E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Curt Bonk heeft een interessante blog over verschillende type MOOCs. Met de MOOCs die er nu zijn, zie je verschillende doelen, doelgroepen en achterliggende redenen om dit te doen. Hij (samen met Jay Cross) onderscheidt hier verschillende types. Wat hier nog mist is het verdienmodel van een MOOC.

The last two weeks multiple articles were published about what MOOCs are and what they are not. Here an overview of some of the interesting reads:

• Debbie Morrisson - MOOC Mythbuster – What MOOCs are and what they aren’t
  there’s been much speculation, misconceptions, exaggerations and misinformation. It’s time to clear the air – in this post Debbie defines what MOOCs are and are not, what the skeptics are saying, and she concludes the post with an attempt to clarify the differences (and similarities), between MOOCs, online courses for credit, and traditional face-to-face courses.
  
  
• Audrey Watters - The Language of MOOCs
  Lately when I write about MOOCs , I feel the need to attach a bunch of adjectives to clarify what I mean by the term: the Stanford-model MOOC. New MOOCs. The OG MOOC. The ur-MOOC. The MOOCs-come-lately. VC MOOCs. Tech MOOCs. Mother of all MOOCs. Change11. DS106.
  
  
• George Siemens - What is the theory that underpins our moocs?
  The MOOCs that we’ve done are defined by a participative pedagogical model. They are unique and different from the emerging elite university MOOC model. There are many points of overlap, obviously, as both our MOOCs and the Coursera/EDx MOOCs taken advantage of distributed networks to reflect changing educational practice.
  
  
• David Wiley - On the Term “MOOC”
  I’ve always passionately hated the MOOC acronym, mostly because of one of the words behind it. There was never anything massive about what we were doing until the Stanford AI class came along. Nothing that has come out of the original group (Wiley, Couros, Downes, Siemens, Cormier, et al.) has approached anything justifying the term “massive.”
  
  
• Oliver Dreon - Ivory towers, fear the MOOC!
  Technology folk love their acronyms.  You have RAM and ROM, DVDs and HD.  You can send a PDF or download a BMP.  Or maybe you want to use HTML to create a website or use a VGA cable to connect a monitor.  But MOOC?  That is probably a new one for most people.  Whether you’re familiar with the term or not, if you work in education, you’ll definitely be affected by the emergence of MOOCs, if not today then someday soon.
  
  
• The Ed Techie - MOOCs Inc
  What we have been witnessing is the mainstreaming of the original MOOC concept.

There are also some interesting posts about experiences people had with MOOcs:

• Sukaina Walji - MOOCing around: reflections on Curt Bonk's MOOC
  There's a lot being written about MOOCs (massively open online courses) at the moment and what they might mean for Higher education or education in general going into the future.
• Chad Black - Attrition and the year of the MOOC
  Like tens of thousands of others, I signed up to take a few of the online course offerings made available through udacity and coursera. And, like tens of thousands of others, I completed nary a one of them.

Vorig week verscheen er een artikel in The Chronicle over afkijken in de online wereld. In het artikel wordt beschreven hoe studenten allemaal een goed cijfer halen bij een online open boek test. Volgens de anonieme professor is dit de "gamification of education, and students are winning".

Ook de fraude die wordt gepleegd met ghost writters wordt besproken. John Fontaine van Blackboard wordt hierin ook genoemd. Volgens hem zouden plagiaatdetectiesystemen, zoals Blackboard's SafeAssign, best zulke ghost writers kunnen detecteren:

"I've been working on classifiers that take documents and score them and build what I call a document fingerprint." The system could establish a document fingerprint for each student when they turn in their first assignments, and notice if future papers differ in style in suspicious ways.

Dit is gebaseerd op dat elke schrijver zijn eigen woordenschat heeft en daarin bepaalde voorkeuren heeft.

Als reactie hierop heeft John Fontaine op zijn eigen blog een artikel geschreven hoe je als docent het afkijken kan verminderen:

1. Cultuur en Design van de course
   Door meer constructivistische activiteiten, zoals bloggen, wiki schrijven en groepsopdrachten, te gebruiken, richt je meer op positieve vorm van leren:
   "Foster a culture that rewards contributing to the corpus of knowledge within the class.  If students are recognized for individual contributions, they will pressure their peers to do their own work rather than copy each other. "
   
   
2. Vragenbank en willekeurige blokken
   Met de huidige toetssystemen is het uitstekend mogelijk om elke student een eigen unieke toets te geven. Je moet hier uitgaan van een grote vragenbank waar willekeur vragen uitgehaald worden.
   
   
3. Willekeurige vragenvolgorde, antwoordvolgorde en steeds maar 1 vraag tonen
   Dit beperkt de mogelijkheid om af te kijken voor de student als ze in één computerzaal zitten.
   
   
4. Verander feedback opties
   Hoewel veel studenten het prettiger vinden om na een vraag meteen feedback te geven, biedt dit ook meer mogelijkheden om te spieken. Je kan er bij belangrijke examens dus beter aan doen om de feedback pas helemaal aan het eind te geven, eventueel kan je ook nog beperken hoe lang de feedback beschikbaar is voor studenten.
   
   
5. "Negative marking"
   Dit beperkt mogelijkheid voor studenten om te gokken. Elk fout antwoord geeft levert negatieve punten op. Dit is een nieuwe functionaliteit in de recente Blackboard-versie, weet niet of dit nu goed werkt.
   
   
6. Berekenvragen
   Vragen die werken op basis van een bepaalde formule geeft je de mogelijkheid om elke student met andere waarden voor de variabelen te laten werken. Afkijken heeft dan geen zin meer.
   
   
7. Toestaan van meerdere pogingen
   Doordat een student een toets meerdere keren kan doen en het belang hiervan te beperken, geef  je de student de mogelijkheid om te leren van zijn fouten en daarmee steeds beter te scoren: "By lowering the stakes of the individual quiz attempt the student is rewarded for learning rather than punished for failing. "
   
   
8. Denk als een videospelletjesontwerper
   In video games blijft de speler het keer op keer proberen om een hoger level te bereiken. In de goede spelletjes is het beheersen van het level de uitdaging en niet om het volgende level te bereiken. Zie ook Punished By Rewards.
   
   

The OERtest project is organising a workshop about how to give credit for learning with Open Educational Resources. The workshop is during the EDEN conference in Portugal, but you can also joining the workshop online:

Join us for the workshop 8th June 17:30-19:00 CET (16:30-18:00 local time, Porto) at the EDEN annual conference in Porto!

The workshop introduces scenarios for the accreditation of learning acquired through Open Education Resources (OERs), each with different degrees of ‘unbundling’ course design, provision and assessment between different institutions and building on concepts such as “Erasmus”, “Summer School” and “Open Market”.

Interesting are the six scenarios they developed for this workshop (click the image for a large size):

You can register for the online workshop via their website.

Afgelopen donderdag was ik uitgenodigd om een presentatie te verzorgen op het eerste Nationale Congres Onderwijs en Social Media. Het congres vond plaats bij de Hogeschool Inholland in Diemen-zuid (liedje :-) ).

From 20th to 22nd of June UNESCO is organising a World Congress on Open Education Resources.

The goal of the 2012 World OER Congress is to invite Governments to view and discuss the merits of open educational resources and to adopt a Declaration that calls on Governments to support the sustainable development and dynamic use of OERs.

In preparation of the conference they are working on an Paris Declaration on OER. Version 7 is now available for review. The draft declaration calls governments to:

• Foster awareness and use of OER
• Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies
• Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER
• Promote and adopt legal frameworks for open licensing
• Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials
• Foster strategic alliances for OER
• Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts
• Encourage research on OER
• Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER
• Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds

During the conference there is also a parallel programme:

To provide an opportunity to civil society organizations, academia, and individual experts to present on their OER initiatives, UNESCO is organizing a parallel Open Seminar & Exhibition from Thursday 21 – Friday 22 June.

I will be present there to promote OpenCourseWare in general and our OpenCourseWare in Europe in specific.

Yesterday Fast Company announced their list of the 100 most creative people in business for 2012. The President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Secretary General of TU Delft Anka Mulder is listed 19 on the list.

Fast Company is a US magazine that emphasizes change in business, and focuses on leadership, technology and social dimensions of business.  Fast Company has a strong readership and is regarded as the voice of innovation in business in the US.

We are very proud of her listing. It will certainly help to to get more attention to OpenCourseWare, the Consortium and hopefully also TU Delft's OpenCourseWare website.

Interesting to see is that we get a lot more international attention for Anka as president of the consortium than in the Dutch media.
The last couple of months there are 2 articles in New York Times/International Herald Tribune (#1, #2), article in Times Higher Education, and an article in the Guardian.

Na het succesvolle optreden van TU Delft-alumnus Walter Lewin vorig jaar heeft het tv-programma De Wereld Draait Door hem weer teruggevraagd en dat hebben ze geweten. Hij heeft de uitzending mooi op zijn kop gezet. Hieronder het gesprek en een tweede proef hij na de uitzending nog heeft gedaan.

Walter is nu ook gevraagd om een college te geven in de DWDD University-serie. Het is nog niet bekend wanneer dit gaat plaatsvinden.

Ik vind het prachtig om te zien hoe Walter de boel op stelten kan zetten. Hij heeft geen haast in tegenstelling tot DWDD, dus loopt het allemaal uit. Matthijs had er duidelijk moeite mee.

Due to the introduction of edX and the start of the MOOC of Coursesites quiet a lot of interesting articles have appeared about MOOCs this last week. Here is a selection:

• Doug Holton - What’s the “problem” with MOOCs?
  This article is about improving MOOCs with problem based learning. MOOLE = Open Education + Problem-based learning.
  
  
• Steve Carson and Philipp Schmidt - The Massive Open Online Professor
  this article is about the role of the professor in a MOOC, especially the really large scale classes with more than a couple of thousand students.
  
  
• Bon Steward - the problem with EdX: a MOOC by any other name?
  this brand-new Mother of All MOOCs is, in the end, likely to do as much preserving of the traditional structures of education – especially in terms of learning – than it is to disrupt them.
  
  
• Ignatia - Selecting meaningful #socialmedia tools for a #MOOC or #PLN
  A big part of setting up an open, online course (e.g. MOOC) is the selection of meaning social media tools. This blog gives a nice overview.
  
  
• Jonathan Rees - What’s the difference between a MOOC and the University of Phoenix?
  Is it “branding” or “not much at all”?
  
  
• Fred Haas - Thoughts on the Curtis Bonk MOOC and Learning Management Systems
  Reflections on Curtis Bonk's MOOC.
  
  
• Sherman Dorn - HypeX: What edX can and can’t do
  Three cases in which the MOOC model will work according to Sherman

The announcement from MIT and Harvard caused quiet some stir around the globe. It even was mentioned in the Dutch media (normally they are not interested in Open Education). A couple of observations and questions I have about this initiative:

• What's New?
  They made it a big announcement, but if I look at it, the only difference is that they spend a lot of money on it. So what is the fuss about?
  
  
• Platform
  Why do all those Open Education initiative (Stanford, MIT) develop their own platform? Now we have Udacity, Coursera and EdX. The first two provide open education, but are not open-source platforms. EdX certainly is open-source. But there are already a couple of platforms that are used around campuses, which are suitable for Open Education. The Open University UK uses Moodle, Blackboard is doing a MOOC on their Coursesites platform (which is a standard Blackboard Learn with some additional building blocks) and there are more platforms.
  
  
• Sustainability
  MIT and Harvard are both investing $ 30 mln. That is enormous amount of money. It puts Harvard recent announcement about the costs of journals in other perspective. I personally think that with that amount of money you never can get it sustainable. Especially because it get financially self-supporting in a couple of years. It would be much more impressive if they could do this for less then $ 1 mln.
  
  
• Connect online and offline learning
  I'm really interested in the research they are going to do within the project: “research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online. The edX platform will enable the study of which teaching methods and tools are most successful. The findings of this research will be used to inform how faculty use technology in their teaching, which will enhance the experience for students on campus and for the millions expected to take advantage of these new online offerings.”
  
  
• Certification
  In the FAQ they write: "As determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard, online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects could earn a certificate of completion, but such certificates would not be issued under the name Harvard or MIT." What does this mean exactly? You will get a certificate, but it is not issued from MIT or Harvard? Is this worth anything?
  
  
• Connect the dots
  I like the concept they announced to connect residential education with OpenCourseWare and Open Education. This is something that is interesting for a lot of brick-and-mortar universities.
  
  
• What do their own students think about it?
  I would be interested to hear what the students of MIT and Harvard think about it. The big question is, what could they have done with 30 mln to improve residential education? In this regard it is interesting to read this weeks posts in The Chronicle.

So, I like the initiative and really appreciate the steps Harvard and MIT are making. But I'm not sure if this is as disruptive as we would like it to be.