Continuing liveblogging from the Edinburgh FLAN meeting, Andy Wright (University of Birminham) was talking about Good MOOC Bad MOOC 2. He started by giving a report from a conference he attended in Asia and how the discussion matched the MOOC success factors he had mentioned his previous talk to FLAN (see http://information-literacy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/good-mooc-bad-mooc-report-1-flansoton.html). He added “Reuse” to his list of factors that could be used to judge MOOC success. He talked about these factors in relation to his own institution. As regards Recruitment as well as straightforward student recruitment there are also “try before you buy”, “recommended reading” and “prerequisite” aspects (you could charge e.g. if you were requiring a certificate for the last option). In terms of Reuse he mentioned the Good Brain/Bad Brain MOOCs, where the MOOC content can be used to enhance on campus experience, to save academics’ time, develop academic skillsets etc. Also the MOOCs are being translated into Portuguese and republished by the Brazilian MOOC platform Veduca. He also gave an example at Sheffield Hallam University where MOOCs have been integrated into a holistic healthcare CPD offering. In terms of Revenue, he mentioned small private online courses (SPOCs) and CLOCs (closed online courses). Obviously these have to differentiate themselves from the free project, and revenue could come from project funding or per student/group and obviously closed online courses are not new (i.e. the existing online degree courses).
In terms of Research, he mentioned a patient outreach research paper on liver disease treatment he was coauthoring and the subject he was researching for his Masters dissertation, analysing the impact of diversity of MOOC learner communities on the achievement of learner goals.
Showing posts with label Futurelearn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Futurelearn. Show all posts
Friday, January 09, 2015
Might #MOOCs still be disruptive #Futurelearn
The day started withg a a talk Might MOOCs still be disruptive given by Jeff Haywood. He noted that we have “mentally domesticated” MOOCs and they are in fact no longer seen as risky. For example, they are talked about as channels for paid student recruitment. Haywood looked at why MOOCs were thought of as disruptive, based on the idea of “disruptive innovation”, as conceptualised by Clayton Christensen (with businesses/products moving from a low to a prominent position, upsetting the market structure). Haywood transferred this concept to the higher education sector. He felt that because the “disruptive” word is being used (my word here) indiscriminately (even when things were not actually that disruptive) actual disruption might be masked. In terms of WHAT could be disrupted it includes types of recruitment (undergrad etc.) online/distance, short courses, pricing, “bundling”. In terms of WHEN he thought about sequencing e.g. postgrad might be more disrupted than undergrad education. In terms of by WHOM – this includes universities who rethink their strategies.
Haywood felt that there were interlocking features which led to stability (or sluggishness, to see it negatively) e.g. interlocked curricula, physical estate, durability of existing pedagogies, that risk of action by an individual university is high. He referenced Robert Zemsky’s Checklist for change who identified academics who think they will “sit it out” rather than opting for risking change. He also cited William Bowen complaining that technology hasn’t been used to improve productivity in higher education, but rather “gilding the lily” (improvinhg oputput).
Haywood identified that “MOOC” is used in different ways e.g. a concept (for online learning; for open learning); a political instrument; a specific educational process. Referring to the report by Bayne and Ross which did identify some disruptive features, for example “teacher as code” (i.e. things happening online without teacher presence).
Originally MOOCs were very North American, but now 45% of Coursera partners are non-US, Futurelearn (now a year old) has 18% non UK and 82% UK, China is investing in MOOCs (Chinese language) etc. so there is significant imapct worldwide.
Looking at higher education trends, Haywood noted the increasing number of part time undergraduates in the UK (23%), although there are not figures for the % distance learners. In the USA there is a larger % (sorry, didn’t catch the details) and potential changes in legislation which could make less traditional forms of education easier to credit. In the USA and UK there is a lot of discussion and some action around competence based education, so more focus on skills (including higher order ones) and on more flexibility in the time, pace and place of learning and assessment.
Haywood moved on to discuss the quest for “globally recognised metrics of graduate learning” and its political interest. He concluded by summarising key points which my fingers weren't quick enough to capture – they are listed on the slide at the start of this blog entry (click it to see a bigger size).
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Good MOOC bad MOOC: report 3 #flansoton #futurelearn
The next presentation was also confidential as Russell Beale talked about Futurelearn course analytics, in a presentation coauthored with David Major; so this was aimed at Futurelearn partners. These are the reports that Futurelearn produce for the people running each MOOC. They aim to give transactional, interactional and conversational data which is "actionable".
I should give a link to the Futurelearn website and the Futurelearn blog https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/
I may blog Naomi's presentation (see previous blog post) tomorrow rather than today.
Photo by Sheila Webber: clover, by the Cherwell, September 2014
Good MOOC bad MOOC: report 2 #flansoton #futurelearn
First up after the coffee break was Naomi Colhoun (Sheffield University) “Learning from Learning Analytics: Can data analysis of a FutureLearn MOOC usefully inform design for learning?”. I have supervised her Masters dissertation on this topic, and therefore know a lot about it so I will do a separate blog post on this!
Rebecca Ferguson (OU) then talked about “Evaluating Educational Impact and Learner Support within OU [Open University] MOOCs”. As an aside, she started by showing an interactive map on MOOC retention that had been created by one of their PhD students. http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html. Ferguson identified the range of people and units in the OU who were interested in MOOC evaluation. There were also a variety of reasons why evaluation was needed. It was, for example, for internal and external comparison, to support the journey from informal to formal learning. In terms of "what learning" it included learning about the subject, the online learning tools and about the people. Learning was also undertaken by learners, the course team, the facilitators and the university.
In terms of what is provided by Futurelearn on its MOOC dashboard, there are basic statistics on joiners, leavers, who has posted a comment etc. MOOC providers can also set up surveys in individual MOOCs (e.g. asking learners whether they think they have learnt anything). However, one issue is that end of course surveys are inevitably filled in by course completers, who are the minority. You can also looked at how many people have participated in an activity. The OU (which is entirely a distance learning university) has a standard learning design tool which they also use for MOOCs.
One thing that the speaker picked out as an example was that they found that in a couple of weeks people were completing step three more than steps one and two, but the learner support was in steps one and two. They can now investigate why this is (e.g. do steps one and two have boring names!) The speaker talked about text mining (e.g. for phrases like "I learnt") as evidence of learning. She also talked through an example of a high-frequency word that initially did not seem relevant to the MOOC, but had actually been a focus for community building and learning.
The OU MOOCs have facilitators. Turning to support structure, the speaker identified an explicit support structure, to help with motivating, socialising, information exchange, knowledge construction and learning development. The MOOC team identified potential support structure risks e.g. thinking that the university's learner support is poor. These can be used to evaluate support. Examples of things they looked at were the facilitator introductions, facilitator activity (e.g. posts, word count, likes of their comments); this included whether facilitators were modelling good behaviour (e.g. were they following people, were they liking things and encouraging learners to like things). The evaluating team could search for comments mentioning the facilitators and for the kind of thing that the facilitators were saying. One of the things that emerged was that facilitators needed more training in features specifically of the Futurelearn platform. This also carries a lesson as regards learners: experienced online learners may come with certain expectations of the platform and need educating specifically in Futurelearn's features.
Rebecca Ferguson's blog is at http://r3beccaf.wordpress.com/
I should mention that there is a Facebook page for FLAN (where the presentations will be put), but I'm afraid it is a closed group for FLAN members.
Photo by Sheila Webber: mallow by the Cherwell, September 2014
Good MOOC bad MOOC: report 1 #flansoton #futurelearn
Julie Wintrup (Southampton University) talked about two studies funded by the Higher Education Academy (HEA): “A Community of Participants? Experiences of MOOC learners”. The full open-access reports will be released this month by the HEA. (This is a previous report funded by the HEA https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/elt/the_pedagogy_of_the_MOOC_UK_view)
The first study is on Engaged learning in MOOCs: a study using the Engagement survey. I know the HEA is interested in the NESSE (USA’s survey for student engagement in higher education) and I think this engagement survey is based on that. There were higher proportions of learners reporting engaging in reflective and integrative forms of learning. Fewer reported in engaging in interactive forms of learning.
The second study is Liberating learning: experiences of MOOCs. 10 learners and 5 academic staff (involved in Souhampton University MOOCs) were interviewed for this study. The speaker started by saying that “belonging” emerges as an important theme in campus-based higher education, and testing out ideas, articulating understanding and being challenged emerge (from the literature) as central to learning. In this group of interviewees (who were all MOOC completers): discussion fora emerged as a key form of interaction; social media etc. was less understood or valued; however some really appreciated Twitter especially if they could interact with the course team; there was anxiety about looking foolish when you posted something; some people just enjoyed looking at others’ posts; some “limited” their posts to give others a chance. One major issue was the unthreaded nature of the comment forum, which was time consuming to go through and made it difficult to engage with in conversation. Despite the latter problem, people did feel part of a learning community, particularly where there was a personalised element, e.g. interaction with educators. In fact interaction with educators was something that people expected, so that was one of the key messages (i.e. don’t let it just run without their input).
The second presentation was from Andy Wright (Birmingham University) “Good MOOC, Bad MOOC: Judgement day”. He came up with retention, research (learning analytics etc. and enhancing teaching materials), reputation, recruitment (to credit-bearing courses) and revenue (e.g. fees for the actual MOOC) as the 5Rs of success. After the first worry about the high drop out rates from MOOCs, the second wave helped people understand that people joined MOOCs for different reasons, and a high drop out rate did not automatically mean failure. However the speaker identified that the longer you could retain students, the more they were likely to be recruited to other courses, they give you more learner data etc. i.e. it contributes to the other 4 Rs.
In terms of research, the speaker talked about (as well as getting data for learning analytics) that you could get enthusiasm/transfer from academics to other online teaching. Reputation included brand awareness, exposure to (good) quality teaching material, students feeling part of the Birmingham community, and also strategic presence in the Futurelearn community. An obvious challenge here is that you could get bad press for your courses too. With Recruitment: at the moment it is difficult to establish whether people were influenced by MOOC participation when they register for a course. Additionally MOOCs may not be pitched at the same audience as normal courses. The speaker raised the opportunity of working with the schools that you were hoping to recruit from. With revenue, as well as certificates he mentioned sales of books.
The speaker also raised the issue of social policy and impact (for example MOOCs on dementia, on inclusion): in this case the MOOC’s success would be the way in which it contributed to policy outcomes. Under the philanthropic banner you could also look at the MOOCs contribution to broadening understanding, tolerance etc. and contributing to charitable work.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Michaelmas daisy, by the Cherwell, September 2014
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