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Our edtech innovation conference, held in Calgary May 1-3, is now more or less planned: http://edinnovation.ca/

I don’t think I’m overstating things when I say that there won’t be an edtech innovation conference in Canada this year that will have as stellar a line up of keynote speakers and panels: http://edinnovation.ca/conference/edinnovation-2013/

Hope you can join us! Registration is available here: http://edinnovation.eventbrite.ca/.

If you are interested in being on a panel or sponsoring, let me know. I’m gsiemens on gmail.

The most valuable aspect of MOOCs is that the large number of learners enables the formation of sub-networks based on interested, geography, language, or some other attribute that draws individuals together. With 20 students in a class, limited options exist for forming sub-networks. When you have 5,000 students, new configurations are possible.

The “new pedagogical models” (A Silicon Valley term meaning: we didn’t read the literature and still don’t realize that these findings are two, three, or more decades old) being discovered by MOOC providers supports what most academics and experienced teachers know about learning: it’s a social, active, and participatory process.

The current MOOC providers have adopted a regressive pedagogy: small scale learning chunks reminiscent of the the heady days of cognitivism and military training. Ah, the 1960′s. What a great time to be a learner.

In order to move past this small chunk model of learning, MOOC providers will need to include problem based learning and group learning in their offerings. That won’t be easy. MOOCs have high dropout rates. Which means that if you’re assigned to a group of 10 learners, by the end of the course, you’ll be the only one left.

The large MOOCs can improve the quality of learning by creating a model for rapid creation/dissolution of groups. If you have teenagers in your house (or if you are a gamer), you’re likely familiar with how groups form in many video games or virtual worlds. There are two extreme opposites: World of Warcraft involves highly cohesive social units where individuals spend long periods of time together in solving problems and engaging in quests. In contrast, Call of Duty has low social cohesion as groups are formed on the spot and once a player logs off, the group dissolve (yes, you can log in and play with friends in a more cohesive unit on CoD as well). The latter model is worth considering for MOOCs.

Let’s say I take a course on Coursera. Due to high dropout rates, pre-planned groups will likely not work well. Instead, if I log in at 10 pm on a Friday in my statistics course, I can be automatically placed into a queue system similar to CoD: I wait until enough people show up to form a basic group, the system then launches us into our group work and we complete the 20-30 minute activity. If we like working together, we can decide to form a more stable group and schedule times to work online together. Otherwise, we disband. For the next group assignment, we are partnered with an entirely different group of learners.

To extend the group work experience, a quest layer can be added onto the assignment. Once a group is formed, each member is assigned a role that is vital to achieving a particular challenge. If members of the group don’t work together and share knowledge and skills, the problem will not be solved. The quest format will likely run longer than 20-30 minutes and may be most successful for groups that have worked together in the past.

My main point here is to emphasize that we need to think differently about group formation in learning when our learners have very weak social ties and when the commitment of learners to varies during the course. Taking a rapid group formation approach, augmented with quests, will help to ensure that some level of social learning occurs throughout the course, even after 90% of the learners have left.

Kuhn emphasized how most activity in science is evolutionary, operating within an existing framework. At a few rare points, anomalies arise that can no longer be addressed by existing frameworks and entirely new conceptions of a field arise. This model of change is relevant in education today. Other models developed by Perez (socio-techno-economic), Schumpeter (creative destruction), David (productivity lag in periods of change) are also applicable and important to consider when discussing change, but are beyond the scope of what I’m addressing in this post.

For decades, even centuries, higher education has been largely able to absorb technological trends through incremental improvements. Learning management systems mirror in class models of control. MOOCs mirror large lectures. The true potential of the internet has not yet produced a Kuhnian shift in higher education. But it’s getting closer. With developments of the last decade, higher education is now at the point where perspectives have enlarged and blurring shapes of education to come can be seen: distributed, unbundled/fragmented, alternative assessment schemes, global, and greater commercial involvement.

Looking for a few partners…

Shane Dawson, Dragan Gasevic, and I have been working on a platform that we feel reflects the future of education. The software, initiated by Gasevic as a research project, has now been in development for several years. Without going into too much technical detail, the software is competency/outcomes focused (i.e. more granular than a course) and targets learning that occurs anywhere (university, work, personal learning, MOOCs, etc). Through social and machine learning models, recommended content and resources are provided to learners. We believe that this will reduce degree completion time and improve quality of learning. We want to test those beliefs.

We are looking to run a series of pilots with a few university and corporate partners. We’ll assist departments/universities in developing courses (we’ll use that word for now, but it’s not really about courses) that emphasize personalized/adaptive learning and competency validation through social and expert networks. If you’re interested, let me know: gsiemens (at) gmail.com

For the past several years, in preparation for our Learning Analytics Conference (this year in Leuven, Belgium, registration is now open), we’ve been running an open online course on learning analytics. During this time, I’ve used Moodle and gRSShopper (the system Stephen Downes developed and that we’ve used for all of our joint MOOCs).

As I’m currently writing a book on the future of higher education and open courses, I’m exploring different technologies for use in open courses. Most universities will not join Coursera or edX. LMS providers appear to be recognizing this and are beginning to offer universities software for running their own open online courses. One LMS provider that has been early out of the gate is Instructure. Late last year, they announced Canvas Network. Canvas Network allows universities and faculty members to run MOOCs without having to join an existing provider. This is an important model and one that will give universities greater control over, or at least access to, data as well as helping to develop faculty competence with technology and distributed networked courses.

This year, we’ll be running our Learning Analytics and Knowledge course on Canvas Network. Registration is now open. The course starts Feb 11.

Tony Hirst shared a new initiative via OU UK: UK universities embrace the free, open, online future of higher education powered by The Open University. From a Times HE release:

Futurelearn will carry courses from 12 UK institutions (see list), which will be available to students across the world free of charge.
It will follow in the footsteps of US providers including Coursera, edX and Udacity, which offer around 230 Moocs from around 40 mostly US-based institutions to more than 3 million students.
The new platform will operate as an independent company, majority owned by The Open University, although details of other investors have yet to be confirmed.

Tony Hirst has compiled a list of articles (or churnalism as it appears to be). The logo of FutureLearn appears to be the byproduct of 2 minutes of creativity “let’s type the name and then change the font colour on half”. At least they’re experimenting rather than joining existing initiatives.

In July this year, I complained about the lack of vision by Canadian universities with regard to open online courses:

Canadian universities are squandering an opportunity to reply meaningfully to Coursera and EDx. I’m aware of at least two major Canadian universities that are negotiating to join Coursera. Why give not develop your own? Why not create an active experiment in a Canadian context that allows you to build your understanding of emerging learning models?
By joining an existing project, you largely give away the knowledge building potential for Canadian universities in their own experimentation. Instead of a diversity of projects, where Coursera/EDx benefit from what our universities do (and vice versa), we are doing what got us into this position of innovation laggards in the first place: neglecting the development of vision by taking an easier more politically palatable route.

Universities simply don’t have time to respond to changes with multi-year consultations. Vision and action are required to stay relevant. I’m encouraged that UK has seen the need to move forward with an initiative that provides a UK spin on open courses.

I’m more dismayed now, however, than I was in July and the anemic vision and response by Canadian universities. Higher education is facing a changed landscape. Even if MOOCs disappear from the landscape in the next few years, the change drivers that gave birth to them will continue to exert pressure and render slow plodding systems obsolete (or, perhaps more accurately, less relevant). If MOOCs are eventually revealed to be a fad, the universities that experiment with them today will have acquired experience and insight into the role of technology in teaching and learning that their conservative peers won’t have. It’s not only about being right, it’s about experimenting and playing in the front line of knowledge. Researchers do this in their labs regularly. Unfortunately, the logic of being leading edge experimenters doesn’t seem to translate into the university system/model itself.

Canada, your move.