OCTEL

by ADavidge

Week 0 webinar recording now available

10/04/2013 in Course information

Thanks to everyone who took part in ocTEL’s first weekly webinar this afternoon.

If you missed all or part of the week 0 webinar, the materials from the session are now available at the links below:

Webinar Recording [skip to 1:42 in the recording for the beginning of the session]

Webinar Presentation by Diana Laurillard

Webinar Chat

Everything is also available on the Course Materials page, which we will update weekly with materials from each live webinar.

Join us next Wednesday at 12:30 BST for the week 1 webinar on TEL concepts and approaches. Check the Course Materials page later this week for more information.

Tags: course information 5 Comments »

by ADavidge

ocTEL weekly webinars starting this Wednesday

08/04/2013 in Course information

ocTEL is running weekly webinars starting this Wednesday, 10 April.

The week 0 webinar will start at 12:30pm (BST), via Blackboard Collaborate 11.

Links to all webinar sessions will be available via the Course Materials page.

This week’s webinar

This week’s webinar has two parts: First, there is a welcome to ocTEL, including a brief orientation and networking session. The main presentation is led by Diana Laurillard and will focus on ‘big questions’ in Technology Enhanced Learning, getting participants to think about their own questions and how these can be explored over the next 10 weeks.

About the presenter

Diana Laurillard is Professor of Learning with Digital Technologies at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, leading research projects on developing a learning design support environment for teachers and trainers, and on software interventions for adult learners with low numeracy and dyscalculia. She is also Assistant Director for Open Mode learning at the Institute of Education, and is Vice Chair of the Association for Learning Technology.

We will make the recording of this session available via the Course Materials page on the ocTEL website.

Webinar help and FAQ’s

For help prior to the webinar and some frequently asked questions please visit our help page.

If you have any questions contact octel-tech@alt.ac.uk.

Tags: course information 1 Comment »

by David Jennings

What we’re learning from you about communications in large online courses

05/04/2013 in About this course, progress report

In this course we encourage you to communicate with each other via several channels, including your own blogs and twitter accounts, and we provide some guidance about when and why to use them. We let you, the course participants, choose which one you prefer.

One of the main purposes of this induction part of the course is to give people time to explore the possibilities of different features and benefits of the different channels. We give you time to ‘settle’ before the course gets underway in earnest.

What we’re finding is that the email discussion list (JiscMail) is both the most and the least popular channel. It’s the one that most people have gravitated towards for introducing themselves and sharing their work on initial activities. That means that there have been a lot messages circulating (good), but also that some people have rapidly felt overloaded (not good) and have opted out.

(For help on getting just one daily digest from the JiscMail list, or opting out, see the FAQ.)

By comparison, the web forum that people can use for posting introductions is relatively un-used, although other forums are starting to get lively. no one has used that channel.

About 80% of you opted into the email discussion list when registering for the course. As some decide that this is not for them, this may fall to 50% or less of active participants.

Whatever channel you choose to use, you won’t miss out on important communication from the organisers. We post all course content and messages from the organisers on the main ocTEL website and send one email at the start of each week directly to each participant. If the email discussion list is used by just a minority (rather than the majority) of participants, we believe it will still be useful.

It’s part of the process of large group dynamics evolving and finding an equilibrium. It’s why we included an induction period in the course design. At the same time, we acknowledge that managing communications in large groups is a challenge for everyone. For help on how to manage the different channels, please go to the FAQ.

There are also some interesting questions and positive points that emerge from this in terms of online learning:

with a large, open course – with participants from around the world and in different professional roles – how do you make visible the other participants and their activity?
can the introductory process ever be non-chaotic (in the sense of chaos theory, rather than shambles)?
how do nudge people towards ‘pull’ or more passive communication channels like forums (which require the hassle of new login procedures as well as unfamiliarity) instead of the convenience, for senders, of email?

19 Comments »

by David Jennings

Course begins: looking forward to your feedback

03/04/2013 in About this course, progress report

ocTEL starts today. Like the English first class cricket season, which begins tomorrow, play gets under way at the civilised hour of 11.00 British Summer Time. Like cricket, it’s best if you don’t rush.

We’ve put a lot of planning and preparation into the course, but we’ve retained a lot of flexibility and minimal central control. So when 900 people starting using multiple discussion channels, things are going to happen that we probably haven’t prepared for. Please give us your feedback, and sometimes a little of your patience as well, when this occurs.

We’ve deliberately stretched the first induction module to be more than a week long. Hopefully that means you can take your time. If you get stuck or confused at any point, you have time to recover without feeling pressured. The main thing in this first session is to get a feel for the different ways of communicating with each other and with the course. With that in mind, here’s an introductory screencast about how to login (more help here). Thanks to Martin Hawksey for this — Martin has built pretty much all of the course infrastructure.

4 Comments »

by David Jennings

Guide to discussion and collaboration spaces

28/03/2013 in About this course

Discussion and collaboration are central to the experience of ocTEL. But it’s a challenge to arrange the online discussions of 850+ people (that’s how many registrations we’ve had for the course at the time of writing). We want to make things as simple and easy to use as possible. However, we also want to provide maximum flexibility to suit individual preferences and to make it possible to manage many conversations for small groups at once – which makes it hard to keep things simple.

There are three main ways you can take part in ‘asynchronous’ (not real time) discussions in ocTEL:

post in your own space, for example, your blog on twitter
if you don’t have a blog or just prefer email, participate in a jiscmail list for the whole course
for ‘specialist’ interest items or working in smaller groups and learning sets, use the web forums

In your own online space

How does it work?

You tell us about your blog or twitter account, via the registration form (if you forgot, or if this has changed since you registered, please email octel-tech@alt.ac.uk).
Whenever you write about the course, you include in the #ocTEL (not case sensitive) tag in your blog title or tweet.
We pull everyone’s ocTEL blogs on one page on this site as well as providing some aggregate views of tweets (links to come when these are live).
You can browse and read them from there, and ‘star’ individual discussions if you want to keep following them.
We will indicate the most read and most popular items on the site and via daily ‘digest’ emails.
(We can aggregate anything with an RSS feed and the #ocTEL tag – if you’re also producing material in another space, please let us know by sending the feed address to octel-tech@alt.ac.uk – unfortunately Facebook does not provide RSS feeds).
If you’re slightly technically-minded, Martin Hawksey has done a screencast of this and the discussion aggregation system — a more user-friendly overview is coming soon — and has also blogged about the design approach.

When and why?

The idea is that you should write about your participation in the course in the place where you feel most comfortable and are used to writing. The course is not designed to be separate and sealed off from the rest of your life, but to be part of your life, intertwined with your other interests. This approach to online courses being distributed across the open Internet rather closeted behind virtual walls was pioneered a few years ago one or two of the early open courses.

Jiscmail list

How does it work?

You indicate you’d like to join this list, via the registration form (if you forgot, or have changed your mind, you can apply to join via the web interface).
We will add you to this list just before the course starts.
You can choose whether to receive every message from the list, a daily or weekly digest, or whether to participate via the web only on the list page.
From there you send, read and reply to messages just as you would with any other list.

When and why?

If you don’t have a blog or twitter, and don’t want to get one, this is the channel to use. Some discussions work better with the ‘push’ approach of email (for example, if quantity of responses is important) so anyone can choose to start topics there. Many of the main activities in the modules will have dedicated ‘threads’ where you can discuss your take on the activity.

Web forums

How does it work?

You will be sent login details after you register for the course.
Log in and edit your profile details if you wish. (If you have difficulties logging in, see the FAQ.)
Visit the forums. You may now post new topics or reply to existing ones.
Forum discussions are lightly moderated by ocTEL tutors.

When and why?

As we were designing the course, we realised that many of the activities could be overwhelming unless there was some way to set up discussions with a tighter focus, either in terms of people – small groups and learning sets – or in terms of topics – niche interests that might run across several modules.

This also gives us the opportunity to set up Q&A forums for the course, such as the Help, I’m Stuck peer support forum.

Additional shared spaces

Webinars

The weekly webinars (every Wednesday, mostly at lunchtime in the UK) are the one ‘live’ part of the course where we have a guest contributor who presents some ideas relevant to the theme of each module and then leads a discussion. This is also the only part of the course where the technical requirements go beyond the ‘lowest common denominator’ web browser and Internet connection. If you haven’t used Blackboard Collaborate (previously known as Elluminate) before, it might be worth checking your technical setup to see if it will support Collaborate, and checking the support information.

Bookmarks

We have an open public group on Diigo for sharing bookmarks related to the course. You can join the group and add your bookmarks there. If you prefer to use Delicious, that’s fine, just use ocTEL as a tag and we will pick it up in our bookmark aggregator. If you’re using another bookmark sharing service (with an RSS feed), please email octel-tech@alt.ac.uk and we’ll see if we can pick that up too.

Disclaimer

Large scale online discussions are an example of ‘complex adaptive systems’, which means no one can predict how they are going to turn out. It’s unlikely that things will turn out quite how we planned them.

3 Comments »

by David Jennings

ocTEL tutor support: what you can expect

21/03/2013 in About this course, Uncategorized

Online learning in ocTEL is designed to encourage participants like you both to engage actively with the concepts in the course and to reflect on what you are learning through discussion. So learning conversations are central to the course. We will help you get the most from these conversations through a combination of

support from peer learners, for which we rely on you to self-organise using the communicated channels we provide, and
support from tutors who facilitate conversations with a range of feedback techniques.

ocTEL tutors, like the course authors, are volunteers. We’ve had an encouragingly large number of offers of help with tutor support, mostly from within the Association for Learning Technology community (and including many with CMALT accreditation), and we’re very grateful for this enthusiastic response.

In most cases, there will be different tutors in each module of ocTEL. There will be at least one ‘specialist’ tutor and three or four support tutors. They will monitor and take part in ocTEL discussions on the jiscmail list for participants, and on blogs, tweets and other forums (as long as you use the #ocTEL hashtag). The kinds of contributions they will make to discussions may include:

summarising key points in a conversation, drawing out alternative perspectives;
encouraging reflection on particular issues and how these may relate to your own experience;
questioning and sometimes challenging assumptions;
suggesting other resources and people that you may want to look up to explore an area further;
providing further explanations to complement the course text and materials.

Specialist tutors are more likely than support tutors to make the latter kinds of interventions, but there is no hard-and-fast distinction. All tutors in ocTEL are here to facilitate, not to assess. They will mostly be ‘non-directive’ and, though they may express opinions, they’re not here to give marks out of ten. In other words, tutors are very much the ‘guide on the side’.

We hope the arrangements we have put in place will provide you with timely feedback and support as you make your way through the course, whether this is from tutors or peers. Please bear in mind that tutors are volunteers, have limited time available, and deserve to maintain a work-life balance. We are organising the tutors with the aim of providing at least 10 hours tutor support for each week-long module. If you divide this among, say, 300 participants, it’s clear that you should not expect a great deal of individual attention from tutors. Tutors may be available to respond during evenings and weekends, but this is at their discretion.

We very much hope you will have no cause to complain about the support you receive during your participation in ocTEL. If you do, please email octel@alt.ac.uk with details of exactly what has gone wrong, and some indication of how you would like us to solve the problem. You should normally get an acknowledgement of your complaint within one working day.

Note on technical support

Tutors are there to help you with your learning on the course. They are not there to solve technical problems. When the course starts there will be a Help button on the menu bar above. That will route you to sources of technical help, both among fellow participants and from the core project team from the Association for Learning Technology.

1 Comment »

by David Jennings

New course outline and confirmed dates

12/03/2013 in About this course, course design, progress report

We now have a complete set of draft materials for our course, which we will be reviewing and revising during the rest of the March, so that we’re ready to start the course in April. While finalising the course and planning the support, we’ve changed the order of the modules in the course. There have been subtle changes of emphasis in the modules since we published the draft course outline.

Here’s the outline as it stands now, with confirmed dates and with my personal take on what you might get from each part. We’ll post a more definitive outline nearer the start of the course.

Induction and Reception (“Module 0”) — 4-14 April
If you haven’t done an open online course like ocTEL before, it can take a little getting used to, particularly at the beginning when a lot of people are introducing themselves, sharing expectations and experiences. Hence we’ve created a “soft” introductory session to help you get familiar with how the course works, how to participate in discussions.
There will be practical activities related to Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), but informal ones which you can use as a “sandbox” to try out alternative ways of approaching the materials and interacting with others.
This module is deliberately longer than a week to allow maximum time for this exploration. We appreciate that many people may be on holiday during the first week of April. You won’t miss anything by not joining until 8 April; you’ll just have a little less time to play.

Foundations of TEL
1. TEL concepts and approaches — week commencing 15 April
How can I use TEL to improve my teaching and learning practice? An introductory overview of the field, covering different ways technology can make learning better, online and offline. In case you thought Technology Enhanced Learning was just about putting course notes on a Virtual Learning Environment and prodding students through them, you will learn about diversity and concepts behind TEL.

2. Understanding learners’ needs — w/c 22 April
How do I take account of students’ requirements? What we know about learners’ needs in general, including digital literacy and readiness to engage with TEL. Plus how you can find out more about the specific needs of your learners, and how to ensure that teaching and learning are accessible to people with diverse needs.

3. Active learning — w/c 29 April
How do I ensure participants learn through active engagement? An overview of theories of active learning and invitation to critique them. What these mean for TEL, and how to design activities that maximise learning. When and how social media and games can help.

TEL Methods and Tools
4. Producing engaging and effective learning materials — w/c 6 May
What makes good learning materials, how to find them, how to assess them, and how to produce them. The licensing principles of Open Educational Resources and using them to make better learning experiences.

5. Platforms and technologies — w/c 13 May
How do I choose the right tech to support effective learning activities? The unique features of online, mobile and classroom technologies as learning platforms. The implications of these features map for learning, and the comparative benefits of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ technologies

6. Assessment and feedback — w/c 20 May
How do I give timely feedback and collect the evidence to support it? Theory and practice of assessment and feedback, and where technology fits into this via the range of e-assessment approaches. Choosing the types of technology that will best fit the needs of assessment and of your students.

7. Tutor and peer support — w/c 27 May
How do I design and manage support for online learners? Focusing on the roles of human, as opposed to automated, support, including how online tuition differs from face-to-face contexts. How to organise peer support and review among learners, including practising peer review.

Managing TEL
8. Maximum learning for minimum cost — w/c 3 June
What can the ‘enhanced’ in Technology Enhanced Learning stand for? Exploring techniques for making richer learning experiences without adding costs, increasing scale, reach and access, as well as improving productivity and flexibility. Assessing the opportunities of open content, free Web 2.0 tools and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

9. Cheating Murphy’s Law: expecting the unexpected — w/c 10 June
How do I keep my project or course on track by anticipating and overcoming problems. Some case studies of what can go wrong with TEL, including implementation issues, risk analysis, troubleshooting, and dealing with technology that doesn’t work.

10. Evaluating TEL — w/c 17 June
How do I tell what difference I’m making with TEL? Evaluation, research evidence and measuring impact. There will also be time to reflect on and evaluate this course, both as a general example of evaluation practice and to give us specific feedback on this first run. And we will be hosting a discussion on where you might like to go after the course, including nurturing new collaborations and outlining what ongoing support is available via ALT and other channels.

If this looks interesting and you haven’t already registered for the course, please do so now via our home page.

As this is an open course, you’re free to pick and choose from the above and do as much or as little of the course as you like.

So far we have over 300 people registered for the course, from around the world, on the back of near-zero publicity. Now that we have firm dates for each of the weeks, we’re going to do a little more publicity. Any help you can offer in spreading the word would be very welcome. Please follow us on twitter, retweet and share.

In the remaining weeks of March we’ll be blogging some more about:

our line-up of guest contributors for the live webinars we’ll be hosting every Wednesday as part of the course;
our approach to tutor support and what course participants can expect;
possibly how experienced learning technologists can get involved and help us run the course (hint!)
and possibly some more about our guiding principles in designing the course.

13 Comments »

by Rachel Harris

There’s nothing new in MOOCs

10/01/2013 in About this course, Evaluation

Towards the end of last year I started working with the ocTEL team on how to evaluate the Massive Open Online Course or MOOC they’ll be running in 2013. There is a *huge* amount of discussion on MOOCs at the moment from tips for those taking a MOOC to the future of MOOCs and HE. This article from the Chronicle provides a rather US centric timeline of developments and responses to MOOCs. There is also the recent launch of the slightly mysterious Futurelearn in the UK. There has been some very interesting discussion on this on the ALT mailing list. The list is members only, but quoting from a recent list posting by Diana Laurillard “Everyone in the field knows there’s nothing new in MOOCs” but we do need to meet the “massive demand for education, across all sectors from primary to lifelong, all over the world… It can’t be done without technology… It’s time to start looking seriously at what those models could be.”

For me at the moment, the focus is on evaluating just one MOOC, which is still under construction. Nonetheless, when I started asking the ocTEL team what they hope the MOOC will provide, one of the themes that emerged quite strongly is the desire for a sustainable community to come out of the MOOC. This has led me back to work I undertook over ten years ago on the theory and practice of online learning communities. At that time, I was influenced by Etienne Wenger’s insights into Communities of Practice and Jenny Preece’s perspective of designing usability and supporting sociability in online communities. Figure 1 summarises the dimensions of practice Wenger attributes to ‘community’, and Figure 2 shows the relative similarities in Preece’s online community key features.

Figure 1 – Dimensions of practice as the property of a community
(Wenger, 1998, p73).

Figure 2 – Key features of an online community, with associated characteristics
(Adapted from Preece, 2000)

These models will be reviewed and elements drawn into the ocTEL evaluation framework. I’ll also be looking at the concept of sustainability in relation to community. This has been addressed before by Bell et al in their 2007 book chapter entitled Evaluation: a link in the chain of sustainability. They highlight how the lack of persistence could come down to coordination failure or when the “costs of participation exceed the perceived benefits“.

So perhaps there is nothing new in MOOCs, or maybe it’s just a reminder to put old lessons into practice.

References
Bell, F et al (2007) Evaluation: a link in the chain of sustainability. In Lambropoulos, N & Zaphiris, P (Eds.) User-Centered Design of Online Learning Communities. Idea Group Inc.
Harris, RA & Niven, J (2002) Retrofitting theory to practice – a reflection on the development of an e-learning community. In Banks et al (Eds). Proceedings of Third International Conference on Networked Learning. Sheffield University.
Preece, J (2000) Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability. Chichester, John Wiley and Sons.
Wenger, E (1998) Communities of Practice. Learning, meaning and identity.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

** Adapted from a post on the Inspire Research blog. **

Tags: #ocTEL, community of practice, evaluation, mooc, online community 3 Comments »

by David Jennings

Introducing OLDS MOOC and mixing courses

17/12/2012 in related courses and developments

ocTEL shares some of its DNA with another free online course, “Learning Design for a 21st Century Curriculum” a.k.a. OLDS MOOC (more on those acronyms in a second), which starts early in January. By DNA, I mean that our principles are very similar; it’s likely that one or two people will be involved in both courses; and it’s possible that ocTEL may use some of the materials developed for OLDS MOOC, or even by participants in that course as part of their learning activities.

OLDS is the Open Learning Design Studio within the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University. MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. It’s fair to say that there’s a lot of noise about MOOCs at the moment (here’s one account [pdf] that has reasonable signal/noise ratio) and this isn’t the place to unpick that, but ocTEL defines itself as a MOOC too. As such, we break with some of the assumptions of traditional courses, including the teacher-knows-best ethos that suggests that all learners should make a similar journey starting from point A and finishing at point B, irrespective of their context and personal aims. As the OLDS MOOC home page puts it,

We expect that many participants will commit for the 9-week ‘journey’, following the MOOC through from start to end and dedicating 3-10 hours a week. We expect others to join us for specific weeks or even a single activity. Participants will find answers to specific questions that interest them…

You can take the same approach to ocTEL. Both courses are free, so why not dip into both of them and see which bits are most relevant to you? We credit our potential participants with the intelligence to work this out for themselves, and encourage them to take responsibility for mixing different learning experiences to meet their needs. So, if you’re interested in ocTEL, have a look too at OLDS MOOC and particularly their launch event on 7 January:

The structure of the MOOC reflects a proposed process for a design inquiry project. In such a process, designers identify a (learning/curriculum) design challenge, explore it to gain an understanding of its context and driving forces, generate possible solutions, implement a solution and reflect on the process as a whole and its outputs.

We are delighted to announce that a live launch event of the OLDS MOOC will be held on Monday 7th January 2013 at 4:00 pm GMT online via a live webcast stream and will last approximately 90 minutes.

It will be broadcast live via Cloudworks at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2481 and online viewers will be able to post comments and ask questions (if they have registered for Cloudworks).

The launch is open to all, and we especially look forward to welcoming course participants.

The event will include a presentation of the MOOC themes, its pedagogical approach and modes of participation, and a brief overview of the weekly activities. This will be followed by an open discussion. The event will be recorded and available afterwards for replay during week 1 of the course.

OLDS MOOC is a project-based MOOC, encouraging participants to do practical work of direct relevance to them as part of the course, and reflect on this. The focus of the course, and therefore of the work, is on developing open education resources. Hence it’s just possible that some of the work done by OLDS MOOC participants (I have registered to be one of them) could find its way into the ocTEL materials, as our course will be starting a few weeks after OLDS MOOC finishes.

Tags: mooc, OLDSMOOC, partnership 1 Comment »

Week 0 webinar recording now available