The Ed Techie

Disrupting disruption

David Kernohan likes to joke that he has a disruption klaxon that sounds whenever that over-used term is deployed. It must have sounded like a nuclear attack warning when reading this educause piece (which he pointed me at, and which Pat Lockley gives the perfect, hilarious response to). Now, I'll confess, I've used the D word in the past. I liked Christensen's first book, it was well researched and well argued. But like so many concepts it has been misapplied to the point where it is meaningless.

If you are about to employ a consultant, particularly in education, I will offer you this money-saving advice for free: don't look at one that uses the word 'disruption' (or, even worse, describes themselves as a 'disruptor').

Disruptors are not concerned about your specific problem, they only have blanket solutions. They don't worry about making something useful, only about sounding revolutionary. Disruption is about ego. You see disruption appeals to people because it's revolutionary, elite, new, sexy. Just being useful or practical looks all dowdy besides glamorous disruption.

So, everything has to be disruptive, a game-changer, a revolution, an all-encompassing tsunami of change. It can't just be useful in a particular context. That educause piece judges OERs a failure precisely because they are not disruptive. That tells you more about the author than it does about OERs - in their world only disruption matters. Take the OER based TESSA project. Useful? Undoutedly. Disruptive? Probably not. So, who cares about it, right? We should aim higher than getting well paid speaking gigs for middle-aged men with goatees who skateboard to work.

Any educational technology advance in the past 15 years will have been claimed to be disruptive by someone: elearning, learning objects, VLEs, OERs, games, MOOCs. The thing is all of these are very useful for particular problems. But if they ain't disruptive they're no good.

So this is my motto from now on: don't be disruptive, be useful.

Last thought - whenever I hear disruption, it is not David's klaxon that plays in my head, but Mitchell and Webb's NumberWang, except it is now "DisruptionWang". Try it, you'll find it makes as much sense.

 

UPDATE: DisruptionWang is sweeping the nation. You can now get the t-shirt (courtesy of David Kernohan)

Registration open for my Open Education MOOC

A year ago we decided to rewrite one of our Master's level courses, H817, Innovation and Openness in Education. I volunteered to write one of the four blocks of the course, on open education. I blithely suggested, "I'll probably make it a MOOC." It seemed fitting as MOOCs and different flavours of openness were the subject of the block. At the time MOOCs were all a bit new, experimental and fun. 

How that glib suggestion has haunted me. As the profile of MOOCs have increased so the demands and requirements placed on creating one have multiplied. But with the help of some great people at the OU (it's been great to work with people who want to help rather than just repeating "no") we are finally ready to roll.

Yes, now you can enrol on the MOOC, which starts officially on March 16th. There is some set-up work that can be done and you'll be registered to go then when it's all live.

Not another bloody MOOC I hear you cry! Yes, but I hope to be testing some new elements as well as providing damn fine learning materials. Here's what I think is mildly distinctive about mine:

• Not celebrity focused - although it's written by me, it doesn't feature me, the activities are written in an objective style. I'm uneasy about the whole celebrity academic thing in MOOCs, but I know some people like that sense of following an expert, so we'll see if this less personality focused model works.
• Collaboration-lite pedagogy - in a lot of our formal courses we have very structured group work, which develops important team working skills, but is very time-consuming and often unpopular. I'm trying to use a 'collaboration-lite' model here (I'm not the first, DS106 and others do it very successfully). The intention is that you act as individuals, but through blogs, twitter and yes, good old-fashioned forums there is room for engagement and community. It's as take as much community as you want model. Some people like to study alone, others want to socalise, I'm hoping to cater for both.
• Open as to time - although it will run as a cohort for 7 weeks from March 16th, the course will then be 'frozen' and stay open in the OpenLearn environment. This means that although you won't be studying it with people or have any support, you can study it any time. I would like to see staff development or study groups create their own cohort and do it whenever they want.
• Mix formal and informal distance learners - Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, Jim Groom, Jonathan Worth and David Wiley have all run open boundary courses before, where the campus students mix with the informal learners. So it's not that new, but it's the first time we've done it at the OU, and I'm not sure it's been done with distance learners that much before. So it'll be interesting to see how these groups mix.
• Forum support - I've been lucky enough to get some cash to pay two of our associate lecturers to support the course by looking after forums and checking twitter. This doesn't mean they are acting as personal tutors to everyone, so don't bombard them with queries, but I'm interested to see what levels of support are needed.
• Badges - okay, not that novel, but there are three badges associated with the course, so again, I'm just interested in how much take-up of these there will be, and whether people want more.

The course outline is as follows:

• Week 1: Openness in education 
• Week 2: Open education resources
• Week 3: Moving beyond OER
• Week 4: MOOCs
• Week 5: Pedagogy in open learning
• Week 6: Operating in an open world
• Week 7: Conclusion

Go on, give it a bash, what have you got to lose but your evenings?

It's kinda personal

Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this!

You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're people who wouldn't have read it. And the book brings out different concerns and reactions in them, many of which hadn't occurred to me. This going beyond your usual readership is a salutary lesson for any writer, and has made me rethink some of the way I write.

In his post Jim comments:

"I understand it would be impolitic for Martin to mention this in the book given his audience, but for me that is the real radical line of reasoning for open scholarship—a clear picture of just who the people behind the ideas ideas are, and what “such people” represent more tangibly as human beings."

I don't know about impolitic, I just forgot to mention it. Whenever I do sessions on social media for educators I always address this point. Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different). So you need to put an element of personal in there, the people I follow on blogs and twitter don't just broadcast cold ideas. But having said that, one of the mistakes I think people make when they first start blogging is to go too personal. I'm not particularly interested if you went to the cinema last night and the film was quite good and then you had a curry. 

So It's about that bridging between personal and professional. Now if you went to the cinema, and had a revelation about open access while watching a 3-D slasher movie, I'm interested. I think the personal element is essential in good online presence (but that doesn't mean I want to know when you've had an argument with your spouse). Which raises the question, are there some roles where it's effectively impossible to do good social media? I think it's very difficult to be a police officer or politician or senior manager online as you end up having to sanitise every output to the point where it becomes unengaging. If you don't there are people who will use it against you. So, as you go higher up the career ladder maybe effective online presence becomes more difficult.

In Amis's The Pregnant Widow the main character finds financial success but as soon as he does, his ability to write poetry dries up. You can't have both. Maybe that's the way it goes with social media.

 

Chips ahoy for MOOCs

In a post some time back I mentioned that academics now have to compete in an attention economy, and this isn't something we're used to doing (or very good at). It means making your slideshare attractive, or making your blog post punchy, or giving your paper a snappy title. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems awkward and artificial.

MOOCs/Open courses will be the next in this line. I've heard more than one commentator say you have yo grab learner's interest in the first 5 minutes of a MOOC (maybe that's too long). That probably isn't true of formal education, where you have a captive audience. It may be a good tactic for a lecture, but it isn't a necessity. 

There are lots of lists of great opening lines to novels - this list puts "Call me Ishmael" at no 1, but I have to say I'd disagree, given the criteria I'm about to set out (Pride and Prejudice at number 2 is a better example I think, and Clavino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller at 14 is probably the best - how can you resist that?).

For me, opening lines (or shots in cinema) need to achieve three things:

1) Quality - you need to know you're in the hands of a gifted artist and it's worth investing the next few hours/days/months of your life in their work.

2) Content - is this something I am going to be interested in? Good opening lines will let you know what type of subject matter, or genre this is, although very good ones may well subvert this expectation too.

3) Direction - you don't have to give the ending away in the opening lines, but a tease about the direction pulls the reader in.

So, armed with my three criteria I thought I'd look at my favourite opening lines of a song (for this month anyway). It's not as lofty as the books in the list, it's The Hold Steady's "Chips Ahoy". The opening lines go:

"She put $900 on the fifth horse in the sixth race
i think its name is "chips ahoy!"
it came in six lengths ahead, we spent the whole next week getting high"

I make no pretensions that's poetry, but it's a good opening to a rock song. And it meets my criteria I think:

• Quality - that number motif is carefully crafted, and the choice of the horse's name (after a biscuit) instead of some fancy name like Beauregard, sets the tone perfectly
• Content - you pretty much immediately know what sort of life this is depicting, and the type of tale it will tell. This is not a story of middle class alienation in the suburbs. 
• Direction - anything that starts with this positive note, you know won't maintain it, so it gives a good hint at the direction it will take (unusually, the song has a sequel too, called The Weekenders, which contains the great lyric "It's not gonna be like in those romantic comedies/ I bet no-one learns a lesson")

Now, I've just created a MOOC open course and it certainly doesn't start off with a carefully crafted opening line or snappy 2 minutes. It starts off with a course description, learning outcomes and an overview. All very worthy and useful stuff. I think it does meet my 3 criteria, but it does it too slowly. A question then for those developing and studying open courses is the extent to which we should deliberately craft these big bang openings? Do learners need them to decide or do they come with a different set of priorities? You may be prepared for the slow build in learning. Or is the attention economy online just too strong a force?

Just asking the questions. Oh, here's a video of Chips Ahoy while you ponder the answers.

How do you fix a problem like education?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/76657755@N04/7408506410/ >

I've blogged a couple of times before about my frustration with the education is broken rhetoric. To be clear this doesn't mean I think everything is rosy and we carry on as we are, but I think it's too simplistic and doesn't really get us anywhere. I'll try and explain why in this post.

Clay Shirky posted a piece on MOOCs as higher education disruptors last year, and has followed up with another piece here. He uses the phrase "school is broken" so my education is broken klaxon went off, forcing this post.

I should say that, unlike some of my edtech peers (stand up David Kernohan and George Siemens), I like Shirky, I think he is often very perceptive and he is also a very persuasive writer. In this piece he definitely nails some things - most significantly the common misperception of a university student and university life. It isn't young people at pristine universities, so making appeals to this type of learning as typical doesn't do anyone any favours. I wonder though how many people really do this? Maybe it's a US thing - in the UK we've had a very mixed economy of higher education (including that Open University thing) for a long time now.

I have a number of issues around the education is broken theme though. It's never clearly explained what exactly is broken. Is it the cost? Is it student achievement? Is it student drop-out? These are quite different issues. If cost is your main concern, then maybe it's not that education is broken, but that education funding is broken. This is quite different. You could argue here that the problem is not with an inefficient education system (I'm sure it is inefficient, but certainly less so than it used to be), but rather with the notion of an education market. As has been pointed out in the UK, marketing spend has gone up considerably in universities. This is a natural consequence of making education compete in a market place. As is providing better sports facilities or bars than competitors. All of this spend has little to do with education, but having created a commercial market through fees, you can't then complain that universities behave in an entirely appropriate way to survive in that context.

If it is student drop-out that is your main concern, then I agree, we could do a lot more. A small example, but my colleagues on the Bridge 2 Success project worked with many of the students Shirky identifies, and who had struggled with maths to the point where it was preventing them from gaining employment. By creating an online course from OpenLearn content and backing this up with support (sometimes face to face, sometimes online) they got something like an 80% pass rate. Absolutely we need more ideas like this, simply sending people back through the same system that they've struggled with before makes no sense.

So, I think we need to decide what is broken with more clarity before offering solutions. We need to know what is broken to fix it effectively. I don't want you amputing my leg and fitting me with a prosthetic, no matter how marvellous it is, if my problem is migraines.

My second beef/horsemeat (UK joke) with Shirky is his naive view of MOOCs as panacea. He cites a book "Don't go back to school" which interviewed 80 people who had dropped out of school and gone on to be successful. I'm sure there are very interesting lessons to learn here. But really, a carefully selected sample of 80 people? And from that you want to make recommendations about education for everyone? 

So when Shirky promotes MOOCs as the equivalent of MP3 or YouTube, he underestimates the demands that will be put on them, and is, unusually for him, wrong about the analogy. MP3s could replace vinyl/CDs pretty much completely. Free MOOCs can't replace education because much of the cost of education is nothing to do with the educating part. Taking a MOOC for fun is great. But when your job will depend on it, then you'll start making demands of it that currently don't exist. If MOOCs replace higher ed then they'll need to find ways of doing the following:

• Dealing with student appeals
• Coping with a diverse range of students and abilities
• Ensuring quality control of content
• Develop assessment methods and procedures that can be defended
• Ensuring robustness of service
• Ensuring accreditation reliability and trustworthiness
• Complying with numerous regulations on issues such as accessibility
• Etc

You get my point. All of these requirements will cost money. So MOOCs as universal education method will soon begin to cost more and more. They'll also start to spend more and more on recruitment and marketing. Sound familiar?

But, I think he is right when he highlights price as a factor. Free education is one revolution, cheap education might be even more significant.

 

The MOOCs that ate themselves

[Image by David Kernohan]

Unless you've been in a very long meeting you can't have missed the story about the Coursera/Georgia Tech MOOC that ran into difficulty and was cancelled (yes, we get the irony that it was Fundamentals of Online Education, no need to go on about it). The Georgia Tech MOOC was trying to do some different things, maybe they didn't all work, but I don't think it was the disaster it's been portrayed as. In the early MOOC days this level of experimentation would have been accepted (I didn't sign up for it, so I'm just going on the reports of others here). It seems that the level of expectation around MOOCs has made this level of flakiness unacceptable.

This is but the most publicly embarrassing example of a growing trend I've noticed. As MOOCs have become mainstream and high profile there is increasing pressure on them to be very high quality, robust and efficient. There is a good deal of brand reputation now invested in them. In short, they have become the equivalent of television broadcast. This means that they're expensive to create, need to appeal to a broad demographic, and have high production values. If this is their direction then there are several inevitable outcomes:

• They become unsustainable - a good MOOC is so expensive to put on that it simply isn't worth doing. You're providing it for free after all.
• Only elite institutions offer them - given the expense, only those institutions who have the money, or the skills to produce broadcast quality content will provide them.
• They are conservative - as Georgia Tech found, it's better not to try anything risky or innovative, because the cost of failure is too great.
• MOOC failure will be costly - if you fail publicly and damage your own, and your institution's reputation, don't expect them to give you promotion. So why risk it?

That'd be quite a depressing scenario, in such a short space of time MOOCs could have moved from the 'we're all in this together' ethos to another form of broadcast controlled by a few. Hopefully people will still experiment with the cMOOC type approach, and offer a huge buyer-beware caveat. But unless we want to kill MOOCs, I'd suggest we all cut them a bit of slack as learners.