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The Learning Design of MOOCs
I got some Gates funding for the MOOC Research Initiative to look at two things: completion data, and learning design MOOCs. The first part allowed Katy Jordan to finish the work she had started in mapping various factors from over 200 MOOCs that influence completion. You can see more of her work here, and I’ll blog on that later. My part has been using the tools we’ve developed at the OU for learning design, building on Grainne Conole’s work. We use two main tools: the Activity Planner and the Module Map. The first maps student activity across 6 categories, eg assimilative, productive, etc. This is a good way to think…
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The Battle for Open
<This is how we do protest in Wales> We have a new issue of JIME out, which is a special issue on the OER 13 conference. There are some excellent papers, so go read them. Then, when you've read all those, read my opinion piece, The Battle for Open. I'm going to write a book about this over the next few months, so if you think it's an awful idea, please let me know. The article is effectively the first chapter of that book, which sets out the overall argument. My argument goes something like this: Openness has been victorious in many ways, but at this point of victory the…
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The iceland of Dallas
<Dallas deathstar in the snow – this may, or may not, be a metaphor> I was at the MOOC research initiative conference in Dallas, Texas last week. As Jim and others have reported, we got caught in icemageddon, but that's a whole other (war) story. I'll be doing a few posts about the conference. It was a fantastic meeting, well done George Siemens, Amy Collier and Tanya Joosten for putting it together. I got to have some great conversations, and meet people I've know online for years. Which is by way of apology for my first post being a bit negative. This one concerns one aspect of the conference…
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Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/hanuman/1860273153/> No doubt most of you will have read the (unintentionally hilarious) interview with Udacity founder and the media's poster child for MOOCs, Sebastian Thrun. If you haven't the short version (minus the ego fanning and competitive cycling) is that Thrun has realised that not many people complete MOOCs, and that making them pay is a good incentiviser, so he's making Udacity an elearning corporate training company. And there it is. After all that hype. All that "Napsterisation of higher education", the "end of universities", the "10 global providers of education" nonsense, what do we have? A corporate elearning company. As TS Eliot observed, the world ends not with…
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What sort of open do you want?
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/42386632@N00/8528725328/ > I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. What do…
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Earning the right to preach
I watched the tweets from the WISE13 conference with interest. One that caught my eye (and rather made it water) was Gordon Brown extolling the value of education and its benefits for society. You can see his talk below: It's a good talk, impassioned and well reasoned. I agree with everything he said. But I find it strange that he is saying it. Brown's record on international development is good, it's something he really believed in. But when he was Prime Minister, he abolished what's called ELQ funding in the UK. This meant that you couldn't get funding to study if you already had an equal or higher qualification. This…
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Open media and the new Stasi
"Trust me, I'm a journalist…" I came across a disturbing story last week, particularly for academics in the UK who use social media. A UK academic who blogs and tweets as Plashing Vole reported that a journalist from the Sun on Sunday had contacted him, telling him they were going to run an article about him. It concerned a few anti-government tweets he had made, in one jokingly making a Nazi comparison. An MP was calling for him to be sacked. In the end they didn't run the piece, but it must have been a stressful few days. This worries me on a number of levels. Firstly, I often encourage…
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MOOCs as 1st year undergrad replacement
For top-secret research I am undertaking, I'm looking at a range of MOOCs, both xMOOCs, cMOOCs and flavours inbetween (although, definitely not ridiculous variations such as SPOCs). Here's some breaking news – they are all pretty good. Take away all the hype, commercial bubble and rabid arguments on both sides and you are left with some good teaching material. As I've been going through them (admittedly not as thoroughly as a student), I've begun to think that a mix of them would probably represent a good grounding in a topic, equivalent to a 1st year of an undergrad degree. It wouldn't teach some of the other skills you develop, I'll…
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Autumn issue of JIME
In times of fake open access journals, and open access being used as a means of making even more money by publishers, it's nice to know that some things are true to the simple values of open access… yes, there is a new issue of JIME out. It may not have the bells and whistles of a funded journal, and maybe we can't give it as much time as we'd like, but it's free to publish, peer-reviewed and open to all. In this issue there is quite a range of papers, some have a 'design' theme, but it's not a themed issue. Here is the editorial, I'm sure there's something…
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The OA battle ground
In the battle for open, I'd say open access is probably the front which has been engaged the longest. It's worth looking at how the battle is going, as it exhibits many of the characteristics we're seeing in other areas. For example, the spoils are worth fighting for - Reed Elsevier reported revenue of over 6 billion GBP in 2012 of which over 2 billion was for the Science Technical and Medical publishing area. It's also an area where openness has 'won' – OA mandates abound, and a recent Wiley report found that 59% of authors had published in OA journals. It's not a minority pursuit any more. And yet at…
