Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, Day 5, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, #hilt2014
Posted: August 17, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: clowns, cMOOC, data visualisation, Elijah Meeks, Francis Bacon, Franco Moretti, Gephi, Google, graphs, Hamlet, Hamlet Hamlet Hamlet, HILT, HILT 2014, HITS, Horatio, map, Medicis, MITH, monkey, MOOC, Moretti, network, network visualisation, PageRank, RDF, Shakespeare, Small worlds, Tufte, visualisation, xMOOC, Zelchenko 1 CommentSorry for the delay in completing this – it has been crazy and I prefer to write directly into the live blog, which means a network feed, as I just find it easier to put things together this way. (It’s only been a week (ish) anyway.)
Today (well, then), we looked at modularity and how we could break networks into separate communities. This is important because it helps us to be able to see structure. The human eye is a great tool but it often needs help and modularity is a good way to do this. We have strong ties between components in directed networks (unidirectional) because we have taken the time to say that the link goes this way. We have weak ties in undirected networks because there is no solidity to the association form one side to the other. The more connected something is, the more strongly tied it is to the things it connects to so, when we hunt for communities, we want to take away the least number of connections to produce the largest number of connected communities.
Let’s look at the Hamlet graph (after Moretti) with some colouring added for the various communities and all the connections left in.
It’s hard to see any separation here although the communities can be seen.
Now let’s take out the intra-community links.
Bingo! Poor old Hamlet.
Now we can suddenly see, in terms of dialogue exchanges and interaction, how isolated Hamlet actually is. The members of the court are one community. The invaders are another. Horatio, the proxy for the Danish state, is deeply involved in statehood. Hamlet, however, is more heavily connected to the characters who help with his dawning realisation that something has gone awry. No wonder he goes mad, he’s the Nigel Nofriends of Medieval Denmark, with only the insane Clown Posse and a group of second-rate actors to keep him company.
After this we spent some extensive time working on producing prettier looking graphs with Gephi and using more advanced algorithms to help us to represent what’s going on. We looked at the Twitter data for the conference and came up with this:
Twitter data using the #HILT2014 tag
This shows the separate groups of Twitter user communities who used the HILT2014 hashtag. My small cluster is the small purple arrow bottomish left. We’ve also ranked the size of the data labels based on the significance of that person in the Twitter information chain, using the PageRank algorithm. So, Jim McGrath wins Twitter for HILT 2014! We also look and how important certain links were in the network by looking at edge betweenness to determine which links are used by the most shortest paths and then use this to identify important connected components.
Lots of good hands-on stuff and a very interesting course! I learned a great deal and have already started using it elsewhere.
Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, Day 4, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, #hilt2014
Posted: August 8, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: clowns, cMOOC, data visualisation, Elijah Meeks, Francis Bacon, Franco Moretti, Gephi, Google, graphs, Hamlet, Hamlet Hamlet Hamlet, HILT, HILT 2014, HITS, Horatio, map, Medicis, MITH, monkey, MOOC, Moretti, network, network visualisation, PageRank, RDF, Shakespeare, Small worlds, Tufte, visualisation, xMOOC, Zelchenko Leave a commentOr, the alternative title, “The Play Formerly Known as Hamlet”. Today had a lot of fascination discussion where the bipartite nature of our class network became apparent, in terms of the the majority of the class who were Digital Humanists and really understood a detailed close reading of Hamlet – and your humble narrator.
Today we talked about modularity, which allows you to break your network up into separate modules, which makes a lot more sense when you call those modules things like communities, groups or clusters. Can your network be split up into areas where some groups are more connected to each other than they are to adjacent nodes? By doing this, we are trying to expose structural features of the network and, in particular, unexpected aspects of network structure – is there some set of nodes that have a role in the network that we don’t understand? If we talk about this in terms of people, if our social network is made up of small communities with connections between the communities, then we would expect gossip to spread more rapidly inside a community than between the communities. Simple, eh? The approach we take depends upon comparing the structure we have with a model of a random network using the same number of links.
Once we’ve done this, we can use this in a tool, such as Gephi, to clearly illustrate the groups. Here’s a grumpy Dane in illustration.
Hamlet and the various posses of Hamlet. Note the Insane Clown Posse.
I’ve coloured and tagged the network to show the key players in Hamlet, based on Moretti’s analysis of Hamlet, which attached unweighted connections between participants who had direct conversations. Now, we’ve made the size of the nodes reflect how relatively important (in terms of betweenness, the number of paths that must go through this person). If we did this in terms of PageRank, another measure of the relative importance of nodes, based on their connectivity, the nodes in green would jump up in size. But what you should note is that Hamlet and Horatio are roughly the same size and, while Hamlet is much more connected to everyone (quelle surprise, given the play’s named after him), the only thing that we lose if Hamlet disappears is that we no longer can hear from the Insane Clown Posse, Lucianus and the Lord. In purely connected terms he doesn’t appear to be that important. We’d obviously lose a lot of the text if he disappeared but how important is Hamlet in Hamlet?
This led to a lot of discussion in class as to the validity of the original Moretti pamphlet, much of which is core to the entire discussion of Digital Humanities. How valid is any conclusion from a network model such as this when the innate nature of the capture process (to provide the capta) may completely remove the ability to draw certain conclusions? The class discussed the impact on perceived and invisible observers, who strictly don’t have dialogue with each other but potentially have an impact upon other characters and their narrative interactions. (The Moretti pamphlet may be found here.) Moretti had a lot to say about Horatio as a proxy for the state and was very interested in the closeness of Hamlet to everyone else, but (later on) we ran some random network experiments and it turned out to be the type of connections in the network (the clustering coefficient) that was more interesting than the closeness.
We then moved on to a discussion of a number of useful metric for networks, including the clustering effects that tend to indicate intention in the system we’re studying (there’s no real reason for a random network to form a small number of unique clusters unless you tune for it.) We also discussed the Small Worlds of Watts and Strogatz (1998) where you have cliques of nodes (tightly connected clusters) linked together by a smaller number of links, characterised by a power law distribution and a higher clustering coefficient (very basically).
We generated some random graphs to see if we got the structure we saw in Hamlet as noted earlier. Why? Because looking at Hamlet and drawing out information from the structure only has validity if (1) the model is accurate and (2) the situation couldn’t have easily arisen by chance. As noted, we generated a random graph for the same number of nodes and it had a similar average path length and identical diameter – but very different clustering coefficients! So it turns out that Hamlet wasn’t written by a monkey after all.
Don’t laugh, this is Darwin’s skull!
The final part of the session was on dynamic networks. This is the study of networks that change over time and we worked with some data that showed people’s association with an area over time. We could look at this in terms of change in time or in terms of progress through a corpus (chapters are as useful as dates here). What you want is a start date and an end date for the feautres in your network – when should the feature be there and when should it not be there anymore? It turns out that Gephi is quite convenient here, because you can merge a start and end time and end up with a time interval. Not bad, Gephi, not bad. Now we can see when things are active – great if you’re looking to see when students are active in forums or activities, for example. Here’s an example of the difference in the test network between the first and second halves of 2009, with all nodes of zero degree (nodes with no links) removed.
First half of 2009
Second half of 2009
We then played around a lot with a vide variety of animations over time, including ongoing calculations, colour and shape alterations. Basically, it was rather hallucinatory by the end but that may be the Dr Pepper talking. We even got to see the sparklines (Zelchenko/Tufte) for some extra visualisation goodness!
This is one of those classic separations between the things we visualise for ourselves to help us to work out what’s interesting about a dataset and what we would visualise for presentation, especially to non-discipline people. There’s a really big difference between what scientists want to see and what other people want to see – and if we don’t realise that, then we risk either having presentations that don’t communicate enough information or we kill people with minutiae. Look at this – how useful is it for you?
Death by Sparkline!
Another good day but I think there are some very full brains!
Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, Day 3, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, #hilt2014
Posted: August 8, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: capta, cMOOC, data visualisation, Elijah Meeks, Florence, Google, graphs, HILT, HILT 2014, HITS, map, Medicis, MITH, MOOC, network, network visualisation, PageRank, RDF, visualisation, xMOOC Leave a commentToday was going to be a short day because we had the afternoon off to go and do cultural things. (I took the afternoon to write papers and catch up on work. I tend to work in both timezones when travelling because otherwise work will eat my head.) Today we explored a lot of filtering in Gephi, which was … interesting and best done in practice. Which we did. So, hooray!
We looked at Multimodal Network Projection throughout the day but I’ll come back to that. We started looking at other ways of determining the important and dependant nodes in a network, starting with the HITS algorithm, which identifies Hubs and Authorities in your network.
Then we moved into the wonderful world of PageRank, Citation networks and how all of these things work. PageRank is, fundamentally, how Google works out which pages to give you. You won’t be able to find out the details of the way that Google runs PageRank because gaming PageRank to serve up pages that you probably didn’t want to see is very big business and highly irritating. Search Engine Optimisers (SEOs) spend a lot of time trying to reverse engineer the algorithm and Google spends a lot of time tweaking it. It’s good we’ve solved all the important problems in the world so we can spend time on this.
Back to PageRank. PageRank looks at the number of links going to a node and what the quality of these links is in order to work out which the most important nodes (pages in the case of Google search) are and, hence, which ones you want. In Digital Humanities, you can use this to identify the most significant element of your model – which, by the way, quickly establishes that Hamlet is not as important as you think. Take that, Hamlet! Want more detail on PageRank? Look here.
From Wikipedia: The more you are pointed to by quality links, the bigger (and happier) you are. Hooray!
In Citations, we want to see how is citing which reference, which is straightforward. In Co-Citation networks, we want to measure how often two documents are cited together. There are many reasons for looking at this, but it helps to detect things like cronyism (someone citing a paper because they like someone rather than because the information is useful). As we discussed before, the Matthew Effect comes in quickly, where frequently cited papers get even more frequently cited because they must be good because they’re cited so frequently. (Tadahhh.)
We also looked at a rather complicated area of multimodal projection, which is going to need some set-up. If you have a set of authors and a set of publications, then you can associate authors with publications and vice versa. However, this means that the only way for two authors to be connected is by sharing a publication and similarly for two publications sharing an author. This is a bipartite network and is very common in this kind of modelling. Now, if we make it more complicated, by moving to a conference and having Authors, Papers and Presentation Sessions, we now have a tripartite network and this becomes very hard to visualise.
What we can do is clean up this network to make it easier to represent by hiding some of the complexity in the connections between nodes. Let’s say we want to look at Authors and Presentation Sessions. Then, while the real network is Authors connected to Papers connected to Presentation Sessions, we can hide the Papers with a network link that effectively says “connects this author via a presentation to this session” and suddenly our network looks like it’s only Authors and Sessions. This level of visual de-cluttering, which is dimensional reduction for those playing along at home, makes it easier for us to visually represent the key information and produce network statistics on these simpler graphs. It’s also a natural fit for triple-based representations like the Resource Description Framework (RDF) because the links in the network now map straight to predicates. (Don’t worry if you didn’t get that last bit, some people just got very excited.)
Finally, we looked at how we collect information. Is it stuff we just pick up from the environment (data) or is it something that we choose the way that we collect it (capta)? (Capta comes from the word for capture. Data is passive. Capta is active. Take that, Bembridge Scholars!) If you think about it, every time you put your data into a spreadsheet, you are imposing a structure upon it, even down to which column is which – it’s not technically data, it’s capta because your interpretation alters it before it even reaches the analysis stage. When it comes to the network that you draw, do you care about the Proximities of elements in your network (location, membership or attitude), the Relations in your network (role, affective, perceptual), the Interactions or the Flows? All of these are going to change what the nodes and edges (links) represent in the network.
The simple rule is that entities are connected by relationships (For those who think in tuples, think “subject, predicate, object” and get your predicate on!) However you do it, you have to pick what’s important in your data, find it, capture it, analyse it and present it in a way that either shows you cool things or supports the cool things that you already know.
A lot to cover today!
After the session, I did some work and then headed off for dinner and board games with some of the other people from the workshop. A nice relaxing night after a rather intense three days.
Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, Day 2, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, #hilt2014
Posted: August 8, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: betweenness, centrality, cMOOC, data visualisation, Elijah Meeks, Florence, graphs, HILT, HILT 2014, Medicis, MITH, MOOC, network, network measurements, network visualisation, visualisation, xMOOC Leave a commentIn Day 2, we looked at using the Gephi tool itself, along with the nature of how networks are tied together, looking at network degree and how we could calculate paths through the network. It’s probably important to talk about some of the key concepts of how we measure connectedness in a network, and the relevant importance of nodes.
The degree of a node is the number of links that connect to it. If we care about whether the links have some idea of direction associated with them then we might split this into in-degree and out-degree, being the number of links going in and the number of links going out. What do we mean by direction? Consider Facebook. If you and I are going to be Friends then we both have to agree to be Friends – I can’t be a friend unless you want to a friend to. This is an undirected arrangement and a connection between us implies that both us have an equal connection to each other. Now think about unrequited love: Duckie loves Andie but Andie loves Blane. In this case, the love is directed. Just because Duckie loves Andie, it doesn’t mean that Andie loves Duckie.
Time to put on some Psychedelic Furs and find the alternate ending. (Yeah, yeah, it’s not actually in the story and it’s creepy.)
ALTHOUGH IT SHOULD, JOHN HUGHES!!!
(An amusing aside for network/maths people is that, sadly, love is not transitive or “Pretty in Pink” would have been way ahead of its time.)
One of the other things that we care about in networks is the relative importance of nodes in terms of how many other nodes they are connected to and what this means in terms of the paths we take through the network. When we talk about paths, we usually mean the shortest path, where we start somewhere and go through the minimum number of intermediate points until we get to the destination. We don’t run around in circles. We don’t go one way and then go another. This is important because the paths through a network can quickly identify the important nodes and, therefore, the links between them that are the most travelled thoroughfares.
In this world, we start to worry about the centrality of a node, which indicates how important it is by looking at how many other nodes it is connected to or how many other nodes have to use it to get to other places in the network. This means that we have to talk about betweenness, which measures how many times the shortest paths that traverse a network have to go through a node. By calculating the betweenness of every node, for every path, we can work out which of the elements in our network see the most traffic.
In the case of the Medicis, from yesterday, all roads in Florence lead to the Medicis, the family with the highest betweenness rather than the family with the most money or fame. The Medicis are an extreme case because they occupy their position of importance as the only bridge (broker) between certain families.
If a network is made of highly connected elements and all of the betweenness is the same then no-one has an advantage. If your network can be effectively split into two highly connected groups, with a smaller number of high-betweenness elements linking them, then you are seeing a separation that may mean something significant in your particular network domain. From a power perspective, the high betweenness brokers now have the potential to have much more influence if they charge for transit and transform information that traverses them.
One of the things about creating a network from data is that the network we create may not necessarily model reality in a way that answers the questions we’re interested in, but by looking at the network and trying to work out if it’s got some different structure at the macro, meso and micro scale, then that might give us hints as to how to analyse it, to further develop our understanding of the area that we’re modelling with this network.
I’ve written about the difference between the real world and the model before, but let’s just say that “the map is not the territory” and move on. In terms of the structure of networks, while many people assume that the distribution of nodes and links associated with them would end up in some sort of Normal distribution, the truth is that we tend to see a hub-spoke tendency, where there are lots of nodes with few links and fewer nodes with lots of links. When we start to look at the detailed structure rather than the average structure, we can even talk about uniform the structure is. If a network looks the same across itself, such as the same number of connections between nodes, then it’s what we call assortative. If we have small clusters of highly connected nodes joined to other clusters with sparse links, then we’d thinking of it as disassortative. Suddenly, we are moving beyond some overall statistics to look at what we can really say about the structure of a network.
There’s also a phenomenon known as the Matthew Effect, where links and nodes added to a network tend to connect to better connected nodes and, as the network grows, nodes with more connections just get more connected – just like life.
Apart from a lot of Gephi, we finished the day by looking at paths in more detail, which allow us to talk about the network diameter, the size of the largest shortest path in the network. (Remembering that a shortest path contains no loops or false starts, so the largest shortest path shows you the largest number of unique nodes you can visit in the network and gives you an idea of how much time you can waste in that network. 🙂 )
There are some key concepts here, where having redundant paths in a network allows us to survive parts of a network going away (whether computer or social) and having redundant paths of the same quality allows us to endure loss without seeing a significant change in the shortest paths in the network. These are all concepts that we’re familiar with in real life but, once we start to measure them in our network models, we find out the critical components in our data model. If we’re modelling student forums, is there one person who is brokering all of the communication? What happens if she gets sick or leaves the course? Now we have numbers to discuss this – for more, tune in to the next instalment!
Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, Day 1, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, #hilt2014
Posted: August 6, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: cMOOC, data visualisation, Elijah Meeks, Florence, graphs, HILT, HILT 2014, Medicis, MITH, MOOC, network, network visualisation, visualisation, xMOOC Leave a commentI’m attending the Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching courses at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, #hilt2014, for the second year running. Last year was Matt Jocker’s excellent course on R and this year I’m attending Elijah Meek’s course on Network Analysis and Visualisation. The first day we covered network basics and why you might want to actually carry out visualisation across graphs – and what the hell are graphs anyway?
Graphs, put simply, are a collection of things and connections between those things. Now that I’ve killed every mathematician reading this blog, let’s continue. I’ve done a lot of work on this before in the Internet Topology Zoo but it’s now looking like analysis of large-scale online education is something I have to get good at, so it seemed a great opportunity to come and see how the DH community do this and get access to some mature processes and tools.
Why is this important as a visualisation (or representation, thanks, Elijah) target? Because pictures tell stories well and we can use this to drive argument and make change.
Let’s consider the Medici, the family who dominated Florence from the 1400s to the 18th century. While not being the most wealthy and powerful families at the outset, they were (by marriage and arrangements) one of the most well connected families. In fact, the connections from some groups of families to other families had to go through the Medicis – which made them more important because of their role in the network.
Padget & Ansell’s network of marriages and economic relationships between Florentine families. (from http://www.themacroscope.org/?page_id=308)
The graph makes the relationship and the importance clear. (Insert toast about Boston, Lowells and Cabots here.)
In graphs of the Internet, everything is connected to the Internet by definition, so we don’t have any isolated elements. (We do have networks that don’t connect to the Internet, such as super-secret defence networks and some power stations – not as many as there used to be – but we’re interested in the Internet.) It is possible to analyse communities and show ways that some people/entities/organisations are not connected to each other. Sometimes they form disconnected clusters, sometimes they sit by themselves, and this is where my interest comes in, because we can use this to analyse student behaviour as a learning community.
A student who enrols in your course is notionally part of your community but this is an administrative view of the network. It’s only when they take part in any learning and teaching activity that they actually become part of the learning community. Suddenly all of the students in your network can have a range of different types of connection, which is a good start to finding categories to talk about behaviour in large on-line courses, because now we can easily separate enrolment from attendance, attendance from viewing, viewing from participation in discussion, and discussion from submission of work. I hope to have a good look into this to find some nice (convenient) mathematical descriptions of the now defunct cMOOC/xMOOC distinction and how we can encourage behaviour to get students to form robust learning networks.
As we can see from the Medicis, the Medicis used their position in order to gain power – it wasn’t in their interests to form additional connections to make the network resilient if they fell on hard times. However, learning networks don’t want a central point that can fail (central points of failure are to be avoided in most contexts!) and this is why a learning community is so important. If students are connected to many other students and their lecturing staff, then the chances of one relationship (connection) failing causing the whole network to fail is very low. Some people are, naturally, very important in a learning community: we’d hope that instructors would be, tutors would be, and key students who handle discussions or explanations also would be. However, if we have very few of these important people, then everyone else is depending upon this small number to stay connected and this puts a lot of stress on these people and makes it easy for your network to fall apart.
I’ll talk more about this tomorrow and hit you with you some definitions!
CSEDU, Day 2, Invited Talk, “How are MOOCs Disrupting the Educational Landscape?”, (#CSEDU14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: Avalanche, cMOOC, computer supported education, CSEDU, csedu14, education, educational landscape, FutureLearn, higher education, Hugh Davis, learning, MOOC, moocs, Napster, Saints FC, Southampton, student, xMOOC 3 CommentsI’ve already spent some time with Professor Hugh Davis, from Southampton, and we’ve had a number of discussions already around some of the matters we’re discussing today, including the issue when you make your slides available before a talk and people react to the content of the slides without having the context of the talk! (This is a much longer post for another time.) Hugh’s slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/hcd99.
As Hugh noted, this is a very timely topic but he’s planning to go through the slides at speed so I may not be able to capture all of it. He tweeted his slides earlier, as I noted, and his comment that he was going to be debunking things earned him a minor firestorm. But, to summarise, his answer to the questions is “not really, probably” but we’ll come back to this. For those who don’t know, Southampton is about 25,000 students, Russell Group and Top 20 in the UK, with a focus on engineering and oceanography.
Back in 2012, the VC came back infused with the desire to put together a MOOC (apparently, Australians talked them into it – sorry, Hugh) and in December, 2012, Hugh was called in and asked to do MOOCs. Those who are keeping track will now that there was a lot of uncertainty about MOOCs in 2012 (and there still is) so the meeting called for staff to talk about this was packed – in a very big room. But this reflected excitement on the part of people – which waving around “giant wodges” of money to do blended learning had failed to engender, interestingly enough. Suddenly, MOOCs are more desirable because people wanted to do blended learning as long as you used the term MOOC. FutureLearn was produced and things went from there. (FutureLearn now has a lot of courses in it but I’ve mentioned this before. Interestingly, Monash is in this group so it’s not just a UK thing. Nice one, Monash!)
In this talk, Hugh’s planning to intro MOOCs, discuss the criticism, look at Higher Ed, ask why we are investing in MOOCs, what we can get out of it and then review the criticisms again. Hugh then defined what the term MOOC means: he defined it as a 10,000+, free and open registration, on-line course, where a course runs at a given time with a given cohort, without any guarantee of accreditation. (We may argue about this last bit later on.) MOOCs are getting shorter – with 4-6 weeks being the average for a MOOC, mostly due to fears of audience attrition over time.
The dreaded cMOOC/xMOOC timeline popped up from Florida Institute of Technology’s History of MOOCs:
and then we went into the discussion of the stepped xMOOC with instructor led and a well-defined and assessable journey and the connectivist cMOOC where the network holds the knowledge and the learning comes from connections. Can we really actually truly separate MOOCs into such distinct categories? A lot of xMOOC forums show cMOOC characteristics and you have to wonder how much structure you can add to a cMOOC without it getting “x”-y. So what can we say about the definition of courses? How do we separate courses you can do any time from the cohort structure of the MOOC? The synchronicity of human collision is a very connectivisty idea which is embedded implicitly in every xMOOC because of the cohort.
What do you share? Content or the whole course? In MOOCS, the whole experience is available to you rather than just bits and pieces. And students tend to dip in and out when they can, rather than just eating what is doled out, which suggests that they are engaging. There are a lot of providers, who I won’t list here, but many of them are doing pretty much the same thing.
What makes a MOOC? Short videos, on-line papers, on-line activities, links toe external resources, discussions and off platform activity – but we can no longer depend upon students being physical campus students and thus we can’t guarantee that they share our (often privileged) access to resources such as published journals. So Southampton often offer précis of things that aren’t publicly available. Off platform is an issue for people who are purely on-line.
If you have 13,000 people you can’t really offer to mark all their essays so assessment has to depend upon the self-motivated students and they have to want to understand what is going on – self evaluation and peer review have to be used. This is great, according to Hugh, because we will have a great opportunity to find out more about peer review than we ever have before.
What are the criticisms? Well, they’re demographically pants – most of the students are UK (77%) and then a long way down US (2%), with some minor representation from everywhere else. This isn’t isolated to this MOOC. 70% of MOOC users come from the home country, regardless of where it’s run. Of course, we also know that the people who do MOOCs also tend to have degrees – roughly 70% from the MOOCS@Edinburgh2013 Report #1. These are serial learners (philomaths) who just love to learn things but don’t necessarily have the time or inclination (or resources) to go back to Uni. But for those who register, many don’t do anything, and those who do drop out at about 20% a week – more weeks, more drop-out. Why didn’t people continue? We’ll talk about this later. (See http://moocmoocher.wordpress.com) But is drop out a bad thing? We’ll comeback to this.
Then we have the pedagogy, where we attempt to put learning design into our structure in order to achieve learning outcomes – but this isn’t leading edge pedagogy and there is no real interaction between educators and learners. There are many discussions, and they happen in volume, but this discussion is only over 10% of the community, with 1% making the leading and original contributions. 1% of 10-100,000 can be a big number compared to a standard class room.
What about the current Higher Ed context – let’s look at “The Avalanche Report“. Basically, the education business is doomed!!! DOOOMED, I tell you! which is hardly surprising for a report that mostly originates from a publishing house who wants to be a financially successful disruptor. Our business model is going to collapse! We are going to have our Napster moment! Cats lying down with dogs! In the HE context, fees are going up faster than the value of degree (across most of the developed world, apparently). There is an increased demand for flexibility of study, especially for professional development, in the time that they have. The alternative educational providers are also cashing up and growing. With all of this in mind, on-line education should be a huge growing market and this is what the Avalanche report uses to argue that the old model is doomed. To survive, Unis will have to either globalise or specialise – no room in the middle. MOOCs appear to be the vanguard of the on-line program revolution, which explains why there is so much focus.
Is this the end of the campus? It’s not the end of the pithy slogan, that’s for sure. So let’s look at business models. How do we make money on MOOCs? Freemium where there are free bits and value-added bits The value-adds can be statements of achievement or tutoring. There are also sponsored MOOCs where someone pays us to make a MOOC (for their purposes) or someone pays us to make a MOOC they want (that we can then use elsewhere.) Of course there’s also just the old “having access to student data” which is a very tasty dish for some providers.
What does this mean to Southampton? Well it’s a kind of branding and advertising for Southampton to extend their reputation. It might also generate new markets, bring them in via Informal Learning, move to Non-Formal Learning, then up to the Modules of Formal Learning and then doing whole programmes under more Formal learning. Hugh thinks this is optimistic, not least because not many people have commodified their product into individual modules for starters. Hugh thinks it’s about 60,000 Pounds to make a MOOC, which is a lot of money, and so you need a good business model to justify dropping this wad of cash. But you can get 60K back from enough people with a small fee. Maybe on-line learning is another way to get students than the traditional UK “boarding school” degrees. But the biggest thing is when people accept on-line certification as this is when the product becomes valuable to the people who want the credentials. Dear to my heart, is of course that this also assists in the democratisation of education – which is a fantastic thing.
What can we gain from MOOCs? Well, we can have a chunk of a running course for face-to-face students that runs as a MOOC and the paying students have benefited from interacting with the “free attendees” on the MOOC but we have managed to derive value from it. It also allows us to test things quickly and at scale, for rapid assessment of material quality and revision – it’s hard not to see the win-win here. This automatically drives the quality up as it’s for all of your customers, not just the scraps that you can feed to people who can’t afford to pay for it. Again, hooray for democratisation.
Is this the End of the Lecture? Possibly, especially as we can use the MOOC for content and flip to use the face-to-face for much more valuable things.
There are on-line degrees and there is a lot of money floating around looking for brands that they will go on-line (and by brand, we mean the University of X.) Venture capitalist, publishers and start-ups are sniffing around on-line so there’s a lot of temptation out there and a good brand will mean a lot to the right market. What about fusing this and articulating the degree programme, combining F2F modules. on-line, MOOC, and other aspects.
Ah, the Georgia Tech On-line Masters in Computer Science has been mentioned. This was going to be a full MOOC with free and paying but it’s not fully open, for reasons that I need to put into another post. So it’s called a MOOC but it’s really an on-line course. You may or may not care about this – I do, but I’m in agreement with Hugh.
The other thing about MOOC is that we are looking at big, big data sets where these massive cohorts can be used to study educational approaches and what happens when we change learning and assessment at the big scale.
So let’s address the criticisms:
- Pedagogically Simplistic! Really, as simple as a lecture? Is it worse – no, not really and we have space to innovate!
- No support and feedback! There could be, we’d just have to pay for it.
- Poor completion rates! Retention is not the aim, satisfaction is. We are not dealing with paying students.
- No accreditation! There could be but, again, you’d have to pay for someone to mark and accredit.
- This is going to kill Universities! Hugh doesn’t think so but we’ll had to get a bit nimble. So only those who are not agile and responsive to new business models may have problems – and we may have to do some unbundling.
Who is actually doing MOOCs? The life-long learner crowd (25-65, 505/50 M/F and nearly always have a degree). People who are after a skill (PD and CPD). Those with poor access to Higher education, unsurprisingly. There’s also a tiny fourth cohort who are those who are dipping a toe in Uni and are so small as to be insignificant. (The statistics source was questioned, somewhat abruptly, in the middle of Hugh’s flow, so you should refer to the Edinburgh report.”
The patterns of engagement were identified as auditing, completing and sampling, from the Coursera “Emerging Student Pattersn in Open-Enrollment MOOCs”.
To finish up, MOOCs can give us more choice and more flexibility. Hugh’s happy because people want do online learning and this helps to develop capacity to develop high quality on-line courses. This does lead to challenges for institutional strategy: changing beliefs, changing curriculum design, working with the right academic staff (and who pays them), growing teams of learning designers and multimedia producers, legal matters, speed and agility, budget and marketing. These are commercial operations so you have a lot of commercial issues to worry about! (For our approach, going Creative Commons was one of the best things we every did.)
Is it the end of the campus? … No, not really, Hugh thinks that the campus will keep going and there’ll just be more on-line learning. You don’t stop going to see good music because you’ve got a recording, for example.
And now for the conclusions! MOOCs are a great marketing device and have a good reach for people who were out of reach before, But we can take high quality content and re-embed back into blended learning, use it to drive teaching practice change, get some big data and building capacity for online learning.
This may be the vanguard of on-line disruption but if we’re ready for it, we can live for it!
Well, that was a great talk but goodness, does Hugh speak quickly! Have a look at his slides in the context of this because I think he’s balanced an optimistic view of the benefits with a sufficient cynical eye on the weasels who would have us do this for their own purposes.
Nick Falkner 