Lighting the UK SoLAR Flare

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I’m delighted to announce that CETIS and the OU are co-sponsoring the first UK SoLAR Flare meeting on Monday 19th November in Milton Keynes.

This is the first UK gathering dedicated to the field of Learning Analytics. Under the auspices of SoLAR (Society for Learning Analytics Research).

Part of SoLAR’s mission is to improve the quality of dialogue within and across the many stakeholders impacted by Learning Analytics. Flare events are “a series of regional practitioner-focused events to facilitate the exchange of information, case studies, ideas, and early stage research.”

We are therefore inviting technology specialists, researchers, educators, ICT purchasing decision-makers, senior leaders, business intelligence analysts, policy makers, funders, students, and companies to join us in Milton Keynes for this inaugural event.

We’ve designed the day to maximise social learning with plenty of opportunity to meet with peers and explore collaboration possibilities, the chance to hear — and share — lightning updates on what’s happening and the opportunity to shape future Flares.

So if you’re involved in any aspect of analytics and want to share your work, or would just like to find out more, join us in Milton Keynes. The event is free to attend, but places are limited, so book quickly.

Big data, learning analytics, a crack team from the OU . . . and me

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Yesterday I was part of a panel in the Big Data and Learning Analtyics Symposium at ALT-C.   Simon Buckingham Schum, Rebecca Fergusson, Noami Jeffrey, Kevin Mayles and Richard Nurse the “crack team” from the OU gave a really useful overview of the range of work they are all undertaking in the OU. Simon’s blog has details of the session and our introductory slides.

We were pleasantly surprised by the number of delegates who came to the session given we were scheduled at the same time as yesterday’s invitied speakers Professor Mark Stubbs and Sarah Porter. The level of discussion and interest indicated the growing realisation of the potential and the challenges for analytics across the education sector.

As ever it is hard to report effectively on a discussion session however a few issues which seemed to resonate with everyone in the room were:

*the danger of recommendation systems reducing and not extending choice 
*data driven v data deterimistic decision making
*the difference between measuring success and success in learning – they are not the same
*the danger of “seduction by stats” by senior management
*the need for the development of new skills sets and roles within institutions based on data science but with the ability to communicate with all staff to help question the data. 
*the increased need for development of statistical literacy for all staff and students 
*the potential for learning analytics in terms of expanding the flipped classroom model allowing teachers and students more time for sense making and actually thinking about the teaching and learning process.

Many of these issues will be covered in a series of papers we will be releasing next month as part of our Reconnoitre work.  And the discussions will be continued at a SoLAR meeting in November which we are co-hosting with the OU (more details on that in the next few days).

 

 

Confessions of a selfish conference tweeter

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As many of you will know it’s the ALT- C 2012 conference this week, the UK’s biggest learning technology conference. I’m going later in the week but today am taking advance of the live streaming of the key notes and invited speakers (thank you ALT for once again providing this service); and of course following the twitter back channel.

During this mornings keynote the #altc2012 hashtag started trending on twitter.

Combined with this there seemed to be a growing number of complaints/ warnings about spam messages using the hashtag too.

The growth of twitter as an integral part of conferences is now, depending on your point of view, both a blessing and a curse. As well as some tweets from people who couldn’t be there positively encouraged tweeting, I also noticed a few tweets this morning bemoaning the level of tweets and harking back to the “good ol’ days” when it was a bit like the altc2012 google+ stream, with just a few “cool kids” hanging out.

So what’s my confession? Well there are a couple. Firstly, I never apologise for tweeting at a conference. If I go to a conference now I tweet. If you follow me you probably know this. I am in a very fortunate position that I am able to get to conferences/events that many in our sector can’t, so I think it is part of my role in publicly funded service to share my experiences/ relevant information and links etc. If that bothers you then I suspect you don’t/won’t follow me on twitter, and that is absolutely fine by me.

Secondly, I don’t use tweet deck or anything like that, and very rarely follow a conference hashtag stream. It may mean I miss out on a few tweets (or actually quite a lot), but you know what? (cue stage whisper) It doesn’t really matter. And there is the advantage of avoiding spam but sticking to my own (relatively) spam free stream.

Thirdly, I am slightly obsessed with the network views that people like Tony Hirst and Martin Hawskey create using the twitter data from conferences, and will no doubt be sharing during this week.

So, dear reader, there are my confessions, am I forgiven?

Confronting Big Data and Learning Analytics @ #altc2012

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Next Thursday morning I’m participating in the Big Data and Learning Analytics symposium at ALT-C 2012 with colleagues from the OU, Simon BuckinghamShum, Rebecca Ferguson, Naomi Jeffery, Kevin Mayles and Richard Nurse.

The session will start will a brief overview from me of the analytics reconnoitre that CETIS is currently undertaking for JISC, followed by short overviews from different parts of the OU on a number of analytics projects and initiatives being undertaken there. We hope the session will:

“air some of the critical arguments around the limits of decontextualised data and automated analytics, which often appear reductionist in nature, failing to illuminate higher order learning. There are complex ethical issues around data fusion, and it is not clear to what extent learners are empowered, in contrast to being merely the objects of tracking technology. Educators may also find themselves at the receiving end of a new battery of institutional ‘performance indicators’ that do not reflect what they consider to be authentic learning and teaching.”

We’re really keen to have open discussion with delegates and engage with their views and experiences in relation to big data and learning analytics. So, come and join us bright and early (well, 9am) on Thursday. If you can’t make the session, but have some views/experiences then please feel free to leave comments here and I’ll do my best to raise them at the session and in my write up of the it.

More information about the session is available here.

eAssessment Scotland – focus on feedback

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Professor David Boud got this year’s eAssessment Scotland Conference off to a great start with his “new conceptions of feedback and how they might be put into practice” keynote presentation by asking the fundamental question ‘”what is feedback?”

David’s talk centred on what he referred to as the “three generations of feedback”, and was a persuasive call to arms to educators to move from the “single loop ” or “control system” industrial model of feedback to a more open adaptive system where learners play a central and active role.

In this model, the role of feedback changes from being passive to one which helps to develop students allowing them to develop their own judgement, standards and criteria. Capabilities which are key to success outside formal education too. The next stage from this is to create feedback loops which are pedagogically driven and considered from the start of any course design process. Feedback becomes part of the whole learning experience and not just something vaguely related to assessment.

In terms of technology, David did give a familiar warning that we shouldn’t enable digital systems to allow us to do more “bad feedback more efficiently”. There is a growing body of research around developing the types of feedback loops David was referring to. Indeed the current JISC Assessment and Feedback Programme is looking at exactly the issues brought up in the keynote, and is based on the outcomes of previously funded projects such as REAP and PEER. And the presentation from the interACT project I went to immediately after the keynote, gave an excellent overview of how JISC funding is allowing the Centre for Medical Education in Dundee to re-engineering its assessment and feedback systems to “improve self, peer and tutor dialogic feedback”.

During the presentation the team illustrated the changes to their assessment /curriculum design using an assessment time line model developed as part of another JISC funded project, ESCAPE, by Mark Russell and colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire.

Lisa Gray, programme manager for the Assessment and Feedback programme, then gave an overview of the programme including a summary of the baseline synthesis report which gives a really useful summary of the issues the projects (and the rest of the sector ) are facing in terms of changing attitudes, policy and practice in relation to assessment and feedback. These include:
*formal strategy/policy documents lagging behind current development
*educational principles are rarely enshrined in strategy/policylearners are not often actively enaged in developing practice
*assessment and feedback practice doesn’t reflect the reality of working life
*admin staff are often left out of the dialogue
*traditional forms of assessment still dominate
*timeliness of feedback are still an issue.

More information on the programme and JISCs work in the assessment domain is available here.

During the lunch break I was press-ganged/invited to take part in the live edutalk radio show being broadcast during the conference. I was fortunate to be part of a conversation with Colin Maxwell (@camaxwell), lecturer at Carnegie College, where we discussed MOOCs (see Colin’s conference presentation) and feedback. As the discussion progressed we talked about the different levels of feedback in MOOCs. Given the “massive” element of MOOCs how and where does effective feedback and engagement take place? What are the afordances of formal and informal feedback? As I found during my recent experience with the #moocmooc course, social networks (and in particular twitter) can be equally heartening and disheartening.

I’ve also been thinking more about the subsequent twitter analysis Martin has done of the #moocmooc twitter archive. On the one hand, I think these network maps of twitter conversations are fascinating and allow the surfacing of conversations, potential feedback opportunities etc. But, on the other, they only surface the loudest participants – who are probably the most engaged, self directed etc. What about the quiet participants, the lost souls, the ones most likely to drop out? In a massive course, does anyone really care?

Recent reports of plagiarism, and failed attempts at peer assessment in some MOOCs have added to the debate about the effectiveness of MOOCs. But going back to David Boud’s keynote, isn’t this because some courses are taking his feedback mark 1, industrial model, and trying to pass it off as feedback mark 2 without actually explaining and engaging with students from the start of the course, and really thinking through the actual implications of thousands of globally distributed students marking each others work?

All in all it was a very though provoking day, with two other excellent keynotes from Russell Stannard sharing his experiences of using screen capture to provide feedback, and Cristina Costa on her experiences of network feedback and feeding forward. You can catch up on all the presentations and join in the online conference which is running for the rest of this week at the conference website.

Analytics and #moocmooc

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This is my final post on my experiences of the #moocmooc course that ran last week, and I want to share a few of my reflections on the role of analytics (and in this case learning analytics), primarily from my experiences as a learner on the course. I should point out that I have no idea about the role of analytics from the course teams point of view, but I am presuming that they have the baseline basics of enrollment numbers and login stats from the Canvas LMS. But in this instance there were no obvious learner analytics available from the system. So, as a learner, in such an open course where you interact in a number of online spaces, how do you get a sense of your own engagement and participation?

There are some obvious measures, like monitoring your own contributions to discussion forums. But to be honest do we really have the time to do that? I for one am quite good at ignoring any little nagging voices saying in my head saying “you haven’t posted to the discussion forum today” :-) A little automation would probably go a long way there. However, a lot of actual course activity didn’t take place within the “formal” learning environment, instead it happened in other spaces such as twitter, storify, google docs, YouTube, blogs etc. Apart from being constantly online, my phone bleeping every now again notifying me of retweets, how did I know what was happening and how did that help with engagement and motivation?

I am fortunate, mainly due to my colleague Martin Hawskey that I have a few analytics tricks that I was able to utilise which gave me a bit of an insight into my, and the whole class activity.

One of Martins’ most useful items in his bag of tricks is his hashtag twitter archive. By using his template, you can create an archive in google docs which stores tweets and through a bit of social network analysis magic also gives an overview of activity – top tweeters, time analysis etc. It’s hard to get the whole sheet into a screen grab hopefully the one below gives you and idea. Follow the link and click on the “dashboard” tab to see more details.

Dashboard from #moocmooc twitter archive

From this archive you can also use another one of Martin’s templates to create a vizualisation of the interactions of this #hashtag network.

Which always looks impressive, and does give you a sense of the “massive” part of a MOOC, but it is quite hard to actually make real any sense of;-)

However Martin is not one to rest on his SNA/data science laurels and his latest addition, a searchable twitter archive, I feel was much more useful from a learner’s (and actually instructors) perspective.

Again it has time/level of tweets information, this time clearly presented at the top of the sheet. You can search by key word and/or twitter handle. A really useful way to find those tweets you forgot to favourite! Again here is a screenshot just as a taster, but try it out to get the full sense of it.

#moocmooc searchable twitter arcive

#moocmooc searchable twitter arcive

Also from an instructor/course design point of view you, from both of these templates you can see time patterns emerging which could be very useful for a number of reasons – not least managing your own time and knowing when to interact to connect with the most number of learners.

Another related point about timing relates to the use of free services such as storify. Despite us all being “self directed, and motivated” it’s highly likely that if an assignment is due in at 6pm – then at 5.50 the service is going to be pretty overloaded. Now this might not be a problem, but it could be and so it worth bearing in mind when designing courses and suggesting submission times and guidance for students.

I also made a concerted effort to blog each day about my experiences, and once I was able to use another one of Martin’s templates – social sharing, to track the sharing of my blogs on various sites. I don’t have a huge blog readership but I was pleased to see that I was getting a few more people reading my posts. But what was really encouraging (as any blogger knows) was the fact that I was getting comments. I know I don’t need any software to let me know that, and in terms of engagement and participation, getting comments is really motivating. What is nice about this template is that it stores the comments and the number other shares (and where they are), allowing you get more of an idea of where and how your community are sharing resources. I could see my new #moocmooc community were engaging with my engagement – warm, cosy feelings all round!

So through some easy to set up and share templates I’ve been able to get a bit more of an insight into my activity, engagement and participation. MOOCs can be overwhelming, chaotic, disconcerting, and give learners many anxieties about being unconnected in the vast swirl of connectedness. A few analtyics can help ease some of these anxieties, or at least give another set of tools to help make sense, catch up, reflect on what is happening.

For more thoughts on my experiences of the week you can read my other posts.

*Day 1 To MOOC or not to MOOC?
*Day 2 Places where learning takes place
*Day 3 Massive Participation but no-one to talk to
*Day 4 Moocmooc day 4
*Day 5 Designing a MOOC – moocmooc day 5

Designing a MOOC #moocmooc day 5

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It’s coming to the end of the week long #moocmooc course and today’s activity is to design our own MOOC. Once again the course team have encouraged collaboration have used a google doc as collaborative space to share ideas and form ad hoc teams this Google Doc.

I’ve had a fascinating morning exploring ideas, designs, existing courses that people have shared. I really liked this existing wiki “Preparing your online self”,not least because had been thinking along those lines myself. In yesterday’s activity reflecting on what we have learned so far I did say that some kind of check list for both learners and teachers who don’t use social networking, web 2 “stuff” (in particular twitter) would be useful. From my existing network I knew that Grainne Conole had shared an outline for her upcoming Learning Design MOOC, so it was useful to have another look at that too.

I’ve also been thinking more about what I would want as a learner from a MOOC. This week has been pretty intense, and deliberately so. There have been many mentions of the sense of being overwhelmed, and I think there is a natural tendency to want to scaffold and be scaffolded that is really hard to let go of for both a teachers and learners.

In today’s introductory essay “Inventing Learning” Sean Michaal Morris (@slamteacher) wrote:

“I like to imagine that MOOCs are a creative act, almost a sort of composition in and of themselves. They’re a composition that begins with one person or a team of people who design the course; but no MOOC is truly finished until the participants have had their say. To be creative in course design is to be both author and audience. We are the author of the themes and ideas behind the course, and the audience to how students / participants interpret, mold, revise — and what they fashion from — those themes and ideas. This is true in a classroom. This is true in a MOOC. . . Perhaps what frightens us most about MOOCs is the loss of control. In the new model of online pedagogy, the classroom has exploded; or rather, theories of classroom practice . . .”

So I revised my earlier thoughts of producing a pre MOOC MOOC instead I would use the wiki guide highlighted earlier as a suggested pre course activity and came up with this

Mainly because Twitter has proved invaluable this week. I’d maybe expand this slightly by adding: choose a topic, ask some questions, start following people and follow back and instructions that when things started to get a bit overwhelming:

Don't panic button

Don't panic button

If you want to go down the cMOOC route like #moocmooc, then you have to be willing to let go, embrace chaos and interaction, diversions – all the things Dave Cormier talks about in his rhizomatic approaches. If however you want to be a bit more traditional, then the xMOOC model is probably a safer approach. That’s why the big guns have taken that approach. It’s controllable, scalable, doesn’t take staff away from their comfort zone, and isn’t (from the courses I’ve seen so far) really providing any challenging pedagogical approaches.

This may change and I’m looking forward to what the eLearning and digital cultures Coursera MOOC from colleagues at the University of Edinburgh will look like. An outline of their approaches is available here.

But for now, for me it’s back to twitter.

Massive participation but no one to talk to: #moocmooc day 3

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So it’s day three of #moocmooc, and after exploring what MOOCs are, places where learning takes place, today’s theme is “Participant Pedagogy”.

We’ve been given a short list of articles offering a number of perspectives from Howard Rheingold, Amya Kamenetz and Stephen Downes, and been to consider and respond to the following questions:

*How does the rise of hybrid pedagogy, open education, and massive open online courses change the relationships between teachers, students and the technologies they share?
*What would happen if we extracted the teacher entirely from the classroom? Should we?
*What is the role of collaboration among peers and between teachers and students? What forms might that collaboration take?
*What role do institutions play?

We’ve also been asked to:
*Create your own conversation around the topic of participant pedagogy.
*Do this by writing an article on your own blog or, if you don’t have a blog, by starting a thread in the discussion forum within this course.
*Establish the space, provide the tools, and provoke your audience to respond. Announce and link to your post on Twitter w/ hashtag #moocmooc and hashtag #post (to help people search and avoid spambots).

I thought that this task might be enlivened by some face to face discussion around the questions and I’m inviting fellow moocmoo-ers and anyone else who is interested to join me in a google hang out tonight (15 August) at 8pm (BST). As well as getting to know some fellow course members, I’m hoping this will be a good opportunity to try out Google hang outs, which I haven’t done before. I understand you can record conversations to, which again would be useful.

Unfortunately, despite a couple of tweets and a post to the course discussion forums, it looks like no-one is really that interested. So if you, dear reader, would like to talk about participant pedagogy (or anything else really) and try out google hangouts – DM me (@sheilmcn) and so I can get your email address and invite you to the hangout. There is a limit of 10 people which again I think would be about the right number for a this kind of conversation. However I am having rather mixed feelings of irony that there is so much other “massive” mooc participation/activity going on, that so far no-one seems to want to participate in this activity. I’m not paranoid, honest, but am beginning to feel slightly like a Billy no-mates:-)

**UPDATE**
I should have had more faith in my fellow moocmooc-ers. Have had a great chat tonight, despite some technical ‘issues’ at the start (note to self – don’t try to do a google hangout on 7yr old mac, with domestic broadband).

Curriculum change: designing for the future – latest edition of JISC On Air

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Curriculum change is the theme of the latest JISC On Air radio show and it highlights some of the projects from the JISC Curriculum Design Programme.

The programme explores curriculum design and the role technology plays in supporting changes to institutional practices and processes.  The focus is on the different approaches to curriculum change and engaging stakeholders of two institutions involved in programme – Birmingham City University (BCU) and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

Reporter Kim Catcheside talks to staff and students at both universities about their experiences.  This includes an interview with Sonia Hendy-Isaac, a senior lecturer at Birmingham City University who explains how the T-SPARC project has been developing a framework which facilitates better dialogue and transparency around course design and approval to enable more agile and responsive curricula.  Kim also talks to Professor Mark Stubbs, Head of Learning and Research Technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University about transformational changes to the curriculum there and the role of the Supporting Responsive Curricula project in supporting this.   Project Manager, Peter Bird, discusses how some of these system and process changes are enabling academic staff to focus more on teaching and Professor Kevin Bonnet, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Experience, explains the business imperative for change at the institution.

Another useful insight into the different approaches institutions are taking to using technology to develop their provision for the future.