E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Yesterday it was officially announced that the Open University NL and University of Utrecht received the 5 year grant for open and online education. The project is called SOONER: The Structuration of Open Online Education in the Netherlands. Officially the project starts in September and is running until August 2020.

The summary of the project:

The SOONER project focuses on fundamental research about open online education (OOE) in the Netherlands. Open online education is viewed as a strategic activity of an educational institution with systemic implications for the organization. Based on proven approaches for program evaluations from the health sciences, the project will enable systematic and long-term research on open online education from a macro-, meso- and micro-perspective. In addition, this project combines fundamental and accompanying research. SOONER will be organized via three PhD-projects on 1) self-regulated learning skill acquisition In the context of OOE, 2) motivation and intentions as key to drop-out in OOE and last but not least 3) scalable support solutions for OOE Including learning analytics. These projects will be framed by a Post-Doc project that focuses on the structural and organizational embedding of OOE. All projects will start from standardized measurement instruments or will adapt those for the specific context of OOE.

All projects will access several sources for their data collection: MOOCs offered by the partner institutions, open courses offered by the OpenUpEd partners, courses offered by the SURF projects and institutions participating in the SURF projects. The SOONER project is connected to the MOOCKnowledge project, a European cross-provider standardized survey about MOOCs and the SCORE2020 project, a European project focusing on support needs of educational institutions for OOE. Data from these European projects will be compared to Dutch OOE initiatives and benchmarking options will be explored. All results of the project will be shared via open licenses. 

The project is lead by Professor Marco Kalz of the Welten Institute of the OUNL.

Different levels of research

The project is doing research on 4 different levels:

• The micro-level of OOE is related to the individual characteristics of participants of OOE. The two research question they are focusing on are the level of self-regulated learning (SRL) required for OOE and the development of SRL skill development and other part is focusing on the motivation and intention in regards to drop-outs.
• The meso-level of OOE is related to the course level. Questions of educational design and support options are the most important research aspects here.
• The macro-level is related to the organisational embedding of OOE. On this level, questions like strategic goals, organizational guidelines and values are important.
• In addition these three levels are embedded into a national context and environmental variables like funding and structural support of OOE.

I'm looking forward to work with these researchers and to the outcomes of the project.