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Open Access Week at Athabasca University – Join us!

Written by terrya
Open Access Week at Athabasca University – Join us!
open access week-Athabasca

open access week-Athabasca

Like many academics around the world we are becoming more interested (and informed) about the opportunities afforded by open access. As “Canada’s Open University” this is a natural fit for us, and thus we are pleased to take the opportunity to participate in the international Open Access Week Oct 19-23 2009.

As our contribution to the gala week, we are hosting a series of five noon hour (Mountain time UTC/GMT -7 hours) sessions focusing on various components of open access. The 60 minute sessions run on the Elluminate webconferencing system and all are invited to attend. The sessions will also be recorded and linked from http://openaccess.athabascau.ca/

The first session (Monday Oct 19) with myself as speaker, focuses on the general theme of open scholarship. The Tuesday session features a presentation on research opportunities and issues related to open access presented by Patrick McAndrew from Open University UK, who co-leads the OLNet research initiative.  The Wednesday session features Athabasca University President Frits Pannekoek on Open Academic publishing and features an overview of the issues surrounding the founding and operations of Canada’s first open access scholarly publisher Athabasca University Press. Thursday’s session,  by AU Librarian Tony Tin, focuses on open institutional archives and repositories. Rory McGreal winds it up on Friday with a session on Open Educational Resources.

All the sessions are open to the general public and you are welcome to participate. The URL’s for participation (and longer descriptions of the sessions) are available at http://openaccess.athabascau.ca/

Mark your calendars and be ready to ‘open’ your mind during Open Access Week!

Terry

Distance Education, My Work

Special Regional Issue of IRRODL on Africa

Written by terrya
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Special Regional Issue of IRRODL on Africa

I hope that readers will not be overwhelmed with IRRODL postings in this blog, as this is a record year for publication. We will likely have 6 issues, and 10(4) that went “to press” this week is our 4th regional special issue.

This special issue presents 9 peer reviewed research articles- each focusing on distance education in Africa. Thanks to Special Issue editors Rashid Aderinoye, Richard Siaciwena, Clayton R Wright for help with this issue. The issue also contains 3 book reviews and a technical report.
Enjoy and Learn!

Terry

IRRODL, My Work

New Edition of the APA Publication Manual

Written by terrya
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At least in North America, and in education domains, in which I am involved, The American Psychological Association calls the shots in terms of formatting and style for most education publications, student papers and thesis work. In addition it is the normal format required for many (most?) educational Journals including the one I edit IRRODL.

Thus, I pay attention when a new edition comes out. Generally the edits and enhancements made to each addition are useful and helpful in reducing complexity and increasing intuitiveness. In particular as an online journal we are concerned with the ways that electronic resources are cited, quoted and included in formal academic discourse.  The 6th edition continues this positive trend. The changes are covered in both podcast and text format at the APA’s site. They also offer an online course Mastering the 6th Edition for $40.

Things I like about the 6th edition include:Read More

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work

ALT-C – Great conference in Manchester

Written by terrya
ALT-C – Great conference in Manchester

alt-logo_0_0

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

Distance Education, ,

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