Time once was
In New Haven Conneticut Richard Levin did instruct
All the scholars Yale could induct
If today
That scholar sought a dollars gain,
He’d brush up on his netiquette To join the MOOCing game.
In olden days a glimpse of data
Was news to a course creator.
But now, God knows, Anything Goes.
The world’s mistook today
And just look today,
There’s ebooks today,
And there’s MOOCs today,
And the hook today
Is they’re took today
By everyone one knows
And as I’m not a proud Courserian
I feel so antiquarian
A-pro-pos anything goes
When Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller
Raise $40million dollars with videos,
Anything Goes.
When Thrun would pivot in Fast Company
Disrupting entire industries full of pros.
Anything Goes.
If some TED you’d like,
Not higher ed you like
Venture Cap. you like,
And free crap you like, M.C.Q.s you like,
Money too you’d like,
Well, see how it flows!
When investors are always hoping
Your course will pretend to be open when it’s closed,
Anything Goes.
And though I am no educator
I know that you’ll comment later
If I propose,
Anything goes…
Anything goes!
There’s two student finance related stories doing the rounds, and some journalists and political campaigners are mistakenly conflating them. And it’s made me so annoyed that I’m writing this in my lunch hour.
Story 1: “Willetts refuses to rule out fee rises in the next parliament”.
This is actually a non-story. Over the last few years the £9,000 upper limit has not risen in line with inflation. But with inflation starting to creep back up, chances are there will be a rise in the next parliament.
This will come as a surprise to no-one – the possibility has been built in since “Students at the Heart of the System”. It is undeniably fun for the opposition to use this as a ruse to attack the government for refusing to rule out a rise – but Willetts can’t rule out a rise as he needs to take account of inflation.
Story 2: “Something something RAB something 45% something expensive”
After a parliamentary response from David Willetts implied that the RAB charge was now 45%, we creep dangerously close to the 48.6% figure that would mean that we are spending more – long term – on the new model of HE funding than we did on the old. (it is already inarguable that we’ll be spending more year on year than the old method, and this has been the case since 2012). This – as I’ve said before on here (since 2010) – means that we need a proper rethink on our model for funding HE.
If you don’t get the basics of the current (Browne/Willetts) system Andrew McGettigan has a twopart primer.
Story 1 plus Story 2 ?
As tempting as it is for journalists and politicians to conflate these two stories, they are two different issues. In particular, we should be clear that raising the fees charged to students will make the amount of money that the government is spending on this new model go up in the short term and the long term.
If the government raises the cost of tuition this will have the effect of lending students more money whilst getting broadly the same amount of money back.
So absolutely the most stupid thing David Willetts could do at this point would be to raise fees.
There are also a range of stupid things that David Willetts could suggest that would annoy the Liberal Democrats to the extent that it could potentially bring down the government.
lower the threshold for beginning repayments
raise the interest rate on loans
move the end-point of the loan later or remove it entirely (making it, effectively, a graduate tax)
cut other HE budgets to cover the hole
But he won’t do that because the Lib Dems won’t wear it.
The one sensible thing he could do is redesign the HE funding system, or even revert to the previous one (which is cheaper).
But the utterly terrifying thing he will do is to come up with some technocratic financial engineering way of pushing the problem a few years down the line into the next parliament.
It’s been something long predicted, but today the Guardian finally reports on the fact that the RAB charge for student loans is now on the cusp of the 48.6% figure identified by HEPI as a break-even point. What this means is that – despite Liberal Democrat hand-wringing about difficult choices at the time – the imposition of large student tuition fees is on the point of costing the government more than the old (pre-2011) system of higher education funding via HEFCE.
Any argument about the change being needed to bring down the deficit is now dead in the water. And there are important implications about the planned use of fee repayments to raise the student number cap.
This leaves us saddled with an expensive, unwieldy system that – as I have already discussed – doesn’t do any of the things it was designed to do.
Now what?
First up – we need another independent parliamentary inquiry into HE funding, similar to the Browne review in that it would be supported by all parties and report after the handily placed 2015 general election. My preference would be for a much more technocratic inquiry with the close involvement of existing HEFCE staff and the likes of HEPI. (Sir Michael Barber should not be involved, under any circumstances.)
The report should be bold and be backed by as much expert advice as can be mustered. My suspicion is that it would want to advocate a return to a system with a greater level of central control, and ensure that stability and affordability are baked in to the proposals.
Secondly – as much as it pains me to say it, we need to hold on to the student number controls for a little while longer. Allowing university access to anyone who would benefit from it is absolutely the right thing to do for the long-term future of the country. But given the current system, it is not affordable. We need to build a system where it would be affordable and return to it.
Thirdly – we need to look at why the graduate job market looks so bleak that these repayment estimates keep going up. Generation Y have been hit particularly hard by the uneven and delayed economic recovery – we need to do some serious work in creating well-paid and dependable jobs for all young people.
Fourthly – Nick Clegg should apologise. Again, for lying to us in his initial apology. “I shouldn’t have committed to a policy that was so expensive when there was no money around” – he can say that again in relation to the policy he actually did commit to. Other members of the government should also apologise, but particularly Nick.
Fifthly – (and I admit this is unlikely) we should look again at the imposition of a market in HE – and in other areas of the public sector. Markets have never saved money in the delivery of public services. They have never driven up quality. We need to abandon it as a failed experiment and move on.
Take a look at the graph below – it represents the changing staff morale over time of a (fictitious) organisation, as measured by a regularly administered survey instrument.
You’ll see you have two buttons, one of which administers a rebuke to staff for poor performance, the other offers praise for excellent performance.
Your task, as manager, is to ensure that morale remains within the orange-bounded band – too low, and staff are too demotivated to perform, too high and staff are insufficiently engaged with corporate brand values.
There are 19 (equal) time periods, with a value given at the end of each. It moves quite quick so you really need to focus on your strategy.
The newest data point is always on the left, older points move towards the right.
Click the arrow button to begin and see how you get on.
Press arrow to start, reload to replay.
So how did you get on? Did you find the right balance of rebuke and praise to maintain morale? Did you learn how to react when morale suddenly dipped or soared? How did your staff morale end up? What would you do if you played again? Did you realise you’ve been pressing buttons linked to absolutely nothing whilst watching an animated gif?
Chances are you developed a narrative around the data displayed and your “interactions” with it. It is only an 20 frame gif so you probably couldn’t develop a truly compelling story based on the data (over which you had no control whatsoever). But if I’d expanded it (or if I was Martin Hawksey and was able to figure out how to do a live random number plot with Google Charts) you’d have eventually become as unshakably certain in your internalised policy rules as David Cameron.
Here he is, running the country.
“Rebuke! Praise! Praise!… no! Rebuke!…”
His iPad visualisation displays a variety of socio-economic indicators in real time, including sentiment analysis (and was developed by none other than Rohan “year of code” “silicon roundabout” “exploding cheese” Silva). His iPad, of course, has an email function allowing him to request action on the hoof, as it were. As much as I’d love to tell you that his email actually goes to “null” I fear this is not the case.
Anyway, let’s get back to how much you sucked at playing the “corporate morale management simulator”. Here are some questions you didn’t ask:
What was the survey instrument used? Why was it chosen? What did it measure?
Why were the only options to “praise” and “rebuke”? Why couldn’t you do something else?
How large was the company? What did it do? What did the staff do?
Why did morale have to stay in the orange zone? Where did those values come from?
Why didn’t you ask these questions? No, not because you suck, but because I presented the situation as a game. If you’re playing Flappy Bird, you don’t ask why the bird has to flap or why he can’t just land on the green Super Mario Bros pipe-thing. It’s more fun not to ask, and to go along with the premise.
Suspension of disbelief: great for games, bad for policy.
In Joseph Heller’s “Closing Time“, the president (referred to only as “The Little Prick”) plays a fictional computer game named “Triage”, one of a suite of war-themed games he keeps in an annex to the Oval Office. Triage simulates the planning of preparations for ongoing life post nuclear strike, in particular allowing the player to decide who to allow access to underground bunkers.
Of course, policy becomes based around the constraints of the game, and when he (inevitebly, after Chekov) triggers the “real” nuclear football, his subsequent choices are based on game logic – and are characterised by his unwillingness to question the logic of the “game”.
In times of uncertainty and rapid change, an ability to question the rules of the game are an essential prerequisite in adding value to decision making. And though access to data is helpful, this must be coupled with a deep understanding of the limits and constraints of the data, something that requires that you are able to comprehend it as a messy and contradictory corpus, away from the clean lines of your dashboard app.
So – our great generation of leaders – look with concern at dashboard apps and anything else that restricts your decision-making by design. And imagine how the morale in our imaginary company must have dipped if you had been randomly praising and rebuking them in the mistaken belief that it was effective.
I ran, in the loosest possible sense of the word, a session at the Jisc DigiFest on 12th March in Birmingham.
The premise of the session was this – the big, platform-led (x)MOOCs are just one colour on the open education palette, and the other tones and shades may more closely fit an institution, team or individual need. We hoped to demonstrate a range of colours for those who were just beginning to explore the area, and in that I feel we succeeded.
I am entirely beholden to the patience and talent of my speakers, whom I didn’t even manage to introduce properly – so:
From left: Viv, Antonio, Lou, me, Lorna, George, Jonathan
Lou McGill
Lou blogs (primarily) at LouMcGill.com and manages to run a gallery alongside her work as a consultant. In open education circles she is known for her work on the UKOER Evaluation and Synthesis Wiki (which more people should be drawing on as it is amazing)and the UKOER Infokit. If it wasn’t for Lou’s early efforts in Jisc , UKOER would not have happened. In this session Lou talked about the long, and powerful, history of “open” in education.
Jonathan began teaching photography in 2009 at Coventry University, as a part of a sublimely impressive career in photography. His thoughtful investigation of the problems faced by educators and photographers led to Phonar and the range of projects around Open Media in Coventry. Phonar has seen huge international success, and won a prestigious Reclaim Open prize in 2013.
A former SCORE fellow, Antonio is a part of the team that made the University of Leeds Open Education Resources policy a reality, incorporating OER into student activity and staff development.
Viv led and inspired a variety of projects around health and life sciences during her time at De Montfort University. She’s maintained these despite her move to the University of the West of England, and has recently branched out into researching the MOOC phenomenon.
George has led the Oxford Brookes First Steps In Learning and Teaching programme (FSLT) since 2011. This was initial a Brookes-only course for those new to teaching in HE – George’s open techniques have made the course multi-institution and international.
Lorna is one of the Knights of CETIS, the near-legendary education technology centre now based in Bolton, UK. She’s been working in her own time to develop OpenScotland, attempting to bring open education policy to the attention of Scottish policy-makers and to unite and galvanise those interested in open education north of the border.
Audrey is one of a very small number of journalists who understands and can interpret the business of education technology. Long a friend to the open education movement, I would (and do) recommend her weekly summaries of the world of EdTech to anyone.
In a near 20-year career in education and technology, David Wiley has been a part of every major movement towards the goal of truly open education… not for nothing is his influential blog entitled “iterating towards openness”. One of the organisers of the annual Open Education conference. he has recently left his post at Brigham Young University to work with his start up Lumen Learning, and to take the opportunities offered by his Shuttleworth Foundation Scholarship.
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
(actually Jim’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, and I have just written the above to try and get into the testimonial list on the right-hand side of his blog – a long held dream of mine)
Despite my obvious and debilitating incompetence and lack of experience, I keep getting asked to speak or write about MOOCs. Now, I take these things fairly seriously (really, I do) and try to read as much of the latest research as I can.
There are more nonsensical news stories about MOOCs every day, and I like to provide a balance by talking about actual research that has been done properly. The amazing Vivien Rolfe has been working on a mammoth paper on the state of the wider MOOC literature with an emphasis on the student experience (previewed at OpenEd13), and there have been two other reviews I know of, from Tharindu Rekha Liyanagunawardena and Stephen Haggard/BIS.
The general opinion appears to be that there is very little decent research out there, and that blog posts can often be as useful – and far more timely – than a published and reviewed paper. This type of “Open Practice” has meant that we can access and talk about high-quality research as it is conducted: it leads to better discussions and better policy-making.
So imagine my delight when I heard about the Mooc Research Initiative being led by none other than George “Connectivism” Siemens. Here, then, would be a whole range of projects learning and sharing in the open – offering high-quality insights into the MOOC phenomenon and raising the quality of this important national debate?
Alas, no – not in the main.
Project
Announcement or Press Release
Blog posts
Papers and presentations
Twitter accounts
The discursive construction of MOOCs as educational opportunity and educational threat: Neil Selwyn and Scott Bulfin
-Peer Assessment and Academic Achievement in a Gateway MOOC: Mark Warschauer, Suhang Jiang, Adrienne Williams, Diane O’Dowd, Thurston Domina and Padhraic Smyth.
-Secondary School Students and MOOC’s: A Comparison between Independent MOOC Participation and Blended Learning: Rosemary Evans, Dilip Soman, Laurie Harrison and Christopher Federico
-The Relations Between MOOC Participants’ Motivational Profiles, Engagement Profile and Persistence: Bruno Poellhuber, Terry Anderson, Jacques Raynauld, Jean Talbot and Normand Roy
-Understanding the Relationship MOOC Students Have with Traditional Institutions of Higher Education: Christopher Brooks, Stephanie Teasley and Steven Lonn
-Writing to Learn and Learning to Write across the Disciplines: Peer-to-Peer Writing in Introductory-level MOOCs: Denise Comer and Dorian Canelas
-Hatch, match, and dispatch: Examining the relationship between student intent, expectations, behaviours and outcomes in six Coursera MOOCs at the University of Toronto: Laurie Harrison, Carol Rolheiser, Stian Håklev and Chris Teplovs
-UW System College Readiness Math MOOC Study: Robert Hoar
-Mapping the Dynamics of Peer-to-Peer Interaction in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Don Huesman
-Promoting a Higher-Level Learning Experience: Investigating the Capabilities, Pedagogical Role, and Validity of Automated Essay Scoring in MOOCs: Erin Reilly, Stephanie Corliss, Cynthia Louden, Kyle Williams, Emily Cicchini, Donna Kidwell and Dawn Zimmaro
-Developing data standards and technology enablers for MOOC Data Science: Kalyan Veeramachaneni and Una-May O’Reilly
-Patterns of Persistence: What Engages Students in a Remedial English Writing MOOC?: John Whitmer, Eva Schiorring and Pat James
Very, very few projects are blogging regularly about their work. Some projects don’t even have any kind of web presence outside of the MRI site and conference. An awful lot don’t even have their MRI presentation anywhere accessible.
Now I understand that there are time pressures on short projects like this, and there may be a desire to publish in a decent journal – especially for new academics and PIs. I totally get the reluctance to share things that are not quite finished, and may even be a blind alley. And it is surely true that some institutions and research groups may have entirely sensible policies on when and where new research is shared.
But I also know, as an interested policy maker, that I want to read about what is going on – and what we are beginning to understand about these large online courses. And that “open practice” would really help me make a difference.
But BEING OPEN IS HARD, and we should never forget this. Being open is even hard for academics writing and researching about open education.
When I looked after UKOER projects, I insisted that they all wrote blogs for precisely this reason (some proof), and when I began to work on the Jisc Summer of Student Innovation I did the same thing. Not all of the projects got it, some tailed off fairly quickly. Which is fine – because being open is hard.
So I’m in no way having a go at the MRI, or George. I could have chosen any research programme in the world and found something similar. This just happens to be the one I am interested in.
BEING OPEN IS HARD. And this is true for all of us. This Open Education Week, challenge yourself with how much of your work and practice you are willing to share.
(MRI grantholders – if you leave links or details in the comments I will add them to the table.)
(MRI managers – you can have this table free, gratis without restriction if you promise to maintain and update it. Let me know where to send it)
