The Ed Techie

What sort of open do you want?

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I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. 

What do I mean by this? Well I could list the different types of openness in education: OERs, MOOCs, open access, open scholarship, etc. But instead it's more useful to consider the motivation for openness, why has someone adopted an open approach in the first place? Here are some possibilities:

Increased audience - you want as many people as possible to be able get at your resource, be it an article, book, course, video or presentation. The main aim here is to remove barriers to people accessing it. This means it has to be free, easily shareable, online, and with easy rights.

Increased reuse - related to the above, but slightly different, you want people to take what you have created and combine it with other elements, adapt it and republish. The same considerations are required as above, but with an extra emphasis on minimal rights and also creating the resource in convenient chunks that can be adapted. Whereas the first motivation might mean releasing your song online, the second motivation might lead you to sharing each of the tracks that constitute the song separately under a CC-BY licence.

Increased access - this is different from the first motivation in that you want to reach particular groups who may be disadvantaged. You have open access in that you do not require formal entry qualifications. You may decide that free is also the best way to gain increased access, but that may not follow. If you want to work with learners who often fail in formal education then simply making a resource free doesn't really help. What they need is material aimed at this audience and specific support. Open access is not just about price.

Increased experimentation - one of the reasons many people adopt open approaches is that it allows them to do different things. Whether that's use different media, create a different identity, or experiment with approach that wouldn't fit within the normal constraints of work, an open method allows this. If this is your goal, then the emphasis is on getting an audience that will feedback on this and maybe participate in this experimentation.

Increased reputation - being networked and online can help improve your, or your institution's, profile. Openness here allows more people to see what you do (the motivation of increased audience) but your main aim is to enhance your reputation. If you were an academic who really wanted to be on the keynote circuit then operating in the open, publishing openly, creating online resources, being active in social media and establishing an online identity might be a good way to achieve this. Here openness is a method by which you realise a different goal, but it could be anything. The emphasis here then will be on networking and using openness to establish identity.

Increased revenue - while we may have suspicions about open washing and using openness as a route to commercial success, it's true that an open, or part-open model can be an effective business model. The freemium approach works this way, where a service is open to a large extent, but some users pay for additional services. If this is the goal then openness works by creating a significant demand for the product.

Increased participation - you may need input from an audience, but can't pay to access them. This could be crowdsourcing in research, or getting feedback on a book or research proposal. Being open allows others to access it and then provide the input you require. Openness here can be quite targeted, you want to reach a particular audience and get them involved, not necessarily as large an audience as possible.

Let's take an example in education and consider it from these different motivations. Let's imagine your university (or a university you know) wants to create a MOOC. They've heard all about them and think they should be doing something in this area (this actually covers about 90% of university's approach to MOOCs). They seek your advice, so you go around to a bunch of different stakeholders and you ask them "what is the aim of the MOOC? What do you want from it?"

Now, the person from marketing says they want to increase the university's online profile and reputation. From this perspective you propose a MOOC in a big hitting subject, featuring a big name academic. The subject will be "Life on Mars". It'll be expensive, high end production, acting as a showcase for the university and getting it in the press.

When you speak to the Dean of the Science faculty they say they are concerned about student recruitment on their post grad course. They want it to bring in high fee paying overseas students. The model that might work here is one that makes the first 6 weeks open, and target a specific audience, who can then sign up. You suggest offering badges and allowing people to build up to taking the full masters.

You then speak to an academic who is really keen to try a student-led approach. They feel frustrated by the customer-led focus of conventional teaching and see in MOOCs an opportunity to try some more radical pedagogic approaches that they have been blocked from implementing. They don't see it as particularly massive in terms of audience, but it will be a rich learning experience for those who do it, as they will be creating the curriculum. You propose a MOOC based in Wordpress, and featuring a range of technologies with learners co-creating the content.

Later you have a conversation with a funding council who want to bring under-represented groups into science. They will need a lot of support, but they are willing to fund the provision of mentors and support groups in the community. You suggest a MOOC based on adapting existing materials, with carefully targeted support and minimal technical barriers.

And so on - you can see that from each of these perspectives the resultant MOOC would be a very different beast. It would be open in each of these scenarios, but with a different emphasis on the form that openness should take.

So, now that openness has to a large extent won out as an approach, the question is no longer 'do you want to be open?' but rather 'what sort of open do you want?'. 

Earning the right to preach

I watched the tweets from the WISE13 conference with interest. One that caught my eye (and rather made it water) was Gordon Brown extolling the value of education and its benefits for society. You can see his talk below:

It's a good talk, impassioned and well reasoned. I agree with everything he said. But I find it strange that he is saying it. Brown's record on international development is good, it's something he really believed in. But when he was Prime Minister, he abolished what's called ELQ funding in the UK. This meant that you couldn't get funding to study if you already had an equal or higher qualification. This was enormously damaging for many of the people you want to avail themselves of education - those who have been made redundant and want to reskill for examples. 

I appreciate this is a minor concern compared with global education for all, and particularly the social power of getting girls into school. But it's the principle - you don't get to talk about the wonderful power of education if when you had the chance you looked at the budgets and thought "nah, education's not worth it, we can make a saving there." 

Everyone (well maybe not some of the Taliban) thinks education is a good thing. It's an easy totem to gather around and make impassioned calls for. Education has a lot of social credit. We shouldn't let people use it without having shown their credentials, and Brown botched his chance when he had it to demonstrate that he really believes in the transformative power of education. Of course, compared with what's come afterwards, Brown's crime is minor in comparison, but even so, you don't get to use education now as your platform. Or at least not without some contrition. The same goes for openness - you have to earn that badge through action.

Open media and the new Stasi

"Trust me, I'm a journalist..."

I came across a disturbing story last week, particularly for academics in the UK who use social media. A UK academic who blogs and tweets as Plashing Vole reported that a journalist from the Sun on Sunday had contacted him, telling him they were going to run an article about him. It concerned a few anti-government tweets he had made, in one jokingly making a Nazi comparison. An MP was calling for him to be sacked. In the end they didn't run the piece, but it must have been a stressful few days.

This worries me on a number of levels. Firstly, I often encourage academics to establish an online identity, and that part of that identity is to give a bit of themselves, not just bland broadcast. If we are now entering a phase when any opinion or joke will be used against you then this advice might be harmful.

Secondly, I think most of us will have a 'there but for the grace of God' moment on reading his account. I am mindful of being offensive in any online communication, but I've made jokes & expressed opinions so if someone really wanted to I'm sure they could construct a negative story about me and use a few carefully selected tweets to prove a case. The same is true for any of us I think - a friend of mine was berated by someone because they tweeted about biscuits during work hours.

But the thing that bothered me most of all was the sense of surveillance and suppression of opinion. The East German secret police used to have people in every workplace reporting to them, and they would drill holes in walls to spy on citizens. Any anti-state sentiment that was expressed would be recorded and that person would find their life difficult, or they'd just be disappeared. The consequence was that no-one would express any dissenting view in public, which was, of course, the aim. It is the same here, it doesn't matter that they didn't run the story, they only need to threaten to often enough to make academics scared of expressing an opinion publicly. And that is a very dangerous society to live in.

The possible saving grace is that I would hope universities are strong enough to stand up to this nonsense, and also, I think it's such a non-story, and would be of so little interest to their readers that it's not a practical policy. But who knows?

MOOCs as 1st year undergrad replacement

For top-secret research I am undertaking, I'm looking at a range of MOOCs, both xMOOCs, cMOOCs and flavours inbetween (although, definitely not ridiculous variations such as SPOCs). Here's some breaking news - they are all pretty good. Take away all the hype, commercial bubble and rabid arguments on both sides and you are left with some good teaching material. 

As I've been going through them (admittedly not as thoroughly as a student), I've begun to think that a mix of them would probably represent a good grounding in a topic, equivalent to a 1st year of an undergrad degree. It wouldn't teach some of the other skills you develop, I'll come to that later. Let's take an example, say I want to study a degree in Psychology. The following MOOCs would give me a good knowledge base:

• Udacity's Introduction to Psychology - good overview of the main areas of Psychology, covers experimental design, major topics, ethics, etc
• Coursera Introduction to Statistics - a basic intro to stats 'for everyone'
• EdX Descriptive Statistics - good to get students to understand interpreting and presenting data clearly
• Saylor's Cognitive Psychology - going a bit deeper into a sub-discipline (and reinforcing bits from the intro course)
• Saylor's Social Psychology - ditto for above
• Lancaster's Linguistics course - a kind of elective, maybe choose from a range of topics eg philosophy

Now, I think that would give you a good grounding in knowledge. I know from doing my first degree in Psychology that the first year is really spent bringing everyone up to speed. A second year could then start on the assumption that all of the above is known to all students. This is where a conventional (campus or distance) university can step in. The MOOCs only take you so far. They're good at getting across content, but not so good at developing skills. As a Psychology graduate there are key skills you need to develop (the elusive qualities of 'graduateness'), such as critical thinking, reading and interpreting scientific literature, debate and communication skills, experimental design, etc. These are really best developed by interaction with other learners and experts in a more structured, focused manner than most MOOCs offer.

So here's a model for a university wanting to offer something different - come to us with certificates in all of the above MOOCs and we will enroll you on a shortened two year degree programme. Because we want to be competitive our fees (assuming a UK uni here) are set at £7K per annum (compared with the usual 9K) and that means your degree will cost you £14K, not the usual £27K. That begins to look like a good offer, and I would be willing to bet that there would be no difference between these students at graduation than those that have studied a three year programme.

Of course there are a whole host of objections to this model, for instance it can undermine universities, it plays along with the broken funding regime, a three year degree programme is the right length of time for personal development, and so on. I wouldn't disagree with any of these. And I wouldn't suggest that this is the only model that should be pursued, but rather it is an example of how changes in education, and open education in particular, could offer a wider diversity of university models.

One parting thought - if this model was used successfully I wonder how long before the MOOC providers started charging for their courses to be used in this way?

Autumn issue of JIME

In times of fake open access journals, and open access being used as a means of making even more money by publishers, it's nice to know that some things are true to the simple values of open access... yes, there is a new issue of JIME out. It may not have the bells and whistles of a funded journal, and maybe we can't give it as much time as we'd like, but it's free to publish, peer-reviewed and open to all. 

In this issue there is quite a range of papers, some have a 'design' theme, but it's not a themed issue. Here is the editorial, I'm sure there's something there to pique everyone's interest:

This edition of JIME sees a varied collection of papers covering a diverse range of topics. It starts with a perspective piece by the Director of the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, Josie Taylor, addressing the institutional approach to pedagogy and technology here at the OU. This piece was originally given as a speech internally and focuses on the OU experience, but it will be of interest to others, particularly as they seek to blend new technologies and pedagogies. Its discussion of the learning model and the connection and journey between informal and formal learning is of particular contemporary interest.

There are three papers concerned with different aspects of design: designing online learning or blended courses - and the role of learning design in developing such courses. The first of these is an article by Terumi Miyazoe and Terry Anderson, which provides a much needed theoretical basis for examining OERs and MOOCs. Using the Interaction Equivalency Theorem, they address issues such as the scalability of different MOOC models.

In the third article Canan Blake and Eileen Scanlon focus on designing for collaborative learning and provide a mix of the theoretical and practical in examining the nature of collaborative online learning and its relation with the learning environment. They note that, whilst much prior research has focused on empirical studies to understand the mechanisms, as well as the benefits of collaboration, this is not always helpful in addressing the challenge of designing good collaborative learning activities.

The fourth article, by Anna Mavroudi and Thanasis Hadzilacos, picks up on both themes of collaboration and design again in its discussion of group work in designing for adaptive learning. This paper presents an empirical case study of collaboration on a complex design text, which like Blake and Scanlon's paper above, is in the context of Open and Distance Education, and which has implications for design guidelines in contemporary teaching contexts.

A less theoretical and more practical focus is given in the final article, where Nick Pearce and Sarah Learmonth investigate the use of Pinterest as a tool for anthropology students, suggesting that its non-linear format aids the integration of material in an interdisciplinary subject.

This issue also includes a book review written by Bethany Alden about Joseph P McDonald's book "Going online with Protocols: new tools for teaching and learning".

 

The OA battle ground

In the battle for open, I'd say open access is probably the front which has been engaged the longest. It's worth looking at how the battle is going, as it exhibits many of the characteristics we're seeing in other areas. For example, the spoils are worth fighting for - Reed Elsevier reported revenue of over 6 billion GBP in 2012 of which over 2 billion was for the Science Technical and Medical publishing area. It's also an area where openness has 'won' - OA mandates abound, and a recent Wiley report found that 59% of authors had published in OA journals. It's not a minority pursuit any more. And yet at the time of victory we are also beset with doubt and conflict.

The Gold route so favoured by the Finch report and other mandates may well end up costing us more. And as the sting operation from Science showed last week, the pay-to-publish model creates a tension in the traditional model. I think the sting (where an obviously flawed, fake article was accepted by 157 OA journals) reveals a couple of things about how the battle is going. Firstly, that 'openness' has market value as a term, and so dubious journals have entered the market place offering open access publishing. Secondly, the incumbents (many of whom published the article) may not have a vested interest in making OA a success. If OA is perceived as lower quality then it reinforces their market position and the position of the library subscription model. I have heard anecdotally (and if anyone can prove this please let me know), that an article rejected for a traditional journal by a publisher will be offered to publish in their alternative OA journal for a fee. If this is true, it's genius, since they get to undermine the alternative model while getting paid to do so. This illustrates the danger of trying to let commercial interests shape the direction of openness.

The same can be applied to the other fronts in the battle for open: MOOCs, OERs, open data, open scholarship. So watch the outcome of the open access skirmishes with interest, for that will determine much of what follows in the rest of open education.

 

Will killer robot dogs mean the end of universities?

The answer to this question is, probably no.

But yet we don't see newspapers running articles about the potential threat of killer robot dogs to the status of universities. But we do see them about how MOOCs (sorry David) will destroy all higher education as we know it. For example here is a piece in Forbes. Or one from Nexttrends. Or one from Eduwire.

Why does it always have to be the death of, the end of? I guess it's because 'Will MOOCs be a complementary part of a richer mix of educational offerings from universities?' isn't such a snappy title. I think we've been through the first wave of the digital revolution, we've seen the things that will die off. And actually they don't usually die, they adapt. We shouldn't underestimate the ability of an industry, an organisation, professional people to accommodate digital practice. The 'will die' proponents do humans a big disservice, and portray digital change as an autonomous force which people are powerless before (I'm not mentioning technological determinism here). But if you look closely at that wave of change it is constructed from people using technology. 

This type of change and adaptation is much more subtle and interesting. So run this test the next time you see this type of claim. Could you replace X (MOOCs, tablets, web 2.0) with "killer robot dogs" and it still make sense? If so, the answer is probably the same. Or dinosaurs.

The art of guerrilla research

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In my presentations on digital scholarship I often make the claim that we have the opportunity to rethink the form that research takes. We are accustomed in academia to thinking of research as being of a certain 'size'. Usually this means it is funded research or something with a traditional output (research paper or book). But digital, networked technologies allow us different ways of approaching research. As I am forever saying, this is not to say they supplant the existing methods, or are superior to them, just that we have a richer mix of options now.

I've started calling the 'just do it' approach 'guerrilla research'. This term has been used in software design, for example Ross Unger and Todd Warfel argue persuasively for it, claiming that "Guerrilla research methods are faster, lower-cost methods that provide sufficient enough insights to make informed strategic decisions." I think there is a lot to be said for this approach to academic research also.

What might guerilla research look like? Well, as I've mentioned before, my PhD student Katy Jordan did some work on MOOC completion rates using open data that has been widely used. Or Tony Hirst likes to play with open data sets (although as he pines, it's not as easy as it was). Or a bunch of research that analyses travel blogs.

Guerrilla research is characterised by the following as I see it:

1. It can be done by one or two researchers and does not require a team
2. It relies on existing open data, information and tools
3. It is fairly quick to realise
4. It is often disseminated via blogs and social media

Guerrilla research needn't be in competition with formal, funded research. In fact it's a good way to get started on this. For instance, Katy's work has led to funding from the MOOC Research Initiative. If you want to demonstrate to a funder that your project is worth investing in, then being able to show some interesting preliminary findings is useful. And not just to say 'these are interesting' but to be able to demonstrate tangible interest because when you blogged it, the post had X many hits and was retweeted Y many times.

I feel we have a tendency to spend a lot of time trying to build up to a proper bid, when much of that work could be done in the open. And if you are a researcher struggling to get funding, then guerrilla research may offer a route to maintaining a research profile while you are waiting for that REFable grant to be realised.