The Ed Techie

My new favourite open scholarship example

When I give talk on digital or open scholarship I often end by highlighting the unpredictable benefits that arise, usually by pointing to some examples of my own practice. I have a new favourite which isn't about me, so thought I'd share.

Katy Jordan is my PhD student at the OU (although none of which follows is at all attributable to my supervision, Katy did it all on her own inititiative). Her research is examining academic networks on sites such as Academia.edu. She is a whiz at data visualisation, and also a serial MOOCer. So she took the Infographics MOOC earlier this year. For her final project she decided to plot MOOC completion rates on an interactive graph, and blogged her results. This was picked up by Phil Hill over on e-literate who blogged and tweeted it.

MOOC completion rates are a subject of much interest of course, and so Katy's post went viral, and has become the de-facto piece to link to on completion rates, which almost every MOOC piece mentions somewhere. She tells me it was even mentioned in Private Eye.

I like it because it's a good example of how openness in different forms spreads out and has unexpected impact. The course needed to be open (or rather, free) for Katy to take it, she was at liberty to share her results, and did so as part of her general practice. The infographic relies on people openly sharing data about MOOC completions, and the format of her work means others can interrogate that data and suggest new data points. The open network then spreads the message because it is openly available. I've encouraged her to write it up as an article, because people like a definitive piece to point to, but really it's a good case of why new dissemination and research methods trump older ones (for this instance). 

It's hard to predict or cause these sequences of events (being picked up e-literate was key I think), and so you can't tell people this will definitely occur, but a closed approach anywhere along the chain would have prevented it. We'll never know the lost opportunities of closed approaches, so we should highlight the benefits of open ones.

Surviving the Day of the MOOC

I gave a keynote for Simon Walker at the University of Greenwich for his Academic Practice and Technology Conference. My talk was entitled "Surviving the Day of the MOOC". I borrowed David Kernohan's image as the front slide, because it seems to me that with all this sudden external interest (MOOCs were even on Newsnight), it feels like an alien invasion.

My talk follows an inverted funnel pattern - starting with my own experience and broadening out to consider the wider design implications and then the general higher education context. The point I end on is that MOOCs are really the most tangible and visible aspect of a broader debate/battle/tension - which is around the role of openness in education. You can see the same thing with open access for instance. And this battle for openness is itself really a proxy for a battle for the future or nature of education. 

At the end of my digital scholar book I made a plea that academics should take ownership of digital scholarly activities otherwise they get taken over by external parties. This was before the big MOOC push and I was referencing publishing as an example. But it was (if I may say so) prescient - it is exactly what is happening with MOOCs, and the very worst thing we can do is ignore it.

It all ended, rather unusually, on a table thumping, go forward kind of note. Anyway, here is the slidedeck:

 

Surviving the Day of the MOOCs from Martin Weller