How to Survive Your PhD: A Free Course

by Thesis Whisperer: http://thesiswhisperer.com/2015/07/29/we-made-a-mooc/

 

A year and a half ago, ANU gave me a chance to make a MOOC. 

 

For those of you in the know, a MOOC stands for ‘massive open online course’. ANU has partnered with EdX, a MOOC delivery platform, so that thousands of people have the chance to participate in ANU courses from around the world, for free.

The process of bidding to run a MOOC at ANU is by competitive tender, so I was surprised when I was given special funding to do one. It was an honour to be singled out and ‘jump the queue’ so to speak. It showed that ANU management had pleasing faith in my abilities … Hmmm. Should they really have so much faith?

In less than an hour I had convinced myself that ANU management had made a big mistake. Sure, I had run a successful blog for 5 years - and authored a few online courses - but this was different. I’d never done anything on this scale before. It was sure to be a miserable failure.

It felt like I’d been asked to organise a massive party. What if no-one enrolled? Not only would I fail, but EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WOULD SEE ME FAIL. The whole world would discover what I had known, secretly, for a long time … I am only pretending to be clever and interesting. I am not as good as everyone seems to think I am.

I’ve seen this pattern of thinking, which is called ‘imposter syndrome’, in PhD students many times, but it took me a surprisingly long time to recognise it in me.

After (metaphorically) smacking myself upside the head a few times, I applied the imposter syndrome cure I always recommend to others. I decided to suspend judgment. Just get on with it and worry about if it was any good later. So I tried to write down ideas - any ideas, bad ideas, stupid ideas …



I worked on ideas for nearly a year, but made frustratingly slow progress. I had what golfers call ‘The Yips’ - a sudden and unexplained lack of ability, just when I needed it most. As the Yips dragged on, and on, the fear started to set in. Everything I wrote seemed dumb, boring, pointless. ANU got a bit worried about me for real at this point, and a couple of people were assigned to help.

Talking with generous, open-minded colleagues was just what I needed. Katie and Chris listened to my account of my troubles and encouraged me to see these as the themes for the MOOC. We worked together to re-orientate the MOOC around the effects of emotions on research student performance and eventually (after much debate) called it How to survive your PhD.

The title makes it sound like it’s just for students. While it certainly aimed at you, we think it can be so much more than a normal course that teaches you stuff. We imagined How to survive your PhD as a node in a huge global conversation, where students and supervisors could, together, work to understand the emotional problems that can get in the way of good research progress, find and share new strategies for coping.

We have designed it so that this conversation can spill into other spaces - social media and campus coffee shops; supervisors offices and classrooms. And since we have a massive, global, free platform, why confine it to the university?

We thought mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and partners might want to join in the conversation too. Many of these people are heavily invested in the success of their loved ones. So we decided to write in plain language to make it accessible to anyone who is genuinely interested in helping PhD students survive and thrive.

As I worked with Kevin Ryland to develop the course content, backed with research sourced from a wide range of literature on emotions, the very problems I had been experiencing started to become modules.

The module on Confidence is all about the imposter syndrome. Why it happens, who tends to suffer from it most and how to combat it. I then wrote about Frustration, particularly why writing is frustrating. Students report that supervisors often give bad feedback - why does this happen when supervisors  are themselves expert writers?

My experience of the Yips became a module on Fear. Why do we sometimes fear writing? How can we get over our fear and write anyway? Many people I know are afraid of presenting their research in public - yet can teach a huge class without any problems. What’s all that about?

A module on Confusion was next, which proved to be quite confusing to write. I found myself looking at my own emotional responses in a different way. I did a lot extraneous, perhaps unnecessary, reading. This experience became a module on Curiosity. Curiosity is important to researchers, but it can also be a problem because it’s hard to shut it down once it gets going.

By this time I was nearly half way through the MOOC, but the enormity of the writing and thinking task was getting to me. Hours of writing paralysis at my desk meant I had to I spent many weekends working while my family went out and enjoyed the Canberra sunshine.

I listened to a lot of James Blunt. I ate badly and let my exercise routine slip. I re-experienced Thesis Prison - the feeling of the world going on around you while you are stuck in a room - writing, writing, writing.

This experience eventually was incorporated in the module on Loneliness. Many research students have strong family connections and lots of friends - yet can still feel very alone. Why is the sense of intellectual isolation so intense and so common? Is it just a part of the process, or something we foster deliberately? Is there really anything that others can do to help?

I was grinding through the writing work by now, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, which (perversely) made me start to lose interest. My heightened attention to my emotional state caused me to critically reflect on my work problems. I love problems. I love researching them and thinking of solutions. But when I have solved the problem, even if just in my mind I’m over it. The next bit, the actual doing, is boring!

Ah - boredom! Of course!

I junked a module on courage and put Boredom in its place. It turned out to be the most enjoyable of all the modules to write. I researched what boredom is and why it happens. I found a whole lot of research on boredom which was anything but boring. I wanted to end on a high note, so I scoped out a module on Love. Then I got stuck again.

Luckily by this time I had enlisted a trusty team of moderators to help me run the MOOC. Steph, Marg, Anna, Jonathon and Kat are all PhD students and so are in touch with the emotions I was exploring on a daily basis. They started to contribute ideas and review the content. We still haven’t finished the last module on Love, but it’s shaping up to be very interesting!

So, are you interested? ‘How to Survive your PhD’ runs for 10 weeks, but it’s designed to be lightweight and easy to manage and should take you no more than an hour a week. We’ll be extending the conversation onto social media so you can participate in a number of different ways.

Research students and supervisors are the main audience and will get the most benefit, but I can imagine that family members and partners, who no doubt have a keen interest in supporting you to finish your research degree, might want to join up too. I’ll be in there chatting with you everyday, along with my team of trusty moderators.

You can sign up for ‘How to survive your PhD’ here.

Or you can watch a video trailer here.

Filming the MOOC was very confronting, and a story in its own right, but here’s a trailer to give you a taste of the content look and feel.

Crucially, unlike other offerings in this space, ANU has made this course completely free. I know that other MOOCs have grown campus communities around them - I’d love it if we could do that with this MOOC too. So why not grab a friend or two and convince them to enrol? It would be a good excuse to grab a coffee once a week and have a chat.

If anyone is a research developer and interested in running it in a formal way, please feel free to email me if you need advice or ideas.

As you can tell from the above, this MOOC extremely hard to write and put it together. I complained about it to everyone who would listen (thanks Twitter!) but I’m glad I did it.

I’m especially glad I had the able assistance of a team of people including Kevin Ryland, Katie Fruend, Nguyen Bui, Chris Blackall and Crystal McLaughlin and top level tactical support from the ANU online team leader Richard Robinson and DVC Marnie Warnes-Harrington. I’m so lucky to have a team of able moderators in Steph, Marg, Anna, Jonathon and Kat. Special thanks to Nigel Palmer who played the role of critical friend so well.

I do hope you’ll think about coming to my MOOC party - and that some of you will invite your parents and partners. I think it will be fun! If you have any questions about the course and how it will run, please feel free to put them in the comments.

The Value of MOOCs Lies With Employers

Are MOOCs about freedom? (Photo credit: Eleni Zazani)

by Dan Jerker B. Svantesson

One often sees news stories about how changes in information technology are killing off different industries.

Newspapers are read online rather than in print, and who bought a book in a physical shop lately?

The bricks-and-mortar shops are fewer and fewer and the offerings online steadily increasing.

One of the latest sectors said to be under threat from technological change is the higher education sector.

If one is to believe what one reads, (almost all) universities might as well start packing up and closing down. However, what we’re witnessing is exaggerated hype.

Fear makes good news stories. And technology fears are particularly “saleable” as people seem to have a great interest in technology and a long-standing fear of technology taking over the world - remember the Y2K hype?

In light of this, it is not surprising that technology fears spark all sorts of doomsday prophecies. But is there any substance to the claims of technology killing off the traditional university?

The claims

A recent article in The Economist contained a rather typical report on the likely effect technology will have on the university. Essentially the article, titled “Creative Destruction”, presented a number of standard claims.

For example, it pointed to the following factors as fundamentally undermining the model universities have relied upon since Aristotle:

Flickr/catspyjamasnz, CC BY

• rising costs;
• stagnant productivity;
• changing demand;
• changes in the employment market for graduates (in no small part due to technology advances);
• declining public funding; and
• disruptive technologies.

More specifically, on the point of technology, the article concluded:

The internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing upside down, will upend higher education. Now the MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, is offering students the chance to listen to star lecturers and get a degree for a fraction of the cost of attending a university.

The reality

The offering of distance education is nothing new. For quite some time, distance education has been a competitor of the traditional university model.

I suspect that, just as the forms of distance education we have grown accustomed to suit some people better than the traditional university model does, so will MOOCs be a better fit for some students.

For example, the flexibility offered may suit students on a Masters level, who often combine studies with work and who, in any case, often work quite independently. Another obvious market is students in developing countries whom it’s difficult to reach using older forms of distance education, and for whom university campuses in developed countries are inaccessible.

No doubt much good can be achieved through MOOCs, but when it comes to the typical undergraduate student coming to the university as a school leaver, I suspect MOOCs represent very much a second-best option. The reality is that they need guidance, preferably in small classes where they can get personal attention.

Universities that can offer this will always have a market. And after all, the university experience should include more than just classes and studies.

I doubt many hormonal 19-year-olds would prefer studying MOOCs from their parents' basement to being on a campus full of other 19-year-olds, about half of whom are of the opposite gender.

The ignored, but crucially important, end-user

Those who, out of fear or for other reasons, promote MOOCs often neglect the end-user, and I am not here referring to the students. Too little attention has been directed at how employers will view future graduates.

Would employers rather take a Harvard MOOCs graduate or a graduate trained in person on campus at a local university lacking a world-renowned brand?

Perhaps we will see a trend similar to the current preference for carefully produced local food over imported mass-produced foods from the mega-brands? And if employers prefer graduates trained at traditional universities, will not then the students also prefer traditional universities? After all, getting a job would seem to be the main motivation for most undergraduate students.

This brings attention to a crucially important point - in the end, whether MOOCs will succeed over the traditional university model in the training of undergraduates will be determined by the choices employers make. So a great deal of responsibility rests on the shoulders of the employers. Maybe it is time they had their say.


Dan Jerker B. Svantesson does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Top Websites That Offer Education to the World

by Listly: http://list.ly/list/KqX-top-websites-that-offer-education-to-the-world

The internet has made a great number of things accessible to us - education being, perhaps, the most important.

Following are the websites that give us a plethora of new things to learn at our fingertips ...

Coursera

Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education. We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

Open Culture

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.

 

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

 

Academic Earth

Over 750 free online college courses and lectures are available from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley and more. A world of learning is just a click away!

 

P2PU - Peer To Peer University

Peer 2 Peer University (we mostly just say P2PU) is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. Learning for the people, by the people. About almost anything.
 

Skillshare 

Skillshare is an online learning community to master real-world skills through project-based classes. Our mission is simple: provide universal access to high-quality learning. 

 

Scitable 

Scitable is a free science library and personal learning tool brought to you by Nature Publishing Group, the world's leading publisher of science. Scitable currently concentrates on genetics and cell biology, which include the topics of evolution, gene expression, and the rich complexity of cellular processes shared by living organisms. Scitable also offers resources for the budding scientist, with advice about effective science communication and career paths.

 

Smarthistory

Smarthistory at Khan Academy is the leading open educational resource for art history. We make high-quality introductory art history content freely available to anyone, anywhere. Smarthistory is a platform for the discipline where art historians contribute in their areas of expertise and learners come from across the globe.

 

Flat World Knowledge

Flat World Knowledge is passionate about helping solve these critical issues facing higher education today - affordability, access and student success. Flat World provides high-quality, affordable college textbooks and an online platform that allows instructors and institutions to personalize content in new ways to help students succeed. The company revolutionized the creation of higher education textbooks, using digital technology to more efficiently and affordably deliver quality content to more than 1 million students, 13,000 faculty, and 2,500 institutions worldwide.

Online Students and "On-Campus Students Learning Online" - Is There a Difference?

On-campus students online

by David Glance, University of Western Australia

In a recent interview with the University of New England’s (UNE) ex Vice-Chancellor Jim Barber, he talked about the disruptive threat of MOOCs to the Australian higher education system.

The threat was largely being ignored by what he perceived to be blinkered and risk-averse educational leaders and governance boards.

It was not clear from the interview what he saw as the solution but part of the issue was around the dilemma posed between cheap online education epitomised by MOOCs, and the increasingly expensive and traditional on-campus version.

Even without confounding the issue with the idea of MOOCs, Barber observed that: “(In theory) you really could jettison UNE’s entire on-campus operation, get rid of enormous cost and run a fairly lucrative (on-line) operation. But the sort of damage that does to the (Armidale) region for the foreseeable future is unconscionable”

The interesting part of this is that even Barber makes a distinction between students who are online and those that are enrolled in on-campus courses.

We all believe to a greater or lesser extent that students who come onto a campus are engaging in activities largely different from those who access the university only through their computers.

The problem is, the difference between online and on-campus is becoming increasingly blurred. On-campus students spend an increasing amount of time using their computers and accessing content through the Internet.

The amount of time a student might directly interact with lecturers and other teaching staff is usually defined as contact time and this averages around 3 to 4 hours a week. This means that the majority of their time that they are spending studying even as on-campus students is actually online.

At UWA, like other universities, our libraries are now being converted into studying spaces that are constantly full of students plugged into their computers. Even during the so-called contact hours, students are multitasking with their laptops open taking notes and checking other sources of information.

Proponents of on-campus university education will argue that students will also be engaging with each other on team work and projects and socialising. This is true, but they will like all young people, be simultaneously interacting with each other via social media and messaging.

Again, what was once limited by being physically co-located has now shifted to making where you are, far less important. Add to this the fact that a large number of students don’t now bother to actually come onto campus because they are working or find the effort of travel too much, the difference between online and on-campus narrows.

There are obviously things like laboratory work that can only currently happen in a physical setting on-campus. But even these are now being challenged as large class sizes and consolidation of teaching make them impractical to run anymore.

We usually do not acknowledge the fact that our students who are enrolled for on-campus courses will actually spend only a fraction of their time in that physical space and even then, the significance of it being a university campus will be simply the place they happened to be when they were online.

We usually care about how our physical spaces look and what amenities are available but never notice poor wireless networks frustrating students trying to work online or worry about the less than professional online content provided to them for use in their studies.

Jim Barber is right to worry about the threat that MOOCs pose. For our students, the online world is now second nature even if they themselves are not fully aware of it. Most would not readily admit to the relative amounts of time they spend learning online versus non-online.

The move to an education system that was driven by the use of MOOCs would not be that great a leap for them.

On the other hand, when academics assess the threat they compare the quality of online with what they falsely perceive to be a largely mythical on-campus experience.

That is not to say that being on-campus to do online courses is a bad thing. UWA for example has a beautiful campus with increasingly attractive learning spaces for students to do exactly that.


David Glance does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

MOOCs: Try, Try Again

What Is a MOOC? (Photo credit: giulia.forsythe)

by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/18/stanford-u-mooc-instructors-trial-and-error-breeds-success

Third time isn’t necessarily the charm for massive open online course instructors, but through a process of trial and error, some faculty members at Stanford University say their MOOCs are living up to (some of) the potential promised two years ago.

As many instructors are finding out, teaching a MOOC is not that different from teaching a face-to-face course - at least the kind where you stand in front of a large auditorium, said Scott Klemmer, associate professor of cognitive science and computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego.

And since MOOCs have for more than a year commanded such a large part of the conversation about online education in general, instructors can more easily see what other instructors are experimenting with, he said.

“As we run these classes multiple times, a major question is: What is the role of the instructor?” said Klemmer, who is also a visiting associate professor of computer science at Stanford. 

“When you run it for the 10th time, how do you have it so you can be involved in the class at the level you want without you feeling like ‘Groundhog Day,’ where you’re doing the same thing over and over again?”

Keith Devlin, a Stanford researcher who is spending a semester as a visiting professor of mathematics at Princeton University, recently launched the fourth iteration of his Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC. 

He said the number of students who persist through the first and second weeks has grown with every new version of the course. He declined to provide any numbers, since enrollment varies between the fall and spring semesters, but said the results mean he has finally reached a point where he has moved from “crude-tuning to fine-tuning.”

Yet through those four versions, Devlin said, the course’s content has remained more or less constant. Some of the lectures have been tweaked or edited, but the structure of the MOOC and the experience of taking it have become “radically different.” 

Devlin said he was inspired by massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as “World of Warcraft,” which have enthralled millions of players - himself included - to the point where they grind through repetitious tasks on the road to a reward.

“I’ve played hours of ‘World of Warcraft’ - in part because I saw [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] as a vehicle for education,” Devlin said. 

“They’ve made it virtually impossible to get the cool stuff unless you enter into at least temporary collaborations. MOOCs offer the opportunity to do the same thing - not in the fictional world of Azeroth - but in the real world of Stanford courses.”

The success of MMORPGs, Devlin said, is that they have managed to simultaneously be massive while encouraging players to form smaller social groups, or guilds. “It’s about communities, and so all of the changes I’ve been making have been about putting students in  a position where they feel comfortable in forming communities,” he said.

Right now, those groups form manually through the discussion forum, and, Devlin acknowledged, the most successful groups are often those where members meet in real life on a regular basis. 

He said he is exploring web-based tools that, in a future iteration of the MOOC, could pair students with like-minded study partners.

The most significant change, however, “is that the course is now explicitly about participation, not about getting a good grade at the end,” Devlin said. 

He has stopped short of giving students points for a task such as posting on the forum, saying he wants students to appreciate the rush of solving problems that at first glance seemed impossible. “What I’m looking for is intrinsic rewards,” he said.

Devlin said he has also changed what it means to complete his MOOC. To earn a certificate of completion in one of the previous versions, students had to score 60 percent or higher on a final exam. 

Now, students who are consuming the lecture materials and interacting with their peers can still experience “valuable learning, even if they haven’t solved a single math problem,” he said. 

After the standard eight weeks, students are also invited to join a two-week “Test Flight” program, which challenges them to apply the “mathematically-based thinking skills” they have learned in the course to math itself.

Completing the “Test Flight” program awards an additional certificate, and Devlin also provides students who want to show how they performed in the course with a certificate showing which percentile they tested into. “If they get that piece of paper, that’s legitimate, that means something, and it’s up to them if they want to show it,” he said.

Despite his progress, Devlin still said he will continue to fine-tune his MOOC through several more iterations. “It’s just barely getting off the ground,” he said. “Where it’s going, none of us that are involved know.”

Klemmer recently finished the fourth session of his Human-Computer Interaction MOOC, and he compared his revision process to that of an automaker’s, with each new version bringing a round of tweaks and improvements. “Once or twice a decade, you will jump to a different point in the design phase,” he said.

Many of the major additional features in Klemmer's MOOC - including a community teaching assistant, a LinkedIn group for former students and the curation of a forum post of the day - were added in time for the second round. 

If one of the students in the original MOOC were to re-enroll, they would likely experience a more polished course, see some new assignments along the way and feel less burdened by deadlines, but essentially, "The class uses the same basic format and strategy as when I first offered it in the spring of 2012," he said.

They would also sit through the same video lectures, which Klemmer highlighted as one of the failures of how MOOCs are delivered.

"If you want to change the text for an assignment, it’s really easy," Klemmer said. "But if you want to change a video - even by one sentence - it’s a huge amount of work." 

Since MOOC providers were able to build the automatic evaluation and peer assessment systems required to teach a MOOC, Klemmer said he expects developers will focus on video editing tools next.

"I think the reason MOOCs came out of computer science is that we had the ability to build the tools to do the things that we need," Klemmer said. "I think there are big opportunities for rethinking from first principles what the interactive experience is like."

Social Sciences Research is Riding High, But is it MOOC-Proofed?

Iconic image for social science (Wikipedia)

by Patrick Dunleavy, Impact of Social Sciences: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/30/social-sciences-research-is-riding-high-mooc/

With four fifths of economic value-added found in services, the UK is now primarily a service economy.

This is great news for social science disciplines who have demonstrated a strong influence in these industries. 

Whilst there are glimpses of optimism, argues Patrick Dunleavy, vulnerabilities still remain. 

Given that only one in nine of the 30,000 social science researchers work in research-only jobs (compared to one in three in STEM disciplines), the social sciences must respond to the advent of digital disruption in more dynamic ways.

This piece originally appeared on The Conversation and is reposted below under CC BY-ND.

The social sciences can now be seen as substantial UK industry, worth £23.4bn a year in broad economic terms according to my research.

But subjects such as politics, economics, business, law and sociology are not being given due recognition for their contribution to the UK’s service economy and labour market. The direct spend on university social science comprises just above a tenth of this total, coming out at £2.7bn a year.

But we need to also look at the indirect economic benefits of social science departments procuring goods and services, and at the multiplier effects of social scientists’ wages on the rest of the economy.

As new research for a book, The Impact of the Social Sciences shows, these increase the total contribution to the economy of university social science to £4.8bn a year.

And new analysis by the Times Higher Education also shows that social science student numbers, and hence staff numbers have been growing consistently.

The remaining £19.4bn a year of impact is comprised of spending by firms, government and public sector agencies, non-governmental organisations and the media who employ some 380,000 post-graduate qualified social scientists in professional and analysis occupations.

Because of limitations in the labour force statistics, we can only get a conservative view of how much these other organisations are spending on translating and mediating social science research.

Translators of social science. Cambridge Econometrics, for LSE Impacts Project. Numbers rounded

The two biggest groups are nearly 180,000 professionals in government and public services (costing £8.7bn a year); and 170,000 analysts and research translators in finance institutions and the banking industry (costing £9.8bn a year).

Our research also identified 40,000 professionals working in the consultancy industry (costing £1bn a year, half of which goes in helping the public sector).

Previous research on the careers of social science graduates found that 3.5 years after graduation, 84% were in employment, compared to 78% of science graduates.

STEMming the flow

Two basic factors underlie the booming social sciences sector. First, the UK is essentially a services-based economy. Four fifths of economic value-added is now in services.

Social science disciplines connect closely with services industries in many different dimensions, while most of the efforts from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in the UK are still trying to focus on a shrinking UK manufacturing base.

Some STEM research plays a key role in “productising” forms of services, such as websites which allow users to book flights without relying on travel agents, or devices that let people check their blood pressure at home without needing health professionals.

But even here, social science knowledge is key in finding what does or does not work (for example, what types of people can or can’t reliably check their own blood pressure).

Second, we live now on a globalising and intensively investigated planet, where human-dominated systems (such as cities, markets, states, physical and digital networks) increasingly constitute the focus of many concerns.

In studying these systems, social scientists are converging with the most applied STEM disciplines - especially medicine and health sciences, IT and software engineering.

Equally important has been the rising importance of social science in studying “human-influenced systems”, a broad category that now includes virtually all other processes across the globe. With rising human populations, almost everything earth-bound is now human-influenced.

Think, for instance, of how even global climatic systems are responding to fossil fuel emissions, and of how closely any mitigation efforts depend on understanding social, political and economic dynamics.

The old polarisation of social science versus STEM disciplines is withering away fast. This change has accelerated recently as the social sciences in the digital era also incorporate and adapt key STEM science methods - such as analysing big data, using more randomised control trials and experiments, and more systematic review.

Estimated value of research grants and contracts to UK universities in 2010-11 Impact of the Social Sciences

Yet there is still a key potential vulnerability. Both government and private sector and charity funding of research are still heavily skewed towards STEM sciences, which receive four-fifths of research funding, according to our research.

The UK government has been in the grip of dated “techno-nationalist” misconceptions of the sources of economic progress. And the UK private sector focuses often on short-term “bottom-line” factors and things that give an individual comparative advantage to firms.

This is not an area where social science (with its collective-research progress mode) can offer “discovery” breakthroughs or patentable advances. As a result, the social sciences get just over a sixth of the amount of total research funding that goes into STEM.

Generous, secured funding means that over a third of the 67,000 STEM sciences researchers in the UK work in research-only jobs, where they can focus their whole energies and activity on advancing knowledge.

By contrast only one in nine of the 30,000 social science researchers has a research-only job - the huge majority must combine research and teaching.

MOOCs are not the end

Some pessimistic observers have argued that the advent of massively open online courses (MOOCs) could begin to heavily erode the numbers of people involved in university teaching over the next decade.

If this happened, it could hit STEM disciplines hard, where 65% of researchers also teach, but social sciences harder - because 89% of their researchers and departments rely on teaching for their basic incomes.

Yet the significance of MOOCs remains uncertain. Any MOOC effect is likely to be complex, focusing mainly at the sub-university level, likely to produce an upgrading of university start levels, and to actually result in more research-focused undergraduate learning than in the past.

Fundamentally, MOOC doom-merchants are operating with a non-dynamic model of what society needs and gets from education and research.

If we can begin to do simple things more cheaply and more quickly - for instance, draw demand and supply curves, or appreciate the difference between a mean and a mode - we will move on very fast to try and do vastly more complex things, which we hitherto accepted as beyond our control.

That has been the number one lesson of the digital era, and it will continue to be true whatever the scale of MOOCs’ effects. In the contemporary development of human-dominated and human-influenced systems, the social sciences have a secure and increasingly salient role.

LSE Public Policy Group, which Patrick Dunleavy chairs, received funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for the research reported here.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

About the Author

Patrick Dunleavy is Co-Director of Democratic Audit, Chair of the LSE Public Policy Group, and a Professor of Political Science at the LSE.

No Room for Sloppiness in Online Classroom

Online Learning (Wikipedia)

by Mike Sharples, The Open University

When your classroom is a global one, filled with well-informed online learners, they don’t cut you much slack.

Hundreds of people pore over every element of your course, making well-informed and sometime acerbic comments.

Academics who run Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are finding that they can’t afford any sloppy reasoning, one-sided arguments, or narrow perspectives when teaching to a massive global audience.

As academic lead at FutureLearn, a company offering free online courses from UK universities, I’ve seen that this instant feedback can be eye-opening for course designers.

On a university campus, students stick around even though the teaching may be dreadful, because they need the degree qualification. In MOOCs they leave as soon as they lose interest.

So far, much of the debate in the United States about MOOCs has focused on the dropout rate. Typically, just 7-10% of students enrolled on a course from a US MOOC provider reach the end.

But that assumes completion should be the goal of online learning, and that students who drop out early are failures. Much of the early publicity around free online courses focused on them as alternatives to an expensive campus university education.

It’s hardly surprising that the simplest measure of failure, student dropout, has been picked up by commentators hoping to burst the MOOC bubble.

It’s now time to move on. The university system, which has seen plenty of social and technological change since medieval times not least the introduction of mass printing, is not going to crumble in the face of free online courses underpinned by questionable business models.

Instead, something more interesting is happening. In 2009, the US Department of Education published an important study.

It reviewed over a thousand evaluations of online learning and found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. And, on average, those students who had a blend of campus and online teaching performed even better.

This lies at the heart of the new debate about online learning and MOOCs: how can we match online learning with classroom teaching, to create more relevant, engaging and effective education?

One way to do that is by extending traditional teaching online. Many universities are now recording lectures and making them available to watch later.

Instead of just attending a lecture, making a few notes, then putting these aside till exam time, students are engaging in online learning outside of class, by reviewing the lecture and joining with other students in online assignments.

The other approach is through MOOCs. Because these are free and available worldwide (MOOCs are currently even available in China, a country that has blocked social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook), it isn’t surprising that they have attracted a wide range of learners.

Most are motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn, rather than the need to gain a qualification. Some register to find out more about MOOCs in general, some only want a taste of the topic being taught, some skim through the material to gain an overview of the subject, and some engage fully with the teaching and with fellow students.

MOOCs will almost certainly not replace university campuses within our lifetimes. But they are finding a much-needed niche, with universities using free courses as a way to attract students onto postgraduate courses or to prepare students for undergraduate degrees.

They are discovering how online learning can blend with traditional teaching. It’s not surprising that companies and public sector organisations are now looking to get in on the act of merging online and classroom teaching. It’s the participation that matters, not the dropout.

Mike Sharples has a secondment to the FutureLearn company as Academic Lead.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Can MOOCs and Open Badges Provide an Alternative to the So-Called ‘Inflation of Educational Credentials’?

Credential Collection (Photo credit: Dave Malkoff)

by Cristóbal Cobo, Impact of Social Sciences: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/16/moocs-open-badges-inflation-of-educational-credentialism/

Cristóbal Cobo (@cristobalcobo) is a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. 

He coordinates research on open knowledge initiatives, emergent learning practices and almetrics. Cristóbal is an active promoter of open access. Further information: blogs, presentations, talks.

Learning takes place in a variety of settings as an ongoing process of skills and knowledge development in changing contexts. 

With the growing popularity of technology-enhanced learning initiatives, Cristóbal Cobo makes the case for more flexible methods for skills and knowledge recognition. 

The challenge is to create more versatile ways of recognizing uncertified forms of learning - both for formal qualifications of informal learning as well as wider social recognition of uncertified knowledge.

Drawing on comparative and historical analyses of education, sociologist Randall Collins argues, “The expansion of education can contribute, under certain conditions, to the aggregate economic well-being of the population” (2000, p.237).

It’s hard to disagree with that statement, but as always - the devil is in the details and those details refer to ongoing, rapidly changing conditions.

Take for instance, the credentialization of knowledge. Between the 14^th and 17^th centuries universities faced extreme bureaucratization. Collins highlights how this circumstance created a “credential inflation”, which affected the trustworthiness of universities at the time:

There have been several episodes of expansion of universities [in Europe], with accompanying formalization of examinations sequences, interspersed with periods when the demand for education collapsed in favour of informal alternatives to schooling (…). Between 1300 and 1500 half of all university foundations were failures. The market for educational credentials was expanding explosively, but at the same time such credentials were flooding the market, raising risk of failure and losing its former prestige (…). By the Enlightenment period of the 1700s, in the eyes of self-conscious progressive intellectuals and educators all over Europe, the university system was a medieval anachronism best left to die on the vine (…) (2000:229–232).

The so-called “inflation of educational credentials” also came after the rapid European expansion of higher education around 1970.

The inflation of educational credentials differs from inflation of a monetary currency; printing more money is relatively cheap, but minting new degree-holding persons requires a huge apparatus of teachers, administrators, testers, buildings, etc.

While monetary inflation reduces the value of currency, credential inflation reduces the value of the college degree. Because so many people have it and/or are getting it, the degree qua degree is giving up its scarcity, and thus its relative value.

There is no sign whatsoever that runaway credential inflations is about to slow down anytime soon. The next couple of decades are likely to demand an increasing credentialization expected to escalate still further (Collins, 2000 and Scanzoni, 2005).

Trow (as early as 1974) with visionary clarity foresaw that higher education was going to face a process of expansion and massification.

He described after World War II only the elite had access to education (0-15% of population), later a larger portion (16-50%), subsequently, with information technologies becoming a vehicle for universal access he predicted a “universal higher education” (with more than 50% of the population).

Though, as a large number of authors pointed out (Nonaka, Polanyi, Wenger, Benett, Freire, among others) learning does not only take place in formal settings.

The claim for lifelong learning should not be understood as hanging around at University forever but “learning to learn” as an ongoing process of skills and knowledge development in changing contexts.
Colardyn and Bjornavold, (2004) explained that validation of non-formal and informal learning become a key aspect. Lifelong learning requires that learning outcomes from different settings and contexts can be linked together.

“As long as learning, skills and competences acquired outside formal education and training remain invisible and poorly valued the ambition of lifelong learning cannot be achieved,” they added.

Nowadays, we are living times where (almost) everyone seems to be dazzled by  flashy style of technology-enhanced learning initiatives, such as Coursera, Udacity or Edx (now with “local” players in Germany or Brazil) but also Khan Academy, TED-Ed and a growing number of lifelong learning initiatives (see the Edupunks’ Guide).

Instead of an over-bureaucratization of these learning initiatives (some more promising than others), and as Colardyn and Bjornavold proposed, more flexible methods for skills and knowledge recognition are required (i.e. signature track, skills passports, competency based credentials, independent examiners, portfolios, open badges, etc.).

Image Source http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/EN/Files/3048_en.pdf

As the illustration shows the challenge is to create more versatile forms of recognizing (and making visible) uncertified forms of learning (informal or non-formal).

It is understandable that this flexibility might not be applicable to all the activities and professions (I wouldn’t want to fly with a DIY pilot, for instance).

However, there is still a lack of research exploring the extent to which these more flexible models of certification are acknowledged by employers.

Interestingly, the recent report published by Department for Business, Innovation and Skills: The Maturing of the MOOC (pdf) suggest that concerning MOOCs, “In the UK environment, the accreditation issue is not as pressing” (p.79) but this lack of interest is not applicable in all contexts.

There is much to explore in this area:

• Formal qualification of informal learning: In 2013 Coursera started offering ‘signature track’ services to earn a verified certificate. In other words, a soft certification validated by identity verification (proof of ID and unique typing pattern) as well as sharable course records (with employers as previously done with Yahoo!, for instance). Now, Coursera has gone further widening the field providing “official” verifiable electronic certificate by offering more academically rigorous credit-bearing versions (which include a fee). Here, the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service has evaluated and recommended and accredit some of the non-traditional courses offered by Coursera.

• Social (peers-based) recognition of uncertified knowledge: A badge is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, competency, or interest. The Mozilla Foundation has promoted the adoption of online Open Badges (likewise DIY.org) that can be used to represent online and offline achievements, communicate successes, and set goals. These Open Badges can support learning that happens beyond traditional classrooms (today particularly relevant for promoting Computer Science’s skills in UK schools). Badges can illustrate a wide set of achievements providing evidence that be shown in the “places” (or spaces) that matter. Similarly, LinkedIn invites users to endorse people’s skills.

The cases suggest different equivalencies and currencies: while US ACE CREDIT College Credit is providing formal accreditation, the Open Badges initiative is promoting a greater social awareness and recognition of skills.

However, the bottom line is that conditions have changed (i.e. progressive mobility worldwide, as well as the increasing need for recognition of migrants’ qualifications).

While some authors warn about the risky “inflation of educational credentials” others go even further claiming that “The university has already lost any claim to monopoly over the provision of higher education” (Duke, 1999).

The initiatives described here are still in an embryonic stage but at the same time are promising in terms of new possibilities for more flexible tools and, as @daveowhite suggests, they provide new currencies that can redesigning the economy of talent (find more in UNESCO UIL or the EU ESCO).

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics. 

The Failure of Udacity: Lessons on Quality for Future MOOCs

Associate Professor Sebastian Thrun (Wikipedia)

by Jason Lodge, Griffith University

The promise was simple, but the idea couldn’t have been bigger.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) would make courses from Harvard and MIT available free to anyone with an internet connection.

The world’s poor would finally have access to the same education as American ivy league students, while traditional fee paying higher education would go the way of relics like CDs and sailing ships.

Massive open online education provider Udacity was one of those promising such change.

In the past, Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun claimed MOOCs would spell the end of the conventional higher education model and transform access to knowledge.

Despite the big promises, retention rates in Udacity courses have been abysmal and those that did make it through were already those with bachelor degrees.

Now Udacity has decided to charge money for their certified courses, leaving behind their claims of free quality higher education for all. As leading technology-enhanced learning expert George Siemens described it:

[Thrun] promised us a bright future of open learning. He delivered to us something along the lines of a 1990s corporate e-learning program.

Even Thrun himself has now admitted that Udacity is “a lousy product”. So where did it all go wrong for Thrun and Udacity? And why, when it comes to online education, did we ignore education experts, and listen to Silicon Valley instead?

A cheaper, faster education

Ultimately, the outcome of higher learning cannot be made cheaper and faster any more than you can expect to improve physical fitness if you cut corners at the gym.

While there are myriad products and services claiming a fast, cheap route to fitness, nothing is as effective as time and/or intensity pumping iron or going on the treadmill.

Similarly, if students don’t put in the right kind of work, with the right guidance and expend sufficient cognitive effort, they will not see results.

The fundamental understanding of quality online learning in higher education was mostly lost or ignored in the MOOC hype. Unlike the invention of online music stores or the steam-powered ship, the journey is just as important as the destination when it comes to learning.

The ultimate aim of higher (as opposed to vocational) education is to transform student thinking and ways of being. Getting there faster and cheaper short-changes everyone.

If we cannot give graduates the solid critical and creative thinking skills they need, they will be ill-equipped to deal with the immensely complex economic, social and environmental problems we face in the coming decades.

Where was the research?

An extensive history of research in education and the learning sciences tells us about the best ways of learning and teaching. Yet the voices of the thousands of eminent scholars in these fields have been largely drowned out.

Instead economists and innovation gurus like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and technology advocates like Thrun have dominated the online education headlines.

Despite the enthusiasm of MOOC advocates, the quality of the learning experience in many (but by no means all) MOOCs is dubious.

Watching videos of lectures and answering multiple-choice questions is hardly cutting edge pedagogy. But despite this, these kinds of MOOCs have been allowed to flourish with great fanfare.

The reason we have found ourselves here is partly due to the paradigm shift that seems to be occurring in education. There is growing tension between the science of learning and the art of teaching.

While practice-based and theoretical understanding of teaching have thrived and become the dominant paradigms in educational research, the learning sciences, such as psychological science, are increasingly encroaching on the classroom after being virtually absent for decades.

When medicine went through a similar paradigm shift, we saw merchants selling snake oil. Now in this new education shift, we’re seeing such dubious innovations as “brain training”.

The uncertainty around the best form of evidence for educational innovation is allowing pre-packaged solutions to education problems to prosper with little evidence to support their effectiveness.

Lessons for Udacity

The key to providing quality higher education in the digital age lies somewhere in between the technology devotees, educational researchers, teachers, developers and learning scientists.

Sound, evidence-based innovation is not to be found in the provocations of the likes of Thrun or Christensen alone. The business model does not operate in isolation from the quality of the service.

It would appear that despite their exceptional expertise in their disciplines, few of the loudest voices touting MOOCs are qualified or experienced in learning theory or educational technology.

This includes Thrun and Christensen, who have no formal qualifications in education or the learning sciences.

A quest to innovate higher education resting solely on reducing time and cost dismisses the required cognitive effort and support needed to transform students’ fundamental thinking patterns.

To develop the knowledge and skills to function effectively as a professional or scientist requires quality guidance, time and genuine effort.

Attempting to disrupt higher education in a way that undermines any of these factors is to devalue what it means to have a “higher” education.

There are good reasons why quality higher education costs as much as it does; a lesson that Udacity seems to be learning only now.

Jason Lodge does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Psychology: Free Courses

Open Minds: An Exhibit of Psychology Department Faculty Publications Exhibit (Photo credit: W&M Swem Library)

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