[David Jennings]

I think that’s a really good analysis, Sancha – thanks.

I understand your suspicion about cost-cutting in education. But there is still a need for low-cost education in some areas. Maybe if you frame it in terms of getting education into places where it otherwise doesn’t reach, the ‘cheapness’ doesn’t seem so suspect. Thus Sugata Mitra talks about encouraging self-organised learning in places where good teachers just won’t go (from rural India to Middlesborough sink estates). Or think about getting higher education back up and running in Haiti.

Personally, my hunch is that the kinds of innovations developed in those areas may have things we learn from in ‘mainstream’ contexts. But even in their own right getting education into such places seems worthwhile. Are there any areas (perhaps less dramatic) that your own teaching doesn’t currently reach but could do if there were a low-cost means of making it available?

[David Jennings]

Thanks for the links, Alice. You make a good point about academic staff with salaries from institutions being involved in free education initiatives. Before anyone else beats me to it, I should point out that the same applies to ocTEL and many members of our team!

Could you extend this critique to the production of OERs as well, do you think?

[David Jennings]

Lots of interesting issues emerging from this discussion already. For me some of the further questions that it prompts are things like:

• these weaker/less motivated students – are they less motivated across the board, or are they less motivated in some areas, more motivated in others? If there’s a unidimensional measure of high vs low motivation, would you consider different teaching strategies for them? Is that morally defensible e.g. if the highly motivated students end up cross-subsidising the others?
• the discussion about accreditation and courses compares xMOOC approach with traditional courses with a fixed end point – but what if we relaxed that and accepted that students determine their own targets to some degree? must we have the same benchmark to measure all students? whose interests does that serve?
• similarly, Sancha’s comment about “huge drop off rate from MOOCs which wouldn’t be acceptable in an f2f institution… no one seems to care“… what if I suggested that MOOCs are a kind of half way house between a course and library/reference reading list for a course? It’s acceptable (isn’t it?) not to read everything on a reading list – but you don’t call it ‘drop off’ if you don’t finish it. Libraries don’t have moral crises of justifying themselves when some of their books remain unread.

Certainly such analogies are limited, and may be flawed, but I think I’m trying to suggest that there’s more to learning than just the standard A to B course, where it’s a prerequisite that everyone starts in the same place and wants to end up at a shared destination. Maybe think about applying xMOOCs to parts of your teaching and learning practice other than that type of course??

[David Jennings]

Hi Elizabeth, Obviously I don’t know your context, but this reads like a very plausible account of the opportunities and risks associated with applying the xMOOC approach to your situation. Two follow-up questions occur to me:

1. have you tried any of the elements of this approach – e.g. problem-based learning online – already?
2. turning things round the other way, what do you feel are the biggest challenges you face, or the biggest changes you’d like to achieve, and do you think the xMOOC philosophy would help with them (or is it a spanner to crack a nut?)?

cheers, David

[David Jennings]

Sorry about this.

Another useful source is Drew’s blog: http://anarchiceducator.wordpress.com

Unfortunately Drew’s own link to Information Obesity in this blog is also broken so I’ll chase him to see what is happening. I think he is still out of the UK at the moment on a study visit so that might explain the problem.

 

 

[David Jennings]

Sorry, Alice, for this glitch, and thanks for pointing this out. I’ve substituted the video you recommend while we investigate what happened to the original resource and whether it’s available anywhere else.

[David Jennings]

Andy, sorry this question went so long without an answer. Thanks to Martin for the initial response (and thus prodding me). Everything Martin says is correct. Just to add that another consideration was the attritional impact of requiring people (a) to register for another login (because we didn’t think we could intergrate MediaWiki within WordPress) and (b) to learn the wiki ropes if they don’t already know them. We thought only a small minority of people would make it through these hoops.

Personally, I’d love to explore the potential of semantic MediaWiki with a community along the lines of ocTEL. I bet Martin would too. But we are a bit geeky, and ocTEL wants to be welcoming to non-geeks. Maybe we can find a compromise that streams the geek element without seeming exclusive of alienating to the majority in future iterations.  

[David Jennings]

Hi Ted, Elluminate is genuinely multimedia, in the sense that the audio syncs up with the chat and visuals on the screen. Hence there is no simple support for dumping onto your phone — or even to a video file. 

As an experiment, however, I’ve made an audio recording of last week’s webinar (I have trimmed the silent passages where people were working collaborative on whiteboards and responding to polls).

It is quite a lot of work to produce this, so, to continue doing this, it would be good to have positive feedback that you’ve listened to it and found it useful.

 

[David Jennings]

Thanks again, Imogen. We will think about this (and don’t get me wrong either: to make this & future versions of the course better, we genuinely thrive on detailed feedback). I acknowledge the accessibility issue. Speaking personally, and not necessarily in line with ocTEL/ALT policy, I say Up with the Open Internet! up with diversity! [mutter] down with overbearing firewalls! One hopes these accessibility problems will clear themselves up, but I appreciate that could take a few years, so, yes, we must consider stop-gap solutions. 

[David Jennings]

Andrew, Thank you, and yes, it’s likely that ocTEL 2.0 — should it come into being — will be shorter. (I’m a little confused by your 15 weeks comment, though?) Will definitely take a look at MOOCMOOC. 

[David Jennings]

Thank you, Imogen. Yes, I did ask, and, believe me, I’m grateful for your reply — thoughtful as ever. It arrived too late for us to do anything about this week’s materials, and, to be honest with you, we have planned the activities for the rest of the course, so I can’t promise that we’ll be able to edit them to ensure that they all meet your “one A4 page” spec. But your account of the hazards of them being longer is persuasive, and definitely something for us to think about within the rest of the course and any re-runs.

I’m glad you made it into the garden — time well spent, I’m sure — though sorry that you were cursing ocTEL as you headed out there…

[David Jennings]

Hi Sancha, good work, and sorry about the paragraph breaks — I’ve edited further and hopefully it looks better now. The removal of paragraph breaks is a common problem in WordPress, I’m afraid, which we’ve tried to mitigate using stylesheets, but this is only a partial solution.

[David Jennings]

Thanks, Kathrine! Interested to here if others share this position, or if there’s a spread of different perspectives.

[David Jennings]

Hmmm, I don’t know how/why that happened. Please try these links:

• http://bit.ly/learnerquiz
• http://bit.ly/researcherquiz

[David Jennings]

Hi Elizabeth, the Google+ group is a participant-led initiative (I’m glad to say) and not one that ‘we’ (the ocTEL team) have any control over. So adding a section is up to David Read, Doug Holton or John Graves. I’m sure they’ll be happy to help, but they may not read this forum, so I’ll cross-post to the Google+ group.

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