e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: EdX

  • ASU, edX and The Black Knight: MOOCs are not dead yet

    In 2012 I wrote a post during the emergence of MOOC mania, pointing out some barriers that must be overcome for the new model to survive.

    So what are the barriers that must be overcome for the MOOC concept (in future generations) to become self-sustaining? To me the most obvious barriers are:

    • Developing revenue models to make the concept self-sustaining;
    • Delivering valuable signifiers of completion such as credentials, badges or acceptance into accredited programs;
    • Providing an experience and perceived value that enables higher course completion rates (most today have less than 10% of registered students actually completing the course); and
    • Authenticating students in a manner to satisfy accrediting institutions or hiring companies that the student identify is actually known.

    Fig 3 EvolutionCombine20120927

    Since that time, of course, the MOOC hype has faded away, partially based on the above barriers not being overcome.

    Today, Arizona State University (ASU) and edX announced a new program, Global Freshman Academy, that takes direct aim at all four barriers and could be the most significant MOOC program yet. From the New York Times story: (more…)

  • The Quotable Justin Reich: MOOC research needs to reboot

    Thanks to Audrey Watters I just read a new article in Science Magazine and publicly posted here by Justin Reich, the lead researcher for HarvardX (Harvard’s implementation of edX and associated research team) ((Note that Science Magazine access requires a subscription or purchase or individual article.)). Justin calls out the limitations of current MOOC research that focuses on A/B testing and engagement instead of learning, single-course context, and post hoc analysis with proper course design. While praising the field for making available cleansed data for any type of analysis, his core argument is that we need new approaches that cannot be solved just by research teams.
    Update: Added link to publicly-available DOCX article.

    While the whole article is worth reading, there are quite a few insightful quotes should get past the journal paywall.

    • Big data sets do not, by virtue of their size, inherently possess answers to interesting questions.
    • We have terabytes of data about what students clicked and very little understanding of what changed in their heads.
    • It does not require trillions of event logs to demonstrate that effort is correlated with achievement.

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  • The Battle for Open and MOOC Completion Rates

    Yesterday I wrote a post on the 20 Million Minds blog about Martin Weller’s new book The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. Exploring different aspects of open in higher education – open access, MOOCs, open education resources and open scholarship – Weller shows how far the concept of openness has come, to the point where “openness is now such a part of everyday life that it seems unworthy of comment”. If you’re interested in OER, open courses, open journals, or open research in higher education – get the book (it’s free and available in a variety of formats).

    Building on the 20MM post about the ability to reuse or repurpose the book itself, I would like to expand on a story from early 2013 where I happen to play a role. I’ll mix in Weller’s description (MW) from the book with Katy Jordan’s data (KJ) and my own description (PH) from this blog post.

    (MW) I will end with one small example, which pulls together many of the strands of openness. Katy Jordan is a PhD student at the OU focusing on academic networks on sites such as Academia. edu. She has studied a number of MOOCs on her own initiative to supplement the formal research training offered at the University. One of these was an infographics MOOC offered by the University of Texas. For her final visualisation project on this open course she decided to plot MOOC completion rates on an interactive graph, and blogged her results (Jordan 2013).

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  • Kuali, Ariah and Apereo: Emerging ed tech debate on open source license types

    With the annual Kuali conference – Kuali Days – starting today in Indianapolis, the big topic should be the August decision to move from a community source to a professional open source model, moving key development to a commercial entity, the newly-formed KualiCo. Now there will be two new announcements for the community to discuss, both centering on a esoteric license choice that could have far-reaching implications. Both the announcement of the Ariah Group as a new organization to support Kuali products and the statement from the Apereo Foundation center on the difference between Apache-style and AGPL licenses.

    AGPL and Vendor Protection

    Kuali previously licensed its open source code as Educational Community License (ECL), a derivative of the standard Apache license that is designed to be permissive in terms of allowing organizations to contribute modified open source code while mixing with code with different licenses – including proprietary. This license is ‘permissive’ in the sense that the derived, remixed code may be licensed in different manners. It is generally thought that this license type gives the most flexibility for developing a community of contributors.

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  • Learner-Centered Analytics: Example from UW La Crosse MOOC research

    Last week I wrote a post What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics. As a recap, my argument was:

    Beyond data aggregated over the entire course, the Harvard and MIT edX data provides no insight into learner patterns of behavior over time. Did the discussion forum posts increase or decrease over time, did video access change over time, etc? We don’t know. There is some insight we could obtain by looking at the last transaction event and number of chapters accessed, but the insight would be limited. But learner patterns of behavior can provide real insights, and it is here where the University of Phoenix (UoP) could teach Harvard and MIT some lessons on analytics.

    Beyond the University of Phoenix, there other examples of learner-centered analytics exploring usage patterns over time. While I was at a summit at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse last week, Bob Hoar showed me some early results of their “UW-System College Readiness Math MOOC” research that is part of the MOOC Research Initiative. I interviewed Bob Hoar and Natalie Solverson as part of e-Literate TV, where they described their research project:

    The results to date focus on capturing and visualizing the student patterns, and progress can be tracked at this project site (go to the site to see interactive graphics). (more…)

  • No, I don’t believe that Harvard or MIT are hiding edX data

    Since my Sunday post What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics, there have been a few comments with a common theme about Harvard and MIT perhaps withholding any learner-centered analytics data. As a recap, my argument was:

    Beyond data aggregated over the entire course, the Harvard and MIT edX data provides no insight into learner patterns of behavior over time. Did the discussion forum posts increase or decrease over time, did video access change over time, etc? We don’t know. There is some insight we could obtain by looking at the last transaction event and number of chapters accessed, but the insight would be limited. But learner patterns of behavior can provide real insights, and it is here where the University of Phoenix (UoP) could teach Harvard and MIT some lessons on analytics.

    Some of the comments that are worth addressing:

    “Non-aggregated microdata (or a “person-click” dataset, see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2013/06/the_person-click_dataset.html ) are much harder (impossible?) to de-identify. So you are being unfair in comparing this public release of data with internal data analytic efforts.”

    “Agreed. The part I don’t understand is how they still don’t realize how useless this all is. Unless they are collecting better data, but just not sharing it openly, hogging it to themselves until it ‘looks good enough for marketing’ or something.”

    “The edX initiative likely has event-level data to analyze. I don’t blame them for not wanting to share that with the world for free though. That would be a very valuable dataset.”

    The common theme seems to be that there must be learner-centered data over time, but Harvard and MIT chose not to release this data either due to privacy or selfish reasons. This is a valid question to raise, but I see no evidence to back up these suppositions.

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  • What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics

    Last week Harvard and MIT released de-identified data from their edX-based MOOCs. Rather than just produce a summary report, the intent of this release was to open up the data and share it publicly. While it is good to see this approach to Open Data, unfortunately the data set is of limited value, and it actually illustrates a key problem with analytics in higher ed. From MIT News description:

    A research team from Harvard University and MIT has released its third and final promised deliverable — the de-identified learning data — relating to an initial study of online learning based on each institution’s first-year courses on the edX platform.

    Specifically, the dataset contains the original learning data from the 16 HarvardX and MITx courses offered in 2012-13 that formed the basis of the first HarvardX and MITx working papers (released in January) and underpin a suite of powerful open-source interactive visualization tools (released in February).

    At first I was eager to explore the data, but I am not sure how much useful insight is possible due to how the data was collected. The data is structured with one student per row for each course they took (taking multiple courses would lead to multiple rows of data). The data columns (pulled from the Person Course Documentation file) are shown below:

    (more…)