MOOC in 2012.

According to Wikipedia, a massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources.
Though the design of and participation in a MOOC may be similar to college or university courses, MOOCs typically do not offer credits awarded to paying students at schools. However, assessment of learning may be done for certification.
Also Wikipedia shares that MOOCs originated from within the open educational resources movement and connectivist roots. More recently, a number of MOOC-type projects have emerged independently, such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. The prominence of these projects' founders, contributing institutions, and financial investment helped MOOCs gain significant public attention in 2012. Some of the attention behind these new MOOCs center on making e-learning more scalable either sustainable or profitable.

According to Willey David MOOCS are Massive but not open, Open but not Massive, and they try hard not to be courses.

According to Educause’s ELI “7 Things You Should Know About MOOCs”, the first MOOC is widely thought to be a course titled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” which was co-taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba, delivered to 25 tuition-paying students but offered at the same time to around 2,300 students from the general public who took the online class at no cost.

The  MOOCGuide finds 12 benefits of a MOOC

1. You can organize a MOOC in any setting that has connectivity (which can include the Web, but also local connections via Wi-Fi e.g.)
2. You can organize it in any language you like (taking into account the main language of your target audience)
3. You can use any online tools that are relevant to your target region or that are already being used by the participants
4. You can move beyond time zones and physical boundaries
5. It can be organized as quickly as you can inform the participants (which makes it a powerful format for priority learning in e.g. aid relief)
6. Contextualized content can be shared by all
7. Learning happens in a more informal setting
8. Learning can also happen incidentally thanks to the unknown knowledge that pops up as the course participants start to exchange notes on the course’s study
9. You can connect across disciplines and corporate/institutional walls
10. You don’t need a degree to follow the course, only the willingness to learn (at high speed)
11. You add to your own personal learning environment and/or network by participating in a MOOC
12. You will improve your lifelong learning skills, for participating in a MOOC forces you to think about your own learning and knowledge absorption

Possible challenges of a MOOC

1. It feels chaotic as participants create their own content.
2. It demands digital literacy.- Which in the digital age is still a persistent issue.
3. It demands time and effort from the participants.
4. It is organic, which means the course will take on its own trajectory (you have got to let go).
5. As a participant you need to be able to self-regulate your learning and possibly give yourself a learning goal to achieve. Researches show that with the development of blended learning, students still prefer a reasonable combination between face- to- face meetings and online learning.

If relate this information to information gained earlier, automatically comes the idea that this kind of innovation will require time and money to make it work. Also there will always be one who wants to earn money out of new ideas. (Or one who has to loose a lot of money because of new ideas). In next video see 0.26 " Innovation is turning ideas into money..."

 

Even though we'e reached a high level of humanism, there are higher values in the society that persist leading nations. Make education open will not be as easy as it seems. The expression " Elite education open for masses" is already in its deeper content discriminative and antidemocratic.

Indefinite amount of students will be the issue that will create further problems in the process. Taking in account that fact that students do not pay for it, there will definitely be a lot of student willing to do that. The question about quality& quality needs to be addressed then.

This idea then goes against the EU higher education policy and Bologna process, which students to have the same level after graduation in order to assure mobility throughout EU and outside EU and to assure quality of education.

Whether MOOC is a threat to the Higher Educational System worldwide, is being discusses.  George Siemens, the founder of the first MOOC, predicted during a speech about transformational change at Campus Technology 2012, "The top tier and elite universities will likely continue to have physical campuses; the midtier levels, on the other hand, are the ones that are going to suffer to the greatest degree."

As Washington post claims, lately MOOC providers include a fledgling nonprofit competitor, edX, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of users to free online courses from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. On Oct. 15, the University of Texas system joined them.

MOOC students, for the most part, aren’t earning credit toward degrees. Educators say that before credits can be awarded, they must be assured that there are adequate systems to prevent cheating and verify student identities. 

Burck Smith, chief executive of Straighter Line, which sells low-price online courses, contends that MOOCs are overhyped. He said universities that give their product away are likely to face challenges similar to those newspapers confronted when they launched open-access Web sites.
                      “Free content has never really been a successful business model,” Smith said.


For extra info see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/elite-education-for-the-masses/2012/11/03/c2ac8144-121b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html
http://nation.time.com/2012/09/04/mooc-brigade-will-massive-open-online-courses-revolutionize-higher-education/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/09/06/massive-open-online-course-a-threat-or-opportunity-to-universities/
https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/
http://mobiliteitenopenonderwijs.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/weer-mooc/
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2436

"Pencils are bringing down education"

2011 draws to a close and I would like to end with more light-hearted news that attracted my attention. Last weeks and months a highly entertaining ed-tech debate unfolded on Twitter. Topic of the debate was … the use of pencils. Thousands of tweets appeared with the hashtag #pencilchat and the debate moved from the U.S., to Australia and Europe. The tweets are funny, a bit surrealistic, contrasting computers with a very old piece of technology: ‘the pencil’. But exactly this is what makes this #pencilchat so interesting to me. The comparison between computers and pencils works incredibly well for ed-tech and causes a light-hearted and thought-provoking reflection on the use of technology in the classroom and the obstacles teachers and schools face with integrating technology. Replace the word ‘computers’ by ‘pencils’ and think about the pedagogical impact of integrating computers/pencils in the classroom. How will computers/pencils influence education? Think about the difficulties teachers can have with adopting computers/pencils in the classroom. Reflect on the fears over whether or not computers/pencils will replace teachers. And how do we deal with students knowing more about computers/pencils than teachers?

“Real men use slate! You won't catch me with one of those new fangled pencil things #pencilchat”

It started all with some tweets after having read the book Pencil me in, written by John Spencer. The book is kind of a reflection of Spencers’ blog Adventures in Pencil Integration and tells the story of a teacher in the 19^th century, struggling with the integration of pencils into the classroom.

I started exploring the #pencilchat after a friend have sent me the ‘Ode to #pencilchat’, a video compilation of the most memorable tweets in the edu-tech debate, earlier this week.

Ode to #Pencilchat: Technology Integration in the Classroom

by: MiddleLevelEd

This video highlights some of the controversies and concerns about integrating new tools (no matter if they are pencils or computers) into education. Teachers and schools are often concerned about the lack of professional development, the accessibility, the costs, … The analogy with the pencils also opens your eyes for some clichés and sometimes school-made problems: “pencils are too dangerous to use for students without supervision”, “impossible to teach students about appropriate pencil use, because the curriculum is so full already”, “students use pencils at home all the time, so they are probably experts already”, … Astonishing is that Dr. Seymour Papert already mentioned this in an article, published in the Washington Post in 1996. There he gives some examples of the fallacies schools manufacture to persuade themselves that the integration of technology is impossible. Even today schools sometimes use some organisational problems as “powerful objective reasons” to ban technology. In my school for example we have only since two years two good-working computer classrooms of 30 computers each plus a Smartboard in each of them for 300 people in total. Reason for this late adaption of infrastructure is that there was no money for it. Before that we had one classroom with 25 very old computers (and you were lucky when they were all working). And some teachers never use any technology in their courses because “pupils aren’t concentrated enough when they have to use a computer” or because “it doesn’t fit in their subject”.

And these fears sometimes lead to strange school policies: “In order to protect our children, we must ban pen and pencils”, says one of the tweets. Katie Stansberry also points out the absurdity of the policies banning technology (or … pencils) in here MindShift post 10 Reasons to Ban Pens and Pencils in the Class.

The metaphor of pencils to talk about technology in education is not a new one. Back in the eighties Dr. Seymour Papert already used the parable as a standard part of his speeches and testimony.

Imagine that writing has just been invented in Foobar, a country that has managed to develop a highly sophisticated culture of poetry, philosophy and science using entirely oral means of expression. It occurs to imaginative educators that the new technology of pencils, paper and printing could have a beneficial effect on the schools of the country. Many suggestions are made. The most radical is to provide all teachers and children with pencils, paper and books and suspend regular classes for six months while everyone learns the new art of reading and writing. The more cautious plans propose starting slowly and seeing how "pencil-learning" works on a small scale before doing anything really drastic. In the end, Foobarian politicians being what they are, a cautious plan is announced with radical fanfare: Within four years a pencil and a pad of paper will be placed in every single classroom of the country so that every child, rich or poor, will have access to the new knowledge technology. Meantime the educational psychologists stand by to measure the impact of pencils on learning.

Though the articles of Papert are quite old, his ideas still seem fresh and some of the issues he mentions are still present today. However, as we take this journey towards integrating technology in the classroom, could one day digital technology become as normal as pencils?

You can also check the whole stream of #pencilchat-tweets on Twitter or you can read some on Storify.

Towards openness in 2012

Mexico’s largest University, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), announced in November it will make virtually all its publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the internet over the next few years. This is only one of the many developments in open educational resources of fall 2011. Further UNESCO launched a new OER platform with significant UNESCO publications open for use. And the most remarkable developments probably are the formation of the MITx and the Open Educational University (OERu), that attempt to combine open access to learning materials to institutional accreditation. The idea of sharing gains ground in education. This is a least what I could notice during my follow-up of the educational news and my research for our group work that dealt with the openness of a learning platform (see earlier on this blog).

The philosophy of sharing in education, mostly discussed in terms of Open Educational Resources (OER), allow institutions to use and adapt materials that have been created by other academic staff. The idea of sharing and reusing educational materials is spread for more than 10 years now (OER are celebrating their 10^th anniversary in 2012) by an increasing amount of institutions worldwide. But despite all the good intentions and the great potential of OER, the implementation of the philosophy of OER misses adoption on a large scale (in all countries and in all educational institutions). So, when OER are the future, why are educational institutions moving so slowly in the direction of openness and how can they be encouraged?

Learning is changing, but what about education?

On her blog Catherine Cronin, lecturer and elearning facilitator at the National University of Ireland, is reflecting on the innovation in learning she and her colleagues noticed this year. She concludes: “Boundaries between informal and formal education are blurring. Open, participatory and social media are not just enabling new forms of communication, they are transforming learning.” And indeed, social media play a major role in the innovation in learning, in that sense that they are increasing the transfer of information and open as such opportunities to create and share OER. The increased access to OER promotes the individual and online learning. So, OER are part of the innovation in learning.

The innovative way of learning and the potential of OER have created unique opportunities and challenges for education. According to Catherine educators have to “refer students to excellent, relevant, online open educational resources.” Therefore educators must learn how to “create and share material in new ways, learn to use different tools, and stay abreast of online learning developments.” But the challenge of educational institutions includes also the investment in systematic development of course materials, the time for finding appropriate OER, adapting existing OER, negotiating the copyright licenses, openness to a more learner-centered way of teaching or openness to the use of different materials … And an efficient use of OER also requires critical and technological skills of both teachers and students.

So, while learning seems to change almost ‘naturally’ on the waves of our changing environment and the increasing possibilities of ICT, the adaptation of education requires a lot more investments and seems to discourage educational institutions in their adoption of OER. A response on Catherines blog makes clear that teachers often have difficulties to find and integrate OER: “I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the exponential growth in tools and apps and other resources”. Another problem in dealing with the innovation of learning and the use of OER is probably the fact that there is no culture of sharing knowledge in education. Based on my own experiences, I notice very often that teachers are not willing to share learning materials they created themselves, in some cases because it took them so much time to create the materials and they don’t want another take advantage of it, or because they are afraid of being judged by others. Further the adaptation to innovative learning faces the difficulty of educators being so attached to their course book, that the use of OER or another approach of the content (a more learner-based) don’t even appear in their mind. Javiera Atenas even goes further and notices “a deep cultural issue in avoiding sharing resources.” He claims there is a” fear of being plagiarised and [a] fear to look as someone that is plagiarising somebody else”, when respectively sharing own resources and using someone else's resources.

Guidelines for higher education

The use of OER in education is more than putting some learning materials on the internet. Taking effective advantage of it requires more investments and changes (in attitudes) in education. To help educational institutions with these challenges UNESCO and COL recently published a set of Guidelines for Open Educational Resources in Higher Education, that give stakeholders in separate sections (government, higher educational institutions, academic staff, student bodies, quality assurance/accreditation bodies) suggestions for efficiently integrating and using OER. With these guidelines UNESCO and COL want to encourage decision makers in governments and institutions to invest in OER. The guidelines are written in a very clear way, explain the advantages of OER (for example “Experiences show that, when institutions make good quality courses and materials publicly available online, they can attract new students, expand their institutional reputation and advance their public service role”) and show for example how government support for openness in education can happen at the policy and guidelines level without any additional funding. Openness clearly brings forth social and economic benefits. So why wouldn’t a government or educational institution implement open policies? It should be nice to see these policies adopted all over the world, and applied in all educational institutions. But, the adoption of the open movement and especially of an efficient use of OER will not just rely on a document of UNESCO and COL. Promotion of the endless possibilities of OER will be needed and therefore I hope that the 10^th anniversary world conference, organized by the UNESCO OER Programme, will be a first step into the direction of a real breakthrough of OER.

Towards openness in 2012?

The culture of open knowledge is growing, the attitude towards sharing is improving significantly, but there is a need to encourage and support governments, educational institutions, … to embrace this culture of openness where intellectual property is important and to consider the opportunities the innovation in learning is offering. The UNESCO-COL-guidelines for the use of OER in higher education and especially a promotion of OER can help to unfold openness on a larger scale and in an efficient way in 2012.