Researchity

Three abstracts for OER15: Licensing talking points, Models of OER production, and OERs and Accessibility

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I just submitted three abstracts for the OER15 Conference 14 – 15th April 2015. It started as one but I realized that there are really three distinct pieces of work that could be of benefit. I don't expect all three to be accepted but here are the abstracts for anyone who's interested.

Open licensing is an accessibility and inclusion feature of OERs

Much talk about accessibility is focused on removing primary barriers to the content for those with specific needs (perceptual, cognitive or physical). This can be done with a closed license document as much as an open license document provided it is not encumbered with Digital Rights Management restrictions. However, in practice, restrictive licensing comes with other restrictive practices that prevent accessibility. In many countries, it is legal to make accessible copies despite other restrictions but this requires setting their users apart and putting other barriers in their way. This lightning talk will showcase several case studies demonstrating how closed licensing puts may be compatible with individual accessibility but works against inclusion. I hope that it will provide another argument for the promotion of OERs at all levels of education.

Have the licensing talk early to maximize impact: Experiences from three collaborative projects

The outputs of many collaborative projects often see limited use in the long term because neither partner is quite sure what is permitted. Frequently, the people involved in the creation of content have left their institutions and futher use and distribution of the developed works is in doubt. Yet, in most projects, the talk about rights and licensing is left till close to the end or is omitted all together. People talk about the value of intellectual property but they never explore the limits unclarities about licensing impose on the potential impact of outputs. It is therefore essential that the licensing discussion is introduced early on in the development of the project. This talk will present key talking points that have been used in three projects that have led to partners agreeing to licensing some or all of the work developed under the project using open licences. Often resistance to open licenses stems from ignorance and making a clear case for it as well as clearly outlining the options can prevent barriers from ever being formed in the first place.

Modes and models of production of OERs: The missing link to wider adoption

Much of the talk about OERs concerns their adoption and use. However, without proper consideration of the different models for their production, it is possible that a OERs will never become available at a volume and quality that makes their adoption a real possibility for institutions looking at a market where cost is only one of the considerations. The typical model is that of an individual content creator (or possibly an institution) who decides to share her materials. However, this rarely leads to sustainable and readily reusable materials. A more likely result is for these materials to languish unused in one of the many repositories. We need to consider alternatives to this and make them explicit when talking about OERs. Luckily, there are several successful models that have worked and can be adopted for OERs. This paper will consider three models of successful open content creation that should be more widely considered and supported by funders. 1) Wikipedia is perhaps the best known example of large-scale creation of open content. However, the way through which it is created and maintained is often confused with 'crowd effects'. In fact, Wikipedia became successful because its creators are anything but a crowd, but are instead loosely organised into editorial groups with meritocratic responsibilities. 2) Code sprints (books sprints) provide a model for creating large amounts of documentation in short focused working sessions with experts gathered in one space. They have been extremely successful in both creating open source software and documentation for the software. 3) Fan Fiction is another area of content creation where free (although mostly not freely licensed) content is made available at a large scale. While mostly following the lone-creator model, Fan Fiction communities have largely resolved the editorial process through a system of alpha and beta readers as well as a network of reviewers who make content discoverable for others. These models can co-exist and combined with one another. This paper will explore how existing OER projects could benefit from these models and present examples of where it has already happened.

Announcing Research Zoo - A Habitat for Guerrilla Research

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Last week, I attended an ELESIG workshop at the OU run by Martin Weller and Tony Hirst. Here are some summaries of what was discussed. However, it struck me that many people would not know how to start. Sure, there are lots of free blogging platforms, but if you want to use some of the neat tools that make the guerrilla researcher's life so much easier, you pretty much have to roll your own. But who knows how to do that? Well, I do. So, as a weekend breakfast project, I created ResearchZoo.net with the tagline "Habitat for Guerilla Research". It's really just a Wordpress multisite with some modules that are particularly useful for researchers enabled. I don't have any great plans for it, it's just sort of a practical essay. Instead of just writing about it, I did it. At the moment, it doesn't do much of anything other than let anyone start a site (with no guarantee of uptime or longevity). But there are some possible future visions out there. This is what I think a site like that could become eventually:

Be a community where guerrilla researchers across disciplines connect
Connect practitioners with researchers but also blur the lines between practitioners and researchers
Help formulate research aims, questions and methods by interaction before, during and after research (not only after)
Connect funders (both micro and macro) with researchers – we could have a combination of Kickstarter, Subbable and a funding agency

Or rather I wish there was a site like that out there. It could be mine. It could be somebody else's. By the way, I'm happy for someone more enterprising to take it on. Let me know what you think. Particularly ideas for useful Wordpress modules would be handy.

MOOC-induced educational blindness: Demotivation and confusion as intrinsic properties of schooling

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

[toc]

Why on earth am I writing about MOOCs again?

I'm not sure why I have this instinct to defend MOOCs. I am generally the last person to be instinctively bullish on purely technological innovations in education even if I tend to be one of the first people to try them out.

Confusing MOOC shortcomings with the failures of schooling in general

The thing that galls me is this tendency of MOOC critics to criticise problems as being specific to MOOCs whereas in fact, they are problems faced by education in general. Clay Shirky outlined the myth of "all college is like Harvard" in this excellent blog post. Essentially, he argues, we are basing our opposition to MOOCs on an image of college experience that is representative of about 3% of the college population. I have argued elsewhere (and Shirky hints at the same) that even this image is to a large extent an illusion of professorial propaganda. Some critics confuse MOOCs with online or distance education in general and criticise things that stem from not having the teacher and students in the same place at the same time. Others want MOOCs to prove great outcomes when it is education as whole (and higher education in particular) that has yet to prove its outcomes in the long run (there are some correlations by no sure-fire causations). Yet others obsess about drop outs from MOOCs. Again, they ignore the fact, that in any course, where some coercion to attend is removed (like individual college courses), the drop outs are staggeringly high (despite much higher possible benefit and initial cost of investment).

Confusing motivation with coercion in education

A final bit of criticism with faint praise is that they require too much motivation. One such bit is what inspired this post:

MOOCs can work well for highly motivated individuals who have the time and/or skills to filter information.

This is the conclusion of a post (derived from a survey). But the problem is that this is true for all of education. The current coercive model of attendance employed in all educational systems (with some exception in the alternative space) don't work very well for those who are not very motivated or don't have good strategies (study skills) to deal with the one-size fits all demands of their particular institution. Sure, we may be able to threaten them and their handlers (teachers) enough to make them pass some kind of examination on a given date but the same examination administered five years into the future would probably result in failure. Surely, the purpose of education is not to prepare people for exams? So, yes, the statement above is absolutely true about MOOCs (I've dropped enough to know from personal experience) but here MOOCs just reveal the weaknesses of traditional education. The strength of MOOCs is in giving somebody an option to find their motivation. I'm currently running a MOOC-like course and amid some positive early feedback, I also got "I'm getting more confused and demotivated". And this is on a MOOC that's by no means massive (250 people) and students receive a fair amount of support. The different blogs about MOOCs around the nets indicate that this is a common experience of MOOC participants (whether they use the extension or connectivist MOOC model). But I've seen similar comments in non-MOOC online courses and in straight up attendance courses. (And not just those run by me - even though I am prepared to admit that I am the problem in many of the individual cases). Confusion and demotivation is a feature of all schooling. Just look at any book of classroom management and you'll see countless tips on how to minimize it - meaning that it's very common.

The myth of the student question and the expert answer

Another implied criticisms of MOOCs came in "Students can't ask a question of real experts". This came up in several blog posts and most recently in a question about the model of a massive (though not open) model of education practiced by a company called StraighterLine that provides individual support to learners but only on study skills and not the subject themselves (http://edwired.org/2012/11/02/the-future-of-higher-education-conference-4). Mills Kelly's reaction was:

It’s certainly a very cost-efficient model, but what happens if Student X has a question that we might call an example of “critical thinking”? How can one of those tutors, who knows a lot about how to help students complete the models in the curriculum, respond to such a question? Probably not very well.

As somebody who has both asked and answered a fair deal of such questions, I have my doubts as to their importance. First, they are relatively rare (most questions are about course logistics or focus on how to answer a question on the exam). They leave most of the rest of the class behind. And as often as not, they do not actually clarify things for the questioner. They are also not infrequently misunderstood by the expert. So having these in your typical educational context leads to more confusion and demotivation. Is motivation, confusion and the resulting disengagement a real problem and if so, how do we overcome it? Yes, it is a real problem. But I suspect that it is a problem as much as tropical storms are a problem. We can't really prevent them. At best we can mitigate their impact and deal with the aftermath. Confusion and misunderstanding are a feature of human communication. We have tools for dealing with them (like conversation repair) but none of them are perfect. In most interactions with their teachers, students are like eye-witnesses. And their ability to recall and act on their memory of what they witnessed are about as reliable. Meaning, not very much at all. If there is a teacher who has never experienced the utter devastation of seeing students act on the most clearly presented information in completely random ways, it's a teacher with enormous powers of self-deception. "We covered that," "I saw you write it down," "You understood that last time" are as common utterances in the language of teachers as "Open your textbooks to page...". The only successful remedy is giving students multiple opportunities for dealing with the same problems from different directions until one of them finds a way in. And finding multiple sources of explanation. Including having students explain things to other students, teaching half-understood things, etc.

Course outcomes as number of connections (Connectivism again?)

The first blog post I referred to actually hits the nail on the head with a criticism of MOOCs focused on the truly "massive" as a way of being a promotional vehicle for institutions.

Success is the number of connections made to the institution, not the number of connections between the participants themselves.

This is exactly right. Except it is missing one part. The number of connections students make outside the course, to other experts and sources of information, is just as important as the number of connections made within its confines. But within this is NOT contained an easy remedy to the "demotivation, lack of study strategies" problem. Connectivist MOOCs seem to produce proportionately as many reports of confusion and demotivation among their participants as the more impersonal extension MOOCs. They certainly don't see many fewer drop outs (which would perhaps be better called drop offs). I don't think our MOOC which combines features of both c and xMOOCs with traditional online and blended learning, is any more successful at this than any other form of education. The general advice, viz, "give students as many ways of interacting with each other, the subject and the teachers, as possible" also contains the seeds of its own downfall. More ways of interaction mean more opportunities for learning and personalizing one's own educational progress. But they also mean more opportunities for confusion and more ways of encountering demotivating experiences. So all we can do is try our best, then somebody else's best, and then try some more. But let's try as much in traditional education, online education, and MOOCs. And let us not fool ourselves. This is never going to get easy.

The "Profit Motive" delusion and open education #edstartup #opencontent #edchat

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Note: This is an expanded version of a comment on this post on EdSurge. Other people have also commented here, here and here. [toc] Note 2: When I first started thinking about this post, I had this title in my head but decided it wasn't quite appropriate "You'd have to be an absolute idiot to think that the profit motive is a guarantee of quality or anything". The reason I rejected it is that I don't actually think that people who believe this are idiots even if I think the notion is silly (see below).

The EdStartup debate: profit motive and technological innovation

Segal Kitties (Photo credit: h-e-a-p)

It seems that previous encounters with ed entrepreneurs have left enough of a bad taste in the mounths of educators that they are now suspicious of the motives of many well-meaning ed technology startups. Tom Segal, who works for ed startup VC firm Rethink Education, went on the offensive (in more ways than one) to defend the profit motive by way of repeating some free market cliches. Let's have a look at how they stack up. Segal preemptively called people who disagree with him "haters", so let me start by saying that I don't hate the idea of a sustainable business, making a profit to maintain its existence and provide comfortable lives for its workers and owners, and providing a useful service to its customers. But the justifications of profit as some sort of panacea or being the primary means of achieving quality, those I do hate. And Tom Segal's post is full of them.

Marketplace analogies are built on a dream

"In an effective marketplace, every good company that lasts provides a product that satisfies the consumer"

This ignores the fact that there is no such thing as an effective marketplace (just like there is no ideal gas). In reality there are plenty of good companies that don't survive and plenty of bad ones that do. This could be due to chance or manipulation. And also, the surviving good companies, often turn bad when they can. They may not even be intentionally bad, they just put profit ahead of other priorities. What is a company could make 20 million, but only makes 10 because of some public good (and no PR stunts do not count)? Why is that not part of the equation? Segal acknowledges that "a truly transparent market filled with a multitude of options" does not "yet" exist in education but he ignores the fact that it does not exist almost anywhere. There are some high profile exceptions (basic consumer products) but most of the time, as Bill Fitgerald pointed out "the 'transparency' gets buried under marketing copy and, in some cases, patents".

The cliche of entreprise as driver of all innovation

"They [computers, phones] were developed by fiercely competitive, ROI-oriented companies".

This is a favorite free-market cliche but it's complete nonsense. Computers and the internet would not exist without government grants, university research (a point so obvious that it was made by all the commenters I mentioned above). And while their consumer incarnation is a result of commercial competition led by profit motive, without massive public subsidies for R&D and infrastructure like electricity, there would have been no opportunity for the profit motive to come into play. Because a pure profit motive is mostly shortsighted and needs a counterbalance to thrive. That is not to say that a competitive marketplace cannot spur innovation. But as often as not it is innovation in accounting practices, worker efficiency, advertising, streamlined production, resource exploitation, etc. These all sound fairly businessy and neutral, but they are not such a positive when we pair them with their counterparts that inevitably seem to pop up in both fiercely competitive environments and monopolistic environments: tax avoidance, exploitation/firing, lies, low quality products, environmental disasters, etc. These alone are not an arguments against competition (we have plenty of examples of what monopolistic telephone companies get up to and its even worse then their duo,trio,quadropolies), but they put us back in the real world. But statements like these are simply delusional and I can't believe anybody with half a brain cell would ever make them. (But plenty of people with loads of brain cells do, illustrating my thesis that incredibly smart people can believe incredibly silly things.)

"That is the beauty of a free market: once a company has been exposed as a fraud or a problem-child, there goes their business."

Segal's obviously never heard of phone companies. This is simply almost never the case for companies of any appreciable size unless some special conditions obtain. Microsoft is the butt of many jokes and many people downright hate Windows but they still keep buying them because they have no choice. So telling schools "don’t buy those products" is living in a fool's paradise, a mirror image to the worst distortions of Marxism Leninism. Consumers never have the freedom of choice and quality of product is only a small part of the equation when it comes to purchase-making decision. The cost of switching a product, the social cost of using something different than others, the institutional pressures of trying something new, the personal risks of "not buying IBM".

The Manufactured Crisis?

Everytime I hear a TED talk or read a TED-syndrome blog post exhorting us to save education (in the US or anywhere else). I remind myself of the Berliner and Biddle book Manufactured Crisis which shows clearly that there's nothing all that wrong with US schools (or schools in much of the developed world). But there is plenty wrong with many of the communities in which those schools are located. Splitting the international comparisons (useless as they are) by income levels clearly showed that. So I don't agree with the premise of...

"Our schools need all the help they can get right now. Our children need all the help they can get."

But there are lots of schools around the US and the world that need all the help. But what they need is less money leeched away by fads of the moment like CD-ROMs/iBooks or interactive smartboards (and here I speak as an early adopter and promoter of technology) and more money given to supporting the basic needs of students and the communities they live in (food, shelter, health care, security, economic opportunities). No amount of technology in the classroom is going to change those fundamentals, although technology can play a role in delivering them. Technology and innovation can also help solve some of the problems around access to resources. But what is needed there are open content, open platforms and open interfaces to avoid lock in and make the "marketplace" of services around the content, platforms and services at least a bit more of an equal playing field.

The passion of the edtech entrepreneur

I absolutely agree with Segal that most of the edtech entrepreneurs are passionate people who want to make a difference. But there have always been people like that (see /2012/09/16/i-dont-want-to-be-an-education-entrepreneur-and-neither-should-you-exploring-the-limits-of-metaphors-in-edstartup). And I would even say that profit probably isn't the first motive of many education entrepreneurs. Profit is just a means to an end. I fully understand that. I have lots of ideas that I would like to exist and sometimes profit is the means of making that happen. But at other times, it is not. There is no reason for private enterprise to "lead" the technological innovation. There are plenty of Open Source models that can sustain innovation and innovators. And charging money for services is a part of that equation. But not the sole and exclusive driver.

Quality, Open Education, and Freedom

Perhaps the greatest howler perpetrated by Segal is this:

"You can’t have high-quality digital tools without the profit motive"

First, there is no one necessary precondition of quality of anything. Ever. There can perhaps be a gurantee of provenance which can form the foundation of trust. But that's about it. Nothing on its own guarantees quality. Not peer review process. Not the editorial board of an encyclopedia. Not a Quality Assurance process. Not a stable of fact checkers. And certainly not the profit motive. Part of the reason is that quality is both subjective and ever changing. But an even bigger reason is that all the would be guarantees of quality are easily subverted and corrupted in the same way that the business processes I described above can be and often are.. The only guarantee we can ever have is the guarantee of freedom to take the content and remix it. To own our data in a meangful way, ie download it all in a format that can be easily parsed. This should be the first ideal of any education technology startup. I'm not interested in spending any of my time or effort in a system that doesn't let me take my data with me or that "sells" me something I can't share with a friend. In effect, this means Creative Commons licensed content in a reasonably open format (and here I would include Word), platforms running on open source software or at least have fully open APIs. This is an ideal that is clearly achievable but not straightforward or easily defined. Brazil has gone perhaps the longest way towards it and there are pockets of success around the world. But obviously, the people creating content, software and other things, have to support themselves and their families. Maybe they even want to have nice things. And we should look for funding models that will allow that. Here's an innovation that is happening (if not enough). But it is the sort of innovation that the "profit motive" will never spur in its pure form.

Content business or Relationship business

But this ideal is not incompatible with people making money. It's a matter of perspective And here I would borrow a slogan from Jeff Jarvis aimed at the media industry but just as applicable to the education industry: "You are not in the content business, you are in the relationship business." Some examples of this, artists making more money from T-Shirts and Concerts than music sales, newspapers running conferences and exhibitions, open source software companies selling support packages, etc. Which means open education companies will have to innovate in building portfolios of revenue sources. And a part of that portfolio can be charging for the delivery of the content (by print, special ebook format, etc.). All of that is possible even if the content itself is licensed in a way that allows sharing and remixing. But a bigger part will be personal (human) services like tutoring, consultancy, support, etc. Many of these do not scale quite as well as making widgets but as so many would be private school entrepreneurs have discovered, you can only ever make marginal savings from economies of scale in education. Buying chalk in bulk or installing VLEs does not make for savings if the bulk of your cost is staff with a more or less fixed ratio to the number of students. Technology can make the life of the staff easier (in the long run). For instance, it can let them focus more on interacting with student than paperwork or access peer support and training at lower cost and expense of time. But that doesn't reduce the staff cost. Education is not like selling widgets and although people make pots of money by selling widgets to schools and students. The bulk of education is about relationships between the learners and the teachers, the learners and other learners and the learners and the content. And true educational innovation will come from facilitating these relationships in an open way. But I see that the companies Segal's fund invests in mostly do not innovate in any of these areas. They offer freemium services but it's mostly build around proprietary lock in in shiny interfaces. That's not to say that they do not provide useful services, but their thinking about profits (with some exceptions) is to have schools or individuals spend money on things that they could also get for free. (I think Engrade and Smarter are going in the general right direction.)

Open Together: Remix this idea

I don't have money to invest but I'm hoping someone who does, will invest it in companies innovating around open education. The Open Source world has paved the way here. For instance, I have an idea for a startup called Open Together that would help schools identify common needs and direct a part of their resources to further development of open content and open software, to bring it up to the quality they expect. Sort of a "collective purchasing" facilitator using the Summer of Code model of development. I think it could be a very sustainable business. So if somebody wants to take that idea and remix it, please do.

Disqus

I feel like I'm missing companies and business models around Open Education. If I do, please school me in the comments.

I don't want to be an education entrepreneur and neither should you: Exploring the limits of metaphors in #EdStartUp

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Title page to Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warning: This post ended up being a lot more "negative" and critical than it started out as. I am still quite enjoying the EdStartUp course.

Entrepreneurship and #EdStartup 101

A new MOOC is going on at the moment aimed at educating educators in starting companies (mostly online ones) to implement their ideas. This is the motivation behind the course:

"Colleges of Education across the country and around the world are permeated with the idea that "business" is a dirty word and that the handling of any money beyond a teacher’s basic paycheck demands ritualistic hand washing. The culture in most Colleges of Education is openly anti-entrepreneurial. Consequently, almost no startup companies come from faculty in Colleges of Education, who actually know the "theory" and could potentially help productize it in well-designed ways that would encourage "practice."" "And because education faculty don’t start education companies, computer scientists, engineers, and other faculty who don’t know the "theory" are the ones who do. Educators and educational researchers must reclaim entrepreneurship in the education space if we are ever to cross the bridge from theory to practice." http://edstartup.net/overview/

We can see from the outline above that the idea of a "startup" is closely associated with the notion of "entrepreneurship". Entrepreneurship is suggested as a generative metaphor for what education could be. There's nothing wrong with this as long as we realize that that's what it is. Metaphor theory sidenote: Generative metaphors are used to come up with new and unexpected perspectives on an existing domain of experience. An example of a generative metaphor first given by Donal A Schon who came up with the term is "paint brush is really a pump" - this allowed engineers trying to come up with a synthetic bristle to abandon the idea of good adhesion and focus on flexibility. This resulted in a technological breakthrough. But it is also important to note that these engineers didn't go any further than that. Generative metaphors are highly partial and targetted. They don't have to provide a very good match between the two domains (pumps and paint brushes), just enough of one to allow for a change of perspective. The problem in many cases, though, is that their early success leads us to extendeding them way past their sell by date and not paying attention to when they start being more of a hindrance than an inspiration. This post looks at the limits of the entrepreneurship metaphor for education. While acknowledging the usefulness of the metaphor for an initial inspiration, it will warn of the danger of not examining points where the metaphor breaks or where the metaphor provides a warning.

What does entrepreneurship mean to us?

Everybody will acknowledge that entrepreneurship is a complex domain. But when it is used as a source for a metaphor, the tendency is to simply go by the stereotypical image. What is this image? Let's do a bit of linguistic analysis. The word "entrepreneur" is imbued with all kinds of positive meanings. The top 10 adjectives most often appearing with it (according to COCA) are: SUCCESSFUL, YOUNG, AMERICAN, LOCAL, NEW, REAL, BLACK, SERIAL, SMALL, WEALTHY. With the exception of "serial", these are all positive adjectives, and serial is given a positive meaning in its coocurrence with entrepreneur. Things get interesting if we don't limit our search by part of speech. Four of the top 10 words are tech related: INTERNET (2), SILICON (4), VALLEY (5), SOFTWARE (6). By the way, SUCCESSFUL is still number 1 and number 3 is NAMED from "entrepreneur named XYZ" or "named entrepreneur of the year". So in the last 10-20 years, most of the talk of entrepreneurship is associated with renewal, regeneration and technology (for comparison, the next specific area of entrepreneurship is "real ESTATE" at 10 followed by, TELECOM at 25 and "HIP-HOP" at 30). Even more revealing is the search for the plural form "entrepreneurs" where the second most common word is YOUNG which underscores the strong association with renewal and future oriented nature of the concept in modern usage. (By the way, the single most common word associate with "entrepreneurs" in the COCA corpus is BLACK but this is a result of a sampling coincidence - there are several samples from the publication Black Entrepreneur in the corpus.) So this is the general picture of entrepreneurship we're trying to project into the domain of education? But is it a picture that is sufficiently complete for us to make informed decisions. And the answer is absolutely not.

What's missing from our typical notion of entrepreneurship?

The frequency of the word NAMED also points to the strong mythologizing tendency we have around entrepreneurship. We spend a lot of time telling stories about entrepreneurs and then use these to help us frame discussions around this concept. And as the other words suggest, most of those stories are associated with success. No words associated with failure appear in the top 100 collocates of "entrepreneur" (i.e. words used within 4 - 9 words of the word "entrepreneur").

Schools as startups? The analogy of failure

That does not mean that we don't talk about enterprise and failure. There's even a meme that 9 out of 10 startups fail. But even though it is a part of the conversation, it rarely becomes part of the metaphor. Now, that meme is inaccurate. Less than half of new businesses survive their first five years but that varies by domain so, high tech startups the failure figure at 5 years is between 10 and 25%. However, the massive success rate defined by huge return on investment is also only about 10%. (See http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-startups-fail and http://www.newventurelab.com/resources/blog.php?id=261) Now, we may feel one way or another about this as such. But it should put a huge damper on using the domain of startups as the source domain of inspiration for changing the domain of education. Imagine 25% of schools failing within five years. But even the definition of success of a startup is sobering in this context. It is defined by "acquisition", "B round of financing", "IPO". And many of these are associated with change of focus, abandonment of founding principles - often called a "pivot" or simply hollowing out of valuable assets with no regard for existing client. Drop.io was a great example of this. Most children only change schools when moving to a higher grade and a significant change in school organization mostly only happens between generations. Under the entrepreneurial model, children at both the successful and failing schools would be exposed to constant change. Change in itself may be good or bad for the development of people but most of this change would be driven by purely business motives, not the motives of improvement of education. And what of the remaining 40-60% of not failure nor successes in the high-tech entrepreneurial space? Well, they are exactly what most schools are today. Mediocre. Not great but not awful. It seems to me that the last thing we want is for schools to be like startups - at least I don't think we do.

Teachers as entrepreneurs?

But maybe we want teachers to be like entrepreneurs. Well, I'd suggest not again. The problem with the positive picture of entrepreneurship is that we think the more entrepreneurs the better. But nothing could be further from the truth. The countries with the greatest penetration of small local entrepreneurs are not the likes of United States or the UK but the likes of Somalia and Bangladesh. Wide-spread universal entrepreneurship is typically a sympton of desperation. Most small entrepreneurs around the world eke out a meagre existence because otherwise they would starve. There is nobody who would employ them. There is no virtue in being a small independent trader. And most certainly no innovation. I've spent a lot of time in the market places of Central Asia and they are remarkable for most people selling pretty much the same thing. They can't differentiate on price (much) or quality (much), they're just there because they don't have much of a choice. And the development research bears that out. Even in Silicon Valley (it is said), the largest spurts of entrepreneurship followed bubble bursts and the big players going bust. This meant a lot of talented ex-employees saw no other option than to start their own companies. This led, for example (it is said again), to the burgeoning of Web 2.0 with companies like Delicious, Flickr, Digg, Twitter and YouTube. So as a whole, this spurt of entrepreneurship led to a transformation (most would agree a positive one) in what the online space looks like now.

Education startup bubble: Analogy and history

But what if the education system went through the same type of transformation? We need to look more closely at what actually happened. What happened to the myrriad companies that constituted the Web 2.0 revolution. Some failed (Digg, MySpace), some were bettered by their imitators (Flickr), some were bought (YouTube, Drop.io), some outshone their inspirations (Facebook, Twit), some continue to coexist with their competition in various niches (Vimeo, Diigo, Status.net), some continue to define their space (Google, Amazon, Twitter). When one takes a closer look, the iconic companies spawned a number of imitators that only differed by a small feature. Although the result was revolutionary, the process was one of evolution through natural selection. Lots of mutations succeeding more or less randomly. But is this what we want in the school system? Maybe, maybe not. Do we need a version of the dot-com bust to come first? And, what would it look like if more teachers or education theorists became entrepreneurs in the mold of the Web 2.0 startup visionaries? We actually have some idea of what that would look like, it's called the 1960s and 70s. Society was changing and schools were catching up, sometimes getting ahead. A lot of experimentation with democracy went ahead. And a lot of it was pretty successful, and in many ways, it transformed the way we think of what goes on in the classroom. But to the outside world (parents, politicos, Diane Ravitch) it seemed like chaos and a 30-year standards backlash ensued.

Is there really not enough entrepreneurship in education?

Sure, we might say. But very few educators actually behaved like entrepreneurs - they were experimenting with various approaches but not out there on their own, risking their livelihoods. But we have a model of what it looks like when educators become entrepreneurs. Just go to any education exihibition (whether in tech or something else). Loads of teachers who collected years' worth of worksheets and exercises are selling them in various forms. There's Tony Buzan with the whole mind mappning business, Lozanov with Suggestopedia. There's more quack learning methods named after their inventor than you can throw a chalk at. But it's not just the quacks. Liz and John Soars transformed how English is taught around the world with Headway (and I'm told became millionairs in the process). And look at any textbook of English these days and you will find it full to the brim of Michael Halliday's functionalism. Dictionaries and grammars are made using the latest advances in corpus linguistics. Even when it comes to pedagogical innovations and curriculum reforms we see patterns similar to those I sketched out for the startup space. New approaches, methods and curriculum innovations have always been pushed by complex webs of special interests ranging from passionate innovators, desperate parents to religious groups and disability advocacies. They are still being presented to teachers, school boards, policy makers. Just look at the market in textbooks. Or what teacher training institutions do. 1912 is not that much different from 2012. In both periods, the education system was looking to learn from the world of commerce. At the turn of the 20th century, it was Taylorism and industrial efficiency, at the turn of the 21st, it is entrepreneurship. And it wasn't that different even earlier than that. We now see the progress of education as slow and reliably periodic but each of the waves was full of little ripples most of them long forgotten by time. Kind of like Friendstr. So, if there really is an "anti-entrepreneurial culture" in the Colleges of Education, it is with an awareness of this background. Educators starting companies is nothing new, educators behaving in an entrepreneurial manner is nothing new, looking to the world of business or commerce for inspiration is nothing new. The consequences of it are relatively well known and not at all uniformly positive.

The grownup start up

We also need to ask what happens to start ups when they grow up and become successful companies. After all, isn't the point of a start up to become a something that isn't a start up? These companies start doing things like "leveraging their IP", "monetizing their clients", "increasing their market share", "streamlinging their processes", "increasing value for shareholders". These often translate to the purchasing of smaller companies trying new things, suing competitors to prevent them from entering new markets, charging for things that were previously free not because it is necessary but to maintain growth and meet analysts' expectations, focusing on the clients who generate the most revenue, using sales techniques to create demand where there is no need. None of these are inevitably negative but they are inevitable to some degree. Remember that Blackboard too was once a start up. It seems that the very premise of the Ed StartUp course is based on a fairly insufficient analysis and more of an impression than solid research of both education and startups.

The theory into practice metaphor: Thoughts and products

So what should educators do in the face of all this commercial activity? EdStartUp suggests that they should shut up and step up providing the analogy of researchers in the STEM field who take their valuable theories and use them to start companies. But that is to ignore the nature of the theoretical knowledge. In the STEM field, researchers start companies with different kind of knowledge than the one in schools of education. They don't spin off companies based on being well versed in the "theory of evolution" or even "theory of materials". They start them using very specific techniques and processes - often those that are not particularly well captured by the theories or fly in the face of these theories (telegraph, flight, speech recognition). These are the algorithms that started Google, chemical processes behind bio med companies, e-ink technology behind eInk, processor techniques behind ARM, or even the coding skills that power Udacity. But the theory in evidence at the schools of education is not of that nature. Educators talk about constructivism, power relationships, hidden curriculum, socio economic disadvantage. All theories that are inherently skeptical of "productizing" anything. And whenever there is even a hint of a theory that can be neatly packaged up, you can bet, there are several companies trying to sell a product based on it to schools or the government. Synthetic phonics (productized), theory of motivation (productized), memory enhancements (productized), metacognition (productized), anything possible to do with the brain (productized), Virtual Learning Environments (productized). How do you productize "good classroom management" or "teacher awareness of literacy difficulties"? You can run teacher training courses in it and sell them to schools (done), you can create materials to make this easier and sell them to teachers (done), you can create supplementary materials and sell them to parents (done). That's not to say that there is not a gap between theory and practice in education. There is and this website was started in response to that gap. But the gap is because education theory is in itself a practice which makes its use by educators very difficult. Research takes too long to do, the results are published in a way that is inaccessible to educators, it is too expensive, too limited in scope, too expansive in ambition, motivated by theoretical rather than practical interests, etc. But is starting a bunch of companies the right way to "bridge this gap"? Audrey Waters suggested that ed entrepreneurs should read theorists like Dewey and Freire (both educators who put their ideas into practice in different ways without starting companies). But how can somebody who starts out reading Freire, take what she reads in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and start a business? We could start publishing houses specializing in critical pedagogy and consulting companies doing teacher training. That was done. What sort of business would we start after reading "My pedagogic creed" by Dewey? Hold on, we'd start Montessori schools. A business idea with definite long-term success and proven growth potential. In fact, when we look around we seem to see nothing but products based on every conceivable theory of education. Many of them don't look much like modern tech startups with VCs, buzz and exit strategies but is that necessary for a company? There have been education entrepreneurs as long as there has been education. But have these entrepreneurs ever been able to effect positive change on the system as a whole? I don't see a lot of evidence for it. Just look at for profit universities in the US. To maintain legitimacy, they have to be very conservative. They are selling a product that the customer expects. They seem to innovate on the business front, not on the educational front. The same goes for private schools, tutoring companies or testing conglomerates. All of these represent profitable businesses in the education sector but engage relatively sparingly in pedagogic and curriculum innovation. Remember all the educational CD-ROMs? Most of them were just traditional textbooks with a few more pictures. iBooks will be the same. This is not meaningful innovation.

The seductive nature of metaphor

So why does entrepreneurship seem to be such an intuitively productive metaphor for education? I would suggest, it is at least in part, because we conceive of entrepreneurship in much more uniformly positive terms than education or schooling. We can't do an exact comparison with the analysis above because the most common adjectives related to schools are things like primary, secondary, etc. But we do find shootings, bullying and drop out rather than success and safety in the top 100. If we only ask for adjectives immediately preceding the word "schools" we get the following adjectives used to evaluate in the top 100: INNER CITY (21), SEGREGATED (25), LOW-PERFORMING (26), SAFE (28), EFFECTIVE (31), PRESTIGIOUS (40), DRUG-FREE (45), WORST (47), IMPROVING (50), HIGH-POVERTY (54), HIGH-NEED (56), STRUGGLING (58), OVERCROWDED (60), FAILING (61), CROWDED (62), CLOSING (63), SECTARIAN (65), EXCELLENT (67), HIGH-PERFORMING (71), LOW-INCOME (77), CRUMBLING (80), TROUBLED (82), HARD-TO-STAFF (81), FINEST (89), LOWEST PERFORMING (93), AFFLUENT (96). So it's clear that negativity predominates. And even seemingly positive words like SAFE or EFFECTIVE are often used in a negative context, suggesting that schools really are not safe and are not effective. So it seems to me that much of what makes tech entrepreneurship so attractive as a metaphor for improving education is its linguistic shininess (or positive semantic prosody to use the technical term) rather than any systemic intrinsic virtue.

Using entrepreneurship as a generative metaphor

So we see that we don't really want a whole sale projection of the domain of entrepreneurship to the domain of education. Because if we do the analysis, not that much good seems to come out. But that does not mean, we cannot get useful new perspectives. Although, entreneurship is not in any way new to education and educators are not lagging behind their counterparts in physics and engineering departments (at least not on closer inspection) as much as might at first appear, much could be gained at looking at education in the light of the latest tech startup entrepreneurship. As long we avert our gaze in time before we get blinded by all that shine and our inspiration becomes a cargo cult. First, there are very useful funding models from Venture Capital to Kiva or Kickstarter-style funding. They are mostly variations on old themes, but still it's the little things that matter. Then, there are interesting models of community engagement and crowdsourcing that were not available previously (from Wikipedia to Creative Commons or YouTube and MOOCs themselves). The incubator model is also worth taking a look at. I can see a lot of potential there. The "intrapreneurship" idea has all the makings of a soon to become annoying and meaningless fad but the underlying metaphor is very interesting. And, of course, there is the technology itself, both in its technical aspect (like ease of video sharing or content creation via blogging and wikis) and use aspect (like Twitter hashtags and other folksonomies, community building and unconferences [although these are not new]). All of a sudden we can build distributed communities with low barrier to entry and no need for a central maintenance. Again, this is not new, Darwin had his own virtual community of sorts, but only he and his correspondents had access to it. Pamphleteers from Luther to Paine had a blog like impact on their audiences, but the cost of entry was pretty high. And, of course, we should be inspired by what individual companies do. Despite many questionmarks, Udacity and other MOOC companies are very exciting. TechCrunch, Wordpress.com, Delicious, YouTube have also all served as inspirations to education and school aimed products. Portfolio products like Mahara will have learned as much from Facebook as anything. Some of the slogans and business processes inspired by coding practices like iteration and fast and cheap failure are also very useful inspirations. We would be silly not to look at the tech startup space and say, this is interesting. Let's learn as much as we can. But we would be equally silly to say, let's do everything exactly the way, they do it over there because that's how we get the cargo coming in again. Here are some of the simplistic equivalencies we would do well to avoid:

Entrepreneurial is new and innovative
Entrepreneurial is cumulative
Entrepreneurial is useful and marketable
Having success at running a business is having knowledge about the "right way of running a business"

Alternative metaphors

But part of the generative metaphor process is also looking at alternatives. And I think there are many. For instance, Open Source project governance models are as useful a model as anything in the startup funding models. So are Open Source project community organizing and code development. Code sprints, book sprints and bar camps are as useful as anything in the pure startup space. The idea of coopetition among companies selling products around a shared code base is also much more relevant to education than pure productization. In fact, I'd say that Open Source projects would be a better starting place for looking for generative metaphor than startup entrepreneurship. I would certainly recommend that anyone reading TechCrunch or EdSurge also listens to Floss Weekly or Linux Outlaws.

Why I will try to stick with EdStartUp

I signed up for EdStartup 101 on the strength of David Wiley. I follow his writing on open educational resources and his Open Education course is one that I always give as an example of how a MOOC should be done (even if it is relatively small). And indeed, the Education Startup course is organized exactly the way I think such a course should go. No cumbersome LMS/VLE, no lock in of the work students produce, no single platform for discussion. I also love the openness about participant motivations. But I am very skeptical of the course premise which I think is reflected in the curriculum. Part of the MOOC idea is that participants are co-creators of the curriculum. Yet, there is talk of the right and wrong way to do business. To me, this seems to fly in the face of what we know. There is some useful learning out there from successes and failures. And successful entrereneurs seem to do better the second time around (though not even 50% of them). But who could have predicted the success of Twitter and the failure of Pets.com? It seems to me that there's not much that separates Digg from Reddit in terms of business models. If anything, Digg was following the entrepreneurial script better than Reddit. There is not much that MySpace has done wrong in basic business terms. Sometimes companies without any business plan thrive and companies going by the book whither on the vine. Great companies selling great product still go out of business because of hard luck or just bad timing. So I think I would would prefer that the "experts" are positioned more as live case studies and advisors. Having said all that, I am enjoying the course so far because the open design brings ideas into the open. But I hope I will learn more than what the curriculum lays out.

The Great MOOC Slander? Realities and Narratives of Education and Learning [UPDATED]

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

education online (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

Note on the title: I was pretty miffed when I started writing this post. And the title was the first thing that came to my mind. But as I was writing, much of the initial anger dissipated but I still like the title. So I added a questionmark to the main title and left it as it was. The subtitle is really what the post is about.

Why do so many progressive educators trash talk MOOCs?

I just don't get it. What do all of these educational progressives have against MOOCs? They all critique conventional education and try to innovate all the time. But when it comes to MOOCs, they behave as if the status quo was the best thing in the world. The best explanation I can think of is the clash of ideology with personal privilege. I have noticed this in many areas where otherwise progressive people start saying "enough is enough" once the change they are espousing impinges on their privileges and requires some personal inconvenience. Black empowerment is great, but black power is going too far. Women rights are fine, but having to think about whether I can open the door for a woman or not is going too far. Protecting religious freedoms is fine, but not allowing anyone to insult anyone else's religion is going too far. The MOOC backlash seems to me to follow the same scenario: Reforming instruction is fine, but removing the need for an instructor altogether is going too far. Reforming assessment is fine but removing rigor is going too far. Open collaboration is fine, but copying whole paragraphs is going too far. Opening up education to more people is fine, but having 100,000 people in a class is going too far. Drop out of 10-30% is fine and expected but having only 10% of students finish a free no-commitment course is going too far. And in many of these scenarios, there are cases where some reform is going "too far" or is not "faithful to the original intentions". But I would ask any of these "too far" critics to consider how that "too far" affects them personally. This personal impact could be in future job prospects, change of practice, change of how things look, change of how we talk about things. And all of these will cause some personal discomfort if only in the form of cognitive dissonance. And then consider how their criticism is colored by the personal impact. Maybe it isn't, or maybe it doesn't matter. But I would recommend spending a few minutes on this. This post came to me while I was listening to the great fortnightly podcast Digital Campus with Digital Humanities luminaries Amanda French, Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, Tom Scheinfeldt and guests Audrey Waters and Bryan Alexander. http://digitalcampus.tv/2012/09/10/episode-90-back-to-school-special/ I have long puzzled over why this podcast has been snide and largely inaccurate about MOOCs. I would have expected these people to embrace MOOCs and work as hard as possible to make them better, experiment with the format, open them up to new subjects and new audiences. Sure, it's annoying when something you support becomes a fad but the solution of "nobody goes there any more because it's too crowded" just doesn't seem to be the right one.

Show me the learning and the "education = learning" illusion

After some collective MOOC bashing (about which more below) Mills Kelly struck a conciliatory note when he advocated the motto "show me the learning" in the form of let's look at the participants a year from now. And then we can compare the results with traditional education. I'm all for that. But I think we can pretty confidently predict what the results of both will be. Awful. And make it 5 years later, too. What have the participants learned. On average: nothing. Many university lecturers have had that encounter with a star student years later in which they discover that all the student has retained is vague impressions and inaccurate snippets of lore. Unless they stayed in the field and continued their engagement with it, they won't have any meaningful foundation upon which to build. Some skills, some attitudes and some info, to be sure, but nowhere enough to pass the exam. In fact, I am convinced many professors could not pass some exams in their field set by their peers. So I say let's do that. Let's do mass testing of student learning 1 year, 5 years and 10 years later and expose the great swindle that is higher education. Those students who took the MOOCs to learn actual skills like programming in Python will do great if they continued programming in Python or some other language and those who just took it out of vague interest or to fulfill some requirement will do really badly. Those students who took literature or history classes (MOOC or otherwise) and continued in that field will do great, those who just did them as part of some requirement will do badly. Will do the students who took the same classes in the traditional format do better? I doubt it. It will vary across classes and subjects but any difference you might see a year later will be negligible 5 years on and erased 10 years later. Nothing is nothing. But of course, there's a fundamental flaw in this approach. It assumes that we can meaningfully measure learning across cohorts and that cohort results tell a good story about the individuals and vice versa. Academics are well aware of this flaw which is why they engage in the narratives of "learning to think", "acquiring study skills", "getting foundations for further learning" or even the odious "becoming a rounded individual" which mostly means "becoming like me and mine". But none of these can be measured in a consistent way (though I have proposed a Turing test of education) so we have to rely on anecdotes and vague impressions that are irretrievably polluted by the prevailing narratives. But the truth is the actual learning is largely irrelevant. Higher education has never been primarily about learning actual things or actual skills. It has always been (and I mean all the way to the first universities) about peer acceptance for the graduates and meeting the requirements of the institution for the students. That's not to say that a lot of people don't learn lots of useful things while attending university. But if that was enough lawyers wouldn't need the bar, doctors wouldn't need their residency and university teachers would not have to learn everything all over again when they start teaching a new subject. Mills continued his conscilience by saying that he is skeptical about a lot of university instruction. But I think that is the wrong approach to take. University instruction has always been just abominable. The vast majority of classes most university students have attended throughout history were taught by drones more or less competent in their subject sometimes reading out of a textbook sometimes cracking a joke. If that really mattered how would have we ever gotten to where we are now? Massive innovation and erudition as far as the eye can see. Even those we disagree with (like the neocons and creationists for me) cannot really be accused of a lack of intelligence or erudition. We talk about the need for better historical education but some of the worst political decisions have been taken by people who studied history meticulously (and it's no good saying "if they had only read that one paper I wrote on that issue"). We talk about the need for better science education but some of the best innovations have come out of school drop outs who flunked the foundational STEM subjects. Why on earth would we think tinkering around with instruction would make a dent in any of that?

Access over instructional purity: The case for MOOCs

So why do I care about MOOCs? Well, first, even though I think instructional reform is of marginal importance in the overall scheme of things, I still prefer an engaging lecturer over a boring one, and a motivating activity over a dull exercise. Both as a teacher and a student. And it's absolutely true that in individual cases, there are ways to help people learn particular things more easily (they just don't make as much of a difference in aggregate as we pretend). And MOOCs offer a lot of opportunities for instructional innovation and even where they are traditional like presenting videos, they are likely to present the better of the traditional instructional approaches out there. But most importantly MOOCs expand access to knowledge and hopefully with time also to certification. They expand it socially as well as globally. They still need to do a better job in expanding the social networks that are such an important part of attending university but they do a good enough job in some formats and are looking to expand this some more.

Why do good researchers ignore good research practice when talking about policy affecting their own practice?

For some reasons, there is a lot of bad information about MOOCs out there. People who are taking them to write about them generally do it with agendas a mile long and I have yet to see a write up that wasn't colored by the writer's own professional wishes. I am not aware of any non-anecdotal research on MOOCs that would investigate them by talking to students and teachers following the best ethnographic research practices. [UPDATE: The day after, I posted this, I was watching this video on teaching by the Harvard physicist Eric Mazur who said [about 18 minutes in to the video]: "It's very important to have data in education. I often go to faculty meetings where my colleagues and I talk about teaching and there are quite a Nobel laureates around me. And it is always surprising to me how whenever the discussion shifts from teaching to education, people, even the most reputable scientists, completely abandon the scientific method. All of a sudden the discussion is about anecdotes: 'My students learn better whenever...', or 'My students like it when I do this...', as if liking equates learning. Data are important." Now, I think I would strongly disagree with Mazur on the kind of data that is important or the scope of what constitutes the scientific method, but we would have no quarrel in that whatever underpins policy debates about education is not it.]

Whose controversy?

The podcast that got me so riled up started with saying that there were a lot of MOOCs over the summer and a lot of controversy around them. And perhaps if we look at the blogs about them, we could say that a lot of them were critical about the MOOCs. But the controversy was entirely generated by the same people who now refer to it as "the controversy". A much more accurate statement would have been, "there were a lot of MOOCs over the summer and a lot of people like us were writing about how we all don't like them".

Plagiarism

Another reference that gave me pause was an offhand comment about the "rampant plagiarism" in MOOCs as if that was in any way a proven thing. There was some evidence of plagiarism but how "rampant" it actually is would require careful and cconscientiousr research rather than skimming a few biased and alarmist blog posts. I was struck that nobody on the podcast (full of excellent humanities scholars) asked what is the evidence of the plagiarism? No one raised the question of the "discourse of plagiarism", or even suggested that "plagiarism" is equally "rampant" in traditional schooling. But even the article referred to only talks about "dozens" of reported cases of plagiarism in a course taken by tens of thousands. Surely, this is pretty good going percentage wise.

Non-native speakers

Another question raised was that of "non-native speakers" in one of the literature MOOCs. But nobody mentioned the fact (which I believe was discussed on the same podcast about a year ago) that lots of students in traditional US universities are exposed to non-native speaker TAs and lecturers. Nobody suggested that new disciplines often constitute a foreign language to "native speakers". The one suggestion was that people could write and grade papers in their "native" languages but nobody suggested that the "native" English speakers try to get over it and learn how to interpret the English of non-native speakers and give good feedback. Surely all the humanities scholars on that podcast must be aware of the difficulties surrounding language skill and language politics. Nobody mentioned that often "native" speakers write appallingly and "non-native" speakers are quite good writers (if plagued by difficulties with idioms). I once graded 10 papers from a small class with one Chinese students whose spoken English was very hard to follow but I couldn't pick out her essay out of the lot. This was in part because her written English was not marked by accent and the pressure of conversation and in part because the some of the "natives" couldn't string together a coherent written sentence in English. We should get used to the fact that written English has elements of a foreign language to it.

Peer assessment

There was also this vague notion that "peer assessment" was somehow suspect. Luckily there were some dissenting voices on this. But nobody mentioned how variable the level of feedback students receive from their instructors and TAs in traditional universities is. I've had to moderate a lot of feedback by experts and I have no illusions about its quality. I took the first 2 weeks of the same Coursera course mentioned as beyond redemption on the podcast and the feedback I received was of entirely sufficient quality. There were a few duff ones but since every assignment received at least 5 pieces of feedback, in aggregate this would lead to improvement. Sure, there would be ways to improve this system, like tracking the quality of feedback, rating "helpfulness" or requesting moderation in cases of disagreement but those are just tweaks not fundamental issues.

"Training is not education": The spaces in between

Towards the end of the MOOC discussion one of the hosts (I believe to was Tom Scheinfeldt) summarized his unease about the MOOCs as the difference between education and training. MOOCs, he claimed, lack the spaces in between. Even if the acquisition of knowledge is the same, the students don't get to chat to the professor during the break afterwards and get random snippets of wisdom. It was curious that he chose as an example "being told that it is not OK to copy Wikipedia" which seems to me to be so trivial that a it could be delivered over Twitter and also something that should probably not be left to a random hallway conversation. But the bigger problem is that this description of higher education (or any education) is completely illusory. There is masses of ethnographic research replicated pretty much every decade since the 1960s that has shown (beyond doubt, I would say) that nothing like that happens in the "spaces in between". Most of the conversations students have with each other about their classes is about how to pass them, not what they about. And almost no students ever talk to the professor personally or in a way that can justify $20,000 a year. (See References section below.) But even if we were to accept that such serendipitous encounters are important and they are certainly narratively salient (see below), there would be numerous ways of replicating them in a MOOC. We would just have to ask the critics to promise not to take the few inevitable bad examples and present them as evidence of MOOCs being broken.

This wouldn't work in a MOOC or what do we do when we teach?

There seems to be a small subgenre of MOOC criticism that has to do with their online nature. These critics are accepting that MOOCs are what they are but keep listing subjects (typically their own) of which they are convinced that they could not be taught via an online course, let alone a MOOC. I used to think the same about my subjects but every time I have I was shown the error of my ways. Now I think that essentially, if somebody can perform a surgery on themselves with online instructions, you can pretty much learn anything online. That doesn't mean that personal contact is often not a useful shortcut or that a particular kind of feedback is not more effective in person. But is the lab, seminar, or the office hour the only alternative? I was thinking about some of these when I was thinking about the flipped school year. I was struck by the reference to "people teaching on a MOOC" by one of the podcast discussants. I have long been puzzled by the references to "teaching" by educators. It first came when I was attending a seminar over 20 years ago, the phone rang and the professor said, "sorry, can't talk now, I'm teaching". But it didn't feel to me like he was teaching. He was sitting there and telling us things. Was that it? Was that what teaching was? What do educators mean when they look at their schedules and say "I'm teaching on Monday from 10 to 11"? And isn't saying "I'm teaching on a MOOC" referring to something completely different? Perhaps MOOCs are so disturbing to many "teachERs" because they don't get to "teach" any more, or at least not in any recognizable form? I have noticed that a lot of people (including me) who are very skeptical about lectures as a medium of instructions actually like lecturing. The ritual of standing up in front of a group of people and telling them things is just exhilarating for some teachers. The challenge of formulating the content in a way that will lead people to learning, posing the right questions, coming up with the right analogy, seeing the "whites of their eyes". But lectures are also a performance of teaching in the ethnographic sense. Both the lecturer and the student play a role they feel is required for them to describe their activities as teaching. Giving and attending lectures is fullfiling a ritual duty that is hard to overcome. I personally also like preparing lectures because they let me think about the subject in more organized ways. And I think others do too. Feynman famously told his colleagues in pure research that they should do some "teaching". I suspect this is what he had in mind. The same goes for looking over students' shoulders and giving them expert advice. One feels so useful when one can point out a little error, share one's accumulated wisdom. Isn't that what being a teacher is after all? But even that is just so much voodoo. How much do we actually learn from this feedback? I have observed hundreds of lessons and dozens of lesson observers. I have seen people give feedback and receive feedback. And I am highly skeptical about its effectiveness. There's just too much going on. Too many things to focus on. Repetition and incremental improvement are the norm. Not comprehensive and exhaustive feedback on every minutiae of someone's performance. Now, there's lots of research on the importance of targeted coaching for skill acquisition. But that's hardly what goes on in a typical section seminar. We can all think of stories where just the right kind of feedback at the right time made all the difference. Just the right analogy or illustration chosen in a lecture or presentation made things previously muddy crystal clear. But if we look at the complex thing that is our current expertise, can we really see a clear an unequivocal pattern of instruction? I suspect not. So why are we so hell bent on recreating it for others?

Improving MOOCs

Do MOOCs need improvement? Absolutely, I can think of a dozen ways in which to improve MOOCs. Some of these improvements are along the lines of improving higher education in general and some of them are to do with the format. But I would argue that we do not actually yet know what the real problems with MOOCs are. Which is why I am so puzzled by the backlash (see also here). Will MOOCs be the salvation of higher education? Probably not. Will they cause the downfall of traditional higher education institutions? One can always hope but it is highly unlikely. The most likely future of MOOCs is opening some new avenues of access and making available some content. They are likely to be co-opted by traditional institutions that will use them as advertising or loss leaders. And with that the MOOCs will become more and more traditional. But at the same time, they will leave their mark and higher education will not be quite the same as it was before. Kind of like with all "revolutions". So there's a lot of hype about MOOCs, but there's just as much hype about universities. The massive fee inflation and variable quality should give us just as much pause as any deficiencies (real or imagined) in MOOCs that are still only on the periphery of this oligopolistic industry. Instead I would recommend to the progressive educators (among whose numbers I count myself) to examine how much of their opposition is driven by the challenge MOOCs provide to their status as innovators and their mass awareness raising success when compared to their own decades-long and admirable records. I am not for a moment accusing anybody of small mindedness or petty jealousy, just the normal human biases that we often ignore in academia. But maybe it's just me and their epistemological consciences are as pure as the driven snow. In which case, I apologize.

References: Research on the student experiences of higher education

These are the references for research about what actually happens in higher education. There have been pretty consistent results in this field since the 1960s but seem to have made pretty small impact on how academics (even those inclined to consider this kind of evidence) think about higher education. Becker, Howard Saul, Blanche Geer, and Everett Cherrington Hughes. 1968. Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life. New York,: Wiley. Becker, Howard Saul, Blanche Geer, Everett C. Hughes, and Anselm L. Strauss. 1977 [1961]. Boys in White : Student Culture in Medical School. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books. Holland, Dorothy C., and Margaret A. Eisenhart. 1990. Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, and College Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. 1987. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present. New York: Knopf. Moffatt, Michael. 1989. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Nathan, Rebekah. 2005. My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nespor, Jan. 1994. Knowledge in Motion: Space, Time, and Curriculum in Undergraduate Physics and Management. London: Falmer Press.

Introducing myself to #EdStartUp - How can we find sustainable business/funding models for open education? [update]

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This is my introduction to the other participants on the #EdStartUp MOOC. My main interest in taking the course is to explore ways of squaring up the demands of a sustainable business or other funding model with openness. My key question is how can we run open courses with open educational resources and using open platforms without the support of large institutions that can afford to treat things like MOOCs as advertising or loss leaders. I think an essential part of this problem is solving the credentials and trust dilemmas as I've blogged about before here and here. But the question could be put in even starker terms: Can we charge for participation in something like a MOOC? As I tweeted about recently: "We know connectivist learning doesn't have to be massive, online or a course. But does it have to be open? Can we charge for open?" Some of the suggestions in the ensuing conversation included the obvious: "Open content & learning nets. But paid participation for official recognition." In simplest terms: It costs money to review somebody's work for the review to have some value (no robot grading but possibly some peer review models). But perhaps we need to reach for models of funding that are themselves open rather than based on an idea of scarcity. Thus this tweet: "Maybe we need a Kickstarter-style website for #MOOCs that could be truly open and not bound to the big companies & unis." The Kickstarter models is not at all new. Book publication was often done on this model in the 18th century (it was called subscription) so maybe course design and facilitation could follow some of these ideas. I'm involved in running the Inclusive Technologies for Reading course that is exploring some of these ideas. While it is entirely free and open in the first pilot run, we will have to find ways of making it sustainable in the long-term. Suggestions welcome.

Update

On reflection, I changed "business model" to "funding model". In practice, they may look exactly the same but I think the difference in perspective is an important one.

Massive open education mindspace: MOOC hows and whys

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Mind map

Inspired by a Tweet and related to my post on What is and what is not a MOOC, I decided to make a little concept map to put a few things in context of each other.

Download and remix policy: Do it!

You can download the map file from the XMind site. It is licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike and I strongly encourage remixes. In other words, download it, make it your own, do anything with it including selling it. I would appreciate if you would link to your remix in the comments below so that everyone can benefit.

Text outline

1 MOOC Type 1.1 xMOOC - extension of traditional education 1.2 cMOOC - connectivism 2 MOOC Procedural Approach 2.1 Task-based 2.2 Knowledge-based 2.3 Network-based 3 Metaphor of knowledge 3.1 Container 3.2 Journey 3.3 Delivery 4 Theory of learning 4.1 Connectivism 4.2 Neobehaviourism 4.3 Eclectic approach 5 Delivery platform 5.1 LMS/VLE only 5.2 LMS/VLE + open web 5.3 Open Web Only 6 Instructional materials (content) 6.1 OERs 6.2 Participant generated 6.3 Free non-open 6.4 Non-free available for purchases 6.5 Non-open only available to course participants 7 Teacher role 7.1 Co-participant 7.2 Course and curriculum designer 7.3 Lecturer on video/webinars 7.4 Facilitator on forums/Twitter 7.5 Blogger/summarizer 8 Student role 8.1 Watch instructional videos 8.2 Complete online self-scoring assignments 8.3 Blog 8.4 Compile portfolio 8.5 Give peer feedback 8.6 Engage with community 8.7 Establish Personal Learning Network 9 Approach to Openness 9.1 Free to enroll 9.2 No pre-requisites for enrollment 9.3 Relying on open educational resources 9.4 Open outcomes without pre-set curriculum 9.5 Learning and student work using open platforms 10 Size of course 10.1 Massive 10.1.1 10,000-100,000 10.1.2 1,000-5,000 10.2 Large 10.2.1 100-500 10.2.2 500-1,000 10.3 Relative - any size larger than normal 11 Time 11.1 Overall length 11.1.1 Longer than typical semester 11.1.2 One or two weeks 11.1.3 Semester-length (8-12 weeks) 11.1.4 Open-ended 11.2 Student time commitment 11.2.1 Self-determined 11.2.2 Full-time course equivalent 11.2.3 Limited (e.g. 5 hours a week) 12 Accreditation/Certification 12.1 Credits available through established institution 12.2 Own credit/certificate awarded 12.3 Badges (badge collection) 12.4 Work openly available for accreditation from other institutions 13 Assessment 13.1 Style of assessment 13.1.1 Automated test 13.1.2 Work/participation 13.1.3 Portfolio assessment 13.1.4 Peer assessment 13.1.5 Self-assessment 13.2 Publicness 13.2.1 Open work 13.2.2 Closed work 13.2.3 Anonymous peer review 13.2.4 Public peer review

MOOC motivations and magnitudes: Reflections on the MOOC experience vs the MOOC drop out #moocmooc

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This is a long post. What can I say? The MOOC made me do it!

When 90% drop-out rate is less than a 10% drop-out rate

English: A diagram of the geological time scale (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the foundations of the, I think largely unfounded, criticisms of the MOOC is the high drop out rate. But I think this is a complete misunderstanding of how proportions work. As in so many other cases, people are basically taking two similar looking different domains of experience and translating meaningless percentages between them without consideration of scale. A brief diversion: The thing we know from complexity science (or chaos theory to be a bit inaccurate) is that magnitudes matter. Complex systems are sensitive to initial conditions, so that a small variation in input can result in an unpredictably large variation in output (to simplify the idea out of recognition). However, the variation is not completely random. It happens in patterns (attractors) that bear a resemblance to each other but are not the same. Weather, for instance is largely unpredictable but whatever the outcome, it still looks like weather (so we may say it's boiling hot, but it will never actually be boiling). But the difference between 32 degrees or 33 degrees today may be the difference between 12 and 42 degrees tomorrow. But the sensitivity to initial conditions only happens at a certain scale. Whether it snows in a particular July or boils makes no difference to the climate. But climate (on its own scale not experienced by humans) also has its sensitivities. It seems predictable to us in human time but not in geological time. This is a roundabout way of saying that even if it looks like a drop out rate, it may not be the same kind of drop out rate. When you take scales into account, you may come to the conclusion that the drop out rate of a MOOC is actually smaller than that of a university. So let's consider a few numbers. The largest MOOCs have enrollments around 100,000 and graduations around 10,000. So that's a 90% drop out rate. Horror of horrors. This is awful education with old style pedagogy moans complain the pedagogues. But what the complainers don't take into account is the scale. Sure, if their classes experienced a drop out rate of 90%, they would end up with what would essentially look like no students (and no money). Imagine 90% if a class of 20 would drop out. Which is why universities take extreme measures to prevent students from dropping courses. But students still drop courses and would drop them more if they were allowed to. The only reason university students can't drop out of courses is to fit in with financial logistics of the overpriced bureaucratic institutions that gauge them for the promise of a better future. Where's the pedagogy in that? The Stanford AI course reportedly had 160,000 enrollments with roughly 15% completion rate. That's 23,000 students. Which is 10,000 more than are enrolled at Stanford at any one time (which by the way has 22% drop out rate). So to complain about the rate of drop out is to ignore the magnitude. Even if 95% of the students drop out, it is still having more impact than a course at an institution on a normal scale where only 5% of the students drop out. Let's look for some parallels. If I make 1 million dollars a year and my salary drops by 90% the next year, I won't experience the same hardship as if I'm making 100 thousand and year and get the same drop in income. If the gun crime doubled in Switzerland from year to year, nothing would essentially change because there are negligible amounts of it to start with. If it doubled in some parts of the US, there'd be bodies lying in the street. Magnitude's also why a tiny organism can carry heavier objects in proportion to their body weight or fall from greater heights. This strength does not scale. A human who can only carry several times her body weight will still win with a fight with an ant. Magnitudes matter and Spiderman is impossible. But there are other reasons why the enrollments and dropouts in xMOOCs and traditional classes are not really comparable even at the same scales. Let's pick some of them apart.

Why do people enroll in MOOCs and universities

Motivations play a big role in enrollment and retention. The range motivation from enrolling in a MOOC is great and no two motivations are the same. However, we can probably describe some of the basic motivation profiles and cover enough points on the spectrum to give an accurate portrayal. The motivation profiles are something like this:

Desire to learn something from an expert to whom you would otherwise not get access
Desire to learn something on a subject with which you are not familiar
Desire to get some sort of recognition for learning done (even though it is not a formal credit)
Desire to complete what was started (see below)
Desire to connect with other learners from a wide range of backgrounds (age, region, language, level of expertise)
Idle or professional curiosity in a new thing (be it methodological, technological or simply because it's there)

Every single person's motivation will combine some characteristics of one of these profiles making everyone completely unique in one sense but not enough to really make a difference. For comparison, these are the motivation profiles for enrollment for a university degree:

Get a university degree or another qualification
Fullfil an expectation imposed by the environment (parents, peers, etc.)
Improve employment prospects (related to but distinct form the above)
Acquire specific knowledge or skills
Enjoy a growing experience with your peer group
Become a more rounded / educated person (often more conversational requirement than real motivation)

So we see the profiles are different, but I'd also suggest that their priorities are different. But we also need to look at why students enroll in individual courses at a university:

It is a required course for a degree (or one of a set of required courses)
It is the only course available due to scheduling restrictions
It is a course reputed to be easy or passable
It is a course that they heard something good about
The course is taught by a star professor
The student wants to learn what the course has to offer

So this shows us that MOOCs and university course are not comparable in any meaningful sense when it comes to student motivation at the moment. MOOCs are somewhere between classes and degrees. The time commitment and level of achievement is comparable to the idea of a single class. But the motivation and student engagement with the institution is more similar to a whole course of study. This will change if MOOCs will become credit bearning or even compulsory as part of a degree. Long time ago, I wrote about the Becker attractor, suggesting that over time students will always organize around meeting the institutional requirements rather than an ideal. So as they become embedded in these structures (or obstacle courses), MOOCs will become more like any other course when it comes to motivation for dealing with their requirements.

Why do people drop out from MOOCs, university courses and universities?

2005-12-25 Magnifying drop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So what are the reasons people drop out of MOOCs? This is not hard to imagine:

Lack of time or conflict of commitments
Lack of continued motivation due to no recognition for hard work
Lack of ability to perform the course assignments (language barrier, pre-req knowledge, etc.)
Dissatisfaction with an aspect of the course (support, peer group, course tools, etc.)

This is not that different from when people drop a university class:

Scheduling conflict or lack of time or other resource
Dissatisfaction with an aspect of the class
Inability to complete assignments

But why do people drop out of university education completely?

Run out of money (my case with my PhD)
Conflict with other commitments (job, sport, etc.)
Find it too hard
Other personal reasons (illness, family situation, move, etc.)

So the range of reasons for dropping out does not appear as great as the range of motivations for joining. Other than cost, they are similar between MOOCs and universities. But before we go any further, we also need to compare the level of investment. The effort to enroll in a university is incomensurable with that of a MOOC which only requires you to fill out a 10 second form. Days and days spent on application forms, research about the university. And then there is the cost. Tuition in thousands or tens of thousands and living expenses. Why would anyone waste all of that and drop out? Yet, students drop out of British universities as a whole at a rate of about 20%. And the drop out rates for US universities can be as high as 40% (and as low as 10% for many - the Webb institute has 96% completion rate but their entire student body is 80 - so we're at magnitudes again). And this is after teh students invested a year or more of their time and thousands of pounds in fees and other expenses. Not even counting how much is potentially at stake in terms of their future job prospects and financial stability. And the impact on their standing in their peer group and the pressure from their family. And that's not even considering all the effort and resource, the universities expend to keep the students. What is the investment in a MOOC? Some time (measured in hours) and some effort. What are the consequences of dropping a MOOC? No practical ones. Some mild sense disappointment, perhaps. So when we compare the two situations, my conclusion is that the university drop out rate is higher in relative terms than the MOOC drop out rate. But that's not the point. The point is that the level of MOOC drop out has little to do with the MOOC pedagogy (individual dropouts do but not the scale of them). It has mostly to do with investment and motivation. So it is a bit strange that the people who essentially keep their students in their classes by force find that in any way alarming. They should be alarmed about the symbolic violence and exploitation to which they signed up!

So what is it like to take a MOOC?

drop out - cracker [portrait] (Photo credit: the|G|™)

But it's not just what brings us in and how we leave. What it's like, is also important. We all sort of know what it is like to take a university class. Lots of sitting, listening, reading and writing is involved. At that level, it is not so different from taking a MOOC. What is different is the engagement. And here the type of MOOC you're taking matters. I've tried and dropped (or lurked on and dropped) several MOOCs but my motivation was always professional curiosity rather than a desire to learn. Conflicting time commitments then got in the way. But it was enough to get a sense, I believe, for what it's like. I've peeked in on 2 xMOOCs (generally larger extension MOOCs) and 2 cMOOCs (generally smaller connectivist ones). The day to day experience of the xMOOCs and the cMOOCs was very different for me. The xMOOCs were very much focused on knowledge and skills and peer interaction was always in support of knowledge and skill acquisition. All the interaction was done inside the course's online platform (forums, etc.). This would have been perfectly suitable if I'd been motivated enough. I really do want to learn Python and I have no doubt I would have learned enough had I followed the Udacity course faithfully. But I also really want to learn Chinese. Both of these motivations are real and sincere but they are aspirational and any steps I may be taking towards their fullfilment will be derailled by the slightest of obstacles (including missing one class or just not feeling like it). The cMOOCs, on the other hand, felt much more interactive and exploratory. To the point I didn't actually feel I was learning all that much (sense, I know, shared by others). The learning was all coming from inside me. Which would be great, if I truly felt I wanted to learn about what was on offer. These MOOCs were much more distributed. There was a central hub (with some) where discussions would take place and assignments would be shared but most of the work happened on blogs, YouTube and Twitter. The motivation to stay involved would stem from establishing peer relationships. But if you're only lurking, as I was, then the ties are much weaker and chance of drop out (or rather fade out) is much higher. And indeed that's what happened. I started with the best of intentions but the smallest stumble on the way was enough to derail me completely. But it need not necessarily be like that. The one xMOOC where I've done all the work for at least a part of the time is the still running Coursera course on SciFi and Fantasy. That one is less about knowledge and more about experience. The peer discussions were quite supportive (if a bit scattered and hampered by a limited software platform) and the assignments and the feedback themselves were very useful. But I'm not going to continue because I don't actually feel, I need that course for anything. I joined to see what teaching literature is like having taught it briefly myself and having on occasion engaged in literary criticism. What I've seen convinced me that (despite the many mostly valid quibbles some people post about the course) it would have given me a very good foundation in reading and writing about reading if I felt like I needed it. The first MOOC where I've completed every assignment (though one rather skimpily) is the MOOC MOOC - a MOOC about MOOCs. I enrolled fully intending to lurk. But I found that I was learning more than I'd expected. I thought that I was prety well informed MOOCwise (enough to run my own MOOC) but found out that I had a lot of room for more MOOC learning. Plus I really appreciated the opportunity to exchange views with others. But the MOOC MOOC only lasted one week (six days to be exact). I may have learned as much without completing the assignments but I found my motivation to be self-perpetuating. I started out doing my own thing but found myself converging on the assingments for the day and wanting to complete the set (thus this post). I also like the aspect of light touch but quite intensive interaction via Twitter (I posted close to 200 tweets in 5 days). But if it had been much longer or more spread out, I may have dropped out anyway. I will of course continue my thinking and learning about MOOCs and writing about them on this blog (though most likely with much lesser frequency - I average about a post a month). What could have helped me complete the other MOOCs, as well, would have been some expectation of a recognition. I would have certainly appreciated some badges to collect as I went along. An expectation of some certificate at the end was not enough. But a more immediate need for learning is probably even a bigger factor. Since I'm in the middle of working on a MOOC of my own, the MOOC MOOC fit perfectly with my needs in a way the other connectivist courses I lurked on did not. And finally, having some time set away without any other commitments would certainly have helped. That is the one advantage of going to a place to a course. You've carved out some space where nothing intrudes. As I've argued in "Space, the final frontier of online education". Now, could I have met the course objectives of all the MOOCs I've tried given the resources and forms of "delivery" offered? Absolutely, I could have been a contender! And I'm sure there would have been frustrations, dead ends and false starts along the way and some of the learning would be incomplete. But that's no different from traditional courses or any learning.

Bringing it all together

So what do magnitudes (which are number like) and experiences (which are decidedly analog) have in common? Magnitudes are about the human experience of numbers. A person earning 10,000/year won't be able to differentiate between someone earning 1 or 2 million. The doubling of a small salary is more impactful than the doubling of a large salary. If a balcony falls on you from great height, it won't be that much different from a whole space ship falling on you. And you won't feel the difference between one feather and two feathers. But there is a point where the doubling of the weight will matter. We need to consider the impact dropping out of a course or education has one the individual. And the impact the dropping out of a large numbers of individuals will have on the a whole group. So we need to explore those experience to understand the magnitudes. Otherwise the numbers we're throwing around won't have much more value than those called out at a Bingo game. Thus endeth the MOOC. MOOC.

How to MOOCify your course and why you should do it: Reasons, skills and tools #moocmooc [update]

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This post is part of the MOOC MOOC course of work. It outlines my journey (now lasting over a year) towards adopting elements of a MOOC in the Inclusive Technologies for Reading (#ITR12) course pilot starting this September. This not a description of the process, more a reflection towards the end of it. [toc]

Update

I was inspired by the comment by Vivian Halloran below sharing her ideas about how she's MOOCifying her course to create a repository of MOOCified courses. This could help all MOOCifiers to see how others are making their courses MOOC-like. You can use this form to enter your info.

So you want to run a MOOC?

A proto-MOOC 3.0 (Photo credit: ConnectIrmeli)

MOOCs are the thing. Just grab a forum and a Twitter account and do a MOOC. Be a MOOC, seize the MOOC by the horns. MOOC it all up! But you're not Stanford with infinite resources and high-profile professors, you're not Stephen Downes with a reputation and an audience for everything you say. So how do you go about it? Should you even start? Or is it all just so much hype?

Why MOOC in?

I think these are the reasons you might want to do a MOOC:

You want to reach a wider audience with the subject you believe is important
You want to deepen the learning of your students through engagement
You want to encourage significant peer interaction beyond forum posts
You want to make sure that your students draw upon the open content already present in your field and get both a realistic experience of the field and make first real connections with it
You want all the hard work your students put in during the course to be a contribution to the field itself

These are valid reasons to do a MOOC but I don't think they would be sufficient on their own (at least not for me) unless you also have one or two of the above:

You want to reduce the cost of education
You want to market your institution and increase its reputation
You are an early adopter and experimenter at heart who cannot stay away from shiny new things (I'm looking in the mirror here)
You want to be seen as being on the cutting edge (not as bad as it sounds)

Does it have to quack like a MOOC?

But MOOCs are huge and require giving up so much of what I do now, you may object. I have to follow all these steps to make a MOOC? Where do I find the time and resources? But there's more than one way to skin a MOOC. I tried to outline some of them in an earlier post: All of the words comprising the acronym have multiple interpretations:

Massive is a relative term. Let's say you teach cuneiform to 3 students a year. Increasing it to 20 with MOOCification counts as 'massive' in my book. The original MOOCs had 2,500 enrollments, the famous Stanford AI MOOC had 100,000. If you run courses under 50, 200-500 would be pretty massive. But massive could also stand for massive engagement and interconnections.
Open can also be many things to mean people. The radical way of being open is using an open platform, open content, have students do all the work in the open, or maybe the outcomes of the course are open themselves. But for others, open is just free. Open enrollment without the checking of prerequisites. And for some just using Twitter and blog posts instead of forums and a VLE might satisfy the definition of open. You could possibly even charge for parts of the course - like issuing certificates.
Online is also a relative term. Online is what makes it all possible but it doesn't have to be purely online. Your students can do face-to-face meetups. There could be summer schools, barcamps, unconferences that are a part of it.
Course is perhaps the least variable part of the acronym. Most MOOCs have a beginning and an end, a topic to engage with every week, and some preset outcomes and a semblance of a syllabus. But these could be very traditional or very non-traditional. Students or "students" can be involved in their development in all sorts of ways.

MOOCify

Stephen Downes speaking at D2L09. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The MOOC MOOC (a meta MOOC which was more like a workshop) Twitter stream produced the term MOOCify. And that should probably be the aim. Despite the criticism they have been receiving lately, MOOCs offer undeniably powerful learning experiences accessible to many who previously would not have had the opportunity. They do not address all of the needs of a reformed educational system and they do not fit the needs of all the students or all the educators all of the time. But what's that thing about the MOOC and the bath water? Everybody who has experienced a MOOC has at least some positive experiences. Some even think it's a panacea for higher education, though I am not one of them, I certainly understand how somebody can think that. Even the people who criticize MOOCs are reacting more to the hype than the experience itself. But if you try a successful MOOC, chances are, you'll want to replicate at least some of that experience in your learning, teaching and professional development. So what do you need.

Tools of mass MOOCification

The MOOC MOOC crowd produced a spreadsheet of MOOC sexy tools but I think the trick is to keep it simple. Give students and yourself easy and open tools for communication (as easy and as open, as you can). I would start with the assumption that every participant in your MOOC-like creation will need a PLN (Personal Learning Network) and the intersection of all the PLNs with each other and the content of your course will result in the MOOCification.

Basic tools to MOOCify

Here are the tools I would start with:

Course hub: You need somewhere to put stuff up about the course. This could be the traditional VLE / LMS that you're already using, or Wordpress Blog or Google Sites or some other CMS. Ultimately, you just need a webpage people can get to. Depending on access, you might also want to run a forum for Q&A as part of the hub and maybe some sort of a link/feed collector. If you have more technical resources, you may want to start some sort of a dashboard that would collate all the feeds.
Blogs and other content creation tools: Keep it simple, you smart person. Use Wordpress. It's easy, free and has many hosting options. I'd advise the students to start a Wordpress.com blog for the course (unless they want to use their own on another platform like Blogspot). Tumblr might also be an good alternative.
Twitter and the hashtag Twitter can provide the glue to your MOOC. Or maybe the lifeblood. Or maybe the backchannel. Or maybe something else. But you should definitely use it. Google Plus and Facebook are ok, but none of them have the simplicity and openness of Twitter.
Webinar platform (synchronous communications) A MOOC can be amplified if you can talk to each other in a synchronous manner. People gathering at the same time in the same virtual space can be very powerful. Your institution may already have some platform like BigBlueButton, GoToWebinar or Blackboard Collaborate but in some ways Google Hangouts on Air are the best. Free, easily accessible and an easy way to share recordings on YouTube.

The skills of the successful MOOCer

We should not overlook the skills, you or your students will need to develop to make all of the above work. You don't need to start with anything more than being able to browse the web, send an email using a webform or maybe buy something on Amazon. But you'll want more. Some of these are very small but they will make things a lot easier.

Understanding URLs: This is probably the biggest obstacle I see most people fail at when they try to take the next step on the web. You need to know what a URL does, what are its components, how to copy, where to paste and how to change it to get a different result. Basically, all people on a MOOC should be able to get this Navigator badge.
Twitter skills: Twitter is simple. But there's good and bad ways of using it. You need to learn to follow the right people, @mentions, two kinds of retweets, short URLs, and above all HASHTAGs! Does take long to suss it all out but suss it out you must.
Blogging skills: At the core, blogging is no differnt than submitting a form or sending an email via webmail. But how about inserting a link, a picture or attaching a file. All of these are easy but if you're new, they're something to learn (which means get wrong a few times and get frustrated by). Knowing how to use the Heading styles can also make the difference to a lot of people.
Sharing and embedding: If you have a blog and get what a feed is, you should understand what it means to embed something and how to do it. This could be scary at first because you get to copy a blob of incomprehensible code and are asked to paste it somewhere else. But it's within the reach of all with a bit of encouragement and instruction. It's also worth exploring what some of the other options found under the Share button are all about.
Collaborative creation skills: Depending on what the course does, being able to edit a wiki, can be a useful skill. It doesn't require much but may be more natural to some than others. But there are other ways to collaborate, all of which can be useful to explore (see below for some tools).
Understanding feeds: You don't have to be able to roll your RSS feed by hand (or even know what on earth I'm talking about here). But your participants should know that all the services they use publish feeds that can be subscribed to in various ways (Google Reader should be on your list of tools).
Signing up for an account: If you sign up for account on every new service that pops up (like I do), you don't even think twice about it. But for people who may not do this sort of thing more than once or twice a year, it can be a frustrating experience. All services are a bit different but knowing how thing like usernames, passwords, recovery emails, settings, etc. work makes it all a lot smoother. Not sure what can be taught here but acknowledging that this is a skill to be refined and thought about is probably a useful first step. Also knowing about some of the tools for managing account information (see below) would be useful.
Single sign on: What's with all these "Login with Twitter" or "Facebook"? Once you have the accounts, it's useful to be able to use that facility. Just knowing it's there and what it does should be enough for a start. Your advanced users may want to learn about the idea of 'oauth'.
General computer productivity: This is not a MOOC skill but being able to use the computer productively and in a way that makes the most of its accessibility features can remove a lot of the frustration. The Computer Productivity and Accessibility Cue Cards are there to help.

MOOC+ the tools for your next MOOC

Badges: I hope that one day all MOOCs will issue open badges (following the Mozzila Open Badge Infrastructure) to participants. And I hope traditional institutions will follow suit. New tools are coming out that will help with that. For now, http://openeducation.us provides a model.
RSS integrator: There are different ways to collect all the RSS feeds that you and your participants are producing. gRSShopper will be for you, if you have a server and some basic sysadmin skills (or know somebody who does). But some people just use GoogleDocs and something like Storify, to put it all together. At the very least, you should learn how to use a private RSS reader like Google Reader. You may also want to geek out with something like Ifttt or even Yahoo Pipes.
Collaborative content creation: Working togeter on a document can be a powerful (if confusing) experience. EtherPad is a fun little tool for workign on a document together. But GoogleDocs are just as good and offer some nice features like commenting. They are also a bit more stable (in my experience). The one advantage of EtherPad is that it will colorize all the contributions at once and has a nice timeline replay function so that you can see how the document was put together. But, of course, an old-style wiki or even Wikipedia itself, could be the tools that are right for you. I am also partial to BookType for producing books you'll want in a distributable formats (like PDF of ePub). For the ultimate geek and open source advocate, there is GitHub.
Multimedia tools: Let's be honest. We're talking YouTube here. Really the best place to share videos (although many alternatives exist). There are also tools that help produce fun animations to be shared like Xtranormal or Animoto. Some screencasting tools like Jing would also be helpful on some courses. And there are audio only services that may be important for some: SoundCloud, Audioboo, iPadio, TokTok, VoiceThread.
Social bookmarking: The heyday of social bookmarking services like Delicious is gone. But they are still there and maybe the just the right tool for your course. Reddit is one but there are also things like Pinterest, Storify or Scoopit that add extra pizzas to the whole process.
The cool tools: All of these tools are cool. But if you go to https://t.co/fpG4sE3r, you'll find many more. New tools pop up and disappear every day. If you want to stay on top, follow the #edtech hashtag and read some tech blogs like Lifehacker, MakeUseOf or TechCrunch.
Password management: If you're serious about MOOCing away, you'll accumulate so many accounts so quickly, you will have soon lose track. I use LastPass to help me keep track of all the accounts on all the machines. It's a secure browser plugin that makes it all painless and effortless. KeePass is another free solution.

Is that it?

#oucel12 @terguy: MOOCs, Walled Gardens, Analytics and Network: Multi-generation pedagogical innovations [visual notes] (Photo credit: giulia.forsythe)

This started life as a blogpost with three bullets:

Wordpress blog
Twitter
Webinars

And it really is that simple. But when you break down anything simple, you end up with many component parts you may not even have been aware of. I'm sure I left out much that others will feel is important. But you know what? That's what the comments are for. Have away!

The MOOC and I (some background by way of a postscript)

MOOC and I were a love at first sight. In fact, I've been proto-MOOCing it for over a decade when I started putting up all my teaching materials on http://Bohemica.com and had a platform developed that would allow teachers and students interact. I've since moved on but the experience made me want more. I got on the Creative Commons and Open Source bandwagon (using and releasing) and when MOOCs started popping up, I was there, too (not right at the beginning but before the explosion). Ever since I saw a MOOC I wanted to do one. The problem with the connectivist MOOCs (see here for typology) is that they are all very self-referential, focusing on connectivism itself or some MOOC related aspect of education (digital storytelling, open education, etc.). So I didn't really see myself fitting into that (interested, as I am, in educational theory). The Udacity/Coursera type MOOCs (or xMOOCs) that really made the name popular also showed me that you don't have to run a MOOC about MOOC like things only. Thus this post and #ITR12. Hope to see some of you threre.

Zero pedagogy: A hyperbolic case for curation and creation over education in the age of the MOOC (#moocmooc)

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The crazy argument for Zero pedagogy [caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Pedagogy does not matter. It has always been a discipline aimed at making people learn something they don't particularly want to learn. If we can truly provide open access to all the resources necessary for learning, then it…

Space, The Final Frontier of Online Education or Flipping the School Year #MOOCMOOC

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

My contribution on the subject of Space to the 2012 MOOC MOOC .

What is and what is not a MOOC: A picture of family resemblance (working undefinition) #moocmooc

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

[toc] Introduction Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs for short, have been getting a lot of attention recently. There have been several high profile posts (see here for a summary ) complaining about the lack of clarity about what constitutes a MOOC (and I think this resulted in a more generalized MOOC backlash ). This…

Debating the MOOC Backlash: Notes from A Primitive Screwhead

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="200"] Advertisement for Hermods (distance learning school) in Sweden (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Recently, one of my favorite titles of a blog post has been " Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads " - I like when righteous indignation is given a full-throated expression. And that is despite the fact that, at least up…

Do researchers need Personal Learning Networks? Yes!

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Educational theorist and provocateur Stephen Downes made really persuasive video on the difference between a Virtual Learning Environment and a Personal Learning Environment . This got me thinking about how this difference is relevant to the area of federated, open research. And I think the analogy is pretty much on the money. Researchers, of course…

Kickstarting research on development: Right on involvement, wrong on outputs

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

What it is I've written a lot on this site about the idea of using crowdsourced funding to support research efforts. Here's the first example of that sort of thing that I've come across. What Works in Development: 10 Meta-Analyses of Aid Programs is a funding call for $10,000 to support research dissemination. Namely printing…

Peer review should be more like Hypothes.is than Hypothes.is should be like peer review!

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I didn’t even have to watch the whole video about Hypothes.is to know I want to give them some money on Kickstarter. It hits all the right buttons: distributed, open, platform independent, ... But I’m not sure about the direction of its foundational metaphor: peer review for the internet. It suggests that the future reputation…

Towards a system of uncredentials for uneducation

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I wonder if it's the increased popularity of Vampires and their undead natures that has contributed to the spread of the un- prefix in education. If so, then it's yet another feather in the cap of the cultural genius that is Joss Whedon. What do the different versions of un- mean? Traditionally the 'uneducated' were…

Is OpenIDEO a good model for a research community?

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

It looks like just at about the same time I started this blog , Haiyan Zhang, who blogs at the awesomely named and beautifully designed site: http://blog.failedrobot.com , was putting together OPENIDEO, an online community-based development platform. It is similar to Quora in principle but rather than solving lots of little questions, it is focused…

Community research and "knowledge exchange network" for neuroscience

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The Royal Society just released a second report on Neuroscience in the Brain Waves policy series this one focusing on its relationship with education: Neuroscience: Implications for Education and Lifelong Learning . While it is a very good overview (I particularly welcome the cautious and sober approach to the results warning against "neuro-myths" - something…

Sharing without community is just piling stuff up

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This is a post about knowledge, community, online repositories, OERs, and the ethnography of the teacher staffroom inspired by a recent experience with JORUM . What was the last time you learned something interesting or helpful ? I'm willing to bet that it was one of these: 1. Somebody you know or trust told you…

Get the Data: Community for Quantitative research

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The Get The Data service seems to be getting some traction. There are interesting questions and answers being posted but even more interesting is the quantitative approach to reputation building and community building in general. (Quite distinct from, for instance, Wikipedia or the Drupal community and even more removed from human reputation than Digg). It…

Toward Community-based Research for Education

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

It is no secret that there is a huge gap between research and practice in education (and many other areas of social practice). Here's a suggestion of a model that might remedy some of this. Parts of it are based on a draft of a proposal for development project. Why community-based research? There are many…

Anthologize: 5 lessons for microfunding of research and development projects

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Anthologize is that great new tool designed during the One Week, One Tool project. It seems to have taken the world by storm partly thanks to the #oneweek Twitter frenzy and as the #anthologize stream indicates, its off to a stellar start. It may seem too early to look for lessons learned for the future…

JISC Elevator might bring more responsiveness to research funding

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Finally, JISC is turning some of the innovation and creativity it has poured into technology into the process of funding itself. The idea of JISC Elevator (see http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/07/28/project-pitching-jisc-elevator-concept/ ) is modeled on the Mozilla Drumbeat ( http://www.drumbeat.org ) - a Kickstarter-like project but with more varied sources of funding. With Kickstarter people have to back…

Harvard leads the way on building institutional academic communities

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, Harvard University’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science released OpenScholar built on Drupal using popular modules such as Organic Groups and getting help from the Spaces and Features. The Biblio module provides the great bibliographic feature. I haven't spent enough time with it yet to completely suss out how it's put together in the Drupal…

URL Storytelling in the Age of the Semantic Web

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

This is a great example of the interface between the machine readable and human readable. It took me a while to figure it out, but I got there eventually.

How researchers use Web 2.0

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A report just came out from RIN.ac.uk that is relevant to the aims of this website (more details on the project website ). I will tweet out some of the more interesting factoids on @techczech but I think the results can be summarised roughly in three points: Very few researchers use Web 2.0 services. Case…

Friend or FOAF: The Building Blocks of Content and Identity Federation

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I started this whole thought experiment as someone who knows quite a lot about research and quite a lot about technology and the social web. But not all that much about how they go together. Sure I've trained others in researching the web, using social networking and bibliographic management with Zotero. And I've advised academics…

Toward a Federated Academic Identity

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

One of the thoughts that kept coming up in my head as I was hearing about all these great digital humanities projects at THATCamp London was: this is amazing but it's yet another silo. As someone who has tried (and mostly failed) building several very niche communities with non-tech inclined audiences, I've come to the…

Notes from session at THATCamp London - 6 July 2010

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Join in the editing process on http://bit.ly/socialtoolsforresearch

Twitter Posts from THATCamp 2010 discussion group

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A summary of Twitter discussions during the session.

Research Swarm - An Interesting Metaphor

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Came across this presentation that has some interesting metaphors and examples of practice:

Researchity: An Idea for a Research Community

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I have been thinking about this for a while but the below happened as a proposal for THATCamp London . If somebody already had this idea, great. If somebody had a similar idea, lets think about this together. If somebody likes these ideas and wants to do something about it, you're welcome to them! What…