E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

More and more you hear about the term "Open Science". The term refers to developments in how science is becoming more open, accessible, efficient, democratic, and transparent, based on new, digital tools for scientific collaboration, experiments and analysis and which make scientific knowledge more easily accessible both for professionals and the general public.

After a public consult, the European Commission has adopted this term as well to replace the term Science 2.0. Last month Carlos Moedas, Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation outlined the plans for "Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World".

Open Education

I think this is a very good initiative, but it is missing an important aspect. According to the plans we should do a much better job in bringing Science to Society, but there is no mentioning of Open Education. According to the Open Education Consortium "Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs."

The strength of (Open) Education is that it makes knowledge much more accessible for a general public. It is not only about sharing (publishing content), but really about learning. So to use the knowledge for learning new skills and competencies. That will really prepare the European citizens for the 21st century.

MOOCs as dissemination of research

A very good example of these are MOOCs,  or at least the open MOOCs. I'm not talking about the introduction courses on many subject, but on the advanced courses. A good example is one of our MOOCs on the subject of Topology in Condensed Matter: Tying Quantum Knots. This course ran this spring on EdX with 4,000 people. That doesn't sound like much (at least in comparison to our other MOOCs), but keep in mind that you need at least a Master in Physics, preferable a PhD to follow this course. All the course materials are also available outside of edx to make it even more accessible. The lecturers of this course are all involved with the research conducted at the Delft Kavli Institute on Quantum Computers.

Image: CC-BY 4.0 International License  Open Knowledge Foundation

This summer and fall we are running 11 MOOCs. There are couple of new courses and a lot of reruns of popular courses. We also offer two self-paced courses.
All reruns will be improved based on the evaluation of prior runs. For the evaluation we use data of edx, the data of the surveys and interviews with the involved people. Another 5 new MOOCs are being produced (but haven't been announced) and last Friday we approved 3 new MOOCs.

Full story »

Last week the Dutch universities decided to boycot Elsevier, because of the negotiations around open access. This is a mayor step in the battle for open.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier resign. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

This is part of a bigger plan to move the Dutch science into the world of open.  Sander Dekker, the State Secretary  of Education has taken a strong position on Open Access. He has set two Open Access targets: 40% of scientific publications should be made available through Open Access by 2018, and 100% by 2024. The preferred route is through gold Open Access – where the work is ‘born Open Access’. This means there is no cost for readers – and no subscriptions.

If universities take these targets seriously, bold moves have to be made. This is such a move, more of those should follow! There are still a lot of scientists who are giving their copyright away without even thinking about open access. Steps like thise certainly helps in the awareness.

Background:

• Dutch article in NRC
• VSNU factsheet
• Article of Danny Kingsley

Image source: Twitter

Last week we officially launched the new website for online learning at Delft University of Technology. The website presents all the online courses of the university. This includes our MOOCs, Professional Education and master courses.

Design

For the website we wanted a little bit more modern design than the current university website. After a selection, the design was made by Richard Straver of Webstudio MM. I'm very satisfied with the design. It follows the current trend of flat design. Not only does the design emphasize the courses, there is also a focus on our lecturers. Each lecturer has his or her own page which shows info about them and the courses they teach. As example the page of Ernst ten Heuvelhof. Nowadays your website is not only accessed with a browser on a pc or laptop, but also on tablet and mobile. So the design is completely responsive and will scale following the width of the screen.

Promo video

We also created a new promo video for TU Delft online learning. The video is featured on the homepage of the website. You can view it here:

Back-end

 An important and difficult part of creating this website was the backend integration with the university administrative systems. Our systems are optimized for tuition-paying students that enroll for a full year on campus. This website is for people who are enrolling in a single course that is taught fully online and have to pay per course.

If you are a little bit familiar with system integration, you can understand that this can be quiet challenging. For now, we do something things manually because we didn't want to wait.

First enrolments

The website was live on Monday end of day and in the first week we already got the first enrolments in. Some of those enrolments we could connect to the newsletter we send out. It is really great that it all works and that the course offering we have is interesting for many people. Take a look at our courses and start learning!

What do course reviews suggest about what it takes to create a compelling online learning experience for students? CourseTalk, a “Yelp for MOOCs” company founded in 2012, has tallied more than 74,000 user ratings for over 7,500 courses from 46 providers to get a glimpse of what students are saying.

CourseTalk has made an analysis (PDF) of all reviewed courses in its catalog to uncover characteristics shared by top-rated courses, characteristics shared by low-rated courses, and other insights into online learning.

Interesting is their overview of refraining reviews:

Their overal findings are:

• Reviews are predominantly positive
• Reviewers complete courses
• Reviewers who drop courses still give nearly 4 stars
• Users are willing to pay for good courses
• Classes with more reviews receive higher ratings
• Ratings are not affected by course workload
• A majority of CourseTalk users have experience in the subject they’re studying

Their conclusions are:

• Providers should embrace reviews from unbiased, third-party sites as a way of promoting improved course selection and engagement.
• They should not be afraid to charge for quality content.
• Providers should make courses experiences clear, easy to navigate, fun, interactive, supportive and flexible.
• They should focus on short course modules, but not hesitate to challenge students with heavier workloads where appropriate.

EdX is also using CourseTalk as review system. Reviews of TU Delft's courses are available here.

Via: EdSurge

The last couple of days I attended the EDEN15 conference in Barcelona. During a couple of sessions people mentioned alternative acronyms to MOOCs, such as mMOOC, cMOOC, sMOOC, xMOOC. Can we please stop with all these acronyms! It is a MOOC or an Online Course.

Online Courses

The starting point of designing an Online Course are the learning objectives you want students to reach. With those you will start designing the learning activities and assessment. In the design process you have to be aware of the context of the course, such as the subject, lecturers, duration, expected audience, language and more.

The result should be a high-quality online course that will help students reach their learning goals.

Massive

One of the specific feature of a MOOC is the massiveness. This means that in the design proces you will keep in mind that the course can be run with 500 students, but also with 50,000 students without extra teaching effort. This can also be useful for some campus courses, although the number will be a little bit smaller.

Open

For me Open means free access (via internet) to the course AND the right (under some condition) to retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute the course materials. Unfortunately most moocs are limit to the first part.

US vs European MOOCs

In the European MOOC world there is a tendency to be very negative about the US MOOCs. I think that you underestimate the MOOCs on the US platforms and overestimate the European MOOCs. My experience is that on both sides of the pond there are really good MOOCs and really bad MOOCs. The quality of a MOOCs is not depending on the platform, but on the lecturers and the course development team.

The people that are affilitiated to the open universities express this negative thought quiet often. According yesterday's keynote speaker Alan Tait this has to do with that the introduction of MOOCs was very painful for the open universities: "Major MOOC platforms not from open universities". I think he has a very valid point here, open universities have always been in the lead in innovation in technology enhanced learing and now the 'conventional universities' are taking over. That must hurt!

This week I'm attending the annual conference of EDEN: European Distance and E-leearning Network. TU Delft has recently joined the network of more than 200 institutional members and more than 1200 members in the Network of Academics and Professionals (NAP).

This years conference will be in Barcelona and is hosted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The conference has some interesting keynotes speakers. Some of the speakers I'm looking forward too:

• Xavier Prats Monné
  DG for Education and Culture of the European Commission. It is always good to hear the priorities of the EC.
• Jim Groom
  Recently resigned his job at the University of Mary Washington to continue his work on Reclaim Hosting.
• Audrey Watters
  the best EdTech journalist and interesting voice in the field op open education.
• Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos
  Vice-President ABED and my fellow board member at the Open Education Consortium.

Presentations of TU Delft

Off course we are not just consuming, but we are presenting too. Together with my collegaes Nelson Jorge and Sofia Dopper we have written a paper about defining a pedagogical model: the TU Delft Online Learning Experience. We will present this on Thursday morning in session D5 (room Salon 4) at 11.30-13.00.

On Wednesday the MOOCs4all project, in which we are participating is organising a workshop about low-cost production of moocs. Janine Kiers is organising this workshop with the others of the project. This session C3 is Wednesday afternoon at 16.30-18.00 in Salon 5.

Live Stream

If you can't attend the conference, it is possible to view the plenary sessions via the EDEN youtube channel. And there will be some tweeting with the hashtag #EDEN15.

TU Delft is a strong advocate for open education. So when we started with MOOCs on EdX.org, we published all the course materials with an open license. After the course is done, we publish the content also on our OpenCourseWare website.

Last year during the Open Education Week, I organised an Edx hackathon for our students. The winners of the hackathon were the guys of FeedbackFruits:

FeedbackFruits is a TU Delft startup that created an online study community that encourages students to participate in lectures and share study material to facilitate the core of education: opening up young minds to the wonders of science and helping students become specialists in the things they love.

FeedbackFruits received the award at the EdX conference in Delft in June last year. On stage I also requested EdX to include this plugin into the platform and they agreed. Unfortunately it took quiet some time to get the plugin included, but last Thursday it finally happened.

The plugin that was created allows course teams to set a Creative Commons license for the course and per item. For instruction, see the manual page.

Below are two screenshots to show what it looks like.

Further development

This plugin is the first step in implementing Creative Commons into the platform. Off course we have a wish list for improvements:

• remove the ND, because that is not really open.
• set the default to CC-BY.
• be able to attribute others for the content.

Other blogs

• Creative Commons
• OpenEdX

We started a blog to present the research of TU Delft Online Learning. On the blog we have published our working papers, conference papers and other articles. Please take a look at http://onlinelearningresearch.weblog.tudelft.nl.

Working Papers

We have published the first 6 working papers. The first five are course reports of our MOOCs in 2013-2014: Solar Energy, Water Treatment, Aeronautical Engineering, Credit Risk Management, and Next Generation Infrastructures.
The sixth report is a cross-course comparison of the first five DelftX MOOCs. The purpose of this analysis is to gain insight in the new opportunities and the new sources of data of this emerging online learning setting. The ultimate goal is to gain insights for enhancing DelftX educational provisions.

SURF has published a report about the Grand Challenges Learning Analytics & Open & Online Education, unfortunately the report is in Dutch. This report describes the possibilities of Learning Analytics in the field of Open and Online Education and what are the biggest challenges. Per challenges the 6 experts did a literature review and decided on what are the questions that have to be answered, are there national or international examples and what needs more research.

The six experts that contributed to this report are:

• Alan Berg, Program Manager Learning Analytics UvA, University of Amsterdam, Community Officer Apereo Learning Analytics Initiative
• Dr. Maartje van den Bogaard, educational advisor and researcher University of Leiden
• Dr. Hendrik Drachsler, Chairing Research Group on Learning Analytics, Leading FP7 project Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACEproject.eu)
• Drs. Renée Filius, programme manager Elevate University of Utrecht Medical Centre.
• Drs. Jocelyn Manderveld, project manager SURFnet
• Dr.ir. Robert Schuwer, lector OER, Fontys Hogeschool ICT

The five challenges these experts identified are:

1. What possiblities does Learning Analytics offer as accelerator of (design of) learning?
2. What are the requirements of a dashboard for instructors?
3. What can learning analytics contribute to the searchability of open educational resources?
4. What are the privacy and ethical issues in using learning analytics in open and online education?
5. What kind of infrastructure is needed to start with learning analytics in open and online education within your institution?

The report gives a good overview of the current state of learning analytics and gives good insight in the challenges we face. Off course you can debate if these challenges are really the biggest challenges. One of the questions I got was why a dashboard for instructors and not for learners?