The Ed Techie

MOOCs Inc

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/barenboime/2355747124/ by Barenboime>

I thought I’d write a couple of posts around MOOCs, and in particular, the sudden awakening of senior management, media and companies to them. I don’t think this post is really saying much more than ‘hmm, interesting isn’t it?’. Having been involved on the periphery of MOOCs for a while, and knowing a lot of the real pioneers on first name terms (George, David, Stephen, Dave, Jim, Alec – see, I do know their first names), it’s been interesting to see the sudden adoption of MOOCs by others, most notably those in the US.

What we have been witnessing is the mainstreaming of the original MOOC concept. I feel kind of privileged in a way because it’s very rarely that you are close to something and see it go through this change. So it’s worth acknowledging that we are seeing this change, as so many times these things happen and later you think in retrospect, yes, that was the point that it altered.

With the Stanford AI course, then the announcement of Udacity, EdX, coursera, and Curtis Bonk’s course, it seems that barely a week has gone by without some major new announcement. As an advocate of open education I should be pleased about this, and I to a large extent I am. But I also have some niggling reservations.

The main change we are seeing is a form of institutionalisation of the MOOC approach. The previous generation was characterised by individuals – so, for example, Alec has run his course as an open one because he wanted to and could get away with it, not as a part of an institutional program at Regina. The next generation is seeing a more formal structure for delivering open courses. For Jim Groom now read MIT.

This is inevitable I suspect, at some point an idea becomes mainstreamed if it is to scale up. It also has a number of benefits. For a start it legitimises the open course approach to many, so it’s no longer “that bunch of Canadians” and therefore nothing to do with me. Secondly it streamlines the process by providing a template, platform and structure. This lowers the cost to entry in terms of the technical knowledge required. The third benefit is that it provides learners with a more robust and systematic approach. Some of the MOOC stuff previously has been experimental in nature and this has led to frustrations on the part of some learners. Lastly, and we can debate whether this is a benefit, it allows for models of commercialisation to be tested and employed. Ultimately this may make the MOOC approach more sustainable.

The upshot of all this should be that more open courses are available to more people. And that’s a good thing, which should be applauded and supported.

But I’m an academic so it’s my job to hedge things, so for all of these benefits, there are some downsides to this new phase of MOOCs.

I can’t help mourning the lack of the more experimental approach. For me, that was one of the great benefits of a MOOC – it allowed you to explore new pedagogy, technology, subject matter without being tied into the conventional restraints of a fee-paying curriculum. The new institutional MOOCs look very conventional in their approach and subject matter. But I suppose there is nothing to prevent the experimental ones still continuing.

My second misgiving is that while they are free, they are not open in the sense of being reusable and openly accessible. In general you have to sign up and get access to the course. It would be much more useful to be able to have access at all times and reuse elements in other courses. Free is very good, but interesting things happen when they’re open.

And lastly is the commercialisation element – I listed this as a benefit also, so it is ambiguous. If the model is that learners can pay if they want formal accreditation then that seems reasonable, as this will probably require some human input, and provides a means of funding course development. But when the MOOCs are set up as a commercial enterprise from the start you wonder how long before they are engaged in Facebook type data selling, for instance.

I also wonder if there isn’t an element of ‘if it wasn’t invented in the US it hasn’t been invented’ about much of this, and 10 years from now people will be writing papers that cite Stanford as the initiator of open courses.

Anyway, as I said at the start, interesting to watch it unfolding.

 

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

What are the values in a MOOC?

[MOOCs should be this kind of fun]

So this week I am coordinating the topic over at George, Dave and Stephen's Change MOOC (you can see my activities here). The topic is, inevitably, digital scholarship. Preparing for it has set me thinking about what the educator and the learners get from MOOCs and how they differ from formal courses. 

At this point, ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to take out your violins - I have a very full workload. I know, you feel my pain. The trouble with this is that it means any of this MOOC stuff is really done at the fringes of my time. There's that bid to put together before the deadline, the meetings to attend, the report to complete, the thesis to read, the chapter to write. So when I said 'yeah, I'll do the MOOC' six months ago, I didn't actually block out any space for it. And this is one of the inevitable problems about doing stuff for free - the paying job takes priority.

Alan calls me out for a boring video, but this is only part of it. I wanted to be more radical in terms of pedagogy and technology use than I ended up being in my week. The problem is this: Innovation takes time. So when you don't have any time you tend to fall back on what you know. (BTW - I think Alan's wrong about that particular video - a friendly, low production talking head works quite well as a 'hello and welcome' framing and helps connect the learner with the educator, but he is right in general, I want to create a nice video that accompanies my book and explores the issues).

Now, maybe this is ok. For a start, with a different person running every week learners in the MOOC might soon get innovation and technology fatigue. But more significantly I view MOOCs in a different way to conventional courses. I see them more as a focal point for bringing people together to discuss the topics. They are not there to teach. It is a shame though because the point of doing a MOOC for me as an educator is that they provide a space to experiment in a way that may not be acceptable with paying students, so I don't feel as though I used this opportunity to its full potential.

In terms of preparing for this MOOC, I probably spent about a day writing my material. Now, I could argue that I could get away with this because I'd spent months previously writing the book, which forms the basis of the course. And I'll come in for the live session on Wednesday and respond to any queries on Twitter. Is that enough? If I were writing an OU course I'd put more effort into the production. So am I short-changing the MOOC learners? 

So here's my question to myself, and maybe to you:

Should I participate in running MOOCs/open sessions if I can't give them the same time I would my day job, or is it an acceptable pay-off for them being free and open that I give less? 

And also:

What are the learner's expectations and what is their experience like?