Week 4 - Activity 14: Comparing MOOCs

Week 4 - Activity 14: Comparing MOOCs
Please scroll down a few lines for the start of  the activity post proper, thank you.

Compare either DS106  or the Change MOOC  with offerings from Udacity  or Coursera .
(You may not be able to access a course on these sites without signing up – there is no need to do this but you do need to ascertain what you can from the information around the course and the approach of the providers.)

Write a blog post comparing the courses with regards to:
technology
pedagogy
general approach and philosophy.

Remember to tag your blog post with #h817open and to read and comment on some of the posts of your fellow students.

DS106: Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington... but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferrably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster.

Change MOOC 
This course will introduce participants to the major contributions being made to the field of instructional technology by researchers today. Each week, a new professor or researcher will introduce his or her central contribution to the field.
Date: September 12, 2011 - May 2012
Technologies Used: Through out this "course" participants will use a variety of technologies, for example, blogs, Second Life, RSS Readers, UStream, etc. Course resources will be provided using gRSShopper and online seminars delivered using Elluminate.
Facilitators: Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes will co-facilitate this innovative and timely course.  Both of these are cMOOCs. DS106 looks the more creative and still active, but I will select The Change MOOC and Udacity. Udacity because it mainly offers CS type courses.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction
At an initial glance we can see the Change MOOC is classed as a cMOOC (connectivism) not least of all because of the key facilitators of this MOOC being Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes. All of whom are the founding fathers of the MOOC, later classified as the cMOOC. Udacity is one of the"fixed" xMOOCs (including EdX, Coursera). Both Udacity and Coursera are for profit companies. So, with The Change MOOC we have an Open free MOOC compared with a for profit, closed (although still free to students) fixed MOOC. I also chose Udacity over coursera for this comparison as I originally signed up for their CS101 course in May 2012.

Technology
The Change MOOC platform looks like Moodle although is running off  Downes' gRSShopper software. The MOOC itself offers MP3 audio, Elluminate recordings (which was bought by Blackboard and renamed to Blackboard Collaborate - a Java run video, audio and workspace collaboration and discussion tool). PowerPoint attached slides,  blogs, RSS feeds, Google calendar, a daily email and most likely Google Docs and they ran a backchannel. In essence the MOOC lives up to it's networking name and social participatory sharing, networking founding MOOC principle. Participants are welcomed and encouraged to make use of any technology to communicate their ideas and reflections with each other.

Udacity, created by a Stanford team, is far more restrictive, fixed, in the technology it uses or requires the student to use. It makes use of "bite-sized videos" within a closed and structured platform. I believe Udacity is currently developing a platform for others to use. Udacity offers 22 courses, mainly comp. sci related, with subtitles in "Spanish, Chinese, French, Portuguese and even less widespread languages such as Croatian.". The lack of language support did not seem a major issue or concern for the cMOOC fraternity I noticed in my literature review. The courses do not appear to be linked to any particular university, nor do the instructors. For example the instructor on the single Physics course, Andy Brown, was biking around the world before creating his Physics course. Udacity do seem to have HAL from 2001 Space Odyssey sending out their compute generated emails, which is obviously a major technological bonus.  Despite almost a year without logging in to Udacity I am able to resume my Introduction to Computer Science course from where I left off.

Pedagogy
For the Change, and other cMOOCs such as this current OU MOOC the methods and practice of teaching is by total immersion into a social peer supported learning bubble. The student is free to make use of the tools of their choice (e.g. I do not make use of Twitter but prefer blogging and reading other student's blogs). I scan emailed forum posts for points of interest. cMOOCs have a supporting structure but they are both the "Wild West" and the "Party where you can wander around eating nibbles and joining groups for chats". The beginner cMOOCer must have developed Internet and IT skills and must be organized (i.e. grouping bookmarks, be adept at searching blogs and forums) etc. if they are to remain motivated within the cMOOC. The pedagogy here is one of constructivism and I would also say experimentalism. The social aspect of this MOOC is very strong, leading to clusters of likeminded people who will continue to discuss and communicate at the end of the MOOC schedule.

The xMOOC is highly structured, less flexible in Internet tool use, in fact everything required is provided in the platform, and so anything added would be optional by the student (for example copying of their work into their own blog). The advantage of the xMOOC is that one can join at any time, where as the cMOOCs seem to run for a few times then close down. One feels alone and like the single independent learner in an xMOOC (unlike the feeling of being part of a big group with the cMOOC). Udacity does it's best to offer up a Blog (but this looks structured and uninviting - sort of the nerd in the corner). They organize "Meetups" and indeed there was one in Bangkok attended by 4 people. No more seem planned. The leaning is simply this: Listen, practice, listen, practice. There are elements of building on past learning and skills, where the programming problems (for the CS intro) got more tricky and made use of previous content covered. The activity problems, program code to write, required a very good understanding of the previous material if one was to be successful. As stated in the literature, the pedagogy is standard fair and quite old. Learning to learn, not required here.

General approach and philosophy
The cMOOC (The Change MOOC) has the advantage of keeping the student engaged and participating by the use of many and varied knowledge delivery systems plus of course asking the student to create digital artifacts (products) using any tool their hearts desire. This freedom of product creation tool means that there will be participants without those tool skills who will feel inferior or lack the confidence to engage and may lurk. Although lurkers have their place to. Peer pressure and "keeping up with the Jones'" may be an issue. On the other hand, this kind of MOOC and the various means of engaging with peers allows for communication at all levels (plus I think, in general these MOOCs attract a more creative and genial crowd). I believe that the MOOC founders might be a little upset that their MOOC ideas have been hijacked by what people term the "elite" universities, who garner all the media attention (Bates was certainly unimpressed with Daphne Koller's Ted Talk). However, many people will feel more at home following a cMOOC course than an xMOOC course. I think the cMOOC philosophy matches more closely to the education for everyone (rich, poor, developed, undeveloped country) ideal than the xMOOC does. Purely because of the openness in tools in cases of restricted Internet bandwidth or government controls.

The xMOOC course appeals to my innate logical, everything sorted and structured anal personality. I know where I am, literally, with a xMOOC. My progress can almost be measured down to the nano-second. The bite sized videos tend, on the CS course anyhow, to make use of the instructor drawing sketches (known to be preferred by many - aka Kharn Academy except we see pen and hand) which then morph, as if by magic, in to MC quizzes in order to test understanding. These computer graded short quizzes combined with automatically graded bigger activities is an area not seen in the cMOOC, although there is no reason I suppose why a cMOOC could not use a tool such as Yacapaca. Eventually, as the Coursera contract states, for profit xMOOCs will, in my opinion, start charging for something. Be it certificates at the end, or selling student data to employment agencies. This potential payment and the lack of media delivery flexibility may be restrictive to poorer students with low Internet bandwidth.

Opinion
I think a person needs to be far more self-motivated in order to complete a xMOOC course, compared to a cMOOC course mainly because of the lack of functionality to "see" and share problems with others (despite the 22 minute coursera stated peer answer time). To see that others are experiencing the same problems you had. The cMOOC has a community of supportive learners who are willing to help which does not seem so apparent with the xMOOC. xMOOC content comes from the so called, best universities in the world, and although this does not necessarily mean the teaching is the best in the world, the chance to be able to access it for free is an amazing opportunity. The xMOOC will be the survivor if there is a MOOC challenge, because of the simplicity and ease of starting any course and the clean interface. By including more social learning opportunities into the xMOOC people will pay for this online course eventually. I know that if I made it to the final exam of a MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale etc. course I would certainly be willing to pay $100 or more for a certificate on passing the exam. I also believe that these certificates are going to be far more relevant to employers than say a Bath Master's degree. An applicant with evidence of having recently successfully completed a few xMOOCs on their CV outweighs the applicant who did an MA ten years back, for a whole host of reasons.  

References
See here for my notes and references that have gone into the above: http://davidbrettell-h817.blogspot.com/2013/04/week-4-activity-12-learner-experience.html

Week 4 - Activity 12

Week 4 - Activity 12
Before we examine MOOCs in more detail, briefly consider if the MOOC approach could be adopted in your own area of education or training. Post your thoughts in your blog and then read and comment on your peers’ postings.

4 hours, that was the timing for this activity. I must have spent at least 10 hours reading and following up on links. Of the 100% I read I only ever seem to retain about 5% if I am lucky, so I had better write this fast. My notes on the given material and links stemming from this material can be found here.

My area of education has always been in private overseas international secondary schools (KS3-5), from the time I earned my PGCE to now (about 25 years in 5 different countries). The simple answer is yes, I believe the MOOC approach can work and already is being adopted in overseas international schools. For example, I have one student who has successfully completed two Udacity courses. He is a special case, but others started the AI course that was offered and some students took part in the team challenge on edX I think it was. This was all self-motivated and initiated by the students. In my school, within the Computing faculty, we make use of Codecademy, Code Monster and other online tutorials. Although these may not be classed as MOOCs I can see that as soon as MOOCs offer courses at the secondary school level they will be used. Already I make use of the first 5 to 7 lectures of a Stanford computing course as an introduction to programming with my IB Computer Science classes. My school is a 1:1 laptop school, which makes a difference in that all students have access to hardware and the school have a fast and fairly robust Internet connection.

The issues for secondary students is the need to help them stay motivated and organized as they work through a MOOC. The other issue will be parents asking what they are paying high school fees for if their children are spending time in lesson working on something they can just as easily work on at home, and probably with private tutor at a far lower cost. When I present this issue to my IB ITGS students their response is that they would rather come to school, for the social aspects of it as well as the need to be in a different place to work. They say they would not do any work if left alone at home. For middle school students, staying organized and not becoming overwhelmed with the various tools required to be used would take learning and practice. Overall, I think the use of MOOCs across a range of subjects will be used at some point in the student's learning during an academic year.

Weel 3 - Activity 11: The advantages and disadvantages of big and little OER

• From the list below, either read the chapter or view the slidecast:
  • Weller (2011b), Public engagement as collateral damage  (chapter).
  • Weller (2011a), Academic output as collateral damage  (slidecast).
• Write a blog post of less than 500 words on the benefits and drawbacks of big and little OER approaches. Remember to tag your post with #h817open.

Notes
I have been falling quite far behind on this due to holiday time. Still, can get back into it now.
I watched the slidecast but found the audio levels very low (one of the drawbacks of little OER). I followed up on some of the links, including watching a weird video of Martin Weller talking to his future self, with beard and pipe.

1. Benefits of big OER approaches.

• Looks professional is professional - set's a standard
• Big OER is planned, specified, designed, implemented, tested. 3rd party content removed and replaced.
• The OER should be 100 legal
• More comprehensive content and robust support systems (for example, system remembers all your past quizzes, and where you are in the OER. Maybe making suggestions for what to look at next).
• A professional (experts?) collaborative OER should in theory lack errors and biases that may be inherent in a single (little) OER.
• Interactive
• One Big OER probably leads on to another relevant OER in a sequence
• More likely to be known and/or recognized as an expert source of data/knowledge/information
• Markets the institution that created it

2. Drawbacks of big OER approaches.

• Content of OER may contain more than the user wants or requires, thereby taking the user time to locate and focus upon their required OER from the provided.
• Geared towards a big audience and therefore less "personal" in the perceived approach/content/delivery method.

3. Benefits of little OER approaches.

• Quick to do. No need to discuss with a team if it is just you creating the resource
• Can be aimed at a specific niche audience
• Cheap/free to do
• Supposedly specialist skills not required.
• Maybe possible to find OER content specific to a very narrow field

4. Drawbacks of little OER approaches.

• Marketing it - Making the public aware of its existence
• Need some technical skills - not only to make the resource but also to share it and manage them/it. (E.g. this slideshare, 2,773 views, with very low level audio level making it hard to hear without external amplification or headphones).
• Lacks quality control - e.g. hard to read black text due to background colour/image
• Usually a single simple resource (podcast, slideshare). No integration of multiple resources.
• Less interactive courses/content
• A single person resource could have errors or biases in their resource
• Is the OER 100% legal, no copied images, all content allowed to be shared? No time or possibly motivation to remove or cite all sources within little OER
• Lack of peer review of content can lead to a poor quality little OER

Week 3 - Activity 10: Applying sustainability models

• Read Wiley (2007), On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education .
• Then look at the following open education initiatives, and for each one determine which of Wiley’s three models of sustainability you think they are operating:
  • Change MOOC 
  • Coursera 
  • Jorum 
  • OpenLearn
• Consider the following:
  1. Was the sustainability model for each OER initiative apparent?
  2. Did Wiley’s models cover all approaches or did you think a different model was operating for one or more of them?
• You can share these reflections in either the forum or in your blog.

Change MOOC 
8 month course. "Each week, a new professor or researcher will introduce his or her central contribution to the field."
Facilitators, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier
this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web.
Closest model match is the Rice model, apparent from the "About" and "How it works" links.
It's not clear if the facilitators are paid, seems like they are not.

Coursera 
Looks very much like the MIT model with founders and a "team". They advertise job positions on their website and so these must be paid positions. MIT model then. This seemed apparent, also from the quality of their website. Time, and therefore, money has been and is being spent to make a quality site and courses.

Jorum
Website looks like the USU or Rice model, probably USU.
Jorum is a Jisc funded Service in Development in UK Further and Higher Education, to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing. Majority female team made up of more Chiefs than Indians, who do not seem to do anything concrete in editing or working on any courses content. Lacks the quality of MIT model and the funding. Most similar to USU but I cannot find reference to removing 3rd part content, but then I guess they do not need to as content is provided mostly by UK Uni's as is. Not same as Rice model since in that model individuals work on the courses worldwide.

OpenLearn
Budding MIT model. Paid from by OU but only supporting their own OU course content, unlike other models. This does not fall into any of the above models. A bit of each really. People within the OU build the course, OL promote and offer the course. Funding from OU and therefor paying students.

Week 3 - Activity 9: Choosing a licence

Activity 9: Choosing a license

A fairly easy task, if one uses the easy CC chooser. I chose this license:


This OU Open h817 course blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Click here to learn what it means: CC meaning which explains the reasons I selected this. I don't want people making money out of what I do, unless it's me. I do want people to build on anything I create as I can learn from it, and I do want my name to travel with the work in case it becomes famous and they need to track me down for the knighthood. So all in all, very selfish and egotistical reasons as oppose to the moral imperative we aspire to.

Week 2 - Activity 8: An OER course

Evaluation Reflect upon whether the use of OER caused you to change what you wanted to teach, and what time saving (if any) would be gained by using OER.

Ariadne tended to come up with nothing. The one time it did find something, on the second search page, following the link resulted in "The system cannot find the path specified." Jorum gives thousands of hits, sometimes over 3,000. However for my week 4 and 5 searches I found a relevant PDF, which although was too advanced for my needs could be useful for a higher level class and/or school management. Merlot was useless, giving me nothing or irrelevant hits. MIT's results were all far too complex or not relevant. OpenLearn came up with something that looked useful for my week 3 search but the content was from 2007 and a link to an online scanner website did not work. A link to another document took me to something from 2004, too old to be of use (I read it and the content was dated, with reference to "AOL Online"). Rice Connexions was very slow to return a search list for every search done over 2 days and with 5 different search criteria. Searching on "Laptop Care Security" resulted in the first listed most relevant result of "Ten Easy Steps To Move Your Cheese For Better Aging", how could it possible come up with that given the search terms?

Overall, very disappointed given I selected a skills based topic related to laptop use and care, taking into account data backup and security. Admittedly the topics searched on related to school level age, but given the keywords used I expected more. What I tended to get was high-level academic theoretical papers and not down-to-earth practical advice, lesson plans or resources of any kinds (i.e. posters, slides, web tutorials, multimedia). In other words, these OER sites seem pretty useless to me as a source for school level ICT/Computing. I will stick with the current search resources I already have. No time was saved and the results have not made me change what I wanted to teach.

(Search result details can be viewed here: http://davidbrettell-h817.blogspot.com/2013/04/week-2-activity-8-notes.html)

Week 2 - Activity 7: Exploring OER issues (Repost)

[Re-posting this as I cannot find it listed by the aggregator. Registered this blog, http://davidbrettell-h817.blogspot.com/,  again just in case ) [search term: David]

Activity 7: Exploring OER issues
What I perceive as the three key issues in OER, and how these are being addressed.

I identify my three key issues from the perspective of creating and using OER within an English language overseas international school context. From the short literature review I undertook my focus has always been on how I and my colleagues would make use of OER and under what circumstances would we be able to contribute to the OER movement (D’Antoni 2009).

Cost, in terms of time and ultimately money is the first main issue. On the one hand the literature states that creating and sharing the resources is a minimal expense, for example Caswell et all state “At little or no cost universities can make their content available to millions” (Caswell et al 2008, p.1). The job of creating OER can be integrated into a faculty workload, passed on to a media center employee (if a school has one) or most successfully accomplished by a dedicated employee (Caswell et al 2008). So then, on the other hand someone must be paid to do this work. In my international school experience, working at for profit and non-profit schools, the board does not employ staff unless they see a tangible benefit (bodies in front of kids) to the school. The time necessary to create the OER, learning and meeting the OER standard(s) used is a luxury unavailable to teaching staff in international schools. As Wilson et al reported, in their study of five institutions, one participant reported that she lacked the time to adapt OER (Wilson et al 2009, p.10) let alone, in my opinion, create new resources. An issue also mentioned by other participants of the study. Indeed the paper alludes to the delay in gaining replies from the five participants stating that they “were contacted at a busy time {mid way) in the academic year” (p.11). Given that international educators have perhaps four non-contact periods per week, one must question where they would find the time to embark on an OER endeavor without the support of their school.

Caswell et al. 2008 asserts that we have a “moral obligation” (p. 8) to create OER and Wiley (2006, cited by Caswell et al. p. 7) states that there is a “moral imperative” and how can we “in good conscience allow this poverty of education” to continue. The simple answer is that for international schools, the owner and accountant look at the bottom line figure and if any innovation does not increase the profit, or worse costs money, then altruism be dammed. It has been argued that the marketing gain from creating OER can offset the costs, which may be true at university level, but not so for a successful and full school.

Assuming OER use and creation take place. Maintaining the momentum and sustainability of the project are major issues. A key concern is the turnover of staff, on average every 2 to 4 years, on the international school circuit. Staff will not invest their own personal time and energy into an OER project when they know they will not see it through to fruition. Of course, “Open” implies geographical boundaries should not impede an OER development.  

There is scope and opportunity to use OER in Secondary Education. For example, recommending MOOCs and OER courses to secondary students as supplementary resources to be accessed outside of school (Wilson et al. 2009). Cherry picking content and including extra content when necessary, as three out of the five participants indicated (Wilson et al. 2009, Figure 4, p. 9) is an option. An example of this was when I introduced programming and Java to an IB Computer Science class by having them complete the first seven lectures and assignments from the Stanford CS106A Programming Methodology course (Stanford 2013). Due to the high level and fast pace of the introductory material, I created extra in-between assignments, and broke down the reading requirements in to secondary level manageable sections.

My International secondary school is beginning to make use of OER however I am unaware of, and doubt that, staff at my school and similar establishments will heed their moral imperative and begin creating OER, likewise the institutions will only  support this movement if it immediately profits them to do so.

Words: 694

References

CALVERLEY, G. AND SHEPHARD, K. 2003. ‘Assisting the uptake of on-line resources: why good learning resources are not enough’, Computers and Education, Vol. 41, pp.205–224.

CASWELL, T., HENSON, S., JENSEN, M., WILEY, D. 2008. Open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1), 1–4. 

D’ANTONI, S.  2009. Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 24:1, 3-1. Available fromhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680510802625443 [Accessed 30 March 2013]

STANFORD CS106A. Stanford University, USA. Stanford CS106A: Programming Methodology. Available from http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/index.html [Accessed 30 March 2013]

WILSON, T. AND MCANDREW, P. 2009. Evaluating how five higher education institutions worldwide plan to use and adapt open educational resources' Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6.

(Badge: OER understanding applied for)

Week 2 - Activity 7: Exploring OER issues

Activity 7: Exploring OER issues
What I perceive as the three key issues in OER, and how these are being addressed.

I identify my three key issues from the perspective of creating and using OER within an English language overseas international school context. From the short literature review I undertook my focus has always been on how I and my colleagues would make use of OER and under what circumstances would we be able to contribute to the OER movement (D’Antoni 2009).

Cost, in terms of time and ultimately money is the first main issue. On the one hand the literature states that creating and sharing the resources is a minimal expense, for example Caswell et all state “At little or no cost universities can make their content available to millions” (Caswell et al 2008, p.1). The job of creating OER can be integrated into a faculty workload, passed on to a media center employee (if a school has one) or most successfully accomplished by a dedicated employee (Caswell et al 2008). So then, on the other hand someone must be paid to do this work. In my international school experience, working at for profit and non-profit schools, the board does not employ staff unless they see a tangible benefit (bodies in front of kids) to the school. The time necessary to create the OER, learning and meeting the OER standard(s) used is a luxury unavailable to teaching staff in international schools. As Wilson et al reported, in their study of five institutions, one participant reported that she lacked the time to adapt OER (Wilson et al 2009, p.10) let alone, in my opinion, create new resources. An issue also mentioned by other participants of the study. Indeed the paper alludes to the delay in gaining replies from the five participants stating that they “were contacted at a busy time {mid way) in the academic year” (p.11). Given that international educators have perhaps four non-contact periods per week, one must question where they would find the time to embark on an OER endeavor without the support of their school.

Caswell et al. 2008 asserts that we have a “moral obligation” (p. 8) to create OER and Wiley (2006, cited by Caswell et al. p. 7) states that there is a “moral imperative” and how can we “in good conscience allow this poverty of education” to continue. The simple answer is that for international schools, the owner and accountant look at the bottom line figure and if any innovation does not increase the profit, or worse costs money, then altruism be dammed. It has been argued that the marketing gain from creating OER can offset the costs, which may be true at university level, but not so for a successful and full school.

Assuming OER use and creation take place. Maintaining the momentum and sustainability of the project are major issues. A key concern is the turnover of staff, on average every 2 to 4 years, on the international school circuit. Staff will not invest their own personal time and energy into an OER project when they know they will not see it through to fruition. Of course, “Open” implies geographical boundaries should not impede an OER development.  

There is scope and opportunity to use OER in Secondary Education. For example, recommending MOOCs and OER courses to secondary students as supplementary resources to be accessed outside of school (Wilson et al. 2009). Cherry picking content and including extra content when necessary, as three out of the five participants indicated (Wilson et al. 2009, Figure 4, p. 9) is an option. An example of this was when I introduced programming and Java to an IB Computer Science class by having them complete the first seven lectures and assignments from the Stanford CS106A Programming Methodology course (Stanford 2013). Due to the high level and fast pace of the introductory material, I created extra in-between assignments, and broke down the reading requirements in to secondary level manageable sections.

My International secondary school is beginning to make use of OER however I am unaware of, and doubt that, staff at my school and similar establishments will heed their moral imperative and begin creating OER, likewise the institutions will only  support this movement if it immediately profits them to do so.

Words: 694

References

CALVERLEY, G. AND SHEPHARD, K. 2003. ‘Assisting the uptake of on-line resources: why good learning resources are not enough’, Computers and Education, Vol. 41, pp.205–224.

CASWELL, T., HENSON, S., JENSEN, M., WILEY, D. 2008. Open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1), 1–4. 

D’ANTONI, S.  2009. Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 24:1, 3-1. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680510802625443 [Accessed 30 March 2013]

STANFORD CS106A. Stanford University, USA. Stanford CS106A: Programming Methodology. Available from http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/index.html [Accessed 30 March 2013]

WILSON, T. AND MCANDREW, P. 2009. Evaluating how five higher education institutions worldwide plan to use and adapt open educational resources' Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6.

(Badge: OER understanding applied for)

Week 1 - Activity 4

Activity 4: Identifying priorities for research

"Imagine you are advising a funding organisation that wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.

• Set out the three main priorities they should address, explaining each one and providing a justification for your list. Share this in the Week 1 forum  and compare with priorities of others.

In this activity you are just expected to start thinking about these issues, and to use your own experience and intuition; you are not expected to research them in depth. You will build on this work during next week, and also for the assignment. " (http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/open-education/content-section-1.5)

To help answer this I want to define a scenario and to work with that.

Imagined scenario
The PTG at my school has loads of money and want to promote Open Education in KS3, specifically the teaching of programming.

Main Priorities
These will relate to the key questions provided, which I summerised/grouped as "Learn - Resources - Support". So, I will use these. Although I have more questions on their behalf than I have any answers for.

1. The "Learn" Priority
They will need to know what the pedagogy is for making use of open education (OE) and whether it fits into the school mission plan and school ethos. They will be concerned about assessment, if standards will be maintained or improved with respect to examination results as well as any changes to student social well-being. They will want to know if the Open Pedagogy will support learners of all types and abilities.

To answer these questions I would advise them of case studies in the area of open KS3 education (there must be some out there). In fact, I saw something in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (Anderson is the editor) - http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl or on the http://www.hewlett.org/newsroom/search?program_id=88 site. I would need to locate empirical data that hopefully shows that gains are made in some form or another. The OE "manifesto" (is there one or at least a succinct definition, probably from OLDaily by Stephen Downes. http://www.downes.ca/ and one of his free books) would need to be mapped to the schools mission statement and stated aims. Case studies of pilot KS3 OE groups and their value-added would need to be compared to those with no OE. How do you find an OE free school/student? Schools with no technology use, that do exist. OE supporting all learner types would need to be addressed by case studies and empirical data.

2. The "Resources" Priority
The PTG will question what they will get for their money if everything is free and open anyway. Buggered if I know the answer. Well, you need the technology infrastructure to support the OE learning, this may mean more processing power (servers), plenty of storage and high Internet bandwidth. It may mean buying licenses for software tool use and online storage for all stakeholders (students, teachers and admin). Of course, the biggest expense is the cost to make the time available to implement the innovation in terms of training and support.

3. The "Support" Priority
This means getting everyone onboard and up to speed with the proposed OE activity. Which means giving ownership to all (students, teachers, parents and admin). It means teachers requiring training and time to investigate, to reflect on the changes, to discuss and question an proposed activity (i.e. KS3 OE Programming). Then to plan, implement and review. In a school this would take at least 2 years to get going, a year to do it and a year to review it. A minimum of 4 years, will the PTG keep funding this as teachers leave and new ones arrive (I think not). The funding organization (aka PTG) would need to know that it is a long term venture and not a one off donation/funding.

Conclusion
The funding organization need to understand that promoting activity and research, in the context of a secondary school, is a large endeavor and perhaps it is best to start in a very small way, with a small manageable change that might hopefully be scalable if seen to be successful.

Week 1 - Activity 2

Activity 2: Open education reading

Summary
My notes, thoughts and questions as I read the two items. For the Anderson (2009), Alt-C Keynote I found it easier to download the slides file and open it in PowerPoint (some slides also contain notes) and also I found his keynote address on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fZ89q3eKPU 
Again, it worked better to download the video to make it smoother for pausing as I took notes. There was so much in Anderson's keynote that I took a few days getting through it all, checking out his links and information. I've copied the links below and commented on what resources I thought looked good. The attached image comes from an introduction video from one of his links

In the image I questioned if Open Education means the end to plagiarism. Anderson answers this question at the end of his keynote, in the youtube video.

As well as an overload of sources (websites, Open journals, eBooks, textbooks etc.) for me the key idea was what defines an "Open Scholar". I began listing the attributes below.

Details
These are my notes on the two resources examined. Probably not that useful unless you want some quick links to some of the things mentioned in the Anderson slides.
 

The openness-creativity cycle in education -A Perspective, Martin Weller, 2012

 

Who is the "open scholar"? - Attributes?

+ve feedback creativity <-> open education resource, one +vely influences and increases the other. An explosion of open resources and creativity until overload? Where is the limit?

 

"The current financial crisis has seen a drop in admissions for the first time in
over a decade, so open access may become an increasingly significant factor
again." (p.)

 

Open...

1. Source - s/w
2. Educational Resources (OER) - free resources
3. Courses - this one
4. Research - crowd-sourcing
5. Data - RealClimate.Org
6. APIs - Application Program Interfaces
7. Publishing
8. Test Centers - ICDL

The open scholar

Open resources - multimedia and shared globally

 

open scholar == digital scholar

 

"The Open Scholar, as I'm defining this person, is not simply someone who agrees to allow free access and reuse of his or her traditional scholarly articles and books; no, the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it--at any stage of its development." (http://www.academicevolution.com/2009/08/the-open-scholar.html) Same source as quote in Weller paper.

 

"Because the Open Scholar reveals his or her processes, data, and procedures, this can bridge the great divide between research and teaching. Not only does the whole model invite collaboration (including drawing upon students and uncredentialed participants), but it allows the modeling of best practices that can help newcomers understand the whole field in question, not just the specifics of a given study."

 

"The Open Scholar is also open in the sense that he or she is reachable and responsive--open to input from those outside of the project, the institution, or even academia. He or she is not impatient with amateurs. And I think this sort of openness does require some facility with the new tools of social media--a blog, a wiki, etc."

 

The Open Scholar is:

1. An independent learner
2. Time manger
3. Organised
4. Self-motivated
5. Adept at using technology
6. Confident with using technology
7. Undaunted by the immense weight of information and media available
8. Always tired due to lack of sleep as she downloads one new resource after the other in the hope that time will one day allow her to investigate and experience the Gigabytes of data
9. Capable of discerning the quality open product from the chaff
10. Self Archive (Terry Anderson's closing keynote at ALT-C 2009, slide 54)
11. Apply their research (Terry Anderson's closing keynote at ALT-C 2009, slide 55)
12. A Blogger
13. Someone who comments on other's work (Terry Anderson's closing keynote at ALT-C 2009, slide 61)
14. Promotes being an open scholar to others
15. a Change Agent  (Terry Anderson's closing keynote at ALT-C 2009, slide 69)
16. 
    

What are the mechanisms by which new technologies have facilitated openness?

My opinions:

1. Sharing - content to all (Weller agrees p.4)
1. Protocols & standards (HTML - Tim Berners-Lee)
2. Servers
3. Free storage
2. Global access
3. Speed of creation and speed to "market" (agree p.5)
4. Possibility of feedback and collaboration for improvements
5. Software controlled assessment and feedback
6. A.I.
7. Dynamic tests
8. 24/7 access
9. No time and distance barriers
10. Cheap
11. Niche communication and social group of same interest/pursuit
12.  

Why is openness seen as a desirable and effective mode of operation in the digital networked
environment?

1. Less formal constraints
2. Not paying the "corporation" for their packaged educational product
3. Wild west of access, less rules, more freedom
4. Privacy of educational topic choice
5. Mobility - study anyway (on the loo, waiting in the queue, at the zoo <smile>)
6. Ease of resource access - Dropbox, Google Drive, phone
7. Sticking two fingers up at the red bricks and their debt inducing fees

Digital Scholar

• Spends a lot of time on the Internet (how much is a waste?)
• Does not necessary grasp every new change
• Are monotonous blog posts and tweets signs of creativity or intellectual malaise?

Weller assumes then that digital scholar is the same as an Open Scholar (p.4) as he sets out  list of digital scholar attributes and then assumes that these apply to an open scholar.

 

Is a digital scholar necessarily an "open" scholar? Take a private fee paying student at a for profit school, where everyone makes use of digital technology but products created are kept closed and in-house.

 

Hajjem, Harnad & Gingras (2005) compared 1,307,038 articles a cross a range of disciplines and
found that open access articles have a higher citation impact of between 36%-172%. (p.6)

Obviously, because more people can access them.

 

In this interpretation creativity is driven by openness, because people are learning from each other's shared efforts, and openness is enhanced by creativity, as the performers seek to compete with each other and share with a global audience. (p.9)

Or the driving force is ego and a need to gain status from unknown "friends".

 

Anderson (2009), Alt-C Keynote
  •Education for elites is not sufficient for planetary survival. (Slide 6) - Rather bold statement, "chip on the old shoulder?"

Slide 7: Why are the technologies disruptive? In what way? How can you align something that is new and emerging. As soon as it has been aligned it is no longer an emerging technology but an established one. It takes disruption, meaning? Chaos, argument, upset, confusion?

Watch the Anderson lecture here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fZ89q3eKPU
 

Slide12 :  http://www.go2web20.net   - hours (nay months of fun to be had here)

Slide 15: Critical Tools for Group Learning Environments

 

Slide 16: http://wiggio.com/ - looks good.

Slide 17: Is the Open Scholar hampered by teacher lead/control of the systems "Often overly confined by teacher expectation and institutional curriculum control"

Slide 18 : Groups of a feather flock together....

Slide 23: Networks - of sports groups, friends, hobbies, interests ...

Slide 24: “People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas” Burt, 2005, p. 90"
Slide 27: Google Wave - died a death I believe in 2010

Slide 28: "Contribute for social capital, altruism and a sense of improving the world/practice  through contribution" Could this be the driving force behind MOOC volunteer tutors?

Slide 33: "–Learning at the edge of chaos" being comfortable in this learning environment. So, next time your lesson observation ends in chaos, say that it was planned and reference Anderson. Lot's to quote from what he says here in the youtube video about this chaos being an excellent learning opportunity.

Slide 43: Collectives. Data mining the crowd traces left behind by individuals. Book :
Click: What We Do Online and Why It Matters [Paperback]In Click, Bill Tancer takes us behind the scenes into the massive database of online intelligence to reveal the naked truth about how we use the web, navigate to sites and search for information; he describes in unmatched detail explanations about our lives, our interests, our thoughts, our fears and our dreams. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Click-What-Online-Why-Matters/dp/0007277830/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363615764&sr=1-1)
Get's poor reviews.

Youtube video dies at 40:36mins.

Slide 50: Open Scholar. The Gideon Burton quote again, as listed above.

Slide 51: Use OER to save time. Use it. http://www.oercommons.org/

Slide 52: His university pays someone full time to go through their curriculum and locate free open resources for them to use. I wish we had that at school.

Open Scholar - sharee everything, totally transparent (like the notes on this blog), hopes to get feedback and reviews of the work, must be willing to allow it to be copied and modified?

Slide 58: What is the P2P university...? https://p2pu.org/en/
"What We’re All About
Peer 2 Peer University (we mostly just say P2PU) is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities.

Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything."

"The School of Open will provide online educational resources and professional development courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and beyond."

Slide 60: Award Winning Open Access Books: E.g. 'The Theory and Practice of Online Learning" By the author of the slides (T. Anderson). $39.95 for paperback copy or download PDF for free???(http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120146).

Youtube video comes back to life again...

Slide 57: OLDaily by Stephen Downes. http://www.downes.ca/  ** Well worth a look **

Links to the article: Learners Are People, Not Isolated Test-Taking Brains: Why MOOCs Both Work and Fail (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-d-blum/learners-are-people-not-i_b_2891097.html)

11pm. Stopped video at 44:02 (slide 57) - using keepvid to download the video and reading Huffington Post MOOC article.

 

Slide 59: http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm - Publish or Perish tool. Gives detailed stats on your cited work.

What Publish or Perish is for

Publish or Perish is designed to empower individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage. We would be concerned if it would be used for academic staff evaluation purposes in a mechanistic way.

"When using Publish or Perish for citation analyses, we would like to suggest the following general rule of thumb:  

• If an academic shows good citation metrics, it is very likely that he or she has made a significant impact on the field."

Open access journals cited more than closed commercial journals.

Slide 64: "Flat world" for textbooks - http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/

Slide 66: http://www.openstudents.org/ - defunct!

Slide 68: Eduforge - defunct, but there is The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (Anderson is the editor) - http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl - This looks impressive and there must be tons of good papers in archived editions.

From the video:
Q/A - Do we need to cite if we use other peoples ideas, quotes etc. "To build social capital". Yes, need to do it.

Can institutions afford Open Scholars? - Free courses increases subscription/sign-up

 

Week 1 - Activity 1 (Opennes in Education)

Week 1 - Activity 1

Blackboard collaborate
So... This Blackboard collaborate Java installed and audio set up okay. Opps, did the V11 and not the V12 by mistake, so doing it all again. That seemed to work. So, how do I know when a live session will take place? Having a go with the link gave:

Session Name OPEN EDUCATION DISCUSSION
Session Type NONE
Hosted By Ou-Events
Session Starts Mar 25, 2013, [Mon] 06:00 PM Western European (WET, Europe/Ireland/Dublin)
Session Ends Mar 25, 2013, [Mon] 11:00 PM Western European (WET, Europe/Ireland/Dublin) May
Join Session Mar 25, 2013, [Mon] 05:00 PM Western European (WET, Europe/Ireland/Dublin)
Version 12 Session Access RESTRICTED
Recording Mode MANUAL
Recording Access RESTRICTED

So in Thailand that's (using the Time Zone Converter) Mar 26, 2013, [Tue] 12:00 AM Thailand (ICT, Indochina/Thailand) Can join 1 hour before.
Ah.. During my full teaching day although might be able to do 30 mins during lunch break. Will set it up at school and see if I can join for 40 mins on the day.

Having got to this point in the set-up I wonder what problems people may have experienced with tech issues. Also, I wonder if using Linux or Mac is easier or more tricky. I didn't see Linux mentioned for the BB although it runs on Java so should work.

Twitter
Okay, I need to dust off my Twitter account and see if I can search on #h817open
Found my old twitter account (Dabr_BKK) and password (the usual with a number on the end) Hmm. Twitter is being a twit and not recognizing my password nor letting me reset it, with the error: "Sorry! We couldn't verify that this user requested a password reset. Please try resetting again." after following a link in an email to reset the password. Will try for 3rd time, if that fails will make new account. The key is to user the twitter username and not the email address for the password reset request. So, now for a quick search on #h817open.

Badges
Just figured out I was in HTML editing more on the blog, thought it looked a bit odd. Why did it go there by default. Badges look like worth signing up for. Even if I don't actually earn any!
Anther username... err, I'll use my twitter one again. What do I put for institution? The one I work at or the one these badges are awarded from? Go for my work one. Use same password as twitter.
Lost my Open Education page in a cloud of badges. Here's a tip, copy and paste current URL to blog before I fall asleep and leave:
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/open-education/content-section-1.3

OER understanding: to get this badge you need to complete Activity 7: Exploring OER issues in Week 2 of the Open Education course. Okay, I see that badge on the cloudworks site.

Participants must complete Activity 7 (Exploring OER issues) of the open course H817open. They need to submit the URL of their blog post as evidence, and this will be checked by a member of the course team. If the evidence provides a satisfactory response to the activity, the badge is issued.

What happens if I Apply for the badge. Okay, it want's a blog URL, so I'll come back to that later.

Other badges:
MOOC understanding: to get this badge you need to complete Activity 14: Comparing MOOCs in Week 4 of the Open Education course. You will need to blog your solution to this activity,

Open Education course completed: to get this badge you need to have acquired both the previous badges and completed Activity 25: Reflecting on openness in Week 7 of the Open Education course.

They, at first site, seem worth doing as part of the course. What on earth they are useful for I don't know, not sure I will stick 'em on my CV. Still you never know. "they do not carry any formal credit in terms of The Open University, nor are they proof you have studied the Open University Masters-level course H817 Openness and innovation in elearning and the badges are not subject to the same rigour as formal assessment, but they can be a useful means of demonstrating participation." (http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/open-education/content-section-1.3)


SOB, blue screen of death just now. Open everything up again. 1:00am, might call it quits for tonight. At least all the browsers (I have IE 10 and FireFox open) restore. Saves a bit of time.

1.4 Flavours of openness
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/open-education/content-section-1.4

I think I will post notes for each Activity otherwise the posts will become too long. So this concludes the Week 1 - Activity 1 post. I got a fair bit done, set up a few accounts, got the BB audio setup, although will need to do that at work also. Will take a quick look / download at Activity 2 reading.