Arenas for learning, workshop at EDEN 2014

What characterizes a dynamic learning environment and how does this affect our choice of learning environments and tools? These were the questions behind a workshop I organised with my colleague from Linnaeus University, Linda Reneland-Forsman, at this week's EDEN conference in Zagreb, Croatia.

Summary of our discussions on Padlet

The workshop grew out of an article we wrote last year, Completion Rates – A False Trail to Measuring Course Quality? (EURODL 2013), where we suggested that we tackle the issue of completion rates by focusing on enhancing student interaction and creating truly dynamic learning arenas. We found that courses with low completion rates had several key features in common: too much focus on text-based communication, no guidelines for students, no synchronous meetings, static course environment, invisible individual processes. How do we design courses that make learning processes more visible and foster a dynamic and supportive community?

After our brief input on these themes we divided the participants into groups. The conference participants formed their face-to-face groups and we also had an online group who were following the workshop via Adobe Connect. The results of the discussions can be viewed on our common Padlet page which also includes some useful links and our presentation slides.

So how do we make a difference? How do we make courses more dynamic and collaborative and thereby significantly raise the level of student engagement? Here is a summary of conclusions:

• Synchronous helps build community faster than asynchronous
• Social presence is important, building up a digital identity.
• Make the course collaborative and co-operative, also encourage engagement.
• Reflection by all at the end of each unit (on own experience and on the learning process)
• Authentic assessment that relates to work situations.
• Get everybody on board - even the "observers" 
• Teamwork: assignments that require interactions. For example the jigsaw method where each student has different information about a problem and only by collaborating can they solve it).
• Create a debate within students – contextualize (how do you do it in your own world?)
• Number of interactions and richness of types of interactions as an indicators of engagement.
• Importance of feedback, both from teacher and from fellow students. Giving feedback needs to be trained from the start. Variety of feedback also vital (more audio and video).
• Rethink how we handle traditional tasks.

Regardless of whether a course is on campus, blended or completely online we need to create a feeling of community and collective responsibility from the very start. Each student needs to feel acknowledged and supported with clear information and guidance to each part of the course. Assessment and feedback is a collective responsibility and assignments must be relevant to real practice. To assist in this there are many tools and methods, both digital and "analogue", and the crucial factor is being able to use the right mix for each course. Let's move away from a pointless "blame game" about completion rates in online education and focus on making all courses as engaging and challenging as possible. Then the completion rates should take care of themselves. 

How many devices do you need in a classroom?

 by adactio

How many devices do you need in a classroom? I imagine the standard answer would be one device per student since so many schools and colleges in the world have invested in one laptop/device per student schemes. However there is a problem with this approach as Edna Sackson describes through personal experience in a post entitled Too many iPads .... She had a special guest in her classroom, none other than the father of the school in the cloud concept Sugata Mitra. He gave the class a task which involved them finding out as much as they can about a concept without any teacher guidance, using tablets, mobiles or laptops to search the net for relevant information. Because they all had their own devices the task resulted in silence as each pupil started searching on their own.

Interestingly, the children initially stay in their own seats and investigate on their individual devices. No-one has told them not to move or converse. In fact Sugata spent some time before the question chatting with them about how often and why they move seats.

After some prompting they did start discussing and solving the problem together but the lesson here was that collaborative work can sometimes be inhibited in a one-to-one classroom. Indeed one of the key principles of Sugata Mitra's work is having around four pupils sharing one device since that forces them to discuss. This is good news for cash-strapped schools who wonder how to afford a one-to-one investment but when all pupils have their own devices and some have several devices, how can we encourage them to look up from their screens and discuss with each other? It depends on the task but I think it's perfectly feasible to agree in advance that for this particular exercise there will only be one device active in each group and let them see it as a challenge to complete the task this way. The key is learning to adapt technology use to suit the situation. Sometimes the focus is on discussion and collaboration and therefore devices can be shared and at other times the focus may be on gathering information and analysis of sources and then everyone will need their own devices.

Accentuating the MOOC positives

 by Jon McGovern

After so much MOOC criticism focusing on the low completion rates (a subject I've written on many times) it was refreshing to read a more positive angle from a teacher. Guy M Rogers (Professor of Classics and History at Wellesley College) ran a MOOC on edX on the life of Alexander the Great (see the archived course on edX) and reflects on the course's success in an article in Inside Higher Ed, Alexander the MOOC Lands, The course attracted 17,500 students from over 130 countries between the ages of 12 and 86. Rogers was well aware of the challenges facing every MOOC team and set three questions to be answered:

... whether a Massive Open Online Course could be as intellectually rigorous as a brick and mortar history course; whether a MOOC could serve as a portal for both teaching and historical research; and whether an online course could engage and inspire students. The data are in and the answer to all three questions is an emphatic yes.

On the surface this course demonstrates the usual low completion rate with 1162 students taking the final exam but Rogers decides to focus on the fact that those students who actually followed the course succeeded impressively. Firstly more students passed the course than had passed all other courses he had taught in the last ten years. In addition 862 of them passed with over 90% test scores and this compares very favourably with results from the campus version of the course. Even more surprising is that this was achieved in a course lasting a whopping 15 weeks, three times longer than most MOOCs.

What this example demonstrates so well is that the students who really engaged in the course learned a lot and performed as well as traditional students. The 16,000 participants who didn't finish were not failures or drop-outs, they were probably just curious about the course and tested it for a while. Once the initial dust has settled you see how many real participants your MOOC has and if you start with that figure the completion rate is generally pretty good considering it's free and the students have made no commitment whatsoever to completing it. The course described in this article was certainly rigorous and demanded a variety of skills, just like a traditional campus course. Basically the course was a success for those who committed to it. The others might come back another day or have maybe continued reading on their own. MOOCs are lifelong learning.

Inspiring engagement, passion, and a love of learning are of course harder outcomes to measure. At the end of our course however we asked the students to fill out course Evaluation Surveys and a very high percentage of the students highly recommended both the course and the instructor. Without any prompting from EdX or WellesleyX students also decided to form ongoing Alexander study groups, requested more history courses like the Alexander course, and asked if we could organize a study tour overseas to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. We also received many unsolicited letters from students telling us how much our course had inspired them.

Quality of online discussion

 by hanspoldoja

Online discussions, just like those in a face-to-face setting, can take many forms. Some never get beyond pleasantries, some turn nasty and many are extremely rewarding exchanges of ideas. Many assume that the classroom is the best place for discussion but that requires good management and a small number of participants. Classroom discussion is often dominated by the most vocal and confident students and in most classes there are students who seldom if ever open their mouths. It also favours those who are able to formulate their ideas quickly and many opinions expressed so spontaneously are not necessarily well thought out. That's why classroom discussions often continue online where everyone can express themselves in their own time and ideas can mature a few days. There have been many studies in recent years indicating that online discussions can be deeper and more nuanced than the spontaneous ideas voiced in a classroom.

However the quality of the online discussion depends so much on how well the participants know and trust each other and also on the number of people involved. Many discussion forums never get off the ground because there is no group loyalty or feeling of mutual trust and respect. This aspect of online discussion is investigated in a new study by Ellen Rose (University of New Brunswick) called “Would you ever say that to me in class?”: Exploring the Implications of Disinhibition for Relationality in Online Teaching and Learning. Ellen studied online discussions from a number of classes at two universities and focused on the phenomenon of online disinhibition; the fact that the online environment somehow encourages people to behave in a less restrained way than in a classroom. She found two contrasting forms of disinhibition: the well-known toxic disinhibition where some participants become aggressive and offensive and the less well-publicized benign disinhibition where people reveal personal details that would never normally be revealed in class.

Benign disinhibition was manifested in stories of shy students who participated more freely online, and in stories of students who disclosed more about themselves than they would face-to-face. Toxic disinhibition was manifested in stories about angry and abusive emails and posts. Students also indicated that their awareness of the possibility of anger erupting easily through miscommunication resulted in an “excessive niceness.” Thus inhibition may be a paradoxical response to the increased possibility of disinhibited behaviour in online learning environments. This study found that disinhibited behaviour, whether in its benign or toxic form, is a factor that powerfully affects the nature of student-student and student-teacher relationships in online courses. 

The negative effects of toxic disinhibition are well-known and can quickly kill all discussion but the benign variety is more interesting. Students who use the forum to discuss personal problems, relationship issues and so on can have as great a destructive effect on the level of discussion as the offensive loudmouths. Both types make all other participants uneasy and nervous not just in this forum but in future online discussions. It can lead to excessive niceness where everyone is so careful not to provoke negative reactions that the discussion never takes off at all.

The article concludes by stating that we need to look deeper at how trust and empathy can be fostered in an online environment. One factor could be that most online discussions are text-based and that increased use of video and audio can create a better climate for collaboration. Certainly classes that meet regularly in the classroom are less likely to suffer from online disinhibition than classes that are exclusively online. However I suspect that the inclusion of video and audio threads that provide a face-to-face element to online discussion could be a step towards reducing the risks of disinhibition.

The mirage of freedom

 by Michael Gwyther-Jones on Flickr

Freedom, like openness is a very subjective concept. One person's freedom is another's prison and this is especially true in the digital world. I have a colleague who refuses to create accounts with companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc on the grounds that he wants to keep as much control of his digital identity as possible and does not want to sell his digital soul to corporate interests. With all the debate around net surveillance this attitude is very understandable and he considers himself free. This attitude is not unusual but it does create difficulties when collaborating with people like me who enjoy the freedom of cloud services and social media and rely on them to work efficiently. My freedom is the convenience of storing resources in the cloud and being able to work from any device anywhere. I value that freedom so highly that I'm willing to overlook the fact that all my work is stored by giant corporations who sell some of it to advertisers and will use my data for future service development as they discover ways of refining the crude oil of raw data. Freedom is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

Similarly I wonder about the freedom of open educational resources and personal learning networks. How open and free are they when they are often dependent on commercial services? Traditional learning management systems are often criticised for being walled gardens and therefore offering less freedom than using social media but we fail to see the lack of freedom involved in letting for-profit companies store our data. How free are you when the company decides to start charging for the service or pulls the plug completely? Even if your resources have open Creative Commons license and are thereby open and free to use they are often stored on commercial services like Flickr, Google, Dropbox etc.

So is freedom just a mirage? Do we have to choose between the two interpretations of freedom described here or is there a way to collaborate, store, create and share online without getting tied into commercial services. Thank goodness for spaces like WikiEducator, Wikiversity and Wikimedia Commons which are non-commercial, self-regulating communities with a culture of sharing. If you are looking for freedom maybe that's the direction to head.

Opening up higher education - Opportunity or challenge for quality?

Workshop in progress

Quality assurance in higher education deals with formal education where students follow set courses within a degree programme and where administration, course design, learning outcomes, assessment and examination are well-defined and where quality criteria are clearly defined. However, the growth of open education, in particular the various interpretations of the MOOC concept, has demanded a reassessment of quality when dealing with a highly flexible and less structured learning environment. Can we define quality assurance for the moving target of open education and if so how can universities adapt?

This was a major theme of this year's EFQUEL Innovation Forum & LINQ Conference, held in Crete 7-9 May and as part of that I ran a longer workshop session with my colleague and EFQUEL president, Ulf Ehlers, called Opening up higher education - Opportunity or challenge for quality? To help us we had asked four experts to be facilitators: Stefan Delpace (Secretary General, European Association of Institutions in Higher Education), Michael Gaebel (Director Higher Education Policy, European University Association), Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic (Senior advisor, CHEA International Quality Group) and Elisabeth Gehrke (newly elected Chair, European Students Union). The workshop gathered about 25 participants consisting of policy makers, consultants and teachers and over two sessions the groups discussed the challenges facing universities and then possible strategies for higher education governance.

Results of the workshop on Padlet (click to see original)

Challenges

How do developments like open education, OER and MOOCs challenge the traditional quality and accreditation schemes of European higher education institutions? What possible new accreditation and quality approaches can be proposed?

• For conventional education there are sufficient quality frameworks, tools, accreditation experiences and regimes but they cover neither e-learning nor open learning. 
• There is a need to involve ministries and QA agencies into a dialogue on how to integrate open learning outcomes into quality assurance. 
• QA agencies need to develop new criteria which take into account the real learning process, competence and not only input factors. 
• However, in many areas the recognition and QA responsibility remains mainly with HE institutions. There needs to be a mechanism for gathering experience and expertise at institutional level and a possible start could be to involve pioneers of digital learning in convening HEIs for dialogue and experience sharing. These activities need coordination and EU organisations have a clear role in this. 
• Elements of the solution could be building on recognition of prior learning, working on assessment of informal learning and building recognition tools. 
• A further important issue is how to align the treatment of traditional learners with MOOC/open learners?
• Promising new initiatives are in progress such as the SEQUENT project with ENQA, EADTU and EFQUEL collaborating to investigate the harmonization of European e-learning quality tools and approaches.

Strategies

In times of change, diversification and non-traditional higher education providers, how does higher education governance need to react to openness and what could be successful strategies?

• Combination of top-down and bottom-up (critical mass of practitioners + management decisions)
• Create a colloquium: to share good governance strategies with others, foster a culture of sharing, create an open space arena, move forward faster together.
• Strategic approaches on the way. 75% of European HEIs have a strategy for ICT-based learning but how good are they? Change process needs momentum. Not sure that OER are sufficiently considered.
• Plenty good e-learning courses exist but they are not open (my university, my course). CC licensing is the exception rather than the rule.
• Take into account the varying motivations of the students (qualification, general interest, professional development)
• Opening up at HEI management level.
• In Europe good strategies exist on access to research but not on OER.
• Do we need standards (ISO project committee PC288 underway for example)?
• Responsibility for teaching/ education. Teaching is changing. How to share this between teachers, teachers and other staff? A more active role for students? (student-centred learning, peer groups). Include external learners and teachers.  
• MOOCs - maybe good enough will do.
• HEIs - need to develop own strategy for MOOCs and be clear why you're doing it.
• Develop MOOCs as lifelong learning and outreach with interactivity and self organisation as central elements to the courses. MOOCs provide introduction and overview to a subject area.

We maybe didn't arrive at a concrete list of strategic proposals but the process was extremely interesting and the debate continues. Have a look at our notes and ideas on the workshop's Padlet page.

Anti-social media

 by ChrisGoldNY

Since we're all so keen to broadcast our every move and allow a variety of apps to track us there has been an explosion of interesting location-based services. However just as you can now see where your friends are you can also track people you are less interested in meeting. As ever there's an app for this - Cloak. This app allows you to list those people who you have friended in some social network but wish you hadn't. So Cloak can keep tabs on where these unwanted friends are and alert you if they are getting too close for comfort so you can take evasive action. As they proudly announce on their site:

Avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat - anyone you'd rather not run into.

Of course the service only works for tracking social media addicts who check in to every cafe, shop, bar or bus stop they visit. Cloak tracks people on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram. So download it from iTunes Appstore ... or not.

Audio - the personal touch in online courses

 by M. Keefe on Flickr

Despite the presence of many easy-to-use and often free programs for audio and video recording it's surprising how so much online learning is still centred on written communication between students and teacher. Written feedback often takes valuable teacher time to compose and even if the comments are highly valuable the opportunity to create a more personal contact between teacher and student is lost. A major success factor in online education is creating a dynamic, interactive learning arena where the factor of distance is reduced or even made irrelevant. A good mix of synchronous and asynchronous communication using a variety of media (text, audio, video, multimedia) gives everyone the chance to be read, heard and seen, including most importantly the teacher. So why are we generally still stuck in text mode?

Terry Andersson's blogpost, Another research article on audio feedback, raises the issue of audio feedback as a quick and efficient method of commenting on students' work and which also adds to the feeling of teacher presence. He provides the example of a new study by Andrew J. Cavanaugh and Liyan Song, Audio Feedback versus Written Feedback: Instructors’ and Students’ Perspectives (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching), that has compared student responses to receiving either audio or written feedback to their written papers. The findings show that students are clearly more positive to receiving audio feedback on the grounds that it felt more personal and more inspiring than the dry matter-of-fact text commentaries. Teachers were in general also more positive though a few had problems with the technology involved and were simply not used to audio recording at all.

An interesting aspect of the study was that text feedback differed to audio feedback; written comments focused mostly on details such as edits and grammar corrections whereas spoken comments discussed themes, structure and overall impression. Written feedback was dealt with by students on a correct-and-move-on basis whereas the audio feedback asked for more reflection from the student rather than simply correcting.

However, it must be asked whether a systematic "correct-and-move-on" approach to revising a paper is what is desired in students. It is possible that, if students see comments as purely editing suggestions or corrections, they will prefer written comments to audio comments. This is not to say that written commentary cannot be preferred for other reasons.

Once again this should not be seen as yet another either/or discussion: there will always be times when written feedback is more appropriate just as there are times when audio is best. Many LMS have functions for audio comments and there are many screencasting tools available to let you record comments while showing the student's text and highlighting. Given the fact that students appreciate being able to hear the teacher commenting on their work in a pleasant and professional manner there should be much wider use of this medium than today. Traditional e-learning was rightly criticized as being impersonal self-study but the tools available today add so many more dimensions and enable us to almost eliminate the element of distance.

OER and linguistic diversity

 by quinn.anya on Flickr

The spread of English as the language of the world has certainly been accelerated thanks to digital media and it could be argued that this threatens to wipe out many smaller languages, some teetering on the brink of extinction. András Kornai describes this danger in an article, Digital Language Death, showing how many languages have a very low digital presence. Even if enthusiasts have accomplished much to create for example a Wikipedia presence for many smaller languages  Kornai argues that this will not be enough to create a community strong enough to help push the language truly into the digital space:

Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. Here we argue that this consensus figure vastly underestimates the danger of digital language death, in that less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide.”

At the same time technology could also empower many of these threatened languages and cultures that have been marginalised in the past. Could the development of open educational resources (OER) be a key to empowerment for smaller languages? This was the theme of a workshop, International workshop on policy for OER and less used languages, run by ICDE (International Council for Open and Distance Education) along with two projects I'm associated with, NordicOER and LangOER. This gathered an impressive cast of OER experts, stakeholders and policy makers to discuss how the development of quality OER and open educational practices can strengthen the position of such languages. For a full programme of the speakers and further details, have a look at the ICDE article on the workshop.

Workshop in progress (Photo CC-BY Tore Hoel)

UNESCO is one of the main driving forces behind the global uptake of OER, emphasizing the right for free and open access to knowledge to all people in all languages. Their representative in this workshop, Abel Caine, gave several examples of recent initiatives, especially the 2012 UNESCO OER Paris declaration calling on all member governments to make all educational materials produced with public funds freely available to all. This has resulted in many national and regional initiatives such as Indonesia (national OER policy) and West Africa. See more in the UNESCO OER Programme.

The development of OER as well as open courses (not necessarily MOOCs) has opened new opportunities to offer extremely narrow courses in places where they would previously never have existed. An open online course in, say, Welsh for beginners can attract students from all over the world, something that no traditional university course could ever do. I once read about a guy in the midwest of the USA who wanted to play the Scottish bagpipes. The chance of a local college running that sort of course was less than zero but on the net it was no problem and soon he was getting tuition via Skype from a teacher in Scotland. Many languages have rallied round the creation of their own Wikipedia and involved a large section of the community to develop the entries. There are countless sunshine stories like this showing how local languages and culture can become glocal. Alan Tait talked of OER as the long tail of education whereby resources of extremely limited interest can still be always available in a similar way to the global scale and reach of Amazon can store book titles that no single bookstore could afford to keep on the shelves.

Some takeaways from the workshop:

• It’s not what you share, it’s how you share it. Share for reuse, include source code, provide a declaration of contents and purpose and systematic tagging and other metadata.
• See OER more as data to be adapted than as finished learning objects.
• Open standards, collaboration and search skills allow anyone to study anything from anywhere.
• Infrastructure must support process, not just output.

But can open education contribute to strengthening smaller languages and cultures? Despite the overwhelming advance of English I believe there are opportunities for less used languages (however you define that vague concept) to gain much more legitimacy and impact than was possible before. It requires concerted effort but this can become a community building process galvinising all generations to contribute to preserving and developing the language and culture. Simply translating existing English resources is not enough, new resources that are relevant to the community must be developed and this is a creative rather than simply a reproductive process. Successful models from the English-speaking world can be adapted to local requirements. Teachers and students can collaborate to produce open textbooks and other educational resources that few if any traditional publishers would see as commercially viable. Open courses can be offered to a worldwide audience including speakers who have long since emigrated from their homeland. Smaller languages can help each other by sharing development costs, collaborating in cross-cultural projects to develop multilingual solutions and suchlike.

ICDE will soon publish the full results of the workshop and the LangOER project will be investigating the area of language and OER in more detail in the next three years. Stay tuned.

Have a look at my colleague, Tore Hoel's blog post on the topic:
Adopting OER for less used languages: We need hard talk on tools and infrastructure!

The fundamental things apply ...

 by Auntie P

Technology is driving radical changes in how we approach learning and education and this demands that students develop new skill sets to be able to work and learn in a world dominated by the application of digital technology. The question is how many of these digital skills are really uniquely digital and how many are adaptations of established principles? Aren't we often talking about fundamental skills and competences but applied in a digital context? Is being a good digital citizen so much different from being a good citizen?

An article by Sam Stecher in EdReach caught my eye this week, The Myth Of Digital Citizenship And Why We Need To Teach It Anyway. He questions whether the concept of digital citizenship is so different from just good citizenship:

The reason why is because there is no such thing as digital citizenship. It’s just citizenship. The rules don’t change just because you have a screen in front of you.

Perceived classroom problems with multitasking students is not essentially a digital issue. Students have always written notes to each other, doodled, daydreamed and messed around when the lesson becomes dull and the issue is one of classroom management rather than about digital technology. Similarly they can of course find irrelevant or misleading information on the net but they could find equally irrelevant material in the libraries and bookstores of the past unless they asked for help or had developed the skill of source criticism. The basic principles of good citizenship, argues Stecher, apply equally in the analogue and digital world; namely Is your use respectful, responsible, and safe? Whether the medium is digital or not the principles are the same. Taking control of your digital identity is all about showing respect for others' feelings and integrity, taking responsibility for your own actions and taking action to ensure the security of your passwords, profiles and keeping safe from virus attacks and suchlike.

The difference is that technology acts as a magnifying glass. Careless comments used to reach only a few ears and the damage could be controlled with a quick apology, whereas today such comments can go viral in minutes and can have disastrous consequences, destroying reputations and careers. Today everything digital is social and once you release a tweet, a Facebook comment, a photo or a film it's out of your control. We have extremely powerful tools in our hands and it takes time to learn to use them wisely. If there is a concept of digital citizenship it involves learning to apply these basic principles of respect, responsibility, critical thinking and reflection and applying them through the highly magnified digital lens.

The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

LMS - from red giant to white dwarf?

 by dawe2k5

Learning Management Systems like Moodle, Blackboard and many others are the backbone of almost all universities' and schools' use of educational technology. However there is increasing interest among teachers and students in using free and open social media for discussion, collaboration and production. The LMS designers have responded by integrating social media into the platform, thus retaining the one-stop shop status of the LMS. This one-stop shop model (or walled garden in the eyes of its critics) has its advantages in that students get access to all the course resources in one place but despite this students still tend to discuss and collaborate elsewhere.

This is the subject of an article in eLearn Magazine, Outside the LMS box: An interview with Ashley Tan. Dr. Ashley Tan is head of the Centre for e-Learning (CeL) at the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore and has been studying students' use and non-use of LMS. He sees a clear move by students away from the LMS towards social media and that this is tied to a need for more genuine interactivity and sharing than is normally seen inside the LMS.

However, both the instructors and the students seem to be unhappy with the LMS because it is a closed system and less user-friendly than other tools or platforms. Over the last three years, the use of the LMS for social learning has dropped to 50 percent among our serious users of the platform, and the more innovative instructors have moved to open social platforms like Google Sites and Facebook. The use of our LMS is mostly for relatively low-level tasks: content repository, basic online communication, and assignment submission.

 Tan sees the LMS model as focusing too much on content delivery, assignment submission and assessment and offering little to encourage interaction.

When blending learning with an LMS, instructors and eLearning practitioners often focus on content repositories or delivery. The didactic model is dominant. When blending learning with open and social systems, the focus tends to shift to interaction and negotiation. The facilitative model comes to the fore.

So instead of the LMS growing into a red giant offering everything under one roof the tendency is for it to shrink into a white dwarf, used for certain crucial functions and letting the more interactive activities take place outside. Although I agree with Tan's conclusions I don't see the LMS disappearing any time soon. Many students are certainly quite comfortable using a variety of tools and platforms and can certainly handle the diversity of the solution described in the article. However there are also students who appreciate the simplicity of having everything in one place and lack the confidence and digital skills necessary to use a variety of social media. It's a similar situation to the MOOC discussion; the linear and more traditional courses provided by the main MOOC providers appeal to students who need more order and structure whereas the connectivist MOOCs appeal to digitally proficient and self-sufficient learners.

I don't think the red giant model will apply to the LMS. Instead I see them as heading to the white dwarf stage, concentrating on what they do best; offering a secure administrative core for a course where sensitive data such as students identity and examination results are stored. The discussions and interaction can then take place mostly outside the LMS but all examination material must be linked or imported for archiving.

Of MOOCs and dragons

Sometimes I read an article or listen to a lecture and just nod enthusiastically all the way through. That was my reaction listening to this excellent defence of the whole MOOC movement by Donald Clark, The decentralisation and democratisation of learning. He goes through the list of frequently voiced criticisms (low completion rates, poor pedagogy, business models, low interaction with teachers) and answers them convincingly. I've written about them all here many times (85 posts on this blog with the tag MOOC so far) but it's good to get everything condensed into a lecture of just under 24 minutes.



This ties in nicely with a new article by Dan Butin in Inside Higher Ed, From MOOCs to dragons, that discusses how MOOCs are evolving into much more sophisticated learning arenas that will soon challenge the exclusive and increasingly over-priced campus model. Dan sees three disruptive factors that will lead to a new model for higher education: automated assessment, adaptive learning, and data analytics. As these become increasingly advanced they will offer low-cost and scalable solutions to processes that are at present expensive and time-consuming in the traditional system. These developments can be seen optimistically as a way of offering personalized education for all or pessimistically leading to faculty job losses and a shift of education into the arms of big business. His basic message is that we must sail off the map into the dragon-infested unknown.

Nevertheless, I believe we are at a new moment exactly because forthcoming digital learning technologies will create educational models that mirror and improve current educational practices at a scale and pace impossible before now. So grab your life vest, power up your Google Maps app, and beware of the dragons ahead.

Just watch the lecture and read the article.

Skimming and diving - the art of reading

 by JonathanCohen

Are we really forgetting the art of reading? We are if you follow the media discussion that has been going on for several years now. The problem is that we have all become so used to skimming, scanning and zapping from site to site and channel to channel that we find it increasingly hard to simply read a book. This is the gist of an article in the Washington Post, Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say, which reports on concern from researchers that the art of deep reading is being lost in the blur of multitasking.

“We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scroll­ing and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” said Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading. “We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.”

The new skills of scanning for information, checking other sources and quickly gaining an overview are of course essential but the big question is how to relearn slow reading? We need to learn to be biliterate; being able to quickly scan and skim for information as well as being able to concentrate on deep reading without distractions. The problem with reading on a tablet or laptop is that there are so many other fun things you can do. While you're reading it's so easy to check for any new posts on Facebook or respond to a tweet. It's often hard to switch the distractions off. A book on the other hand has no distractions, not even a photo, and we're simply not used to that anymore. The article gives several examples of even researchers who find it almost impossible to sit down and read a classic novel without getting itchy fingers reaching for the smartphone, just to check if I'm missing something.

The need to focus on deep reading in schools and colleges is certainly there but I wonder if things are as bad as such articles claim. We are multitasking more than ever but at the same time the sales of fiction (both print and digital format) are booming and the phenomenal sales of the Harry Potter series, fantasy literature and vampire fiction show that teenagers certainly do read lengthy works of fiction without any distractions. However I like the concept of building biliteracy and the importance of knowing when to skim and when to dive.

Read more on this theme in a new article in the Guardian, The internet isn't harming our love of 'deep reading', it's cultivating it.

Turning point in Estonia

This week I was invited to Tallinn, Estonia, speak at the annual conference of HITSA (Information Technology Foundation for Education), a national organization for the development of educational technology: initiating, coordinating and facilitating activities and developments in the field of ICT-supported learning in Estonian higher and vocational education. It was held in the impressive Mektory innovation centre of the Tallinn University of Technology and attracted over 200 delegates from schools and universities. My contribution consisted of a keynote speech on the future of MOOCs (see video at MOOCs - from hype to opportunity) and an overview of the development of OER in the Nordic region (Nordic OER) focusing on three projects I am involved in: NordicOER, OER Sverige and LangOER. Here is a short summary of my impressions from two intensive days.

Estonia is well known as a country that has invested in the use of educational technology, it is of course the home of Skype. They have also made some wise choices in the development of educational technology, for example establishing a consortium offering all educational institutions access to a national installation of the learning management system Moodle and thereby saving institutions enormous amounts of time and money running their own installations. In recent years two national repositories for open learning resources have been set up: one for higher education and one for schools, Kooleilu. Now a new education strategy has just been published by the government (only in Estonian just now), written in broad consultation with all stakeholders. The implementation of digital technologies is one of the key issues in the new strategy. The motto of the strategy is "Learning is a way of life" (Öppimme on eluviis) and it stresses that it is not just about buying new technology but about changing the way we work, study and learn (see article 2014 Estonian lifelong learning strategy is called smart people. A partnership with Finland has recently been announced (see press release) to create a common cloud for storing OER at all educational levels and giving access to other global repositories. The aim is to offer a mix of open and commercial resources with quality assurance criteria. Government will also sponsor the development of quality resources with the cooperation of publishers. Heli Mattisen (EKKA Quality Assessment Council) presented the main aims of the new strategy and stressed the importance of raising the skill sets of teachers, increasing the professionalism of school leadership and implementing new rating systems for schools based on skills criteria rather than simply test results.

The sessions were full of examples of how educational technology is being integrated into Estonian education as well as highlighting international perspectives and trends. Here are a few highlights I'll take away with me:

• Sixth grade pupils from Gustav Adolf Grammar School in Tallinn presented their perspective on learning and teaching. Their key factors for effective learning were attention, collaboration, respect and active learning. Not to mention a lot of creativity and fun. 
• There is too much spent on technology for teaching content and nothing spent on helping learning. We need to use technology for learning. Technology can be used in four stages: to exchange, to enrich, to enhance and to empower. Most attention is still on exchanging; using technology to reproduce traditional processes. (Bob Harrison, Education adviser, Toshiba Information Systems UK)
• We need new spaces for learning to cater for self-regulated learners and flexible teachers. The learners set the objectives and select strategies for learning. The teacher has to become a researcher in the widest sense of the term. (Margus Pedaste, University of Tartu) 
• ICT use in schools is still dominated by presentation tools like PowerPoint and interactive social tools are very seldom used. We need innovative teachers, innovative schools and innovative education systems. We have to empower teachers to develop, nurture innovation and strengthen the evidence base of new practices. (Marc Durando, European Schoolnet)
• If it's not digital it has no value. (Tiit Paananen, Association of IT and telecommunications)
• Kids aren’t all the cool digital natives that the media portray them as. There are digital divides there and many are vulnerable and need guidance. (John Carr, European NGO Alliance for child safety online www.enacso.eu)
• Hans Pöldoja, Tallinn University, presented his work with open badges on an open course, Preparation for digital learning, and the value of such badges as motivators on open courses without formal credits as rewards.
• Most classroom time is on the bottom two layers of Bloom’s taxonomy and then we send them home to deal with the upper levels without access to the teacher. Flipping the classroom involves doing the demanding work in class and the lower levels at home. (John Bergmann, Flipped classroom) 
• Innovations happen outside established institutions. (Steve Taylor, From Start-Up to Stay-Up)

Finally a very positive feature of the conference was the availability of simultaneous translation so that I and other foreign visitors could follow sessions in Estonian and the Estonians could follow our contributions. This wasn't available in the practical workshops that took place away from the main hall so I wasn't able to participate in them. They certainly looked like fun!

Feeding the blogs

 by mclcbooks

The first of April is the one day of the year where most people have a high level of source criticism. You really have to check your sources and question everything. Most of the jokes are easy to spot but one that nearly caught me out was Steve Wheeler's farewell to blogging, Goodbye. Steve is one of the most prolific and most read edtech bloggers and the idea of him quitting blogging is rather hard to swallow. However he made a very convincing case; describing how blogging was affecting his private life and causing such stress that he could no longer justify it. I was actually just about to tweet the link with a sympathetic comment when I stopped and realised what day it was and that the post did contain some rather odd references to things like telepathy as an alternative to blogging. Normal service was resumed with a new post from Steve today (Seriously, 2 April) where the advantages of blogging far outweigh the disadvantages. The 1 April post was not so much a joke as an attempt to provoke a discussion about the role of the academic blogger.

The original post did resonate with me however. My blogs are not in the same league as Steve's in terms of readership but they do exert considerable pressure on my home life. Once you've built up a readership and set your own pace of how often you publish it is very hard to break the routine. I have built up a whole ecosystem around monitoring what's going on in the field of e-learning and then writing about it on blogs, in articles and various websites. For several years I've been keeping my hungry blogs well-fed and satisfied with this blog getting one or two posts a week and my Swedish news blog, Flexspan, getting 4-7 posts a week. Based on that I have a newsletter (in Swedish) that goes out every Monday with highlights from the week. Completely away from work I even have a third blog, about beekeeping, that demands regular postings. Hungry mouths indeed!

Once you get into that level of production it's mighty hard to break the habit and if you do, you get messages from people wondering if something is wrong. So I recognize the pressure Steve wrote about and the potential for stress that comes from setting a high level of production. Strange isn't it that if I had a boss who demanded this I would probably complain but I've created this all by myself and completely outside working hours. At the same time I realize that my blogs and other social media activities have completely changed my work. By sharing my thoughts and helping to spread others' good ideas I have built up a global network of colleagues who have invited my into interesting projects which have resulted in being invited to speak at conferences and join even more projects. I've visited places I could never have imagined visiting as part of my work and it keeps on developing. For me blogging has opened up a whole new world and even if I find it a strain now and then to think of what to write or to keep to my production schedule it's been well worth the effort.