E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

There is a growing need for online learning. Blended learning and online courses are becoming a norm for both campus and professional education. The role and tasks of the teacher are different online from teaching in physical classes. It requires additional qualities and digital skills to stimulate a conducive learning experience for students.

That is why my team has developed two courses for our teachers and we now decided to open these courses for an external audience.

Designing an Online Course

After taking the course, you will be able to:

• Describe online learning and the course development process.
• Design an online course module, using three of the principles of the TUD Online Learning Experience model and the course development process.
• Build a learning sequence for an online course in Open edX.
• Reflect on your role in online learning.

The course starts January 28th 2020 and costs € 300. More information and registration can be found on the online-learning website.

Teaching an Online Course

After taking the course, you will be able to:

• Describe moderation techniques and best practices.
• Produce an engaging artifact for an online course.
• Provide feedback in an online environment.
• Provide a list of online student expectations.
• Create a strategy for student engagement with both peers and content.

The course starts March 11th 2020 and costs € 300. More information and registration can be found on the online-learning website.

The 4TU Applied Mathematics Institute in the Netherlands is organising an interesting conference about mathematics education. The conference will take place on 11th and 12th April 2019 in Utrecht.

The conference will bring together Mathematicians and teachers of Mathematics in Higher Education to explore and discuss new trends and innovations in Mathematics education.

The conference focuses on:

• Learning Analytics (Thursday)
• Digital Testing of Mathematics (Thursday)
• Blended and Online Learning of Mathematics (Thursday)
• Didactics of Mathematics teaching (Friday)
• Programming in Mathematics education (Friday)

Registration
For registration to the conference, please fill in and submit the registration form before March 24.

Registration fee
Euro 25 including two lunches and one dinner.

For the EMBED project we like to validate a framework for blended education and learning. Therefor we want to ask the opinion of experts in the field of blended education and learning. This blogpost describes the research design and explains how you can participate in this research.

Introduction: The EMBED project

The European Maturity model for Blended EDucation (EMBED) is a strategic partnership between seven1 institutes of higher education in Europe. EMBED will create a reference model for developing and implementing blended learning, embracing all levels of an institution: the design of the blended course (micro level), organisational aspects such as staff support and training (meso level), and institutional leadership, developing policies and strategies making the institution continuously innovative (macro level). The maturity model is a model with criteria and instruments to assess the degree of maturity of blended learning and innovation.

This research

The aim of this research is to validate the maturity framework for blended education. We developed a draft maturity framework, based on an extensive literature research and dozens of interviews. The draft maturity framework consists of two levels; the micro-level (course and curriculum level) and the meso level (institution level). For each level we have identified dimensions to describe the level and indicators to measure the maturity. The next step is to validate the draft maturity framework with experts in blended learning (that would be you).
This validation will be done using a Delphi research. In a Delphi research we ask experts in the field of blended education their opinion about the draft framework. This will be done in two rounds. We will use the input from round 1 to adjust the framework for round 2.

Round 1 (will take place between 21 November 2018 and 12 December 2018)
In the first round you will validate the dimensions of the draft framework. We defined 7 dimensions on micro-level and 9 dimensions on meso-level. We’re asking if you agree with the dimensions and also to give reasoning why you agree, or not. This will be done using an online questionnaire, which will take about 30 till 60 minutes to complete. The questionnaire will be available from 21 November till 12 December.
After Round 1 we will refine the framework based on the input of the participants.

Round 2 (Will take place between 16 January 2019 and 6 February 2019)
In the second round we will present the revised list of dimensions. First we will ask you to rank the dimensions in order of importance. After the ranking we will present the indicators for maturity per dimension. We will ask you to what extent you agree with the indicators and why. In this round we will also use an online questionnaire and it will take about 60 minutes. The questionnaire will be available from 16 January 2019 till 6 Februari 2019.

What do we ask of you?

We ask the following of the participants in this research:

• You have any experience in the field of blended education, learning or teaching. This can be in a role as director, manager, teacher, educational advisor or something else.
• You can spend 60 minutes per round, to fill in the online questionnaire. Round 1 will be from 21 November 2018 till 12 December 2018. Round 2 will be from 16 January 2019 till 6 February 2019.

How can you participate?

If you like to participate with the research for the EMBED project, please enrol using this link:
https://delftxtudelft.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3fPI86ZZiG2D5kx

Next week the new academic year will start with a new Collaboration & Learning Environment Brightspace. This summer the teachers, supported by the migration team, have done a great job in migrating all the courses. More than a 1,000 courses have been migrated. Earlier this year we did a pilot at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE). Based on the pilot we made many improvements to our implementation. One of the teachers involved with the IDE pilot was Jasper van Kuijk, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Below is an interview with him about his first experiences.

‘In the course that I coordinate, we did a lot of things outside of Blackboard. So when Brightspace came along, we wanted to use it for everything that we could’, explains Jasper van Kuijk, Associate Professor at IDE. Last semester, he gained experience in Brightspace at IDE, which was the first faculty to start working with the learning environment. ‘There are a lot of intermediate deadlines in our course, so everything is now arranged via Brightspace’. Jasper points to student assignments as a good example of how the system helps. ‘An added benefit is that all assignments are submitted in Brightspace, so we can easily keep track of who has submitted what. It is all available per group in one place. And that means that your teaching material archive is also kept up to date, which is handy should the inspectors visit, for example’. As a pedigree industrial design engineer, Jasper also considers other crucial aspects, such as design. ‘The design of Brightspace is smoother, such as when drafting messages for students’.

However, he does see room for improvement: ‘The student environment is alright, except that students still do not receive a message when feedback is posted online’.  And what about for teachers? ‘I have seen that numerous coaches in my course without prior experience of Brightspace need a few goes to get the hang of it. I think this is down to the back-end of Brightspace, which if you ask me, sometimes lacks logic. It is very hip and modern, with large letters and lots of white. And it is very spacious; but as a teacher, you sometimes want a better overview’. Jasper admits that some issues are a case of habituation, from both sides: ‘Procedures regarding how something works in Brightspace are sometimes unclear – even after five months, I occasionally still make the same mistakes. Perhaps the amount of time it takes to set-up a system like this was a little underestimated. But I must say that the Brightspace support team take feedback from teachers very seriously and even contact the Brightspace supplier when necessary’.

Courses are being transferred to Brightspace in the run-up to each quarter this academic year. This year the basic configuration is being installed, so that everyone has time to get used to the system. In the next academic year, the focus will be on optimisation and improvement. Jasper’s tip for all teachers still to get started with Brightspace: leave plenty of time to get to know the system. ‘Start on time and explore what Brightspace has to offer – it has different functions to Blackboard. It is much easier to use films and new media, as well as to store assignments and offer your students structure – use this to your advantage. You will not master Brightspace in one day, there is a learning curve. Also give sufficient thought to how you set-up the student environment, to avoid it being different for each course’.

This interview was first published in TU News.

Today I attended an interesting session organised by 4TU Centre for Engineering Education. Kristina Edström and Jakob Kuttenkeuler of KTH Stockholm gave a keynote on "How can we simultaneously improve student learning and cost-effectiveness of teaching?"

In their presentation they focused on cost-neutral interventions. More hours of a teacher doesn't mean that student learning improves.

Everyone agreed that it is much harder to stop with activities than start new ones. There are many reason why it is hard to stop with certain activities:

One of the interesting things that were mentioned was the quote:

"When old model doesn't work, it's the student's fault, but if I try something new and it doesn't work, it's the teacher's fault"

In their presentation they had some really interesting tips and tricks to spend less time. Here two examples:

Less time correction exams
Teacher are spending a lot of time on making and correction exams. Jacob told that he switched to oral exams and that is saved him a lot of time. Benefit is that student prepare much better, so it is also better for their learning. The setup:

• Each exam is a half hour
• starts with 7 minutes in which the student has to show how he has reached the learning outcomes of the course. This gives students an easier start and gives the teacher enough information to continue the oral without needing to prepare questions in advance.
• use a simple scale: fail, good, excellent
• calculate what the maximum number of students is for which this saves you time. It probably is much higher than you think. In the calculations of Jakob he came to 95 students.
• Jakob plans the orals in a couple of weeks. This gives students some flexibility to plan it around their other exams. He uses a doodle to plan this.

No comments
When students have to write a paper, it costs a lot of time to give students feedback on their papers. In the their improved paper they usually only address the items the teacher has mentioned in his feedback. If you don't give individual feedback, but publish a list of most common errors, students will address all the items and their papers actually get much better. This saves you time.

Continue

I think this way of thinking can be really effective to improve learning and lowering the burden of the teacher. It is important that the teacher is open for it and accepts that the tips and tricks.

I'm hiring another eLearning developer to further expand our Course Development Team. An the right you see the rest of our Course Development Team:

As eLearning Developer you will be part of a team creating advanced eLearning modules that will be part of the new Delft Extension School. The Extension School delivers OpenCourseWare, MOOCs, blended and online education (bachelor and master level) to a worldwide audience. You will have considerable experience designing and developing online & blended education courses. In this role you will partner with the academic staff to create outstanding open and online courses. Your project management skills contribute to your success in this role as you will be responsible for managing multiple projects.

An important part of this job will that you will be responsible for promoting Open Education and the usage of Open Educational Resources by our faculty and staff. So I'm reaching out to the Open Education community to share this job opening to anyone who might be interested.

More information (and how to apply) can be found on this website. The deadline of applying is 28 november 2014. If you have any question, please send me a message via twitter, skype, email or via the form on this site.

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.

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

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.

Dit najaar is een groep van Nederlandse onderwijsbestuurders naar de VS geweest:

Tijdens de studiereis bezoekt de delegatie bestuurders uit het Nederlandse Hoger Onderwijs elf toonaangevende organisaties op het gebied van open education in Washington DC, Boston en New York.

Tijdens de reis is er elke dag een verslag gemaakt. Deze verslagen zijn nu gebundeld tot één document.

De conclusies van de studiereis zijn:

• Open en online onderwijs, in de vorm van MOOC’s of in andere varianten, is een onvermijdelijke ontwikkeling, waar, met name in de Verenigde Staten, met veel passie en veel middelen in wordt geïnvesteerd.
• Het open beschikbaar stellen van kennis is geen bedreiging, het biedt juist toegevoegde waarde en zorgt voor doorbraken. Redenen om te investeren in open en online onderwijs zijn reputatie en educatie:
• De kwaliteit van onderwijsmateriaal en de kwaliteit van docenten wordt zichtbaar;
• De instelling wordt zichtbaar als speler in de internationale online wereld;
• Dat kan talentvolle studenten en docenten aantrekken en nieuwe samenwerkingspartners in onderwijs, onderzoek en MKB en industrie opleveren;
• Doordat het onderwijsmateriaal in (internationale) dialoog kan worden (door)ontwikkeld kan de kwaliteit ervan verbeteren;
• Doordat er op basis van (big) data onderzoek kan worden gedaan naar de effectiviteit van verschillende onderwijsconcepten (learning analytics), kan de kwaliteit van het (campus)onderwijs verbeteren;
• Open en online onderwijs kan een belangrijke rol spelen in het kader van levenlang leren en internationalisering van het onderwijs.
• Nederland heeft een uitstekende uitgangspositie om in te zetten op open en online onderwijs:
• Het hoger onderwijs beschikt over een state of the art infrastructuur voor onderwijs en onderzoek;
• Het onderwijs in Nederland is al sterk internationaal georiënteerd en beschikt al over een breed Engelstalig onderwijsaanbod.
• Om deze uitgangspositie te benutten moeten instellingen serieus investeren in de ontwikkeling van online onderwijs.
• Het zou helpen als de overheid zich krachtig zou uitspreken voor open en online onderwijs, zorgt voor het wegnemen van barrières in wet en regelgeving, innovatie en onderzoek stimuleert en ruimte biedt voor experimenten.
• Open en online onderwijs biedt goede mogelijkheden voor kennisvalorisatie. Ook kan de zichtbaarheid van de kwaliteit van het Nederlands hoger onderwijs een belangrijke bijdrage leveren aan de positie van Nederland als kennisland. Aansluiten bij de topsectoren en samenwerking met het bedrijfsleven liggen daarbij voor de hand. Open en online onderwijs kan ook een programmatische rol spelen in ontwikkelingssamenwerking.
• De docent speelt een sleutelrol in deze ontwikkeling, en moet worden gefaciliteerd in:
• Professionalisering in succesvolle didactiek van online onderwijs;
• Samenwerking met (internationale) vakgenoten;
• Technische randvoorwaarden en voorzieningen.
• Didactiek van open en online onderwijs zou moeten worden opgenomen in de Basis- en Seniorkwalificaties Onderwijs en worden geïntegreerd in de lerarenopleidingen.
• Open en online onderwijs biedt mogelijkheden om effectief leren te ondersteunen met bijvoorbeeld:
• Onderwijs dat is opgedeeld in kleine segmenten met oefeningen;
• Vormgeven van mastery of learning, de student heeft de beschikking over voldoende oefenmateriaal en kan door naar een volgend niveau als hij de stof beheerst;
• Snelle feedback en peerfeedback;
• Gepersonaliseerde leerpaden;
• Learning communities
• De snelle ontwikkelingen vragen om actie, leren door te doen, waarbij belangrijke uitgangspunten zijn:
• Sluit aan bij de eigen onderwijsvisie en laat open en online onderwijs die versterken;
• Investeer in (gezamenlijke) analyse vanresultaten en succes.
• Samenwerking kan meerwaarde bieden bij het ontwikkelen en uitwisselen van kennis en het delen van praktijkervaringen zoals nu gebeurt binnen SURF, bij het aanpakken van vraagstukken over bijvoorbeeld het certificeren van open en online onderwijs en het erkennen van open en online onderwijs in het eigen curriculum, en bij het in samenwerkingsverbanden ontwikkelen van online onderwijs.
• Voor internationale kennisuitwisseling op open en online onderwijs biedt het OpenCourseware Consortium een uitstekend podium.
• Binnen ‘coalitions of the willing’ kunnen instellingen werken aan innovatieve manieren om online onderwijs vorm te geven.