A note on the end of Steve Carson's post about MOOCs and the liberal arts prompted a brief conversation about the two different meanings of "MOOC" with Brandon Muramatsu. Steve's original post drew (based on his conversation with Brandon) a distinction between the Edx/Coursera/Udacity "MOOCs" and the Change11/ds106/wileyMOOC "MOOCs" - he suggested using MOCs as a description of the former (as they are not, in the strictest sense, open). But Brandon felt, on reflection, that the real distinction concerned how massive the courses were.
As a primer for those of you who read this but don't live it (you lucky people!) MOOC stands for "Massively Open Online Course", basically a big global chunk of online learning that doesn't cost you (the learner) any money. It's the big noise in university-level education as it's got that game-changing disruptive innovation feel about it right now.
At the basic level, you could just take your standard online course (crappy managed learning environment, some professor doing a video lecture, discussion forum with tumbleweeds(*) and take off the paywall. Obviously everyone involved still needs to get paid (because isn't that what game-changing disruptive innovation is all about?) so there are a range of models around to ensure that this happens. Most commonly you'll see lots of advertisements everywhere, because that's totally a sustainable business model, or the "open" students getting to pay for accreditation or similar extras.
These get called MOOCs because of some earlier work (Siemens/Downes/Cormier/Wiley and so on) that also involved learning for free, coined the term, and the four words in the acronym seem to fit. But really there is not much else in common. The earlier MOOCs were built around the ideas behind connectivism, which could be (slightly controversially) unpacked as the suggestion that much valuable learning happens because of the connections and networks that learners build during a course. If you want to disappear further down this rabbit hole of networks and educational theory, check out rhizomatic learning.
So - for your first version above you could see something like:
learner -> guy(**) in a suit who used to lecture in the ivy league -> knowledge
and for the second an unASCIIable mess of learners connecting to each other and discovering knowledge in all kind of places, with a smelly hippy educator generally helping out and making sure it all stays lovely.
But fundamentally there are two kinds of MOOC because there are two competing cultural conceptualisations of the learning process, both of which have value and relevance but which have become politically (small P) polarised. The first, I guess, is easier to monetize as it treats the idea of an expert as a saleable resource.
Some courses are open as in door. You can walk in, you can listen for free. Others are open as in heart. You become part of a community, you are accepted and nurtured.
For many the first is and will be enough. For me, having tried the second, I'm not sure I could go back.
Post represents my own opinions only. Available under a CC-BY license
(*) no. not your online course, that's great. It's just all the other ones.
As a follow-up to what I think is one of the most popular posts here, I've been reading and logging other curious correspondences and coincidences between NewsCorp, conservative ministers, and the compulsory education systems of the US and the UK. And blimey, it's a bit complicated. I started drawing things together on XMIND, and thought I should share what I did to avoid anyone else wasting an evening doing so.
What disturbs me most - NewsCorp directly funding, and JoelKlein leading, two "grass roots" organisations (StudentsFirst and Education Reform Now) that are very similar in remit to the New Schools Network, who are somewhat cagey about the source of their non-government funding.
Yes - it looks a bit like it should be created using post-its and pictures torn from magazines in a dilapidated basement flat. But I'm no conspiracy theorist - this is all sourced and hopefully one day soon I'll dump a bundle of links on this post (shout if you need a particular source, I'll prioritise). And it is a great big PNG that you have to download full size and zoom in to in order to read it - any suggestions for ways I can do this as a proper infograpic with live links would be great.
Have fun now.
Available under CC-BY-SA. As far as any opinions are expressed in this post, they are mine only.
"[There is] only one answer: really fix public education and give everyone equal opportunity. Present situation a crime against young." "[C]urrent technology–and its increasing diffusion among people in all countries–makes it possible to drive the marginal cost of each new unit of education, effectively, to zero"
"Technology has transformed how we live and play and will transform how we learn."Not the words of inspirational keynote speakers at a recent open education conferences; the words of(in order) Rupert Murdoch (the CEO of NewsCorp), Michael Saylor (the CEO of Microstrategy) and the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. Murdoch had recently been visiting the Harlam Village Academy, a "poster child" of this new wave of education and a favoured project of his (and Michael Gove's) friend, Joel Klein. Apparently, to become a "poster child" you need a 75% churn rate of teaching staff within one year - who knew? And you'll recall, of course, that Jeb and George W. Bush's brother (Neil) set up Ignite! learning: a digital content solution for learning.
The highest educational "marginal cost" is not, despite the efforts of many academic publishers, materials: it is salary. This is true in both compulsory and post-compulsory sectors. So all of those wonderful, inspiring quotes about technology "fixing" education above actually relate to the casualisation and de-professionalisation of educators.
This is a neat illustration of the bizarre educational confusion that the political right seems to find itself in. On the one hand we have the kind of techno-determinism above, on the other we have David Cameron's calls for a return to "real discipline", with pupils standing up when teachers enter the room (sorry, Daily Mail link). And you get the bizarre target-driving literacy drive via the medium of synthetic phonics, which is the favoured Conservative reading methodology for no adequately explored reason that anyone can see - indeed as far as I understand it most serious educational researchers see Whole Language and Phonic approaches as complementary. In higher education you see the split between railing against mickey-mouse courses like Golf Course Studies and in favour of vocational courses like, er, Golf Course Studies. Or the push for higher and higher academic standards, and the push for higher and higher profits and lower costs. With one foot in the imagined past, and another in the corporatised digital future, the only possibility is confused and ill-considered policy.
You'd be hard pushed to spot a unifying link between these seemingly diametrically approaches, and I've struggled with it for a long time. You can also add to this mix the emerging "sound-bite" culture of disruption and educational revolutions - easily grasped obvious interventions that can give the impression of activity where none is needed.
George Seimens' post from ASU Skysong Education Innovation Summit brought this all together for me. The whole post demands to be read, but one key point that stuck out for me:
". The best way for me to kill a conversation was to say “I work in a university”. That would pretty much end things. The correct answer, apparently, was something like “I work for [foundation, bank, VC] and I want to allocate funds to this market”."
There's clearly little or no place for actual educators in this gold rush. Which I guess is the point: all of the expected profits in this "market" would come from either employing less educators or from cutting the pay and conditions of existing staff.
Gary Matkin touched on these wider issues in his should-have-been-a-keynote at the OCWC/OER 2012 annual conference in Queens' College, Cambridge. His characterisation of the commodification of education shifting the value proposition from product to service a parallel to Cable Green's vision of a pay-to-graduate future which was (@dr_neil) Universality in a nutshell - and that he seems bizarrely proud to have had mentioned in Money Magazine.
I commented on this trend in my write-up of the OCWC11 conference as the "search for a new model" and the "growth of private sector competition". This is no longer a trend, this is mainstream open education.
Panagiota Alevizou (p282 of cam12 Conference Proceedings (pdf)), in my other favourite conference presentation (excluding of course, the amazing ukoer stuff), looked at the way academics are reacting to the commodification implicit within open release using the language of mediatization. Clearly the role and language of the consumer of free "online learning media" sit uneasily within education:
"[E]ducators’ prior knowledge and familiarity with Web 2.0 or technical skills, as well as wider OER advocacy agendas or general familiarity with openness and crowdsourced education, are also high in the motivational threshold." [but] "The sharing of one’s own materials and the reuse of others’ OERs is less expansive"
Whereas the rhetoric of openness is superficially attractive to those committed to sharing knowledge, there are also concerns around precisely this kind of commodification within mainstream educational discourse. As nearly all the presenters at cam12 conceded, in an atmosphere that at times seemed more like a revival meeting than a sober gathering of academics from 21 countries, open educational resources are inevitable; however this is much more so than the institutions that sustain the academics responsible for releasing them. The developing business models around "open" and "technology" need urgently to take their own parasitic nature into account.
This post represents my own views only and is available under a cc-by license.
So Amazon, that well known global e-commerce company based in Seattle, doesn't pay any corporate tax in the UK and avoids VAT on various products by having a "corporate centre" in the thriving metropolis that is Luxembourg City (twinned, apparently, with the London Borough of Camden Town). This revelation has spurred a great deal of hand-wringing in the UK, but has also introduced the subtle distinction between a vendor and an "order fulfilment operation" to our ever-evolving sacred texts of business-speak
@Stebax (the Enemies of Reason bloke) set a hare running in my mind on twitter by suggesting that, as his business in Britain was merely "blogpost delivery", he would henceforth be basing himself in Luxembourg. I wondered if he, along with many of us, are in fact in the business of idea delivery and thus were only taxable within our own minds.
I blog on Posterous, which is based in San Francisco and is now owned by Twitter which is split between SF and New York. Both organisations graciously allow me to retain ownership of my "work" (such as it is!) which is hosted by their platform. To be more specific, I voluntarily supply ideas to Twitter and Posterous, granting them a global non-exclusive and transferable royalty-free license to publish my work. To put this another way, I have entered into a contractual relationship with both organisations to provide them with content that I permit them to monetise as they see fit, and in return for this they provide a stable hosted platform for me to publish on to.
In both cases the model is either to use my content to sell ad space, or to use the promise of their ability to use my content to sell ad space to raise venture capital. These ads are bought (or will be bought) by global companies, who hope that they will be seen by a particular demographic of viewers filtered by earnings, interests, geographic location, gender or a million other variables.
In simple Marxist terms I create value via my labour which is exploited in return for profit, but all of this happens on a global basis. I sit at a desk in the UK, some guy sells ads from a desk in the US, some woman buys ads space from a desk in China but all of these transactions are actually stateless.
Corporate Tax law, as it currently stands, levies a charge on net profits relating to a trade conducted within a particular country. Section 6.(4)(a-b) of the 1988 Income and Corporation Taxes Act defines this:
"(a) "profits” means income and chargeable gains; and (b) “trade” includes “vocation”, and also includes an office or employment or the occupation of woodlands in any context in which the expression is applied to that in the Income Tax Acts."
Trade is here seen to include "Goods, Services, Income & Transfers", all of which concern the exploitation of commodities ("the products of human labour", after Marx).
Regarding posterous or twitter, the person producing the commodity in all this is me. My renumeration (as above) is the free use of the platform - a benefit which is not taxable, and/or is also the means by which the commodity I create can be exploited. You could imagine if I was C19th homeworker I would produce a certain number of ladies undergarments without pay in order to cover the cost of a sewing machine. This is the same, except I never get to own the sewing machine or get any wages.
[Going deeper, am I actually creating the commodity at all? I've been inspired by news on the Guardian, commentary on twitter and content from the UK government, Wikipedia and the town twinning association so far. So, in the same way that I'm adding value to what Posterous do, all these people are adding value to what I do. And what about the likes of Google selling ads alongside search results and aggregation...?]
So trying to locate where the "trade" happens, who is "trading" with whom and where profits are taxable is by no means a simple matter. I'd be tempted to argue that, as we move to increasingly global business models, that we need a global corporation tax collected by an international agency and spent for the benefit of the entire world - which in the short/medium term would be primarily aimed at the developing world in order to reduce global inequality. Eventually we could move for a global minimum wage and then some kind of sustainable and controlled use of natural and human resources. But I'm just a smelly hippy and I don't understand finance or business...
Personal views only, available to you, dear reader, under a CC-BY license.
So, for those of you who haven't heard, I'm very proud to announce that Followers of the Apocalypse is becoming the first ever affiliate (non-institutional) member of the Russell Group, the UK grouping of elite research-focused universities.
You'll probably all agree that the Russell Group is a "natural fit" for the values and aspirations of FOTA, and I am honoured to be the first mainstream higher education blog to be recognised in this way. I'm sure others will follow.
Over the next week and at their indirect request, I'll be using a number of posts to detail ways in which the intelligent use of learner analytics can increase institutional revenue. You'll know that I've long been an advocate of the use of personal data to maximise the monetary value of every educational and social interaction, and it is great to be given the opportunity to write at length about this
However, from Monday syndication of this blog (which will be renamed the English Journal of Eschatalogical Locomotivity) will only be available via Elsevier. I've come to the conclusion that only the support of a major publisher can take FOTA to the next level, and Elsevier's reasonable pricing and capable delegation to me in the matters of writing, commissioning, proof reading, typesetting and distributing the new journal have convinced me that this is the best choice. So please, do ask your library to add me to their portfolio of subscriptions, act before Wednesday for a special introductuary rate.
Post available under a CC-BY license, representing my own opinions only. Written at the suggestion of Mark Leach at Wonkhe.com
Reading the HEFCE grant tables for 2012/2013 is like reading the racing form guide at the back of the Daily Mail. You know that most of what you are seeing is based entirely on extrapolation and guesswork, and you feel fairly dirty and ashamed whilst doing so. As HEFCE themselves say:
"The allocations announced in this document are highly provisional: in particular, most of the recurrent teaching grant allocations will be recalculated as we receive more up-to-date student number information for 2012-13." (para 26)
The new regime payments are sketchiest, as HEFCE have needed to extrapolate (from 2011-12 numbers and projections), the price per students for funding groups A&B (the only ones attracting direct HEFCE payment under the new model). The rates per student are £9,804 for price group A and £1,483 for price group B.(para 39) These numbers themselves are calculated so that overall HE spending falls within the general need to restrict overall student funding, via student number controls.
After a general overall control of undergraduate numbers, there is additional mucking about at the edges via the exclusion of all students with above AAB at 'A'-level, and those studying Medicine or Dentistry as a first degree from this overall control. Institutions can compete to recruit as many students with AAB+ as they like. Further complicating matters, the "margin" places (that we talked about in an earlier post) are sliced from the general overall control and are then completable for.
So poor old HEFCE (and I do feel for them, the financial modelling staff who had to do this are second-to-none in terms of their integrity and capabilities) have had to extrapolate, institution by institution, the following numbers:
An expected number of AAB students that each institution will recruit.
An expected number of non-AAB (non-medicine, non-dentistry) students each institution will recruit.
And has added to this
The number of marginal places each institution has successfully bid for.
To put together an "implied" number of students per institution.
For those of you who don't live and breathe this stuff, in the bad old days HEFCE just told institutions how many students they could recruit, and how much money they could expect for doing so.
These implied totals (one of the strangest sets of data ever to come out of HEFCE) are there in table 4 in the grants table spreadsheet (Annex B). Apparently (and there really is no better word than apparently here), the big dips (by headcount) in student population will be at:
Manchester Metropolitan University
University of Plymouth
University of Central Lancashire
Leeds Metropolitan University
Sheffield Hallam University
Liverpool John Moores University
University of the West of England, Bristol
Kingston University
University of East London
Middlesex University
And the big rises will be at:
Institute of Education
Anglia Ruskin University
University of Worcester
York St John University
University of Durham
University of Gloucestershire
University of Bristol
Staffordshire University
Aston University
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
Why? A mixture of the effects of the allocated marginal places (notably those institutions subject to big dips in recruitment have not been successful in getting marginal places) and the inferred additional recruitment of AAB+ students.
This latter is simply based on the current number of AAB+ students at each institution, plus an extra 4,000 places applied pro-rata based on the each institutions current AAB numbers as a function of the total AAB population.
Cynically, one could argue that this modelling is predicated on the "free market" in AAB+ students having no effect on applications whatsoever, other than magicing up 4,000 extra highly qualified applicants. I'm not levelling this as a criticism (as clearly they need *some* numbers) just as a passing note regarding how unpredictable and convoluted this new funding model actually is. Whereas the figures in Table 4 may suggest that 335 less freshers will be eating pasties at the University of Leeds, and 248 less freshers will be eating pasties at the University of Liverpool, the reality is that no-one has any idea at all what will happen in the late summer of 2012.
Which, given that HEFCE are also charged with controlling student numbers overall, is a recipe for utter chaos come admissions time.
I've been thinking more about my #openedspace post, and the can of worms I opened in acknowledging that many of my underlying ideas about the nature of the learning process came from folk music. I've been wondering what folk musicians say about learning, and how widely applicable this is.
Richard Thompson is one of those rare guitar players who is always worth listening to, just because no-one (including him) is quite sure what he is going to do next. He doesn't have a blog as such, but is endlessly quotable and keeps a record of these quotes on his website. I've always been attracted to this one:
"For me, the best feeling in music is when you're truly improvising and don't know where you're going, but you know you're going to arrive at an interesting place."
This is a fine example of what I would call a benefit of higher education, the ability to follow any thread or collections of threads in the pursuit of knowledge. Improvised learning is that which is utterly learner-led and unbound by extrinsic motivation. A wonderful thing to aim for, but there is a lot of skill needed to get there. So does my underlying idea base itself on technical mastery of learning?
Dick Gaugan is a very interesting chap, with twin interests in protest songs and web accessibility. He's maintained a proto-blog since the early days of the web and one of his sporadic posts concern the limits of technical mastery. The closing paragraphs are worth quoting in full:
"Mastery of technique is not the job of a musician, it is merely the basic toolkit for learning to do the job of a musician. The most essential element of the job of a musician is the skill to intelligibly communicate ideas and emotion from the musician to the listener via sound. The absence of that means it is not music, it is a programmed sequence of noises, regardless of however pleasant and harmonious those noises might be.
In the words of Mike Heron's Hedgehog Song, "You know all the words and you sing all the notes but you never quite learned the song . . .""
A very odd song, but one chosen as a Desert Island Disc by none other than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Who has also written and spoken a fair bit about learning, including a lecture to the Centre of Anglican Communion Studies in 2004 where he makes almost the same point as Gaugan does from the opposite direction.
"It is possible, you see, to learn quite a lot about let us say the history of music, about musical theory. It is possible even to recognise patterns of a page of black marks on a white background which tell you how a composition moves. But it would be strange, as I have said, if that were all pursued in the absence of any acquisition of a skill – any capacity to do something in a particular way."
Both Rowan Williams and Dick Gaugan are arguing that learning requires both the mastery of a set of skills and the ability to set these within a wider pattern that can communicate ideas and emotion to others. However, much of current orthodoxy in educational policy sees the former as an end in itself, which is as unhelpful and uneducational as the occasional focus on the latter as the point of higher education.
But there is one key aspect of folk music missing from this picture, the idea of learning as the reinterpretation rather than the reproduction of knowledge. This is what I touched on in the #openedspace post when I quoted song collector Cecil Sharp. But Richard Thompson, in a song that is at once a folk song and not a folk song, expresses the idea thus:
"We used to say That come the day We'd all be making songs Or finding better words These ideas never lasted long"
There's been surprisingly little written about this idea of "finding better words", but it seems like it has a lot to say a mainstream education that is still reeling from the implications of the read/write web. An encyclopaedia that is rewritten by any reader to reflect their experience is, at heart, a very similar idea to a ballad or tune that is adapted by all those that experience it. In both instances, a certain level of technical mastery is required and a sense of the overarching pattern of the source material is required.
After reading Donald Clark's post promising a series of pieces on 50 learning theorists (in 50 days) I was rather startled to see that only one woman (Ruth Colvin Clark) was mentioned, and then only as a co-author. I wouldn't claim to be any kind of an expert in learning theory (an interested amateur, if anything) but it struck me as - at least - statistically unlikely that only men had ever made significant contributions to our understanding of learning and education.
I was unprepared for the awesomeness that ensued. Huge kudos to Frances Bell, Helen Beetham, Josie Fraser, Catherine Cronin, Anne-Marie Cunningham, GNA Garcia, Jennifer M Jones, Pat Parslow and others.:
I don't know enough about the NHS or the bill to say anything useful about it, but I am opposed to it based on the comments from expert bodies and individuals that do. But I am struck by the parallels to the "There is No Alternative" rhetoric about HE funding.
Compare:
"To those people who doubt what we are doing I would say, because of the pressures we are facing, we cannot afford not to reform the NHS." - Andrew Lansley
with
"The current system of funding for higher education is no longer fit for purpose" - David Willetts
The second quote was fundamentally questioned this week via a report by HEFCE on the financial health of the HE sector. In 2010-11 the sector ran a £1000m operating surplus, the highest on record and a little over 4% of the total government income. And damningly, HEFCE cite the new model as providing a need for retrenchment and savings rather than a new golden era for universities and colleges.
"Despite there being uncertainty about the future government policy for higher education, in particular student number controls, there is strong evidence that the sector is financially well prepared for the new funding system" (para 50.).
Many commentators and experts (and even me!) have been saying this for nearly two years. Sadly we have been proven right.It seems it is not the current system of funding that is not fit for purpose. It is the new one.
Expert opinion seems to say the same about the NHS reforms. It is possible, though unlikely, that the NHS Bill may still be rejected at this late stage. In comparison the HE Bill was rejected without a fight though the damage has already been done.
I hope that the same will not be said about the NHS, either with or without the bill.
post represents my own opinions only, and is available under a CC-BY license.
Margin places have been allocated to institutions based on on "criteria of quality, demand and cost – only those institutions with average tuition fees in 2012-13 of £7,500 or less (net of fee waivers) were eligible to bid. HEFCE received bids from 203 institutions for 36,000 places. Final allocations were made on a pro rata basis" (the "pro-rata" being that everyone's allocation was reduced to meet the total fit below the 20,000 places HEFCE could allocate.)
I'd expected a positive correlation for widening participation funding, hypothesising that institutions with a focus on WP would be good at delivering efficient, effective and popular HE courses. But - of course - delivering HE to non-traditional learners is expensive, so this would play against such institutions having fees of £7,500 or less - and there's no sense having extra places that mean you are running a course at more of a loss.
But just look at the graph! I've never seen a clearer example of a teaching/research binary divide. I'd be interested to come back to this data when we get the AAB numbers.
This is a personal post and should not be seen as representing the views of any group or organisation. It is available under a CC-BY license.
