Tag: collaboration

Signals of Success and the EMOOCs Summit #emoocs2014

Published by crumphelen on February 15, 2014

Earlier this week, I was in Switzerland at the EMOOCs Summit. I was there, along with Paige Cuffe, to present a collaborative paper entitled ‘Signals of Success and Self-directed Learning’. It seemed a little weird at first, considering that this time last year I had barely cut my MOOC teeth (who had?), and I’d certainly never presented at such a conference before or had a paper published (collaborative or otherwise), so testimony to the power and possibilities that MOOCs and open education can afford and, more importantly for this story, testimony to the power of connection for collaboration and ongoing learning that’s now possible in this new era of learning.

Reflecting individually, collectively and openly — Paige Cuffe, Iwona Gniadek, Briar Jamieson, Penny Bentley, Helen Crump and Sheila MacNeill –
“How do learners define success in a MOOC?”

So what’s the story? As you might know, this time last year I participated in OLDSMOOC and you might be forgiven for thinking that once a MOOC has finished that is it that, the learning is over, but not so because via the OLDSMOOC hashtag and other various social networking activities, connections made in the MOOC continued; the true awesomeness of which was realized when, six months after the MOOC, a group of us responded to a tweet from one of the OLDSMOOC design team wondering if anyone was thinking of submitting a paper to the EMOOCs conference. Hey presto, what do you know; spontaneously and enthusiastically out from the internet emerged six individuals to reflect on their learning and to deliberate what success in a MOOC meant to them. You can read the full paper in the conference proceedings here (p.18) and get more of an insight into our back story in the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBMmkCBf9tg

The premise of our paper is interesting in that it tries to go beyond institutional evaluations and measures of success to offer an alternative perspective to the pervasive discourse about completion rates and dropouts in MOOCs. Hence, in the conference session entitled ‘Dropouts in MOOCs’, I was heartened by the findings presented by Tharindu Rekha Liyanagunawardena that shows that “MOOC participants are challenging the widely held view of dropout, suggesting that it is more about failing to achieve their personal aims”. Yay!!

On the other hand though, I was a little dis-heartened because although there was a session devoted to connectivist style MOOCs at the conference, cMOOCs seemed to be something of a Cinderella topic. Don’t misunderstand me, there were some excellent presentations given pertaining to cMOOCs (Christine Sinclair, p.245 and Jutta Pauschenwien, p.277) but the overarching concerns of the conference seemed to be xMOOC oriented with concerns about platform provision, production quality and costs and the optimum way forward for higher education dominating.

Not that the conference was all about higher education, indeed one of the four tracks was dedicated to business. I’m glad I opted to go to the panel discussion in this track, ‘MOOCs as a training instruments for employees and partners’, because it really was excellent.

The panelists:

Donald Clark, Plan-B Learning, UK
Ralph Wieser, SWISSCOM, Switzerland
Gregor Erkel, Deutsche Telekom, Germany
Marcelo Di Pietro Peralta, WIPO, Switzerland
Yannis Angelis, Fresenius Kabi, Germany
Carl Dawson, Proversity.org, UK

Certain of their application and with a can-do beta attitude, the panelists were very convincing in aligning MOOCs with vocational skills, competency, CPD and lifelong learning for a corporate market, which was in stark contrast to the presentation entitled ‘MOOCs: an alternative perspective’ given by Debra Humphris of Imperial College, London who didn’t really seem to say what purpose MOOCs might serve and whose institutional policy was to go away and formulate a strategy.

It’s widely agreed that MOOCs are a phenomenon of transition, pointing the way to some future landscape of learning. Right now though, the term seems to signal different things to different people with discussion easily conflating learning contexts, learning cohorts and pedagogies for learning.

In the policy track session, ‘Bringing new challenges to Higher Education’, that I attended on the last day, Gerhard Fischer, Center for Lifelong Learning, University of Colorado noted that many reflections on MOOCs seem to be based on economic and technical perspectives rather than on perspectives of learning science. He suggested that in the main MOOCs are currently geared towards ‘learning about’ and to topics for which there is a known answer, as opposed to ‘learning to be’ and when the answer is not yet known.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience of attending the conference and learning something of the flavor and the fervor of MOOC development and debate, but I think what I was struck by the most was that despite the general nod towards social learning there is a real lack of awareness or understanding for learning in networks and distributed learning environments. Attending the conference as just such a learner (or researcher) made me wonder if I belong to a secret sect because so many people seemed oblivious to these developments.

Image source: Davinia Hernández-Leo. https://twitter.com/daviniahl/status/432906051277836288

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2013, a year on the global learning commons.

Published by crumphelen on December 27, 2013

Do you have books just lying around on your Kindle, clicked and downloaded back in the mists of time because they seemed to have something important to say then forgotten, or simply left upstream as the river of information kept on flowing passed? I thought you might, so have I (quite a few actually). Well, an airport lounge always affords the opportunity to paddle back and take a look; this is how, as I embarked on my Christmas travels, I came to read “Open: how we’ll work, live and learn in the future” by David Price and subsequently came to put this blog post together as a kind of end of year review.

Although the New York Times might have labeled 2012 the “year of the MOOC”, for me it was most definitely 2013, just take a look at my blog posts. I think I participated in 8 or 10 altogether, at least half of which I either completed or participated in to a large extent. However, I don’t think I’d like to remember the year as just being synonymous with MOOCs. After all, I was active in many online communities as well as kept busy attending to my personal learning network, so I’d rather like to think of 2013 as the year that I discovered the “global learning commons”. But what do I mean? According to the author of the aforementioned book, the global learning commons is something that

encompasses the ‘ecology’ of learning: the relationships we have with each other; the creation of an hospitable habitat for learning; how we cultivate the evolution of learning in communal, social environments, [and] transfer it successfully to others.

I like this idea because it gets away from what’s become almost ceaseless noise about MOOCs and their platforms/sponsors to put the spotlight firmly on learning (three cheers!!). That is, learning across a variety of environments in which open is a fundamental feature, learning that’s personally driven by passion and/or purpose and open in the sense of not just open access but in the sense of open values and actions too. In truth though, this notion is quite contentious because openness signifies the battle being fought for the control of knowledge (hence, the reference to the commons with its historical connotations and its antithesis, the enclosure); the idea also signifies a switch in thinking from teaching to learning, or pedagogy to heutagogy, which is equally contentious.

Medieval_Open_Field_System — Medieval Open Field and Common Land System

Shaping how we interact online in the global learning commons, where collaborative participation abounds, are four inter-connected and consequential values making up the acronym SOFT: share, open, free and trust. Sharing appeals to people’s sense of altruism; they freely share with no sense of return other than maybe a little recognition, which in turn encourages reciprocity and requires that we’re open. Free can mean many things, but the notions that sit best with me here are “free to roam”, wherever your passion/purpose takes you, and “free to fail”. Trust is best thought of as “in ourselves we trust”, which gets us away from the plethora of institutions that we’ve recently lost trust in and away from the “command and control” mindset of the industrial era.

It’s these values and actions that are thought set to become increasingly important because they allow knowledge to flow freely and quickly, facilitate collaboration and in turn promote innovation. Looking back over my own participation for the year, I can certainly vouch that these values, actions and outcomes are to the fore in the informal social learning environments that I’ve been engaged in. And what’s more, it’s the learner that’s calling the shots. However, this shift is largely being experienced not in education or the workplace but in individuals’ social space. It’s true. Using my experience “in the new learning landscape” and telling of my learning journey “beyond the walled garden“, I’ve presented at a couple of education conferences this year and both presentations clearly illustrate this. In addition, I’ve recently collaborated, as part of a small international group, on a paper that’s been accepted for the European MOOC Summit in Switzerland in February, which again is proof of new and innovative things that can happen in open environments, or the global learning commons. I’ll blog about this at a later date, maybe after the conference, because it’s been an interesting learning experience, one that none of the group had prior experience of or that none of us could’ve have been prepared for, not in the management/logistics of the endeavor nor in its potential for cooperative learning.

So now, with all this in mind, it kind of begs the question of me, “so now you know (about the global learning commons, or learning in open online environments), what are you going to do about it?” This is the “transfer it successfully to others” bit that was mentioned in the quote above. Good question. Because like I said earlier, this is happening in the informal social space; I’m not a big shot in higher education (just a limpet on the underside), I’ve not had anything to do with learning in the workplace for over a decade and in the day job I teach adults that education didn’t do right by the first time and that “accidents of geography” now similarly place on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Looks like that’s the challenge for 2014. I’ll keep you posted.

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_England_in_the_Middle_Ages

References: Price, David (2013). OPEN: How we’ll work, live and learn in the future. Crux Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A review, or two, giving the heads up for social learning designs #oldsmooc

Published by crumphelen on March 10, 2013

Well, #OLDSMOOC draws to a close this week with time being given over to look back and learn something of participants’ learning narratives or design narratives and to review the course itself. Over all, for me, the course has been a great success, but that’s not to say it’s not been without its trials and tribulations, most of which seem to stem from the constraints of the Cloudworks platform, used by the course as a central hub and repository for content, and the challenge of designing for collaboration and the successful establishment of social contacts on which this collaboration might be built. So, in order to throw some light on these aspects, I’m going to use this plenary session to look back and review the “social” design of the course and take a closer look at Sheila MacNeill’s prototype, which addresses the problem of visualizing networks and content within Cloudworks.

In week 5, the concept of prototyping for teaching and learning was explained as being part of the iterative process within “design science”, that is “the need to build on what others have done and learned, to experiment and test, and then use this to improve the design” (Laurillard, 2012). Well, that’s certainly what Sheila did.

Seeking a better way “to make Cloudworks more friendly and show how some of the social data there could be used to give users a different view of what they’re doing, and maybe help them to make more connections and maybe use Cloudworks a bit more”, Sheila used Balsamiq to prototype her envisaged Cloudworks make over.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/59403361 w=500&h=299]

I think Sheila has done a terrific job here. The prototype, and her demonstration, clearly shows the advantages of making these modifications. It shows how the platform might be used to provide alternative views highlighting the relationships amongst networks and amongst content. Used in this way, like Sheila, I can really see how Cloudworks has the potential to be used more widely, not just as a content repository, but as an individual’s portfolio/personal working space across a range of learning events, and so support their lifelong learning. Clearly, like Richard Site says in his article, “working with prototypes can point out deficiencies and reveal unseen opportunities”. Sheila’s design modification, and rationale for doing so, has been warmly received. Indeed, one of the original Cloudworks developers has responded positively in the discussion forum, adding “what would be most useful for me is to know the exact navigation issues that folk are having difficulty with: what exactly are you having problems finding and how are you trying to look for it at the moment?”

It’s here that comments from learners, or end users, can be illuminating. Kelly Edmonds says, “I don’t find Cloudworks intuitive and it has hindered my ability to jump into the social aspect of this MOOC”, and Paige Cuffe‘s response also seems particularly illuminating when she says, “I really like your idea of organising around people to whom you are connected through interaction – it would greatly facilitate conversation within this environment rather than driving discussions out of Cloudworks into a plethora of spaces (twitter, FB, google closed groups…)”.

So what participants are having problems with, apart from visualisation of the platform, is finding how to develop conversations within Cloudworks and nurture relationships in order to help facilitate meaningful collaboration.

By switching perspective, it appears much as Diana Laurillard says, “the closer ~~teachers~~ learners are to the specification of digital learning designs, the more these programs are likely to achieve useful learning goals. The detail of the design must not be left to programmers!”

It seems to me that the same sentiment might well be applied to course designers as well. I wonder whose opinions the OLDSMOOC designers solicited. Who did they envisage would be their MOOC participants and what learning proclivities did they envisage them having? I wonder if they used the Ecology of Resources (EoR) Design Framework in the inquiry stage because, if I understand this correctly, the EoR framework seeks to include the views of course participants into the process.

I know the course designers did survey participants upon registration, but I wonder if instead of just paying attention to the course materials, individual learning goals and to the course website and tools, if sufficient acknowledgement was given to the “social” dimension pertinent to MOOCs and to the extent to which participants were willing and able to engage in social and networked participation in order to support their learning. I’ve looked over some templates provided within the course, but I can’t detect anything noteworthy that relates to this aspect.

To be fair, attempts were made within the course design to encourage collaboration, but this proved to be too much of a challenge in the short space of time available. Particularly as the course bizarrely advocated that participants assemble themselves not just into a collaborative project group but also into a study group as well. This is puzzling, indeed possibly plain wrong, and I can’t figure out the reason behind it. It seems to me that one encourages learning by doing whilst the other encourages learning about, and adds up to a lot of effort. Mysterious.

Despite all that, it seems that the design challenge for such courses in the future is how to “jump start” conversations so that people can make connections, build trust and go on to develop working relationships. My own learning narrative demonstrates that finding commonalities with other participants is vitally important. Additionally, Penny Bentley showed how by disclosing small snippets of personal information you can reach out and invite contact. During the first OLDSMOOC convergence session she provided a link on Twitter to pictures of her recent camping trip, such a simple act that helped spawn the development of a supportive learning network. What’s more, looking to strengthen the “social glue” within the MOOC, Penny went on to initiate the OLDSMOOC Facebook group. To me, the social underpinning of a course such as this appears to be just as important as its content, structure and facilitation.

Talking of which brings me back to the course itself. Over all, the course was very good. The content provided was both expansive and of a very high standard, and facilitation of the course was excellent too. It’s amazing that a “rookie” like me was provided with access to so many experts in the field of learning design. The course was highly structured, possibly over structured, but I’m not sure if that was a bad thing for me. I didn’t know anything about learning design before I started the course, so I probably benefited from being “micro-managed” within such a tight structure, even if the timings for some activities seemed highly fanciful at the beginning. However, I definitely found the project based premise of the course to be very useful, and I’m coming to think that with all this talk of MOOCs and their ideological prefixes – whether it’s a cMOOC or an xMOOC – that the real gem might just be the pMOOC. After all, if done well, participants have the opportunity to come away with not only tangible skills and competencies but also an enhanced personal learning network too.

Finally, I’d like to add that incorporating a badge strategy into the MOOC has proved interesting. Some participants have reported that they’ve found it strangely motivating, whilst others have found it a source of irritation as it seems to introduce an element of competition. I don’t know what to make of the effect it’s had on my participation. I know that in week 7 I was tired, and because I didn’t need to participate for it to count towards a badge, I largely ducked out, and I know, like you might already have suspected, that this “review” is a blatant attempt to bag another badge.

Anyway, to end, I’d like to thank not only the OLDSMOOC design team but also all the facilitators on the course as well. It can’t have been easy designing for what’s pretty much unknown territory, but your efforts are sincerely appreciated. I’ve lots to take away with me, not just in terms of learning design but also in terms of new buddies for future laughs and learning.

Thanks OLDSMOOC 🙂

References:

Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science. Routledge. New York

Site, R. (2013) Prototypes Are Essential to e-Learning Design. Available at: http://info.alleninteractions.com/bid/94339/Prototypes-Are-Essential-to-e-Learning-Design

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Sites 2013 http://info.alleninteractions.com/bid/94339/Prototypes-Are-Essential-to-e-Learning-Design