The new oil

 by cclark395

Every day we happily agree to sharing enormous amounts of information about ourselves to a wide range of companies. All those club cards we carry around which register every purchase we make and gather various kinds of bonus points that some day can be cashed in for discount. The reward to the company is tons of data about our preferences, purchasing habits and spending power that can then be used for targeted advertising and as statistical data for marketing analysis. Free has a price tag.

The same goes for all the free web services we know and love, bringing you, among millions of other things, this blog. The price of free is offering a vast amount of raw data that companies can then analyse to then offer services back to us or as strategic marketing data. As the saying goes "if it's free, you're probably the product." Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and all the others are collecting all our clicks for future harvesting and it's not hard to see that maybe that is one of the main drivers behind the MOOC trend. There's a lot of speculation about MOOC business models and although there are a few already in place they are probably not the reason the major MOOC players have attracted impressive amounts of venture capital.

An excellent presentation by Audrey Watters, Student Data is the New Oil: MOOCs, Metaphor, and Money (Hack Education 17 October), raises possible the real motivation behind MOOCs, namely the promise of data mining. Data it seems is the new oil and we are only just beginning to be able to refine it and put it to use. By storing all your clicks, which sites you visit, browsing patterns, videos watched, tweets sent, test scores and so on you can build up incredibly detailed profiles of every user. This can be used to be able to suggest new content specially for you, predict how you will behave, assess your learning and so on. Learning analytics has been on the radar of the Horizon Report for a few years now but the technology to fully realise the potential is only beginning to emerge.

Student data could well be digital oil and companies that can store the most will soon be able to refine it into useful commodities and Watters suggests that the scramble to own the oil reserves has only just begun. Until now this data was stored in many separate silos but these are being linked together and the next stage of web development will see completely new ways of utilizing and monetizing the raw data. Learning analytics promise personalized education where the net will guide you through customized learning paths suggesting material and methods suited to what works best for you. There are almost unlimited opportunities here but there's also a more sinister side if all this data gets into the wrong hands. Watters quotes from journalist Jer Thorp:

"Perhaps the “data as oil” idea can foster some much-needed criticality. Our experience with oil has been fraught; fortunes made have been balanced with dwindling resources, bloody mercenary conflicts, and a terrifying climate crisis. If we are indeed making the first steps into economic terrain that will be as transformative (and possibly as risky) as that of the petroleum industry, foresight will be key. We have already seen “data spills” happen (when large amounts of personal data are inadvertently leaked). Will it be much longer until we see dangerous data drilling practices? Or until we start to see long term effects from “data pollution”?

The analogy with oil is an excellent warning of the potential and dangers of digging too deep. Here's Audrey Watters' slideshow that accompanies the talk.

Student Data is the New Oil from Audrey Watters

Bite-sized learning

 by Smaku

I've written several times about why completion rates are not particularly relevant when it comes to MOOCs. Most of the students are studying out of pure interest in their limited spare time and if more important things happen in their lives they will naturally drop the course. However if you really want to keep most students' attention for the full duration of your course the answer is to make the course as short as possible. Given people's busy schedules it's best to break learning into bite-sized modules where you can "complete" a course after say 2-3 weeks while your enthusiasm lasts and momentum is up. Instead of offering a 12 week course, divide it into say 4 x 3 week modules. Short term targets feel more achievable. My MOOC efforts haven't lasted past the week 3 mark yet so I can identify with this model. I simply can't commit my evenings to a MOOC for many weeks in advance but 2-3 weeks would probably work.

This is the subject of an article by George Anders in LinkedIn, Education Pioneer's Advice: Beat the Clock. It seems Andrew Ng, co-founder of MOOC provider Coursera, has drawn the conclusion that Coursera's courses should be short and sweet instead of simply following academic tradition with twelve week courses that inevitably suffer from very low completion rates, no matter how good the course material and pedagogical approach.

"Why not take a fresh look? Internal Coursera data shows that drawn-out classes consistently suffer from higher dropout rates. The actual teaching may be impeccable. But as Ng puts it, "life gets in the way" for many of Coursera's students. The site attracts learners in all walks of life, from cab drivers to corporate vice presidents. Full-time students represent only a minority of the overall enrollee population. So class-takers typically struggle to clear out time in the midst of on-the-job demands, business travel, family illnesses and car repairs."

The global success of TED talks is further proof of our preference for shorter chunks of input. The 10-15 minute lecture can captivate and inspire in a way that the traditional academic 45-60 minute version patently fails to do. Shorter courses or modularisation of longer courses provide clear short-term goals for even the busiest learners. Many campus courses are also being divided into bite-sized chunks by awarding badges for successful completion thereby encouraging students to focus on one step at a time. Learning - one bite at a time.

See also George Anders' article in Forbes, Coursera's Online Insight: Short Classes Are Education's Future.

Quality and openness

 by California Avocados

An article in Inside Higher Ed, Puzzling peer reviews, highlights supposed dangers of open access publications. John Bohannon of Harvard University wrote a deliberately flawed biology article using a fictitious name and non-existent institution and submitted it to over 300 open access publications. It was accepted by about half of them (read a longer description of the experiment can be found in Science, Who's afraid of peer review?). The article was written as part of a survey to see how much peer review was involved in the rapidly expanding open access journal market and the results cast a serious shadow over many of them. It contained serious scientific flaws that would be obvious to any academic in the field so the journals who accepted it had clearly not carried out any sort of serious peer review. Interestingly it was not only obscure journals that failed the test, even journals run by the big academic publishers fell for the trap.

"Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

This is clearly unacceptable, though I find it hard to believe that so many people would fail to at least check the credentials of Ocorrafoo Cobange of the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. The basic principles of Howard Rheingold's Crap detection seem to have been overlooked here (Is this a credible source? What other publications come from this person/institution?). But does this mean that the open model is inherently flawed and that the traditional closed journal system is more credible?

All journals, open or closed, rely on peer review for the credibility of their publication. In neither model do the reviewers get paid for their services so the crucial factors must be the integrity and experience of the reviewers and the rigour of the process. Those were clearly lacking in the journals that accepted this fake article but I wonder what the success rate would have been if submitted to a large number of traditional journals. I suspect that even there there are some whose quality assurance processes are inadequate.

This is not really an openness issue but more a quality issue that can affect any publication open or closed. Those whose peer review and editing routines are not sufficiently rigorous will lose credibility. The reason so many open access journals seemed to fail this particular test could be because there are so many new journals on the scene who are still trying to establish themselves and have not developed quality assurance routines in their peer review processes. There are of course many extremely dubious publications out there, often based in developing countries but with titles that begin with "The American Journal of ...". These offer publication at a price and often succeed in luring academics into paying for publication. These deserve to be named and shamed as they are in Jeffrey Beall's List of predatory publishers 2013.

However it is important that we are not be tempted into thinking that openness means poor quality. The two are simply not related as David Wiley points out in an article, On quality and OER. Copyright or a price tag are no guarantees of good quality, whether we're talking about educational resources or academic publications. There are excellent open resources and excellent proprietary resources and their excellence depends on quality assurance routines and professionalism.

"Because quality is not necessarily a function of copyright status, neither traditionally copyrighted educational materials nor openly licensed educational materials can exclusively claim to be “high quality.” There are terrific commercial textbooks and there are terrific OER. There are also terrible commercial textbooks and terrible OER. Local experts must vet the quality of whatever resources they choose to adopt, and cannot abdicate this responsibility to publishing houses or anyone else."

MOOCs - copyright confusion

 by opensourceway

In an ideal world where educators and institutions share resources with Creative Commons licenses that regulate reuse and adaptation there would be no problems with digital rights in MOOCs. The original connectivist MOOCs were all based on open educational resources and participants were well versed in the principles of openness. However the newer MOOC variations come in 50 shades of openness and there are suddenly complex copyright issues that participating institutions and educators need to be aware of.

There's a timely reminder of these issues in an Educause article entitled Copyright Challenges in a MOOC Environment. The article is the result of interviews with university leaders and legal experts about agreements with MOOC providers. Copyright agreements within a university regarding teachers' rights to their material may not apply when the course is globally distributed as a MOOC. Some material that may be used for educational purposes within the confines of a campus course may not be used when freely available on line. Some MOOC providers claim copyright on the content of the MOOCs they distribute.

"Each MOOC provider, for example, establishes a proprietary claim on material included in its courses, licenses to the user the terms of access and use of that material, and establishes its ownership claim of user-generated content. This conflicts with the common institutional policy approach that grants rights to faculty who develop a course. Fair-use exceptions to traditional copyright protection face challenges as well, given a MOOC’s potential for global reach."

If a university offers an open MOOC with the best of intentions and then offers the course via a MOOC consortium, that openness may be threatened. If that consortium sells the MOOC to other universities in a sort of franchising agreement the consortium will profit from selling rights that are inherently open. If money is made from a MOOC then shouldn't those responsible for creating the content get some kind of reward too?

An even more problematic area is that of user-generated content; the assignments that students submit for evaluation on the course forum or other repositories. Are those contributions automatically the property of the MOOC provider and are students aware of this? If you're taking a for-credit MOOC and you submit a longer paper for assessment who does that work belong to: the MOOC provider, the university or the student? Can the MOOC provider use student material from one course on future courses? The article raises many interesting questions that cannot be fully answered today but it concludes by stating that the legal discussion about MOOCs is inevitable given the pioneering nature of the movement.

"MOOCs present complex copyright questions that can challenge the relationship between the institution and its faculty and students. Creation of and/or participation in MOOCs do not always fit comfortably within the terms of standard institutional policies. Involving all stakeholders in open and flexible discussions should enhance the development of a shared copyright vision in the emerging MOOC environment for the greater benefit of higher education today."

The moral of the story is that universities need to consider very carefully the legal implications of  an agreement with a MOOC provider and discuss concerns openly before committing. It's going to take time to establish a new framework and maybe new perspectives of digital rights will emerge. The crucial factor is that all parties discuss as openly as possible and try to find answers to all these questions.

E-mail generation

 by Farid Iqbal

E-mail is the default tool for digital communication in most organisations. You simply can't work without it and since most people have mobile access to their work account the mails just keep rolling in 24/7. The sheer volume of e-mail leads to considerable stress and I've seen colleagues with over 100 unread mails in their inbox. Even if most users complain about the volume and have problems clearing the backlog very few dare to use other services even if they are patently better at doing some of the jobs that e-mail fails to do. We somehow see e-mail as more trustworthy than other types of communication such as instant messaging, shared work spaces or collaborative documents despite the often-reported fact that over 90% of all e-mail is spam and so many viruses, trojans and other malware are transmitted by e-mail. It's a complicated love-hate relationship.

Students however have abandoned e-mail, according to an article the New York Times, Technology and the College Generation. Students seldom check their student e-mail accounts and this leads to a communication breakdown between them and their e-mail generation teachers and administrators. In the past there were often complaints about the university forcing students to use university accounts rather than letting them use their own private e-mail addresses but today's students don't even have an e-mail account. Some only have an account because many services like booking concert tickets or downloading a game demand an address in order to register. Using e-mail for communication is virtually unknown.

So students have abandoned e-mail whilst most people over 25 is hooked on it. That doesn't mean we're any good at using it. We misuse e-mail all the time, using it for tasks it simply is no good at. Most people still edit texts by mailing dozens of updated copies back and forth to each other when Google Drive or other collaborative tools do the job so much better. Many meetings take 50 e-mails to arrange (all using the dreaded Reply all button) instead of using a service like Doodle. Long discussions between members of a group (using Reply all to a group of thirty members) can fill your inbox in no time when the whole debate would be more efficiently run in a discussion forum.

The article also points out that faculty use of e-mail is not exactly exemplary:

“Faculty and staff love to blame students for not checking e-mail instead of owning up to the fact that no one ever got that good at using e-mail in the first place,” he said, citing vague subject lines and (exaggerating to make his point) 36-paragraph e-mails from faculty in which the crucial information is in paragraph 27. “How are they going to learn to use e-mail when that’s the model, and why would they want to?”

E-mail, like most tools, is good for some things and not so good at other things. Over the last 15 years we've used it for just about every type of transaction. Maybe we should listen to the students and try new ways of communicating, leaving e-mail to deal with what it's good at. Maybe if we were less addicted to it the spammers might also have top reconsider.

Integrating the e- into learning - EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2013

Open University of Catalonia

This year's EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2013 was held at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona 26-27 September. This is always an enjoyable event and being on the EFQUEL board and the programme committee I am kept pretty busy before and during the conference. This year's conference had the theme Refocusing quality in e-learning and the aim of reviewing the progress made so far in defining quality in the field as well as examining quality criteria for new areas of open education, in particular MOOCs.

My highlights of the conference

• We are at last moving from a divided view of quality in education (traditional/e-learning) to a single concept of learning and teaching. Representatives of the major European higher education organisations ENQA, EUA, EURASHE and ESUwere all active contributors and ready to start a common discussion about how the area of e-learning quality can be integrated into traditional quality assurance criteria for higher education. This feels like a major breakthrough and hopefully specialist e-learning quality organisations will be able to contribute actively to the development of mainstream quality assurance in higher education.
• MOOCs have taken the discussion of e-learning into the spotlight and will force even the most traditional universities to review the way they use technology and focus on quality. Even if MOOCs are mostly about informal learning the hype has made universities think about how they work with online learning in general and MOOC lessons will be applied to campus courses.
• The tyranny of university ranking systems that focus only on high profile research universities could soon be over as new more comprehensive ranking systems that include vital criteria such as quality of teaching, student satisfaction, internationalisation and regional engagement. One such system was highlighted in Barcelona, U-Multirank.

  

  MOOCathon in progress

• The three session long MOOCathon that I ran together with my board colleagues Ulf Ehlers and Ebba Ossiannilsson was a success with all seats taken all the way. My fears that it would be like a real MOOC with standing room only at the start and then only a handful left at the end proved to be unfounded though we did have a number of participants who opted in and out during the day but the total number remained fairly constant. We are now compiling and reviewing all the ideas and comments from the session for a new post on the MOOC Quality Project site and hope to write an article about the whole process in the near future.
• Isn't it time for us to review and redefine our own terminology? We all use terms like e-learning, net-based learning, distance learning, online learning, technology enhanced learning etc sometimes interchangeably. If we are not clear about what we mean it's no wonder that other people get confused. Let's work together and define our terminology. At the same time I hope we can soon dump MOOC as a confusingly all-embracing term for many different types of learning arena.

Main conference hall

Some good quotes

How can openness contribute to a quality learning experience rather than be seen as a second rate option? - Ulf Ehlers, President EFQUEL.

The quality of online education and provisions are pivotal to the quality of an institution - Josep Planell, Vice Chancellor Open University of Catalonia.

MOOCs will lead to higher quality in for-credit university education.- Sir John Daniel, Commonwealth of Learning.

MOOCs can stimulate elearning if institutions develop policies for online teaching and execute them determinedly.- Sir John Daniel

Don’t assume that students are automatically attracted to online learning. They want something that will get them where they want to go. - Sir John Daniel

Recognition of prior experiential learning must be included in QA.- Guy Haug

E-learning is not the revolution. The real revolution is in teaching. - Josep Grifoll, ENQA

National QA Agencies don't consider e-learning priority, since its not in legislation. - Josep Grifoll

Quality Assurance labels should be included in EQAR together with QAAs. - Josep Griffoll

There is no such thing as the best car, wine or university in the world - Jon File, U-Multirank

The digital revolution in education is actually about moving to choice based education - are we fit for the choice based mode? - Antonio Teixeira, President EDEN

Let's hope the momentum can be maintained and we can have more detailed discussions next year when we meet in Crete, 7-9 May.

I also made a Scoopit magazine for the conference with many of the presentations and related articles as well as a selection of mini interviews I did with some of the key speakers and other participants.

Connected learners need connected teachers

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano creates some excellent presentations and here's a new one dealing with the need for teachers to become globally connected. Read also her related blog post, Global learning - what do you mean?

Global Learning- What do you mean? from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

It's a simple message but for some reason it is taking a long time to reach all parts of the education system. If students are going to succeed in a global knowledge society they need teachers who are able to guide them. Assuming that students are digital natives and don't need support with digital literacy is resigning responsibility. Using today's social media and net-based tools require very little, if any, technical expertise; often much simpler than using the average washing machine or TV set.

We need to move away from seeing digital media as mysterious technology only for the initiated, to integrating them into education as natural communication tools. Maybe we need to stop calling it all technology because doing so gives many an escape clause: "I'm a teacher not a technician".
In the past when computers were deskbound and clumsy there were legitimate fears that students would be pacified in front of screens all day but today's "technology" is mobile and ubiquitous. Learning can take place anywhere rather than being confined to the classroom. But first we need to learn how to connect.

Shop window MOOCs

 by dcmaster

There have been plenty metaphors for the MOOC movement; some very apt, some rather exaggerated and a few downright silly. An article by Martin Weller about the launch of the UK MOOC consortium FutureLearn, FutureLearn & The Role Of MOOCs, defines MOOCs as a shop window for higher education in a similar way as open educational resources. They offer millions a chance to learn from top universities and will stimulate an interest in learning and a thirst for more. They're not going to smash the system but will settle into a necessary and worthwhile niche once the hype dust has settled.

"The MOOC hype is settling down now, and I feel that FutureLearn is really an indication of what it may well end up being. Forget the "end of universities as we know them" rhetoric, ignore the "all education will be this way one day" commercial wet dream - MOOCs will be as OERs. And that's a good thing. OERs are now available from providers all over the globe, they make a big difference to the way many people work. But they haven't really fundamentally changed what we do in education, they've allowed new models and enhanced others."

MOOCs should be seen rather as marketing campaigns that benefit both the university and the thousands of learners who will study them. The success of a marketing campaign is decided by how many people that are more attracted to your institution as a result, not by the number who didn't react. MOOCs are not competing with regular courses, they are marketing the benefits of education. It's essential that they are well designed and offer a quality educational experience but the number of learners who complete such courses is not particularly relevant to judging their worth.

Weller's closing remarks are spot on:

"If a million learners every year get to experience some good online teaching material, and a smallish percentage of these then go on to study other MOOCs, or enter formal education, that's a positive outcome for universities, society and the individual learners. It probably isn't a model that will get venture capitalists excited though."

Learning to deal with free - don't put all your eggs in the same basket

 by paulmorriss

We often hear that if you don't pay for something then you are the product, especially in connection with social media and cloud computing. Companies offer attractive services for free in return for information about ourselves that can then be used for targeted advertising or to tempt us into buying a more advanced version of the service (so called freemium). However there's nothing new with this concept. We've had many years of commercial radio and TV who offer their services "free" and the cost is being subjected to sometimes rather intense advertising. Many magazines which we pay good money for are over 50% pure advertising and many of the articles are slightly more discrete lifestyle advertising. Most of us have loyalty cards that give us discount at the cost of giving the company information about every purchase we make. Read more on this in an article from 2012, Stop Saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product'.

The concept of free raises a lot of integrity issues, especially when cloud services are used in an educational context. An article in Inside Higher Ed, Teaching Ethically with the Free Web, raises many relevant questions about using services like Google Apps, Facebook, Dropbox, WordPress and iCloud in schools and colleges. Many of these are excellent for collaborative writing, discussion, project work and reflection and are more user-friendly and attractive than more closed environments such as learning management systems. However they all have different policies for privacy and ownership of content and each has to be examined and discussed. Another issue is that some are not compatible with tools that improve accessibility for those with visual impairments.

However the article advises teachers to become more aware of the implications of using open services and discussing them with their students. For example the documents you store on a cloud service are probably your own intellectual property but the information you put in your profile is probably not. Becoming aware of the conditions is the first step to taking control of your digital footprint and this is an essential classroom discussion that needs to be repeated and refined over the years. The article offers the following practical advice to teachers working with cloud services and social media.

• Inform ourselves about the technologies we are using with students and our responsibilities as their teachers—both legally according to FERPA and ethically according to our beliefs and our students’ best interests. To that end, I’ve provided links to the policy and privacy statements of all of the apps and technologies mentioned in this post in the fact box above.
• Engage our students in conversations about whatever apps or technologies we will be using in our courses, including conversations about what will be done with their personal information or content.
• Offer options whenever possible as alternatives to particular web services. This gets tricky when using reminder or organizational applications, but you can always use multiple reminder services (Twitter and Remind101, for example) to keep students up-to-date on changes to the syllabus, or give groups options for online collaboration when they are completing collaborative projects.

The advantages of using free social media and cloud-based services are too many to simply ignore but we need to be aware of the conditions and actively discuss the issues when using them in teaching. And don't put all the eggs in the same basket.

MOOCs - more glacier than tsunami

 by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

About a year ago Stanford University president John L. Hennessy made a much publicized presentation comparing MOOCs to a tsunami about to hit higher education. It certainly intensified the discussion of online learning and helped to put MOOCs on the front pages of some glossy publications. However one year later and we maybe should change the metaphor. Although the various MOOC players have made a dramatic impact on the educational landscape I don't see the wave sweeping away any campuses just yet. No ivory towers have crashed down and curiously the most active proponents of MOOCs are those universities with the most ivory towers to defend.

Maybe MOOCs are part of an educational glacier that will eventually lead to radical changes but as a slow grind rather than a massive impact. In that case the MOOC is simply one of many concepts that will be tested and developed as the glacier grinds over the landscape. Although I often compare what's happening to education with changes in publishing or the music industry there are fundamental differences. An article by Jonathan Tapson, MOOCs and the Gartner Hype Cycle: A very slow tsunami, points out that choosing to download an album instead of buying it in a shop is an undramatic and instant decision and meant that the music industry changed radically in a very short period. Education however is a major life decision and students are unlikely to opt for new options until they offer a recognized and proven improvement on the traditional model.

"Undertaking a university degree is not an impulse purchase, like a book, or a song, or a newspaper; even a periodical or cable TV subscription only lasts a year or two, and involves moderate cost and no time commitment. A traditional university degree is a minimum three-year, whole-of-life experience, which results in a career-defining outcome and a mountain of debt, or cash spent, or some equivalent outlay. Not entirely unlike getting married, in fact."

For students today MOOCs are not an alternative to college and they are unlikely to be that for several years. Most colleges will continue with business as usual for many years but slowly the alternatives will become more serious and appealing to an increasing number of students. The article projects that the real effects of this change will not really be felt until around 2023, quoting Bill Gates, “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”

There's a lot happening in education today and MOOCs are just one of many important new elements being experimented with. They're all part of the glacier but I don't believe that one element will lead to real change. The MOOC concept will fade into something else and we'll see plenty of tsunami scares before we finally realize that change is more organic and less dramatic but the effects will be radical.

Can Apple kill passwords?

 by Lulu Hoeller

I hate passwords! I have dozens of them and if it wasn't for my devices automatically remembering them I'd be locked out of everything. I've tried to follow the standard advice of sticking to a certain formula but then there are several services that insist I change password every month and will not accept any old ones. The worst ones are services I only use now and then, like 2-3 times a year. I nearly always have to ask for a new password. Worst case scenario is when I can't remember my user name either. I know there are alternatives including apps that remember everything for you but I still haven't got round to them. Other technical solutions so far have had too many ifs and buts to threaten the dominance of the password.

My hopes have been raised however by Apple's move to include fingerprint ID detection in the new iPhone as described in a BBC article, Could iPhone's fingerprint sensor help kill off passwords? Biometrics has been toted for at least 15 years now but have never really found the killer application. Inclusion in the iPhone could well lead to mainstream acceptance. It's not foolproof, nothing is, but the article suggests that future ID authentication will involve multiple checks on say fingerprint, iris, voice and even pulse. The future may well build upon your body as your ID and not a combination of symbols.

The impact of more secure identification control on education is clear. An often discussed weakness in online assessment and examination is ID control and the use of biometrics with mobile devices could clear up many of these concerns. For now, however, we still have to remember those irritating passwords.

Rockstar keynotes

 by Anirudh Koul

One of the most prolific keynote speakers at educational conferences in recent years has been George Siemens of Athabasca University in Canada. As the founder of connectivism and one of the pioneers of the MOOC movement his research and practical experience in the pedagogical use of educational technology has made him one of the most sought-after keynote speakers on the international circuit. His air miles total for the past 5 years must be mighty impressive.

In a new blog post however he has announced his retiral from the conference limelight, Done doing keynotes. He understandably wants to return to teaching and research and contribute to the educational discussions from that perspective rather than from the spotlight of the conference stage. An excellent example of knowing when to step back.

One paragraph in the post caught my eye in particular. Keynote speakers in education are gaining rockstar status and that creates an uncomfortable tension.

"I’ve long held that once something becomes routine, rather than innovative and challenging, that it is time to rethink what I’m doing. Additionally, there has been growing creep of “rockstar-ism” in education where we look for “the person” to give us “the solution”. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the view that the answer can be brought to us by someone outside of our system. This view is appealing but completely false. I’ve answered many questions from audience members with “I don’t know” and “that depends”. People seem to find this unsatisfying. We like our so-called rock stars in the education and technology field. We like clear answers. And it’s not healthy for us or for our field."

Of course the role of a keynote speaker is to challenge, inspire and create a buzz in the conference hall that will then permeate the rest of the sessions. However there is the risk that Siemens states that we expect them to have all the answers. I experienced this first hand in the summer when I attended the EDEN (European Distance and E.-learning Network) conference in Oslo. Two of the most prominent keynotes in the business, Sir Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra, were appearing (Robinson via videolink from Los Angeles) and the buzz in the hall before the performance really felt like a rock concert. They are both inspirational and polished performers who challenge many fundamental beliefs about education and are naturally excellent at getting a conference off to a flying start. However I got a strong sense of the rockstar-ism that Siemens mentions in his post as we all laughed at the jokes and enjoyed the keynote ride as we would if our musical heroes were performing their greatest hits. No disrespect to the speakers, it's more our own need for figureheads and gurus who can provide the answers we seek.

The answers are within us rather than on the conference stage.

The silent majority - why are MOOC forums counterproductive?

 by James Cridland

The discussion forum is a central feature of all learning management systems and the focus for most online courses. Often it's the only interactive feature in the course but it's notoriously difficult to generate real discussion there. Too few participants and it will probably never take off. Too many and it becomes chaotic. In many cases students only post in the forum because there are credits at stake and very often the real discussion takes place elsewhere; on Facebook or Google Hangouts for example.

So if the forums of regular online courses are difficult to run effectively they will prove almost impossible in a MOOC with potentially tens of thousands of participants. Nonetheless most MOOCs persist with them as a token attempt at interaction or because the forum is somehow a default setting in online learning. Generally MOOC forums become overwhelming and chaotic with hundreds of unrelated threads and the vast majority of participants take one look and never return. An article in Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, reinforces this impression that forums are actually counter-productive:

"Ironically, the biggest obstacle preventing MOOC students from forming relationships is the feature most relied on to encourage them."

A dynamic forum is like gathering people in a room and asking them to discuss. A class of say 30 will divide into smaller groups and it is easy to move over to a new group when you want to. There's a clear structure to the interactions and it's easy to get an overview. However if you add a few thousand strangers into the mix it gets completely chaotic and effective communication is likely to break down. Some forums are dominated by so-called super posters, students who can be responsible for up to 25% of a forums total posts (see report on a recent Stanford University survey in eCampus News Sept 2013 p6). Their enthusiasm might inspire a few but will intimidate less confident participants. The same survey shows that only one in ten students posted more than once in MOOC forums and the vast majority wrote absolutely nothing. A major factor to the inactivity is that most people are simply not used to online discussion and see learning as an information transfer from teacher to student. Media literacy is a clear issue here.

Another problem I have noticed in MOOC forums is the presence of expert participants. Many teachers and researchers are taking MOOCs out of curiosity and as a way to expand their professional networks. Very valid reasons and I am guilty as charged. However the danger of having over-qualified participants is that their contributions to the discussions can set an impossibly high standard that can intimidate the new learners. There are also MOOCs which are also regular for-credit courses mixing full-time campus students with thousands of MOOCers. The regular students will inevitably set the tone of the discussion. Maybe these two groups should somehow be kept apart since they have such widely different motives for participating. They can inspire and motivate each other but I suspect they can also intimidate, irritate and confuse. I'd be very interested in reading any research on this issue.

So if a massive anarchic forum is not the way to encourage meaningful discussion in a MOOC, what is? The Campus Technology article lists a number of examples. One way is to encourage small-scale groups using whatever networking tool is most appropriate for the participants, such as a Facebook group. Basically break up the massive crowd into friendly neighbourhoods. Another way is to create focused interactions such as a question and answer session with a tutor where the structure is clear and within a given time frame.

"So instead of trying to force a free-flowing conversation in the live session, Greene and her colleagues took advantage of students' eagerness to pose questions in the forums. "The second week, we ran a question-and-answer session with topics we had prepared," she explains, "formed by what was coming up on the [forum] thread." The blend helped students feel like participants in the live session without being pressured to interact with the experts on the spot."

Interestingly many MOOCs are using synchronous online meetings as an effective discussion area where a teacher meets with a limited number of students to deal with questions using for example Google Hangouts. These are also situations that most participants will feel comfortable with reflecting traditional classroom practice that all are familiar with.

There is of course no patented answer to this problem but maybe we should think at least twice before launching a MOOC with a common discussion forum in the middle. Maybe that's the one element we should drop.

MOOC limitations

 by Intrepidteacher

We often hear claims that MOOCs will make top class higher education available to the whole world and that they will democratize higher education. This is true to some extent but a new article on E-learning Africa puts these ambitious claims into perspective: The underlying inequality of MOOCs. For many learners in the world the MOOCs are still inaccessible due to lack of infrastructure. Although there are numerous educational technology initiatives in developing countries the reality for most is that access to online learning is still a dream.

"There are a variety of mitigating factors that limit access to MOOCs, many of which are the same as those that also exclude disadvantaged groups from traditional educational models and stem from financial, geographical and educational disparity. In practical terms, sustained participation in a MOOC requires a set of resources and infrastructure that is a privilege, as many of us ... often forget. A reliable electricity supply, frequent and uninterrupted access to a device capable of going online and playing video and sound, and a secure, unrestricted Internet connection are essential starting blocks – as is a safe and comfortable space in which to learn."

Then there is the simple lack of time to study with long working days, family duties and chores that we in developed countries take for granted but that can take much longer to do in less developed countries. When you have to work 12 hours a day to keep going when do you have time to study? Our increasing interest in informal learning depends on us having significant leisure time to pursue such activities.

In addition to this is the fact that online learning requires advanced study skills, digital literacy and a high level of self-discipline that most people lack, even in affluent countries. The key to levelling the educational playing field is teaching people how to learn.

"A “basic level of education and the ability to study” spans everything from essential literacy and numeracy to self-motivation, being able to pursue independent research and practice of writing academic papers. Learners without these skills, let alone the foundation knowledge required to follow a university level course, will no doubt struggle to remain engaged."

Until these elements are in place the promise of open online learning (whatever acronym it goes under) will remain elusive for the vast majority. We have still a lot of work to do.

What do employers want from graduates?

CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by Nuwandalice

How important are qualifications in today's labour market? According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Giving Employers What They Don't Really Want, there's a mismatch between what educators believe and the answers given by industry representatives. Not surprisingly educators believe that employers look first at academic credentials whereas the employers clearly state that they're looking more at relevant skills, practical experience and personality. These are the findings of a new study from the Association of American Colleges and Universitie: It Takes More than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success. The employers questioned in the survey are looking for applicants who are innovative and analytic with high levels of critical thinking, problem-solving and communication skills. Furthermore they were positive to graduates with a broad range of knowledge and skills; a 21st century liberal education. Despite strong rumours to the contrary the generalist graduate is clearly not dead.

So employers are looking for evidence of your practical skills, preferably combining academic studies with hands-on workplace projects. Your collection of diplomas and certificates are of much less value than proven track record in concrete workplace projects and soft skills. This is nothing new of course and it's not always the candidate with the impressive certificates that gets the job - it's usually the one who shows the right communication skills in the interview and can offer the most relevant experience. An article in the Huffington Post, Why You Shouldn't Have 'Education' at the Top of Your Resume, confirms this trend that relevant skills and practical experience should come at the top of any resume.

"If you begin your resume with 'Education,' you sacrifice coveted space to, frankly, the least interesting part of your bio. Then, the employer looks up from your piece of paper and says, "OK, so what do you know how to do?"
We are entrenched in a skills-based economy, and what really counts are your abilities. It doesn't matter if you learned them at college, an internship, a full-time job or while babysitting your neighbor's kids.
Skills. Skills. Skills."

A degree is of course still important but what gets you employed is being able to show what you can do with it all. This is where the adoption of skills based badges, like the current Open Badges initiative, could well be a major breakthrough. Badges can be awarded for practical skills and workplace experience and provide credible credentials for informal learning. This can provide a complement to formal certification. Your degree shows a certain level of academic ability whereas your badge collection provides an employer with credible evidence of more practical skills.