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ALT-C – Great conference in Manchester

Written by terrya
ALT-C – Great conference in Manchester

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I was very fortunate to be able to attend what I consider to be one of the best higher education, ed tech conferences in the world, last week in Manchester, UK. I was even more fortunate to be asked to do the closing keynote. The annual Association for Learning Technologies sponsors the Conference (the C) and a Journal Alt-J. This year, was a sold out event and lots of great presentations, conversations and networking. Alt-C is probably the best kept UK secret, as it is a world class event, but the attendees are at least 90% UK ed tech innovators. The conference features the usual keynotes, panels, tradeshow, concurrent sessions, posters, food and drink. Unlike some others I’ve attended, this one was very well organized, few presenters missing and tight adherence to time lines leaving a fair chunk of time for discussion after each presenter.Read More

Distance Education, My Work

Royalties from Open Access

Written by terrya
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I was very pleasantly surprised to receive this week the download stats and a check from Athabasca University Press. I edited the second edition of the Theory and Practice of Online learning and it was copy edited and now promoted, sold and distributed by Athabasca University Press. I documented the reason for releasing the book under a Creative Commons license as one of Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness see Terry’s Amazing Story of Openness

During the first year of distribution 404 copies were sold and at 5% of net sales, my royalty check was for $636. During that year 26,497 chapters or copies of the whole book were downloaded at no charge. This means  1.5% of readers choose the paid route- This may be underestimated  as some readers probably downloaded more than one chapter, or more than once. In any case, this $600 is about the same range of funding I have come to expect from the other 5 academic type books I have authored or co-authored. But of course, the fame and glory from 26,000 PLUS readers is unmeasurable!

The download links for the full book and each chapter are accessible here Read More

Distance Education, My Work

The disruptive effects of ‘free’ education

Written by terrya
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The disruptive effects of ‘free’ education

u-of-people-logo

After reading Wired Chris Anderson’s (2009). Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available but ironically only for free to residents from the world’s richest country, the US, from SCRIBD), I spent some time reflecting on the disruptive effects of ‘free’ on higher education provision and opportunity.

Free has not only effected media consumption, publishing, and software production but also has capacity to create very disruptive, low end challenges to higher education. A low end disruption offers a service to a large new market by providing satisfactory (but not necessarily equivalent, at least at the beginning) services to large new groups of consumers. The most publicized example in higher education is the University of the People, founded by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef. UoPeople is headquartered in California and is now registering students for its first courses to begin in September 2009. Mr Reschef provides a good overview of his vision and the logistics of operating a very low cost institution in a recent Higher Ed podcast.Read More

Distance Education, My Work,

Past the "No Significant Difference"

Written by terrya
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The release last month by the US Dept of Education’s  Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies provides another salvo in the simplistic showdown between online and face to face learning. As expected online learning (both at a distance and a classroom continues to out perform unmediated education.

First, let me repeat the standard whine accompanying every educational meta analysis – there are far too few studies, many of the conditions between control and experimental group are not held (and perhaps cannot be held) constant and as always when one says ‘online learning’ the term includes a very wide range of learning activities, modes of learning, types of teacher intervention and divergent focus on collaborative, cooperative or individual work – and many other variables that have long been associated with changes in learning outcomes. So when “online’ learning is conceived of as the independent variable- it really means this is the variable we are going to focus on, make a vague attempt to control those we can and ignore the rest!  This occurs even though we know there there are a lot of potentially confounding variables in play. However this variability applies to the complex face to face (F2F) classroom environment as well as online. To be fair to the researchers on this study, attempt were made to tag studies for differences in ‘practice variables’- those under control of the teacher/designer and ‘conditions’, rather unchanging environmental differences  between experimental and control groups. However, again messiness intrudes – as noted by he the authors “Many of the reviewed studies, for example, did not indicate (a) whether or not the online instructor had received training in the method of instruction, (b) rates of attrition from the contrasting conditions and (c) contamination between conditions.” Retention and completion rates are a concern in all types of distance education, so not documenting the independent variables’ association with successful completion mares many studies.

As an example of the confusion of terms, methods and technologies, the study has a brief anecdotal section on “individualized instruction”. I went right to that section hoping it talked about changing condition of online study from the usual cohort, to the older self-paced, independent study mode. Unfortunately, what the authors meant by the title was interventions involving more machine interactive learning – tailored responses with additional help for incorrect answers (positive effect) and individualized adaptation presenting different environments to different students (positive effect again).Read More

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Epub versions of IRRODL Articles

Written by terrya
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Thanks to our friends and publisher at Athabasca University Press, we have been experimenting with publishing IRRODL articles in epub format. Epub format is supported by the The International Digital Publishing Forum and was designed for reading books on portable and lother electronic readers.  The Web-Books site explains that “the EPUB format can be viewed by Calibre, Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), FBReader and Stanza. In addition to notebooks and desktops, ADE supports Sony Readers, Stanza targets Apple’s iPhone, and FBReader applies to Google’s Android.”

Displaying the epub articles can be a bit problematic- depending upon the software and hardware you use. Apple’s IPhone supports the free Stanza program (also available for desktop reading) so we have set up a Stanza catalog to distribute our epub formatted articles. Use this URL to add the IRRODL catalog added it to your Stanza’s online catalogs: http://www.irrodl.org/catalog/catalog.atom Or you can open the link below in your iPhone’s browser or email client, and it will do the trick for you:
stanzacatalog://www.irrodl.org/catalog/catalog.atomRead More

IRRODL, My Work

Back to The Past

Written by terrya
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Back to The Past

This is a personal note and reflection on my trip to the North Country Fair for the 31st annual solstice celebration and folk festival.

Way back in 1979 I was living “back to the land” on a farm near Joussard Alberta, on Lesser Slave Lake – about 400 km north of Edmonton. The previous summer I had taken a trip to Ontario and attended Mariposa and Killilou Festivals and came home with the idea to expand our annual community solstice picnics, to a folk festival. Thus was born the North Country Fair, and I served as the coordinator for the first five years.

The Fair has moved to 5 different sites over the years, but has finally arrived “home” at a wonderful and HUGE site on the Driftpile River. Farsighted individuals now running the Fair were smart enough to invest in the purchase of 9 quarter sections (1,440 acres or 583 hectares). The site is easily large enough for the Fair and serves as a large eco-reserve of Northern Alberta pasture, riverbed and boreal forest.Read More

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Large, new Issue of IRRODL

Written by terrya
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Issue 10(3) of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) was released a couple of hours ago. I take the liberty of reprinting my editorial here, but see below for hotlinked table of contents.

This issue is notable as it is the largest single issue ever published by IRRODL! The issue contains fourteen peer-reviewed research articles, two technical reports, and links to five recordings and Powerpoint slides from research presentations to IRRODL’s sister organization, the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research (CIDER). It also contains two articles formatted for mobile devices (EPUB), and we welcome feedback, particularly from Amazon Kindle and Stanza users.Read More

IRRODL, My Work

23rd ICDE World Congress

Written by terrya
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I was very pleased to be invited to do a keynote at International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) in Maastricht Holland this month. ICDE  is the largest coordinating and professional development organization for distance education and open learning institutions and communities around the globe. It attracts delegates from the large mega universities as well as a smattering of dual mode colleges and universities. My keynote on Open Educational resources, was OK, except the time was limited to 20 minutes and my iphone count down timer failed to bark at me, so the moderator practically had to get the hook out to get me to finish – quite embarrassing! The slides from my talk are here and the slides from the other speakers on the OER panel Peter Sloep and  Andy Lane are as well.

The keynotes were videotaped and there was a promise of streaming, but I can’t seem to locate the links from the conference web page at www.ou.nl/icde2009. I was especially pleased to have the opportunity to hear the legendary network theorist Manual Castells author of the trilogy “The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture”, 1996-2003, translated in 23 languages. For some reason he did not allow a video recording of his talk.

The congress featured the usual scrumptious buffet of concurrent sessions, most of which I quite enjoyed. The concurrent sessions were organized under the themes of cultural diversity, learning technology, removing institutional constraints, quality assurance, student support and a number of other special sub-themes.  Unlike most DE conferences, presenters were compelled to submit full papers, and most of these have been linked from the listings of the schedule at the web site. Unfortunately, the paper from my own session THE DANCE OF TECHNOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY IN SELF-PACED DISTANCE EDUCATION isn’t linked, so I have posted it here

The conference was also the annual conference of the European Assoc. of Distance Teaching Universities, so there was lots of European representation. As always, I was impressed by the amount of money provided for educational technology related research and development in Europe. I attended a presentation from the e-jump 2.0 group whose 2 year project from the EU Lifelong learning program was “Implementing e-Learning 2.0 in everyday learning processes in higher and vocational education”  A great idea, but some of the problems encountered creating ‘courses’ for teachers on web 2.0 tools (why create courses???), were very predictable. More encouraging was the work of the Re-vica Project which “aims to make an inventory and to carry out a systematic review of cross-institutional Virtual Campus initiatives of the past decade within higher education at European, national and regional levels”.  I would love to undertake a similar rear view look at Canadian initiatives during the past decade, but alas, no EU pot of money to make it happen.

All in all, I was pleased with the ICDE Congress, and glad to see that ICDE (under new management) seems to have recreated itself and back to doing important networking and knowledge development in this sector. Congrats as well to the host Open University of the Netherlands, for a well organized conference

Distance Education, My Work