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.

(other useful links – project descriptions on MRI site, eLiterate video interviews with some participants)

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)

Increasingly the boundaries between the journalistic and academic professions are becoming muddled, with both embracing the practices and norms of blogging as the process of publishing and sharing are disrupted (yep, that’s a correct Christiensen-referencing use of the word) by online platforms and social media. I’ve written about this idea before, with an particular focus on the way academia (and research funding) can adapt to facilitate this process.

Politics Inspires, an initially JISC-funded project based around the politics departments of Oxford and Cambridge, recently held an afternoon workshop on the practices and realities of academic blogging around politics. A superb set of panels encompassed the project itself (which has now been taken into the departments and is clearly established as an ongoing concern), LSE Blogs, Crooked Timber, and The Conversation – each using academic bloggers to respond to and analyse current events in politics and policy.

From the more traditional media end of things we had a speaker from the Guardian Politics blog, from the less traditional media OpenDemocracy. And from a more analytical end we saw speakers from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the study of journalism, with the whole event led by Stuart White of the Public Policy Unit at Oxford.

For such a wide variety of speakers there was an unusual consistency of message: everyone was very clear that the academic voice was one that could and should make a valuable contribution to public life, and that academic blogging (be this group or individual, mediated or not by news values) had a key role to play.

However, despite an increasing emphasis from research funders on public engagement, and from departments and institutions looking to extend their public profile – academia has been slow to engage, perhaps because of an unclear link between practice and measurable benefits. How can you tell when your blog is successful?

It seems clear that the journal article is no longer a primary means of research dissemination – even though expectations and funding do both provide a continued stream of articles. The blog has the potential to become this – giving the academic control over how their research is reported (unlike the traditional PR route) and sitting on the open web… often under an open license.

For newsrooms too the idea of a quick, lively and responsive medium has proved popular. Andrew Sparrow’s Guardian Politics blog responds to (and occasionally defines) the news agenda of each day. And he often looks for and links to academic blogs (he gave the example of the wonderful revolts.co.uk as an academic blog source many journalist/bloggers use as background for stories of backbench insurrection in the House of Commons.)

So are academics becoming journalists? Clearly there is something special that an academic can bring to the reporting of any story, and that is a deep – lifelong – understanding of the micro-issues behind the headline. We’ve all had experiences where something we feel we understand well is reported badly – for me most articles (and frankly, many thinktank reports!) on higher education are largely unreadable for this reason. Academic blogging offers a chance to add a knowledgeable and historically nuanced voice to the public understanding of a story.

But journalistic values – being able to react quickly, write accessibly and promote your work – can be incredibly helpful for academics looking to drive interest in their work and enhance their own profile. Blogging, of course, is astonishingly addictive: especially when it starts conversations and helps you make connections that lead to collaborations and friendship. For work that links to public policy or current affairs this is coupled with a real chance to inform, and maybe shape, debate. One speaker wondered whether “direct influence on policy-making via blogs could be counted under the REF” (in which case maybe I’ll be expecting HEFCE QR to flow direct to followersoftheapocalyp.se?)

From a theoretical perspective Bill Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute postulated the existence of the Fifth Estate – a citizen publishing revolution based around the communicative and knowledge generating power of networks…. “sourcing, creating, distributing/leaking, networking and exhibiting collective intelligence.”. Very connectivism, which for me emphasised the range of academic positions that were converging on the idea of online communities as learning communities.

Of course, something like this fifth estate doesn’t get to stay an emergent, commons-focused space for long. Organisations like the advertising-led Huffington Post, and (specifically) the government and foundation funded “The Conversation” are capitalising on this willingness to write purely for recognition and building businesses on the back of free blogger content. And in a lesser, but somehow more insidious way, those institutions who are supporting academics in blogging are seeking a bewildering range of metrics and impact measures. (But –again- what *is* success for a blogger?) In both cases, the commodification of free labour is foregrounded – prompting one to question why the writer should not profit from their own work.

[that last part about The Conversation spawned a whole other twitter conversation with some of the editors there, which I have storified – A Conversation about The Conversation]

Stylistically, the spectre of “buzzfeed” hangs over both academia and journalism – the temptation to ramp up hits can lead to the listicle and the headline tricks that bloggers like you don’t know you are missing out on (etc). What buzzfeed evolves into may be interesting… I like especially the way that sites like UsVsTh3m play with the format to sneak a distinct leftist politics and social commentary into the memes and nostalgia. But whether articles are experimental or long form essay, accessible or specialist, they represent a willingness to share and communicate that is laudable and useful.

For instance – as the event unfolded in Oxford bloggers, academics and citizen commentators around the country were converging on the twitter hashtag #caredata – critiquing the use of NHS patient data from a range of expert perspectives. The focus was a parliamentary committee questioning ministers and civil servants – an otherwise routine event that was amplified and expanded upon by the Fifth estate in a perfect illustration of the way journalism and academic engagement are informing and shaping an ongoing national debate.

A blog should have a voice – it should be personal, conversational and there should be less concern for complete accuracy than there is for having the confidence to test out (as the writers on  crooked timber sometimes do) half-finished ideas. And – I would add – it need to be confident in the space it wants to fill. One contributor suggested that a blog is the first rough draft of journalism is the first rough draft of history – but is the blog not an oral history where a newspaper article is the official version?

The first ebook collection of “Politics Inspires” posts, “Democratic Wealth”, is freely available as is a podcast of the “Academic Blogging” event  – with both released under an open license. Also, keep an eye on the @PoliticsInspire twitter account.

I didn’t do it on purpose, but I think I may have invented an internet rule. I credit Frances Bell as co-creator and evangelist.

I chose “107” as the number in deference to the events of the ds106 summer of oblivion, where the students rose up as one against Jim Groom and started their own course: ds107. And this was all part of the ongoing course narrative – or was it? Can you plan a backchannel?

But anyway, whatever you are doing online – there is a backchannel and if you don’t know about it you are not a part of it.

P.S: The probably not-safe-for-work rulesoftheinternet.com cites Rule 107 as “That’s what she said” jokes are stupid. No Exceptions”.  Which is also fair. 

P.P.S: Heheheheh – “backchannel”. That’s what she said…

“On Writing, 2014” – a Triolet.

For writing copy that must go to press,
Are we writing or just making content?
Like writing – but somehow sadly less,
And I am less; and I am less content

“Short and punchy”, simple – but a mess,
Wrote to be! – but just with that intent
Unread and unloved on readers it will press
Not prose, not poetry, just content.

—

Make art, dammit.

Professor Madeline Atkins once told me a story – as a very senior academic in a University in England she took an interest in the end-of-year art shows, which tended to colonise strange parts of various university buildings and the surrounding city. She was slightly taken aback to see a sealed box on a staircase with a small window, through which a male student could clearly be seen masturbating.

Said student was, she claimed (in jest, I suspect…), only awarded a 2:1 for their work. A first would only have been awarded if he’d managed to ejaculate. (He did actually get a first…)

I wonder if, being faced by the continued prevarication of (male) Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers over a Grant Letter which does not reach a satisfying conclusion, Professor Atkins in her new role of HEFCE Chief Executive was reminded of this strange episode. The Grant Letter arrives late and leaves a lot left undone, itself public evidence of a private self-indulgence. And the ever-vigilant Registrarism reminds us that this doesn’t usually happen.

Of course, it is also a seminal letter for another reason – it is the last that is likely to have any meaningful direction as regards mainstream HE teaching funding. As the final year of “old regime” supported students proceed (with my best wishes!) towards graduation, HEFCE becomes – in effect – a special investment company using government funds to buy or subsidise various services provided by independent bodies, which include universities.

So “mainstreaming” of funding is perhaps inevitable as the overall resource allocated by HEFCE drops. The loss, in particular, of ring-fenced widening participation grants expresses a fervent hope that the “market” will itself be a mechanism that provides equality of access – Osborne’s (as yet) uncosted commitment to an end to student number caps demonstrate an eagerness to move away from ensuring that certain groups have access by making access universal.

HEFCE – then – have the difficult task of ensuring that whoever decides to enter the market provides education of a required quality. New entrants – excepting those that have the level of corporate backing that allows them an easy start – are faced with the prospect of being entirely at the whims of the student market, competing against a large number of general and specialised institutions which have a long-standing track record of delivering student success.  Even the corporate behemoth beneficiaries run a risk of staining a broader reputation.

Thus the “regulatory burden”, long an agenda as a sop to Vice-Chancellors who would prefer all their funding in a brown paper bag as non-sequential notes , becomes a sink-or-swim game that only experienced and tenacious higher education administrators are able to play. Chuck in Willetts’ desire for a “level playing field” and you risk annoying the Russell group on the one hand and seeing students hard-done-by on the other. So much of HEFCE’s work over the next year will concern which hand to use and how often.

STEM remains a priority investment, as do small and specialist institutions, and “widening participation” (though not via a named ringfenced fund). The lack of ministerial instruction here give HEFCE the opportunity to make evidence-based intervention in these areas, which could potentially be very interesting. The largely toothless OFFA would likely be a part of the later priority, though I would hope that we would see a revitalised HEFCE policy-making function that whacks OFFA into a more pro-active role.

Research (QR) support is again focused on the best-of-the-best – leaving research-led teaching reliant on institutional cross-subsidy and the continued likelihood of academics to work evenings and weekends. I’m reminded of the criticisms that Brian McVeigh (2002) made about the higher education system in Japan :

What some foreign observers fail to understand is that unlike the problems found in higher education in other places, the poverty of teaching and learning in Japan’s higher educational system is widespread, profound, systematic, and deeply structural. What we have is not mere weaknesses at some sites, but organized hypocrisy. In a word, failure is institutionalized, and institutionalized in such a way that schooling can be called ‘simulated’ (p22)

Increasingly the average undergraduate pays top dollar for teaching offered by post-graduate students or itinerant short-contract teaching-only academics – divorced from the spirit of intellectual enquiry that is open to an vanishing number of full-time (not “tenured” mind you, just with a contract of full-time employment) staff lucky enough to sit in a department that receives funding.

A simulated taste of intellectual inquiry and collegiate support. Are we turning Japanese? I really think so…

Who trains the leaders of our society? The decision makers, those whose ideas mean happiness or misery for millions? Historically, this would have been the ancient Greeks and Romans, via the classical education that was once de riguer for any learned man. To be able to dispute a subject in Latin was an early measure of competence for politicians, priests, doctors and lawyers – and was the primary means of university-level assessment for hundreds of years.

But assessment practices, and society, move on. These days our lives are more effected by a managerial class who are more likely to have a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) than a grounding in Plutarch and Pliny.  And, as one of the leaders of a recent conference noted: ”

As a result of the financial crisis, business schools have had an image problem. Society has the feeling we have failed them.

The MBA and other related qualification are delivered by the Business School, which was described by one speaker at a recent event for business school Deans as “the most successful educational innovation of the 20th century”. I was at the event to talk about an unlikely contender for the most successful educational innovation of the 21st century, the MOOC.

My respect for Deans of business schools rose sharply over the two-day event, as I saw just how exercised and engaged business school leaders are with the character of their graduates. I knew that “social entrepreneurship” had long been a management sub-discipline, but I was surprised to see how deeply these ideas of a social benefit to business had been embedded even in more mainstream courses.

Alas, this sort of stuff is less measurable than the traditional “salary premium” scales that have traditionally been used to pit one school against each other. (Just as a passing note, the salary premium offered by an MBA has doubled since 2009 according to one delegate). There are initiatives in development, including one supported by major accreditation body EFMD, that are looking to develop ways of understanding these more subtle impacts. And the majority of the event, an invite-only global meeting for Deans and similar school leaders, was focused on aspects of outreach and adding value to wider society.

Being at the interface between academia and the commercial world, Deans were best placed to see where academic practice could be useful. And nearly all were in agreement that the capacity for slow, considered, thought and a focus on the wider implications of business activity was something that research and scholarship could usefully bring to the table.

However, another key question (posed in the closing session) was:

What are business schools and academia doing to themselves?

A lot of people in my corner of the academic internet have been lamenting the “commercialisation” of university management practice – but somehow hearing it from people who research and teach around management practice more generally really hit home. The need to focus on preparing graduates for a radically different future is a concern that links executive education to Dark Mountain.

In parallel, thinking about the changing face of business was characterised by an emphasis on the resurgence of politics – the increased willingness of the state to step in to regulate and manage markets. How much of this strand of thinking was driving the emphasis on the social good was unclear – my guess is that the two themes were largely separate… I never thought I’d have occasion to accuse the Dean of a very prominent school of socialism, and I was surprised to see so many ideas I would have characterised as very “radical lefty” put forward without apology. Many schools have a focus on student voluntary work, generally in supporting local businesses, charities and other social enterprises pro bono with student expertise.

A concern around the increasing intervention of politics prompted two UK business school deans to tell me that their primary worry for the next two years was a potential change of government funding policy – with a clear acceptance that the current model had failed and was failing.

A range of industry CEO keynotes was also focused on social good, with executives from heavy engineering concerns lining up to talk about supporting, effectively, social enterprise and education around the world. Another take-away from me was the trend for larger companies to in-source – to take unrelated business areas like estate management and IT services in house to drive up efficiency.

In talking about MOOCs I was left to concentrate on business models – the flaws in the current crop of platform offers, the current low financial and reputational benefit offered to an individual school within an institution, the start-up rather than publishing or educational nature of the path to value realisation were as clear to me as they were to the delegates. Talking authoritatively about business models to a room full of people who research and teach them every day was nerve-wracking, to say the least.

But there was an enormous appetite to showcase the quality and expertise of business school staff, and to allow schools to build on the work of others online; an appetite that was filled, incongruously, by the re-emergence of the plainer elder sister of the MOOC, Open Educational Resources. Both myself and the legend that is Paul Stacey (another invited speaker, focusing on MOOC pedagogy) were surprised by how animated delegates were by the ideals and original benefits of OER.

I closed my session with my usual lament about the state of EdTech journalism – itself made poignant by an earlier speaker claiming that “Schools of journalism are dead”. I got the impression that it was very senior institutional leaders that were signing up to the big platforms, and that they were not acting on accurate product information. When the book on the MOOC comes to be written – probably by Audrey Watters – my suspicion is it will be seen as an early indicator of the failure of journalism rather than as a triumph of educational innovation.

(A hearty salute to Paul via the Canadian National Anthem)

The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests.

Who said that? Why, Clay Shirky, of course. The same Clay Shirky that said MOOCs were Higher Ed’s mp3. This time, the End Of Universities As We Know Them (yawn) is because of the 1970s.

“And then the 1970s happened…”, and clearly human nature changed entirely at this point. Because before 1975 we lived in the golden age. Then it stopped. Shirky is unclear why this happened. Sure he says that the Vietnam War ended,  and the GI Bill became less generous, oil got expensive – but not only is this very US-centric, it also omits the equally salient and relevant point that David Bowie released “Golden Years” in 1975.

Driven by this pivotal turn that marked the beginning of the transition between Bowie’s “Thin White Duke” persona and the synth-driven “Berlin” albums, we as a society decided that education was not something we wanted to spend money on for the wider good. Instead, support for students and institutions began to fall, and learners were expected to contribute more. The tasteful  guitar stylings of Carlos Alomar led us to stop seeing education as benefiting us all, and started seeing it as primarily benefiting the individual in question.

This  headlong dash into a more stratified, less equal society had the secondary effect of driving up enrolment. As wages began to stagnate even as productivity grew a generation of Americans decided that the only path to earning enough to live like their parents used to was to go to college.

An army of adjunct professors, growing from less than 45% of faculty in 1975 to more than 60% in 2009, evolved to keep institutional costs down.  The percentage of full-time and part-time tenure posts both nearly halved during this time, which is a shame as this inconvenient fact rather undermines the latter part of Shirky’s post. Actually, to be entirely correct – it is a shame because less academics have the security of a long-term paid role.

Elvis Presley reportedly turned down the chance to sing Golden Years,  instead releasing his 1975 album “Today”, his final studio recording. And “the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older” says Shirky (coincidentally – not coincidentally – this is true in many parts of the world where tuition fees are charged).  And just like Elvis in the 70s, these students are supposedly in some danger of dropping out.

“One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.”

And we’re back with the old saw of Baumol’s cost disease – where apparently education cannot be made more efficient. As usual with economists, you have to query what is meant by “efficiency”, especially where something complex like education is under discussion. And “value”, for that matter.

Fundamentally, the thing that is broken has very little to do with what Higher Education actually is, and everything to do with the cultural value of the status that higher education qualifications has in a world where the very idea of waged labour as an organising principle is breaking down.  But don’t let me hear you say life’s taking you nowhere…

This post was originally written for wonkhe.com back in December. Unfortunately, for various reasons, it was never published and is now beginning to get out of date. I’ve tweaked it a little to make it a useful (I hope!) summary of the “state of the MOOC” round about the turn of the year.  This post is available under a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

It has been just over a year since I last wrote about the Massive Open Online Courses on Wonkhe, and since then we have climbed onto our Hype Cycle, crested the Peak of Expectation, and are currently speeding towards the Trough of Disillusionment.

For the uninitiated a MOOC can refer to

• (a) A (generally) free-to-take online course building on the “artificial intelligence” open online course experiments by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford in 2011, and typified by Udacity, Coursera and FutureLearn.
• (b) A free-to-take, (mostly) openly licensed online course building on the “Connectivism” ideas pioneered in 2008 by George Siemens, Dave Cormier, Rita Kop and Stephen Downes, and typified by a range of smaller courses based around learning networks.
• (c) Other examples of open class and online delivery, usually influenced by connectivist ideas if not explicitly so. Examples include Phonar, H817open and ds106.
• (d) “Something something INTERNETS something something LEARNING something FREE”. Typified by articles in Forbes, Fast Company and the New York Times written by people who claim to be journalists but haven’t done any research.

Rather than address an imagined “MOOC movement” as a whole, it makes more sense to look at each tendency in isolation, and with a greater emphasis on where the money and hype is. There is some overlap, but also a great deal of disdain/suspicion.

Type (a) MOOCs (sometimes known as xMOOCs, the “x” standing for “cool letter at the front”) are the ones that have been burning through all that venture capital money, and their thinking has turned towards more sustainable business models. Recent research (for example by Weller and Jordan) has made it clear that the early concerns are correct and that these courses do not retain student interest well, and that the early days of enormous interest and sign up at the launch of each MOOC have long gone. A recent MOOC research conference in Arlington, Texas (#MRI13) reiterated these long-standing concerns, now backed up by a great deal of data.

Even the acknowledged “founder” of this strand of MOOCs, Sebastian Thrun, has made statements appearing to back away from his earlier bombast, and the theorist whose ideas of “disruption” underpins the initial Thrun comments – Clayton Christiansen – has been the most significant and surprising move away from the business process arrogance that generated the education/natural disaster metaphors which were everywhere at the start of last year.

All those millions of dollars that venture capitalists have invested come with the expectation of financial return – or, at the very least, sustainability. But despite moderately-huge (on a social media scale) user numbers, financial returns are proving harder to come by.

Most of the major xMOOC platforms now appear to be moving (at greater or lesser speed) towards a corporate training model rather than directly replacing traditional Higher Education.  Where this leaves the corporate platform offerings from Instructure and Pearson, or the nascent mooc.org platform from Google and the pay-to-deliver operation EdX, remains to be seen. But early research around linking xMOOC activity to employment prospects has not been positive.

Microtrends within the xMOOC world include an attempt to engineer the narrative around “drop-outs” by redefining the actual term. Various people, most notably Martin Bean of the OU, have argued that the intention of the learner is more important than the scope of the course as planned and delivered – if a learner stays for one minute of one lecture, but gets something they value from the interaction, then (goes the argument) this is not a drop out but a success. (Maybe I would be tempted to argue that it is an indication that the courses are not what people want?)

And the early hype about a new generation of iterative (“artificially intelligent”) learning platforms has yet to be translated into actually gains in understanding about learning. Though more data is around, and – finally – more high quality, ethical, research is underway, the evidence cupboard is looking rather bare.

One notable champion of this strand of MOOC-life has been our very own David Willetts, who as appeared as MOOC cheerleader at a range of conferences throughout 2013. BIS commissioned Stephen Haggard to produce a MOOC literature review (pdf), which due to publication times mostly covers (formal and informal) work from 2012 and earlier.

On to cMOOCs, which have continued to tick over at a low level in 2013. These are not the MOOCs you are reading about in newspapers, but have primarily been aimed at educators and very experienced learners. Connectivism – briefly – is the idea that knowledge is mediated by a network of co-learners and resources, and that learning happens via the connections of these nodes. (See also Deleuze and Guattari (pdf)on rhizomes, and follow Dave Cormier’s rhizo14 cMOOC)

But Connectivism is a theory of learning that is very young, and needs a lot more work and analysis. Away from the xMOOC number-crunching, another major research topic concerns improvements and examples to strengthen this theoretical position.

The rise of the Open Course may be the beginnings of this evidence base (there are also some xMOOCs – in particular see #edcmooc at Edinburgh/Coursera  – experimenting with Connectivism). An open class occurs where a traditional course delivered to paying students for credit is shared with the wider world – in that anyone can have access to the content and assessment that traditional students have, and discussion between students inside and outside the classroom is promoted and encouraged.

An open course offers the paying learner the best of both worlds – the structure, support and accreditation of traditional HE, plus the global network and enormous range of resources offered online. And for open learners, it is a chance to experience the reality of class-based teaching and to build strong relationships with students and staff in an institution.

“That’s uncharacteristically positive!”, you may be thinking – and I would have to caveat that much more research is needed. But three out of five winners of “Reclaim Open” – a MacArthur Foundation/MIT/DML supported attempt to look at the truly interesting and beneficial work happening under the wider banner of open education – fit broadly into this category, Phonar at Coventry University, the FemTechNet DOCC, and the venerable DS106. So something to watch in the future as the MOOC hype dies down.

Ah yes, MOOC hype – I did promise a look at that, but instead of more detail I’m going to link to two longer articles that unpick some of the cultural and socio-political aspects of the issue. The first was presented by Audrey Watters at OpenEd13, the second by me at ALTC13.

If that’s all a bit TL;DR (though I would suggest that you did read them, or at least Audrey’s) – people have been going around for the last two years saying that MOOCs are going to utterly destroy every notion of traditional higher education in some kind of natural disaster, and it now appears that this is not the case. However, such nuanced messages take time to filter through to lazier headline writers and PR folks.

Writing about the #MRI13 conference, Bon Stewart initially suggested that this presents an opportunity to “challenge the empty narratives that your administrators or your faculty have been sold. Find ways to talk about why what you’re doing matters. Change the narrative from [MOOCs] back to what education is about: learning. End story.”

But her wider thinking suggests something different – the first conversation that needs to happen may be the one between the various actors in the wider “open education” field. There are basic disagreements around things like the definition of “open” – openly licensed (meaning everyone can use it) or “free of charge” (meaning you don’t have to pay – money – to see it) and every colour in between.

I’m fascinated by open education because it cuts right to the heart of the values and narratives of civilisation – what do we believe about education, about media, about the way we interact with culture, about employment, about uses of state funding? By covering only MOOCs in this post, I’ve missed out a lot of interesting stuff happening with Open Education Resources, Open Access to research (and research data)…

For further reading I would point to this recent CETIS publication (Yuan, Powell, Olivier 2014), which covers some of the technological and process trends around c- and x- MOOCs in more depth.

If you are interested in policy making in education you should be interested in open education. It is not going to stop.

So according to David Willetts at the BIS committee this morning…

There is no link between income from student loan sales and the planned expansion of HE spending at BIS. The Treasury are (apparently) underwriting an uncosted expansion of the sector, which is very different from the impression George Osborne gave in the Autumn Statement.

There is no BIS budget black hole due to the expansion in loans for HNC/D fees offered, even though BIS had to intervene in the market to stop expansion in this area.

HEPI, in forecasting a RAB charge on income contingent loans of 38% were “right for the wrong reasons”. In a spectacularly relaxed response, the Secretary of State admitted RAB may well rise to in excess of 50%, and that this was due to wages not rising fast enough. Seemingly Mr Willetts was happier to give Ed Milliband “cost of living” attack lines than to admit that HEPI are actually quite good.

9% of UK student fees are paid upfront. That seems high.

David Willetts will provide a response to the BIS Committee on Andrew McGettigan’s identification £1.7bn accounting error in the autumn statement. I wonder if he’ll leave Andrew a blog comment?