E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

A couple of researchers of MIT looked at the surveys of 11 MITx courses on edx in the spring of 2014. They found that one in four (28.0 percent) respondents identified as past or present teachers. Of the survey respondents, nearly one in 10 (8.7 percent) identified as current teachers. Although they represent only 4.5 percent of the nearly 250,000 enrollees, responding teachers generated 22.4 percent of all discussion forum comments. One in 12 of the total comments were made by current teachers, and one in 16 were from teachers with experience teaching the subject of the MITx course in which they enrolled:

Teachers are heavily enrolled and engaged in MITx courses on edX, and evidence indicates that they play a substantial role in discussion forums. Measuring the current impact of teachers on other participants is an important area for future research, and one that might help develop learning frameworks that better partner teachers with course staff and other participants. Teachers' motivations in taking a MOOC will play a key role, whether they are engaging in life-long learning, pursuing life-long instruction, or searching for new pedagogy and peer support. Regarding pedagogy and peer support, adoption of new teaching practices is a major challenge facing teachers and school districts in the United States. MOOCs targeting the needs of teachers and providing mechanisms to become personal online courses can potentially provide a space for educators to overcome adoption barriers and a sustainable foundation for MOOCs' continued existence.

Teacher enrollment clearly represents an unrecognized, meaningful audience for MOOC providers. Recent reports have largely focused on demographics within MOOCs,even leading to criticism that the typical participant is older and holds an advanced degree.²⁹ Recognizing the significance of large teacher enrollments in MOOCs may shift perspectives toward course design and MOOC platform capabilities more attuned to expert participants. We believe teacher participants in MOOCS are a resource to respect and value, with the potential of further enriching the MOOC experience for participants.

Read the full article on the Educause website.

In exactly 4 weeks the 2015 edition of the Open Education Week will start. Open Education Week is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement. Its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.

Open Education Week is coordinated by the The Open Education Consortium, an association of hundreds of institutions and organizations around the world that are committed to the ideals of open education.  Universities, colleges, schools and organizations from all over the world have come together to showcase what they’re doing to make education more open, free, and available to everyone.

Ways to Contribute

There are many ways you can contribute to Open Education Week: upload an informational or inspirational video, host an event in your community, send us links to resources about open education, hold a webinar, and promote open education week in your social media networks. To contribute a video or resource, or to have your event or webinar featured on the Open Education Week Events calendar, please use the submission form at www.openeducationweek.org.  To get the website ready, we need your submissions by 10 February 2015. You are welcome to submit multiple resources or events.  Please fill out one form for each contribution.

Videos

The Open Education Week website will feature short videos (2-5 minutes in length) showcasing open education projects, featuring short messages about open education, or providing how-to tutorials on aspects of open education. A third category is being added this year for longer, inspirational talks, panels or interviews on open education. We welcome videos that are specially made for Open Education Week, as well as those already available that fit the following categories.

Go to openeducationweek.org for more information to contribute.

Although a lot of attention is going to MOOC, our OCW website is still very alive and kicking. In this blog I will give you a update of our activities.

Courses

In 2014 we published 27 new courses. In total we have 150 courses on ocw.tudelft.nl. That is 4 more than last year. Important part of this is that we publish the course materials of our MOOCs on OCW-website. Below is an graph to show the grow of courses since we started.

The top 5 of most visited courses in 2014 were:

1. Analog Integrated Circuit Design
2. information Literacy I
3. Delft Design Guide
4. Bio Inspired Design
5. Petroleum Geology

Visitors

The number of visitors is still growing. In the last quarter we had on average 1280 visitors per day. 30% of the visitors are from the Netherlands, the rest is from abroad. Since the launch of the website in October 2007 we had now more than a million visits to the website.

The visits cam from all over the world (221 countries according to Google Analytics). Most visitors, besides the Netherlands, came from:

1. US (10%)
2. India (7%)
3. Belgium (4%)
4. UK (4%)
5. Germany (4%)

Although the absolute number of visitors from the Netherlands increased, the percentage dropped from 43% to 30%. So we got a lot more visitors from abroad. There was a big increase from visitors from the US and India. I think this is related to our MOOCs, because that are the top countries for our mooc students.

Award

This year we received the OCW Consortium Award for oustanding website at the Global Conference in Ljubljana.

Plans for 2015

In 2015 we will make some adjustments to the website. Our planning is to publish 30 new courses.

Last week David Wiley published An Open Education Reader, a collection of readings on open education with commentary created by students in his graduate course Introduction to Open Education taught at Brigham Young University, Fall 2014.

This group of readings was compiled by David Wiley for IPT 515R, Introduction to Open Education, taught at Brigham Young University in Fall 2014. The students in the course, who are listed as contributing authors below, wrote the summaries and discussion questions for each reading included in the book.

This is by no means a complete or final version of this book. We’re sharing it with the community now in the spirit of “release early, release often,” trusting that the community will help correct faults rather than criticize errors. Please leave suggestions for improvement in the comments at the bottom of individual pages, or email them to David.

I really like the concept and appreciate the work of David and his students in the field of open education.

A couple weeks ago Martin Weller has published an interesting book about open education:

With the success of open access publishing, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open education practices, the open approach to education has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. This marks a moment of victory for the open education movement, but at the same time the real battle for the direction of openness begins. As with the green movement, openness now has a market value and is subject to new tensions, such as venture capitalists funding MOOC companies. This is a crucial time for determining the future direction of open education.
In this volume, Martin Weller examines four key areas that have been central to the developments within open education: open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship. Exploring the tensions within these key arenas, he argues that ownership over the future direction of openness is significant to all those with an interest in education.

Martin Weller is professor of Education Technology at the Open University. If you’re interested in OER, open courses, open journals, or open research in higher education – get the book. It’s free and available in a variety of formats from the website of the publisher.

Reference:

Weller, M. 2014. Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org//10.5334/bam

Since 2010 Audrey Watters, ed-tech writter, spends her December reading through all her articles and making the top ed-tech trends list of that year. It is always a pleasure to read those articles. She does a really great job in catching the trends, although some trends are specific for the US, such as Common Core.

Here is the list of the trends for 2014:

1. Buzzwords

2. The Business of Ed-tech

3. School and "Skills"

4. MOOCS, Outsourcing, and Online Education

5. Competencies and Certificates

6. The Common Core State Standards

7. Data and Privacy

8. The Indie Web

9. Social Justice

10. #Fail

Once again Audrey has done a great job. This year she also published a new book: The Monster of Education Technology. I haven't read the book yet, but it is based on her keynote presentations this year and I enjoyed reading those.

Tomorrow I'm participating in the conference "Mapping The European MOOC Territory". This conference is organised by the HOME project. This project is about MOOCs the European way led by EADTU.

This conference will focus on the opportunities and characteristics for European cooperation on MOOCs. Authors of selected position papers will present their views, next to the first results of the survey “Benchmarking MOOC strategies in Europe”.

I'm one of the authors to present my paper I have written with my colleagues Timo Kos and Martijn Ouwehand.

In the paper we have posted two clear recommendations for the European Commission:

1. Don’t try to regulate the MOOC development

The MOOC development is still in an infant stage. Every university is currently looking at what it will mean for them and what consequences it will have. At this moment it is too early to regulate the MOOC world. This is all about innovation! Governments should be de-regulating the education world, so there is more space for innovation and step into the open and online world.

2. Think global, act local

Education is becoming a globalized market. Focusing too much on the European situation will mean that you loose the connection with the rest of the world. So be aware of the global developments and help universities to position themselves in it. So think global, but act local!

Below is our full paper to download.

OER Research Hub has released it first dissemination report, The ‘OER Evidence Report 2013-2014′ brings together a range of evidence around the research hypotheses of the product and provides an overview of the impact OER is having on a range of teaching and learning practices.

There is some interesting data in the report:

• 37.6% of educators and 55.7% of formal learners say that using OER improves student satisfaction
• 27.5% of educators and 31.9% of formal learners agree that OER use results in better test scores
• 79.4% of OER users adapt resources to fit their needs
• 79.5% of educators use OER to get new ideas and inspiration
• 88.4% of learners say that the opportunity to study at no cost influenced their decision to use OER
• 74.9% of informal learners use OER to have a learning experience
• Knowing where to find resources is one of the biggest challenges to using OER
• General knowledge of well-established OER repositories is low
• Only 5% of educators say they don’t share information about OER
• The more educators use OER, the more they are willing to share
• Only 12.4% of educators create resources and publish them on a Creative Commons license
• Videos are the most common type of OER used.
• Cost of and access to materials can have an effect on student retention
• 40.9% of all formal learners in our sample consider that OER have a positive impact in helping them complete their course of study
• 79.6% of formal students think they save money by using OER
• 31.5% of informal learners say that their interest in using OER is a chance to try university-level content before signing up for a paid-for course
• 31.3% say their use of OER influenced their decision to register for their current course.
• 83.2% of informal learners say they are more likely to take another free course or study a free open educational resource, and 24.2% say that they would go on to take a paid for course as a result of using OER
• Informal learners choose OER that are relevant to their particular needs, have a good description of learning objectives and outcomes, and are easy to download
• Only 15.5% of informal learners select OER with an open license allowing adaptation despite the fact that 84.7% say they adapt the resources they find to fit their needs

Two weeks ago I attended the 8th EDEN Research workshop in Oxford (UK). EDEN is the European Distance and E-learning Network. I was invited as keynote speaker.

It was an interesting conference with good keynote speeches, interactive workshops and good conversations. Others (Sally Jordan, Antonio Texeira) have already written good blogposts, especially the official reporteur Tony Bates.

The organisation has also published the slides of the keynotes on slideshare. Below are the slides I used for my keynote:

I'm hiring another eLearning developer to further expand our Course Development Team. An the right you see the rest of our Course Development Team:

As eLearning Developer you will be part of a team creating advanced eLearning modules that will be part of the new Delft Extension School. The Extension School delivers OpenCourseWare, MOOCs, 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 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.

An important part of this job will that you will be responsible for promoting Open Education and the usage of Open Educational Resources by our faculty and staff. So I'm reaching out to the Open Education community to share this job opening to anyone who might be interested.

More information (and how to apply) can be found on this website. The deadline of applying is 28 november 2014. If you have any question, please send me a message via twitter, skype, email or via the form on this site.