CLIPP Board

MOOCs just keep getting bigger!

Hype or hope? You decide.

I thought it was time to catch up on the current headline grabbing subject of MOOCs ; following my own recent MOOC experiences and a few inspirational talks here at Aston. On Monday 28 January 2013 Professor Curtis Bonk visited Aston University and delivered a brain melting talk on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). His presentation was recorded and is available in 4 chunks on the Global Dimensions in HE website 

Professor Bonk galloped through the recent history of MOOCs, models, and (learning) theories – which was both fascinating and overwhelming! The MOOC is definitely here to stay in a multiplicity of variants and pedagogic models, and all look somewhat disruptive (if you believe the hype), and some are even innovative! I still think the primary reason for most is still a “shop front” or large data collection for learning research. Some are offering innovative modes of delivery and learner engagement; i.e. the recent E-learning and Digital Cultures  course offered some interesting and engaging activities – including a final peer assessment on created digital artefacts. Whereas the Coursera course: Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application was forced to close after only a few days. I was enrolled and attended (in parts) both the above, so it was interesting to see two completely different models of MOOC courses, and experience (chaotic) social learning using two vastly different (interactive) models. It was somewhat ironic to witness the Fundamentals course fold/fail , but I’m sure they are redesigning the course for version 2 – as we speak. Let’s not forget how Daphne Koller promotes the Coursera model of altruism / openness, but then talks about the usefulness of the (learning) data they’ve gathered! This keynote by Gardner Campbell at the Open Education Conference 2012, should bring us all back down to earth, as should this recording of a debate on the subject at the ASCILITE 2012 conference?

Professor Bonk also mentioned the new Google learning platform called coursebuilder but advised that it required some coding skills to use it. On that note, I was talking to David Kernohan from JISC, at the JISC CETIS conference this week about the other types of MOOC platforms being developed; his research had uncovered most were bespoke coded products, and some were using WordPress or the Pearsons platform.
In other recent news; two of the big players in the field announce significant increases in partnerships, whilst 5 US MOOCs have been recommended for credits. In the UK, Sir Michael Barber, chief education adviser for Pearson, says online learning (not necessarily MOOCs) offers “both a threat and opportunity” for UK universities. At the Online and Open-access Learning in Higher Education event , Professor’s Josie Taylor (OU) and Diana Laurillard (London Knowledge Lab ) criticized the ethics, motives, and pedagogic models of most MOOCs (i.e. does completion = success? What are the values for those who drop out?), which are all founded concerns. Although; we don’t hear much complaining from the “students” of these courses about multi-choice assessments wrapped around (good quality) talking heads type video production! Do we?

At this week’s CETIS conference I attended presentations by Simon Buckingham Shum  (OU analytics guru), and Professor Patrick McAndrew  (OU Professor of Open Education) both talked about the creation of the FutureLearn MOOC project. Simon talked at length about [research & marketing] data, and what types of data will/could be harvested from FuutreLearn, whilst Professor McAndrew talked about the Open learning movement and the design ethos behind the new venture. Their MOOCy “good intentions” are thus:
• Build on what we know
• Innovate
• Be accessible
• Be interactive
• Make use of data
• Use the right licence
• Be prepared to re-use
• Not be in it [just] for the money
• Be happy
If you want to know more on how to design a MOOC, dip into the (OU driven) OLDS MOOC archives for the received wisdom from those that have just completed this course. I’ll finish off this update posting with a link to the new CETIS white paper on the subject : MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education which helps clarifies the current state of play. Just try not to mention the word disruption too much, will you.

We see data

Approximately a year ago we contributed a suite of learning resources into Jorum for HE consumption. They were tagged with AUOER .  The video below depicts the contributions tagged UKOER into Jorum by everyone involved in that funded project. Stunning data visuals by Martin (Mashe) Hawksey.

New EU cookie law

Delicious Cookie (CC) Andreas Moreno

On Saturday May 26th the new EU cookie law (e-Privacy Directive) came into force. Any website/learning platform must provide advice and information to users. Those website visitors can chose to accept or deny the use of cookies on their computer. Most of the time cookies (small text file) are harmless, and provide a mechanism to easily store data we re-use, when revisiting a website. But sometime the same “good cookie” technology can be used for illicit means, eg. capturing personal data.  The new law  will mean that you will see many more of these statements  (see image below) requesting  user consent to use their cookies.

The ICO states:

Cookies or similar devices must not be used unless the subscriber or user of the relevant terminal equipment:

(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and

(b) has given his or her consent.

…………………………………………………………..Read more here

Flipping Vital

In most examples at Aston,  Replay (Panopto) lecturecasts are made available to students immediately following the formal lecture. But “flipping” could provide another equally popular model?

What is flip teaching?
This refers to a method of instruction where classroom-based teaching time and traditional “homework” time are reversed (flipped). A teacher provides video lessons to be reviewed outside of class, which in turn gives teachers more time in class to focus on higher-order learning skills. Ref: http://ed.ted.com/about

I recently attended a webinar organised by the ViTAL SiG.  This caught my eye as it covered a new ideology called Flipping the classroom. The webinar by Carl Gombrich outlines his approach to successful flipping. Carl, records lectures, then encourages students to ask three questions about them (in the VLE) – and add a timestamp video reference.
Essentially this “movement” entails the use of short video “lectures” either using tools such as Panotpo, or shorter chunks of videos posted on YouTube, or hosted on sites like the popular Kahn Academy. Essentially the idea is to make traditional lecture material available to students BEFORE a lecture, in a more informal/accessible/varied format.

By supplementing the [chunked] video material with tasks/questions in a VLE or by using the new TED ed tool box – you extend the learning, and move towards a more inquiry based model. The students then arrive at the traditional lecture primed full of ideas they want to discuss – as per a standard tutorial format. We used to call this homework! The same outcome of promoting learner autonomy, inquiry, and problem solving, can be also achieved by posting any resources for students to work on before lectures into Blackboard or Pebblepad. The aim is to promote a more discursive, Q&A lecture format. The use of chunked video clips or lecturecasts in this new “flipping” ideology ensures that core course resources could be presented in a more engaging format (as opposed to text) and could therefore improve motivation?

Further information;

• http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/news/carl-gombrich-flipping-the-lecture-theatre
• http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/04/flipping-the-classroom/
• http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/flipping-lectures/
• http://www.khanacademy.org/
• http://ed.ted.com/about
• http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDEducation 
• http://tlc.aston.ac.uk/aston-replay/case-study-lecture-capture-aston-university
• MIT & Harvard release Edx

ALT-C 2011 musings

Miguel Brechner opened the conference by discussing his 1 laptop per child project (Plan Ceibal). This had the desired effect of inspiring us to think about the positive effect technology can have on learning, and also managed to focus our minds on “doing more with less” in this challenging climate.
Various sessions were live streamed, and delegates interviewed for sound bites during the conference . Inevitably, the twitter back channels kept those peeking in, informed of our thoughts.  Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Martin Hawksey (MASHe)   helped to archive the tweets using Twapper Keeper. The associated Summarizr makes a neat job of aggregating and displaying those archived tweets.
As you can expect, after not attending ALT-C  for a few years, I was keen to fill up the days with interesting sessions.  My highlights were:

Read more

Supporting learning

Dr Matthew Olczack explains how he used, and  subsequently researched web based resources to enhance traditional teaching and learning methods.  The research is of particular interest as Dr Olczack investigates aspects of self selection bias.  The overall results were very favourable, both in terms of the postive impact upon students learning, and their overall achievements.

Turnitin refined

Turnitin have just announced a few subtle enhancements to their tools.  The most useful for Aston are listed below;

What is reduced sensitivity for student paper matches?
In order to reduce noisy matches in the Originality Report (spurious, short matches that instructors don’t care about/ that don’t mean anything), we have raised the minimum number of words in a student paper match, added a requirement for the minimum number of non-frequently used words in a match, and lowered the amount of non-matching words that can be included in a match, the overall effect is to reduce the number of small or inconsequential matches to papers in the student paper database. This will also allow matches to primary sources like the internet and publications to rise to surface of the Originality Report source list (a common request amongst instructors).

What changes were made to the instructor inbox?
A number of small changes were made to the instructor inbox besides the addition of the “Response” column for the student GradeMark view indicator. These changes include the addition of on-hover help text for each of the column headers, expanded space for clicking on a column header to sort the inbox, a change to the GradeMark and Originality Report column headers, a change to the GradeMark icon, and a change to the downloadable file icon.

Instructor inbox Changes:

1. Hovering on a column header will display help text regarding the contents of that column
2. Clicking anywhere in a column header will sort the inbox according to the contents of that column (clicking again will reverse the sorting)
3. The column header for the Originality Report column has been changed from “Report” to “Similarity”
4. The column header for the GradeMark column has been changed from “GradeMark” to “Grade”
5. The GradeMark icon has been changed from a comment bubble and a grade or “–” (for ungraded papers) to a pencil (for ungraded papers) or the grade. Hovering on the pencil will show a message that the paper has not yet been graded
6. The downloadable file icon has been changed to a blue outline of a paper

Student Engagement: Student GradeMark view indicator

What is student GradeMark view indicator?
The student GradeMark view indicator is a feature that displays an indicator in the instructor inbox when the student has viewed the GradeMark for their paper for 30 seconds or more in one session (one viewing). If the student has viewed the paper for 30+ seconds a image of a little person with a check will appear in the new “Response” column of the instructor inbox. Hovering on the icon will display a message that the student has viewed the paper and when the latest 30+ second viewing took place. If the student has not viewed the GradeMark for the paper for 30+ seconds, a dot will appear in the “Response” column of the instructor inbox. Hovering on the dot will display a message stating that the student has not viewed the paper. The reason the student must have GradeMark open for 30+ seconds is to help ensure the student did not just open GradeMark view the grade and then close GradeMark.

P.s. If you have recently read about the new grammar checking tool (e-rater) now available, don’t hold your breath! It is only available in beta for USA customers, and selected markets.

Need some TLC?

Yes you do! Well – we all require some TLC occasionally. Of course I’m referring to the new Technology and Learning Community web site (TLC): http://tlc.aston.ac.uk which provides advice and guidance on appropriate and potential uses of technology enhanced learning (TEL), here at Aston. It is aimed at all staff or students wishing to know more about a specific technology. TLC serves the needs of “those in the know”, who will appreciate the powerful search engine to quickly locate resources, and those who are just curious. The intuitive navigation structure also serves to encourage those new to TEL to discover and understand the potential of certain tools and applications. It is a public website, therefore we are incorporating resources, case studies, and guides generated by Aston, but also linking to effective practice and guides across the globe.  It has been created to answer the important questions of; “why, what, and how do I exploit learning technologies to enhance the learning experience.”

This website is being continually enhanced, and is being built for the use of Aston staff and students, so it is imperative that we get your feedback for improvement. Contact Kevin Brace in CLIPP to give us your ideas. The “Community” aspect of the web site is part of the ongoing work. Broadly speaking we will aim to create features to enable discussions around particular tools. Watch this space. Being a public site, we also want others in academia to benefit from the resource.  Send us your comments, link to us, and suggest content. Sharing resources and knowledge is vital in this current economic climate.

Moving to Blackboard 9.1

For those wishing to know more about our impending move to Blackboard 9.1, please access the new resources added to the TLC Blackboard page, to find all those answers to your pressing questions.

JISC 2011 conference

A short report on the JISC 2011 conference,  of which you can revisit some of the live streamed sessions and grab the virtual goody bag.  The keynote speech by Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol, contextualised our current shift in HE provision to an unavoidable consumer lead market model. The twitter back channel displayed next to the recorded videos makes for a useful resource, and a glimpse into personal reflections on the day. Maybe they should have used the tool created by Martin Hawksey (JISC) which enables Twitter feeds to by overlaid onto video?

Ironically, one of the most interesting sessions I attended – “amplifying events” run by Brian Kelly of UKOLN was not officially recorded – but Brian and colleague did record it on their iphones (see above). This session was a good overview of some of the techniques and tools available to event organisers to enhance F2F and blend them with online events – as JISC demonstrated his year. The green meeting guide, was also mentioned – which looks a useful resource. As does this article by  Marike Guy (co-presenter) entitled “10 ways to amplify your event.” This topic also resonates with my previous post on using Elluminate here at Aston to help with our sustainability agenda.

The session entitled “Using digital media to improve teaching and learning”, illustrated some interesting exemplars of effective practice at University of Bristol focussing on the role of students as producers of media rich learning content. This session was fronted by JISC Digital Media service, reminding me of their wealth of excellent resources.

I also attended a short workshop explaining the Co-generative (Co-genT) toolkit project, which guides you through the process of writing learning outcomes. These can then be exported from the Moodle toolkit into PebblePad. Very handy for course designers, and could also be used to assess activities. n.b a great deal of work has been done on this tool  to map outcomes/descriptive verbs against national standards.

The final session I want to comment on was entitled “Pushing the frontiers of ‘open education and research“.  This session outlined two new tools created by Plymouth University and The Academy. They will be extremely useful for people wanting to easily understand copyright and create OER resources. Both will be live in a week or so. I’ll wait until they go live to report back, as I will be using them myself.

Greener virtual classes

The above video illustrates an excellent example of how a tool such as Elluminate can be used to support peer learning in an online environment.  This virtual class together with the virtual presentation (webinar) described below can help reduce travel costs and therefore help as part of a wider sustainability agenda – vital for all in the current economic climate.  These tools can help universities provide more flexible ways of serving student needs, whilst making considerable savings.

CLIPP department are helping the Aston sustainability agenda by promoting awareness to staff and students of potential carbon emission savings that can be made when running webinars and virtual classrooms.  Aston University has a licence for Elluminate, which enables live (web based) presentations or classrooms via a PC and using a web browser.  A presenter can be sat in front of their PC (and web cam) and “broadcast” to hundreds of delegates simultaneously across the globe.  Delivery of presentation slides, web tours, and interactive activities are all possible with Elluminate.  A typical example of this was run recently by the Business School Alumni department.  The 45 minute webinar hosted by Dr Patrick Tissington was a resounding success with 80 delegates from Aston, UK and internationally.
Kevin Brace has been working with Victoria Johnsen the Environment and Sustainability Officer to calculate the carbon emissions saved in the ‘Effective Global Teams’ webinar.  We calculated that approx 7.5 tonnes of carbon were saved in this international webinar. This equates to approximately 11 flights from New York to London.  (Ref: http://visualization.geblogs.com/)
This illustrates the potential carbon and travel savings for typical delegates and students. We should also include a carbon offset calculation to balance the equation. This is just one typical example of how a tool like Elluminate can be exploited. Others include;

• Virtual tutorials
• Careers advice
• Alumni events
• Virtual open days
• Distance learning
• Training programmes
• Collaborative project/research meetings
• Placement visits
• Flexible student support
• Validation committees
• Exam validation meetings
• Research consultancy