One of the better of many recent articles covering the popular breed of xMOOCs like Coursera, edX and Udacity, with some superficial discussion of the pedagogies, business models, technologies and motivations behind them.

One of the things that worries me most in this article is the cherry-picking of relevant research to back up claims and models. I recognize the value of appreciative enquiry, but this is not the place for it. Lectures are dismissed with a nod to an article from the 1970s which is actually concerned with short and long term memory models – barely relevant, not reflecting recent findings and far from the best article on the maninfold weaknesses of lecture-based approaches. But it fits with the cherry-picked model of providing short lectures to fit what are presumed to be average attention spans, ignoring the fact that it depends not just on length but on content. I could watch a great talker like Sir Ken Robinson for an hour without boredom but will turn off in an instant if the speaker is not engaging. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about skill and artistry, and the interest of the learner. Other references are similarly thin and also make the classic mistake of generalizing from the particular that is so prevalent in educational research, especially when called upon by those who are not educational researchers. For instance, the fact that peer grading can under some circumstances be closely correlated with teacher grading does not mean that it is always so. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and it varies according to the context you are in, the subject you are teaching, the nature of the students, the resources that are available and the pedagogies you are using. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-science

Well, it’s not that thorough, and does raise the question of why this information is not made available by purveyors of MOOCs, but there are data here, and that’s a start. One of the reasons for non-completion is answered in the text – that a focus on completion assumes this was among the goals of the learners who participate. In many cases, perhaps the majority, it is clear that this is very much not the case.

This highlights a fundamental difference between open courses (massive or not) and closed courses and one of the reasons that MOOCs are disruptive innovations, not just a big and free version of mediocre examples of what we already have. Traditional courses are focused on accreditation, for which it should be fairly vital to complete everything in the course, so people tend to do so a little more often than when left to their own devices. For those participating in MOOCs, the goal is typically quite different: it is to learn something. There is no reason on earth that a whole course is always needed for that, any more than that we should have to read an entire edited book to learn something useful from it. Nor is there any reason to finish a book we have started once we find that it doesn’t interest us or is too difficult for us right now. Or we might find a different book, or article, or blog, or Wikipedia page that does it sufficiently or better. This is not news.

Give learners control, and they can choose when, how and what they learn. It is not up to us, the teachers. This is why I suspect that the future lies less with the xMOOC or even with the cMOOC (though that is far more interesting), but with the kMOOC – with the kind of things provided by the Khan Academy and a million how-to videos, help forums, Q&A sites and wikis, where learning comes in chunks appropriate to the needs of the content, not to filling a number of weeks or credit hours: where learning is on demand, not on command. Some things take five minutes to learn, some take five years, some are a never-ending process.

But, let’s assume that completion rates actually do mean something. It seems to me that what this most likely shows is not that MOOCs are problematic as a matter of principle (if they were, no one would reach the end), but that those created so far are insufficiently compelling to be of value to more than a few. If they really offered value, neither hell nor high water would stop people from finishing them (OK – both might be a strong disincentive, but completion rates would be a great deal higher). This means that the content is perceived as insufficiently compelling and/or they are boringly or confusingly enacted. If we look at what people learn in appropriately sized chunks, there are things that people look at and gain value from, and things that they don’t. The bigger you make the chunks, the more likely it is that there will be things within them that are of lesser value. So people lose interest. That’s not much of a story though. We love to generalize from the particular to the general and we like news that simplifies complexity, especially if it demonizes something strange to us.

Address of the bookmark: http://mfeldstein.com/the-most-thorough-summary-to-date-of-mooc-completion-rates/

Well this is cool.

Predicted by Ian Pearson more than 10 years ago, along with many other interesting things – http://www.futurizon.com/future/skin3.htm

Always a bit of a surprise when the future arrives. The adjacent possible just expanded a whole lot more.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/mar/13/electronic-tattoo-monitor-patient-symptoms

Nicely written article. It’s not really about binge learning though – it works just as well if you take the opposite approach too and eke out your learning a little at a time. It’s really about control.

The tricky thing is always achieving a balance between too much and too little choice – to be in control is to have the power to choose intelligently when you engage with the course, how you engage, and how much help and interaction with others you get when you need it. Really big MOOCs have an advantage here because there are likely to be more opportunities to engage with people as and when you need to do so. Smaller MOOCs are disadvantageous to self-paced learners who may not so easily find the help, support or simple presence of others when they need it.

Address of the bookmark: http://theumlaut.com/2013/03/06/binge-learning-is-online-educations-killer-app/

This should be an interesting workshop on social technologies, in an interesting place.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to March 20th.

Details:

The 2013 International Workshop on Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2013)

September 4-6, 2013, Gwangju, Korea    http://www.ftrai.org/socialcomnet2013  

Call for papers available at: http://www.ftrai.org/socialcomnet2013/cfp.htm

Damned lies and statistics…

But it does seem that Google+ is gaining ground and network effects are amazing things, as MySpace found to its cost when Facebook shot past it. I find it interesting, however, that there is a lot of chalk and cheese in this list and this is an ecosystem in which many different systems can thrive.  And I still don’t believe that Google is trying to compete directly with Facebook in a big way, even though Facebook might think it is competing directly with Google. Google+ is not a direct competitor to Facebook on most counts, even though many functions are superficially similar and industry watchers would love them to be head-to-head. They are not quite like chalk and cheese, but nor are they like two brands of car competing on features, style and price.

One thing in this article really caught my eye…

“The continued growth of Facebook, Google+ and Twitter also has a secondary side effect, the survey found. Local social networks in various countries are seeing a dip in usage, up to 57 percent in some cases, particularly in China. This is apparently due to a saturation of the market and shift towards more informal social media including blogs and forums, where privacy is easier to maintain from growing government clampdowns”

I know of thousands of Elgg, WordPress and possibly millions of other social sites out there that are quietly populating an increasingly long tail. While many of these are largely independent, this long tail is feeding on the big providers in many cases, even while the big providers attempt to feed on them. On an increasing number of social sites I use, from Pinterest to AcademicExperts.org, the big three (Twitter, Facebook and Google+) are simply a means of authentication to get to somewhere else. Speaking for myself, if the choice is between Facebook and pretty much any other alternative, I choose the other alternative, and an increasing number of sites provide good alternatives. I suspect that use for authentication might count as ‘active use’, in which case the figures are hiding some big changes in behaviour that are going unreported, but it’s hard to tell for sure. If so, the respective business models of Google and Facebook put Facebook at quite a disadvantage: Google just needs to know more about you so that it can improve its search (which is why Google+ exists – social networking is just a fringe benefit that sometimes adds a bit more information for it to use), whereas Facebook needs you to actively engage in its toolset before it can make a profit from you. But, if all it is doing is getting you in to a smaller competitor’s site, then it becomes increasingly irrelevant (still dangerous, still nasty, but no longer the site where the game is held). If this turns into an endgame, the winner will not necessarily be the one with the most identities to its name, but the one that can make most effective use of them. And, in a distributed universe of decentralized systems, that looks like it might be Google. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026521/google-outranks-twitter-as-no-2-social-network-after-facebook.html

“Don’t make people pay for music. Let them’

A wonderful talk by Amanda Palmer on what looks like a radically alternative approach to making a living from music. In fact, in some ways, it is not really radical at all: it is simply a return to pre-recording-industry methods (busking), that is updated to incorporate social media. But that assembly of technologies makes all the difference, transforming a millennia-old system into something quite wonderful and quite new. This is a person who has embraced the adjacent possibles of social media in a remarkably whole-hearted and inspiring way. Interesting that what the industry deemed as a ‘failure’ (selling a mere 25,000 recordings) was, in the absence of the need for the mechanisms to turn a profit for a company geared to traditional methods of distribution, turned into a spectacular success. But what is perhaps more interesting is an alternative way of thinking about success, production, economies, and trade that actually works, without the structures and strictures of the industrial age, at a very human scale. Many great stories in this talk.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html?utm_content=addthis-custom&utm_source=t.co&awesm=on.ted.com_s4jB&utm_medium=on.ted.com-twitter&source=twitter&utm_campaign=#.UTSs47nNqAp.twitter

Nice to see that a few journals are starting to run articles on MOOCs. This is a straighforward and quite well-informed  JIME article describing the state of play in MOOCs last year (2012). 

Address of the bookmark: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/viewArticle/2012-18/html

Very well conducted research showing that, in the study sample, active learning does not produce any significant gains compared with the inactive variety. What is most interesting is the reason the authors discover for this, which fits perfectly with the model of soft/hard technologies that I have been developing and writing about in my forthcoming book on how learning technologies work. In brief, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Softer constructivist methods are extremely effective if the teacher uses them skillfully but, if not, they are pretty hopeless and may be positively harmful. Most studies of active learning have involved researchers who know what they are doing and engage with passion and enthusiasm as well as expertise, whereas this study simply grabs a random sample or people using active learning methods in their classrooms. The one and possibly the only benefit of harder formulaic methods of teaching is that they are rather more resilient to bad teachers (and/or those that do not have enough time or energy for the task as a result of other pressures). 

There are other good insights in this paper – it is well worth reading if you have an interest in education.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228657/