E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The theme of the 2014 Conference of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is "Open Education for a Multicultural World". The conference will explore the international dimensions of open education, its diverse projects, new research, policy dimensions and impacts on teaching and learning.

The conference will take place in scenic Ljubljana, Slovenia from 23-25 April 2014. Early registration has started today.

I would also like the recommend the pre-workshop Getting started with Open Education: Everything you need to know to begin open education projects at your institution. The workshop is organised by the team of OpenCourseWare Europe:

This one-day interactive workshop will introduce you to principles, tools and techniques that will allow you to get started with open education at your institution or organization.  Participants will gain practical knowledge of the benefits and potential pitfalls in starting projects, convincing faculty and administrators, and integrating open education into institutional practice through examples from institutions around the world.

The first two MOOCs of DelftX are about to finish. This is a good moment to publish our MOOC Journeys we have created in the past months to help teachers and course designers with the development of their moocs.

Last monday my 'bosses' Anka Mulder and Timo Kos have presented this journey as a poster presentation at the EdX Consortium meeting in Boston.

The journey is based on the processes of DelftX. We call this a "talking picture". You can download the image here as PDF. Off course the image is CC-licensed. If you have any remarks, please comment below.

The graphics are all created by Mark van Huystee.

Li Yuan and Stephen Powell from JISC CETIS have written an interesting white paper on MOOCs and Open Education. The goal of the authors is to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of MOOCs and trends towards greater openness and the implications for their institutions.

Although the paper is focused on UK institutions this is als for others an interesting read. They raise a lot of interesting questions, issues and challenges.

I fully support their conclusions:

Open education brings new opportunities for innovation in higher education that will allow institutions and academics to explore new online learning models and innovative practices in teaching and learning. At a national and international level, new frameworks for HE funding structures, quality insurance and accreditation to support different approaches and models for delivering higher education will be required. Policy makers will need to embrace openness and make education more affordable and accessible for all and at the same time be profitable for the institutions in an open higher education ecosystem.

Via: Wilfred Rubens (in Dutch)

The Chronicle has published the result of an survey among professor who have taught a mooc. They invited 184 professors and 104 reacted to the invitation. Although the findings are not scientific. They say "the most enthusiastic of the MOOC professors were the likeliest complete the survey". Below are the most important findings of the survey:

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Last week Phil Hill wrote a blog post about four types of students in MOOCs. He identified four types:

• Lurkers – This is the majority of students within xMOOCs, where people enroll but just observe or sample a few items at the most. Many of these students do not even get beyond registering for the MOOC or maybe watching part of a video.
• Passive Participants – These are students who most closely align with traditional education students, viewing a course as content to consume. These students typically watch videos, perhaps take quizzes, but tend to not participate in activities or class discussions.
• Active Participants – These are the students who fully intend to participate in the MOOC, including consuming content, taking quizzes and exams, taking part in activities such as writing assignments and peer grading, and actively participate in discussions via discussion forums, blogs, twitter, Google+, or other forms of social media.
• Drop-Ins – These are students who become partially or fully active participants for a select topic within the course, but do not attempt to complete the entire course.

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Net zoals vorig jaar organiseren Surf, OpenUniversiteit en de TU Delft weer een groot evenement tijdens de internationale Open Education Week. Het evenement vind plaats op woensdag 13 maart in het Geldmuseum in Utrecht. Het programma bestaat dit jaar o.a. uit:

• presentatie van Matthijs Leendertse over onderwijstrends
• presentatie over het trendrapport OER 2013 (versie 2012 staat hier)
• presentatie over Open en Online Onderwijs door Anka Mulder (TU Delft)
• presentatie over de ontwikkeling in Europa door Fred Mulder (OU)
• Videoboodschap van Europees Parlementslid Marietje Schaake
• Presentatie over de impact van de Paris OER Declaration door UNESCO
• en het grote studenten OER-debat

Ik ben zeer tevreden over het interessante programma dat we weer hebben kunnen samenstellen en dat door de dagvoorzitter Paul Rullmann aan elkaar gepraat zal worden.

Aanmelden is natuurlijk gratis en gaat via de Surf-website. Hier vind je ook het volledige programma.

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:

Chrome is op dit moment duidelijk de favoriete browser van de gebruikers van de TU Delft blackboard-omgeving met bijna de helft van de bezoeken. En dat is wel opvallend want de standaard TU-omgeving is niet voorzien van Chrome. Daar staan alleen Internet Explorer en Firefox op.

De dalende trend van IE blijft doorgaan en dat is natuurlijk goed met de recente bug.

Hieronder het overzicht.

De afgelopen jaren zijn er vele overnames geweest van LMS-systemen waardoor er een consolidatie is ontstaan. Het grote voorbeeld hiervan is Blackboard met de overnames van Angel Learning en WebCT. Phill Hill heeft het overzicht van de ontwikkelingen gemaakt.

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The next three days I will be present at the 2012 World Congress on Open Educational Resources at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. With my European project about OpenCourseWare in Europe I have a stand at the exhibition.

UNESCO has made a press release about the conference with mentions TU Delft's courses on water. Go check them out!

Below is the poster I have made for the conference, click on it to view it full screen. You can also download the poster in PDF.

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