The Ed Techie

My new favourite open scholarship example

When I give talk on digital or open scholarship I often end by highlighting the unpredictable benefits that arise, usually by pointing to some examples of my own practice. I have a new favourite which isn't about me, so thought I'd share.

Katy Jordan is my PhD student at the OU (although none of which follows is at all attributable to my supervision, Katy did it all on her own inititiative). Her research is examining academic networks on sites such as Academia.edu. She is a whiz at data visualisation, and also a serial MOOCer. So she took the Infographics MOOC earlier this year. For her final project she decided to plot MOOC completion rates on an interactive graph, and blogged her results. This was picked up by Phil Hill over on e-literate who blogged and tweeted it.

MOOC completion rates are a subject of much interest of course, and so Katy's post went viral, and has become the de-facto piece to link to on completion rates, which almost every MOOC piece mentions somewhere. She tells me it was even mentioned in Private Eye.

I like it because it's a good example of how openness in different forms spreads out and has unexpected impact. The course needed to be open (or rather, free) for Katy to take it, she was at liberty to share her results, and did so as part of her general practice. The infographic relies on people openly sharing data about MOOC completions, and the format of her work means others can interrogate that data and suggest new data points. The open network then spreads the message because it is openly available. I've encouraged her to write it up as an article, because people like a definitive piece to point to, but really it's a good case of why new dissemination and research methods trump older ones (for this instance). 

It's hard to predict or cause these sequences of events (being picked up e-literate was key I think), and so you can't tell people this will definitely occur, but a closed approach anywhere along the chain would have prevented it. We'll never know the lost opportunities of closed approaches, so we should highlight the benefits of open ones.

Surviving the Day of the MOOC

I gave a keynote for Simon Walker at the University of Greenwich for his Academic Practice and Technology Conference. My talk was entitled "Surviving the Day of the MOOC". I borrowed David Kernohan's image as the front slide, because it seems to me that with all this sudden external interest (MOOCs were even on Newsnight), it feels like an alien invasion.

My talk follows an inverted funnel pattern - starting with my own experience and broadening out to consider the wider design implications and then the general higher education context. The point I end on is that MOOCs are really the most tangible and visible aspect of a broader debate/battle/tension - which is around the role of openness in education. You can see the same thing with open access for instance. And this battle for openness is itself really a proxy for a battle for the future or nature of education. 

At the end of my digital scholar book I made a plea that academics should take ownership of digital scholarly activities otherwise they get taken over by external parties. This was before the big MOOC push and I was referencing publishing as an example. But it was (if I may say so) prescient - it is exactly what is happening with MOOCs, and the very worst thing we can do is ignore it.

It all ended, rather unusually, on a table thumping, go forward kind of note. Anyway, here is the slidedeck:

 

Surviving the Day of the MOOCs from Martin Weller

What quality measures apply to MOOCs?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/wetwebwork/2402908982/ >

In case you haven't seen it, Ulf-Daniel Ehlers & Ebba Ossiannilsson & Alastair Creelman are running a project on Quality and MOOCs. It has a different blog post from an invited author every week for 12 weeks. They've all been of a very high standard (until this week, see below). I'd recommend Stephen Downes and Grainne Conole's posts in particular, but they're all worth reading.

So last week was my turn, and you can read my post here. The point I wanted to make was that we have created a set of quality criteria for education that is, obviously, matched to the context of education. So we are interested in things like student satisfaction ratings, student completion rates, benchmarking against agreed criteria and external review. Some of these are applicable to MOOCs, for instance you might still want external review of content before releasing it, and some courses may need to be linked to official criteria, for instance if they are related to specific vocations.

But MOOC audiences are very different, and the motivations for people studying MOOCs are different for those in higher education, or are at least of a different priority. So the same quality measures are not applicable. The most obvious of these is the much discussed drop-out rate. Course completion is just not as important for MOOC learners as it is for formal education students. And, as the (excellent) report on Edinburgh MOOCs highlights, the numbers of MOOC learners who complete surveys is a small fraction of the small fraction who complete, so student satisfaction is difficult to compare also.

My blog post ends with a plea though - and that is not to constrain MOOCs with the same quality demands we have placed on higher education. Those constraints are understandable when people are parting with lots of money, but the point of MOOCs is that they are liberated from these considerations. They allow experimentation, because the relationship between learner and educators is fundamentally different when money hasn't changed hands. We don't want to make MOOC providers fearful of experimentation because they'll fall short of quality measures that have been imposed from a different context. 

What university rankings really tell us

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

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

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

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

• Teaching: the learning environment (30 per cent)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cost of support

Two factors are making universities (in the UK in particular) consider the costs of their courses like never before. The first is the withdrawal of state funding and reliance on student fees. I guess this was always the intention behind the shift to a pure market driven approach, it certainly makes universities focus on their course costs. Can they do it for cheaper? Can they justify their fees? Can they lower fees?

The second is our new old friend, MOOCs. It seems rather arrogant but many MOOC providers think they've just invented the idea of considering elearning costs. But all the same, the fact they are gaining attention, and that they are providing alternative models of support (largely through automatic assessment) makes universities take a look at their costs and assumptions too. 

None of this is new, I wrote this paper about economic models of large-scale elearning back in 2004, building on the foundational work of Tony Bates (MOOC providers may care to read it, as it may save them a few years of coming to the same conclusions). But that doesn't mean it isn't valid to reconsider it from the perspective of MOOCs. As I conclude in one of my MOOC presentations, one of the really good things about them are the questions they make us ask ourselves.

MOOCs are about no-support teaching, that's their basic model. In the cMOOCs this support is replaced by a peer network, in the xMOOC by automatic feedback. The student fees makes us consider how much learners are paying for this support, how much they are willing to pay and how good this service is over unsupported.

Below is an idealised chart showing typical ratios for course production and presentation costs over 5 presentations (you need 5 to get a clear picture as all the production costs are in year one). The big cream chunk in the second column is tuition costs. The green bit on top is student support costs (generic and specific student support services, eg support for students with disabilities, pastoral support, running regional centres, etc). The other bits are things like IT services. I've removed the actual figures, it's the relative amounts I want to focus on. This shows that by far the biggest cost is that of tuition. Paying people to support learners is where the money goes. 

The other key element is that, of course, production is a fixed cost. So once we've paid it, we've paid it (more or less, we may need to produce new items). Whereas, most of the presentation costs are variable - they increase as student numbers increase. Of course, countering this is the income side of the graph, where your income increases as you get more students too. The two should balance each other out.

Now, of course if you remove those big chunks in presentation you can offer courses cheaply. We've always known that. MOOCs are essentially doing away with the second bar, it's just the fixed costs of production. The good thing with this model is that there are no variable costs, and each presentation doesn't cost you, but you do still get the income side of the bar (although how that income is realise isn't clear). So in theory, you should move from debit to profit quickly as you recoup those production costs, without the hindrance of additional presentation costs.

The issue is that these services are key to long term success for learners. It isn't evenly distributed though. Some learners hardly ever avail themselves of these, don't care about tuition and do very well studying on their own. Other learners require a lot of support for various reasons and probably have more than their 'fair' share of these services (ie more than they've actually paid for). And most are in the middle, they make use of them sometimes, depending on circumstances.

For distance education in particular, this first group, the confident, independent learners probably do okay by MOOCs. They probably represent the 10% or so who complete. Then there are some for whom no amount of support can help through, either study isn't for them, or this is the wrong time. But sitting in the middle is a big group who need varying levels of support to 'survive' a protracted course of study. If MOOC dropout over 7 weeks is 90%, imagine what it'd be like over 3 or 4 years of degree study?

But that doesn't mean universities shouldn't look at ways of reducing the cost of that cream bar, if we can do so without losing students. Maybe not all of the support does need to be done by a human. But I'm pretty sure some of it does.

This highlights the dilemma for universities - many students may not think they need that cream bar. It's like a universal credit, such as a state pension. Some need it more than others, but if you remove the principle of all paying into it, then it becomes prohibitively expensive for those who do need it. So the question that fees and MOOCs make both universities and students address is - how much do I value support? It's a profound question for the future direction of education, but I agree with Christopher Newfield when he argues that dreams of zero marginal costs in MOOCs are fanciful.

It all rests in that second column..

You can stop worrying about MOOCs now

I guess we all knew the MOOC bubble would burst sometime, but I'm saying it's happened this week - it just doesn't know it yet. The reason? Commercial MOOC providers have started making noises about becoming elearning courseware providers for standard education providers. 

So we have Clayton "I'll disrupt your breakfast" Christensen talking about "hybrid innovation". This turns out to be blended learning, which many people have been promoting for at least 15 years (although calling it hybrid innovation at least maintains the illusion that it's new and sexy for a while longer). That's not a bad thing, blended learning is an entirely sensible and appropriate response to combining the best of face to face teaching and the information rich resources of the net. It's just not very new.

Then Coursera make an announcement that they are going to explore "MOOC based learning on campus". I mean, what does that even mean? That's blended learning, or e-learning, and again, not exactly new. If you take the MOO out of MOOC you're left with just a C, and no-one's that interested in just a C. This follows on the back of Georgia Tech's not free, online Masters MOOC, which looks awfully like a not very well supported elearning course.

It's hard not to come to the conclusion that MOOCs are rather retreating from their initial promise/threat of world domination here. They're becoming a means of approaching elearning within traditional education systems. There's a couple of possible reasons for this.

The first might be that those Venture Capitalists are now demanding a solid and quick return on their investment. The initial open model isn't offering this any time soon, so a quicker route to pay back is to work with existing providers and students who are already paying. As people such as David Kernohan have been pointing out, the problem with MOOCs funded by VCs is that sooner (rather than later) they want their money back, and they'll make you shift your model to do that. The open access publisher FlatWorld Knowledge provide a useful precedent here - eventually the VCs wanted their money back and 'open' was the first thing to go.

The second, is that this is what they always intended to do anyway. Mike Caulfield called this long ago, as he helpfully sums up here (at my request, thanks Mike). Commercial MOOC providers were never really interested in being free providers of education - they wanted to become courseware providers to the education market. As he put it as early as 2012:

"We now understand the endgame here. We now get the business model. The idea is not “send your students to us!”. The idea is to become yet another online vendor of services to higher ed."

None of this is bad - a commercial elearning provider, that may be helpful. It's just not very exciting. And it certainly doesn't warrant the coverage it gets. Can you imagine if Coursera had launched as a provider of elearning content to universities? I don't think the media would have been as willing to reprint their every press release and promote them so uncritically. So it's been a smart game to push the 'future of education for everyone' line, but surely that game is up now?

So what about MOOCs, you know, those free, open courses? Is this the end of them? No, I don't think so, but maybe they can now become what we always wanted them to be, focused on access and experimentation and not hype and commercialism.

If education were free, what would MOOCs be?

Here's a thought experiment, if there were no students fees and higher education were free, what would that do to MOOCs? I mean, obviously it'll never happen... oh, wait, Germany just abolished student fees. Yeah, but what do they know about running an economy, right?

So, on with our thought experiment. At the opposite ends of the spectrum we have two scenarios: It doesn't change a thing, as MOOCs are about a different form of learning; or it completely kills MOOCs as their main feature is that they are free.

Then there are some elements inbetween these two extremes:

• MOOCs become more focused on niche subjects not served by higher education - many current MOOCs offer courses straight out of conventional curriculum, indeed if they want big numbers for monetisation then the curriculum becomes narrower. But in a free higher ed system MOOCs can fill some of the demand and gap not met by conventional curriculum. These would be offered by communities, societies, individuals for interest and maybe universities and commercial providers for professional development
• MOOCs are outreach focused. While competition is lessened in a free HE system between universities, there is an increased pressure on them to perform social-good functions (since they're being paid for by the tax payer). MOOCs are a useful means of achieving this, with the emphasis now on open access, and less on shop window.
• MOOCs offer a different granularity. Related to the above, the full 3 or 4 year degree is not for everyone, and MOOCs provide a means of offering smaller chunks of courses. There is less pressure on them to be a taster or freemium model for the full degree in a free system. They operate as smaller units of learning which may be aggregated, but may not, appealing to leisure learners and professional updating.
• MOOCS are experimental. As with the current system there is room for MOOCs to act as a means of experimenting with technology, pedagogy or curriculum. This allows universities to trial approaches and learners to trial subjects, without impacting upon the core degree. The impetus to do this may be lessened in a free HE system however.

My guess is that in a society where higher education is freely available, then the commercial focus on MOOCs decreases. They are competing less directly with an expensive system, and their main selling point of being free is undermined. But I also suspect they wouldn't disappear. In fact, they end up being altogether more interesting I think, and other features about them come to the fore. And that probably tells us quite a lot about the current MOOC debate.

Uncle MOOC

Uncle MOOC will be looking after you for a few weeks...

A metaphor is always a handy way to get a grip on something new (as long as one is aware of its limitations). My attitude to MOOCs changes on a weekly basis, and so does my MOOC metaphor - I'm sure you've got one of your own: the MP3 of education, this year's SecondLife, industrial revolution applied to education, a giraffe smoking a cheroot rollerblading down the Champs-Elysees - it can be pretty much whatever you want. So here is this week's MOOC metaphor.

MOOCs are like the patronising uncle who has yet to have a child of his own. They are great fun for the nieces and nephews, they are inventive, playful, and the kids always look forward to them arriving. But this uncle secretly (and after a couple of beers, not so secretly) thinks he could do a better job at raising the kids than the parents. He may also think they prefer him to their actual mum and dad. "Why don't they do all the stuff I do with them?" he thinks. "I'm great at getting them out of a tantrum, I do my distraction technique and they forget it. I never see their dad doing that," he compliments himself. "I would have a set of rules that the kids would respect and obey, not this slapdash approach," he vows.

And then, of course, he has kids of his own. Suddenly he realises he has to work as well as raise the kids, that his distraction techniques don't work with a tired 6 month old at 3 in the morning, that he has to do it every single day and getting the basic stuff done like feeding, bathing, looking after them is a real achievement in itself. 

This is how I sometimes feel about MOOCs and their relationship to formal education. They are good fun, they offer something new, a lot of learners really enjoy them. But they shouldn't kid themselves they can do the robust, day to day stuff better than the existing system. If they had to, they'd soon find that a lot of their energy is spent on the not-so-fun stuff, because that is required of them. But, like our friendly uncle they do also make the parents think "maybe we should go to the zoo more often," and "he does know how to get the best out of Tommy, I could learn something there". 

So when I see pieces like this announcement that Georgia Tech are offering an online Masters (they don't even have the good grace to blush when they use the term 'MOOC 2.0") it begins to sound not unlike, ooh, I don't know, an Open University (but with cheaper staff support). This makes me think - this is the first signs of MOOCs discovering that it wasn't quite as easy as they thought, but they still like to dress it up as a revolution.

That's my metaphor for the week, I'm sure Dominik has some better ones. What's your MOOC metaphor?

Edukashun is brocken - the Tumblr

To save me clogging up this blog by banging on about the lazy 'education is broken' meme used to justify venture capital, I've set up one of those Tumblr blogs that gathers stuff together here: http://brokeneducation.tumblr.com/

I think there's a slight danger that like Pseuds Corner in Private Eye it ends up including too much. In the case of Pseuds corner it sometimes seems that any attempt to use words of more than one syllable will be lampooned. Similarly, this tumblr may end up including any attempt to talk about the future of education. In general what I want are those pieces where the education is broken meme is trotted out largely as a pretence for some solution the company or individual has to offer. But I'll take anything in this area really. I would like to pretend that one day I'll go through them and do a semantic analysis or cluster analysis of concepts. But I'll probably just make a sarcastic one-liner instead.

Any suggestions for inclusion just tweet me @mweller.

Mildly interesting aside - I often talk about finding the right voice for a blog. This one is the carefully considered, balanced, poorly written one. I found that as soon as I started doing this tumblr blog it revealed a much snarkier, sarcastic me. Some people may like that, others not.

H817Open reflections

My small MOOC open course, H817Open ends this week, so I thought I'd post some reflections on how it's gone.

I'll start by saying what my intentions were for it. The idea was to mix formal and informal learners (as it is one quarter of a Masters level course), to blend OERs and MOOCs (it is in the OpenLearn repository and exists after course end), to use an activity-based 'collaboration-lite' model and to adopt a range of technologies.

In general it went well, the learners seemed to enjoy it, although we saw the familiar drop-off of participation. It was only on a small scale so I don't think I can draw any big conclusions. I've summarised my thoughts in the slidedeck below, so won't repeat them here. If you have time I'd thoroughly recommend looking through the blog aggregator at the student contributions, they're fabulous.

 

I will say though that I'd do it again, and it's been one of the most engaging teaching experiences I've had for a long time, if also one of the most exhausting.

In an earlier post I said the puppy would get it if people didn't enjoy it. Suffice to say the puppy is alive and well, and that is as much as we can hope for: