Category Archives: mooc

Giving Too Much Credit

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Stephen comments on the “Great Rebranding” of MOOCs:

MOOCs were not designed to serve the missions of the elite colleges and universities. They were designed to undermine them, and make those missions obsolete…. There has been a great rebranding and co-option of the concept of the MOOC over the last couple of years. The near-instant response from the elites, almost unprecedented in my experience, is a recognition of the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs (which they would like very much to erase from history).

In summary, Stephen sees the rapid adoption of MOOCs among prestigious universities as a proactive attempt to co-opt their potentially subversive nature.

I think this is giving these schools WAY too much credit. As we saw with OpenCourseWare a decade ago, there is a HUGE amount of public relations benefit from being involved in these initiatives. As we saw in the early 2000s, every single school that launched an OCW initiative garned an incredible amount of press and praise – until the new car smell wore off. If you were one of the first schools out of the chute, you were showered with media coverage. But after OCW “got old,” additional OCW launches received no press coverage whatsoever.

Coursera has done an incredibly effective job harnessing this Presidential passion for press. Coursera – ‘the platform for offering “open” courses’ – has been very noisy about the fact that they only work with prestigious universities. What school doesn’t want to join the Stanford / Tecnológico de Monterrey / Princeton / École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne club? For the cost of offering one class in a new format, a President can officially put his or her institution in the same category as these “prestigious” schools. What Board of Trustees doesn’t want that?

Don’t mistake lust for fame with forethought. The current mania around MOOCs has nothing to do with strategic neutralization of a potential threat to higher education’s business model and everything to do with needing to be in the New York Times. Assuming the prior gives way too much credit where it isn’t due – twice. First, to the leadership of schools who have jumped speedily on the MOOC bandwagon. And second, to the creators of the MOOC approach who by implication have supposedly devised a method so brilliant as to be capable of destroying formal higher education (which, apparently, is to be lauded).

Where I’ve Been; Where I’m Going

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Sometimes it helps to look backwards and figure out where you’ve been to get a clearer picture of where you’re going. As today is the first official day of my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve been taking the opportunity to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Upon reflection, it feels like I have some really strong momentum behind my work in open education. But where is that momentum carrying me? How can I leverage it thoughtfully to be more useful? (This thinking fortuitously coincides with a recent article titled Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education to which I have included a paragraph response to below. Spolier alert: we see the world very differently.)

Where I’ve Been

I’ve had the privilege of being part of several interesting events in the open education timeline. (Some of them were even successes!) But as I look through the list, there is a subset of events I can pick out from the others that suggest a fairly specific trajectory. In K-12, that list includes:

  • Launch the first high school committed to using OER exclusively across it’s curriculum in Fall 2009.
  • Launch the Utah Open Textbook Project in 7 classrooms in Fall 2011.
  • Take the Utah Open Textbook Project district-wide in Fall 2012.
  • Take the Utah Open Textbook Project statewide as of Fall 2013.

Where’s the momentum heading? While the vector may not be immediately obvious, I see it this way: demonstrate the effectiveness of OER in a lab-like charter school setting, then take those success to a few brick and mortar schools, then grow it to a district, then expand it statewide across Utah.

What to do with the momentum? Now that I have practical experience with regard to rolling out open textbooks in secondary school settings (including the state level), and data about the cost savings and learning impacts of doing so, I need to keep pushing here until the number of state offices of education promoting the statewide adoption of open textbooks grows from 1 to 50.

In higher education, the subset of events that point in a particular direction includes:

  • Help launch and run the first phase of the Kaleidoscope Project which replaced commercial textbooks with open textbooks in 10 courses across 8 schools from 2011-2012.
  • Grow the Kaleidoscope Project to cover 30 courses across 28 schools in 2013-2014. (We secured grant funding to do this back in 2012.)
  • Help launch the first Textbook Zero Associates degree – an entire Associates degree using only OER. This will launch in Fall 2013 – a launch announcement is coming next week. (Associates in Business Administration)

Where’s the momentum heading? This momentum feels very much like the momentum in K-12: start small in terms of numbers of schools and courses using OER, then grow that number, and eventually cover an entire degree program.

What to do with the momentum? First, I need to help more schools adopt the Textbook Zero model for their Associates of Business degrees. At the same time I need to help a school move to a Textbook Zero Associates degree of General Studies – the OER work necessary for the business degree gets us 2/3 of the way there. The Associates of General Studies has almost 100% overlap with the General Education sequence at four year schools, so the next obvious move is to help a university commit to a Textbook Zero model of Gen Ed. And by that point, we’re within striking distance of a four year degree in Business or Computer Science based exclusively on OER – I should help a university do that next.

Where I’m Going Next

If I can successfully go where the momentum is pointing, this would give us successful exemplars from the top to the bottom of the entire formal secondary and post-secondary ecosystem – making it possible to earn a high school diploma, Associates degree, and Bachelors degree without ever spending a penny on a textbook. More importantly, that entire experience would occur in the context of 4R permissions that allow customization, personalization, remixing, sharing, continuous improvement, etc.

So this is where I’m heading – connecting the OER dots all the way from 7th grade through the end of the Bachelors degree. I think we can get the initial post-secondary program launches done within three years:

  • Textbook Zero Associates degree in a community college, Fall 2013 launch
  • Textbook Zero General Education pathway in a university, Fall 2014 launch
  • Textbook Zero Bachelors degree, Fall 2015 launch

Of course, the initial post-secondary launches are groundbreaking and interesting, but we’ll never have the level of impact we want if we don’t scale this work. Post-secondary OER adoption needs to expand like an ever-broadening wake behind an OER boat moving purposefully upstream.

I think the secondary launches take longer, likely five years:

  • 1 state actively promoting open textbooks across its secondary courses, Fall 2013
  • 3 states actively promoting open textbooks across their secondary courses, Fall 2014
  • 15 states actively promoting open textbooks across their secondary courses, Fall 2015
  • 35 states actively promoting open textbooks across their secondary courses, Fall 2016
  • 50 states actively promoting open textbooks across their secondary courses, Fall 2017

Obviously, this is a monumental work. How to tool up in terms of capacity, coordination, and organization to get all this work done successfully and enable it to scale is another question. More thoughts on that soon.

And in response to Gerd Kortemeyer I would say only this: OER haven’t been impacting education as much as they could because with very few exceptions the open education community has been too busy creating materials and writing hype articles about their potential impact to do the dirty, almost thankless work of helping people adopt them. There was a time when I was as guilty of this as anyone. This is slow, slogging, culture changing work that has to be done one faculty member and one school at a time (at least until it hits a tipping point). I doubled down on my belief that this is the problem by applying for a Shuttleworth Fellowship focusing on doing this very “boots on the ground” work. I don’t believe faculty and students need another piece of magic technology that will solve this problem for them. They need good old-fashioned, hand-holding help. I’m doing it, and it’s working.

Post Script: The Deep Future; or, The End Game

So what’s the end game here? Certainly not OER adoption. Getting the open content infrastructure broadly deployed is just the first step. Once faculty and teachers are comfortable using OER, and these OER are widely adopted across entire secondary and post-secondary programs, who knows what other kinds of innovations – think pedagogy, support, assessment, credentialing – we’ll realize are possible to build on top of the open content infrastructure? I come back to one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Don’t ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit. (Linus Torvalds)

I pair that quote with what has been (for me personally) my most profound realization in all the years I’ve worked on open – “openness facilitates the unexpected.” OER empower and enable. Yes, we already know that OER adoption will lower costs and can improve outcomes. What we don’t yet know is all the other things that can be done by an innovative student, teacher, entrepreneur, policy maker, or anyone else who can assume the existence and broad acceptance of the open content infrastructure as a starting point.

If we succeed in broadly deploying this open content infrastructure, it will empower and enable people to do things we can’t even imagine today – the same way an open communications infrastructure (read: the Internet) allowed people to create things we could never have imagined a few decades ago. Think of the incredible things that have emerged in the past 10 years alone because creative people can now assume the broad deployment and adoption of the open communications infrastructure called the Internet. Imagine what they’ll do when they can make the same assumptions about the open content infrastructure. You really can’t – and that’s the beauty of it.

Thank you, Shuttleworth Foundation, for creating a space in my life that allows me to pause and reflect like this.

MOOCs and Digital Diploma Mills: Forgetting Our History

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When David Noble first published his groundbreaking critique of online education in 1998, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, I thought to myself “he couldn’t be more wrong.” As it turns out he might not have been wrong – maybe Noble was simply so miraculously prescient that I couldn’t see what he saw. Fifteen – count them, fifteen – years later, Digital Diploma Mills reads as if it were researched and written about the current phenomenon called “MOOCs.” Entire paragraphs from the essay can be read unaltered and applied precisely to the state of things today:

What is driving this headlong rush to implement new technology with so little regard for deliberation of the pedagogical and economic costs and at the risk of student and faculty alienation and opposition? A short answer might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures of “progress”. But there is more to it. For the universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education. For here as elsewhere technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise.

. . .

The foremost promoters of this transformation are rather the vendors of the network hardware, software, and “content”… who view education as a market for their wares, a market estimated by the Lehman Brothers investment firm potentially to be worth several hundred billion dollars. “Investment opportunity in the education industry has never been better,” one of their reports proclaimed, indicating that this will be “the focus industry” for lucrative investment in the future, replacing the health care industry… It is important to emphasize that, for all the democratic rhetoric about extending educational access to those unable to get to the campus, the campus remains the real market for these products.

. . .

The third major promoters of this transformation are the university administrators, who see it as a way of giving their institutions a fashionably forward–looking image. More importantly, they view computer–based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and plant maintenance costs — fewer teachers and classrooms — while at the same time undermining the autonomy and independence of faculty. At the same time, they are hoping to get a piece of the commercial action for their institutions or themselves, as vendors in their own right of software and content.

. . .

Most important, once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant, and when they leave, their work remains behind. In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Player Piano the ace machinist Rudy Hertz is flattered by the automation engineers who tell him his genius will be immortalized. They buy him a beer. They capture his skills on tape. Then they fire him. Today faculty are falling for the same tired line, that their brilliance will be broadcast online to millions. Perhaps, but without their further participation. Some skeptical faculty insist that what they do cannot possibly be automated, and they are right. But it will be automated anyway, whatever the loss in educational quality. Because education, again, is not what all this is about; it’s about making money.

If MOOCs (or xMOOCs more precisely, for those of you who know the inside baseball) do not represent “the automation of higher education,” what does? And even today we read again about universities rushing to become “one of the elite” schools offering MOOCs in partnership with Coursera or edX, and the pathways to diplomas these organizations are working hard to create.

The whole xMOOC phenomenon reads like the history of the Internet played backwards (or the history of the Reformation read backwards, if you prefer). Remember when the internet was largely a walled garden to the average user of AOL, Prodigy, or Compuserve? Remember how hard those companies resisted letting their users loose into the big wide world of the internet on their own? Remember their justifications and reasons why? Remember how amazing it was when people finally made their way onto the open internet?

Now play that record backwards, as the first generation of MOOCs (cMOOCs) – that allowed anyone from anywhere to participate however they liked in experiences built from openly licensed course materials – gives way to a new generation of walled gardens that call themselves “open” but require registration, use copyrighted materials, and take investment capital. They even prohibit students from using their services in the most useful ways: “You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera or use any Statement of Accomplishment as part of any tuition-based or for-credit certification or program for any college, university, or other academic institution without the express written permission from Coursera” (Coursera Terms of Use). David Noble saw something like this coming. I’m not sure he was wrong.

But he doesn’t have to be right, either. Since the very beginning, open education has been about enabling and empowering. Including empowering faculty – not replacing them. Free and legal access for faculty, their students, and everyone around the world to high quality educational materials that can be legally adapted and customized specifically for your particular circumstances, and then shared broadly, openly, and freely. Ultimate flexibility. Zero cost. Increased dependance on faculty as curators, customizers, and contextualizers – real people who have relationships with students and understand what they need. Unlocking the potential of faculty and unlocking access for students. Allowing for any and all uses of educational materials a learner sees as valuable. That’s the vision of open education the wider world apparently has not yet seen. Unfortunately, much of the world seems to have seen the more limited xMOOC vision and accepted it as the state of the art regarding what is possible.

There was a positive sign from one of the xMOOCs today – edX announced its first MOOC to release its content under a Creative Commons license today. If this were to become a trend, and xMOOCs were to rejoin the open education movement, David Noble would have come frighteningly close – but would still be wrong.

Where do you think things are going? Better yet, what are you doing to influence where they will end up?