E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

As sustainable member (and board member) of the Open Education Consortium we feel obliged to actively participate in the Open Education Week (Noblesse oblige). Here you find the overview of the activities we are organising on our campus in Delft. There will be many more activities during the week by all the organisations that are participating.

Monday, March 9th: Research Seminar: Data Science

During the research seminar we will address topics like learning analytics, gamification and assessment. Many researchers from TU Delft and other universities will share their visions on research in Open & Online Education.
Time: 9:00 – 13:00 | More info

Monday March 9th: Education Seminar: Open Education

During the education seminar both our E-dean of Open & Online Education, one of the board members of the Open Education Consortium and lecturers of TU Delft and other HE institutions will shed their light on sharing and reusing Educational resources and the impact of Online education on campus.
Time: 14:00 – 17:00 | More info

Tuesday, March 10th, Workshop: Develop an 'Open' Course design

Learn about what open educational practices are and how you can design your course around reusing Open Education(al resources).

Time: 14:00 – 17:00 | More info

Wednesday, March 11th: Visit the New Media Centre

Sign up for a tour to the New Media Centre, catch a glimpse of the recording studios, learn how to prepare for recording learning videoclips (short workshop) and find out everything you want to know about the services the New Media Centre can provide.
Time: 14:00 - 15:30 Group 1 (max. 12 participants), 15:30 - 17:00 Group 2 (max. 12 participants) | More info

Thursday, March 12th: A Future for Open Education?

Join the debate and discuss the current developments and future directions of TU Delft Open & Online Education with Anka Mulder, Vice president Education & Operations TU Delft.
Time: 14:00 - 15:00 / More info

There is one registration form to register for these events.

A couple of researchers of MIT looked at the surveys of 11 MITx courses on edx in the spring of 2014. They found that one in four (28.0 percent) respondents identified as past or present teachers. Of the survey respondents, nearly one in 10 (8.7 percent) identified as current teachers. Although they represent only 4.5 percent of the nearly 250,000 enrollees, responding teachers generated 22.4 percent of all discussion forum comments. One in 12 of the total comments were made by current teachers, and one in 16 were from teachers with experience teaching the subject of the MITx course in which they enrolled:

Teachers are heavily enrolled and engaged in MITx courses on edX, and evidence indicates that they play a substantial role in discussion forums. Measuring the current impact of teachers on other participants is an important area for future research, and one that might help develop learning frameworks that better partner teachers with course staff and other participants. Teachers' motivations in taking a MOOC will play a key role, whether they are engaging in life-long learning, pursuing life-long instruction, or searching for new pedagogy and peer support. Regarding pedagogy and peer support, adoption of new teaching practices is a major challenge facing teachers and school districts in the United States. MOOCs targeting the needs of teachers and providing mechanisms to become personal online courses can potentially provide a space for educators to overcome adoption barriers and a sustainable foundation for MOOCs' continued existence.

Teacher enrollment clearly represents an unrecognized, meaningful audience for MOOC providers. Recent reports have largely focused on demographics within MOOCs,even leading to criticism that the typical participant is older and holds an advanced degree.²⁹ Recognizing the significance of large teacher enrollments in MOOCs may shift perspectives toward course design and MOOC platform capabilities more attuned to expert participants. We believe teacher participants in MOOCS are a resource to respect and value, with the potential of further enriching the MOOC experience for participants.

Read the full article on the Educause website.

Today, New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) released  the NMC Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition. This edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. They’ve also released this video summary:

This image shows the 6 key trends, 6 challenges and 6 technologies.

 

Download report

In exactly 4 weeks the 2015 edition of the Open Education Week will start. Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.

Open Education Week is coordinated by the The Open Education Consortium, an association of hundreds of institutions and organizations around the world that are committed to the ideals of open education.  Universities, colleges, schools and organizations from all over the world have come together to showcase what they’re doing to make education more open, free, and available to everyone.

Ways to Contribute

There are many ways you can contribute to Open Education Week: upload an informational or inspirational video, host an event in your community, send us links to resources about open education, hold a webinar, and promote open education week in your social media networks. To contribute a video or resource, or to have your event or webinar featured on the Open Education Week Events calendar, please use the submission form at www.openeducationweek.org.  To get the website ready, we need your submissions by 10 February 2015. You are welcome to submit multiple resources or events.  Please fill out one form for each contribution.

Videos

The Open Education Week website will feature short videos (2-5 minutes in length) showcasing open education projects, featuring short messages about open education, or providing how-to tutorials on aspects of open education. A third category is being added this year for longer, inspirational talks, panels or interviews on open education. We welcome videos that are specially made for Open Education Week, as well as those already available that fit the following categories.

Go to openeducationweek.org for more information to contribute.

The Higher Education Academy in the UK has written an interesting report on MOOCs. This is their third report on MOOCs within a year.This report is about a study of ten people who completed one of the University of Southampton’s first two such courses during 2014. Its goal is to better understand their motivations for studying in this way , and the learning opportunities and problems they encountered. Findings were discussed with five academics involved in leading, developing and teaching on the MOOCs in order to explore issues from both perspectives. Given the small - scale nature of the project no specific recommendations are made as a result of it. Instead, the final paragraphs offer reflections from the project team about how the research is likely to impact their own practice in the future, and sugge stions about how learners might make the most of the opportunities MOOCs offer.

Interesting conclusion is that the 'completer' interviewees view moocs not as poorer quality version of similar online courses. They experienced a MOOC as something new, exciting and completely unique in their educational experiences.

 Download report

Ellen Brandenberger is a Master of Education Candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Technology, Innovation, and Education program. She has done an interesting research on the course developments of MOOCs:

Recently, with the help of folks at HarvardX, and as a project course on MOOCs taught by Adjunct Lecturer on Education Justin Reich, I set out to examine the course development role across institutions in the edX Consortia to determine if it was uniform across institutions, or a label with little meaning or standard definition.

To do so, I conducted interviews of individuals in course development roles at four different higher education institutions that develop courses for the edX platform. These eight individuals sat down with me for 1-2 hours each, and I used semi-structured interviews to explore their roles, responsibilities, and qualifications.

In three blog posts on Inside Higher Ed she has writen 3 blog posts about this research:

• Part 1: The Emergence of a Role
• The Evolution of a Role: Taking the online, offline
• Part 3: Course Development and MOOCs

Today I read about a new initiative of Clive Shepherd about Blended Learning. On campuses around the world there is a lot of attention going to blended learning. Expectations are that it will be the new standard for campus education (replacing the traditional instructor-led classroom teaching).

According to Clive they have developed a whole new way of designing learning interventions. It’s called More Than Blended Learning (>BL):

Blended solutions combine contrasting learning methods and media in order to maximise effectiveness and efficiency. The More Than approach goes a step further to ensure the blend results in application to real-world tasks and the learner is supported along the whole length of their learning journey.

Reading through the PDF and their website it looks like an interesting approach that can be useful for many educators.

 

Although a lot of attention is going to MOOC, our OCW website is still very alive and kicking. In this blog I will give you a update of our activities.

Courses

In 2014 we published 27 new courses. In total we have 150 courses on ocw.tudelft.nl. That is 4 more than last year. Important part of this is that we publish the course materials of our MOOCs on OCW-website. Below is an graph to show the grow of courses since we started.

The top 5 of most visited courses in 2014 were:

1. Analog Integrated Circuit Design
2. information Literacy I
3. Delft Design Guide
4. Bio Inspired Design
5. Petroleum Geology

Visitors

The number of visitors is still growing. In the last quarter we had on average 1280 visitors per day. 30% of the visitors are from the Netherlands, the rest is from abroad. Since the launch of the website in October 2007 we had now more than a million visits to the website.

The visits cam from all over the world (221 countries according to Google Analytics). Most visitors, besides the Netherlands, came from:

1. US (10%)
2. India (7%)
3. Belgium (4%)
4. UK (4%)
5. Germany (4%)

Although the absolute number of visitors from the Netherlands increased, the percentage dropped from 43% to 30%. So we got a lot more visitors from abroad. There was a big increase from visitors from the US and India. I think this is related to our MOOCs, because that are the top countries for our mooc students.

Award

This year we received the OCW Consortium Award for oustanding website at the Global Conference in Ljubljana.

Plans for 2015

In 2015 we will make some adjustments to the website. Our planning is to publish 30 new courses.

In September 2013 Arno Smets run the Solar Energy MOOC for the first time. This academic year, he did a rerun of the mooc and at the same time also changed the on-campus course to a flipped classroom. Preliminary analyses showing the positive impact on student performance.

In this report, the first results on the implementation of the flipped classroom concept in the on-campus course ET3034 ‘Solar Energy’ 2014 show an increased efficiency of the performance of the students. The on-campus students spend their time more efficiently, are able to study and master more material and accomplish better grades. Overall higher passing rates are achieved in reference to teaching in classical classroom approach over the period 2010-2013. The majority of the students express that they prefer the flipped classroom approach above conventional teaching methods.

Download report

Last week David Wiley published An Open Education Reader, a collection of readings on open education with commentary created by students in his graduate course Introduction to Open Education taught at Brigham Young University, Fall 2014.

This group of readings was compiled by David Wiley for IPT 515R, Introduction to Open Education, taught at Brigham Young University in Fall 2014. The students in the course, who are listed as contributing authors below, wrote the summaries and discussion questions for each reading included in the book.

This is by no means a complete or final version of this book. We’re sharing it with the community now in the spirit of “release early, release often,” trusting that the community will help correct faults rather than criticize errors. Please leave suggestions for improvement in the comments at the bottom of individual pages, or email them to David.

I really like the concept and appreciate the work of David and his students in the field of open education.