E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The first keynote of the OpenEd Conference this year was supposed to be delivered by Daphne Koller of Coursera. Because some reason I don't know, we ended up with the other founder of Coursera Andrew Ng via a skype connection. He did a presentation based on the standard slide deck many of us have heard before. Anya Kamenetz did a very good job in writing a report of the keynote. You should definitely check it out.

For me the most important part was that Coursera is not interested in Open Education. In his answer to a question of UNESCO chair Rory McGreal he made it sound that Coursera owns the content and not the universities.

I'm interested to hear what public universities will say about this. Within the Open Education family we have always said that publicly funded education/research should be available to the public. Coursera thinks differently about this.

I'm very glad that my university has decided to join EdX and not Coursera. Let's see what the Dutch Universities of Leiden, Amsterdam and Eindhoven have to say about this next week at the Onderwijsdagen.

At the OpenEd Conference Kathi Fletcher presented a new open-source editor for creating textbooks that are immediately available on the web, in epub format and pdf. This project is done with the OERPUB project.

With the development they kept as close to their principles as possible:

• as much like word/gdocs as possible
• support attribution
• born accessible (Images, tables, mathematics)
• Mathematics editing support
• drag and drop examples, exercises, notes
• Support collaboration

The presentation was really good and it certainly has attracted my attention. Let see if we can start a project at TU Delft with it.

More information in her slides:

The 10th annual OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference will be held in Europe. From April 23-25, 2014 Ljubljana in Slovenia is place to be.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium and the Knowledge for All Foundation are jointly organizing the event whose special theme is Open Education for a Multicultural World.

The 2014 conference will be organized around four tracks:

• Research and Technology. In this track, we expect to explore new technologies allowing scaling and sharing of Open Educational Resources in a faster or more economical way, to index the multimodal and multilingual material, or to navigate and remix available material. Researchers and developers are encouraged to present on-going research as well as running prototypes.
• Open Educational Policies in which policy issues and their impact on open educational practice will be discussed. Licensing issues, alternative business models, cooperative efforts and governmental funding can all be discussed in this track. The focus of such sessions should be on lessons learned rather than a recounting of steps taken.
• Pedagogical Impact will allow users to present novel uses of Open Educational Resources and their impact on education. We welcome analysis of the impact of Open Educational Resources on the learning process itself, as well as deployment of OERs in MOOCs, flipped classrooms, hybrid educational approaches and online education.
• Finally, a project dissemination track will allow actors (teams, projects, companies) currently involved in open education projects in Europe to present the results of their work.

The call for papers is out and you have until December 1st to submit a paper.

The conference will also be the place where we will officially launch the European branch of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Phil Hill has written an interesting post about student patterns in MOOCs. I have written about this earlier this year. But Phil continued with this research and it is getting more interesting. Below the main figure:

He identified 5 different types of users. Earlier he used 4 types:

1. ‘No-Shows’: appear to be the largest group of those registering for an open-enrollment MOOC, where people register but never login to the course while it is active.
2. ‘Completing’: learners who completed the majority of the assessments offered in the class. Though these participants varied in how well they performed on the assessment, they all at least attempted the assignments. This engagement pattern is most similar to a student in a traditional class. ‘Passive’ participants are students who might watch videos, take quizzes, read discuss forums, but generally do not engage with the assignments and post in discussion forums. ‘Active’ participants are the students who participate in the majority of assignments and post in discussion forums.
3. ‘Auditing’: learners who did assessments infrequently if at all and engaged instead by watching video lectures. Students in this cluster followed the course for the majority of its duration. No students in this cluster obtained course credit.
4. ‘Disengaging’: learners who did assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement (their engagement patterns look like Completing at the beginning of the course but then the student either disappears from the course entirely or sparsely watches video lectures). The moments at which the learners disengage differ, but it is generally in the first third of the class. A subcategory includes ‘Drop Outs’ who cease all course activity.
5. ‘Sampling’: learners who watched video lectures for only one or two assessment periods (generally learners in this category watch just a single video). Though many learners “sample” at the beginning of the course, there are many others that briefly explore the material when the class is already fully under way.

The registration has started for two new DelftX courses that start in March and April of 2014.

Introduction to Aeronautical Engineering

The first course is Introduction to Aeronautical Engineering:

Discover the fascinating world of aviation by investigating aeronautics, with a closer look at aerodynamics and flight mechanics.

The introduction video gives a good impression about the course:

Next Generation Infrastructures - part 1

The second course is Next Generation Infrastructures:

Explore the complexity and challenges of infrastructure systems (Transport, Energy, IT/Telecom and Water) in the 21st century.

This course is part one. In this course we will explore the challenges of infrastructure design, management and governance for the future. In September part 2 will start. There we will focus more on each infrastructure specifically.

Both courses have already started with the development and certainly will be very interesting for a large audience. So register today at EdX.org.

This summer Philip guo, an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, spend time at EdX as visiting research scientist.

In his research he looked at video usage, obtained from analyses of a few edX math and science courses. According to his findings the optimal video length is 6 minutes or shorter.

If you look at the classroom we all know that the attention span of a student is not 45 minutes, but what the exact attention span is, is not clear. Some say it is variable, others say it is 10-15 minutes.

The general rule is shorter is better as shown in this blog post.

William G. Bowen has written an interesting article about online learning in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 48, no. 5 (September/October 2013). William G. Bowen is President Emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, President Emeritus of Princeton University, and Founding Chairman of Ithaka/JSTOR. He is also the author of the book Higher Education in the Digital Age:

To realize the potential and promise of online learning (and MOOCs), colleges and universities must be aware of the pitfalls while taking full advantage of the wonderful, if problematic, opportunities provided by ingenuity and technological prowess.

In his article he discusses 8 propositions:

1. We need to distinguish among target populations.
2. Different pedagogies are right for different disciplines.
3. A limited degree of "local" customization of online courses is important and should be facilitated.
4. It is critically important that we assemble more real evidence, from more rigorous research, concerning the learning outcomes associated with online offerings.
5. We must focus self-consciously, and relentlessly, on controlling educational costs.
6. System-wide thinking is required; many of the most challenging questions for our educational system cannot be addressed on a single-campus basis.
7. New thinking is needed on faculty roles and on optimal organizational and decision-making mechanisms.
8. Stratification worries deserve much more attention than they receive.

I share his opinion he makes in the final note of the article:

I am optimistic that the world at large will be a far better place because of online learning—and because of MOOCs. But for that to happen, we need to be able to take full advantage of the wonderful, if problematic, opportunities provided by ingenuity and technological prowess. And we must include in our calculations the needs of the less privileged. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves where all of this is heading and what the real consequences will be—not just for the privileged but for society writ large.

Via: Wilfred Rubens

In 2012 heeft de TU Delft mee gedaan aan grassrootsprojecten als onderdeel van de Innovatieregeling Learning Analytics 2012. De evaluatie van deze projecten is nu beschikbaar als het artikel: ‘Learning analytics in het hoger onderwijs: mogelijkheden en aandachtspunten’.

Wat is learning analytics?

Onder learning analytics vallen alle analyses en onderzoeken die zich bezighouden met “het meten, verzamelen, analyseren en rapporteren van data van studenten en hun omgeving met als doel het leren en de leeromgeving te begrijpen en te optimaliseren” (Siemens, 2011). In het onderwijs worden enorme hoeveelheden data gegenereerd die afkomstig zijn van studenten en docenten. De analyse van deze gegevens kan hogescholen en universiteiten onder meer inzicht verschaffen in: • het studiegedrag van studenten• de kwaliteit van het gebruikte onderwijsmateriaal• het gebruik van de digitale leer- en werkomgeving• de kwaliteit van toetsitems• de studievoortgangMet deze kennis kunnen instellingen interventies plegen om het onderwijs te verbeteren.

Aanbevelingen

De aanbevelingen uit het rapport zijn:

• Werk samen en bundel expertise
• Onderzoek de juridische en ethische aspecten
• Bied een overzicht van tools en good practices
• Zet learning analytics in voor feedback

An interesting blogpost of Edutechnica. Based on open data they created a dataset of all universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia including their enrollment numbers, geographical coordinates, and URLs. That was not all, they went further. With a combination of Google’s search API, Microsoft’s Bing search API, and a number of open source software libraries they crawled each university’s web site to identify the primary LMS (or in more than 200 cases, multiple primary LMSs) in use. After some clean up, they came with interesting numbers:

More information and details on their blog.

Kom ook naar de netwerkdag van de special interest group Open Education en ontmoet collega’s die actief zijn op het terrein van open educational resources, open education en MOOC's. Tijdens de netwerkdag is er volop gelegenheid om ervaringen uit te wisselen en van elkaar te leren. Daarnaast zal Timo Kos (TU Delft) de laatste ontwikkelingen op het gebied van open education schetsen en licht Adrie Steenbrink de visie van het ministerie van OCW op deze ontwikkelingen toe.

Meer informatie en aanmelden: https://events.surf.nl/link/event/1725