E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

On November 6th at the Dutch education days, SURF presented their trendreport. Since last week the report is also available in English. This trendreport focus on customised education.
SURF invited 44 Dutch experts, including three experts of TU Delft, to contribute to this report. This trend report describes 13 technological trends that may affect the content and design of education.

Thirteen trends

The trends:

• Virtual Reality
• Serious Gaming
• Gamification
• Internet of Things
• Virtual Classroom
• Student as owner of their own identity
• Digital Badges and micro-credentials
• From Open Content via Open Pedagogy to Open Education
• Personalised learning environment for cross-institutional study
• Adaptive learning environment for agile education
• Learning Analytics
• Digital Assessment and Learning Analytics
• Artifical Intelligence

Three Themes

The thirteen trends were grouped in three themes:

Didactic enrichment

Firstly, a number of trends lead to the enrichment of teaching and learning. Thanks to the sensory experience it provides, virtual reality can, for example, facilitate interactive learning in authentic learning situations. The same applies to the use of serious games. Gamification offers opportunities for providing feedback and encouraging self-management in that students can earn badges that act as milestones. Digital assessment allows students to obtain feedback immediately and gives them a better idea of their progress. The virtual classroom also enhances inter-active and collaborative learning without students and lecturers having to be physically present in a single location. Although many lecturers still regard a virtual classroom session as ‘nothing to do with them’, this learning technology, in conjunction with digital assessment, probably comes closest to the way we are used to learning within our education system. Rather than a drastic change, then, it is an improvement.
All in all, these technological trends are able to support key principles of effective education.
It is clear, however, that the quality of some technologies needs to be improved if they are to actually make education more effective and more attractive. For example, there is rather a large amount of variation in the quality of technology available for virtual classrooms. Meanwhile, VR applications that use ‘cardboard’ currently offer limited opportunities for interaction.

Organising flexibility

Secondly, we see the incorporation of flexibility in education, which ‘blurs boundaries’. Students are increasingly studying different programmes within the same institution, at different institutions (both within the Netherlands and abroad) and outside the traditional higher education system. They can follow programmes that incorporate open pedagogy and courses that are rewarded with microcredentials (such as massive open online courses). Micro-credentials and digital badges allow students to utilise the knowledge and skills they have acquired in different contexts. These technologies demonstrate that students have also developed their skills beyond the traditional education system. Students undergo a wide range of online and offline learning activities to develop an online education identity – in effect a personalised education number that they can use throughout their lives. The educational institution’s monopoly over the awarding of qualifications is definitely a thing of the past.

Adaptive learning

Thirdly, a number of technologies enable adaptive learning. This includes both highly advanced applications that could play a key role in the long term and technologies that enable a certain amount of ‘adaptivity’ in the short term. Artificial intelligence is an example of an advanced application. Here, students follow personalised learning paths based on the digital traces they leave in online learning environments. One example of a simpler application is digital assessment combined with learning analytics. Another example is the personalised learning environment that gives individual students access to the applications they use for learning purposes.

Download the report here. The report is published with an open license.

Since 2013 I'm member of the Board of Directors of the Open Education Consortium. The consortium is a global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation and collective development and use of open educational materials. The Open Education Consortium is a non-profit, social benefit organization registered in the United States and operating worldwide.

The board

The Board of Directors of the Open Education Consortium is composed of elected representatives from member institutions.  The Board of Directors provides strategic direction and fiscal oversight to the organization. Board members are elected for a term of 2 years with the possibility to get reelected once.

Profile of a board member

A typical board member is leader in open education in his/her institute and region. They are part of the leadership or management of the university or department (provost, dean, rector, etc). Off course you should have sufficient time available for the board membership and have the support of your organisation to cover the travel expensises. There are two online board meeting and two meetings in person per year and you are expected to attend all four.

Responsibility

Primary responsibilities of the Board of Directors include:

• Determine and refine the OEC’s mission and purpose
• Lead strategic planning and monitoring to ensure activities are in support of the OEC’s mission
• Ensure adequate financial resources and retention of assets
• Identify, support and evaluate the OEC’s Executive Director
• Monitor the ethical and legal integrity of the organization
• Orient and support new board members, build board capacity and set board policies
• Promote the OEC and its mission
• Board members will serve as liaisons with various standing committees and work groups, and will represent the Consortium at various meetings and/or events.

Interested?

New board member are officially elected at our global conference in the spring, next one in March 2017 in Cape Town. The elections are in the two months before the conference, so we are currently open for nominations. If you are interested in running for the board, please contact our Executive Director Mary Lou Forward or me.

Do you want to nominate your self or someone else, please go to our website. (deadline January 17, 2017 12:00 UCT)

Two weeks ago the OE Global Conference in Krakow I got re-elected by the members of the consortium. It is a honour to serve on the board of directors. Next to me Sophie Touzé got also re-elected. We also welcomed four new board members:

• Papa Youga Dieng, Organisation internationale de la Francophonie
• Barbara Illowsky, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
• Allyn Radford, Corporate member
• Naoko Tosa, Japan OCW Consortium

With the new board members it shows the international aspect of our board. We have board members from all over the world. Since the start of the consortium this has always been the case. Last year we formalised this in the by-laws:

The Consortium desires a strong, internationally diverse board of directors. Election results may be weighted to ensure representation from different regions of the world. In this case, the weighting of results shall be set by the nominating committee and disclosed to members in advance. 
Source: OEC By-laws

The Open Education Consortium has more than 250 members from 45 countries (At the conference we had participants from 38 countries):

I can recommend any organisation (not only universities) that supports open education to join the consortium. The fees are moderate and you join the global network of educational institutions, individuals and organizations that support an approach to education based on openness, including collaboration, innovation and collective development and use of open educational materials. The activities we do:

• Awareness raising
• Networking and community development
• Advocacy and advising
• Capacity building and training
• Implementation support
• Consultancies

Want to join? You can contact me or one of the other board members of contact the OEC staff.

As part of the Opening Up Europe intiative the European Commission has started a project OpenEdu at their own research centre IPTS in Seville. At #OEGlobal Andreia Inamorato dos Santos gave an insightful presentation about the results of the project. Many of the reports will be published this year.

Defining Open Education

Andreia started with defining Open Education. The definition they adopted is focusing on removing barriers:

This definition is a very broad one, but I think it has the right focus:

• not only digital technologies, although that is the most common form.
• learning not only accessible, but also ambundant and customisable
• not only formal, but also non-formal education and bridiging this

Framework

An important part of the project is the OpenEdu Framework. This framework should support higher education institutions to adopt and implement Open Education. The framework is build on 6 core dimensions and 4 transversal dimensions. For each dimension of open education, the framework brings a definition, a rationale and components with descriptors.

• 6 Core: access, content, pedagogy, recognition, collaboration, research
• 4 transversal: strategy, leadership, technology, quality

The dimensions seem logical and usually that is a good thing. I'm looking forward to the publication of the full report.

For the maturity of Open Education it is important that we get more solid research evidence about the open education and its value for policy maker, instructors, and students. In my previous blog I already mentioned the Open Educuation Group, another group of researchers that is doing some great work is the OER Hub of the Open University. At the OEGlobal conference I attended a session of the this group about the Open Research Agenda.

This activity is focused on forming a better understanding of research needs in open education. To do this, they published a survey (please submit!) and did sessions at #OEGlobal and #OER16 to collect information about research priorities. The results will be shared in the form of a report.

The researchers of OER Hub will not do all the research questions that will be mentioned in the report. Any researcher can work on the items in the agenda. The more the better I would say!

On the last day of the OEGlobal Conference Martijn Ouwehand and I gave a workshop on Open Course Design. This workshop is designed for teachers to help them create a course design in which they use OER.

Normally the target audience are teachers that are OER novice but are interested in help with their course design. So the workshop also introduces them in Open Education.
Below are the slides we used during the workshop. This workshop will be part of the offerings of our training programme for instructors.

An often heard comment is that OpenTextBooks can't be as good as commercial textbooks. At the OE Global Conference John Hilton III presented the result of synthesis of Sixteen OER Studies. John is working for the Open Education Group. The Open Education Group is an interdisciplinary research group that conducts original, rigorous empirical research on the impact of OER adoption on a range of educational outcomes and designs and shares methodological and conceptual frameworks for studying the impact of OER adoption.

His presentation is based on an article that is published in the journal Educational Technology Researcy and Development. The conclusion of the article is very clear:

The collective results of the 16 studies discussed in this article provide timely information given the vast amount of money spent on traditional textbooks. Because students and faculty members generally find that OER are comparable in quality to traditional learning resources, and that the use of OER does not appear to negatively influence student learning, one must question the value of traditional textbooks.

So if OpenTextBooks don't have a negative impact on the learning outcomes, the argument to use them becomes much stronger. OpenTextBooks saves students a lot of money and that is positive in times that education becomes more and more expensive for students.

On Wednesday 13th of April,  I attended a #OEGlobal session in which MIT and OpenUniversity presented their results of many years of Open Education. The general feeling I had over these two presentation was that Open University has a very clear strategy and MIT is just bopping around. I know that this is not true for MIT OpenCourseWare, but it certainly is the impression I got about MITx.

15 years vs 3 years

In 15 years MIT OpenCourseWare has accomplished a lot. They reached 203M people around the world. There production proces and IP handling is very professional and made sure that they have published over 3000 courses.
The contrast with MITx can’t be any bigger. They have produced 83 unique MOOCs, but I didn’t get the impression that there is a standardised proces and the process definitely is different from MIT OCW. I really don’t understand why MITx hasn’t used more of the expertise of their OCW team. It seems that they are reinventing the wheel while their colleagues next door, already know the answer.

In their presentation Joseph Pickett and Dana Doyle stated that OCW and MITx are very separate from the start:

• Different buildings
• No clear communication as to who is doing what
• Both groups extremely busy producing course sites and online courses

Since 2015 the teams have been working more closely together, they state "MITx is still a young organization seeking to find an optimum path in a changing environment".

Ten years of open practice: a reflection on the impact of OpenLearn

The presentation of Patrina Law was so different from MIT. The strategy and activities of OpenLearn are very organised. Their strategy in engaging learners seems very logical:

I especially liked the slide with the guiding principles for all their courses:

• Learners most value quizzes with feedback
• Use of activities and video also highly rated
• Select the most engaging content within a module
• Make a key topic accessible to new learners
• Ensure the course works as a stand-alone piece of learning
Learners

value recognition for their achievement

(statement of participation)

Their project of Badged Open Courses is a very good example of their activities:

The Badged Open Courses project returned the investment in 4 months via extra enrolments (26% clickthrough rate):

• 2500+ badges issued
• The BOCs are generating around 12,000 new visitors a month to OpenLearn
• They drive a very high proportion of learners to click-through to make an enquiry to the OU (26.2% Feb-Nov 2015)
• Completion rates of BOCs are higher than our MOOCs
• 350 formal module registrations have been made (mostly entry level)
• 2,500 prospectus requests
• >300 qualification sign-ups (mostly new students)
• Satisfaction rates very high (~98%)
• 57% say that they will be sharing their achievements with an employer

Altogether it showed me that if you have a clear strategy and align all your projects towards this strategy a vialable business model is open education projects.

This week I'm attending the Open Education Global Conference in Krakow. This is the yearly conference of the Open Education Consortium of which I'm member of the Board of Directors (and just got re-elected for 2 years).

On the first day I presented about the impact of 30 DelftX MOOCs. In general I can say that the impact of our MOOCs is much higher than we anticipated when we started in 2013. In my presentation I discuss 6 impacts:

1. Educating the world
2. Increasing TU Delft’s international Reputation
3. Improving campus education
4. New relations between education and research
5. Collaboration with industry
6. The whole TU Delft organization

Currently we are writing the evaluation report, so later I will publish more about these impact. For now, you can take a look at my slides:

Last week it was Open Education Week. Many people world wide participated in local and online events during the week. We hope it inspired you for Open Education. Next month is the Open Education Global Conference were you learn more about Open Education and join the global movement in Open Education.

The Open Education Global Conference is the annual opportunity for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and educators to deeply explore open education and its impact on global education.

Conference participants learn from thought leaders in open education and have the opportunity to share ideas, practices and discuss issues important to the future of education worldwide. Sessions cover new developments in open education, research results, innovative technology, policy development and implementation, and practical solutions to challenges facing education around the world. The Open Education Global Conference 2016 will take place in Kraków, Poland from the 12th to 14th of April 2016. The theme of the Open Education Global Conference 2016 is Convergence Through Collaboration.

TU Delft's Vice President Education and former President of the consortium Anka Mulder will be one of the keynote speakers. Martijn Ouwehand and me we also attend the conference and we will participate in a couple of sessions. I hope to see you there!