I’m always looking out for ways to share and collaborate effective practice and use of technology in learning and teaching. The other week I came across @LearningWheel “a model of digital pedagogy” created by Deborah Kellsey (@DebMillar24).
Over the past year so I have been using and encouraging colleagues to try Blendspace and the Learning Wheel “Blendspace in 8 steps” was a fantastic resource to be able to share.
Exploring the site I was struck by how the learning wheel closely mirrored the model for blended learning we use here at GCU .
I was also really encouraged to see the strong community building and sharing ethos the site is fostering, as well as the simple but effective approach to sharing practice through a series of resource wheels.
“A Resource LearningWheel focuses on a ‘single’ digital resource e.g. Moodle or QR-Codes or Twitter. They offer numerous practical suggestions for using the resource which are aligned to each of the four modes of engagement.”
If you have an idea, a resource, a system that you use or want to develop and share practice then you are encouraged to “captain a resource spoke”. Just get in touch and a few days later a collaborative google doc will be created and the collaboration can begin. The step by step guide to writing the guide helps to keep things clear and simple too.
So I’ve taken the plunge and decided to captain a spoke based on Sway. I’ve been using Sway for a while now and again encouraging colleagues to “have a go” with it too. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the positive response it is getting too. So, if you use Sway at all then why not come on board and add your suggestions/uses and help to generate another open, shareable resource.
“This is the second time in 2 years where I have voted the same as millions of fellow citizens but found myself on the wrong side of a very small majority. I am left wondering how and why democracy has failed me.”
I wrote that last Friday, and almost a week on I am still wondering. Unlike my friends and colleagues Lorna, Martin, Frances and more recently Helen, David and David – who inspired me with title for this post – I haven’t really had the words to describe what I am feeling. I thank them, and the countless other personal reflections I have read over the past 5 days for their eloquence, compassion and integrity.
I too feel despair, confusion, despondency. Mostly though I feel like I am experiencing a type of out of body experience. One where all around me chaos is descending, I try to shout but no one can hear me, so I just float on. Sometimes laughing at the insanity, sometimes close to tears.
Like many others living in Scotland I’ve been here before. But that was different. That didn’t matter to THEM, until it looked like the yes campaign might win and then we got the Vow. We were lied to then, and THEY won. They told us the only way Scotland could stay in the EU and was if it stayed in the UK. We took our democratic revenge in the general election – but still we don’t matter to them. They still lie.
Our “United Kingdom” has been taken to the brink by ego and internal Tory party politics. The disaffection of so many has been horribly manipulated by over simplification, acceptance of casualised racism, the conflated and convoluted myths of immigration and migration, not to mention barefaced lies.
In a bizarre way I almost admire the way that the leave campaign was able to return the many serves that Project Fear sent their way. All economic arguments were dismissed as experts have “got it wrong in the past.” BOOM! Take that Project Fear. No-one can beat the “taking back our country” return. And no-one could. Or at least no-one was actually given the opportunity.
THEY saw to that. Where was the rigorous debate, the balanced media coverage? I don’t know about any research being done around the coverage of both campaigns, but from my point of view dear old Auntie Beeb seemed to revel in the easy headlines that Vote Leave campaign gave them. “I don’t agree” was an acceptable explanation, headline and lead story. Why were the leave campaign not taken to task about a plan after a leave vote? Why are they still not being taken to task about that? This has been the greatest political swindle possibly of all time.
And it’s all down to to THEM. The media, the establishment, the “oh it’s ok to take a gamble so I (or my new BFF) can become PM because we won’t actually win”; the just scare them the way we did to “the Jocks”; the I can’t reconcile my own political views with the vast majority of the membership of the party I led so I’ll just do the absolute minimum because the leave campaign can’t win, can it?; the disaffected public who wanted to protest about so many things other than EU membership.
Sadly there’s probably a part of me in some (but hopefully not all ) of THEM. So where now? We all we need to take back control of the debate from THEM. I rejoice in the fact that so many people since Friday have taken to social media, have blogged are looking for ways to question the majority, are having their say. We need to demand that we get proper debate, not pop concert arenas staged for waving and cheering. We need to demand young, ethnically diverse people lead the coverage, not the old guard – not THEM.
The result last Friday morning proved that UK mainstream politics are not listening, We need to overwhelm THEM with our voices, our petitions. We can’t continue to let THEM get away with it. At the same time we must not disregard the other THEM, the ones who used the referendum as a protest. We need to help them see the facts, the truth so that they can never be victims to another swindle like BREXIT.
What a day. I feel I need to write something today, but to be honest I don’t really know what. The results of the the UK EU referendum has stunned me, and many others. What it all means I don’t know, but there will be consequences. The known unknowns will be making themselves visible very quickly. In many ways the debate over the UK being in or out of the EU actually starts today. However, this is not a political blog, but Brexit is already affecting my everyday working life.
This morning I gave a presentation to the UHMLG Summer conference on learning analytics. What a day to be talking about data and predictions! As I was presenting I made references to so many cross European, EU funded collaborations – not least the LACE project. I have been involved and benefited from so many EU funded projects, it really saddens me to think that future collaborations could be curtailed.
Part of my talk centred around the ethics of data use and collection. What happens to us now in the UK? It was only the power of the EU that was stopping Mrs May et all from turning Britain into a total surveillance society. Who is going to protect my data rights now? I spotted this post on twitter which seems to suggest that there is hope from the web and big and open data, that the UK will have to comply with wider EU and global regulations, but will it?
Today is sad day for many. I feel stunned. This is the second time in 2 years where I have voted the same as millions of fellow citizens but found myself on the wrong side of a very small majority. I am left wondering how and why democracy has failed me. In the meantime here are my pretty pictures from this morning.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, but I think it’s time for a revival. This week’s outing was to the first of the Jisc #connectmore16 conferences organised by Jisc Scotland and hosted at Forth Valley College.
The events are an opportunity to “Connect with your peers, learn more about their good practice and how, through Jisc, they are making most of digital” and yesterday certainly did that.
I was very impressed with the college campus, what a lovely space and view. Also the spaces we used for the break out sessions were really well kitted out too ( although we might have had a few more people than they were designed for squeezing into the sessions). I was particularly pleased that we had a smart board for presentation as I was able to be all “swooshy” ( aka share some of my digital capabilities) with my presentation which I created using Adobe Spark. I am liking this tool more and more. I was great to see some appreciation from the audience too.
#connectmore16 Love the credibility when speaker presenting on #digitalcapability is using tools like Spark, padlet, google forms to do so.
I have to confess though, I did find the onscreen keyboard a bit of challenge but the excellent IT support staff did a re-calibration and found the wireless keyboard. I wish all our learning spaces were as well kitted out.
I presented in the Leveraging change through digital capability, alongside Lawrie Phipps, Jisc and Terri Smith, West college.
Throughout the day I was reassured by the similar challenges colleagues across FE and HE are facing in terms of using (digital) technology effectively for learning and teaching. As ever this opportunity for formal and informal sharing of practice ( particularly over the lovely cakes and scones provided) is invaluable.
This storify gives a great overview and flavour of the day’s activities and discussions and below is my presentation.
Over the past month or so directions, locations and travel seem to be on mind a lot. Not just because it’s coming up to holiday season, but also because things have been a bit unsettled at work. A number of conference presentations and blogs have appeared in my twitter stream and have also got me thinking in terms of where and how I do things and how that is perceived by others. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while but I have finally found the space and place to do it today.
This podcast from James Clay features a discussion with Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lancos based on a blog post they wrote called “something, not somewhere, and increasingly somewhen? . The post reflected on some work done by Jisc back in 2007 which explored location independent working in universities and a policy developed by the University of Coventry. I wasn’t aware of the report but have to agree with the points made in the post about the lack of more examples of a more formalised approach to this type of flexible, location independent working in Universities.
“Why isn’t location independent working more widespread in higher education contexts? We wonder here the extent to which the suspicion of using digital places and tools to facilitate working presence is related to the generalized suspicion of screens and the conviction some people have that digital presence isn’t “genuine” or “real” enough. The privileging of physical interactions at the expense of the potential for digital interactions to enhance or substitute for face-to-face meetings happens in classroom settings as well, with professors banning laptops, thinking that will make their students pay more attention. This flies in the face of what we know about the rich potential of online interaction, the ways that people engage in important parts of their lives online as well as face to face.”
I am relatively fortunate in that I have a reasonable amount of flexibility in my job. Working from home is not frowned upon, and in certain circumstances I actually think I am more productive when I work from home. Particularly if I have some writing to do as I don’t have the same distractions as when I’m in the office.
I still have my online presence during these times and that connectivity ensures that I can still interact with colleagues as and when necessary. I don’t need to be on campus to fulfil certain tasks. As Lawrie and Donna highlighted:
“The recognition that work does not just take place on the campus is more important now than ever before. Fixing an individual’s role to a place, in a culture where identity is becoming more important than role, can lead to loss of productivity in the individual, but from the institutions perspective it is also losing the opportunity to become greater than the boundaries of its official self. Tying the work of individuals to a physical location ignores and blocks the benefits of being networked scholars and practitioners, of using the spaces of the web to facilitate and enhance their work, regardless of where they are physically.”
In the podcast Lawrie also highlights that often we confuse presence with work, and assume if you are “in the office/on campus” you are working and ergo more productive than if you were somewhere else. I’m pretty sure we all know of instances where that is most definitely not the case. The old walking around with some paper (or perhaps an iPad now) with a sense of purpose trick did spring to my mind.
How does this networked, location independent way of working then impact on the traditional role of the campus based education. As much as we still equate work with “the office” we still tend to equate learning with “ being in the classroom/lecture theatre”.
Sian Bayne’s recent keynote at the Networked Learning Conference explored notions of “campus codespaces for networked students” (Jenny Mackness has also written a great summary of Sian’s talk) Although primarily thinking about distance learners, Sian’s presentation raises key questions for campus based education too and key questions for every university in our increasingly digital age.
“the university can no longer be seen as a bounded stable place – static container in which education takes place. Instead it is re-cast as a complex enactment by which people, buildings, objects, machines are brought together to produce certain performances in certain places at certain times”
This is really a significant shift in perspective which I don’t think is being fully realised particularly by senior management. Later in the presentation Sian highlighted this blog post by James Lamb which gives a fabulous critique of a new university policy around student leave of absence and relates that to research about learning spaces he carried out with Sian
“We also looked to the work of Edwards et al. around mobilities and moorings to argue that when teaching and learning takes place within digital online environments, the university becomes characterised by ‘flux and flows rather than simple bounded space’ (2011, p.153). While our research focused on ‘distance’ learners, the distinction between students who attend classes within the university’s physical buildings and those who do not, is becoming increasingly blurred. “
So how do these flows and interactions really fit in terms of our current practice particularly around student attendance? Like many other institutions we have a swipe card system for students to swipe into class. This does help with many important regulatory conditions the institutions needs to fulfil such as visa compliance. But again, we come back to the simplistic notion that if you are on campus you must be “learning”.
I still believe that campus does provide an vital hub for both learners and staff (both teaching and administrative). When we talk about the learning environment, we are talking about so much more than the VLE. It’s about our own personal learning/working environments and networks. The physical campus still has a large role in facilitating this and as I have argued before, evolving more into a digital hub with analytics capabilities that can provide us with more sophisticated measures of learning than swiping in and out of classrooms. Then we can start to have more nuanced conversations about where and when we are working and learning.
(Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44272)
Dear Reader you may have noticed a change in title from my more common “where’s Sheila been” an “What’s Sheila’s seen” this week. Today I am thinking more about where I, and indeed many of us in the sector, are going. As usual this is a bit of a half formed post about “stuff” running through my mind, sparked by the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen this week.
On Monday I attended the ALT/BIS Learning and Technology in Further and Higher Education symposium. This was a really positive meeting in terms of “our” community getting the chance to share and talk with representatives from BIS, some of the challenges, models and opportunities that both FE and HE across the UK are facing.
Open policy, practice and badges were all covered by the presentations. Martin Weller (OU) aand Neil Morris ( Leeds University) shared their respective models of policy to practice. Martin also gave a helpful overview of some of the evidence and international business models around open education. Peter Kilcoyne and Peter Robinson (Heart of Worcestershire College) gave a really inspiring presentation about their Blended Learning Consortium.
This now has almost 20% of the UK college sector as partners. It’s the tried and test model of “if we all put a little in then we all get a whole lot more out.” In these times of FE cuts and restructuring doing a little with a lot is critical. Bryan Mathers (City and Guilds) gave a beautifully illustrated talk on the power and potential of open badges to help fill the twists and turns that people who fall out of formal education have to take. Bobbie McClelland (BIS) provided a useful overview of the current FE landscaping review in England, stressing the need for strong digital leadership.
The discussion afterwords, was, as ever, wide ranging and ALT will be producing a summary of the proceedings of the day over the coming weeks. A couple of things have been circling the forefront of my mind since the event. One is about the move from policy to practice and then business models and the other is around leadership.
The Blended Learning Consortium is a fantastic example of a ground up, sector led approach to addressing funding cuts and mandatory requirements around online provision. It’s essentially a content creation and sharing club. It’s open in the sense that any college can join, but the outputs are just for those in the club. How much more effective could that club be if the funding model was flipped a bit of funding from each college was put into a pot, and the resources were created and openly licensed? Top slicing isn’t in favour just now, in case you missed if folks, that’s what I ‘m talking about. Increased regionalisation shouldn’t lead to more silos of content. We could have a cost effective model based on open content, if only we had the leadership to drive it. Which brings me to my next point – leadership.
During the discussion I made the point that we need leaders who “walk the digital walk”. By that I mean people who actually use digital technologies, and don’t wear their “I’ve never used twitter, I don’t understand all this social media nonsense” badge with blazing pride. We need people who do understand the frustrations and simple pleasures of using any kind of VLE, who understand the difference between open and freely available software, who know that there is more to open education than MOOCs who you know, have a bit of digital capability . . .
Maybe it’s because it’s a Friday afternoon and it has been a very looong week peppered with restructuring fun for me, but I can’t help thinking we in our institutions and in the sector in general are in danger of heading down the wrong road.
Open seems to be slipping off the agenda and not being recognised as much as it should as a sustainable, alternative business model. Partly because there are too few people in leadership positions who understand and engage with it. There’s the beginnings of a good debate on this kicking of on the Open Education special interest Jisc Mail group which is far more eloquent and informed than this post.
I’ll leave you with the song that’s been playing in the my head too this week, and hope that , as David Byrne says, “it’s all right”.
Firstly I want to thank Amy Burvall for her post which has helped me to find a way of sharing something that was dancing around my mind towards the end of last week.
I have the Timehop app on my phone. It basically pulls feeds from Facebook, twitter etc and each day shows slightly random vignette of what you shared 1 year, 2 years, 5 years ago. It has about 8 years worth of posts of mine to play with.
It’s equally reassuring and disconcerting to see how regularly certain events occur over the years; and a reminder that actually the trees and tulips do bloom at around the same time every year.
Towards the end of last week Timehop, in its not quite so serendipitous manner, reminded me that it has been 2 year since I started playing with sketch noting, or as I have come to call it “doodling” as a way of recording keynotes at conferences I attend.
It was at the Blackboard Conference in Dublin that David Hopkins and I had a chat about the experiments and approaches he had been taking. David suggested having a look at Mike Rhodes book The Sketch Note Handbook, and mentioned an app called Notability.
David was (and still does) draw on real paper but I wanted to experiment with using my ipad. Duly inspired I got the book, downloaded the app and had a go. My first attempt were done post conference but I quite like the idea, approach and the outcome.
Encouraged by people like David, and my doodling heroine Giulia Forsythe ( I remember watching awe as she drew a talk on an iPad about 5 years ago at a conference in Vancouver) when I go to conferences/events I try now to make a visual note or doodle of what I have heard. Following Giulia’s example, I share my doodles, usually via twitter as I go along and also via Flickr with a CC licence so they can be re-used openly.
Like many people I don’t really think that I am particularly creative at work, so reading Amy’s post really help affirm this little creative work related part of me. I also realise that I when it comes to sharing, I am far more comfortable with sharing my “stuff” than many of my colleagues. So whilst I can relate to the positive feeling Amy mentions when you create something, I am aware of this train of thought:
“. . . many have the notion that creativity is synonymous with artistic talent, and they freak out when they are asked to be “creative”…Thinking this way snowballs into an extreme lack of creative confidence. We feel we our work is unworthy before we even begin. Or worse — we feel we have to wait for inspiration before we can start on a creative project.”
If you can hold a pencil, you can create and line ergo you can draw! But I realise not everyone wants to, but perhaps more importantly the issue around sharing fundamentally comes down to this?
“Being concerned with what people think of you or your work, or the chances you have in succeeding with an idea, or — this is the worst — how much better other people are at what you are attempting is only going to inhibit what can possibly come out of you.”
Like my blogging, my doodles are primarily for me. They aren’t great works of art, they’re not supposed to be. They are just a representation of what I have been listening too. Some work better than others. Looking back at them, there is a similarity (perhaps a style) to them. My style is very different to Mike Rhodes and Kevin Mears (who did a fantastic job of my OER15 keynote) – I will never be that neat. I don’t go back and “fix” them – perhaps I should.
The act of creating them makes me listen in a different way. Looking at them reminds me of the talks in a different way than reading text about the talk. Other people seem to like them too, which is always nice.
I’m not advocating that everyone needs to start drawing/sketchnoting, though I do notice more people doing it. As Amy highlights throughout her post, I would encourage you, dear reader, to try something a bit different, maybe something visual, be it taking a photo, creating your own bank of images, ones you create and/or ones that inspire you. Think about using them in your learning and teaching (remembering of course to check the copyright on them – CC ftw) get your students to experiment to. It’s a great way to get them thinking creatively and also to start to think about copyright/ ownership and use of images.
When Professor Paul Kirschner started his keynote on the second day of the #LAK16 conference, with the opening lines from the Dickens’s classic a Tale of Two Cities, it chimed with me on a number of levels. Yes, in the way he intended around the utopian and dystopian views of the potential of data and analytics, but also in terms of my recent two conference experiences.
#oer16 and #LAK16 were neatly planned to run the week after each other, in the same venue at the John McIntyre Conference Centre, University of Edinburgh. The infrastructure for each was very similar, however I found them quite different experiences.
Taking liberty with Dickens, the thought “it was the best of times, it was the best of times” has been running through my head as I try and synthesise and make sense of both conferences.
Although very different experiences and each conference had a different focus there were a number of key themes that kept surfacing. This post is an attend to bring together some of my thoughts from attending both conferences.
Scale, gender and community
Both conferences were respectively “the biggest” (and best) for each community. Both had more submissions, papers and delegates than previous years. Both drew an impressive international attendance, and their timing I’m sure made lots of sense for delegates coming from the Southern hemisphere. With over 400 delegates #LAK16 was almost double the size of #oer16. So it was a different scale of event.
I know the #oer16 co-chairs and committee were very conscious of gender balance (hurrah, there are still too many all male keynote/panel conferences, and too much mansplaining around ed tech). I didn’t see/hear any gender stats at #LAK16. Anecdotally I can say it seemed like a pretty good balance. With 3 keynotes, there is always going to be an imbalance. I also didn’t go to any all male panel sessions, and I think I pretty much had a 50/50 split on paper presentations.
I’m very lucky in that I have been interacting with both the LAK and OER communities for a number of years. I’ve actually been to one more LAK conferences than OER ( last year in Cardiff was my first time at OER). I haven’t been to LAK since 2013 in Leuven so I was surprised by just how much the attendance has grown. Both communities are welcoming, and the twitter backchannel for both was very active and engaging.
I did feel that there was a lack of extended community driven engagement in LAK compared with OER. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation. There was more live streaming of sessions at LAK ( a bigger conference + bigger budget allows for that, there is only so much (and he does an awful lot) that Martin Hawksey can do by himself! ) However LAK did miss the equivalent of edutalk sessions from John Johnston. This type of community broadcast is becoming increasing popular, and imho, useful in conference I attend. Of course it does rely on people like John doing it.
On the other hand I did really like the sessions after each keynote at LAK for an extended conversation with the speakers. I know there are many community events in the LAK community such as SoLAR flares, and the LASI summer schools. But these do get a bit of funding and support. For example the LACE project has had a specific community building remit for Europe. Now that funding is coming to an end for LACE, I wonder if more grassroots “stuff’ will emerge?
Data and Culture
No surprises that data featured highly on the the #LAK16 agenda. Ethics, ownership, use, impact permeated the conference From the opening keynote from Professor Mireille Hildebrandt, which really got us all (and particularly all of us in Europe) thinking about new data regulations, ownership and use of data; to the myriad of questions and conversations throughout the conference that looked at the how, why and how of using data.
Data ownership was also a big part of OER16, particularly with Jim Groom’s keynote which centred on reclaiming both data and hosting of said data. Again this is just my perception, I found LAK discussions working more at the institutional (meso) level and not really engaging with the personal (micro) data as much. Understandable since most of the presentations were dealing with institutional data.
As legislation increasingly gives users more rights over how their data is being used, I think there is potential for some greater cross over between the communities in terms of openly exploring the boundaries and fuzzy areas of educationally relevant data, data ownership and data use.
If more and more learning happens “outside the LMS” as was said more than once last week, then how do we develop the workflows, agreements, sharing practice that allows me, as a learner/individual, to host my data and make informed choices about what systems to share/give access to my data that will help my longer term educational goals? Similarly, where are the crossovers with learning analytics and the third sector ?
The theme of #oer16 was Open Culture, and it was great to have input from third sector organisations around the potential of open-ness (content, data and practice) out with the education sector. Catherine Cronin’s opening keynote of #oer16 addressed cultural issues around inequality, culture, participation and open-ness head on. Changing societal, organisational and personal attitudes to open-ness is an ongoing debate in the open education world.
Cultural change was also very high on the agenda at #LAK16. Just how do you change institutional and personal cultures to support, adopt, explore the potential of using data and learning analytics is something that many of us, not least myself, are struggling with.
Again another great opportunity for some crossover, and the development of more informal, open networks around developing practice. The DELICATE checklist and winning conference paper, Privacy and Analytics – it’s a DELICATE Issues. A Checklist for Trusted Analytics, from Hendrick Drechsler and Wolfgang Greller and the panel session organised by Simon Buckingham Schum on “Institutional Learning Analytics Centres: Contexts, Strategies and Insights” were really helpful for me.
There was a lot of emphasis on creating more engagement with the learning sciences community, and perhaps that is an obvious and natural fit for the learning analytics community. However I think more links with the open education community would be beneficial, particularly around changing and sharing practice and culture.
Learners and teachers
Last but of course, not least, what about learners and teachers? Ultimately that’s what anyone in education is really concerned about – creating better experiences for learners. To do that we need to have well supported teachers and effective learning designs.
Perhaps it’s because I’m not a “numbers” person, and I am a bit scared tables of data, and in-jokes about the vagaries of Bayesian modelling techniques, I did notice that a lot of questions for presenters at LAK were around the statistical methodology taken and not about the change in practice/outcomes created by the sharing of the findings. Mea culpa, I should have asked more questions around that too.
Unsurprisingly then I found the learning analytics and learning design session really useful, particularly the “A Conceptual Framework linking Learning Design with Learning Analytics” paper describing work being undertaking in Australia. I’m looking forward to following this up and exploring at their open source tool.
Another highlight for me was the paper “Fostering 21st century literacies through a collaborative critical reading and learning analytics environment: User-perceived benefits and problematics” by Jennifer Pei-Ling Tan, Simon Yang, Elizabeth Koh and Christin Jonathan. The conference reviewers may have thought this a modest contribution to the field, but it made a big impact on me. It was one of the few presentations I attendedd that actually quoted learners, and some of their reflections on the impact of dashboards. I maybe a total sucker for a network graph – but not all students are.
Jen Tan interesting paper on mixed student reactions to social learning dashboards, e.g. SNA, dispositions #lak16pic.twitter.com/d2W47BNIj5
Like I said both conferences were “the best of times” for me. I enjoyed both equally for their differences and similarities. #oer16 felt smaller and more like family. #lak16 was more like a clan gathering (not least because of the bagpipes welcoming us on day 1), a bit noisy and vague in places but very close to home in others. My appreciation goes to both conference committees and all involved for organising two excellent conferences.
I will get round to writing a proper reflection on this week’s #oer16 conference when I get a chance to make sense of all the great ideas/connections and practice. In the mean time here are the slides from the presentation I did with Keith Smyth and some of my doodles from the keynotes.
If you do want to get a flavour of the conference then look no further than the fabulous live blogs from Frances Bell.
In preparation for our #OER16 presentation, this is the first of two blog posts where Keith Smyth and will build on our abstract and give a bit more detail and context around our current thinking. There’s quite a bit to pack into a 15 minute conference presentation so we hope that these posts will allow us to elaborate a bit more, ask some questions and hopefully get some feedback which we can take into the session itself. We’ll also follow up after the session itself.
For the past 3 years now, Keith, Bill Johnston and myself have been investigating and trying to unpack the notion of a digital university, and develop a way to move from what can be a very tech-centric, view of “the digital” to one which is more balanced and includes people, pedagogy, and wider societal factors. If, as we are starting to do, we take open as the lens to examine our conceptual matrix, then a number of questions arise. As our abstract states
”despite the early promise of open online education, including developments such as MOOCs, the Higher Education sector as a whole has fallen short in using digital spaces to provide equitable distribution of access to education.”
From the early openly shared evaluation from the University of Edinburgh, to more recent statistics from FutureLearn, the evidence shows that the majority of “learners” in MOOCs have a first degree and a significant proportion of those have a post graduate qualification. Instead of widening access to education, are we now in a situation where MOOCs, with their “massive” investment, unclear ROI, only served to preserve the status quo and create another elite measure of engagement? MOOCs may not have lived up to their disruptive hype (Siemens et al 2015), however the reverberations of the hype, the urban myths that have grown up around it continue to have an impact in the HE sector, and in the development of open education practice.As MOOCs become more established the already contentious “open” element of the acronym becomes even less significant, the platforms and licences become more closed.
For institutions like my own who didn’t ride the first, or second wave of MOOCs, is development of open educational practice going to suffer from the still widely held assumption that open education = MOOCs? Is our development of digital learning going to be predicated on the more “popular” templates of many MOOCs for example “high quality” video talking heads and MCQ quizzes?
Open falls of the agenda as we can’t justify the case for that level of investment without a clear ROI, and we look for more “legitimate” income streams from postgraduate/Masters level online programmes.“Digital learning” in turn becomes equated only with fully online experiences, the “digital” is something new, disruptive, that doesn’t need to be cognisant of past and current research and practice (Siemens et al 2015).
The obsession with global market share blinds us to the potential of the local. Discussions around digital environment forget the place of the physical and where institutional psychically sit within a community. The power of open, connected, student driven learning exemplified by the numerous examples of spontaneous face to face meet-ups is not being seen as something that Universities could capitalise on. Could this be the place, as we state in our abstract, where open education could “act as a bridge between formal institutional cultures and learning within physical and digital third spaces.”
Should we not be looking for ways for our physical campuses to become digitally enabled community hubs. Places that don’t empty after 6pm until 8am this next day, but are being used to create more informal, open learning opportunities which utilise the capabilities of our digital and physical infrastructures?
We need only look to our conference hosts, the University of Edinburgh, and their definition and use of “the common good” as a rational for their commitment to the support, development and sharing of OERs as a first stage in this type of engagement. My own institution’s 2020 strategy is predicated on our position as “the university for the common good”, yet we are still not able to articulate and use open education as cornerstone of this. Open is a “nice to have”, but still seen with suspicion (if at all) by many.
Instead of open being a means to meaningfully deconstruct the ivory tower and reintegrate it with wider society, the conflation with digital and online merely helps to reinforce the status quo. Those who can afford to be open do so in ways of their choosing, the rest of us still scrabble around for ways to be innovative which actually equates to making money. Open seems like common sense however, as one of my colleagues wisely said in a meeting this week common sense is not common practice.
This frustrating for many of us Yet again open educational practice can offer us a bridge at individual, organisational and sectoral level. Developing open, distributed curriculum is key part of this and something that Keith is going to explore more in part two.
