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Surviving the Day of the MOOC
I gave a keynote for Simon Walker at the University of Greenwich for his Academic Practice and Technology Conference. My talk was entitled "Surviving the Day of the MOOC". I borrowed David Kernohan's image as the front slide, because it seems to me that with all this sudden external interest (MOOCs were even on Newsnight), it feels like an alien invasion. My talk follows an inverted funnel pattern – starting with my own experience and broadening out to consider the wider design implications and then the general higher education context. The point I end on is that MOOCs are really the most tangible and visible aspect of a broader debate/battle/tension…
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What quality measures apply to MOOCs?
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/wetwebwork/2402908982/ > In case you haven't seen it, Ulf-Daniel Ehlers & Ebba Ossiannilsson & Alastair Creelman are running a project on Quality and MOOCs. It has a different blog post from an invited author every week for 12 weeks. They've all been of a very high standard (until this week, see below). I'd recommend Stephen Downes and Grainne Conole's posts in particular, but they're all worth reading. So last week was my turn, and you can read my post here. The point I wanted to make was that we have created a set of quality criteria for education that is, obviously, matched to the context of education. So we are interested…
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What university rankings really tell us
There's a law with league tables that goes something like, your criticism of them is indirectly proportional to your placing in them. If you're in the top 10, it's a marvellous piece of research, but as you go down, you become more suspicious. So, when I saw that the OU was ranked 99th in the Times Higher top 100 universities under 50 years old, my critical faculties were engaged. So you can probably dismiss all of this as sour grapes, but the table raised a couple of issues for me which reveal quite a lot about the state of higher education (and to be honest, I'm desperate to blog about something…
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The cost of support
Two factors are making universities (in the UK in particular) consider the costs of their courses like never before. The first is the withdrawal of state funding and reliance on student fees. I guess this was always the intention behind the shift to a pure market driven approach, it certainly makes universities focus on their course costs. Can they do it for cheaper? Can they justify their fees? Can they lower fees? The second is our new old friend, MOOCs. It seems rather arrogant but many MOOC providers think they've just invented the idea of considering elearning costs. But all the same, the fact they are gaining attention, and that…
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You can stop worrying about MOOCs now
I guess we all knew the MOOC bubble would burst sometime, but I'm saying it's happened this week – it just doesn't know it yet. The reason? Commercial MOOC providers have started making noises about becoming elearning courseware providers for standard education providers. So we have Clayton "I'll disrupt your breakfast" Christensen talking about "hybrid innovation". This turns out to be blended learning, which many people have been promoting for at least 15 years (although calling it hybrid innovation at least maintains the illusion that it's new and sexy for a while longer). That's not a bad thing, blended learning is an entirely sensible and appropriate response to combining the…
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If education were free, what would MOOCs be?
Here's a thought experiment, if there were no students fees and higher education were free, what would that do to MOOCs? I mean, obviously it'll never happen… oh, wait, Germany just abolished student fees. Yeah, but what do they know about running an economy, right? So, on with our thought experiment. At the opposite ends of the spectrum we have two scenarios: It doesn't change a thing, as MOOCs are about a different form of learning; or it completely kills MOOCs as their main feature is that they are free. Then there are some elements inbetween these two extremes: MOOCs become more focused on niche subjects not served by higher…
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Uncle MOOC
Uncle MOOC will be looking after you for a few weeks… A metaphor is always a handy way to get a grip on something new (as long as one is aware of its limitations). My attitude to MOOCs changes on a weekly basis, and so does my MOOC metaphor – I'm sure you've got one of your own: the MP3 of education, this year's SecondLife, industrial revolution applied to education, a giraffe smoking a cheroot rollerblading down the Champs-Elysees – it can be pretty much whatever you want. So here is this week's MOOC metaphor. MOOCs are like the patronising uncle who has yet to have a child of his…
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Edukashun is brocken – the Tumblr
To save me clogging up this blog by banging on about the lazy ‘education is broken’ meme used to justify venture capital, I’ve set up one of those Tumblr blogs that gathers stuff together here: http://brokeneducation.tumblr.com/ I think there’s a slight danger that like Pseuds Corner in Private Eye it ends up including too much. In the case of Pseuds corner it sometimes seems that any attempt to use words of more than one syllable will be lampooned. Similarly, this tumblr may end up including any attempt to talk about the future of education. In general what I want are those pieces where the education is broken meme is trotted out…
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H817Open reflections
My small MOOC open course, H817Open ends this week, so I thought I'd post some reflections on how it's gone. I'll start by saying what my intentions were for it. The idea was to mix formal and informal learners (as it is one quarter of a Masters level course), to blend OERs and MOOCs (it is in the OpenLearn repository and exists after course end), to use an activity-based 'collaboration-lite' model and to adopt a range of technologies. In general it went well, the learners seemed to enjoy it, although we saw the familiar drop-off of participation. It was only on a small scale so I don't think I can…
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The MOOC wars
I admit it, I'm slow on the uptake, but I had a lightbulb moment David Kernohan pointed me at Donald Clark's post on MOOCs "More action in 1 year than 1000" (no hype there then). As Brian Lamb has reported a wikipedia edit battle around MOOCs to remove the early MOOCers such as David Wiley and George Siemens from the picture has also taken place. Initially I thought this was just a bit of ignorance, but Clark's post made me understand – it is part of a wider narrative to portray MOOCs as a commercial solution that is sweeping away the complacency of higher education. So Clark dismisses the impact…
