The Ed Techie

Increased university costs and admin

One of the common themes you'll see when people complain about rising university costs is the increased cost of administrative staff. This is usually portrayed as simply greed, or laziness on the part of universities, for instance this Wall Street Journal article reports a 37% increase in admin staff from 2001 to 2012. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity has little doubt about the lack of value admin staff add, stating: "You can have a university without administrators, but not without students or faculty. The minimization of administrative costs and bureaucracy should be sought in any university reform. A few decades ago, few universities had more than a small centralized public relations staff."

A report detailed in Inside Higher Ed comes to a similar conclusion: "They waste a lot of money on redundant administrative activities and could probably save money in the long run if they made big changes to their structure". And this article suggests that Pennsylvania universities increase in admin spending rose by 53% from 2001 to 2010. And while he doesn't address admin specifically, Clay Shirky tells us that the Golden Age of higher ed is over because it's unaffordable (see David Kernohan's withering response also).

Now, I ought to confess that I'm married to a university administrator, so I may have more than a little bias in my response to this. What most of these articles conclude is that it is simply greed, or unnecessary bureaucracy that has led to this, with of course, the implicit suggestion that if universities were proper businesses they wouldn't put up with it. Now, I get very frustrated with some of the needless layers of process that have been put in place, and often it seems inflexible and all rather pointless, so I'd admit that I'm sure we could do a bit of a streamlining. But between my wife and I we've been through a fair number of these restructurings, as well as seeing other universities do it, and my general impression is that they don't really produce the admin savings people predict. 

One of the common complaints is that "we used to be more efficient and not need as many admin staff". The second part of this is true, we didn't need as many admin staff, but that was because the amount of legislation that universities have to respond to was far less. Think of the following areas, all of which affect universities, and ask yourself whether the associated administration related to them has increased or decreased over the past 20 years:

• Student accessibility
• Finance, tax, charity status
• Health and safety
• Estates and property
• International students and business
• Student recruitment, teaching quality assessment, pastoral care
• Research bidding and reporting
• Employment law

The reason universities have big, complex administration is because they operate in a big, complex world. Probably far more so than most companies who only have a particular focus and are only concerned with legislation that relates to their niche practice. In the 1970s you only needed one administrator in a department because no-one cared about any of this stuff. Now, you'd be shut down, or face criminal charges for failing to respond to it.

As a test of my hypothesis that university administration has increased in complexity, I did a simple bit of research. I went to the legal database Justis.com and searched for legislation that related to universities. Now there are all sorts of problems with this methodology: I didn't analyse each piece, I didn't strip out repeated legislation, I just counted the number of bills.  It doesn't include a lot of things that will relate to universities but not mention them specifically, eg health and safety, and it also won't include all the increased administrative overhead that isn't included in a bill, eg increased demands for reporting on EU funded research projects. So it may well be flawed, but as a simple indicator of the increased administrative burden on universities, it should work to give a general feel for the level of change. My hypothesis would predict a substantial increase. I counted the number of bills from 1974 to 1993 and from 1994 to 2013. The results are shown below:

From 1974 to 1993 there were 262 bills, and from 1994 to 2013, 413, an increase of some 58%. Now I did this in 10 minutes and I suspect it's really a two year research project to really underake it (maybe someone has, please let me know), so I'm happy to be corrected, but I think this gives a good general indication. My guess is that it may underplay the real increase in administration since so much else relates to factors apart from legal duty.

The question then is not so much "why do universities spend so much on admin?" but rather "do we want society to make universities spend this much on admin?". And here people can be a bit hypocritical - they will probably say reduce the admin spend, but then demand robust appeals procedures or sue a university for not taking due care. Which of the areas I've outlined above would you personally be willing to take responsibility for if we reduced the legislation on it? 

The point is that these are issues beyond universities, society can't place an increasingly complex legislative and administrative burden on universities and then complain that they spend more money on legislative and administrative tasks. If higher education were truly privatised and run by companies as some wish, then maybe some of this cost could be reduced, mainly because government ministers would listen to entrepreneurs who complained that needless bureacracy was impeding profits. I'm not sure that would lead to better education necessarily, but it may be cheaper. But can we please stop with the "bloody admin doesn't add anything" message?

Dickens & open scholarship

You know when you're doing two completely unrelated things and your brain forces connections that aren't really there? You think it's genius, everyone else thinks it's painfully laboured? This is one of those posts.

So, I've been away for a week in the middle of Bodmin moor writing some chapters for my Battle for Open book. I came away with just my dog and a week's supply of beer. It's amazing what you get done when there is nothing else to distract you. I have written three chapters this week on MOOCs, the silicon valley narrative and open scholarship. I'm not saying they're good, but they are written.

Anyhow, when I can't bring myself to think about open education anymore, I've been reading Claire Tomalin's well written and nicely balanced biography of Dickens. Because there is nothing else in my head but MOOCs n stuff, I've been making tenuous connections, which I may as well share. Three connections have come to mind:

1) Publish as you go - for about a third of my book I've been taking existing blog posts and adapting them. I worry that this is cheating somehow, but I figure I've been writing the stuff as I go, now I'm pulling it together. Can you plagiarise yourself? Anyway, Dickens reminds me there is nothing new in this. He famously published many of his novels as serialisations, which would then be wrapped up. This strikes me as very hard to do, there is no revisiting it and deciding that character needs to live after all. Compared to Dickens I have it easy. But it does illustrate that content can have more than one mode of existence.

2) Copyright wars - Dickens was rather screwed over by international copyright. British copyright didn't extend to the US so publishers there could just take his work and put out books, making huge sums of money (they adored him in the states), which he saw very little of. I think with his money obsessions I'm not sure Dickens would have embraced CC licensing, but I think he would've been a champion of open textbooks in education.

3) Hard work never killed anyone, oh wait - after reading this quote, I will never complain about being over-committed again:

"Dickens was now committed to the following projects: He had to continue Pickwick in monthly instalments for another year; he had to provide a few more pieces for the Sketches; both his farce and his opera were being published and needed seeing through the press; he had promised a children's book, 'Solomon Bell the Raree Showman' by Christmas; he had to start preparing for his editorship of Bentley's Miscellany, which began in January and for which he must commission articles and also contribute a sixteen page piece of his own every month; Chapman & Hall were hoping for a sequel to Pickwick; Macrone still wanted 'Gabriel Vardon'; and Bentley was expecting two novels."

So that's alright then. Of course, Dickens kept up an impossibly punishing schedule all his life and it contributed to his early death. So not one to follow in that respect.

The dangerous appeal of the Silicon Valley narrative

For my book I've been writing about why it was that MOOCs came to such prominence in the popular press in a way that OERs didn't. One key aspect is that they fit the Silicon Valley narrative.

The model of Silicon Valley provides such a powerful narrative that it has come to dominate thinking far beyond that of computing. For instance Staton declares that the degree is doomed because Silicon Valley avoids hiring people with computer science degrees, and prefers those with good community presence on software developer sites. From this he concludes this model is applicable across all domains and vocations. It hardly needs adding that Staton is the CEO of an educational company.

There are several necessary elements to the silicon valley narrative: firstly a technological fix is both possible and in existence; secondly that external forces will change, or disrupt, an existing sector; thirdly that wholesale revolution is required; lastly the solution is provided by commerce.

The education is broken meme satisfies the third condition of the silicon valley narrative. If it is accepted as broken, then only a revolution is sufficient to resolve it. MOOCs appeal to the first and second of these conditions. They are a very technologically driven solution, particularly in their xMOOC instantiation. Thrun famously worked at Google after all. The artificial intelligence promise of adaptive learning systems and sophisticated automatic assessment is both appealing in that it seems futuristic and aligns with the silicon valley technological solution approach.

Although Thrun, Koller and Ng all worked at Stanford, and so could thus be seen as part of the establishment, Thrun in particular has been cast as the education outsider. In order to satisfy this need for an external party coming to the aid of the sector, the Sal Khan has often been proposed as the godfather of MOOCs.

Another important aspect that appeals to silicon valley, entrepreneurs and journalists alike is that of disruption. It is a term that has been applied much more broadly than its original concept, to the point where it almost meaningless, and rarely critically evaluated. Dvorak complains that it is essentially meaningless, stating that “There is no such thing as a disruptive technology. There are inventions and new ideas, many of which fail while others succeed. That's it.” There remains however a disruption obsession inherent in the silicon valley narrative. As Watters argues, disruption has become somewhat akin to a cultural myth amongst silicon valley: “when I say then, that “disruptive innovation” is one of the great myths of the contemporary business world, particularly of the tech industry, I don’t mean by “myth” that Clayton Christensen’s explanation of changes to markets and business models and technologies is a falsehood… my assigning “myth” to “disruptive innovation” is meant to highlight the ways in which this narrative has been widely accepted as unassailably true.”

Nobody wants to just create a useful tool, it has to disrupt an industry. Education, perceived as slow, resistant to change and old-fashioned is seen as ripe for disruption. Christensen, Horn and Johnson themselves have deemed it so, stating that “disruption is a necessary and overdue chapter in our public schools.” Hence the Avalanche report justifies itself by claiming that all of the key “elements of the traditional university are threatened by the coming avalanche. In Clayton Christensen’s terms, universities are ripe for disruption.” In his criticism of the impact of OERs, Kortemeyer states that they “OERs have not noticeably disrupted the traditional business model of higher education”, because for something to be successful, only disruption counts.

We can see many of these elements in essays on MOOCs. Let us take Clay Shirky’s essay “Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken”, as it generated a lot of interest and was considered to be a thoughtful analysis.

In terms of our narrative essentials, Shirky even has the “education is broken” meme in the title of his piece, and later states it boldly: “I have a different answer: School is broken and everyone knows it.” He sets out a reasonably convincing case about the finance issues associated with higher education, although he does not question finance models for higher education in general. Shirky cites a book "Don't go back to school" which interviewed 100 people who had dropped out of school and gone on to be successful. Largely they then self-teach themselves using internet resources, an example of the Silicon Valley model being applied broadly.

In his previous essay, Napster, Udacity and the Academy he compares the impact of MOOCs on higher education with that of the MP3 on the music industry. This conforms to the silicon valley narrative, proposing a revolution and disruption: “Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC)”. It also suggests that the commercial, external provider will be the force of change, stating that “and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup”.

All of the elements can also be seen in Clark’s piece where he declares that (referring to Khan) "It took a hedge fund manager to shake up education because he didn’t have any HE baggage." It appeals to the silicon valley narrative to have a saviour riding in from outside HE to save it. If the influence of those inside higher education such as Wiley, Downes, Siemens, etc is acknowledged then that weakens the appeal of the story.

David Kernohan performed a semantic analysis of eleven popular MOOC articles. Taking Kernohan’s articles to conduct simple word counts, then the word “disrupt” (or derivative) occurred 12 times, “revolution” 16, and “company” 17. Obviously this is a selective choice of terms (“open” appears 48 times for comparison), but the presence of these terms indicates a particular framing of the MOOC story that allies with the silicon valley narrative.

We can now see why MOOCs proved so popular with journalists. Firstly they seem to offer a solution to the education is broken meme, which had been gaining currency. Secondly, they met all the criteria for the silicon valley narrative: they proposed a technological solution, they could be framed as the result of external forces, and they provided a revolutionary model. Nearly all the early MOOC articles framed them as disruptive to the standard higher education model. And they were established as separate companies outside of higher education, thus providing interest around business models and potential profits by disrupting the sector. This heady mix proved too irresistible for many technology or education journalists.

This analysis also reveals why other open education initiatives haven’t garnered as much attention. They often seek to supplement or complement education, thus ruining the education is broken argument. Similarly, they are often conducted by those who work in higher education, which undermines the narrative of external agents promoting change on a sector that is out of touch. And lastly, they are supported by not-for-profit institutions, which does not fit the model of new, disruptive businesses emerging. If one wanted to make an argument for disruption, then open textbooks could make a convincing case, since they undermine an established business with digital, low-cost alternatives, but as projects like OpenStax are not-for-profit, they do not fit the silicon valley narrative as neatly as MOOCs.

One further aspect of the silicon valley and disruption narrative is that it demands a ‘year zero’ mentality. It is a much more convincing story if someone can be said to have invented a new way of working. Because complete genesis invention is rare, most work is tinkering with old ideas and improving them, this often requires either a wilful ignorance of past work, and an imaginative reworking of it. 

The morality of scale

<broadcast tower http://www.flickr.com/photos/7715592@N03/2177026879/>

When I was an undergraduate a friend and I had one of those (no doubt drink fuelled) discussions that we felt were very important. It was based around the idea of what would it be like if everyone lived to be 1000 years old? We decided that it would be unlikely that anyone would stay with the same partner for that length of time. Not because you didn't love them, but because in order to stay sane you would need to change yourself. Otherwise you'd just go mad being the same person all the time - the 670 year old you is likely to be different from the 130 year old you. We also felt that morality would change under such a dramatic shift - could you really live to 1000 years old and not be in trouble at some point? So having a criminal record might not be unusual anymore ("yeah, I had a brief fraudster phase in my 570s").

While we may not be living to 1000 yet, I think we're seeing a similar need to shift morality when it comes to networking. The twitter mob is now operating on a daily basis, as a number of recent examples have shown. The Justine Sacco story attracted much attention - being sacked while in flight for posting a racist joke. To be clear, what she posted was offensive and stupid, but as this Forbes piece argues, "at no point in history has it been so easy to destroy your entire life so quickly in so few words". And while sympathy with Sacco may be in short supply, the twitter mob is not very discerning: this teenage girl received lots of abuse after posting a joke which most people failed to appreciate.

While Sacco and other twitter morality outrages are based on offensive tweets, they are often no more offensive than the type of conversation one overhears in the pub. And yet someone won't have their life ruined for saying such things in a pub, but if a broadcaster said such things we would rightly be outraged by them. And this seems to be the difference, we are applying broadcast morality to personal communication.

Of course, you can say 'treat everything you say online as broadcast', and that's a pretty good model. But to bring us back to my 1000 year lifestyle change in morality, just as we would have to get used to people having a criminal record, so we might need to get used to someone having been the subject of a twitter mob. As pervasive technology gets used more extensively, those pub conversations may be broadcast without the speaker's knowledge. Most of us (in my world) are liberal, and don't go around saying offensive things either in pubs or on twitter, but can any of us say that over the course of our lives, something you've said couldn't be taken out of context, and be the subject of a twitter storm? 

I'd like to think that we're going through an evolutionary phase and this massive connectivity is something we'll grow accustomed to, and adjust our social norms. But as the tragic gun crime stories from the US remind us, we're not always that great at adjusting society to meet the new possibilities of technology. In the mean time, avoid being part of a twitter mob, no matter how justified it is - it's bad for your soul.

Year of epic fail & minor win (running)

<Even puppy power wasn't enough to salvage my year>

For the past few years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012), I end them with a post reviewing my running over the previous 12 months, and make some tenuous connection to education. No-one cares, but hey, it's my blog, and I like to plan this post when I'm out running, as it gives me something to fix on. So here goes.

This year started out with big plans. I signed up for a marathon in January, a 10K February, half marathons in March and April, just a 5k in May, and marathons in June and July. That was the plan. It started badly and got worse, in a year of woe on the running front. 

I was training ok for the January marathon and did a 20 mile long run on December 20th 2012. I didn't know it at the time but I was coming down with flu that very day. The next day I was feverish, shaking and wiped out. The whole family came down with it. Christmas day 2012 was cancelled, our holiday was postponed. Full-on, miserable, definitely not just a cold, type flu. This lasted for about 3 weeks, before I could get out running again. I could barely do 5 miles then, so the marathon was out of the question. Epic fail.

I regrouped, and concentrated on the 10K in February. I forgot my Garmin when it came to this, and so had no idea of pace. I went out too fast (I was like Simon Pegg in Run Fatboy Run), and slowed considerably but actually finished in a decent time (for me) of 49.50. This was a race PB for 10K. Minor win.

Then I had a note saying the March half-marathon had been cancelled due to insufficient numbers. Never mind, I'll concentrate on the April New Forest half-marathon. Come the race date, it was postponed due to ice and rescheduled for a day when I was in Bali for the OCWC conference. Epic Fail.

I did discover the wonderful parkrun though. Every Saturday you can go down and run a 5K free of charge, and get a time posted on their website. In a world of evil, the parkrun is an unalloyed thing of goodness. I went a few times in May and got my time down to about 24 mins. Minor win.

I abandoned the June marathon as I hadn't maintained enough fitness and decided to concentrate all my efforts now on the July Tenby marathon. If I could do one marathon this year, it would still be all worthwhile, I could salvage the mess of the year with this one race. I trained dilligently, if not enthusiastically. I wasn't going to get a good time, but I should be able to get round. Come the day before the marathon I was planning my arrival time when I had a sudden thought: "That's strange, I haven't received anything from the organisers". I checked emails with increasing panic. I rang the organisers. No, it seems I had registered for all the other races back in December, but this one I had forgotten to actually put my name down for. It was full, there was no way of running the race. Epic, epic fail.

I entered a slough of despondency then. I hadn't been enjoying the running, but at least it had some purpose. I picked myself up for a late entry into the September 10k, and managed another PB of 49.43. A minor win. My Cardiff Half time was average for me at 1.55.

And then I lost all running mojo. I ended the year with a desultory total of 880 miles, the lowest in 4 years. I could have reached the 1000 mark easily if I'd kept up any decent running schedule in November and December, but I really couldn't be bothered.

Why? Well, I'm doing an MA in history and as they got nearer the end it demanded more time. And I'm writing a book, and managing research projects, etc. I found that a day would be stressful if I had to fit running in as well as these things, but if I took it out, then suddenly the day fitted together more neatly. Sarah, my wife, has a theory that you can only keep three plates spining effectively, for example work, family and one serious hobby. You can have more on the go, but the others suffer. You have plenty of other minor interests, for example I like reading literature, but if I was to go at it seriously, one of the others would have to suffer. Completing MA and maintaining running has proven difficult. 

But ultimately, that is an excuse, one can always find the time. It's only an hour here and there with the occassional long run. So, I need a plan, and it is this: next year I am going to be less ambitious in the knowledge that once I started failing this year, it gave me permission to carry on doing so. I've signed up for the Windermere marathon in July, and I'm not going to stress about time - a 5 hour marathon is better than no marathon. This way I hope to get back to enjoying running, as any run I do, regardless of time, is a success. 

So, now for the tenuous link to learning. For a start, the title could stand for any edtech review of the year, but I won't go over that again. Instead I think the analogy is that in learning you can coast for a while or you can overstretch yourself, and then you need to reflect and plan for some success to make it seem wortwhile. This may be completing a Masters, or finishing a MOOC, or just reading that novel or learning that programme language you always promised yourself. Failure is part of the pattern, but now that learning, like running, is so diverse, there's always one more way to tackle it.

Redefining MOOC completion rates

A few posts back I posted Katy Jordan's data on completion rates for MOOCs. It's set me thinking that we're probably being harsh in terms of how we define enrollment on MOOCs, which in turn makes completion rates look worse than they actually are. In formal education there are different ways of defining who has enrolled on a course. I'm pretty sure there is a cooling off period, so if a student drops out within the first week or so, they don't count as having enrolled in the first place (can anyone confirm this from their uni?).

So, taking MOOC enrollment figures to be the number who signed up for a MOOC even if they never come in to it is always going to give harsh figures. It's a bit like saying university courses enrollments are all those who come to an open day. Maybe a better figure would be the number of students active after 1 week. This is your baseline figure as those are the students who have actually started the course.

Another graph Katy plotted was the average number of students enrolled across weeks:

I stupidly didn't get the data from Katy before she went on maternity leave, so actual analysis will have to wait until she's back. But just using this graph as a rough guide we can do some calculations. At the end of week 1 it looks like to me that there are about 55% of students still active from the week 0 point. So, if we took this 55% as our starting figure, we know that the average completion rate was 12.6%. This would now be 22.9% (I have probably done something very wrong with the maths here, but bear with it for rough estimate). Now, approximately 23% completion with open learners isn't too bad.

When I ran T171 we had around 12,000 students and our completion rates were around 40-50% with open access learners. And that was with expensive and intensive tutorial support, so I know how hard it is to get open entry level 1 learners to complete (mind you it was a 28 week course, if I'd stopped it at 7 weeks the completion rate would have been nearer 70-80%).

But MOOCs can't have it both ways, they've been boasting about those massive enrollment figures, which take into account everyone who raised an eyebrow at their course. We know from Katy's data that the median enrollment (from our data) was 18941. So if we take my rough 55% number, this comes down to 10417. Which is certainly not 100K, but it's not too bad either.

So, as always, when you dig into it, the picture is more subtle:: MOOCs don't enrol as many as first thought but their completion rate isn't as bad either. That's not a very snappy headline though.

The year of no s**t Sherlock

With apologies for the potty mouth title. If you want a really good review of the year from an ed tech perspective then I suggest reading Audrey Watters' series of posts. One thing that I found myself doing repeatedly this year was staring open-mouthed at my screen as I read yet another 'discovery' or 'innovation' from US based silicon valley start-ups relating to education. It seems that if you want to be noticed then having no shame in pretending you have invented something is a real advantage. And journalists really do love a 'new and shiny' story. Here are some of my faves:

The SPOC - don't want your MOOC to be massive and open, then try a Small Private one. Or as we've called them for the past 15 years "an online course".

Hybrid Pedagogy - Clayton Christensen discovered “a fundamentally new concept [in] the world of disruptive innovation.” Or as we call it "blended learning"

MOOC based learning and innovation on campus - Coursera announced that it was working with universities to deliver MOOCs on campus. Or as we call it "elearning".

Micro-MOOCs - a micro-MOOC is either a platform to host video and content (or as we call it "the web") or "short e-courses" (or as we call them "OERs")

Creating quality courses is hard and expensive - who knew?

Retention with open access is difficult - again, why did no-one tell them this?

Massive open online content - again, as we call them "OERs"

I hope next year isn't as dumb.

The best edtech book you've never read was published last week

And indeed is published every week. 

I'm referring to Stephen Downes' OLWeekly, where he gives a round up of all the material he's commented on that week. Like many of you I subscribe to the email, and when it came through on Friday, I was struck by how much great stuff there was in there this week. I thought "this could be an edited book". So I decided to see just what it would be like as a book.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting it should be a book, in many ways the book is an inferior format since you lose the comments and the media. But it's an interesting comparison. We know what editing a book takes, and if someone said they were going to edit a book every week, we'd think they were insane. So, I went through OLWeekly, and copied Stephen's comments and the article into a PDF. I missed some out because they were too long or they were newspaper/magazine articles who would probably send drones after me for copying their material. If I have included anyone's content here and they want it removed, let me kow. I'm not really interested in distributing it, just the point of comparison. The resultant PDF was 252 pages long. You can have a look for yourself: Download Downes_weekly. I didn't bother with any formatting, and some images are missing, I only had an hour. 

There are two interesting things that the exercise raised for me. The first is to recognise the great work Stephen does every week. What I admire about Stephen most is his endurance. I might have had an idea to do this, would have done about three and then given up. Stephen reminds me of an artist who goes in and out of fashion, produces albums of varying interest and quality, but what you come to admire most is their durability and their resolution to keep doing interesting things. Think Neil Young. With not much more effort in terms of copyediting and layout this could be a proper book, and the range of material in there is truly impressive. And he does this every week. We recognise book editing, but web curation isn't normally acknowledged, there is no yardstick for measuring it. So comparison with book editorship is useful from that perspective at least.

The second point is that if you were to try and create a book that covered these topics it would probably take you a year or so. You'd need to organise a publishing deal, cajole the writers, sort out rights, get it through copyediting, etc. When blogging was all fresh we used to comment a lot about the freedom it gave, and make these sort of comparisons, but we take it for granted now. It's worth noting it occassionally though - this is still pretty amazing stuff, and it calls to mind Scott Leslie's classic Just Share post. It really is the most efficient way to operate.

And if all that wasn't interesting, here is a picture of Stephen on a steer:

 

Find time for courage

At the MOOC research conference last week Amy Collier gave an impassioned call for courage in relation to MOOCs, and in the way I interpreted it, openness in general. As she put it "some things are too important not to have courage".

This quote came back to me last week, when I was in discussions about open access publishing at the OU. The responses from others in different departments were sensible and cautious, a wait and see strategy. I couldn't disagree with them, but part of me felt, 'remember when we used to take risks and do stuff because we thought it was right?' This isn't a moan about that decision, but rather that it made me consider the wider context in universities.

My concern is this - post-austerity, and particularly post-fees in the UK, all universities have become risk averse and cautious. There are lots of factors to consider. I don't blame an individual - it's not a great outcome to take a risk, get a bad NSS score and have to lay off staff the following year because of reduced enrolments. But I think this cautious approach seeps into the culture and takes years to overcome. Imagine you are a new academic who takes on a management role, sub-dean say. You are being enculturated into how a sub-dean behaves by observing others. If the appropriate sub-dean type behaviour is sensible caution, that is the mode you adopt. And then this gets passed down to the next incomer, and so on. Twenty years from now you find yourself asking "where did all our innovators go?". But if you reverse that and have people taking appropriate but occassional risky decisions, then this becomes the behaviour you adopt. 

So I make a plea to all of those in universities, especially myself as I lack it on a daily basis - have the occasional flash of courage.

Design responses to MOOC completion rates

Well, my previous post on data for MOOC completion rates caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter. It was interpreted by some as saying "ONLY completion rates matter". And also of not taking into account other factors such as what learners who don't complete get from a MOOC. That seems rather like criticising Alien for not being a rom-com to my mind - they're doing different things. This research was showing one aspect with the quantitative data available. It is part of a bigger picture which ethnographic studies, surveys and more data analysis will complete. It wasn't attempting to be the full stop on MOOC research.

Anyway, here is another graph that Katy created, showing attrition rates of active users (those that come into the course and do something, not just those who complete assessments) across disciplines:

That's a pretty consistent pattern. If we saw it nature we'd give it some name like "The MOOC attrition law". My interest is as a course designer, so given that the drop-off pattern seems fairly robust, what does it mean for design? (Doug will have issues about the power-lawness of this) 

I think there are two responses (but maybe you can think of more).

Design for retention

The first is to say that completion is a desired metric. There may be courses where you really do want as many people as possible to complete. Imagine you were running a remedial maths course for instance, then it won't help your learners much if they only cover a third of the subject matter they need for whatever purpose (Bridge2 Success got learners through maths so they could get onto an employment program, so completion was very important here).

In this case you need to address the 'problem' of drop-out, because it is a problem for you. There might be a number of ways you do this: by adding in more feedback, using badges to motivate people, creating support structures, supplementing with face to face study groups, breaking your longer course into shorter ones, etc. The point is that you design in features that aim to improve completion.

Design for selection

The second design approach is to say that completion isn't an important metric. Here you accept the MOOC attrition law and design the experience with that in mind. I have some sympathy with Stephen Downes when he says no-one finishes a newspaper but we don't talk about people 'dropping out' of a newspaper (I've heard him say this but can't find a link - anyone?). So even to talk about drop-out is to map the wrong metaphor to MOOCs. His analogy breaks down a bit however because not all readers drop out at page 7 of a newspaper, they dip into different sections. People tend to drop out of MOOCs by week 3. It's not as if they're coming in and doing a bit from week 7 and a bit from week 5, and then leaving. They're simply not getting to those later weeks. And even if you are of the 'completion doesn't matter' camp, I'm sure most course designers don't think the content in week 5 is half the value of that in week 1. 

So, in this design approach you might break away from the linear course model, to allow people to do the 'newspaper' type selection. A course might be structured around themes for instance, and each one around largely independent activities (I tried to design H817open a bit like this). So in this case completion really doesn't matter, learners take the bits they want. 

In both cases I would suggest that the completion rate data is useful for you. In the first case you know what type of completion rate to expect, and in the second one it drives you to be more innovative in design approach. And that's the point about the research - it helps inform decisions.

By the way - this is my fifth blog post in 5 days. Just in case Jim Groom berates me for not blogging often enough...