Activity 8 Enhancement Strategies

Having reached week 10, I am stepping back and finishing what I started in week 8.... I always dreamt of being able to travel through time....

This week's focus is on enhancement strategies.

I will focus on this broadly as my current 'teaching' is limited to short skill workshops with small numbers of staff on campus and doesn't quite fit with the MOOC and Open Education model.

I really applaud the open education movement, but still wonder how it would be sustained as a global provision as a substitute to education through existing educators and educational establishments. How would the quality and credibility be affected if there were not the professors within higher/tertiary education, as used by Saylor.org, available to create these resources and provide peer review.

I love their tag line HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE EDUCATION FREE

Will the open education world develop its own 'professors' and critical peers through Badges and online reputation alone? or will universities still be required to do this? and at what cost and whose expense?


I really like the structured approach of saylor.org in their course delivery and that of the xMOOC (still getting my head around the cMOOC configuration).

As they are similarly structured to a 'traditional' higher education experience they may be more easily digested by academics seeking open content and students seeking to build their own learning experience.

Initial bullets: applicable aspects and challenges...

• Motivation, we usually have a clear motivation for studying. The where and how are big factors in this. Choosing to study in an Open Education/ MOOC model may not suit all our learners. So I do hope we don't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
• Video delivery, I started doing this years ago (I don't record many of my own but enjoy the OERs of others. Academics where I work have been using slides, videotapes and DVDs for many years and are now moving to the digital version and are catching on to the rich resources on the internet and local creations which we stream. 
• Digital media creation, this is something we are starting to do more of now. We slowly winning over academic staff to the idea that a video capture can be of value to the student in many ways. We just have to shake of the myth that face2face delivery is the only way. The biggest challenges have been cost for the equipment, servers, cameras etc, skill and time of the academic staff to create 'high quality' reusable digital media rather than live capture for one distribution.
• Flipped teaching, I started doing this years ago but didn't know that was what it was called! Local interest is slowly growing. We have a few champions, who are an inspiration to others. 
• Free access to books through digital devices. Fantastic and I already encourage this, I read lots of e and audio books through my smart phone (from my local lending library). Our limitation would be the licence provided by the publishing houses and student access to copyright content not published under CC BY. 
• CC BY is great to show permission for content sharing and reuse. 
• Peer reviewed resources add credibility and confidence to the courses.
• Use of Professor consultants to develop course content (!adds speciality and credibility!) but as indicated earlier, at whose expense? 
• Certificate of completion. Will this suffice in the professional workplace? Will it be possible for vocational professionals to become qualified entirely through Open Education? Is this the goal or are these the exceptions?

xMOOC

The final message in the video is that the MOOC is for those who are not the 'best of the best', those who are unlikely to get into the 'top universities'.

So it could/ probably is a great opportunity for students who unlikely or unable to get into the elite universities. But we should not sell them short. Traditionally students are paying many thousands $ £ for their 'university education', there is kudos in the experience, the student makes friends and builds networks with others which can be an asset to their work and career. All of which can be replicated, to some degree, in the virtual world.

Personally I believe the big challenge is its massivity and open aspect of the MOOC. As a student I want and need to have flexibility to study in my preferred way, this includes place and time, and I want and need to feel part of the cohort. When there are many thousands of learners and possibly only one member of the 'teaching' team I anticipate this would be a challenge.

I think the challenge here is for the Higher Education and employment community to value learning and skill development through non-traditional routes.
I believe we are still in an environment where employers of those in 'professional' roles require tangible validated evidence of learning. The certificate, degree, statement of professional competence. Will the Badge take over?

Activity 5.2 and 5.3

Activity 5.2: Practicals

• What is your current virtual learning environment or the main technology you use? 
• Blackboard Learn 9.1.9 moving soon to SP11.
• How does it differ from the ocTEL platform? 
• It is a closed environment where the institution validates membership and access. The Course team decide on the look and feel of the course instance and use tools to create content. Students and staff are constrained by the LMS/VLE. In ocTEL there is more openness, the forum can be read by anyone without log in, blog pages are also public. This may be a concern for those students who are still feeling their way around the subject and may not want their learning experience broadcast publicly. 
• Our LMS/VLE environment is not available to the student after they leave the institution :-( Students creating a personal portfolio of their digital learning would need to export course resources and contributions from course into another environment to save for posterity. I am also doing this for ocTEL so I have my own personal archive. 
• What learning styles does it afford that ocTEL cannot? Where is it restrictive? 
• Blackboard provides style sets for various teaching styles These can be used to structure the course to focus on different learning styles. The challenge however, is when schools create standard templates to provide a common visual presence for their students then the teaching style templates get forgotten so everyone is presented with the same top level options. 
• The tool settings are restrictive. The limitation is that the content and interactions are within Blackboard and, anecdotally, some students find the steps for logging in to the environment and navigating to the activity too tedious to bother! The desired route would be a unique url for the tool activity with direct login so you can just click and post. 
• The visual presentation is restrictive, our design and artistically driven staff find the visual layout uninspiring and constraining. 
• Is it ‘open’ in the sense that you can develop or configure tools that fit your pedagogy (e.g. the learning styles above), or does it command a certain pedagogy? 
• It is not fully 'open' you are constrained by the tools within the environment and limited to their configuration. However, anecdotally, that is probably a blessing for some as they still just about manage the basics. Too many options and people start getting lost in the set up. 
• The limitation is that the content and interactions are within Blackboard and, anecdotally, some students find the steps for logging in to the environment and navigating to the activity too tedious to bother! The desired route would be a unique url for the tool activity with direct login so you can just click and post. 
• To increase functionality and provide 
• What are the wider implications of enforced platforms and technologies for higher education? 
• I struggle with the term enforced, my assumption is that technologies have been piloted and selected by institutions as being the best thing at the price they can afford at the time. They seek something which they can handle, maintain and have a support and archive package. It takes a brave HE institution to say we do not provide a technology environment to support your learning you can use what you, like when you like, how you like, and fix it yourself when it goes wonky. And for the academics choose what you like to create and deliver your content, we will not provide any platforms or technologies. 
• I think the challenge is the middle ground, better response from the product vendors, more customisation/personalisation/flexibility in the tools. Greater institutional support for students who want to build their own personalised learning environment which is joined seamlessly with anything the institution provides. Free access to a portfolio for alumni. 
• How can your learning platform promote inclusion? 
• The learning platform is the tool, it is what the academic does with it which counts. 
• Accessibility needs to ensure the resources./ tools can be used by all students regardless of ability or technical skill. It needs to be accessible across all platforms and devices so students can engage with their own devices (if they have them). 
• Resource needs to be made for students to access and engage where they do not have their own personal device. 
• Activities need to be designed to bring students together, discussion, reflections, group work, in a respectful and valuing way. 
• Most importantly the student must feel safe and a valued member of the class when using the learning platform. It is an extension of the real classroom, it is ok to ask questions and challenge each other and the academic must nurture and support this interaction to 'include' all the students equally. 

How I use Google apps - link to document here (Timestamp 14/06/2013 01:15:31)

My thoughts on synchronous delivery - view my forum enty here

Activity 5.3: What does Open Source mean to you?

For me OpenSource means, the creator has given the user (co-creatoe) free rein to adapt, modify, enhance their code. I have been a long time visitor to SourceForge to try things out for my own use.

• Do they force a certain pedagogical approach? If so, what are the benefits or drawbacks of that? 
• Depending on the design and architecture, the level of collaborative learning varies significantly from MOOC to MOOC. MOOCs have the potential to be flexible for the learner.
• Each MOOC requires the learner to engage with different software and applications and learning object file types. 
• I think that those learners who are less experienced or less confident with technology then the MOOC may not be their first choice, and there will always be the fun and need for face to face learning and skill development with the real object in real time, learning a craft, and art, etc.
• What difference would it make if the platform were Open Source?
• If we had sufficient expertise and resource we could have a platform with the look, feel functionality of 'what we want' rather than what it does out of the box.
• How does it differ from past initiatives for open content such as iTunes U or Khan Academy (mentioned in Week 4)? I see these as OpenResources not Open Source.You use these rather than manipulate it entirely.
• How does open content differ from open education?
• Opencontent is the content is freely available, usually open license for reuse, repurpose (Creative Commons  CC BY) for learning and teaching activities. 
• Open education is where the person creats their own learning pathway to meet their personal learning need, using existing resources, outside an 'educational' establishment. They set their learning goal and only they know when they have reached their goal. They may 'validate' their learning through communities, online reputation and badges, or through 'reputation'.
• I have added a comment to this weeks forum on this - read it here.