Reclaim open learning

 by -pdp-

I've previously written about the need to refocus on real open learning again after being blinded by the glitter of the high profile xMOOCs for the past year or so. I don't mean we should dismiss them but instead see them as a development of the traditional educational model rather than something truly innovative and certainly not particularly open. Those of us who are interested in the development of open educational resources that are free to reuse and adapt and education that is truly open need to look beyond the mainstream MOOCs and find inspiration elsewhere.

Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U and other works on open learning, wrote a good post in the Huffington post, Can We Move Beyond the MOOC to Reclaim Open Learning? about the need to let the MOOCs go their way and raise the profile of truly open and innovative learning. This learning is happening everywhere but receives little media coverage: in communities of practice, virtual worlds, forums, Twitter, social networks, wikis and so on. They also take place face-to-face wherever people can meet to discuss common interests. They are learner-initiated and create their own learning resources or make use of existing open educational resources and there are no formal credentials available.

Anya belongs to a group known as Reclaim open learning (#ReclaimOpen) which is a network of open learning supporters who wish to encourage more development and innovation in the field. Right now they're running an innovation contest to showcase best practice in open learning that has so far escaped the media spotlight but deserves support. The contest raises the following questions:

• What are independent learners and innovative teachers doing now that deserves support, recognition, and scaling up?
• How can colleges and universities engage with the social, participatory, and open learning ecology of the Internet in ways that go beyond making, using, or resisting xMOOCs?
• What kinds of infrastructures, policies, and business models can support more participatory and peer-based forms of post-secondary learning?
• What kind of programs and platforms could meld the grassroots capacity and peer-based learning of the net with the knowledge, expertise, and credibility of institutionalized research and education?

If you have the answers to these questions and know of innovative learning that deserves support just send in the details.

Learner-initiated learning

 by *Psycho Delia*

An article by Trent Batson on Campus Technology, The Essence of MOOCs: Multi-Venue, Non-Linear, Learner-Initiated Learning, sees the present MOOC movement as only one element of a more wider and fundamental change in education. Instead of solely relying on institutions to offer ready-made courses the modern learner has many other options available. The move towards learner-initiated learning is about learners taking charge of their own development and actively looking for the right courses, communities or networks that will help you learn the skills you need. In this arena MOOCs are simply one of many potential arenas for learning.

"The upswing of interest in MOOCs is perhaps a harbinger of the speeding up of a historic move to learner-initiated learning (LIL). Learner-initiated learning is a term that may best describe the new forms of learning that have emerged to combine learning experiences from multiple venues. An internship here, a course there, job-related learning here, self study there and so on (often called DIY learning). Even students enrolled in degree programs do "swirling," taking courses from colleges or universities away from their home institution. Or, as an added option now, learners may take a MOOC, or use open education resources as part of or in addition to assigned materials. LIL is also related to "self-directed learning" or "self-initiated learning," two research threads that began in the last century."

Those who succeed in this new educational ecosystem will be those who have learned how to learn, are digitally literate and are able to develop their own learning portfolio. This portfolio on the net will contain all your significant work from courses, projects, publications and other activities such as blogs or wikis. Keeping this updated and in an accessible and coherent structure will be essential so that particular units or sequences of work can be validated and assessed by independent reviewers when necessary.

The challenge for today's educators is helping as many as possible to be part of this development - learning to learn.

Massive Open Online Whatever

 by revbean

There's a thickening alphabet soup brewing with variations on the three letters MOO. What we're seeing is the potential of massive communities or networks to solve certain problems or offer new opportunities. Exactly how open and massive they are varies considerably and we shouldn't focus on all these often misleading acronyms. Look instead at each concept on its own merits and see what it offers.

The idea presented a couple of weeks ago of using the MOOC concept to offer greater support to doctoral students and provide them with a greater sense of community and access to wider peer review makes a lot of sense, though the details are still to be fully worked out. Now comes an article by Benjamin Ginsberg, Forget MOOCs - Let's use MOOA, where he suggests massive open online administration to share the administrative load on universities. It's really a case of building a community around university administration and pooling resources rather than each institution reinventing the wheel every week, at an enormous cost. By working as a community and sharing smart ideas and best practices can spread more quickly and expensive mistakes could be avoided.

"Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would have saved more than a half billion dollars."

Ginsberg plans to launch an administrative community Administeria next year and it'll be interesting to see how it is received. There is nothing terribly new about this idea since large communities have been collaborating on the net for many years but the MOOC-hype has brought the power of massive communities to the forefront. 

On a related theme a meeting of global virtual universities has discussed the mainstream MOOC phenomenon: see article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Virtual Universities Abroad Say They Already Deliver ‘Massive’ Courses. There are many online universities in the world who have been running massive and relatively open online courses for years, such as the Virtual University of Pakistan (see their massive YouTube channel) or the African Virtual University, and providing education more suited to their target students than those of the mainstream MOOCs. MOOCs offer new opportunities for learning but it's worth remembering that they are variations on themes that have been present for some time now. Online education is so much more than MOO ....

In defence of the lecture

  by TED Conference

It's very fashionable to claim that the lecture is dead (I've done it myself) and that there is no need for the form in modern education. While I firmly believe that lecturing as the default form of university teaching is on the way out we need to consider when the lecture can be of positive value. In our enthusiasm to embrace the potential of technology in education it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The simple fact is that despite all the criticism lectures are more popular than ever. The iTunes U platform features almost half a million of them and they are downloaded and viewed by millions every week and if you throw in the lectures featured in all the MOOCs the sheer volume is astounding. Sure many of them are very traditional and not particularly inspiring but there is no disputing their popularity whatever we may think of the pedagogy.

However many MOOC providers have realised that online audiences learn more from more a series of concise lectures of 5-10 minutes rather than one hour marathon sessions. The staggering success of TED talks is a clear indication that we enjoy lectures if they're short and sweet. Maybe the appeal is linked to the massive appeal of stand-up comedy; one comedian on stage with no props or extras. TED talks feature the masters of stand-up teaching and they consistently succeed in inspiring and providing food for thought. Isn't that effective teaching? From sage on the stage to dean on the screen.

Tony Bates comes to the defence of the lecture in an article The beginning of the end of the lecture hall?. He makes the following list of occasions when a lecture would be a valuable feature of a course and asks if readers can add to it:

• a lecture at the beginning of a course to set the tone and build a sense of community
• a lecture at the end of a course to pull things together, to provide a synthesis, or a sense of completion or to ask: where now? 
• a lecture in the middle as a check on where students are, what are the ‘sticking points’, and a realignment of expectations or resetting of students’ focus 
• a lecture for a research professor to synthesize/summarize his/her findings or the field in which they are researching 
• special occasions, such as analyzing a dramatic current event in terms of theories or principles studied in a course: why, how, what next, etc. 
• distinguished visitors who have something extra to add to a course or program.

The conclusion here is that we should be careful not to simply dismiss traditional methods and rush to the shiny new ones. Many people learn a lot from lectures, some learn very little, some thrive in a traditional classroom, others do not. Let's integrate the old with the new to offer a wide range of learning paths to suit all tastes. 

Fast forward

  by DaGoaty

How often do you read an article on a web site to the end? Not often I suspect and my fears are confirmed in a fascinating article by Farhad Manjoo, You Won’t Finish This Article. He cites traffic statistics from the web site Slate showing readers' habits and how long they spend on articles. According to the stats we very seldom read whole articles any more and many people seldom get past the first two paragraphs. A staggering 38% hardly read more than the first sentence. Many more show a great reluctance to scroll so anything you write below the horizon of the browser window may only be read by less than half of your "readers".

"Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don’t even make it halfway. Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing."

So even if lots of people seem to have landed on this blog there's no guarantee that any of them have actually read my posts. Getting loads of retweets doesn't mean that any of them have read anything either, they're just sharing. So technically a blog post could get enormous coverage in social media without anyone actually reading it to the end. If you write something outrageous in the last paragraph the chances are you'll get away with it. It's the literary equivalent of TV zapping where we give a programme about 10 seconds to grab our attention before zapping onward.

It's easy for stats like this to prompt outraged end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it responses. But the sheer volume of information we are subjected to every day makes it hard to focus on anything for long in case we miss the next big story. We've never been better at skim reading but at the cost of forgetting the art of deep reading, following an in-depth discussion, listening to a long piece of music etc. I'm as guilty as anyone and confess to often reading half an article or less and have indeed tweeted about them. I save them however and try to read them later when I have more time. Sometimes I succeed.

I'll end this by quoting Manjoo's closing remarks:

"Maybe this is just our cultural lot: We live in the age of skimming. I want to finish the whole thing, I really do. I wish you would, too. Really—stop quitting! But who am I kidding. I’m busy. You’re busy. There’s always something else to read, watch, play, or eat."

Prepare to be MOOPhD

  by miseldine

With Georgia Tech offering a degree programme in MOOC-format (or at least as an online degree) the next step in the process must surely be massive open online research. A fascinating article by Jon Dron of Athabasca University, MOOCs are so unambitious: introducing the MOOPhD takes up precisely this challenge; a massive open online PhD. It's not such a crazy idea but there are many important considerations and limitations.

Firstly the MOOPhD is not about awarding doctorates but providing resources to help students write articles and learn research skills. MOOCs can be provided to help teach research skills, improve academic writing, assessment skills, support for gaining funding as well as providing a wide network of peers to learn from and share experience. It's about providing scaffolding for the research process that is isn't always available on campus, at least to the same extent.

"A MOOPhD would, of necessity, be highly modular, offering student-controlled support for all parts of the research process, from research process teaching, through initial proposals, through project management, through community support, through paper writing etc. Students would choose the parts that would be of value to them at different times. Different students would have different needs and interests, and would need different support at different points along the journey. For some, they might just need a bit of help with writing papers. For others, the need might be for gaining specific skills such as statistical analysis or learning how to do reviews. More broadly, the role of a supervisory team in modelling practice and attitudes would be embedded throughout."

The MOOPhD would complement the formal process not compete with it. The post-grads would still have to publish peer-reviewed articles and write their thesis but would get considerable support from their peer network. The MOOC element could save universities from having to provide their own research skills courses. Dron also suggests crowd-funding as a possible source of research backing. 

It sounds promising but the last part of the article lists a number of barriers; from ethical issues to start-up costs and gaining academic acceptance. This one is not going to happen overnight but it shows yet another way the MOOC boom might benefit higher education, not through conflict nut through integration and enhancement.

MOOCs in research spotlight

As the dust of the last 2 years of hype and optimism begins to settle it's time for some MOOC research; how they work (or not), student motivation, learning outcomes, pedagogical aspects etc. The original connectivist MOOCs have been well studied and in particular Rita Kop and Helene Fournier have written a series of articles on issues arising from those courses. Most of these MOOCs are aimed at educational professionals and are highly experimental and pedagogically innovative so it's only natural that they spawn many research articles.

However the mass-market MOOCs of the last two years raises new questions since their format is more linear and traditional and the participants so diverse. There has been a deluge of news and blog posts on these MOOCs but very little solid academic research. A welcome development is the formation of the MOOC Research Hub which aims to stimulate and fund research into MOOCs and act as a hub for disseminating results. The initiative is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the academic coordination lies with Athabasca University in Canada.

"The dramatic increase in online education, particularly Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), presents researchers, academics, administrators, learners, and policy makers with a range of questions as to the effectiveness of this format of teaching and learning. To date, the impact of MOOCs and emerging forms of digital learning has been largely disseminated through press releases and university reports, with only limited peer-reviewed research publication. The proliferation of MOOCs in higher education requires a concerted and urgent research agenda." 

The first stage is underway; researchers are invited to submit abstracts of proposed projects with grants of $10,000 – $25,000 available to those selected (see details of the submission process). The selected projects will be expected to present preliminary findings at the MOOC Conference, University of Texas, Arlington, December 5-6, 2013.

The site will also act as a hub for all MOOC research as well as linking to conferences, webinars and events. It's good to see that the Steering Committee for the MOOC Research Initiative Grants includes both leading figures from the xMOOC consortia as well as George Siemens, one of the creators of the original cMOOCs. The MOOC Research site is still under development but it is definitely one to bookmark and follow.

Read also a good article on MOOC research by George Veletsianos, The research that MOOCs need.

PS
An hour after posting this I discovered that a journal called Research and Practice in Assessment has just released a special issue on MOOCs. It's free to download or view as a flipbook.

The branding of education

  by derekGavey

In an age that is obsessed with brands it's not surprising that education is also becoming increasingly brand conscious. Coursera and EdX are gathering momentum as trusted suppliers of courses or content and many wonder if we are seeing the birth of educational megabrands that will supply the world with educational content and course packaging. We trust Blackboard to host our courses and content or we sign up with Google or Apple and the effect is that education is being forced to choose brand as the major players offer increasingly all-inclusive packages that seldom allow compatibility with those of their rivals.

Dean Groom questions the brandification of education in his post BYOD (build your own demise). Many outward signs of independence and freedom such as bringing your own device to school (BYOD) and personal learning environments are instead making us ever more brand conscious. By adopting certain brands for use in the classroom schools and teachers are helping to "market" the brand to children, students and parents.

"The impact of brandification is clear – kids use brand names to describe objects. These brands penetrate the family. The fact the brands make huge profits, avoid tax, farm personal data which they sell and routinely ‘drop’ the privacy ball seems to be of little concern. Educators are one of society's most trusted institutions – by fostering brand-value as ‘educational’ families tend to ‘deny’ and ‘ignore’ the darker agenda of profit, power and control of information and ideas."

Maybe educators need to be more cautious about overtly promoting one brand over another and maintaining a healthy skepticism to the marketing and hype. Try to use a variety of tools and apps and encourage students to do likewise rather than falling for the temptations of the all-inclusive branded solutions.

Libraries and MOOCs - the missing link?

  by Universitetet i Bergen

Several surveys indicate that the majority of people studying on MOOCs already have a university background and that these courses are not reaching new learners as much as many would hope. The problem is that most people have a traditional school education behind them and need clear instructions, feedback and supervision. Many MOOCs on the other hand demand rather advanced study skills, independence and digital literacy and for those who lack these skills a MOOC can be a bewildering and daunting environment.

That's where libraries come in according to an article on OEDb, Librarians: Your Most Valuable MOOC Supporters. Libraries provide study guidance and information retrieval tuition for campus courses so why not for MOOCs? The article urges librarians to get involved in the MOOC debate by trying them out for themselves and finding ways of supporting MOOC students with trustworthy study guides and literature lists. Many MOOCs that are already on offer have not integrated library services into the package and librarians at MOOC-universities need to get involved in course design from the beginning.

"Miller sees libraries supporting MOOC students by doing many of the things they’ve always done, like providing access to resources, and even existing as a place where learners can use the Internet to access a MOOC. Miller points to the many potential MOOC support roles for librarians: as copyright consultants to MOOC faculty, tech and research assistance for MOOC learners and instructional design consultants as MOOCs are built.

Librarians can extend beyond the role of MOOC support, though. Librarians are experts in information and other resources that can help both faculty and students in MOOCs. In addition to a support role, Miller would like to see librarians move to the role of collaborators in growing MOOC potential."

The difference is that the people taking MOOCs are not on campus, they're everywhere else. So it's time for public libraries to get involved in MOOCs providing support for informal learning, offering computer access, advice and hands-on support for learners unused to online learning. It's not just university level MOOCs, there are lots of other types of informal online courses through channels like Udemy or Peer 2 Peer University and many of the people who would most benefit from them are completely unaware of what's available. There are many libraries who are already offering support for lifelong learning but the rise of the MOOCs puts this even more in the spotlight.

MOOCs - are the clouds beginning to clear?

  by Aloriel

Martin Weller wonders if the whole MOOC bubble has already burst in his post, You Can Stop Worrying About MOOCs Now. This week has seen the announcement by Coursera that they will be partnering with 10 US state university systems and public schools to provide them with course content. Instead of being the revolutionary element of disruption in higher education the xMOOCs are beginning to blend in with regular campus by providing ready-made course content for smaller universities and colleges to embed in their own programs. A college can thus offer a wider range of courses since they do not have to make the investment in developing the course material and can offer the tuition and examination that the MOOC cannot offer.

I'm not surprised by this move and it fits in with the layered model of education with free resources at the bottom layer and then optional value-added services like tuition, validation, examination etc higher up and at a fee. Martin sees this as the xMOOCs revealing their true colours and instead of offering free education for all they are now looking to establish a good business model within the traditional set-up.

A few weeks ago there was a discussion about whether MOOCs are courses or textbooks and the answer seems to be verging toward the latter with the course element added on by other parties, at a cost. Rather than disrupting higher education MOOCs may well end up fitting comforably into it providing new dimensions but not challenging too hard.

Maybe we should let them get on with it and get back to looking at MOOCs as they were originally conceived:

"So what about MOOCs, you know, those free, open courses? Is this the end of them? No, I don't think so, but maybe they can now become what we always wanted them to be, focused on access and experimentation and not hype and commercialism."

Time for a reminder of the roots of MOOC with Dave Cormier's classic video description. Now this is what I call a MOOC:

Effective communication in a webinar

I have been involved in a lot of webinars over the last four years or so; as organiser, moderator, speaker and participant. It's a wonderful opportunity to gather people from all over the world and from different fields to discuss a common interest and learn new things but I wonder if we really use this arena effectively.

Many webinars are pretty well standard one-way lectures from a guest expert. There may be a chat window for participants but most prefer to sit back and listen to the lecture. That's perfectly valid as long as we don't pretend that it has any other function. Many of the webinars I've been involved in however have audiences of 100 or more and the chat window is used heavily with a constant stream of comments, links and questions. What happens is that the webinar has two threads of communication that are sometimes interlinked and sometimes go off in slightly different directions. This means that some participants choose to follow the speakers, some get deeply involved in a parallel chat discussion and some try to multitask between the two threads. I've always seen this combination of discussion channels as an exciting and stimulating feature of webinars.

However after a webinar I held yesterday one participant got in touch and explained that she found the experience messy and frustrating. The use of the chat session while someone was speaking meant that many weren't able to concentrate on the speaker and it seemed to be a multitasking free-for-all without any clear communication strategy. A fair point indeed and maybe we should think of ways to change focus during a webinar. One possibility would be to make it clear what the focus is by using visual cues. If someone is presenting we could make the chat window very small to show that it's time to focus on the speaker. After the input from the speaker the chat window could be expanded to indicate that now it's time for comments and questions. Focus on one activity at a time and make the rules clear from the start. Divide the input into short bites and then regularly open up for comments and questions.

It would of course be great to be able to let participants contribute with sound and video but once you get over 20 participants this can be very tricky from a technical perspective. Most participants have not installed their headsets correctly for the e-meeting tool and if you give someone the floor to speak it often leads to audio issues; either no sound, echo or howling feedback. So we continue with only the speakers with video and audio and the participants in the chat.

So how do we make webinars more participative and rewarding for all? Breakout groups are one possibility that I hope to try soon. It works with smaller groups but I wonder how to organize this in a webinar with 150 participants. It would mean a lot of groups and the risk of causing confusion among participants unused to suddenly finding themselves transported to another virtual meeting room. Should we try to minimize multitasking and focus one one activity at a time (attention, discussion, questions, brainstorming)? Or is the webinar a clumsy tool for real interaction and should preferably be used for lectures or panel discussions?

What do you think?

Learning to learn

Here's an excellent slide show by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano that is getting quite a lot of coverage just now. It's about the need to rethink education and although the message is not new the approach of using her little daughter as the focus of the presentation is very effective. What sort of education awaits her and will it prepare her for the challenges of 2030?

Read some background to the presentation on Silvia's blog: Take Another Look Around You- Learning to Learn in a New World.

Take Another Look Around from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

Make hay while the sun shines

  by TinTrunk

While academics discuss the pros and cons of different types of MOOCs and argue over whether they present a threat or opportunity for higher education a lot of people are busy learning from them. Whatever you think of them they are opening up new learning opportunities for millions of people and that is really the main point of it all.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, What Professors Can Learn From 'Hard Core' MOOC Students, looks at the real MOOC enthusiasts who have already worked their ways through 30-40 different courses and can't seem to stop. There are evidently over 100 people registered with Coursera who have already completed 20 courses. The format suits them perfectly and they are clearly learning a lot from the experience. Being able to earn badges and certificates (whether or not they have any academic value) adds to the addictive attraction of these courses it seems.

There is however a very revealing paragraph quoting one serial MOOCer:

One reason Mr. Lepin takes so many MOOCs at once is that he's afraid they might not last—or might not remain free—a concern shared by other students as well. "It boils down to what feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he says. "I'm just afraid this thing might end sometime soon."

A rather sad observation but, given the current discussion of how to monetize MOOCs. very understandable. Make hay while the sun shines.

MOOC assortment

  by camknows

An assortment of MOOC thoughts inspired by this week's news feed.

There is some concern that many MOOCs are simply repositories of content in the form of lectures, reading and automatic tests and are not even really courses at all. This is the main point behind a post by Justin Reich, Is a MOOC a Textbook or a Course? Yes there's plenty of good material there and you can certainly learn a lot but you're largely on your own and the question is whether this can be considered a coherent course. I feel that such types of MOOC are perfectly valid as long as they don't pretend to be any more. It's vital that every MOOC describes clearly and upfront exactly what type of course it is (or not) and explains what types of study the student should expect. That can be one quality criterion; a clear statement on what's in store for the learner, the type of course, pedagogy and demands. All I've seen do this well but maybe we also need to know what the MOOC doesn't offer, just to avoid any misunderstanding.

Then there's the excellent report from the University of Edinburgh on the results of their first MOOCs under the Coursera banner. As Donald Clark reports on his blog, Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises, students were clearly satisfied with the courses on offer with only 2% responding that the course did not meet their expectations. The report also confirms that very few MOOC students are motivated by certificates or credits and that attempts to provide a social aspect to the courses via course forums seldom work. Somehow the key element of the connectivist cMOOCs, networking and collaboration, do not translate well into the xMOOC paradigm (my wish for 2014 is that we find a new terminology for all this). Forums tend to be confusing, overcrowded and not always particularly interactive and most students seem to go it alone.

Maybe the reason for the cMOOCs succeeding in creating a dynamic learning network was that the participants were usually digitally literate academics who were already used to such an environment. The xMOOCs however attract a much wider range of participants, many of whom may not be used to online learning at all. Many sign up expecting a fairly traditional course and expecting it to be largely self-study even if the organisers might wish it to be otherwise.

So how do we get learners more involved in MOOCs and how can we foster collaboration and networking? Peer review may be the best bet and already some courses are use peer assessment as a powerful teaching and empowerment tool as well as providing meaningful feedback. Students need training to be able to offer meaningful feedback to each other and this can be built into the course at an early stage. If a set of assessment criteria for a task is given to students and they can practice on a test case first they can then assess each other. Studies indicate that peer assessment often comes very close to the grades given by experienced teachers, though the feedback may not be as insightful.

There's an article on MOOC News and Reviews,Massive MOOC Grading Problem – Stanford HCI Group Tackles Peer Assessment, that describes peer assessment in MOOCs and gives examples of how this can lift the learning experience of the MOOC to new levels, without involving faculty at all.

"I recently completed a two-week video production course on the Skillshare platform that used peer reviews. While the course was not for college credit and the only rubric used was to foster positive comments even while pointing out areas for improvement, knowing I was commenting on the work of my cohorts made me dive into the course more deeply. I felt a certain sense of fairness at play: I was going to make my project live up to the standard I set for others. In the end, I put in more hours reviewing comments and working on my projects than I spent watching the instructor’s videos and engaging in other assignments. The comments I received from my peers spurred me to rethink, revise and improve my project."

Finally this is exactly the approach being offered by NovoEd, yet another new kid on the MOOC block.
They divide students into groups of up to ten, based on location or interests and those groups then support and assess each other through the course. Creating group loyalty and a small scale study environment even in the vast sea of a MOOC could well be the road to follow.

Read more about NovoEd in an article on TechCrunch,Stanford’s NovoEd Brings Collaboration And Group Learning To MOOCs To Help Fight Attrition.

Don't believe the hype 2

  by elizaIO

Don't get me wrong, I'm enthusiastic about the new opportunities for learning that the net and social media offer. However there is a danger that in our enthusiasm to embrace the new educational landscape we enjoy hearing what we want to believe and choose not to take conflicting opinions too seriously. Those who can express our hopes an beliefs in an inspiring manner can win a massive wave of support and attain guru status and this is of course fairly typical human behaviour. So when people like Sugata Mitra, Salman Khan or Daphne Koller so convincingly challenge the traditional educational system and offer the hope of new solutions it is easy to get swept away in a wave of enthusiasm without stopping to challenge our beliefs.

Now I too am inspired by these and many other leading figures in the educational debate and am really looking forward to hearing two of them (Robinson and Mitra) at the EDEN conference in Oslo in June. However it's worth digging around to see if there is another side to the argument. Maybe children don't really learn so effectively completely on their own, maybe flipping the classroom is not really the solution to motivating kids and maybe the growth of MOOCs is not as open and free as we would like to imagine.

Two articles in the past couple of months provide necessary wake-up calls for us all. Firstly Donald Clark's article, Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt, casts doubt over some of Mitra's claims about self-learning children. It's not quite as simple as it sounds and Clark presents evidence that there were commercial interests behind the famous hole-in-the-wall project and that it does not prove that schools are irrelevant. Read the article and consider.

There's also a timely article by Irene Ogrizek, Daphne Koller and the Problem with Coursera, which questions the motives behind Coursera and other commercial MOOC providers. She's not the first to question the commercial motives behind the MOOC-explosion but notes that Coursera and other MOOC consortia present a convincing case for democratising and opening up education but we forget that they are for-profit commercial operations with a duty to provide ROI to their investors.

"Coursera is a for-profit company that has joined with top universities to deliver free online courses. The “free” part sounds great until we realize that the real intent of companies like Coursera is to transition into producing monetized, for-credit university courses. To many academics this represents a conflict of interest that compromises the independence and integrity of higher education institutions."

Read these tow articles. It's worth remembering there any many sides to every story.