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Seven Editors Best Picks

Written by terrya

From the special issues of Distance et Médiations des Savoirs -Sous la direction de Martine Vidal

This post is designed first to celebrate this multi-journal innovative and cost effective means to enhance Distance Education (DE) scholarship. Secondly, I provide a very brief overview and annotation of each of the 7 articles in the special issue.

Congratulations and thanks to Martine Vidal for pulling off her second international scholarly collaboration in the field of open and distance education (see her 2008 DMS earlier collaboration of the Right to Education. Martine’s idea in designing Seven sister journals – seven international contributions to distance learning, was to invite the editors of seven internationaly known, peer reviewed DE journals to select the most important article from their journal in the past 15 years.  The editors were asked to select a significant contribution either to research, practice or both.  The resulting special issue appeared (under Creative Commons license) this month online.

Of course, I intended to immediately write this post as a tribute and a review when I saw the issue online. But alas time got in the way, and I may have negleted the task, as I didn’t really read the complete artciles until a free paper copy of the journal arrived in my mailbox.  What does that say about paper vs. electronic journals?

Likely there are readers (including you?)  who think this issue might be of interest, but will you really get around to reading these journal articles??

Hopefully, you can scan through this review and follow a link to the paper that you think sounds most interesting to your teaching, learning or researching – or all three.

I should note that  Distance et Médiations des Savoirs is usually a French language journal, so additional thanks to the DMS staff and editors for producing this  bilingual journal.

In order as they appear in the special issue:

1. IRRODL  Intro by Terry Anderson

Alfred P. Rovai Building Sense of Community at a Distance The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, [S.l.], v. 3, n. 1, apr. 2002

Like the other editors,  we had to consider what constituted the “best article” over 15 years of IRRODL production. First, I went to Open Journal System stats to check out the download numbers. This provides a pretty good estimate of “crowd sourcing”. However, it is biased towards older articles that have had longer time period to gain downloads. Next, I checked some of the top cited articles on Google Scholar and finally,  of course, we used our bundle of personal prejudices and  preferences to pick a winner. 

We choose Rovia’s 2002 article because it dug into the conceptual basis for the growing interest in distance education, not as independent study, but as an example of community operating at a distance.  Rovai’s article led to a companion piece in which he introduced his 20-item Classroom Community Scale that provides empirical measurement of the community experienced by DE learners.  In the introduction I couldn’t help but compare it to the Community of Inquiry model (developed just a few years earlier by Randy Garrison, Walter Archer and myself) and speculated on the greater use and citations of the COI model.  

The Rovai article does an excellent job of a overviewing the conceptual base for 7 dimensions of community- from trust, spirit common expectations to interaction. It goes on to isolate factors of interaction including transactional distance, social presence, social equity and actives associated with the learning design.

2. Asian Association of Distance Education Ramesh C. Sharma 

Fred Lockwood A Ladder of Publication: Scaffolding for emergent authors. Asian J D E 2003 vol 1, no 1, pp 5-11. Asian Journal of Distance Education 2007 vol 5, no 3, pp 10 – 27

Ramesh C. Sharma et Mohana Kumar Rajesh Tutor-Marked Assignments: Evaluation of Monitoring in India [Texte intégral]

Editor Ramesh Sharma choose two articles from the Asian Journal of DE. The first by Fred Lockwood provides a ladder model (moving up from seminars and workshops through chapter and articles to books), to describe the steps necessary to successfully publish and distribute scholarly research article.  It is striking to note the absence of discussion of open access publishing and its advantages, but then the article was written in 2003, long before open publishing culture and even Creative Commons was established. 

A bit strangely, Sharma choose one of his own articles for the second entry. This article examined the results from tutor marking and assessments of hypothetical DE students at Indira Gandhi Open University.  This empirical study looked at the nature and quality of the comments left by tutors after they had engaged in a professional development “orientation”. It is perhaps unfortunate that the study didn’t look at real assessments and feedback, rather than those produced to provide feedback on an anonymous assignment after the workshop – thus detracting from the face validity of the research.

3. EuropeanJournal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (EURODL)

Ulf-D. Ehlers Quality in e-Learning from a Learner’s Perspective. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, May 2004

Editor Uli Bernath choose a great article that overviews the complex issue of quality in learning.  Quality remains a focus, even though so ill and variously defined by all the educational stakeholders – including students. Thus, an article that focuses on learners’ perspective is especially useful.  In an era of increasing opportunity and individual responsibility for life-long learning, understanding what learners perceive as the most important features of e-learning experience is invaluable. The article covers both qualitative and quantitative data to produce 30 dimensions of quality. Generally my head begins to spin when talking about more than three dimensions – so thirty is a bit challenging. Fortunately, Ehlerscondenses these to 7 themes. He then presents data using cluster analysis to try to understand the different criteria for assessing quality by different crowds (aggregates of interests in a DE course).

4. DMS Distances et médiations des savoirs (DMS)

Jacques Béziat Formateur en ligne : vers un modèle d’action Distances et médiations des savoirs, n°1, Décembre 2012. Trainer Online: Towards an Action Model

Monique Grandbastien, Pierre Moeglin et Daniel Peraya  The host editors of DMS provide a nice description of how and why they chose this article.

This article discusses the role of the “trainer” – in this case I think it is like the tutor in a large-scale DE environment.  Unfortunately, my unilingual handicap meant it was much easier reading this French article through Google Translate (great improvement on translating the full article since last I checked!!!).  This model presented and validated, to some extent, (with very small N survey data) the teachers’ role in a paced DE program with synchronous and asynchronous sessions. The model gives a picture of the various types of actions encountered and required by trainers in this context.

5. Open Praxis

Inés Gil Jaurena, editor of Open Praxis introduces (for a number of well explained reasons) her selection of:

Sandra Peter et Markus Deimann On the role of openness in education: A historical reconstruction Open Praxis, vol. 5 issue 1, January–March 2013, pp. 7–14

Given the very long association with DE and openness – a linkage, that continues to grow to this day, is useful to examine the historical perspective – especially to us old guys! In their romp from late medieval to modern times, the authors note the evolving meaning and the various dimensions of openness. They also “highlight the danger of emphasizing one aspect of openness while backgrounding others and how unrestricted practices can quickly and repeatedly become institutionalized”(p. 6)  The article is now over 5 years old but I think there many discussions and technological innovations yet to come to contribute to our openness knowledge and practice in DE.

6. International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education

Irwin DeVries provides a nice little essay that I couldn’t help but love, as it has“my name all over it” literally. In this selection we see a second reference to the valued perspective of the student, as opposed to the teacher, employer, government or institutional perspective

IJDE chose Penny Rush Isolation and Connection: The Experience of Distance Education International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, La revue internationale de l’apprentissage en ligne et de l’enseignement à, Vol 30, n° 2 (2015).

This work analyzes a survey administered  in 2014 to 1002 students enrolled in DEprograms at the University of Tasmania. The analysis of the open-endedquestions reveals what students both like and dislike about DE. As expectedcommon themes for advantages centre on flexibility, self determination,location independence and necessity (the only choice, given life circumstance).Also unsurprisingly, disadvantages include lack of support from theinstitution, isolation and challenges of self-reliance and balancing busy lies.Major suggestions for improvement include more resources, more contact and more communications.

7. Open Education Research

Zhihui Wei introduces Ye Zhonghai, Zhang Yong et Ma Lihua. A Historical Overview of China’s Learning City Construction: Since the 1990’s.Open Education Research, vol. 1, No. 1, 2015

I confess to be quite out of words to describe this article from the Chinese Journal Open Education Research. The article is supposedly about how Smart Cities were designed, planned and implemented in China. However, even after reading the translated version (twice!), I have no idea how a “smart city” is defined, how exactly they function, how they are evaluated etc. etc. I did get LOTS of preaching, politically correct best practices and directions –supposedly for creation of best smart cities, but nothing that really struck me as scholarly rationale nor much of any evidence. Typically, the talk on security measures notes the smart learning organization “is associated with planning, guiding, evaluating, coordinating, supervising, and securing” But again, I have no idea what Smart Cities in China actually organize.

I looked through the titles of Open Educational Research in their archives of 24 years, and I see a lot of interesting titles- related to DE. I also could not locate this particular article as the reference in the special issue (and Google scholar) is incorrect- it isn’t in Vol 1 2015, or even volume Vol 19 1 2015. So I may be losing a lot in translation, but this is by far the weakest article in this special edition.

Conclusion 

I think anyone with a strong interest in improving either practice or theory of DE will learn from and enjoy this special issue. It is nice to see global perspectives and to note the commonality of interests that we share.  I also really liked the mix of empirical results, “think pieces” and historical pieces. This is especially fortunate to get this mix as no one knew before hand what articles would be submitted. Please see links below for more detailed summaries of the seven articles. – or better yet – read the articles yourself!

For more detailed reviews please see the final articles in the special issue by Emmanuelle Voulgre and Clément Dussarps

Distance Education, IRRODL, Open Scholarship

More on Distance Education Journal Rankings

Written by terrya

Both academics and administrators love to argue about the value (impact) of their academic work.  The old adage of “Publish or Perish” still has currency. Despite the many distribution opportunities besides and beyond publishing in scholarly journals, the bean counters (myself included) love citation indexes. The basic idea is that the more your work is cited or used by other scholars, the more impact it has had on the field.  Especially since the onslote of predatory open-access journals that support themselves through publishing fees with minimal peer -review, the decision as to where to send one’s work and the prestige, value and exposure involved in its publication, depends a great deal on the Journal. Work published in prestigious journals is distributed more widely – but of course, these journals also get more submissions, so acceptance is usually more difficult.

Thus, the better authors, submit better work, to better journals – creating a lockin of prestige that favours the older and more established journals.  Given this landscape, how does a new journal both attract quality submissions and then see that the work is widely distributed, such that it is cited by other researchers?

In this post I highlight some of the factors that lead to the success of the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL)

In our case, it was helpful that the discipline is relatively new and expanding – certainly the context of distance, open and online education has expanded since 2001 when IRRODL was founded. It turns out that being an early adopter of online (only) and open access were also critical decisions. Being online only, meant that our distribution and production costs were significantly lower than paper only or dual media publications. Secondly, by allowing free and open access, we allowed scholars from around the world to read our publications, without needing subscription purchases, going to physical libraries or finding our work through proprietary indexes or scholarly database systems. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we had a sponsor (in our case Athabasca University) who felt that the focus of the journal matched well and supported the strategic mission of this relatively new and totally online university.

During the ten years that I served as Editor, we fought many battles with funders, authors, software systems and ourselves!, but we managed to attract a growing numbers of subscribers, authors and reviewers.  A very significant move was as early adopters of Canada’s Open Journal System (OJS), that coordinates review and publication processes. OJS has come to be, by a  wide margin, the world’s most widely used journal publication system – offering open access systems for free in many languages.

So, where are in 2018?

The major commercial journal publishers (notably Scopus and Social Science Citation Index) provide listings of the citation metrics from major scholarly journals in all fields.  These are used as a numeric indicator quality of the journal and the articles published. These ratings are calculated using a variety of metrics but basically they count the average number of times an article published in a journal is referenced or cited by others (now including automated systems). These indexes can be modified to discount self publications, to include a measure of the annual number of publications and the prestige of the journals in which the work is cited and other factors designed to enhance the validity of the count – thus the different column headings in the table below.

The current co-editor of IRRODL Rory McGreal has gathered recent (2017) data from Scopius to produce the table below see .

Journal Title

Acronym

Cite Score

SJR

SNIP

Rank
Journal of Research on Technology in Education
JRTE
3.03
1.435
1.593
1
Educational Technology Research and Development
ETRD
2.79
1.31
1.913
2
British Journal of Educational Technology
BJTE
2.74
1.333
1.815
3
International Review of Open and Distributed Learning
IRRODL
2.5
1.034
1.632
4
Open Access
Educational Technology and Society
ETS
2.47
1.103
1.719
4
Distance Education
DE
2.36
1.001
1.632
6
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology
AJET
1.42
0.854
1.035
7
Technology Pedagogy and Education
TPE
1.4
0.844
1.412
8
International Journal of Technology in Higher Education
IJTHE
1.33
0.425
0.928
9
Open Access
American Journal of Distance Education
AJDE
0.9
0.522
0.72
10
Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education
TOJDE
0.36
0.233
0.559
11
Open Access
International Journal of Distance Education Technologies
IJDET
0.47
0.157
0.328
11
Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology
TOJET
0.32
0.218
0.514
11
Open Access

At one time, is was useful to discount comparison with educational technology journals as the focus of learning design, technology used and delivery was quite distinct between campus and distributed contexts. Today, in an era of blended and extensive technology use both on and off campus, these distinctions are much less meaningful.  By this old distinction, IROODL (followed closely by Australia’s Distance Education) is the most widely cited (of about 20 – not listed here) distance education journals.  The table shows that IRRODL continues to gain ground on the older and more established educational technology journals.

Also of interest is to note that 3 of the 14 journals offer their products freely to all. – giving evidence that publication in an open journal does not result in lower citations.

However it isn’t all that simple. Rory McGreal has informed me that TOJET is not open access in that their freely READABLE articles carry an “all rights reserved” tag.  This of course begs the question of how ‘open’ does ‘open’ have to be?

The gold seal that is supported by the DOAJ  calls for journal articles to “using Creative Commons Attribute (CCA) only.  Adding restrictions such as Non Commercial (CCNC) or non derivative (CCND) means that anyone can still read and cite the work but they can’t change or sell it and there may be other restrictions on re-use.  David Wiley argues that we need to clarify the definition of OER to allow for “free access to the resource” which at least from an end user’s perspective amounts to open access – though it may NOT allow for reuse, re-sale or other purposes. However,  Stephen Downs notes “It’s a clever argument but has the unpalatable consequence that a resource might not be available to anyone and yet still, by this definition, be classified as an OER.”

I’ll not resolve this issue in this post, but I’ve always favoured the rights and convenience to use a product over those seeking to re-use or benefit commercially. From my pragmatic perspective and much as I think that re-use and repurposing of digital media is a major problem in education, serving the needs of end users (students, actual teachers) shouldn’t be compromised by endless debates over ownership. However, I’ve been in enough useless arguments over software ownership by academic developers to know that CC licensing is a game changer for collaborative production. That is why there are a number of licences. Let’s not limit the right for anyone to benefit from the work in order to protect all possible rights of the creator.

Finally, let me address the now old argument  (first made to me by my PhD supervisor) that publishing only online, will limit the distribution of the work.  Open publication results in the work being more widely distributed- especially to practitioners and research audiences from developing worlds or in industry or K12 schools where journal access is often restricted due to costs.

Finally, It should be noted that a growing number of the proprietary journals publishers  (some in the table above) allow individual authors to “free” their work by submitting a publication fee – often around $2,000. This isn’t of too much value to educational researchers who rarely have an extra $2,000 lying around – or needing to be spent from a research grant!

So congrats again to IRRODL, to OJS and to Athabasca University for helping open quality scholarship to the world!

Distance Education, IRRODL, Open Scholarship

Is Google Scholar a Filter Bubble?

Written by terrya
2 Comments
Is Google Scholar a Filter Bubble?

A major  goal of net-based  mass media is to customize the feed that is delivered to each viewer received a unique screen that matches their interest and more importantly their likelihood of purchasing some product or viewing some paid for message.  This phenomenon was labeled as “filter bubble” by author Eli Pariser – meaning that certain results are filtered out creating a bubble of unawareness that surrounds each of us.

I remember my first vivid encounter with these covert filters when I was building a web site some years ago for the Westwood Unitarian Congregation. I was flattered when I noticed that a Google Search started turning my site up not only on the first page of search returns but increasingly in first or second place. I naively imagined that our site was becoming the most popular Unitarian destination in Canada.  Sadly,  I came to realize that this top end response  was only being enjoyed by myself. Google searches filters had determined that I really liked that site (based on my subsequent keystrokes) and thus presented a filtered result of searches for Canada and Unitarian.  Obviously the search engine had established a personal profile for me and was feeding me what it thought would be of most interest to me.

More recently, the use of filters by Facebook to provide customized news feeds to individual users has raised both technical and ethical issues. The diagram below by TechCrunch demonstrates a small part of the filter system used by Facebook and other media outlets.

Facebook Filter bubbles

One can argue the value of these filters (how many ads for women’s perfume do I really need or want to see?) but they come a cost of reducing the variability that exists throughout societies and may leave us blind to ideas or events that we may  have both interest and expertise.

This is no more critical a problem than in academic research.  When doing any quality work and especially that associated with PhD study, the candidate as an obligation to purview all of the relevant literature.  Long gone are the days when this could be accomplished by a few afternoons in the periodical section of the library. Today this means searching through the academic databases – extracting and reading everything relevant to the topic.  This can be done using proprietary search indexes such as Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) or rival product Scopius, however I have long argued that these indexes discriminate against both new Journals in the discipline and especially those that are Open Access.

Google Scholar is my first choice for such searches for a number of reasons. First it providing broader coverage than its competitors that includes documents from the grey literature (conference papers, reports, white papers etc.). Second it indexes far more journals in the educational discipline than either Scopius or SSCI. Third, empirical tests have shown that the results are not significantly different when using any of these indexes (see Harzing, A.-W. K., & Van der Wal, R. (2008). Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis. Ethics in science and environmental politics, 8(1), 61-73.)  Finally, and critically importance for scholars in developing countries and those non affiliated with a relatively rich university, is that access to Google Scholar search is free of charge (unlike SSCI).

So tying these two threads together (choice of search engine and covert filtering), leads to an obvious and important question. Does Google Scholar filter results?  Or can one expect different search results to arise when different scholars with different experiences, interests and use profiles?

I was pleased to hear that has question has been addressed and the results did not displease me (ie they made it past my filtering to be presented to you, in this blog!!). The study:

Yu, K., Mustapha, N., & Oozeer, N. (2016). Google Scholar’s Filter Bubble: An Inflated Actuality? Research 2.0 and the Impact of Digital Technologies on Scholarly Inquiry, 211.

compared Google Scholar research results using variety of default and advanced settings  (see abstarct below) and it concluded “that the filter bubble phenomenon does not warrant concern.” Unfortunately the chapter and the book are not open access however the main points can be seen from the Google Book abstract or the publishers preview.

Thus, my faith in and appreciation for the service provided by Google Scholar has increased.

 

 

 

ABSTRACT:

This chapter investigates the allegation that popular online search engine Google applies algorithms to personalise search results therefore yielding different results for the exact same search terms. It specifically examines whether the same alleged filter bubble applies to Google’s academic product: Google Scholar. It reports the results from an exploratory experiment of nine keywords carried out for this purpose, varying variables such as disciplines (Natural Science, Social Science and Humanities), geographic locations (north/south), and levels (senior/junior researchers). It also reports a short survey on academic search behaviour. The finding suggests that while Google Scholar, together with Google, has emerged as THE dominant search engine among the participants of this study, the alleged filter bubble is only mildly observable. The Jaccard similarity of search results for all nine keywords is strikingly high, with only one keyword that exhibits a localized bubble at 95% level. This chapter therefore concludes that the filter bubble phenomenon does not warrant concern.

 

My Work, Open Scholarship, Unitarian,

European MOOCs – Special Issue of IRRODL

Written by terrya
European MOOCs – Special Issue of IRRODL

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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 2nd 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 7th 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

Why you should do design based research (DBR)

Written by terrya

In this post I’ll review and respond to two useful posts by Rebecca Hogue – Why you shouldn’t do Educational Design Research Part 1  and Part 2.

First of all I think the title is quite misleading, in that my reading of it provides amble reasons for doing DBR, in line with the literature. Perhaps I should allow a bit more literally license, but I expected the posts to be attacks on DBR itself as a mythology for doctoral student research. However, the series does highlight contexts and understandings which are inconsistent with DBR and thus is of significant value.

 

My second problem, is that Rebecca urges the readers to first read her article:

Hogue, R. J. (2013). Epistemological Foundations of Educational Design Research. Paper presented at the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education.

Unfortunately, she only provides the link to the article in the EdIT database, which charges for access. I was able to access it through my University, but I urge Rebecca and others to NOT submit her work to closed sources (if possible) and to post the article in open fashion if you must give copyright away. Let the copyright police get after you. The worst that can happen is a cease and desist order, unless the copy owner can proof significant economic loss from the infringement.

The first post notes the underlying epistemology of the DBR research paradigm. Pragmatism  supports and defines DBR, action research, many “mixed methods designs” and some types of grounded theory. In the post, Rebecca does a great job of explaining the differences in research design, research questions and methodologies that do not create a ‘mismatch’, with the overarching research paradigm. She gives a good example of why students interested in the nature, phenomena or experience of learning, should be using interpretive paradigms and not pragmatic. One can easily provide additional examples of valid research questions that really are only a match with positivist or critical research paradigms.  Both her article and this post provide amble evidence for the particular epistemological underpinnings (Pragmatism) that are associated and she argues, and I agree, are  required of a DBR research project.

She goes on talk about the output of a “design” as itself being a valid research output. I also agree, but always urge my DBR students (from my own pragmatic world-view) to provide emperical evidence (qualitative and quantitive) that their design has or has not worked – that is as important a contribution to the research as is the design.

The second post is more “pragmatic” and gives 3 potential “show stoppers” which can derail a DBR research thesis.

The first deals with time and notes that a dissertation takes time and the problem should still be around when committee, ethics and a zillion other delays have been surmounted. I would add the converse, that DBR studies almost always involve multiple iterations. This is fine for an established academic to build a research agenda upon, but is nearly impossible for a DBR student who wants to graduate with the decade they begin!!  In science a PhD student can often do a small piece of a research agenda being enacted within their supervisor’s “lab”. Unfortunately, in education due to funding problems and lack of clear and concrete identification and action on particular problems, doctoral students often have to create and define their own research problem and context.

Jan Herrington et al have addressed this issue in more detail see:

Herrington, J., McKenney, S., Reeves, T., & Oliver, R. (2007). Design-based research and doctoral students: Guidelines for preparing a dissertation proposal. Paper presented at the Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications, Vancouver. Retrieved from http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/6762/

As an aside, note how the above article was published and likely owned by EdIT but there are 5 other versions (including the uRL above) of the article (mostly in University databases) available.

A final constraint that I would as is that the intervention must be feasible and cost effective. If one is designing for example a mobile app, one needs the resources to actually create a compelling app that likely needs to run on multiple operating systems. Without resources and time, the design may fail, not because it isn’t an effective design, just that it can’t be built within the contexts of the environment in which it is designed to operate. DBR is pragmatic in more than just the epistemological sense of the word.

 

Design Based Research, Open Scholarship

Great Firewall of China

Written by terrya
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I’m on research and study leave (aka Sabbatical) this year and I see that I have been ignoring my blog as well as a number of other “normal responsibilities”. But I have been learning and enjoying. After a 6 week road trip through Eastern Canada and the USA, my wife Susan and I  are just ending a 4 week visit to China.

Our VERY gracious hosts for this trip have been the faculty and students in Distance Education and Educational Technology at Beijing Normal University. Education universities here in China still use (in English) the rather old fashioned term “Normal University” – (not implying that other universities are not normal, nor that the education ones are more normal in the modern sense of the word). Beijing Normal University BNU was founded in 1902 and is China’s 2nd oldest and one of the 3 or 4 most highly respected Universities in China.

I was charged withdoing lectures in 6 classes for PhD and Masters students, 2 lectures for Faculty and students and along the way, accepted invitations to talk at 3 other Universities. In addition I was asked to do a literature review on Interaction in Online Learning. Given the overwhelming interest in various types and modes of interaction in online education in the literature and in my own career, I didn’t think this should be too great a problem. With the help of a grad student from Canada, we did Google Scholar searches for the 10 most cited articles in each of the past 10 years, that included the words Interaction and “distance education” or “online education” or elearning in the title. We then began classifying them by types of interaction (student-student, student content etc.), methodology, context and tried to get a sense of results of recent scholarship. To increase efficiency we stored our spreadsheet of results and first outlines of the paper on DropBox.

Well, major surprises when I attempt to to continue the work in China.  I had heard that some Google services weren’t available, so I changed my browsers to use Microsoft Bing for searches -which worked OK, but much less coverage from Google Search). But I began to realize how Gogglized my life had become. Fortunately Google Mail works most of the time, but Google Scholar was also disabled along with Maps, Image search, Google Books, Google Earth, YouTube and most everything else Google that I use.  Wikipedia lists 2,701 banned sites but I am told that sites come and go with irregular frequency and certainly no accountability. I was particularly sad to loose Google Scholar because I have it set to let me access all of the full text works from closed works that are not available on the Internet but are available to folks like myself with university access to a number of journal databases. I am able to logon to my university library account directly, but when this hotel internet, (shared with MANY University offices) gets used during daylight hours, Internet speed gets VERY slow.

I knew that Google and the Chinese government had a major dustup, but I was surprised to see how many other services were blocked. no Twitter, no Slideshare, No DropBox, No FaceBook,  and likely a number of other services. For the first week, I couldn’t access CBC.com but now it is available – perhaps the Chinese Government  has gotten over the outrageous behariour of either our Prime Minsiter or Jian Ghomeshi, even if I haven’t!)

I also came to realize how Googlized other aspects of my life have become. As Editor Erimitus of IRRODL.COM, I was very surprised to find that this open access journal is basically unusable here in China. We had installed an automatic translator app, in large part becuase of the growing interest in China and many other developing countries in distance education research. But I had forgotten that it used Google Translate (banned). Further investigation found that we used Google analytics, google API’s that are built into the Open Journal System we use and one other Google service – on each page view!  As result the IRRODL site works SLOWLY, one has to wait while it calls and eventually times out on 4 different calls to banned services, making it functionally useless. sigh…

Most of new Chinese friends are aware of the problem, but have a number of standard responses. First, the blocked services have invigorated a number of Chinese social networks and commercial services. Many of these web services such as wechat, Renren, Douban  and Jiepang  have millions of users (they have achieved critical mass) and arguably are as good or better than English language services. Secondly most academics use their library databases and seem quite resigned (no protests in the streets here) to doing without some of the systems that have become part of my personal learning network. Finally, there are MANY services which provide services for $5-10 month. I asked a friend if they were not worried that the government would come down on them for bypassing their control systems. He was quite confident that the government didn’t mind, as they were doubtlessly monitoring his VPN access and getting the potential miscreants using fewer services makes their monitoring job easier!

So, it has a been a great visit to China. We’ve seen many of the top tourist sites, squeezed into quite a few over crowded buses, subways and elevators and had many conversations with fascinating students, academics and ordinary Chinese- well at least those who speak English.

I can understand the Chinese motivation to get out of the domination of new media by Western (and mostly USA) services. We’ve been struggling with that in Canada for decades. But heavy handed blocking seems to make academics compete in research endeavours with one English language arm tied behind their back!

Distance Education, My Work, Open Scholarship

African Council for Distance Education 2014

Written by terrya
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African Council for Distance Education 2014

Zambezi Valley

Zambezi Valley

I was honoured to be invited to do a keynote talk at the 4th conference of ACDE in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. After sitting up for 2 nights on a plane (42 hour journey) I was very glad to reach the Elephant Hills hotel and a soft bed. The hotel overlooks the Zambezi River and the constant myst of the Victoria Falls can be seen about 3 km away.

Mist rising from Victoria Falls

Mist rising from Victoria Falls

The next day I took a tour of the Falls, and they did not disappoint. They reminded me a lot of Niagara – maybe not so tall, but wider and the same deafening roar as millions of gallons of water churn over the cliff. Victoria Falls Victoria Falls

I did my talk the next day entitled ” Using Open Scholarship to Leapfrog Traditional Educational Barriers And it went OK, but the elaborate formal greetings and pomp of the opening ceremonies, meant that my time was really constrained- though I did manage to squeeze in a joke and give away a copy of one of our open access, Athabasca University Press, Issues in Dist. Educ. series books. The afternoon was spent at a very interesting workshop present by UNESCO and Fred Muller in which he challenged the Open Universities of Africa to embrace and develop MOOC applications- rather than fear them as we seem to do.  I was very impressed with over 200 MOOCs put together by 13 European OpenUpEd collaborators as a service- not profit see openuped.eu.

Generally the African Open Universities are focussed on quality production of print packages and support (tutorials, testing etc) in local learning Centres. They suffer from the same prejudice from educated elites, and the faculties of traditional universities, but of course their costs are much lower. It is clear to all that sufficient campus universities will never be built to accommodate the large and growing demand for higher education in Africa.  Many of  the presenters presented compelling cases for more support, but also presented evidence of the changes that their programs are making in the lives of disadvantaged students.  All the participants seem to have a sense that they should be using more net based technologies, but judging from the general absence of laptops by all but a few of the conference delegates, I think that net access and literacy is an issue not only for students but for faculty as well. This has been a very short trip, but the kindness of new friends and of the Zimbabwe people I have met here at the hotel is long!

Design Based Research, MOOCs, My Work, Open Scholarship

Greewich Connect connects with us on a number of levels

Written by terrya

I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent conference paper (reference below) by folks at the University of Greenwich who are reporting their first year results from a project (Greenwich Connect) that is designed to induce a variety of open and social programs to the university teaching and learning communities.  The surprise was pleasant because we have been attempting a similar project here at Athabasca University- known as the Athabasca Landing. However, it was unpleasant to read that the challenges they are facing are very similar to our own and some days they seem intractable.

The contrast between contexts is as striking as the similarities in challenges. Greenwich is a 2-campus University in the UK, while Athabasca is a 100% online and distance education institution in Canada. However we both share a passion “to enhance the connectedness of learners at a curricula and teaching and learning level” .

Greenwich Connect is a 2 year, $750,000 initiative funded and championed by their Vice Chancellor (President). (see project description)Read More

Distance Education, OERs, Open Scholarship

Where is Higher Education’s Digital Dividend?

Written by terrya
1 Comment

One doesn’t need to devour political or economic analysis, listen to experts or even chat with one’s friends to realize that the Internet has changed the way we produce and consume information and the myriad ways in which we communicate. Blogs, wikis and Facebook walls have granted to each of us –a multimedia printing press with global delivery capacity – at VERY low cost. Similarly we can engage in audio, video or text conversations with politicians, relatives, co-workers or “followers” at VERY low cost.

Given that education works by nurturing interactions and communication among and between teachers, students and content, it would seem logical that the costs of education, like its component interactions would also have drastically reduced in cost. However, this is not the case. Despite the possibility of a digital dividend students, in every country, are being met with heavy increases in the cost of education.Read More

Distance Education, MOOCs, My Work, Open Scholarship

Does teaching presence matter in a MOOC?

Written by terrya
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A recent study of a Coursera MOOC is really interesting in that it implemented a random assignment of student to 2 conditions – one with no teacher interaction with the students and the other with teacher and teacher assistant interaction in forums. The study is

Tomkin, J. H., & Charlevoix, D. (2014). Do professors matter?: using an a/b test to evaluate the impact of instructor involvement on MOOC student outcomes. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2566245

The study concluded that teacher presence had no significant relation to course completion, most badges awarded, intent to register in subsequent MOOCs or course satisfaction.  This is of course bad news for teacher’s unions and those convinced that a live teacher must be present in order for significant learning to occur. However, the findings is predicted by my Interaction Equivalency Theory in which I argue that if one of the three forms of student interaction (student-student, student-teacher, student content) is at a high level, the other two can be reduced or even eliminated.  Adding additional forms of interaction may increase satisfaction (though it seems not to have done so in this experiment), but it most certainly also increases costs and thus decreases accessibility.

Tomkin and Charlevoix argue “The results of this study broadly support the connected learning model, at least for these motivated, educated participants. The absence of the professor did not impact the activity of the forums – the participants did generate their own knowledge in this arena. It should be stressed that this MOOC was highly structured, so an alternative explanation is that the enhanced machine interactivity that MOOCs provide relative to textbooks, or older styles of distance learning, may be sufficient to stimulate student engagement. ” p. 75

I see this as one the few tangible outcomes of the “digital dividend” that actually results in cost savings to students.  The student-teacher interaction was morphed into student-content interaction through the digital videos. The study shows there was student-student interaction, however in no teacher interaction MOOC, this interaction was both stimulated and supported by the students themselves.

I’m discouraged by the ever increasing costs of higher education and most notably our incapacity to scale higher education to meet needs (and the capacity) of students in developing countries. I believe we have a moral obligation to help all students become proficient life-long learners who are capable of learning with or without active teacher presence – despite the potential impact on our own employment.

 

Distance Education, MOOCs, Open Scholarship