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Data, Analytics and Learning
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| From E-Learning V |
Fig.1. EdX MOOC – right up my street (MOOC = Massive Open Online Course).
These, like the NHS, are ‘free at the point of delivery’ – they are free and online with often, potentially at least, a huge enrolment – though this collapses on the heavyweight longer courses such as the above to around 5%. FutureLearn with its three week ‘lite’ format is retaining 22% of those who register.
They are free, but the US ‘Open Learn’ courses don’t half use the opportunity to sell you at every turn on the idea of making a contribution, or purchasing a badge, certificate or even a formal assessment. It shouldn’t feel like one of those holiday timeshare things or a ‘free’ trip to a traditional Turkish village where you are flogged carpets.
Might the supply of free online learning of this calibre threaten traditionally courses entirely?
H817 on Open Learning, a new MAODE module, is, in various alternative forms offered online. Here with George Siemens, now at the University of Texas. This would be no different to Martin Weller turning up at Harvard and offering a version of H817 or some of the other MAODE modules on the EdX MOOC platform.
Escape
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| From NSSC 3AUG14 ARK |
Fig. 1 Five Lasers, like butterflies
Helming the boat that set the buoys for this race (it’s called ‘Ark’) I got this shot and likened it to butterflies in the back garden. I so wanted to be out there competing in the race and juggling my inabilities to control the dinghy, but got a thrill from this moment all the same with this imbalance of boats. One getting away, the others heading towards the buoy.
My turn next week.
I’ve done 12 hours on a ‘pond’ in various winds on a Laser so feel ready for the sea, and ready for bruises, muscle pain, a dunking: ready too for managed risk: I will have on a wet suit and life jacket. I will have a pouch containing an inhaler (asthmatic) and water.
I like danger. I need the physical and mental thrills I so enjoyed in my ‘youth’. I prefer a challenge. I want to be hit with a stick and offered a carrot. The Open University equivalent of the written exam and recognition of success: Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs) are too infrequent for essay writing to become a way of life, whilst End of Module Assignments (EMAs) lack the danger and challenge of an examination. At Oxford University essays are weekly, read out and shared in a tutor group of two or three and at the end of the year you sit exams – terrifyingly demanding but both proof that you know your stuff and a way to distinguish the pack.
‘Ark’ is a bit of a tug, a diesel engined quasi-fishing vessel on which the day’s race buoys are kept – hunking great things on a long length of rope with a chain and anchor attached. It has a VHS radio so you call back and forth to your harbour of departure and the Race Officer in the clubhouse and RIBS in the bay.
Seven years since I was last on the thing I had with me a cushion I grabbed from the sofa at home not thinking why I did this … until in the chop I recalled how I had broken my coccyx training to do this when I had bounced off the rubbery side of the RIB and landed on the anchor: twice. Broken coccyx. Imagine how they test for this in A&E? Basically someone prods you up the arse and if you scream there’s a problem. This problem then turns into ‘there’s nothing we can do’. But here’s a rubber-ring you may like to have to sit on for the next six weeks … or don’t sit down????
You live and learn, or rather learn through giving things a go until you can get it right enough.
Learning Design looks like this
Gagnés events of instruction:
1. Gaining attention . The scene opener, even the preview or title sequence.
2. Informing the learner of the objective . Laying out your stall
3. Stimulating recall of prerequisite learning . Tapping into what has already been understood – creating empathy.
4. Presenting the stimulus material . Presenting the case, offering evidence that might impress or inspire, that could be controversial and memorable.
5. Providing learning guidance. Offering a way through the maze, the thread through the labyrinth or the helping hand.
6. Eliciting the performance . Now it’s their turn.
7. Providing feedback . Sandwiched, constructive feedback on which to build.
8. Assessing the performance . How are targets going?
9. Enhancing retention and transfer . Did it stick, could they pass it on and so become the teacher?
Wet Learning
In an environment in which the coining of phrases is endemic I wish to invent the term wet.learning – learning that is conducted in and around water in relation to teaching people to swim and teaching teachers and coaches how to teach people to swim.
By definition you cannot have anything electric or electronic around water; this negates e.learning of any kind.
even paper learning (p.learning) can be problematic as the stuff invariably gets wet, goes soggy, tears and is binned.
so we are left with original learning (o.learning), which like original sin committed by Adam & Eve is done in a semi-naked state.
I mock, I must. I’ve been involved in education, mostly corporate, and have never deemed it necessary to call it v.learning when we used video, though interactive learning & training became common place (though never called i.learning or i.training) – it was sometimes called ‘clever’ or ‘smart’ learning though … but never c.learning or s.learning.
So back to wet learning …
undertaken poolside where the acoustics are atrocious we often resort to grunts, sign language and waving our arms & limbs about in demonstration.
Did our ancestors in cave teach cave-kids to paint in such ways?
If there is to be any final definition of e.learning it should be ‘effective learning,’ the alternative be “*.learning.”
Applied or practice-based learning
Odd how I can treat a TMA like an essay, research it to death and build towards an essay crisis. Having to write the TMA equivalent, a strategy paper on Social Media, I find I am a couple of days ahead with the first draft written, expectations of a meeting where expert colleagues will have input before finalising and presenting in a week.
Applied learning, or practice-based learning … action learning, they’re all the same idea that attracts a good deal of interest; it increasingly makes sense for people, especially if they are settled in a position that they enjoy and need, to study as the work, the learning occurring alongside what they do, rather than separately from it.
In some respects this is the immersive learning that game-like learning environments are supposed to re-created; but why do that when you can have the real thing?
I had thought of creating it as a wiki, password protected for contributing stakeholders. As long as we’re on the same wavelength from experience of doing this in the MAODE I’d trust the end result to be better as a result, the equivalent of lifting something from the 70% mark towards 85% and beyond.
Blogging here My Mind Bursts more than here, where the audiences have far more choice and haven’t the focus of hear of learning with the OU.
Its been an interesting environment to hone some more advanced blogging habits and skills, not simply the generation of regular content, but how it is linked, where it is linked and the important of tags which I’ve used simply to identify content, but of course of search engine optimisation purposes too.
If you have a moment and can put the right hat on, perhaps you’re an Open University Faculty of Business and Law student anyway, then do please visit our website as I will be listening to all comers on valuable enhancements we can make here.
To ‘blogify’ is my mission.
Mind Bursts 