The Ed Techie

The issue of scale

Michael Feldstein has an interesting post on the issue of scale, inspired by Jim Groom's Open Ed keynote. Michael's post is very reflective and thoughtful and he admits he'd always sort of dismissed Jim and the edupunk stuff as interesting, but it doesn't scale, and scale was what he was concerned with. He concludes he was wrong to do so, and maybe Jim's approach does scale, but not in the conventional sense:

"But if we can create a world in which the average community college student asks her professors what their credentials are to teach their classes, then all else becomes possible in educational reform."

In his comments on the post Scott says:

"what I object to is an idea of “scaling” that works through what I call “massification,” e.g. find something that works and that either make that single instance bigger, or simply replicate that model holus bolus. I take this to be the industrial model of growth."

Now I work for an institution that has scale at its heart. It is all about delivering quality education at scale. I ran a course with 15,000 students on it. That's scale. And it isn't the kind of organic, network scale that Scott is talking about, it's the industrial type scale we traditionally think of. I've met plenty of OU students who will tell you enthusiastically that study with us has changed their lives (for the better). I occassionally bump into students who took my big course back in the early 2000s, and for whom it was a major event in changing the direction they took. So scale doesn't have to be dehumanising, it can still be designed with learners at the heart and every care taken to ensure that they have a personal, well structured learning experience. And delivering that at scale helps lots of people.

But the type of scale we're looking at with Jim, and which Scott refers to, is different. We've always known that an exciting lecturer will enthuse students, there's nothing new in  personality being a factor. But we do see a form of scaling when this is done online and in the open, which is new. In this TED talk Chris Anderson highlights the power of video to accelerate innovation:

I think his ingredients of a crowd, light and desire apply to how work like Jim's scales. I have pondered before about what I could take away from DS106, and the answer is not 'be Jim', but it might be 'have greater student involvement'.

Are the two forms of scale at odds? I don't think so, and I would urge Michael to keep worrying about scale - my experience is that it can work and when it does it has a real impact on people's lives. That's not something to be sniffed at. But the new form of scaling is significant too. Maybe through the former we encourage people to participate in the latter, and maybe the latter provides means of making the former more engaging and responsive. 

And the other thing I know about scale is this - it doesn't always matter. Sometimes you do something on a small course for example, which would never scale. But that's okay, it doesn't have to - it just works here and now.

Bridge 2 Success

This is the third in the what I'm up to at the OU posts. A while back we were part of a consortium that won a bid in the Next Generation Learning Challenges funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, & The Hewlett Foundation. The partners are us (IET at the OU), MIT, the Anne Arundel Community College and University of Maryland University College (UMUC) - the project is Bridge to Success.

It's aim is to use OERs to help community college students who struggle with study skills, and math(s) in particular. So we've taken some OU courses and these have been adapted in the US, and made available through our OpenLearn labspace. But this is about more than just creating content, so these materials are used in classroom instruction, and we are researching how students and instructors find the process.

My role is to head up the research work programme (Patrick McAndrew is the OU lead and does all the real work). One of the things I'm interested here is in the process of adaptation. We have given our materials to US partners to adapt, and what we are looking at is the type and degree of adaptation that occurs. There are at least four types of adaptation that take place:

1. Simple context - changing £ for $ is a simple way of thinking about this
2. Language adaptation - changing the nature of the instruction that is given in terms of the style used
3. Content adaptation - reworking, deleting or adding content so that it meets the needs of a US maths curriculum
4. Pedagogic adaptation - altering the nature of activities and instruction based on knowledge of the types of students

Now, you probably want to get away with just doing type 1 adaptation as that is fairly straightforward and takes the least time. But you still need subject experts to do this, and it quickly becomes apparent that it bleeds across to the other types of adaptation too. It is all context. 

So what will be interesting to see is just how much adaptation takes place, whether some instructors adapt more than others, and if this has any impact on student performance. There undoubtedly comes a point when you have adapted something so much, it would have taken as much time to create it from scratch. The argument here then is whether the OER approach is worthwhile, if it takes as long to adapt as to create? Even if this is the case (and we haven't found that to be so yet, but it's still early), the use of OER may lead to better material than creating from scratch - this would be a tough thing to test, but maybe for another project.

Those are the kinds of things I'm interested in, beyond the more practical (and worthwhile) outcomes of hopefully improving student performance, confidence and understanding.

Here is a presentation from MIT's Brandon Muramatsu on the project if you want to know more:

Demystifying OER and Bridge to Success

View more presentations from Brandon Muramatsu

Book launch - YOU are invited

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bayasaa/2693171833/>

The good people at IET have offered to do a launch of my book, and Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Rebecca Ferguson have done a great job in organising it. Details are here in Cloudworks, the important details are below (one of them is not true, guess which one):

When: Tues 15 November 2011, 3-4pm

Where if you're OU based: Ambient Lab, ground floor of the Jennie Lee Building)

Where if you're online: Live streamed here: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1769&s=31&ran=1641022548&state=1

Twitter hashtag: #digitalscholar

Competition: YES! Win a free copy of the book. To enter the competition, please show or tell us what you consider to be "a digital scholar". Entries can take the form of an image, audio clip, video, blog post, piece of writing or animation - and will be uploaded via this cloud (or just point me at it). 

Afterwards:I shall be breakdancing at the end of the event.

Come on, you know you want to. I really hope OU colleagues will come along and external colleagues/friends/mortal enemies will join in via twitter.

 

JIME editorship

The second of my 'what does Martin do every day?' posts.

I've recently taken over editorship of JIME - this was a highly innovative journal when it was first started up by Simon in KMi over ten years ago. It was open access before anyone talked about open access and had an open peer review model. But as with so many academic journals, particularly when there isn't a big publisher behind them, it operates on the margins of everyone's time, and it's kind of stuttered over the past few years.

So we're planning a relaunch next year. We are currently working through a backlog of papers, so no new submissions are required yet. We've got the open source journal system OJS operating now, and that seems to work well. It's fairly conventional now in its review model, but it is still open access. One of the issues we face is rather akin to the conference conservatism cycle I suggested a while back. People won't publish in a journal that doesn't have an impact factor. In order to have an impact factor you need to conform to certain processes eg have a set number of issues per year, operate a pre-publication peer review system, etc.

But I would like to use the journal as a form of research. What is possible with a journal? What review models are acceptable? Can we move away from just text articles to multi-media submissions? What metrics can we apply? How will a journal that operates a different model be viewed? Does it still constitute a journal if you make too many changes?

So, here's where you can help. I've set up a quick survey to guage opinion about the longer term direction of JIME (in the short term it'll be open but with the standard review model). I'd really appreciate it if you took 2 minutes to complete it. 

 

Curriculum Business Models

I rarely blog about the day job anymore, so I thought I'd do a series of posts around 'what I'm up to at the moment', as I'm involved in a lot of projects that are interesting and probably relevant to other places as well. And also, just in case you thought I just sat around all day.

First up is the Curriculum Business Models project. I'm the academic lead on this, having taken over from Grainne. The project grew out of a lot of the learning design work at the OU, particularly the JISC funded OULDI project.

The name is a bit of a misnomer I feel, it isn't really about business models. It is more about trying to scaffold the course design process in a standard manner across the university. We have a number of tools to help this, the two I'm mostly focused on are the pedagogy profiler and the module map.

The pedagogy profiler aims to get course designers to categorise how they aim to teach each subject in their course, using six categories of learner activity. So, for example if I were creating a course around digital scholarship (now there's an idea), I might say 'I want to cover Boyer's work on scholarship, and to do this I'll get students to do some assimilative work (reading a chapter) and also some experiential work (categorising their own work)'. The aim, I feel, of this tool is twofold: firstly, there is a tendency when producing distance education courses to operate in a production mode, to focus on the stuff, and the intention here is to think about student activity first before moving to the actual implementation of this; secondly, by having six categories of activity there is an implicit suggestion that a balanced diet is required. If your pedagogy profile comes out as one massive block of assimilative, then it tends to make you go back and revisit this. It is not the case that a completely even split is always desirable, for example level 1 courses may have more assimilative (ie acquiring info from reading, watching, etc) and level 3 more communication, or vocational courses may have a stronger experiential element, and so on. But it does tend to promote a more pedagogically diverse course design I find, and I think that makes for a more interesting learner experience.

Having done a pedagogy profile you then move to a module map. This has four categories: Content, Guidance, Communication and Demonstration. So now you can start mapping those student activities onto a representation which says how you're going to deliver them. That group activity you decided to do, well now you map out that it will require use of the wiki tool in the VLE, which will hopefully trigger this.

This module map is a common representation that can be shared by different groups, and it can also drive an initial costing, where you can say 'you know that 3 hour video with George Clooney we were planning? It may be a tad expensive, let's revisit that.'

So that's Curriculum Business Models, we're currently in the stage of developing the tools so they look nice and rolling it out across faculties so it becomes part of the course production process. Wish me luck

Jobs weather

Like many, I was saddened at the death of Steve Jobs yesterday, and inevitably it led to some reflection on the impact of a person's life.

In 1999 I wrote part of a course (T171, You, your computer and the Net), based around the story of the early computer industry. We used Cringeley's Accidental Empires as a set text. Ultimately this came down to a story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Incidentally, this compelling narrative was a very good way to teach about dry subjects such as microprocessor operation, analogue to digital conversion, etc. At the time Jobs had just gone back to Apple, and it was by no means certain this would be a success. Many people were predicting the end of Apple and Microsoft were all conquering. Like football managers, the advice for company founders is usually "don't go back".

If Jobs had done nothing in this second phase at Apple, we would still be marvelling at his achievements, but that he made this second reign eclipse the first is really a remarkable achievement. Much of the eulogy yesterday focused on the number of people using his products, which I agree is testament to his success, but I think perhaps even more powerful is the long reach he had - the impact beyond immediate Apple products.

I saw a couple of snidey comments on forums along the lines of 'I don't see why it is the lead news on the BBC', and 'I don't use Apple stuff so he had no influence on my life.' To these people I'd say: if you don't think Steve Jobs had an impact on your life, then you simply don't understand the world you live in. (At least in the developed world, but arguably everywhere).

So what is this long reach of Jobs:

• Windows - Gates can be seen as the great democratiser of computers, but the Windows interface, which was key to this, was driven by competition with Apple. I'm not saying we'd still have DOS interfaces (and yes the original ideas came from Xerox PARC), but the Mac pushed it forward a good decade or so. Which leads us onto the next point:
• The Internet - now, you're probably thinking I'm stretching things here, and yes I know Jobs didn't invent the internet. But the work he did to create a world where the personal computer was ubiquitous laid the foundation for our whole internet driven economy. 
• Music and other sectors - I wrote a post once asking the question 'Why didn't Microsoft invent iTunes?'. By really grasping what the net meant for a digital content industry, Jobs completely transformed this industry. In so doing he also highlighted how other similar industries would be challenged by the arrival of digital content distributed via a global network (eg the film industry). As with the graphical interface, it may have happened eventually, but the music industry themselves weren't driving this change, so who knows how long it would have taken. 
• Economy models - iTunes is still the only really good example of making micropayments work, and as such it is often held up as a model for other sectors to immitate and explore. 

I could go on. My point is that Jobs' impact is not just that a lot of people have an iPad, but on the subtle ways his work pushed others and changed society. I should stress that I'm not a Fanboi and lots of Apple's products and approaches infuriated me. But we can view it like Adam Greenfield's analogy of network weather - even if you don't engage then it has an impact upon you, like the weather. Jobs weather can be seen in everything from the number of people using social media to report on an event (because they have easy to use mobile devices) to the closure of the record shop in your high street (because everyone buys their music online).

How many of us will be able to say our lives were like a 30 year global weather system?

Made-up social media stats

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizettegreco/279539306/>

Seeing as most media reports concerning social media seem to rely on no evidence whatsoever, I thought I'd pinch an idea from Josie Fraser, and just make up some stats (she had some wonderful ones about retweeting). Feel free to use any of these, remember they have no basis in truth, but when has that stopped people? I expect to see them in an interview with Baroness Greenfield any day now.

1. 7 out of 13 people confess that they would rather go on holiday with their iPad than their spouse
2. Every day £27 billion in productivity is lost through people using social media at work
3. 4 out of 9 people admit to having tweeted during sex
4. If you put all of Stephen Fry's followers end to end they would stretch from Bolton to Biarritz and then back up to La Rochelle.
5. 5 out of 4 young people admit that they use social media to cheat on assignments
6. If Facebook were a country and each person had ten foot square, it would be the size of 27 Wales.
7. 76% of all Twitter accounts are young ladies in bikins selling iPads
8. Excessive use of social media causes a 33.45% inflammation of the hippocampus
9. 88% of all teenagers say they would rather chat on Facebook than stroke a puppy
10. Using social media for more than 20 seconds a day increases your chances of cancer by 37%
11. Using iPads (only iPads mind, no other tablet) in class increased student performance by 2000%
12. Children who play computer games for more than 20 minutes per day are 17% less likely to recognise their mother in a crowd

 I'll stop there shall I?