E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Today we launched the conference website for the Open Education Global Conference 2018 in Delft. The theme of the Open Education Global 2018 Conference is Transforming Education through Open Approaches.

This theme is a result of many discussion within the programme committee (Robert Schuwer is the chair of the committee) and I think it reflects very well the global development how education is transforming. The open approaches are not limited to education, it includes the broader perspective of openness. This aligns with the Year of Open strategy of bringing together all the different kinds of openness, suc as open science, open access, open data, open ict, open education, open research and more.

Call for Proposals

The website includes the Call for Proposals including the conference tracks:

• Open Connections 
  Connecting different worlds of Open, such as open access, open science, open source software; strengthening our reach and increasing impact through collaboration.

• Open Education Research
  Research on practices to mainstream openness in education; evidence of impact, studies of educational transformation using open modalities.  

• Innovation through opening traditional practices
  MOOCs as an accelerator for open & online education, opening teaching practices through open textbooks, openly licensed student work as OER.

• Policies & strategies for Open Education
  Setting priorities and conditions for mainstreaming Open Education, designing effective policies and strategies, connecting open education policies to larger policy movements such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Open Government Partnership.

• Institutionalizing Open Education
  Intellectual property arrangements at schools and universities; reward and recognition systems; institutional conventions; disciplinary norms; types of in-service training for Open Education; impact on hiring practices; challenges and barriers for mainstreaming openness; openness as a tool for community outreach, enhancing leadership in open education.

• Tools & Technologies for Open Education
  Supporting the development and use of tools for OER production, hosting, use and remix, authoring OER, conventions for tagging OER, hosting derivative works, citation conventions for derivative works, standards for remixable formats.

• Open Educational Practices/Open Pedagogy
  New approaches to teaching and learning based on openness, personalization of education, OER-enhanced teaching, facilitating informal learning with open resources, course redesign with a focus on open.

• Connecting Open Education to formal education
  Accelerating adoption of open education, recognition and rewards for open education adoption, alignment of open education values to institutional mission, accreditation of open education, recognition of learning through open means.

• Student perspectives
  Student-led initiatives to advance open education and research, impact of open for students, student perceptions of open education, students as open education leaders.

The deadline for submitting proposal is 23rd of October. I hope to see many great proposals from around the world. Check out the conference website for more information.

Charles Lang, George Siemens, Alyssa Wise, Dragan Gašević have edited an extensive handbook on Learning Analytics. The Handbook of Learning Analytics is designed to meet the needs of a new and growing field. It aims to balance rigor, quality, open access and breadth of appeal and was devised to be an introduction to the current state of research. The Handbook is a snapshot of the field in 2017 and features a range of prominent authors from the learning analytics and educational data mining research communities. 

The book is 356 pages. What is really great is that it is openly licensed, although the ND is quiet restrictive.

Reference

• Charles Lang, George Siemens, Alyssa Wise, Dragan Gašević (ed). The Handbook of Learning Analytics. ISBN: 978-0-9952408-0-3.
  DOI: 10.18608/hla17

At the Creative Commons Summit two weeks ago the book Paul Stacy and Sarah Hinchliff Pearson worked on for two years was released: Made with Creative Commons. It has been interesting journey and a great result. The book is an excellent read on how to make openness core of your business model:

Made With Creative Commons is a book about sharing. It is about sharing textbooks, music, data, art, and more. People, organizations, and businesses all over the world are sharing their work using Creative Commons licenses because they want to encourage the public to reuse their works, to copy them, to modify them. They are Made with Creative Commons.
But if they are giving their work away to the public for free, how do they make money?
This is the question this book sets out to answer. There are 24 in-depth examples of different ways to sustain what you do when you share your work. And there are lessons, about how to make money but also about what sharing really looks like -- why we do it and what it can bring to the economy and the world. Full of practical advice and inspiring stories, Made with Creative Commons is a book that will show you what it really means to share.

Today Paul Stacy presented the research to our Extension School team as part of our Year of Open activities, below are his slides:

Business Model Innovation

We also invited Mark de Reuver. He is associate professor at TU Delft and is the coordinator of the European project ENVISION and of our MOOC Serie on Business Model Innovation. ENVISION is an EU funded program aiming at understanding and supporting business model innovation.

The combination of the presentation of Mark de Reuver and Paul Stacey gave us great insights and inspired our team in current discussion on the business model of the TU Delft Extension School. During the event Mark van Huystee made sketches of the event. They will be published on our Open Sketching blog.

Image Credit: Creative Commons CC BY-SA

After a great tour around South-Afrika, I attended the Open Education Global Conference 2017 in Cape Town. Off course, I have to be there as board member of the Open Education Consortium, but I really enjoy this conference. I attend many open education conferences and this is by far the most global open education conference.  More than 200 participants from 47 countries. In this blog some observations from me.

Open Educational Practices

There were a wide variety of presentations about open educational practices. OEP is the use of Open educational Resources for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process. I counted 15 presentations that mentioning it in the title (Robert made a more in depth analysis). I agree with multiple speakers that OER by itself will not make the difference, you need the pedagogy to make an impact. So these practices are important for the succes of Open Education.

Interesting model that was presented was the continuum model:

Evidence of OER impact

The OER Research Fellows are a group of 44 graduate students and faculty members who are doing research on a variety of OER projects. John Hilton III presented some of the research results. They are 18 months into the project and 3 articles have been published, 12 articles are accepted for publication, 8 articles have been submitted for publication and more is on the way. The publications and a useful toolkit for OER Research can be found on their website.

Bringing the global North and South together

 There was a big presence of the ROER4D project comprising 18 evidence-based OER research studies across the Global South with the aim of improving educational policy, practice, and research in developing countries. There were conference presentations by many of the 18 ROER4D studies as well as a report on the project meta-synthesis by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams:

The presentation of Cable Green to connect OER to the UN Sustainable Goals is a great way to connect the global North and South.

OER-based Degree Pathways

Interesting is the momentum of theOER based degree pathways in the US. Richard Sebastian of the Achieve the Dream organisation gave a good overview. The concept is to create complete pathway of courses converted to use OER instead of traditional textbooks. The mission of Achieving the Dream is to lead and support a national network of community colleges to achieve sustainable institutional transformation through sharing knowledge, innovative solutions and effective practices and policies leading to improved outcomes for all students. 
Already 38 colleges in 13 US states are working on these Z-degrees and saving a lot of money for students.

OEGlobal was great

The conference brought a great number of interesting people that shared their passion for Open Education. The team of University of Cape Town and the staff of the OE Consortium did a great job to organise this conference. They have set the bar high for us next year in Delft. I'm looking forward seeing you all in Delft!

Below some photos of the conference and Cape Town, More photos on my flickr page.

This week we published our online magazine about the Open & Online Education at TU Delft. The magazine gives a great overview of our activities and the impact it has had.

Open Magazine

 Please leave a comment with your feedback on the magazine.

Educause has released an interesting video of the student of the future. In my opinion they give a good overview of developments in the technology and the diversity of our learners. 

Next week it is time for the 5th Open Education Week. Again we are organising some events in Delft. Both events are on Friday 31st of March. In the morning we start with the Delft Data Science Seminar and afterwards is our Open Science Seminar.

Delft Data Science Seminar

TU Delft’s Delft Data Science organises an event regarding Online Education. Massive Open Online Courses are an innovative way to make education available for everyone. But how do we keep the quality high with such a large demand for Online Education? Delft Data Science’s researchers and international speakers will share their new findings in this seminar with other academics, partners and with you.
Some of the speakers are Justin Reich of MIT and Marcus Specht of Welten Institute.

Open Science Seminar - Being Strategic about Open

Open Science concerns openness in the entire cycle of practicing science, increasing access and transparency in both research, education and valorisation, based on the principle of circulating knowledge by sharing, reusing and collaborating. During this Seminar we will share and discuss examples how openness in education and research can support TU Delft's mission to contribute to a sustainable society for the 21st century and challenge you to think about what open education and open research means for you in your daily practice. More info on our website.

Both events are open for TU Delft employees and externals.  There is one registration form for both events.

At the Open Education Global conference I organised an Action Lab on MOOCs. The session is focused on answer the questions of the audience. This time the audience consisted of a newby, a couple of instructional designers, a couple of researchers and some others. This focused the discussion and slides I showed.

Below is the slide deck I used for the session.

Tonight at the gala diner of the OEGlobal Conference the official announcement was made that the 2018 conference will be in Delft. After a fierceful selection process my proposal to host the conference in Delft was selected by the board.

Although it means a lot of work for me and my team, I think it is a great opportunity for the Netherlands and Delft. There are a lot of activities currently happening and this conference in April 2018 can further focus and showcase this to the rest of the world.

The conference will be from 24-26 April 2018 in the TU Delft Conference Centre. All participants can enjoy kingsday on the 27th of April (bring your orange shirt).

City of Delft

Delft has a historic, picturesque city centre with world famous unique selling points such as the famous painter Johannes Vermeer (girl with the pearl), William of Orange and Delft blue pottery. Due to the central location in Randstad, Delft is easily accessible by car, train and public transport. In 40 minutes you are in Delft from Schiphol Airport. Within a hour you can be in the four big cities Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam or Utrecht.

A week ago TU Delft launched their first MicroMaster programme. The topic is about Solar Energy Engineering. This programme is part of the announcement of 16 new MicroMaster programmes on the edX platform.

What is a MicroMaster?

It is a series of MOOCs, which allow learners to specialise in a certain topic and advance their careers or studies. It can be finished with a certificate and may be counted towards a regular master programme after admission. With MicroMasters programs, we are helping to bridge the knowledge gap between higher education and the workplace by offering content and credentials in the most in-demand fields and skills needed for success in today’s rapidly-evolving and tech-driven world. These credit-eligible, career-relevant programs are free to try, and can help advance careers and offer a pathway to an accelerated Master’s program.

Solar Energy Engineering

Our online solar energy MicroMaster programme includes four rigorous courses and a practical project derived from TU Delft’s Master of Science programmes. The workload is around 18 EC (European Credits). It will provide learners with most of the technical knowledge they need – from the physics of photovoltaic solar cells to the design of microgrids. But the MicroMasters programme offers more  than that – it will lead to a valuable MicroMasters credential when finishing all courses and the project successfully. For prospective students who apply and get admitted to specific TU Delft Master of Science programmes, it will allow them to use the MicroMasters credential to request an exemption for the equivalent solar courses (depending on their Individual Exam Programme).

Demand from industry

The renewable energy market develops rapidly. It is our university’s mission to contribute to solving tomorrow’s problems and that includes supporting the transition to renewable energy through research and education. Providing education to professionals in the solar energy sector is one way of doing that. In line with our approach to lifelong learning, we hope to close the knowledge gap for engineers and other professionals who desire to develop their expertise with this MicroMaster Programme on solar energy. 

In the first week already more than 4,000 learners enrolled in the first course that starts on April 24th.