The Ed Techie

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?

Prospect theory & the panopticon of debt

Last night, after Nick Clegg's semi-apology over student loans (see comedy version with honesty subtitles below), I got involved with a twitter chat with an economist from Demos. He argued (very intelligently) that the loan scheme would actually save the tax-payer $2.5K per student, and that it should be viewed as a progressive tax, and not debt.

I don't know enough about economics to really counter his claim about the savings. It certainly appears that the Coalition were caught out by all universities charging the full fee, which would suggest it isn't being quite the financial success they had envisaged. But the fact/misleading rumour that it was unaffordable was only ever an extra insult/icing on the cake to what was generally perceived to be a damaging policy to higher education. "You've done all this damage, and it's worked out worse than the old scheme anyway" was the cry.

Let's accept for now then that it could theoretically save money in the long term. This doesn't mean it won't severely damage the higher education sector. And here I do feel on firmer ground, because economists (particularly free market ones) tend to ignore those pesky humans in the mix and assume a rational market.

I would like to propose two psychological factors that will come in to play, which I don't think have been modelled in any government plans.

Prospect theory - Tversky and Kahneman conducted a series of influential experiments in the 70s which demonstrated that people give loss more psychological weight than gain - put bluntly losing £20 has more significance than finding £20. People then adjust their behaviour accordingly - they are risk averse. 

In our case this means they will perceive the student loan as debt, and that debt will weigh more heavily than the potential gain of a good job, a rewarding time, or future earnings. They will thus behave appropriately, with two courses of action:

a) Risk aversion - they don't go to university in the first place and take on the debt. This harms the higher education sector.

b) Risk reduction - they act as if it is current debt and seek to pay it off. This harms society more broadly, for instance, they avoid taking on more debt in the form of a mortgage thus impacting the construction sector.

This won't affect all students, just as some people are more risk averse. Some will judge it a risk worth taking and study anyway. Tversky and Kahneman also talk about the 'Value function", whereby the difference in loss between £100 and £200 is seen as greater than the difference between £1100 and £1200. This would suggest that the impact will be felt most keenly for those from less well-off backgrounds as the potential debt is perceived as a larger part of current wealth, it is a bigger risk

It would take a big research project to estimate the impact of this factor on student behaviour, so for now let's take a figure of, say, 20% fewer students applying, given that is a strong psychological factor found in many instances.

The panopticon of debt - the second factor is that of the panopticon. Taken from Bentham's proposal for prison design and adapted as a metaphor for society by Foucault, the panopticon suggests that when all prisoners/citizens can potentially be observed all the time, they act as if they are. As Foucault puts it:

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection"

It doesn't matter that they aren't observed all the time, the knowledge that they could be makes them act as if they are. I would suggest future debt acts in a similar way. The knowledge that it could become debt and be paid off makes people act as if it is current debt, even if they never had to pay it off (because their earnings didn't reach a certain level). As with prospect theory the impact of this factor is likely to be felt more keenly in some sectors. Some prisoners in a panopticon prison will calculate the probability of being observed at any one time and overcome their fears, others won't.

This transfers the debt from a national one to an individual one, and at this level its impact is more toxic in the economy. The outcome will be the same as for prospect theory: a reduction in numbers applying and a reduction in spending from those coming out the other end.

Again, knowing the size of the impact of this factor would take more research than I can put into a blog post. But let's say it adds another 10% to our previous 20%, giving a total reduction in student numbers of 30%. Like the impact of these factors, it would not be evenly distributed, so Russell Group unis might see no decline at all, while others might see a drop by as much as 50%. This would surely send some under.

Now, it may be that we think a 30% decrease is desirable, that the higher education sector has become over-crowded. But it would be better to state this as an aim, and to work towards it (universities could do better planning then), rather than hope it occurs as the result of an unpredictable system. It would be interesting to know if any of these factors were considered when modelling the future of higher education? 

Digital scholarship, tenure & barometers

I use this blog as well as our university repository system to keep track (and shamelessly publicise) those journal article things that your grandad told you about.

I have a new article out in RUSC (the open access journal from the University of Catalonia). It has the snappy title of "Digital scholarship and the tenure process as an indicator of change in universities". You can access the PDF here through our repository, or at RUSC here.

It's an extension of some of the stuff I covered in the book, and I'm making the argument that how universities respond to the challenge of recognising digital scholarship can be taken as a barometer for how well prepared they are for dealing with the complexities of operating in a digital, networked context. Here is a quote from the conclusions:

"Recognising and rewarding digital scholarship has a significance beyond the promotion of individuals. For universities, as they seek to manage change to a digital, networked society, it acts as a strong indicator and vehicle for change.

There are two main reasons for prioritising the recognition of digital scholarship. The first is the message it sends to individuals within the university. Because they operate in an open, digital, networked manner, digital scholars are often well known in their institution (for example, many of their colleagues will read their blogs). If a well-known digital scholar struggles to get their work recognised, then it sends a message to the rest of the university that this is not the type of activity that is likely to be rewarded, with a subsequent decline in its uptake. The reverse happens if that digital scholar is rewarded; it sends the positive message that academics should engage in this type of activity.

The second reason for recognising digital scholarship is to encourage institutional innovation. For example, universities are beginning to explore the use of Facebook to support students, or the use of blogs to disseminate research findings to the public, or new models of course development based on third-party content and crowdsourcing. There are very real benefits to the institution from these approaches, such as reaching new audiences, increasing the university profile without advertising, increasing student retention through improved peer support, lowering the costs of course production, developing new research methodology, etc. But it is difficult to realise any of these institutional approaches to new media if the university does not have a solid base of digital scholarship experience to draw upon. Having a range of digital scholarship experience amongst the faculty will be the key resource in realising the change required for many universities, and an appropriate reward and tenure process acts as a means of facilitating and encouraging this."

Better angels of our edtech nature

Over the summer I finally got around to reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. In case you don't know about it, Pinker makes the argument that violence of all forms has declined - between states, domestic, national and criminal. It's a lengthy book, but he goes through the arguments very carefully and brings a range of research together to make a compelling case.

What he does very well is take accepted arguments or facts and challenge them - for instance that the 20th century was the most violent one in history. He demonstrates how these are often based on a combination of a rose-tinted view about the past (we were all happy farmers) and a misreading of data.

I was often struck when reading it how lazy people are - and not just journalists or lay perceptions, but academics also. Certain beliefs become an accepted starting point, and when you really examine these you often come to some surprising, counter-intuitive findings.

In education and education technology I think this is also true. Many claims appeal to our "common sense" or widely held beliefs about how society is today, without really backing this up. For example, the raft of 'technology is destroying society' type books or beliefs often only draw on indirect data at best, but usually rely on anecdote. Take Sherry Turkle's argument that we're losing the art of conversation and becoming more isolated. What is this really based on? There is evidence that families are spending more time together, yet you would be hard pushed to find anyone who had this as a starting point in an argument.

Or take the argument that education is broken (which I've moaned about before). This often starts from the 'fact' that truancy is at an all time high, therefore schooling isn't working, therefore we need to do something radical. I haven't analysed truancy rates in sufficient detail (in fact there doesn't seem to be much meta-analysis of truancy rates), but I know the manner in which they are recorded varies considerably. One must also ask the following questions:

• Is any change now a statistical one, or within the realms of normal variation?
• Are historical comparisons valid (ie are they comparing the same measures)?
• Can an increase in truancy rates be accounted for by an increase in population or targeted school attendance (eg if you are working harder to make sure certain groups are registered in school in the first place, will you get more truancy)?
• Is it an increase in more pupils being truant, or the same number of truancy pupils being truant for longer? (eg this article suggests7% of pupils account for one third of all truancy numbers).

And so on - I'm not suggesting truancy isn't an issue, but merely making the point that we adopt lazy interpretations in education, and then make quite sweeping demands for change based on them.

And, naturally, I can't resist one more digital natives swipe on all this. The whole digital natives argument was dogged by this failure to make any real historical comparison and instead rely on anecdote and over interpretation.

Because ed tech is often dealing with new things, it is easy to do this. And I definitely don't advocate doing nothing until you have all the data 20 years from now when you can declare 'yes, the internet will be significant.' It's perfectly okay to have hunches, intuition, to draw from experience and to have a working hypothesis. But equally, because this stuff is all new, we should be forceful in making sure claims are really founded in evidence.

So here's an activity you can do with students, or just for the fun of it: Take a claim or widely held belief in educational technology and examine the precepts that underlie it. How solid are these? Are any of them subject to the kind of Pinker analysis and review?

For now, I would just heed caution to any argument that is based on something that is 'obvious to everyone'.

 

How to dismantle a sector, stage 2.

So last week, London Met university had their licence to act as a sponsor for overseas students revoked, so it can't teach its existing 2,600 non-EU students, or get new ones. This is unprecedented, and as well as being obviously distressing for those students, will send a loud message around the world about the UK's openness to overseas students.

I think there are three interpretations as to why it occurred:

LMUea culpa - it's all LMU's fault, they've been playing fast and loose with the immigration system and have been caught out. I'm sure there will be evidence of wrongdoing, indeed I would suggest the Government has been waiting for such a case where there is unarguable evidence, so it can take such action. But even if we accept that LMU are at fault, the reaction seems way out of proportion. A warning, a suspension, a fine would have all been reasonable - but revoking it and causing such distress seems a clearly targeted action to create publicity. Which brings me onto my next two options.

Sinister pressure - it was not the result of a direct order or intervention, but rather the outcome of pressure created by Government. As this piece points out, Teresa May is under pressure to hit targets for reducing migration, and student visas are perceived (incorrectly as I understand the process) to be an easy option. It is therefore part of playing to the home crowd Tories to be seen to be taking a firm stance. There is undoubtedly something in this, and combined with an element of dodgy behaviour at LMU it may be sufficient as an explanation. But I want to consider a third option also.

Conspiracy theory - John Naughton reminds us that "Whenever someone intelligent seems to be behaving oddly, the hypothesis has to be that they know what they’re doing and that you simply haven’t figured it out." Let's assume people in the coalition aren't stupid (yes, I'm not sure about Gove either, but let's go with it). On the face of it, the LMU decision is stupid. It is over the top, and will cause damage to the sector, when that sector is one of your primary exports. In times of financial crisis you would do everything possible to support such a sector, not undermine it wouldn't you? So, taking John's reasoning, this must mean we haven't figured out what they're doing.

Which heralds in the conspiracy theory. A while ago I blogged that higher education in the UK felt not just like any sector in a crisis, but one which was being deliberately targeted. In that post I was highlighting how the student loan scheme, combined with student number control would damage universities. If we give our conspiracy theory free rein, then having undermined the financial basis for the domestic market, the LMU debacle begins to look like the next stage in this plan, namely to undermine the overseas market. 

Why then would the Government deliberately seek to destabilise an industry? The answer would be that it seeks to gain from that destabilisation. Having seen the problems it encountered by trying to reform the health system through due process and passing legislation, it doesn't want a repeat of this protracted and damaging scenario. A better approach is one of stealth - by financially undermining the existing structures, many universities will go to the wall. This will leave room for the private universities, which they have already made warm noises about (and remember, student number control doesn't apply to these). 

By these commando tactics, the Government could achieve a radically different higher education model, with the high brand universities remaining intact, and the rest of the market provision from private universities, which fits better with a conservative free market model. And all without having a single debate in the House of Commons, or attracting any negative headlines.

Now, I'm not really one for conspiracy theories, and maybe it is a bit far-fetched. A combination of my first two explanations is more realistic. But, if the conspiracy theory is true, I'll make the following predictions:

1. We'll see more universities lose their sponsorship licence, or more likely, a 'toughening up' of the student visa process to continue to make the UK less attractive.
2. Student number control and capping of fees will be used strongly and undermine some universities
3. A piece of legislation favourable to private universities will be slipped through on the back of another bill.
4. Up to 10 unis will go to the wall and others will retract significantly.
5. Unis will be encouraged to partner with private providers.

Of course, if the conspiracy theory is true, then the stance universities & VCs take towards the Government, which has largely been one of cooperation, should change drastically. Just to emphasise, I don't say it is true, but if we see my five predictions above begin to come true, then we should be suspicious. Of course, by then it might be too late.

Two OER sites for researchers

I've been involved very peripherally with a project funded through SCORE, and led by my colleague Robin Goodfellow. The aim was to develop two sites, one aimed at overseas postgrads coming to the UK to conduct research study. This site gives advice on matters such as research methods and writing for academic purpose. It is at http://www.readytoresearch.ac.uk/

The other site is aimed more at UK undergraduates and looks at digital literacy, digital scholarship type issues, so addresses topics such as learning with social media, plagiarism, collaborating online. It can be found at: http://www.digitalscholarship.ac.uk/

The interesting thing about the project was that the brief was to build it using only OERs as content. This led to quite a bit of agonising about what constituted an OER, for instance did it need to have an explicit reuse licence attached? In the end we have opted for CC licensed, good quality OERs where we can, but occassionally had to opt for a different resource.

The role of the team then was to find and select appropriate resources then. We didn't want a site that provided an exhaustive list of all possible resources, but rather one that deliberately selected what we thought were the best ones. This reinstigation of a filter, after it has been removed from the publishing stage, is a potentially significant role for higher education I think.

While it was probably quicker to find, select and describe resources and then coordinate a nice site around them than it was to produce them all from scratch, it wasn't that quick. But I do think the overall quality is better as a result and this may be the better selling point for OERs. There is an obvious analogy with teaching here - we could have just as easily been creating a course in these subject areas. 

Anyway, I hope you find them useful and can maybe think of some people to pass them on to.

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 inclusions & cold flows of the Finch report

In this post I shall attempt to use aluminium pressure die casting as a metaphor for what I perceive as the defects in the recent Finch Report on Open Access publishing. I know what you're thinking, "not another aluminium die-casting as metaphor for open access post, I've read ten of those this week".

Here goes then - when making aluminium pressure die casts, molten aluminium is forced into a mould at high velocity and pressure. There are a number of defects that can occur, and two of these are analogous to the problems I see with the Finch report.

I should start by saying I think the Finch team did a very thorough job, and that have the genuine, honorable aim of increasing access to research publications. Their report is very well researched and the conclusions they come to are sensible and based on sound analysis. I recommend reading the report in full if you're interested in open access publishing as it does an excellent job of pulling together many different strands and setting out the context.

But, I have some niggles. These fall in to broadly two categories, which are analagous to my die casting defects.

The first is the 'cold flow' type defect. In die casting a cold flow occurs when the metal begins to cool too quickly, either because it wasn't hot enough to start with, or it was injected too slowly, or the design of the mould restricts flow. You get big unsightly swirls, which can also weaken the structure. 

The Finch report cold flows are where they have been too cautious in my opinion. They are injecting open access too slowly into the system, allowing it to cool and congeal around key points.

Cold Flow 1: Lack of support for repositories

The report acknowledges that some repositories such as arXiv have been successful but concludes they are not a viable model on their own, stating that there is a:

"widespread acknowledgement that repositories on their own do not provide a sustainable basis for a research communications system that seeks to provide access to quality-assured content; for they do not themselves provide any arrangements for pre-publication peer review. 
Rather, they rely on a supply of published material that has been subject to peer review by others; or in some cases they provide facilities for comments and ratings by readers that may constitute a more informal system of peer review once the material has been deposited and disseminated via the repository itself"

I'm not sure I agree with this, and if you are proposing a national initiative then certainly there is room for a repository. Their suggestion to move to Gold Open Access means that effectively the tax-payer will be funding publishers, since the money will come from research bodies. If you're going to plowing this money in then you have the opportunity to rethink approaches. So we could set up a national, interdisciplinary arXiv. With possible post-filter (eg using my metajournal approach). That would be an innovative thing to do.

Cold Flow 2: Lack of demand on publishers

As I said above, the model they propose will mean the government effectively funds the publishing process. If you're going to be doing that, then you should make sure you get value for money. So instead of suggesting that it would be good for publishers to link data with publications, eg:

"In an ideal world, there would be closer integration between the text and the data presented in journal articles, with seamless links to interactive datasets; a consequent fall in the amount of supplementary material; and two-way links, with interactive viewers, between publications and relevant data held in data archives. The availability of, and access to, publications and associated data would then become fully integrated and seamless, with both feeding off each other."

Perhaps they should mandate it? And offer an alternative, for instance, they could fund universities directly to publish OA journals, where you get the 'basic' package, or if you have publishers then this is the value they add. Without mandating what you are requiring for your money, you create cold flows as people figure what they can get away with.

The second type of defect I see in the report is analagous to inclusions. In die casting the presence of foreign particles (typically Aluminium Oxide) is known as an inclusion and can be very damaging to the overall strength of the casting. As the aluminium cools around these particles, it will create a weak spot, which can potentially fracture.

The Finch report has one large inclusion in it that I think creates just such a weak spot. It is the role of the publishers. I know a few people in publishing, and they're good people generally who want to work with academics and believe in the research dissemination process. So this isn't an anti-publisher rant. But in a talk I attended from the Finch team and in the report, I got the impression that the economic viability of the academic publishing industry was a key objective. For example, the report states:

"arrangements must be in place to enable publishers (whether they are in the commercial or the not-for-profit sector) to meet the legitimate costs of peer review, production, and marketing, as well as high standards of presentation, discoverability and navigation, together with the kinds of linking and enrichment of texts (‘semantic publishing’) that researchers and other readers increasingly expect. Publishers also need to generate surpluses for investment in innovation and new services; for distribution as profits to shareholders;"

Generating profits for publishers can be a side effect (as it was in pre-internet days), but it cannot be a goal. The goal is to effectively disseminate research. That is all. 

The danger of this inclusion is that it creates an economically unviable model, where much of the money flows to shareholders, or creating systems that gain competitive advantage. Neither of these are concerns for disseminating research. A Deutsche bank report (cited in McGuigan and Russell) stated that:

"We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process. We are not attempting to dismiss what 7,000 people at the publishers do for a living. We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available."

The conclusion of the Finch report does nothing to address this, and indeed could make the situation worse. It also loses an opportunity to think of more radical methods through which that principle aim of disseminating research might be achieved, because the stability of the existing approach is assumed.

I won't try and make connections to other die casting defects such as porosity. I'll leave it there, but you should read Stephen Harnad's piece on the Finch report, which makes up for what it lacks in tenuous die-casting metaphors by being excellent.

 

How to dismantle a sector

I'm not an overtly political animal, unlike many of my colleagues, so maybe this post is misguided or misinformed, but increasingly working in Higher Ed in the UK feels like working in a beleagured sector. Many people will feel like this in the current crisis, so higher ed is no different in that respect, but it now feels like it is not only suffering the same fate as all sectors, but is actually the victim of an ongoing campaign. I sit in many meetings with colleagues, in this university and across the sector, where we end up shaking our heads and laughing with a mixture of amazement and hysteria at the next cumbersome plan that is being foisted upon us.

As I said, I'm not that political, so maybe I've got some of the following wrong, in which case, please correct me. But here is how I interpret the last few years, and some supposition about the next few:

• The student loan scheme is forced through, and the coalition seems to have not considered the scenario that most universities will charge the top rate of £9000.
• The scheme then turns out to be more costly to realise than the existing method.
• In a panic, the government then introduces Student Number Control, so that it can cap the number of loans it gives out and can ringfence that money.
• As I understand it, the situation with part-time students is too complex at the moment (when is a student studying, or in-between studies, what counts as a full time equivalent, etc), so they have avoided student number control at the moment. But it will probably come in to play for 2014.
• However, because it will look politically damaging to allow students to 'buy' their way on to courses, the student control figure will apply, regardless of whether the students are taking out loans or not. Universities could then find themselves in the position of turning away students who have the money to study and who they have the capacity to teach.
• The student control numbers however, do not apply to new private universities because they want to grow that sector.

WonkHE has a lot more insightful stuff on student number control if you want to dig down into it.

And this is avoiding looking at the situation with research. The higher education sector in the UK was a widely respected, profitable and functioning system. It was by no means perfect and certainly wasn't efficient, but it worked. I appreciate it worked because it was funded to an extent by the UK taxpayer, but even in hard economic terms, this shift from Government debt to private debt doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Not all debt is equal - Government debt can be long term and at low interest rates. Private debt creates a liquidity trap in times of economic crisis, because individuals seek to reduce their debt and thus don't contribute to growth, thereby creating more debt. And a nation's debt is best measured by combining Government debt, financial institutional debt, and personal debt. Shifting it to individuals then doesn't reduce the overall debt, it just increases the damage it does to your economic outlook.

Socially it's a poor idea too, in times of crisis society undergoes a seismic shift - people lose jobs in one sector, but retrain, re-educate and create a new one. But if they can't afford to study (or are put off by the austerity rhetoric) then this shift doesn't take place, or is at least limited. 

This may sound like special pleading - "we should be immune from the winds that batter the economy because we have nice beards" - but it isn't. Like many people in the sector, I expected and accepted that higher education would go through a period of increased accountability and efficiency. We weren't prepared though for this sustained assault, combined with a dangerous level of incompetence. 

And all this when you want to shift to being a knowledge economy - strange times indeed.

 

Comparing the value of education

I've signed up to study the OU's MA in History starting in September. My reasons for this are twofold: it's good to be a student every now and then to remember what it's like to be a 'real' student; and I have this notion that part of what I do on this blog and in my digital scholarship book is to act like a contempary historian. I am trying to document, predict, analyse, and generally make-it-up-as-I-go-along this particular period of change for scholarly practice, because I feel that it's a significant one. But I don't have the real theoretical or methodological underpinning from a historical perspective to do this. 

I'm lucky, I get my fees paid as an employee of the University (rather like the mythical island where everyone makes a living taking in their neighbour's washing, maybe the OU can just populate its courses with its own staff). But completing the fee waiver form made me think about the (purely financial) cost of studying, and how it compared. Now, I believe education should be free, it's a general benefit to society to have people studying, so this isn't a political post about education funding, instead just looking at how it compares with other family spends.

As a leisure activity it is at the higher end, but doesn't come out too bad. My course is £3120 for the first part (which lasts a whopping 16 months), and then £1560 for the second which lasts 9 months. So that's a good couple of years of high quality activity (it actually comes to 2.5 with a small break in between and some pre-course work).

Here are some other leisure costs for comparison over the same period:

• Full season ticket at Spurs: about £4000 (would be 2.5 seasons)
• Average family holiday: £7,800 (2 family holidays)
• Gardening: £700 

So it's definitely a luxury 'product' but not excessively so. It doesn't compete then on price as a luxury activity. What does it compete on? I'd suggest it has the following advantages:

• Longevity - a post or undergrad degree will teach you techniques and you'll gain knowledge that will stay with you forever. On the first day of my Psychology degree back in 1986 they told us "long after you've forgotten all the stuff we teach you, you'll remember how to be a scientist". And they were right. You may retain memories of a good holiday or football season, but the longevity of good education is hard to beat.
• Self-worth - I think an adventure holiday or growing a beautiful garden provide this too, but there is something about the objective value of a degree or masters qualification. You have achieved something that is broadly recognised and even for a Prof, that has a value to one's sense of self-worth. The sense of having been challenged and achieved something (much like running) gives a sense of purpose that is difficult to find elsewhere, outside of physical, sporting challenges.
• Identity - being a football fan can add a lot to a sense of identity and people often label themselves in such terms, but so does acquiring a degree. I don't know if I'll label myself a historian afterwards, but it will definitely be a component.
• Job prospects - this depends on the qualification, and increasingly is less significant than it used to be when everyone has a degree. It probably won't count much in my case, but who knows, it could lead to interesting career directions, research projects, etc. But certainly this is something holidays and footie tickets can't claim.
• Enjoyment - I can't say how much it compares with a good family holiday or a great footie season, or a carefully cultivated garden. All of these provide enjoyment, but that is their principle sales pitch. I feel the joy you find in becoming part of an academic community, of learning interesting stuff for its own sake is something we don't make enough of in education.

In making this comparison though I think I've highlighted the problem in making education a market commodity. If you look at that list above of the virtues education offers, aside from job prospects, it is almost impossible to value them in monetary terms. How much is improved self worth in cash terms? To ask the question is to see it as ridiculous.