I feel like I preface every post on here with an apology about not posting in a while. I’ve been in my new job for a few months now, and as part of that I went to a conference over in California, Open edX 2016.
This is probably going to be fairly long, simply because there’s so much to say about the conference. If you want the short version – It was amazing, and really want to go again before next year, but next year will do.
You can find the slides and videos (where available) of various different talks from the day on the Open edX Wiki, and here’s the slides and accompanying notes from my Lightning talk that I had to give when I came back (which was basically just ‘There’s too much to talk about in a lightning talk, read my blog post’).
Still here? Here’s the long version. I’ll try to keep it fairly light and steal some pictures to keep you entertained, but it’s going to be a bit of a slog. Our story begins (I’ve always wanted to start a sentence like that) in 2015. I was working on a project called DDI – Driving Disruptive Innovation. It was briefly known as Project Erebus, which is possibly the coolest project name ever, but it was a little bit sinister. We were looking at producing a course, S309, in the Open edX platform. I’m not going to talk about Open edX at length here, so feel free to go back to that link and take a look. During that time, I spent a good few hours at my desk watching the 2015 Open edX conference. It was a small affair, but it was packed with useful tidbits of information. Who’s using the platform, some of what they’re doing… it was infuriating not being able to be there and ask questions.
Fast-forward to this year. I’m now a Learning Environments Specialist, as part of the Minerva programme, investigating different tools and platforms for delivering our modules. As (in my opinion at least) the best open source learning platform currently, Open edX is again on the table, and I start getting slightly suspicious questions from various levels of bosses about whether I have a passport… I didn’t at the time, but when they finally told me it was to go to California for the Open edX 2016 conference, I got that sorted (after much daily nagging. Thanks for that Mark…).
Fast-forward again, this time to June 14th. After significant amounts of flying and a quick nap (boy is that a long flight when you’ve not left the country since being a child) I arrived at Stanford University. I was there before pretty much everyone else, so I got my pick of the nice Open edX travel mugs. They claimed they were all identical, but I definitely got the best one (right). It was attended by a much larger, more diverse crowd than last year. I got into some fantastic conversations about things like how to teach hula dancing and martial arts online with motion tracking, whether any of us actually know how to teach online and whether OU academics still wear fantastically colourful waistcoats. For me, the people there really made the event. I’ve tried to keep in touch with some of them (the shiny new Slack channel is helping with that), but it was fascinating just to mingle and find out about where people come from. I hate mingling, so that’s probably a good indicator of how the networking bit was.
The first day kicked off with a bang, or rather a welcome speech from Jennifer Widom of Stanford, and Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX. Which is sort of like a bang, if you think about it. Here’s a picture of Anant from the conference (on the right), with absolutely no suspicious three-legged people in the background.
Mmm. Moving on.
“If you announce it, it’ll probably happen”
That was a quote from Anant’s welcome that has stuck with me a bit. Those of you who’ve talked to me about the conference at all have probably been promised a blog post, and here it is. If you promise it in a loud and exciting way, it suddenly becomes very hard to back down for anything but the most extreme reasons. It also becomes very hard for anyone else internally to shut you down without awkward questions, which is sometimes a handy shield if you work on projects like I typically gravitate towards that threaten the status quo.
Anant’s focus for his welcome was on maintaining innovation on a budget, as well as how we can ensure integrity in the MOOC world. Those who have heard me rant about this previously know that I have a little bit of a bugbear with the word ‘innovation’. I’m very much of the opinion that innovation is a label that should be assigned after something has proven value, and not just as a replacement for ‘new’ or ‘good’. But that’s not the point. Anant’s talk spoke to that very real limitation on making anything that is new or good, when old makes money and money is the only reason we still have doors to open. What can we improve or do in a new way without breaking the bank? Does ‘innovation’ (however you regard it) have to be the product of expensive new toys and projects? Bigger questions than I’m equipped to deal with right now. I’ll stick with just trying to make everything better on a budget and hoping that someone labels it innovation later.
The second bit about integrity in the MOOC world is something that everyone in that area is struggling with right now. How can a MOOC have value and make money (to support the whole ‘money makes the world go around’ downside of the first part) when it’s easy to cheat and you’re offering your content for free? Who will buy your certificate of participation if it doesn’t have institutional value, and how can institutions add value to your course if the assessment doesn’t hold up to scrutiny? He gave some examples of some of the kinds of things they’re trying at MIT and with edX in general to show there’s some really good ideas going around there.
One of these ideas is the MIT Micromasters, where the course is free, but if you complete the series you get credit towards an intense accelerated Master’s degree program at MIT. To support this, they have things like online proctoring, timed exams, a new exam every presentation… basically digital versions of the safeguards you’d have in place with a traditional course. The difference is, all of those materials are available for free. The general strategy with all their latest ideas appears to be that if it doesn’t cost money on top of the course production costs, it’s available for free. If it costs money to run and maintain, it’s available to fee payers.
So while paid students work through the same courseware, they pay for the fact they’re getting an accredited, valued course which is valuable to both institutions and the learners (due to the recognition it gains). Free students get the standard exam, the one that doesn’t get updated, the un-proctored, automatically graded exam. It’s a much cooler solution than the ‘Let’s just stick a price on the door’ or ‘Try and sell certificates with no other value’ strategy that many other providers are offering at the moment (including edX, of course, as the don’t all use the same business model). Time will tell if it works.
Next up was the keynote from Jono Bacon, Director of Community Development and Growth at GitHub and general community guru, and his talk on building a community exoskeleton. This is probably my favourite bit of the entire conference, in all honesty. He compares the support you can get from a good community structure to an exoskeleton, an Iron Man suit. As a nerd, this immediately gets my vote because A) comic books and B) who wouldn’t want a sick robotic suit to help them do things? My flat would be so clean right now.
What immediately struck me was what Jono said doesn’t just apply to development communities. Communities are everywhere, whether it’s a module team, students, people stuck in a broken down train who suddenly become best friends… the art of constructing a productive community is in breaking down the barriers that prevent people engaging, and enabling people who have the ability to be driving forces to support the rest.
I honestly can’t do Jono’s talk justice, and I’m going to try and force myself to limit this write-up from here on, as it’s already huge and I’m two talks in. If you can spare the time, watch this video. You won’t regret it.
Pretty good, right? Save it for later if you didn’t actually watch it, seriously.
Next up was the State of Open edX with CTO Mark Haseltine and friends, something that’s of staggering interest from the outside. I’m not going to recount the entire thing, the slides are available if you want a look, or there’s the YouTube video.
The platform is growing. It’s starting to cross that gap from the innovators to the mainstream. There’s been a huge surge in the past year since I watched those YouTube videos, and it’s not stopping any time soon. The revolution has not been televised, but in a world where there just frankly isn’t a learning platform that meets my standards, Open edX is gathering momentum. The glorious thing about open source is that the more widely the platform is adopted, the better it’ll get. I don’t exclude Open edX in that sweeping statement that all online learning platforms are a bit rubbish right now, it’s worth noting, it’s just a huge step in the right direction, and the more it grows, the better it (should) get. Until that critical mass where it outlasts its lifespan and institutions try to beat a dead horse until it literally catches fire and they have to replace it. Not that that happens everywhere or anything.
I’m not going to detail every talk I attended in order, I’ve come to realise that I’ve written too much already, so here’s some of the cool bits floating around my head right now.
Basically nobody seems to know how to teach online. Ok, that one’s not a strictly talk-led realisation, and it’s not really 100% true, but it is a fascinating thing to think about. In terms of teaching, online is still a very young medium. Some places have done it for maybe 20 or even 30 years, but have they actually done it well? How long did it take from the beginning of the written word for someone to write a textbook that is actually good at really teaching a subject rather than just delivering information? There’s still more books written today that don’t teach a subject very well than do, and they’ve been making books for thousands of years. Looking back at online, brick and mortar institutions put recordings of lectures and slides on YouTube because they’re so firmly rooted in face to face, distance learning institutions like the Open University put textbooks online instead. They’re purely applications of their status quo of teaching, putting a video of a lecture online is not the same as attending a lecture, putting a textbook online is not the same as having a book to scribble notes in the margin. If you’re producing either for online consumption, you’re not teaching online, you’re delivering an experience designed for offline in a less satisfying way.
Time to back down from that controversial statement before I start getting angry emails and get back on topic.
That isn’t to say every course online right now is bad, I know from experience there’s a lot of great OU courses online at the very least, and a lot of great courses from other providers too. People are figuring it out, and good teachers teach well regardless of medium, for the most part. People taking bits and pieces here and there, sneakily figuring out what works, how interactivity can be made integral to the learning, how to present their content in a way designed for online first… and that’s really important. If there’s one thing I definitely got from talking to people and some of the talks given at the conference it’s that we as providers of online learning may be quite late to the internet party, but everyone there had very different insights into how this transition is going to happen, and soon.
To change the subject entirely, UBCPI is pretty awesome. We’re going to have a go with it on our courses. For those not in the know, it’s the University of British Columbia Peer Instruction tool for Open edX, an XBlock. It takes a physical teaching technique (right off my mini speech about that potentially being a bad idea) but adapts it into something engaging and interactive using technology online (saved it). You can check out the YouTube video of the presentation (I was the one lone hand that had used the tool previously, in case you were wondering) and the slides are also pretty interesting. As previously mentioned, we’re going to give it a try and I hope we can contribute back some useful data for Derek’s research.
Next up, the big US universities like Stanford and Harvard are weird. That was my primary takeaway from the keynote from the second day. They were flagships of government propaganda, look how fantastic and prestigious American education is, monuments to trust in educators to do whatever they like to teach… and now they’re not. They’re expected to quantify quality in teaching, and give evidence of why they deserve their status, and they just don’t know how to do that. This is something that we on Minerva have brushed up against recently that I didn’t quite grasp was such a huge issue facing the education sector. How do you prove that you’re delivering good teaching? It can’t be fully based on assessment of students, but how do you assess learning materials without that? Is it even possible to do in a standardised way given differences in learning styles, trends in subject areas and other constantly shifting variables? As an extension to that, how can you measure positive change, or ‘innovation’ if you’re inclined to calling everything that, without any sort of reliable baseline measurement? If you enjoy the social history surrounding universities and that sort of question, you should probably give the recording below a watch (length warning).
UQx (University of Queensland) gave a really interesting talk on their course production and support process, and I wish I could share the slides with you, but they’re still not online yet. Now available here! They’ve got a really interesting workflow from course conception, brainstorming and pitching through to production and presentation, that builds in review and TEL design throughout. Neat.
The second half of the event was the workshops and hackathon, which was absolutely fascinating. Intimidating, as I’m a rookie at best when it comes to actual programming, but fascinating. With the help of a large number of different people, I was eventually able to take some existing code from one of our developers cleaning up my previous bodge-job prototype and turn it into an XBlock, a customisable, reusable component that can be inserted into any Open edX course, which I titled C2R (Click-to-reveal). I’m kinda proud of it, even if it was accomplished with help and some pre-existing work. If nothing else getting the workbench working on Windows is no mean feat, and I learned so much about Git, shell and python in the process. You can download the XBlock here. As far as I’m aware, it works with all Open edX instances, which is pretty neat. Feel free to steal it.
I also spent quite a while working with Christine Michael, a UX Design Researcher at edX, on some user stories, identifying trends and patterns between the different users that we came up with. It was a fascinating experience for me, while I’ve got an interest in user experience design, it’s not something that I’ve had any formal training or experience in. I loved the process and I’m keen to repeat it. We identified a few strong correlations between certain activities that online learners seem to share, and it’s definitely sparked a greater interest in the field for me. Might have to look up a course or something. If I ever get hold of them, Christine put together a nice summary and interim analysis of the stories while I was working on C2R.
I’m going to finish up with some snaps, mostly from a few hours walking around San Francisco before my flight home, just to make you jealous. I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the valuable information that was flying around at the actual conference, heck, I couldn’t even attend every session due to the overlap between them. For that experience I had back in 2015, here’s the link again to all of the slides and videos (that are currently online). The next conference in 2017 is in Madrid, and I really hope to head back, because I’ve not had that much fun in a long time (and it was work! Boy do I need to go on holiday…).
– Matthew