Category: Open Education

Flipping research

Lisa M Lane 3 Comments
http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/

“Flipping” a class (putting lectures and presentations online, then using class time for collaboration and discussion) is all the rage at the moment.  Everyone’s in on it now, from The Economist to The Daily Riff to Daniel Pink. I don’t see the big deal, since basically using a textbook is the same thing (read at home, then come to class). Maybe in the 16th century people were wowed by this idea. I’m glad it’s come back around – I don’t like using class time for relaying information you could find elsewhere. You want to know when the Battle of Waterloo was? Go look it up. It’s easy now to look it up, so it’s easier to justify not lecturing on the facts unless I’m presenting a different paradigm. I think I started doing that, what, fifteen years ago?

But I want to be more innovative, so I’m doing flipped research.

Here’s the idea. I’m referred to in education research circles as “just a practitioner”. I do stuff. I teach history at community college, and try web technologies to help me do that. I use learning management systems, video, slidecasts, whatever it takes. I’ve done everything from Webboard to WordPress to Google + hangouts.

But I’m not an expert in educational theory, nor in the entire edtech field that I’ve watched emerge (and achieve frightening proportions) over the last decade.

So now I’m doing something really cool: offering an open, online class to prepare faculty to teach online. It’s designed like a MOOC, but it’s not a MOOC because it’s not massive (90 enrolled, 81 blogs aggregated). I’m taking ideas from other people, including Alec Couros’s EC&I831 for the structure and the mentoring, Jim Groom’s ds106 for the aggregated blog and the element of insanity, George Siemens and Stephen Downes’ whatever-MOOC-they’re-doing-today for the large topic and distributed conversation. But I haven’t done much “reasearch”. I do read articles on learning management systems and MOOCs, but basically I’m … just a practitioner.

So now I’m writing a research paper based on what I’m doing, and it all feels like reverse engineering. I’m looking up studies on open classes and professional development for online faculty, and finding a few people doing what I’m doing. Some of the articles show findings that what I’m doing might be good; most end with “further research is required”. I’m doing that research, survey participating faculty, planning to note how approaches change on their blogs.

For a historian, this is so not what you do. You create a provisional thesis based on the reading of primary sources. I guess in this case, according to the educational research folks, the primary sources are the studies. They should have guided what I do, and I should have planned my class based on the findings of others. I should have been consciously aware of what everyone else was studying, not just doing. Instead of pulling cool ideas from Alec, Jim, Stephen and George, I should have read a bunch of studies on the ways of doing this and built my class with a solid theoretical and practical foundation.

But no, I just did it. I created the class based on my experience rather than my research. I’ll probably be kicked out of the historians’ club if they find out. And that’s what makes me…just a practitioner.

SMOOC update (or the joys of being a WP admin)

Lisa M Lane 6 Comments

The not-quite-a-MOOC (but rather Small to Medium-Sized Open Online Class) POT Certificate Class is underway at the new Pedagogy First! Blog. What follows are notes about technology realizing my pedagogy for this class.

What I wanted

I wanted something like Jim Groom and Martha Burtis do for DS106, a central WordPress blog that pulled in posts for the separate blogs of people participating in the class.

I wanted to adopt a mentoring system like the one Alec Couros used for EC&I831, where more experienced people could help the newbies.

I wanted it open, as Jim and Martha and Alec did, and as George Siemens and Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier do for their MOOCs (yes, that link is the unfinished Wikipedia entry, but I haven’t had time to work on it).

I wanted participants to be able to add their own blogs to the big blog.

I wanted sticky posts at the top that had the week’s instructions, since we are not using a strictly connectivist pedagogy (if there is such a thing) for the people earning a certificate. Certificate folks have weekly readings and tasks, including a blog post showing what they’ve reflected upon and created on the web.

I wanted each week to have a moderator, who would create some introductory media for that week and then follow the big conversation, just for that one week.

The content was set up as a simple syllabus page. That’s actually been the easiest part of the whole thing. It’s just a syllabus. We all know how to do that!

I wanted it not to be an administrative nightmare. (Well, as they say, ROFLMAO!)

The technology

It’s turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated. Here are the challenges:

1. Sticky posts (Solved)
Feedwordpress at first could not do a Sticky Post properly, causing me to try other plugins designed to pull in feeds, none of which were what I wanted. This was resolved with a bug fix in the updated version of Feedwordpress that came out in July. In Atahualpa theme, it was easy to change the background color of these posts, and even add a little POT logo, so they look different.

2. Massive database and CPU usage (Partly made kind of OK)
As I set up the blog and people began adding feeds, even with only a few, the CPU usage at my hosting company (Lunarpages) was climbing. I alerted them before they alerted me, but they don’t support the scripts you use, just yell at you to fix it. I did chat support a lot trying to narrow down the problem with my limited knowledge of databases (i.e. none) and php (almost none). I failed and opened a new account at Bluehost using POT’s Excellence reward money, created the domain pedagogyfirst.org (after checking with Glenda Morgan, who first coined the phrase) and imported the WordPress files and database. Since I’m not a fan of using the phpAdmin to repair and optimize the database (I figured out this was helpful to deal with what they call “slow queries”) I’ve had to use an optimizing plug-in that I manually click on if I want it to clean stuff up more than once a day (and I do).

3. Feedwordpress weirdnesses (OK)

Author names come through as usernames rather than a real name. Since people don’t sign their posts, I’ve changed these so long as I can see that they want their real names used (if they mentioned their real name on their blog).

The first post on WP (“Hello World” with no real content) comes through as the first post in syndication, so if they didn’t change it, it posts the default first post. I am removing these manually.

Jim and Martha had to remind me that when you delete syndications (like with spam), it only makes them inactive. You have to then go to the inactive ones and really delete them. Interestingly, Chrome will immediately not show them even though they’re still there, so you think they’re gone when they’re not. Firefox and Safari will show the undeleted feeds.

Also, if using a Cache (recommended) plug in (I used Quick Cache), be sure to clear it when you make changes. Some browsers will continue to show the old post or page.

And strange things happened, but even with manually refreshing all the feeds, they wouldn’t correct themselves for hours.

4. WordPress things (OK).

When using iframe on a page, you must create a template just for that page. I also used Custom Menu, which meant remembering to add the page to the menu also.

The Atahualpa theme is wonderful, but some of its settings get overridden by Feedwordpress, and it’s hard to tell which ones.

I removed the admin account for security purposes. (I learned this while flailing around trying to decrease CPU usage.)

5. People adding their own blogs (sort of OK)

I used the “Add Link” widget plugin, which lets people put their blog onto the Blogroll. Then I set Feedwordpress to syndicate posts from the Blogroll. First, I got some spam blogs, so I had to implement a password. Also, Feedwordpress needs the URL of the blog’s feed, not just the blog’s URL. People put in the wrong feed or a whole other URL. I had to change these manually for each blog. Since most newbies are using Edublogs, the feed URL usually just ends in “feed”.

I also gave instructions for adding only posts that had the class tag (“potcert11”) into the blog URL, but people didn’t always know how to do that. The idea was that if someone already had a blog, instead of adding the feed from the entire thing, they could just add the tag’s feed (for Edublogs or WordPress.com, this is something like http://example.com/?feed=rss2&tag=potcert11. For Blogger, it’s something like http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/potcert11. When folks didn’t understand, I had to try to do this manually to prevent the entire blog filling up with unrelated stuff.

6. The prompts (well, I hope it’s OK now)

The sticky posts, once they were working, appeared to be simple. Just add in the instructions (written by Jim Sullivan, our Blog Meister, who’s wonderfully encouraging). But each post will also have media, and all the  moderators are creating their stuff in different applications — Voicethread, Jing, Camtasia, YouTube. This is what we want, of course! But embed codes didn’t always work. I’d have to add a plug-in, or change the size on a video to prevent it overlapping the sidebars. Lots more work than anticipated.

The Participants

I asked everyone to email me to be “registered”. I kept all their information on a Google Doc spreadsheet. I added their name, where they were from, what they taught or studied, then their blog URL and feed URL, and whether they were interested in Mentoring.

But I also asked them to sign themselves in to a public Doc that appeared on a blog page as an iframe. I used a Google Form for them to enter their info, setting it to show the resulting spreadsheet after they had done so. This way they could know who else was in the class, I could find out how they came to know about the class, etc.

Some people aren’t comfortable being “known” on the internet, so I had a provision for the certificate that they could use a pseudonym. It’s hard to assign a mentor to a pseudonym.

The Moderators and Mentors

Several wonderful people agreed to be moderators and mentors, proof of the old adage that you just have to ask.

Moderators introduce a unit and supervise for a week. I called on POT leaders, certificate holders, and facilitators to take a week and moderate it, making a video tutorial or something to inspire and preview that week (an idea of one of our new people, Eric Robertson). Everyone is doing great work with this, and I look forward to each of them “taking charge” during the week they’ve chosen.

Mentors help individual participants, with a focus on community so no one is sitting there with no comments on the blog. When I saw an obviously accomplished blog post or experienced distance educator add the class, I asked if they’d be a mentor, plus we have people who already earned a certificate last year and are paying it back. As the class registration rose above 50, I decided to follow Alec Couros’ lead and assign mentors to particular participants, so I just added a column to the Doc then gave the mentors edit access to it. Right now each mentor has 4-6 people assigned to him/her.

The Insanity

At one point in my panic, Alec Couros advised me not to abandon my pedagogy. I thank him for that. Others advised me to bail on it and use an LMS (the horror!) or a Google Reader bundle, which is certainly my backup if all this fails and the database crashes or my new host sends me threatening emails. Some people think it’s too open, and they don’t want to blog. Others think this isn’t open enough, and want it to be a connectivist MOOCy thing with internet diffusion and intergalactic social network connections. (If I let this kind of stuff get to me, I’d have given up teaching undergraduates a long time ago!)

It is possible, however, that there is a much easier way to accomplish some of this. I stumbled recently upon a post by Jim Groom, who used WPMU and another plug in to create a Feed to Rule All Feeds by just pulling in any post on the web that had a particular tag. This would be good (no 77 separate feeds, latecomers can play along much more easily) and possibly bad (lots of spam postings, dependence on yet another plug-in to pull them in). I am still trying to decide whether to try it now, but I think it might be better next year. Then we could go even more open and diverse, which would be good.

For now, tracking 77+ people and trying to prevent Pedagogy First! from crashing will be quite enough.

Now what?

The class actually starts tomorrow.

What will we do with those who want to add late? I can allow a few exceptions (I already have, since the registration deadline was August 26). But the way the feeds are done there isn’t much mechanism for just jumping in on the big blog.

People can jump in, though, in a number of places: the POT Facebook group (already very active), a Diigo group, the POT YouTube channel, Twitter (hashtag #potcert11) etc. And we have several mentors already who will be taking the lead in doing synchronous sessions, Google Groups, and goodness knows what other Distributed Activities.

I’m confident that the pedagogical model is sound, and the set-up is sustainable and rich. I mean the people-to-people set-up. We’ll have to see about the technology. 😉

Creative Commons giveth, but does it also taketh away?

Lisa M Lane 2 Comments
from Michael Cerviere’s post on ScribeMedia

I regret to say that I have not been able to participate much this summer in the eduMOOC: Online Learning Today…and Tomorrow course. But I did step in during Week 5 for the live session, the format of which had been changed from an Elluminate room holding 100 people to just listening to a panel while using the Twitter hashtag #edumooc5 as a backchannel (ah, the vagaries of learning online).

The recording is here for the session, which featured Ray Schroeder (UIS) Moderator, Cable Green (Creative Commons), Larry Ragan (PSU World Campus), and Jeff Newell (IL Com College Board). One of the issues discussed was the use of Creative Commons to share materials created by educators. Some school districts now require their faculty to use Creative Commons for everything they create, an approach that was lauded by the panel and several listeners. The question briefly came up about the possibility of monetizing this work, even with a CC license. But it wasn’t fully discussed.

Well, that’s a problem. I watched this happen with Academic Earth in 2009. A number of top universities, including Stanford, MIT, and Penn, release the lectures and materials given by their faculty with a CC license. MIT even has its own community site (called OpenStudy) to enable people following the courses to have their own space for discussion. Then Academic Earth “repackaged” the “content”, building courses around the content and publishing the resulting “course” on a website with for-profit goals (in this case, with the permission of the university).

The CC license I use says attribution/non-commercial/share alike. That means that you’re supposed to say you got it from me, not use it for commercial purposes, and share your stuff back.

When big universities began sharing open coursework, I was enthused. But repackaging it inside a for-profit product or website seems to violate the intent, if not the letter, of CC licensing. The model for Academic Earth is that they abide by the CC license by not charging for any of the university, CC-licensed content, but then they add other “non-university” content where advertising (presumably click-through, but they could have something else in mind) makes the money. So the free content is the draw, then the ads come in. Is this commercial use?

Even if the repackaging were done by the institution itself, or a non-profit company, it doesn’t seem right. If a professor creates a lecture and Creative Commons licenses it as I do, a public or non-profit school could still take all the stuff and repackage it, charging for the class without passing on any royalties to the professor.

It was never my intention to provide free content to entities who might put a framework around it, call it their own, and charge people. My intention was to make my work free to individuals to use, without charge.

I am lucky enough to work at a college where some intellectual property rights are spelled out in policy — so far, at least, I “own” what I create as part of my regular job, so long as I’m not receiving special compensation. I could copyright my work, and some of my colleagues do. I used to think this was bad, it was closed, how could they do that?

Now I’m not so sure. If a CC license means that our work is free to be taken and repackaged for profit, I’m not liking this at all.

Update: I am seeking out sites that are ad-revenue based but use other people’s content. Here’s one.

Diderot, come help your Encylopedia

Lisa M Lane 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to link to something defining a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for a professional development thang (and for my last post!), so naturally I went to Wikipedia. But the page for “Massive open online course” had very little on it, just a basic definition and a list of years and some courses.

So I tweeted, of course:
And Dave Cormier answered:


Now, I’m not a MOOC expert at all. No research, no articles. I’ve participated fully in three of them, as a student. I taught one in History, and failed. I am teaching another one in fall, POT’s Online Certificate Class. But I started editing, though I’d never edited a Wikipedia article before that I recall. I put in a few names, like George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Then I figured I’d get back to it later.

Then it got more urgent. I regret to say that I have not been able to participate much this summer in the eduMOOC: Online Learning Today…and Tomorrow course. However, I subscribe to the feed from the Google Group. I began seeing a thread called “Please help edit the Wikipedia article on MOOCs (before it disappears)“. Perhaps my actions triggered something, but the MOOC page was set for deletion.

So I and a couple of folks from the eduMOOC class have been working on it. I’ve added links to research, and some text with references, and links from other pages (like Connectivism, and George Siemens) because it was an “orphan” page.

But really, I’m thinking some of the Big Players might want to work on this too? The topic itself is about openness and collaboration, and while blogging and writing journal articles and conducting courses is great, Wikipedia is where most people get their information. In an area that emphasizes open education, shouldn’t the Wikipedia entry be pretty important?

I wonder — did Diderot and d’Alembert outsource the Encyclopedia to their students?

From Course Learning to Snapshot Learning

Lisa M Lane 4 Comments
cc shownbyphotos.com

One of my students wrote on her self-assessment today that she was sad our summer course is ending, because she really enjoyed talking to her colleagues using the Messaging feature in Moodle. She wrote “very sad since I greatly enjoyed the lectures in this class and I’ve met new people via messaging them”.

I have noticed this before, that students often use the Messaging system in Moodle (or any LMS) to talk to each other. I’m not aware of it unless they tell me or I have to go into a student’s account for some reason. But it makes sense. It’s less intrusive than trying to be a Facebook friend, and less direct then email. If you use the LMS system, it means, “Hi! I’m in class with you. Wanna talk about class? or something else maybe?” Less risk, and it draws on your immediate and obvious connection.

My student’s sorrow, of course, is based on the fact that this experience is organized as a class that will “close”. No one will come back after this week, and eventually the website will be unavailable as we all move on. It’s like a coffee shop where you meet some people and hang with them all evening, but then the coffee shop closes and really, you’re too shy to ask for anyone’s number.

A lot has been discussed lately about open learning, life-long learning, learning outside the box. We talk about e-portfolios that would span ones whole academic career, and we bemoan courses as isolating events and lack of appreciation for informal learning.

I like to combine things, so let’s try something different, where we still have courses (and grades, and records, and all those socially-sanctioned assessed things everyone needs for credit and advancement regardless of how much you bitch about it). But let’s get rid of the Course in Isolation, and have the Course as Snapshot.

cc Flickr Mykl Roventine

The idea is that everyone would be learning, online and in the open, all the time. I am going to call this Evidential Learning, because you can see that it’s happening. Then an event comes along, which is the Course, and students enroll and work on that course. This happens all the time with MOOCs — one comes along and everyone begins to focus activity they’d already been doing on the schedule, topics, and feedback loops for that MOOC.

So all of their Evidential Learning is considered a flow, but instructors set up courses in their disciplines,and students register as usual, and for that period of time, the student’s energy is directed toward working on that class. This could be in their usual environments, or other online environments added or encouraged by the instructor. Their directed activities during the course are then seen as a “snapshot”, to which is assigned a grade.

Then students will connect to each other in their own way, and the coffee shop need never close.