The Ed Techie

FutureLearn & the role of MOOCs

If you're working in higher ed in the UK you will no doubt have seen that FutureLearn had its beta launch last week. Some disclosure - FutureLearn is owned by the OU & I've been partially involved in its development, so I'm probably not a completely objective commentator. Needless to say, what follows is just my opinion and not an official OU/FL one.

The first thing to note about the FutureLearn launch is that it launched. This is no mean feat. To get all those partner universities to sign an agreement on something quite vague, to develop a platform from scratch and to get good quality courses created for a platform that didn't exist involves an incredible amount of negotiation, hard work and good will from all parties. My small involvement with the project is that we have a weekly one hour meeting with the lead developer where we feed in advice and research. I've found them to be very smart and willing to take stuff on board. It hasn't felt like an antagonistic or us and them relationship. And I know where I speak of here, having been involved in the UK eUniversity, which became mired in contracts and stalled development. 

So, getting FutureLearn launched in a decent state is the higher ed equivalent of hosting the Olympics successfully. We're often criticised in higher ed for not being able to deliver so we ought to recognise it when someone does.

I know some people are down on FutureLearn, and I can appreciate why. It's a backlash to all the MOOC hype. I think it is important to maintain a critical standpoint particularly when commercial interests are trying to undermine existing practice to create a market for their own solutions. But I don't want to find myself in the position where I'm arguing that making good quality, well designed learning content available for free is a bad thing. 

The MOOC hype is settling down now, and I feel that FutureLearn is really an indication of what it may well end up being. Forget the "end of universities as we know them" rhetoric, ignore the "all education will be this way one day" commercial wet dream - MOOCs will be as OERs. And that's a good thing. OERs are now available from providers all over the globe, they make a big difference to the way many people work. But they haven't really fundamentally changed what we do in education, they've allowed new models and enhanced others.

Now if you're a venture capitalist this is bad news, you've sunk millions into a MOOC company, you need it to entirely revolutionise education, so you can own a big chunk of it. But if you're a university this is good news. Martin Bean, quite rightly in my view, pitched MOOCs as a shop-window. That's a sustainable business model for universities. We've found that OpenLearn is more or less sustainable now as a recruitment channel. This talk of business models may not be as altruistic or as revolutionary as radical MOOCers would like, but I think it's a good model with benefits on both sides. If a million learners every year get to experience some good online teaching material, and a smallish percentage of these then go on to study other MOOCs, or enter formal education, that's a positive outcome for universities, society and the individual learners. It probably isn't a model that will get venture capitalists excited though.

Academics and online impact

I presented at the OU's communications conference yesterday. I was asked to talk about how you create an impact online. I'm always a bit cautious about giving advice on this, as I didn't (don't) have a plan, so it's all been trial and error and messing about. But I guess that is my advice - just get started and try stuff out, don't wait to go on the "Creating academic impact online with blogs" course, just do it.

I was lucky to share the stage with two great OU colleagues. Meg Barker is an expert in relationships, and has a good blog associated with her book Rewriting the Rules. Natalie Starkey's expertise is in comets and asteroids and does a lot of TV work and writing for the Guardian, as well as blogging. I went last, so the previous two subjects had been sex and space. I then had to follow up with... educational technology. Do you ever get the feeling you made the wrong career choice? 

Anyway, my presentation is below. I make the point that I don't really know what all the stats mean associated with blogs, but they must mean something, right? 

Academics & online impact from Martin Weller

What university rankings really tell us

There's a law with league tables that goes something like, your criticism of them is indirectly proportional to your placing in them. If you're in the top 10, it's a marvellous piece of research, but as you go down, you become more suspicious. So, when I saw that the OU was ranked 99th in the Times Higher top 100 universities under 50 years old, my critical faculties were engaged. So you can probably dismiss all of this as sour grapes, but the table raised a couple of issues for me which reveal quite a lot about the state of higher education (and to be honest, I'm desperate to blog about something other than bloody MOOCs).

The first issue is that, despite all the talk to the contrary, it's research that counts still. The league rankings were based on six criteria. Of these 5 are related to research:

• Research: volume, income and reputation (30 per cent)
• Citations: research influence (30 per cent)
• International outlook: people 
• and research (7.5 per cent)
• Industry income: innovation (2.5 per cent).

This may favour smaller institutions, where a couple of big hitters can have an impact. But more significantly, it means only one criteria relates to teaching. That tells you a lot about what's valued in higher education by people in higher education, but I'm not sure the same is true of students. The one remaining factor then is:

• Teaching: the learning environment (30 per cent)

The OU would fair well here I though, after all, we usually come in the top 3 in terms of student satisfaction (yes, I'm strangely supportive of that league table). But the OU only scored 18.1% on this. How come? Well, closer examination of the methodology for rating the learning environment reveals that it isn't based on student satisfaction but is instead influenced mainly by, you've guessed it, research. So two of the six factors were:

"the ratio of PhD to bachelor’s degrees awarded by each institution. We believe that institutions with a high density of research students are more knowledge-intensive, and that the ­presence of an active postgraduate community is a marker of a research-led teaching environment valued by undergraduates and postgraduates alike.
The PhD-to-bachelor’s ratio is worth 3 per cent of the 100 Under 50 scores (up from 2.25 per cent).
This category also uses data on the number of PhDs awarded by an institution, scaled against its size as measured by the number of academic staff."

If you have a lot of undergraduate students, like the OU does, then no matter how good their learning experience is, you won't score highly because the ratio to postgrad will be low.

I do value research, but for 5 of the 6 criteria to be based around it and the remaining 1 be heavily influenced by it seems to raise issues. For potential students I wonder what use this is. I'd want to know what the teaching environment is like, as that's what I'm paying my money for. Quite often those researchers who contribute to the ranking view teaching as an inconvenience, so it doesn't bear much relationship to the quality of teaching. 

Choosing a university on the basis of its research is a bit like moving to an area and using the quality of schools as your sole criterion, when you don't have any children. It may be a proxy for good quality but it could be that everyone lives outside the area and busses their kids in (Harrow for example has a very posh school but not many of its pupils live in the surrounding area). For you, the quality of doctors may be a more important criteria.

I wonder what message this sends to all, but particularly new, academics. The message I would take away is "research is still king, do the minimum you have to in order to fulfil your teaching duty." And with students paying high fees for their education, this is setting up a conflict between the 'customers' and the context within which staff operate. And that can't be good for the long term future of education (I'm not going to mention MOOCs here, I'm not!).

One other thought was the research obsession left no room for any digital presence. These rankings could have been created 20 years ago. There is nothing in here about online engagement, digital profile, use of social media, outreach via new channels, etc. This would be difficult to measure I grant you, but given the significance of online presence for students, academics and institutions alike, it seems like an oversight.

Goodbye to two colleagues

I don't often use this blog for personal reasons, but two colleagues are leaving the OU, and for various reasons I can't make either of their leaving dos. So, to assuage my guilt, and also to publicly acknowledge and thank them, I'm blogging it. I'm sure it's better than a fountain pen as a leaving present.

The first colleague is Ross MacKenzie. Ross works in what is called Learning and Teaching Solutions. They do all the content creation stuff from editing to DVDs to running the VLE. In fact, it was Ross who succeeded me as VLE Director - I'd come up with a solution based on an open architecture, which Ross very sensibly translated as a decision to go with Moodle. This single decision did an awful lot for open source (many other universities took it as a cue that it was okay to adopt Moodle), and also for the Open University it was important to embrace open source. Part of the story of the OU over the last 15 years has been to engage with changing definitions of what it means to be 'open'. And the VLE was a big part of this.

Ross is unusual for a technical chap in that he is helpful and likes to say yes. Arguably this makes him unqualified for the changing world of educational IT (I'm joking IT friends! Sort of). He is also a very good photographer, and plans to do more in this line. He has been going for nearly 3000 days continuously over on Blip, check out his photos there and on his blog (he likes to travel to cold, inhospitable places). 

The second colleague is Tony Walton. Tony has worked in the strategy office and alongside various PVCs. For a few years I worked on a number of projects which Tony was charged with leading. I used to joke that a coffee with Tony was a dangerous event since you'd end up on a strategic project. When I list the projects I worked on, mainly because of Tony, you'll appreciate the impact he's had on the OU as well as on my career: Getting the initial Hewlett funding for OpenLearn; developing a new Broadcast Strategy that moved away from TV and led to the founding of our Open Media Unit; the VLE which saw us move to a centralised elearning system; SocialLearn which was the OU's first engagement with social media (and a forerunner to FutureLearn in many ways).

As with Ross, these projects have all helped the OU engage with what it means to be open in 21st century. Like Ross, Tony does not have typical administrator traits, I won't stereotype (again) but he's helpful, unflappable, unassuming and enthusiastic about his tasks. 

Tony and Ross, it's been great working with you - enjoy your retirements (or in Ross's case, new career), the OU will miss you (wipes tear from eye). Here's a retirement card for you both to share:

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?

Education in 'not broken' shock

This is what all education is like - FACT.

I've complained about the "education is broken" meme before - my reservations about it have been threefold:

i) It's just lazy - saying something is broken (or dead) avoids having to do any subtle analysis and appeals to a simplistic viewpoint. 

ii) It frames technological change as a crisis and not an opportunity - Mike Caulfield covered this better than me, but once you adopt a 'broken' metaphor then a whole set of language accompanies it which frames it as a negative problem to be fixed.

iii) It's suspicious - those who peddle the "education is broken" line usually have something to gain from its acceptance. Either they are directly selling a solution that will mend it (after all, a broken something needs to be fixed, see point ii) or they have individual prestige in being seen as someone who can at least see the means of fixing it.

I've been studying the Masters in History at the OU recently (it's an 18 month long haul, only 2 months in). So I thought I'd reflect on how 'broken' this experience feels. The answer is, well, not at all really. This isn't an advert for the OU, I'm sure the majority of reliable HE institutions would provide a similar experience. The point is that it isn't a radical course in terms of approach or technology, and so provides a reasonable experience of what education is really like I think. I'm sure there are plenty of worse examples, and grudgingly, maybe I'll concede there are some better ones, but this is what distance education in the 21st century roughly equates to, I'd hazard. 

First of all we had to read quite a dense text (Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortunes), we were provided with reviews around it and the first assignment was based around analysing its approach. The aim of this was, I think, to introduce us to the type of academic writing in history (I suspect it weeds out the people who really just want to do genealogy), and to think about the range of references and resources required to provide a comprehensive argument (Davidoff and Hall are exhaustive, and at times, exhausting in this respect).

The assignment was an old fashioned 2500 word essay. And it worked - I read the book in a much more analytical manner because of it, I followed up references, I considered the manner in which evidence is found and constructed to form a picture, I engaged with fellow students in the VLE (shhh).

We're now on to a more active block, looking at the range of online resources. This is enjoyable stuff, I really didn't know there was just soooo much stuff out there. I have been lost for a few evenings in the House of Commons Parliementary Papers, or the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, or the National Library of Wales, etc.

I'm not going to do a critique of the course, but studying it has reinforced my belief that "Education is broken" is an unhelpful stance to take. For a start it doesn't reflect the reality. I would urge anyone who uses this claim to study a course outside of their own domain of expertise and see how it feels (I'm obviously focusing on higher ed here, the claim is also frequently used for K12, which I can't claim expertise in). I think many protaganists are basing their claims on rather outdated views of what it feels like to be a student. 

But more importantly, if one adopts the broken stance then you want to start afresh. In my experience this isn't beneficial. I can see how you could take the existing course and maybe add some new elements in to it, or campaign for open access to all historical archives for instance, explore new forms of assessment, find ways of making such courses more accessible and open (I didn't say MOOC, no sir), etc. These are opportunities to build on top of a successful approach, which seems a better, if less sexy approach, than demanding wholesale revolution with some glorious new leaders installed.

Reflecting on this has made me think of a fourth reason why I don't like the 'education is broken' rhetoric, and that is it is fundamentally cliquey or elitist. It's underlying message is "all these other people don't get technology like we do. That's why they're stuck in that old fashioned way of thinking which we know is hopelessly broken. Come join our new gang." But of course, if this new gang became the establishment they'd quickly abandon it. They don't really want educational change, they just want to feel cool for a while. Let them do that, we can do better.

Does your MOOC have penguins?

It turns out that there are no less than three MOOCs on open education coming your way. George and Stephen are running one now, David Wiley's one ran last winter and will run again this winter. And very last, I'm running one next March. My one really arose through logic and not a desire to ape George or David (although I do that often enough). I was writing a block of the new Masters level course on Innovation in education, and my block was on open education. I have a strong 'learning by doing' approach, so it made sense for the students on this block to experience it as an open course. So, the course itself is 22 weeks long, and mine is the second block, so for my bit students come out of the protected OU environment and into an open one, and it runs as a mini, self-contained course (in the OpenLearn platform).

After David's blog post the other day, I was joking with him and George on Twitter about competition between the open education MOOCs. In an effort to entice learners I promised that mine will have dancing penguins, booze and fireworks. Through her marvellous drawing skills, Giulia Forsythe visualised this for all of us:

Okay, I may have slightly oversold it there.

Firstly, I don't think the open ed MOOCs should be territorial or alpha male about the whole thing - we'll each bring different takes on it, and learners will prefer one style to another. It might be a good exercise in all three courses to get learners to compare the three in terms of pedagogy, content, technology.

Secondly, we should turn Giulia's penguin into a badge. Only the penguin badged MOOCs offer something different, either in terms or approach, coverage or activities. As I've mentioned before, the interesting thing about the early MOOCs, was the ability to experiment. This is what is lost in the new wave of industrial, commercial MOOCs. So to differentiate them, the experimental MOOCs can state what is innovative about theirs. So I'd claim that the penguin elements in mine are:

• Postgrad level
• Activity based, light collaboration model
• Hybrid approach to fee-paying and open students
• Combination of formal university systems and third party services

(I'd like to add badging to this, but there are some internal discussions going on around this, so we'll see).

So, what is the penguin in your MOOC?

Innovating Pedagogy report

Here at IET in the OU, a bunch of us, led by Mike Sharples, were asked to produce an annual report on how changes in teaching and learning (related to technology) were changing the current landscape. The initial idea was to do this for senior OU management, but I'm pleased to say that everyone involved wanted to make it wider than that and create a publicly available report. Think of it as like a Horizon's report with more focus on pedagogy. We adopted the same methodology as the Horizon report also.

It does have a bit of an OU bias, but I think it's a very good read (and I should know as I had to read through it multiple times for editing) for anyone in higher ed (a lot of it is applicable across other sectors, but we're upfront in saying these are not our areas of expertise). It's meant to do so in a short, accessible format, so for instance the (inevitable) coverage of MOOCs probably won't add much to you if you've been following them in detail, but then again you may find the stuff on Personal Inquiry Learning is new to you.

It's billed as a "New report from the Open University on ten innovations in teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world". It covers ten such innovations, some of which won't be a surprise to readers of this blog. They are:

• Assessment for learning
• Badges to accredit learning
• Learning analytics
• MOOCs
• New pedagogy for e-books
• Personal inquiry learning
• Publisher led mini-courses
• Rebirth of academic publishing
• Rhizomatic learning
• Seamless learning

You can read the full, nicely formatted, pretty pictured, report here, and make comments on any of the topics on the accompanying blog.

The intention is that it is an annual report, so we'll revisit next year. In the meantime, I hope you find something useful in it, and it might be the type of thing you can leave lying around on the desk of a senior management type person.

 

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