E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Currently EdX has 32 universities that are member of the xConsortium. EdX noticed a growing demand from foundations, NGO's, business and universities to offer courses on edx.org. After quiet some discussion with the consortium we have decided on a new membership structure:

EdX, the not-for-profit online learning initiative composed of the 32 charter members of the xConsortium, today announced a new expanded membership structure that will enable additional universities and colleges, foundations and other global organizations to join the edX community. These new members will supplement the distinguished group of colleges and universities that currently make up the xConsortium. The expansion comes in response to increasing demand from edX students for a broader array of courses, along with growing interest from academic and non-academic institutions to offer a diverse set of high quality courses to a global audience on edx.org and through the expanding network of edX open source partners.
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Next week is the third Open Education Week. Open Education Week is a series of events to increase awareness of open education movement. There are both online and offline events around the world. Through the events and resources, we hope to reach out to more people to demonstrate what kind of opportunities open education has created and what we have to look forward to.

TU Delft

At our university will will organise three events. The events are free to join, but you have register:

• March 12^th Lunch Launch: Delft Extension School (12:30 - 14:00h, Hive, TU Library).Rob Fastenau, e-Dean of the Delft Extension School, will tell you something about the activities of the Delft Extension School and the possibilities of online worldwide education. Feel free to ask questions and discuss any online education subject.
  
  
• March 13^th MOOC Workshop (12:00 - 13:30h, Snijderszaal, Faculty of EEMCS) One of our first DelftX MOOC teachers, Dr. ir. Arno Smets (MOOC Solar Energy)will share his experience in MOOC making. He challenges you to think about what MOOCs can or cannot mean for you.
  
  
• March 14^th, edX Hackathon (15.00 - 21.00, Hive, TU Library) With the support of an edX developer and free pizza, students and staff are challenged to develop a concept and make a prototype of a new or improved functionality of the Open Source MOOC platform of edX.

On Tuesday we are also participating in the Dutch Symposium Open en Online Education and the Nuffic Jaarcongres 2014.

MOOCs have gone from a distant idea to a global phenomenon in less than five years. During this period MOOCs have innovated at a dazzling speed in content creation, delivery, feedback, testing and other aspects of the knowledge delivery process. The excitement of MOOCs has been the promise of learning at scale. As a result, the primary focus of the design of MOOCs to date has been on “scale”. We believe it is now time to focus our attention on the design for learning.

This workshop plans to bring together the educators, technologists, researchers, learning scientists, entrepreneurs, and funders of MOOCs to share their innovations, discuss the impact on education and to answer questions such as: How to best support students to learn in an online environment? How can MOOCs be successfully integrated with the traditional classroom experience? For which students and in what contexts are these courses most effective? What can we learn from the rich data streams generated by these platforms? How do we structure the learning activities to produce data streams that better support research?

Topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Creating and teaching with MOOCs 
• Open content /open licensing and MOOCs
• Novel pedagogical processes with MOOCs
• Tools for collaboration, feedback, testing and content delivery
• Best practices in MOOCs
• Learning from experiments with MOOCs (including both successes and failures)
• Metrics of success for learners and instructors of MOOCs
• On campus use of MOOCs
• Evaluation of MOOCs
• Learning analytics and MOOCs
• Interactive activities in MOOCs
• Challenges facing MOOCs
• Expanding the learner community with MOOCs
• Learning research based on MOOCs
• Key research challenges

We invite practitioners interested in coming together to discuss these issues to submit a one page description of work they have done in a MOOC including something interesting that they have learned through their work that they believe would be valuable to share with others and/or a question or challenges that they confronted that they would like to have others discuss.

Key Dates:

• Monday, March 31, 2014: Submission deadline (midnight, PST)
• Monday, April 21, 2014: Acceptance notification
• Thursday, May 1, 2014: Preregistration opens
• Tuesday-Wednesday, August 12-13, 2014: Conference

The submissions procedure will be available soon at http://www.moocworkshop.org/call-for-papers/.

Harvard and MIT have made a suite of open source interactive visualization tools for the data of moocs. This is a follow up of their release of a series of working papers:

The technologies, dubbed Insights, draw upon near real-time, de-identified data of course registrants, dynamically updating at frequent intervals.

Developed collaboratively by Sergiy Nesterko, a Research Fellow at HarvardX, and Daniel Seaton, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning, the tools showcase the potential promise of “big data” generated from massively open online courses (MOOCs) to help advance learning science.

Harnessing information on 1,055,562 total registrants, the tools provide an intuitive way to review individual courses across a number of metrics, including global enrollment, certificate attainment, gender and age composition, and education levels, all viewable country-by-country on a world map. The tools also feature HarvardX-wide and MITx-wide statistics. 

“These tools provide our faculty and course developers, as well as the general public, usable, visually interpretable data from course offerings in near-real time,” says Nesterko. “This can help to guide instruction while courses are running and deepen our understanding of the impact of courses after they are complete.”

For example, Insights shows how HarvardX and MITx course registrations from China, highlighting how technical barriers such as the blocking of YouTube and firewalls influence participation. In addition, the tools can shed light on common claims like MOOCs serving primarily male, highly educated students. It turns out to be less black and white, as there is dramatic variability in gender and education across different countries and courses.

“Our hope is that these tools will be useful to everyone, including researchers, journalists, course developers, and the public, for the purpose of understanding how these courses work and who our students are,” says Seaton.

Moreover, the code is open source and the aggregated datasets are downloadable, allowing interested users to modify and build upon existing functionality. In the future, the pair plans to expand the Insights toolkit to include distinctions between “auditors” and “enrollees.”

The tools can be viewed here:

• http://harvardx.harvard.edu/harvardx-insights
• http://odl.mit.edu/insights/

Last week I attended the second European MOOC Summit in Lausanne and I was not the only one. More than 400 attendees from a lot of different countries, not only European. There were 20 participants from the Netherlands. The conference was held in the Rolex building on the EPFL campus.

Although the conference was about MOOCs, the discussion was as much about online learning. Their were four tracks at the conference:

• Policy
• Experience
• Research
• Business

The conference had good and interesting keynotes. I personally didn't like the the setup of the parallel tracks. That were very long session with multiple presentations with limited interaction and not easy to switch within a session.

During the conference I tweeted  a lot. My tweets can be found in my tweet archive. Summit proceedings are available online (PDF, 294 pages), video recordings of keynotes will follow soon.

Other interesting blogs about the conference:

• Signals of Success and the EMOOCs Summit #emoocs2014
• blog about the keynotes
• Blogs of Ignatia: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• storify day 1 and day 2 and 3 
• Is there a business model for MOOCs? Report from #emoocs2014
• Pierre Gorissen (in Dutch): day 1, day 2, day 3
• Peter Sloep: European MOOCs Stakeholder Summit 2014 - EMOOCs 2014

New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) recently released  the NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition. This eleventh edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. They’ve also released this video summary:

Interest is to see the developments NMC Horizon has identified over the last couple of years:

The six trends featured in the report were selected by the project’s expert panel in a series of Delphi-based voting cycles, each followed by an additional round of desktop research and
discussions:

Fast Trends: Driving changes in higher education over the next one to two years

• Growing Ubiquity of Social Media
  For educational institutions, social media enables twoway dialogues between students, prospective students, educators, and the institution that are less formal than with other media. As social networks continue to flourish, educators are using them as professional communities of practice, as learning communities, and as a platform to share interesting stories about topics students are studying in class. Understanding how social media can be leveraged for social learning is a key skill for teachers, and teacher training programs are increasingly being expected to include this skill.
  
  
• Integration of Online, Hybrid, and Collaborative Learning
  Education paradigms are shifting to include more online learning, blended and hybrid learning, and collaborative models. Students already spend much of their free time on the Internet, learning and exchanging new information. Institutions that embrace face-to-face, online, and hybrid learning models have the potential to leverage the online skills learners have already developed independent of academia. Online learning environments can offer different affordances than physical campuses, including opportunities for increased collaboration while equipping students with stronger digital skills. Hybrid models, when designed and implemented successfully, enable students to travel to campus for some activities, while using the network for others, taking advantage of the best of both environments.

Mid-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education within three to five years

• Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment
  In online environments especially, students and professors are generating a large amount of learning-related data that could inform decisions and the learning process, but work remains on structuring appropriate policies to protect student privacy.
  
  
• Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators
  A shift is taking place in the focus of pedagogical practice on university campuses all over the world as students across a wide variety of disciplines are learning by making and creating rather than from the simple consumption of content. Creativity, as illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities, and crowdfunded projects in the past couple years, is increasingly the means for active, hands-on learning. University departments in areas that have not traditionally had lab or hands-on components are
  shifting to incorporate hands-on learning experiences as an integral part of the curriculum. Courses and degree plans across all disciplines at institutions are in the process of changing to reflect the importance of media creation, design, and entrepreneurship.

Long-Range Trends: Driving changes in higher education in five or more years

• Agile Approaches to Change
  There is a growing consensus among many higher education thought leaders that institutional leadership and curricula could benefit from agile startup models. Educators are working to develop new approaches and programs based on these models that stimulate top-down change and can be implemented across a broad range of institutional settings.
  
  
• Evolution of Online Learning
  Over the past several years, there has been a shift in the perception of online learning to the point where it is seen as a viable alternative to some forms of face-to-face learning. The value that online learning offers is now well understood, with flexibility, ease of access, and the integration of sophisticated multimedia and technologies chief among the list of appeals. Recent developments in business models are upping the ante of innovation in these digital environments, which are now widely considered to be ripe for new ideas, services, and products. While growing steadily, this trend is still a number of years away from its maximum impact. Progress in learning analytics, adaptive learning, and a combination of cutting-edge asynchronous and synchronous tools will continue to advance the state of online learning and keep it compelling, though many of these are still the
  subjects of experiments and research by online learning providers and higher education institutions.

Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.

The Open Education Week Organizing Committee invites your contributions to and participation in the third annual Open Education Week, featuring online and in-person events around the world.  

Ways to Contribute

There are many ways you can contribute to Open Education Week: upload an informational or inspirational video, host an event in your community, send us links to resources about open education, hold a webinar, and promote open education week in your social media networks. To contribute a video or resource, or to have your event or webinar featured on the Open Education Week Events calendar, please use the submission form at www.openeducationweek.org.  To get the website ready, we need your submissions by 28 February 2014. You are welcome to submit multiple resources or events.

Please visit www.openeducationweek.org for more information, ideas and FAQ, follow us on Twitter and Facebook @openeducationwk, or contact us at info@openeducationweek.org.

Help us spread the word and make this year's open education week a huge success!    

Earlier this week MIT and Harvard University announced the release of a series of working papers based on 17 online courses offered on the edX platform. The working paper series features detailed reports about individual courses; these reports reveal differences and commonalities among massive open online courses (MOOCs).

The papers analyze an average of 20 gigabytes of data per course and draw on interviews with faculty and course teams as well as student metrics.

Key Takeaways
Takeaway 1: Course completion rates, often seen as a bellwether for MOOCs, can be misleading and may at times be counterproductive indicators of the impact and potential of open online courses.

Takeaway 2: Most MOOC attrition happened after students first registered for a course. On average, 50 percent of people left within a week or two of enrolling. After that window, attrition rates decreased substantially. The average probability of a student ceasing to engage in the second week of the course declined to 16 percent.

Takeaway 3: Given the “massive” scale of some MOOCs, small percentages are often still large numbers of students — and signify a potentially large impact.

More information on their websites:

• http://odl.mit.edu/mitx-working-papers/
• http://harvardx.harvard.edu/harvardx-working-papers

Also interesting to read is the review of Tony Bates.

The guys from CETIS have written an interesting white paper on the next phase after MOOCs:

The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies.

According to the authors three key themes emerge from the MOOC experiment:

• Openness – new approaches to online learning, including models for scalable provision that may generate revenues, and promote open learning, which goes beyond institutional boundaries through the use of online communities. [Increasing impact & long term, likely for most institutions]
  
  
• Revenue models – different revenue models taking the established ideas from technology start-ups, such as applying the concepts of freemium and premium offers into online learning, providing institutions with new ways of thinking about marketing and income generation. [High impact & medium term, more likely for institutions looking for new revenue streams]
  
  
• Service Disaggregation – experimentation with business models that include unbundling and re-bundling of courses and delivery related services, such as offering paid for assessment and/or teaching and support, on top of free online course content. This may have a wider impact across institutions in the future through better deployment of existing resources to add value to customers where there is greatest benefit and to reduce costs through outsourcing (unbundling is already happening independently of MOOCs). [High impact & short term, likely for most institutions]

Institutions should consider exploring a set of opportunities that have been brought to the attention of mainstream education by MOOCs, and experiment with new approaches for developing technology-enabled changes in teaching and learning to improve opportunities for individual learners.

Download the white paper.

Last monday I attended a public hearing of the committee on Culture & Education of the European Parlement. The subject of the hearing was "New technologies and open educational resources". I was nominated as expert by the MEP Marietje Schaake of the ALDE group. There were three experts selected to present their intervention on the subject.

• Are European education institutions ready to welcome OER and ICT-related innovation?
  Presentation by Mr Claudio DONDI, Member of the advisory group to the Commission on Opening up Education, MENON, European network for research and innovation (summary)
• The future of education is online
  Presentation by Mr Willem VAN VALKENBURG, Coordinator of TU Delft Open Education Team, TU Delft
• Opening Up Education – Noble goals, important demands, effective measures? A critical assessment of the initiative and options for increasing acceptance and effectiveness in secondary education
  Presentation by Mr Harald MELCHER, Managing director at educational publisher m2more GmbH, Berlin (summary)

Here is the presentation that I used:

The complete hearing is also recorded and available online.

An important change I noticed is that the discussion on online education is less about why we should do this and more about how Europe can help. That is an interesting and good discussion. The new Erasmus+ programme is also more focused on this. In Erasmus+ the European Commission is specifically looking for impact of a project proposal.