E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Gisteren was het evenement dat ik samen met Hester Jelgerhuis (SURF) en Robert Schuwer (OU NL) heb georganiseerd in het kader van de Open Education Week.

Het hele evenement werd live gestreamd. Deze video's staan nu ook online. Op het youtube-kanaal van SURF zijn deze allemaal terug te zien. Ook is er een foto-serie van het evenement.

Trendrapport
Belangrijk onderdeel van het programma was de presentatie van het Trendrapport 2013. We kregen ervoor veel positieve reacties. Grote dank gaat uit naar Hester, Ria Jacobi en Nicolai van der Woert voor de redactie.

OER Studentendebat
Het laatste onderdeel van de dag was het OER studentendebat. Helaas viel het aantal aanwezige studenten tegen (TU-studenten lieten het ook afweten), daardoor hebben we discussie gedaan met de hele zaal in een Lagerhuis opstelling. Het debat werd geleid door de Utrecht Debating Society. Het debat kwam wat moeizaam op gang, maar uiteindelijk vond ik dit wel een zeer geslaagd onderdeel van het programma.

Yesterday the OER Trend Report 2013 of the Dutch special interest group for Open Educational Resources has been published:

The Trend Report: Open Educational Resources 2013 describes trends in open educational resources (OER) and open education in the Netherlands and elsewhere, from the perspective of Dutch higher education.

It comprises fifteen articles by Dutch experts in the field of open and online education. It also includes 15 short  ?Intermezzos? giving high-profile examples. The report is published by the Open Educational Resources Special Interest Group (SIG OER) supported by SURF.

The report is available in Dutch and English. The Dutch version is also available as online book and iOS app.

Tomorrow during the Open Education Event in Utrecht there will be a market where most of the authors will present their chapter and are available for questions. I will be there for questions about MOOCs.

Last monday MIT and Harvard organised an seminar on MOOCs. The official title was "Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education". Anka attended the conference on behave of the TU Delft. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was one of the speakers at the seminar and has written an very good article about the seminar:

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.

The column is an interesting read. I especially lik the last sentence:

When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.

On List EdTech there is an interesting post about the different universities that joined Coursera, EdX, Coursera and FutureLearn. Some interesting information I got from the article:

• Coursera has universities from 17 countries, EdX from 5 and FutureLearn from 1 (UK).
• The average ranking on Times higher Education list is almost equal between Coursera (77) and EdX (80.2). The differences on the other rankings are bigger.
• In the ranking's top 5, only the University of Oxford is not part of any of the platforms.
• There are some universities that joined more than one platform.
• It is very obvious that each platform has hand-picked the participating universities.

A very informative post and you can als click through to see the all the data that generated the graphics.

Often I hear remarks about the completion rates of MOOCs. Personally I don't see a problem there as long as participant are satisfied with their experience and what they have learned.

In most comments people talk about completion rates below 10%. Although 10% of a populair MOOC is stil a couple of thousand learners who complete the course.

Full story »

Today Delft University of Technology announced that we will join the EdX Consortium. In January our President announced at the Dies that we would start with MOOCs and that we would join an international consortium.

We have talked and negotiated with Coursera and EdX. Both organisations wanted us to join them. So we had the luxury to make our own decision on which platform to join. After some considerations we decided to join EdX.

Full story »