Research Study: Self-regulated learning in massive open online courses

Massive Open Online Courses are still very new and it is important to conduct research to try to understand how they support different types of learning. At the Caledonian Academy, we are interested in Self-regulated learning outside formal learning contexts and we have designed a study, which aims to surface, describe and systematise the activities and strategies that adult learners use to self-regulate their learning in the context of the Change 2011 massive open online course (MOOC). Our interest is specifically in professionals’ actions – practices and strategies that they use to plan and attain their learning goals.

We are looking for volunteers to participate in this study. Anyone who has signed up for the Change11 MOOC is welcome to participate. Participation in the study will involve completion of an online questionnaire (in January/February 2012) and participation in a telephone or Skype interview (in or around March 2012).

Data collected will be accessible only by the research team at Glasgow Caledonian University (Professor Allison Littlejohn, Dr Anoush Margaryan and Dr Colin Milligan). All data will be anonymised prior to publication and participants will not be identified (or identifiable). Participants are free to withdraw from the study at any time.

If you would like to participate in the study, please enter your name and email on the page linked here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R2GK6W2. Alternatively, email me at colin.milligan@gcu.ac.uk, or tweet me @cdmilligan We will contact you in the new year with details about how to participate.

Further information on the research design: The study will examine how learners in Change 2011 MOOC plan, implement and reflect upon their learning goals, analysing similarities and differences in the use of SRL strategies between learners who are positioned on different points on the spectrum of SRL skills.  In identifying the SRL activities and strategies used by the participants, we are specifically interested in finding out how individuals draw upon available resources, such as other people and artefacts, to plan and attain their learning goals, and what tools do they use to do so. The study is guided by the following key research questions:

1. How do participants plan, implement and reflect upon their learning goals within Change MOOC?What strategies do they use to self-regulate their learning?What tools do they use to self-regulate their learning?
2. How do participants draw upon collective knowledge – people and other environmental resources – when planning, implementing and reflecting upon their learning goals within Change MOOC?
3. What are the environmental factors, in particular those related to the coherence of the information space and structure of the MOOC, that constrain or enable SRL?
4. What are the similarities and differences in the use of SRL strategies between learners who have diverse self-regulatory profiles? For example, do learners who score higher on self-regulatory skill measures use significantly different goal planning, implementation and reflection strategies than participants who score lower on the SRL measures?

Please sign up to participate in the study (here is the link again: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/R2GK6W2). If you have comments or questions about the study, please email me at colin.milligan@gcu.ac.uk or leave a comment below.

Even more on MOOCs. Am I obsessed?

Here’s an old post (written in December 2010) I found which seems not to have been published. I don’t know why

In my first post on MOOCs I ended up hinting at a link between our concept of Charting and MOOCs. This was probably as far as I was going to go on that front, but then this morning I saw a post by Tony Hirst about MOOCs which included a link to this video by David Cormier. The image at 3:13 of this animation is so relevant to our own thinking about collective knowledge management that I decided to dust off the blog again …

Social Artists … ends up being about mooc design #change11 #socialartist

Finally caught up with the MOOC. Well not quite: I didn’t catch Nancy White’s presentation live, but looked at it, and the DTLT event as recordings. Nancy‘s presentation was hyper-interactive, with dozens of participants contributing via the whiteboard (usually all at once) … as such it was a bit frustrating to follow as a recording. later in the day she joined a smaller group for the DTLT chat, and it was this conversation that I found most stimulating (particularly the first 15 minutes on social artists, though the discussion of visual communication and sketchnoting was interesting on a different level) .

The start point for the chat was the idea of the social artist (a concept from etienne wenger) as someone who brings learners together, understands the commonality they may have and therefore facilitates learning (although interesting, not much was said about the complementary concepts of the transversal, who understands the inherent structure of an organisation/network and can therefore get things done and the social reporter, who has a formal role of spreading ideas within an organisation/network (my paraphrased definitions)).

I was sitting thinking about the ideas of a social artist (and how they might apply in different educational contexts) when I was stirred from my thoughts by a comment from Tim Owens which resonated (I think he said it came, in turn, from Jim Groom as part of ds106) that highlighted the importance of commenting on other people’s blogs as a way of stimulating ideas (a behaviour of a social artist).

I noted something similar in one of my Week 4 summary posts – that I am a great believer in commenting on other people’s posts rather than starting my own. In this way we build on each other’s work, rather than restarting anew. It also leaves an idea in its original context, rather than wresting it away to a new location.

Anyway, while I was sidetracked by this thought, the conversation moved on and I was stirred by a  second comment, this time from Zach Dowell, who was discussing the change mooc saying that it  ’feels like a network I am not part of‘. This is an understandable sentiment, and one which I can recognise from my (non-)participation in previous moocs.  Moocs can be daunting, especially if you aren’t in from the start as the course does quickly gain an identity/tempo which can be hard to align yourself to (think of it like a juggernaut, as an individual, you are not going to be able to re-direct it). I think the preparatory material created by the organisers this year certainly helped me reflect on my expectations and consequently I feel I have managed to stay engaged throughout the event so far. I’ve not worried when I fell behind, not tried to read everything, not even worried with carrying out the tasks suggested by the facilitators. Instead, I set my own personal goals, and have focused on engaging and responding to each of the topics presented. From this perspective, I have managed to engage with others (comments on blog posts) and move forward my own thinking (making semi-coherent blog posts on topics I haven’t focused on specifically for years). By not worrying whether I am part of the network, I think I have become ‘part of the network’.  I feel I am achieving something.

In the past, I have said that if I were running a mooc, I would put a lot of effort into the initial establishment of learning communities (no, I’m not trying to over-formalise the course here) as I think peers become key to learning when some of the other sources of extrinsic motivation (synchronous/f2f courses, accreditation at the end) are missing. Two ideas I would consider are (i) to get people to explicitly articulate their learning goals and then group (or develop a tool to allow individuals to discover) others with similar goals (ii) to find ways to connect people together during the asynchronous parts f the course (e.g. have a live chat window below a recorded elluminate session to allow me to connect with others who are listening to the same recording at the same time as me). Thinking about the concept of the social artist discussed today, I wonder whether these ideas are mechanisms whereby technology plays the role of the social artist, creating a locus for learning (like the comments section of a blog post) and bringing learners together.

 

More OER #change11

Last week in the Mooc, Rory McGreal returned to the topic of Open Educational Resources again, in his capacity as UNESCO/COL Chair in Open Educational Resources. Like David Wiley, he is an advocate of OER and has been involved in the development of OER guidelines for Higher education which will be available from his blog at https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/blog/owner/rory from around now.

Rory’s week focused on the tension between the economic value of OER to public institutions and the rise of DRM amid the proliferation of consumption devices afforded by m-learning.  A particular concern, which I share, is the way in which content providers and device manufacturers collude to effectively cripple devices and applications to disallow highlighting, copying/pasting/remixing which are fundamental actions of deep learning.

One example of this from a few years ago is the DIDET project (http://www.didet.ac.uk/ I always quote form this fantastic project because it was such a great idea, and surfaced so many issues). In DIDET, design engineering students were encouraged to bring together design ideas, as a precursor to designing a product (e.g. a can crusher). Content was collected through wiki pages, but copyright issues got in the way of the learning – if the same task were being delivered without technology, then the students would have collected old magazines together and cut out relevant pictures, yet copyright effectively disallows this online (if your institution wants to play safe and stay on the right side of the copyright minefield).

I think OER is a good example of where we need internationally organised policy guidelines to allow relevant bodies at a national level to lobby individual governments to promote open sharing and prevent copyright laws which over-protect IPR in educational settings.

Technology and Learning: #change11

On to Tony Bates’ week at the Change MOOC — almost catching up! Tony’s topic is ‘Managing Technology to Transform Teaching’ It’s not really an area that concerns me much now that I am working more explicitly as a researcher of workplace and informal learning. But I have worked for many years in HE contexts (and am married to someone who runs an institutional  LMS service) so I have thought in detail about many of the issues covered over the years. When I started to think about what to write for this week, I remembered that I had a half-written blogpost that would fit the bill, so here goes with that post, updated (but still with some unfinished ideas as I wanted to concentrate on writing the new blog post in a reasonable timeframe).

The university where I work is undergoing restructuring – like many in the sector –  and the changes afoot call into question the nature of the relationship between learning and teaching research and development and support units, and the University as a whole.

I’ve worked in and around L&T research and development  and support for over 15 years (mostly across institutions, with far less time working at institutional level). Much of that time has been spent focusing on technology enhanced learning (virtual and personal learning environments, simulations, computer mediated distance learning, reuse of learning materials), though I’ve also spent considerable time thinking about assessment, personal development and employability, learning design, research and teaching linkages and graduate attributes, independent learning etc.

This post began as an attempt to think through some of the lessons I have learned in that time. This then provided a catalyst for thinking about the current challenge of continuing to underpin core university functions and needs with modest resources.

Lessons Learned (there are many, but I got sidetracked having come up with two, so shall save some of the other ones for a separate post)

• enhancing the learning experience is an insufficient driver to justify innovation. It took me a long time to learn this lesson: it is a very noble goal to want to make the learning experience better.  For years I worked on a set of tools for developing simulations which could be used to explain complex numerical models (flow of water through pipes, current in an electric circuit. The tools were undoubtedly innovative, and there was clear published evidence for the pedagogic benefit of simulations. But we always struggled to convince the teachers to really embrace these tools for teaching. At the time, we always put it down to the relatively steep learning curve to using the tools effectively, and I have even been known to speculate that the tools were too sophisticated, and the teachers unable to come up with activity designs which could benefit from using the tools. Looking back though – it was simple – for the most part, the teachers teaching the difficult concepts which might have benefited from using our tools had already worked out how to teach them – their methods may not have been innovative, but they worked – students came to classes, the teachers taught as they had taught for years (no redesign of course needed) and most of the students passed the exams at the end.
• technology is a barrier to innovation. During my time as an educational developer, the relentless arrival of new technologies enabled the continual reinvention of the challenge of how technology can enhance the learning experience’. This was especially true in funding regimes (e.g. the successive generations of tools to facilitate sharing of educational resources, or the quest for an adaptive learning environment.)

(and the blog post initially tailed off here as I realised it had grown into something quite big and didn’t really fit as a blog post). I had some sketchy notes for ‘solutions’, or positions and practices which educational developers should adopt. Without elaborating, here are the ideas I’d had:

Suggestions

• understand stakeholders and their motivations (academic staff, senior management, quality).
• articulate the role of L&T units – for example agreeing a definition of innovation.
• understand drivers (short and long term, map drivers to stakeholders)(assessment load, competitiveness, )
• understand apparent drivers which do not translate into sustained change (innovation, external and long term trends)
• understand barriers (inherent disciplinary practices and beliefs (theory practice gap in nursing, Bernsteins conformance and framing characters of different disciplines influencing when different types of intervention/teaching approach are appropriate), professional bodies specifying curriculum in nursing etc.)
• focus effort (complement others trying to do the same thing)
• concentrate effort where we can make a difference (induction – setting expectations, assessment, providing a relevant (authentic) learning experience)
• set an example (active learning, academic credibility, transparent goals and simple strategy)
• L&T units should be carefully integrated with other components of the university – disciplines, regulation (quality) (recognise that the motivations of different stakeholders may be at odds and that resolving tensions is important)

One of the tasks for this week of change11 was to read the executive summary of the book (http://www.batesandsangra.ca/2011/03/executive-summary/). This summarises a set of recommendations under a number of headings (and my summary of the recommendations in brackets following each):

• Institutional planning and Strategy (prioritise and reward innovation, set long term goals to exploit technology (e.g. flexible and cost efficient access, personalised learning, authentic learning, digital literacies)
• Leadership (leaders should communicate importance of technology in transforming T&L, clear governance for technology decision-making and policies)
• Planning at programme level (encourage clear vision of how programs will use technology to enhance provision)
• Organisational structures (high level technology committee to set strategic goals and prorities. formalise links between l&T support and disciplines.)
• Quality Assurance and Evaluation (use equivalent procedures to assure quality of f2f, online and blended programs)
• Financial management (don’t just add technology to old-processes, understand the relationship between teaching model and cost of delivery to allow best options to be determined)
• Organisational culture and barriers to change (formalise teaching skills as a baseline upon which teaching with technology can build, educate senior officers across the organisation to be cognisant with technology issues and expertise, investment in technology to support innovation in teaching will be wasted if innovation isn’t incentivised properly).
• Roles for government (govt should provide strategic leadership, use funding to drive innovation)

I think there is much overlap between bates’ recommendations and the suggestions I had come up with in my original post. Clearly, we were thinking at different levels, but  the commonalities are there – reward innovation, take a strategic view (including quality, curriculum design etc.), think broader than disciplines to reflect the world beyond academia.

Reusability Paradox etc. change11

I’m falling seriously behind with the change mooc for  a number of reasons. Whilst I am mindful that i shall get most out of the course if I follow in real-time, I dont want to just skip the few weeks that fell by the wayside, especially as they touch on topics close to my own heart.

A few weeks ago, David Wiley led a week on open learning. I didn’t manage to attend his sync session, but read his position paper, which related ideas which I have followed over the last decade or so. For almost half of that time, I was  involved in working on various JISC projects related to open learning, specifically the reload project which looked at standardisation of packaging and description of Learning Objects and later the creation and reuse of learning designs. Over those years (2002-2006) I spent a lot of time thinking about some of the motivations and practicalities of reusing learning materials. I always felt there was a mismatch between what funders such as this tried to promote and what learners and academics needed in the way of learning materials. Although I am no longer directly involved in this area of work, in the Caledonian Academy we have retained an involvement in what are now called open educational resources projects, so the ideas are never far away.
David’s summary of the reusability paradox reminded me of my views on learning objects and reuse of learning materials. As well as the tension between the complexity of  a piece of  learning material and its potential for reuse in another context, I have a number of other issues:

• whole course or lesson chunks of material work well in college level education and other contexts where there are standardised curricula, but they are go against the tradition in HE where a course at two different universities will differ significantly because the lecturers who deliver the course have different research interests and backgrounds and are actually defined by their diversity not their similarity (yes I know standard curriculaare  becoming more prevalent, and there are instances of standardised curricula controlled by professional bodies)
• teachers and lecturers fundamentally don’t want designs or content for whole courses or even whole lessons. Instead, when delivering a new course they bring together their own notes, resources, perhaps lecture notes from a previous lecturer etc then look for gaps and fill these in. Only once they have delivered the course and start to develop a feel for what is working and what is not working do they begin to seek external sources of learning material – and at that point what they want are specific solutions to problems they have (as an aside, designing content around threshold concepts has felt like an interesting avenue to explore in this regard).
• finally, what do learners want? We know that learners constantly find learning resources using google – on the whole these learning resources aren’t bundled up in a standard way, nor do they come with accompanying learning objectives/outcomes etc. Maybe there isa  research project somewhere where we analyse what useful resources (ie the ones learners use) look like.

Answers … I feel I have been quite negative above, but it’s not all doom and gloom. I think going up a level and promoting open text-books would be a grear idea – this is sufficiently ‘removed’ from lesson plans and learning objects/oers that some of my ‘issues’ disappear.

Week 4 Mooc: more reflection and synthesis #change11

Here are some more posts which caught my eye from last week, along with any comments I have made (fewer comments as a proportion today). As this and the previous post were about me responding to other people’s ideas, I thought it most appropriate to comment on their blog pages, and provide links to their blogs, rather than bring the ideas and conversations here.

• http://idstuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-binds-people-to-collective.html
• http://svmoose.edublogs.org/2011/10/06/effective-learning-change11-re-collective-learning/ (commented).
• http://apointofcontact.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/binding-and-values-change11/
• http://silenceandvoice.com/archives/2011/10/06/does-collective-learning-organizational-exploitation-change11/ (commented)
• http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/collective-and-connected-learning-implications-for-open-distance-and-e-learning/ (Allison provided a comment to this already)
• http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/making-sense-of-collectiveconnective-learning-%E2%80%93-the-plot-thickens-change11/
• http://edtech-insights.blogspot.com/2011/10/tools-for-collective-learning.html
• http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/change11-collective-learning-reflection/
• http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/change11-getting-to-know-you-your-identity/
• http://mary-karpel.blogspot.com/2011/10/collective-learning-my-learning.html (comment)

Mooc Week 4. Synthesis and reflection.

I have been trying to collect together posts which responded to our collective learning work which has been showcased in the mooc last week.  Here are some interesting posts I found and links to comments (where appropriate):

• http://markusmind.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/struggle-to-progress/ (commented)
• http://brainysmurf1234.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/could-i-have-my-sandbox-back-please/
• http://idstuff.blogspot.com/2011/10/do-we-need-to-know-one-another-when.html (commented)
• http://brainysmurf1234.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/the-5-cs-consume-connect-create-contribute-and-commit/ (commented)
• https://deck.kwantlen.ca/node/78
• http://edtech-insights.blogspot.com/2011/10/collective-learning-explained.html (commented)
• http://silenceandvoice.com/archives/2011/10/04/initial-reaction-to-little-by-littlejohn-collective-learning-change11/ (commented)

I’ve spent a few hours commenting on blogs this morning (very rewarding) but still have another dozen or more posts to look through, so this post will have to be continued.

I’m a digital scholar, I hope

So, another week in the Change MOOC. Lack of audio at the time meant I listened in to the live session asynchronously but the fuzemeeting replay allows you to follow the chat etc so a good experience.

Martin Weller ran last week, based largely around his book which I am currently reading on the train, through the open access route. Martin’s challenge for participants was to create a digital artefact answering the question ‘what impact has digital scholarship had on your practice and what difficulties have you encountered?’ I’m going to use this blog post as a response. So stand by for some reflection (which felt relevant to me, not sure about for anyone else).

Some background. I stared life as a molecular biologist, and finished my PhD just before the advent of the web. One of the tasks in my PhD was sequencing unknown genes from Drosophila melanogaster and comparing the sequences to those held in databases located in Switzerland. We used to query these databases by email and the response would take 24hrs to arrive, and would consist of an email about 30 pages long plain text. by the time I had written up (and moved onto my new career in distance learning), the web had come along and you got html formatted results for your queries within seconds of submitting them. Witnessing this step-change in the way research practice could be supported by technology (ultimately there is no point in sequencing a gene unless you can compare it to every other bit of dna ever sequenced) has meant that I have always been very positive about the use of technology in research practice. So that was Web1, When Web2 came along, I wasn’t working as a molecular biologist, but my work with the PLE project allowed me to see how the web could connect an individual not just with data, but with other researchers. Reading the open science/open research ideas from people like Cameron Neylon was really the first time since the mid-90s that I wished I had been a molecular biologist again, doing science in the current technology supported environment must be so stimulating (and yes, I know there are downsides).

Hmm, don’t seem to have answered the question yet. Onto , my current practice. Before moving into a full-time research role, I spent many years on the fringes of research working as an educational developer and on JISC projects. In the same way that availability of software drove the first wave of the web (I remember downloading new versions of browsers almost daily which added new functionality to the web), to me, the second wave was driven by the availability of services such as wiki sites which allowed simple collaborative knowledge building, and of course the blogs of people like Alan Levine (when he was blogging at the Maricopa Learning Exchange) and George Siemens (at eLearnSpace) which allowed me to see other’s practice and ideas up close. Today, RSS feeds of dozens of blogs provide at least as much stimulation for our research as more traditional papers. I see myself as fundamentally a digital scholar. I haven’t myself fostered an active blog etc. and don’t have a strong profile in the community, but I do try to share ideas and contribute back to the personal learning network I find myself in.

But of course there is a tension which for me is two-fold. First, our research is at the fringes of traditional academic research we are trying to address challenges of knowledge worker learning in the workplace. we are not technology focused, we are not traditional educational researchers, yet whilst we (I) can identify with many voices in the blogosphere, it can often be difficult to integrate findings and ideas from blogs into research papers whose referees demand more traditional sources. Secondly, as a developing researcher, contribution to the next REF is critical for my career and the assumption is that success will depend on publishing in impact rated journals. This means that we have to play the game publishing according to conservative rules.

 

 

Change Week 2

Zoraini Wati Abas presented on the topic of Mobile Learning at the OU Malaysia yesterday: (http://change.mooc.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=60 ). Now there is an inherent problem with these presentations as they coincide with me picking up the wee lad from nursery and making his tea. The recording and slides of the talk aren’t up yet, but now is the only opportunity I have to think about this week of the course so I thought I would write some initial thoughts based on the Introductory paper, and some of the responses which have been posted to the presentation.

First (written before I read any of the text for this week) I should say I have been known to be sceptical of mobile learning (as I am with a whole list of technology enhanced learning approaches which I won’t reel off here). But with the advent of proper smartphones, and app designs which encourage easy sharing (connecting) of any content you consume or create on these devices, I am much more positive. I see these devices as lightweight access points to interaction with your personal learning network.  In comparison to PCs, they do have the advantage of being suited not just to text creation but also to creating audio, video and images, but of course screen real estate, using for extended periods etc. are the compromises which are made.

So I have now read the position paper. The work is from 2009, so from a time when I would say smartphones weren’t quite ready for full blown -learning, and indeed the study here actually describes a far more modest use of the technology – to use SMS messages as a communication (motivation) aid between tutor and students. OUM is a distance learning university and the students were mostly working full time as well as studying  At GCU (in a f2f context) I think there are similar things being introduced.

Although there was some discussion of overloading students with messages, there  didn’t seem to be anything about whether students in general would be receptive to their tutors ‘invading’ part of their personal space.

In a way I think the m-learning debate has moved on since the study was carried out. One of the key advantages of using SMSs was that a phone (unlike a PC) would (almost) always be with the student. Now with the smartphones discussed above, email and (critically) twitter have overtaken this. Now, when running a course and considering m-learning the tutor may  use a combined approach. SMS for personal communication, Twitter for announcements and community building (twitter is group; sms typically one to one), and email for tasks and more formal learning communication.

It will be interesting to see if the discussion develops through the week. I’m still unsure how these discussions are going to `play out. I suppose we are all testing models here.