[David Jennings]

Hi Imogen,

Just to answer on the CMALT part of your post. We are currently mapping CMALT into ocTEL and are aiming to provide guidance to future participants about how they can make use of ocTEL in order to gain CMALT in future iterations of the course. This will start with a blog post on the mapping that I’ll write next week.

This time around ocTEL has provided us with a great learning opportunity and has provided input into the development of CMALT as well. Providing credible accreditation is high on our wishlist for future runs of ocTEL, and your comments are very helpful in shaping that – thanks!

all the best, David

[David Jennings]

Thanks, Angela – an interesting account of what I believe they call ‘co-creation’ in the jargon. Do you think this is particularly applicable to xMOOCs or more generally applicable to all kinds of interventions with mature online distance learners and tutors?

[David Jennings]

Thanks the elaboration, Jim – that makes sense, and I get it now 😉 In fact it makes such obvious sense that one is tempted to assume that it’s bound to happen sooner or later. But might it take a generation in HE (however long that is – how frequently do departments rethink their courses from first principles in the normal course of events?) to work through the system?

[David Jennings]

Hi again, Jim, on the “concrete data on who is taking their courses” question, I’m sure you’re right that the majority are not substituting for ‘regular’ higher education (though there is that marginal group who a decade ago might have gone into HE, but are now discouraged by the costs and may be interested in a halfway house). In this sense the likes of Saylor fit into the Informal side of the table I quoted in my blog post.

More generally you could see the whole MOOC/Saylor/etc cluster as another example of the variegation of HE’s ‘regular’ offering i.e. so it’s not just the three-year, full-time, 18-21, for-credit experience, but that each of those hyphenated adjectives are open to change  – more mature, part-time, informal learning experiences. Which in itself seems not a bad thing? Though it may challenge some of the institutional habits that have become engrained?

[David Jennings]

Thanks, Jim, (and I’ve tweaked the formatting a bit for ease of reading)

So just to check that I have your plan right: you are aiming to source existing OERs to create a new (?) course, which will be available in two versions – a free, open access version with no credit, and a for-credit version? Is the latter essentially the same course, but with added support and assessment? And is it that you’re using the savings in development costs (by virtue of using OERs) to balance the extra costs of the ‘free’ version (as you say here, there are always some costs)?

This may seem a little like semantic nitpicking but the things you’ve listed as enhancements seem more like methods than enhanced outcomes. For example, “inclusion of more OER” is more a feature than a benefit in its own right, no?

You have mentioned some enhancements at the beginning in terms of improved access for new/extra learners, and improved experience for existing learners (I’d be cautious about promising to save money for the university, because if you aim to increase provision and cut costs at the same time, you need to work through the figures to ensure that’s achievable). Good stuff.

Let me try and put myself in the shoes of a sceptical, business-minded but fundamentally lazy (implausible as that might seem!) head of department or pro vice chancellor… why would I bother? If the cost savings really stack up, OK. Extending access to courses seems like a good altruistic thing to do, and if there’s political pressure on me to do that, this might alleviate the pressure. On the downside, what if it cuts the demand for the paid-for course and reduces our enrolments? Might some other institution come along and offer support and accreditation to the people taking our free course?

Hope you don’t mind me posing these challenges – I’m just trying to anticipate what you might get asked if trying this for real.

[Personal note: I’m having a routine operation later today, so if I don’t respond to any follow-up in the next few days, it’s not that I’m not interested, just that I’m recuperating.]

[David Jennings]

Fair points, Jim, and I’m sure many would take a similar position.

If Saylor is not particularly relevant to what we do in universities, then why do you think people who work in universities are working for Saylor? Their employment page says

The Saylor Foundation relies heavily on members of the academic community in order to fulfill its mission. We are always in search of progressive-thinking deans, professors, assistant professors, instructors, teaching assistants, and students of varying levels of education (from high school level interns to graduate students) willing to share the breadth of their knowledge and expertise in order to make the Free Education Initiative a success.

Is it just that “progressive-thinking” here means “wrong thinking” or is there something more complex going on?

[David Jennings]

Sorry about that, Sancha, that editing bug is a known annoyance with WordPress – I’ve edited the formatting a little to reintroduce the bullet points.

[David Jennings]

Wow, thanks, Imogen, that’s quite a weekend’s work you’ve done there.

I really appreciate that you’ve got to grips with the possibilities of ‘enhancement’ at a deeper level than just cheaper, faster etc

I haven’t seen supply chain theories applied to this area in this rigorous way before, and it’s enlightening. I’m no expert in those theories but I want to push back a little bit — at the risk of being accused of ‘special pleading’ — by questioning whether learning can be analysed as a supply chain in the same way that cars, printers and baked beans can. To some extent, I’m sure it can, but I think many would argue that there’s something different in the way that learning (especially in higher education) depends on interaction and negotiation with the learner. Arguably it’s more a process than a product, and a process that is co-created rather than simply supplied from producer to consumer. But you may say that some supply chain theories take account of this? I’m no expert.

I’d also like to elaborate on the bit where you’ve drawn on my ALT newsletter article and equated my use of ‘agile learning’ with ‘lean’ philosophy and practice. I know there are special management theory uses (with their own mini-industries and literature) around terms like ‘agile’ and ‘lean’, but I prefer to use agile in the common, everyday sense. Hence I’m concerned that cutting down waste, in the lean approach you’ve identified, could actually reduce agility and flexibility in education. If you want learners to be able to change course or tailor their own learning experiences, then I think you need to accept that there is some inherent unpredictability on how they are going to do this. To cater for this unpredictability I think the system as a whole needs to have some redundancy and slack (a.k.a. waste) in it to enable it to adapt. Hence not so ‘lean’ if I’ve understood the use of that term correctly?

There’s lots more to your post than that, but those are the couple of issues that jumped out at me.

all the best, David

[David Jennings]

Maybe try another way of looking at it, picking up on Sue’s suggestion of blending Saylor with other elements and approaches? One thing OERs do is separate the content elements from the delivery (and learner support, and accreditation) to some extent. This then creates possibilities for the different elements to be recombined in new ways, of which Saylor is only one example (and maybe not a comprehensive ‘full service’ one).

Are there ways in which you could break down your teaching practice into elements and explore new ways of recombining them (possibly mixing them with other elements drawn in from other spheres)? What enhancements might that provide? And whose interests would it serve, in the long run?

[David Jennings]

In some (perhaps most) cases, yes, that’s definitely true. It’s like cooking a four course meal for your students, and then saying “Oh, I’ve got a few leftovers of the main course – let’s save them going to waste, eh?” However, if you listen to Fernando’s webinar he describes his OER production as specifically designed for one platform (iTunes U) and for that specific audience. So not a byproduct – but then he does work for the Open University.

[David Jennings]

All good stuff, Sancha, Jim (and everyone), and “putting the world to rights” discussions are perfectly valid…

… just to remind you that the other thing this week on ocTEL invites you to do – and which Sancha started in kicking off this thread – is to consider what kinds of enhancement might be possible for your own practice, why, and how?

Here endeth the tutor intervention 😉

[David Jennings]

Agree very much, James. My friend Seb Schmoller did Devlin’s recent MOOC/MOOR and rates him as a shrewd practitioner and commentator on the form. Another friend, Fred Garnett, points out that the M in MOOC is often moot, especially in cMOOCs (ocTEL for example has had around 1,500 registrations, which is quite a lot but only 1% of some xMOOCs, and now it doesn’t feel massive at all), and that they should be called DOOKs – Distributed Open Online Knowledge. Maybe DOORs… though I can’t see that catching on, can you?

[David Jennings]

Just to answer your last question, Jim: if you look at the spread of activity across the forums, you’ll see that people are still contributing to Weeks 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. We/I tried to encourage people to focus on the current week and come back to earlier weeks later, but that was just advice, not regulation, and many people have other ideas. That’s fine – whatever works for them. But it does mean that, in the snaking 26-mile marathon of ocTEL, people are spread out from about the 6 mile point to the small leading pack at around 20 miles in…

[David Jennings]

Funny, isn’t it, how we start off with seemingly simple, practical questions like the applicability of video lectures, or how to make higher education a little less expensive, and within a handful of exchanges we’re on to a complete re-think of global education and homeschooling for all?!

I know it’s a red rag to a bull in some quarters even to mention Wikipedia, but who pays for the “experts” to create that? Might future courses be curated guides through openly available online resources (this is effectively the Saylor model)? There’s a complex ecosystem at work here, and the answer to who pays is correspondingly complex, including:

• public funds in R&D and governance that originally set up the net and many of its cornerstone technologies
• public institutions looking at new ways to fulfil their goals (from OU to MIT to your local 1992 uni)
• private corporations and advertising (Google and the start-ups that wan’t to be the ‘next Google’ etc)
• private individuals and hobbyists with spare time (millions of Wikipedians, organised by their complex and evolving governance models)
• billionaires motivated by philanthropy and/or egotism (Saylor etc)

I appreciate you mentions of homeschooling are off the cuff, but there may be some interesting developments there. The online resources to make home education more viable have grown beyond all recognition in the past 10-15 years, and the practice is growing by 15% a year according to some estimates because you no longer have to be so ‘hardcore’ and devote your whole life to it. I have a few friends who are homeschoolers (actually they mostly call themselves home educators – school = yuk!). Here’s an interview with one of them.

Sorry, you’ve got more of a personal opinion from me there, rather than a typical tutor question-and-challenge response, but I hope you don’t mind!

[David Jennings]

Thanks, Elizabeth. Please don’t take this as ‘proper’ professional advice as I’d have to spend a lot more time getting to know your set-up there, but I wonder if one thing you could usefully focus on might be how to provide “just in time” support without being dependent on you or your colleagues all the time? Is there a way you can get them to see the whole internet as a support environment – both in terms of peer advice and as an information resource? Maybe develop their self-organised learner skills by doing some guided webquests at the beginning and then encouraging them to find their own support resources after that (maybe helping them curate the resources using a shared bookmark system)? This might give you more scope, and a more clearly defined role, in delivering f2f elements or developing other online materials.

Just a thought, and please forgive me if I’ve misread your situation.

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