Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Finding data is not always easy. The new data search engine – http://www.zanran.com – promises to make life easier.

Following on yesterday’s blog post on MOOCs as a possible model for Open Education, here is another initiative taking a different approach. The Open Education Quality Initiative (OPAL) describes itself as “a flagship initiative being implemented by a group of organizations including UNESCO, EFQUEL and ICDE and includes representatives of leading institutions from within higher education and adult education.”

The OPAL website, inviting participation in an on-line consultative group says: “The initiative believes that although OER are high on the agenda of social and inclusion policies, their use in higher education and adult education has not reached a critical threshold. The focus has been placed on building access to digital content, while the challenge now is to support educational practices and to promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning.”

This theme is taken up by Ulf Daniel Ehlers in the introductory video above.  Ulf Daniel calls for a transformation in the approach to Open Educational Resources moving the focus in what he calls stage two of development from content to practice and goes on to outline the idea of an Open Educational Architecture.

Whilst seeming to be saying the right thing, this seems to me more of a policy lobby, than anything really impacting on practice. And the idea of OERs remains within the context of exiting institutions, rather than opening up education to a wider participant group. None the less, the focus on what Open Education might mean, and how educational institutions could engage with Open Education is a welcome addition to the debate.

The idea of Open Education has come a long way in the last two years. Massive Online Open Courses are becoming more common (with the announcement of the “mother of all MOOCs” on Change: Education, Learning and Technology exciting great interest in the edu-blogosphere), conferences and seminars being streamed online and Open Educational Resources have entered the mainstream.

What has been learned in this process?

Firstly the model of courses which are free to participants but charge for institutional enrollment and for certification appears to be gaining traction. How far this can go depends I guess on the extent that participation (and recording of work) becomes recognised as achievement. It will also depend on how much value universities and other institutions think they can gain (or stand to lose) through such a model.

Secondly most of these programmes are using all manner of social software and Open Source applications. There seems to be a growing practice of hanging programmes together around open webinars, with students using their own blogs or other social software for their personal work. One of the less successful experiments seems to be attempts to integrate VLEs, especially Moodle, within MOOCs. Participants are being encouraged to develop their own Personal Learning Environments as part of the process.

Thirdly such initiatives place great emphasis on peer support for learning, with a greater or lesser extent of formal learning support and formalization of networks. One greatly encouraging development is the blurring of the boundary between teachers and learners. Another is the involvement of people form different organisations in leading, facilitating or stewarding such programmes. Most stewards or facilitators are not being paid, although I suspect at present this is being accepted by institutions as a legitimate part of their work as researchers. Whatever, this is resulting in a weakening of institutional boundaries and the emergence of stronger communities of practice.

There also seems to be considerable pedagogic innovation, with a willingness to explore new ways of learning. Especially encouraging is the use of multi media, which although promised in so many formal elearning programmes, has seldom really happened.

Now comes the big question. Can the experience gained from the MOOCs be extended to provide a transferable and scalable model for Open Education.

I’ve already talked about the issue of recognition which I see not so much as a question of assessment but of social recognition of achievement. But there are other open issues. How do we deal with language barriers? More critically, most participants in the early MOOCs seem to be professionals, teachers and researchers already engaged in online learning or multi media and / or students. In other words, people with a fair degree of competence in communicating through on-line media. The model is based on a large degree of self motivation and is reliant on learners being able to manage both their own learning and able to develop their own support networks. This is a pretty big limitation.

I see two ways to deal with this. One is to provide more formal and institutional support through participation in MOOCs becoming part of courses on which learners are already enrolled and their host institution providing support. This idea is already being suggested for the Change: Education, Learning and Technology MOOC. The second is through developing more fomalised individual and group mentoring and support systems. At the moment, we are tending to focus on presenters as the key people in facilitating the online programmes. But such a second layer of mentors could play the critical role, and providing such mentoring could be a key part of Continuing Professional Development for teachers and trainers. In other words, a win, win situation.

Graham Attwell will be presenting a  keynote speech at the annual European Distance and E-Learning Network conference in Dublin from june 19th – 22. The theme of his presentation will be ‘Context, Authenticity and Learning in the Real World.’

The UK press has becoem obsessed with the issue of press freedom and super injunctions. the so called super injunctions not only legally ban the press from reporting about a particular person or issue, but also ban them from stating that such an injuction exists. But such draconian legal measures have become somewhat ineffective in the face of social network services like twitter which do not recognise UK borders or to that matter injunctions.

However the debate is confused, not least because of the UK press obsession with chatter about the private lives of celebreties. Ordinary people have no access to legal redress to ban press reports. And the real issue is not so much privacy but our abilities and rights to control our own digital identities. And that debate will not go away.

I am in Innsbruck for four days for a meeting of the EU funded research project, Mature-IP. Over the next few days I will try to report on what theproject is doing.

The Mature project has always interseted me in its approach to Personal Learning Environments. Whilst most projects based on PLEs have looked at learning within schools and univeristies, Mature looks at knowledge maturing processes in work.

And the project has adopted a user based approach working with a number of different user groups, in the UK from the Careers services, in developing and iterating a PLE based on knowledge development services. The project has also developed a series of knowledge indicators, based on these services.

Is it working? It is a little early to tell. But the project acknowledges the importance of different forms of learning leading to knowledge development and sharing in the workplace and also takes account of differences in context. The services developed have been based on the idea of represneting, modellinga nd reseeding knowledge delopment or maturing processes as seen in the diagramme above. Twenty seven services have been developed to date and can be combined in what are being called insubstatiations to take account of such contexts. I realise these may seem somewhat abstract but they have served in bridging between social and educational researchers working on the project and software develers. These services are:

Representation Services:

Content

• Content metric service: Provides a wrapper for encapsulating various content metric implementations
• Classification service: Classifies resources to a given set of categories based on their content. Classification can be improved by the help of user feedback
• Clustering Service: Groups items regarding a special feature

Structure

• Task Similarity Service: Computes the similarity between tasks
• Tag Mortality Analysis Service: analyses tags / concepts and their activity to predict their death
• Concept Relationship Analysis Service: Analyzes concept hierarchy and usage of concept for annotations to derive recommendations for adding broader/narrower relationships
• oSKOS Analysis Service: analyzes a SKOS ontology for potential redundant or missing information

Usage

• Usage Logging Service: collects usage data from the user’s interaction with the MATURE systems
• Process Tracking Service: logs process and task execution

Model Services

User

• User Modeling Service: Detects a user’s knowledge from his or her usage data
• Topical User Modeling Service: Provides an aggregated topical profile of a person

Task

• Process Monitoring Service: Provides the means to query and browse log data provided by the Process Tracking Service in aggregated form
• Process Model Refinement Service: Compares the modelled process with the actual process executions and suggests improvements on the process model based on it

Resource

• Resource Model Service: Describes resources based on usage data
• Document Similarity Service: Derives the textual similarity between two documents
• Resource Quality Profile: Creates a qualitative profile for each resource

Reseeding Services

Reseeding of Knowledge about contents

• Quality Based Resource Recommendation: Provides a set of ranked resources based on the qualitative status of the resource and quality requirements of the user
• Context Aware Notification Service: Provides information about activities related to artefacts
• Reseeding of Knowledge about SemanticsTag Recommendation Service: Provides tag recommendations to achieve a consistent personal and organisational tag vocabulary
• Keyword Recommendation Service: Provides a list of synonyms and hyponyms for tags
• Ontology Gardening Recommendation Service: provides recommendation for improving a SKOS ontology based on the ontology itself and information on its application

Reseeding of Knowledge about Processes

• Case-based Resource Recommendation Service: suggests resources based on resource-use in historical process executions.
• Historical Case Service: searches for historical cases based on a given input

Reseeding of Knowledge about People

• Expertise Analytics Service: Provides an aggregated overview and comparison of available and requested expertise based on tag assignments and search query analysis within a certain timeframe
• People Ranking Service: Provides a ranked list of people that are relevant for a given topic
• Expert Ranking Service: Based on past tag assignments (user-document-tag triple marked with a timestamp), this service recommends knowledgeable colleagues working on a specific topic
• People Awareness Service: Based on a user/person’s profile, this service recommends other persons with a similar profile

Lst week I was aksed to provide video conferencing services for a meeting of the board of the European Educational Research Association’s Vocational Education and Training Network (VETNET).

The long running network has members from some nine different countries, but very limited funding. Six people were able to make it to Bremen for the face to face meetiong, another six wanted to particpate remotely in the meeting.

We experimented with a video conferencing link up last year, using the free UK Open Univerisity Flash Meeting and providing a link from the face to face meeting through a Panaosnic camcorder. This year was harder as I have managed to lose the power lead for the Panasonic, not realising until it was too late to get a replacement.

So I ended up using my Blue Snowball USB microphone for audio, set to 360 degrees, and a Logitech webcam, taped to a light stand and a data projector for those participating face to face.

This was all looking good, except that the camera was picking up the light, and adjusting the lense so that paradoxically the room appeared underlit. A couple of hastily borrowed desk lamps solved that problem.

And the the whole set up worked fine. The key part of the technology was the microphone. With video conferencing you can get away with poor quality video, but clear audio is vital. Also, higher quality microphones allow reasonably loud speaker playback in the face to face part of the meeting, without the risk of feedback. Other than that, having two moderators for the meeting is useful, one to moderate the face to face part of the meeting and the other moderating the online participation. Of course one person can do both, but it soon becomes very tiring.

All of which goes to show that you do not need expensive video confercing suites to effectively communicate on a remote basis. Flash Meeting works very well, and with a good USB microphone (cost about 90 Euro) and a standard webcam you are away and running.