I work in eLearning at a university and MOOCs are flavour of the month at the moment, so this seemed like a good opportunity to do a little semi-formal studying on the subject and experience a MOOC at the same time.

I have a bit of history in this area. I’ve been working in eLearning for about ten years now and completed the MA in Online and Distance Education with the OU about three years ago – H817 Open Education was not an option at the time so, again, this is an opportune moment to update my learning in a familiar environment.

I’ve also been a long-time advocate of openness, especially in education. This interest stemmed from my use and advocacy of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and the belief that the theories underpinning FOSS could be transferred to education.

That’s me in a nutshell, but I’m sure I’ll reveal more about myself in future blogs.

He says that understanding is socially constructed and these new Social Networks, including blogs and wikis, encourage people to form communities of practitioners and thus extend the reach of instructors and education. For this to happen there needs to be a major retraining of teachers for e?learning to work. Mentoring, rather than teaching, needs to be brought into the process and there should be a merging of the teacher/learner distinction. Sfard (1998) might point out that Seely Brown adopts the Participation Metaphor (PM) and neglects the Acquisition Metaphor (AM), with AM being knowledge as commodity and PM being learning as activity. Social media falls very much into the PM style of learning where the acquisition of knowledge is based on the the act of becoming a participant. Sfard importantly points out, with reference to the “learning paradox” that learning cannot take place solely through adherence to he Participation Metaphor as it cannot account for the transmission of knowledge and can lead to a gradual disappearance of a well defined subject matter. Use of the Acquisition Metaphor style of teaching and learning is necessary. Sfard describes them as differing perspectives rather than competing opinions. Seely Brown does hint though that the role of the mentor is a subtle balancing act: shaping and directing learning, especially at the outset, but recognising the need to abandon that role and join the developing community and participate in the knowledge creation. This idea corresponds with Wenger (1998) who identified two key elements in the creation of a community of practice: participation and reification. Participation merely involves the engagement of an individual with other members of the group as part of the process of creating meaning. Reification is the process of turning practice into a “thing”. This “thing” could take the form of anything but has to be practice that is formalised so it has some independent life.

Similarly, Weller (2007) says the Internet was constructed around three design principles: robustness, decentralization and openness. These design principles became social characteristics. E?learning would naturally follow the community norms of the Internet. The challenge for educators is how to accommodate this way of working, a way of working and communicating that is increasingly comfortable for a new generation of learners, into formal education.

Seely Brown cites Free and Open Source Software as an example of what he is talking about, describing it as a participatory learning platform – a form of distributed learning. In fact the leading blog and wiki software, WordPress and WikiMedia, are both Free and Open Source Software. Their source code is freely available to download to examine, learn from, modify and contribute back to the community. This idea of sharing and community building that blogs and wikis help to create is not a new idea. As a formal theory it can be traced back at least as far as Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (1902) where mutual aid is put forward as an evolutionary imperative, which more than corresponds to what Seely Brown is proposing about moving into a new kind of economy – a creator economy, and a new kind of culture – a culture of co-operation.

The most famous and ardent proponent of Free Software is Richard M. Stallman, who set out to create a free Unix-like operating system called GNU in 1983 (GNU stands for Gnu Not Unix) after restrictions were put on the sharing of software source code by software companies, and then founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. His motivation was not to be able to go on not paying for software but to be able to see the software code to help himself and others learn how to make better software.

Eric Raymond, in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999), examined the Free Software process of developing software through the sharing of code and co-operation. He described the process as bottom-up and likened it to a bazaar, and compared it to the top-down, closed, corporate model of software development which he liked to building a cathedral. The essay has proved very influential and was a contributing factor in Netscape making their internet browser “open source”, a phrase coined by Raymond to better describe the process of Free Software development. The Netscape browser eventually became the current Firefox browser, one of the most successful Free and Open Source Software projects.

The open sourcing of Netscape is examined in Glyn Moody’s Rebel Code (2001) which describes the evolution and significance of Free and Open Source Software and in particular the Linux operating system which started life as a student project released as Free and Open Source Software and has since gone on, with the help of numerous contributions by volunteer enthusiasts to become the operating system that now runs most of the Internet.

In 2009, BBC Radio Four broadcast the documentary “Inside the Virtual Anthill: Open Source Means Business”. As well as looking at how Free and Open Source Software rivals and excels more commercially developed software, the programme looks at how the ethos of sharing, co-operation and participation is spreading to other businesses. This is how things like blogs, wikis and e?learning in general should be deployed. As Seely Brown in particular advocates, education needs to change to embrace e?learning, and that means changing the way teaching and learning is approached: it needs to be about participation, community building and co-operative knowledge building, it needs to be Open Source.

Refernces

• Inside the Virtual Anthill: Open Source Means Business, (2009), BBC Radio 4, 1 June. (Accessed online 19th August 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/kp806/)
• Kropotkin, P. (1902) Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution. Reprint, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989.
• Moody, G. (2001) Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. London: Allen Lane: The Penguin Press
• Raymond, E. (1999) The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source from an Accidental Revolutionary. O’Reilly and Associates, Sebastapol, CA.
• Seely Brown, J. (2007) ‘Learning 2.0: New Modes of Learning and Scholarship’ – Open University’s Open Learn Conference, Milton Keynes, England, 31 October 2007
• Sfard, A. (1998) ‘On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one’, Educational Researcher, vol.27, no.2, pp.4–13.
• Wenger, E (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
• Weller, M. (2007), ‘The distance from isolation: Why communities are the logical conclusion in e-learning’, Computers & Education, No. 49, pp. 148–159.

Describe my solution

I want to provide a service that points people to online learning and resources, enables them to record their learning and then validate that learning.

I want to do this because I believe that access to knowledge and education should not be subject to one’s comparative wealth.

1 The problem

Tuition fees for higher education are rapidly increasing. Many people are asking if formal education is worth the cost and subsequent debt and are looking elsewhere for their education.

2 What causes the problem?

(To answer this question well, channel your inner four-year-old and ask a 5-question “why” chain: “Why is there a problem?” “Why is that the cause?” “Why is that the cause of the cause?” and so on.)

Lots of people want a higher education, a degree, but feel they can no longer afford it. Also, the benefits that a degree affords – a better job and standard of living – no longer materialise, so a degree is no longer worth the expense.

Higher education has always been the aspiration of ordinary people as a means to improve their log in life. For many years university tuition fees were state funded, making access independent of cost. Recently, fees have been introduced and have now increased to a prohibitive level.

Mass higher education, in the view of many, has become financially unsustainable by the public purse, i.e. taxpayers. When there is increased strain on the public purse, as there is in these times of economic recession, taxpayers and politicians are asking whether the cost of state funded higher education is acceptable.

3 Think about the people with the problem. What are they currently doing, or willing to do, to solve it?

The people with the problem are usually young people looking to start on their lives independently of their families. The current options they have are to: take out a student load for fees and maintenance, embark on-the-job training in the career they wish to pursue, work full time to fund a part-time degree (this option has become less attractive since the recent increase in student fees), rely on family money to subsidise their university career, or just not pursue a university education.

4 What are all the current solutions to the problem?

The only official solution, and the only one really viable, is to take out a student load to pay for tuition and maintenance. Of the options stated above, the only other viable option, and only open to the very few, is to rely on family money. On-the-job training in one of the professions is just not available, and working to pay for a part-time degree is no longer financially viable – degrees are just too expensive now.

Prospective students are looking at a £40k-£50k debt on leaving university. For many, the rewards of a university degree will not cover this debt.

 5 Why aren’t the current solutions good enough?

The current solutions are not good enough because they entail individuals having a massive debt that they will never be able to repay. This prospect is just too daunting for many people to consider.

 6 How long has it been a problem?

The problem has only been so acute since the current government introduced the new level of fees. However, the problem has been steadily growing for the past twenty years when nominal fees were first introduced. Many people opposed to fees have been predicting the current situation but their arguments have largely fallen on deaf ears as the majority don’t see the long term value of free at the point of use higher education.

 7 How easily could  something change to make the problem go away?

This is not a problem that will go away with a little change. The current format of higher education in this country – full-time, campus based, university higher education – does indeed cost a lot of money to sustain, especially if we want a high quality, highly trained workforce. Alternatives to this model are seen as inferior and second best, especially when the use of technology and the World Wide Web are seen at part of that alternative.

The problem will go away quickly if voters and governments are willing to pay for mass higher education through taxes. This is unlikely. The alternative to is to start the long process of changing attitudes, and centuries of prejudice  to prove that alternative methods of mass higher education are just as good if not better than the existing model.

I’m playing catch-up here, so please bear with me.

Having worked in the eLearning sector for more years than I care to remember, most of these Startups are variations on themes that have been discussed in my institution for some time.

The Clever Startup seems to be a technical solutions for back-end systems that has little interest for me.

Most of the other Startups are versions of delivery systems with their own particular take on how eLearning works. ClassDojo markets itself as a classroom management tool and seems to my mind something of an update of the Victorian schools’ monitorial system. CodeAcademy focused on the teaching and learning of coding and if very much and interactive platform. Coursera is one of the new breed of MOOCs, along with Udacity and edX for example, with close affiliations with established universities and with an approach to pedagogy based on hard research. Dreambox and Knewton have unique selling points based on their approach to individual adaptive learning. Similarly, Goalbook’s approach to eLearning is to focus on Individual Learning Plans. Instructure seems to market itself on its ease of use to teachers.

What most interested me though was Degreed. It struck me as and ePortfolio Plus with its tag-line of “Jailbreaking the degree” by validating lifelong learning whether it’s from an accredited institution like a university, or from non-accredited learning. I think its represents an attitude shift that is most definitely needed and will become increasingly necessary.

My idea of a Startup is quite woolly and vague. I hope to have a better idea about how to develop something more substantial by doing this course. However, a quick review of this list of startups has led me to believe that the Degreed approach is the only one that is substantially different and offers the most scope for future growth. The others seem to be, although well intentioned in themselves, normalised thinking and offer little that is new.

What I have in mind is something based on the methods of Free Software that have worked so well for developing and building knowledge in the software world. You’ve almost certainly used Free Software without even knowing. If you’ve used the Internet then you’ve used Free Software, that’s how ubiquitous it is.

What I hadn’t expected was the dearth of new thinking. I don’t mean to be rude about the Startup but there was very little there that I didn’t already know about. I think it’s a case of the research and theory being so far ahead of actual deployment.

It’s similar to the situation I face in my day job. I work in a research university and the research into eLearning that I deal with everyday is in far excess of how the University deploys eLearning on the front-line of teaching and learning.

I guess I was expecting to see something of an attitude shift from the norm of eLearning deployment.