Brainstorm in Progress: connectivism

Showing posts with label connectivism. Show all posts

Friday, October 24, 2014

Taking the Red Pill and Reclaiming Hosting

This blog has moved to http://geoffcain.com

Numerous metaphors seem apt here. I have been toying with the idea that Tim Owens and Jim Groom have been promoting for some time now: A Domain of One's Own and Reclaim Hosting. When I first heard the idea, I was not too keen on it because I was working in a community college with students very new to technology and with luddite faculty who were hostile to and afraid of technology. I couldn't imagine trying to get first generation college students with little exposure to computers and saying "oh yeah, you are not only going to learn how to save your paper to a thumb drive but you are going to host your own website on your own domain." But what is interesting to me right now is that I have students at Humboldt State who do not want to go online at all because they are afraid of all the corporate control of their information - they have heard Snowdon and Zuckerberg and want no part of that internet. Jim and Tim are providing that alternative.

"Founded in 2013, Reclaim Hosting provides hosting support for individuals and institutions that want to build out spaces online for personal portfolios, digital projects, and more." If you are interested in learning more, I would encourage you to explore Mary Washington University's Teaching and Learning Technologies page. Closer to home, Chris Mattia at California State University, Channel Islands is experimenting with the idea as an alternative to a learning management system. We have departments here at Humboldt State University that are using Wordpress blogs to run their courses, but Reclaim Hosting takes that one step further and hands the keys over to the students.

All I can say is that it has been surprising and fun. The technologies have advanced to such a state that anyone really can do this. My blog has been with Google since 2005. I had even older blogs on blogspot.com that are fortunately lost to the mists of time. I like this direction. This is a good time to get students, to get everyone, to think about who owns your information and what you can do about it. This is what I think the principles of Connectivism should lead to - not to just be a node in the network, but an active, aware node.

"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." - Morpheus, The Matrix

This blog has moved to http://geoffcain.com via Reclaim Hosting.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Why Connectivism is a Learning Theory

Domains of major fields of physics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

David Wiley recently made a comment on his blog, in response to a very succinct posting by Stephen Downes, that the learning theory Connectivism, though he is sympathetic to it, was incomplete. I am not sure what to make of that. I understand David's point that terms need to be carefully defined. A solid theory needs operationally defined key terms. But I am not sure that Connectivism is really incomplete. There are a lot of great theories out there that work well and are very useful but are not "complete" in every sense. Einstein thought that his theories of relativity would lead to a Universal Field theory and because his work does not account sufficiently for quantum mechanics, in that sense his theory is incomplete. But it is still quite useful and irreplaceable in many fields of study and in practical application.

When Einstein first published his theory it had to go through years of refinement and testing. That is the process. There are still things being worked out with Darwin's Theory of Evolution but the days of wondering if it is valid are long behind us. It has been proven, observed, and tested. There are still evolutionary mechanisms to be worked out and the history of evolution will take more field work.

Looking at the history of theories, I am beginning to think that the discipline a given theory arises from is often the one least capable of evaluating it. But that is where all of the experimental and observational evidence is going to come from. Most of the criticisms I have read of Connectivism boil down to the new theory is not like the old theories. A theory is meant to provide a conceptual framework for viewing and understanding phenomena. As an instructional designer, I have a purely practical approach. I am only interested in a theory's usefulness, but for me, a theory must

account for current theories (either through refutation or inclusion)? A theory shouldn't just account for a given phenomena, it should do so in some measurably better way (more complete, elegant, etc.).
sufficiently explain where we are now.
make predictions. Any theory that can't predict anything is basically a conjecture at best.
be subject to testing. Here I would emphasize that the theory should change what we do based on experiment and empirical data.

In my experience, Connectivism has met those four conditions. Those shouldn't be the only ones but as an instructional designer, the theory accounts for current issues in my work in ways that other theories do not.

One of the problems of learning theory is that it is usually an interpretation of learning based on a psychological school of thought, sociology, or philosophy. It would be difficult for learning theory not to come from those disciplines, but learning theory seems to get stuck because while the derivative disciplines may have moved on, the learning theory often does not because educators are not participating or doing research in the parent disciplines.

New theories come about when the current theories no longer account for new information or phenomena. This is what made Connectivism particularly important to my work. The theory was created by Stephen Downed and George Siemens (Connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age) at the same time that networks and social media were impacting education in some profound ways. Some of the phenomena that Connectivism accounts for are phenomena that many educators fight against: online classes, social media, MOOCs, student-driven learning, etc. Connectivism for these instructors will never be a valid theory because they will never be comfortable with some of the implications of the theory: it would represent a profound change in their world view that they are not ready to accept. Connectivism is a learning theory because it accounts for the changes we are seeing in our society and in education in ways that the older theories cannot. Even social constructivists have a hard time wrapping their minds around social networks.

With that said, I am no ideologue either. I have my own bones to pick with Connectivism. It is still unclear to me how learning "may reside in a non-human appliance." It should either be the case or not. My definition of learning requires someone to actually do the learning. I see non-human appliances storing information, processing information, even mimicking pattern-making (chess computers). I don't understand how learning resides there. That is my "why a duck?" moment with the theory. It also feels like a left over principle from another theory that is not necessary for Connectivism to be a strong theory on its own.

But Connectivism is not just an explanatory or descriptive theory. As an instructional designer, I can use it to help analyze the success and failure of a particular course. So how would I test it? There are a number of ways. First, we build a course design rubric based on the tenets of Connectivism, and compare the success and retention rates, and course satisfaction (for students and teachers). Second, we repeat the experiment, and share the finding so others can reproduce the results.

The jury is still out for Connectivism. This is as it should be! The jury should always be out for all theories if we are going to engage in the scientific method and reason together.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Connectivism - The First 2000 Years

I would like to highly recommend a book I am currently reading to educators interested in Connectivism. It is called Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2000 Thousand Years by Tom Standage, the digital editor at the Economist. The point of the book is that social media is not a new phenomena but it is something that we have been engaging in for millennia and that it is part of being human. The book is interesting, well-researched and brings pieces of history that have been floating freely in your head together in some unusual and useful ways. He ties how we used to communicate with everything from cuneiform tablets, pottery shards and graffiti together with Twitter, email and Facebook. Some of those themes are discussed were discussed here in postings about the Silk Road as a network, The Republic of Letters, and other postings. I have also written here about Connectivism being "nothing new" and, for me, that is a great compliment to a theory - it means that we can use the theory not only to account for where we are now and where we are going, but also use it to analyze where we have been.

How this vision informs instructional design is that we recognize the social dimension of learning and how learning experiences happen in networks. Instructional design and teaching is the facilitation of these networks. The one-way delivery of information is a one sided "conversation" that has some use. I can gather information through reading a book or hearing a lecture, but I learn when I discuss it, through writing, talking, meeting others (in whatever medium) and make connections.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Using a Blog-Based Environment to Support a Community of Learners

Presentation notes for: "Using a Blog-Based Environment to Support a Community of Learners"
Institute for Student Success, Humboldt State University
Presenters: Daniel Fiore, Riley Quarles, Claire Knox, and Child Development Faculty

Riley introduced everyone by saying that the network of blogs (Wordpress) created with the Child Development department began with solving a problem: communication. Claire Knox pointed out that there was learning that they wanted visible to everyone, they wanted everyone participating in the conversations. They wanted the learning to not be locked down behind a learning management system. Resources for the presentation are at the Child Development site for the Institute.

They created a network of blogs to support their program. The network of blogs arose from the users - the needs of the faculty. All of the course blogs reflect the interest and needs of the individual classes. The blogs serve as eportfolios.

The department blog provides calendars, advising, and a link to all of the other classes. The site supports online and hybrid courses. It allows students to feel and be connected throughout the program.

They also wanted to engage alumni in an open site. They are expanding the community to include former students. Students create their own blogs that feed into course and department sites. They are using RSS feeds and categories in Wordpress.

Blog posts help students get to know one another before they work together in the class or in other classes. This has increased the sense of connectedness and community.

The students sign up for a blog at Wordpress.com, send the address to the instructor, the instructor puts them into a plug-in that gathers the students postings that are labeled or catagorized according to the class instructions. The pulg-in automatically pulls in all of the materials that the students tag to the class blog. Instructors and students then comment on the postings.

The blogs allow students to explore topics further. The instructor was using the blog to post more articles and resources and the students began to do the same on their blogs.

Carole said that she is not a technological person but found that Wordpress was easy to use and the program allows the faculty to go at their own pace in using these tools. The blogs assignments were good tools to discuss web presence, communicating online, and our web history. They had conversations about how the blog can represent the student to prospective employers and how what you put online represents you.

They want the students to carry their experiences in the program and their relationships after they leave the program. Learning management systems do not allow that. They want the learning community to continue.

All of the course content from the courses stays visible. Students can look at other classes and see how course materials are related to other courses. They begin to link what they are learning to their other classes. Students can go and look at any courses that they are going to take in the future. They can see how all the courses fit together. Faculty can also visit the sites and find new ways to make connections to other classes in the program. Typically, faculty in purely face-to-face courses might not have that opportunity. The blogs also serve as a community orientation site.

They have also had a lot of discussions about privacy - there are some materials that they put into Moodle (the learning management system). Observations of children or copy written materials, for instance, need to be kept private.

Even though the environment looks structured, the community created by the students and their comments represents another network within the network - this is like the idea of rhizomatic learning posited by Dave Cormier. There are opportunities here for collaborative learning and team-based projects. Blogs allow students to communicate their processes, to reflect on how they learn. Peer instruction and support can begin in this network and follow them throughout the program (also much like Eric Mazur's ideas on peer instruction). This is also a good example of students learning through their connections with one another (connectivism).

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

#Rhizome14: Community as Curriculum

This is my introductory post. I am participating in a MOOC facilitated by Dave Cormier called "Rhizomatic Learning - The Community is the Curriculum." Dave's 2008 article "Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum" has informed many of my education projects since including courses, student orientations, professional development, as well as my own teaching which has included English and Health Information Management. Back in 2008, I participated in an early MOOC, Connectivism and Connective Knowlege '08, and Dave's article was an essential node. You will notice that on the side-bar of this blog (if you scroll down) you will find the resources for my presentations on the "Connectivist Classroom" and that article is always there. It is also on my reading lists for new instructional designers. I am participating in this MOOC for a number of reasons but one of them is that I am in the middle of developing an online orientation to online learning called "eLearning 101" that I want to run as a MOOC.

I think it is important to practice what you preach and to give back to your community. I have been to too many workshops on "active learning" that were one-way dumps of information. We need to model and practice. I feel as an educator, I want to help shape this new knowledge landscape. That is the difficulty of this kind of education. I can't get a certification and then shift into neutral! Degrees or past accomplishments don't mean anything in this environment - you have to participate.

Another reason to participate is that the tools, methods, and people in online collaborative education are always changing. It is important to stay connected!

Related articles:

Thursday, January 02, 2014

Social Networks and The Good Way to Do History

Biblioteque Nationale

There is a fascinating article by Harvard librarian Robert Darnton in this month's New York Review of Books called "The Good Way to Do History." It is a review of Arlette Farge's book The Allure of the Archives. This book was originally written in 1989 before the rise of the internet and ebooks, and yet, as Darnton points out, Farge's work addresses issues that are quite relevant. Farge's work talks about how information travelled in earlier centuries. I think that what we will find is that the patterns of communication are strikingly familiar. Darnton addresses what he says are some of the myths about our time with Farge's work:

1. We live in the information age.
Darnton says that this is misleading and that every age was an age of information. I agree with this - the networks people created through letter writing and books were slow but just as significant and useful as the networks we have now. He points out that Farge once used the phrase "the logic of the crowd" to talk about how inflammatory information spreads revolt - much like Twitter in our age but through word of mouth. "The logic of the crowd" is like Howard Rheingold's concept "Smart Mobs." As Darnton puts it:

"Farge shows how information traveled through the media of eighteenth-century Paris. Primarily oral but intermixed with printed material such as chapbooks and popular engravings, the flow of talk and images (also, I would add, songs) shaped a collective consciousness that often erupted in violence."

I have a note here on the Republic of Letters that describes some of these early modern networks.

2. All information is available online.
Darnton says that this is false. He says that there are an estimated 129,864,880 books and Google has only digitized 20,000,000 of them. He discusses the miles of archives that exist: 252 miles of them in the Biblioteque Nationale alone. Although I get his point, the significance of Google is that I do not have to be a member of an elite academy to get access to the information. The internet can represent the democratization of information (and yes, there are problems to overcome with that idea). Farge documents in her book the arduous process she had to go through to get access to the archives.

3. The future is digital.
Darnton calls this myth true but trite and misleading. The death of the book is routinely predicted since the invention of just about every other media (movies, television, comic books, etc.). Darnton points out that "more books are produced each year than the year before - an increase of 6% in the United States in 2012." He goes on to say that new media actually expand and enrich the experience of the old.

I think it is important that I read outside of my discipline. We need to stop thinking so much about specific disciplines and make the connections between them to solve problems. Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel by addressing issues that may have been solved, in part, by other scholars elsewhere. I really appreciate publications like the New York Review of Books because it gives me a chance to read about what is happening in other fields and make connections that I would not readily be able to make.

I actually bought the Kindle version of this book. I like to read physical books as much as anyone else but this is a short one and I could not resist the price or the irony.

eLearning 101: Presentation from DET/CHE

I went to the DET/CHE conference in November and I had a presentation that I was going to give. What happened at the conference was interesting. After listening to other presentations and listening to the concerns, fears, and needs of other presenters, I wrote a brief "prelude" as a response. I also added more notes in the notes field. I am glad I had the opportunity to do this. Presentation from DET/CHE conference:

I was really impressed that the educators I met at the DET/CHE conference. I have received a lot of offers for help, advice, and some constructive criticism around our ideas about an orientation MOOC. I will definitely put the next DET/CHE on my calendar!

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

DET/CHE: The Art & Science of Education

Town plan of Imola (Wikipedia)

I am at the Directors of Education Technology and California Higher Education conference in San Jose this week (DET/CHE). This is my first time here and I am presenting on MOOCs, eLearning, and Instructional Design. I am excited about the location. We are in downtown San Jose which has the Tech Museum right across from the San Jose Museum of Art. Interestingly enough, the Tech Museum is looking more like an art museum (Fritjof Capra spoke there recently on Leonardo Da Vinci) and the art museum is running an exhibit called "The Genius of Everyday Things." And this is how it should be. There is a long history of art and science working and playing together. It is only in the last few centuries when specializations and their theoretical baggage seem to have separated the two in academia. I like the Merriam-Webster definition of Art: "something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings." That should at least also be the definition of instructional design if not education itself. I have a number of postings to this blog on art because art talks about how we see and experience the world and is about expressing our connection to it. Education is an opportunity to erase those artificial boundaries and to acknowledge that we experience the world with all of our senses and not just the ones for writing papers. Like Art (with a capital "a") education is also an opportunity think about how we see and experience the world and navigating our connections to the people and ideas around us. It is not an accident that George Siemens sees the role of the teacher to be a curator and "sense-maker" rather than a subject matter expert or funnel. (See p.15 of Siemens' "Learning and Knowing in Networks.")

The Tech Museum of Innovation in downtown San Jose; the white line in the sky is an airliner on approach to San Jose International Airport during the exposure time (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Tech Museum is running a program on the movie Star Wars which really has nothing to do with actual technology. It has everything to do with how artists imagine technology. And if Star Wars was not a great story, no one would care. You would never see a tech museum do a presentation on "Plan 9 from Outer Space." It was the art of Star Wars that fired the imagination.

Lets tear down those walls. If you are here at this conference, I think it would be worthwhile to take the time to visit the art museum. I would love to see the three organizations (DET/CHE, Tech Museum, and the Art Museum) coordinate a presentation someday!

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

eLearning 101: An Open Class for New Online Learners

Humboldt State University (Wikipedia)

Our new class is slowly taking shape. The course will be based on our old DE 101 (Distance Ed 101) which in turn was based on HIM 100 (a Health Information Management class where we introduced students to networked learning). It is also based on my experiences with CCK08 (the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes) and DS 106 (Jim Groom's project-based digital storytelling class), both of which I think represent the best of the MOOC idea. I was calling our course a MOOC but I am absolutely disgusted with some of the online classes that are going under that name right now - I would not want to give my faculty the idea that we were following a model that didn't build in student support, or value engagement and interaction, and valued venture capital over learning. I believe that we can create an open course that uses the best of these classes, uses actual research into the needs of our students, and then help students learn to be independent, life-long learners, with a dynamic learning community that they can take with them through college and into their professional lives.

The structure of our course owes a lot to the excellent work of Humboldt State Universities instructional designers, like Riley Quarles who has developed the structure of the blogs for our Child Development program. Dan Fiore, another instructional designer I am working with, is putting together Wordpress and an open badge system.

The students for this course are new to online learning, but of the 1600 students who responded to our survey, 95% use Facebook. At the typical university that hosts MOOCs, there is a higher level of motivation and skill sets (Stanford for instance). What we know about this population is that we need to have modules on things like time management, online communication skills, motivation, study skills, and how to create a personal learning network. One of the key purposes of the course is to help the students figure out how to form online learning communities for academic and professional support. We do have a module called "LMS" (learning management system) and that is specific to our campus' installation of Moodle - other campuses could insert their LMS of choice there.

The MOOCs that I have participated in were made up mostly of grad students and education professionals. My work has mostly been in community colleges and state colleges, so the tools and skills we are teaching are different.

Where we are now:

1. We are using Wordpress. There will be a main course blog that will link all the topics of the course (which may be on pages or separate blogs). The facilitators will have blogs as will the students. The students will choose or create an assignment on the topic and post to their blog. This feed will be aggregated on the topic blogs.

2. We are using open badges. I know that motivation is an issue in online classes in our university system, and all the research I have read says that badges are one of the ways to address that issue. Plus, I want the students to have a

3. We are gathering data. We have sent out a survey to our students to see how they are accessing the web, where they are accessing it, and what tools they are already using. The course is based on previous courses and orientations I have created but each is different according to the needs of the student population. For instance, at Tacoma Community College, we had more students involved in virtual worlds like Ever Quest and Second Life. Humboldt State only had 6% of the respondents in online games.

4. Updating course materials. The course materials are from previous courses and orientations. All of the modules will be openly licensed with a CC-NC-SA license.

5. Getting out to the learning communities and asking people to help get out and push. I went to the Open Ed 13 conference to learn more about open badges and to meet more people who are teaching in MOOCs. I will be presenting on this at the DET/CHE conference in San Jose next week.

The illustration below is s rough sketch that is evolving - this is not meant to be a traditional hierarchical course but student driven: the student chooses which modules are important, the student chooses the assignments from the module (or creates one) and gets together online with students to complete the work.

I would love to talk to anyone who is working on a similar project. Feel free to email me or leave a comment. I will also post updates and my presentation here as things take shape.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Some Notes on Connectivism and Peer Review

A social network diagram (Wikipedia)

I have been looking at social constructivism and the social generation of knowledge over the last week. I am interested in this line of thought because I feel that for us to really get a handle on what connectivism is, we have to be able to talk about it in the context of previous theories that talk about how we communicate and learn. Connectivism has to account for social constructivism because that is one of the prevailing theories about learning in the universities. According to Stephen Downes, "connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks." Connectivism, if you are not yet familiar with it, is a learning theory proposed by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. It is important to note that even though this is a new theory, it is not particularly dependent on any technology: connectivism was not invented by the internet. The internet was invented because we are very interested in communicating and being connected, and connectivism is a useful theory that can describe how this happens. When I say that connectvism is nothing new, I am not saying that in a derogatory way, I mean that it is the natural evolution of our understanding of how we learn. In various postings in this blog, I have pointed out how throughout history spontaneous learning networks have arisen between groups and individuals. I am interested in in the development of communication and knowledge networks from the earliest mail routes to the "Republic of Letters," from the telegraph to the early dial-up networks, from the Minitel to the modern internet. There is a lot of concern out there about whether or not connectivism is a learning theory or not. I find this issue ironic and kind of amusing. Well, it is about learning, so that is settled. How can it not be a theory? According to Merriam-Webster, a theory is "an idea or set of ideas meant to explain facts or events" and "an idea that is suggested or presented as possibly true that is not known or proven to be true" and finally, the third definition "the general principles or ideas that relate to a subject." So yes, it is a theory, the real question is whether or not it is a strong or weak theory, or does it account for the facts? Can we make predictions with this theory? Does it explain what happened before? The irony is that the same mechanisms that educators are going to use test whether or not it is a useful theory are the same mechanisms connectivism describes, for instance, peer review.

Brent Renalli has in interesting paper called "A Pre-history of Peer Review: Religious Blueprints from the Hartlib Cycle." In it, I ran into my old friend John Cominus (1592-1670), the author of one of the first illustrated textbooks for children. He was also an early proponent of universal education, visual learning, and going beyond rote memorization in schools. All of these ideas, like connectivism, are still considered "new" and controversial in many universities - any instructional designer can tell you stories about that! I didn't go looking for Cominus, but in my research into education, I keep running into him. In a typical paper on peer review, authors tend to credit the Royal Society with its invention, but it was already a well-established system in Europe and elsewhere to ensure religious orthodoxy as a mechanism of censure. "Peer review" is generally not a good way to get new ideas out.

Connectivism has gone through its modern "Republic of Letters" stage via the blogs. Downes and Siemens both have used the blogs to write books, essays, and propose ideas. Educators in turn have responded for and against on their respective blogs - and continue to do so. And now, Siemens has published in a more formal and traditional manner with peer reviewed journals such as MERLOT's Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Other education researchers are publishing articles about connectivism such as Dorothy Kropf in the European Journal of Open, Distance, and Elearning. Thus far, the ideas around connectivism have had more exposure and peer review than Einstein's theory of relativity had in 1905 (the "Annus Mirabilis" papers) when only Max Plank and Wilhelm Wien had read them before publication in Annalen der Physik. I wonder if the theory of connectivism could have come out of the traditional institutions. I think these ideas had to have been born in the very media the theory analyzes. In many ways, the theory flies in the face of all the accepted theories in education (behavioralism, cognitivism, and the many shades of constructivism) and probably would not have gained traction. I have seen papers get rejected from journals because there are not enough researchers publishing about idea X in refereed journals. We have to expect that. Universities rarely innovate - that is left to the lonely patent clerks of the world. Universities are where ideas go to fossilize and become the established order. Connectivism needed the internet, blogs, and Twitter to take shape.

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Open Ed 13: George Siemens

"George Siemens is a Professor at the Center for Distance Education and a researcher and strategist with the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. He is the author of the Connectivism theory of learning and co-creator of the first MOOC in 2008."

MOOCs: How did we get here?

A different view than Andrew Ng's corporate model.

A bit of history
George began blogging and following Todd, Downes, etc. He was able to talk with innovative people outside of the institution. Most systems think that content is the start of the learning and his idea was that content was the by-product. We don't need content, we need good questions and community. Open learning was learning not owned by a system but created by people.

He described Wiley's Wiki Design - everything in a course is run in the open. He talked about the history of open learning through Connectivism and Connective Knowledge through Jim Groom's DS 106.

An alternative to institutional controlled tech, monolothic self/contained/ locked-in platforms, transmission pedagogies.

Knowledge is iterative and communal. So many people are involved in th production of knowledge that is hard to call it "owned."

He brought up the MOOC map and showed how MOOCs have "vomited" over the world. It is no longer an academic practice but a corporate enterprise.

MOOCs are not really new - distributed learning has a long history. People have been thinking about this for a long time. It is a mistake to disregard that history

Why MOOCs now?
It is a supply-side answer to decasdes fo change in demand-side learning.
Student profiles are changing - older students, more females, China and India are changing the profiles.

What is happening in MOOC research?
http://www.moocresearch.com
There are a lot hyped statements like "there will only be 10 universities in the future." Universities will increase in number because the students will be doubling in the next ten years. With the Gates Foundation grants - where were the researchers coming from? Most of the research is coming from th Education field and not just Computer Science.

Problems with MOOCs
MOOCs do not prepare a student to create, generate, solve and innovate. We need stuff that stirs the soul. They need to respond to society.

Openness is being lost in the conversation. The hype is driving the trends. Coursera does not care about openness.

What happened with MIT wanting to provide all course materials are open and now they are with EdX who wants to copyright everything.

Lack of innovation.

Dropout rates are totally irrelevant. We are missing out on an opportunity for real research.

MOOC providers are disconnected from the research in education.
They need to look at social and generative education models - they exclude them because their technology does not do that well.

We are norming from Coursera and edX and they are concerned with revenue models.

We need to refocus on creativity and knowledge generation. MOOCs are just part of the landscape of the current state of education.

A MOOC is a web, not a website. It is a network.

A Domain of One's Own - reclaim the web. gather t artifacts of your digital identy in a central place that you won and control.

Don't just hate MOOCs, but look for another

Friday, September 13, 2013

MOOCs and Student Support

Internet Penetration (% Population). Red
indicates no statistics available. (Wikipedia)

I read an article this week that I found via Stephen Downe's blog that is from the eLearning Africa News Portal called "The Underlying Inequality of MOOCs" by Alicia Mitchell. The main issue that Mitchell has with MOOCs is an old argument against all online education: the "digital divide." Unlike the education writers of the 1990s, she looks at the issues of poverty and connectivity and says that we have to be mindful that not everyone has access or the same means and skills that those of us in more privileged parts of the world may have. I do not argue that there is not a digital divide, I just don't think stopping online learning is a great solution to that problem. She does not make the leap that many have in the past with a "therefore," online learning is not viable or should be curtailed etc. I actually agree with her and my "therefore" is that, broadly, we need to continue to work for economic justice and universal education. Africa is a hot bed of online learning, open education resources, and innovation specifically because of the problems discussed in her article. And my more focused "therefore" is say this is exactly why we need a MOOC to help students "learn how to learn." That is what we were getting at when we created "DE 101" - an free, two-week, fully online orientation to online learning. That was in a "traditional" online course format. The one I am working on here at Humboldt State University will be a MOOC called "eLearning 101."

In another look back to the 90s, I am really concerned about so-called "MOOCs" that are massive, not particularly open, online courses that are based on a one-way distribution of information and then tests. This is a huge step backwards. Especially when there are such better models out there such as Stephen Downe's and George Siemens' Connnectivism and Connective Knowledge MOOC or Jim Groom's project-based DS 106. There are all of these great models out there (often called "cMOOCs") but the ones that get all the attention are the ones supported by the Ivy Leagues and a lot of grant money. The entire MOOC phenomena is being judged by players like Sebastian Thrun who just figured out that online students need student advisors, mentoring, and tutors. These are things that many people have been writing about and more importantly doing for years now. In the article "Udacity CEO Says 'Magic Formula' is Emerging," David Carr reports:

Thrun's magic formula is not a fully automated online class featuring prerecorded videos and Web-based assessments. In other words, it's not a MOOC at all. To get better results, he said, "We changed the equation and put people on the ground." By adding mentors and a help line, and making phone calls to remind students to do their work, Udacity found it could get more students to do the work, finish the course and pass. Longer term, he has some ideas about using adaptive learning software to eliminate some of this labor, but for now it takes manpower.

The press, publications like the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Information Week are now defining MOOCs by such phrases as "a fully automated online class featuring prerecorded videos and Web-based assessments." This is not innovation, at least, not innovation in education. It may be an innovation in platform building, fund raising, or grant writing, but it is not an innovation in education. Real online courses and truly massive, open, online courses are engaging, interactive, and focus on building learning communities and networks. There is a rich body of literature and research that discusses the importance of student advising and support. If it has taken this long for Udacity to figure out what we all learned about online education in the 90s, I don't think I will live long enough to see them figure out the importance of learning communities and PLNs.

But it is not enough just to be against something. I am going to keep using the term MOOC even though the term is missapplied by the press and highly funded institutions and businesses. We need to keep building instances of MOOCs that counter the prevailing notions. I will be posting updates here as I continue to work on the eLearning 101 MOOC.

Thursday, August 08, 2013

Are You Ready for Online Learning?

Educators will often discuss the barriers to online education without considering what a student would need to do to overcome those barriers. The typical answer to "are you ready for online education?" is "online education isn't for everyone." As someone who has taught English at all levels, face-to-face and online, I could not disagree with this more.

If you are new to online learning, you might be wondering what skills you will need to be successful in your online classes. Students are often surprised at the fact that they already have some of the main skills it takes to be successful as an online student. Many of the skills that you need to take online classes you can learn as you take the classes; there are, however, some differences. The seven factors below are some of the considerations you may want to keep in mind as you take online classes.

1. Time Management
Time management is very important in online courses; be sure to download the course calendar and keep it near your computer. Keep "to-do" lists and take advantage of any calendar and alarm functions on your phone or computer. You can use online calendars like Google Calendar. Take some time to develop a system. Students tend to take online classes because they want to take advantage of the flexibility it gives their schedule.

2. Academic Rigor
Often, students new to online classes expect them to be easier than face-to-face classes. Classes online are just as academically rigorous as face-to-face. Online classes require the same amount of effort as traditional courses, sometimes more; the convenience is that you can select (to an extent) when you show up in the course environment. They may require a little more for some students as they learn the technology. Online courses can rely heavily on reading assignments, written lecture, and written communication in groups. If you learn best by reading, then you have an advantage in an online environment.

3. Communication Skills
Online classes are primarily text-based environments. Communicating online lacks the visual cues we are all used to in conversations; be specific when you ask questions and don't assume that someone else can tell when you are joking. Remember to take a few moments to check spelling and grammar, as this it will affect the impression you create with your peers and instructor.

4. Technology Skills
You do not have to be an expert in technology to be successful in an online class. You should be comfortable navigating the internet, using email, and attaching documents to email. Technology skills are not a barrier to your success: just as you learned how to be a face-to-face student, you can learn to be an online student. Be sure to check out the minimum technology requirements recommended by your school's distance education department. As you take online classes you will become more comfortable with online technology. You can't "break" anything in your online class. Go ahead and click all the buttons and get use to the environment. Take the time to find out what kind of tech support is available to you and keep that information handy.

5. Networking Skills
Online learning is a social environment. Participate in your class. Online learning is about connections you will make with your instructor, your fellow students and the course content. Take some time to read about your instructor in the faculty area, and be sure to ask for a face-to-face or virtual office hour if you feel you aren't getting the information you need in the online environment. Be sure to give some extra effort to all the group activities, discussion forums, or social lounges offered in the course. The real learning in your online courses comes in the connections you make with your instructor, fellow students and the content of the class. Use social media like Twitter and Facebook to help other students create learning networks - study groups and connections that will follow you throughout your academic and professional career.

6. Critical Thinking Skills
The same kind of critical thinking skills that are required in paper-based research is required online. You will need to remember that not all sources on the internet are equal as far as academic credibility is concerned. The same citation questions for paper-based research apply online: what are the author's credentials? What is the author's purpose in writing? Is the author an expert in his or her field? Remember that as an online student, you have access to a librarian for guidance by phone or email. Consult your college webpage for the reference librarian's contact information. Your college may even have a librarian that specializes in online learning or internet research.

7. Motivation
The habits that you developed to be a successful face-to-face student are also required in online learning. Online learning requires a little more discipline. Online classes are generally not to self-paced classes and participation can be a major factor in your success as an online student. Typically, as an online student, you will need to check in with your class at least three times a week and take time to do your assignments completely and thoughtfully. Ask questions if you do not understand an assignment. Go into the discussion forums and see if there are students forming study groups (or form one yourself). Set course and personal goals in your calendar and don’t forget to reward yourself or celebrate your accomplishments. Remind yourself why you are taking classes online and keep fixed on your goals.

By keeping in mind these seven factors, any student can successfully take online courses.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Four Steps to Getting MOOCs Right

"Lehrer-Student" von Reinhard Schmidt
in Rostock (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I love alarming education headlines - five MOOC classes are put on hold and the San Francisco Chronicle says "San Jose suspends online courses." Which it didn't - it suspended five MOOC courses because of a high student failure rate. San Jose's online college is still going forward. And they are right to suspend the classes. I just wish more work went into how those courses were put together (if only for the sake of the students). These classes are not so far out on the cutting edge that one couldn't predict that there would be problems. The MOOCs at San Jose are nothing new - even the failure rate is nothing new. All of the research into how to make online classes successful, including MOOCs is already in place. Educators have been researching successful online programs since the 90s. There are very clear reasons why the best online programs succeed. My own work in community colleges in closing the student success and retention rates between online and face-to-face classes dealt with similar issues. What we learned about online classes, big and small, was that they will not succeed for any population, at-risk or otherwise without these four things in place:

Interactivity and Engagement - There is a direct correlation in the research between online interactivity and student success rates. Interactivity means "meaningful, purposeful, engagement" not just clicking on the play button. Interactivity means teacher-student, student-student, and student-content. And yes, there are ways to do this successfully in a MOOC (step 1, hire an instructional designer!). There needs to be more emphasis in MOOCs on collaborative projects and less"watch a video, take a test." This distinction is easily made when you look at connectivist cMOOCs versus xMOOCs.
Student Support - If your face-to-face students can't be successful without tutors, academic advisors, a help desk, and librarians, why would you expect your online students to be successful without them? There are tutoring services on your campus and great peer-to-peer tutoring resources online such as OpenStudy.
Student Orientation - Students have spent 12 years learning how to be a face-to-face student and 0 years learning how to be an online student. This is an easy fix. We did it in the community colleges with courses like "DE 101." Things that make students successful in online classes include time management, study skills, motivation, and other metacognitive skills that can be taught. Online learning is not just about technology.
Faculty Training - The same magic that makes someone a teacher instantly when they get their master's degree does not work online. Just as students need to learn the skills to be an online student, teachers need to learn the skills to facilitate online teaching. Recording your lecture and posting it online will not work. There are a lot of resources, classes, and research online on this subject.

So interestingly enough, there are no real differences in how classes online or off are successful! I have been in online classes, including MOOCs that had all of this in place: the assignments were designed to be collaborative and engaging, there were links to student support, there was sufficient information to tell students how to take the class, and the instructors were skilled online facilitators, curators, and guides. A college does not have to ignore 20 years of research into online learning to be innovative.

Friday, June 14, 2013

MOOCs: Disruption is the Mother of Invention

Stephen Downes

There is an article in the Boston Review by Thomas Leddy called "Are MOOCs Good for Students?" In this article Leddy claims that

"MOOCs pose a great threat to the most important value of higher education: 'literacy.' By 'literacy' I mean, very broadly, the ability to read, think about, and intelligently respond (both orally and in writing) to the literature of any field of study. Thus, implementation of MOOCs for university credit is bad because it is bad for our students."

Leddy says this because he seems to be familiar with only one kind of MOOC - those of the MIT and Stanford model. Not all MOOCs are alike, yet despite the fact that he has had the traditional education that would allow him to read, think about, and intelligently respond to any field of study, that does not seem to extend to education itself. I am not sure what publications like the Boston Review or the Chronicle of Higher Ed is up to, but the majority of articles about MOOCs in such publications are typically written by those who have never taught online, taught a MOOC, or even taken a MOOC. They are written by people who have not even reviewed the history or literature (however scant) on MOOCs.

I hate to tell Leddy this, but literacies are changing. I do a lot of writing, but my work depends more on my ability to collaborate with others and the creation of intelligent networks than my ability to write a ten page paper.

Leddy is very concerned with the massive (not "massively" by the way) courses that use multiple choice tests and paints all MOOCs with the same brush. I have taken three MOOCs and in not one did I take a multiple choice test. The MOOCs were assessed with what I would consider portfolio assessment. I could not have finished any of the MOOCs without reading, thinking, and intelligently responding to my peers.

George Siemens

MOOCs didn;t just come out of nowhere to just to knock traditional teachers out of their chairs; they came from very thoughtful teachers who said "what if we did for teaching what open education resources was doing for content?" There were problems that needed to be addressed in education that traditional educators have no interest or stake in solving. MOOCs (massive open online courses) are not the disruption. The disruption came when the traditional schools decided that money was more important than access. The disruption happened when educators decided that they were fine with keeping education as an exclusive privilege of the few. The real disruption was the fact that the cost of education rose faster than the cost of living and the cost of healthcare combined.

We need to keep making the distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs - cMOOCs "Connectivist MOOCs" are actually community-driven models where the students create knowledge and learning together. This knowledge creation can be facilitated but it is not dependent on a "teacher." The teacher becomes the facilitator and curator of the learning experience. In a cMOOC the connections students make with one another are just as important, if not more important, than any other kind of interaction in the course.

xMOOCs are getting all of the press because their model more closely fits, for good or ill, the model of education most familiar for traditional academics: sage on the stage, education as information transmission, knowledge as consumable, students as commodity, etc. xMOOCs are not true MOOCs: they often massive online but they are seldom "open" and depending on what you call a "course" they may not be that either. A true MOOC should be free. There is still a lot of hand wringing about money and tuition in some of these models that falls under the "sustainability" issue. I would even question if some of these are actually "courses" in the sense that we mean them in the world of online education. As a Director of Academic Technology, I would not sign off on a course that had no student-student or teacher-student engagement. I would call it a correspondence course, a learning experience, but not a true online learning experience. In contrast, cMOOCs depend on the interaction of the students for their success.

MOOCs are going through the difficult stages of innovation that open education resources and open textbooks have and are still going through. Free, openly licensed (non commercial) textbooks are a great idea - monetizing that is a horrible, counter-intuitive, counter-productive idea. "Lower cost" is not the same as free. Open for business is not what the "open" in OER, open textbooks, of MOOC is supposed to mean.

MOOCs can work. There are ways to design MOOCs to maximize student interactivity and engagement. In the related articles below, I have included some postings I wrote on MOOCs and instructional design and give some of my history with successful MOOCs. MOOCs are not going away and just like any other learning platform (including face-to-face) there are good and bad ways to use it. We need to research MOOCs thoroughly with an open mind to discover why the successful ones are successful and address potential problems.

I would encourage Leddy and anyone else who is interested in MOOCs to explore the work of David Wiley, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, David Cormier, and Jim Groom before coming to any conclusions. You might just learn something.

Essential Skills for Online Students

(Photo credit: London College of Fashion short courses)

I am writing up a page for our students here at Humboldt State University on the study skills needed to be a successful online student. The same skills needed for success in face-to-face courses are needed in online courses, but my research shows that the following are particularly important for online learners:

Motivation and Self-Discipline - There is often no set schedule - you must make real commitment to your assignments and deadlines. Remind yourself often why you are in school and what you want to accomplish.
Time Management - Use the calendar in gmail or any task list that will notify you like "Remember the Milk." Print out the course schedule and enter the dates into an online calendar.
Effective and Appropriate Communication - Even though you are online, your classes are an academic environment; communicate accordingly.
Engagement - Be an active learner. You have to take responsibility for your education. Ask questions. Ask questions in the forums where other students will benefit from the answers, and don't be afraid to answer questions either.
Collaboration - Forming online study groups and participating in discussions online can make all the difference in an online course. The connections you make are as important as what you learn.

I am basing a lot of this on my previous research working in community colleges with our DE 101 class - an introduction to online learning. I am also very interested in the Connectivist perspective here: we need to include more in our student prep courses on networking which is important for students to connect to content, their peers and instructors. Being able to build smart networks is at least as important as the subject matter because the networks will allow students to continue their learning long after the class is over.

I am unsatisfied with our "tech skills" list too. Lots of emphasis on software and not enough on what you would use it for. We need to teach students how to be effective in MOOCs, mlearning and other platforms and educational environments - not just the online learning model of the 90s.

What would you add to this list? What habits make your students successful? Add them to the comments or email me and I will include them in the list.