Fortnightly Mailing

Of avalanches, tsunamis and the longer view

Cornice avalanche East of Slettningsbu, Norway, April 2012

Written in March 2013. Video PS added in November 2013. Broken links fixed in March 2020.

Tsunamis and avalanches kill. They are so vile and fearsome that I think it is almost in bad taste to compare social and technical phenomena to either of them.

IPPR's use of one of the terms in its An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead[1.8 MB PDF] (written by Michael Barber and colleagues from Pearson) caught my eye, and reminded me of a talk - Universities, eLearning and The Internet Tsunami [PPT] - that I heard at the 2000 ALT Conference by Jack Wilson, then of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

I've only skimmed the two documents so far, but the fact that quite similar things are being said now as were being said 13 years ago probably shows that these kinds of apocalyptic visions are a bit wide of the mark, and that what is really going on is better viewed as a rather slower "tectonic" movement, that peppers the landscape with very big but patchy bursts of change.

I believe that looking back in 20 years we will see that over the previous 40 years technology's impact on learning, teaching and assessment will have been very profound indeed. In effect there will have been several big step changes. But I do not think that apocalyptic metaphors - which in some respects play into the hands of the naysayers - are helpful for organisations needing to take wise decisions about what to do next. Jack Wilson's much more recent talk at the 2012 Sloan Consortium conference - Evolution or Revolution? The relentless advance of online learning - Neither hype nor negativity can stop it [PPTX] - is of a very different ilk.

PS - for an effective, angry, sweeping and affecting critique of the ideas in IPPR's report, watch this 24 minute video by David Kernohan, narrated by Mark Styles:

Maths MOOCs

For various reasons I'm keeping a close eye on maths MOOCs (or, strictly speaking, xMOOCs, in the jargon explained here by John Daniels [PDF]).

I've been dipping in and out of the Udacity/San José State University College Algebra course, and I am about to start Keith Devlin's Coursera/Stanford Introduction to Mathematical Thinking course, which starts on Monday 4 March. In the latter case I intend to do the course thoroughly, Easter holiday permitting, and to write about it as I go along, though probably not as systematically as I did in 2011 during the Norvig/Thrun AI course.

Keith Devlin, who hails originally from Hull - almost close enough to Sheffield to feel an affinity - is writing regularly about the practicalities of MOOC design, with a particular focus on "the question of the degree to which good, effective mathematics learning can be achieved at scale, over the Internet". Here are two examples:

• MOOCs are So Back to the Future from MOOCtalk, which Devlin describes as "A real-time chronicle of a seasoned professor who is about to give his second massively open online course";
• Can we make constructive use of machine-graded, multiple-choice questions in university mathematics education? from Devlin's regular column for the American Mathematical Association.

MOOCs and Open Access: parallel reactions

In Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken Clay Shirky eloquently counters Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College, a no holds barred attack on MOOCs and their proponents by journalist Maria Bustillos.

I agree with Shirky's line in the excerpt below, though I wonder if, as someone who can more or less name his price as a public speaker, Shirky is being a bit disingenuous getting down amongst the academics with his "us", "my peers", and "we".

But setting that aside (and I do not grudge Shirky his success) what is very striking about the reaction of academics to MOOCs is its similarity to some of the reactions in the UK [353 page PDF on House of Lords web site] to the pressure from Government and the funders to move scholarly publishing to an Open Access model.

The competition from upstart organizations will make things worse for many of us. (I like the experiments we’ve got going at NYU, but I don’t fantasize that we'll be unscathed.) After two decades of watching, though, I also know that that’s how these changes go. No industry has ever organized an orderly sharing of power with newcomers, no matter how interesting or valuable their ideas are, unless under mortal threat.

Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.

Afterthoughts

1. In the case of scholarly publishing, the O'Reilly funded PeerJ is one of the upstarts to watch.

2. In the UK it is in further education colleges (which generally do not have lecture theatres) where degree-level students are given the most individualised attention.

MOOCs and educational TV - an insight-rich 1989 discussion

If you've the time, do watch this insight-rich 1989 discussion between Mara Mayer and Lawrence Cremin about technology in learning (via Stephen Downes and then Mike Caulfield).

Caulfield draws points from the discussion astutely, but you'll need to watch it for its many "aha" moments (as Caulfield says, you can safely skip the first 10 minutes).

The video is very relevant to current discussions about MOOCs, equity of access and provision, "hard-to-teach/hard-to-learn" subjects, and professional development.

Unusually the discussion focusses simultaneously on schools (Cremin) and on HE (Mayer), which adds greatly to its value.

Panel session about online learning with Friedman, Gates, Koller, Niazi, Reif, Summers, Thiel & Thrun

Despite some of the sentimentalism, the kowtowing, and the US-centrism, there is plenty of interest in this 68 minute recording of a panel session on 24 January in Davos. Thrun and Koller get too little of the floor, I think; and what the session generally lacks from the chair, NYT journalist Thomas Friedman - who knows how to gush - is critical challenge.

The need to try lots of MOOCish things at the same time

I think Stephen Downes (picking up on analysis by Michael Feldstein) hits the nail on the head in this comprehensive well-linked commentary on developments in Californian HE relating to online learning, MOOCs etc. Specifically:

The problem, to my mind, is that the aristocrats - the professors - fundamentally don't care whether the sysem is accessable or affordable. Tha's what has to change. Feldstein proposes:

• aggressive program of experimentation and evaluation
• a data-driven and public conversation about the cost and sustainability models
• personas and use cases that help the stakeholder groups have focused and productive conversations

I think the initiatives have to reach beyond mere planning (there's always the clarion call from  professors for "more research" and a "coordinated program" and an "emphasis on quality", but at a certain point it becomes more important to do than to plan, to try a bunch of things on a larger scale and take notes about what worked and what didn't).

Worthwhile also reading Donald Clark's MOOCs: ‘dropout’ a category mistake, look at ‘uptake’? which concludes:

We need to look at uptake, not dropout. It’s astonishing that MOOCs exist at all, never mind the millions, and shortly many millions, who have given them a go. Dropout is a highly pejorative term that comes from ‘schooling’. The ‘high school dropout’. He’s ‘dropped out of ‘University’. It's this pathological view of education that has got us into this mess in the first place. MOOCs are NOT school, they eschew the lecture hall and are more about learning than teaching. MOOCs, like BOOKs, need to be seen as widely available opportunities, not compulsory attendance schooling. They need to be encouraged, not disparaged.

MOOCs: influencing what the student does to learn

Small changes to ending made 5/1/2013.

Mark Guzdial's excellent Computing Education blog has an interesting, growing and already long discussion thread about MOOCs (of the "x" rather than "c" variety) and what they do or do not do, and about the extent to which they can substitute for or embody (good) teaching - prompted by Mark's own forceful MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works.

My immediate reaction to reading Mark's post (before the comments began to flow) was to look once more at CMU's Learning/Teaching Principles where Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon's axiomatic

takes pride of place.

The key question for me is whether it is or will be possible to build MOOCs  to influence "what the student does to learn" as or more productively overall than in a well run, reasonably but not lavishly resourced face-to-face course.

These are early days. My instinct and experience tells me that it is premature to assert now that it is not or (more importantly) will not be possible. The challenge, surely, is to put a effort into:

• seeking to make it work;
• scientifically assessing impact;
• understanding the affordances of subject, level, learner-characteristics, and so on.

This excerpt from Blake Morrison's fictional memoir The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (taken from this review: I've not read the book) struck me as apt:

"The press would not stand firm or bed down flat. The type kept breaking off. The hand-mould would not fit right. The characters we made were blurred or twisted, and impossible to align. The ink ran like a stream or stuck like mud. The paper creased and tore."

 

From a MOOC learner's point of view things are already nothing like this bad. In fact, for many MOOC learners, things are already pretty good.

Jörn Loviscach and Sebastian Wernicke talk about designing and running Udacity courses

Millions of Lessons Learned on Electronic Napkins [via Stephen Downes] is a candid, informative and well structured 36 minute joint presentation by Wernicke - who is the designer/teacher of Udacity's Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science course - and Loviscach - who is the designer/teacher of Udacity's Differential Equations in Action course. The presentation was given in Hamburg on 30 December 2012 at the Chaos Communication Congress (an annual conference on technology, society and utopia). The optimistic and clear abstract for Loviscach and Wernicke's session is well worth reading.

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.

 

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.