E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

John Robertson (aka kavubob) posted an interesting presentation about the use of someone else's MOOC in your course. He identifies four different models:

• The guest lecture
• The reading
• The textbook
• The distributed flip

Below is his presentation:

Other interesting studies about using MOOCs in the classroom:

• Rebecca Griffiths - MOOCs in the classroom?
• Wrapping a MOOC: Student Perceptions of an Experiment in Blended Learning

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

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.

Educause has published an interesting article about copyright challenges in a MOOC environment:

The intersection of copyright and the scale and delivery of MOOCs highlights the enduring tensions between academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and copyright law in higher education. To gain insight into the copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders, EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs, university general counsel, provosts, copyright experts, and other higher education associations. The consensus opinion was that intellectual property questions for MOOC content merit wide discussion because they affect multiple stakeholders and potentially carry significant consequences. Each MOOC provider, for example, establishes a proprietary claim on material included in its courses, licenses to the user the terms of access and use of that material, and establishes its ownership claim of user-generated content. This conflicts with the common institutional policy approach that grants rights to faculty who develop a course. Fair-use exceptions to traditional copyright protection face challenges as well, given a MOOC’s potential for global reach. Nonetheless, fair use and MOOCs are not mutually exclusive ideas. MOOCs remain an experiment. Initiating discussions with a wide range of campus stakeholders will ensure clarity of purpose and a common understanding of copyright issues in a MOOC environment.

I think this article is helpful to start the discussion. We noticed that a teacher in a classroom has less issues with copyright than a teacher in an online environment. It is time that copyright laws are updated for the current educational experiences of online teaching.

Via: Surfspace (in Dutch)

Michael Fullan and Katelyn Donnelly have written an interesting report. It is an actionable guide to learning technology that will allow founders, funders, and teachers to make better decisions. It identifies persistent gaps in innovation activity and points to what needs to be done if we are to finally make good on the promise of technology to transform learning. 

The authors argue that we should seek digital innovations that produce at least twice the learning outcome for half the cost of our current tools.  To achieve this, three forces need to come together. One is technology, the other pedagogy, and the third is change knowledge, or how to secure transformation across an entire school system. 

The core of the report is the development of an index that brings these three elements together, and which allows us to systematically evaluate new digital innovations. 

Reference
Michael Fullan and Katelyn Donnely (2013) Alive in the Swamp, Assessing Digital Innovations in Education
http://www.nesta.org.uk/home1/assets/features/alive_in_the_swamp_assessing_digital_innovations_in_education

Terry Anderson described a research study about time factors in online learning. The study he describes is done with 80 full time online teachers, teaching 4 online courses during the same semester:

Teaching in any context varies a great deal based on personal teaching style, use of synchronous tools, discipline, level and motivation of learners, support and funding for teachers and a host of other contextual factors. Nonetheless aggregate data is very interesting and helps paint the reality as well as vanquish some myths about online teaching. As expected the data confirmed that teachers did spend slightly more time online than literature reports for oncampus. (Averaging 44 hours/week for the 4 courses). But perhaps of greatest interest is the tasks that made up these 44 hours.

What surprised me is the limited time that is spend on Content Development. It seams to me that this research only focuses on running of the courses and not taking into account the development.  We notice that this takes large amount of time. Also there is not a lot of information about the context (kind of students, motivation, teaching style, didactical model, etc).

Another issue is the number of students. Especially with the student communication it would be interesting to know how many students were in a 'class'.

Reference
Mandernach, B., Hudson, S., & Wise, S. (2013). Where has the time gone? Faculty activities and time commitments in the online classroom. Journal of Educators Online, 10(2). 
http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume10Number2/MandernachHudsonWise.pdf

Via: Wilfred Rubens (in Dutch)

Mike Caulfield wrote a long, but very interesting blog about the distributed flip:

The distributed flip is a way of approaching flipped classroom design. It’s worth noting that I’m using a fairly broad definition of flipped classroom here. This is not the simple “homework in reverse” model. Rather, it is the idea that *some* amount of “low-level” activities done inside class (lecturing, quizzing, etc) can be moved outside of class using technology, and the reclaimed time can be used for high-impact activities – project-based learning, peer instruction, guided inquiry, etc.

A more precise definition he uses:

The idea here is that some amount of design of flip materials is done centrally by a group of people, either as a company, consortium, or loose network of individuals. Those high quality materials are then distributed among many instructors who work to localize and modify them for use in their own flipped classrooms.

Interesting are the comments he makes about the use of MOOCs in a flipped classroom. Are MOOCs more than just educational materials?

Read more on hapgood.us.

Vanmiddag organiseert de VVD een ronde tafel over open onderwijs. Samen met TU Delft CvB-lid Anka Mulder ben ik uitgenodigd om daar bij aanwezig te zijn. De middag bestaat uit twee delen, waarbij het eerste deel zich richt op het hoger onderwijs en het tweede deel op po/vo. Bij de sessie over hoger onderwijs zitten de volgende personen:

• TU Delft: Anka Mulder (spreker) & Willem van Valkenburg
• Open Universiteit Heerlen: Fred Mulder (spreker) & Wilfred Rubens
• SURF: Christien Bok (spreker) & Hester Jelgerhuis
• Universiteit Leiden: Rick Lawson (spreker) & Marja Verstelle

Elk van deze instellingen is ook gevraagd om een position paper (1 A4) aan te leveren. Hieronder de tekst die ik samen met Anka hiervoor heb opgesteld.

Full story »

Video is an import part of today's courses, such as blended courses, MOOCs, and fully online courses. But there’s a big difference between watching a video and learning something from it. Videos are great for presenting visual information and emotional appeals, but not particularly effective at diving below the surface of non-visual theoretical or abstract topics or for driving critical thinking.  (Nielsen, 2013)

Emily Moore gives four active learning strategies:

Video as a guided lesson (flipping the classroom): “The goal here is to help ensure that students watch videos actively—in other words, giving it their full attention. You also want to help draw students’ attention to (and reinforce) the most important concepts being presented.”

• Pose a question at the beginning of each video to give students an idea before they watch of what to expect, what to look for, and what might be worth thinking about.
• Present videos in an outline-like structure using concise, descriptively labeled links that include running times as shown below.
• Embed short graded or self-assessments either in the video itself, or at the end of each video.

Video as springboard for in-depth discussion: “This strategy encourages students to make a personal connection between video content and their own existing knowledge. It also encourages student-student collaboration, which is a critical component of any successful online course.”

• Assign a video. After viewing the video, have each student post to a discussion board based on a specific task, concept, or reflection and encourage students to interact and engage with each other.

Video as springboard for critical thinking: ”Ideally, students come away from a class not just having memorized material, but also having understood it well enough to discuss and apply it to novel scenarios.”

• Get students to identify, compare, and contrast the concepts presented in a video (or series of videos). How are the concepts similar? How are they different? Which are substantiated or refuted by the course text (or other course materials)?

Video as a way to strengthen online research skills while driving conceptual understanding:

• Have students locate online and present to the class a second video that (supports, defends, opposes, elaborates…) the original video.
• Use students’ “found” videos as the basis for class discussion. Ask students to comment, via discussion board, on how well the clips shared by their classmates met the selected criterion.

I think these strategies are really useful for online classes such as MOOCs.

Reference:
The Nielsen Company, Free to Move Between Screens: The Cross-Platform Report, March 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013/the-nielsen-march-2013-cross-platform-report–free-to-move-betwe.html.

Errol Craig Sull has made a list of the 10 mayor obstacles and their solutions for teaching online.

1. Losing all power and other related interruptions
2. New to teaching/new to teaching online.
3. A severe medical problem strains teaching efforts.
4. Sexual/aggressive emails and other difficult communications from students.
5. Receiving poor student and/or supervisor evaluations.
6. Teaching an unfamiliar course or subject.
7. Links in course not working/course setup items incorrect.
8. Efficiently managing time.
9. Accidentally posting email, etc., with improper/offensive wording.
10. Posting grades incorrectly—especially final ones.

As Wilfred Rubens mentioned in his post, it is interesting to see that most problems are not related to the teaching. Most of these are technical and communication problems.

As a teacher you should be aware that your communication is very clear and doesn't give to much room for interpretation. You don't have the classroom to correct this.