What to See in Cambridge (UK) in July

Any suggestions as to what to do in Cambridge (UK) in July? I have visited twice before by bus and bicycle.

I will be at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, 21 to 26 July 2015, to present a paper at the 10th International Conference on Computer Science and Education (ICCSE 2015). Normally when speaking at a conference I also give a free public talk for government, professionals and academics, hosted by a local body. Anyone willing to host a talk please let me know. On a previous visit I talked at the Cambridge Computer Lab.

The paper for the conference (prepared with Hao Wu), is "Time-shifted Learning: Merging Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques for E-Learning":

E-learning techniques are usually classified into two broad categories: synchronous and synchronous. The core question of this research is how to combine synchronous and asynchronous techniques in e-learning software, so it can have a stronger connection with constructivist education. The benefits and drawbacks of existing e-learning software is looked at broadly. Three popular e-learning packages used at the Australian National University are investigated: Adobe Connect (synchronous), Moodle and edX (asynchronous). The results of a brief survey of edX students is reported. Using the results of this work a team of students at the ANU Research School of Computer Science is now implementing enhanced asynchronous software to be plugged into Moodle and other asynchronous e-learning packages.

Worthington, T. & Wu, H. (2015, July). Time-shifted Learning: Merging Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques for E-Learning. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 20152 10th International Conference on (accepted paper). Preprint: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/13554

ps: Any suggestions on where to stop and speak on the way from Australia to Europe would also be welcome. For example, in 2008 I stopped off in Kuala Lumpur and filled in for a missing speaker at the 2008 World Congress of Information Technology.

ANU MOOCs for Exploring Education Not Profit

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington,  Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) is reprising her keynote presentation to the THETA conference ‘Navigating the Edge of the World’. Professor Hughes-Warrington started by explaining that as a historian, she could use her skills to get a perspective on on-line education, and MOOCs in particular. When exploring a new territory, the explorers project their own wishes on the unknown.

Professor Hughes-Warrington explained that as a new initiative MOOCs are an exploration, not a business venture for ANU. At the same time she argued that MOOCs have very large numbers of students and so there is potential for this being treated as a startup, which would later earn income.

Professor Hughes-Warrington pointed out that many of those undertaking MOOCs are school students and those with degrees. The MOOC therefore can act as a way to connect with potential students.

Professor Hughes-Warrington discussed how ANU is adapting to on-line education. There are obvious synergies between MOOCs and traditional on-line courses. ANU has been offering on-line and blended courses for many years (I have been running COMP7310 on-line since 2009).

Professor Hughes-Warrington also discussed more flexible evidence based forms of assessment, using e-portfolios. This is particularly applicable, in my view, for postgraduate education.

Professor Hughes-Warrington poitned out ANU has a Course Assessment: Consultation and Finalisation policy. ANU students are required to be consulted about the proposed assessment at the start of a course. The logistics of how to do this with a course having a large number of students is challenging. In my view the ANU policy should be dropped for other reasons: it is unfair on the students. As a student, one of the primary criteria I use to select a course is the assessment. If the assessment is changed after the course starts, then the student is not getting what they signed up for.

One area I suggest need to be explored is to look at education from the point of view of the learner, not the educator. Spending a year as a student of higher education, the most important insight was how hard it was being a student and how administrative problems were so frustrating. One of the advantages of e-learning is that it puts problems with administration out in the open, where hopefully they will be solved.

ANU is taking a cautious approach to MOOCs, as was done with the ANU e-Press. In my view there is a risk that other institutions may over-invest in free on-line courses, with the irrationally exuberant idea that some time soon, somehow, this will make them money. We may be at the beginning of a MOOC bubble which will burst within a year, bankrupting universities and companies, much like the  1990s Dot.COM bubble.

ps: I will be speaking on "MOOCs with Books" in the CSIRO Seminar Room at ANU, 4pm, 8 July 2013.

Engaging India Through a MOOC to Disrupt the Hegemonic Discourse

Greetings from the University of Canberra, where presenters from Canberra are practicing their presentations for the HERDSA conference in a few weeks time. Dr Lyndsay Agans, Digital Learning Convenor at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific is describing the background to the development of a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) "Engaging India", to be run by Dr McComas Taylor. One feature that sets this course apart is that it will be the first MOOC to be offered in both English and Hindi. This course will be ten weeks long and available free to anyone, anywhere.

Apart from the technical and pedagogical aspects of how to design a MOOC, the is the interesting question of why design a MOOC and why students would enroll in one.

Scalable learning with massive open online courses

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where a panel, including a Nobel Laureate is discussing "Scalable learning: the beautiful paradox of massive open online courses (MOOCs)". The ANU joined the edX consortium a few weeks ago to develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The first two MOOCs from ANU will be "Engaging India" and "Astrophysics" taught by Nobel Laureate Professor Schmidt. On the way to the event I picked up a copy of "The Idea of the Digital University: Ancient Traditions, Disruptive Technologies and the Battle for the Soul of Higher Education" I had asked the  ANU Library to purchase, which is very relevant to the panel's deliberations:

ANU has become the only Australian member of edX.org, the online learning enterprise founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the aim of providing free education to one billion people worldwide within 10 years.

In this seminar, we will hear from the two pairs of academics behind the first ANUx courses:  Professor Brian Schmidt and  Dr Paul Francis, who will be teaching Astrophysics; and Dr McComas Taylor and Dr Peter Friedlander, whose MOOC is called Engaging India.

We will also hear from Dr Lyndsay Agans, Convenor of the CAP Digital Learning Project, who will discuss some of the organisational thinking and approach behind the development of Engaging India. Lyndsay will open a dialogue on the 'paradox' of distance learning and mass scale as one that actually allows for a more personalised design of education for individual needs, and in particular, the implications of the evolving educational theory of teaching in an open and massive online environment.

One analogy used by the panel for the early days of MOOCs is that it is like "flying a plane while still designing it". As someone with a professional technical background, this analogy is troubling: if I subject my clients to an untested system I can expect appear before an ethics committee, or a court. Similar ethical principles should apply to educators. When designing courses, educators need to confirm they are competent to do so and are using proven techniques: to do otherwise is unethical and may be unlawful. What is reasonable to do is create MOOCs using approaches from decades of previous work on e-learning. The way the MOOC runs can be recorded for research purposes, provided the participants are informed and give permission.

The issue of the purpose of MOOCs was also raised in the seminar. The point was made that at present most of those undertaking MOOCs are already at least undergraduate students at a conventional university. So MOOCs are not brining university education to a new group. The MOOCs may be a marketing exercise for universities to attract students away from other institutions, or to attract high school students to a particular discipline.

Those promoting MOOCs may have the idea of opening education and improving the world. However, there is little evidence to suggest this will work in practice, or that the MOOCs have a sustainable business model. However, it should be noted that there are many claims made for MOOCs with new technology, the reality by ANU is likely to be more conservative, based on existing courses, using proven technology and practices, not just made up on the spot.

The MOOCs are obviously not conventional courses. MOOCs will be a blend of course, research project and marketing campaign. But policies and procedures will be needed to see that, whatever they are, MOOCs are well designed, tested and run. Institutional  policies and procedures may need to be adapted and to be applicable to the MOOCs. As an example, a MOOC may use the institution's standard new course proposal form, where the learning objectives, teaching techniques and assessment plan are outlined, but to this may be added a focus group, as usually used for a marketing campaign.

It should be kept in mind that while institutions are not charging for MOOCs, they are still required to conform to various consumer protection, educational and other laws. As an example, all video must have closed captions for the deaf and the web interface must meet accessibility requirements. Also student information is subject to privacy principles, which will limit its use and may prevent the MOOC being hosted in a country which does not have comparable privacy protection.

The format of the MOOC will need to suit its purpose. One model which might suit a broad audience is that of a TV documentary series. This could start with a shot of the professor in the classroom with students, to establish their credentials as an academic. But within a few seconds we would see them in the outside world, demonstrating the topic. This does not require the professor to go to India or outer space, they could be in the library showing a  manuscript, or standing next to the university telescope.

This was an interesting event, at which the nature of education was being redefined. The audience was made up of a who's-who of educational designers and researchers in Canberra, not just from ANU. I will be discussing some of these topics in a free talk on "MOOCs with Books" in Singapore 24 April 2013. This is a short version of my talk "Syncronisation of Large Scale Asynchronous e-Learning" for the 8th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE 2013), 28 April 2013, in Colombo.

edX MOOC Software Open Source

The edX consortium have announced they will release their edX software as open source 1 June and Stanford will integrate its Class2Go software with this. However, it is not clear what the functionality of this software is and how it will work alongside existing open source Learning Management Systems, such as Moodle. The emphasis with MOOCs at present seems to be on video and automated testing, much like 1960s computer assisted instruction. Some of the announcements from MOOC consortia are less than credible, such as edX claiming to be able to automatically grade essays (Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break, JOHN MARKOFF, April 4, 2013, NY Times).  There seems to be little regard given to the effort needed to design content for a course and particularly text based materials, nor to what the research on effective on-line pedagogy tells us.  I will discuss some of this in my conference talk on "MOOCs with Books", in late April, in Colombo.

Mobile Learning Future for University Education In Australia

In "E-learning: Supplementary or disruptive?" (Telecommunications Journal of Australia, February 2013), James Barber Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England, concludes with the hope that "Australian universities embrace the opportunity that the NBN provides before it becomes a threat to them". However, I suggest the evidence in the paper supports the use of lower speed communication, suitable for mobile devices. Concentrating on the use of the NBN's higher speed fixed infrastructure would lock Australian universities out of most of the education market and in particular the Asian professional education market.

Barber reviews progress with electronic learning over the last two decades and its effectiveness. They cite research showing e-learning produces better results than traditional classroom instruction, but blended learning (classroom combined with e-learning) is better than e-learning on its own.

Barber traces the idea of open courseware back to MIT's decision in 2001 to uploading course materials, but notes ‘Massive Online Open Courses’ (MOOCs) only became commonly discussed in 2011 with Stanford's robotics course. This was quickly followed by the establishment of Udacity in 2012, then coursera.org six days later and then edX two weeks after. What I found curiously absent from this analysis was any mention of Open University UK, which had been offering free on-line courses since at least 2010, using its own and others free open source software.

Barber describes the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, particularly in developing nations such as India and its use for education. The paper provides a very good overview of e-learning development and I agree with the findings, apart from one point which is not supported by the evidence presented. Barber ends with the hope that Australian universities make use of the NBN. However, the NBN is not designed to support mobile devices and will primarily provide fixed fiber-optic connections.

If universities design their e-learning for the NBN's fixed high speed fiber, then students using mobile devices and some on the rural and remote wireless NBN connections, will be excluded. In addition this would exclude Australian universities from providing courses on-line to students in the Asian region, using mobile devices. Instead I suggest universities should aim to support lower speed connections. Lower speeds can be accommodated by careful course-ware design and this can support an updated form of blended learning where the class is synchronized with asynchronous communication.

Optimizing the Pedagogy, Software and Content Formats for On-line Courses

A few days ago the Australian National University (ANU) announced it had joined the edX consortium and would start offering Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs) from 2014. I have been running an on-line courses for small numbers of students at ANU since 2009, so decided to see what was needed to use the content for a MOOC. Here I have discussed general issues. At present I don't have any technical or procedural details of how edX is implemented.

Content

The content for my courses is already free open access, so that removes a major impediment to making it widely available. Also I prepare my course notes in a format designed to meet accessibility standards and require minimal system resources. I did this because Australian law requires access for the disabled and also because some students are in remote locations with low bandwidth connections. In practice this is a matter of using a simple layout for documents, with default formatting. The content then easily translates into the content delivery system used. Originally I used lots of separate notes in different formats, but now consolidate all the noes for a course into a HTML formatted e-book, using the Moodle book module. Hopefully edX has a similar feature.

Pedagogy

I designed course content so it can be downloaded and used off-line. This is to help with locations where the student has only intermittent Internet access. Providing off-line access also helps with student learning: the student has a reasonable chunk of work to do (either alone or in a group), before asking their tutor or fellow students about it. I will be discussing this form of synchronized asynchronous learning in a presentation at ICCSE 2013 (a preprint of the paper is available).

On-line university courses will typically group students into cohorts of about two dozen and encourage the students to get to know each other and their tutor. MOOCs seem to be still trying to find a way to reproduce this approach, with students forming their own on-line study groups. Clearly it is unworkable to have thousands of students in one group and so tools are needed to have then forum smaller groups. There have been reports of problems with this in some MOOCs, with the tools for students to select their group not being able to cope with the load. It will be interesting to see how edX handles this.

Software

Courses are usually delivered at institutions using specialized Learning Management System (LMS) software. ANU uses Moodle and much effort is put into making sure that there is sufficient capacity for the more than ten thousand students. Even so, like many of my colleagues, I also provide a copy of course notes outside the LMS, on an ordinary web site, in case of access problems. This is also useful for students who have not yet completed the formal enrollment process, and so do not have access to the LMS, but want to start work.

Hundreds of thousands, or millions, of students creates a very large load for the LMS. Today Coursera reported: "We're currently experiencing server issues. Stay tuned to status.coursera.org. Thank you for your patience.".

I have some experience at diagnosing problems with on-line systems used for emergency warning and disaster recovery. These systems experience high loads during an emergency. The usual response is to increase server capacity, but if you have very high loads this can be ineffective. It is possible to carry out a quick examination of the system and usually identify a few hot-spots which can be fixed to increase the system capacity by hundreds or thousands of times. One problems is customization of content for each user unnecessarily, thus preventing caching working. Also video and images in the wrong format, resulting in very large files can be a problem. Another problem is to offer  content to the user before they ask for it, thus wasting system resources and their time.

In the longer term it should be possible to break the LMS into a number of independent parts to make it more efficient and reliable. Google have taken an interesting approach with their "Google Course Builder", by essentially having the courses hand crafted using HTML and JavaScript. This approach will not work for the average course designer, which does not have that level of technical skills, but might be workable with some front end tools to generate the needed code. The result could be something like a compiler for computer software, which produced code which is very efficient to run, but the penalty being changes are harder to make. The LMS can instead be thought of as an interpreter of the course-ware: easier to make changes to but much less efficient to run.

Where are teacher has a few dozen, or few hundred, students they can simply make a change to the course and tell the students, answering any queries. But of there are millions of students such ad-hoc changes will cause chaos. It may be that course designers will need to learn some of the same skills of software engineers use to systematically make changes to a large system, so as to cause least inconvenience to those using it.

Some MOOC providers seem to be attempting to avoid the problem of supporting a large system by using other services in place of their own, such as Google and Facebook. But this may simply transfer the problem somewhere else and also can result in privacy problems. Universities offering courses in Australia are subject to federal privacy laws. It is reasonably simple to configure the in-house LMS (even an outsourced one) to meet the legal requirements to protect student information. But if the students are required to use an external social networking site as part of their course, then ensuring privacy becomes more difficult.

ANU First Australian University to Join edX e-Learning Consortium

The Australian National University (ANU) announced it has joined the edX on-line course consortium ("ANU joins edX online education revolution", 21 February 2013). edX was originally set up by MIT and Harvard University to provide Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs). ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young announced the first two ANUx courses would be Astrophysics by Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt and Engaging India by Dr McComas Taylor. Also I have offered to prepare a MOOC version of my award winning ICT Sustainability course, which has been run on-line at ANU since 2009 and uses an open access e-book, but I am no Nobel Laureate, or Sanskrit scholar. ;-)