Fortnightly Mailing

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.

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...

 

Stolpersteine - joining up the personal and the professional in a 20 minute talk about learning technology

Sculptor Gunter Demnig and his co-worker embedding three Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) into the cobbles outside 52 Oderstrasse, in Neukölln, Berlin, on 29 November 2012.

Small addition to final paragraph made on 10 May 2013

Today I gave a talk at a conference in Berlin called Online Educa, in which I tried to meld the personal and the professional into one piece. So far as I could tell from the audience reaction this worked: but partially. (Link to the presentation I used [45 page 3 MB PDF, includes the script for the talk]; link to a somewhat "heavy breathing" video recording of the talk; link to other videos of talks at the conference on the Online Educa web site).

Below is a series of pictures I took yesterday (on 29 November) of sculptor Gunter Demnig and his co-worker embedding three Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) into the cobbles outside 52 Oderstrasse, in Neukölln, Berlin. The Stolpersteine commemorate Selma Lewin, Martha Meth and Max Meth, and the pictures show descendents of the family at the informal ceremony that was held, and childred from a local school who had become involved in  researching Selma, Martha and Max.  Eight further batches of Stolpersteine - 18 in total - were embedded by Demnig on the same day in Neukölln. Between Tuesday and Friday of this week a total of  115 Stolpersteine were laid outside 36 houses all over Berlin. [I am in the process of arranging Stolpersteine to be laid outside the block where my grandparents and great grandmother last lived in Berlin, before they were taken to Terezin in Autumn 1942.] You may also be interested in this May 2013 piece by Andreas Kluth, the Economist's Berlin Bureau Chief.

From the horses' mouths - Janet Finch and Mark Thorley speaking to research librarians about developments in UK Open Access

Last week I picked up on Stephen Curry's 15 November talk to the 2012 Research Librarians UK Conference. Below I've embedded the recordings of Janet Finch and Mark Thorley's talks a the same event. You may also be interested in Curry's own reflections on the event.

Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence - How to expand access to published research findings - 15 November 2012 talk by Janet Finch at the 2012 Research Libraries UK Conference

Going for Gold? The RCUK Policy on Access to Research Outputs - 15 November 2012 talk by Mark Thorley at the 2012 Research Libraries UK Conference

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.

Clayton R Wright's November - June 2013 Educational Technology and Education Conferences listing

Clayton R Wright - source

Clayton R Wright just sent me the 28th edition of his meticulously prepared conference list [1MB DOC] covering selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. As Clayton notes in the document, only listings until June 2013 are complete as dates, locations, or URLs were not available for a number of events held from June onward.

For Clayton's explanation for his use of DOC as the distribution medium, see his 2011 article in ALT News Online.

Snippets from 17 September to 29 October

Egalitarian push-back from readers of the Economist in response to its "Capitalism and inequality" special report. - http://www.economist.com/news...

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Important report > "Understanding low and discontinued Internet use amongst young people in Britain" - this blog post by the authors links the the full report. Concluding para excerpted below: - http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy...

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Rereading Zhao and Frank's terrific 2003 "Factors Affecting Technology Uses in Schools: An Ecological Perspective" http://www.webcitation.org/6BgDdu1.... Related: 2006 blog post: http://fm.schmoller.net/2006...

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