MOOC assortment

  by camknows

An assortment of MOOC thoughts inspired by this week's news feed.

There is some concern that many MOOCs are simply repositories of content in the form of lectures, reading and automatic tests and are not even really courses at all. This is the main point behind a post by Justin Reich, Is a MOOC a Textbook or a Course? Yes there's plenty of good material there and you can certainly learn a lot but you're largely on your own and the question is whether this can be considered a coherent course. I feel that such types of MOOC are perfectly valid as long as they don't pretend to be any more. It's vital that every MOOC describes clearly and upfront exactly what type of course it is (or not) and explains what types of study the student should expect. That can be one quality criterion; a clear statement on what's in store for the learner, the type of course, pedagogy and demands. All I've seen do this well but maybe we also need to know what the MOOC doesn't offer, just to avoid any misunderstanding.

Then there's the excellent report from the University of Edinburgh on the results of their first MOOCs under the Coursera banner. As Donald Clark reports on his blog, Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises, students were clearly satisfied with the courses on offer with only 2% responding that the course did not meet their expectations. The report also confirms that very few MOOC students are motivated by certificates or credits and that attempts to provide a social aspect to the courses via course forums seldom work. Somehow the key element of the connectivist cMOOCs, networking and collaboration, do not translate well into the xMOOC paradigm (my wish for 2014 is that we find a new terminology for all this). Forums tend to be confusing, overcrowded and not always particularly interactive and most students seem to go it alone.

Maybe the reason for the cMOOCs succeeding in creating a dynamic learning network was that the participants were usually digitally literate academics who were already used to such an environment. The xMOOCs however attract a much wider range of participants, many of whom may not be used to online learning at all. Many sign up expecting a fairly traditional course and expecting it to be largely self-study even if the organisers might wish it to be otherwise.

So how do we get learners more involved in MOOCs and how can we foster collaboration and networking? Peer review may be the best bet and already some courses are use peer assessment as a powerful teaching and empowerment tool as well as providing meaningful feedback. Students need training to be able to offer meaningful feedback to each other and this can be built into the course at an early stage. If a set of assessment criteria for a task is given to students and they can practice on a test case first they can then assess each other. Studies indicate that peer assessment often comes very close to the grades given by experienced teachers, though the feedback may not be as insightful.

There's an article on MOOC News and Reviews,Massive MOOC Grading Problem – Stanford HCI Group Tackles Peer Assessment, that describes peer assessment in MOOCs and gives examples of how this can lift the learning experience of the MOOC to new levels, without involving faculty at all.

"I recently completed a two-week video production course on the Skillshare platform that used peer reviews. While the course was not for college credit and the only rubric used was to foster positive comments even while pointing out areas for improvement, knowing I was commenting on the work of my cohorts made me dive into the course more deeply. I felt a certain sense of fairness at play: I was going to make my project live up to the standard I set for others. In the end, I put in more hours reviewing comments and working on my projects than I spent watching the instructor’s videos and engaging in other assignments. The comments I received from my peers spurred me to rethink, revise and improve my project."

Finally this is exactly the approach being offered by NovoEd, yet another new kid on the MOOC block.
They divide students into groups of up to ten, based on location or interests and those groups then support and assess each other through the course. Creating group loyalty and a small scale study environment even in the vast sea of a MOOC could well be the road to follow.

Read more about NovoEd in an article on TechCrunch,Stanford’s NovoEd Brings Collaboration And Group Learning To MOOCs To Help Fight Attrition.

Don't believe the hype 2

  by elizaIO

Don't get me wrong, I'm enthusiastic about the new opportunities for learning that the net and social media offer. However there is a danger that in our enthusiasm to embrace the new educational landscape we enjoy hearing what we want to believe and choose not to take conflicting opinions too seriously. Those who can express our hopes an beliefs in an inspiring manner can win a massive wave of support and attain guru status and this is of course fairly typical human behaviour. So when people like Sugata Mitra, Salman Khan or Daphne Koller so convincingly challenge the traditional educational system and offer the hope of new solutions it is easy to get swept away in a wave of enthusiasm without stopping to challenge our beliefs.

Now I too am inspired by these and many other leading figures in the educational debate and am really looking forward to hearing two of them (Robinson and Mitra) at the EDEN conference in Oslo in June. However it's worth digging around to see if there is another side to the argument. Maybe children don't really learn so effectively completely on their own, maybe flipping the classroom is not really the solution to motivating kids and maybe the growth of MOOCs is not as open and free as we would like to imagine.

Two articles in the past couple of months provide necessary wake-up calls for us all. Firstly Donald Clark's article, Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt, casts doubt over some of Mitra's claims about self-learning children. It's not quite as simple as it sounds and Clark presents evidence that there were commercial interests behind the famous hole-in-the-wall project and that it does not prove that schools are irrelevant. Read the article and consider.

There's also a timely article by Irene Ogrizek, Daphne Koller and the Problem with Coursera, which questions the motives behind Coursera and other commercial MOOC providers. She's not the first to question the commercial motives behind the MOOC-explosion but notes that Coursera and other MOOC consortia present a convincing case for democratising and opening up education but we forget that they are for-profit commercial operations with a duty to provide ROI to their investors.

"Coursera is a for-profit company that has joined with top universities to deliver free online courses. The “free” part sounds great until we realize that the real intent of companies like Coursera is to transition into producing monetized, for-credit university courses. To many academics this represents a conflict of interest that compromises the independence and integrity of higher education institutions."

Read these tow articles. It's worth remembering there any many sides to every story.

It's a MOOC, Jim, but not as we know it ...

CC BY-NC-SA by jeveaux

Every week I think maybe I can avoid writing about MOOCs but it seems impossible since the phenomenon totally dominates all discussion of online learning. Sometimes you get the impression that online education has only just been invented and that the only way to do it is by aiming at a mass market. There's plenty of good online learning that isn't MOOC-shaped and some of it is far more pedagogically innovative and collaborative. The definition of a MOOC that is embedded in the name is getting increasingly blurred and it's getting very hard to see where the border goes between a MOOC and a regular university course.

This week's announcement of a whole degree program, an accredited Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS), to be offered by The Georgia Institute of Technology, Udacity and AT&T certainly blurs the definitions considerably.

"All OMS CS course content will be delivered via the massive open online course (MOOC) format, with enhanced support services for students enrolled in the degree program. Those students also will pay a fraction of the cost of traditional on-campus master’s programs; total tuition for the program is initially expected to be below $7,000. A pilot program, partly supported by a generous gift from AT&T, will begin in the next academic year. Initial enrollment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates. Enrollment is expected to expand gradually over the next three years."

They aim to offer different participation levels with different price tags so that some students will be studying online for credits and paying for it whereas others will be participating in only the courses they choose and paying a small fee for a certificate but no credits. This is a far cry from the original idea of a MOOC as an experimental educational arena where learning takes place in networks and students define their own learning objectives, creating content that is then processed and adapted within the network. OMS CS looks very much like a regular online degree but at a much lower fee. The difference is that much of the university teachers' workload is transferred to mentors at Udacity and students will probably have to be much more self-reliant than their more expensive campus colleagues. Some fear that this is the academic equivalent of low-price air travel and are concerned at how academic standards can be maintained.

The big news for some is that suddenly a MOOC has a price tag but I'm surprised it took this long. The freemium model is coming to a MOOC near you very soon. Access to the material may be free but if you want tuition, guidance, validation, examination and quality assurance you will have to pay, one way of another. However the sense of revolution and innovation that the original MOOCs created is rapidly disappearing as the new interpretations of the concept develop business models. It's all beginning to look very similar to the system it was supposed to be challenging and considering that the main drivers are the leading universities in the world that should not be any surprise either. Read more about this in an article on Inside Higher Ed, Massive (But Not Open).

Many fear that MOOC consortia will soon reveal their true colours once they've captured the mass student base and are fearful of the way we are being won over by the lure of "free". Bob Meister (University of California) has just written an open letter to Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera entitled Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? voicing concerns that the free education offered today is a way of gaining a customer base and a volume of data that can then be turned into for-profit services. The vast amount of investment being made into the MOOC market will be looking for some solid returns in the not too distant future and even if some of it remains free for the student it is worth remembering the adage that if you are not paying for it then you are the product.

I think we will see a development where the division between the different MOOC models will become even more pronounced. The academic innovators and researchers will continue to offer free, challenging connectivist MOOCs based on collaboration, creation and sharing whilst the institutions and consortia will find hard business models for more traditional online courses with a variety of fee options aimed at mass audiences. And the term MOOC will disappear into the buzzword junkyard.

Grabbing attention

  by williamhartz

I often return to the subject of attention, often because I have a problem with it myself. I have great difficulty switching off both digital and physical distractors when I'm working and could get much more done if I could resist the sirens' call. I don't believe this is a new phenomenon but the lure of social media has certainly exacerbated the problem. It has a lot to do with where your motivation comes from and the fact that if you want to be distracted you will be. If you have a task you are extremely committed to then it is much less likely that you'll bother checking e-mails, Facebook, Twitter or news feeds. If it's a task you have to do but are not particularly interested in then it's hard to focus and the task takes at least double the necessary time.

Online learning offers great flexibility and is often the only form of education available to people with full-time jobs as well as family and other commitments. However it demands high levels of self-discipline and the ability to focus and many are simply not good at that. Even when you sit down and try to focus on your studies, say a recorded lecture or an article to read, the distractions are always temptingly close and work that could easily be done in one concentrated hour can easily take two or three.

So when designing an online course are there methods for helping the student to focus on the task in hand? This area has been the subject of research by Daniel Schacter and Karl Szpunar of Harvard University and summarised in an article in Harvard Science, Online learning: It's different. The idea of breaking up lectures into small digestible segments is commonplace today but their research shows that it is not enough. You need to have regular tests of some sort between the chunks of information, not too challenging but tricky enough to make them focus.

“At the very least, what this says is that it’s not enough to break up lectures into smaller segments, or to fill that break with some activity,” he said. “What we really need to do is instill in students the expectation that they will need to express what they’ve learned at some later point. I think it’s going to be a very sobering thought for a lot of people to think that students aren’t paying attention almost half the time, but this is one way we can help them get more out of these online lectures.”

This approach applies just as well to classroom as online learning and although it doesn't sound particularly surprising they claim there is very little research in this area so far. It seems a rather primitive behaviourist carrot and stick method but we need only look to the world of gaming to see how motivating small rewards can be and the total concentration and immersion that gamers experience. Khan Academy for one has been built around this principle with short input films, tests and a system of badges and levels to show progress. Although these are important considerations I still think the article focuses on only one aspect of online learning and misses the big picture.

This article seems to focus too much on the need to force students to focus and see the testing as a form of stick rather than carrot. I think there is enormous potential to adapt the reward principles of gaming in an educational context but the focus in the article is on traditional knowledge transmission and does not deal with learning as an interactive process. The online learning focused on in the article is the traditional self-study linear model rather than collaborative networked learning arenas where digital skills, source criticism, networking and peer review are essential. The challenge is to move from external motivation where students are forced/encouraged to focus to instilling internal motivation where they actually want to focus and the distractions simply evaporate.

A MOOC on cheating

  by Mr_Stein

Cheating in online courses always attracts a good deal of media attention and is often accompanied by cries for tougher measures to counter cheating as well as criticism of online learning in general. So if we are going to deal with this issue how about organising a course on the subject? This is exactly what is now offered by Bernard Bull of Concordia University Wisconsin - a new MOOC called Understanding Cheating in Online Courses. It's a course for educators to investigate different types of academic cheating, how to spot them and especially how to design courses that make cheating either very difficult or irrelevant. Not surprisingly the course is already full (1000 students) but is most likely to be repeated given the current interest.

"Participants in this eight-week open course will examine philosophical and psychological perspectives on cheating; consider instructor, institutional, and student perspectives on cheating; learn about specific strategies and practices used by students to cheat in online courses; and develop a plan for cultivating a culture of honesty, integrity, and accountability in online courses. The end goal of the course is for participants to gain a deeper understanding of cheating in online courses."

As with most MOOCs there are no credits available for the course (not worth cheating basically) but there are a number of badges available for successful completion of the modules. However it may inspire other universities to include for-credit courses in this field since we need to investigate and understand more fully what we really mean by cheating and whether we even invite cheating by choosing certain types of instruction methods. 

In a networked world where we borrow, remix and reuse other's work in increasingly sophisticated and creative manners we really need to revise our ideas on "cheating". Copying and imitating others is a vital part of learning, as long as we clearly show that we are doing just that. When you don't know how to approach a problem at work you consult your network to see if someone has the answers or at least some assistance. At work this shows initiative whilst if you did that with an examination task it would be cheating.

Read a good overview of the course in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, MOOC Teaches How to Cheat in Online Courses, With Eye to Prevention.

MOOC quality project

How can we assess quality in a MOOC? Is it even possible to have quality assurance in an educational form that is constantly developing and is already split into several distinct categories?

Over the next couple of months I will be helping to run a blog called The MOOC Quality Project under the banner of EFQUEL (European Foundation for Quality in E-learning) together with colleagues Ulf-Daniel Ehlers and Ebba Ossiannilsson. The project will feature leading experts in the field of open education who will take turns in writing a weekly blog post on how they see the issue of quality in MOOCs.

- The MOOC Quality Project, an initiative of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (www.efquel.org), attempts to stimulate a discourse on the issue of Quality of MOOCs. A series of blog posts of worldwide experts and entrepreneurs will address the issue from each particpant’s viewpoint. After each blog post we will allow a one week period of time to react and comment on the post made available. At the end of the week the discussion will be shortly summarized and made available to all.

We hope that the articles will stimulate discussion and we will use the findings as the basis of a session at the conference EFQUEL Innovation Forum 26-27 September in Barcelona.

This subject is extremely relevant in response to the extreme hype surrounding MOOCs and the expected skeptical reaction. How can we apply quality assurance methods in this field since MOOCs differ significantly from "regular" courses? First of all there is no clear definition of a MOOC. Many of them are not so massive, few are genuinely open and some are not really even courses in the traditional sense. Donald Clark recently listed the diversity of MOOC models in his post MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC. There's a huge gulf between the open connectivist learning networks of the courses run by the likes of George Siemens and Stephen Downes and the more traditional lecture-based model offered by Coursera. So it's difficult to discuss quality in MOOCs in general terms, it depends on which type of MOOC.

One key quality factor is missing in MOOCs, namely the target group. Courses normally have a clear target group and can measure success by how well the course meets the needs of that group. There is no real target group in a MOOC, everyone is welcome. The participants' aims and motivations differ widely and many have no intention of even completing the course. How do we then assess the quality of a course that will mean very different things to many different people?

At a basic level a MOOC offers free access to a collection of educational resources that together form a logically linked progression. Quality here is the value and relevance of the resources and how they are linked. Many MOOCs have little or no qualified tutoring or guidance, only offering online arenas for student communication. These arenas can be quality assessed for their functionality but little more since what goes on there is out of the control of the organisers. Maybe the real quality issues of the MOOC phenomenon lies in the "value-added" services that are on higher layers than the course material. If tutoring, guidance, validation and examination are available at a price then these add-ons can be more easily assessed and quality guidelines set up.

It'll be very interesting to read the views of the experts in weeks to come!

Just because you can

  by Cycrolu

When I went on holiday 15 years ago or more I thought a couple of 36 photo film rolls were easily enough to capture those important moments. The cost of developing those photos meant that every camera click was carefully considered. Today I take hundreds of photos, not because I have to but mostly because I can. I delete the worst ones but I keep about 90% of them even if I know that very few people in the world, if any, are likely to want to see them. We all sit on vast collections of photos and video footage that are hardly ever viewed. Since digital storage is free or inexpensive it's easy to save everything, just in case.

Maybe we spend so much time filming and taking photos that we actually forget to simply enjoy the real experience. Whenever you go to a major tourist attraction the place is swarming with people all taking thousands of very similar photos of the same place, from much the same angles. I'm in there with the best of them but I sometimes wonder why. I suppose it's the need to prove that you were actually there and in recent years to prove that to all your friends on Facebook. I do often enjoy seeing friends' photos on Facebook, especially if they've been somewhere interesting. Sharing memories and experiences is what drives social media and fulfills the need to create bonds and common reference points. However maybe we have to step back now and then and wonder if we really need to take all these photos and films and whether we are sometimes more focused on that than actually enjoying the experience.

An article on CNN, At concerts, put that cell phone down, complains of the forest of mobiles held up at concerts with everyone taking blurred photos and recording poor quality films of the performance. YouTube is full of dreadful concert video clips that no one ever watches and the author wonders why we do it.

"It's difficult to explain just why we do it -- why having a very basic camera in our pocket compels us to shoot photos and videos of live music that, deep down, we know we'll never look at.
Part of it might be the delusional notion of preserving a memory, but it's probably more about showing everyone in social media that you're actually out of your house doing something culturally important. As opposed to staying in and slathering your body with ranch dressing."

The article cites a recent example of the rock group the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who put up signs at a recent concert appealing to fans to keep their mobiles out of sight. Let the people behind you see the show. The chances of you getting any decent footage are slim and it's simply an unnecessary irritant.

"Of course, if you have a quality camera and can get up close, there's definitely an art in concert photography. And people certainly appreciate that.
But for everyone else, let's all agree to give it a rest. Do it for you. Just experience the music, take it in, and we'll talk about our favorite moments over late-night food."

Change the focus

  by thejuniorpartner

When I was a student just about everything I wrote was for a very exclusive audience; generally one person, a teacher or examiner. No-one else would ever read it. I wrote purely to be assessed and it wasn't a very stimulating, fulfilling or realistic process. That's why today's students are writing assignments that are published publicly on the net or made available on the university's open access archive. When you know your work will be available to all you automatically raise your game, suddenly the assignment is real and not a test. Shift the focus and change the view.

A similar change of focus can inject much needed energy to the tired ritual of course evaluations. A short article by Brian Croxall, Improve your Course Evaluations by having your Class Write Letters to Future Students (Chronicle of Higher Education), describes how he choose a new angle for the end-of-course evaluation. Instead of handing out the standard evaluation form he asked the students to write a letter to next year's students giving them advice and tips about the course and the teaching. By changing the focus from writing to a faceless administrator to a group of fellow students the task suddenly became meaningful and the feedback was much more enlightening. The quantity and quality of the feedback was improved.

"... I found that the students wrote, on average, far more on these evaluations than they have on past ones that I have provided. And in writing something directed at fellow students rather than me or some faceless, unknowable bureaucracy, I’d say that the students were much more candid. This means that they are more direct in talking about my strengths and weaknesses. And while it’s nice to hear the former, it’s the latter that will actually help me do a better job the next time around."

A slight change of focus can often make a big difference.

Test for success?

  by jackhynes

There are many paradoxes in education today. For example, on the one hand there is an increased focus on standardised testing and educational league tables that compare schools and universities based solely on test scores and on the other hand the need to foster entrepreneurship and creativity in schools. There is considerable evidence that success in tests does not correspond to creativity and innovation. However, the more national authorities focus on success in, for example, PISA the more teachers will need to teach the test and that in turn leads to students focusing not on learning but on cramming facts to pass the tests.

There is of course intense competition between nations as markets become more global and every country tries to stay ahead of the competition by being more innovative. But maybe standardised testing in schools and colleges is counter-productive. This is the essence of an article by Katrina Schwartz, In an Era of Global Competition, What Exactly Are We Testing For? which discusses the research Yong Zhao, professor of education at University of Oregon. Zhao has compared students from countries with high test scores in mathematics, like Korea and Japan, with countries with lower average scores and discovered a negative correlation between high math scores and confidence. The "successful" students are not particularly interested in the subject they are supposedly excellent at and have low confidence in their ability. They have focused on memorising the facts needed to pass the test rather than applying them and thinking creatively.  In schools where students can choose more freely and have more control over what they learn and how they learn there is greater commitment and higher levels of creativity, even if they may not perform so well in standardised tests.

What is the focus for educational institutions then? Should education start with a curriculum of facts that every student must know or does it focus on the individual and build on her/him? It would seem to be a choice between conformity and creativity. We need to learn how to learn rather than learn to pass tests.

“The new education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content,” Zhao said. “We start with individual differences; we start with their cultural strengths.” Beginning with the individual and building upwards from there allows each person to become uniquely great at something. And when students are passionate about anything, they can then be creative and entrepreneurial. For Zhao, the new model has to be about creating a new middle class based on creativity.

To do that, he suggests giving students more autonomy over their learning and emphasizing the importance of making authentic products that solve problems. He also emphasizes a global learning community that can collaborate to fill the gaps that each country, school or teacher experiences.

The problem is that tests focus on facts and acquired knowledge but do not test the skills that today's employers value most: creativity, entrepreneurship and collaboration. If we really want to promote these skills we need to find new methods of assessing real skills and practical competence and let students follow their natural talents and learn in the manner that suits them best.

Buzzword pruning

  by C.K.H.

A lot of buzzwords have really passed their sell-by dates and maybe its time to bid them a fond farewell. We've been sticking 2.0 on to lots of words for at least 10 years and it simply isn't cool anymore. Cyber- is another term that has lost its sting. Talking to friends on Skype or Facebook is not cyberspace, I'm simply talking to friends. I also feel that we should tone down the e- in front of learning since it's about time we saw the e- as default and that education should of course make use of the technology and communication opportunities that are used in society in general.

A blog post by Richard Byrne, 21 Reasons to Stop Saying "21st Century Teacher" makes a good case for dumping another overused term. Since we are now 13 years into the 21st century it doesn't sound impressive anymore and the skills and teaching we are referring to are firmly rooted in the present decade and cannot be seen as typical of an entire century. We still have 87 years left of this century and a lot will happen in that period. Would we describe skills or technologies from 1913 as typical of the 20th century?

The post is also poking fun at all those list articles with titles like 5/10/20/21/30 awesome uses of the latest technology. Let's check our language use from time to time and do a bit of buzzword pruning.

Wait a minute ... isn't buzzword a buzzword?

Who are MOOCs really for?

CC BY-NC-ND Some rights reserved by catspyjamasnz

I've written before about the irrelevance of looking deeply into completion rates of MOOCs. Due to the fact that MOOCs are free and (relatively) open they should not be compared to regular university courses. The typical completion rates of around 10% obviously alarm those who view MOOCs as alternatives to for-credit courses. However, given the fact that such a completion rate for a course with 50,000 students would still give more successful students than several years of campus courses, they maybe don't do so badly after all. What so many articles seem to miss is the fact that the target group for MOOCs is not traditional university students at all. I would like to see some studies on the demography of MOOCs to see who's really using them and I suspect that the traditional student group of 19-25 year olds is not as well represented as you might expect. MOOCs do not really compete with higher education, they make higher education material accessible to people who would never otherwise have access to it.

This is the theme of an excellent article by Oscar Becerra, The One Laptop Per Child Correlation With Massive Open Online Courses. He starts by stating that "MOOC Target Audience are Currently “Non-consumers” of Education", meaning that MOOCs should be seen as an exciting extension of higher education allowing millions of people to explore new fields that were previously closed off to them. Whether these people complete their courses or not is not really very interesting, it's what they feel they have learnt from the experience.

"What we need to bear in mind is that the MOOCs are trying to make better quality education available to a great mass of people who are currently “non-consumers” of education and such quality is currently superior by far to whatever they may be getting right now. The MOOCs are not aimed to people who are willing to cheat but to those willing to learn ...
... we may say the MOOCs and online education offerings available today are “good enough educational offerings” helping ordinary people who are willing to learn to reach goals that had been out of their possibilities so far."

MOOCs are not regular university courses and we shouldn't compare the two. You do not get the same levels of tuition and guidance and you need to be highly self-sufficient and digitally literate to be able to benefit from them. But you can learn a lot from them if you apply yourself and that in itself is a justification. At the moment I suspect the majority of MOOC students are graduates and professionals who are trying out the new arena out of curiosity. People like myself basically. We are often only interested in looking at methods and content and seldom stay for the whole course (I'm guilty as charged here). This group is highly self-sufficient and many are educators themselves with little interest in credits even if they were available. I'd be interested in seeing how the demographics change as the hype dies down. I suspect that the curious academic category will fall off and the group of new learners, people outside higher education, will increase. They are the real target group of MOOCs but they are not in focus at present due to the vast numbers of "curious academics" so maybe we should reserve our judgement on the MOOC phenomenon till the dust settles.

The music of teaching

  by MITO SettembreMusica

Teachers and students have a vast range of resources to use: books, audio recordings, films, tests, simulations, games, photos, diagrams etc. The teacher's role is putting selected resources into context and finding methods to help students to reflect on and develop that input. However, although we have documented and stored so much content we have not succeeded in documenting or recording actual teaching methods in a standard format.

Teaching resembles in some ways the performance of music. You have lots of instruments that can be used and integrated in complex or simple structures and there are a wide range of styles to choose between. Courses can be orchestrated and can involve soloists as well as different groups of musicians or combinations of instruments. The difference is that music has a standard form of notation (at least western music) and is therefore accessible through the centuries. Teaching on the other hand has no form of notation, no way of expressing how a lesson or course is orchestrated, so that other teachers can draw on previous practice. Teachers often have to work in their own silo reinventing the wheel rather than being able to draw on other's experience.

We've created open educational resources (OER) but the big question is how to fit them all together. Maybe we need to develop a language for open lesson plans with a standard notation form that all teachers understand and can interpret. A choreography for teaching, Not to slavishly follow but for each teacher and class to interpret and adapt.Teaching is becoming increasingly complex today and it feels like time to develop methods to transfer teaching practice.

This is where Learning Design comes in. I've just read an interesting paper called the Larnaca declaration on learning design that describes various attempts at devising a notation for teaching (download the paper from the website). One such attempt is called LAMS Learning Design system (see example below). The lesson plan is represented by a diagram with a number of linked icons. Each icon tells what type of activity is proposed and each icon is linked to further embedded information on the details of the activity and even xml-code for educational technologists to be able to implement this activity in say a learning management system. The example below shows the organization of a roleplay and has a linear format but other learning designs could have more complex structures.

CC BY-NC-SA James Dalziel at http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=690433

The article contains several other attempts to find a graphical means of describing the structure of a lesson and the potential for this is enormous. Not simply to describe how a one teacher has devised an effective method for helping students to grasp a particular concept but that now other teachers can easily interpret this plan and use it themselves. Just as a piece of music can be played in a variety of styles and interpretations so can a learning design be interpreted in various ways, depending on the teacher and the class context. Some forms of music, like jazz, depend greatly on improvisation whereas classical music stays more true to the written score. The same may be true for teaching using learning design. The key is recording and transferring good practice. If we can also find ways of linking to relevant open resources we can create complete lesson plans.

Time for open learning design to build on open educational resources.

Can you own a digital purchase?

  by Jemimus

If I buy a book, a music CD or a DVD movie I own it and when I get tired of it I am free to sell it to someone else. This principle of ownership seems simple enough but in the digital world it suddenly ceases to apply. An article by Dan Gillmor in the Guardian, In our digital world you don't own stuff, you just license it, describes a recent American court ruling against a start-up, ReDigi, who proposed to start a market for people to resell digital music.

"Had the users of the startup, ReDigi, been selling used CDs via any number of online stores, there would have been no issue. But the music in this case was stored in computer files, so the doctrine of "first sale" – your right to resell what you've bought – didn't apply.

ReDigi tried hard to live up to the spirit of copyright law. It created a system where the uploader of a "purchased" iTunes song would lose access to the music after the file was transferred to the new "buyer's" computer. Yeah, right, said the record company and the judge – there's no way to ensure that the "seller" wasn't keeping the song anyway."

The same problem applies to e-books, e-magazines and all types of digital content. Because it's so easy to make perfect digital copies the companies argue that you can't really own digital content, simply the right to access it yourself and that right is not transferable. Many libraries have encountered difficulties in lending e-books and often have to pay considerable sums to be able to lend such content.

June Breivik points out another absurdity with digital content in a post about how e-books are often much more expensive than the printed equivalent (blog post in Norwegian).

Is the high price some kind of compensation for the fact that once bought the content may be copied? The ruling against ReDigi would suggest that we need to rethink our principle of ownership when it comes to digital products and that you merely pay for the right to borrow rather than own. Many digital content services are subscription based and if you stop paying the subscription your content is no longer available.

But if I pay money for something that I don't really own and do not have the right to resell, the price for this service should logically be much lower than the purchase of the physical equivalent which include reselling rights? It seems that the content companies are still uncomfortable with digital formats and are applying an analogue business model that doesn't quite fit. I don't have the answer but new models are needed to avoid absurd examples like the above.

The future of education is diversity

  by Mark Brannan

There are a lot of articles about the future of education/schools/universities full of claims and counter-claims about exactly which technology or method will prevail. I think the answer is that education and learning will take place in a wide variety of settings from traditional classrooms to virtual worlds and in many modes from independent self-study to small collaborative projects to massive online courses. In the past education was more limited to face-to-face meetings at set times or to correspondence courses with long response times. Today there are so many options available to satisfy all preferences. MOOCs are not going to replace regular university courses, they simply add new options and new arenas for learning for those who learn well in that type of setting.

There are plenty innovative platforms for learning. One such that has just caught my attention is the London based site The Amazings. The idea here is that people with a passion for a practical skill can offer classes to anyone in the area via the site. The focus is on older people (over 50) being able to offer their knowledge and skills to the community and earn money for it. These classes, workshops and courses range from £15 to £140 and are all face to face sessions in the London area though they plan to expand to other cities as demand increases. The teachers are not necessarily qualified but are all enthusiasts who want to share their knowledge. Classes take place in all sorts of places but never in a classroom. Their tone is refreshingly honest and hype-free:

"Who are the classes for?
Anyone who wants to learn but hates formality. We want to make learning more fun, more friendly, more social, and more personal. If you want certificates or diplomas, keep on walking. If you're interested in learning for its own sake, we've probably got a class for you."

Read more about the Amazings in an article in the Independent, Meet the Amazings! Keeping knowledge alive. Here's a short video that presents one of the courses, how to play steel drums:

At present there are very few online courses in the Amazings but a similar service that has been around a while now, Skillshare, offers a wide range of online informal courses as well as face-to-face sessions in various cities (mostly in the USA).

People helping other people to learn, online, in person, anywhere, any time. If you can't meet physically you meet online. It's all about people communicating, helping, learning. There is no best method, no killer app, no disruption. It's about diversity, choice and flexibility.

Boredom is good for you

  by joshme17

Is boredom is becoming an endangered state of mind? We have almost abolished boredom from our lives today because the second we feel the slightest hint of it we check our mobile for a game, an app, some music, a film or at least check Facebook or Twitter for updates. We used to get very bored waiting for buses or trains but not any more. Everyone is absorbed in their own private soundtrack. We all demand entertainment and contact 24-7-365.

Boredom and its colleague silence are not a popular couple these days and we try to eliminate them wherever they might appear. When was the last time you sat in a cafe, pub or restaurant that didn't have background music (often foreground music)? Runners and walkers are cocooned in their playlists. Do we ever allow ourselves to be alone, in silence and without any particular plan of what to do next?

An article from BBC News, Children should be allowed to get bored, describes research carried out by Dr Teresa Belton (University of East Anglia) on children and boredom. She has interviewed people about how boredom affected their creativity as children. She found many who were inspired to creative activities through boredom and silence:

"Enforced solitude alone with a blank page is a wonderful spur."
"As I get older, I appreciate reflection and boredom. Boredom is a very creative state."
"She happily entertained herself with making up stories, drawing pictures of her stories and going to the library."

Many people today are willing to pay for retreat weekends free from noise and distractions, hoping for inspiration and balance. Silence and a lack of stimulation are becoming exclusive commodities. Maybe it's time to reassess boredom and see its positive side.