E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Today, US Senators Durbin and Franken introduced the Affordable College Textbook Act for consideration by the US Senate. This act specifically supports the use of OER and open textbooks. From the press release:

Textbook costs are one of the most overlooked costs of going to college, but they can be substantial and can be a barrier to attaining a college education.  According to College Board, the average student budget for college books and supplies during the 2012-2013 academic year was $1,200.

“Students can’t afford to pay $250 for a single textbook. In fact, U.S. PIRG found that seven of ten current college students have skipped buying a textbook because it was too expensive. It’s clear that the current big-publisher system isn’t working for students, and needs to change,” said U.S. PIRG Higher Education Associate Ethan Senack.  “For students, the cost-saving potential of open textbooks is massive - around 80-100% compared to published textbooks. We thank Senators Durbin and Franken for championing this innovative solution to the high cost of textbooks.”

Specifically, the Affordable College Textbook Act:

• Creates a grant program to support pilot programs at colleges and universities to create and expand the use of open textbooks with priority for those programs that will achieve the highest savings for students;
• Ensures that any open textbooks or educational materials created using program funds will be freely and easily accessible to the public;
• Requires entities who receive funds to complete a report on the effectiveness of the program in achieving savings for students;
• Improves existing requirements for publishers to make all textbooks and other educational materials available for sale individually rather than as a bundle; and
• Requires the Government Accountability Office to report to Congress by 2017 with an update on the price trends of college textbooks.

Among the supoorting organisations are Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

This act is very good news. It brings very high level attention to OER.

John Robertson (aka kavubob) posted an interesting presentation about the use of someone else's MOOC in your course. He identifies four different models:

• The guest lecture
• The reading
• The textbook
• The distributed flip

Below is his presentation:

Other interesting studies about using MOOCs in the classroom:

• Rebecca Griffiths - MOOCs in the classroom?
• Wrapping a MOOC: Student Perceptions of an Experiment in Blended Learning

Aanstaande dinsdag en woensdag zijn de onderwijsdagen. Dit jaar is dinsdag gericht op het hoger onderwijs en woensdag op po, vo en mbo. Recent ging ik het programma bekijken en zag ik dat de TU Delft wel erg goed vertegenwoordigd bij de sessies. Totaal zijn er 9 sessies waarbij de TU Delft een van de sprekers levert. Dat is voor mij niet verbazend, want wij doen op dit moment veel leuke dingen, waar we graag over vertellen. Hier dus de lijst met Delftse sessies. Helaas staan er een heel aantal parallel geprogrammeerd, dus je kan ze niet allemaal volgen.

On the third day of the conference I had to do my own presentation. The title 'Pushing EdX to be Open' I submitted half a year ago, still did the job, the room was filled.

The slides of my presentation are below. As soon as the video is available I will embed the video as well.

NB. The picture of the first slide I haven taken on Tuesday morning in Bryce Canyon National Park.

Video recording

What did people say?

Here I have embedded some tweets about my presentation:

Been looking forward to @wfvanvalkenburg session since the schedule came out - Pushing EdX to be Open #opened13

— Rolin Moe (@RMoeJo) November 8, 2013

http://t.co/nE1sutBBIY They post OER, OA and Open Source software they develop. Hells yes, son, that's how you do it. #opened13

— Sarah Glassmeyer (@sglassmeyer) November 8, 2013

@wfvanvalkenburg disappointed that TU Delft is the only @creativecommons licensed MOOC in edX. Well, this is embarrassing. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

@cgreen says when negotiating for MOOC creation terms, hold the line and make #openlicensing a requirement. Like @wfvanvalkenburg. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

I'm pretty sure I just saw @wfvanvalkenburg after his prez drop the mic and walk off the stage. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

I saw the mic bounce RT @LBWicket: I'm pretty sure I just saw @wfvanvalkenburg after his prez drop the mic and walk off the stage. #opened13

— Richard Tibbles (@richardtibbles) November 8, 2013

This morning David Kernohan did an a-typical keynote. He started of that he couldn't do it and ran away. On the screen we saw him running and that was already part of his documentary. His documentary The Avalanche that Hasn’t Happened gives a critical evaluation of the testing/evaluation narrative in education.

Everyone who is involved with education should watch this video

Resources and citations for the video are available here.

The only critic to it is, that David should know that students don't watch videos that long ;-)

The first keynote of the OpenEd Conference this year was supposed to be delivered by Daphne Koller of Coursera. Because some reason I don't know, we ended up with the other founder of Coursera Andrew Ng via a skype connection. He did a presentation based on the standard slide deck many of us have heard before. Anya Kamenetz did a very good job in writing a report of the keynote. You should definitely check it out.

For me the most important part was that Coursera is not interested in Open Education. In his answer to a question of UNESCO chair Rory McGreal he made it sound that Coursera owns the content and not the universities.

I'm interested to hear what public universities will say about this. Within the Open Education family we have always said that publicly funded education/research should be available to the public. Coursera thinks differently about this.

I'm very glad that my university has decided to join EdX and not Coursera. Let's see what the Dutch Universities of Leiden, Amsterdam and Eindhoven have to say about this next week at the Onderwijsdagen.

At the OpenEd Conference Kathi Fletcher presented a new open-source editor for creating textbooks that are immediately available on the web, in epub format and pdf. This project is done with the OERPUB project.

With the development they kept as close to their principles as possible:

• as much like word/gdocs as possible
• support attribution
• born accessible (Images, tables, mathematics)
• Mathematics editing support
• drag and drop examples, exercises, notes
• Support collaboration

The presentation was really good and it certainly has attracted my attention. Let see if we can start a project at TU Delft with it.

More information in her slides:

The 10th annual OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference will be held in Europe. From April 23-25, 2014 Ljubljana in Slovenia is place to be.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium and the Knowledge for All Foundation are jointly organizing the event whose special theme is Open Education for a Multicultural World.

The 2014 conference will be organized around four tracks:

• Research and Technology. In this track, we expect to explore new technologies allowing scaling and sharing of Open Educational Resources in a faster or more economical way, to index the multimodal and multilingual material, or to navigate and remix available material. Researchers and developers are encouraged to present on-going research as well as running prototypes.
• Open Educational Policies in which policy issues and their impact on open educational practice will be discussed. Licensing issues, alternative business models, cooperative efforts and governmental funding can all be discussed in this track. The focus of such sessions should be on lessons learned rather than a recounting of steps taken.
• Pedagogical Impact will allow users to present novel uses of Open Educational Resources and their impact on education. We welcome analysis of the impact of Open Educational Resources on the learning process itself, as well as deployment of OERs in MOOCs, flipped classrooms, hybrid educational approaches and online education.
• Finally, a project dissemination track will allow actors (teams, projects, companies) currently involved in open education projects in Europe to present the results of their work.

The call for papers is out and you have until December 1st to submit a paper.

The conference will also be the place where we will officially launch the European branch of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

Phil Hill has written an interesting post about student patterns in MOOCs. I have written about this earlier this year. But Phil continued with this research and it is getting more interesting. Below the main figure:

He identified 5 different types of users. Earlier he used 4 types:

1. ‘No-Shows’: appear to be the largest group of those registering for an open-enrollment MOOC, where people register but never login to the course while it is active.
2. ‘Completing’: learners who completed the majority of the assessments offered in the class. Though these participants varied in how well they performed on the assessment, they all at least attempted the assignments. This engagement pattern is most similar to a student in a traditional class. ‘Passive’ participants are students who might watch videos, take quizzes, read discuss forums, but generally do not engage with the assignments and post in discussion forums. ‘Active’ participants are the students who participate in the majority of assignments and post in discussion forums.
3. ‘Auditing’: learners who did assessments infrequently if at all and engaged instead by watching video lectures. Students in this cluster followed the course for the majority of its duration. No students in this cluster obtained course credit.
4. ‘Disengaging’: learners who did assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement (their engagement patterns look like Completing at the beginning of the course but then the student either disappears from the course entirely or sparsely watches video lectures). The moments at which the learners disengage differ, but it is generally in the first third of the class. A subcategory includes ‘Drop Outs’ who cease all course activity.
5. ‘Sampling’: learners who watched video lectures for only one or two assessment periods (generally learners in this category watch just a single video). Though many learners “sample” at the beginning of the course, there are many others that briefly explore the material when the class is already fully under way.

The registration has started for two new DelftX courses that start in March and April of 2014.

Introduction to Aeronautical Engineering

The first course is Introduction to Aeronautical Engineering:

Discover the fascinating world of aviation by investigating aeronautics, with a closer look at aerodynamics and flight mechanics.

The introduction video gives a good impression about the course:

Next Generation Infrastructures - part 1

The second course is Next Generation Infrastructures:

Explore the complexity and challenges of infrastructure systems (Transport, Energy, IT/Telecom and Water) in the 21st century.

This course is part one. In this course we will explore the challenges of infrastructure design, management and governance for the future. In September part 2 will start. There we will focus more on each infrastructure specifically.

Both courses have already started with the development and certainly will be very interesting for a large audience. So register today at EdX.org.