E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Sarah Hayes has written an interesting report about MOOCs and Quality. She wrote this report in commission for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) in the UK. This literature review presents a number of different perspectives from a broad range of sources relating to the nature of MOOCs and pertinent considerations of quality.

The report gives a good overview of MOOCs and quality. I agree with Sarah that with each new learning innovation, MOOCs present the possibility of new approaches to education, but the promises now need to be evaluated to see what can be delivered in the longer term, on a sustainable basis and with what implications for HEIs and for the assurance of quality.

Download report

Do you want to be part of innovating education with online education? Help us to become a world leader in online education? Educate the world! We are looking for 2 eLearning Developers to join our (international) team!

TU Delft

Delft University of Technology is the leading University of Technology in the Netherlands with a global reputation in the fields of science, engineering & design. TU Delft’s mission is to make a significant contribution towards a sustainable society for the twenty-first century by conducting ground-breaking scientific and technological research which is acknowledged as world-class, by training scientists and engineers with a genuine commitment to society and by helping to translate knowledge into technological innovations and activity with both economic and social value.

Open & Online Education

TU Delft has been a forerunner in the field of Open & Online Education since 2007, and is one of the sustaining members of the Open Education Consortium and since 2013 charter member of the EdX Consortium. In March 2014, the board of the TU Delft approved a 3-year innovation program to accelerate the development of open & online education. The goal is to educate the world by creating an online learning portfolio with open & online courses for a global population of life long learners. Our courses are listed on https://online-learning.tudelft.nl.

Job description

As eLearning Developer you will be part of the (international) Extension School team, which supports and leads the online learning developments of the university. You will create advanced eLearning modules that will be part of the TU Delft Online Learning portfolio. The Extension School delivers MOOCs, Professional Education, 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 and support 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. Together with a team of eLearning developers you will also work on constantly improving course designs and deliveries.

• Devise complex technical methods and processes to meet new and unique eLearning and web requirements and resolve technical problems.
• Ability to work independently. Ability to interact effectively with various faculty members in the TU Delft organization.
• Recognize, recommend and participate in the development of standards and procedures that support quality improvement in the Delft Extension School and products for our students.
• Provide project management for e-learning projects with tight deadlines. These projects bring together people from various departments and backgrounds to develop content, technical specifications and functional prototypes for the Extension School.
• Provide training to faculty on developing and teaching online courses.
• Meet all internal deadlines according to project plan regardless of project limitations.

Requirements

• Master of Education (M.Ed) in Instructional Design, Educational Technology or related experience plus 1 year recent curriculum design and/or course development experience in online education;
• Demonstrate a keen sense of organization and attention to detail;
• Demonstrated ability to handle unforeseen difficulties and obstacles with ease;
• An excellent team player that is able to work on complex projects with a group of other course developers;
• Ability to work on a tight, rapidly-changing schedule;
• Experience with using ICT in education, such as digital assessment, e-moderating, online teaching methods and platforms;
• A committed consultant with strong communication skills in English, mastery of Dutch is a plus;
• Experience in higher education;
• Experience as a teacher of open or online education is a plus.

For more information and application, please visit our official vacancies website. If you have questions you can contact me via contact form above.

More and more you hear about the term "Open Science". The term refers to developments in how science is becoming more open, accessible, efficient, democratic, and transparent, based on new, digital tools for scientific collaboration, experiments and analysis and which make scientific knowledge more easily accessible both for professionals and the general public.

After a public consult, the European Commission has adopted this term as well to replace the term Science 2.0. Last month Carlos Moedas, Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation outlined the plans for "Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World".

Open Education

I think this is a very good initiative, but it is missing an important aspect. According to the plans we should do a much better job in bringing Science to Society, but there is no mentioning of Open Education. According to the Open Education Consortium "Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs."

The strength of (Open) Education is that it makes knowledge much more accessible for a general public. It is not only about sharing (publishing content), but really about learning. So to use the knowledge for learning new skills and competencies. That will really prepare the European citizens for the 21st century.

MOOCs as dissemination of research

A very good example of these are MOOCs,  or at least the open MOOCs. I'm not talking about the introduction courses on many subject, but on the advanced courses. A good example is one of our MOOCs on the subject of Topology in Condensed Matter: Tying Quantum Knots. This course ran this spring on EdX with 4,000 people. That doesn't sound like much (at least in comparison to our other MOOCs), but keep in mind that you need at least a Master in Physics, preferable a PhD to follow this course. All the course materials are also available outside of edx to make it even more accessible. The lecturers of this course are all involved with the research conducted at the Delft Kavli Institute on Quantum Computers.

Image: CC-BY 4.0 International License  Open Knowledge Foundation

This summer and fall we are running 11 MOOCs. There are couple of new courses and a lot of reruns of popular courses. We also offer two self-paced courses.
All reruns will be improved based on the evaluation of prior runs. For the evaluation we use data of edx, the data of the surveys and interviews with the involved people. Another 5 new MOOCs are being produced (but haven't been announced) and last Friday we approved 3 new MOOCs.

Full story »

Last week the Dutch universities decided to boycot Elsevier, because of the negotiations around open access. This is a mayor step in the battle for open.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier resign. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

This is part of a bigger plan to move the Dutch science into the world of open.  Sander Dekker, the State Secretary  of Education has taken a strong position on Open Access. He has set two Open Access targets: 40% of scientific publications should be made available through Open Access by 2018, and 100% by 2024. The preferred route is through gold Open Access – where the work is ‘born Open Access’. This means there is no cost for readers – and no subscriptions.

If universities take these targets seriously, bold moves have to be made. This is such a move, more of those should follow! There are still a lot of scientists who are giving their copyright away without even thinking about open access. Steps like thise certainly helps in the awareness.

Background:

• Dutch article in NRC
• VSNU factsheet
• Article of Danny Kingsley

Image source: Twitter

What do course reviews suggest about what it takes to create a compelling online learning experience for students? CourseTalk, a “Yelp for MOOCs” company founded in 2012, has tallied more than 74,000 user ratings for over 7,500 courses from 46 providers to get a glimpse of what students are saying.

CourseTalk has made an analysis (PDF) of all reviewed courses in its catalog to uncover characteristics shared by top-rated courses, characteristics shared by low-rated courses, and other insights into online learning.

Interesting is their overview of refraining reviews:

Their overal findings are:

• Reviews are predominantly positive
• Reviewers complete courses
• Reviewers who drop courses still give nearly 4 stars
• Users are willing to pay for good courses
• Classes with more reviews receive higher ratings
• Ratings are not affected by course workload
• A majority of CourseTalk users have experience in the subject they’re studying

Their conclusions are:

• Providers should embrace reviews from unbiased, third-party sites as a way of promoting improved course selection and engagement.
• They should not be afraid to charge for quality content.
• Providers should make courses experiences clear, easy to navigate, fun, interactive, supportive and flexible.
• They should focus on short course modules, but not hesitate to challenge students with heavier workloads where appropriate.

EdX is also using CourseTalk as review system. Reviews of TU Delft's courses are available here.

Via: EdSurge

The last couple of days I attended the EDEN15 conference in Barcelona. During a couple of sessions people mentioned alternative acronyms to MOOCs, such as mMOOC, cMOOC, sMOOC, xMOOC. Can we please stop with all these acronyms! It is a MOOC or an Online Course.

Online Courses

The starting point of designing an Online Course are the learning objectives you want students to reach. With those you will start designing the learning activities and assessment. In the design process you have to be aware of the context of the course, such as the subject, lecturers, duration, expected audience, language and more.

The result should be a high-quality online course that will help students reach their learning goals.

Massive

One of the specific feature of a MOOC is the massiveness. This means that in the design proces you will keep in mind that the course can be run with 500 students, but also with 50,000 students without extra teaching effort. This can also be useful for some campus courses, although the number will be a little bit smaller.

Open

For me Open means free access (via internet) to the course AND the right (under some condition) to retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute the course materials. Unfortunately most moocs are limit to the first part.

US vs European MOOCs

In the European MOOC world there is a tendency to be very negative about the US MOOCs. I think that you underestimate the MOOCs on the US platforms and overestimate the European MOOCs. My experience is that on both sides of the pond there are really good MOOCs and really bad MOOCs. The quality of a MOOCs is not depending on the platform, but on the lecturers and the course development team.

The people that are affilitiated to the open universities express this negative thought quiet often. According yesterday's keynote speaker Alan Tait this has to do with that the introduction of MOOCs was very painful for the open universities: "Major MOOC platforms not from open universities". I think he has a very valid point here, open universities have always been in the lead in innovation in technology enhanced learing and now the 'conventional universities' are taking over. That must hurt!

TU Delft is a strong advocate for open education. So when we started with MOOCs on EdX.org, we published all the course materials with an open license. After the course is done, we publish the content also on our OpenCourseWare website.

Last year during the Open Education Week, I organised an Edx hackathon for our students. The winners of the hackathon were the guys of FeedbackFruits:

FeedbackFruits is a TU Delft startup that created an online study community that encourages students to participate in lectures and share study material to facilitate the core of education: opening up young minds to the wonders of science and helping students become specialists in the things they love.

FeedbackFruits received the award at the EdX conference in Delft in June last year. On stage I also requested EdX to include this plugin into the platform and they agreed. Unfortunately it took quiet some time to get the plugin included, but last Thursday it finally happened.

The plugin that was created allows course teams to set a Creative Commons license for the course and per item. For instruction, see the manual page.

Below are two screenshots to show what it looks like.

Further development

This plugin is the first step in implementing Creative Commons into the platform. Off course we have a wish list for improvements:

• remove the ND, because that is not really open.
• set the default to CC-BY.
• be able to attribute others for the content.

Other blogs

• Creative Commons
• OpenEdX

SURF has published a report about the Grand Challenges Learning Analytics & Open & Online Education, unfortunately the report is in Dutch. This report describes the possibilities of Learning Analytics in the field of Open and Online Education and what are the biggest challenges. Per challenges the 6 experts did a literature review and decided on what are the questions that have to be answered, are there national or international examples and what needs more research.

The six experts that contributed to this report are:

• Alan Berg, Program Manager Learning Analytics UvA, University of Amsterdam, Community Officer Apereo Learning Analytics Initiative
• Dr. Maartje van den Bogaard, educational advisor and researcher University of Leiden
• Dr. Hendrik Drachsler, Chairing Research Group on Learning Analytics, Leading FP7 project Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACEproject.eu)
• Drs. Renée Filius, programme manager Elevate University of Utrecht Medical Centre.
• Drs. Jocelyn Manderveld, project manager SURFnet
• Dr.ir. Robert Schuwer, lector OER, Fontys Hogeschool ICT

The five challenges these experts identified are:

1. What possiblities does Learning Analytics offer as accelerator of (design of) learning?
2. What are the requirements of a dashboard for instructors?
3. What can learning analytics contribute to the searchability of open educational resources?
4. What are the privacy and ethical issues in using learning analytics in open and online education?
5. What kind of infrastructure is needed to start with learning analytics in open and online education within your institution?

The report gives a good overview of the current state of learning analytics and gives good insight in the challenges we face. Off course you can debate if these challenges are really the biggest challenges. One of the questions I got was why a dashboard for instructors and not for learners?

Yesterday it was officially announced that the Open University NL and University of Utrecht received the 5 year grant for open and online education. The project is called SOONER: The Structuration of Open Online Education in the Netherlands. Officially the project starts in September and is running until August 2020.

The summary of the project:

The SOONER project focuses on fundamental research about open online education (OOE) in the Netherlands. Open online education is viewed as a strategic activity of an educational institution with systemic implications for the organization. Based on proven approaches for program evaluations from the health sciences, the project will enable systematic and long-term research on open online education from a macro-, meso- and micro-perspective. In addition, this project combines fundamental and accompanying research. SOONER will be organized via three PhD-projects on 1) self-regulated learning skill acquisition In the context of OOE, 2) motivation and intentions as key to drop-out in OOE and last but not least 3) scalable support solutions for OOE Including learning analytics. These projects will be framed by a Post-Doc project that focuses on the structural and organizational embedding of OOE. All projects will start from standardized measurement instruments or will adapt those for the specific context of OOE.

All projects will access several sources for their data collection: MOOCs offered by the partner institutions, open courses offered by the OpenUpEd partners, courses offered by the SURF projects and institutions participating in the SURF projects. The SOONER project is connected to the MOOCKnowledge project, a European cross-provider standardized survey about MOOCs and the SCORE2020 project, a European project focusing on support needs of educational institutions for OOE. Data from these European projects will be compared to Dutch OOE initiatives and benchmarking options will be explored. All results of the project will be shared via open licenses. 

The project is lead by Professor Marco Kalz of the Welten Institute of the OUNL.

Different levels of research

The project is doing research on 4 different levels:

• The micro-level of OOE is related to the individual characteristics of participants of OOE. The two research question they are focusing on are the level of self-regulated learning (SRL) required for OOE and the development of SRL skill development and other part is focusing on the motivation and intention in regards to drop-outs.
• The meso-level of OOE is related to the course level. Questions of educational design and support options are the most important research aspects here.
• The macro-level is related to the organisational embedding of OOE. On this level, questions like strategic goals, organizational guidelines and values are important.
• In addition these three levels are embedded into a national context and environmental variables like funding and structural support of OOE.

I'm looking forward to work with these researchers and to the outcomes of the project.