E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

On Wednesday 13th of April,  I attended a #OEGlobal session in which MIT and OpenUniversity presented their results of many years of Open Education. The general feeling I had over these two presentation was that Open University has a very clear strategy and MIT is just bopping around. I know that this is not true for MIT OpenCourseWare, but it certainly is the impression I got about MITx.

15 years vs 3 years

In 15 years MIT OpenCourseWare has accomplished a lot. They reached 203M people around the world. There production proces and IP handling is very professional and made sure that they have published over 3000 courses.
The contrast with MITx can’t be any bigger. They have produced 83 unique MOOCs, but I didn’t get the impression that there is a standardised proces and the process definitely is different from MIT OCW. I really don’t understand why MITx hasn’t used more of the expertise of their OCW team. It seems that they are reinventing the wheel while their colleagues next door, already know the answer.

In their presentation Joseph Pickett and Dana Doyle stated that OCW and MITx are very separate from the start:

• Different buildings
• No clear communication as to who is doing what
• Both groups extremely busy producing course sites and online courses

Since 2015 the teams have been working more closely together, they state "MITx is still a young organization seeking to find an optimum path in a changing environment".

Ten years of open practice: a reflection on the impact of OpenLearn

The presentation of Patrina Law was so different from MIT. The strategy and activities of OpenLearn are very organised. Their strategy in engaging learners seems very logical:

I especially liked the slide with the guiding principles for all their courses:

• Learners most value quizzes with feedback
• Use of activities and video also highly rated
• Select the most engaging content within a module
• Make a key topic accessible to new learners
• Ensure the course works as a stand-alone piece of learning
Learners

value recognition for their achievement

(statement of participation)

Their project of Badged Open Courses is a very good example of their activities:

The Badged Open Courses project returned the investment in 4 months via extra enrolments (26% clickthrough rate):

• 2500+ badges issued
• The BOCs are generating around 12,000 new visitors a month to OpenLearn
• They drive a very high proportion of learners to click-through to make an enquiry to the OU (26.2% Feb-Nov 2015)
• Completion rates of BOCs are higher than our MOOCs
• 350 formal module registrations have been made (mostly entry level)
• 2,500 prospectus requests
• >300 qualification sign-ups (mostly new students)
• Satisfaction rates very high (~98%)
• 57% say that they will be sharing their achievements with an employer

Altogether it showed me that if you have a clear strategy and align all your projects towards this strategy a vialable business model is open education projects.

This week I'm attending the Open Education Global Conference in Krakow. This is the yearly conference of the Open Education Consortium of which I'm member of the Board of Directors (and just got re-elected for 2 years).

On the first day I presented about the impact of 30 DelftX MOOCs. In general I can say that the impact of our MOOCs is much higher than we anticipated when we started in 2013. In my presentation I discuss 6 impacts:

1. Educating the world
2. Increasing TU Delft’s international Reputation
3. Improving campus education
4. New relations between education and research
5. Collaboration with industry
6. The whole TU Delft organization

Currently we are writing the evaluation report, so later I will publish more about these impact. For now, you can take a look at my slides:

Last week it was Open Education Week. Many people world wide participated in local and online events during the week. We hope it inspired you for Open Education. Next month is the Open Education Global Conference were you learn more about Open Education and join the global movement in Open Education.

The Open Education Global Conference is the annual opportunity for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and educators to deeply explore open education and its impact on global education.

Conference participants learn from thought leaders in open education and have the opportunity to share ideas, practices and discuss issues important to the future of education worldwide. Sessions cover new developments in open education, research results, innovative technology, policy development and implementation, and practical solutions to challenges facing education around the world. The Open Education Global Conference 2016 will take place in Kraków, Poland from the 12th to 14th of April 2016. The theme of the Open Education Global Conference 2016 is Convergence Through Collaboration.

TU Delft's Vice President Education and former President of the consortium Anka Mulder will be one of the keynote speakers. Martijn Ouwehand and me we also attend the conference and we will participate in a couple of sessions. I hope to see you there!

Just like last year, a selection of papers of the Open Education Global Conference are published in the ICDE Journal Open Praxis. Open Praxis is a peer-reviewed open access scholarly journal focusing on research and innovation in open, distance and flexible education. Open Praxis is published by ICDE and is under the editorship of Dr. Inés Gil-Jaurena at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain.

According to the editors the selected papers presented in this issue are a good example of some trends they currently find in the field of open education:

• The increasing number of research and showcases with a focus on openness, providing a rigorous basis for getting recommendations, lessons learned, highlights.
• The relevance of open educational practices, a step beyond open educational resources and open courses.
• The core position of open education within the transformation of higher education, and the relevance of institutional strategies which include "open" to do so.

Here is the list of papers:

• Capacity-building in open education: an Australian approach
  Carina Bossu, Wendy Fountain

• The Open Library at AU (Athabasca University): Supporting Open Access and Open Educational Resources
  Colin Elliott, Elaine Fabbro

• Recommendations on Formative Assessment and Feedback Practices for stronger engagement in MOOCs
  Nikolaos Floratos, Teresa Guasch, Anna Espasa

• Using an ‘open approach’ to create a new, innovative higher education model
  Susan Huggins, Peter Smith

• Using Open Educational Practices to Support Institutional Strategic Excellence in Teaching, Learning & Scholarship
  Thomas Carey, Alan Davis, Salvador Ferreras, David Porter

• Learning from the innovative open practices of three international health projects: IACAPAP, VCPH and Physiopedia
  Tony Coughlan, Leigh-Anne Perryman

• Book review: Book review of The Battle for Open
  Daniel Dominguez

The papers are published in Open Praxis Vol 7, No.2 (2015). Other papers of the conference can be downloaded from the conference website.

Yesterday it was my turn to do an action lab on MOOCs. The subtitle was "everything you want to know about MOOCs". For my it was also a good activity to get all our activities together. And it is impressive!

We have 16 MOOCs finished, 4 are running (you can still enrol), 5 new and 7 reruns are in production. So we can say that we have some experience with making MOOCs. We also have more than 400,000 enrolments.

I started the action lab with a short presentation about the TU Delft MOOC activities. The presentation is below. After the slide 21 I had some spare slide I could use to answer questions.

Journey

After the presentation I opened it for questions and used our MOOC Development journey to answer questions. I also had the poster of the learning experience flow of our award winning MOOC Delft Design Approach up on the wall. They used this to design their MOOC. They start with the template and use the cards to organise it week by week. All the documents are attached at the bottom of this post.

Sublicensing MOOCs

One of the questions I got was about the sublicensing of MOOCs. My colleague Martijn Ouwehand did a presentation about this subject on Wednesday. His slides are below.

Yesterday we received three awards at the yearly Open Education Award Ceremony. With these three awards our total comes to 10 awards in the last 4 years. It always is great honour to receive external recognition for the activities of our professors and support staff. It strengthen our mission for open education at TU Delft.

OpenMOOCs

Solving Complex Problems, by Alexander de Haan, is about Complex Multi Actor Systems, ‘spaghetti situations’ in which everything appears to be interlinked and many factors influence each other. Consider, for example, a situation in which new energy technology is introduced into an existing energy market. In such situations, people often talk about solutions, but nobody is exactly sure what the question is, or the best solution. Quantitative and qualitative models can help people understand such complex issues. Course participants will acquire practical tools and methods with which to structure and analyse complex problems.

Delft Design Approach, by Jaap Daalhuizen, has also received an Award of Excellence in the ‘Open MOOC’ category. The Delft Design Approach is a structured approach that helps designers cope with complex design projects – from the formulation of a strategic vision and mapping users and their contexts to developing and selecting meaningful designs for products and services. TU Delft hopes that this MOOC will introduce participants to its own unique approach to design, using several models and design methods, and drawing upon the knowledge and experience of experts from both education and practice. The online course allows participants to compare their results with those of students studying on campus at Delft and designers from the profession.

OpenCourseWare

The Human Controller, by David Abbink, is a course in the Mechanical Engineering Master’s degree programme. The course material (video lectures, exercises, articles, exam questions, etc.) is freely available as OpenCourseWare (OCW) on the internet. The Open Education Consortium has awarded the course as an ‘Outstanding (OCW) Course’.
The course studies man’s abilities and limits with regard to controlling machines. Various human sensors are explained, and participants learn how muscles work and how movement is coordinated. Man’s ability to control is explained within the context of control technology – a tricky subject that is made somewhat easier by considering examples from the practical situation. Two of the course assignments involve students doing their own experiments to demonstrate that the theory also applies to them. In one of these projects, the students download software that requires them to follow a moving dot with their mouse. This game allows the students to experience just how difficult it can be to control different types of systems, and teaches them how to measure their own control behaviour and construct mathematical models.

This week I'm in the beautiful town of Banff in the state of Alberta (Canada) for the Open Education Global Conference 2015. This is the yearly conference organised by the Open Education Consortium. As board member I have to be present at this conference, but that is never a burden.

It always is a busy conference for me. Next to the conference we also have the board meeting of the consortium. This year Meena also tricked me in some workshops. So you have multiple opportunities to see me in action.

Pre-conference workshop
On Tuesday we start with a pre-conference workshop on getting started with Open Education. Together with Robert Schuwer, Martijn Ouwehand, Jure Cuhalev and Meena Whang I will organise a full day workshop. This conference will be based on the workshop we organised last year as part of the OpenCourseWare Europe project.

Action Lab MOOCs
On Friday I'm organising an 'Action Lab' about everything you want to know about MOOCs. In this one hour session I will try to answer all the questions the participants have on the production and delivery of MOOCs.

Awards
This year the TU Delft has won three awards:

• Outstanding course: The Human Controller (David Abbink)
• Open MOOC: Delft Design Approach (Jaap Daalhuizen)
• Open MOOC: Solving Complex Problems (Alexander de Haan)
  

The project manager of the Design mooc is here at the conference, so she will pick up this award. The other two Martijn and I will pick up on behalf of David and Alexander.

Banner Image: CC-BY-SA Karl Johnson

The theme of the 2014 Conference of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is "Open Education for a Multicultural World". The conference will explore the international dimensions of open education, its diverse projects, new research, policy dimensions and impacts on teaching and learning.

The conference will take place in scenic Ljubljana, Slovenia from 23-25 April 2014. Early registration has started today.

I would also like the recommend the pre-workshop Getting started with Open Education: Everything you need to know to begin open education projects at your institution. The workshop is organised by the team of OpenCourseWare Europe:

This one-day interactive workshop will introduce you to principles, tools and techniques that will allow you to get started with open education at your institution or organization.  Participants will gain practical knowledge of the benefits and potential pitfalls in starting projects, convincing faculty and administrators, and integrating open education into institutional practice through examples from institutions around the world.

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.

My collegau Martijn Ouwehand did a presentation at the OCWC Global Conference about bringing OER into the classroom. This presentation is based on the project STUMBLE which is focused on adding OER materials to basic courses that have a low pass rate. The idea is that with the additional materials students have more options to understand the concepts and will do better in the course.

In our powerpoint you can see the results: