Stephen Downes
December 10, 2013
Access
I'd like to begin with the issue of
access. This is not where I usually begin a talk, because the main thing, I
have to say, about issues of access is that's, to be outside the scope of the
areas that I work in.
But from the perspective of the
learner, the online learner, there are two major forms of access that need to be
considered. First of all, there is technological access, ranging from power to
Internet access, to mobile delivery.
The main thing that, I want to say,
there is that there is a very large difference between any sort of access, and
all‑the‑time broadband access and that this degree of access might facilitate a
difference in your ability to enjoy and use e‑Learning.
As well as digital access, I want to
talk about cognitive access, because this is equally a factor in online
delivery. In particular, we face issues of, not only literacy, but also, digital
literacy, that is, the ability to actually make use of the online learning
materials that are made available to you.
As well, people are facing issues finding
time to learn. We've discovered in recent offerings of online courses, people
started out enthusiastically, but are unable to finish the course because
they've run out of time.
As well, there is the idea that,
learning is something that needs to be valued. This is something that does not
come from the online course, or even the online environment.
This is something that is created by
the community, the child's parents, or leaders in the community, the idea that
learning and scholarships are something to be valued, and something to be
pursued.
E-Learning
You're probably familiar with
traditional e‑Learning. e‑Learning looks at the online course, as a course.
What I mean by that is the
traditional college/university course. Indeed, e‑learning in many respects
begins as a set of course tools for web support. That's what the original
learning management system was: course outlines and tests and things like that
that the instructor could put online.
From this early beginning, they
began to put course content online, which typically consisted of a text and
perhaps some images and graphics. Only after this, do we move into the idea, of
learning design and pedagogy, which is drawn primarily from the field of
distance learning, where courses are rounded up as packages, or what we might
call program texts, designed to lead the student through a course of
instruction.
As e‑learning developed in the late
1990s, early 2000s, the online course almost began to resemble a book, where
the structure of the book was the structure of the pedagogy, and where course
content was contained in small learning objects, which were digital materials
of chunked content intended for discovery, reuse, and application in multiple
online learning environments.
Web course tools, then became
mechanisms for collecting, packaging, and presenting these. The course, as a
result, began to resemble a publication. You begin to think in course packages
complete with content, learning design, everything you need for an online
course.
Massive Open Online Course
The Massive Open Online Course, or
MOOC, is a bit of a reaction to this. It is, in many ways, an unbundling of
this traditional course design. I'll talk about that as we go along.
Very briefly, what I mean by a
Massive Open Online Course, is a course that satisfies each of those four
terms. You've heard from Google and others about EdX, and Coursera, and the
rest, and I caution that many of these online courses do not satisfy all four
of these criteria.
By massive, I mean, massive by design, capable of handling large
numbers of students, but not necessarily actually reaching them. The idea is to
build into the design the elimination of bottlenecks or choke points that would
make it difficult to deal with very large numbers of participants.
By open, I mean, open across many dimensions. Open, not in the sense
of anybody can enroll, but open, in the sense of the content is free and open
to use, to reuse, and there aren't limits on the use of the course materials.
Online,
obviously means online. That does not mean that all course activity must take
place specifically, and only online, but that there are no necessary elements
of the course that must be taken offline. Put more plainly, you do not have to
show up at a certain university campus, at a certain time and place, in order
to pass a course.
By course, I don't mean course as in course package, in the sense
we've just discussed, but rather course in the sense that it has a start date
and end date and a sequence of materials in the middle.
Open Educational Resources
The Massive Open Online Course in
the sense should be thought of as a form of Open Educational Resource. This
Open Educational Resource is a concept that was identified and named by UNESCO
in 2002 or 2003[1].
The idea of an Open Educational Resource is that it's a digital resource that
can be used to support learning.
Now, there is some dispute about the
educational in Open Educational
Resource, and we could have a long digression here, but what's important is
that, it can be used to support learning. In a sense, any digital resource can
be an Open Educational Resource.
As Open Educational Resources have
been developed, they've been used to form courseware and this, in the
traditional sense that I discussed earlier. An example of that is Open
Education Resource University (OERu), created by the Commonwealth of Learning,
which is made up of what is called anchor partners, universities from various
commonwealth countries.[2]
The idea is that, courses are
created as course packages using open educational resources. These course
packages are offered by different universities for a credit degree.
They follow what is called the logic
model, as created by Jim Davies from the University of Southern Queensland. The
idea is that you go through stages of openness, from open content, to open
learning design, to open educational activities and classes, through open
assessment, and open credentialing.[3]
Now OERU does not go all the way to
the top. Credentialing in the OERU level is closed to all but the participating
universities, but with the idea of progression (through types of openness) is a
well-established model.
Sustainability
With open educational resources
comes the concept of sustainability. The concept of sustainability refers to
the capacity of those supporting resources to continue to fund the productions
and distribution of these resources. Models of sustainability[4] can be broken down to the
commercial models and the non‑commercial models.
The commercial model includes the
end up selling of extended services, the use of the platform for advertising
and marketing, or to support a product, or to support a labor force. So, in all
of these cases, the resource will be paid for by some commercial entity, and
that commercial entity will expect some return on that initial investment.
Non‑commercial models include public
knowledge such as, the models provided by public broadcasting corporations such
as, TVC, BBC and National Public Radio.
They also include the charity model.
OECD released a report called "Giving Knowledge for Free"[5], which really depicts OERs
as charity. A third model is based on a foundation or the community such as,
the Apache Foundation, the Wikipedia foundation and the open source model,
where the costs are borne by the community that is interested in releasing the
software.
Publications vs Community
Now, in the study of open
educational resources, which I did a number of years ago, for OECD, I looked at
the different models of openness, and it seemed to me, at that time, and stills
seems to me, that the open model of educational resources themselves
significantly acts as a sustainability model.
In a sense, there are two ways of
producing an educational resource, which we might distinguish: the publications
model and the community model.
In the publication model, a contractor
is hired, or in some author is engaged, to produce the resource. Sometimes it
is a university, sometimes it is commercial publisher, sometimes it is private
contracting firm. The idea is that, first the resource is produced, and then it
is distributed as a part of a course.
In the community model, the idea is
that the community benefits from both the resource and the production of the
resource for itself. One example of this is the student produced resources,
where students themselves create the resources that will be used in their
courses. This is the model that I advocated to the OECD, and forms the basis of
the massive open online courses that we have offered.
This is a major difference between
the courses we offer, and those produced by Cousera, edX and the rest. These
courses use a publisher model of open educational resources, as opposed to a
community model open educational resources.
Formal and Informal Learning
This also points to a significant
difference in use application, of open online learning. There are many reasons
to take a MOOC. And for the purpose of this discussion, I distinguish two major
types. First of all learning in order to
know, and second, learning in order to
do.
These characterize the differences
between formal and informal learning.
In formal learning, the course is
defined by the content. While in informal learning, the course is defined not
by the content, but rather by the desire of the interest of the user in
accomplishing some task or some goal external to the course.
So, there are two different
definitions of success. In one case, the formal learning case, success is
demonstrated by mastery in the material. But in the case of informal learning,
success is demonstrated by completing the task.
This creates a different source of
support and a different source of authority for each of the two models.
In the formal learning model,
support is intended to be derived from the professor, or the institution
offering the course, while the community model receives an example of mutual
dependence, and indeed, impendence, for support comes from the community that
made the task, and the environment in which the person is working.
Now, in the creation of open line
courses, this need for support, I would argue, creates one of these bottlenecks
that we are trying to avoid with the design mass of open online courses. And there
is a lot of talk about the need of the instructor to be present, with the
interaction between the student and instructor, or a student and a team of
teaching assistants, or whatever.
This contrasts with the community
model, where support is distributed across the community of learners. And it is
this distribution of the support, which eliminates the bottlenecks that are
inherent in the formal courses.
Learning and Performance Support System
The technology and support that
completes the provision of delivery of open online courses, that is to say,
what I am describing in the sense to the community model, can be described
within a rubric of a program that, we in NRC, are undertaking what is called a
learning and performance support system. This will be a $19 million, five‑year
program. This program is divided into five major components.
First of all, access to resources or repositories of resources. Here, I refer not
to specifically ordinary published materials because that is the model of the
formal course. But rather the productions created by the surrounding the
student learner.
It also involves the cloud storage infrastructure, In most
applications of cloud infrastructure in an educational context the student’s
cloud, is managed by, or is essentially the property of, the institutional host
of the course. However, what we are looking at is this cloud infrastructure
managed by and operated by the student. And this creates the question of
synchronization, across multiple cloud providers.
If you look at that, for example, there
are many available cloud providers such Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Cubby, and
the rest. A personal cloud is a method of managing access to synchronization of
their materials in this cloud infrastructure. Also, this cloud infrastructure
serves in turn, as a portal for their E‑portfolio, or collection of materials
that they created.
There's still a lot of discussions
with E‑portfolio, and the focus here is to manage on personal, rather than
institutional basis, on the portfolio. The major components of informal
learning, and personal online learning is the personal learning record - this could be a whole‑talk in itself.
Delivery, need to be enabled in a
variety of environments and there's a lot of talk about mobile devices. But, in
my perspective, this is one and for many platforms which learning needs to be
available. This leads to the concept of the personal
learning assistant.
In particular, we would speak the
idea of projecting learning resources, and projecting learning resources means,
making content services available, wherever the person is, whether it be a
laptop, desktop, a mobile computer, working with a tool or appliance, working
with software system, or any other vehicle. There is a wide range of possible
support.
Finally, in the LPSS, or Learning in
Performance Support System, is analytics,
competence and assessment, and this is essentially the application of
artificial intelligence, and the pattern recognition to identify the ways in
which a person can become competent at some skill or task, and the gap between
where they are, and becoming competent.
Options
Finally, I just want to talk about
the model of delivering this type of learning. One model is associated with the
Udacity model which is to give up and focus on corporate learning. Of more
interest is the Coursera option, but it's only part of the way toward the
solution.
The Coursera option is essentially
first of all, to focus on the provider, as offering a unique experience. But
secondly is the promotion of the creation of learning communities. Now, Coursera
has set‑up a set of physical learn communities around the world. This is based
mostly at US Consulates and similar sorts of infrastructure provided by the
American Government around the world.[6]
I think, full support of a community‑based
model of all online learning is to follow what we might call, 'The Triad
Model', or "The Host-Provider Framework,” Where, the MOOC stands as an
independent entity, not belonging to any particular institution, which can be
thought of as an event hosted by an online community practice, that start/stops
dates and contents in the middle.
Where experts, or people who are in active
in the field, make presentation, provides resources, and generally serve as a
focus or an attractor to bring people to the event.
The host is the learning community
itself. This maybe online. But very often this will be a physically‑based
community, where a mutual support network is created for people in the
community to talk about, and discuss among themselves, to create resources for
this online course.
Host communities may be online, or may
be community based groups or a combination of both.
The idea in here is that the
community brings a part of itself into the community‑based open online course.
So course becomes, not only a method of propagating and distributing learning,
as though it were a publication or a book, but rather an mechanism for sharing
and exchanging information and learning, and creating new learning in the model
of conversation in the community.
That concludes my talk, I'd be happy
to entertain any questions or comments that you may have.
Audience Member: I don't think you can see me, but I'm particularly interested in books
right now, I'm doing a feasibility study for OECD which is examining how as an
organization that could use massive online courses for its own knowledge
production, examination and so on.
I have two questions. One, is on your perspective on MOOC aggregators so
the course has new densities and so on. Except for the xMOOCs.
Is there, from your standpoint, a comparison to be made between these
aggregators and what else are there and read other sort of journal publishers
have done, by basically claiming content produced by universities, by
researchers and then selling that content to the same universities, and the
same institutions libraries? Just to get your perspective on that.
Thinking and listening to my second question, which is, what would be
your advice or recommendation where an organization wants to develop, that
makes the decision to develop a massive open online course.
Does an organization today, this is a non‑profit organization. Does it
need the organization or the partnership with a formal learning institution or
a higher education institution, in order to deliver on a promise of not to be
scaling up and opening up knowledge and learning? That's my second question.
Scaling Up
I'll answer your second question first,
because it's easy. The answer is no. What really matters is that the
organization is able to engage on the community, that is interested in
learning, in some way, shape or form. If it was an organization like OECD for
example, which just released its PISA results.[7] Just as an example.
OECD could easily create a MOOC
around the results by setting up a series of discussions, five, six, seven
discussions like people who are involved in the case study creating online event
and then encouraging the creation of community supported resources around that.
And any organization can do this. It
doesn't require educational institutions; it requires mostly some technical
smarts, and the idea, that contact of creating that resource. In any open
online course created this way you can use open‑source technology.
We use technology that developed,
but you don't need to use that. You should use, for example, WordPress with the
BuddyPress plugin, in order to create a community and aggregate content across
that community. I can go into that in a lot more detail, but the short answer
is that the idea of a PISA MOOC.
It would not be for people to master
the material or learn all of the content. It would be a way for people to get
together, to explore the idea of these, and to develop their own thoughts and
their own ideas around it.
And people would draw from it,
different senses, different communities, different learnings and application of
that learning.
Publishing
To answer the first question, it's
really hard to distinguish between platform, Udacity, Coursera and the like.
The model is...and it's interesting the question was phrased in comparison with
a publishing model where professors, universities are invited to contribute
their material to a publication, which in turn sells them access to their own
material.
The difference between this and
Coursera or Udacity is that the publishers are selling the content back to the
institution, what they are doing is selling access to the platform in which the
content is located back in the institutions.
Technically, in a sense, it's not a
case of selling the institutional content back to itself. But that might just
be accomplished in any case by sleight of hand. My own preference, and people have
heard me express this a lot, is for institutions to manage and publish their
own content, their own learning content, their own academic content, their
public relations content. There are many good reasons for this, and they are
mostly significantly, this content for some raw material on open online course,
potential raw material maybe in open online courses, created in many different
ways.
If the content is made available for
free, then it can be re‑used by people offering online courses where they're
first setting up an open online course and inviting participants to populate
that course useful converted materials, simply by linking to it. This greatly
reduces the cost of production and greatly facilitates the ease of creating a
course, not just by your academic institutions, but by any institutional
provider around the world.
One of the ways I like to talk about
this, and it's an alternative way of thinking about this, is that the academic
content that is produced by professors, and universities, and institutes, and
the like, is not content to be learned and retained by the learners or
students, but rather becomes the words in a vocabulary that they use in order
to communicate with each other.
Instead of sending sentences, in
text, to each other, they send content which they refer to and talk about to
each other, and very often content which they modify, and recombine or mash up
with other content, to each other.
This content becomes the raw
material, not just for the production of other courses, but for the
conversations that people have among each other. It is for this reason that
open online content is really essential in order to support a community‑based
model of online learning.
It is for this reason that I found
myself, as have many others, butting heads against the publishers, who choose
to put a subscription or other barrier in front of this content. What they're
doing when they do this, is that they're creating barriers to the conversation
that happens between academics and between students with academics and with
each other. It makes conversation impossible.
Audience Member: I have one question, Stephen, from my side. You mentioned something
about the personal learning record. Just try to enlighten my mind, because this
could be like medical stuff. How do you see, what is your vision about it?
Personal Learning Records
There's definitely an overlap in the
concept between the personal learning record, and the personal health record.
One of the important elements here, and I'll start with that, because as I
think it characterizes it, is that the personal learning record needs to
belong, essentially, to the individual holding the record.
It's not some other institute's
record of your learning. It's my record of my learning. This record would need
to be able to be supported, or substantiated with reference to individuals, so
at least a part of the personal learning record would consist of links to
credentials, academic or otherwise, that are held by other institutions.
Much like your wallet contains a
driver's license, which is connected to a record in the government department
for transportation, certifying that you're able to drive, and contains some
insurance record which is connected to an insurance company record, which is a
statement of their policy.
What's important here is that, like
your wallet, it's personal. You don't show it to people. Other people can't
look at it without your permission. You show it only to people that you want to
see it.
The other aspect of the personal
learning record is that, it contains links, references, and metadata regarding
your performance. This would refer directly to evidence of that performance in
the form of an e‑portfolio or records in academic content service providers, et
cetera.
In its widest sense, the personal
learning record will keep track of all of the learning that you've done. This
is the basis of a lot of analytics that providers of the MOOCs and learning
management systems will talk about, where they talk of tracking a student's
performance.
The difference between a personal
learning record and a platform‑based analytics, is that a personal learning
record, can extend beyond the limits of the platform.
While a platform, such as an LMS,
can only analyze your performance inside the LMS, a personal learning record
would look at your work inside the LMS and would look at your work in social
networks like Facebook, Twitter, or whatever.
It would look at your work in
application programs such as Word, PowerPoint, et cetera. It provides a
comprehensive picture of your own personal performance. This is why it's very
important that access be restricted and security managed, so that your record
remains personal only.
The thing is, this can be used as
the basis of what we might call personal analytics, as compared to platform
analytics, creating a network of voluntary exchanges of information, about
personal performance and academic achievement among a community of learners, to
create analytics based on the whole person in comparison with relevant
information, to other members of the community, or of other members in the
community.
Audience Member: I don't know if you can answer this question, but you were talking
about the difference between formal learning and informal learning. You were
talking about the fact that the formal learning part is more about, how do you
define success is by people completing the course, the formal course.
I wonder, because we had someone from Google just before you. We were
talking about that, saying that open learning is the news. It seems that people
are not really so much interested in getting a certificate of the courses they
have done.
I wonder if you had any sense of this evolution, or do you know the
percentage of...are people interested in this completion course or
certification anymore or not?
Because in the UN system, we are very much into the formal learning
approach and the very formal certificate approach of credentials, or maybe compliance
legislation. We don't have it good so far, sometimes. I wonder what's your
knowledge about that.
Credentials
I think, probably the major
observation of massive online courses has been that, their completion rates are
low, and therefore certificates are offered for completion of the course. The
certificate rate is low.
A big part of this is caused by the
phenomenon of drop‑ins, or tourists as they're sometimes called, people who
just look at the course because they're interested in the content of the
course, but they don't have the intent of moving from start to finish.
I will say that, the model of
learning, where you proceed through course material from start to finish, and
complete with some sort of a capstone exercise, such as a test or a
presentation or project of some sort, is a very common model in learning.
It's a common model that
characterized e‑learning for many years. This model is well‑known. The
difference between MOOCs which follow this model, and traditional online
courses is actually pretty minimal, the only difference being that the content
available to MOOCs would be openly accessible.
Generally, there tends to be a limit
or a restriction on completion or certification. As I mentioned, OERu requires
that you enroll at the university to receive the capstone. Coursera has a model
where they verify a person's identity for a fee, and that's how you get your
certificate there.
I think there is demonstrated
interest in obtaining the certificates. It's not the majority of participants,
but it's a significant, non‑negligible number of participants. I'm thinking of
a graph that was drawn by Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein.[8]
Looking at the size of these
populations, and as I recall the graph in my mind, it's in the 15 percent
range, plus or minus ten percent of people who were interested in the
certification.
This is especially the case, among
that population that is outside Western Europe and North America, and where
there are significant challenges to employment, and where even something like
the Coursera certificate, say, would be a significant advantage in obtaining a
job.
We do see this and that explains
quite reasonably why certificates of completion are of interest to organizations
such as UN. Where do I want to go with that?
Community Assessment
From that perspective, I think,
Massive Open Online Learning forms a better alternative than the traditional
system, but not a dramatically better initiative because the need for
certificates faces the same barriers of technological and cognitive access.
It faces the same sort of bottleneck
in terms of evaluation and assessment of the credential. The more you attempt
to assess a credential, the more time and labor intensive it becomes, and
that's a real concern.
Just to put this in context, and to
explain partially why, I think that the open community‑based model will
ultimately be a better alternative, I think we're right at the point where,
instead of evaluating learners by capstone exercises or credentials, we'll be
able to evaluate people according to their portfolios, and according their
performance in open online networks.
You see this in communities like the
open‑source software community already, where people are able to demonstrate
their leadership capabilities and their software capabilities in an open
community and can obtain employment, by that means.
This is true for Google... we might
have mentioned that Google, in particular, has been known to hire people
directly out of open source projects, for example people who created Mozilla
foundation on the basis of the work that they've done in this environment.[9]
With intelligent analytics, and with
learning and performance data shared in an open online environment, it will be
possible to create a learning profile of people, drawing on their personal
learning record, such that we no longer need these credentials offered by an
institution, but rather only need the actual evidence of their performance, in
order to create a comprehensive picture.
I think, we're looking at a coming
sea change in the nature of assessment and certification. It's not here yet.
It's going to take five or ten years, but I think it's definitely coming.
Audience Member: I don't see any more questions from the floor, but just one sentence
can sum up your vision or... I know it's hard, but just so we can go through.
One Sentence
I think that the future of education
is in people working communities to provide their own learning, as opposed to
having their learning provided for them by publishers or institutions. How's
that?
Audience Member: I just have one comment, which
concerns the ISO norms in terms of accreditation. We haven't been mentioning it
and I'm wondering if someone could. We are not very aware of this inside of the
WFP. We know that this has been an initiative. What is actually your experience
concerning this?
Standardization
Stephen: I now know, what you mean by ISO. I
would say ISO. It points to, even if you're using the same language, the
problem of translation.
There's a lot about ISO I don't
know. I'm familiar with the ISO metadata for learning, I forget the
exact...it's LMR. I forget what the "R" stands for - Metadata for
learning resources, which is a classification, a categorization scheme.[10]
I would not be surprised if there
were other ISO standards that I'm not aware of, but I'm going to be careful and
say, I don't know the full range of ISO standards with respect to learning,
because ISO is just so huge. It's a question of standardization of quality in
general.
It's expressed not only by ISO but
also, for example, in initiatives like Common Core in the United States and
even to some degree in the PISA evaluations which are setting baselines for
math, language and science learning (Interestingly, not art, geography, or
history, but that's a different issue as well).
It does point to the danger of
standardization, and the danger is probably most characterized by the
difference between formal and informal learning.
That is, this standardization
presumes that everybody has the same objectives, the same understanding of
quality, the same concept of mind. That's true of formal learning but it's less
true of informal learning.
Standardization implies in many
respects, that there is a definition of quality that can be created for a
particular set of resources or a particular domain, and again, that's not
necessarily going to be the case in informal learning.
That is not to say that, there is no
distinction between quality and lack of quality, but rather that quality is a
relative property. Quality is in many ways in the eyes of the beholder, and in
the case of education, the beholder includes not only the student but the
education provider and the society in which the education is provided. If we
look at the different values of different societies, we see that there's going
to be a very different understanding of quality.
In my own case, I like to
distinguish for the purpose of standardization between syntactic and semantic
activities.
Syntactic activities refer to the
mechanics of the interaction. We think of plumbing. Think of the pipe fitting,
the size of pipes, the gauge of the thread, and material used in pipes. These
standards are made, in order to make sure that pipes fit together with each
other.
Electricity has standards regarding
wattage, amps, the gauge of wires, the width of the light bulb that screw into
the light socket, et cetera. This is to make sure the light bulb fits into the
light socket. The standards do not address what you run through the pipes,
mostly.
It certainly does not address what
you use the water for, what you use the liquid for. The standards do not
address what you're going to light with the light that you're lighting. In
cases of meaning, value, content, et cetera. I don't think that they can apply
standards.
In cases where you're dealing with
semantic elements of learning, I think that it would be a mistake to establish
standards, because each person approaches semantics from a slightly different
perspective. That, I think, is the role of standardization, where can I
identify my syntax mechanism for interaction.
I think, they're really important,
but where we're looking at communicating values, I think, we need to look at
other non-standardized approaches. It would be a community kind of approach
where these things are determined as a result of interaction among people
operating in and information network, and that's a short version of a very long
concept.
[1]
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources/
[2]
http://wikieducator.org/OERu
[3]
http://wikieducator.org/OERu/Logic_model
[4]
http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/36781698.pdf
[5]
http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/givingknowledgeforfreetheemergenceofopeneducationalresources.htm
[6]
http://www.downes.ca/post/61316
[7]
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm
[8]
http://mfeldstein.com/insight-on-mooc-student-types-from-eli-focus-session/
[9]
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/01/4549-2/
[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_19788
