A couple of days ago I wrote a dreadful piece of drivel that I’ve since removed from this blog (not a step I take lightly but it was just that bad). I was trying to explain my concern at the way that some educational technology commentators appeared to be becoming increasingly critical of MOOC platforms such as Coursera and educational technology entrepreneurs in general. For me, at that point, the rise of private MOOC platforms and edtech startups in general was something that, while not ideal, was at least the lesser of two evils and could be seen as a positive trend in changing higher education for the better.

I didn’t explain myself very well. Fortunately Cole Camplese (@colecamplese)  wrote a very good piece that  articulated my thinking much better than I ever could: “Innovation Confusion – Why do those who used to push forward now push back?”. But then an interesting thing happened; yesterday David Wiley wrote a great response to Cole entitled “Be Awesome Instead”. I spent a lot of time overnight thinking about what an ethical MOOC should look like determined to blog about it this today.  Thankfully Mike Caulfield has already written another good response to Cole (Reply to Cole: Pushing Back vs. Pushing Forward) and like David Wiley his key point is about openness.

“It’s really the openness issue, full stop”

And yes it is the openness. I had convinced myself that a ‘sort of’ open was good enough as long as enough disruption was going on to make the big changes that I think we need. I was wrong. While we may argue about  what form of MOOC is best, the role of instruction versus connection, how assessment could be carried out, if at all we should all be agreed that an ethical MOOC should be open. Very much like the Psychology MOOC that Mike Caulfield co-created.

What do you think of Grusin’s ideas?

 

1.MOOCs are the bastard children of 1980s cyber-utopianism and post-1945 economic neoliberalism.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

2.MOOCs are a 21st century manifestation of cyberspace’s revolutionary ideology of information freedom.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

3.MOOCs deploy liberatory & egalitarian rhetoric of the Open Net in the service of21st century neoliberalization of higher education.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

4.MOOCs are driven by the desire of Silicon Valley entrepeneurs to capitalize on the data generated by college students.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

5.MOOCs falsely equate non-profit higher education with profit-based industries like bookstores or newspapers or entertainment companies

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

6.MOOCs use the economic model of 21st century social media to build a massive user base for commercial purposes

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

7.MOOCs follow the model of Facebook or Google by giving away their product in exchange for data and advertisements, eventually for money.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

8.MOOCs, like for-profit commercial entities, admit all comers; the ability to pay (whether in money or data) is all that counts;

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

9.MOOCs reduce the purpose of a college or university education to training students for jobs
— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

10.MOOCs reduce human learning to cognition and information

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

11.MOOCs minimize the role of embodiment and affect in education

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

12.MOOCs eliminate the ideo-affective structures of intimacy that have been central to education for millenia.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

13.MOOCs replace shared embodied relations with individualized mediated interactions.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

14.MOOCs reduce education to content delivery; online lectures, interactive exercises & discussion boards do not equal classroom education.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

15.MOOCs reduce college education to testable knowledge, eliminating completely the benefits of accident, chance, and late-night partying..

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

16.MOOCs imitate the logic of derivitization, breaking up courses and faculty into discrete parts—a MOOC here and a MOOC there.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

17.MOOCs ignore the logic of the curriculum, in which courses are meant to complement and build upon one another .

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

18.MOOCs represent the pro bono gestures of elite universities towards the underfunded public university underclass.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

19.MOOCs are extractive industries. The knowledge they exploit represents a resource that will become finite in a MOOCified future.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

20.MOOCs must be made to serve the needs of higher education, rather than higher education being made to serve the needs of MOOCs.

— Richard Grusin (@rgrusin) March 12, 2013

I’ve been familiar with the basic concepts around the use of open badges for a while now but I have to admit that they hadn’t really grabbed my attention front and centre until, that is, I got my first badge almost by accident yesterday. Let’s just say it was an aha moment.

I like to build things and I like to code. One of the tools I use is Jquery which is a powerful Javascript framework for building rich functionality into web pages. I’ve been using it for a while. I normally like to learn things myself and then go back and do some training if I feel I need it. It was with this in mind that I tried the free Try Jquery course run by CodeSchool.com.

Now, as an aside, let me say that this course was one of the best pieces of online learning that I have ever undertaken. The use of video explanations coupled with interactive exercises is extremely well done. The explanations are perfectly pitched. The technology used is powerful but seamless. In short, I loved it and I learnt a lot that will improve the way I code.

When I’d completed the course I was reviewing my details when I noticed that there was an option to add my course to Mozilla Open Badges. Of course I clicked the button, authenticated and was taken to the open badges site and there was my badge. I dragged it into a group that I’ve decided to call Technical Badges and clicked on the share button.

You can see my badge in my backpack on open badges. I also shared it to my Linked In profile. This morning I installed the WP Badge Display widget for WordPress and now you can see my badge displayed on my blog (it’s on the right).

It was all very seamless and easy. Well done to Doug Belshaw and all of the team at Mozilla Open Badges.

I have to say that my feelings where of enormous pleasure at finishing my course and being able to display that quickly and easily. It also made me very eager to get get another badge to add to my collection. If feelings like this can be engendered in someone as notoriously cynical as me then that’s a pretty powerful reaction.

My other immediate thoughts were of the implications for higher education. I know lots of people with more experience in open badges than me have already written a lot on this but my my immediate reaction is that open badges will become increasingly popular as more providers offer them (that’s fairly obvious) . I also suspect that traditional higher education providers will resist providing them because they don’t fit in with traditional  academic perceptions of achievement and credentialling. This means that non traditional providers will step in to provide that service. They’ll be doing that anyway for other reasons.

It’s interesting that the reaction to open badges from senior academic managers is often to dismiss them as being child like and akin to collecting a badge for sewing at scouts. It’s often extremely difficult to understand the power of badges until you’ve actually been through the process and got one yourself.

I’d encourage all of you to have a go at a course with a provider that gives you an open badge. It’ll be a real eye opener.

My two previous posts have considered the role of venture capitalists in higher education and my disagreements with a fiercely critical anti-mooc article by Jennifer Cost and colleagues. From this you could be forgiven for thinking that I am some sort of arch capitalist hell bent on exploiting higher education for profit.

Peter Sloep picks this up in a blog post about ‘unhelpful’ arguments. He states that:

Quite obviously Mark sits on the ‘make money’ side of the fence, as is evidenced by such terminology as delivery model, product, marketplace, consumer.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I actually dislike the use of the language of commerce being applied to higher education. Nothing irks me more than hearing students being described as consumers or customers. They’re  not; they’re students. The reason I used that language in my blog post was that it is the language that Clayton Christensen uses when he talks about disruptive innovations. It was just clearer to use that language in describing the way that MOOCs are working as a disruptive innovation in higher education. That was the point I was trying to make.

Having said that, I do think that Peter is right in that Jennifer et al and I are operating on different paradigms although not, I suspect, the paradigms that Peter would like to attribute to use. Well to me at least. Here is what I think in a nutshell.

I believe that the current model of higher education is broken. It is hugely expensive. It doesn’t deliver very good outcomes for many students. It doesn’t encourage self learning. It’s not open. It’s not accountable. Etc. You know the arguments.

Surprisingly I am not particularly enamoured of MOOCs either. Particularly xMOOCs. Even cMOOCs have lots of issues that they need to overcome if they are to become a sustainable method of higher education.

What I do like about MOOCs is that they are, at last, disrupting the current system of higher education and making the people that run higher education think about doing things differently. I really hope that we come out with something that is fundamentally better and fairer for everyone. This is the main question that both Peter and I want answered “how we as a civil society want to build and run our educational institution”. I suspect we may not agree on it but at least we could have a discourse.

In terms of MOOCs I have to disagree with Peter when he writes:

I believe we need to tackle the issue of whether we should want MOOCs or not, by addressing the issue of we are ok with monetising education.

This assumes that we don’t already monetise higher education. Maybe in the Netherlands this isn’t the case but in the UK and, particularly Australia, universities are already highly commercialised operations working at an industrial scale in the ‘production’ of graduates. They often rely on large fees from domestic and, especially, overseas full fee paying students. Are we OK with the way we monetise higher education right now? I’m not.

I think the real question about whether we want MOOCs or not (and it’s a moot question because we’re going to get them anyway) is whether we want open courses or not. The first O and the C are the only things that matter in the acronym. I do find it hard to find any argument that says we would not want freely accessible, open courses. But then that’s the thing about incommensurability to use Thomas Kuhn’s term.

I reviewed my blog post following Peter’s description of it as being ‘unhelpful’. I’m probably guilty of replying to a rant with a rant. In that sense it may have been unhelpful although I stand by my points. Hopefully, this post will have cleared some things up though.

In what can only be described as a rant, six community colleges members have taken to Inside Higher Education to produce a self serving article that bemoans the implications of the use of educational technology and, in particular, the rise of the MOOC.

Without encumbering themselves with anything so drastic as a bit of research into their topic they proceed to brand MOOCs (presumably all types of MOOC) in fairly inflammatory language as being “designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering”.

There are a couple of problems with this; firstly it supposes that the current higher education business model is the only one that should exist and, secondly, that the current higher education delivery model does, in fact provide a better learning experience.

Both of these claims are contentious to say the least. MOOCs are a classic disruptive innovation that fits the model described by Christensen precisely. They operate at the lower end of the supposed product capability range at low cost to the student. Typically such innovations arrive in a marketplace in which the functionality of existing ‘products’ has increased beyond the current level of demand from the consumer at a cost beyond what they are prepared to pay. In other words, the disruptive innovation is good enough.

I would argue that, in fact, for higher education the functionality of the product hasn’t increased over the last thirty years. In fact the utility of most traditional courses has decreased as a result of the massification of higher education. At the same time costs have risen as has the availability of alternative sources of appropriate content through the internet.

The  result is that the traditional higher education business model is no longer a good fit for many students. I don’t know why recognising this is a problem for the authors.

The quality of learning materials in some xMOOCs has been criticised by the authors. I have some sympathy for their argument, particularly the argument regarding elite universities suddenly ‘discovering’ learning design (which they will no doubt implement at some point). Having said that, I think it’s a long bow to tar all MOOCs with the same brush (to mix our metaphors yet again) . Much of the learning that takes place in MOOCs is of the highest quality. The bad news for the authors is that it is only going to get better. That’s what happens with disruptive innovations. They get better and better.

But wait, it’s not educational quality or business moels that most draws the ire of the authors. Their main problem with MOOCs is this:

“In our view, the central philosophical flaw in the MOOC paradigm is that proponents believe that there is nothing to be lost in turning professors into glorified tutors, parts of a larger information delivery system”

And there we have it. It’s not the quality of education, it’s the authors’ position as the repositories and gatekeepers  of knowledge that is being challenged. There is nothing I can really say about this other than that the genie is out of the bottle and is riding off madly into the distance on a horse that bolted. It’s not MOOCs that did this, it’s the internet. We live in age of information abundance. There should be no going back.

Instead of tilting at windmills the authors need to decide how they are going to contribute to global, open education. There are many ways that they and their expertise can contribute. It’s just not going to be in the same way as it was in the last century. Get over it and move on.

I’m not sure why there seems to be an obsession with the ‘evil’ of venture capitalists at #ascilite2012

— Mark Smithers (@marksmithers) November 26, 2012

A number of people responded to this and Peter Sloep wrote a a very thoughtful piece on the debate that included some thoughts on the role of venture capitalists. I have to say I agree with almost everything he says. In an ideal world it would be largely as he describes.

Having said that, we don’t live in an ideal world and I do, therefore, find it curious when people, in general, complain about venture capitalists in in public forums and yet seem happy to remain silent while their institutions sell low quality closed courses for a small fortune to international students. Institutions that have grown fat and lazy from the massification of higher education over the last 30 years while still churning out courses who only ever have any quality control applied to them every 5 years when they get increasingly rubber stamped by Academic Boards whose main interest is looking at the enrolment forecasts and the bottom line rather than the rigour of the course. Institutions that are loathe to discontinue any student however poorly they perform in assessments (particularly full fee paying students).

In the case of Udacity and Coursera I happen to think that they are run by people who are committed to providing free courses at the best quality they can deliver. There are lots of things I disagree with about xMOOCs. There are huge improvements that can be made, but strangely enough their intrinsic motivation to provide free courses for everyone is not one I can disagree with. Given that we are only a year or so into the xMOOC age I think there is plenty of improvement to come. Just remember how poor most traditional courses are the first time they are run. I think I’d rather side with an organisation that makes its  failings open and learns from them. There is a far greater chance of improvement than from organisations that keep it all closed and hidden from view.

I don’t really care who pays the start up bills and I hope that they can develop a sustainable business model. If that business model delivers benefits for student, the subject matter expert and the investor then that’s fine. At least we’re all open and honest about it. Which is more than can be said for current approach to delivering not a lot of higher education for very large amount of money.

It’s a world we’ll have to live in because more start ups are coming to the higher education sector every day. Every aspect of the business (for want of a better word) of higher education will be disrupted. Entrepreneurs and innovators smell blood in the water and it’s the carcass of Mr Creosote (aka the higher education sector) that is attracting them.

I’ll finish by saying that this sounds as though I’m anti university and anti higher education. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want higher education and universities in particular to rediscover their role in providing a public good for society at large. This is a role that, in my opinion, they are only partially fulfilling at the moment. I hope that the sector in future can provide space for genuine scholarship, the ability to think and to research and innovate and that it can come to terms with the fact that it is no longer the gatekeeper of higher learning.

Finally, I disagree with Sebastien Thrun. I think there maybe many more Higher Education Institutions in the future than there are now, not less but I think they’ll be much smaller. They’ll also more collegial and much happier places to be than our current institutions.

Here is my list of Mooc resources.

The Conversation web site is currently half way through a series of invited posts entitled “The Future of Higher Education”. It has been a disappointing series so far in that five of the first six posts have focussed on MOOCS and the sixth has been a general post on equity in online learning. Now MOOCs are an important development but the future of higher education is bigger than MOOCs and the questions are much more fundamental. Here are are some questions that I think this series should be addressing.

How does the academy transform its role from the one it occupied in a society in which knowledge was scarce to a new role in a society in which knowledge is abundant?

This seems to me to be the fundamental question about the future of higher education. For universities (which are just a subset of higher education organisations) the question is wrapped up in their traditional late 20thC intrinsic (although by no means exclusive) role as knowledge creators. From this basic premise a number of other questions arise.

Assuming universities continue their role as knowledge creators then what is their role in knowledge dissemination in the future? Do they still do it? And let’s not kid ourselves about the teaching/research nexus. That hasn’t happened in any large measure for years. Do other providers do it? Other providers that are specialised in online and (occasionally) blended delivery techniques.

Furthermore, in a networked age, do all universities need to be generating knowledge in the same domains? Similarly, if universities continue to disseminate knowledge then do all universities need to provide the same range of topics to disseminate? Isn’t that all a little wasteful and, quite possibly, vain?

How does the academy cope with the increasing amount of knowledge being created and disseminated outside of the traditional idea of the university? And this goes to the question of what it actually means to be an ‘academic’ in the 21st century. Are we all academics when we are all contributors? Does an academic have to have a PhD? The vast majority of experts in their field do not have one and aren’t inclined to get one. They don’t work in higher education.

What about the role of higher education providers that are not universities? Who sets the curriculum for a ‘course’? Who determines what is appropriate assessment of knowledge and how is it done? Inevitably the role of ‘assessment for learning’ will decline. Auto-didacts will point out that they can learn in many different ways, often outside of formal higher education. They will (and do now) want their learning recognised.

Given these factors, what is the role of a course of study when information on just about any topic is readily available? Certainly some people will still want to undertake courses of study leading to an award. This will depend on their prior learning and experience in the field of study.

For students that still want to undertake a course of study, how will this course be structured? In semesters? Almost certainly not. When will they be able to enrol? I would suggest that enrolment will be much more flexible. How will that work? What will be the effect on university administration systems? Pretty huge I would expect.

What will the role of credentialling be? For example why would professional organisations continue to rely on universities to credential students for entry to practice in a profession? They often already require subsequent practice and credentialling. Why not do it all? In an age when it is more possible than ever to demonstrate prior learning is it really necessary to spend four years doing a degree first? Some people may just decide to rely on their professional social reputation. New techniques for independently measuring this are being developed all the time.

What is the role of a degree course? Will it be better to work at 18 and study part time through your entire life at appropriate providers maintaining a self managed e-portfolio of evidence that includes both formal and informal learning? I expect that the role of the life changing one off right of passage (and financial servitude) that the modern first degree represents may become less enticing.

These are just a few of the questions that a series on the Future of Higher Education should be asking. There are four more posts to come in the series. Let’s hope at least some of these questions get addressed and we can get off of the MOOC fixation.

My friend Inger Mewburn (@thesiswhisperer) recently wrote a thoughtful piece in The Conversation web site entitled Academics behaving badly? Universities and online reputations. For the record I think that the points she made were valid and true but I also think that there is an underlying issue that remains uncovered. Simply put, it is that fact that policies around the use of social media by the academy have, in many cases, been outsourced to individuals who are not members of the academy and do not understand the purpose of the academy. As a result they fundamentally miss the opportunities that social media offer universities in engaging with the wider community. This seems to me to be particularly true in Australia where rampant managerialism associated with the corporate university has led to situation in which ‘brand positioning’ and being ‘on message’ is seen to be more important than concepts of sharing, collaboration and collegiality in knowledge distribution and generation.

It is not unusual to find the University Social Media Manager (normally a self appointed guru) has been previously employed by Acme widget makers where their use of social media revolved around broadcasting content, occasionally giving personal insights into how great the latest widget is and designing some random competition in the hope that something will ‘go viral’. They never realise that universities are fundamentally different organisations. The role of a university is knowledge creation and dissemination. It seems unfathomable to me that a modern progressive university would not look at social media and say here is the most fabulous set of tools for helping us carry out some of our core tasks. Such universities should be saying to the faculty, why aren’t you blogging, tweeting etc your thoughts and ideas as privileged members of the academy? Not, why are you?

There are a few things going on here. Firstly, current policies represent a deep seated mistrust of university employees. This level of mistrust is telling in itself. Secondly, there is a culture of command and control. I firmly believe that most University Social Media Managers do not want anyone other than their trusted team of gurus to be contributing to social media. They protest otherwise but in reality they will make it difficult for others through the use ‘policy’ around branding and attitude.

Finally there is there idea of the university as a business whose reputation requires protection. This has, sadly, taken hold to an extreme level in Australia which is one reason we have no equivalent to the UK’s Open University or Canada’s Athabasca University (but that’s another blog post).

I think it’s worth pointing out what these social media policies cost the university. I was meeting with an LMS vendor last week. He was talking about the new social learning components being incorporated into a new version coming out soon when he observed that another university would not be deploying these tools in their LMS because the ‘contravened the social media policy’. So here we have a policy developed by a guru from Acme widgets determining the future pedagogy for an entire university.

At a previous institution I had proposed that we should make it much easier for our students to set up their own blogs. I remember watching the Social Media Manager’s face go white at the prospect. And so an opportunity to become a leader in the use of student blogs in learning and teaching disappeared. Thankfully I can still look to progressive universities like the University of Mary Washington to see that sense can prevail.

We have early adopters of social media sharers and collaborators from many different  institutions being marginalised within their institutions and having their contributions considered to be not worthy or even not considered to be scholarly activity. Inger herself is an example of this having helped literally thousands of PhD students through her blog and tweets and yet, my perception is that she remains under valued by her own university.

We have the huge missed opportunities for inter institutional collaboration that can generate research and teaching opportunities. Who knows how big that cost is?

The good news is that rigid social media policies are unworkable. The future belongs to networked institutions and, increasingly, virtual inter organisational teams built up between people that actually like each other (rather than just happen to work in the same place) and facilitated by social media. It would just be nice if Social Media Managers actually helped facilitate this rather than holding institutions back into a late 20th century model of the corporate university. These are times of rapid change. University managers need to make bold decisions and these include how to use social media. We can’t outsource it to the Acme widget gurus any more.

The resulting diagram is below and it’s available under Creative Commons license for re-use and, preferably, improvement. I say improvement because I’m not entirely happy with it and I think some relationships are missing or could be re-interpreted. Inevitably, it is trade off between presenting complex ideas and relationships in as simple a way as possible. I’d welcome suggestions for improvement or you’re welcome to it yourself.

I created the original in Visio and the file is available here for download.