E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The European Commission has published a report on Validation of Non-formal MOOC-based Learning. The report is an outcome of the OpenCred study, which was carried out collaboratively by the ICT for Learning and Skills team of JRC IPTS, researchers of the University of Leicester, and consultants:

This report presents the outcomes of research, conducted between May 2014 and November 2015, into emerging practices in assessment, credentialisation and recognition in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Following extensive research on MOOCs in European Member States, it provides a snapshot of how European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) recognise (or not) non-formal learning (particularly MOOC-based), and how some employers recognise open badges and MOOC certificates for continuing professional development. We analyse the relationship between forms of assessment used and credentials awarded, from badges for self-assessment to ECTS credits for on-site examinations, and consider the implications for recognition. Case studies provide deeper insights into existing practices. The report introduces a model which guides MOOC conveners in positioning and shaping their offers, and also helps institutions and employers to make recognition decisions. It concludes with a set of recommendations to European HEIs and policy makers to enable wider recognition of open learning in higher education and at the workplace.

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SURFnet lanceert een nieuwe initiatief om ICT start-ups in contact te brengen met onderwijsinstellingen. Het initiatief is een experiment dat start-ups met innovatieve ICT-technologieën en nuttige producten en diensten voor het onderwijs helpt hun weg te vinden naar toekomstige gebruikers. De start-ups hebben al een toepassing, maar nog weinig tot geen afnemers en staan op het punt te groeien.

Op de website startuppodium.surf.nl kunnen start-ups zich aanmelden. Onderwijsinstellingen kunnen die pitches vervolgens liken. Bovendien kunnen onderwijsinstellingen die direct met een start-up in zee willen, rechtstreeks met hen in contact komen.

Ik verwacht natuurlijk dat een aantal YesDelft startups zich melden, zoals FeedBackFruits, ProjectCampus, Binkies, KE Works, Vemble, en WebChair. 

Start-up Live Event
Op 19 mei organiseert SURFnet tevens een Start-up Live Event, waar enkele start-ups hun product of dienst presenteren. Het programma biedt ruimte aan onderwijsinstellingen om in gesprek te gaan met de jonge ondernemers.

March 7 to 11, the yearly Open Education Week is organised. This is a yearly week of events, organised by the Open Education Consortium, to raise awareness for open education:

Open Education Week’s goal is to raise awareness about free and open educational opportunities that exist for everyone, everywhere, right now.  We want to highlight how open education can help people meet their goals in education, whether that’s to develop skills and knowledge for work, supporting formal studies, learning something new for personal interest, or looking for additional teaching resources.

Many organisations from all over the world are participating this week in organising online and local events. Off course, TU Delft is also participating. One of my collegaes, Pedro Cabral, is part of the Programme Committee and we are hosting a couple of events during the week.

TU Delft events

During the Open Education Week you will find out all there is to know about different facets of Open Education. In our Action Labs you will learn more about the basics of open education and how to make full use of it in your courses. You will be able to see the opportunities to develop video's and we invite you for in depth sessions about Open Education. The Open Education Week will be closed with an Open Education Seminar and debate. During this closing event, Anka Mulder and (inter)national guests (University of Queensland, University of British Colombia and EPFL) will discuss the next big step in Open Education: offering credits for MOOCs.

The events are open to anyone who is interested, but please sign up on our website to secure a seat.

Last week Coursera announced that they updated the enrolment and grading option of their courses. No longer you can have free access to the full course:

Starting today, when you enroll in certain courses, you’ll be asked to pay a fee if you’d like to submit required graded assignments and earn a Course Certificate. You can also choose to explore the course for free, in which case you’ll have full access to videos, discussions, and practice assignments, and view-only access to graded assignments.

Most Coursera courses never used an open licensed. So they were not open in the common use of the definition of open. David Wiley wrote a very clear blog post about this. If you look at the defintions open open content, OER, open access, open data, open knowledge, open source and open standards, they have 2 things in commons:

1. Free access to the content, resource, journal article, data, knowledge artifact, software, or standard, and
2. A formal grant of rights and permissions giving back to the user many of the rights and permissions copyright normally reserves exclusively for the creator or other rights holder.

Although Coursera used to follow the first thing, they never did for the second one. So formally they were never really open. EdX followed the same line of reason, but last year they added a creative commons plugin, so universities can change the rights from all rights reserved to an open license. Unfortunately, I don't have stats on how many courses use an open license. One of thing I know is that all TU Delft MOOCs use an open license (CC-BY-NC-SA). Recently we decided that the course Topology of Condensed Matter (starting Feb 8th) will even have a more open license: CC-NY-SA (I expect an applause from Cable).

With the removal of free access to the assessment part of the course, I would say that we can no longer talk about a free course. You get free (not open) access to learning resources, but you have pay to for access to the course. According to Insight Higher Education Coursera is creating a mismatch between their mission of provide universal access to the world’s best education and their business model. I agree with George Siemens that Coursera is “playing a short-term venture capital game” instead of focusing on the larger goal of improving access to education. We have seen this with the other Silicon Valley company Udacity.

I think it will be interesting to see what the university partners of Coursera are going to do. They have to show their cards: are they in the MOOC business for the greater good of universal access to education or just for making money! At least show that you find open education important and become a member of the Open Education Consortium!

The staff of the Open Education Consortium has created a great overview of the activities of the Open Education Consortium. The overview gives interesting numbers of the Open Education Week 2015, the Global Conference in Banff, ,member & community services and other projects and activities.

One of the interesting overviews are alle the trainings, workshops and presentations the OEC staff and board members conducted in 2015. More info on the website.

Take a look at the great overview of our activities and visit the website.

Today at the 174th Dies Natalis (birthday) of Delft University of Technology, our rector magnificus announced that the Executive Board has accepted a new Open Access Policy for the university effective per 1st of May:

As of 1 May 2016 the so-called Green Road to Open Access publishing is mandatory for all (co) authors at TU Delft. The (co)author must publish the final accepted author’s version of a peer-reviewed article with the required metadata in the TU Delft Institutional Repository.

By making scientific publications freely accessible and reusable we allow more people to become aware of the results of scientific research; including those who cannot afford paid access to this information. New ideas are spread faster and wider which in turn leads to new research: a boost for science. Teachers also benefit from Open Access by using this knowledge directly in their courses. Companies gain access to the latest scientific ideas and can build on these. And Open Access publishing and Open Science boost the knowledge-based economy and innovation. This is why TU Delft expresses the importance of Open Science in its mission:

‘TU Delft is dedicated to making a significant contribution to finding responsible solutions to societal problems, at both national and international level. Our mission is to deliver Science to Society.’

This policy is part of the TU Delft Open Science programme. Open Science consists of Open Research (Open Access publications and FAIR Research Data Management), Open Education, and Open Software and Sourceware. I'm one of the members of Programme Board of Open Science.

In a recent report of the Hewlett Foundation they use the Pencil Metaphor for the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). In the metaphor they identify six types of users:

• The Leaders
  First to adopt technologies, document and share practice—warts and all.
• The Sharp Ones
  They watch the leaders, grab the best bits, learn form mistakes and do great stuff.
• The Wood
  Would use tech if someone else sets it up and shows them how-to and keeps it running.
• Hangers-On
  Know all the lingo, attend the seminars but don’t do anything.
• The Ferrules
  Hold tightly onto what they know. Tech has no place in their classroom.
• The Erasers
  Endeavor to undo much or all the work of the leaders.

I agree that we should focus more on the people in the wood. So more focus on helping teachers with the adoption of OER.

Hewlett is focussing on strengthening pedagogy and reducing costs in higher education. The activities focus on:

• Open Textbooks for the most-enrolled college courses
• Building the library of easily discoverable open textbooks.
• Providing technical assistance.
• Promoting open textbooks among faculty and librarians.
• Zero textbook cost degrees in Community Colleges
• Identifying and supporting the next set of early adopters.
• Scaling the model through targeted advocacy.
• Ensuring implementation with sufficient tools and expertise.
• Strengthening the supply of postsecondary OER to fuel expansion.

At the beginning of this month Anka Mulder did a keynote at the yearly Online Educa conference in Berlin. The title of her keynote was "Universities must be bold" and that is what we are doing.

According to Donald Clark her vision is exactly what HE needs and I fully agree with that.

It makes me proud to work for the TU Delft. I think we have an extraordinary team that is responsible for the open and online learning at my university. Anka is a great leader for the university and it is a pleasure working with her for many years.

Gisteren op het Next Higher Education congres hield Hans Schutte, DG op het ministerie van OCW, de keynote. Hierin ging hij in op alle veranderingen die aanstaande zijn binnen het hoger onderwijs ten gevolge van studievoorschot, strategische agenda en prestatieafspraken. Ik moest echter met mijn oren klapperen doen hij doodleuk zei "online onderwijs, dat zijn MOOCs". Ik zag naast mij Wilfred Rubens ook even slikken.

MOOCs zijn een vorm van online onderwijs en soms van open onderwijs (als er een open licentie aan hangt), maar er zijn veel meer vormen van online onderwijs. Gelukkig maar zou ik zeggen, zoals er ook veel meer vormen van klassiek onderwijs zijn. Ik merk dat in de politiek en op bestuurlijk niveau MOOCs en online onderwijs veel als synoniemen gebruikt worden. Dit is niet correct!

Volgens het begrippenkader van SURF is online onderwijs:

Online onderwijs is onderwijs waarbij de leermaterialen, tools en diensten volledig of voor ten minste 80% via het internet beschikbaar worden gesteld.

Dit is dezelfde definitie zoals hij internationaal ook wordt gebruikt. MOOCs zijn een specifieke vorm van online onderwijs waarbij  het massale karakter benadrukt wordt en het ontbreken van ingangseisen:

Een massive open online course (MOOC) is een online cursus voor een ongelimiteerd aantal deelnemers. Een MOOC is vrij toegankelijk en gratis (tenzij je een geverifieerd certificaat wilt). Bij MOOC’s krijgen studenten niet alleen toegang tot de leermaterialen, maar is er sprake van een complete cursuservaring. Studenten ontvangen geen formele ECTS.

Op de TU Delft zeggen wij ook dat we een MOOC ontwerpen met voor minimaal 10.000 studenten. De meeste online vakken worden echter voor kleine groepen ontworpen. Hieronder een overzicht van de producten zoals wij ze gedefinieerd hebben:

This week the OECD published an interesting report about Open Educational Resources in educational policy and practice. The authors Dominic Orr, Michele Rimini and Dirk van Damme used the expertise of the Open Education field.

Education is the key to economic, social and environmental progress, and governments around the world are looking to improve their education systems. The future of education in the 21st century is not simply about reaching more people, but about improving the quality and diversity of educational opportunities. How to best organise and support teaching and learning requires imagination, creativity and innovation.

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials that make use of tools such as open licensing to permit their free reuse, continuous improvement and repurposing by others for educational purposes. The OER community has grown considerably over the past ten years and the impact of OER on educational systems has become an issue of public policy. This report aims to highlight state of the art developments and practice in OER, but also to serve as a basis for exchanges and discussions that lead to cross-country peer learning on how to improve teaching and learning.

The interesting of the report is that it really focuses on the educational challenges that we face today:

• Fostering the use of new forms of learning for the 21st century
• Fostering teachers' professional development and engagement
• Containing public and private costs of education
• Continually improving the quality of educational resources
• Widening the distribution of high-quality educational resources
• Reducing barriers to learning opportunities

The authors say that there are gaps in research on use and adaptation of OER. I agree with them that there should be more evidence-based research for policy and practice on how OER are produced and how they are used in certain contexts and by certain actors in the education system (teachers, instructors and learners). Policy makers should promote and fund more OER research!

This report is a must read for anyone involved in education. The report can be downloaded here.