Anchor with Discussion: The instructor(s) finds videos and shows them in class and students discuss them in small groups with certain assigned tasks.

Collaborative Anchoring: A pair of students as well as the course instructor each find a few relevant videos for the week and then share what they have found with each other and decide which ones to use in class.

It should go without saying that any videos used need to be fully previewed beforehand and their links checked a few days before use; don’t assume that what you used last year will still be available online. If they contain some information or opinions that do not align with your teaching, that is not necessarily a reason to reject them – conflicting voices present a great opportunity for discussion in class. By highlighting any bias, omissions, contradictions or misinformation you can help students become more self-critical of the online resources they find themselves.

Contributors to the discussion forum in the MOOC provided a couple of great links to help you find video resources in places other than YouTube or iTunes U:

• RefSeek provides a great list of educational video sites – and looks to have many other useful lists in addition.
• The Internet Archive has links to a wealth of historical moving images

I’d also thoroughly recommend looking at the JISC Digital Media advice on Finding Videos for Academic Purposes Using Web-based Video Hosting Sites which highlights the time taken to find and review suitable material as well as the importance of choosing effective search terms and filters.

Bonk, C. J. (2008, March). YouTube anchors and enders: The use of shared online video content as a macrocontext for learning. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2008 Annual Meeting, New York, NY. Accessed online (May 2012) http://www.acecjournal.org/2009/Journal_Data/Vol7No1/201103.pdf

However, academics want proper peer-reviewed research to back up these assertions, so I was delighted to pick up a link from an ALT discussion thread today to a recent article in Computers & Education that clearly proves that text-heavy slides have a negative impact on learning: Slide presentations as speech suppressors: When and why learners miss oral information.

The retention of information presented orally and of information presented orally and on slides was measured separately in each condition and standardized for comparability. Cognitive load and subjective importance of slides were also measured. The results indicate a “speech suppression effect” of regular slides at the expense of oral information (within and across conditions), which cannot be explained by cognitive overload but rather by dysfunctional allocation of attention, and can be avoided by concise slides.

Even better, the paper has a great selection of citations to follow up and use to reinforce my arguments for good slide design.

Of these, the second is by far the most interesting point – they are a finite course with instructors in a central role and a syllabus that aims to keep the learners in sync. Of course Stephen Downes and others would argue that a MOOC is all about the connections that one makes with other learners, although this requires a level of maturity, intrinsic motivation and self-direction that many learners seem to lack. Doug goes on to propose a new model, the MOOLE (Massive Open Online Learning Experience) that is more of an open-ended community that revolves around finding solutions to problems – so is a variant of Problem-Based Learning and Life-Long Learning. There are already similar communities on the web, built around specialist interests (e.g. The Oil Drum or Librarium Online), massive multiplayer games or software development and use (e.g. Linux or Processing). Perhaps in the future we will all be members of several online professional communities in which we develop our status and reputation, and that will be how prospective employers will view our ‘qualifications’? Hmmm… maybe I should be posting all this stuff in LinkedIn Groups instead…

This is the second bulletin from the frontline of the MOOC being run by Dr. Curtis Bonk on CourseSites. As might be expected, the initial enrollment of over 3000 people has suffered heavy attrition – around 500 participated in the first live lecture; this week that was down to 300. For some, real life took precendence (and hey, if it is free you don’t lose anything if you drop out) while for others the chaotic sprawl of alternative collaborative spaces may have caused them to abandon ship. Still, CourseSites are learning from the experience too and are adapting the course – for example there is now a central course blog, which makes it easier to see what other participants are saying. I do find the discussion lists pretty impenetrable… threaded discussions are a great theory, but really annoying to follow in practice. Blogs and Facebook got it right with a date-ordered list of posts with comments that you can choose to view and add to.

This week, Dr Bonk has been expounding his R2D2 model of learning (Read, Reflect, Display, Do) which has much in common with other models of learning (Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, VARK, Honey & Mumford etc) and is perhaps a little too closely aligned to the dubious concept of  learning styles for my taste. Still, its a useful model with some good suggestions for activities that fit into each phase of the cycle. However, my attention was more forcibly grabbed by another of the readings by Bonk and Zhang; Generational Learners & E-Learning Technologies.

This outlined the supposed attributes and learning preferences of various generational groups (Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Neomillenials etc.) and struck me as being a flabby concoction of unsupported assertions. Too many of the citations are from website articles and are treated uncritically. I was therefore extremely pleased to come across a link in one of the course’s blog discussions to a well-written and researched paper from 2011 which critiques the whole idea of Digital Naives and Digital Immigrants:

Koutropoulos, A. (2011) Digital Natives: Ten Years After. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 7(4). Accessed online May 2012: http://jolt.merlot.org/vol7no4/koutropoulos_1211.htm

The bottom line is that the concept of the digital native is a stereotype that has little validity in reality. Sure, there are some young people who create, collaborate and live their lives on the web – but they are a small minority. For many, it involves socialising on Facebook, playing online games and consuming all kinds of media such as YouTube  and whatever is trending on Reddit. And of course that is only for those with convenient access to the Web… and lets not even begin to explore the experience of young people in other countries and cultures.

The joy of Apostolos Koutropoulos’ paper is that is provides all the references and critical analysis needed to justify the kind of sweeping generalisations I made in the papagraph above. Recommended reading…

Compare and contrast with:

Bonk, C. and Zhang, K. (2010) Generational Learners & E-Learning Technologies. In: Yang, H. and Yuen, S. (eds) Handbook of Research on Practices and Outcomes in E-Learning: Issues and Trends, Hershey, New York. Accessed online May 2012: http://www.irma-international.org/viewtitle/38347/

Digital Native photo  by TF28 ❘ tfaltings.de on Flickr – Creative Commons

There was one part which dealt directly with TEL:

In teaching, for example, it is no longer enough to give a lecture and run some seminars, we are also expected to produce a set of resources for use on the new online communications platforms such as WebCT, Blackboard and Moodle. ‘It is not acceptable simply to upload your lecture notes’, comes the guidance from one University. ‘We encourage you to use WebCT creatively, with quizzes, hyperlinks, visual materials, etc. To learn more about the potential of WebCT for innovative teaching, come along to one of our training courses’. Oh great, I would think facetiously, on receiving yet another memo like this, another training course! And yet the pressure that is produced by such constant exhortations to be more creative, teach more innovatively, be at the cutting edge (etc) is undeniable — particularly because it meets an already existing set of desires and ethics around being professional and wanting to do a good job.

And there is the rub. We know that the skilled use of TEL can help students learn (and of course we want them to) but its does take time, effort and continued attention – and that must either supplant some current activity (research? teaching? administration?) or add to the burden. Of course, there are some aspects of TEL where an initial investment in time (extra work) could leave to savings later – but that saved time will be swallowed up by (at best)  further TEL development or (more likely) more admin and an ever-increasing deluge of emails.

The paper makes the point that academics are to some extent complicit in this problem by their silence on the subject, and that their institutions are simply responding to the prevailing political agenda and the demands of the market for ever-increasing ‘efficiencies’. But nevertheless, learning technologists need to be sensitive to this issue as we try to persuade our colleagues of the benefits of taking advantage of technology.

Gill, R (2009) Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia in Flood,R. & Gill,R. (Eds.)
Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections. London: Routledge

There was some great double-think; Flash and Silverlight bad, because they don’t work on (Apple) mobile devices and so restrict access, but interactive iBooks good, even though they only play on iPad. There was also the implicit view that learning is all about content, probably because Apple understands very clearly how content can be monetised. iTunes U may be free, but to use it you have to have iTunes on your PC and so it may well become your default media player – and then an iPhone becomes a better choice than an Android phone.

I have a MacBook laptop as my home PC, and an iPhone and probably an iPad soon as well, so don’t get me wrong – they make great products that work well – but I’m dead set against educational approaches that lock our students into buying from company A rather than company B. The interactive iBooks look fabulous, but I’d rather the output was HTML5 that could be played on any device – such as a laptop. Technology lock-in – just say no.

Week one of the course focuses on the critical importance of motivating students in online courses, and in the webinar Prof. Bonk raced headlong through a pile of slides that showed inspirational case studies from around the world, organised according to his TEC-VARIETY model of motivational techniques. One student commented that she felt she had been ‘fire-hosed with ideas’, and the relentless rush certainly left no time for reflection. The chat windows scrolled by at a distracting rate, and it proved impossible to scroll up to read them as new ones were continually added. Welcome to creative chaos! Luckily, the webinars are being recorded and you could save the chat as a text file, so later reflection is possible – provided we have time!

The last time I was involved in an online course was 1998-2000, when I studied for an MEd in Networked Collaborative Learning at the University of Sheffield. The course was run by an educationalist with fairly radical ideas, Dr David McConnell, and he gave free rein to them on the course. For example we could choose our own assignments and did a lot of peer assessment – it really moved me outside my comfort zone and was just great! The topic of my second assignment was student motivation, as I could see that it was clearly a key issue. Back then, technology issues (connectivity, equipment, software and skills) were far more of a concern, and the use of audio or video were out of the question, so motivation had to be encouraged through the medium of text and the design of the activities. Accordingly, my assignment talks about John Keller’s ARCS model (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction) and strategies for running discussion fora.

How about motivation in the era of the MOOC? Prof. Bonk and his team are clearly going to model the TEC-VARIETY approach as best they can, adjusting and adapting as they get to grips with the challenges posed by thousands of students. But what about us, the students? What about our own internal motivation?

Firstly, the topic has to have its own value – we’re not going to get a credit-bearing certificate or award at the end of this. Apparently we will get a ‘digital badge’ which will look great on our blog or LinkedIn profile, but won’t cut much ice with employers (or at least, not at present… but they may be big in the future). On the other hand my CMALT status will need re-accreditation in 2014 – at which stage participation in this MOOC will offer real benefits.

In this MOOC, lots of us (including me) are also there for the experience of being in a MOOC – so for us, the medium is also (part of) the message. By definition, almost all of us are ‘up with the technology’ – and it is interesting to think how an ‘ordinary student’ would cope with this. Or is that unfair? Suppose I was an English student taking part in a MOOC on ‘Metaphor in Elizabethan Drama’  how would I cope with the sprawl of the discussion forums? I found the analogy with a big conference really helpful – you attend the keynotes, drop in on a few sessions and spend most of your time interacting with just a few people who you bumped into.

Stay tuned for next week’s comments on MOOCs Progress…

oh… and WordPress just let me know that this was my 100th post on Telic. Yay. Wot, no digital badge?

Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.

A few weeks back I posted about my old Phase Diagrams website, and noted that it was number 2 (after Wikipedia) on a Google search for ‘phase diagrams’. And so it is, for me… and possibly me only. What I had failed to take account of is that Google personalises web searches, and so I suppose that it should have been obvious that relevent links located at the University (soton.ac.uk) would have a much higher ranking when I (with an @soton email) was searching using a PC in the soton.ac.uk domain.

So although at one level, personalised search is great because it means that I see the results that are most relevant to ME, it is also terrible because I’ll never know what results the Google algorithms have decided I shouldn’t see. Its a bit like the ‘Daily Me‘ personalised newspapers (printed on rip-proof Tyvek) that the Guardian envisioned in 1994. The danger is that if people only choose the news they want to read, they won’t see the news they need to read. Or perhaps we already have that with the tabloids’ relentless diet of celebrity, sport, sleaze and advertorials…

Given the all the recent hoo-haa about Apple’s iBooks, it is interesting to look at the new Educational Portal from Wolfram, the company behind the Mathematica computational application and the Wolfram|Alpha ‘knowledge engine’.

As you would expect, the focus is on maths, a topic that really benefits from truly interactive learning resources. The first two courses are the key foundation topics of Algebra and Calculus. “In the portal you’ll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more built by Wolfram education experts.” Access is currently via a free account, although they warn that they may start charging in the future. You need to download and install a free browser plug-in so that you can view the interactive CDF Computable Document Format pages.

iBooks are fine if the topic requires words, images, audio/video, animations and MCQ questions but it runs out of steam if you need to calculate, graph or visualise data. That’s where CDF really shines – not as glossy as an iBook, but seriously functional. At the moment you can view and interact with CDF on your desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) or online (again, desktop browsers only). Their website says that Mobile apps are ‘coming soon’, including an iOS browser. That may well be the case, since they already produce many iOS apps, known as course assistants. It looks like Android users will be out of luck again – no iBooks and no CDFs

Tutors can create their own CDF resources using Mathematica, so the creation of free Open Educational Resources is a possibility. It is interesting to look at the licensing agreement, which in many ways is similar to the one about Apple’s iBooks that has upset so many people. Again, if you want to give away your OER there is no problem, but if you want to sell it, Wolfram would like a slice of the action. Seems perfectly reasonable to me, and is in fact a driver in favour of OERs.

And the resources themselves? Algebra has a comprehensive collection of matching lesson plans and textbook pages, all with plenty of interactive examples, while Calculus is much less formal with 19 demonstrations and 12 problem-solving widgets. There is plenty there of interest to science, maths and engineering students from college to University.

At one level, iBooks are like the multimedia CD-ROMs that so much effort (including mine) was spent on in the 80′s and early 90′s. These combined text, images, animations and quizzes, all hyperlinked together to create an engaging self-study resource. Remember Microsoft Encarta? Where are they now? Steam-rollered by the web.

But surely the iBooks Author programme will enable anyone to publish a rich learning experience? I’m sure that most tutors could use it to lay out text and photos – but do they have the skills needed to create good diagrams, let alone animations or interactives? Looking at their PowerPoint slides, I would say the answer is no. Creating really good iBooks will take a team of people – like those used by the publishers of the first examples. Of course there will also be some extraordinary work produced by talented obsessives… but there will also be an avalanche of utterly mediocre content – like most of the self-published e-books for Kindle.

Then there is the technology lock-in: iBooks can only be read on iPads, so every student on a course will have to have one. Sorry, no Android owners allowed in this club. Are the iPads provided by the institution, and if so how does the institution manage them? Or should the students own them and be responsible for installing apps, iBooks etc? My own view is that these are personal devices and that students will take much greater care if they own them.

That brings us neatly on to the risk of theft. iPads are expensive, desirable and compact – the ideal combination for any aspiring thief. Even if the rumoured £299 iPad is available, that is still a lot of money for an debt-laden student to find. On the other hand, they wander round with expensive phones all the time, so maybe this isn’t really an issue.

The most damning posts have pointed out that students use real textbooks in ways that are not currently supported by iBooks or any other e-book formats. They need to be able to flip quickly from one marked section to another, to jot down extensive notes and (especially) to compare two or more sources side by side. However, I’m sure that apps will quickly evolve to solve all these issues and make e-books even better for academic study than printed books.

For me, though, the main thing wrong with iBooks is that they represent old-style learning – the individual student working their way through the definitive textbook, be it ever so shiny. The textbook publishing industry is under threat, but not by Apple and its iBooks, but by the wealth and plurality of information now freely available on the web, and the social networks that link learners. I think that in the near future  every HE student will use a tablet as the hub of their study – for taking notes, reading and communciation – but I doubt that iBooks will feature heavily.