A Few Words on ePortfolios

I was asked, I think that it would be of a great interest that you (as a world wide reference in education) can write a very brief review (between 200-300 words) about your vision regarding ePortfolios.

(Graphic: Helen Barrett http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/index.html )

e-Portfolios have been around for a number of years now and we're beginning to see how they may be applied in learning and development. An e-portfolio is a collection of digital materials uploaded by a student to an e-portfolio repository; the repository owners can then make this material available publicly to prospective employers or clients, as requested by the student. A good example of such a system is the Desire2Learn ePortfolio system. http://www.desire2learn.com/products/eportfolio/ A good ePortfolio system will not only allow storage and sharing, but also interact with social networks and support comments and annotations.

As Helen Barrett illustrates (see above) on her e-portfolio website  http://electronicportfolios.org/balance/index.html the role of ePortfolios has developed in two major directions over the years. On the one hand, the portfolio may focus predominately on learning and reflection. Such a portfolio may come to resemble a student's journal or sketchbook.  On the other hand, the portfolio may be used primarily for evaluation and assessment, becoming more a documentation of achievement that a personal workspace. As Barrett notes, the former model focuses on the ePortfolio as process, while the latter contemplates the ePortfolio as product.

In recent years discussion of ePortfolios has been eclipsed by the excitement around massive open online courses (MOOCs). I think this is a mistake. It is important to encourage students to create and share their own work. That said, the focus on taking many courses from multiple providers makes it difficult to reply on a single provider's ePortfolio service. Increasingly, students will have to manage the hosting of their online portfolios on their own.

In the MOOCs we have offered over the years, such as Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08), we approached this issue by encouraging students to use their own blogs or websites. In this case, the primary function of the central course management system was not to create and store student ePortfolios, but to aggregate from them and to facilitate the sharing of their contents with other students. In this light, a worthwhile project developed at University of Mary Washington called "a domain of one's own" is probably the modern version of ePortfolios. http://umwdomains.com/ It incourages students to establish their own web presence independently of service providers.

Increasingly in the future students will be responsible for managing their own online learning records and creative products. Though they may use a variety of services -  such as Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Google Docs, and more - to store their work, they will need to manage these resources, index them, and enable access to them. This will enable them to balance between the process-oriented and product-oriented aspect of their work. This will become important as employers will over time rely less on tests and formal assessments, and will instead look for tangible evidence of personal achievement in web-based repositories. Maintaining an ePortfolio will become tomorrow's equivalent of achieving certification and polishing up one's resumé.

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Connective Knowledge and Open Resources

The following is a set of responses to interview questions I answered over the weekend.

1.      Chinese readers firstly know you and George Siemens by the theory “connectivism”. How did you start your cooperation initially? What is the background (or reason) you create this theory? Can you introduce the meaning of connectivism and illustrate its characteristics in details?

That’s a good question, and I don’t really know the answer to it. George and I have been exchanging email since the late 1990s – we each had our own online newsletter (mine was OLDaily, his was called elearnspace). We read each other’s’ work, talked about the same subjects and encountered each other at conferences. And we had very similar perspectives on the nature of online learning.

To me, the theory is and always has been ‘learning networks’. This is a play on words: it is in part a theory about using networks to support learning, and in part a theory about how networks learn. For me, this is based on an associationist philosophy of knowledge, and rooted in connectionist theories of artificial intelligence. I wrote a long PhD proposal on it in 1990 –

http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2009/03/tnp-1-introduction.html

When I began working on online learning, I brought this theory with me. It led me to propose content syndication networks in education, and to embrace social media in education. I outlined my theory in the paper ‘Learning Networks’ in 2004

http://www.downes.ca/post/20 and George wrote his important paper also in 2004.

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

He came up with the term ‘connectivism’. I think it is derived from the term ‘constructivism’. His version of connectivism is much more socially oriented than mine, much more about social networks. Mine is rooted in artificial intelligence and neural networks.

Either way, the underlying propositions are the same. A person’s knowledge is the state of connectivity in their mind – the connections between their neurons – and to learn is to form or reshape these connections by strengthening or weakening them through interaction and use. It’s a theory where we grow knowledge, rather than acquiring it, where we learn by immersion in a field of study rather than by being told about it.

2.      The “connectivism” is extended to the whole world recent years, how did you combined it with practice in a subsequent study? Can we think OER is an effective way to implement the theory?

The practical implementation of connectivism is the massive open online course, or MOOC. George and I developed the first MOOC in 2008, called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’. It was intended very deliberately to be an example of the theory we had formed over the previous four years, and not simply a place to talk about it.

The key aspect of the CCK08 MOOC was that it was distributed – that it, it was not based on a centralized core of content, and it was not located on a single website. Rather, we encouraged people to create course content and to contribute to the course through their own websites, through discussion groups, communities, and and other forum they chose. We had about 170 blogs created to support the course, and we aggregated these using RSS – content syndication supporting online learning.

The CCK08 course and all the other courses we have developed since have been based on open educational resources (OERs). We use OERs as a way to talk about the concepts and ideas in the course. They may be papers, lessons, diagrams and images, videos, or anything else. What was most important what that they were sharable – we needed to be able to move them from one location to another in our distributed course.

The course as a whole was formed in the structure of a network. The OERs were the signals being sent back and forth between individuals in this network. The knowledge created in the course was the resultof this interaction, and not the contentof the interaction.

3.      From your web & blog, we found you were a passionate advocate of OER, can you share with us your first experience about open online educational resource? and the purpose and meaning of the action at that time?

I knew about open educational resources before anyone knew what the term meant. By no means am I alone in this. It has always been common for teachers and instructors to create and share learning materials. It is only with the arrival of the internet that we could do so globally.

It’s really hard for me to find a ‘first’ instance of experience with OERs, but if I was forced to do so I would probably say it was my ‘Guide to the Logical Fallacies’. You can still see this guide today – http://www.fallacies.ca – and it was created in 1995. I created the text for it when I was teaching at Grande Prairie Regional College in 1994, because my students needed a good way to think about logical fallacies. I was trying to get them to spot fallacies by recognizing them, by seeing signs that would remind them of common patterns of argument.

When I moved to Brandon and began working at Assiniboine Community College, I converted the guide into HTML and posted it on my brand new web site. It was partially to share the content with the (small) internet community, and mostly to show people at the college what could be done with the web. It led to our first web-based course a year later.

This was before Creative Commons or OERs, and only a few years after Richard Stallman created GPL. But there was still a sense in the community that there should be a type of licensing that allowed people to use content for free. I attached such a license to my Guide to the Logical Fallacies – it was modeled on George Reese’s license for the Nightmare Mudlib software package.

4.      You have your own definition of OER which is apart from the official definition, can you explain it? And talk further about the role of OER in personal learning?

When I’m asked to define OERs I use the UNESCO definition, which is, “teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution.”

Generally, when I think of OERs, I think of digitalresources, simply because non-digital resources cannot be shared in the manner envisioned in the definition.

In addition, my definition of ‘teaching, learning or research materials’ is a functionalist definition, rather than an essentialist definition. That is to say, I do not believe it is the nature of a resource that makes it a ‘teaching, learning or research material’, but rather, its use.

This is significant because some people say that OERs must have a certain format or construction – for example, they must have learning objectives, or an instructional focus, or a mechanism for assessment, or some such thing. I don’t agree with this. If a resource, whatever it is, is used to support teaching, learning or research, it is by that fact an educational resource.

Finally, when I employ the term ‘free use, adaption, and distribution’, my sense of the word ‘free’ includes the sense of ‘without cost’. Many supporters of OERs argue that the license must allow commercial reuse, including sale or subscription fees. I don’t agree with this. If someone wants to license their material to permit commercial use, I have no objection, but for me, ‘free learning’ does not have a price tag attached.

There has been in the past some efforts made to define a type of open license that would apply specifically to educational use. I have opposed this because such a definition would define educational use as use by a college or school. But to me, the great strength of OERs is that they enable a person to learn without relying on an educational institution. OERs become, as I said above, the vocabulary learners can use to talk with each other about a certain domain. In this sense, OERs ought to be freely usable, and sharable, not only by institutions, but more importantly, by students and learners.

5.      We all know you are the originator of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), what’s your perspective on OER’s potential impact on MOOCs? Can you summarize the major elements of MOOCs?

The major types of MOOC are the cMOOC, which wqe created, and the xMOOC, which is the sort of MOOC offered by Coursera, Udacity, and the like. The difference is that a cMOOC is designed as a network, as I described above, while an xMOOC is based on a central course site and content that will be followed by all students.

The xMOOC, in other words, is like a traditional college or university course. It typically requires that custom content be created, and is therefore very expensive to build. Costs can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes this is necessary, if for example you are creating a MOOC in a new subject area or new language. But often, the content already exists on the internet as OERs.

In a cMOOC, we begin with the presumption that the content exists out there somewhere. So when the MOOC is set up, we begin with what is a bare outline, usually just a list of topics and ideas. Course participants begin by reconsidering this outline – not everything will suit everyone, of course, but nobody has to do everything. Then, as the course progresses, participants (including the instructor) find OERs from around the internet and link them to the course.

Note that this use of OERs is very different from the traditional online course. In a traditional course, or an xMOOC, all the content is brought into the central website and incorporated as a part of the course. Not only does this create a lot of work, it also raises licensing issues, as you are now copying or republishing the content. In a cMOOC, though, we leave the content where it is, and simply link to the content. So a cMOOC is not a package, like a traditional course, it is a network of related and connected content.

Sometimes this content will be found on the internet, but just as often it will be created by course participants. That’s why it’s important to have a mechanism – like RSS – to link different websites together. So in any given week of the MOOC, participants will be able to read text and watch videos that were either found on the internet, or to read text and watch video that was created by participants in the course.

What, then, are the major elements of the course? In one sense, they are whatever the course participants want them to be. In another sense, the major elements are:

-          The course participants, including the instructor

-          Resources. Either found on the internet or created by participants

-          A mechanism for linking participants and resources with each other

It’s this this third part that traditional courses and xMOOCs lack. Because they are centralized, everything is brought into the course site. But in a cMOOC, we use a system that connects people.

In our courses, we used the gRSShopper application that I created. http://grsshopper.downes.ca  It can be used as an RSS aggregator to harvest resources found or suggested by participants. It also harvests Twitter messages and discussion board posts. It then organizes these resources, most commonly as a daily newsletter, which is then distributed to participants. They can either subscribe by email, reads the RSS version, reads the website, or follow the course on Twitter or Facebook.

6.      Could you analyze the differences between cMOOCs and xMOOCs? As the commercially driven, xMOOCs explode in popularity very quickly, how do you think about the limitation of its development in the next level? And what’s the development space of cMOOCs?

Well as I mentioned already, the xMOOC is centralized and the cMOOC is distributed. The xMOOC has a core content that everyone follows, while the cMOOC has a wide ranging network of content which people browse through and sample according to their own interests.

But more than that, the pedagogy of an xMOOC and a cMOOC is different. The xMOOC is typically based on the transmissionmodel of instruction. That is to say, the instructor will attempt to take some knowledge he or she has, and through a process of communications, transfer it to participants and students. Success in this kind of course occurs if the student’s resulting knowledge resembles or (ideally) is identical to the instructor’s knowledge.

In a cMOOC, by contrast, an immersionmodel of instruction occurs. That si to say, the instructor creates or sets up an environment similar to one in which the students will want to be successful. The instructor will model correct or successful behavior in the environment. Because the environment is dynamic and continually changing, the students will not be able to replicate the instructor’s knowledge, but instead will have to generate his or her own strategies. Success in such a course occurs if the student is able to successfully navigate the environment without scaffolding or support from the instructor.

The different is like, on the one hand, telling a person how to swim, and having them repeat that information back to you, and putting a person in the water and showing them how to swim, eventually letting them go to swim on their own.

There is room for both types of instruction. But in any field, students will have to graduate from the simpler transmission mode of instruction to the more complex immersion mode of instruction.

7.      In Your article you mentioned MOOCs provides a fair opportunity to learn, and it eliminates one of the great advantages the wealthy have always enjoyed over the poor. Can we think it bring great impact on developing countries’ education?

In the recent Times Higher education article George Siemens talked about students in India telling him their lives had been changed by Coursera. I can easily believe this. The traditional form of learning requires schools and professors and facilities and resources. The cost is enormous compared to what the provision of internet access costs. Whatever people can learn on their own is that much more countries do not have to hire professors to teach them.

A lot of people argue, correctly, that you cannot have a full education without in-person instruction, hands-on experience, and even the social contact you get with other students in a school, college or university setting. They are quite right. But the point here is, we do not need to set up all education in this way. And there is a great deal people can learn on their own.

We’ve seen this in India, even before Coursera. Many major software companies are built using Indian programmers. These people taught themselves on the internet. They accessed open source learning materials, they participated in online discussions and in online communities, they created software working on open source development projects, and through interaction and immersion, they developed their own software development skills. On their own, without college or university. Now they compete worldwide – I just took part in an online WizIQ session, through a very nice collaboration tool built and run by Indian software engineers.

Not every nation will focus on software, but every nation will focus on maximizing the amount of learning a person can do on his or her own. This creates tremendous opportunities for developing nations, because if they can enable their citizens access to these online resources, in their own language, then they will be able to develop skills equal to those in more industrialized countries.

Yes, this by itself will not be enough. But it significantly improves the capacity and opportunity for developing nations.

I should add, it’s not MOOCs specifically that create this capacity. It’s open online learning generally. MOOCs are just one way to structure and deliver educational experiences. Development communities – such as open source software communities – are another way. The main and underlying element here is open access to learning resources and community. Open access to learning networks, in other words.

8.      Accompanied by the MOOCs, a network-based pedagogy have been proposed, can you introduce the pedagogy? What’s the difference between a MOOC and a traditional course?

I think I have addressed that sufficiently above.

9.      We know you develop the gRSShopper application, can you introduce and explain how that affects MOOCs?

I have already described the functionality of gRSShopper. The way to think of it, and similar applications, is as an open content distribution system.

This is important. It is not enough simply to have open educational resources. If nobody can find them, if nobody can access them, they serve no useful function at all. If a person creates an OER and has no way to distribute it to students who are interested, the OER is not very useful.

gRSShopper employs open syndication standards – specifically, RSS and Atom, along with open APIs and other mechanisms, to create this distribution network. In a MOOC, the network is created specifically for a given course, but gRSShopper is designed to support open content distribution and syndication generally.

People who used Google Reader or who use Feedly or Evernote or similar tools are accessing a similar capacity. When we use channels like RSS, we do not need to depend on publishers or distributors to find and package information for us.

In the past, I used gRSShopper mostly to distribute content – to make my own RSS feeds and my own email newsletters. When I first started work on it, there weren’t any good ways to do this – people were building RSS feeds by hand. Over time we saw Blogger and WordPress and Livejournal developed, and RSS feed generation was automated, but I still needed the registration and email newsletter function. And none of these supported aggregation – the RSS readers and blogging engines were always separate products. So gradually it became my integrated tool that did everything.

It was this all-in-one functionality that made the first MOOC possible In this one tool I had a mechanism that would collect student postings and make links to them available to everybody else, in whatever format they liked. Without this tool, our course would have looked like any other course, and would have been nothing special. And when – inevitably – someone mass-marketed an open course (like Stanford AI) there would have been no alternative model to compare it against.

10.  You mentioned a paradox that the more autonomous, diverse and open the course, and the more connected the learners, the more the potential for their learning to be limited by the lack of structure, support and moderation normally associated with an online course. Do you find the appropriatesolution or approach for this problem later? Whether the learning analytics(LA) can be think as problem-solving techniques?

Well the reason why their learning is limited by the lack of structure is that they have never learned to be able to learn for themselves in an environment that lacks structure. This makes them unable to function in most environments, not just MOOCs, with the result that even after completing their education they still have a great deal of learning to do in the workplace or the community.

Most educational institutions – and most corporations, and governments – respond by creating more structure, so people are more easily able to cope. And there is certainly a merit to this approach; when we want large numbers of people to be able to do something, the more clearly defined the structure, the more likely they will be successful. But this works only so long as the structure can be clearly defined. And in most of what happens in the workplace or the community, this becomes impossible.

Take transportation, for example. The most structured system of transportation employs buses or trams moving at predefined times. This works for as long as transportation needs are limited. But if people have more complex needs – they need to deliver milk, for example, or they need to go into the country – then the bus and tram system is inadequate. So we have to adopt a less structured system, such as the automobile, and teach people to manage their own transportation for themselves. Even with cars and trucks, there’s still structure – there’s still roads and traffic regulations and signals. But the denser and more difficult the traffic, the more ineffective such structures are, and people have to learn how to self-organize in traffic. Exactly the same is true of learning.

Right now, we have a basic learning system. We put people into schools and colleges and take them through predefined routes. But if we say we do this because people cannot learn for themselves, we are fooling ourselves. People will have to learn how to learn for themselves, because our learning needs are becoming as complex as our transportation needs.

So how do we approach this. Rita Kop and I looked at one way of doing it, using a MOOC to help people learn the basic tools of learning – the course was called Critical Literacies and it was a mixed success. I do intend to try it again, because I think that the basic tools for learning – the critical literacies – are just like the basic tools for traditional learning, like reading and writing, and can be (must be) taught and learned at a basic level of education, with children, as a platform to support future learning.

11.  With respect to actual assessment and credentialing, there are two basic approaches, except learning analytics, your mentioned your own approach-a network clustering approach, can you explain it for us?

I can sketch the idea, but it’s important to understand that it’s an idea that needs a lot of development, and that other people probably have a greater grasp on this idea than I do.

It’s a two-step process. In the first step, we identify what the competencies are that constitute expertise in a given area of study. In the second step, we compare an individual’s performance against that expertise.

What makes the method I propose different is that I propose to use network analytics for both steps. This is importantly different because the competencies won’t be typical competencies, which can be expressed as a proposition (like: ‘staple two pieces of paper together’) but will rather be a complex collection of network behaviours that can be described in words. So people won’t be able to just imitate the right words, they will have to be able to master the actual performance.

12.  Finally as the end of this interview, can you talk about technologies that will impact the development of MOOCs in the future? And make some recommendations for the development of China’s MOOCs? 

I have never even been to China, so I am very hesitant to make recommendations for the development of China’s MOOCs, except to offer wide platitudes: don’t close your options, embrace a diversity of approaches, focus on helping people learn for themselves, and develop a culture of sharing and cooperation. But you know all that.

Every technology will impact the development of MOOCs in the future, but we can probably reduce them to three major types of impact: carbon, carbon, and carbon.

First, carbon will play a key role in the development of super-strength materials for construction, etc. Carbon-fibre already has a wide variety of applications (my laptop, a Lenovo, made in China, is made from it). Carbon fibre redefines where and how we can build computing power into things.

Second, carbon will impact power and information storage. Carbon nanotubes, graphene supercapacitors, etc., will enable powerful computers to hang on the wall, be read like books or worn like clothes.

Third, carbon-based life (such as genetics, organic computing, crops, seeds and medicines) will inform the nature of computing in the future. Connectivism is only the first iteration of this. A next-generation version of connectivism will envision the develop of learning from the creation of network structures to the organization of knowledge in forms resembling DNA.

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THE Article - Full Interview

I was interviewed by Chris Parr for an article that appeared in the Times Higher Education supplement today (October 17). This is the full set of responses I sent for that interview. Typos on both sides are preserved for historical accuracy.

On 30/09/2013 6:44 PM, Parr, Chris wrote:

Great - thanks. That's you, George, Dave and Bryan on board. Perhaps I can do a second pie e with the other names you suggest.

I'm on the move at the mo so apologies for typos, but the questions I had in mind are below. Sorry to be demanding, but if you could send some responses by Friday, that'd be great. It really is appreciated.

Qs:

You were part of the team that created the first Mooc to be known as a Mooc five years ago. Did you feel, at the time, that the concept with which you were experimenting would become so huge that 2012 would be christened the “year of the Mooc” by the New York Times?

I don't think anyone can ever expect their concept to be called 'the concept of the year' - it would take quite an ego to assume that! But it was evident early on that we had latched on to something when we got a hundred times more participants in our course than we expected. And what we were after - open online learning - was a concept we believed in and worked toward. If someone had said in 2008 that 2012 would be "the year of open courses" I would not have been surprised by that. Thousands of people have been working for many years toward free and open learning, and we've done so out of the conviction that ity makes sense not just from the perspective of social justice but also from the perspective of public economics.

What are your thoughts on how Moocs have developed since 2008?

There are lessons to be learned from the history of online learning. The concept of 'learning objects' as defined by people like Wayne Hodgins in 1994 envisioned a set of interoperable pieces of learning software, but over time came to resemble books and videos produced by publishers - learning objects were changed, in other words, from something interactive and dynamic to something static and passive. The same think is happening to MOOCs - as they were originally concieved they were the locus of learning activities and interaction, but as deployed by the commercial providers they resemble television shows or digital textbooks with - at best - an online quiz component.

But despite that I am nonetheless delighted that the concept of open online learning has become front and centre of the dislogue on education. I have long believed that this is a force for good in society. I would have rather the form stayed more true to the original model developed by George Siemens and myself, but I am less concerned about that than I might be because it is evident that the newcomers into the field from Stanford are beginning to learn many of the lessons we learned seven or eight years ago, and that even MOOCs offered by Coursera and Udacity will tend to be more community-oriented than the video-and-test model offered thus far. MOOCs developed outside the Stanford-Harvard-MIT nexus tend to be more interactive and community-based, and this is likely to be true of the offerings from the Open University.

What are your opinions on the Mooc platforms that have sprung up to act as a bridge between the public and the Moocs being offered by universities (Coursera, EdX, Udacity – and in the UK, Futurelearn)?

I think they are temporary and unimaginative, created by people who for the most part are not aware of the history of online learning, and which will not be successful in the long run against competition offered by much more established companies such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn. I think they are marvels of marketing (and of the naivity of venture capitalists) but looking at the platforms from a technological point opf view I see virtually nothing innovative. These courses, which featured 100K or more people, used video lectures and old-style threaded discussion lists! I hasten to add that I expect FutureLearn to be an exception to this, building as it does on the Open University's depth of experience.

I think the other think about these platforms that misses the point to some extent is the degree to which they are associated with universities. This almost by definition means that in some important respects they will not be innovative - they will be based around the idea of a university curriculum, for example, be grounded in assessment and credentials, and critically dependent on a centralized source of expertise. The connectivist courses we created starting in 2008 challenged all of these presumptions, with the result (I think) that the learning that resulted had much greater impact on the participants. The idea of MOOCs as an experiment in pedagogy and educational orghanization has been completely abandoned by the new platforms, to the detriment of MOOCs.

Some such platforms are funded by venture capitalists who, ultimately, will want to see profits. How do you feel about Moocs being used to line the pockets of private businessmen?

Everything lines the pockets of someone somewhere. So I am not in principle opposed to the idea of MOOC techn ology being commercialized. The same is true of all other eductaional technology, from student information systems such as Colleague and Banner, to learning management systems like Blackboard and Desire2Learn, to presentation software and word processing. Professors are paid, support staff are paid, authors write texts and are paid, publishers are paid. The people who build the university campus are paid, as are the groundskeepers, as well as thopse who supply water and power. So I think the ship has sailed on the idea of the commercial sector being involved in education.

Where I would express concern is with the ownership of the product and the equity with which it is applied. We have already seen that in cases where education is managed by commercial corporations, the bottom line often takes precedence over student needs - the whole history of Edison Schools in the U.S. is typical and illustrative. Of particular concern is that manner in which educational content may be adapted to serve corporate needs rather than student needs. It's a bit like a Disney movie - the purpose isn't so much to entertain and educate the child as it is to move Disney product off the store shelves. At the university level this can be ultimately much more sophisticated, but is nonetheless a concern. So I think there is a critical need for there to be a public hand on the tiller, so to speak - there must be a mechanism through which we ensure that education, from the earliest years through university - is designed and delivered to serve the interests of students and society at large. If commercial enterprise is to be the producer, it cannot at the same time be the customer.

We see this most clearly of all when we examine the beneficiaries of open online education. For my own part, I have always been more interested in ensuring the widest and most equitable access possible to education, as opposed to serving every better quality education to a smaller and smaller niche market that can afford it. In commercial education, there is a tendency toward 'cherry-picking' - that is, focusing on the wealthy market, while ignoring the rest. We can see this phenomenon in everything from phone service to grocery stores - it is in many cases actually more expensive to purchase goods and services if you're poor, because nobody is marketing to you. or in private health care, we see valuable resources diverted toward cosmetic surgery and vanity medicine, while basic social health needs, such as the prevention of epidemics, remain under -funded. A public hand is necessary to ensure equitable access to education resources, which indicates a key role for government.

Has the word Mooc been corrupted? Do today’s Moocs adhere to the principles of the Moocs you envisaged? Why / why not?

'Corrupted' is too strong a word. 'Co-opted' would be more appropriate.

At a conference on MOOCs I covered recently the opening speaker laid out an argument to the effect that MOOCs need not be massive, open, online, nor even courses. http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-great-rebranding.html To be clear, I believe educators are perfectly within their rights of offer courses that are not massive, open or online. But we call those 'traditional courses', not MOOCs.

The original design of the MOOC was intended to support massive participation through disaggregation and distribution; the courses are based on interaction among self-organizing communities in a distributed network. Diversity in both content and approach is encouraged. This is quite different from schieving massive scale by using video and broadcasting the same message to thousands of people.

In order to be effectively open, it was also necessary for courses to be offered online. This does not mean that no in-person events could be held, but rather, that these events were organized by participants for their own community, rather than organized centrally by authorities around some 'elite' or local base of participants.

Any other thoughts on Moocs that you wish to go in the article? I will include as much as I can.

MOOCs are the first step in something much more interesting. Once we take seriously the idea that learning - even higher learning - ought to be open to all, we are led to rethink much of the traditional mechanisms of education, and begin tro think of means of extending it from the traditional classroom to all aspects of life. Learning becomes in the future something much like the written language is today, a powerful means of personal advancement and individual fulfillment.

Could you also let me know your 2008 job title and your current one as you would like it to appear in the piece (along with any other positions of which I should be aware)? And are you Mr, Dr or Prof? That's all for now.

In 2008, as it is now:  Senior Research Officer, National Research Council Canada, based in  Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

It's 'Mr' (not 'Dr or Prof' - full story here: http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2009/03/tnp-20-years-on.html ) but my preference is to not use titles at all.

-- Stephen

p.s.

This is the email with the set of names I suggested for the interview. My deepest apologies in advance to anyone who really felt I should have mentioned them - the oversight was neural, not intentional.

Hiya Chris,

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Here’s the full set of names associated with MOOCs, pre-2011 (there’s probably more but this is the cast I can think of off the top of my head).

Pre-MOOC Innovations & Inspirations

Me – e-learning 2.0 - http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1104968

Leigh Blackall (NZ/Australia) – Networked World tour 2006 – see http://flnw.wikispaces.com/

Scott Wilson & Wilbert Kraan – CETIS (UK) – Personal Learning Environment – see http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=1104968

Gardner Campbell (along with Jim Groom and myself) – Edupunk - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edupunk

David Wiley – Bingham Young University – the ‘Wiley Wiki’ open online course

Alec Couros - University of Regina, Canada – Open online courses

Nancy White (USA) and Diego Leal (Colombia) - Educamp

1^st MOOC – 2008 – CCK08

Stephen Downes – that’s me – National Research Council Canada (NRC)

George Siemens – Athabasca University (he was with University of Manitoba at the time)

Naming of the MOOC

Dave Cormier – was helping out with CCK08

Bryan Alexander – was in a conversation with Dave

Ds106 – creativity MOOC - 2010ff- see http://ds106.us/history/

Jim Groom – Mary Washington University

Bryan Alexander – NITLE

Grant Potter (ds106 radio)

cMOOC alumni and researchers

Sui Fai John Mak

Rita Kop (NRC) – hosted and research MOOCs – currently at Yorkville University, Fredericton

Helene Fournier – NRC – MOOC research

Frances Bell (UK, I think)

Jenny Mackness (UK)

Roy Williams

Heli Nurmi (Finland)

Giulia Forsythe

Other relevant names

Alan Levine (formerly of New Media Consortium, ds106 person)

Brian Lamb (Thompson Rivers University)

D’Arcy Norman (University of Calgary)

Scott Leslie (not sure…)

Viplav Baxi (India)

p.p.s.

Both the photos are from my Flickr account - I don't think they ever asked whether they could use them (I could be wrong) but it doesn't really bother me. The first was from a really nice set taken by a a public relations official from ANTEL - he was trying out my camera and we took advantage of the great light and background of the top floor of their building in Montevideo. The photo here - http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/ - is also from that set. I have no idea why the editors chose the photo they did - presumably it expressed the creativity they were trying to capture in the headline. I really liked Montevideo, and I think the photos reflect how much I was enjoying the visit.

The other photo is much more interesting, because they probably didn't know what they were getting. George and I first discussed the MOOC plan at a D2L conference in Memphis in 2008. As the article correctly relates, he emailed me asking whether I was interested in a course. That conference is where we designed it. That that photo is from that conference. It was a great trip overall - we saw Graceland, and Sun Studios, and I went to three minor league baseball games (go Redbirds!).

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Notes from Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training ITHET 2013, Antalya

A New Strategy for Higher Education and Training
Shirley Alexander

Some intro stuff about the buildings being built for the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).
   - leads to questions about designing learning for the future
   - reference to the old 'cranking ifo into students' heads diagram

- claims about the future:
       - work at own time, place, etc
       - computers will revolutionize learning
   - along came MOOCs
   - investment in MOOCs: $100M
       - will take time but will have a major impact

- why things will change...
   - Bondi beach: people ran way from the storm front
   - cost
   - decrease in public funding
   - questions whether the investment is worth it
   - disaggregation of higher education

- cost - taxpayers spend $7B in Australia on HE
   - suggestion they should fund only courses where there is a clear public benefit
   - Ernst & Young - only 3 ways universitys can survive
        - status quo - requires streamlining
        - niche dominator
        - become 'transformers' and change completely what they do
   - Georgia Tech & Udacity - $7000 for an online masters degree
        - people are enrolling in the hundreds in that degree
        - people on campus may ask why they're paying an additional $33K

- disaggregation - what sudents want:
    - learn new things,
    - employment, or
    - broader opportunities

- what should be in a course? what employers say:
    - interpersonal skills & communication
    - passion, desire, commitment, attitude
    - fourth place - calibre of academic result
- what students say:
    - engaging classes (and podcasts of them)
    - more F2F time with academics
    - more feedback & faster turnaround
    - etc. - and they want electronic versions of all those things

- week by week - attendance in a f2f class - down to 31% by end of semester

- What students need to do in order to learn:
    - have learning goals, then,
    - access ideas and content (itunes, YouTube, MOOC, etc) - high
          - so before they come onto campus they have been engaged already
    - on campus: making sense, testing ideas, action of some sort, perhaps industry internship, nore MOOCs
    - receiving feedback on those actions - from network, or perhaps 1-1 confersation with academics
    - reflect - think, maybe write a blog, etc.

- the new buildings don't have a single standard lecture theatre in them
    - (but then we see a lecture theatre photo - but with chairs on casers and tiered tables
    - engineering - labs - but also - remote labs using simulations
    - support for peer learning, groupwork (picture or room with tables)
    - picture of studio-type spaces

- Learning 2020 Projects:
    - nuanced timetabline system
    - change in workload models
    - data-intensive university
    - eg., event lifecycle analytics

- analytics in teaching and research:
    - mapping courses to identify 1st year attrition and 'killer' subjects
    - student dashboard & personalization
    - seeing high attrition rates in engineering courses
    - i-Educator - outreach program by student service unit
          - reduces attrition rate by half in contacted students
    - understanding why pass rates <20 br="" courses="" in="" killer="">          - resources: social networking, teaxhers, pathways, etc
          - factors included: interval between adjacent subjects

- personalization - the 'holy grail'
   - eg. Knewton, Sigmo
   - numeracy


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Linking Theory With Practice
Blanka Klimova
Uni of Hradec Kralove, Czech

- many young graduates cannot find employment after leaning school - about 1900 annually in Czech Republic - rates between 2.7 - 13 percent
- number of graduates increased from 8000 16000 2001-12

- our uni member of Hradec IT cluster
    - about 20 companies from Hrdadec region
    - company experts invited to give lectures
    - companies offer students topics for final projects
    - staff do research for companies & offer workshops
    - one-day job fair since 2008, includes presentations from companies (300-400 students)


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Control Engineering Edication Critical Success Factors Modeling via Fuzzy Cognitive Maps
Engin Yesil
Istanbul Technical University (ITU)
- ITU ABB Process Control Laboratory
        - fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) - various presentations

- FCM firected signed graphs with feedbacks - model events, values, goals as collection of concepts by fgraphinh causal links between these
- eg. FCMis a 4-tuple - concepts, weights, connections, functions
- two approaches:
     - expert based
     - automated learning based
- expert-based approaches - but these can be subjective and introduce errors; use more than one expert
     - define important concepts - eg. using self-study report, reserach studies from literature
     - identify relationships - uses survey
     - determine weights - aggregate expert weights
- simulation - code written in Mretlab - sigmoid transformation function


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Didactic Reflection of Learning Preferences in IT & Managerial Fields of Studuies
Petra Poulova
Uni of Hradec Kralove, Czech

- online course run in three different ways:
    - materials selected by leanring styles
    - or by teaching styles
    - or as selected by student

- Johnson's concept of learning styles:
    - combination lock metaphor
    - 'learning combination' inventory - four patterns:
            - sequential, precise, technical and confluent 

- No statistally signif. difference between groups
    - as determined by test scores
    - why? it students prefer everything?
          - it's our experience that IT students are different from every other student
          - anything online is fine, but they reject anything printed

- some discussion of Bloom;s - adaptation for digital literacies, adds 'communication'

------------------------------------------------

Building Effective Blended Learning for Engineering Studies
Samra Mujacic
Uni of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
- developemnt of learning tech and learning styles
- bringing together educational resources of a different nature - resulting 'blend' is more valuab;e
- this is the model developed at College of Computing and Business Communications eMPIRICA

- blended learning: mixes face-to-face and online learning
   - blend:  f2f(driver), rotation (flipped), flex, online lab, self-blend, online driver
   - model based on pedagogical, tech, mmanagement and institutional factors
   - dominent model: 80% e-learning, f2f 20%
         - LMS: eCampus + IWB-video capture (YiuTube channel) + Adobe Connect + WebEx

- analysis of blended learning model, compared with traditional learning model
   - analysis:
   - blended students better in IT related subjects;
   - group A had better results in engineering math & business English

Conclusion
   - efficient blended learning is more than eTexts and productivity tools
   - eMPIRICA approach better for teachers and students


--------------------------

Skill Learning Environment for Posture and Motion
Masaru Okada
Wakayama University Japan
- in traditional method, motion skills are learned by observation - it is difficult to pick up on this
- new method proposed: use a life-sized model using artifical reality (AR)
   - orientation sensor produced by MicroStrain

- evaluation experiment - 10 male students in thier 20s, motion example: Aikido
    (Aikido chosen because it's slow, performed in a small area, and posture is important to master the motion)
    Result: only the experimental group has improved

- note: the control group watched the video before the pretest, then only watched the same video during instruction; the test group watched the bvideo before, and used the simulation during instruction. As a commenter pointed out: this is a test on whether feedback helps, not a test of some particular tech.

-------------------------------------

Do Engineering: Delivering First Class Online Engineering Education with Graphical System Design
Michael Haddad - National Instruments Arabia
Online learning:
- access to education to hundreds of thousands of people
- platform for dissemination of a wide variety of topics
- ideally suited for arts, humanities, finance...

But...

- engineering still relies in theories and equations - there isn't really th idea of learning by doing, so
   - engineering courses have low completion rates
   - retention of concepts is very low
- eg. MIT engineering courses stufy:  8% completion rate (yikes)
- so, how do we address this?

Let's do engineering.
   - how does a student's brain work? David Barret, Olin College
   - cycle of learning - net gain after rest is small compared to what wasoriginally retained
   - so, give them stimulus: high emotion reinforces neural connections
        - eg., make paper airplanes to win competition
   - as a result, net gain much higher
   - so, doing engineering is essential

How can online students do engineering to build systems?
   - future eengineers will either design or use systems, so they have to understand system-level design
   - systems are everywhre, from the Tesla motor to the smartphone
   - Berkeley research: best way to learn system-level design is a platform-based approach
        A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, 'Designing Platform Based Design', EEDesign, Feb. 2002
        - because engineers spent more time figuring out the tools than actually doing engineering

Graphical system design:
   - top-level, the application domain (measurement, test, monitoring, embeddedm control...)
   - middle: platform
   - bottom-level: work environment: desktops and laptops, NI CompactDAQ, PXI and modular installatioons, NI Compact RIO

The platform API should provide several tools for interacting with data online
   - eg. LabVIEW Web Services
   - eg. Data Dashboard - download for android tablet or iOS
          - build their own applications, eg. windmill monitoring system

So, when we look at doing engineering, there are two approaches:
   - direct access, on campus, to advanced applications - ike robots, etc. - high cost; or campus access in central lab
   - open couyrses, MOOCs, highly distributed hardware
   - LabVIEW crosses these two envirnments

Centralized lab: eg., NI ELVIS Multi-Disciplinary Teaching Platform
   - combines various functions: oscilloscope, digital multimeter, function generator, etc.
   - fully programmable
   - supports teaching eco system - from engineering to bio
   - interactive remote labs: (Massive Open Online Labs - MOOLs) - iLAT use of MIT labs, for example
   - such a system is scalable
        - you can have centralized labs on multiple universities,
        - served through a common broker,
        - which can provide access to thousands of clients

So, how are they used?
   - students build circults, analyze them, collect data
   - the circuits access these labs - these are preset experiments that are assembled for them (so they never insert the transistor backwards)
   - but you want them to be able to touch and use the hardware...
       - so, eg., NI myDAQ - similar to the ELVIS, whuch does a bunch of things

Use case: Rice University MOOC
   - Dr. Johnson, spring 2013 - 350000 studnets - but no lab component
   - Echoes 'Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering'
   - being developed for 2014 with experiments

Use case: Georgia Tech (the $5K masters)
   - they want to guarantee that the experience online is the same as in person
   - so they are making optional books + equipment they can buy

Use case: Circuits by Tsinghua University
   - China MOOC in edX online for myDAQ integrated in circuits
   - uses NI myDAQ - but needs more, to provide access to controls....
         - with 'systems on a chip' we can introduce electronics for controls
         - eg. myRIO - enabled system design platform with api, wifi access, etc

I asked whether there are use cases where teams of people in different locatiosn colaborate to design a single system - response is that this is possible, but we are not MOOc providers. So it still needs to be developed.


----------------------------

Technology for Learning: Flipping Instruction
Keith Willey, the University of Technology, Sydney
Flipped instruction:
   - a form of blended learning (Wikipedia)
   - transmission-based in-class lectures replaced with participative leanring activities
   - humanities have been doing this forever, with books
   - but STEM students have a different mindset, they want to be led a bit first

Features of flipped instruction:
   - we want to release class time to be used for interactive and collaborative activities
        - because learning is socially and culturally constructed
        - meaningful learning happens when students are engaged in social activities
   - need to create opportunities for feedback, to get feedback from studnets
   - class time is freed up for higher-level activities: analysis, evaluation, creation
        - this includes assessments and providing feedback

(failed attempt to show a couple videos)

Misconceptions about flipping:
   - it's not less work - it's actually more work
   - many students find they dion't have the time to consume the flipped lectures
   - students thought they 'paid' to be taught by an expert - student culture resists change
   - many students don't have the confidence to exercise their judgement

Assessment:
   - Ramsden (2003) - assessment deisgn and methods have the biggest impact on student learning
   - Tang (1994) - is assessment seen as requirin passive acquisition and accurate reproduction of details, students will adopt a surface approach employing low-level cognitive strategies
   - Carless (2007) - diagram of learning-oriented assessment
        - assessment usually though of as measurement
        - but there's also a leanring aprt - we want assessment tasks as learning tasks - feedback as fed forward
   - formative vs summative assessment - as soon as we make assessment summative, students get strategic

Validity of assessment:
   - Sadler (2010) - assessment fidelity - elementss that contribute to a grade correctly identified as academic achievement
                           - vs. grades for efforts, attendance, participation, revision, compliance, memory
                   - lower thresholds for interim quality judgements send a muffled message
                           - you need to give people the chance to practice the stuff that will be on the exam
                   - cumulative assessments in which early understandings are recorded misrepresent the achievement in the course
                           - some people might be really good at the little quizzes each week, but others learn more globally
                           - need to use threshhold exams where earlier results can be overruled

Activity design:
   - begin with understanding of how it is going to be assessed
   - what opportunity can I give them to learn it?
   - then - and only then - do I look at the resouces

Supporting scaaffolding
   - get them to explain why they deisgned they activity they did
   - and what learning opportunity this affords
   - how can students evaluate their learning from the activity?
   - how will the activity impact on their reality - how does it help them see their world differently?

Technology's role....
   - should be more than about efficiencies and sustainability
   - use simulations and enquiry-based learning activities
   - they should facilitate collaboration and peer learning and development of professional judgement
        - writing for the tutor should be dead - we want students readinge ach others' assignments
        - example: Tim's Tutor online simulation (by Emona)
        - example: SPARK PLUS software - a way for students to self-assess each others' work
   - they should provide new perspectives and views to address threshold concepts (these are difficult-to-understand concepts that open up a whole new way of thinking) - give them more incremental access to these concepts
   - should provide access to analytics to understand how students learn

Flipping recommendations:
   - start small, learn from feedback and imporve, and make things short
   - spend more time preparing the flip
   - take the opportunity to learn from student feedback and dialogue
   - design appropriate and valid assessment


-----------------------------


MOOCs and/or E-lectures - a means of virtualizing university education
Thomas Ottoman, Germany
- crucial point in xMOOCs - high quality content production
   - EU - significant funding for content production 1995-2005
   - but most online cousres did not survive the initial funding period
- a feasible alternative - recordings of live lectures
   - this is now a routine service at many universities
   - access to e-leactures doesn't empty lecture theatres

- engagement of the teacher:
   - lecturing is still seen as the main duty of a university teacher
   - so why should a professor engage in a MOIOC?
         - prestige
         - attraction of grant money and VC
         - personal financial benefits
         - in the long run, financial or other rewards appear to be indispensible to keep teachers involved in online teaching
         - example: The VFH - 3000 students enrolled
         - media fees paid by students (have to do thuis in Germancy, there's no tuitions for brick & morter)
         - or, online tecahing may reduce teaching load
         - example: VHB (Virtual University Bavaria) = 100K students per year
                 - the reason student take these is credits count fully toward degrees

- involvement of students:
    - MOOCs have high dropout rate, there's no entry requirement, no dropout cost
    - students tend to behave like watching TV, there are many rubbernecks and lurchers
    - MOOCs students cannot be perosnally taught, need tests, discussion forums, etc
    - MOOCs follow the 'Darwinistic approach'f teaching and learning

- e-Lectures production - digital or analog?
    - turns a perfect event into time- and space- independent mode
    - make optimal use of current technology for recording, storage, distribution, etc
    - provide added value: replay, searching, browsing, etc.
Not as easy as it seems - professors use multiple tools today. 3 main forms of recording
   - screen grabbing
   - VCR recording
   - object-based recording

Screen-grabbing
   - take snapshots of presentation screen, synch with audio, present as video
   - eg. Camtasia
   - problem is it destroys the object-base of presented media & symbolic information

VCR recording
   - done in background through projector - you don't need software on the presentation computer
   - eg. matterhorn open source lecture capture
   - object information is lost

Object-based
   - object remains intact, can be searched, etc
   - but you need dedicated recording and replay software - eg. Lecturnity

Essentials:
   - prepare slides as templates to be filled-in at presentation time
   - use a large graphics tablet
   - cut the recording into chunks of about 20 minutes
   - take care of the audio stream - use high quality microphones
  
E-lectures portal at Frieberg - one of the most accessed servers
   - students like to download lectures
   - permanent problem: management of digital rights
         - copyright laws allow use in limited classrooms
         - so they have to password-protect classes

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