E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

This week I was invited to introduce the participants of the 2nd International Conference on E-learning, organised by the Egyptian E-learning University, to the field of Open Education. This is one of the things you sometimes have to do as board member of the Open Education Consortium (it is a tough job ;-) ). It was a delight to visit Cairo, although it was only for 1,5 day.

About 50 people attended the 3-hour workshop. This were people from different universities in Egypt and some companies and NGOs. Most of the people were new to the field of Open Education. Below is the slide deck I used during the workshop:

 In the afternoon I had the opportunity to visit the pyramids of Giza. This is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was amazing to see such enormous construction of stones. Thanks to EELU for arranging this for me.

Vanwege het opzetten van de Delft Extension School onstaan er ook vacatures in de bestaande organisatie. Er zijn er nu 4 posities beschikbaar:

• Twee Onderwijsadviseurs/docententrainers met specialisatie E-Learning
  Er zijn op dit moment twee vacatures voor onderwijsadviseur/docenttrainer: voor de ene vacature ligt het accent op het ontwikkelen van virtuele leerromgevingen, het begeleiden van docenten in onderwijsprojecten, het geven van didactische trainingen op het gebied van E-learning (Online en Blended Learning) en het didactisch gebruik van digitale tools (ook ten behoeve van Blended Learning). De tweede vacature betreft meer projectcoördinatie (zoals het Grassrootsproject van TU Delft), het adviseren van opleidingen bij onderwijsvernieuwingen en het didactische trainen van docenten op het gebied van E-Learning.
  Meer informatie en solliciteren
  
  
• Twee High Level ICTO Medewerkers
  De functie van High level ICTO medewerker biedt ambitieuze professionals die werkzaam willen zijn op het randgebied tussen onderwijsondersteuning en ICT alle mogelijkheden om zichzelf net zo hard te ontwikkelen als het vakgebied waarin hij of zij actief is. ICTO, DLO, Onderwijstechnologie: als hier je kracht ligt, dan is dit je kans! Je geeft invulling aan de Functioneel Beheerfunctie rond de applicaties Blackboard (Digitale leeromgeving), Maple TA (Digitaal toetsen), Scorion (Peer review) en een aantal kleinere applicaties die in gebruik zijn. Hierbij werk je samen met je directe collega’s binnen Onderwijs & Studentenzaken, maar ook met collega’s die werkzaam zijn bij ICT. Je onderhoudt nauwe contacten met onderwijskundigen, docenten en studenten over het gebruik en de functionaliteit van Blackboard en de andere ICTO applicaties binnen het onderwijs. Jouw taak is om de algemene wensen van bijvoorbeeld de Blackboard-gebruikers te vertalen naar eisen, wensen en randvoorwaarden voor verbeteringen. Je adviseert over wijzigingen in processen en fungeert als vraagbaak voor vraagstukken rond de ICTO applicaties.
  Meer informatie en solliciteren

Absoluut interessante functies op het gebied van ICT en onderwijs.

MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a set of investments intended to explore the potential of MOOCs to extend access to postsecondary credentials through more personalized, more affordable pathways.

28 projects were selected last year and now their reports are available. On the website www.moocresearch.com/reports you find all reports.

Last week I hosted a little conference at Delft University of Technology. For the first time, the EdX Conference was hosted outside the Boston Area. It was hosted in the beautiful building of our library. It was quite some work to organise it, but it was a great success according to all participants.

It is always exciting to see that the plan you set out works out even better then expected. Thanks to my great team of TU Delft Event Solutions (Anneke, Ginny, Natascha and Marie Louise), thanks to all the speakers of the parallel sessions, thanks to George Siemens for delivering a thought-provoking keynote and off course thanks to all the people who participated in the discussions.

Blogs and articles about the conference:

• ScienceGuide interview with Anant Agarwal
• Inside HigherEd blog of Joshua Kim about the conference
• Inside HigherEd blog of Joshua Kim about the keynote of George Siemens
• ScienceGuide article in Dutch

On my Facebook I placed a selection of photos to give an impression.

The last couple of weeks I haven't been blogging and tweeting as much as people are used to see from me. The reason for this, is that I'm extremely busy with setting up the Delft Extension School and also organising the EdX Conference FutureEDU.

For the first time this conference for all EdX Consortium members and partners will be outside of the Boston area and it happens to be at my university. So for me the job to organise together with our office for event solutions.

Next week 200 participants will arrive in Delft to participate in an interesting programme about MOOC, online education, future developments and transformation of campus education.

We have participants from 50 institutions from 17 countries from all around the world (except Latin America). About 50 people are from Europe (excluding TU Delft): Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switserland and the UK.

On Thursday the Dutch Minister of Education, Jet Bussemaker, will open the conference. The closing keynote on Friday will be delivered by George Siemens. In between we have many interesting presentations, panel discussions, round tables and time to talk with collegues from around the world.

I'm really looking forward to meet everyone in Delft. It will be a great conference in a beautiful building.

This infographics shows 7 habits that teachers should have if they use technology for their teaching.

Stanford University published an interesting report (PDF) about their online activities in 2013:

Since the first three Stanford MOOCs were offered in fall 2011, VPOL has awarded 66 faculty seed grants and has helped more than 145 faculty members from all seven schools deliver 246 online courses and blended campus courses hosted on three different platforms. More than 1.9 million people, from almost every country in the world, have registered for one or more free public online courses taught by Stanford faculty. And since the fall of 2012, our global community of learners has interacted with Stanford Online courses for more than 4 million hours.

The strategy of Stanford shows much resemblance with the strategy of the TU Delft Extension School.

There are already multiple classifications of types of MOOCs. The most known are xMOOCs versus cMOOCs. Personally I think that this is too simple. Gráinne Conole from University of Leicester describes MOOCs by using twelve dimensions. In addition, she uses the classification schema to describe five MOOCs. According to Conole this classification can be used for the design and evaluation of MOOCs as well.

 More information on her blog.

Last night was the Awards Ceremony of the OpenCourseWare Open Education Consortium. This year TU Delft was  privileged to receive 4 awards.

The first award was a personal award for Anka Mulder. She received the Leadership award for her commitment for open education, TU Delft is now achieving the ideal of open education both in the Netherlands and internationally.

The second award was an outstanding site award for our OpenCourseWare website. Martijn Ouwehand received the award. He is responsible for our website.

The last two awards we received for our first two MOOCs, Solar Energy and Introduction to Water Treatment. On behave of both teachers, Arno Smets and Jules van Lier, I received the awards.

Below are the photos of our awards. More photos of the event, can be found on my flickr page.

Today at the OCW Consortium Global Conference in Ljubljana, the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced a name change to Open Education Consortium with the tagline "The Global network for Open Education". The new name better reflects the current activities of the Consortium and the interest of many institutions.

The Open Education Consortium (www.openedconsortium.org) envisions a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so anywhere in the world, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.  The Open Education Consortium acts to expand access to education and promote open sharing of knowledge. It does this by leveraging its sources of expert opinion, its global network and its position as the principal voice of open education.