MOOC
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Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
Because I was too busy indulging in self-pity in my last post I forgot to blog about Udacity being acquired by Accenture to build a platform to take advantage of AI, blah, blah. Audrey Watters taking a rare foray back into ed tech to say “I told you so” reminded me to blog something. Audrey says it better, but that’s never stopped me before… There are lots of takeaways from this tale. Here are some that occur to me: Self-Reflection is the real unicorn. Investors like to talk about unicorn companies, but it seems the real unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) is any sense of self-reflection or humility in…
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MOOCs and the Upside Down
You will have no doubt seen that the Open University has sold its share in FutureLearn, and found a buyer in Global University Systems. This has followed a few years of difficulties and strategic redirections in the MOOC world generally, but happening a decade on from the year of the MOOC definitely prompts some reflection. MOOCs were going to destroy higher education, remember that? Others will do more detailed analysis, but here is a small anecdote which I think reflects some of the strange logic that underpinned the whole MOOC saga. Around 2015 (I think) the Open University went through a process of closing many of its regional offices. One…
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10 years since the Year of the MOOC
Ah, 2012, Brexit and Trump were but ill-conceived jokes, and we were all bopping along to Carly Rae Jepsen on our way to see Skyfall. And MOOCs, they were everywhere. Suddenly online learning was hot news, and the New York Times declared it “the Year of the MOOC”. Heady days. So, a decade on, after all those promises, that hype, investment, huge learner enrolments, and endless thought pieces, where are we with MOOCs? It’s a good question, and one my colleagues Katy Jordan and Fereshte Goshtasbpour have gone some way to answering in a special collection of JIME. They have republished 25 articles from the JIME archives, spanning the entire…
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Putting the Meh in MOOCs
First up, exciting news! GO-GN have published their annual research review. Led once again by Rob Farrow, this contains reviews of a number of papers in the open education space. It’s not intended to be an exhaustive literature analysis, but rather a selection of articles that we think cover some of the main areas. They are reviewed by members of the network and it’s an excellent example of the many hands makes light work principle of co-production. It’s worth a read all the way through for anyone interested in OER or OEP. For the review I took on three MOOC papers. Individually they were all fine papers, and well written…
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25 Years of OU – 2013: FutureLearn
via GIPHY At the end of The Year of the MOOC, the OU VC of the time, Martin Bean, invited a few of us to discuss a new project. There was political pressure (I believe but not had it confirmed) on the OU to engage with MOOCs. The argument went something like “you get all this money to widen participation in education, and there’s these MOOCs getting millions of learners for free”. I probably don’t need to explain why that is a deeply flawed take, but the sentiment was there nonetheless. More significantly, the OU had successfully entered the OER field with OpenLearn, which can be seen as a broadening…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2012: MOOCs
(we used David Kernohan’s image a lot back in the day and this is Michael Branson Smith’s animated version) [Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] Inevitably, in this series 2012 had to be allocated to MOOCs, when it was so breathlessly anointed “The Year of the MOOC“. In many ways the MOOC phenomenon can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies: some of the open approach of OER, the application of video, the experimentation of connectivism, and the revolutionary hype of web 2.0. Clay Shirky mistakenly proclaimed that MOOCs were the internet happening to education. If he’d been paying attention, he would have seen that this…
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Easy Profs and Raging MOOCs
I’ve been reading (well listening to on Audible) Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s the account of New Hollywood, covering roughly 1969 to 1982, and plotting the rise and fall of the Hollywood auteurs such as Coppola, Scorcese, Altman, Friedkin and Bogdanovich. As is my wont, I’ve been drawing parallels with the education sector as I’ve been going through it. The tale is often portrayed as one of these plucky outsiders with artistic vision challenging the studio system, but ultimately failing and the money men then ruining cinema forever. Certainly when you consider the best films that arose form this period – The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Jaws,…
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Emerging OER research discipline
The Primordial soup of OER… One of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is how the OER discipline emerges. Having lived through it, you get to see the field evolve. I’m not sure it counts as a field, subject, discipline, or whatever. Is it part of a new open education discipline? Is there a unifying field at all? These are general questions I have, but one I was also interested in, was what themes have emerged in research over the years? I set out to have a look at this, by examining publications in OER Knowledge Cloud from 2001. I did a content analysis of abstracts from 2007 (chosen…
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What’s in a name?
Yesterday I had a bit of a pedant tantrum, when following the announcement about FutureLearn MOOCs offering credit, Leeds Uni tweeted they were the first Russell Group university to offer credit for online courses. They deleted the tweet after I complained because online courses aren’t the same as MOOCs, and of course many universities have been offering online courses for credit for years. I fully appreciate it was the demands of twitter and communications that caused this, there wasn’t anything sinister in their intent, and I apologise if I seemed a bit grumpy about it. But it was the latest example of a move to conflate MOOCs and ‘online courses’…
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Appropriate use of MOOCs
One of the unfortunate downsides of all the MOOC hype is that it pushed people into opposing camps – you either buy into it all or reject them absolutely. And of course, MOOCs are not going to kill every university, educate the whole world, liberate the masses. But they can be used for some purposes effectively. Today the OU, FutureLearn and University of Leeds announced a mechanism by which you can gain credit for studying MOOCs and transfer this to count towards a degree. Getting this set up is the type of thing that just takes ages and lots of negotiation (we never cracked it with SocialLearn), so well done…
