Fortnightly Mailing

Edinburgh University bites on the "MOOC" bullet with Coursera

Don't be put off by the slightly stodgy tone in parts of this just-released promotional video from the University of Edinburgh about www.ed.ac.uk/moocs. Instead, listen carefully to what Stanford's Daphne Koller has to say about scale and formative assessment in Coursera's new "breed" of free on-line courses, as well as to the comments from Vice-Principal Jeff Haywood about Edinburgh University's approach to quality assurance. [See also coverage by BBC, Guardian, The Times Higher, Inside Higher Ed, Downes. ]

Of possible interest to readers of Fortnightly Mailing will be one of Edinburgh's Coursera courses E-learning and Digital Cultures, taught by Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross, and Christine Sinclair. E-learning and digital cultures will "explore how digital cultures and learning cultures connect, and what this means for e-learning theory and practice". [On 8 August, ALT published MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera, Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish MacLeod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair.]

Questions to use in an interview with Eric Mazur

On 18 July I will do an interview for ALT News Online with Harvard physicist Eric Mazur, who will be a keynote speaker at the 2012 ALT Conference, but who happens also to be speaking in my home town Sheffield. I asked the ALT Members' Discussion List for suggestions for questions to use in the interview, and here are the 10 interview questions I will use as the basis of the interview.

Final update, 18/7/2012.

1. Was there a breakthrough moment when the idea of peer instruction came to you? Can you describe it?

2. Your original work on peer-based instruction preceded the ubiquitous Internet. What difference has the Internet and the widespread availability of "always on" devices made to your thinking on peer-based instruction?

Snippets from 1 July to 13 July

Via @shackletonjones "Is online learning really cracking open the public post-secondary system?" by Tony Bates. 5 lessons in comment below. - http://www.tonybates.ca/2012...

Lesson 1: No president with an activist Board of Governors is now safe if the university does not have a clear institutional strategy for online learning. It’s now become the latest buzzword in post-secondary education.

Lesson 2: MOOCs may be the answer – but what is the question? May there be better solutions to the question? And may such solutions exist already but are not being sufficiently supported?

Lesson 3: Governments are increasingly not going to accept the status quo or business as usual. In particular, if your institution doesn’t have a meaningful strategy for innovation in teaching, for improving the cost-effectiveness of the organization, and particularly a strategy for online learning, you will become increasingly vulnerable to funding cuts.

Lesson 4: Prepare and train your faculty to deal with change and innovation in teaching, and in particular for teaching online.

Lesson 5: If public institutions do not respond effectively to the challenge of change, they will eventually be swept aside by the private sector – and will deserve it.

The emergence of mass on line tutoring systems (MOTS)

Epigeum is a spin-out company from Imperial College London. Co-founder David Lefevre sent me this piece about mass online tutoring systems. He wrote it partly prompted by hearing a talk - "one of the most impressive presentations I have seen in our field" - by Daphne Koller (co-founder of Coursera), on 2 July at the University of London Computer Centre.

Lefevre is not making a new point, but he gets to the heart of the matter, in this snippet:

Human tutors are present but the delivery system allows them to operate largely at a meta level and therefore teach many more students than is possible via more traditional methods. .....  As anyone who has taken a course on these systems will attest, the learning experience does not feel impersonal. The effect is a rich, engaging experience far removed from the solitary browsing experience provided by OpenCourseWare.

(I wonder if the MOTS acronym will stick?)

Lessons from Finland – do comparisons help?

Pasi Sahlberg Source

[This is a Guest Contribution by Andrew Morris of the Policy Consortium, an informal grouping of independent consultants to which I belong.]

Education in other countries sounds so much more interesting than our own! In Switzerland it’s the calibre of apprenticeships, in France the breadth of the Baccalaureat, in Scandinavia the quality of pre-school play. But as I see more and more examples used in political argument I begin to wonder how much we simply cherry pick from abroad to suit our pet criticism of the home system. Do we fall for the best features in other countries but fail to look at the whole, warts and all?

Peter Norvig's TED talk reflecting on creating and running the online AI course

[Added 9 July 2012: The discussion on Hacker News prompted by this post by Colin Wright is well worth reading.]

Peter Norvig is Google's Director of Research. Here, finally, is a recording of Peter Norvig's February 2012  six minute TED talk about his and Sebastian Thrun's 2011 mass free online computer science course about artificial intelligence (in which I took part as a student and from which I wrote weekly reports throughout - to find them scroll down here). It is interesting in its own right. It also shows how much can be conveyed in only six minutes (though post-talk questions and discussion would have added a great deal).

Note Norvig's conclusion:

"....the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come."

[Below the video I have pasted the transcript of the talk.]

Just how little students learn - Mark Guzdial

Nearly two years old, but still fresh, this post by Mark Guzdial in his Computing Education Blog, is worth reading. As an aside, it has an interesting description of how/why "ordinary" users fail when they try to edit Wikipedia. Mark's  Education is already Gamified (from which I came across "Just how little students learn") sheds interesting light on the current enthusiasm for badges, and why the "badge fad" needs treating with some care.

Preventing death on the roads due to obstructive sleep apnoea - excellent efforts by my MP Meg Munn

In 2006 my nephew Toby Tweddell was killed by a truck driven by a sufferer of undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), since when I have been intermittently involved (with the families of others similarly killed or seriously injured, medical and other specialists, and road safety and health charities) in an informal campaign to get the menace of OSA dealt with.  I've also written the occasional Fortnightly Mailing post relating to OSA, for example:

• 2007 - Sleep apnoea: joined up government needed to prevent road deaths;
• 2008 - Coroner calls for Government action on sleep apnoea;
• 2009 - Finding and treating lorry drivers with sleep apnoea - 13 May adjournment debate in Westminster.

On 20 June my indefatigable MP Meg Munn spoke again in an Adjournment Debate about OSA, this time focusing in part on the inactive "dead sheep" role of the Health and Safety Executive in relation to OSA and truckers. Instinctively I feel that we are now on the edge of making some progress in the campaign.

The links below have more.

• Hansard – Health and Safety Executive debate (Westminster Hall) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm120620/halltext/120620h0002.htm#12062079000118
• Parliament website – Westminster Hall debates: 20 June 2012 (with useful links) http://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2012/june/westminster-hall-debates-20-june-2012/
• 20/06/12 – Politics Home – Meg Munn MP: employers should screen drivers for sleep conditions http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/meg-munn-mp-employers-should-screen-drivers-for-sleep-conditions
• 21/06/12 – IOSH – IOSH cited in Parliament debate on work-related RTAs http://www.iosh.co.uk/news/latest_member_news/mp_cites_iosh_in_debate.aspx
• 22/06/12 – 4-traders – The United Kingdom Parliament : Westminster Hall debates: 20 June 2012 http://www.4-traders.com/news/The-United-Kingdom-Parliament-Westminster-Hall-debates-20-June-2012--14381999/
• 23/06/12 – BBC Parliament – Westminster Hall debate http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kbfq9
• 25/06/12 – The Star – MP in call for probe into work deaths on roads http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/local/mp-in-call-for-probe-into-work-deaths-on-roads-1-4677099
• 25/06/12 – SHP online – Road accidents warrant closer HSE involvement, MP urges http://www.shponline.co.uk/news-content/full/road-accidents-warrant-closer-hse-involvement-mp-urges

System Upgrade - a vision for technology enhanced learning in UK education

Today I attended the launch of the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme's "System Upgrade" report, which summarises the overall findings of the programme and offers recommendations for future strategy. [The 17 minute documentary from the 6 November 2012 final public meeting of the TEL programme is here.]

The report has been written by TEL director Richard Noss and a team drawn from those who led the different strands of the £12m programme over the last 5 years.

It is written in layperson's terms, with two or three coherently structured pages, with examples, for each of the following 12 recommendations:

1. Connect - Exploit the power of personal devices to enhance learning.
2. Share - Catch the wave of social networking to share ideas and learn together.
3. Analyse - Use technology to understand better how we learn, and so help us learn better.
4. Assess - Develop technologies to assess what matters, rather than what is easy to assess.
5. Apply - Allow technology to help learners apply their education to the real world.
6. Personalise - Utilise artificial intelligence to personalise teaching and learning.
7. Engage - Go beyond the keyboard and mouse to learn through movement and gesture.
8. Streamline - Enhance teachers’ productivity with new tools for designing teaching and learning.
9. Include - Empower the digitally and socially excluded to learn with technology.
10. Know - Employ tools to help learners make sense of the information overload.
11. Compute - Understand how computers think, to help learners shape the world around them.
12. Construct - Unleash learners’ creativity through building and tinkering.

Here are three links to snazzily designed materials:

• The TEL report itself [60 page PDF];
• Commentable online version;
• A summary of the report [4 page PDF].

Printed copies of the PDFs can be ordered from the TEL programme.

[Disclosure: for the last few years I was a member of the Advisory Group for the Programme].

Snippets from 4 June to 14 June

Here in one place are some largely unfiltered snippets from my FriendFeed "stream" (about 2 posts per day) for the period 4 June to 14 June 2012.

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Expert Panel member Andrew Pollard provides some very carefully written background to the National Curriculum Review. - http://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2012...