Avoid getting hooked on the concept of the virtual MOOC University

In this article about grading the MOOC university A J Jacobs makes the mistake of following the hype of the MOOC providers that claim this is the future of higher ed as we know it. This misses the point that MOOCs are a different, alternative paradigm that will evolve to become the way to acquire the skills and competencies needed for paid work, self employment and day-to-day living in general.

Even AJ acknowledges:

MOOCs provided me with the thrill of relatively painless self-improvement and an easy introduction to heady topics

Starting from a suitably early age why would a person ever need hugely expensive, increasingly overrated higher ed which less than 1% of the world's population can afford?

Activity 12 Background to MOOCs #h817open

It is good to look back at the history of MOOCs and the influences and context that brought them forth. Martin's interview with George and Dave gives an excellent sense of the pedagogical challenges that were taken on and solved to a large extent in the early cMOOCs and are still confronting the xMOOCs today.

The lengthy report by McAuley et al being written 3 years ago and predating xMOOCs seems like ancient history and almost 2 MOOC generations old. Even Martin's MOOCs Inc post with the important link to Curt's May 2012 massive link bait seems to exhibit peeling MOOC paint. Curt admits that even back then he had too much reading, watching and listening to do to catch up on MOOC developments. So how much harder is it today?

The last subject I taught at my own institution before retiring was entitled Web Applications. Subsequently the first MOOC I took as a student was Udacity's CS253 Web Apps Engineering now called Web Development. So can a MOOC compete with a traditionally lectured subject? You bet it can. In 7 weeks of  the CS253 MOOC Steve Huffman and 1 TA covered about double the amount of material of my 12 weeks of lectures.

As it happens we both used Google App Engine for the practical work and this allowed direct comparison. I taught about 15 students and Steve at least 1,000 times that number. What I found most impressive was how App Engine allowed the used of automated assessment scripts so that students were able to receive direct and useful feedback with comments on their practical work 24/7. To moocify my own course would be very straightforward.

The drawbacks would be that my institution markets and prides itself on small class face-to-face teaching. Also I believe most of the weaker students would struggle after about 3 weeks of the MOOC pace, probably explaining the high dropout rates from which most MOOCs experience.

As far as I know the furthest my previous colleagues have come is to put up course lectures and special presentations on iTunesU, where I have to admit they receive acceptable viewing rates. A noticeable trend is that the shorter the 'lecture' the higher the viewing figures.

Activity 11 Pros & Cons of big & little OER #h817open

In a couple of my previous posts for this MOOC specifically on location OERs for a digital literacies course and OER issues I have complained of various difficulties with what our instructor is calling Big OER. These difficulties mainly relate to searching and discovery, reusability and pertinent for this activity the granularity of OER. Long lectures peppered with irrelevancies and voluminous course notes carrying unwanted side issues are the main problems. Reuse of these Big OERs therefore mitigates against reuse without substantial remixing involving the same level of work by the instructor as starting from scratch.

Taking Martin's Collateral Damage slidecast as the queue I find I have always been in sympathy with the view that it is the collection of simple digital artifacts easily made widely available online that form the most useful educational material for my own courses. As Martin points out these artifacts are easily produced with simple online publishing services many of which are free, and, most importantly, don't require specialist broadcasting skills beyond those possessed by the typical lecturer. Most usefully too is these Little artifiacts tend to be byproducts of normal academic activities producing outputs like papers, code, lectures, recorded debates, conference talks, data, ideas, and workshop materials.

I like the thought of this long tail of academic outputs, often produced out of research activities, finding immediate use in teaching. At last we have a demonstrated direct link between research and teaching. This needs further emphasis to encourage many of the reporting and administrative activities to be made more visible and accessible online as part of the normal production process. The academic becomes a perfect long tail production engine. We owe a debt to Martin to giving this process an acceptable and impressive name - digital scholarship. These Little OERs also make impressive background materials for public engagement with world community, an increasingly important aspect for all academic endeavours.

Of course discovery of these Little OERs or digital artifacts still remains a problem. Maybe the universal adoption of hashtags in all online publishing platforms might be a step towards a solution provided the content is searchable by Google or more specialised search engines.

Activity 10 Applying sustainability models #h817open

I consider a number of open education initiatives and after a brief look at their web sites attempt to determine which of the three funding models, MIT, USU and Rice, proposed by Wiley in his OECD report are being used.

• Change MOOC: the facilitators are the cMOOC kings who seemed to provide their time gratis with the apparent help of volunteers. Certainly the 30 or more speakers, one per week, provided their input freely and to great affect. It would seem that the Rice model is being used here.
• Coursera: set up as a private company but still offering free MOOCs prepared by a large consortium of high-profile universities around the world but with most being in the USA. Each MOOC is prepared professionally with the cost met by member institutions. The total team size of full-time equivalent staff is likely in the thousands. Coursera presents and operates as a single entity so I would put them in the MIT category.
• Jorum: funded by JISC (a UK charity) collects and shares learning and teaching materials allowing for reuse and repurposing.  Although the materials served are free for reuse Jorum is supported by full-time professional staff so again is more akin to the MIT model. Since the OERs in the Jorum repository are obviously provided by a wide range of 'volunteer' contributors across the globe it could be argued this is like the USU model as well.
• OpenLearn: operated entirely by the Open University UK to provide MOOCs to the world. This would seem to definitely conform to the MIT model.

From the chosen open education initiatives it would appear the MIT model carries much weight. Wiley's model categories seem a sensible spectrum but it is obvious elements from two of more of his models are mixed in practice.

Activity 9 My choice of licence for my creative works #h817open

Asked to choose a licence for my own creative works, both in a professional capacity and for personal uses, I would choose probably the weakest Creative Commons licence CC-BY.

I believe the attribution requirement (BY) is sufficient for me to be satisfied that I will receive recognition for my work when it is copied, reused in new contexts and remixed in new uses. These hopefully will be many and varied. My only regret is that I as an individual and even with the search power of Google will be unlikely ever to know the full extent of any reuse in scope and over time.

There is a temptation to add the not-for-commercial-use (NC) provision but I am persuaded by Erik Muller in his case against the NC provision. I feel the reduction in basic and beneficial uses that NC will force is real. Also any thought of sharing in a potential profit from commercial use is dashed by the inevitable complexity of legal agreements and the time taken to prepare them.

The share-alike (S) provision sounds excellent in principle but highly likely to be ignored when the work is reused. Also there appears to be no productive method of following the trail of sharing to police or even just to check that the provision has been followed. If my work is incorporated into a successful commercial work the attribution of my contribution would be valuable in raising a digital profile.

CC-BY is good enough for me.

Activity 8 An OER Course #h817open

Digital Literacies Course

Five week course for undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, and so on.

1. Network Communications
• Internet and protocols
• Web and links
• Bytes, bandwidth, digital formats
2. Network Devices
• ADSL, fibre, wi-fi, Bluetooth
• Wireless access points
• Mobile, tablets, laptops
• Memory, filestore
3. Network Software
• Browsers, downloads
• Searching text, music, video
• Email clients
4. The Cloud
• Social media
• Office cloud apps
• Cloud storage and sharing
5. Simple Programming
• Basic data types
• Sequence, conditional, repetition
• Scripting in AutoHotkey, JavaScript

OER Repositories Search Results

General impressions of locating suitable material from each repository by week:

Ariadne: 1: medium, 2: medium, 3: poor, 4: very poor, 5: medium
Jorum: 1: good, 2: good, 3: good, 4: very poor, 5: medium
Merlot: 1: good, 2: good,3: good, 4: medium:, 5: good
MIT: 1: medium, 2: medium,3: medium, 4: medium:, 5: good
OpenLearn:  1: medium, 2: medium,3: medium, 4: good:, 5: poor
Rice Connexions: 1: poor, 2: poor,3: poor, 4: poor:, 5: good

Difficulties faced included:

• locating a suitable education level for such introductory material; most courses or modules were multi-week or simply too extensive and would need considerable contraction amounting to an effective rewriting of the content
• the significant effort required to drill down to sufficient detail in each OER found by the initial search to determine the suitability of the material
• a worryingly high number of broken links to OERs which highlights the sustainability problem
• some much of the material in the OERs was old and out of date, a big problem for the very fast moving topic of digital literacies

I found that Merlot which gave access to different types of course materials not just whole subjects was the most appropriate source of OERs readily usable without a great deal of detailed rummaging and research.

5 year technology outlook for Australian Higher Ed

The Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018 has just been published without many surprises. The context with previous reports and research provides a look at trends:

The 1-year horizon is predictable with the vague social media topic being unhelpfully broad. I had already predicted that 3D printing would move to a closer horizon as its influence is growing at a great rate. It is good to see virtual and remote labs coming into the 5-year horizon but I had introduced virtual IT teaching labs to Bond in 2008, exactly 5 years ago.

As always the report makes good reading.