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The Future of MOOCs #wweopen13
I enjoyed reading Alex Usher’s The Future of MOOCs: Coursera and edX article, and I would like to add a perspective. The future of MOOCs has yet to be written, but there are some indicators of where it’s heading. As Alex points out, toward bankruptcy. Particularly the xMOOC corporations, the profit-driven ones. Even enormous startups with heaps of venture capital are subject to exceptional failure rates, startups fail, a lot. Long-established corporations fail a lot, particularly when they fail to heed the winds of change. This is a key dirty secret in the social media hype of “be your own boss, make your own future, edtech is where it’s at.” The daily grind and stressful reality of trying to attempt anything new in an ultra-conservative, capitalist, “what’s your revenue model,” “show me your exceptionally talented volunteer team,” and “prove it,” environment is exhausting. Add to it the uphill battle of being a charitable corporation in Canada where no national education platform has ever existed, and well, welcome to my world. I’m not bitter, nor defeated, I could just use another cup of coffee.
Would I trade what I am doing? No, not yet, I am nowhere near discouraged. Fear is a liar, and there’s quite of lot of it being generated around this particular topic. Generated in stereo. In the right-side of the headset we have those who believe they stand to lose everything if open education is allowed to flourish, and on the left-side of the audio spectrum, the self-serving edtech industry attempting to convince everyone that teaching and learning are impossible without assistive devices and interactive software.
One of the things I find fascinating on the so-called adult education battlefield is that one side is simply refusing to engage. There’s actually no battle. It’s not disruption, its disinterest. There’s nothing a group of bullies hates more, let me tell you. Didn’t we learn that in bullying 101? There are massive numbers of learners who are simply walking away from conservative, scarcity-based, expensive, standardized formal education and doing their own thing. They are completely aware that they don’t need anyone’s permission to learn, nor do they need a scaffold that they are not allowed to help build. They are persistently immune to the idea that they require the latest adaptive feedback algorithms to ensure their success. They pick and choose, surf and click, learn and make mistakes all day. They are not concerned. Learners recognize the underlying scarcity model in Coursera and the like as well. There’s a Trojan Horse effect. The gift appears open, safe and inviting on the exterior, but underneath, razor sharp commercial swords. There’s a very intelligent group that are not falling for the tactic.
There are also some incredibly talented and engaged educators in the camp of non-confrontation. They’re working in extraordinarily conservative institutions just carrying on doing their own thing. Some of them even hide what they’re doing in plain sight. I heard an educator state it really well, “if our President has ever done more than pull up financial news bookmarks provided to him by his assistant I’d be shocked. I am in no danger of institutional repercussions for the open research I’m conducting.” I’m with them, the learners and the educators, just carrying on doing what feels right for them about their own work and learning on their own time.
I love what I am doing. I wake up every day tired but engaged, stressed but hopeful, because here’s what I believe. I believe the future of open education (let’s leave the M-word out of the mix) rests with dedicated educators that partner with, and empower themselves and dedicated learners through connection and dialogue about passionate shared interests. That’s it. Simple formula, wholly sustainable, and will contribute more to the economic success and wellness of individuals and communities than anything a government ever made up.
“Listen here Ms Pollyanna Hayman, how can such a model be funded?” I have heard spoken. “Simply connecting educators with learners, and learners with learners, and letting them interact, and teach each other is neither an education, nor a business model, not-for-profit or otherwise.” Yes it is. It just hasn’t been fully tested. It’s one of the self-imposed hats I wear, to help figure out exactly how this model can work, if it even needs my help. I will admit that educators and learners have everything they need to be successful without me. I just enjoy building the bridge and watching people move back and forth.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far. The more learners I engage with and learn from, and help empower, and like and talk with, the higher my chances of them becoming contributors and helping me fund and carry out the research of Wide World Ed. The more educators I engage with, and like and talk with, and learn from, the more we agree about the potential of this model. The more evidence I can provide that teaching and learning at individual levels of interest and engagement increases contributions to civil society, demonstrates a shared responsibility for public education, empowers care of the whole, and supports people to learn skills they actually want to learn, the more people we will have working in jobs they like. The more evidence I can provide of how all of this contributes to the wellness of networks of like-minded thinkers, and encourages them to pay taxes, well, now we’re talking about sustainability.
My job, as I see it, is to help connect the dots for foundations to take a chance on me and my research and support the testing of my unreasonable sustainability model. My role is to demonstrate for governments the clear benefits of open education (read economic savings and increased access) as part of the current mix of options (read not trying to replace colleges and universities). It is also to help convince education institutions that supporting their educators to experiment with open education and community engagement represents employee satisfaction and reputation benefits they can never purchase, at any price. I have some great supporters and contributors in this, I need more, I’m just getting started.
The future of open education is in the hands of individual learners and educators, absolutely the safest place for it. Wide World Ed is going to succeed in the open education business, like many other great UNESCO-focused initiatives, by nourishing learners and educators as they conduct their tasks.
Ramping up the Blog Posting as a Priority #WWEOpen13
So, to set a good example, I’ll be ramping up the blog posting here, and sorting out how to aggregate other blog posts into the course shell for our Online Instruction for Open Educators course.
No easy feat. As with many great pedagogic ideas, there is a certain amount of legwork, often a significant amount of legwork involved in finding an effective solution that delivers on your concept. I simply want to pull in all participant blog posts to one common page we can all view and that is easily shared in the course shell (or that participants can bookmark).
Stephen Downes has a great solution that he has used in many courses called gRSShopper. I’m going to check in with him on how that works, however, I really need the gRSShopper for dummies course, because when it comes to technology walk-throughs, it’s sometimes a slog-through for me. So many things to learn, so little time. Meantime, I’m going to test out some true dummy solutions to see how easy and effective they are.
Cheers!
Jenni
New Learning in Canada #oer
The New Requirements of Learners (riff on a conversation with Stephen Downes)
Adult learners, think about this:
You are the only one responsible to know yourself when it comes to learning. Know your skills, your strengths, your weaknesses about a new thing you are trying to learn. If you want to learn, you are required to participate in the activity of learning, go, search, find, analyze, write, organize, do – find others. Don’t wait for someone to spoon feed you, your parents to pay for it, a bank to loan you the money, or your employer to train you on what they need you to know.
You are responsible to find other learners interested in what you’re trying to learn. In groups (learning communities) you must find peers willing to look over your work and provide you with positive critical feedback. You must find good examples of other work, bad examples of other work, and become an effective critical thinker. You help others, others help you, learning takes place in communities, and the end product is always higher quality than if you did it alone. You will develop trustworthy peers if you do this. You will develop networks of people you would like to work with, or for, and people you would hire.
You need to address the problem of your learning yourself. It’s your brain, your time. You should not wait for colleges or universities or governments to tell you what to learn. You’re the one who is going to have to do the work, the heavy lifting of learning. Is your time worth money? You need to make sure that what you’re spending your time learning is what you want (motivation), and what you need (you have assessed what you already know and are filling in the gaps to learn something new). You should not waste your own time, or let others waste it for you.
Don’t know what you want to do? Take a look at the predictions about looming labour shortages and pick something that attracts your interest. It’s not very likely that will be where you end up, but if you need an income, it’s a good start. Get enough experience in it and you can teach others and keep filling the labour gap in Canada until it’s filled. Once you have experience and skills you have more choices.
What tools do you need? What advice do you need? How can you hook up with a group of learners, or learning that’s low cost or no cost, to learn what you need to learn for whatever it is you want to do? Go and find out.
How can you convince an employer that you will be the good worker they need? Go and find out.
You need to find a way to send your message to employers, that you’re not willing to go into debt to satisfy optical character recognition software’s preliminary resume scans. Tell them to hire you for your values, your commitment, your work ethic, your talents and abilities, your experience, and not for how much you spent at a higher education institution. Tell them to train you, promote you, let you train others, let you effect change to better the organization, and see if you turn out to be a loyal and dedicated employee.
Employers, think about this:
Accreditation is not always worth the paper it’s printed on. Just because a person has a degree in marketing, does that mean they know how to market effectively for your specific organization? Are you going to train them to do what you need them to do? What are the real and basic skills you need them to have? Stop requiring needless accreditation as a hiring screen. Hire people you like, who agree with your values and mission and train them on the job. If you’re worried that they’ll leave with the valuable skills you gave them, make sure you’re the kind of employer they want to stay with.
Your values need to change to accommodate a global shift in learning and training on the job and, in general, about who you are as an organization. If you are worried about the looming labour shortage, you need to get involved rather than waiting for your government or higher education to solve this problem for you, at great cost to the learners, who are going to be your unhappy employees if they’ve sold their shirt to get an education it turns out they don’t need in order to work for you.
You need to connect your employees to each other and help provide them with quality learning resources, and build a real and effective learning community within your organization. Because learning is more effective in real and trusted communities, and the quality of the work you get from connected workers is ten times that of workers in silos. Believe it.
People without jobs. Jobs without people.
Solved. Learners, employers, get to it.
Radical Openness #edcmooc
I Tweeted, and was not satisfied with the space for rant. I read an article today from the Globe and Mail by Don Tapscott talking about MOOCs and the World Economic Forum. Don was admiring the talk of open education by the heavy hitters in the entrepreneurial ventures surrounding this “Open” education movement and I was with him (for the most part). Coursera, EdX, Udacity, the usual suspects. The article mentioned Don’s new TED book Radical Openness. Being a curious sort, I navigated about and found the link to the book, and genuinely, actually wanted to read what he wanted to share, but low and behold there’s a $2.99 fee to buy the book from the iBooktstore, or a couple of other vendors if you like. And there’s a bonus deal, if one wishes to subscribe to TED Books, they’re on for $4.99 a month. REALLY? Seriously? Does anyone who believes that charging money for a book called Radical Openness makes any sense at all? Come on! It’s not the money, make no mistake, I am really blessed to have a livelihood and a roof over my head, so not only have the technology to read it, but the money to afford it, but it absolutely falls down to the principle. And openness in global education has got to be first, foremost, last and always about personal principles and values. Absolute total fail by someone who seems to be trying really hard to embrace change. I’m only guessing here Don (Anthony Williams, co-author, you are no less culpable), but if the powers that be at TED ask you to tow the line on an action as jackass stupid as this, you need to flat out refuse. Many, many people who are paying attention to what it really means to stand for open global education will not now, not ever, respect someone who would consider for a moment charging money on a title like that. Hope you hear this, hope you set the record straight, and what I mean is, I hope you make it right, publicly and rapidly.
#oped12 #cfhe12 Google Scholar search, amazing results!
Module 5 Scholarship II
Following on Dr. Siemens’ activity for this week in Openness in Education, I did a Google and Google Scholar search on all 9 FT faculty at the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca. Some interesting things arose.
I searched my own name just for kicks and realize I’m not doing my due diligence in either open publishing or Google profiling. Will try harder! I got 2 accurate hits in Google Scholar, 2 non-starters.
In all cases, within Google Scholar, clicking on an article of interest leads to one of two things, a barrier to reading it (such as its inclusion in a secure journal, or it’s availability as a purchasable product) or the opportunity to begin reading because it has been posted for everyone’s (that is every privileged one with access to the Internet’s) benefit. I prefer the latter. Barriers are frustrating.
As a graduate student, I have access to a rich library at Athabasca that includes many of the articles listed in Google Scholar, so these barriers are not significant for me. However, I still prefer, from a values perspective to read and link and explore artifacts that are open. It pleases me that others who don’t have my student access can see them and benefit from them. I will endeavour in all that I do to publish openly.
What really, really stood out for me in this mini-exercise was the exceptional disparity between males and females in a Google Scholar context for this group, FT Faculty at CDE. There are six men and three women in the list, already a disparity. The number of artifacts was 6,991 for men, 129 for women. Even if one were to sift through and determine which artifacts are truly attributable to their authors, and truly open access, there would still be an exceptional and terrible difference in output and availability. The question is, what are women scholars going to take away from this unintended discovery?
Can’t write more, have to get busy 🙂
jennihayman 