Reflections on the Knowledge Society

The entire debate about electronic learning, MOOCs and open education hinges on one central question: why do we need teachers? It is often sadly misunderstood what the added value is that teachers bring to learners. For this reason, they are increasingly put up to be replaced by technologies in different guises and roles, for example data algorithms that aim to substitute human judgement, or multiple choice tests instead of continuous qualitative assessment.

It’s time to think about the qualities a teacher needs to have and where they outperform computers, often by miles:

Psychology: especially where family relations are stressed or difficult, teachers are often the first (adult) advisors for children in trouble. Also in other cases (break-up relationships, uneasiness about oneself, etc), the experienced teacher is most likely to notice and able to put the finger on the problem.

Knowledge and Enthusiasm: computers and the Internet contain loads and loads of collective human knowledge (including also piles of unworthy garbage), but they don’t contain wisdom and competence to act on this knowledge. They are also incapable of enthusiasm for a subject discipline – hence they are unable to install excitement in the learner.

Gut feeling and empathy: “a feeling is worth a thousand datasets” (I don’t know who said that, but it should have been said by someone important). Even without being able to articulate and quantify the multitude of granular circumstances that play a part in a learner’s life, a good observant teacher in direct contact with a learner gets a feel for where they are and can pick them up from there. They are able to understand and factor in when and why a learner is distracted, puzzled, or otherwise limited in progressing. Teachers are able to show empathy and understanding for the situation and in most cases are able to mediate them. Note carefully that this complements and goes beyond the help that peers will provide.

Pedagogic qualities and qualifications, therefore, necessarily emphasise not only the knowledge and competences of a teacher in a given subject area, but also their interpersonal aptitude and mental stability. Teachers, nowadays more than ever before, need to be able to cope with criticism from parents, politicians and even CEOs and other outsiders. They need to be able to see through the eyes of the learner and balance their interests with the general context.

Given these demands, it’s clear that not everyone is suited to be a teacher. Allthemore concerning is the fact that these scarce human resources are not given the attention, opportunities and acknowledgement they deserve, in a world that’s drifting to become more like an industrial factory floor dominated by forms and robots than by human conversation.

There has been much talk about the key skills and 21st century skills that young people should acquire to master their future lives well. Most often, these key skills were defined in terms of competences like numeracy and literacy. Interpersonal and communication skills are also frequently mentioned.

What I miss very much is a debate about attitudinal skills for today. I believe that what students require more than anything are the following competences:

• patience
• attention
• curiosity

These attitudes are critical to the acquisition of the said 21st century and any other skill set.

Here is yet another piece on MOOCs, called “the MOOC movement – learning for all”, this time from the EuroNews channel. And yet again, it contains all the wrong propaganda!

Walter Lewin’s message in the video that MOOCs are “as important as the invention of the printing press” because “we reach out now to millions of people” is wrong in historical terms as well as in the present context. The same accounts for his enthusiastic claim that ‘we’ are reaching out to people “who could never have dreamed of sitting in a classroom or getting an education, let alone that they can now choose one course from Harvard, one course from Berkeley, one course from MIT”. In historic terms this is wrong, because the outreach did not start with MOOCs, but is as old as the Internet for learning. What’s more, there have been specific outreach agendas from different governments and supranational organisations (UN, EU) that paved the way to widening access to higher education. This change in political mindset has often been negatively associated with the technology-enabled ‘industrialisation’ of education. But, as can be seen in OECD statistical analyses (Education at a Glance), it accounts for a much larger rise in education levels than MOOCs have done to date, and with more lasting success, I might add:

Over the past 15 years, tertiary type-A graduation rates have risen by 20 percentage points on average among OECD countries (Education at a Glance 2012)

Even more encouraging:

Across all OECD countries, “an average of 47% of today’s young women and 32% of today’s young men will complete tertiary type-A education over their lifetimes”. (OECD 21012)

Note that this talks about completion and graduation, not registration figures or certificates for individual MOOCs.

One reason why things did not reach people in the millions early on was to do with the limited access to networks and bandwidth, but also with limited awareness. And even today, the Internet and unlimited high bandwidth are still an exclusive asset, as are smartphones. Those layers of society that are distant to education are typically also socioeconomically distant from the essential infrastructure that would allow them to participate. For this reason, MOOCs still are very much a middle class thing and will remain so for as long as telecom cost models present financial barriers to access – no matter how open the courses are.

Apart from the wrong praises for outreach attached to MOOCs, I remember the late nineties when e-learning claimed unlimited access to experts around the world. The best in the field, it said! This early promise hasn’t come true to the learners and MOOCs are not likely to provide this either, at least not long term. There is little sustainability in a MOOC and it is only a matter of time until institutions realise the true cost of delivering MOOCs the way Udacity, EdX, and Coursera do. Already, some institutions like Santa Fe Institute ask participants for donations, realising that even the simple broadcast of videos and MCQ tests costs tens of thousands of dollars. Currently, support comes from foundations like Templeton, but this stream isn’t going to last.

Another issue with MOOCs is that they are like puzzle pieces in the ocean. Getting hold of one or two pieces is an achievement, no doubt, but doesn’t constitute a curriculum leading to a qualification. If you want to become a medical doctor or an astronomer you need more than a single 10 weeks course in basic physics or anatomy. What about those field trips? What about the practical dissection sessions? Will competitor institutions like the said Harvard, Berkeley and MIT allow picking and choosing courses at different institutions for awarding degrees? Even in Europe where a common currency like ECTS provides a theoretical basis for this to happen, students encounter great difficulties with mutual recognition.

A note on the side: If all those top world experts would indeed be accessible by MOOCs, what would happen to all those million lecturers who are not on top? In my experience, students are quite pragmatic. They don’t go for the top grades or top experts, they usually follow the most comfortable path that balances academic success with personal efforts and fun.

One other key attribute that qualifies for being part of a curriculum is reiterations. Every academic year, a new cohort is guided through a course module, which is only updated a bit. This reiteration is not sexy in terms of MOOCs and the media, albeit that it may be the only way the initial costs can slowly be recuperated – perhaps.

In summary, the title of the programme “the MOOC movement – learning for all” may just be a MOOC movement of the united press and media companies, who unanimously admire the newness of the old hat that’s displayed by clever university marketeers.

An interesting development as more organisations jump on the MOOC bandwaggon. It’s not comparable to the Hewlett grant that MIT received for their OCW some years ago, but the €250,000 from the Stifterverband der deutschen Wissenschaft and iversity are still a tidy sum to compete for on individual level.

The intro video is interesting to watch (video and site are in English) explaining their interpretation of MOOCs, and, yet again giving Stanford the usual (and erroneous) credit for “inventing” MOOCs. On the positive side, peer interaction gets a mention as being important.

Ten so-called fellowships at €25,000 each are up for grabs to help implementation of the submitted MOOC concepts. Although it’s an international call, five of the grants are earmarked for German institutions, which I guess is acceptable considering that the funding bodies are German. What I find less appealing is that the awarded fellows “must ensure … that the course can run on the iversity platform”. Hmmm! How does this go together with “openness”?

Ambient learning is the term used for learning that happens in the (natural physical) environment. It makes use of ‘ambient technologies’ such as sensors built into the environment or computer-enhanced interfaces on ordinary every-day items. A good example are speed traps that don’t produce fines, but rather use feedback loops to inform drivers of their behaviour. This type of learning builds on awareness and self-correction. However, not all areas of learning or subject disciplines are suited for ambient learning. Cognitive and discursive disciplines like Philosophy are more restricted than behavioural ones. Still, there are several valuable spaces where this can bring benefit.

Immersion teaching is one of the most powerful pedagogic methods ever invented. It is most successfully used in language learning, but also has a place in work-based learning and other settings. Ambient technologies can be used to create an authentic environment for immersive learning. While this sounds straight forward enough in theory, the practice is substantially different. When you’re trying to set up an immersive environment for yourself, e.g. in your home, you quickly encounter the limits of current technology and learning opportunities.

Firstly, the technologies available today are not sufficiently ‘ambient’ yet to allow proper interaction. Any learning that needs a keyboard or mouse to communicate is unsuited, as are resources that require staring at a monitor for longer periods (e.g. presentation slides). It is simply not convenient to look at a slideshare presentation on your fridge door, even if your fridge has an internet connection or if you use a projector to display it there. Secondly, there are too few channels that you can use to provide a continuous authentic experience.

One domain where it is relatively easy to create an ambient learning environment using ordinary technologies in your average living room is language learning. Immersion in language learning provides exposure to authentic language for your daily habits such as listening to radio or watching tv.

Using a mobile app for streaming radio while plugging the iPhone into a speaker set, allows you to listen to native target stations. It is important to note that the authenticity of immersion does not only lie in the language spoken, but also in the information content. That is why satellite channels like BBC World or Russia Today are of no real use in this, as they do not contain content from the target country. Instead, shows like “Focus on Africa” or “India Business Reprt”, etc. are specially moderated programmes for a foreign not a native audience. In case of doubt always opt for the original!

An audio-visual experience such as satellite tv and streaming radio, already do much to create a surrounding immersive feeling. Distribute a couple of target language newspapers or books round the room, and that is roughly where today’s state of the art ends. For developing ambient learning in the home further, we need communication technologies that seamlessly sit in such an environment, operated by voice control or gestures. Another thing that’s missing is interactive opportunities which provide feedback. I can, for example, imagine a listening agent that checks what you are saying (assuming you are talking aloud to yourself or others in the living room) and makes a boo noise when it detects the wrong language spoken. Of course, the first iterations of such a feedback agent would boo a lot, just like the first spell checkers did. But we are there to make progress and there is an awful long way to go!

Lest we forget: despite the ubiquitous discussions going on around MOOCs, there are lots of learning activities that you can do BY YOURSELF. It is not getting the limelight of courses that operate on immense scales, but the smallest possible courses are the ones you can do alone and from which you are still able to benefit – believe it of not!

What are do-your-own learning (DYOL) courses good for? Many things and it really makes for independent learning. No need to register, just do it. Good areas for DYOL are:

• reviving former knowledge
• immersion in real life environments
• CPD
• assessing yourself

In fact, it’s what you probably do anyway without really noticing or without giving it the attention that are attached to MOOCs. But MOOCs too can provide for DYOL, since many of them are just about knowledge transfer (aka. online lecture videos).

This is in response to an interesting post by Bonnie Stewart, who did a nice piece on MOOCs, what they stand for and what they challenge in our world of HE learning.

Starting with the critique, I don’t see that “The Domain of the Known Can No Longer Be the Purview of Higher Ed“. This, I believe, is the viewpoint from the high horse. I see freshmen/freshwomen students all the time coming into HE – and they have not conquered the “domain of the known”. Most of them haven’t yet conquered independent learning either. It is true that the HE mission is and always has been pushing the frontiers of knowledge, to explore the unexplored, to unravel mysteries and to challenge the known “facts”. At the same time, it would have died out long ago as a system had it not had this other mission of creating new scientists from novices and freshers, to stimulate and focus interest in the unknown, and give them the basis for methodical investigation and knowledge enhancement, aka (independent) learning. And, remember the time you were a student, getting the basics does involve an enormous part of dealing with areas that you had absolutely zero interest in, but which are essential for dealing with the depths of understanding (not just the surface that is in the press and media). For this, reading Wikipedia isn’t enough!

And, as Bonnie rightly says, that’s where MOOCs are insufficient. They are not a system! Actually, it is difficult to know what they are as the name floats semantically between broadcast lectures and online social groups. In this, they resemble Bible group gatherings versus preaching congregations, but online. “Massive” as a determinant is also extremely misleading and gives the wrong direction. Not everything that’s desirable to be open needs to be massive. There are legitimate knowledge areas which aren’t geared for “massive” – either because they are of interest to very few people (Historical Numismatics was always my favorite examples of this), – or because they are too specialised. Actually, “massive” only works in the introduction phases of HE (cf. the Stanford MOOCs), and maybe MOOCs can have a place where 101 lectures fast-track students into a domain.

But what are they beyond a marketing campaign of large institutions to maybe attract more recruitment? First and foremost, MOOCs seem to be an instrument for self-criticism and reflection of and in the establishment, its openness, its reach, its transparency, its core values and its barriers. This is not in itself a replacement for the HE system, and will never be. But it can be an enhancement and stimulant for change – they are what Bonnie calls a “platform”. And this is why there is so much talk about it in the education community. However, I get the impression, the MOOC talk is never in earnest extended as a challenge to basic primary and secondary schooling systems, which is a sector dedicated exclusively to the “Domain of the Known”. This maybe so, because HE is more commercially challenged than K-12. As an industry, HE is able to benefit from what MOOCs do best, continuous professional development, branding and networking.

Day 2 of the Edusprint on Analytics was devoted to the impact analytics can have on learning and teaching. Marsha Lovett from Carnegie Mellon presented an interesting approach to derive meaningful inferences from analytics about students’ learning states.

To start with in a quick poll, participants (of whom most declared themselves IT professionals) showed a clear preference toward intuitive judgements being made for measuring student performance and progress. 59% of some 300 spontaneous respondents said they evaluate how their course is going by the “feel”.

Carnegie Mellon have attempted to move beyond this in interesting ways, and with consideration of cognitive learning theories. Their base assumption is that learning is skills specific and that students draw on their skills to carry out instructional activities. On this they built a quantitative model of skilled learning, by also assuming that frequent practice leads to better skills. Through this, one can get better and deeper insights into the learning state of a student than by just looking at raw performance data, such as test scores or attendance. Unfortunately, Marsha did not explain how the digital actions of students (e.g. clicking on a resource) are translated into these skills, but still, the thought model looked pretty convincing.

When a student does some digital learning, the interactions are analysed and computed into an inferred student state, which, if I understand correctly, identifies the learning skills in use, and compares them to an expected state. This is presented to the student and instructor in a dashboard. The dashboard displays key aspects of the student’s learning state and also gives some recommendations.

What I liked about the presentation was the mention of analytics needing to be actionable. This is close to my thoughts encapsulated in the Learning Analytics framework. It leads to the question: are the dashboard displays of learning skills intelligible to students and teachers in determining their next action?

The general idea that I see represented here is similar to what some of my colleagues work on, that is using dashboard displays as reflection amplifiers that make people consider their position and perhaps change direction or efforts. Another thing that is reasonably clear is that comparative info about similar students performance gives more room to reflect than just one’s own data.

An important point raised by the audience was in how much learning analytics takes web clicks as proxies for learning. The response to this is that we need to look beyond simple clicking behaviour. Students perform linked actions and we need to perceive them contextually as patterns of learning and action sequences.

This question has been bugging me for a while. Having attended several MOOCs in a row, my initial enthusiasm has somewhat declined. Basically, I see two types of MOOCs: the “original” Connectivist MOOC and the Stanford MOOC (if it is one?). I am actually not sure I agree with people calling the Stanford (Sebastian Thrun) style courses a MOOC. To me they are little more than an imitation of the early OU course broadcasts on tv in the 1970s. This is by no means a bad thing, indeed, free access to education is never a bad thing!

Although connecting to people globally is a great thing, I feel that MOOCs are too much focused on personalities and not on learning. The question “how do we learn in MOOCs” is usually answered in a Connectivist way: by connecting to other people (learners, experts, peers). But who are these people? Why do we connect to them, or even consider to gain benefit from connecting? It’s not like I create a peer group from people who I meet in the supermarket or at the busstop, just because we take a ride together. How are we able to distinguish in a learning context between experts and posers?

The MOOCs I signed up to all missed one simple but vital thing: pedagogic strategies. What I mean by this is that apart from giving weekly topics, the courses did not provide any scaffolding for learning to happen. This is something that can easily be amended, by charging participants with the execution of collaborative tasks. How come that the organisers forgot about this simple and omnipresent pedagogic strategy of collaborative learning? Chit-chatting about your interests alone is not collaboration. Yet it is so easy to set a shared task, let people find the peers they want to work with and share findings back to the entire congregation.

The Thrun MOOCs have these reflective tasks and tests built into their videos, yet they too aren’t collaborative. I find it not very encouraging nor rewarding to sit alone, struggling with my solution, or wading through a forum flooded by thousands of others also struggling or selling you the solution.

My suggestion for MOOC design therefore has a very simple and familiar message: “concerted collaboration”. Every teacher does this regularly, and it happens in conferences and business workshops: people are asked to find partners for doing a task, solving a question, or investigating a topic, followed by sharing their findings with the plenary and others.

Now, what do we make of this news story from the Independent? It looks like the English Minister of Education wants to turn back the clocks and make pupils rote-learn and recite poetry as part of planned changes to the national curriculum.

Traditional values are making a come-back in this proposal to reform (if this is the right word?) the curriculum in English primary schools. Spelling and grammar are given a more prominent role and foreign languages are intended to be made compulsory.

From Year 1, at the age of five, they will be read poems by their teacher as well as starting to learn simple poems by heart and practise recitals.

Maybe I’m too rash in my criticism that is based on a personal attitude towards the news item. My first feeling was “wow, they’d like to reintroduce parrot learning and books – this is soooo retro!” But at second reading, new pedagogies and technologies are actually not mentioned, neither were books and blackboards. So, I guess the method of learning is not described here, at least not in the article, but may well be in the NC proposal. Another thought that came to mind was that rote learning is probably not as bad as its reputation in current pedagogic innovation circles. Many children want to become actors or singers, and there, learning by heart, rehearsing and reciting are important skills, as they are in public speaking and presenting. It’s not a bad idea to expose children at young age to these performing arts.

Similarly, putting a stronger focus on foreign languages early on, is something that apart from English schools every nation on Earth has practiced successfully, so we find competent English speakers not only in Anglophone countries or in exceptional cases.

In total, I would conclude that it is not the intentions and target outcomes that may open the reform of the National Curriculum to criticism, but the pedagogic methods by which these are to be achieved. More details of this should become available soon.