E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Earlier this week MIT and Harvard University announced the release of a series of working papers based on 17 online courses offered on the edX platform. The working paper series features detailed reports about individual courses; these reports reveal differences and commonalities among massive open online courses (MOOCs).

The papers analyze an average of 20 gigabytes of data per course and draw on interviews with faculty and course teams as well as student metrics.

Key Takeaways
Takeaway 1: Course completion rates, often seen as a bellwether for MOOCs, can be misleading and may at times be counterproductive indicators of the impact and potential of open online courses.

Takeaway 2: Most MOOC attrition happened after students first registered for a course. On average, 50 percent of people left within a week or two of enrolling. After that window, attrition rates decreased substantially. The average probability of a student ceasing to engage in the second week of the course declined to 16 percent.

Takeaway 3: Given the “massive” scale of some MOOCs, small percentages are often still large numbers of students — and signify a potentially large impact.

More information on their websites:

• http://odl.mit.edu/mitx-working-papers/
• http://harvardx.harvard.edu/harvardx-working-papers

Also interesting to read is the review of Tony Bates.

The guys from CETIS have written an interesting white paper on the next phase after MOOCs:

The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies.

According to the authors three key themes emerge from the MOOC experiment:

• Openness – new approaches to online learning, including models for scalable provision that may generate revenues, and promote open learning, which goes beyond institutional boundaries through the use of online communities. [Increasing impact & long term, likely for most institutions]
  
  
• Revenue models – different revenue models taking the established ideas from technology start-ups, such as applying the concepts of freemium and premium offers into online learning, providing institutions with new ways of thinking about marketing and income generation. [High impact & medium term, more likely for institutions looking for new revenue streams]
  
  
• Service Disaggregation – experimentation with business models that include unbundling and re-bundling of courses and delivery related services, such as offering paid for assessment and/or teaching and support, on top of free online course content. This may have a wider impact across institutions in the future through better deployment of existing resources to add value to customers where there is greatest benefit and to reduce costs through outsourcing (unbundling is already happening independently of MOOCs). [High impact & short term, likely for most institutions]

Institutions should consider exploring a set of opportunities that have been brought to the attention of mainstream education by MOOCs, and experiment with new approaches for developing technology-enabled changes in teaching and learning to improve opportunities for individual learners.

Download the white paper.

Last monday I attended a public hearing of the committee on Culture & Education of the European Parlement. The subject of the hearing was "New technologies and open educational resources". I was nominated as expert by the MEP Marietje Schaake of the ALDE group. There were three experts selected to present their intervention on the subject.

• Are European education institutions ready to welcome OER and ICT-related innovation?
  Presentation by Mr Claudio DONDI, Member of the advisory group to the Commission on Opening up Education, MENON, European network for research and innovation (summary)
• The future of education is online
  Presentation by Mr Willem VAN VALKENBURG, Coordinator of TU Delft Open Education Team, TU Delft
• Opening Up Education – Noble goals, important demands, effective measures? A critical assessment of the initiative and options for increasing acceptance and effectiveness in secondary education
  Presentation by Mr Harald MELCHER, Managing director at educational publisher m2more GmbH, Berlin (summary)

Here is the presentation that I used:

The complete hearing is also recorded and available online.

An important change I noticed is that the discussion on online education is less about why we should do this and more about how Europe can help. That is an interesting and good discussion. The new Erasmus+ programme is also more focused on this. In Erasmus+ the European Commission is specifically looking for impact of a project proposal.

This week the yearly world economic forum in Davos is taking place. One of the announcement is the launch of Forum Academy. They do this in a partnership with EdX and will use the Open.EdX platform:

Davos, Switzerland, 22 January 2014 – The World Economic Forum today launched Forum Academy, an online learning platform, in partnership with edX, a non-profit initiative created by founding partners Harvard University and MIT for online education. Forum Academy will provide continuous leadership development and updating, offering courses for professionals and organizations to enhance their strategic knowledge in a fast-changing world.

Forum Academy will:

• catalyse an online global learning environment for continuous and certified professional development
• create a world-class curriculum, providing cutting-edge global, regional and sectorial knowledge
• establish a network of academic and other members to develop standards, best practices and joint certification models

As rapid technological, economic and social changes affect the context of professional work, there is a pressing need for insights into the latest developments and best practices on relevant topics. Forum Academy will help to address this need for yearly certified updates on the latest professional developments, leveraging the Forum’s worldwide multistakeholder network of the best and most relevant knowledge providers. The professional leadership courses will focus on specific global issues and industries. It will also focus on regional developments and provide updates related to professional and technological issues.

This is another interesting platform that is using Open.EdX. I think it is a very good development that more organisations are using the platform. This will improve the platform and strengthen the EdX Consortium.

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.

The last month and half I have been traveling a lot and busy with our new plans. That means that I'm a little behind on blogging. This blog post is a summary of interesting articles in the last month or so (in random order):

• Design responses to MOOC completion rates
  Interesting article of the design of the mooc. Is the MOOC designed for retention or selection.
  
  
• Results of U Penn MOOC
  The research tracked several characteristics of the student population.
  
  
• Journal MOOCs Forum
  Online journal about MOOCs
  
  
• Open edX Roadmap now public
  The code for Open edX has been open source for six months now but we now also the roadmap is open.
  
  
• Completion data for MOOCs
  Interesting find: there is a significant negative correlation, ie the more people who enrol then the lower the percentage who complete.
  
  
• It's Not a MOOC, It's a Movement
  in the current era, the Internet has changed our world faster and more extensively than anything we’ve ever seen before. But the biggest drivers to change have come from outside rather than inside higher education. And not necessarily in a good way.
  
  
• Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems for Massive Open Online Courses
  Not only does student participation decline dramatically throughout the new generation of Web-based courses, but the involvement of teachers in online discussions makes it worse.
  
  
• An edX SPOC as the Online Backbone of a Flipped College Course
  This is Part 1 in a series chronicling the process and findings from Brian White's blended learning experiment.
  
  
• A review of online learning in 2013
  Another year of the MOOC
  
  
• the post-MOOC-hype landscape: what’s REALLY next?
  Challenge the empty narratives that your administrators or your faculty have been sold. Find ways to talk about why what you’re doing matters. Change the narrative from unicorns back to what education is about: learning.
  
  
• The greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs
  According to attendees it was the best conference they have attended.
  
  
• MOOC Platforms : a primer - biggies, newbies & freebooters
  As the MOOCosphere expanded, more and more platforms sprung into action.
  
  
• The (Off-Campus) Future of MIT
  MIT names EdX key component of their educational strategy

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.

John Robertson (aka kavubob) posted an interesting presentation about the use of someone else's MOOC in your course. He identifies four different models:

• The guest lecture
• The reading
• The textbook
• The distributed flip

Below is his presentation:

Other interesting studies about using MOOCs in the classroom:

• Rebecca Griffiths - MOOCs in the classroom?
• Wrapping a MOOC: Student Perceptions of an Experiment in Blended Learning

On the third day of the conference I had to do my own presentation. The title 'Pushing EdX to be Open' I submitted half a year ago, still did the job, the room was filled.

The slides of my presentation are below. As soon as the video is available I will embed the video as well.

NB. The picture of the first slide I haven taken on Tuesday morning in Bryce Canyon National Park.

Video recording

What did people say?

Here I have embedded some tweets about my presentation:

Been looking forward to @wfvanvalkenburg session since the schedule came out - Pushing EdX to be Open #opened13

— Rolin Moe (@RMoeJo) November 8, 2013

http://t.co/nE1sutBBIY They post OER, OA and Open Source software they develop. Hells yes, son, that's how you do it. #opened13

— Sarah Glassmeyer (@sglassmeyer) November 8, 2013

@wfvanvalkenburg disappointed that TU Delft is the only @creativecommons licensed MOOC in edX. Well, this is embarrassing. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

@cgreen says when negotiating for MOOC creation terms, hold the line and make #openlicensing a requirement. Like @wfvanvalkenburg. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

I'm pretty sure I just saw @wfvanvalkenburg after his prez drop the mic and walk off the stage. #opened13

— Lindsey Weeramuni (@LBWicket) November 8, 2013

I saw the mic bounce RT @LBWicket: I'm pretty sure I just saw @wfvanvalkenburg after his prez drop the mic and walk off the stage. #opened13

— Richard Tibbles (@richardtibbles) November 8, 2013

Phil Hill has written an interesting post about student patterns in MOOCs. I have written about this earlier this year. But Phil continued with this research and it is getting more interesting. Below the main figure:

He identified 5 different types of users. Earlier he used 4 types:

1. ‘No-Shows’: appear to be the largest group of those registering for an open-enrollment MOOC, where people register but never login to the course while it is active.
2. ‘Completing’: learners who completed the majority of the assessments offered in the class. Though these participants varied in how well they performed on the assessment, they all at least attempted the assignments. This engagement pattern is most similar to a student in a traditional class. ‘Passive’ participants are students who might watch videos, take quizzes, read discuss forums, but generally do not engage with the assignments and post in discussion forums. ‘Active’ participants are the students who participate in the majority of assignments and post in discussion forums.
3. ‘Auditing’: learners who did assessments infrequently if at all and engaged instead by watching video lectures. Students in this cluster followed the course for the majority of its duration. No students in this cluster obtained course credit.
4. ‘Disengaging’: learners who did assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement (their engagement patterns look like Completing at the beginning of the course but then the student either disappears from the course entirely or sparsely watches video lectures). The moments at which the learners disengage differ, but it is generally in the first third of the class. A subcategory includes ‘Drop Outs’ who cease all course activity.
5. ‘Sampling’: learners who watched video lectures for only one or two assessment periods (generally learners in this category watch just a single video). Though many learners “sample” at the beginning of the course, there are many others that briefly explore the material when the class is already fully under way.