The focus of the report
This report sets out to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and trends towards greater openness in higher education and to think about the implications for their institutions. The phenomena of MOOCs are described, placing them in the wider context of open education, online learning and the changes that are currently taking place in higher education at a time of globalisation of education and constrained budgets. The report is written from a UK higher education perspective, but is largely informed by the developments in MOOCs from the USA and Canada. A literature review was undertaken focussing on the extensive reporting of MOOCs through blogs, press releases as well as openly available reports. This identified current debates about new course provision, the impact of changes in funding and the implications for greater openness in higher education. The theory of disruptive innovation is used to help form the questions of policy and strategy that higher education institutions need to address.

Making sense of MOOCs
MOOCs are a relatively recent online learning phenomenon, having developed from the first early examples five years ago, they are now generating considerable media attention and significant interest from higher education institutions and venture capitalists that see a business opportunity to be exploited. They can be seen as an extension of existing online learning approaches, in terms of open access to courses and scalability, they also offer an opportunity to think afresh about new business models that include elements of open education. This includes the ability to disaggregate teaching from assessment and accreditation for differential pricing and pursuit of marketing activities.

Analysis of MOOC initiatives
The opportunity that MOOCs offer for massification of courses has generated significant interest from governments, institutions and commercial organisations. A number of bespoke MOOC platforms have been developed and offer courses independent of or in collaboration with universities. A growing number of institutions have been involved in engaging and experimenting with MOOCs for the purpose of expanding access, marketing and branding, as well as the potential of developing new revenue streams. Motivations for learners to participate in MOOCs are varied, and many struggle to engage with courses and keep motivated in the context of an online learning environment. The market value of certification of courses, short of credit as part of traditional institutional awards, has yet to be determined. Other potential business models are being developed but need further work to establish them.

Issues and Challenges for MOOCs
Over recent years there has been a significant change in societal adoption of Internet technologies with extensive proliferation and use in more economically developed countries. However, in terms of the proliferation of MOOCs as an educational approach, there is a risk that the current enthusiasm is being driven by a self selecting group of highly educated, IT literate individuals who are able to navigate the sometimes complex, confusing and intimidating nature of online learning. In general, there are concerns about the pedagogy and quality of current MOOC courses, with a clear distinction between process and content-based approaches. The motivation for some MOOCs is a philanthropic one and for others a business proposition. However, in both cases, there is the challenge of finding a viable model that allows for sustainability of MOOC provision.

MOOCs as disruptive innovations
The theory of disruptive innovation (Bower and Christensen, 1995) offers an explanation as to why some innovations disrupt existing markets at the expense of incumbent players. In this case, there is a significant question for higher education institutions to address: are online teaching innovations, such as MOOCs, heralding a change in the business landscape that poses a threat to their existing models of provision of degree courses? This possibility is brought about through the combination of wider societal adoption of communication and, particularly, Internet technologies, changing funding models and the development of new business models that leverage this opportunity. If this is the case, then the theory of disruptive innovation suggests that there is a strong argument for establishing an autonomous business unit in order to make an appropriate response to these potentially disruptive innovations.

Implications for higher education
The current UK political administration has continued the course set by the government with an even more radical agenda to allow new, for-profit providers to enter the higher education market. These include, changes to funding whereby students pay most of their tuition fees, through student loans, and changes to national quality assurance measures so that new players can enter the market place and offer new, differentiated provision including more for-profit universities. There is also an opportunity here for open education where less traditional lecturing and more facilitative and guided approaches to education can find a place in this new landscape of online learning where increased fees for established models may act as a deterrent to students.

The diagram below is based on two key dimensions that stand out for me based on readings, namely the time of use from collection dimension and a control and authority dimension (reminiscent to me of the Edinburgh Scenarios, Jonathan Star 2004). I think that a key point is to get across the potential in the top right hand quadrant and what it might mean for understanding the University as an enterprise (Educational Data Analytics ) beyond learning analytics and data mining that focus on pedagogical, learning and teaching aspects.

In addition, presenting the ideas as analytics for whom and for what purpose also appears useful:
learners: self reflection, cohort comparisons, automated learning, etc.
• teachers: retention, progression, student satisfaction/experience, etc.
• course developers: design for success – assessment, content, teaching strategies, etc.
• administrators: retention, progression, efficiencies, balancing HEFCE control numbers internally, etc.
• researchers: pedagogy, models, theory, etc.

On a more theoretical level the Viable System Model has potential application to better understand the central concept of feedback loops and how the different components of the systems in view interplay with each other and their external environments. For example, seeing that measures intended to address issues such as retention are inextricably wound up in the students wider environment where factors such as the need to work to fund studies may come into conflict with approaches like giving more contact time in the belief it will help students be successful. More work need on modeling this, but:

• real time feedback loop for learners & teachers – learning and retention are here and now issues;
• medium term for learners, administrators & teachers – universities plan, allocate resources & undertake quality processes in annual cycles. Progression is a medium term concern of academics and learners;
• long term for researchers & courses developers – the concern of theses groups tend to be more about aggregations of experience over a number of iterations.

An untidy thread that is niggling me and perhaps just needs more reading around is where Management Information Systems fit in all of this – they have been around for a very long time now and seem to occupy most of the Educational Data Analytics domain.

My simple interpretation, is that Data Mining advocates seek to automate learning through extensive analysis of previous learners behaviours captured in learning systems. Whereas advocates of Learning analytics emphasise not prediction but on providing information (often visual) to inform stakeholders for decision-making purposes.

This report seeks to combine these two traditions in the concept of an ‘adaptive learning system’, the model below being self explanatory and at first glance convincing, but I think too tidy in practical terms.

Three deficiencies that stand out for me are:
1. the limited view of learning as shown by the exposure of a ‘Student’ to ‘Content’ as generating ‘student learning data’ – learning as process?
2. the narrow distinction of the learning system – courses (instructional) designers (not the same as administrators or teachers) and the curriculum as expressed by learning outcomes/aims, professional body requirements, etc. which are a significant part of the system;
3. and the fact that online courses seem to be the focus – there are lots of data to be analysed on f2f courses.

I think that the letter point is a more general observation of work on learning analytics.

As someone new to this domain of knowledge, two organisations appear to represent the different traditions, see the Society for Educational Data Mining and the Society for Learning Analytics Research – SoLAR. In a previous post, I conflated both of these under the Analytics badge, but now see more clearly a difference.

A significant generic application of the canvas tool ( fully editable and lockable / un-lockable making them very powerful and flexible) is in support of face-to-face workshops. On creation, a new ‘canvas’ can also be exported as a .png or .jpeg, enabling it to be printed out on large A0 sheets. These can then be provided for workshops participants to use with post-its in the normal way. However, a rapporteur can additionally use the tool to capture the post-its as they are created, thus providing a record that can be shared, built on in future, &/or handled by other applications.

Our motivation for developing the tool was our use of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) which as its name suggests is designed to support thinking around business models, something that we are not particularly good at when we develop new degree programmes in the UK Higher Education sector.

Rather than simply building a ‘hard wired’ representation of the BMC into Archi, we hope that we have added new dimension for people who wish to try and tie together different approaches and techniques with the practice of Enterprise Architecture using Archimate modelling language. An important point, is that this isn’t just a visual representation, but the tool (built in Eclipse) captures relationships between objects with associated name-value properties so that more can be done with the data in an automated way.

We think this is a cool bit of work and expect to see the commercial vendors like BizzDesign following suit:^) Phil’s work will ship with the next release of Archi in early December 2011.

An early example of the tool in use…

Traveling to New Zealand, I came across these cybernetic devices at Singapore Chang Airport which I haven’t seen or noticed before. You can rate the service of the particular toilet attendant by selecting the appropriate button (hard to see but excellent on the left, poor on the right) so that he (and presumably his managers) have pretty much real time information on his performance.

These things are everywhere in the airport and it would be good to speak to the designer/s behind the system to find out what the thought process and inspiration was!

Despite the subject of the presentation being about openess and the generosity required, I couldn’t see any creative commons licence so if asked to do so we would have to take it down.

Some of the research questions we have are:
- how to develop a sustainable business model that allows us to continue engage with learners from different Chinese universities at a cost that is not prohibitive to them
- how to allow anyone to participate in the course on a sliding scale from £0 – £cost of accreditation & support
- how to coordinate activities to retain the key element of synchronous conversational practice with proficient English speakers
- and what are the cultural, technological, pedagogical differences between Chinese teaching & learning and the UK.

Many people are well ahead with some of these questions and we are making the effort to learn from them, but at the end of the day what is possible is very context specific so we shall have to work out our own answers as well.

For this first iteration, we have a payment from our Chinese colleagues to cover the work we have undertaken in developing the course and for our facilitation of the online community & expert input into ‘hotseats’. In this particular case, we will also assess the students but credit awarded will be from the Chinese university not Bolton – lots of variations around teaching & assessment & accreditation are possible!

And of course no YouTube, but we do have the local equivalent youku…
Introductions from IEC staff

As a consuming device, it works great for a three year old who is able to turn it on, manage the interface to get to the iTunes app and chose and lay videos. As a creative tool, there is also merit in that Lily can easily draw pictures (lines, clip art, etc.).

My observations tell me that this is a ‘natural’ way for a young child to use ICT. When she now tries to use my laptop, the move back to a trackpad and keyboard is difficult and requires some ‘unlearning’ – touching a screen to select icons and dragging a finger to navigate around to make things happen seems natural.

The Hype Cycle diagram is pretty intuitive when looked at and will resonate with many people’s experiences. Put simply it is a way of plotting the expectations of an innovation (vertical axis) over time (horizonal axis) and illustrating how over inflated these can be initially (‘peak of expectations’) , leading to a reappraisal (‘trough of despair’) and possibly as the innovation matures adoption through a ‘slope of enlightenment’ to a ‘plateaux of productivity’.

The purpose of this post was to consider how the track part of the STREET process might be informed by Google Insights which is a tool that allows you to ‘compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.’ Below are a few that we tried, do they tell us anything when viewed through the lense of the Hype Cycle? Of course many problems with this approach but it might be that as the period of time over which this kind of analysis is available extends it becomes a useful step in the tracking of innovations.