E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

March 7 to 11, the yearly Open Education Week is organised. This is a yearly week of events, organised by the Open Education Consortium, to raise awareness for open education:

Open Education Week’s goal is to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone, everywhere, right now.  We want to highlight how open education can help people meet their goals in education, whether that’s to develop skills and knowledge for work, supporting formal studies, learning something new for personal interest, or looking for additional teaching resources.

Many organisations from all over the world are participating this week in organising online and local events. Off course, TU Delft is also participating. One of my collegaes, Pedro Cabral, is part of the Programme Committee and we are hosting a couple of events during the week.

TU Delft events

During the Open Education Week you will find out all there is to know about different facets of Open Education. In our Action Labs you will learn more about the basics of open education and how to make full use of it in your courses. You will be able to see the opportunities to develop video's and we invite you for in depth sessions about Open Education. The Open Education Week will be closed with an Open Education Seminar and debate. During this closing event, Anka Mulder and (inter)national guests (University of Queensland, University of British Colombia and EPFL) will discuss the next big step in Open Education: offering credits for MOOCs.

The events are open to anyone who is interested, but please sign up on our website to secure a seat.

Vandaag verscheen er een rapport van het CBS over een leven lang leren (LLL) in Nederland. De auteurs Astrid Pleijers en Marijke Hartgers hebben op basis van de CBS-data onderzoek gedaan naar leven lang leren in Nederland en in  vergelijking met andere EU-lidstaten. Hun conclusie is dat Nederland goed scoort qua deelname aan LLL vergeleken met andere EU-staten. Dit is een opvallende conclusie die niet strookt met de politieke opvattingen op dit gebied. Dus ben ik eens gaan kijken waar nu dat verschil in perceptie vandaan komt.

Definitie van LLL:

Leven lang leren volgens de Europese indicator bevat in principe al het onderwijs dat wordt gevolgd door personen van 25 tot 65 jaar. Hieronder vallen bijvoorbeeld werkgerelateerde opleidingen of workshops, maar ook initiële opleidingen in het geval van langstudeerders, of cursussen gevolgd in vrije tijd, variërend in duur, tellen mee.

In de Nederlandse politiek wordt vooral gekeken naar volledige (deeltijd)opleidingen die leiden tot een diploma. Dat zie je ook terug in stimuleringsmaatregelen:

De overheid stimuleert volwassenen om te blijven leren, ook als ze al een baan hebben. Onderwijsinstellingen in zowel het hoger onderwijs als het middelbaar beroepsonderwijs krijgen meer ruimte om maatwerk te leveren, onder meer via experimenten met vraagfinanciering, pilots van flexibele opleidingstrajecten en de introductie van certificaten in het mbo.....

Deze maatregelen richtingen zich op publieke onderwijsinstellingen die zich voornamelijk bezig houden met volledige opleidingen. In deze definitie is te zien dat ze het begrip veel breder opvatten. Dit sluit wat mij betreft veel beter aan bij de praktijk van een lerende. Iemand die fulltime werkt volgt zeker losse workshops en cursussen, maar vaak niet een hele opleiding.

Van alle personen van 25 tot 65 die in 2014 deelnamen aan LLL deed 16% een opleiding of cursus die bekostigd wordt door de overheid (minOCW en EZ). Van de 16% is ook nog de grootste groep onder de 30, oftewel een langstudeerstudent die nog bezig is met zijn/haar initiële opleiding.

Qua definitie geven de auteurs ook aan dat informeel leren op dit moment buiten de Europese indicator valt. De auteurs geven terecht aan dat dit een significant gedeelte van het leren van een werkende is.

De conclusie die de auteurs trekken is dat deelname aan LLL vooral plaats vind onder een selectieve groep in de bevolking, namelijk in een bedrijfssector waar verplichte bij- en nascholing is, zoals advocaat, huisarts, medisch specialist.

Conclusie

Als ik het rapport zo lees dan kan ik niet anders concluderen dan dat de politiek LLL veel te beperkt opvat. Internationaal zie ik de trend naar korte (online) cursussen en informeel leren, zoals met MOOCs. De politiek blijft nog veel te veel hangen op sturing via de publieke instellingen, terwijl het steeds meer de individuele lerende is in zijn werkomgeving bepaald welke cursus hij gaat doen. Het gaat de lerende om het vergaren van de kennis en niet om het certificaat of diploma.

There are many different ways to communicate content by video. To provide teachers and course developers some guidance and inspiration, we have collected multiple videos and created three menu items:

• Recording locations: where to go?
• Presentation methods: how to behave?
• Supportive content: what to show?

The content is also available as interactive PDF (3MB).

The website is an initiative of the TU Delft Extension School in cooperation with our New Media Centre. The videos you can see, are all examples of our MOOCs and online courses.

We realize that this guide can never be complete without your input. So please use the Feedback button on the right or leave a comment below. Your suggestions for additions to this guide are most welcome.

Take a look at the multimedia academy website

Last Friday I attended a presentation of Erik Meerbrug. After his Geodesy study at TU Delft he specilised in GIS: geo information systems. In his presentation he mentioned some interesting projects that are happening in the world of geo and open data.

Full story »

Last week Coursera announced that they updated the enrolment and grading option of their courses. No longer you can have free access to the full course:

Starting today, when you enroll in certain courses, you’ll be asked to pay a fee if you’d like to submit required graded assignments and earn a Course Certificate. You can also choose to explore the course for free, in which case you’ll have full access to videos, discussions, and practice assignments, and view-only access to graded assignments.

Most Coursera courses never used an open licensed. So they were not open in the common use of the definition of open. David Wiley wrote a very clear blog post about this. If you look at the defintions open open content, OER, open access, open data, open knowledge, open source and open standards, they have 2 things in commons:

1. Free access to the content, resource, journal article, data, knowledge artifact, software, or standard, and
2. A formal grant of rights and permissions giving back to the user many of the rights and permissions copyright normally reserves exclusively for the creator or other rights holder.

Although Coursera used to follow the first thing, they never did for the second one. So formally they were never really open. EdX followed the same line of reason, but last year they added a creative commons plugin, so universities can change the rights from all rights reserved to an open license. Unfortunately, I don't have stats on how many courses use an open license. One of thing I know is that all TU Delft MOOCs use an open license (CC-BY-NC-SA). Recently we decided that the course Topology of Condensed Matter (starting Feb 8th) will even have a more open license: CC-NY-SA (I expect an applause from Cable).

With the removal of free access to the assessment part of the course, I would say that we can no longer talk about a free course. You get free (not open) access to learning resources, but you have pay to for access to the course. According to Insight Higher Education Coursera is creating a mismatch between their mission of provide universal access to the world’s best education and their business model. I agree with George Siemens that Coursera is “playing a short-term venture capital game” instead of focusing on the larger goal of improving access to education. We have seen this with the other Silicon Valley company Udacity.

I think it will be interesting to see what the university partners of Coursera are going to do. They have to show their cards: are they in the MOOC business for the greater good of universal access to education or just for making money! At least show that you find open education important and become a member of the Open Education Consortium!

The staff of the Open Education Consortium has created a great overview of the activities of the Open Education Consortium. The overview gives interesting numbers of the Open Education Week 2015, the Global Conference in Banff, ,member & community services and other projects and activities.

One of the interesting overviews are alle the trainings, workshops and presentations the OEC staff and board members conducted in 2015. More info on the website.

Take a look at the great overview of our activities and visit the website.

Today at the 174th Dies Natalis (birthday) of Delft University of Technology, our rector magnificus announced that the Executive Board has accepted a new Open Access Policy for the university effective per 1st of May:

As of 1 May 2016 the so-called Green Road to Open Access publishing is mandatory for all (co) authors at TU Delft. The (co)author must publish the final accepted author’s version of a peer-reviewed article with the required metadata in the TU Delft Institutional Repository.

By making scientific publications freely accessible and reusable we allow more people to become aware of the results of scientific research; including those who cannot afford paid access to this information. New ideas are spread faster and wider which in turn leads to new research: a boost for science. Teachers also benefit from Open Access by using this knowledge directly in their courses. Companies gain access to the latest scientific ideas and can build on these. And Open Access publishing and Open Science boost the knowledge-based economy and innovation. This is why TU Delft expresses the importance of Open Science in its mission:

‘TU Delft is dedicated to making a significant contribution to finding responsible solutions to societal problems, at both national and international level. Our mission is to deliver Science to Society.’

This policy is part of the TU Delft Open Science programme. Open Science consists of Open Research (Open Access publications and FAIR Research Data Management), Open Education, and Open Software and Sourceware. I'm one of the members of Programme Board of Open Science.

It has been a busy travel year: 12 trips, 8 countries, 20 flights and 92 nights away from home. As many of you know I like the travelling to comes with my current job. In most cases I have the opportunity to stay a couple of days longer to explore the city or country. Here is the list of trips:

• Jan: day trip to Brussels
• Feb: visit to Airbus in Toulouse and Marseille
• March/April: conference in Sausalito (next to Golden Gate Bridge) and extra time to do a roadtrip around California (San Franscisco, Napa Valley, Yosemite NP, Kings Canyon, Sequia NP, Death Valley, Santa Barbara, HW 1 up to Monterey)
• April/May: Conference in Banff and a roadtrip around Alberta (Banff NP, Jasper NP, Edmonton, Drumheller, Calgary)
• June: Conference in Barcelona, only one afternoon to explore the city
• July/Aug: Holiday in Fryslân
• September: Weekend in Dusseldorf
• Sept/October: Conference in Sun City, South Africa. Added 2,5 weeks to explore South Africa (Johannesburg/Pretoria, Entabeni Game Reserve, Capetown, Krugerpark, Sun City)
• November: Conference in Vancouver. Added a couple of extra days to visit Whistler and Vancouver Island.
• Nov/Dec: Conference in Rome, added 2 days to visit Rome and Vatican City (first time for me in Rome)
• December: Christmas holiday in Fryslân

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In a recent report of the Hewlett Foundation they use the Pencil Metaphor for the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). In the metaphor they identify six types of users:

• The Leaders
  First to adopt technologies, document and share practice—warts and all.
• The Sharp Ones
  They watch the leaders, grab the best bits, learn form mistakes and do great stuff.
• The Wood
  Would use tech if someone else sets it up and shows them how-to and keeps it running.
• Hangers-On
  Know all the lingo, attend the seminars but don’t do anything.
• The Ferrules
  Hold tightly onto what they know. Tech has no place in their classroom.
• The Erasers
  Endeavor to undo much or all the work of the leaders.

I agree that we should focus more on the people in the wood. So more focus on helping teachers with the adoption of OER.

Hewlett is focussing on strengthening pedagogy and reducing costs in higher education. The activities focus on:

• Open Textbooks for the most-enrolled college courses
• Building the library of easily discoverable open textbooks.
• Providing technical assistance.
• Promoting open textbooks among faculty and librarians.
• Zero textbook cost degrees in Community Colleges
• Identifying and supporting the next set of early adopters.
• Scaling the model through targeted advocacy.
• Ensuring implementation with sufficient tools and expertise.
• Strengthening the supply of postsecondary OER to fuel expansion.

At the beginning of this month Anka Mulder did a keynote at the yearly Online Educa conference in Berlin. The title of her keynote was "Universities must be bold" and that is what we are doing.

According to Donald Clark her vision is exactly what HE needs and I fully agree with that.

It makes me proud to work for the TU Delft. I think we have an extraordinary team that is responsible for the open and online learning at my university. Anka is a great leader for the university and it is a pleasure working with her for many years.