Experiences from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how the MOOC could potentially increase diversity, social inclusion & learner engagement

Posted on January 8, 2013 by markuos

Background

There is currently much interest and excitement at the emergence of an educational approach commonly termed the ‘Massive Open Online Course’ or MOOC. These MOOCs are truly global in their reach, and can be massive with tens of thousands of participants. Whilst the approach is very much in its infancy the concept has gained traction in a short time and is developing and evolving almost on a month/weekly/(or even) daily basis. For many people much of their understanding about MOOCs will have been gained from reading about them in the traditional media.

I have participated in several MOOCs and wanted to present my experiences to the conference, and allow delegates to consider the positives that MOOCs could offer in and of themselves, but also how lessons can be learned to potentially improve on-campus courses.

What are MOOCs

As the name implies, in their original form these ‘courses’ are open in the sense that they are available for anyone to participate, they are at zero cost to the participants and the content is freely available without restriction.

Depending on the type of MOOC there may be no prerequisites to participation. Thus, some would argue, MOOCs have the potential to open up higher education to vast numbers of people who would not otherwise have access possibly due to gender, religion, culture, socio-economic background or a host of life events or supposed disadvantages preventing access. They can also bring greater breadth to the learning experience of traditional ‘campus-based’ participants, drawing upon cultural differences and past life experiences.

History of MOOCs

Dave Cormier is credited as coining the term MOOC in 2008 when he had a discussion on Skype regarding the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course (CCK08) George Siemens was running with Stephen Downes. A year prior to that Alec Couros ran the Social Media and Open Education open online course and David Wiley ran an open course based on a wiki. In turn these initiatives were founded upon a long history and research of open education and online learning and teaching.

These types of MOOCs were the only ones run until in 2011 Stanford made some of their courses openly available, which included the Artificial Intelligence course run by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. That particular course was successful in attracting 160,000 people who enrolled from 190 countries, aged from 13 to 70, including working single mothers, people in active war zones under attack, in short a diverse cohort of ‘non-typical’ Stanford students.

Fig. 1 Screenshot of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence MOOC webpage

Arguably, this initiative by Stanford is what took the MOOC concept out of the educational technologists’ world and propelled it into more general acceptance, fuelled by traditional media hype.

Following the Stanford AI course, Sebastian Thrun decided that he couldn’t go back to teaching in a class of maybe a hundred students at Stanford so he resigned his tenure and jointly set up Udacity.

Fig. 2 Screenshot of Udacity home webpage.

Also out of the work at Stanford came Coursera.

Fig. 3 Screenshot of the Coursera home webpage

And at the same time Harvard and MIT set up edX, with Berkley joining later.

Fig. 4 Screenshot of edX home webpage

Udacity and Coursera are for-profit organizations. Currently, they have a large amount of venture capital provided to them so that they can operate (e.g. $22m for Coursera). Ultimately, they with need to monetize their business concept. edX is different in that it is a not for-profit initiative. My understanding is that edX allows the institutions to enhance and improve their on-campus course provision by experimenting within these open online courses, in a continual feedback mechanism.

So, in their short existence MOOCs have undergone this schism into two distinct forms. The original format, based on a proposed new ‘pedagogical theory’ (or simply a ‘pedagogic view’) called Connectivism, is now commonly termed cMOOC whilst the other strand that has a more ‘traditional’ approach to course content transfer and where enrollment is required and the content isn’t ‘open’ is termed xMOOC. The latter has got most of the publicity and kudos for the concept, as George Siemens writes:

… let’s start by doing away with the “lone genius myth” of MOOCs. Thrun, Udacity, Coursera, and Stanford did not invent MOOCs. They did run them on a much larger scale than we have done with our MOOCs. They had better PR connections and better funding. Our own MOOCs, in turn, borrowed heavily from online learning research, our work with networked learning, and the experiences of conferences and online courses that are at least 20 years old. In academia, there is a desire for attribution, an acknowledgement of the origin of ideas. … Having the idea first is not the same as succeeding in commercializing and moving ideas into the public sphere. In regards to the ladder [sic], Udacity and Coursera have been wonderfully capable.

George Siemens

Adjacent possible: MOOCs, Udacity, edX, Coursera

http://www.xedbook.com/?p=81

Accessed 18 December 2012

The timeline of MOOC development is as shown:

Fig. 5 Diagram showing the MOOC development timeline

http://www.deltainitiative.com/bloggers/online-educational-delivery-models-a-descriptive-view

Accessed 7 December 2012

A slight aside to xMOOCs is Semester Online. This isn’t strictly a MOOC but interestingly some universities that have signed up with Coursera are also involved in this venture. Significantly, these are credit-bearing courses.

Semester Online is a for-credit, online program for undergraduates offering rigorous courses, where students will have access to renowned professors from multiple, highly selective institutions.
Courses are taught live, in small groups where students are surrounded by outstanding peers and guided by renowned professors – much as they would be if they were on campus.
Compelling, richly produced, self-paced course materials are designed with university faculty and are accessible 24 hours a day.
Familiar social networking tools allow students to connect and build relationships with peers from their school and other schools online.

http://semesteronline.org/

Accessed 18 December 2012

The latest news about MOOCs include major announcements from the UK Higher Education sector. In July 2012 Edinburgh announced that they were joining Corsera in providing online courses. Then in about September time, The University of London also announce a tie-in with Coursera.

On 14 December 2012, The Open University announced that it along with a consortium of 11 other UK universities would be launching their MOOC courses on a dedicated platform provided by FutureLearn Ltd. an independent company but with The Open University as the majority owner.

The 11 other consortium universities are:

News articles relating to this announcement included:

my Experience

Participation in MOOCs

I now want to go on to expand on some of my experiences participating in MOOCs; the courses I studied, my thoughts on the process and learning experience, how positive or negative I felt each course was for me as an individual.

cMOOCs

Change: Education, Learning, and Technology – Change11

My first experiences of participating in MOOCs was with the ‘Change: Education, Learning, and Technology’, Change11, course facilitated by Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier. These three are considered to be the originators of the MOOC concept.

With this incarnation, the format involved a series of respected academics and speakers from the area of education, education technology (edTech) and the open educational movement, participating and interacting directly with the facilitators and course participants for a set week throughout the 35 week programme of the course beginning in September 2011. Guest experts included:

Martin Weller
Allison Littlejohn
Tony Bates
Rory McGreal
Nancy White
Howard Rheingold
Tony Hirst
Diana Laurillard
as well as Stephen, George and Dave hosting a week each themselves.

Each week generally consisted of some text, notes or other readings supplied by that week’s presenter. The topics covered included:

Digital Scholarship
History and future directions of open education
OER for learning
Slow learning
Authentic learning
Social Networks, Learning Communities and Web Science
Open Scholarship

Sometimes there might be a video session where the presenter might talk with four or five course participants; this tended to be at times which were more convenient to US participants than elsewhere in the globe.

The initial challenge of such a MOOC is orienting yourself, developing an understanding of the format and how to interact and participate in the most appropriate way for you. There was some introductory material from the course facilitators, including some video presentations, to assist participants in their understanding of MOOCs generally and Change11 in particular. Stephen in one of his videos explained about how individuals could follow along and participate throughout the entirety of the course as the facilitators worked with the weekly guest expert. However, Stephen emphasized how it was about you as a learner and that it was acceptable (and indeed encouraged) to dip in and out with your interactions, or ‘lurk’ following the interactions of other participants, or simply access the readings and other materials of direct interest to you.

As an individual it is your own choice how you want to record your own learning and interaction with the course material, the experts, the facilitators, other course participants and any other materials you or they might bring to the learning experience. So the choice of technology was generally up to individuals or groups of participants to decide upon what worked best for their needs. The technologies commonly used included blogs (WordPress and Blogger), Twitter, a Diigo Group (which I set up, owned and moderated), Facebook, Google+ and Google Hangouts (which came along when the course was underway). All content relating to the course simply needed to be marked with #Change11.

It did initially take a little time to become familiar with the format. Primarily there was the supplied content to read and digest. However, once content and comments began to be generated by other participants there was a means to develop my own understanding from the interaction with the thoughts of other learners. From that a community of learners began to develop. This is perhaps the fundamental purpose of a cMOOC – it is its essential component – its essence if you will. The learning that happens is constructed from the connections made and the sharing with others.

I interacted extensively with others via the Twitter channel that developed. This was a very active medium with much lively discussion that including the facilitators and some of the guest experts. There were often links out to other interesting content and materials commenting on the week’s subject topic. There were links to blog posts from the contributors. Those that were deemed to be of significance would get retweeted and comments/discussions would develop around the blog post.

This process was personally a very rewarding experience for me. I enjoyed the process of learning with and from other learners; an exchange of views including with the facilitators and guest experts. It was challenging, sometimes uncomfortable but always dynamic, and engaging and very fulfilling.

I also maintained a blog where I recorded my own reflections about the course and my learning. Additionally, I created a group in Diigo the Social Bookmarking and Annotation service. This allowed contributors to share links to interesting material they came across on the web. This process has the advantage of creating an external library of interesting content that can be accessed into the future.

Some of the aspects about what have now been termed cMOOCs is that they are an experiment in learning and teaching in and of themselves, which can be interesting and exciting, and may also be frustrating at times. Because the technology being used might not have been used in this way before there can be problems. For example, the original video conferencing software, chosen because it was open source, was unable technically to deal with the requirements it was set and consequently broke. Testing of alternatives was hastily undertaken by the facilitators and a replacement was implemented. The aggregation software used to pull together all the content created by course participants and present it to everyone else is created by Stephen Downes himself and is available for anyone to use as it is open source. It is called gRSShopper and it can aggregate any content with an RSS feed (marked with #change11) and display it in a list of similar content via an email to a mailing list of participants.

I enjoyed participating in this course immensely. The community was large, vibrant, dynamic, thought provoking and challenging. The guest experts brought interesting materials and insight into their own particular areas of interest, research or work. As an entire package, Change11 work very well for me.

The level of involvement of the facilitators was very high in this course. This is something to consider if you intent to facilitate a similar experience.

Digital Storytelling – ds106

The essence of ‘Digital Storytelling’ ds106 is the creation of a ‘story’ or a ‘meaning’ using digital creation and creativity. It is learning by doing and also interacting with other contributors. It is run as an on-campus course at the University of Mary Washington in Computer Science and was started by Jim Groom, (the poster boy for EduPunk).

There are a number of ways to be involved and contribute to ds106. As an open online course it is possible to follow along with the syllabus as the on-campus course runs, either at Mary Washington or any other institution that has adopted and runs the course. There is an ‘assignment bank’ where you can choose to do any of the creative projects, with categories including:

Audio
Video
Design
Web
Visual
Writing
Mashup

There is a daily assignment that you can take part in, taking no more than 15-20 minutes each to complete. And there is the conversation on Twitter and constructive commenting on the works of others to become involved with.

… you succeed just by doing, by participating where you can, by sharing your work, and most importantly commenting on the work of others. More than just the cliché sense, ds106 is a community that is made better from the ideas and contributions of the people who come inside that door.

We do not give out badges or certifications, the creations you do, the connections you make with others, and just the experience of challenging yourself to tell stories is its own reward.

How to Succeed as an Open Participant in ds106 (with really trying) http://ds106.us/handbook/success-the-ds106-way/open-participant/

Accessed 13 December 2012

Again I used my blog to host and post the work I created for ds106. I registered my blog with the course and categorized content so that it could be aggregated back to the course website to allow everyone else easy access.

The level of creativity and the sense of community within ds106 is astounding; it has become a phenomenon. Many of those who have participated say that the experience has changed the way they consider things. It has become so popular that the server it was run on couldn’t deal with the volume of traffic and extra funding was required to purchase and run more hardware. Jim went to the ds106 community to make this happen by raising money via a Kickstarter project, with the level of funding required being reached within 24 hours.

I found this ‘course’ or is it a ‘community’ or a ‘culture’, a ’movement’, a ‘way of being’ a true revelation. The participation level of Jim Groom and the other course instructors was fantastic, more so than any other course I’ve participated in. The level of positive feedback is very high which leads to greater levels of engagement by participants. It is challenging. It can be difficult. However, I found that the level of effort and sense of achievement to be extremely fulfilling.

Although ds106 is a course run on-campus, it has become something much bigger due to the open online element. The feedback and experience the on-campus students receive from this supportive exposure to a worldwide community I would think is extraordinary for their learning.

I didn’t have long working on ds106 before I wasn’t able to contribute. However, after a year I am ready to dive back in again. This is one of the advantages of ds106 that it is always open to you to go back and participate.

Introduction to Openness in Education – ioe12

I happened upon a Tweet in January 2012 by David Wiley that the ‘Introduction to Openness in Education’ course he was running on-campus at Bingham Young University was also being run as an Open Online Course. The area of Openness is one of my primary interests. Consequently, I signed up that day and started taking the course.

This is again a slightly different incarnation of the cMOOC approach. There is a set of 12 topics related to Openness. Each topic has a link to materials that David has put together. This includes videos and readings. In the spirit of Openness, David makes all this material publically available via the web. Consequently, as a participant you are able to access the content of the course how and when you want and in any order.

Participation and understanding is developed by interacting with other participants of the course, as this extract from the course description outlines:

You participate in this course by blogging and tweeting (and in any other media you like – like YouTube videos – as long as you help us find them via your blog or tweets). After reading the articles and watching the videos – the passive part of the course – you engage actively by posting your thoughts, challenge responses, and questions in blog posts and tweets. You engage socially by reading, pondering, and responding to others’ posts and tweets. There is no quota for the number of posts or tweets that you respond to per unit time. These interactions should be organic and driven by your own desire and interest.

How It Works, http://openeducation.us/how-it-works

Accessed 13 December 2012

Once again I used my blog and twitter feed as my workspace for reflection and discussion. Posts and tweets were tagged with #ioe12 and I registered my blog with the course so that any content would be aggregated and shared with others.

In addition to the understanding you can develop from your interactions with the course materials and other participants, David has developed a form of recognition to certificate and demonstrate your understanding if you so wish. This is based on an Open Badge approach, similar to that of the Mozilla Open Badges Project. For the course there were four different levels of badges with a number of tasks to complete for each. They were categorised as:

OpenEd Overview (Novice level, complete for all 12 topics to earn the badge)
OpenEd Researcher (Apprentice level, complete for 3 topics to earn the badge)
OpenEd Assessment Designer (Apprentice level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge)
OpenEd Evangelist (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge)

These badges then parallel grades as follows:

No badges earned = F
1 Novice Badge = D
1 Novice Badge + 1 Apprentice Badge = C
1 Novice Badge + 2 Apprentice Badges = B
1 Novice Badge + 2 Apprentice Badges + 1 Journeyman Badge = A

Earning Course Badges, http://openeducation.us/badges

Accessed 13 December 2012

The advantages of this approach are that it is a well thought out and structured course which you can see has its origins firmly embedded in an on-campus course. There is strong and appropriate course material, but the course isn’t limited or confined by that material; indeed this is a springboard to the real learning process. Again there was an active, if much smaller, community of participants that developed around the course.

A particularly interesting element was the possibility of participants devising the criteria for a badge and for other participants to work to meet those objectives and be awarded the badge.

Personally, I found this a very rewarding course to follow. The way that the badge system was organised in the course enhanced the subject understanding process with ‘deep level’ learning happening. The only possible negative I encountered was the lack of direct interaction with David Wiley himself on the course.

xMOOCs

Coursera – The University of Michigan’s Social Network Analysis

I decided to take xMOOC courses to see how they compared with the cMOOC principles. Originally I signed up at the same time for two separate courses where the subject matter was of personal interest; ‘Social Network Analysis’ run by Lada Adamic, Associate Professor in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, and ‘Computing for Data Analysis’ run by Roger D. Peng, Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. From the onset I realised that I’d be unable to dedicate the time required to keep up participation on both courses so I decided to follow the longer, more involved of the two, the eight week course on Social Network Analysis.

The delivery of the course took place in the Coursera standardized course delivery environment, perhaps in that respect it can be likened to a Learning Management System (LMS). However, this environment could be said to be less than intuitive. Initially I was a little lost and it did take some time to orientate within the course. If this is typical of Coursera, then generally the environment allows the course tutors to deliver content via videos as well as accompanying text. For the course I took, this format actually seemed to work as a reasonable delivery mechanism. There was some ‘talking head’ element, but as the course was also heavily involved with data analysis using software packages, including Gephi the open source data visualization package, there were lots of screencast demonstrations and discussions relating to those demos within the videos. As I often view videos (on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) to gain an understanding of any software I might want to use, this format within the course worked well for my approach. As a participant it was easy to stop the videos and flip to the software to try things out. The creation or generation of datasets wasn’t covered in the course, so datasets were provided and it was these that I used to work with within the analysis software. The videos had quizzes embedded within them, this was a useful means of immediate feedback on understanding. It was a process of taking the quiz and if you got it wrong then you could access the explanation. It also meant that you could go back over that portion of the video to reaffirm your understanding. However, here is where a very positive element of the course structure also was significant, a learner community developed very rapidly in the discussions section of the course environment. There other ‘students’ would help and advise on any problems others might be having. General discussions about the topics also ensued to allow greater understanding of the topics to develop.

It’s been a terrific experience for me to be able to teach and interact with students from so many different places, professional stages, and interests. I was impressed by the variety of insight you brought to the forum discussions, from sharing practical tips on software tools to discussing wide-ranging applications, to questioning fundamental assumptions. I hope you’ll all go forth and apply your newfound knowledge in interesting and meaningful ways.

Social Network Analysis Course Staff email to participants

Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 6:33 PM

Assignments (or graded tests) were set at the end of each week. This was all integrated and facilitated within the environment. However, again it was difficult to locate where the assignments were within the environment without searching around or finding out from the forum. Also, there was no introduction to what to expect within the assignment part of the environment; it wasn’t stated that multiple attempts were allowed, that it only registered when you clicked the submit button, that you could save your answers part way through.

There are no qualifications granted by either Coursera or the host university for taking or completing the course. However, there is the potential of a certificate as a reward for ‘successful’ completion of the course sent out as a pdf from the instructor. These effectively simply state that you have done the course to a standard.

This element of the course was detrimental to the level of my own learning during the course. Initially on starting I was much more interested in the learning element of the course; developing an understanding of Social Network Analysis. I did find it difficult to get through the additional reading material associated with each week of the course, but I could manage the videos including the in-video quizzes. I also managed to complete the regular assignments. However, with taking a weeks holiday during the course, which meant that one assignment was then late and incurred a penalty, it became more difficult to keep pace. At that stage I started to pay less attention to my own level of learning and more to my grades with a view to the certificate at the end. My learning strategy moved from ‘deep level’ approach to a ‘strategic level’ working at applying the system to achieve the grades I required for the ‘pass’ standard (Marton and Säljö, 1976). This was no longer a personally rewarding learning experience, but a strategic exercise at course completion with surface level learning at best. There is the possibility for me to re-access the course materials to concentrate again on the learning, but I feel I have missed an opportunity to achieve this during the course.

One major element of the software architecture used to run Coursera courses allows the gathering of large amounts of data about participation, as evidenced by this email extract:

Some participation stats: 61,285 students registered, 25,151 watched at least one video, 15,391 tried at least one in-video quiz, 6,919 submitted at least one assignment, 2,417 took the final exam. 1303 earned the regular certificate. Of the 145 students submitting a final project, 107 earned the programming (i.e. ‘with distinction’) version of the certificate.

Social Network Analysis Course Staff email to participants

Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 6:33 PM

There was also a questionnaire sent out to gather more data about participants and their motivations for taking the course, including a question asking if you would be willing to pay for a certificate of successful completion and if so how much.

An interesting development in the last month is that a careers services has been started by Coursera which any registered user can sign up for and have their details and course achievements paired with companies seeking those skills. It is being suggested that companies such as Google and Facebook might use such a service. This is also one of the options for Coursera to monetize the business, another being pay-for completion certificates by students.

Comments

I think for me that throughout each of the MOOC experiences, the communities that developed centred on the learning were a significant element of the process regardless of the format of the ‘delivery mechanism’ of the course. Sure, the xMOOCs can be considered to have a much more ‘traditional’, transmissive teaching approach, and people can and obviously do choose to vote with their feet if that approach isn’t suitable for their needs.

I personally always feel uncomfortable saying that one learning or teaching approach is ‘better’ than another for whatever reason. I feel that possibly each has its own merits in certain contexts for different individuals. Possibly what the technology has allowed to happen is that there is greater choice for individuals, allowing them to participate more fully and take more control of their own learning experience. This might be a mixture of different processes for different topics or even within the same topic.

The attrition rate on xMOOCs is very high. There could be a number of factors influencing this. Certaining I could see how the environment itself could deter engagement due to the user interface not being intuitive enough. Also the sheer number of courses to enrol on does allow (if not encourage) sign-up to multiple courses, which could lead to dropout from at least some of the courses (if not all) from a feeling of being overwhelmed. However, an argument often put forward is that in actual terms the numbers completing courses is still very much higher than you would see attending an on-campus course at any university.

I believe that whenever an element of accreditation is introduced, and the level of accreditation is certainly a hot topic for discussion within the context of xMOOCs more broadly, then the learning experience is fundamentally altered. For me in the xMOOC this was altered for the worse.

Whilst the xMOOCs continue to remain free (and no one can predict how long this situation will persist) I intend to access them and use them to learn, but on my own terms as much as I can within the course framework. The challenge for me is the timeframe that courses run in and the need to concentrate on deep level learning without having my attention pulled away to the certificate ‘prize’ and surface/strategic learning approaches.

For the quality of the learning experience, I therefore believe that the deeper interactions and greater level of understanding that I have experienced from the cMOOC approach has been much more beneficial to my lifelong learning experience, though it might have much less impact in the area of career advancement.

So what can be drawn from my experiences of different MOOCs?

I feel there is much we can learn from the delivery of MOOCs that can be used to enhance the on-campus experience supplemented by online course material and delivery. This format offers us the opportunity to investigate learning and improve teaching processes, perhaps more similar to the edX approach. It would seem appropriate to collect and use data to inform this process; treating learning and teaching as a field ripe for research, tying in to a research-led approach.

Are there threats or challenges?

The Open University has a project to research different aspects of online learning to provide academic rigour to what works, how it works and what the benefits are.

The areas, I believe, which are most under threat from the xMOOCs are courses run by The Open University that people might take out of interest or for professional development. Recent increases in costs of these make the choice of ‘free’ (as in cost) online courses more appealing, particularly out of interest. Other areas that could be hit include taught postgraduate courses at conventional universities. As they exist at the moment they don’t really replace the on-campus undergraduate experience at these universities, though they could supplement them. However, with recent announcements, The Open University has shown how it is agile enough to swiftly react to any changes in the educational landscape. They are informed about future possibilities by performing the necessary preparatory research in advance. They have the infrastructure, resources and technical ability to produce a MOOC platform, and the knowledge to run high quality courses.

Patrick McAndrew, professor of open education at The Open University, noted that free course materials attract two kinds of users: the “students for free” and the “social learners”, who use the material as a jumping-off point for meeting other students.

“Some of the more recent free large-scale offerings are attracting ‘students for free’ – however, there are also interesting approaches around more radical course design that leaves more of the structure to the participants.”

Teaching intelligence – This game is wide open,

Times Higher Education, 1 November 2012

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=421645&c=1

Accessed 14 December 2012

From the xMOOC perspective there are several challenges that need to be considered. Perhaps the primary one is that of monetizing and subsequent sustainability. There are considered to be eight possible monetization strategies:

Certification (students pay for a badge or certificate)
Secure assessment (students pay to have their examinations invigilated)
Employment recruitment (companies pay for access to student performance records)
Applicant screening (employers/universities pay for access to records to screen applicants)
Human tutoring or assignment marking (for which students pay)
Selling the MOOC platform to enterprisers to use in their own training courses
Sponsorships (third party sponsors of courses)
Tuition fees

Certainly the first three in the list are already being seriously considered or have been implemented.

Analysis

So there are a number of viewpoint regarding MOOCs and their impact on the educational landscape. There are stark polar views that the traditional media and others are trying to portray about MOOCs replacing existing higher education systems. I’m not sure that is the case, but then perhaps anything else doesn’t sell copy. And even though there are parallels with the music industry, etc. currently the end product of higher education is controlled differently. However, that could quickly change. But also, unlike the music industry, to some extent it is market leaders in higher education who are attempting to control any changes that happen.

What these current events can facilitate is that questions about education are asked and that serious discussion can occur.

Do online courses have to be structured as traditional courses?
What are the existing tensions between education as a business or a public good?
Is it still legitimate to restrict access to education?
Indeed, what is education for?

The xMOOCs seem to be trying to replicate the existing educational system but on a larger scale, and reducing the cost. It feels as if the openness part is simply a stepping stone to achieving these ends and it is a massification of education, or at least a new stream of potential mass revenue, that is the motivation. There is a risk that MOOCs will gravitate towards a massive medium for delivering what education systems already deliver.

In some ways, technology is the factor that has allowing this massification to take place. Many would argue that this is a positive; knowledge is no longer a scarcity or just the purview of existing educational systems. However, there is still some intrinsic value provided by these systems in the structuring of learning paths, supportive scaffolding of learning experiences, and to some extent legitimation of the experience. A MOOC is simply a platform to allow an educational experience to take place. This can be a rich experience, with the technology allowing greater interaction of participants with the course materials, with the facilitators and with each other. Alternatively, as with any educational platform, the experience for learners can also be a poorer one.

Statistics that have emerged (e.g. Inside Higher Education article) about the participants of the early xMOOCs show that the majority tend to be professionals who already have a degree and are following the course out of interest or to help with continuous professional development in their current role. Interestingly, the majority of participants are from outside the USA. So to some extent they are widening participation into the US higher education system, and providing a potentially new revenue stream.

However, I believe for these xMOOCs to deliver on all the hype and rhetoric about changing the existing system of higher education, they have to deliver a number of things, including:

a sustainable business model
widening the participation base to include greater diversity of socio-economic background, gender, culture, religion, disability, pre-existing educational experiences (or lack of formal education), etc.
large improvements in participant retentions throughout the course period, requiring greater engagement and sense of achievement through the experience
and remaining free.

MOOCs as they exist at the moment might not be around for very long. However, they are causing existing higher education providers to consider their business models, and for governments to consider education policy generally.

References

Marton F. and Säljö R. (1976) On qualitative differences in learning. I – Outcome and Process’ British Journal of Educational Psychology 46, pp. 4-11

Open Policy #ioe12

Posted on March 14, 2012 by markuos

At the heart of the movement to open educational resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general, and the World Wide Web in particular provide an opportunity for everyone to share, use and re-use it.

Kathy Casserly & Mike Smith, Hewlett Foundation

The course topic ‘readings’ consider the area of pushing for legislation within the US to increase public access to data generated by publicly funded grants. Examples being the expansion of National Institutes of Health Public Access policy. However, I have previously written about the Research Works Act H.R.3699 which would undo this approach if my understanding is correct.

In the UK the Research Councils are requiring research data to be made openly available as it’s a ‘public resource’. Increasingly there is a requirement for research institutions to have a Data Management Plan in place prior to funding being granted, as I’ve previously mentioned.

Brazil has a very interesting openness approach as outlined in the OER into federal legislation article.

The bill deals with three main issues: It

1) requires government funded educational resources to be made widely available to the public under an open license,

2) clarifies that resources produced by public servants under his/her official capacities should be open educational resources (or otherwise released under an open access framework), and

3) urges the government to support open federated systems for the distribution and archiving of OER.

https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27698

When reading this for education I was minded of the robust approach taken by Brazil towards pharmaceutical patents for the good of the national public health that I have previously encountered. There does seem to be a will in that country to work for the educational benefit of its peoples.

But more generally across the globe there are problems in policy at different levels:

within institutions
in government
etc.

where they don’t understand the technologies and make decisions within existing parameters.

Most of the resources in higher education are digital, non-rivalrous and we just need to license them properly, using Creative Commons licenses for example. Cable Green argues that by licensing and opening work there can be greater leveraging of a global workforce that will take one’s work and maybe translate it, make it more accessible, or improve it in other ways.

Cable suggests that there are instances where the policies of institutions have been circumvented.

Where the faculty have come together and said “we are the Academy. Our job in the Academy is to advance knowledge. Our job in the Academy is to share knowledge to the extent that it’s what we are about. We will not only publish in the journals, but we will provide a free, accessible version of our research as well to anybody who would like to access it.”

Cable Green, Creative Commons, (video) http://youtu.be/bPTzFbpKIFA#t=12m08s

By following an openness policy there is increased potential for sharing and learning from each other:

across an institution (intra-openness)
and crossing institutional boundaries (inter-openness).

This also has the potential for financial savings. But Cable suggests that we need to move towards a ‘not invented here’ to ‘proudly borrowed from there’ stance so that resources can be shared. Additionally there are general advantages for society if people have increased access to education; good quality curricula and affordable up-to-date ‘textbooks’, constantly maintained and with use of the latest technologies.

There is a movement where some universities are proving resources and instruction openly. “The OER university (OERu) is a virtual collaboration of like-minded institutions committed to creating flexible pathways for OER learners to gain formal academic credit.”

“The OER university aims to provide free learning to all students worldwide using OER learning materials with pathways to gain credible qualifications from recognised education institutions.”

http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/Home

There is a much reduced fee for assessment and credit from the institutions. Obviously there is an outreach and community mission to this approach, but there are potentially widespread general implications to the approach, meaning a shift away from the status quo in higher education provision.

Currently the ‘anchor’ partner institutions of OERu are:

Athabasca University (Canada) wikieducator link
BAOU (Gujarat’s open university) (India)
Empire Stat College (USA) wikieducator link
Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (New Zealand)
North Tee (New Zealand)
Open Polytechnic (New Zealand)
Otago Polytechnic (New Zealand) wikieducator link
Southern New Hampshire University (USA)
Thompson Rivers University (Canada)
University of Canterbury (New Zealand)
University of South Africa (South Africa)
University of Southern Queensland (Australia) wikieducator link
University of Wollongong (Australia)
BC campus (non-teaching) (Canada) wikieducator link
OER Foundation (non-teaching) (New Zealand) wikieducator link

Other interesting things happening in this area are the University of the People and Wikiwijs in the Netherlands. Athabasca University in Canada has a policy that prior to building a new course the academic must go out globally and look at what OER materials are already available.

But there is a challenge with all of this; existing structures are difficult to change. The current ‘preferred’ institutional model of higher education is one of gatekeeper and rivalrous resource model.

Open Business Models #ioe12

Posted on March 13, 2012 by markuos

The question that seems to arise from throughout the course topics is one of sustainability and the open business models topic considers this area in more detail.

When looking at particularly the concept of OpenCourseWare (OCW) there is the concern that it can’t be achieved without major subsidies. The MIT OCW seems to always be quoted, as is the investment figure running to millions of dollars required each year to maintain the initiative.

[Aside: However, this approach seems to be based on maintaining and propagating the existing systems of higher education structures. “How can we get to a (financially) sustainable position of providing openness in education whilst still doing what we are doing?” And if we have seen anything over the last decade or two, existing systems/business models adapt or die. Cable Green in the next topic, Open Policy, makes a valid point that possibly we are asking the wrong question. “What are we trying to achieve?” is the primary and fundamental question. If we are trying to achieve the maintenance of the existing educational system then possibly the answer is different to us trying to expand and open education much more fundamentally to enable access to all who want it. From an institutional or organisational perspective openness is a question of mission and strategy, which includes community outreach, marketing, retention, student satisfaction, etc. Financial sustainability is part of a larger strategic discussion. However, there are moral and ethical issues for the sustainability position of openness to consider.]

So running through the course readings for the Open Business Models.

The Johansen & Wiley, 2010, ‘A Sustainable Model for OpenCourseWare Development’ article/paper is primarily devoted to analysing the possibility of adapting courses at Bingham Young University (BYU) to create OCWs, and the financial implications of that process to reach financial sustainability.

[The main cost of adapting existing courses is ‘copyright scrubbing’. This is the process of identifying copyrighted content, identifying the rights holder(s), negotiating for rights to use the material(s), and paying any applicable fees. Alternate solutions after identifying copyrighted content are to remove any such content, or to create your own alternative content (still requiring resourcing).]

The paper works through the analysis, drawing on concerns about the potential loss of revenue from participants learning from the open courseware balanced against the potential increased sign-ups to register on the formal, paid-for course enrolments. Examples like that of the Open University in the UK are highlighted, I’ve written about this myself previously.

Figures are calculated within the paper of the revenue levels required versus the costs of adapting to OCW for BYU example courses. It provides a useful resource for institutional policy makers looking to perform a similar analysis.

However, I think my recommendations would be to ensure that resourcing factors are taken into account at the course production stages – record staff time to produce the course. Also, copyright and licensing of material should be considered from the onset of the production process for materials destined for open use.

The other ‘readings’ from the topic centre on book authoring and publishing, be it general of textbook specific. I personally found the Hilton & Wiley, 2011, ‘Free: Why Authors are Giving Books Away on the Internet’ of interest. In this article, 10 authors were asked a set of questions about their views on open publishing and whether there were affects on sales. The general consensus amongst the authors was that they had a desire to increase the exposure of their works; open publishing achieved this by increasing readership to those who wouldn’t otherwise have accessed the works. They felt that there was little impact in relation to loss of sales of people who accessed the open publishing rather than bought the book. Indeed, the authors felt that sales of the books actually increased as a consequence of the open publishing availability; arguments related to accessing the works to see whether they were worth buying, and preferring to read a ‘hard’ copy than off the screen. Since publication, however, sales of electronic copies of books to Amazon’s Kindle eReader have outstripped their ‘hard’ copy sales of equivalent titles. In light of this statistic, it would be interesting to see subsequent analysis of open publishing to eBook format and whether there is any affect on sales.

The textbook model related topic readings relate mainly to The Flat World Knowledge (FWK) approach, of which David Wiley is the Chief Openness Officer; with passing reference to Rice University’s Connexions and Wikibooks. FWK uses a ‘freemium’ strategy, giving away some elements and charging a ‘premium’ for other services, however it doesn’t subsidize with advertising revenue. So students can access full online versions of the textbooks for free, or pay for printed, PDF or audio versions for example.

Open Teaching #ioe12

Posted on March 12, 2012 by markuos

In some ways I’ve perhaps found this topic to be the lightest on content with regard to the topic ‘readings’, perhaps because I’ve encountered both videos previously, not least from participating in the other MOOCs. However, I also found the content going some way to present me with more of an insight into how the separate MOOCs are managed, and the differences taken by the facilitators of each.

Inevitably there is bound to be a comparison of styles if you are participating in multiple open courses run by different people.

My own, less than rigorous analysis of the three approaches I’m currently being exposed to run something like:

With Change 11 the facilitators are providing direct support, from the ioe12 topic readings this approach is resource intensive and time consuming for the facilitators.
With DS106 the facilitators, from my perspective, are rolling their sleeves up and getting stuck in with the rest of us. I’m rather liking this approach.

But perhaps the most insightful reading for me from the topic was the Graham, Hilton, Rich, & Wiley, 2010 ‘Using Online Technologies to Extend a Classroom to Learners at a Distance’. I think it goes some way to explain the less involved approach taken by David Wiley with his Open Courses. For me, and I might be wrong in this, it shows how the boundaries of a campus based course can be expanded out to an open participatory course without creating undue burdens on the course facilitators. I think this is the essence of David’s approach; to enable a widening of access and participation to education in a potentially sustainable model.

This reading gives details about how previous open courses were designed and what technologies were employed to enable them. There are also estimates of how long setup would require for educators with less technical proficiency than David. There is analysis of the course to develop an idea of participation and which areas of the course structure were given greatest weight by participants; carried out by questionnaire.

There are three types of interaction:

Learner – Content interaction
Learner – Learner interaction
Learner – Instructor interaction

The Learner – Learner interactions for an open and campus combined course are different as without the instructor facilitating interaction the two groups can remain separate, but it is felt that there is much that can be gained from an interaction beyond the classroom/lecture theatre.

However, for David Wiley facilitated courses, the course readings seem to carry most weight with distance participants. I’m personally finding that the case at present due to the course structuring and ‘reward’ system. (I’ll write more about that in the future.)

‘The MOOC Guide‘ by Stephen Downes, 2011 I found particularly interesting and useful if one wants to develop and facilitate a MOOC. It is an open wiki for anyone with MOOC experience to contribute to and already it has much useful information for a number of previously run MOOCs. I hope to use this information to develop and run a MOOC in the near future, and to contribute back my own experiences from that venture.

Open Data #ioe12

Posted on February 17, 2012 by markuos

Tim Berners-Lee talks on his TEDtalk about how he originated the World Wide Web. The memo he wrote about it was read by his boss (who after his boss’s death was found to have the words “Vague but exciting” written on it). I’m thinking of adopting that as one of my own taglines because of the amount of ideas I propose and receive little interest and even less understanding. (I’m not saying my own ideas are of Tim Berners-Lee’s scale of impact.)

It was a grassroots movement that launched the Web and it was this community that excited Tim. He asked people to put their documents onto the Web, and people did. In his words, “It’s been a blast.” Now he asks us all to put our Data onto the Web.

He refers to Hans Rosling, who also says that it’s important to have a lot of data available. I’d previously seen Hans Rosling’s TEDtalk and also his presentation on a BBC television programme. Tim is going further, however, with his concept of Linked Data, where everybody is putting everything on the web, and therefore virtually everything you could image is on the web. He asks for three things to be observed in this process:

Everything has a http ‘name’ – events, products, things, people, etc.
When someone fetches something with a http name it returns some standard data (information) in a format that people will find useful – something about the event, that person, etc.
The data returned shows relationships; importantly the data has relationships and these related data also carry http names that allow them to be looked up, etc.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to use standardized formats for data as outlined at Schema.org

Another interesting phrase to come out of the videos is ‘Database Hugging’, coined by Hans. Tim demonstrated it as though he was actually hugging something with his arms. The idea is that people, governments, institutions don’t want to release their data until they’ve created a lovely website to display it. Tim says, by all means make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, emphasized with the chanted phrase – ’Raw Data Now’.

‘Linked Data’ useful links:

Material by Tim on this topic of Linked Data:
- Linked Data – http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
- Slides from the TEDTalk (use arrow keys to scroll through) – http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/

Wikipedia entry for Linked Data
Linked Open Data – The Essentials (pdf)

The site that draws together useful information about Linked Data is linkeddata.org
There you’ll find, amongst other things:

Guides and Tutorials
- Key Reference Documents
- Textual Guides/Tutorials
- Video Tutorials
- Introductory Slide Sets
- Frequently Asked Questions
Tools
- Linked Data Publishing Platforms/Frameworks
- Linked Data/RDF Editors and Validators
- Tools for Consuming Linked Data
- Linked Data Applications for End Users

A point that Tim makes in his video at t=11m30s is about the sharing of data to enable Open Science activities to occur, which links in nicely to the previous topic in the Openness in Education course about Open Science.

Tim Berners-Lee returns to do a short TEDtalk ‘updating’ the situation with Open Data:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YcZ3Zqk0a8

It is interesting to see that over this time we have witnessed more of a willingness by governments in areas across the world to share data openly in what has become know as Open Government or ‘opengov’. So in the US you have sites like the one in the topic readings, and in the UK you have ones including data.gov.uk from HM Government; a BBC interview with Tim Berners-Lee on the project that brought about data.gov.uk is available.

Areas of the media are making it easier and more convenient to use open data and allow individuals to interrogate and interpret the data to provide useful information to them. Examples being The New York Times in the US and The Guardian in the UK (which enables questions to be asked of government data from around the world). The Guardian also has a section online that is dedicated to the journalistic use of open data, called the Data Store.

Open Science #ioe12

Posted on February 16, 2012 by markuos

Michael Nielson in his TEDtalk begins by talking about Tim Gowers1, a renowned (famous) mathematician, and Cambridge (UK) professor, who asked on his blog in 2009 whether science could be done collectively out in the open. There was a mathematical problem that he would like to solve, and so he set out via his blog to make all his workings open and invite contributions from anyone and everyone, with the anticipation that multiple people working collectively by expressing their ideas and studying the workings and ideas of others would lead to a solution. This experiment was the Polymath project. Michael says that he observed the blog at the time and was amazed by the speed of activity; how ideas would quickly develop and be elaborated upon by others, and sometimes be discarded. It took 37 days for the core problem, and even a harder generalization to be solved.

Michael believes what the Polymath Project demonstrated is the potential of the internet to enable us to expand our ability to solve some of the most intellectually challenging problems. It follows from this that there can be an expansion in the range of scientific problems we can go on to tackle. It means that the rate of scientific discovery can be increased. And Michael suggests that it means ‘a changing in the way we construct knowledge itself’.

There are challengers and problems with this approach. One area is development of the community and the lack of contributions by others. Many times wikis have been suggested and developed to encourage the sharing of knowledge and problem solving in different scientific areas only for them to falter due to lack of participation. Similarly social networks along the same lines have failed. Primarily the current reward structure for researchers in higher education institutions is focused on the publication of academic papers in journals, and consequently researchers are much more likely to put their efforts there than contributing to a collective, community project. So even though the concept might be appealing, and you might think that it would advance scientific endeavour more rapidly, the rewards structure doesn’t allow, or actively discourages participation.

Arguably the Polymath Project succeeded because, even though it was carried out in an unusual way, it was still inherently conservative because academic papers would be ultimately published as a consequence.

Michael suggests that the Open Science movement wants to change the perceptions that data should be locked away even though it could be potentially useful to others, about the hording of scientific ideas, and even the hording of descriptions of problems that researchers believe to be interesting.

The movement is intent on changing this culture of science so that there is greater motivations to share; to share all these different kinds of knowledge. they want to change the values of individual scientists so that they start to see it as part of their job to be sharing their data, to be sharing their code, to be sharing their best ideas and their problems.

Michael Nielson

This can then lead to changes in the system that then incentivize this kind of activity. It’s not easy, but there are things that scientists and non-scientists can do; as Michael outlines at the end of the video.

http://youtu.be/DnWocYKqvhw#t=13m30s

All the ideas expressed above are extracted from the video and attributed to Michael Nielson.

The Open Science Project is ‘dedicated to writing and releasing free and open source software for scientific use’. The blog for the project is a very useful source of information. In one particular post it quotes an informal definition of Open Science provided by Michael Nielson:

Open science is the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as is practical in the discovery process.

One element in the work of scientific researchers is the Lab Notebook. I’m familiar with the concept from my own scientific training in my days as a science undergraduate and postgraduate researcher. It’s not the first time that I’ve been interested in the concept of Open Notebook Science which makes up part of the reading for this topic in the course. I wrote a blog post about it back in 2008 when I was experimenting running multiple blogs (a bit of a daft idea), and received a response from Jean-Claude Bradley the concept originator. Open Notebook Science certainly fulfils the ideal of openly sharing as early as is practically possible.

Since 2004 the Creative Commons has been looking to expand Creative Commons Licensing to the area of science. It had a section know as Science Commons between 2005-2010, but is now called Science at Creative Commons. By licensing in this way, science has a greater chance of being practiced more openly. There are interesting links to organisations that have adopted a Creative Commons Licence to enable Open Science activities to happen.

1 I’ve already encountered Tim Gowers more recently with regard to Open Access, and I’ll be writing about that in more detail later.

In the writing of this post, I’ve also seen writings by Michael Nielson that are relevant to the Open Access section of the course, and I hope to bring those into my later posts.

Open Access ioe12

Posted on February 14, 2012 by markuos

From the course readings for this topic, Peter Suber’s initial article begins by drawing on a number of sources for a definition of Open Access. These include:

The Budapest Open Access Initiative
- There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
The Public Library of Science
- free availability and unrestricted use
and others

Peter is a very influential character in the Open Access movement and has written extensively about the subject. There are numerous links to several of his other writings from within the text.

Peter highlights the importance of three declarations to the Open Access movements:

Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/

I think that the primary point that Peter is making in his article is that Open Access is comparable to conventional scholarly publishing, with regard to the rigour of the peer-review process, academic career advancement, etc. it’s just that with Open Access there is no financial barrier to readers accessing the content; and that copyright holders have given their consent with prior licensing arrangement (be that via Creative Commons, or similar). It must be remembered that free doesn’t mean free to produce, but free to the reader. However, production costs are much less that conventional publishing. Open Access isn’t an attempt to put existing publishers out of business, but instead it’s intent on making content freely available to readers.

Because the publishing of academic articles are royalty-free for the author (they receive no payment from the work but develop greater prestige and career advancement), then to some extent this is the initial place where Open Access can make a significant difference. This is increasingly the case as we begin to see other pressures becoming important, particularly the requirements by funding bodies that research findings are made open and freely available.

Peter goes on to highlight the distinction in Open Access publishing of research articles. The best know distinction is Gold (Open Access Journals) and Green (Open Access Repositories), with the former always conducting peer-reviews and the latter not but may be hosting articles peer-reviewed elsewhere.

Funders and universities are upstream from publishers and can adopt policies to ensure green OA and the permissions to make it lawful. Because most publishers already permit green OA, and because green OA is a bona fide form of OA, authors who fail to take advantage of the opportunity are actually a greater obstacle to OA than publishers who fail to offer the opportunity. Funders and universities are in a position to close the gap and ensure green OA for 100% of published work by their grantees and faculty. Because authors cannot close this gap on their own, funders and universities who fail to close the gap have no one else to blame if fast-rising journal prices enlarge the fast-growing fraction of new research inaccessible to those who need it. All publishers could help the process along and some are actually doing so. But there’s no need to depend on publishers when we could depend on ourselves.

Open Access Overview by Peter Suber, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (Accessed 8 Feb 2012)

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, SPARC provides much useful advice and resources on the Open Access section of their website. The material here could prove very useful in my own efforts to move the institution I work for to implementing an Open Access policy.

The next reading on the list is the UNESCO Global Open Access Portal (a knowledge portal) which is at a much more strategic level, providing an overview of the current global state of play with Open Access. Its content is aimed more at policy-makers. The Portal allows individual countries to see what level they are actively engaged at with regards Open Access. From a UK perspective, the situations is quite encouraging. Perhaps the initial main area for further work to be done in the UK is to increase awareness amongst academic researchers about Open Access and their role.

Heather Morrison Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in her blogpost ‘Happy 2012 Open Access Movement! December 31, 2011 Dramatic Growth of Open Access’ provides a summary of the growth of Open Access over 2011.

It’s possible to find out more about the progress of, and about, the Open Access movement and to get involved via the annual Open Access Week, ‘a global event now entering its fourth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.’

(http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/welcome-to-open-access-week, Accessed 8 Feb 2012)

Perhaps the final element in the jigsaw puzzle is finding and accessing the Open Access journal content you require for your individual academic, scholarly, research or learning activities. That’s where directories come in, allowing browsing and searches to be carried out. These include:

And OpenDOAR, an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.

Open Assessment ioe12

Posted on February 1, 2012 by markuos

The area of assessment, recognition and reward for skills development and learning beyond formal education has been a difficult one. However, the Digital Learning and Media Competition 4, sponsored by the MacAuthur Foundation (Press Release) in association with HASTAC and Mozilla (who are developing the infrastructure) are creating the concept of Badges (for Lifelong Learning) to demonstrate competency levels, to reflect abilities and skills developed in informal (and formal) learning and training and act as a validated indicator. These badges representing achievements can then be displayed on social media websites, profiles, reputation, and other places with an association to a person’s professional development.

On the launch video we hear from the primary partnership sponsors. Additionally, there are presentations from NASA, and US Department of Education represntatives.

I must admit that as I was watching the video there was a feeling of it being a US national initiative rather than something global and international. However, this particular point was raised and it was stipulated that competition and Open Badge infrastructure was an international affair; indeed there was activity taking place in Japan as well.

Mozilla is developing the ‘Open Badge’ infrastructure, which defines a set of standards and the technical building blocks to enable others to create and use badges for their websites. The hope is that such a system will help learners, educators, and employers all reach their goals.

Now this raises an interesting point for me about the relationship between employers and traditional education institutions. Previously, I was all for the idea of students creating ePortfolios to demonstrate their abilities to employers. I even did some investigatory work about which environment would be most convenient for students and prospective employers. However, I attended a presentation where an employer said that they had little interest in (time to) look at such material. They were reliant on the institutions being the gatekeepers of the accreditation and validation. However, there are some areas where professional standards are seen as a much better indicator of ability; CISCO and Microsoft qualifications are primary examples. With the concept of separating validation and accreditation of skills from the course (and potentially the institutions) which are easy for employers to access and understand, this could well be a significant (some might say paradigm) shift in educational provision.

Mozilla is also interested in developing people’s skills in web development. As a comment, this is a great initiative on the part of Mozilla who want to maintain the ethos of the Web being ‘open’. If people train to develop skills in Web development in an open way, assisted by Mozilla with the School of Webcraft, then they as the next generation of developers are much more likely to want to uphold and defend that ethos. Thus developing a self perpetuating, self sustaining community.

So now we are seeing the potential for Open Online courses to provide the recognition of achievement some participants might require. Some examples of such take up by Open Online course providers are the Peer-2-Peer University (P2PU), which Mozilla is working in conjunction with to deliver the School of Webcraft, and this very course Openness in Education.

There is the potential that other MOOCs might use the Open Badge infrastructure approach in the same way.

OpenCourseWare ioe12

Posted on January 30, 2012 by markuos

OpenCourseWare (OCW) is the provision of course materials provided openly on the Web and pioneered by MIT.

I recall the time of the MIT announcement as I worked in a Computing Services department of a UK university the Deputy Director at the time saying that MIT was putting all its courses online. I tried to make the distinction that it wasn’t their courses but their courseware that was being made public and that there was much more to a course than its content. Fundamentally, education is more that just content, it is the added value above and beyond the content; it is the interaction of students with faculty, with other students, with experts, with novices, anything that creates an intellectually challenging environment to challenge pre-existing beliefs. In the Openness in Education OpenCourseWare topic video, the announcement press conference (I’ve linked to the MIT hosted version) filmed at MIT (4 April 2001), MIT President Charles Vest makes this point quite distinctly in his opening speech, and again in response to questioning. Importantly for me and the work I’m currently involved in, Prof. Vest strongly points to the “deeply ingrained sense of service” and “incredible idealism” within the MIT faculty. This for me encapsulated the ethos of a deep sense of commitment to what education means to illustrious and highly motivated educations at one of the world’s great educational institutions. Prof. Steve Lerman (Chairman of the Faculty) says that selling courses for profit is not why most of the faculty do what they do, and it’s not the mission of the University. A fundamental value is how you create and disseminate human knowledge. Also, the fact that such an idea, and indeed a venture, could come seemingly from the grassroots faculty is extremely encouraging for me personally.

Prof. Hal Abelson (EECS) points out that going through the process of creating OCW actually allows faculty to reflect upon their own teaching practice; what they are doing with their own students. Once the content has been ‘separated’ from the education process you are able to think more deeply about the overall educational experience.

Prof. Vest goes on to say that openness is a successful way for bright people to innovate, as was the case with software – so for education. This would seem to draw in other topics from the Openness in Education course, particularly the Open Source topic.

From the video, intellectual property rights wasn’t as large an issue for the faculty at MIT as had been anticipated. Instead there was more of a concern about quality of product and service to end user.

The MIT initiative celebrated its ten year anniversary in April last year. In those intervening years, MIT through ‘OCW has shared materials from more than 2000 courses with an estimated 100 million individuals worldwide.’ (http://ocw.mit.edu/about/next-decade/ accessed 27 January 2012). Well over a million visits are logged each month on MIT OCW, accessed from 200 countries.

I guess paralleling the MIT OCW, the Open High School of Utah is committed to making available its entire curriculum as Open Courseware, thus providing a freely available high school level education.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium

The OpenCourseWareConsortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWare and its impact on global education. They serve as a resource for starting and sustaining OCW projects, as a coordinating body for the movement on a global scale, and as a forum for exchange of ideas and future planning. (http://ocwconsortium.org/en/aboutus/abouttheocwc accessed 27 Jaunary 2012).

Individuals, whether they represent Consortium members or not, are welcome to use and modify materials and resources found on this website, and to participate in discussions, webinars, communities of interest, and other Consortium activities. (http://ocwconsortium.org/en/members/howtojoin accessed 27 January 2012).

There is a useful search facility on the site to allow access to courseware from member institutions, with course descriptions and overviews, and links to access and download the full courseware or individual sections. You can also access courses via the categorizations or the catalog.

The Toolkit section of the Consortium’s website has a collection of resources (or a ‘shed full of toolkits’) to help with development of an OCW project. This will prove very useful for me personally in the immediate future.

There is a master list of Consortium members, or you can use the map or list of countries/regions to narrow down your search to a geographical area.

In the UK there are six OpenCourseWare Consortium members:

Institutions of Higher Education

Organizational Members

This compares with 51 from the USA, four from Canada, one from Australia, 39 from Spain, and 25 from Japan.

Open Content ioe12

Posted on January 30, 2012 by markuos

Again, these are my notes from the course topic video http://vimeo.com/1796014

All this content is attributed to David Wiley.

David starts with the 10 year anniversary of Open Content.

It all started with Free Software (which was covered in the previous topic). It started out with Richard Stallman and the GPL that allowed free (liberty, freedom) reuse of software. Freedom was very important to Richard. In winter 1998 Eric Raymond became involved. He said that ‘free’ was confusing to business, and so developed the concept of Open Source. This focused on why openness and peer review was good.

At the same time David was working and thinking that digital content was really magic because it’s non-rivalrous, because it can be used simultaneously by multiple people without detriment to any. This, he thought, had implications for education. Library books are rivalrous (only one person can use a particular copy at one time), electronic versions of text are not. Digital content could drive down costs and improve access to education. So David went on to work on this concept of making educational content in a way that it could be shared and accessed with others who needed to use and change it for their requirements. That’s when David made the connection between Open Source and doing the same for content. There should be a comparable licence for materials doing the same as the GPL does for software.

David emailed Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond and they asked questions of him about what it would be called (‘free’ or ‘open’) and what it would cover (education, culture, content, stuff ?). So in June 1998 David decided on Open Content. It would cover a whole bunch of stuff. The preliminary licence was called The OpenContent Principles / License (OP/L). There was some success in the uptake of the licence, but very little uptake in education. This required talking to publishers. David was talking to Eric, who was talking to the publisher Tim O’Reilly and the question was asked, “Will you publish something that is openly licensed?”, which lead to a discussion about what publishers might want. Publishers would have to have protection from undercutting, due to costs and work involved. What did authors want? ‘Open Content isn’t really like Open Software.’ Some authors wanted recognition and some wanted to protect the integrity of their work; they were willing to share as long as no changes were made to it.

So in summer 1999, the Open Publication License was published; allowing download, sharing and redistribution. It required attribution to be given to the original author. It came with two options:

Option A) To prevent distribution of substantively modified versions without the explicit permission of the author(s)

[Effectively a derivative works clause]

Option B) To prohibit any publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in part in standard (book) form for commercial purposes unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.

[Effectively the undercutting (no commercial) clause]

This saw much more uptake of this licence.

There were a number of problem. Both licences were abbreviated to OPL. They were both referred to as ‘that open content licence’, so again there was confusion. Also the naming of the Options A) & B) didn’t tell you anything about the content of the option. Additionally a link at the bottom of a page of content that took you off to the Open Content License page didn’t tell you if either of the Options had been implemented for the work or not.

This was a “good idea, but poorly executed”.

Then along came Larry Lessig (and the group that he worked with) and in December 2002 Creative Commons License 1.0 was born. The options were specifically names, e.g. non commercial, no derivatives, etc. and there wasn’t just one licence but each combination of options created a separate licence, with descriptive names, e.g. CC By, CC By-NC-ND.

There was still a button problem, because it didn’t make clear which licence it was. This was fixed later in time.

In the CC 2.0 version, attribution (By) became mandatory.

At the end of the video, David asks “So where are we now, 10 years on?”, and goes on to give a run down of examples from major sites and online services where there are hundreds of thousands of individual content elements made available under Open Content Licences.

In Education, UNESCO convenes a meeting and discusses Open Educational Resources. There’s the Open Courseware Consortium. There are hundreds of university level textbooks openly available. And the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

And looking forward, “Where are we going?”

There are still problems. Licence compatibility; ‘which material from one licence can be mixed with material from which other licences’. Without the Public Domain there is 28% compatibility of CC Licences. (Refer to the card game from the Open Licensing course topic). David states that whichever Copy Left licence you pick, you can’t mix it with the majority of other available Copy Left licences.

Also there is some confusion/concern over the noncommercial clause. At the time 76% of Flickr content licenced as CC contained a noncommercial (NC) clause.

CC+ and CC0 will become more important.

David then goes on to outline a couple of areas of personal involvement for him.

Flatworld Knowledge textbooks is a new publishing models.
Open High School of Utah, which is a new free online schooling model. Interestingly the model allows for an iterative cyclic correction of the curriculum.

Drawing on the other course topic reading(s):

“Open content” … is content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law – at no cost to the user.

The primary permissions or usage rights open content is concerned with are expressed in the “4Rs Framework:”

Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Squire Morley

Things I’m working on

Open Policy #ioe12

Open Business Models #ioe12

Open Teaching #ioe12

Open Data #ioe12

Open Science #ioe12

Open Access ioe12

Open Assessment ioe12

OpenCourseWare ioe12

Open Content ioe12

Background

What are MOOCs

History of MOOCs

my Experience

Participation in MOOCs

cMOOCs

Change: Education, Learning, and Technology – Change11

Digital Storytelling – ds106

Introduction to Openness in Education – ioe12

xMOOCs

Coursera – The University of Michigan’s Social Network Analysis

Comments

So what can be drawn from my experiences of different MOOCs?

Are there threats or challenges?

Analysis

References

Further Reading