forums or in the Google Plus group that some students have set up. The blog is more of a sample of what is going on in the course, rather than a definitive record.

It's difficult to individually trouble shoot problems on an open course, but the above covers any problems we've encountered so far.