Fortnightly Mailing

India's National Mission on education through ICT

Here is the 9/1/2009 official announcement of the Indian Government's National Mission on education through ICT, which has a focus on equipping teachers in the use of ICT in teaching and learning. The full text is below as two JPG files.

Fond memories of Keith Duckitt

Keith Duckitt's step-daughter Sara Powell has made a fitting web site with photographs and tributes to Keith, who died on 3 October 2008.

Academic Earth - founder Richard Ludlow answers some questions

Richard Ludlow, founder of the video-lecture sharing Academic Earth, preferred answering some questions to writing a Guest Contribution, which was fine by me.

My questions and Richard's responses are below.

University of the People - providing low cost online degree courses worldwide

The University of the People will "open its doors" (i.e. take enrolments for a September 2009 start) in April 2009. According to the organisation's web site:

"The University of the People is a nonprofit organization devoted to providing universal access to quality, online post-secondary education. The organization, founded by Shai Reshef, is comprised of volunteers from all around the world. Many of these volunteers are appointed faculty at universities; others are active professionals-business administrators, librarians, computer programmers, economists, and educators. They share the belief that all people should have the opportunity to change their lives and contribute to their communities, as well as the understanding that the path to societal and individual prosperity is through education. We are certain that our collective efforts as volunteers can be decisive in developing and executing the programs through which millions of people previously denied access to higher education will be able to earn accredited academic degrees."

UoP (a not-for-profit)  is coy about costs:

"The University of the People plans at this stage to charge only nominal application fee ($15-$50) and examination fees ($10-$100), which will be adjusted on a sliding scale based on the student's country of origin."

and will start with two degree courses, a BA in Business Administration and a BSc in Computer Science, running over ~four years for full-time students. Currently, UoP says it "intends to apply for accreditation from recognized authorities as soon as possible".

Shai Reshef, the founder, is a serial entrepreneur with a very strong track record in making this kind of thing work. For example, a Netherlands-based for-profit company Reshef chaired, and which was subsequently sold to Laureate Inc. [PDF], was the delivery partner for a range of Liverpool University online masters courses.

Google Research Awards - call open to staff in universities worldwide

There is a Google research award call open to full-time faculty members from universities worldwide. Awards are typically for one year in the range from $10K-$150K.

"Areas that are of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

• Economics and market algorithms
• Education innovation
• Geo/maps
• Health
• Information retrieval, extraction, and organization
• Machine learning and data mining
• Machine translation
• Mobile
• Multi-media search and audio/video processing
• Natural language processing
• Policy and standards
• Security and privacy
• Social systems
• Speech
• Structured data and database management
• Software and hardware systems infrastructure
• Human-computer interaction"

National Audit Office diagrams showing the gross over-complexity of the English learning and skills system

Source: Reskilling for recovery - 16/1/2009, page 94

Reskilling for recovery - 16/1/2009 [1.88 MB PDF] is a recent report of the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, which examines "how responses to the agenda set out in the Leitch Report would affect the broader structures of further education (FE), higher education (HE) and lifelong learning".

It contains an Appendix, supplied by the National Audit Office with, on pages 94 to 97, four "function maps" showing the functions and relationships on November 2008 of the key organisation in England with a hand in the provision of education and training. Simple the system certainly is not - "The charts in particular speak for themselves showing how complicated the system has become" -  and, if the Committee's recommendations are acted on, we can expect complexity and reducing it to feature in a future National Audit Office review of the training system.  On this subject, Frank Coffield's diagrams [130 kB PDF] from his "The Impact of Policy on Learning and Inclusion in the New Learning and Skills Sector" are worth reviewing. If anything they show the situation to be even worse than the National Audit Office diagrams indicate.

December 2006 Fortnightly Mailing piece about the Leitch Review of Skills.

Always on: learning providers in a world of permanent connectivity

Long article in First Monday by Lorcan Dempsey about the impact on libraries of "always on / always connected" devices. Excerpt:

"As networking spreads, we have multiple connection points which offer different grades of experience (the desktop, cell phone, xBox or Wii, GPS system, smartphone, ultra–portable notebook, and so on). While these converge in various ways, they are also optimized for different purposes. A natural accompaniment of this mesh of connection points is a move of many services to the cloud, available on the network across these multiple devices and environments. This means that an exclusive focus on the institutional Web site as the primary delivery mechanism and the browser as the primary consumption environment is increasingly partial."

The general point made applies equally to students and to employees in their on-line relationships with their school/college/university/employer, and squares with some thinking we've been doing in a mobile learning initiative at The Sheffield College, where I am a Governor.

Specifically, what policies should govern learner's access to the Internet when in college using their own devices, and how should these differ (if at all) from the policies that apply when they are using college-provided devices? (Answer, content filtering other than by connectivity suppliers is increasingly irrelevant.)

And, if learners are using a wide range of devices to access college and other learning-related services, who is best placed to host and configure these for distribution to such devices? (Answer, surely, third parties with the expertise and above all large scale to do it well.)

Never trust an expert: eLearn Magazine's predictions for 2009

[Updated 13/1/2009]

My old friend Colin Squires described an expert as a "cross between a has-been and a drip under pressure", so you will need to take with a pinch of salt the 30 predictions - mine are below - assembled here by Lisa  Neal Gualtieri in the ACM's eLearn Magazine. Last year Stephen Downes did a good review of the predictions for 2008, with gradings, with some nice observations on what makes for useful predictions, and you can now read this year's review.

1. During the coming slump the risk of relying on free tools and services in learning will become apparent as small start-ups offering such services fail, and as big suppliers switch off loss-making services or start charging for them.
2. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement will strengthen, and will face up to the "cultural" challenges of winning learning providers and teachers to use OER.
3. Large learning providers and companies that host VLEs will make increasing and better use of the data they have about learner behavior, for example, which books they borrow, which online resources they access, how long they spend doing what.

OLPC downsizes

(Via Stephen Downes.) Ryan Paul reports in Ars Technica that OLPC is cutting staff and the pay of those remaining, and, it seems, ceasing to develop software, and, it is said, concentrating on the Windows based OLPC 2. Others pick up the story.

Should higher education course materials be free to all? Leo Pollak in the IPPR's Public Policy Research

Leo Pollak's Should higher education course materials be free to all? [84 kB PDF] in a monthly publication of the influential Institute for Public Policy Research passed me by. Abstract:

"In recent months, UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have, respectively, announced and achieved their intention to make entire lecture and course materials freely available online – to anyone. Leo Pollak argues that while British universities lag far behind in online course provision, the UK is uniquely placed to innovate further than MIT, and to once again radically redefine the basis of opportunity, learning and social mobility."

A footnote in Pollak's paper:

"The Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock has argued convincingly that there exists a calculable opportunity cost to a wide range of restrictive intellectual monopolies; not merely to individuals, innovative firms, to jobs, consumers and to the wider economy, but, most crucially, to the providers of the ‘first copy’, the original content producers (Pollock 2006)."

took me to Pollock's January 2008 Innovation and imitation and with and without intellectual property rights [250 kB PDF] which provides a "welfare economics" based argument for Open Content. Abstract (emphasis added):

"An extensive empirical literature indicates that returns from innovation are appropriated primarily via mechanisms other than formal intellectual property rights and that `imitation' is itself a costly activity. However most theory assumes the pure non-rivalry of `ideas' with its implication that, in the absence of intellectual property (for example under an `open source' regime), innovation (and welfare) is zero. This paper introduces a formal model of innovation based on imperfect competition in which imitation is costly and an innovator has a first-mover advantage. Without intellectual property, a significant amount of innovation still occurs and welfare may actually be higher than with intellectual property."

[As an aside, today's  Open Education Skeptic: We Are All Prof. Gradgrind Now, by Michael Feldstein, gets to the heart of a weakness in Leo Pollak's paper, namely that access to course materials is not the same as access to education.]