E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

As part of a panel discussion at OpenEd16 conference on the future of Open Educational Resources I was asked to write an article. As we all know it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future.

This excersise has resulted 15 interesting articles about the future of OER by David Kernohan, Mary Lou Forward, Martin Weller & Patrick McAndrew, TJ Bliss, Paul Stacey, Mike Smith, Karen Willcox & Luwen Huang, Katsusuke Shigeta & Tomohiro Nagashima, Una Daly, Lorna Campbell, Cathy Casserly, Cable Creen, Stephen Downes, Andy Lane and myself. The articles are all published on www.futuoer.org.

Below is the article I submitted.

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Today the great folks of OERhub launched an open text book about open research. The book is based on two iteration of an open course they have run in the past:

This resource will help you explore what open research is, how you can ethically and openly share your findings so others can reuse or develop your work, and the role of reflection and open dissemination. Whilst many challenges and issues apply to all aspects of research (for example choosing an appropriate methodology), open research brings a range of different opportunities and challenges; it’s these that we are specifically interested in exploring. What can openness add to the research process?

The book has 4 main chapters:

• Open Research
• Ethics in the Open
• Open Dissemination
• Reflecting in the Open

Although I haven't read the complete book, it looks interesting and a must read for every researcher!

Reference
Pitt, R. de los Arcos, B. Farrow, R and Weller, M. (2016). Open Research. OER Hub. Available from: https://openresearch.pressbooks.com

Image Credit: CC-BY-SA OERhub

As part of their Open Leadership Fellowship Amanda Coolidge (BC Campus) and Daniel DeMarte (Tidewater Community College) have developed an OER Policy Development Tool. The contents of the tool are intended to be adopted and adapted for use within a college or university’s culture. The OER policy tool is organized in three sections:

• OER Policy Assumptions
• OER Policy Components
• OER Policy Resources

The tool seems like a very useful tool for many institute around the world. Currently is uses the data of 6 policies. If you know others, please let them know.

A good suggestion would be to add text that can be added to other policies on OER. For example as part of HR policy, IP policy etc.

Photo Credit: CC-BY Alan Levine

Three weeks ago I attended the SURF Challenge Day. This day was organised to let suppliers show how their solution fitted with the SURF framework for flexible and personalised learning environment (in Dutch). 15 suppliers presented their solutions.
This framework is based on Educause Next Generation Digital Learning Environment. Both models use the metaphor of LEGO.

Personally I think that metaphor oversimplifies the process of a learner and it doesn’t help to solve the challenges that many universities face regarding their educational technology. A couple of reasons why it is flawed:

• Not all educational technology tools that are used as part of the learning experience are created equally, there is much more variety in the ‘bricks".
• Just sticking bricks together doesn’t make it a learning experience. The flow and interactive design are important.
• Accessibility is much harder to guarantee, especially if instructors can add their own bricks via LTI.
• Learning is much more complex.

We need to intelligently orchestrate all these different “bricks” to serve the student. In some situation it can just be as simple as IFTTT: if student has passed this quiz, he can go to the next chapter. But in many cases this process is far more complex than an IFTTT recipe of course, especially if you connect it to all the context. It is more like a central nervous system.

Photo Credit: CC-BY-SA Joe Miserendino

Today I attended an interesting session organised by 4TU Centre for Engineering Education. Kristina Edström and Jakob Kuttenkeuler of KTH Stockholm gave a keynote on "How can we simultaneously improve student learning and cost-effectiveness of teaching?"

In their presentation they focused on cost-neutral interventions. More hours of a teacher doesn't mean that student learning improves.

Everyone agreed that it is much harder to stop with activities than start new ones. There are many reason why it is hard to stop with certain activities:

One of the interesting things that were mentioned was the quote:

"When old model doesn't work, it's the student's fault, but if I try something new and it doesn't work, it's the teacher's fault"

In their presentation they had some really interesting tips and tricks to spend less time. Here two examples:

Less time correction exams
Teacher are spending a lot of time on making and correction exams. Jacob told that he switched to oral exams and that is saved him a lot of time. Benefit is that student prepare much better, so it is also better for their learning. The setup:

• Each exam is a half hour
• starts with 7 minutes in which the student has to show how he has reached the learning outcomes of the course. This gives students an easier start and gives the teacher enough information to continue the oral without needing to prepare questions in advance.
• use a simple scale: fail, good, excellent
• calculate what the maximum number of students is for which this saves you time. It probably is much higher than you think. In the calculations of Jakob he came to 95 students.
• Jakob plans the orals in a couple of weeks. This gives students some flexibility to plan it around their other exams. He uses a doodle to plan this.

No comments
When students have to write a paper, it costs a lot of time to give students feedback on their papers. In the their improved paper they usually only address the items the teacher has mentioned in his feedback. If you don't give individual feedback, but publish a list of most common errors, students will address all the items and their papers actually get much better. This saves you time.

Continue

I think this way of thinking can be really effective to improve learning and lowering the burden of the teacher. It is important that the teacher is open for it and accepts that the tips and tricks.

Interesting research video of Jeanine REUTEMANN  about different MOOC video styles on edX, Coursera, Futurelearn & Iversity. Jeanine works for University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. The video is based on the paper she presented at the EMOOCs Stakeholder Summit 2016 in Graz, Austria. Read the paper in the conference proceeding (page 383).

Today Ioana Jivet succesfully defended her master thesis "The Learner Tracker: A Learner Dashboard that Encourages Self-regulation in MOOC Learners":

The purpose of this work is to investigate how self-regulating skills can be enhanced by encouraging metacognition and reflection in MOOC learners by means of social comparison. To this end, we developed the Learning Tracker, an interactive widget that could be integrated in a learner dash- board aimed at learners. The Learning Tracker allows MOOC learners to compare their learning behaviour to that of previous graduates of the same MOOC, which we named successful learners.

In her research she has shown that feedback on learner behaviour, such as the learner tracker, might lead to changes in a learner’s overall behaviour and not only in the areas they received feedback on.

During her period at our research group she has made three important contributions:

• an interactive widget that visualises learners’ behaviour with the purpose of developing learners’ self-regulated learning skills by means of reflection.
• deployed and evaluated the widget in several real-world MOOCs across the whole duration of the MOOCs reaching more than 20.000 learners.
• the results showed the effectiveness of our design across all evaluated MOOCs, as learners that are exposed to the Learning Tracker are more likely to complete the course due to changes in their behaviour.

The first iteration of the Learning Tracker was tested on WaterX during January-March 2016, while the second iteration was deployed on SewageX and InnovationX. All three MOOCs were reruns:

It is important to mention that the course teams make changes in every run, especially in the InnovationX mooc they made significant changes (see page 36). Ioana made adjustment to correct this.

Results

In the research learners were randomly divided in a Test and a Control group. In all three MOOCs the test group showed a better result than the control group:

The main results reveal that when exposed to the Learning Tracker learners are more likely to complete the course with a graduation mark because (i) learners attempt more quiz questions and (ii) they submit their work earlier. Although our results indicate that the Learning Tracker impact learners’ engagement and reduces procrastination, there is little evidence that other aspects of learners’ self-regulation were influenced.

Conclusion

In this research project Ioana has shown that a giving learner feedback on their progress might influence their behaviour. We are definitely continuing the work. Ioana is starting a PhD at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen and we hope to continue to work together.

Download

You can download her full report from our repository.

Christina Hendricks (of UBC) made a great overview of literature on OpenTextBooks. For the ordening she used the “COUP” framework developed by the Open Education Group: Cost, Outcomes, Use, and Perceptions:

• Cost: The adoption of Open Educational Resources can impact a range of financial and cost metrics for students and institutions.
• Outcomes: Given the folk wisdom that “you get what you pay for,” some individuals and organizations worry that student learning will necessarily suffer when students use freely available, openly licensed resources instead of $200 textbooks.
• Usage: The permissions provided by open licenses allow students to use OER in a range of novel ways – for example, updating a history textbook based on recent events. Likewise, the permissions provided by open licenses allow teachers to engage in new pedagogical practices.
• Perceptions: What do faculty and students think about, and feel toward, Open Educational Resources?

More and more research is showing the positive effects that Open Text Books has. We are starting to reach the point that an instructor has to explain why he is using a commercial textbook.

Image credit: CC-BY Opensource.com

Next year there are elections in the Netherlands and political parties are already publishing their programmes. Due to the strict policy (budget cuts) and smart investments, government deficit has been reduced significantly. That means that there is money to spend and the different parties are claiming their priorities.

One of the priorities for many parties is more money for hiring more teachers in higher education. Although the workload of many teachers is high, I have my doubts if this will solve the problem.

Problem

Education is changing in higher education. One of the important changes is the digitization in education. I hear many universities and colleges say that blended education will be the default. This means that education will be a mix between classroom teaching and online learning.
This change means that the role of a teacher is changing, but also that more disciplines need to be involved to develop and run a course.  Teaching has been a one man job for many centuries and I think it is time to rethink our perception on this

Course Teams

Education has become a complex balance between content, technology and pedagogy. It is very hard to find people that are subject matter expert, as well as tech-savvy as well as up-to-date on pedagogy (so no urban myths) and think about effective ways of examining learning outcomes - all at the same time. In addition, in most universities staff members also need to be researchers, grant experts, and (PhD) student supervisors. These are too many roles to ask of one person.

So we need to disperse these roles to a team of people, each with their own dedicated role and expertise.

In the last two years at TU Delft Extension School we have pushed that a teacher forms a course team to develop and run a course. The minimum for a course team is:

• Teacher: subject matter expert.
• E-learning developer: course design, assessment, constructive alignment.
• Student assistants: course builders, moderators.

Depending on the course objectives additional roles can be added. This is a list of the expertise we have in our support team to be added to the course teams:

• Assessment expert: digital testing is different from exams on paper.
• Graphic designer: create graphical elements, infographics.
• Multimedia expert: creating online videos, animations.
• Instructional designer: expert on how to technically implement your course in your platform.
• Copyright officer: to correctly use and reuse (open) content.
• Data Analyst: lots of data is generated that can be analysed and used to improve the course experience.
• Additional specialists for online labs, simulations, games, etc.

This approach has helped us to develop high quality online courses, but also lifted some of the burden from the shoulders of the teachers.

Conclusion: new perspective of teaching and support

Investing in extra teachers in higher education might seem like a proper way of spending extra budget.  Investing in better course teams will have a much bigger effect to unburden teachers. Don’t invest in extra teachers, make existing teachers much more effective by properly supporting them.  So better value for money!

Image Credit:  CC-BY-SA Scott Maxwell

Earlier this month the JRC-IPTS (in Seville) published the final report of their OpenEdu Project. Earlier on they published 4 other reports:
OpenCases, OpenCred, OpenSurvey and miniOpenCases.

This report is final outcomes and describes the framework they developed:

This Framework identifies 10 dimensions of open education, giving a rationale and descriptors for each. The goal is to promote transparency for collaboration and exchange of practices among higher education institutions. Without a framework, stakeholders could overlook important questions and could put effort into matters that need little further investment. It is a tool to be used mainly by higher education institutions, but it is also very relevant for EU policy makers and other types of educational institutions.

Opening up education is an item on the European agenda because of three reasons:

1. it can help to reduce or remove barriers to education (e.g. cost, geography, time, entry requirements).
2. it supports the modernisation of higher education in Europe, since contemporary open education is largely carried out via digital technologies.
3. it opens up the possibility of bridging non-formal and formal education.

The framework can be used on different levels:

• at university management and decision makers for defining the overall strategy.
• at those staff members of HE institutions who actually design educational strategy. It offers a framework which can help them think through critical questions, such as: why is open education important and what is it exactly? What benefits can an open education strategy bring to an institution, to students (and to others out there), to a region, country or to Europe as a whole?
• at European level for relevant for policy makers since it can help them formulate policies to encourage institutions to open up education.

Framework

The OpenEdu framework consists of 10 dimensions for opening up education. It is a holistic view of open education which includes different areas where universities can be more open. Many experts (including me) were involved in the development and evaluation of the framework.

The 10 dimensions of the framework are divided into two categories: core dimensions and transversal dimensions. There are 6 core dimensions (access, content, pedagogy, recognition, collaboration and research) and 4 transversal dimensions (strategy, technology, quality and leadership). All dimensions are interrelated; the core dimensions are not more important than the transversal ones. Core dimensions represent the 'what' of open education and transversal dimensions indicate `how’ to achieve it.

Reference

Inamorato dos Santos, A., Punie, Y., Castaño-Muñoz, J. (2016) Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions. JRC Science for Policy Report, EUR 27938 EN; doi:10.2791/293408