Networked Learning - MOOCs and more

It is about time an article like this appeared. Kudos to Ry Rivard and Inside Higher Ed for doing so. Ry summarises and illustrates the case against the simplistic idea that MOOCs will democratise education because everybody now has access to US branded, world-class content. In January this year, I already called this an example of cultural imperialism in a blog post of mine (and argued why, using Michael Sandel's work - http://tiny.cc/igu3vw), Ry talks about cultural neo-colonialism. Same difference.  Not only does not everybody have fast internet connections, not only does not everybody speak English or wish to be educated in a language other than their native tongue, but vast and deep-seated cultural differences make the very notion of educating the world with USA-made courses highly problematic. Ry illustrates this point with a variety of different examples, ranging from not being at ease with the Socratic, dialectic way of learning to preferring to put group interests above individual ones. Even if half of his examples turn out to be wrong, the remaining ones should give more than enough pause for thought. (@pbsloep)

This is an interesting turn of events. The MOOC platform providers - Coursera, Udacity, edX - all want to promote their brand by hitch-hiking on the brandnames of several elite universities. They have tried to accomplish the seemingly impossible, that is marrying mass education with the exclusivity that people associate with the elite universities. Thus far, this has worked pretty well, perhaps because universities did not want to be seen missing in this exquisite group. So there were enough applicants and MOOC platforms could afford to turn many of them down. However, things seem to have changed. 

Amherst is a school that prides itself in its 'mission to provide 

education in a "purposefully small residential community" and "through close colloquy”.' For the details you need to read the article, but basically Amherst faculty decided that this mission was incompatible with the mass education that MOOCs provide. It seems they spotted the paradox and were not impressed by the fact that many other universities were lining up to join edX and its ilk. The question of course is whether this marks a turning point or remains a unique action. (@pbsloep)

Networked learning is about learning as an individual in punctuated interaction with various fellow network members (peers). In the course of doing so, groups of people may be formed, either at the behest of the learner him or herself, or through the intervention of teachers themselves or of tools that act on the teacher's behalf. An example of the latter is research my colleagues and I did on ad-hoc transient groups, groups that are formed on the fly to answer a question some fellow network learner is unable to answer (cf. Sloep, 2009). An important question for designers of such networked learning environments is the most appropriate size of such peer groups. In the ad-hoc transient community experiments, we settled for a size of three. Our choice was based on a mix of considerations. One of them was that large groups would rapidly diminish peer willingness to answer questions as they got too many turns. Another one was that large groups would foster social loafing. A third one was that the limited knowledge available in small groups would increase the chance of giving mistaken answers. 

Our considerations at the time were based on little more than common sense arguments. We could not find any hard evidence on optimal group sizes. Although Christopher Allen's piece does not site much scientific evidence either, he has amassed a lot of personal experience that can be used to inform optimal group size choices in different circumstances. I am glad to see that, after the fact, his experience supports the choice we made at the time. (@pbsloep)

Sloep, P. B. (2009). Fostering Sociability in Learning Networks through Ad-Hoc Transient Communities. In M. Purvis & B. T. R. Savarimuthu (Eds.), Computer-Mediated Social Networking, ICCMSN 2008, LNAI 5322 (pp. 62–75). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1198

Two very important elements of all licenses are that i) it is the platform provider owns the content, which then users my access under very strictly regulated conditions; ii) any user-generated is also owned by the platform. The first point matters to universities, the second to the students, who basically seem to handover the rights on the texts they themselves have produced. So much for openness …. Educause promises to "continue to monitor and report on this [licensing] issue" (@pbsloep)

THE reports on the recent Open Educational Resources conference held at the end of March in Nottingham, UK, in particular on a speech by the OU's (that is, OU UK) Patrick McAndrew. Speaking of Coursera and Udacity, he claimed they were creating a 'closed community in the open' because of the way these platforms were operated, unlike such initiatives as the Peer to Peer University or the Open Courseware Consortium. So, how come they failed to attract the attention that Coursera and Udacity do?  According to Patrick, what they offer and universities do not is complete courses that you can 'pick up off the shelf'. 

This is an interesting observation. I believe online educational resources (OERs), of which MOOCs are an example, are descendants of learning objects. The leading paradigm behind learning objects was that they could be mixed and matched in all kinds of different arrangements, as the teacher pleased. This was their strength. Since the number of users per object now increased more effort could be put in their quality without raising costs. If Patrick is right, it seems we've come full circle. Perhaps, the shift in focus of attention, form fellow teachers for learning objects to students for OERs, is the reason behind this. Whatever the case may be, Patrick is of course absolutely right that this shift in our thinking about the best use of OERs does not imply the ideal of openness should be abandoned. (@pbsloep)

This is all about business models, about how the large sums of money can be recouped that are being pumped into developing platforms for MOOCs and in creating the courses that these platforms run. It seems that two approaches are emerging. The first one is attempted by Coursera and Udacity, which follow a traditional closed-source model for their platforms. Course developers who want to offer their MOOCs through these platforms pay in terms of a share of the future revenue (see also http://sco.lt/7IoKZN). This is the Apple iTunes model, as I argued earlier in a blog of mine http://tiny.cc/ralyuw). The other way is followed by edX and now Stanford (the university, in contrast with the for profit companies Coursera and Udacity that are run by Stanford professors or ex-professors). The source code is open for any one to use, revenue streams are generated by offering services around the code (installation, fine-tuning, additional plug-ins, etc). 

This model allows the MOOC-providing university much more freedom, it is the model Stanford now has decided to favour. Crucially, even though the software that drives edX's and the future Stanford MOOCs, is open for other universities to use - after all that is what 'open' here means, they do not become part of the edX family of MOOCs or the planned Stanford family of MOOCs. Ultimately, therefore, the move to open source the platform code by Stanford and Harvard is mainly a means to avoid diluting their brand by associating it with a mere platform provider (to wit, Coursera or Udacity). (@pbsloep)

I normally do not list MOO Course announcements in these scooped pages. There are just too many of them and it would divert attention from my main purpose, providing resources to inform our thinking about networked learning in general and, at present at least, MOOCs in particular. However, I want to make an exception for the present course announcement as it promises to do exactly what I just described as my purpose. Although the focus here is narrower, to wit the disruptive potential of technologies such as MOOCs, it is their disruptive potential that instills so much fear in university admins and is a source of hope and joy for so many others. (@pbsloep)

Audrey Watters discusses the familiar history of xMOOCs, the rhetoric surrounding that (Thrun: in 50 years there'll be only 10 universities left on the entire planet), the towering attrition rates, and the fears of many university admins to be left behind if they don't junp on the MOOC bandwagon (but see my yesterday scoop on Amherst http://sco.lt/8p5Ig5). And then she discusses the distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs, something not everybody knows about. Now you could argue that cMOOCs might just as well be left out of the discussion, being such an entirely different beast than the xMOOC that the only thing they still seem to share is their name. But Audrey makes an interesting use of the contrast. 

She rightly points out what nobody to my knowledge seems to have highlighted so far, that xMOOCs are designed by computer scientists and cMOOCs by education scholars. As it happens, their approach to teaching is as different as it imaginably can be and it is this difference of approach that is responsible for the contrast between xMOOCs and cMOOCs. Which brings up the following question: do we want to place the fate of (higher)  education in the hands of a number of entrepreneurial computer scientists or do we entrust it to education professionals? Put this way, the question is not so hard to answer. (@pbsloep)

Such a toolkit would indeed be very useful, not necessarily for MOOCs only, but more for networked learning in general. The tools that Martin discusses - e.g.  Wordpress for blog aggregation, Twitter, Google Plus - certainly suggest a wider applicability. 

From my point of view, the interesting thing about such toolkits is that they support a view of learning that embraces the idea of personal learning networks (PLNs), yet allows one to organise learning in courses. The course sets the topic, time period as well as interaction and communication structures, the tools used to make the course happen are a selection of the tools that people already use anyway to sustain their PLNs. To the extent that students do not use any such tools already or a limited subset of them only, the course also introduces them to their use and in doing so helps them to start building their own PLNs. This kind of course set-up amounts to a view of education that not only seeks to enlighten students on the course topic, but also prepares them for a career as a lifelong learner (or helps them sustain that career). It amounts to a shift from an institution-centric view to a genuinely student-centric one. This is good news for students, now we only need to convince educational institutions that it is also good news for them.

I think this question could be made more precise by introducing Margaret's Boden's distinction between psychological and historical novelty (I am not sure about the exact wording and haven't got the book at hand). The former refers to something I discover which may not be new in a generic sense but is novel to me. Historical novelty refers to something that is novel to everybody (as far as it is humanly possible to establish that, but that's another matter). What Colin seems to refer to here is psychological novelty at the group level. So if someone in a company discovers something that is psychologically novel to her, she might share it with her co-workers whom she knows to be unfamiliar with this. That way, there is knowledge production at the company level. If everybody does their share, you get a multiplier effect, which is the effiency Colin refers to. This is an interesting thought, something which would certainly be in the interest of companies (or other organised groups of people).

First of all, this thought has no bearing at all on xMOOCs, which really aren't about knowledge production but about knowledge consumption. And even if new insights happen to be produced that go beyond that what the teachers intends to transfer, the individual character of such MOOCs guarantees it is the individual and only the individual whose knowledge gets increased. So we definitely are talking cMOOCs here. Then, I guess it depends on the question of how the cMOOC is organised whether Colin's suggestion makes sense.

Suppose, a cMOOC-like setup would have been followed within the confines of some company which sets up a professional development exercise this way. Even if the exercise is open in the sense that non-company participants may join in, it still should be possible to arrange for a mechanism that ensures that novel knowledge gets shared. Content curation is a way to do so, blogs are another. Even in situations of self-organised groupings, such mechanisms could be put in place, as long as someone takes the trouble to do so. I think Stephen Weber's in his The Succes of Open Source has revealed such mechanisms, certainly for the Linux developers community. A big question is whether people will _want_ to share their flashes of novel insights this way. After all, the novel knowledge gives them an advantage over their colleagues, which may come in handy in many ways. But that is a problem for all instances of sharing knowledge among co-workers, not just for cMOOCs.

So, I see no reason why psychological novelty may not also occur at the level of closely interacting individuals. I am not sure, though, that you need interdisciplinarity in particular. It is well known that creativity thrives in the presence of heterogeneity, all kinds of heterogeneity, not just of the disciplinary kind although it does help. So, when contemplating measure to foster psychological group novelty, we should focus on a more general kind of heterogeneity of such groups. (@pbsloep).

Are MOOCs in the USA often portroyed as a means to save money and beat the towering tuition fees, in Europe they could help create a European identity. And why not? What is missing from the discussion are the elite universities. There is no doubt in my mind that a large part of the reason for people to enrol in a MOOC is the chance to learn from the best in the field. So this must somehow be taken into account. But an interesting thought nevertheless, one that for once is not so much about money as it is about improving education and instilling a (European) civic identity. (@pbsloep)

What is special here, Scott Wilson argues, is the subtle but important difference between free of charge and open. Many platforms may be used free of charge - Facebook, Google+ - but few are open in the sense that the software that drives them is freely available. edX's XBlock code is not only open in this sentence, but the AGPL code ensures that improvements made to it by users of the code have to be made available to all other users, including of course edX. (@pbsloep)