E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Yesterday at the Dies Natalis of the university, the president of TU Delft announced that we will be offering MOOCs this year and that we will announce the platform this next couple of weeks (see recording in Dutch after 1:49:40).

The start of MOOCs is the next step the university is making in the field of Open Education. In 2007 we launched our OpenCourseWare website, now we have more than 100 courses online. Last year we announced that we will start with offering of 3 online masters (Aerospace Engineering, Watermanagement and Engineering & Policy Analysis).  The MOOCs fill in the gap between our OpenCourseWare and our online masters.

Our executive board has decided that we will offer at least 3 MOOCs this year. They have assigned me as project manager. This will be an exiting and very busy journey.

The big question is which platform we will use. I can tell you that is one of the platforms I mention in this blogpost. ;-)

Gisteren staat er in de Volkskrant een artikel over hoogleraar Jan Derksen die zegt dat hoorcolleges uit de tijd zijn en dat universiteiten zouden moeten 'fuseren met het internet':

"Studenten worden steeds meer gepamperd met 'competentiegericht onderwijs' en 'leerdoelen'. Zelf noemen ze dit kleuterbouwwerk al 'school'. En gelijk hebben ze, want de universiteit is veel te schools geworden..."

"Geef studenten de vrijheid om hun eigen interesses na te jagen. Colleges kunnen het internet op. Toetsen kunnen ook online worden afgenomen. Leuke bijkomstigheid is dat er flink kan worden bezuinigd op managers en gebouwen."

"Natuurlijk, als je stopt met pamperen vallen er heel veel studenten af. Maar dat is helemaal niet erg, er zijn er toch veel te veel. Als studenten langer willen studeren is dat prima, maar dan wel op eigen kosten."

".. ik vrees de kooi waarin zelfs de beste honoursstudenten als baby's worden behandeld. Nu moeten ze zich aan alle eisen houden die van bovenaf zijn verordonneerd. Hun nieuwsgierigheid wordt aan banden gelegd. Dat heeft niets met wetenschappelijke vooruitgang te maken. Natuurlijk, de hoogleraar zal altijd een gids blijven. Professoren zouden sowieso meer op didactische kwaliteiten moeten worden geselecteerd. Dat gebeurt nu veel te weinig."

Ik ben het eens met deze hoogleraar en mijn reactie stond vanochtend in de Volkskrant (alleen toegankelijk met account). Screenshot van mijn reactie staat hier rechts. De meeste colleges zijn de afgelopen jaren weinig veranderd. Ze gaan nog sterk uit van het feit dat de universiteit het 'monopolie' heeft op kennis en informatie. Dit is in de 21ste eeuw zeker niet meer het geval. Vrijwel alles is tegenwoordig op internet te vinden. Ook fantastisch onderwijsmateriaal, zoals Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, TED ED, YouTube EDU en natuurlijk TU Delft OpenCourseWare.

Docenten zouden hun colleges meer op interactie, discussie, en reflectie moeten richten en minder op kennisoverdracht.

Er zal altijd ruimte blijven voor inspirerende docenten. Uit mijn eigen studententijd kan ik me natuurlijk de colleges van De Bruijn en Ten Heuvelhof nog goed herinneren of de colleges van Wim Dik. Dit zijn echter de uitzonderingen, de meeste colleges weet ik echt niks meer van.

Zoals Jeroen Jansen en Pedro de Bruyckere ook schrijven heeft het onderwijs behoefte aan goede docenten, die op zoek blijven gaan naar manieren om hun studenten te inspireren en te motiveren. Hierbij gebruik makend van de mogelijkheden die beschikbaar zijn, zowel online als offline.

Ook in de online wereld, geldt de regel "a good teacher is a good teacher with any tool".

Aanvulling 4 januari:
Vandaag staat er in de Volkskrant ook een reactie van een student en die sluit volgens mij uitstekend aan bij mijn blog. Studente Eva van Gemert schrijft dat als hoorcolleges geen waarde toevoegen aan de opgegeven leerstof, dan kunnen ze beter worden afgeschaft.

Een hoorcollege moet inspireren en motiveren, zoals TU Delft-professor Witteveen ook schrijft in een column (pag 5) in MACHAZINE (blad van de studievereniging Christiaan Huygens). Zijn argument dat het geven van hoorcolleges leuk is gaat volgens mij lang niet voor alle docenten op. Als student merk je dit trouwens wel meteen!

Daar zit precies ook de crux. Er zijn zeker hoorcolleges die waarde toevoegen, maar er zijn ook veel die dat niet doen. Het gaat hier ook niet om een keuze voor één van beiden, maar om de juiste mix van online en offline.

The OERTest project has released its final results in the form a publication, entitled “Open Learning Recognition: Taking Open Educational Resources a Step Further”. The book is the result of two years of research by 8 European partners, and provides the reader with the foundation for the development of envisaged framework, organised into the four topics:

• assessment methods;
• requirements and standards of resources;
• credentialisation,
• certification and recognition; 
• inter-institutional collaboration.

CETIS has written nine papers about Learning Analytics. The CETIS Analytics Series explores a number of key issues around the potential strategic advantages and insights which the increased attention on, and use of, analytics is bringing to the education sector. Funded by Jisc, it is aimed primarily at managers and early adopters in Further and Higher Education who have a strategic role in developing the use of analytics in the following areas:

• Whole Institutional Issues
• Ethical and Legal Issues
• Learning and Teaching
• Research Management
• Technology and Infrastructure

The titles of the papers are:

• Analytics; what is changing and why does it matter?
• Analytics for the whole institution
• Analytics for Learning and Teaching
• Legal, Risk and Ethical Aspects of Analytics in Higher Education
• What is Analytics? Definition and Essential Characteristics
• Analytics for Understanding Research
• A Framework of Characteristics for Analytics
• Institutional Readiness for Analytics
• A Brief History of Analytics

Read the papers here.

Via: Surfspace

Image is CC-BY Frankwatching

This is the 100th blogpost that I publish on this blog in 2012. In this blog an overview of the most populair posts and other statistics. The image above is a wordle of all the titles I published this year.

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Voor het TU Delft OpenCourseWare-project was 2012 een succesvol jaar. We hadden onszelf 3 speerpunten gekozen en daarbij 6 doelstellingen gesteld:

1. Marketing
• het gemiddeld aantal dagelijkse bezoekers per kwartaal verhogen van 450 naar 600.
• het aantal volgers op Facebook vergroten. We begonnen het jaar op 173 volgers.
• bekendheid onder onze eigen studenten vergroten
2. Open en Online Education
• uitrollen van OpenStudy
• actieve rol in Online Masters
3. Aanbod
• 30 nieuwe cursussen publiceren.

Al deze doelstellingen hebben we dit jaar gehaald.

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This infographic takes a look at what happened in social media in 2012, from The SEO Company.

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In 2011 Blackboard launched Coursesites. This platform is free for teachers to create course and offer them to students. The CourseSites platform is based on the full Blackboard Learn platform including Collaborate and Mobile Learn. They are running the newest version (SP10), so it is also a good way to get to know the new version.

From the beginning Blackboard showed in this platform their commitment to support standards and to be more open. This year they also started to promote the platform for MOOCs. In this video they show what they offer:

If you are not familiar with Blackboard Learn, this video gives a good overview of the newest features in 9.1.SP10:

Audrey Watters is one of the rare Educational Technology (Ed-Tech) journalists and she is really good at it (support her). This month she is doing a serie about the top Ed-Tech trends of 2012. She has publiced 10 really great articles which everyone in education should read:

• The Business of Ed-Tech
  It's been a major story this year: broken educational institutions under seige by Silicon Valley.
  
  
• The Maker Movement
  The Maker Movement reflects the technological, political, and economic zeitgeist: the need for a technologically skilled work force, hope for a revival of American manufacturing, concern about STEM education all the while cutting many of the programs in schools that foster these skills to make more room for more standardized testing.
  
  
• Learning to Code
  It was sheer marketing genius: the announcement on January 1 by the learn-to-program startup Codecademy that 2012 should be “Code Year.”
  
  
• The Flipped Classroom
  “Flipping the classroom” is hardly new. But with all the hype surrounding both Khan Academy and MOOCs, it’s hardly surprising that the practice became incredibly popular this year.
  
  
• MOOCs
  Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs. This was, without a doubt, the most important and talked-about trend in education technology this year.
  
  
• The Battle to Open Textbooks
  The most exciting change in digital textbooks comes with efforts like these hackathons, where teachers and learners are the creators not just the consumers of OER.
  
  
• Education Data and Learning Analytics
  She wrote about “data” as one of the top trends of 2011, noting at the time that this often meant simply “quantitative data” — or more accurately even, standardized test results. There was certainly plenty of interest in (and handwringing about) testing this year, and perhaps the political and financial pressures from that continue to spur this trend. Certainly there were a number of ed-tech companies that offered data “solutions” and learning analytics. But who uses these tools? Who benefits? And who owns the data?
  
  
• The Platforming of Education
  There seems to be an interesting tension here with education platforms and the “unbundling of education.” We have heard a lot this year about “unbundling”: that many the services once offered by schools — content delivery, assessment, credentialing, research, mentorship, affiliation and networking, job placement — will no longer be monopolized by them.
  
  
• Automation and Artificial Intelligence
  Why would we want to automate it? Why, for the sake of efficiency, of course. We have to scale. Process more students. We have to assess more content. Write more. Grade more. Test more. Cut costs. Etc.
  
  
• The Politics of Ed-Tech
  Education is political — inherently so and despite the protestations from some quarters when what happens in our schools, in our textbooks, in our brains “becomes politicized.” Education is political not simply because of the governmental role — federal, state, local — in school funding and policies. It is political because of the polis — the connections between education and community. Education is political because learning is at once personal (and, of course, “the personal is political”) and social; it is both private and public.

At the Online Educa Berlin I got a preview of the new Blackboard product xpLor. xpLor is a Learning Object Repository in the cloud which is fully integrated in Blackboard Learn, but also in Moodle and Sakai:

Over the past 15 years the Learning Management System has transformed education enabling you to create rich interactive learning materials, effective online assessments, and interactive discussion.
But the LMS can build walls between educators, making it difficult to share content they create or use content other have shared.
XpLor implements modern software standards and removes the restrictions of LMS-based software allowing you to use the same learning materials in various LMS environments wint unprecendented ease.

Blackboard has now made an infographics to explain what xpLor is supposed to do.

The impression I got from the demo is that it is something that can really help the OER movement. It makes it much easier for instructors to share and re-use open content. Especially because they are not only integrating it with Blackboard, but also with Moodle and Sakai.