The Ed Techie

My Sandinista

I'm generally a forward looking chap when it comes to music, and don't dwell too much in the past. But every couple of years I revisit a band that was important in my youth, not as a matter of policy, that's just what seems to happen.

I've been doing this with The Clash recently, after reading Pat Gilbert's Passion is a Fashion. I always liked Sandinista - as an impressionable teenager it was a good exposure to different music styles and some of the awkward rebel politics of the Clash. It was panned when it came out, after the success of London Calling, largely because it was a triple album and seemed confused and messy. It's often said that it would have been a good double album. I think part of its problem was not just the rather rubbishy tracks that got included but also the ordering of the album. So, feeling a bit bored last night I created my good double album Sandinista. This is embedded as a spotify playlist below. It has twenty tracks, and is a bit longer than London Calling in length, but roughly comparable. 

The order is important here, I tried to envisage it as four sides of vinyl, as it would have been then. Each side has 4-5 tracks in my version and has a distinct personality. It starts of with what you might think of standard Clash. These are probably all tracks that could have been on London Calling. It then moves into a 'funk' side, with the excellent Magnificent Seven and Lightning Strikes. The best side would be side 3, the reggae side. I've slightly cheated here and added Armagideon Times (I wanted a live version but Spotify couldn't find it) and also Bank Robber. I know these weren't on Sandinista and came out earlier, but they fit much better with (my favourite Sandanista track) One More Time and The Equaliser. This really makes reggae/dub a strong theme of the album. The last side is the 'reflective' side, ended with the excellent Broadway.

I think if this had been the Sandinista that had been released, we'd be talking about it now in the same way as London Calling. 

I've been thinking about it too much haven't I?

 

Meta Edtech Journal - issue 3

The new, hot off the open access press, issue 3 of my Meta EdTech journal is out. It features five articles, including an interesting one from Australia comparing the use of games with traditional lectures. Perhaps surprisingly games don't come out that well, although there are some benefits. I think this just demonstrates that it is always a more complex issue than we first assume - surprise, learners are not all the same, and what works well for some may not work well for others.

There's also a quick overview of learning analytics from Erik Duval (useful to stick under the nose of one's boss), a look at how Athabasca transformed itself into an elearning university, incorporating social media into problem based learning, a review of copyright debates, and a look at how open textbooks are being reused.

If there's not something there to tickle your ed tech fancy then you're just being awkward.

Remember, I'm only linking to existing open access publications in other journals here, there is no claim to being the original publisher.

Enjoy!

Amnesimooc

You can probably dismiss this post as 'stop being defensive', but I'll log it now while it occurs to me.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the sudden interest in MOOCs from mainstream universities and the media is exciting, and has a number of benefits, but is not without its pitfalls. In the rush to fuel the MOOC hype it seems to me that some commentators have confused the possibility of running large scale (always the large scale gets them excited) open courses with running large scale online courses. The two are not synonymous. I believe it is the open element of MOOCs that is really intriguing - for me they are moOcs, whereas others see them as Moocs (if you get the distinction).

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/8929612@N04/4911298118/ by Gerry Balding>

Henry Petroski suggests we forget fundamental lessons in bridge design every 30 years, because that is the average length of an engineering career. I wonder if the same is true with distance education. We've been designing large scale distance courses, and then large scale online courses for some time now. And the differences are worth noting, because I would suggest there are differing design approaches, pedagogy, and economics for open courses and 'traditional' ones.

I haven't done a detailed analysis of (large-scale) online distance ed courses and (large scale) open courses (I expect there are a few PhDs beavering away on this very topic), but here is my off the top of my head set of characteristics for the two (based largely on my own OU experience of course).

Traditional large-scale online courses are 'production heavy', ie they spend a lot of time in crafting the course material. This material forms the basis of the content, and so goes through multiple edits, critical reads, and is produced by a team. There is a structured, supported tutor model, whereby each student is a member of a small tutor group, so they have personalised support. This is combined with cohort wide communication and interaction, typically in forums which are moderated either by the course team, paid tutors or students. The course has accredited assessment, and feedback on this forms an essential part of the student-tutor dialogue. This is a pretty standard distance education model, modified for online delivery to a large-scale. In this paper Ley Robinson and I describe the set up for a 1999 course with 12-15,000 students (that isn't as massive as the Stanford AI course, but it's essentially a scaleable model). They are costly to produce and run and therefore carry a study fee. Jones et al compare three open universities and their respective models, which are variations on this.

Large-scale open courses , or MOOCs, tend to have less focus on production I would contend, but then are more flexible and adaptable at the delivery stage. They seem to be focused around an individual instructor/academic rather than a team. Support is provided through peer networks and automated feedback. Assessment is either informal, paid for separately or automated. They can be delivered fairly cheaply by a single academic and are usually free to study.

I am definitely not trying to suggest one is better than the other. But I think it's important to distinguish the two as they may meet different needs. If studying for free is the overriding factor for you as a learner, then MOOCs are obviously the way to go. If you feel that support is important then the more traditional route may be better.

We are seeing an inevitable, and innovative, blending of the two, so this distinction shouldn't be seen as absolute. For example, some MOOCs will offer support for an additional fee. (The cynic in me think that in a few years time someone will unveil the 'completely supported MOOC' which will rather resemble my traditional model above).

In the rush to embrace MOOCs I think it is a disservice to them to fail to appreciate that it is the open element which is truly interesting, and a failure to appreciate the different needs of learners to ignore the other models of large scale online delivery. The defence rests. And has a cup of tea.

 

 

Random debt relief

I my last post I pointed to some research which suggested that random selection of a proportion (not all) of politicians led to greater efficiency, and that a similar model might be useful in the allocation of research funds. 

I'm not an economist, so I expect to be mocked for the next proposal, but here goes anyway. A similar approach might be a more effective means out of the financial crisis than straightforward austerity. This is based on two assumptions:

1. Individual debt relief is more effective at generating growth than bank bailouts - the reasoning here is that banks don't actually distribute the money very far. Individuals will spend more if their debt is relieved. They act as a more effective conduit to get money into the system in a distributed manner than banks.
2. A random element introduces a level of unpredictability into the system, which can prevent stalemate.

So instead of giving £50 billion here, or €100 billion there to banks, a sustained programme of individual debt relief is established. It works like this:

• A useful but not excessive amount is determined. Let's say it's £100,000. Not a lot to a bank but to an individual a substantial amount.
• A 5-year programme is established of a set amount per annum, say £50 billion (that may be too much, it may be not enough)
• The money is allocated at random to households, in a lottery fashion. Crucially there is no quality filter, people do not bid for the money, or put in proposals. There might be a few simple rules in place, eg you can't have it twice, maybe convicted serious offender are ruled out, etc. But largely it's a random process with a high chance over the 5 years of being successful.
• There are no restrictions (apart from existing laws) on how it is spent.

What would happen would be that it would be spent in a variety of ways, each helping the economy. So many people will clear debt. This helps banks, but also benefits the local economy since those people have more to spend on meals out, shopping, etc. Others may decide to start up that business they've always dreamed of, while others still will use it to retire early, thus freeing up a job for someone else, etc. Undoubtedly some people will spend it in ways we wouldn't like (on becoming an alcoholic, emigrating or buying Katie Price books), but you just have to accept this.

Over a sustained period enough people would have received it for it to have a significant impact in most areas, without leading to rampant inflation as it is still a minority. And before the argument that the way out of debt is not more debt argument is raised, this isn't really increasing overall debt. A nation's debt is made up of the government's debt, individual households, financial institutions and non-financial institutions. Currently we are swapping some of the financial institution debt for government debt, but creating no growth. This plan swaps some of the individual household debt for government debt, but would, I suggest create growth.

I'll go back to being an educational technologist now.

 

The random REF

<Image from gringer http://www.flickr.com/photos/gringer/5096129532/>

As a senior member of staff (I know, how did that happen?), part of my duties currently include reading papers for the UK research assessment exercise, the REF. I've moaned about how this reinforces traditional publication models previously. This is a more general moan.

I think the REF has muddled objectives. It aims to make academics accountable to some extent, but primarily acts as a means of allocating research funds. It may have some secondary aims, or you could classify these as indirect consequences, such as reinforcing the position of the main publishers and maintaining the status of Russell Group universities.

When you have multiple objectives the resultant process is often unsatisfactory. So if we ignore the secondary aims (although I wish the Finch report had been brave enough to make clear reference to the REF in undermining the move to open access), then how might the first two be best served?

Let's assume for now that you want to go along with accountability drive. There are of course plenty of reasons why this may not be a good idea, but that's for a different post. As someone who has to read papers and try and judge them, the real problem with the REF is that it brings in quality judgements. I thought that educational technology was a special case in that it didn't fit well into a broader education category and so the people making assessments weren't sufficiently well acquainted with the subject area to make decent judgements. But I've spoken to people in other disciplines and everyone feels the same. The specialisation of research means that no categorisation can be fine enough to really capture it. And it's a fruitless task anyway, who can judge the impact or quality of a paper? I think you can spot a poor paper easily, and maybe a really excellent one, but 90% of the rest sit in the middle so judging whether something is a 2* or 3* is essentially a coin toss.

So, my suggestion (if you want to do the accountability thing) is to simplify it and just apply a simple gateway threshold. So, for example you could take the REF guidelines - in four years someone who has a research part to their contract should be expected to publish four refereed articles, have got one piece of research funding in and supervised one student. Against this simple criteria you can then have accepted trade-offs: running large university projects, digital scholarship equivalents, personal consultancy as funding, etc. But you remove the quality judgement, it's a simple measure that this is what a research active should be expected to deliver. I don't necessarily agree with it, but we'd all know what the rules were.

The next element is to allocate research funding. You could simply do away with direct funding and have it all come through research councils, as they do in some countries. Or you could distribute it evenly, or according to number of staff who've passed the threshold above. But I've got a more interesting suggestion - there was some maths research (from those crazy Italians) recently that argued that random selection of some, but not all, politicians would benefit democracy:

"the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained."

I wonder if the same might apply to research funding? So some is allocated according to worth (but using a simple system), but a percentage is allocated randomly, on the proviso it is used for research. This might well generate innovative research we wouldn't see otherwise. And it prevents a self-reinforcing group who get caught in version of group think. And it'd be more fun.

I know what you're thinking - why isn't he in charge of the next REF? We can only shake our heads.

Quick blogging survey

Alice Bell is conducting some research for us at IET, so this is asking you (yes YOU) to participate. Alice says "email answers to [email protected]. Or you can cut and paste it to post it on your blog, if you want to share your answers with your readers (although please drop me a line with the link so I can make sure I have a copy)"

Well, I'd best respond too:


Blog URL:
edtechie.net

What do you blog about?
Digital scholarship, Open education, educational technology, social media, impact of new technology.

Are you paid to blog?
No.

What do you do professionally (other than blog)?
I'm a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University.

How long have you been blogging at this site?
Six years.

Do you write in other platforms? (e.g. in a print magazine?)
I've published books and academic papers, and occasionally (when asked) for other publications eg Chronicle of Higher Education, but not on a regular basis

Can you remember why you started blogging?
My colleagues John Naughton and Tony Hirst had been doing it for a while, and I read lots of blogs, so it seemed like a natural progression.

What keeps you blogging?
It's a habit and it provides an outlet for ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day. It is also part of my academic identity now, so there is an element of inertia in keeping it going.

Do you have any idea of the size or character if your audience? How?
It has about 2000 subscribers plus gets around 30,000 visits a year (Google Analytics). Most of the audience are practitioners in higher ed with an interest in technology, but across a range of disciplines.

What’s your attitude to/relationship with people who comment on your blog?
They are often people I've come to know either personally or through twitter. Much of the commenting now happens away from the blog, on twitter. I'm always pleased that someone takes the effort to comment, although which posts will attract comments is very unpredictable. They are nearly always friendly, and helpful - pointing me at other resources or helping to develop an argument.

Do you feel as if you fit into any particular community, network or genre of blogging? (e.g. schools, science, education, museums, technology)
Edubloggers (I guess)

If so, what does that community give you?
I've come to think of it as my extended, global, network of peers, very similar (but bigger) to my peer network at work. 

What do you think are the advantages of blogging? What are its disadvantages/ limitations?
I think I covered the advantages in this piece: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Virtues-of-Blogging-as/131666/

Disadvantages are that it probably has decreased the amount of traditional publication I've done (which may impact on things like the REF). There is a small element of compulsion to it - I tend to blog on average about once a week, so if a few weeks have gone by, I feel I shoud blog _something_. 

Do you tell people you know offline that you’re a blogger? (e.g. your grandmother, your boss)
I don't think my parents know what a blog is, but most other people know that I blog eg friends, family. I don't think (or expect) that they read it as it's quite narrowly focused on educational technology, ie I don't blog about my holiday.

Is there anything else you want to tell me about I haven’t asked?
I've said too much already...

Give me an M!

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigblue/317855467/ by bigbluemeanie>

The second of MOOC musing posts:

On Twitter recently Alan Levine bemoaned that there was too much emphasis on the M in MOOCs, and I think it's the M that worries Jonathan Rees. Kate Bowles has a well reasoned post on some MOOC concerns also. I wonder if there is some truth in this – it is the manager’s dream of the infinite lecture hall that characterised early e-learning until people found out e-learning wasn’t very cheap in the end. But for a MOOC, learners aren’t paying so they can’t complain about the infinite lecture hall approach, but they will be monetised somehow (whether through accreditation, data, adverts, etc). And for that to work the M in MOOC has to equal massive. Moderate or minor won’t do.

 Let’s take each of those initials and think them through:

M – Massive. As mentioned above the massive element is appealing if you are a commercial enterprise. But if you are offering MOOCs out of interest, then they may not be massive. When Dave coined the term (it was Dave wasn't it?) I think it was more a reflection on what had happened in CCK08 – that these large numbers of learners had congregated. It was an observation rather than a prescriptive element. Open courses don’t need to be massive, and focussing on this element because it’s where the money lies, may lead to less interesting topics being proposed because they won’t achieve the mass required to kick in the money. And that’s a shame because one of the potential benefits of MOOCs is a form of liberation of the curriculum – it need no longer be dictated by what courses are profitable and meet a sufficient need. It would be a failure of imagination to apply the same constraints we currently labour under.

Open – as I mentioned in my last post, one of the disappointing aspects about the new open courses is that they are not truly open. Real openness has a number of benefits – others can take elements of the course and use it in their own courses, the course itself acts as a learning resource that anyone can dip into at anytime, it allows open research through data analysis, learners are encouraged to use their own tools rather than the artificial course system. Not being fully open loses much of the subtlety in MOOCs that made them fun in the first place.

Online – Steve Carson suggests we should call the new breed MOCs, for Massive Online Courses. But they are free, so this acronym would miss the key element that differentiates them from all the elearning we’ve been doing over the past 15 years. I had a Massive Online Course in 1999 but it was the open element that was missing. This is the no-brainer in the acronym I guess. They need to be online to really be free and work, but what might be interesting is the combination of MOOCs with local, face to face support. One could imagine a general introduction to teaching MOOC for example, which covered pedagogy, core subjects etc but accompanied by local support which placed teachers in school, added local contextualisation (eg curriculum requirements in that country) and so on. So Online needn’t mean ‘Only Online’.

Course – after a decade of OERs, it’s interesting that we’re coming back to educator constructed courses. The vision might have been of learners constructing their own personalised courses from the vast array of content out there. And while this does happen to an extent, and social tools will help it happen more, it’s also the case that one of the core functions the educator provides is to structure content into a sequence that learners can follow and have trust in. The bargain they make is this – if I do the course you have constructed then I will come out with a certain understanding of the topic. 

I guess the moral is, be careful of the acronym you dream up as someone will analyse it in excessive detail one day...

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.

 

Blogging was the best decision

I have an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was asked to write a piece about the role of blogging in academic life. In many ways this is a tad quaint, blogging is hardly the new kid on the block (indeed it is now ripe for the X is dead meme). But maybe that's the point, it's been around long enough that we can assess its impact in real terms, and not just as the new shiny thing. My approach was to take blogging as a representative for new forms of scholarship, and how it had impacted upon my practice. 

There is nothing in it that will be a surprise to readers of this blog (it doesn't contain unusual cake recipes for instance), but it was quite nice to reflect on blogging from some position of maturity (by which I mean having been blogger for a few years now, not that I am mature, which of course, I'm not). The gist is probably in this paragraph:

In terms of intellectual fulfilment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap.

Losing the glue of scholarship

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/kapungo/422491278/>

This thought has been bubbling away with me for a while, so I'll try and express it here, but it may be patchy (yes, yes, no change there).

The financial crisis and rising tuition fees (particularly in the UK, and Europe will probably follow given the state of their economies) has placed a number of pressures on higher education. One of the outcomes is that greater accountability and transparency is demanded. That's only to expected and is reasonable - if students are paying high fees which pay academics salaries then we need to demonstrate that those academics are engaged in meaningful work. And as employers struggle with less money, they will place more demands on their staff, so will ask them to account for their time to a much finer level of detail.

Many people outside of higher ed will shake their heads and think 'we've all had to do that for years anyway.' I have some sympathy with this view, academics have often had a cushy life and hidden behind vague work related tasks with little connection to outputs.

But as this begins to bite, it's surfacing a number of tasks which we have always performed as part of scholarly practice, but which are hard to link to a direct output or return on investment. Consider the following:

• Reading around your subject area - academics will read journal papers, books, blogs etc as part of their everyday practice, just to stay current in their field. This may not have a direct, or immediate link to teaching (ie you are not researching something in order to teach on a specific course) or be related to a specific research project. It's just part of what you do. 
• Peer review - I often get asked to review papers for journals. If they meet my open access test, then I usually say yes. But there is no direct return on this.
• Experimentation - in the field of educational technology in particular (but also in other disciplines I suspect), experimenting is essential. The key to this is that you don't know if it will be successful or what it will lead to. You trust your academic instincts that it's an interesting thing to do. Much of playing with new technology would come under this. So when I've played around with MOOCs for instance, giving talks or running a small one with George. A few years later, I'm now being asked to contribute to a strategic appraisal of MOOCs for the university. But I couldn't have predicted this, or stated it as an outcome.
• Giving presentations - on an almost weekly basis I get asked to give a presentation, usually at another university for a staff development day. I decline most of these because I am running a big internal project at the OU and have a number of other roles, so I'm nearly always in meetings. And even if I wasn't, I believe that I should prioritise doing work for the place that pays my wages. In order to do these talks now I have to take leave, and without wishing to sound mercenary, if I'm going to spend a day giving a talk instead of with my family, I'll only do that if I get paid. Many such staff development days don't have a budget, and operate on reciprocal good will.

This raises two very important questions for me with regards to how scholarship functions:

1. Are these kinds of tasks the unseen glue that binds scholarly activity together? So, if we lose, or at least drastically reduce, them does it fundamentally undermine the whole practice, or will we just find other ways of achieving them (for instance giving a talk remotely is a lot more efficient than travelling to the venue).
2. Does it demonstrate that they are tasks which should have an associated cost, and we've just been hiding that hitherto? If we value the tasks then maybe we should attach a cost to them, then we can properly account for that time. Or are they such nebulous tasks that this wouldn't work and we need to trust academics to spend a degree of their time doing 'scholarship type stuff'.

Many universities do have an allocation of staff time that covers most of the above, and is labelled something like 'personal research time'. But I think we'll see more of a squeeze on that time and a greater demand for identifiable outcomes from it. So I guess we'll find out how important this glue really is.