E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Yesterday at the Dies Natalis of the university, the president of TU Delft announced that we will be offering MOOCs this year and that we will announce the platform this next couple of weeks (see recording in Dutch after 1:49:40).

The start of MOOCs is the next step the university is making in the field of Open Education. In 2007 we launched our OpenCourseWare website, now we have more than 100 courses online. Last year we announced that we will start with offering of 3 online masters (Aerospace Engineering, Watermanagement and Engineering & Policy Analysis).  The MOOCs fill in the gap between our OpenCourseWare and our online masters.

Our executive board has decided that we will offer at least 3 MOOCs this year. They have assigned me as project manager. This will be an exiting and very busy journey.

The big question is which platform we will use. I can tell you that is one of the platforms I mention in this blogpost. ;-)

Gisteren staat er in de Volkskrant een artikel over hoogleraar Jan Derksen die zegt dat hoorcolleges uit de tijd zijn en dat universiteiten zouden moeten 'fuseren met het internet':

"Studenten worden steeds meer gepamperd met 'competentiegericht onderwijs' en 'leerdoelen'. Zelf noemen ze dit kleuterbouwwerk al 'school'. En gelijk hebben ze, want de universiteit is veel te schools geworden..."

"Geef studenten de vrijheid om hun eigen interesses na te jagen. Colleges kunnen het internet op. Toetsen kunnen ook online worden afgenomen. Leuke bijkomstigheid is dat er flink kan worden bezuinigd op managers en gebouwen."

"Natuurlijk, als je stopt met pamperen vallen er heel veel studenten af. Maar dat is helemaal niet erg, er zijn er toch veel te veel. Als studenten langer willen studeren is dat prima, maar dan wel op eigen kosten."

".. ik vrees de kooi waarin zelfs de beste honoursstudenten als baby's worden behandeld. Nu moeten ze zich aan alle eisen houden die van bovenaf zijn verordonneerd. Hun nieuwsgierigheid wordt aan banden gelegd. Dat heeft niets met wetenschappelijke vooruitgang te maken. Natuurlijk, de hoogleraar zal altijd een gids blijven. Professoren zouden sowieso meer op didactische kwaliteiten moeten worden geselecteerd. Dat gebeurt nu veel te weinig."

Ik ben het eens met deze hoogleraar en mijn reactie stond vanochtend in de Volkskrant (alleen toegankelijk met account). Screenshot van mijn reactie staat hier rechts. De meeste colleges zijn de afgelopen jaren weinig veranderd. Ze gaan nog sterk uit van het feit dat de universiteit het 'monopolie' heeft op kennis en informatie. Dit is in de 21ste eeuw zeker niet meer het geval. Vrijwel alles is tegenwoordig op internet te vinden. Ook fantastisch onderwijsmateriaal, zoals Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, TED ED, YouTube EDU en natuurlijk TU Delft OpenCourseWare.

Docenten zouden hun colleges meer op interactie, discussie, en reflectie moeten richten en minder op kennisoverdracht.

Er zal altijd ruimte blijven voor inspirerende docenten. Uit mijn eigen studententijd kan ik me natuurlijk de colleges van De Bruijn en Ten Heuvelhof nog goed herinneren of de colleges van Wim Dik. Dit zijn echter de uitzonderingen, de meeste colleges weet ik echt niks meer van.

Zoals Jeroen Jansen en Pedro de Bruyckere ook schrijven heeft het onderwijs behoefte aan goede docenten, die op zoek blijven gaan naar manieren om hun studenten te inspireren en te motiveren. Hierbij gebruik makend van de mogelijkheden die beschikbaar zijn, zowel online als offline.

Ook in de online wereld, geldt de regel "a good teacher is a good teacher with any tool".

Aanvulling 4 januari:
Vandaag staat er in de Volkskrant ook een reactie van een student en die sluit volgens mij uitstekend aan bij mijn blog. Studente Eva van Gemert schrijft dat als hoorcolleges geen waarde toevoegen aan de opgegeven leerstof, dan kunnen ze beter worden afgeschaft.

Een hoorcollege moet inspireren en motiveren, zoals TU Delft-professor Witteveen ook schrijft in een column (pag 5) in MACHAZINE (blad van de studievereniging Christiaan Huygens). Zijn argument dat het geven van hoorcolleges leuk is gaat volgens mij lang niet voor alle docenten op. Als student merk je dit trouwens wel meteen!

Daar zit precies ook de crux. Er zijn zeker hoorcolleges die waarde toevoegen, maar er zijn ook veel die dat niet doen. Het gaat hier ook niet om een keuze voor één van beiden, maar om de juiste mix van online en offline.

In 2011 Blackboard launched Coursesites. This platform is free for teachers to create course and offer them to students. The CourseSites platform is based on the full Blackboard Learn platform including Collaborate and Mobile Learn. They are running the newest version (SP10), so it is also a good way to get to know the new version.

From the beginning Blackboard showed in this platform their commitment to support standards and to be more open. This year they also started to promote the platform for MOOCs. In this video they show what they offer:

If you are not familiar with Blackboard Learn, this video gives a good overview of the newest features in 9.1.SP10:

2012 is the year of the MOOC. Audrey Watters has written an very good overview of MOOCs in 2012.
In the last year we got the announcements of new platforms to deliver MOOCs. This week the 12 UK universities announced another new platform.

I made a list of the platforms I know:

If you know any other platforms or can fill in the question marks, please leave a comment.

Features

If you take a look at the features of the different platforms, I see three distinct characteristics:

• Most of them have a very specific instructural design in the course. Most is based on the traditional instructor-led model.
• They have limited features, but the features they have are working really well.
• They log everything and use this data actively (learning analytics). Some of them even are saying that they will even sell this data.

The traditional LMS-providers should really take a good look at the MOOC platforms. They can definitely learn from it!

Conclusion

As you can see is that most of the platforms are created by a US for-profit company. So I encourage initiative from outside the US, especially the ones that are really open. Improvements in the instructional design are also very welcome.

The last couple of weeks I was a bit busy with travelling and didn't have time to blog a lot about MOOCs. There are some interesting new articles and reports written about MOOCs. Here a selection:

Sir John Daniel - Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility
The paper describes the short history of MOOCs and sets them in the wider context of the evolution of educational technology and open/distance learning. While the hype about MOOCs presaging a revolution in higher education has focussed on their scale, the real revolution is that universities with scarcity at the heart of their business models are embracing openness.

Educause - What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs
A publication of Education about the hype in Education for 2012.

New York Times - The Year of the MOOC
The line between online and on campus is blurring

Edudemic - 40 Useful Tips For Anyone Taking A MOOC
Whether you’re looking to online education for personal reasons or to get ahead in your career, use these tips to help you get more out of open courses and use what you learn to market yourself, improve your performance, and stand out on the job.

Clay Shirky - Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
Great post on MOOCs from Clay Shirky

Wired Campus - Course-Management Companies Challenge MOOC Providers
Two software companies that sell course-management systems, Blackboard and Instructure, have entered the race to provide free online courses for the masses.

Inside Higher Ed - MOOCs for credit
Coursera, the largest provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs), has entered into a contract to license several of the courses it has built with its university partners to Antioch University, which would offer versions of the MOOCs for credit as part of a bachelor’s degree program.

Learning Solutions Magazine - Ten Tips: Keep Learners Motivated in Your Open Online Cloud Course or MOOC
Setting up an open online course (cloud course or MOOC) is one thing, but keeping the participants motivated can be quite a challenge if you never meet face-to-face. The dropout rate of online courses can be huge, and for collaborative courses this can be disastrous, as it will have an effect on the peer-to-peer learning dynamics.

The Conversation - Online learning glitch: MOOC flaws will be hard to resolve
there are still a few issues that the MOOCs haven’t solved, and I’m not certain they’re going to be able to do so without significantly revising their model.

The Guardian - Online learning: pedagogy, technology and opening up higher education
Debate discussion with interesting participants.

Michael Feldstein - Everybody Wants to MOOC the World
But hype aside, it’s worth asking what it means for the traditional LMS players to be marketing themselves as platforms for MOOCs and other open courses.

BBC - Can schools survive in the age of the web?
A growing number of online universities are redefining education. But what will that mean for traditional institutions?

Michael Feldstein - Is Coursera Facebook, Amazon, or Pets.com?
it’s an uncomfortable truth for educational folks that one of the principal innovations of the xMOOC is the store front

Mike Caulfield - Who is accountable at Coursera?
Coursera wants to be the Google of the education world. You can’t complain about your email if the email is free, right? And the same thing holds true with their courses.

In my  presentation From OCW to Online Education I mention 5 big mistakes on online education:

1. Believing that Virtual Education = Massive Education
2. Believing that Online Education = Mysterious and Complex Education
3. Putting Technology before Pedagogy
4. Underestimating your Teachers and Students
5. Taking the Fun out of Education

Because the presentation was not recording, a lot of people were interested if I could explain these mistakes in more detail. So here we go:

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This week there was an interesting article in the Chronicle about the mobile studio project. The mobile studio project is developing technology-based pedagogy and inexpensive hardware/software which, when connected to a PC (via USB), provides functionality similar to that of laboratory equipment (scope, function generator, power supplies, DMM, etc.) typically associated with an instrumented studio classroom.

Withe the current - much lower - prices for hardware a student can have his own lab instead of the very expensis lab equipment universities have invested in the past. The latest version of the Mobile Studio hardware costs about $150 per student—cheap enough that every engineering student gets his or her own board.

According to Kenneth Conner students get higher scores with a mobile studio. Because students can pursue their own ideas, build something, and then try it either just for their own satisfaction or, in my class, for more points. This style of teaching closely resembles the way engineers do their jobs and allows the students to achieve understanding based on what they do best.

I think this is a great concept that is certainly interesting for Delft. You could also use this in online education.

This infographics gives a nice overview of the development of online education. The numbers are related to the United States. Although the US is in a recession, the growth of this type of education is enormous. It is becoming clear that there is a fundamental shift in how Americans are being educated after high school. The flexibility, lower cost, and variety of choice are just some of the reasons that online education is growing at its current pace.

Click on the image for a large version

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