MOOCs, online learning and Coventry Open Media Classes

My name is Shaun Hides – I’m head of the Dept of Media at Coventry – I’m going to try to do three things

1) Understand where you are in relation to digital/connected media 2) Briefly explain where MOOCs came from and what they are 3) To explain what we have done with our Open Classes in this context of change

I will locate this in the context of education for media and creative practice with reference of UK HE - and in relation to Open Education

Changing our mind-sets: the media Landscape

Media – becoming more connected/distributed, mobile, prosumer

Firstly we need to note the changed media landscape

Media no longer only consists of boxes (discrete technologies or platforms – e.g. newspapers television sets ) media platforms have “converged” so smart phones allow us to ,make calls (communications devices) but also receive media content (news TV film/video / news papers audio/music) all in one device and to make content (photo vidoe audio) and to distribute it through web and social media.

These new connected digital media change our relationship to media content we become prosumers (producer-consumers)

Changing our mind-sets: teaching

Students are connected/distributed, mobile, prosumer; but we are not

This change walks into our classrooms with our students – who bring in the most capable communications device in history: the Smart phone

Accepting – embracing and taking advantage of massive level of change in media - from broadcasts and screens / boxes and receivers to distribution touch/tactile technologies and prosumers applies in the classroom too

For CU in a Media Dept. Moving to Open Media (OA OE Course Hybrids) meant :

Changing our mind-sets: scholarship

Connected/distributed, mobile, prosumer media are changing content creation and publishing; but we are not

This change is also directly impacting academic scholarship and publication, where for instance, researchers are increasingly using Creative Commons as a means of publishing their research in openly accessible ways.

This is done for positive reasons – to give more people access to research – especially if its publicly funded, but it is also changing ideas of who the researcher or author is – since such research often become collaborative

Changing our mind-sets: research and Publication

Publishing

The university

Money

Academic / researcher

content

An unsustainable business model ?

Public sector / funding

The academic community

content

Money

Money

content

content

Students

The current structure of the economy of academic scholarship/publishing seems wholly untenable – even before taking the disruptive effects of digital technologies.

The transformation of this landscape via new digital platforms, will disrupt this iunstable space

Initial suggestions on how to make published academic research openly accessible in the UK – so-called “gold” open access publishing - appears to suggest swapping over-priced subscriptions and book charges for over-priced publishing fees - mooted to be c £1500-2000 for journal articles and £10-11000 per book – ie academics and universities pay to ensure the preservation of publishers role in the system = this seems unlikely to be the outcome

• US HE costs - $1500 p.a. textbooks

• US overall student debt -

• Digital–connected media • Lowered threshold costs for access• End of scarce content• New modes of engagement UK / Europe – necessity to respond despite different contexts By some estimates, the cost of obtaining a college degree has grown almost twelvefold over the last few decades, and in 2012, our nation’s student loan debt hit a record high, surpassing the $1 trillion mark—a figure larger than the country’s outstanding credit card debt.

MOOC Mania: Debunking the hype around massive open online coursesBy Audrey Watters

CONTEXT

MOOCs

So MOOCs - at least xMOOCs are a response to this changed environment – one kind of response, or maybe symptom of it

MOOCscMOOCs (C for “connectivist”, the educational theory that inspired them1) run on open source learning platforms and are led by academics as part of their university activity. Their pedagogical model is peer learning. These are associated particularly with their founding institutions Abathasca and Manitoba Universities in Canada.

xMOOCs are online versions of traditional learning formats (lecture, instruction, discussion etc.) on proprietary specialist software platforms owned by private enterprises. They feature contractual and commercial relationships between Universities who create content, and technology providers. These are associated mostly with the three largest platform providers edX, Udacity and Coursera. The UK’s FutureLearn, scheduled to launch autumn 2013, will be in this group.

This change is also directly impacting academic scholarship and publication, where for instance, researchers are increasingly using Creative Commons as a means of publishing their research in openly accessible ways.

This is done for positive reasons – to give more people access to research – especially if its publicly funded, but it is also changing ideas of who the researcher or author is – since such research often become collaborative

MOOCs a timeline

With acknowledgement to UUK

Here is a timeline which places the recent xMOOCs in historical context

The Open Educational Resources and Open content movements predate MOOCs by some way - MIT’s Opencourse ware is a precursor

The Close relative cMOOCs work on a very different ethos – they are about collaboration.

MITx EdX Coursera Udacity and Futurelearn are fairly similar and come out of need to broadcast their content as mode of promoting their brand(s)

MOOCs

“ (xMOOCs) are mostly quite conservative pedagogically and seem to be mostly about leveraging the brand value of elite institutions – and the costs of starting up in the US are viable given the cost context of HE in America – as above

MOOC Characteristics

Measuring some of the current xMOOCs and related innovations against their tendencies towards innovation and conservatism is quite instructive - thus the cMOOCs are quite disruptive of HE institutions because the networks they put together offer a wholly different sense of participation – but they are technologically fairly conservative since they require no new technologies – they pick up what is to hand.

So they aren’t safe or unsafe, progressive or regressive – they are each all of the above

Broadcast vs Trusted-provider hub for Community – Networked

and bespoke

In the context of new connected-mobile media – simply broadcasting wont be enough - xMOOCs can look a lot like a new form of broadcasting

As media content proliferates, the question will no longer be “how can I get to make or distribute media” - as it was in the 20th Cent . That will be easy.

The questions will become how will my work be found and seen or heard – this applies to us in the classroom – how will we be heard – how can we persuade the student that we can be trusted – that we can be a hub for their developing community - what value do we add by being here now this minute??

Social media revolution

Structured Content Un-bundled

This a NEW STORY – can be understood in different ways The Napster moment – the disruption of the Music industry

In the ‘beginning’ –

Here is my (the artist) highly crafted; high quality carefully structured and bundled album – which you must pay quite a lot for

Napster says - you (the audience) bought the CD but probably only like 3 out of the 13 tracks and you want to share them with friends - go ahead re-digitise them online and share

The music industries response was a) copyright violation – you (most of the music audience) are criminals - not a good business move AND, b) the MP3 format is terrible – its poor quality people won’t want it - WRONG ! Most people did want to trade off portability for HiFi quality

Apple – iTunes and Amazon ‘got it’ Download - but the music industry had to be levered into this -

IF this is our Napster Moment - our question is how not to respond like the music industry.

OPEN MEDIA

Our response we defined an Open Media strategy - an ethos and approach to organise experiments in new ways of working

Task was - not take a stand in the face of incoming tide of new information-media - to protect the traditional academic model

Coventry Open Media Classes

Aim : a (media)

scholarship and practice sustainable in the 21st Century

Changing our practices: spaces, technologies, visibility

This meant that our classes became open and connected – which meant that the classes didn’t look like classes but networks -

which has begun to make them disruptive of the rest of the teaching in the Dept.

Our spaces were transformed - but also our connections with the rest of CU was also transformed

The classes brought in new kinds of collaborators but these were “with” us in new ways

Lastly the classes disrupted the boundaries of how was and wasn’t a student - when they were students and who were the experts /practitioners .

Changing our practices – open Classes

We have released a series of Open Media classes which make all forms of the class content and much of the dialogue and interaction freely accessible on line.

The classes use openly available platforms rather than keeping them behind the usual barriers of fees (pay-walls) or password/ID protected online learning environments – although we do operate one of these (Moodle) as well.

Instead the classes use wordpress blogs, and other externally accessible paltforms twitter, flicker vimeo etc. - the content is all released under CC BY SA licence to register the need for attribution but easy sharing. .

Means: the connected,

expanded - hybrid class

Changing our practices: open Classes – effects

The classes brought in new kinds of collaborations but these collaborators (external professionals, academics in other institutions, creative parctitioners) were “with” us in new ways

The classes disrupted the boundaries of who was and wasn’t a student - when they were students and who were the experts /practitioners

This approach enabled amazing new kinds of direct collaboration and creative practice - internship with Annie liebowitz L1 student work on the cover of BJP L2 students establishing a new online magazine .

Open research

We have also explored “new” modes of distributing media scholarship -

For example Liquid Theory TV uses emerging media practices and networks to magnify the scope, scale and impact of all our (staff and student) work.

Impact

This new way of doing things has had real impact

One modest symposium event, was later offered as a series of openly accessible pod-casts

These have had a huge number of listeners way beyond the audience for the face to face event

1 day event 35 participants

1,000,000+ listens ,

Impact

This approach led to our work being ranked as noteworthy alongside that of Harvard Stanford and Oxford by itunes

• 2006 Open talks (300+ talks c. 500,000 listens)

• 2008 Uni. with Youtube (1.5+ million views )

• 2008 Green Open Access Research Mandate ast Uk media dept

• 2009 CU and Medi itunes U (6.8 million Listens )

• 2009 Open classes (500,000+ visits )

• 2011 1st BA Photography Class App (500 downloads first term )

• 2012 1st mobile media courses – every student has tech-pack

Some lessons we are trying to learn:

• Open and mobile are just modes of operating not ends in themsleves;

• reducing barriers between your audiences and your content works out economically – the

piracy/obscurity paradox ;

• work out where the real value of what you do lies

– we offer a unique hub that’s connected and curated

– we offer an intensive collaborative-connected-distributed learning experience

– we offer high level certification

• go where the fish swim ( use what is being used) / don’t build “it” (e.g. VLEs) hoping ‘they will come’;

• don’t assume the fish know about the water – students aren’t digitally ‘literate’, they’re digital natives;

• disruption doesn’t just happen where/how you intend;

• new (business) models and re-purposing/re-versionning/ unbundling are our next steps - we need

radically new pedagogies and radically new relationships with/offers to, our communities

Thank you.