Comparing MOOCs - a cMOOC and an xMOOC (H817 activity 14)

DS106 looks amazing to me - I think I may sign up for that after H817.

The video of a cat in a piano duel - one of the products of DS106 -  was the highlight of my day.

	DS106	Udacity
Technology	Broadly, DS106 uses a deep range of Web2.0 technologies suited to a variety of social platforms, and enabling the creation of a variety of different media - blog posts, tweets, audio files, mash-ups of videos etc. Web connection. Each learner needs to set up accounts in Twitter, Flickr, Google and Soundcloud, and to create a consistent online identity for each using Gravatar. Each learner needs their own blog. Learner conversations happen by way of blog post and comments, and Twitter posts. Each learner needs their own domain. RSS feeds and the use of Google Reader are encouraged to enable learners to be part of the ongoing conversations and postings. Google+ hangouts.	Broadly, Udacity seems to require fairly basic technologies suited to a fairly passive learning experience. They are not exploiting the social, networking aspects of the internet at all. For the course only, a web connection with minimum speeds to access the content. For online proctoring a webcam and microphone is also required. There are online forums, but it isn’t clear what technology is used to power these. There is a web-link to a site for Udacity meet-ups in real locations – I checked the group for KL, there is no meeting currently scheduled, so I didn’t get the feeling that these are promoted heavily as a necessary part of the Udacity experience.
Pedagogy	Connectivist – The DS106 course and platform is a website that creates a community of learning.	A mixture of behaviourist (online quizzes to stimulate learning) and cognitivist (there are problems to solve and forums to discuss activities and make meaning with fellow learners).
General approach and philosophy	This is a ‘cMOOC’ – connectivist in spirit, nurturing a community of learning around the topic of Digital Storytelling. Course structure and content Learners are encouraged to create content. There are weekly assignments presented in a linear fashion. Whilst the website writes about the aspiration to allow learners to create their own non-linear learning paths, this hasn’t happened yet. Support – for technical problems, learners are encouraged to use the internet to find a solution. For problems with assignments, learners are encouraged to use Twitter. I got the sense that open learners will only get support from any of their peers that they engage with online – I don’t think any tutorial support is given.  Assessment For open learners, posting your assignments and getting comments seems to be a core part of the course. There are assessments for the learners studying at the university – the main requirement seems to be that you do the assignment and write up your thoughts on the process in your blog – as long as learners follow these guidelines then they will ‘pass’. Certification None. Timing Open learners can do the course at any time and pace, but are encouraged to run along at the same time as an actual class.	This is an ‘xMOOC’ – more commercialised and using more of a behaviourist/cognitivist approach.  Course structure and content Content mainly comprises ‘bite-size’ videos that present learning’s in granular pieces. The courses include activities and assignments. There are weekly assignments presented in a linear fashion. Whilst the website writes about the aspiration to allow learners to create their own non-linear learning paths, this hasn’t happened yet. Support For free courses, the support for these is from other learners by way of forum posts. For some of the courses with a partner university, there are options to pay a fee that includes an element of tutorial support. From the Q&A section, it seems there are no course tutors – any support needed is provided by peer learners. Assessment Assessment is by way of assignments and a final test.  Certification Udacity gives free certificates if you attain ‘mastery’ level on a course, but these have no credits with any university. Certification from partner universities for some courses is possible, learners need to consult the partner’s website to check on requirements – there may be a fee to pay for this. Timing Any course can be done at any time, at the learner’s pace (which suggests that posting to forums may not be a key part of the learning here, as the timing is too broad to allow for much scheduling of collaborative work on activities.)

Applying Sustainability Models

[Activity 10, H817 MOOC]

	Is the sustainability model apparent?	Did Wiley cover all approaches, or do you think a different model is operating?
Change MOOC	Not really – seems like a personal site curated by Cornier, Siemens and Downes	I guess this is closest to the Rice Model – not linked to a specific institution, and looks like services are provided voluntarily.
Coursera	Not very apparent. It looks slick and commercial, and the links take you to ‘founders’ who are venture capitalists. It describes itself as a social enterprise, so it is profit-making, albeit maybe not profit-maximising.	This is a different model, Wiley has not covered it. I guess it is seeded by the venture capitalists, and probably has some different revenue streams. One that is apparent is the ‘signature track’, where you can pay to have your learning accredited and certified. I would guess the universities involved may pay a fee to Coursera to be on the platform, as this is good marketing for them – but this is not apparent.
Jorum	Quite apparent – the ‘about us’ section has a lot of the history of Jorum, explaining that it is a JISC-funded collaborative venture.	Probably closest to the USU Model – a hybrid of centralisation and decentralisation. It isn’t clear whether all the work is done by paid staff or if volunteers are also involved.
OpenLearn	Reasonably apparent, not as apparent as Jorum though.	Probably closest to the MIT model. OpenLearn is centralised, focuses on the materials of just one institution, and (from memory) was given foundation funding to get it established.

An OER Course - Fairy Tales

[H817 MOOC Activity 8]

I drew up a short course format for a course about Fairy Tales.

Week 1 – Introduction to Fairy Tales

Common Themes in Fairy Tales from Different Cultures

Resources:

SurLaLune Fairy Tales (www.surlalunefairytales.com) (found via MERLOT). Covers a lot of what I want to cover – very useful site.

·      What is a Fairy Tale? Defining Fairy Tales. SurLaLune has a page on this.

·      Fairy tales through history – a timeline (also on SurLaLune). All useful resources.

Week 2 – Theme 1. Killing the Monster.

Resources:

·      Jack and the Beanstalk. Annoted text from SurLaLune. Good resource.

Week 3 – Theme 2. Transformation – from pauper to prince, from farmboy to warrior.

Resources:

·      Beauty and the Beast. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

·      Cinderella. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

Week 4 – Theme 3. Finding the treasure.

Resources:

·      Bluebeard. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

·      The Tinder-Box. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

Week 5 – the Fairy Tale in modern culture. Re-tellings in cinema and TV. Freudian views on the Fairy Tale.

Resources:

·      University of Notre Dame course, ‘Reinventing the Fairy Tale’.

·      Quite a good resource – the skeleton of a syllabus, some short bits of writing that explain what the teacher wants to teach – but insufficient as a ‘learning material’; some Q&As which would be helpful in class (although the OER is the questions only, so no way of being able to assess whether answered well or not)

General Comments - difficulties in using repositories

·      Wrong context. Not all resources were in English.

·      Wrong context. In general it was difficult to know whether the OER was suitable without opening it – very time-consuming.

·      Not relevant. It was difficult to know if the OER was relevant to what I wanted the learners to learn. Some OERs (particularly MIT’s) were very specific to a narrow learning outcome.

·      Not at the right level. I couldn’t tell if it was at the right level.

·      No way to judge the quality. For the most part, I had no way of judging the quality of the OER. MERLOT had a star review system, but most items were not scored.

·      No maintenance and upkeep – some resources were out-of-date. Quite often I would click through to an incomplete resource or an inappropriate resource – like a book I had to pay for.

·      Re-use / re-mixing – Jorum placed more emphasis on the ability to adapt and share resources than some of the other sites.

·      Overall, I found MERLOT yielded the most useful results.

·      I modified my course structure to adapt to some of the materials I found – it had to be a bit of an iterative process.

OERs - The Key Issues

OERs – the issues

Defining OERs

I’ll use the Wikieducator definition, cited by Cornier (2009):

“The term ‘Open Educational Resource(s)’ (OER) refers to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing…”

What are OERs trying to achieve? What problems are they solving for?

In my view,

·      OERs are trying to increase access to education to people who don’t currently have access or have restricted access.

·      OERs are trying to give learners access to the best quality educational resources appropriate to their needs.

In thinking about the key issues facing OERs, I’ve tried to think about any factors that are preventing them from providing optimal solutions to these problems.

Issues

Issue 1 – scale

·      The huge volume of OERs available (and growing) are often uncategorized and of variable quality. Cornier (2009) writes that learners will find themselves ‘wading in a sea of content.’ Learners need to have a means of identifying appropriate resources of sufficient quality if OERs are to have any use to them.

·      Some repositories have been created to address this issue (e.g. MERLOT), although it can still be difficult to find appropriate materials on these.

·      We can predict an increasing role for curators and collators of OERs – perhaps textbooks will shift from the current rigid, hard-copy format to more fluid, online formats curated by experts.

·      Such collations could be dynamic – allowing learners to annotate their own copies and share annotations with other learners, or to add contextualized content (e.g. a current YouTube video that illustrates a particular piece of learning, or a blog post).

Issue 2 – context and suitability of OERs to different learning situations

·      ‘Knowledge’ and ‘content’ are different (Cornier, 2009) – ‘content’ is a presentation of knowledge that has typically been contextualized in some way to suit a particular learning audience, learning at a particular level. Learners in a particular context may find little benefit in accessing an OER crafted in a different context (Hatakka, 2009).

·      One response to this has been to suggest that OERs should be made more granular, so that it is easier for them to be incorporated into a variety of contexts (Hatakka, 2009).

·      Such granular resources may have lower inherent pedagogic value, requiring an intermediary (e.g. a teacher) to be more involved in rendering the OER useful for learning. Wiley (2004) has written about the ‘Reusability’ paradox, where the higher the inherent pedagogical value of an OER (which usually means the more contextualized it is), the less reusable it is in a different context.

Issue 3 – there isn’t a robust model for the ‘OER economy’ yet

·      BOERs may seem like an abundant resource – in that once they have been produced and digitized (often with funding from foundations or public funds), the marginal cost of distributing them digitally is minimal.

·      I would argue that they are not an abundant resource, however – Hatakka (2009) has written about the high development costs of new OER content, and Downes (2007) writes that the UK’s Open University spends an average of US$3m per course on content development. In most fields of knowledge, OERs will require updating and maintaining, which will be an ongoing cost (Hylen & Schuller, 2007). OERs are scarce resources.

·      So for OERs to be sustainable, I’d argue that we need a mechanism to efficiently allocate resources to their creation, maintenance and distribution.

·      In a market economy, we would let the interaction of supply and demand determine ‘value’ and the optimum allocation of resources. The things people want to learn will change over time, and the ‘OER economy’ needs to be able to respond to these shifting priorities.

·      The current ‘OER economic model’ is distorted in that, it seems to me, a lot of it focuses on ‘supply-push’ economics, with limited means to capture demand accurately. For example, universities like MIT have published learning materials from their existing courses in online format. By offering these for free as OERs, there is no part of the system that accurately measures demand for specific learning needs from learners.  ‘Supply-push’ systems tend to be inefficient, producing unwanted products that are insufficiently tailored to the needs of consumers. There are no incentives for the producers of OERs to work at modifying them to suit the needs of different learners.

·      I’m not arguing that learners need to pay for OERs – that would defeat the purpose of making them open. There are many different possible funding models that could keep OERs free to the learner – for example, (Downes (2007) lists the Endowment Model, the Membership Model, the Donations Model, the Conversion Model, the Contributor-Pay Model, the Sponsorship Model, the Institutional Model and the Governmental Model).

·      I’m simply arguing that, whichever funding model is chosen, there still needs to be an underlying mechanism that measures demand (e.g. automatically-collated data showing the number of downloads for an OER, or rating systems from users akin to Amazon’s book rating system). Some of this is already in progress through learning analytics systems.

·      Note that there is an underlying assumption in some of the writing about OER funding that assumes that the traditional university model of ‘academics as the producers of knowledge’ and ‘students as the consumers of knowledge’ applies. I’d argue that what we need to move towards is a ‘co-producer’ model, where there is less of a divide between academics and students – all people involved in learning should produce, modify and adapt OERs. Downes (2007, p.38) cites a contributor to a recent UNESCO conference arguing for ‘a shift from a provider/user model to a community model of collaborative development’.

·      Such an approach, I would argue, will still be more sustainable if there is some underlying mechanism for the recognition of the economic value of an OER. Exploring such mechanisms is not the focus of this blog post, and there are other factors to consider around copyright and licensing – for the immediate purposes of this post I am simply trying to suggest the possibility of making a learner’s demand for a specific OER more measurable and transparent, as I think this would lead to higher-quality OERs that learners would find more useful.

Conclusion

OERs are attempting to increase people’s access to educational resources of appropriate quality. In my view, this goal is being impeded by issues of scale, contextualisation and the fact that the over-arching economic model for OERs is not robust. Learners need to have the means to identify and signal their demand for the OERs they deem most relevant, useful and valuable.

References

Cornier, D. (2009). ‘OERs – shining light, new textbook model, or harbinger of a new imperialism?’, blog post available at  http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/02/22/oers-shining-light-new-textbook-model-or-harbinger-of-a-new-imperialism/ (accessed 24 April 2013).

Downes, Stephen (2007). ‘Models for sustainable open educational resources’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, vol. 3. Available at: http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf (accessed 28 March 2013).

Hatakka, M. (2009). ‘Build it and they will come? – Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries’, in EJISDC – the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, Vol. 37, n.5, pp. 1-16. Available at: http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/545/279 (accessed 27 March 2013).

Hylen, J. & Schuller, T. (2007). Giving knowledge for free. OECD Observer, 263. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/document41/0,3343,en_2649_35845581_38659497_1_1_1_1,00.html (accessed 28 March 2013).

Wiley, D. (2004). ‘The Reusability Paradox’, Connexions [online], http://cnx.org/content/m11898/1.18/ (accessed 3 April 2013).

MOOCs - Identifying Priorities for Research

[This post is based on H817 activity 4 - being revisited in the penultimate week of the MOOC]

My 3 areas of priority for research into MOOCs/Open Education

Learner motivations – I view this as a priority as there are high drop-out rates from MOOCs and it would be good to see if this is a problem (it may not be – learners may be very satisfied with learning just part of a MOOC) and, if it is a problem, what can be done to enable more learners to be successful.

·      What reasons are learners learning for?

·      Why are they using Open Education rather than other courses?

·      Are they motivated by badges?

·      Why do many learners drop out of MOOCs?

Learner Support

·      What level of support do learners need? How is this affected by the type of course and / or the type of learner? (e.g. learners from developing countries with little school infrastructure may have different support needs compared to learners from countries with well-established schooling systems).

·      Do learners need a certain level of digital literacy before they can get the most out of a MOOC?

·      What role, if any, can tutors/course designers play?

·      Network development – do networks need to be encouraged by tutors, or can they be left to grow spontaneously if learners have sufficient access to online tools?

·      Use of technology – do learners spontaneously use a variety of technologies, like Google+ and Twitter, or does such usage need to be prescribed or encouraged, either by activity design or by tutorial inputs?

·      What are the factors that enable learners to self-direct their own learning / self-assess or peer-assess their own learning?

Funding Models

·      How do different funding models impact on the learning experience? E.g. in a MOOC funded by advertising, does the presence of the advertising on the MOOC materials have any impact on learner motivations?

·      Is the quality of learning enhanced in some funding models compared to others? E.g. can we research the quality of the learning on a traditional face-to-face course funded by student fees at a physical university vs the same course taught for free on a MOOC?

Monetizing content on the web - a different perspective

I watched this video from the Financial Times today - interviewing Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist with Microsoft, talking about his vision for how content should be created and shared on the internet.

It's not directly about MOOCs but I found it offered very interesting views on a lot of the areas relevant to MOOCs.

Should content be free?
In particular, he argues that demonetizing content will ultimately lead to less stability and more poverty.
If information costs money, there will be more wealth for all.

His solution is not to put up barriers and force people to pay for content - he views this as a 'negative' type of contract. Better is to create networks where people can both earn and pay for content, which is a far more 'positive' and constructive contract.

He also talks about intellectual property rights, and the shape of networks - at the moment the business model is to try and build tree-shaped connections with a business at the root that can 'milk value' out of content. Lanier argues that if we have a thickly-connected mesh of networks, the volume and flow of information becomes much greater and there is more opportunity for monetization by more people.

Rhizomatic Learning - a great theory, but don't we still need to measure outcomes?

Activity 20 – Rhizomatic learning

Really enjoyed the video, it is captivating.

1. I’m absolutely convinced with Rhizomatic Learning as an approach.

2. Could I imagine implementing Rhizomatic Learning? Yes. I think the bit about differentiating different types of learning is very useful – Simple Learning, Complicated Learning, Complex Learning and Chaotic Learning. Cornier says that Rhizomatic Learning is most appropriate for Complex Learning – sounds right to me. You determine what it is you are trying to learn, and then decide whether Rhizomatic Learning is appropriate. There are a lot of complex areas to apply this to – where the ‘learning outcome’ is nebulous and constantly changing and uncertain – e.g. understanding how people respond to economic policies, understanding what drives ‘value’ in any market (art, shares), understanding how to cope with new diseases like bird flu – wherever knowledge is uncertain, we need to ‘probe, sense and respond’ – and Rhizomatic Learning is a great metaphor for that process.

3. How might Rhizomatic Learning differ from current approaches? Well, it’s a lot more flexible and less prescriptive than a lot of current approaches. Cornier says that in his online course, learners set their own curricula to achieve their own personal learning outcomes – that’s very different from most current approaches, which are based on pre-determined curricula and outcomes.

4. What issues would arise in implementing Rhizomatic learning? I think measuring outcomes is a big issue. Cornier’s response is that we should stop trying to measure outcomes. I think that’s a legitimate but purist response – when learning in realms of uncertainty, we can learn better if we stop obsessing about measurable outcomes. But if we want to maximise learning, don’t we need to recognize that a lot of people don’t learn for the sake of learning, they learn to earn an accreditation that will enable them to access new jobs or new salaries? I support learning for the sake of learning, but I recognise that a lot of energy and motivation comes from learning for the sake of accessing better opportunities for material reward. I don’t think that makes the learning any less valuable and I think we need to capture those energies and motivations. So I think we should always be trying accommodate learners who are motivated by the need to have a measurable outcome. I’m not arguing that learning needs to be exclusively about measurable outcomes, I’m arguing that we need to cater for all motivations – the desire to learn for the sake of learning can run in parallel to the desire to learn for measurable outcomes.

A connectivist course in Fine Wine Investment

H817 MOOC Activity 19

Designing a course based on connectivist principles - I've tried to see if a course focused on something quite different from online learning could benefit from connectivist principles.

Wine investment – how to make money from investing in wine

Week 1 – the basics of wine

Tasting and evaluating wine

Week 2 – the key investment wine regions of the old world

Bordeaux – the 1855 classification system, First Growths and Super Seconds

Burgundy – Grands Crus and Premier Crus

Spanish wines – the key investment regions

Italian wines – the key investment regions

Week 3 – the key investment wine regions of the new world

Australia

New Zealand

California

Argentina

Chile

Week 4 – making connections with the wine trade

The key wine merchants

The key wine commentators and their blogs – Hugo Johnson, Andrew Jarvis, Jancis Robinson

Robert Parker and the effect of his scoring system on wine valuations

The key wine trading indices – Winex, BBX

Analysing historical data – what the indices tell us about historic values

Week 5 – building your wine investment portfolio

How to select wines

How to judge if the purchase price is fair based on historic analysis

Building a trial virtual portfolio

Implementing connectivism

The underlying knowledge here – the value of fine wine and trying to understand how it changes -  is dynamic and resides outside of any one individual. It is constantly being updated, and every year new wines for new vintages are being released – so this is a field of knowledge that is in constant flux.

There is no ‘right answer’ or ‘corpus of knowledge’ to be transferred.

The value of wine is a reality, but it is derived from thousands of individual transactions that change all the time. The prices change daily. How to make money from investing in this is a real challenge with real, tangible outcomes.

There is no ‘right or wrong’ answer as regards whether a particular wine is good or not.

So, to apply connectivist principles:

·      Learning and knowledge rests in a diversity of opinions. Absolutely – you can only get a sense of the quality of a wine and how it is viewed for investment by reading a lot of different opinions. There is no ‘one right answer’.

·      Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes – yes, in the wine trade, you can only make sense of which wines to invest in by monitoring  and connecting what information you can from key wine trading indices and the opinions of wine experts and wine writers.

·      Learning may reside in non-human appliances. The ‘value’ of each different type of fine wine can only be seen by looking at indices showing the average prices of specific wines – these change daily and are the blended average of hundreds of actual buy/sell trades – so this is dynamic knowledge (continuously updating and changing) that resides in a computerised index, not in any one person.

·      Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. If a major commentator like Robert Parker re-tastes a historic wine vintage and changes his opinion (e.g. he re-tastes the Bordeaux 2005 vintage and decides that it is not as good as he previously thought) then we can guess that values for those wines may fall. The ‘truth’ is not currently known – no-one knows how the market will react. We need to triangulate a number of data sources to judge whether we should hold our 2005 wine investments or sell them before the price falls.

·      Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Wine changes all the time – new wines are released onto the market, and old wines are re-rated as they mature. If we are not current with a diverse set of opinions, we cannot know when to buy or sell, so we cannot maximise the investment returns we can make.

·      Ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill. Wine as an investment is subject to many peripheral factors and sentiments. E.g. a lot of value for Bordeaux First Growths comes from Chinese consumers who have, fairly arbitrarily, deemed Ch. Lafite as the best wine historically, but who are now shifting their view and valuing other wines more – if their sentiments change as a result of other factors in the Chinese economy then valuations can be impacted. So we need to connect to areas beyond ‘wine investment’ to really understand how the market is evolving.

·      Currency – the only meaningful knowledge here is the up-to-date valuation and what it tells us. So we must have accurate, up-to-date knowledge if we are to make good returns on our wine investment.

·      Decision making is itself a learning process. The people who are open to shifting realities will profit from it. 30 years ago no-one would have countenanced the possibility of making returns from wine investment in Californian or Australian wines. Yet now, some of those wines are some of the most expensive in the world. The parallel today would be wines from, say, India – if the course were constructed to allow for forums where people sing the praises of wines they feel a passion for, then there is an opportunity for people to decide to invest in a completely new way.