E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Alastair Creelman and Linda Renland-Forsman have written an interesting paper on completion rates in online courses:

Statistics are often used to reveal significant differences between online and campus-based education. The existence of online courses with low completion rates is often used to justify the inherent inferiority of online education compared to traditional classroom teaching. Our study revealed that this type of conclusion has little substance. We have performed three closely linked analyses of empirical data from Linnaeus University aimed at reaching a better understanding of completion rates. Differences in completion rates revealed themselves to be more substantial between faculties than between distribution forms. The key-factor lies in design. Courses with the highest completion rates had three things in common; active discussion forums, complementing media and collaborative activities. We believe that the time has come to move away from theoretical models of learning where web-based learning/distance learning/e-learning are seen as simply emphasizing the separation of teacher and students. Low completion rates should instead be addressed as a lack of insight and respect for the consequences of online pedagogical practice and its prerequisites.

According to the authors we should call in the HEROEs: Highly Empowered Resourceful Online Educators. Which means once and for all abandoning a consumerist approach to education applying a meaning-oriented approach.

Their conclusion is that the low completion rates of many online courses and in particular today’s mainstream MOOCs is not a credible gauge of course quality. We need to move the focus from a simplistic head count to developing strategies for increased interaction, collaboration and collective responsibility in online learning – HEROES could do the trick.

Reference:
Alastair Creelman, Linda Reneland-Forsman (2013). Completion Rates – A False Trail to Measuring Course Quality? Let’s Call in the HEROEs Instead. In European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning 2013/II.

Yesterday we organised an informal launch event for our DelftX MOOCs. With the push of the button of the two teachers the courses opened at 13.30 (Delft time).Nearly 70,000 students are now able to enjoy learning about Solar Energy and Water Treatment.

Video

We also made a short video of the event:

First day

The first day is always very exciting. The courses we have been working on the last months is live and now we have to see if it all works out.

We had some small hickups, but overall it worked as expected. The forums are actively used and seem to be vibrant and cheerful.

Tomorrow at 13.30 (Delft time) the first two MOOCs (Solar Energy and Introduction to Water Treatment) of Delftx will start. The last couple of months we have been working hard to organise the production process of our MOOCs and helping the faculty with creating a great learning experience for our MOOCs.

Enrolments

The enrolments of our MOOCs have been steadily increasing. In total we start with more than 66,000 students: 44k for Solar and 22k for water. You can still enroll.

Update 16/9 : Solar has 45k and water has 22.5k.

Background of students

If you look at the background of the students, most students have a Bachelor's degree. Solar Energy attracks more secondary/high school students than Water Treatment.

Our water course attracks more female students (28%) than solar (16%).

The next two MOOCs

We already started with the next two MOOCs that will run in the spring of 2014:

• Introduction of Aerospace Engineering
• Next Generation Infrastructures (about the social and technical complexity of infrastructure systems in the 21th century)

Enrolment will open this month.

This fall I will speak at a lot of conferences around the world. I will speak in Leuven, Athens, Park City, Rotterdam, Nairobi, Amstelveen and Leiden. It is all about Open Education and mostly about MOOCs.

September:

• 19th: DigHum Summerschool
  I will speak there about DelftX.

October:

• 3-4: VI Guide Conference
  On behave of the OpenCourseWare Consortium I will chair a session and I do a presentation about TU Delft Open Education.

November:

• 6-8: OpenEd Conference
  I will speak here about DelftX and pushing EdX to be open.
  
  
• 12: Onderwijsdagen (Dutch educational days)
  I will speak about MOOCs together with the other Dutch universities that are running MOOCs (UvA, Leiden, OUNL).
  
  
• 22-23: First International Conference of the African Virtual University
  Together with other board members of the OCW Consortium I will join an panel discussion about Open Education.
  
  
• 27: National Hoger Onderwijs Congres
  I will talk about MOOCs at the national higher education conference.

December:

• 2: Congres NUV Academy 'A day at the MOOCs'
  I will be speaking at a conference for Dutch publishers about Open Education and MOOCs.
  
  
• 16: Teaching Meeting at Tilburg University
  I will be speaking for teacher of Tilburg University about MOOCs.

Today EdX and Google announced their partnership:

EdX, the not-for-profit online learning initiative founded by Harvard and MIT, today announced a partnership with Google to jointly develop their open-source learning platform, known as Open EdX. The core edX offerings currently consist of a few dozen free "Massive Open Online Courses," or MOOCs, from top-flight university partners like MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley--but the Open EdX vision goes far beyond that.

This Google will put resources into the development of the EdX platform. They will stop with the development of Course Builder. So more developers will be developing on the edx platform.

Next to this,  edX will build out and operate MOOC.org (in collaboration with Google), a new site for non-xConsortium universities, institutions, businesses, governments and teachers to build and host their courses for a global audience. This site will be powered by the jointly developed Open edX platform.

MOOC.org will go live in the middle of 2014.

Links

• Announcement from Google
• Announcement from EdX

Deze week starte de eerste MOOC van de Open Universiteit. Het onderwerp is E-learning. Ik was natuurlijk vooral benieuwd naar de open licentie die de OU hiervoor gebruikt. Fred Mulder en Robert Schuwer van de OU zijn hiervoor een groot voorstander en dan moet je natuurlijk zelf ook het goede voorbeeld geven ("practice what you preach").

Als je de voorpagina van de MOOC bekijkt staat er onderaan in de footer het volgende:

Dat ziet er niet goed uit, maar ik klik toch maar ff door naar de algemene voorwaarden en daar staat het volgende:

2. Intellectueel eigendomsrecht Open Universiteit en Verklaring intellectueel eigendomsrecht abonnementhouder

Intellectueel eigendomsrecht Open Universiteit

© Alle rechten voorbehouden
Tenzij anders aangegeven mag uit het aangeboden (cursus)materiaal niets worden verveelvoudigd en/of openbaar worden gemaakt, zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de Open Universiteit.

Verklaring intellectueel eigendomsrecht abonnementhouder (met betrekking tot eigen bijdrage(n) van abonnementhouder)

Door uw bijdragen op te slaan geeft u uw bijdragen vrij onder de licentievoorwaarden CC BY-NC-SA van Creative Commons   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Uw bijdrage(n) valt/vallen onder uw eigen verantwoordelijkheid. De Open Universiteit is niet aansprakelijk voor de inhoud of het gebruik van de door u geleverde bijdrage(n).
 

• Gebruik nooit –zonder toestemming- materiaal dat beschermd is door auteursrecht.
• Gebruik nooit –zonder toestemming-  beeldmateriaal waarvoor geen toestemming is verkregen van de maker.
• Gebruik nooit –zonder toestemming-  materiaal waarop geportretteerde personen zichtbaar zijn zonder dat deze personen toestemming tot gebruik hebben gegeven.

NB
Als u niet wilt dat uw bijdragen onder de CC BY-NC-SA licentie worden vrijgegeven, voeg uw bijdrage(n) dan niet toe. Uw proefschrift en de resultaten van de opdrachten moeten worden toegevoegd aan OpenU. Er kunnen uitzonderingen worden gemaakt op de regel dat deze bijdragen zullen worden vrijgegeven onder de CC BY-NC-SA licentie. Neem daarvoor contact op met uw studie coördinator.

Dit betekent dus dat standaard op het gebruikte platform de universiteit alle rechten voor zichzelf houdt en dat alle bijdragen die deelnemers doen een CC-BY-NC-SA-licentie krijgen. Dat doet toch wat vreemd aan, maar de licentie biedt ruimte met de zin "Tenzij anders aangegeven...".

Dus ben ik een individuele video gaan bekijken of daar dan een open licentie op zit. De introductievideo van Wilfred heb ik bekeken. Helaas, hier wordt gebruik gemaakt van de standaard Youtube licentie en niet de creative commons-licentie die ook mogelijk is:

Al met al dus zeer teleurstellend. Ik had van de Open Universiteit meer verwacht op het gebied van Open Licenties.

Update

Naar aanleiding van deze blog is de MOOC aangepast door Wilfred Rubens. In de colofon staat nu:

materialen binnen deze cursus hebben de licentievoorwaarden CC BY-NC-SA van Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

In Campus Technology Michelle Fredette has written an interesting article about How to Convert a Classroom Course Into a MOOC.

The sheer size and diversity of the student body in a MOOC force faculty to use strategies for planning, teaching, and assessment that differ radically from those used in traditional classes.

She has three main issues that she discusses:

• A Different Student Body
• Plan Meticulously
• React to the Data

I recognise the issues she discusses. The task of converting a course for MOOC use is not as simple as taking recordings of class lectures and cutting them up into digestible segments.

Athough a lot of people were enjoying their summer holiday, the news around MOOCs didn't stop. Here a list of interesting articles:

• MOOC Killer Apps: The Autograder vs. The Syndication Engine
  One of the best ways to distinguish between them is by thinking about their "killer app," the special tool that distinguishes them from previous generations of technologies.
  
  
• Moocs: if we're not careful so-called 'open' courses will close minds
  Massive open online courses, or Moocs, will probably turn out to be little more than an edu-tainment 'bubble', says Peter Scott.
  
  
• On the Automated Scoring of Essays and the Lessons Learned Along the Way
  A piece of software coldly judging the quality of our carefully constructed phrases and metaphors based on unknown criteria is more than most writers can bear. But is this what automated essay scoring (AES) is? If not, what is it? In this article, I aim to explore what AES is, the state of field, some of the lessons I have learned along the way, and where I think it is going.
  
  
• Business Model for Education Venture Calls for ‘Empowering Adjuncts’
  Courses will run for 12 weeks but can start at any point during the year. In a way, it’s the anti-MOOC, with the focus on small classes of 25 to 30, rather than one instructor teaching thousands, and an expectation of more student-faculty engagement.
  
  
• MOOCs are Toast or at Least Should Be
  Is it time yet to declare massive open online courses or MOOCs an academic failure?
  
  
• The New MOOC Strategy: Rise of the Higher Ed Empires
  It sheds light on the plans by universities like Harvard to develop MOOCs and market them to less prestigious institutions.
  
  
• In Shadow Of MOOCs, Open Education Makes Progress
  Advocates say higher education would be better served by resources that are truly open -- not just free.
  
  
• How MOOCs Will Revolutionize Corporate Learning And Development
  But as MOOCs storm the academic world, the public discussion of their impact is ignoring what could become their most valuable application. Far from being limited to higher education reform, the new learning style’s most important legacy could be its impact on the world of corporate training – which is a $150 billion industry.
  
  
• MOOCs: The Asian perspective
  A World Bank blog noted that "public discussions around MOOCs have tended to represent viewpoints and interests of elite institutions in rich, industrialized countries (notably the United States)" and calls for perspectives on MOOCs from developing countries. The e-DIRAP project have solicited some perspectives from Asia.
  
  
• MOOCs: A Disruptive Innovation or Not?
  Although MOOCs are considered the “new technology” from Silicon Valley, online learning has a long history and extensive use both to replace and supplement traditional classroom instruction.
  
  
• The emergence of x and c MOOCs and pedagogy
  Based on my observation and research, I think there are vast differences in terms of needs and experiences in MOOCs (especially the c and x MOOCs) for various types and cohorts of learners – high school students, college and university undergraduate students, graduate students, graduates and working learners, scholars, researchers, professors etc.
  
  
• Bill Gates on His Foundation's Health and Education Campaigns
  If you look at who’s used MOOCs so far, it’s an elite phenomenon. The completion rates are very low, and the effect on employability is very low.
  
  
• Feminist Anti-MOOC
  "Feminism and Technology" is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced "dock").
  
  
• What’s the Difference Between OCWs and MOOCs? Managing Expectations.
  What’s the difference between OCWs and MOOCs? At the end of the day, it may be nothing more than managing expectations.
  
  
• Coursera hires VC Lila Ibrahim (from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) as President
  To accelerate our next phase of growth, we are delighted to add Lila Ibrahim to our team as Coursera’s first President. She will join our co-founders and co-CEOs to form the Executive Office. During this period of time, she will remain an operating partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
  
  
• Lessons Learned from Vanderbilt’s First MOOCs
  As faculty, staff, and students worked over the last year to launch Vanderbilt’s first three MOOCs, we grappled with the following question: How do you create effective learning environments online for thousands and thousands of students? We haven’t fully answered that question, but we have learned much about the design and implementation of MOOCs.
  
  
• What Do Massive Open Online Courses Mean for the Future of Higher Education?
  MOOC Special Issue of Campus Technology.
  
  
• MOOCs and The Change of Higher Education
  MOOCs look neat, are plausible and… too many get it wrong! MOOCs captured the imagination of venture capitalists, academics and university administrators and this is a rare thing for higher education. Enthusiasm and a bit of passion in this field is always a welcome change. The problem is that – despite exuberant enthusiasm surrounding them - MOOCs remain marked by many unanswered questions and still fail to clarify how they will deal with many crucial pedagogical and managerial aspects. Again, we do not talk about online education here, but MOOCs!
  
  
• Blended MOOCs: The Best of Both Worlds?
  Combining in-class instruction with high-quality MOOCs may resolve some of the hurdles facing stand-alone MOOCs, but questions about cost and the impact on faculty remain unanswered.
  
  
• MOOC, SPOC, DOCC, Massive Online Face2Face Open . . . (Uh Oh!): Age of the Acronym
  On Facebook, my pal John recently joked that we're not living in the Digital Age.  We're living in the Age of the Acronym.
  
  
• Don't Fear the MOOC: Re-Invent the Learning Ecosystem
  There is a tsunami rising in higher education. In fact, it is finally starting to crest. The chatter around the need to improve education in the U.S. has been going on for decades, but it looks like something is finally going to happen. Why? Because the business model of higher education is truly under attack.
  
  
• Is Online Education Widening the Digital Divide?
  Universities across the country are experimenting with MOOCs as a way to make higher education more affordable and accessible to all  students. The premise of MOOCs has, to some, come to mean the democratization of quality higher education, a way of equalizing the playing field for students of every demographic.
  
  

In June the EdX launched its code base with a open license. Yesterday they launched a new initiative to translate the platform via a crowd-sourced platform Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/edx-platform/

Please help us to translate the platform!

Initiated by the 5 Chiao Tung Universities in Taiwan and China (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xtan Jiaotong University, Southwest Jiatong University, Beijing Jiatog University and National Chiao Tong University), there is a new Chinese MOOC platform: Ewant. This is the first Chinese MOOC platform. The platform is aiming at the Chinese population around the world. They will offer around 15 courses this year from Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and even the US.

At this moment the website is only in Chinese. There are plans to add an English site, but that will take some time.