MOOCs: a Model for Open Education?

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Graham Attwell

The idea of Open Education has come a long way in the last two years. Massive Online Open Courses are becoming more common (with the announcement of the “mother of all MOOCs” on Change: Education, Learning and Technology exciting great interest in the edu-blogosphere), conferences and seminars being streamed online and Open Educational Resources have entered the mainstream.

What has been learned in this process?

Firstly the model of courses which are free to participants but charge for institutional enrollment and for certification appears to be gaining traction. How far this can go depends I guess on the extent that participation (and recording of work) becomes recognised as achievement. It will also depend on how much value universities and other institutions think they can gain (or stand to lose) through such a model.

Secondly most of these programmes are using all manner of social software and Open Source applications. There seems to be a growing practice of hanging programmes together around open webinars, with students using their own blogs or other social software for their personal work. One of the less successful experiments seems to be attempts to integrate VLEs, especially Moodle, within MOOCs. Participants are being encouraged to develop their own Personal Learning Environments as part of the process.

Thirdly such initiatives place great emphasis on peer support for learning, with a greater or lesser extent of formal learning support and formalization of networks. One greatly encouraging development is the blurring of the boundary between teachers and learners. Another is the involvement of people form different organisations in leading, facilitating or stewarding such programmes. Most stewards or facilitators are not being paid, although I suspect at present this is being accepted by institutions as a legitimate part of their work as researchers. Whatever, this is resulting in a weakening of institutional boundaries and the emergence of stronger communities of practice.

There also seems to be considerable pedagogic innovation, with a willingness to explore new ways of learning. Especially encouraging is the use of multi media, which although promised in so many formal elearning programmes, has seldom really happened.

Now comes the big question. Can the experience gained from the MOOCs be extended to provide a transferable and scalable model for Open Education.

I’ve already talked about the issue of recognition which I see not so much as a question of assessment but of social recognition of achievement. But there are other open issues. How do we deal with language barriers? More critically, most participants in the early MOOCs seem to be professionals, teachers and researchers already engaged in online learning or multi media and / or students. In other words, people with a fair degree of competence in communicating through on-line media. The model is based on a large degree of self motivation and is reliant on learners being able to manage both their own learning and able to develop their own support networks. This is a pretty big limitation.

I see two ways to deal with this. One is to provide more formal and institutional support through participation in MOOCs becoming part of courses on which learners are already enrolled and their host institution providing support. This idea is already being suggested for the Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. The second is through developing more fomalised individual and group mentoring and support systems. At the moment, we are tending to focus on presenters as the key people in facilitating the online programmes. But such a second layer of mentors could play the critical role, and providing such mentoring could be a key part of Continuing Professional Development for teachers and trainers. In other words, a win, win situation.

Story telling with Data

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Graham Attwell

Today Google Labs released their new data visualisation store. Very impressive it is too, although it is not a straightforward task to register on the site, upload uses an XML format and you cannot download data. But the visualisation is pretty good and Google themselves have linked to a number of large Eurostat data sets.

I have been working on data for the last couple of weeks. I am trying to build a TEBO – a Technology Enhanced Boundary Object (or objects) for explaining Labour Market data to Careers Advice, Information and Guidance (CAIG). Together with my colleagues from the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick University, I have been looking at TEBOs for some time.

Alan Brown explains the conceptual idea behind TEBOs:

The ideas of boundary crossing and tool mediation (Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström, 2003; Kaptelinin & Miettinen 2005) and situated learning with a close alignment to the importance of a focus upon practice (Brown et al., 1989; Hall, 1996) informed considerations of the role of technologically-enhanced boundary objects in knowledge maturing processes in different contexts. One specific concern is to make visible the epistemological role of symbolic boundary objects in situations in which people from different communities use common artefacts in communication. A fruitful approach to choosing ways to develop particular boundary objects is to focus on what Onstenk (1997) defines as core problems: the problems and dilemmas that are central to the practice of an occupation that have significance both for individual and organisational performance — in this case the problems associated with providing advice relevant for career planning. One method this development project used was therefore to engage in a dialogue with guidance practitioners about common scenarios involving Labour Market Information (LMI) which could inform the development of prototype technologically-enhanced boundary objects (TEBOs). The development … was therefore informed by a consideration of the following issues:

Importance of developing methods and strategies for co-design with users

Need for conceptual tools to help people understand the models and ideas which are part of LMI

Need for a more open pedagogy (than is typical of much existing technology-enhanced learning, and existing workplace training practice)

A system in which boundary objects are configurable by end-users (practitioners) and by guidance trainers to be used in multiple ways

Need to build an understanding of how TEBOs may be used in ways that are empowering for practitioners, and ultimately for clients too.

These concerns could be coupled with another set of issues concerning appropriate skill development:

Need for time for people to interact, reflect, use concepts etc.

Trying to reach a stage where practitioners have justifiable confidence in the claims they make and can exercise judgement about the value of information when faced with unfamiliar LMI

Choosing between a range of possible use-contexts

Decide how to employ support from communication and discussion tools

Developing and transmitting Labour Market intelligence – importance of communicating to others

Preconfigure certain ways of thinking through use of scenarios; discussions can point into and lead from scenarios.

In practice it is not so easy to develop such TEBOs. Identifying key problmes is probably the most useful approach. But then there is an issue in accessing different data to visualise as part of the process. A great deal of data is now publicly available. But I am no data specialist and have faced a steep learning curve in understanding and interpreting the data myself. then there is the issue of visualisation – I am mainly using Google Gadgets, although we are also working with Tableau (a powerful tool, but unfortunately only available for Windows) and IBM;s Many Eyes. All these tools are good, but are all extremely finicky about how the data is formatted. We are working with data in xls and Apple’s Numbers but I suspect longer term it would be better to use the Open Source R programming environment.

And the hardest task of all is the storyboarding. At the end of the day we are trying to tell stories with data: TEBOs are a storytelling and exploration approach to learning. So for each TEBO I intend to make a short video explaining the key concepts and showing the various visualizations. We will also provide access to the raw data and to static versions of the graphing, along with explanatory notes. And for each TEBO we will try to construct an interactive visualisation tool, allowing learners to play with the data and displays. I also want to try to build some sort of simulations using the Forio tool. No doubt there is better software (and if anyone has any ideas I would be very grateful). But I sort of feel that the more social software, open source or free tools we can use the better. We want to encourage people to do it for themselves. And they have no money to spend on fancy software tools.We cannot possibly provide access to visualisations of all the data available. But if we cane explain what is possible, hopefully interested CAIG professionals will start there own work. And then who knows – a Careers Guidance data store?

Using social software for managing research and development projects

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Graham Attwell

In around 1995 I was appointed by Bremen University to manage a relatively well funded European project on the teaching of teachers and training for vocational education and training. The project had partners in seven or eight countries. I set up a project newsletter and after three or so months announced I would no longer be ending postal copies but it would be sent exclusively by email. There was considerable opposition to this, one person (the Swedish partner) saying he had a Mac and documents would not be compatible, others claiming that they lacked the skills and technical infrastructure to manage a project electronically (my own professor used to get his secretary to download and print off copies of any emails to him).

But the shift was made and by the end of the three year funding period no-one could imagine going back to post as the main means of project communication.

In the last two or so years we have seen a similar radical shift in the technologies we use for research communication and collaboration. At the launch workshop for a project in January I was asked what tools I wanted to use for the project. My list got surprisingly long:

Skype for day to day chat and audio communication
Flash meeting for online project meetings
Diigo for shred bookmarks
Twitter for project dissemination and sharing outwards
WordPress for the project website
PB Works for sharing work in progress
Flickr for sharing photographs
Google Docs for collaborative authoring
DropBox for sharing documents

Interestingly, one of the parters offered us a space on a relatively mature project management system and although we all agreed to use it I doubt we will. In my experience these systems are too restrictive and do not provide sufficient facilities for active collaboration. Of course they usually provide forums, but I have never worked on a project where there has been prolonged collaboration through a forum (despite most projects trying).

The one application not on my list is of course email. And despite having taken part in many projects where it is decided not to use email as the primary means of communication, after a short period everyone reverts back to it. Is this because of familiarity or because it perhaps is the quickest and simplest means of communication?

None of the applications listed require any great technical abilities (although firewalls and interoperability issues do sometimes arise). However they require changes in our working practices – in our socio-technical competences. And that can be difficult, especially where researchers are not used to working in an open and collaborative environment.

In terms of distributed international projects it is probably skype and Flashmeeting which have made the greatest impact. even then it takes time to get used to working online in synchronous environments. Online meetings require preparation and moderation – just as do face to face meetings. Yet because it is online there is often a tendency not to prepare in the same way as we would for a face opt face workshop.

I am not quite sure how DropBox is going to pan out in all of this. It certainly has a clever financial model – my free account was overflowing within a month of setting up an account.

And it is an uncertain science. Whilst organisations like Jisc have invested considerable expenditure into developing relatively heavyweight online research environments I do not know of any research into how we can use loosely coupled social software tools for research projects. We are maki9ng up our own practice as we go!

Serious Social Networking

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Graham Attwell

The Guardian newspaper points to a so called ‘backlash’ against social networking, expressed in a number of recent academic studies and books. And to an extent, I agree. I suspect the novelty factor has worn off. That does not mean social networking is dead, far from it. But it does mean we are slowly evolving an ecosystem of social networking and I am not sure that the Facebook model, driven by the desire to monetarise a huge user base will survive in the long term.

Instead I see two trends. With applications like Facebook, or whatever succeeds it, friends will return to being friends. People we know, people we want to socialise with, be it family and friends we see regularly face to face or friends in distributed networks.

The second will be the growth of social networks based on shared interests and shared practice. Of course this is nothing new. The early days of the web spawned many wonderful bulletin boards with graphics being based on the imaginative use of different text and fonts. Ning led to the explosion of community sites whilst it remained free. But now we are seeing the evolution of free and open source software providing powerful tools for supporting interest and practice based communities.

Cloudworks, developed by the UK Open University has now released an installable version of their platform. Buddypress seems to have developed a vibrant open source community of developers.And I am greatly impressed by QSDA, the Open Source Question and Answer System. Quora is all the hype now. But like so many of these systems, it will be overrun not so much by machine driven spam, but by the lack of a shared community and purpose.

According to Ettiene Wenger, a community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
How it functions – mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.

Open Source networking tools can allow us to support that shared repertoire of communal resources. I am working on the development of open and linked data for careers guidance and counselling. it is a fairly steep learning curve for me in terms of understanding data. And one of the bests sites I have found is Tony Hirst’s Get the Data site, only launched a week ago and based on the QSDA software, but already providing a wealth if freely contributed ideas and knowledge.

it is this sort of development that seems to me to be the future for social networking.

Declaring our Learning

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Graham Attwell

I am ultra impressed by the idea behind the Declare-It web app. The site says

Declare-It is a tool that assists you in creating, tracking and being held accountable to your goals. For every declaration you make, Declare-It requires you to add supporters. Supporters are notified of your declaration and receive progress reports along your journey. If you start to fall off track, your supporters are sent an ALERT message. They can send you comments and even add incentives to help you stay motivated.

Sadly, Declare-It is a commercial site. Although it allows a ten day free trial, it then costs $9.99 per month. And I don’t honestly see enough people being prepared to pay that money for the site to gain critical mass. But the idea is simple enough and could easily be adopted or extended to other web tools.

Essentially all it is saying is that we set our own learning goals and targets and use our Personal Learning Networks for support. Then rather than just selecting friends to monitor our progress and receive alerts when we slip behind, as in the Declare-It app, we could select friends from our Personal Learning Network to support our learning and receive alerts when we achieve something or need collaboration.

Of course many of this will do that already using all kinds of different tools. My learning is work based, and most of this work is undertaken in collaboration with others – using email, forums or very often skype. Having said that I have never really got on with any of the myriad task setting (lists) and tracking tools and astikll tend to write my lists on the back of envelopes.

But rather than a separate web site like Declare-IT (which admittedly does have some Twitter and Facebook integration), I need some way of integrating Declare-It type functionality with my everyday workflow. A WordPress plug-in could be wonderful, particularly for project work.