Fortnightly Mailing

Futurelearn - an OU-led response to Coursera, Udacity, and MITx

UK reaction to the launch last year of the precursor to Udacity tended to be sceptical, with what seemed to be a rush to early judgement that free massive open online courses were not going to be a game-changer. Had the ill-fated UK eUniversity burned UK Higher Education's fingers? [Links to BBC report, and to Paul Bacsich's "lessons" report.]

Futurelearn - with a website that is so sparse that it looks to have been "scrambled" (and, via @DougClow, the company was only incorporated on Monday of this week) - seems to be UK Higher Education's eventual response to Coursera, Udacity, MITx and their siblings.

From what I can glean Futurelearn will be driven from and by the Open University, led by Simon Nelson (an ex-BBC executive); and from 2013 it will offer free learning from a slew of English, Welsh, and Scottish universities including Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick.

Here is an excerpt from the briefing sheet on the OU web site [DOC]:

Futurelearn Limited will bring together a range of free, open, online courses from leading UK universities, in the same place and under the same brand. The courses will be clear, simple to use and accessible. Futurelearn will not replicate class-based learning online but reimagine it, realising the potential offered by digital technologies. The Company will be able to draw on The Open University’s unparalleled expertise in delivering distance learning and in pioneering open education resources. These will enable Futurelearn to present a single, coherent entry point for students to the best of the UK’s online education content. Futurelearn will increase the accessibility of higher education, opening up a wide range of new online courses and learning materials to students across the UK and in the rest of the world.

Links, which I have begun to update, some of which involve rather lazy reuse of Futurelearn's own media release:

• UK reactions in 2011/early 2012 to MOOCs - Rhodri Marsden in the Independent, 12/9/2011; Emma Barnett in The Daily Telegraph, 18/8/2011; mine, 7/11/2011; John Naughton's Observer piece, 5/2/2012.
• About Futurelearn - Daily Telegraph; BBC; TechCrunch; launch media release [PDF]; supporting material from the Open University; posts by OU staff members Tony Hirst and Doug Clow; Times Higher; JISC; Guardian; Financial Times (registration required); Kings College London; The Higher Education Chronicle.

 

Do TIMSS and PIRLS tell us as much as media and political reaction imply?

[Note - added 14/12/2012] - here, by courtesy of Diane Ravitch, are Finn Pasi Sahlberg's similarly veined comments on TIMSS and PIRLS.]

Yong Zhao is a very interesting US-based educational researcher, whose work I first covered covered almost exactly six years ago.

His Numbers Can Lie: Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything? strikes me as an excellent, thought-provoking counter to standard reactions to the slew of comparative data that has just been published, such as this one from English Education Minister Elizabeth Truss, or this report from the BBC. After an interesting discussion about why it might be that learners in some of the countries that score well in maths at the same time have very low confidence in maths, and place a very low value on maths,  Zhao asks, if America has been doing so badly in comparison to many other nations, why is it not falling apart economically? Here is an excerpt:

Peter Norvig: Online Education - One Year Later

Peter Norvig uses this 14 November 2012 talk at Stanford University (~34 minute talk; ~22 minutes of discussion - questions just about audible) to reflect candidly on what he learned from making and running the mass online AI course with Sebastian Thrun last year.

The screen-shot below has Norvig's concluding slide, which he uses to support the idea that in the future online learning will i) feel to learners like 1:1 instruction, ii) be organised with cohorts of 100,000, and iii) use analysis of the "big data" flowing from masses of peer:peer interactions to shape formative feedback to individual learners and/or determine how a learner is "routed" through their studies.

For more on how this might work, see Norvig's responses - optimistically to the question that is asked at 39:10, and more cautiously to the question asked at 51:40. See also his answer to the question asked at 53:10 for an interesting insight into how Google itself has been testing the impact of its own online search course (which, like the AI course, attracted over 150,000 learners) on the actual search behaviours of users.

As an aside, it is worth considering Norvig's comments on Carnegie Mellon University's efforts to create a mathematics tutoring system alongside observations made by Dylan Wiliam in Scaling up: Achieving a breakthrough in adult learning with technology a report I wrote earlier this year with Adrian Perry, Clive Shepherd and Dick Moore. Here is an excerpt:

A particular barrier to successfully creating software that helps learners develop their conceptual understanding is the great difficulty in building a solid proficiency model or map of a knowledge domain. For example, a well-funded team of expert researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed an effective tutoring system (now called the Cognitive Tutor56) for a relatively small proportion of the US equivalent of the Year 10 algebra curriculum. Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London, explains: “The Cognitive Tutor has been very well researched and it’s very effective. It’s probably better than 90% of teachers that are teaching this part of the curriculum. But one of the reasons it is so effective is that its focus is on such a very constrained domain. And it still took the Carnegie Mellon team 20 years to work out what are the knowledge structures that are involved in this domain.” In short, whilst the computer science behind the tutoring system is robust and getting even more so, the proficiency models of learners’ cognition are neither well developed nor easy to create.

Snippets from 30 October to 3 December

This puts all snippets into one place. Possibly worth scan-reading for items that catch your attention. (Updated 20151201)

 

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Ian Nash grades Michael Wilshaw's annual report ‘unsatisfactory’. - http://policyconsortium.co.uk/2012...

 

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The Economist has bubble/Ponzi nuances in "American universities represent declining value for money to their students" - http://www.economist.com/news...

 

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Economist article about "dronefather" Abe Karem with many insights on the superiority of tightly focused smallish scale development. - http://www.economist.com/news...