E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

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

Babson Research group published an interesting report on the use of educational resources in US Higher education.

The study shows multiple factors are in place to support rapid future increases in awareness and use of OER:

• Faculty and department chairpersons believe that the high cost of course material has a negative impact on student access.
• The 5Rs that underpin OER (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute) are a perfect match to the extensive use of 'revise' and 'remix' that faculty are already practicing.
• Faculty members express considerable resentment towards commercial publishers over price and unnecessarily frequent updates, among other issues.
• Faculty report a growing acceptance (or even preference) for digital materials.
• The 'open' a spect of OER resonates with faculty; they see it as an excellent match to academic principles

Key findings from the report:

• Faculty awareness of OER has increased every year, with 46 percent of faculty now aware of open educational resources, up from 34 percent three years ago.
• For the first time, more faculty express a preference for digital material over print in the classroom.
• 61 percent of a ll faculty, 71 percent of those teaching large enrollment introductory courses, and 73 percent of department chairpersons, "Strongly Agree" or "Agree" that "the cost of course materials is a serious problem for my students."
• Department chairpersons overwhelmingly believe that making textbooks less expensive for students would be the most important improvement to course materials.
• Less than one -in-five faculty members are aware of any departmental-, institution-, or system -level initiative to deal with the cost of course materials.
• Faculty are acting independently to control costs by supporting used textbooks and rental programs, placing copies on reserve, and selecting material s based on cost.
• Overall faculty satisfaction with required textbooks is high, with over 80 percent either "Extremely Satisfied" or "Moderately Satisfied." That said, faculty express considerable resentment about price, unnecessary frequent updates, and other issues with commercial textbooks.
• Faculty often make changes to their textbooks, presenting material in a different order (70 percent), skipping sections (68 percent), replacing content with their own (45 percent), replacing with content from others (41 percent), correcting errors (21 percent), or revising textbook material (20 percent).

It is really good to see the growing awareness of OER in the US.

I would be interested to see how these number relate to Dutch higher education.

TU Delft

The TU Delft strategic framework states that we want to replace commercial textbooks by open resources in all BSc programmes as much as possible. Last month we released the first 4 open textbooks. The are available on textbooks.open.tudelft.nl.

Full Report PDF: Freeing the Textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018 (pdf)

Image design by Mark Favazza. CC-BY-NC-SA Babson Survey Research Group

For the EMBED project we like to validate a framework for blended education and learning. Therefor we want to ask the opinion of experts in the field of blended education and learning. This blogpost describes the research design and explains how you can participate in this research.

Introduction: The EMBED project

The European Maturity model for Blended EDucation (EMBED) is a strategic partnership between seven1 institutes of higher education in Europe. EMBED will create a reference model for developing and implementing blended learning, embracing all levels of an institution: the design of the blended course (micro level), organisational aspects such as staff support and training (meso level), and institutional leadership, developing policies and strategies making the institution continuously innovative (macro level). The maturity model is a model with criteria and instruments to assess the degree of maturity of blended learning and innovation.

This research

The aim of this research is to validate the maturity framework for blended education. We developed a draft maturity framework, based on an extensive literature research and dozens of interviews. The draft maturity framework consists of two levels; the micro-level (course and curriculum level) and the meso level (institution level). For each level we have identified dimensions to describe the level and indicators to measure the maturity. The next step is to validate the draft maturity framework with experts in blended learning (that would be you).
This validation will be done using a Delphi research. In a Delphi research we ask experts in the field of blended education their opinion about the draft framework. This will be done in two rounds. We will use the input from round 1 to adjust the framework for round 2.

Round 1 (will take place between 21 November 2018 and 12 December 2018)
In the first round you will validate the dimensions of the draft framework. We defined 7 dimensions on micro-level and 9 dimensions on meso-level. We’re asking if you agree with the dimensions and also to give reasoning why you agree, or not. This will be done using an online questionnaire, which will take about 30 till 60 minutes to complete. The questionnaire will be available from 21 November till 12 December.
After Round 1 we will refine the framework based on the input of the participants.

Round 2 (Will take place between 16 January 2019 and 6 February 2019)
In the second round we will present the revised list of dimensions. First we will ask you to rank the dimensions in order of importance. After the ranking we will present the indicators for maturity per dimension. We will ask you to what extent you agree with the indicators and why. In this round we will also use an online questionnaire and it will take about 60 minutes. The questionnaire will be available from 16 January 2019 till 6 Februari 2019.

What do we ask of you?

We ask the following of the participants in this research:

• You have any experience in the field of blended education, learning or teaching. This can be in a role as director, manager, teacher, educational advisor or something else.
• You can spend 60 minutes per round, to fill in the online questionnaire. Round 1 will be from 21 November 2018 till 12 December 2018. Round 2 will be from 16 January 2019 till 6 February 2019.

How can you participate?

If you like to participate with the research for the EMBED project, please enrol using this link:
https://delftxtudelft.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3fPI86ZZiG2D5kx

At the annual EADTU conference Open, Online and Flexible Higher Education Conference at Aarhus University (Denmark) I was also invited to present about the European project we are currently participating in. The Erasmus+-funded project focuses on developing a European Maturity Model for Blended Education (EMBED).

 My keynote focused on the three levels of blended education that our framework will connecting.

Defining the blend

In the project we focus on the blend between online and face-to-face activities. We use these definitions:

• Blended Learning
  learning as a result of a deliberate, integrated combination of online and face-to-face learning activities.
  
  
• Blended Teaching
  designing and facilitating blended learning activities.
  
  
• Blended Education
  the formal context of BL that is determined by policies and conditions with regard to the organization and support of blended learning.

Three levels

Within the project we identified three levels:

• Micro
  blended learning and teaching of a course or programme. Primary actors are the students and teachers.
• Meso
  This is the context of the institute for blended education. Is there a policy for blended learning? Is there support available for teachers? Are classrooms setup suitable for blended learning?
  The primary actors are the leadership of the institute and support staff to make blended teaching and learning possible
• Macro
  the macro level is outside the institute, such as governmental policies, accreditation organisations. Interesting societal discussion on more classtime for students can influence the maturity of blended learning on the micro level.

In the feedback I received, it is especially the MESO level that is a eye-opener for many people. It is important that all three levels align to reach a level of maturity in blended education.

 Below the slides of my keynote, the session was not recorded.