Pre-MOOC MOOCs

I have just been to the first webinar of the #octel mooc https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=7565&password=M.DE7761F09D9A3D6F03A998E592ED6D, where the chat window was discussing the pedagogy behind moocs, whether it is anything new, whether we can accredit from a MOOC (how can we do the marking) and other things...

To continue this thread I thought I would write down a list of projects that could have been labelled MOOC, had the term been invented yet.

iTunes U

iTunes U offers free content, from a proprietary (but free) software (iTunes). The content is hosted by the universities and fed to iTunes U via RSS. Not sure when this started, but the content is multimedia only (podcast, video), OPEN FORMATS (mp3, mp4), and arranged into courses (lecture 1 - lecture 10). I have 'attended' several Philosophy courses on iTunes U from the heavily produced (Justice with Michael Sandel) to the less so (one on Nietzche by Oxford U seemed to be nothing more than a voice recorder in a tutors pocket).

My question is to what extent does the MOOC offerings now (coursera, udacity, edX, ocTEL) enhance or change this model?

If the answer is that the other platforms have p2p communication tools and self-assesment, then to what extent does the Coursera/ Udacity MOOC platform differ from Moodle, which is open source, scalable, multimedia and open standards rich? Also a place where you can control your own content without giving it away to the coursera or udacity platform (which I believe is in the legal agreement with publishing through them)

My gut is telling me that iTunes U is no good today because it is too free. Nobody knows who has downloaded what. The other systems want you to enrol (ie give up your data), which I can only presume is profitable from a silicon valley point of view... iTunes U content is more capable of enabling 'offline' learning, as online access is not a pre-requisite, once the recordings are downloaded.

note... I do not work for iTunes U, but i think it is a good focal point for comparing what we have today.

Moodle

Moodle has been around for around 15 years now. It has always been open source, and for many years has been able to host video, quiz, discussion (wiki) activities. Why has nobody developed a moodle site and allowed thousands to self enrol for free? 

I know this is very possible because my University has an open Moodle site (https://openlearning.lancs.ac.uk) which anyone can self-register and self-enrol on courses. This was intended to be a hub of open content and courses, much like the MOOCs, but  perhaps more familiar? The problem is engaging tutors to see the point in opening their courses. It offers them or the university nothing (unless it is surrounded by the hype associated with FutureLearn, in which case...)

Wikipedia
Seriously,  we've been co-creating for a long time with Wikipedia to create the single largest body of knowledge in existence.  I've talked of the university of Wikipedia half heartedly for a while now,  but maybe some wiki plus discussion combination it seems at least viable. Needs a 'course format' to fit the bill here though.

Educational tablets

These are pretty new to the party, but is this the Panacea for mass education? An tablet with subscription based educational content. You can see other publishers quickly joining this game to e-leaning-y-fy their textbooks and sell units. And it fits the bill for 'university in my pocket' and 'off the shelf' technology.

I can see these selling like wildfire across schools and colleges, who want to present a tech-forward approach, and have existing subscriptions. But is the pedagogy any good, or is it good just for autonomous rote learning.

The whole thing makes me think that the game is still pretty open in terms of sales (there is lots more money to be made in Coursera courses or orange tablets), but fairly closed in terms of the pedagogy 

• is this orange tablet a modern learning machine that supports autonomous fact collecting from animated resources - probably
• is coursera making a splash because of enrolments, rather than something new in the teaching game - probably

I'm for taking moodle and adding the toolset (such as extended RSS Reader like the ocTEL reader) to enable the massive educational experiences. That way the platform is always open for people to download and re-mix, in a way that is not possible with Coursera and Udacity.

Can anyone else think of 'the others' in this race for massive-ified education or have something to add to my post

Please comment!!

RSS - you'd think it had gone the way of Google Reader

Just trying to subscribe to the interesting blogs on #octel. Why is it so difficult to get an RSS feed from Wordpress or Blogger? It's hard just to find the link..

Is RSS going the way of the Google Reader, or is there time left yet?

Who does the driving? Technology or pedagogy?

Thought I would blog on this one. Please do comment if you have anything to add.

Perusing through the ocTEL mailing lists, I have noticed that a few people are talking about who does the driving in this relationship. The commonly held view is that pedagogy should come first and technology should be its slave. It is religiously cited by Learning Technologists and academics against their ISS division.

This blog post wants to make you think about whether this is such a no-brainer.

Taken from a post on the JISCMail list:

The temptation given the many different technologies evolving every year is that we say “How can I adapt my teaching to make use of this technology” rather than “Is there a technological tool out there that will enhance what I do?”

How can I adapt my teaching to make use of this technology? vs Is there a technological tool out there that will enhance what I do?

My take is that reality is less clear cut than this. Most innovation happens in the no man's land or 'the rub' in between pedagogy and technology, and who is to say what is the 'driving' force, when both conditions are necessary? When you are considering the adoption of a new tool, it can be useful to run it past your existing pedagogical practices, but that is no guarantee that your learner's experience will improve as a result. It may get worse as you get used to the new tool. The risk here is that you are perfecting the 'mechanical horse', rather than rethinking the learning process.

The question goes further back than this. Are my current teaching practices appropriate? Who do they serve? I think the problem is that online technology and traditional teaching are not always comfortable bedfellows. The technology wants to disrupt everything in its purest form, and the traditional teacher wants to domestic-ise it. For example, many teachers ask me how best to use the VLE, but behind this question is 'how best can I use the VLE in support of my lectures?', so it gets used as a resource repository, a self-testing centre, and sometimes an FAQ. 

9 times out of 10, teachers are not looking for this answer: 

"get rid of your lectures and spend that time co-creating knowledge with your students in online discussions and resource sharing exercises"

they are looking for this:

"why don't you try adding MCQs so the students can do formative quizzes, and the VLE will do the marking?"

So the internet-as-p2p-communication tool gets used an a autonomous 'hole in the wall' portal for fact checking.

This is because most teachers will compartmentalise their 'VLE stuff' away from their 'lecturing stuff' so hobble its potential from the start by not integrating the VLE activities with their classwork. For the student to take the VLE work seriously, there must not be a break in between classwork and VLE mediated homework. (You're surfing the same wave, right, albeit with different feeling 'sections' and 'bowls')

Getting back to the main question (Is there a technological tool out there that will enhance what I do?), the argument could now be framed:

What can (careful use of) this technology bring to my students? which puts the technology back in the driving seat, at least rhetorically (and perhaps thats where this question belongs full stop).

I think the recent rapid emergence of new technologies such as podcasting or mobile real time communication really makes us rethink this chicken and egg question. Sometimes technology will afford something you haven't already thought of, or suddenly make possible a new way of communicating (such as using public channels on lecture captures for peer support and resource sharing) which can enhance practice in unexpected ways. Similarly poor use of a tool (such as not moderating forums or over use of MCQs) will inhibit the learning even if the theory is right.

It is certainly easier to evaluate each new technology on the basis of how it affects our current practice. We need to first question if our current practice is acceptable, or if it hobbles the potential of the technology. e-Learning takes us back to the primary question, not to be used as a gloss for existing practice.

Perhaps it ends up like most domestic car sharing arrangements: both parties get a chance to drive sometimes, but always with the 'support' of the other half (shouting out instructions and directions, sometimes down the phone at someone else)      :-)

(and isn't it all really about getting there, safely, without the kids falling out or being sick?)

xMOOCs, cMOOCs and what I might get from #octel

MOOC is a popular word buzzing around universities at the moment, and some people are talking about Udacity, Coursera, FutureLearn like they are going to be the be all and end all for higher education. Much of the content for these platforms is video, and there has been some notable one-off successes in terms of class size and retention rates, mainly in the states, backed up with venture capital.

Just to stop here:

the reduction of education to video clips of content concerns me as it seems like stage 1 in justifying the status quo of further elitism in the current system. "Let them eat cake..." or something like that... ('watch it on catchup')

There doesn't appear to be a lot of new pedagogy, for all the fuss, and the lack of a human teacher to help us understand or curate these 'assets' places more value on the 'asset' itself, which may or may not be good, discoverable, understandable, copyrightable, formatted etc.

So, we have these 'clips/ assets' interweaved with discussion forums, which for a long time has been the mainstay of distance teaching, or informal education. So again nothing new here.

So far.

Going back a little. The video heavy/ 'traditional model' MOOC (xMOOCs) have had the first say (Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity), made the first splash, but we must remember the story is at the beginning. I declared my concern above, not to condemn MOOCs totally as a conspiracy to increase HE elitism, but to make clear that arguments need to be made carefully, lest we drift in this direction.

What of all the discussion though? I have already declared my cynicism that 'there is something new' in the pedagogy of MOOCs, and 'normal' people have been learning skills online (autonomously driven, socially supported) through forums and communities since the 90's. The MOOC in this respect is a 'wrapper' around the informal conversations that were happening anyway, and this is where the ocTEL platform comes in. As an aggregator of hashtags across the web, uniting the monolithic communities that have supported each other for nearly a decade, and all out of a WP installation. Now that seems more like something new.

So this is what I hope to get out of ocTEL. More understanding of what the 'discussion' part of MOOC has to offer (cMOOC) and how the content and discussions are best archived and curated for my future reference.

And with some luck and a bit of magic, this will appear on the ocTEL website now!! :-)

#octel

Open Source Thinking (part 1)

I recently presented a lecture on the connections between open source software development and open educational resources. The full lecture is viewable @ http://lancasteruni.adobeconnect.com/p1n8dhcmfhp/ (link working 12/4/12).

I thought I would expand this in a blog post (we don't all have multimedia capable browsers or connections!) as I think their are some important points to make and connections not just with OER but also with political and philosophy that should be free to air.

The Postmodern Condition
Back in 1978 Lyotard wrote 'The Postmodern Condition' which was an attempt to analyse knowledge in the 'postmodern age'

So he was talking about what is considered 'knowledge' and how such information is 'framed' in postmodern culture. In the past all 'knowledge' had been framed in metanarratives, such as reductionism, or teleological ideas such as Marxism, or Enlightenment.. This is starting to dissolve in the late 20th century, as technological shifts in communication, media and computer science have granulated 'knowledge' into 'bits', which can be reshaped.

Lyotard speaks of these 'bits' as being controlled by large companies in 'data banks'. He cites IBM as an example of knowledge custodians, and predicts their model for the future is to sell this knowledge to the highest bidder, and therefore create a dystopian view of progression. It's a bit like Wikipedia acting like iTunes and selling you articles formatted for your iDevice, if you have one... if you don't, well...

I think this fits into place for the time of writing. UNIX, the first computer programming environment, was controlled by AT&T. That is to say, the root protocols upon which the technological alchemy can take place are set and controlled by large corporations. (You can see parallels today in the race for patents that Apple, Samsung, Microsoft etc have chased in terms of touchscreen technology.)

Let's reflect on the political and philosophical implications of this and imagine a computer programming environment is like a physical environment, like a small village. We have rules to make sure the fabric of such an environment works, such as 'Don't litter the park'. If we didn't have this rule, the park may get filled with litter and thus become unusable. In the virtual environment, this may be a piece of code,  which runs to delete the cache. If this agent doesn't work, or the patent for this code is controlled by someone else, then the 'park', or 'memory load on the CPU' may become filled and crash out. If the code is owned by a third party, you may have to pay for rights to use it in your software, and you may not get 'open source' access to it so it may not do exactly what you want it to (e.g. you may want the agent to pick up only certain bits of the cache to delete...').. software development suddenly becomes hard, slow and legally cumbersome.

Lyotard saw this part of this change, that knowledge was being granulated and 'framed' by its ability to sit in data banks rather than by its relation to 'big' ideology, but what he didn't see is that these structures would become cumbersome or unusable if they were not released into the open.

Let's just go over this again using another example.

Say the rule/ protocol in the computer operating system is relative, such as the rule to 'drive on the left'. This enforces all 'drivers' or 'programmers' to write code in a certain way, which is not necessarily bad in itself. But if IBM 'own' this rule, they act like the political 'state' in the physical environment - they have control not only of what direction traffic can go, but also what the taxing arrangement on this protocol is. This rule is often built on other rules ("the road must be made of tarmac, have the following signs, be the following width etc.") and IBM can own and sell them all. But as we have seen, selling them as 'finished products' is not enough for flexible software development. Programmers need to have 'open source' access to them to be able to develop flexible systems (e.g. I want the protocol to drive on the left, but I want the roads to be made out of some other material for some other benefit, and be another width...)

This all sounds mighty complicated and technical, but I hope you have taken the following out of Part 1 of this blog post:

1. Computer Operating Systems are basically a series of protocols
2. Protocols are analogous to 'rules' in the physical world
3. You can own the protocols, but ownership is not flexible enough, too totalitarian
4. Openness of rules is what is required to make flexible systems as the relationships between the rules are the important bit, not the rule itself

In Part 2 I will talk about the Open Source movement, where it came from and how a new legal framework came to protect the collaborators and encourage more collaboration.

Change every lightbulb in the house

In Uruguay, every schoolkid has a laptop. A hard cased plastic laptop with wifi and a webcam. Costs a couple of hundred dollars, probably a lot less. Kids can use these laptops for whatever they like, not just schoolwork. What do you think happens - they spend all day on msn? not listening to the teacher anymore? they load it up with games? probably a bit of it all, probably some school tests, probably some web browsing, some wikipedia reading, some media sharing.

Ask a class in Uruguay any question - how do you wire a plug, what is the definition of this word, who was the first man to climb Everest, what is the speed of light, how does this relate to the big bang... and they will have the knowledge at their fingertips. This makes the job of the teacher more interesting. Instead of using a written textbook with a set collection of facts, or lecturing them your set of facts, you can guide them through the connections they make between the information online in a discursive way, a collaborative way. Learning happens most when we are talking, expressing ourselves and interacting with others who are expressing themselves. It all comes back to the questions we ask of the content, not the content itself...

Let me explain. Before google, if you wanted to know something - you had to go to a library. When you got to the library, you looked in a encyclopaedia, arranged alphabetically, and discovered the information in the context of the rest of the article, written generically. For example, you want to know more about the music written by handel, or beethoven. the article will probably tell you a few facts about these people such as birth, death, main compositions, but this is unlikely to satisfy you like the music does. You want to know more about the situation that brought these artists to compose such pieces, what they felt like when they were writing them, who they were socialising with, what other things were happening around the time, how is the music a representation of the epoch. but the encyclopaedia cannot give this to you, and if you either devote your life to finding the small answers in the thousands of books that form part of the bigger answer for you and help you appreciate the music more, or you give up and join a pub quiz team - they love little facts - hatched, matched, despatched, clinical, emotionless information. can you see how this about the questions we ask though? - we ask our questions to a search engine, it gives us an immediate reply of the keywords we choose ' handel politics', 'beethoven string instrument', 'scientific discoveries of the xxx century' - we can get to a position of evaluating more ideas more quickly and dissolve the boundaries, we can see unity and parallels and metaphors between the subjects - history and music, engineering and art - we can move to experiential appreciation of knowledge. By discussing the ideas, we are forced to defend what we think, to actually express what we think, and often causing us to re-evaluate what we think. this is learning. Ask, Express, Evaluate.

Click the first link of a wikipedia article and in less than 10 clicks you are at 'Philosophy'. Everything is philosophy because philosophy is about questions and hypotheses. Facts are facts, not very interesting on their own, until we ask a question and connect it to another fact. then we get ideas, or hypotheses.

Summary: textbooks are history. content has no boundaries, experience is knowledge, ask, express, evaluate - and that's what they can do in Uruguay now in their formal education process if they want. Who does it, maybe nobody, maybe its multiple choice questions everyday. But it seems to me to be opening the leaking door and letting the new ways flood in, whatever shape that may turn into. And the kids have control now, or at least they will shortly when they know more than the teachers!

We cannot say the same here. although perhaps the same things are going on informally, outside class. it just seems like a massive shame not to have a stake in the questions and connections of the future.

Who is Protagoras?

Back to ancient Greece again.

Protagoras was a sophist who lived around the same time as Socrates. Essentially he disagreed with the Socratic notion that there are 'forms' that exist outside ourselves, such as virtue and justice, and it is the goal of the philosopher to teach people the 'external' logic behind these forms. There is a much quoted analogy from these Socratic dialogues of man in a dark cave, dimly lit by the light of truth coming in the entrance a long way away.

Protagoras did not take this line. He believed that 'man is the measure of all things'. He did not believe in God, and he did not believe that there were forms that we have to discover the truth behind. What is true for one person is absolutely true for them; some people espouse statements/truths of little gravitas, but still phenomenologically true for them, and it is the job of the philosopher (or sophist) to teach people how to discriminate.

This little story is profound for me. Socrates' rather conservative approach of 'only the philosophers can teach you how to discover the truth (through absolute logic and mathematics)' next to 'the truth is relative' to individuals, and presumably societies. I follow on from Protagoras by claiming that truth is a participatory activity; we should not have to rely on Socrates or his conservative cronies to teach us things anymore.

This strikes to the core of this blog; on one hand, Protagoras' relativism shouldn't be taken to absolute solopcism, many truths are universally agreed, and it is the job of the educator to create knowledge from these truths. Content is important. Especially in subjects like medicine, or more broadly in the sciences. Much useful education is the activity of exposing people to content. Philosophy is not everything.

So I meant to write a blog about where I have come from in terms of my thinking on technology in education in the 21st century, and I have ended up back in ancient Greece. Who said all Western Philosophy is really just a series of footnotes to Plato (i.e. Socratic dialogues)?

So this is me. I started out designing learning objects, content for HE healthcare courses. I got quite good at visualising content. I spent a lot of time examining the same information in the books and realised that information has to be interactive, responsive, visual if possible to release its full educational potential.

Being Socratic now, I thought these learning objects should be free for everyone's benefit, not just as a means to a qualification. This is information that we as a world need to be free and available. So that's 'it' then. Content is the most important thing, yeah? Being able to interact with it, cool. Just get it out there..

And this is where it gets difficult, or possibly not. But certainly more tricky. Because now we are in the realms of what is useful content, what is agreed truths, how certain people may read certain things, what people can 'do' with the content - a host of problems that look like they need human intervention. so this has taught us something. technology can only go so far... we need to engage people in the learning process to make information socially worthwhile, if we can agree as a society what 'worthwhile' means...

and now i'm not sure if i am socrates or protagoras...