Fortnightly Mailing

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.

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.

From the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Open Access

[16 January 2013. With thanks to Mike Taylor for a helpful comment about timings and the availability of a Windows Media Player version of the recording. I've reflected this with small revisions below.]

Here is a video of today's session (Silverlight-based, but there is also a Windows Media Player version) of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Open Access with Dame Janet Finch, who gave evidence for just under an hour from 11.40. (In Silverlight the time is shown in the bottom righ of the screen; in the Windows Media Player version I believe you have to slide to 57 minutes 55 seconds in.)

According to my notes, the Chair John Krebs says in his introduction:

“We are not here to question the whole Open Access agenda. We take that as a given. We are not questioning the recommendations of the report. We are very much focused on the current plans for implementation and on the concerns that have been raised with us by various stake-holders which you allude to in your written evidence.”

During the session 4 or 5 members of the committee in addition to John Krebs questioned Janet Finch. Those whose names I noted were Martin Rees, Margaret Sharp, Alec Broers and Robert Winston. All seemed variously well informed, not least Martin Rees who looks to be aware of the concerns of Humanities and Social Sciences societies.

Janet Finch gave a confident and calm account of the work of the committee that produced the Finch Report; and the effect of cross-questioning by knowledgeable and research-experienced members of the committee served to clarify and open up the thinking behind the Finch Report pretty well.

The full session on 29 January, when Research Councils UK, the Higher Education Funding Council, and Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts will give evidence, should be interesting (if you are interested in Open Access). Whatever the Committee recommends, the transcript of today's session (due next week?), along with the written evidence that is submitted (including Janet Finch's) will be worth perusing.

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.

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:

"Openness without career suicide" a plain English overview of Open Access

Slideshare of the presentation, which is also embedded below

[Updated 25/11/2012]

I enjoyed this candid witty almost samizdat^* 15 November talk by Stephen Curry at the 2012 Research Libraries UK conference. I think plenty of readers would do likewise, as much as anything else because Curry's perspectives are those of a highly visible life scientist who "came to Open Access late", mainly as a reaction to the (subsequently failed) US Research Works Act [slide 3]. Curry is mercifully unzealous, and also clear about how complicated OA issues actually are.

To my mind he gets the balance right between Gold and Green; and he understands the reasons for the differences between disciplines in their views about OA. He also talks persuasively but realistically about impact factor and the need for alternative ways of judging the quality of an article than by the prestige of the journal in which it appears. Curry's "Why we are not there yet?" points [on slide 11], and list of "Residual challenges" (slide 14) are spot-on, not least his calls for a unification of "the broad church of OA", and for openness on the profits and taxes of the publishers.

[25/11/2012 update - Janet Finch's Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence - How to expand access to published research findings and Mark Thorley's Going for Gold? The RCUK Policy on Access to Research Outputs are available here.]

^* it's the camera angle

Decoding Learning - a report that gets to the heart of the challenge of enhancing learning with technology

NESTA's Decoding Learning [90 pages, 4.4 MB PDF], published today, was written under contract by Rose Luckin, Brett Bligh, Andrew Manches, Shaaron Ainsworth, Charles Crook and Richard Noss from the Learning Sciences Research Institute at Nottingham University and from IOE/Birkbeck's London Knowledge Lab. 

The report has caught the attention of the media, with much of the coverage having a strong "money wasted by stupid people and organisations" flavour. (BBC - Costly hi-tech kit lies unused in schools, says study; Telegraph - Schools 'wasting £450m a year' on useless gadgets.)

But this is an important report, because it gets right to the heart of the challenge of enhancing learning with technology in schools (and elsewhere), whilst retaining an underlying (and evidence-based) optimism.

To encourage you to read the report in full, and to give you its overall flavour, here is its concluding section in full.

We looked for proof, potential and promise in digital education.

We found proof by putting learning first. We have shown how different technologies can improve learning by augmenting and connecting proven learning activities. This approach gives us a new framework for evaluating future innovations in education.

The numerous examples of good practice identified in this report show that there is also a great deal that can be done with existing technology. It is clear that there is no single technology that is ‘best’ for learning. We have identified technology being used effectively to support a variety of learning activities and learners across a wide range of subjects and learning environments. Rather, different technologies can be used to support different forms of learning, either individually or in conjunction with others.

There is a growing body of invaluable evidence that demonstrates how technology can be used effectively to support learning. However, if that evidence is going to be useful in practice it needs to address the contexts within which the technology is used; and it needs to be presented in ways that are accessible to industry, teachers and learners.

We found clear potential to make better use of technologies that are widely available and that many schools have already purchased. But this potential will only be realised through innovative teaching practice. Teachers may require additional training that enables them to use technologies in new ways.

There is enormous potential for further innovation in digital education. Success will come from commercial developers, researchers, teachers and learners working together to develop, test and spread imaginative new technologies.

We also found many areas of promise; that is, areas where technology is currently undervalued and underused. We found relatively little technological innovation in some of the more effective learning themes we considered in Chapter 2. For example, the market is saturated with drill and practice games (particularly for maths) to support Learning through Practising despite being regarded as one of the less powerful learning themes. Meanwhile, there has been relatively little technological innovation aimed at supporting Learning through Assessment – which can be a powerful aid to teaching and learning.

Over recent decades, many efforts to realise the potential of digital technology in education have made two key errors. Collectively, they have put the technology above teaching and excitement above evidence. This means they have spent more time, effort and money looking to find the digital silver bullet that will transform learning than they have into evolving teaching practice to make the most of technology. If we are to make progress we need to clarify the nature of the goal we want to satisfy through future innovation. Much existing teaching practice may well not benefit greatly from new technologies. As we continue to develop our understanding of technology’s proof, potential and promise, we have an unprecedented opportunity to improve learning experiences in the classroom and beyond.

Inventing the future of learning

It is amazing how Barbara Flynn's familiar-sounding narration adds credibility to a documentary such as this one.

The video was launched at the The Royal Society on 6 November at the closing event of the TEL Research Programme.  It aims to highlight - for a lay(ish) audience - the results of 8 four-year ESRC/EPSRC funded Technology Enhanced Learning projects, and to emphasise the scope that now exists for TEL to "take off", ubiquitously and at scale, and in a designed rather than random way. I think it largely succeeds in this, though if the documentary has a weakness it is it's lack of focus on the big impact that TEL is already having. Public figures featured - alongside teachers, learners, and researchers, include:

• Tim O'Shea, Principal of Edinburgh University;
• Charles Clarke and Jim Knight, former Labour Secretaries of State for Education;
• Michael Gove, the current Coalition Government's Secretary of State for Education;
• Eban Upton, the designer of the Rasberry Pi;
• David Puttnam;
• Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google;
• Mitchel Resnick, from MIT Media Lab.

For more on the TEL programme read this September 2012 Guest Contribution, and System Upgrade - a vision for technology enhanced learning in UK Education.

Disclosure. I was a member of the TEL programme's Advisory Group. My previous employer, the Association for Learning Technology, was a partner in the TEL Learning Designer project.