E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Part of our participation in the EMBED project (European Maturity Model for Blended Education) is the organisation of a couple of training events to share our knowledge and to give you the opportunity to learning about state of the art research and innovation in blended and online teaching and learning.

The next training event will be a EMBED training seminar at DCU in Dublin, 4-7 June 2019. This 3-days intensive training session is organized by the project team of EMBED. The “European Maturity Model for Blended Education in Europe” (EMBED) is developed by a consortium of frontrunner universities in blended and online education: KU Leuven, TU-Delft, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Aarhus, Dublin City University and Tampere University of Applied Sciences. It is coordinated by EADTU and funded by the European Commission. For full details on the project we kindly refer to the EMBED website.

The training seminar will be an opportunity to learn about state of the art of blended teaching and education and to apply new concepts on the current context of your university. Participants will further generate feedback on the multidimension maturity model for course design as developed by the consortium (micro) and on the institutional strategies needed in order to implement it (meso). You will also learn about the monitor to assess the maturity of blended and online educational practices at universities. The monitor is conceived as a multi-layered instrument with dimensions and indicators that were newly developed or adapted from previously validated instruments. Its goal is to grasp in detail practices and conditions for blended learning. All instruments are piloted across different institutions, programmes and courses

Foreseen participants are coming from:

• Teaching staff designing or redesigning a course, using new modes of teaching and learning. Teaching staff looking for a stable framework for innovating or assessing courses, in search of a balance between increasing student numbers, enhancing the quality of the teaching and learning experience and cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, teaching staff, developing online learning activities for short postgraduate degrees and continuous education.
  
  
• Teaching and learning departments developing blended and online teaching and learning models; supporting staff in course design teams; identifying patterns of good practice in their institution or in a network; collaborating with learning technology services and organising continuous professional development for teaching staff and program directors, or organising institutional evaluation and research on blended and online education. Learning technology departments providing learning-oriented technology infrastructure, tools and resources and supporting teaching staff. Internationalisation departments, responding to the needs for international blended or online courses and programs, online program collaboration and mobility schemes.
  
  
• University leaders, developing and implementing policies, strategies, frameworks and guidelines making their university continuously innovative; developing drivers and enablers for innovation; organising support services and continuous professional development for staff and program directors; stimulating and activating communities of practice and sharing educational resources; providing learning technology environments and tools; funding grassroot initiatives, program-based projects, institutional evaluation and research

Although the training seminar, including coffee breaks, is free of charge, there are participants costs for lunches and dinners.

The full programme of the training seminar will follow soon. Please register as participant under the EMBED event website here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an useful guide on online teaching. The teaching suggestions in this guide are not revolutionary. Once you read them, they’ll probably seem like common sense. But that’s just the point.

Professors often fail to make the connection between what we do in a physical classroom and what we do online. This guide aims to make that connection explicit — to help you think about what you do well in person so that you can do those things in your online classes, too. If you already employ some of these practices, the intent here is to help you think more comprehensively about what else you can do to be an excellent online teacher. With that goal in mind, let’s get to work.

10 Essential Principles and Practices

• Show Up to Class
  When you are regularly present and engaged in the online classroom, your students are more likely to be, too.
• Be Yourself
  Students need to know you in order to engage with you online. So look for ways to be yourself via technology, just as you do in person.
• Put Yourself in Their Shoes
  students should know exactly what you are teaching and what they are supposed to do as a result.
• Organize Course Content Intuitively
  Try to think like a student when you organize course materials.
• Add Visual Appeal
  When thinking about the visuals of an online class, look to your favorite websites. Why not apply this philosophy to an online class?
• Explain Your Expectations
  provide as much meaningful support as you can — without going overboard — so that students don’t have to guess what you want them to do.
• Scaffold Learning Activities
  Look for ways to break down complex tasks so that students make timely progress and receive feedback on their work while there is still time to adjust their approach if needed.
• Provide Examples
  Online learners benefit from multiple explanations of difficult concepts and multiple examples of the kind of work you want to see.
• Make Class an Inviting, Pleasant Place to Be
  When you teach in person, you do a lot of things to help students feel welcome and comfortable in the classroom. Apply that same principle to your online classes.
• Commit to Continuous Improvement
  A hallmark of good teaching is the desire to keep getting better at it. Even small efforts can have a big impact.

Common Misperceptions

Unfortunately there are many common misperceptions. In the guide they list four of them:

• Online classes are like slow cookers: Set and forget.
• Online students are lazy/disengaged/(insert negative adjective here).
• Online classes don’t work.
• Teaching online is not as enjoyable as teaching in person.

These misperceptions are still alive in the academic world. I still encounter them quiet often.

Conclusion

This guide is an excellent read to lear more about how to be an excellent online teacher. It isn't rocket science, just common sense!

We get many requests for visits from academic and staff from other universities to visit our Teaching Lab and hear about what and especially how we have organised our open, online and blended education activities. To make this a bit more efficient for us and more accessible for everyone we are organising a Erasmus+ Staff Week from 11 to 14 June 2019 in the Teaching Lab.

In a four-day programme we’ll dive into a wide range of topics. From online and open education to teacher training and the best way to support our TU Delft teaching community. During our Erasmus+ Staff Week, we aim to exchange ideas, evidence and expertise. We’ll share our vision on education and focus on the variety of available services and programmes to help teachers improve their education. We’ll give demonstrations of our spaces for experimentation, collaboration and exposure. And we are very much interested in your own institutes’ vision and practices!

If you are interested to participate, please register via this website before May 22nd.

After the great Open Education Global 2018 conference is now time to focus on the 2019 edition. This years conference is organised in Milan by the hosts OEC and Politecnico di Milano (Polimi) from 26-28 November 2019.

Theme

The theme of the conference is Open Education for an Open Future - Resources, Practices, Communities. This theme aims to emphasize opportunities offered by Open Education as a means to empowerment and to increase accessibility and quality of educational opportunities for all.

Call for Proposals

The call for proposals is open with a deadline of May 1st. Again this year we are collaborating with Open Praxis. They will publish a selection of papers from the Open Education Global 2019 conference.

The tracks and topics that are available are:

• Strategies for the further development of open educational resources, practices, and communities through cross-boundary collaborations
  • a) Open connections and collaborations
  • b) Open education to bridge the gaps beyond curricular education
  • c) Open education meets Sustainable Development Goals
• Roles and practices to enact open education
  • a) Students, facilitators, teachers, and communities: evolving roles, fading dichotomies
  • b) Open Educational Practices and curriculum design
  • c) Tools, technologies, and spaces that enable, support and spread open education
• Pedagogy, reflections and policies for an open future
  • a) Open education research
  • b) Impact of open education initiatives
  • c) Policies & strategies for open education
  • d) Visions of future landscapes

I hope to see you all in Milan in November. Submit your proposal(s) and start packing your bag!

There are still people that talk about xMOOCs and cMOOCs. My response is that the MOOC world has involved and that distinction is so 2012. In the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning I read an interesting article that tries to define a MOOC taxonomy based on literature.

The authors identified 13 different categories, which cover information provided to learners before entering a course. These categories are then compared and combined with classifications from the literature to create a taxonomy centred round eight terms: Massive (e.g. enrolments), Open (e.g. pre-requisites), Online (e.g. Timings), Assessment, Pedagogy (e.g. instructor-led), Quality (e.g. reviews), Delivery (e.g. educators), Subject (e.g. Syllabus).

They not only looked at how the different MOOC providers are categorizing their MOOCs, but also the MOOC agregators, such as ClassCentral. They are even more focused on the learners.

The taxonomy they proposed in the article:

Conclusion

I do agree that we need a more extensive taxonomy for MOOCs, but I also still see characteristics missing in this taxonomy. A couple of comments:

• Openness is more than the listed example fields. Especially the open license is missing for me
• For pedagogy they fall back to the c and x and nowadays the pedagogy of most moocs is much more complex. Often learners can choose I active they engage in the course
• I missing the aspect of teacher presence in the course. Is it a self-paced course with no involvement of the educators or are they actively involved in the discussion, but also giving feedback on assignments.
• Many MOOCs are now part of short learning programmes, such as MicroMasters, PCP of edX and specialisations of Coursera.

Although I think it is excellent that the field works on a MOOC taxonomy, the field is also still in development. This means that any taxonomy will be also behind on the current state. The big question is: is a MOOC taxonomy still relevant, now we see that MOOCs are more and more just regular online courses? Many MOOCs are not massive or open anymore.

Reference
Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Lundqvist, K., Mitchell, R., Warburton, S. and Williams, S. A. (2019) A MOOC taxonomy based on classification schemes of MOOCs. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 22 (1). pp. 85-103. ISSN 1027-5207

Image CC-BY Mathieu Plourde

Last month we celebrated the fifth year anniversary. It was a great event, but also means that staff members move on to new jobs. Currently we have a couple of job openings. This is a great opportunity to join the fabulous team of the Delft Extension School:

• All-round Marketer Online Education: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/53865/all-round-marketer-online-education/
• Educational Data Analyst: https://vacature.beta.tudelft.nl/vacaturesite/permalink/53803/?lang=en
• Video Publishing officer: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/53796/video-publishing-officer/

Deadlines to apply are all this month, so don't wait with writing your application letter!

Today we celebrated the fifth year anniversary of the Delft Extension School. It is a good moment to look back at what we accomplished.

You can look at the numbers as displayed in the graph above, but the impact has been much bigger for the university. As our Vice President Education mentioned at the celebration today, the activities have had a big impact on our campus education. Especially it has been an enabler for blended learning on campus.

When we started the Extesnion School we got some specific assignments:

• be an international frontrunner in open and online education
• create a flexible and international team

Both assignments we accomplished with honour. For the first bullet, I just refer to the MIT report. For the second bullet, let me list the nationalities in our team. We have team members from Italy, Mexico, Israel, Iran, Slovenia, South Africa, Canada, US, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Chili, and Greece. And this week we hired a new learning developer from the UK.

Looking back on these five years it is amazing what we have accomplished. We sometimes forget this, because we see all the things we can do better. I would like to thank the great team that made this possible, not just the support team, but also the amazing teachers that took the extra step to create an online course.

Banner image is CC-BY Delft University of Technology

ICDE published an interesting guide on ethics in learning analytics. The guide is written by Sharon Slade and Alan Tait. The report proposes a number of core issues that are important for the use and development of Learning Analytics in ethics-informed ways:

• Transparency
• Data ownership and control
• Accessibility of data
• Validity and reliability of data
• Institutional responsibility and obligation to act
• Communications
• Cultural values
• Inclusion
• Consent
• Student agency and responsibility

These issued need to be further discussed and adopted to the local context. I think the guide helps to address the ethics issues related to learning analytics. We need to address these to make learning analytics a success within education. Many of the issues we have addressed in the TU Delft Learning Analytics Policy Framework.

Download the guide

The 4TU Applied Mathematics Institute in the Netherlands is organising an interesting conference about mathematics education. The conference will take place on 11th and 12th April 2019 in Utrecht.

The conference will bring together Mathematicians and teachers of Mathematics in Higher Education to explore and discuss new trends and innovations in Mathematics education.

The conference focuses on:

• Learning Analytics (Thursday)
• Digital Testing of Mathematics (Thursday)
• Blended and Online Learning of Mathematics (Thursday)
• Didactics of Mathematics teaching (Friday)
• Programming in Mathematics education (Friday)

Registration
For registration to the conference, please fill in and submit the registration form before March 24.

Registration fee
Euro 25 including two lunches and one dinner.

The Open Education Consortium is actively recruiting nominations for members of its Board of Directors.  We seek passionate educational leaders of high integrity who are committed to improving education worldwide through open educational practices. We welcome nominations from administrators, faculty, Presidents and Directors of educational institutions or other organizations that support the OEC’s mission and activities.

I hereby invite you to nominate candidates for Member of the Board of the Open Education Consortium (OEC).

The Open Education Consortium desires a strong, internationally diverse Board of Directors. Nominees from all regions of the world are welcome. This year, we particularly welcome nominations from Central/South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia/New Zealand.

Responsibilities of Board Members

The Board of Directors is charged with setting the strategic direction of the OEC. Board members make high level decisions concerning the mission, outputs, finances and services of the Consortium.  Board members are expected to act in the best interest of the organization and its members in all deliberations.

The Board particularly seeks nominees with experience in fundraising and sustainability, membership growth and engagement, events and services, and operations including legal & finance.

Primary responsibilities of the Board of Directors include:

• Determine and refine the OEC’s mission and purpose
• Lead strategic planning and monitoring to ensure activities are in support of the OEC’s mission
• Ensure adequate financial resources and retention of assets
• Identify, support and evaluate the OEC’s Executive Director
• Monitor the ethical and legal integrity of the organization
• Orient and support new board members, build board capacity and set board policies
• Promote the OEC and its mission
• Commit to the full board term of two years

To fulfill its charge, the Board will hold four in meetings a year, two of which will be in person and two online. It is important that board members make every attempt to fully participate in all meetings. While substitutions are permitted if necessary, the substitute will not be allowed to vote on the Board member's behalf.

The Board member's institution is expected to cover the cost of the Board member's travel to meetings and time that is given to the OEC.  

Likewise, it is anticipated that Board members will serve as liaisons with various standing committees and work groups, and will represent the Consortium from time to time at various meetings and/or events.

The filing deadline for nominations is 13 February 2019 at 12:00 UCT. To Nominate yourself or one of your colleagues, please fill in the webform.
For questions, please send an email to the OEC Board Nominating Committee: nominating@oeconsortium.org