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Category: Distance Education

What the FOLC is new in this article?

April 28, 2017Written by terrya

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist spoofing, in the post title, the unfortunate sound of the acronym for the “new” model proposed in this article. Now, I’ve got it out of the way and can only suggest that if this “divergent fork of the Community of Inquiry model” is to survive, it needs a new English acronym.

This post is a critical review of Democratizing digital learning: theorizing the fully online learning community model Todd J. B. Blayone, Roland van Oostveen, Wendy Barber, Maurice DiGiuseppe and Elizabeth Childs. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2017 14:13
DOI: 10.1186/s41239-017-0051-4

First, let me get out the good things about this article stated. I love the fact that the authors published this in a peer reviewed, Open Access journal (thanks to Roland van Oostveen for noting an error in my original post) . Second I love articles about the now venerable Community of Inquiry model because it is flattering to see this work live on, nicely adds to our citation rating indices and because I share with Randy Garrison and Walter Archer an ongoing interest in constructivist models for online and blended education. And finally, as always conceptual arguments and calls for research are welcomed – especially if they follow with real research results!

First in a number of concerns with the paper. The basic claim is that the Fully Online Learning Community (FOLC) is a “divergent fork of the Community of Inquiry model”. It seems the divergent claim is made on the basis that the revision is for FULLY online courses. In fact no divergence is needed or called for as the original COI model was always based on fully online courses – blended courses – or at last the name hadn’t been invented in the 1990’s when we developed the COI model. The authors may argue that the divergence stems from the integration of synchronous and asynchronous discussions. The original COI model was grounded in asynchronous threaded discussion, as the Internet did not support synchronous interaction in those days. However, Randy and I had been working since 1989 on synchronous delivery models based on group teleconferencing, (see for example Anderson, T., & Garrison, D. R. (1995). Transactional issues in distance education: The impact of design in audio teleconferencing. American Journal of Distance Education, 9(2), 27-45.). We certainly thought the constructivist underpinnings of the COI could and would support synchronous communciations as well.

Second, is the claim that FOLC “responds to the limitations of distance learning and MOOCs (e.g., student isolation, low completion rates, etc.)” and “the needs of transformative and emancipatory learning” and “responds to requests from some international partners for new models of learning aligned with democratic and socio-economic reforms. Both Randy and I had long argued and published about the need for distance education to use technologies to get beyond distance education, as perceived as one-way content dissemination to “education at a distance” based on social construction. Thus, the ‘new’ FOLC adds nothing new to our initial claims and desire to supplant individualistic models of correspondence models of distance education. MOOCs and especially cMOOCs are much more than mere content dissemination as decried by these authors. Finally, the COI was and is a response to the need for new models of learning and the needs for emancipatory learning. The only claim that is true is that the COI didn’t directly respond to the need for 21st Century learning competencies -mostly because these hadn’t been invented when we developed the COI model. Moreover, these newer ideas certainly fit within the original COI and its development and support by thousands of researchers in the past two decades.

The authors present a “revised model” as below

I can’t see anything new here beyond the original three presence Venn diagram of the COI model. Both note the collaborative learning environment, both have social and cognitive presence and teaching presence is assumed in the organization and management of the digital space as the FOLC model (like the COI) is based on formal, institutionalized education.

The paper then goes on to provide conceptual scaffolding for a number of tending educational related theories or ideas – digital space; democratized learning and collective identity and responsibility, community and authenticity. I don’t have any problems with these conceptual arguments and they could each be used to update and strengthen the original COI model. I really don’t see anything new here except for the inclusion of references and arguments that have developed since the COI model was first introduced.

The article then goes onto to propose a research agenda which is little more than a wish list of things that could or should be researched. We criticized this type of rather adhoc model of research agenda development in our Stöter, J., Bullen, M., Zawacki-Richter, O., & von Prümmer, C. (2014). From the back door into the mainstream: The characteristics of lifelong learners. In O. Zawacki-Richter & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education: Towards a research agenda (pp. 421-457). Athabasca: Athabasca University Press. But again, nothing wrong with this list of things to do, but nothing new either. Finally, the authors invite others to join them in this research process – all good stuff but….

I don’t think there is enough new here to claim a “divergent fork” merely by strengthening the original argument.

Community of Inquiry, Distance Education

Quality in Online Learning Presentation

September 28, 2016Written by terrya

I was asked to do a video conferencing talk to a meeting of three Mexican Universities yesterday. They are attempting to come up with a common set of criteria to define and measure the quality of their online courses.

Perhaps I was not the best person to ask, as I have very mixed feelings about quality control systems dealing with emerging technologies and pedagogies. In particular, I hate it when quality standards impeded innovation and opportunity for experimentation. I hope I got across the complexity- if not a solution! I illustrated the challenges of defining quality by presenting the different quality measures associated with each of the Three Generations of Distance Education pedagogy from a 2011 article by Jon Dron and myself.

I did however end with a plug for one of the most respected non-profit quality consortia Quality Matters, but I fear I didn’t clearly answer my own title question – Quality Online Teaching and Learning – Is it really different than campus-based education? It Depends! – not least of which depends on the pedgaogy employed

Here are the slides I used:

Online quality Mexico from Terry Anderson

Distance Education, My Work Quality onlien learning

Our Spanish adventure

September 20, 2016Written by terrya

Unlike most of our voyages, this month I was accompanying my wife Susan on a trip to her conference. She registered in the 16 European Symposium on Suicide Prevention that took place this month in Oviedo, Spain. We took the opportunity to rent a car and bought a GPS with European maps (thank god!) and travelled through most of northern Spain. We headed up to the Basque country with stops in Pamplona (fortunately no running bulls this month) and then to the beautiful, but tourist plugged town of San Sebastian. We then motored through Basque countries, many mountain passes and tunnels (a bit white knuckled at 120 Km/H) to visit Guernica (site of first mass civilian bombing and immortalized by Pablo Picasso) and then to Bilbao.

guggenheim-museum-belboa Of course, like all good tourists we couldn’t miss the Guggenheim Museum and it did not disappoint.

We then headed west to Oviedo, capital of Asturias. I didn’t attend much of Susan’s conference, except for a couple of sessions in which Danish and Belgian online Suicide prevention systems were presented. I was impressed with the scientific rigour with which these interventions were tested – though trying to randomly assign suicidal participants to interventions presents a variety of ethical challenges.

We also travelled by car, (I know it was cheating) along some of the Camino de Santiago routes, trying to assess if we have the interest and the legs for such adventures. I had not realized the number of different Camino routes nor the number of pilgrims on them. I learned that in one day they ‘processed” over 600 pilgrims who were finishing the pilgrimage in Santiago.

We then headed south to Madrid with a stop in Leon. I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, which is the largest University in Spain with all courses delivered at a distance. Like Athabasca University, this University has had considerable challenges moving from its roots as a correspondence university to interactive online delivery. We visited many of the tourist spots and of course the famous museums in Madrid – though the huge line ups at the Prada scared us away.

Next we headed back to Barcelona, but we ventured into the hinterland for a brief visit to Belchite

belchite-1296 This town was left in ruins after a horrendous battle during the Spanish Civil War and a new town was built beside the ruins. These ruins now stand as a monument to the destruction of war, though they seem far off the tourist trail and we were the only visitors that day. It is strange that, unlike the American Civil war which is celebrated by numerous monuments and re-enactments, Spaniards seem to want to forget this sad time in their history. Perhaps because the “good guys” lost??

We then headed to Barcelona. As always, Barcelona with the inspiring architecture was a treat. It was interesting to see the progress on the Sagrada Familia, sagrada-familia Gaudi’s most famous design. It looks to be on track for completion marking the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death in 2026. The new stain glass (abstracts and NOT crucifixion scenes) in the windows (though still far from complete) adds blue and green hues to the whole interior – in keeping with the natural and forest like feeling. I am sure that this is the most spectacular building that I have seen anywhere and I hope to live to see its completion!

I then spent 2 days and 2 web-cast lectures with my old friends at Open University of Catalonia. The first talk was a repeat plus additions from a chapter I recently did on Theories for Online Learning and Research.

For the second talk, I overviewed the chapter that Jon Dron and I (mostly Jon) did on the Future of E-Learning.

After a great weekend with friends in Barcelona – we even made it to the beach and to watch my first game of handball, we headed back. Susan home to Edmonton and me to Helsinki, where I am the “opponent” in a PhD defence here on Friday.

Distance Education, Personal, Travel spain

Downe’s great summary article, but…….

August 21, 2016Written by terrya

1 Comment

The good news is that Stephen Downes has posted the full text from a chapter he wrote for New Models of Open and Distance Learning in Open Education: from OERs to MOOCs, Editors: Mohamed Jemni, Kinshuk, Mohamed Koutheair Khribi, 2016.

This is good news for two reasons – the first is that the full Springer book retails for $139 – but you can get it as an ebook for ONLY $109!!. This means the text is basically unavailable to the vast number of practitioners and scholars who would likely find it of great use. The second reason is that it is a really good historical summary – describing the dance of education and technology as they have evolved with each other over the past half a century.

The bad news is that the very first sentence of the chapter (and first of the whole book!) is blatantly false. Stephen writes “Historically most learning that has ever taken place has taken place in a classroom with a teacher giving instruction and students reading books and writing on paper.”

Surely Stephen is not arguing that he “learned” to program the Painted Porch Mud in the 1980’s; devised Connectivism, or co-invented MOOCs by sitting in a “classroom with a teacher giving instructions”! In fact only a very tiny fraction of the “learning” that has ever taken place historically and of course 100% pre-historically, has occurred in a classroom. Only beginning in the 19th Century have a few children of rich minorities been able to learn part of what they learned in life in a classroom. For the vast majority there were no classrooms for them to attend. Even more so today, learning takes place from Google and Wikipedia searchers, from mass media, from social connection and the innumerable historical and pre-historic ways of learning – observation, apprenticeship, story-telling, guided practice and many more ways of learning.

Obviously Stephen’s mistake is to conflate learning with formal education. It is common enough because it is in the interests of teachers, educators and professors to promote their work context and their own self-interest by elevating education to encompass all forms of learning- but it does not. That is why it is especially strange to find this slip from Stephen Downes who has build a career and inspired many, based upon his championing of learning – and not only that subset that happens in classrooms. It is especially ironical that within the essay Stephen covers formal and non formal learning and argues that both have benefited from the wealth of online resources and communities.

Having gotten this irritation out of my system, let me strongly recommend this chapter. It helps if you mentally do a cut and paste and switch ‘education’ for ‘learning’. Perhaps Stephen will do it for us.

As with all of Stephen’s writing you get very clear, precise and knowledgeable argument, illustration and rationale. And similarity with all his writing as you always get a good dose of “Downism” – where Stephen injects his personal insights, experiences, opinions and convictions. The sections on PLE’s and PLN’s are especially good as is Stephen’s overview of connectivism. Strangely, this overview chapter ends without a summary or conclusion, but PERHAPS you have to cough up the $139 for that. So as not to make the same mistake with this post, let me again recommend this article for anyone trying to figure how both ‘learning’ and ‘education’ have evolved to both exploit and create technologies and pedagogies to make the most of our networked world.

Distance Education, MOOCs

Order of Athabasca University

June 10, 2016Written by terrya

Yesterday at Convocation in Athabasca, I was deeply honoured by my former colleagues at Athabasca by being installed into the Order of Athabasca University. Most other members have been individuals from the community who have made exceptional contributions to the University. I was the first Faculty member (other than Dominique Abrioux, who also served as President) to be so honoured. The hupalo started with the blurb below published in the Edmonton and Calgary daily newspapers.

It continued at Convocation where Rory McGreal made a terrific and over flattering introduction to me at the beginning of the ceremonies. Rory’s introduction contained comments from Mark Brown, Alan Tait, Morten Paulsen and Wayne Macintosh – thanks to each of you. The life stream of the whole convocation ceremony is streamed at goo.gl/ZziwsG . Rory and my part begins around Minute 53

The celebrations ended with a banquet. All very moving, and I am trying hard to not leave with a swollen head! But thanks to all who have helped make my time at Athabasca very personally rewarding and recognized!!

It was also flattering to have AUPress over 40% discount on three of my authored, edited or co-authored books.

I was asked to do a 3 minute speech which I addressed to the graduates and to the wider Athabasca Community. Here is the text;

Madame Chair; Mr. President; Distinguished guests; Members of the Platform party; Graduands: Ladies and gentlemen:

Thanks to each of you!

I think I am the first faculty member (who wasn’t also a president) to win this award, and so I feel very deeply honored for your recognition—of not just my contributions—but of our work, together, here at Athabasca University.

Today is a day primarily for the graduates—and thus, I would like to use this time on the stage to congratulate each of them—and their family members and friends networks that you created —who have helped to get them here today.

All of my research has been focused on the distance learning experience. One of the most common questions is:

“Is distance education as good as campus-based education?”

Well … my colleagues and I have been asking this question for more than 30 years! And in roughly 90 per cent of studies, the results have shown that there is NO significant difference in learning outcomes.

And even when there is a difference it is likely to be in favour of distance learners. However, there is certainly more to being educated than just simply ‘learning outcomes.”

What distance education students build—and usually in larger doses than campus students—is self-efficacy. The belief in yourself and the knowledge that you can succeed in the tasks you set for yourself.

Distance learning builds knowledge and belief in yourself and an empowered understanding that you can achieve your goals.

You didn’t earn a distance education degree without being—or getting—good at creating and meeting deadlines and producing quality output—usually without the help of peers or classmates.

And so, today I celebrate your earned increase in self-efficacy!

But, to be sure, this graduation milestone does not mark the end of your learning. Technological and social change continues to happen—and more rapidly than in it changed in the past.

Luckily, I know this for sure: Because of your experience with AU, you are armed with the confidence and the knowledge that you can learn—and learn successfully.

You have self-efficacy. You can succeed—and you will succeed—as life-long learners.

Finally, I want to speak to my colleagues and friends in our broader Athabasca University community:

Bear with me as I don my sailor’s cap,—one of the pleasures of retirement! —obviously, as an institution, we’re continuing to sail through some rough waters. We are facing weather winds and that are very hard to predict. However, “the glass is rising”. Certainly there is value and risk in every decision we make.

But I want to continue to urge us to use the ever-increasing power of networks—and importantly, our own networking skills—to work together to build a new kind of university: A university that is not like the Athabasca University of 1970, nor that of 2016, for that matter.

But one that marries academic knowledge, collegial support and governance with cost-effective ways to study and teach. Alone, and together, we need to support and create better and more effective personal, academic, administrative and community networks.

These networks have demonstrated they produce the power to be critical components of the new ‘net-era’ university—and thus, they are a challenge for each of us to navigate—but a necessary one.

Oh, have I mentioned the Athabasca Landing yet?

Thank you very much!

Distance Education, My Work, Personal

End of Jobs in Online Education?

March 19, 2016Written by terrya

2 Comments

I started out my teaching career as a “shop teacher” – teaching middle school students how to work and built with a number of technologies. Thus, it was a bit disturbing to listen to recent CBC radio broadcast listing jobs that have disappeared and to hear that ‘shop teachers’ along with elevator operators, typists and postal worker were disappearing.

Two articles from the latest issue of Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, caught my attention for the same reason. Will technologies soon reduce or even eliminate the relatively new job position of “online teacher”.

The first article,

Vu, P., Fredrickson, S., & Meyer, R. (2016). Help at 3:00 AM! Providing 24/7 Timely Support to Online Students via a Virtual Assistant. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, 19(1). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/vu_fredrickson_meyer191.html.

directly addresses the issue of substituting the traditional teacher role of answering student queries with a machine. The article notes that most online students do their work in the evening and on weekends when many teachers are not interested and often not available to answer questions. In an attempt to provide some sort of 7/24 service the instructors built a chat bot and seeded it with a database of questions culled from archives of questions asked by students taking the course in previous terms. Chat boots have rarely been used in education, though colleagues at Athabasca worked developing a Freudbot. But chat bots are becoming ubiquitous on online shopping sites where they provide a type of 7/24 customer support.

During the design-based research project the Bot was involved in 475 sets of interactions with the 56 students enrolled in 2 sections of an early Childhood Education course. As expected more than half of the interactions took place on weekends and 88% were during evenings. Of course some of the questions were ‘off topic” and used by curious students to learn the capabilities of the bot. But many were on topic with 65% of queries focussed on information seeking – much related to assignments and exams.

Of perhaps most interest was the students’ reactions, which were queried by 5 point Likert perception questions. Only about half (m=2.5) found the bot did effectively answer their question, but nearly all (m=4.8) noted the extra service provided 7/24 by the bot and over half (m=3.3) preferred asking the bot rather than emailing the teacher. The effectiveness of these type of bots naturally grows as the data base expands through use and the searching algorithms improve. Thus, one can, even now, see how machines will undertake at least some traditional teaching roles which in a positive sense can give teacher more time for more important learning diagnosis and help and reduce time spent on administrative type queries. It is also interesting to think about the “teaching presence” of of the female avatar (displayed at left) used in this study. In any case a very nice exploratory, design-based study.

The second employment related article compared adjunct teachers employed in for-profit universities as compared to those in the not-for-profit sector. This is an important problem as more than half of online courses in the USA are taught by part-time sessional instructors. This in itself has huge implications on job stability for teaching faculty, but the rise (in the US) of for-profit universities with a tradition of not offering tenured positions, doing no research and not training next generation of scholars is also threatening.

Starcher, K., & Mandernach, J. (2016). An Examination of Adjunct Faculty Characteristics: Comparison between Non-Profit and For-Profit Institutions. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration,, 19(1). http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/starcher_mandernach191.html.

This study used an online survey to query 859 online adjunct teachers. The results were remarkable in the lack of statistical differences between the teachers at the two types of institution. No differences in age, satisfaction, education or a host of other variables. There were small differences in class size, but this was confounded by the higher percentage of graduate courses (with normally smaller numbers of students) in the public, not-for-profit universities.

The authors put a nice spin on the discussion by noting that the similarity means that professional development and support can be shared between the sectors – unlikely as that may be. But the study also adds empirical support to the notion that education can be and is being “privatized” with resulting decreasing employment for traditional, tenured faculty.

So what do I conclude from these two very good articles? I think one of the largest challenges for our global population (ranking right up there with climate change) is the capacity to meaningfully employ people in a context in which machines are more and more able to perform both mundane as well as high performance and high communication tasks. My Interaction Equivalency Theory speaks to this by noting the ways in which activity that used to be performed by live teachers (student-teacher interaction) can and is substituted by bots and canned media to create high quality student-content interaction.

Design Based Research, Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory

The Enigma of Interaction

March 3, 2016Written by terrya

I’ve been fascinated by the role of interaction all of my career as both a student, a researcher and a teacher. Michael Moore’s famous article details the role of the ‘big three’ (student-student, student-content, student-teacher) interactions and influenced Randy Garrison and I to explore the other 3 possibilities (teacher-teacher, teacher-content and content-content interactions). I’ve written a number of summary articles, a recent article on interaction in MOOCs and note that interaction serves as the primary indicator of ‘presence’ in the Community of Inquiry (COI) Model.

Many, many research articles have shown significant and positive relationships between interaction and a host of outcomes including persistence, achievement and enjoyment. However, these studies are almost always correlational and sometimes based exclusively on student perceptions. These are useful methodologies but marred by challenges of proving causation. Did the interaction cause the positive outcomes (causation) or do motivated students both interact more and get better marks (correlation)?

Thus, I was pleased to see an interaction study in the latest issue of IRRODL that used a quasi-experimental study to examine the impact of student-teacher interaction. The article:

Cho, M., & Tobias, S. (2016). Should Instructors Require Discussion in Online Courses? Effects of Online Discussion on Community of Inquiry, Learner Time, Satisfaction, and Achievement. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning, 17(2). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i2.2342

The study was set in the context of a US undergraduate, fully online course with between 25-30 students in each of three sections taught by the same instructor. In the first instance there was no discussion. In the 2nd, the teacher posted a weekly discussion question and students were obliged to post at least one answer and one comment per week (typical forced participation that brought down the wrath of friend Jon Dron in a recent post). In the final section the teacher actively participated in the weekly discussions. In all cases the teacher was readily accessible via email.

A strength of the study was the multiple measures of interaction effects. These included:

completion of the COI Inventory – a Likert-scale, perception instrument derived from the original indicators of teaching, social and cognitive presence).
Student satisfaction measured by 3 lLkert questions
Time on task as represented by login time to the LMS
Student achievement as measured by final grade. The authors wisely excluded the marks for participation awarded in instance2 and 3.

Perhaps the least surprising outcome was that perceptions of social presence were significantly different with, as expected, higher perceptions of social presence in the more interactive instances. Also not surprising is that teaching presence increased in the 3rd instance, but not significantly.

The results became both interesting and surprising on the final 3 measures. In each of the three course sections, each with markedly different amounts of interaction, there were NO significant differences in terms of time on task (logged into Blackboard), student satisfaction or student achievement. There was a small (but not significant ) increase in student satisfaction in the 3rd instance with enhanced teacher participation.

The discussion section of this paper is also very good. They note that time requirements for participation required in the forums in instances 2 and 3 did not end up costing students more time – at least as measured by Blackboard logins. Finally, they note the obvious – teacher participation did not lead to increased achievement – despite the assumed time commitment required of the teacher.

These results tend to reduce support for the importance a number of the types of student and teaching presence described and promoted in the COI model. But the results provide support for the ideas I promoted in my Interaction Equivalency Theory. I proposed there that given high levels of one of the three levels of interaction, the other two could be reduced without loss of academic achievement. I also noted in my 2nd thesis of that work that likely increased satisfaction would results if more than one of the three forms were used (in this study, there was an increase but it was not significant in student satisfaction across the instances) but that it would come at increased cost (usually time to both teachers and students).

The study also did not look at attrition, perhaps because the numbers were small. I know from experience at Athabasca, when teaching and peer interaction is drastically reduced in self paced and continuous enrolment designs, that attrition almost always increases.

This excellent study concludes with recommendations for practice which include the note that student-student and student-teacher interaction are just choices and shouldn’t be considered to be hallmarks of all online (or classroom) courses. Good learning design counts!

Blended Learning, Community of Inquiry, Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory, My Work

Self-paced MOOCs and Blended Learning

December 16, 2015Written by terrya

1 Comment

One of the challenges in designing any educational program is balancing the need for individual freedom (of pace, space, relationship, technology and other freedoms that Jon Dron and I have described in Teaching Crowds) with the benefits of social learning. Maximizing freedom leads down a path of individualized and self-paced programming. It may be possible to Have your cake and eat it too, but incorporating social activities into self-paced programming presents many challenges to designers, teachers and students. In this post I want to describe promising developments in self-paced MOOCs for use in blended learning contexts

One of the advantages of blended learning and its variation of a “flipped classroom” is the mix of event based programming with student freedom to shift at least space and time during the asynchronous, online portions of the course. However, aggregating, creating and curating the content and activities for the online portions of this model can present challenges for teachers and especially those with limited levels of network literacy. The growing number of Open Educational Resources and content, not specifically designed for education, but with an open license certainly helps meet this need. I’ve often thought that MOOCs or portions of MOOCs could be ideal material for this task. They often display production quality beyond a single, underfunded teacher/producer and student exposure to well-known academic experts and good teachers can enhance the learning experience. However, two challenges have, to date, frustrated extensive use.

The first challenge relates to access. Most MOOC content and especially that produced by commercial companies is copyright protected and often hides behind passwords or is only accessible a limited number of times during a year. The second challenge also relates to scheduling in that the majority of MOOCs have been paced, meaning the start and finish dates are set by the MOOC provider and these dates rarely match with the scheduling needs of blended learning programs.

Progress is being made on both fronts. The recent “State of the Commons” report celebrates the continuing increase in amount of content licensed with a variety of Creative Commons licenses. This material can legally be included in blended learning courses. On the second front more and more MOCCS are moving to a self-paced delivery format or they are offered as self-paced resources after their debut as a paced course.

This shift is illustrated by data from Class Central, which provides a directory of MOOC offerings from many providers.

As can be seen there are 2,316 finished MOOC courses. Presumably none of the content from these courses is available for re-use. However, there is a significant and growing number of courses that are offered in self-paced format. Udacity has been delivering its mostly science orientated programming using self-pacing almost since their inception. But it is CoursEra who is demonstrating the shift towards self-paced programming most clearly. No doubt they see potential revenue (from completion certificates and revenue generating eye-balls) disappearing as soon as the course has finished.

A very limited of educational institutions (for example Athabasca and Thompson Rivers in Canada, Open University of the Netherlands and Open PolyTech in New Zealand) offered self-paced courses for years. Predictably, course completion in self-paced courses is always less than in event paced courses. However, as CoursEra and other MOOC suppliers are realizing, self-paced courses offer distinct advantages to some students. As described in my earlier post, we have attempting for years to provide “compelling, but not compulsory” learning activities that include social learning opportunities for our self-paced students at Athabasca. These effort have not been overly successful and integration within the administrative structure of self-paced institutions remains challenging. (see for example the challenges uncovered by one of my Doctoral Students, Jan Thiessen in her thesis Self-Paced study at a Distance.

Nonetheless, the much larger context of blended learning, may more easily incorporate self-paced resources in their blended programing. A number of studies have looked at MOOC use in flipped or blended classrooms – (Bruff, Fisher, McEwen, & Smith, 2013; Holotescu, Grosseck, Cretu, & Naaji, 2014; Milligan, Littlejohn, & Margaryan, 2013). Generally they conclude that the social glue from the classroom does a nice job of pacing and providing social interactions between and among students and instructors. Yousef, Chatti, Ahmad, Schroeder, & Wosnitza (2015) also do a nice job of showing how learning analytics can also be used by students to monitor the course and their performance.

Thus, I think self-paced MOOCs will continue to find a valuable role in the ongoing (if SLOW!) evolution of Universities and adult education and learning generally. The classroom experience can motivate and pace while providing an instructor the opportunity to personalize, regionalize or in other ways add value to the MOOC. And finally, let’s never forget the potential of this type of blended intervention to save instructor time.

References

Bruff, D. O., Fisher, D. H., McEwen, K. E., & Smith, B. E. (2013). Wrapping a MOOC: Student perceptions of an experiment in blended learning. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 187-199.

Holotescu, C., Grosseck, G., Cretu, V., & Naaji, A. (2014). Integrating MOOCs in Blended Courses. Paper presented at the The International Scientific Conference eLearning and Software for Education.

Milligan, C., Littlejohn, A., & Margaryan, A. (2013). Patterns of engagement in connectivist MOOCs. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2).

Yousef, A. M. F., Chatti, M. A., Ahmad, I., Schroeder, U., & Wosnitza, M. (2015). An Evaluation of Learning Analytics in a Blended MOOC Environment. The European MOOC Stakeholder Summit.

Blended Learning, Distance Education, MOOCs

European MOOCs – Special Issue of IRRODL

December 4, 2015Written by terrya

We certainly are past the famed “Year of the Mooc” but there availability and I will argue impact on adult education is far from past. This week’s special issue edited by Markus Deimann, Sebastian Vogt adds many new insights – a few of which I’ll comment on in this post.

The first article MOOCs and the Claim of Education for All: A Disillusion by Empirical Data by German authors Matthias Rohs and Mario Ganz works within a critical paradigm to address issues of inequality and lack of opportunity to debunk the notion that MOOCs are “education for all.” The article is well written and has some good conceptual information on Knowledge Gap Theory, but I didn’t find their survey results either original or surprising. I don’t think that finding that most people in Germany who take MOOCs on Adult Education are themselves adult educators and already have University degrees is at all surprising, nor a valid criticism of MOOCs. The notion that MOOCs attract niche audiences is not surprising nor alarming. They also lament the increase in 2-tier MOOCs whereby students wishing to get a certificate and be tested in their learning, are required to pay a fee. However, I think to be viable a MOOC needs some revenue stream and this model still allows the learner to browse or consume with no cost.

The 2^nd article Opportunities and Threats of the MOOC Movement for Higher Education: The European Perspective, by a host of well-known European authors provides an EU centric look at the opportunities and threats of MOOCs. The study uses a twitter hash tag data-collection technique which provides a unique way to do a type of Delphi study, but the participation rate and number of tweets is surprisingly low. No surprises are the opportunities for innovation and collaboration and the (mostly unrealized) potential to move this learning opportunity into valid and widely accepted credentialing of learning outcomes. Conversely the threat (again NOT a surprise coming from Europe) is too much bureaucracy and vested interest in bridging the chasm separating formal and informal education.

The third article by Abram Anders, Theories and Applications of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs): The Case for Hybrid Design is the only article not by a European author. The article does a nice job of trying to categorize the pedagogy underlying MOOCs. It is always nice to see our own work referenced (Anderson & Dron, 2011) and Anders uses our 3 generations of DE pedagogy to map a third “hybrid model” MOOC based on social constructivism. This adds a middle ground between Stephen Downe’s distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs.

The next article Setting-up a European Cross-Provider Data Collection on Open Online Courses describes the start-up phase of the EU- funded MOOCKnowledge project. The article is a call to action for large-scale data collection amongst MOOC providers to gather a host of demographic, motivational, employment and other data from participants. One can almost see the resulting path analysis studies that could arise from their proposed data collection model for predicting outcomes of MOOC participation such as completion and satisfaction.

The next article adds to the long debate amongst distance educators as to what constitutes open, in so-called open education systems. Obviously, MOOCs are central to this discussion – even though we have witnessed evolving meanings of the Open in Massive Open to include student cost, paid text books, use and non use of copyright protection, rigid time pacing and other dimensions of openness. In Dimensions of Openness: Beyond the Course as an Open Format in Online Education Christian Dalsgaard, Klaus Thestrup argue for three dimensions of openness – transparency, communication, and engagement. They revisit Dalsgaard’s earlier work equating transparency with persistence such that student contributions are not hidden behind passwords or destroyed at the end of a course. The article is a good summary of the divisive issues that still divide proponents of MOOCs and other forms of distance education as “open” seeks a viable home amidst economic, privacy, control and assessment opportunities and challenges.

A group of researchers from Ireland next present a classic case study of a single institution, Dublin City University and their attempts to rationalize and develop a MOOC. This is a challenge that has sparked debate in probably every University in the world. Should we do a MOOC and IF we decided to how would we do it? The article takes a cue from the much older debate of picking the best LMS to the detailing the criteria for selection and brief reviews of nine potential MOOC platforms. This is the first comparison that I have seen that tries to categorize the strengths and weaknesses of each platform for the best “strategic fit” with the Dublin requirements. This is a very useful overview of how one university comes to grips with the potential benefits, the cash, opportunity costs and contextualized type of tools needed for a successful implementation. The article will be very useful for any institutions still wondering if there should be a MOOC or two in their educational strategy.

In the second article from EU Home project the authors present results from a series of annual surveys assessing institutional attitude and experience with MOOCs. The article is interesting as it charts the changes in attitude and practice over the past two years. Further it displays differences between European and US universities. There aren’t too many surprises in the data but it certainly shows that though MOOCs have North American roots, the current and present focus – at least at the institutional level is shifting to a global perspective.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart and mind for the local study centre. My first full time job in distance education was as Director of Contact North and I was charged with setting up dozens of community learning centres in small and often isolated towns in Northern Ontario. My PhD work examined students’ perspectives of learning in these distributed communities and this was the genesis of the work that my supervisor Randy Garrison and I did to develop the Community of Inquiry model. Thus my interest in the 7^th article Using MOOCs at Learning Centers in Northern Sweden. In an era when educational programming is as easily delivered to the home or office as to a formal learning centre, it is useful to read about the experience of people who take the time and expense to gather together physically to learn. The article recounts the long Swedish history of “Learning Circles” and provides concrete suggestions for using MOOCs as the content piece of learning – leaving social constructivist engagement to happen face-to-face in a community learning centre.

The next article from Portugese authors is a case study of an iMOOC on Climate Change: Evaluation of a Massive Open Online Learning Pilot Experience. iMOOC is yet another variation on the MOOC sub- categorizations theme that brings some of the expertise and tools from “normal” formal online education to MOOCs. The case study shows high levels of persistence (relative to most MOOCs) and the general success of the model. I was especially interested to see the use of ELGG platform for the social components and integration with Moodle which was used largely as a content provider. Jon Dron and my work on Athabasca Landing, based an ELGG platform, that we created to work in a similar fashion as the persistent social glue to the content provided by Moodle.

The final paper, A MOOC on Approaches to Machine Translation provides another case study of a successful MOOC – this time from Catalonia. The MOOC used the popular open source Canvas platform and the researchers provide lots of graphical displays of demographics, persistence, motivation and perceptions of value.

So what do I conclude? First, if one thought that MOOC was synonymous with American culture and venture capitalists, these notions will be disabused by the refreshing look at MOOC experiences from a European perspective. The special issue editors Markus Deimann and Sebastian Vogt from Germany did a good job of shepherding these 10 high-quality articles through the IRRODL review process and helped IRRODL realize a bit more the ‘International’ in its name. Thanks to the editors and each of the authors.

Second, the issue in total provides a host of practical examples of the way MOOCs have evolved both technologically and pedagogically. As we all experience, it is hard to keep up with EVERTHING, but even a skim reading of this issue will update and show how MOOCs have ridden the roller coaster of hype, through the trough of disillusion and are now ascending to find there rightful place in a world in great need of quality lifelong learning.

Distance Education, MOOCs, Open Scholarship

Where are the Women?

October 28, 2015Written by terrya

This week I am privileged to be a keynote speaker at the 21^st International Congress of the Brazilian Association for Distance Education in Bento Goncalves, Brazil. The scholarly stimulation, hospitality, weather and fine Brazilian wine have been great – but something is wrong. Only 1 of the 12 keynote speakers and none of the 10 officials who addressed the opening ceremony are women.

This inequality reminded me of the ICDE World Congress held at Penn State in 1997, when a very brave women marched to the stage during the closing ceremonies, grabbed the mic and demanded to know if it was really possible for a woman to talk from the stage at this event! Seems like not much has changed since then.

In this post, I provide a list for distance and online education conference organizers of female distance education scholars who I have personally heard give high-quality keynote addresses. I approach the task with some trepidation because I am sure that I have omitted more than one very qualified scholar from this list and hope to be able to edit it with the help of the crowd.

But first a rationalization for producing the list.Read More

Distance Education women keynotes