Connectivist Enterprises

I wrote this in 2011 but it seems almost current in terms of relevance. Some links may not work.

Introduction

Education has morphed across centuries of foundational thought and practice on what is learning, teaching and knowledge. Whether they are ancient practices and beliefs like in the Vedas or are contemporary like Connectivism, the landscape has been shaped by and has shaped events of culture, technology and society. What has remained constant is the change itself, the constant evolution and revolution of thought applied to the domain of learning and teaching.

These progressions reach a strategic inflection point every once in a while resulting in a fundamental change of perception and belief. I believe we are at one such point now given the rapid advances in learning theory, technology, market characteristics and consumer preferences in turn fuelled by recessionary trends.

These strategic inflection points are marked by a change in the frame of reference. Traditional methods are overturned and new technologies and practices reshape the landscape creating new models for efficiency and investment in organizations. The theory and practice of Connectivism marks such a strategic inflection point.

A key dimension in this inflection is technology, with Web 2.0, the promise of ubiquitous networks, cloud computing and social networking. Personal Learning Environments are quickly emerging as de facto learning environments.

But a far greater change seems to be manifesting itself – the emergence of the millenials or Generation Y or the Net Generation by Don Tapscott in his recent book Grown Up Digital (p 16) – terms multifariously used to describe the fast evolving digital generation for whom networking, sharing, gaming and online collaboration are breaking down boundaries of thought and location.

Learners are changing from passive receptors of information and training to active participants in their own learning. This is a viral change, so it is really fast. Today’s digital learners are part of communities. They share their interests with members of their community. They twitter. They blog. They rake in RSS feeds and bookmark their favorities on de.li.ci.ou.s. They share photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube. They share knowledge on Slideshare and Learnhub or Ning. They share ideas. They grow by meeting and engaging peers and gurus alike using the LinkedIn or Facebook. On their laptops and on their mobile phones.

https://learnos.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/xos-in-learning-and-technology/

Don characterizes the Net Generation, those born between January 1977 and December 1997, as having 8 distinct characteristics or norms (Grown Up Digital, p 74) – freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, entertainment, collaboration & relationship, need for speed and innovation.

A predominant contribution to social networking sites, life streams, instant messaging, blogs and media sharing tools, seems to be emanating from this younger generation. This in itself is a key dimension because this generation is getting access to media and practices that traditional learning mechanisms cannot provide. The Pew / Internet report Teens and Social Media reports that “The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media.” The MacArthur report suggests that “New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn, and this raises a new set of issues that educators, parents, and policymakers should consider.” Privacy concerns are raised by Don (Grown Up Digital, pp 65-70) and Pew Internet, among others; to highlight the issue that this generation is sharing too much of what is personal.

What we’re seeing right now is a cultural shift due to the introduction of a new medium and the emergence of greater restrictions on youth mobility and access. The long-term implications of this are unclear. Regardless of what will come, youth are doing what they’ve always done – repurposing new mediums in order to learn about social culture.

(http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html)

Another key dimension contributing immediately to this inflection, but will have enduring effects beyond it, is the immense pressure in the current marketplace on expenses. As Josh Bersin says:

And best of all, an informal learning strategy saves money.  By empowering people to publish their expertise and learn from each other, you can cut spending on content development, external content, and formal training – focusing your energies on the “upper right” training programs in your organization.

Suppliers and vendors are changing over to incorporating 2.0 technology and crafting new consulting services to meet the new challenges. LMS providers such as SABA have already incorporated social media technologies like blogs and wikis in their offering. Authoring and content development providers are fast incorporating social media strategies as part of both the design and deployment of content.

Substantial opinion has also been generated with Jay Cross’s Learnscapes, James Suroweicki’s Wisdom of Crowds, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Valdis Kreb’s Social Network Analysis and many books, articles, blog posts and publications reflecting the changing technology, culture and social landscapes and impacts on learning, organization and innovation.

Jay Cross suggests the inflection point is upon us.

Clearly we have reached an inflection point.   Where “e-learning” was the big craze in corporate training in the early 2000’s, and “blended learning” was the craze in 2003 and 2004, today, thanks to the slowing economy and the widespread availability of social networking and online wikis and portals, “informal learning” is the next big thing.

The underlying message is that there is a significant change happening that promises to change not only the way we do business but also the way we teach and learn.

Connectivism

The Theory

Connectivism is a new theory of learning for the digital age propounded by George Siemens with its epistemological roots in the theory of Connective Knowledge postulated by Stephen Downes. Connectivism stands contrasted to major existing theories of learning and knowledge by its emphasis on learning as the ability to make connections in a network of resources, both human and device and by the amalgamation of theories of self-organization, complexity and chaos as applied the process of learning.

Connectivism embraces and extends the following principles:

• Learning is the process of making new connections
• Connections are a primary point of focus and could be to people or devices
• Connections expose patterns of information and knowledge that we use (recognize, adapt to) to further our learning
• Networked learning occurs at neural, conceptual and social levels
• Types of connections define certain types of learning
• Strength and nature of connections define how we learn
• Networks are differentiated from Groups (by factors such as openness, autonomy, diversity, leadership and nature of knowledge)
• Knowledge is the network, learning is to be in a certain state of connectedness
• All knowledge is associative in nature and resides across our connections
• Chaos, complexity theory, theories of self-organization and developments in neurosciences are all extremely important contributors for us to understand how we learn in a volatile, constantly evolving landscape

Connectivism focuses on the distributed nature of learning and knowledge, the explicit focus on networks as the primary means of learning. As George Siemens states, connectivism, as a networked theory of learning, draws on and informs emerging pedagogical views such as informal, social, and community learning.

Other theories such as Jay Cross’s Informal Learning, Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice (CoP) and Brown and Duguid’s Network of Practice build upon the networked and distributed nature of learning.

For example, defined by knowledge rather than the task, CoPs are different from social networks or teams because they are not only about relationships or tasks. Rather they are about the shared learning and interest of its members.

Connectivism is very different from existing theories of Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Constructivism and is more readily and effectively applied to today’s learners and their needs. Learning 2.0 as a style or Connectivism as a theory are diametrically opposed to the traditional 1.0 styles of learning or the prior learning theories. Every aspect, whether it be setting goals for learning, providing content, organizing learning groups, measuring & tracking progress and managing schedule constraints, needs to be re-evaluated for it’s equivalent in the 2.0 connective world.

In Connectivism, learning becomes the process of making connections and knowledge is the network. As Stephen explains:

Just as the activation of the pixels on a television screen form an image of a person, so also the bits of information we create and we consume form patterns constituting the basis of our knowledge, and learning is consequently the training our own individualized neural networks – our brains – to recognize these patterns.

Connectivism as applied to contemporary challenges facing educators is nothing short of an inflection point. In an appeal to end course-o-centrism, Siemens writes:

What is really needed is a complete letting go of our organization schemes and open concepts up to the self/participatory/chaotic sensemaking processes that flourish in online environments.

Impacts

Connectivism impacts all aspects of education & training design, development and delivery – from the role of the educator , the role of the learner, the roles of the developers (instructional design, visual design, technical design) to the very structure of the learning organization and its vendors. This aspect is critical to understand while implementing designs based on this theory. As I have written before:

The enormity of what Connectivism asks us to do can be realized in this very context – re-evaluate the role of educators, think of the network or connectedness as the base architecture for learning and re-assess notions of identity, power, law, authority, expertise, assessment and control in the light of the new theory.

Wendy Drexler’s Networked Student brings this into sharp focus.  Nancy White reviews 14 characteristics of Network Weavers (a contemporary metaphor for educators)

Janet Clarey’s series of posts on the evolution of LMS systems also provides information on how LMS and Talent Management System vendors are fast incorporating social media and informal learning into their systems.

Connective Learning for the Enterprise

Organizations are fast aligning their learning and development ecosystems to this new way of learning. John Chambers, CISCO’s CEO had to say:

…”Without changing the structure of your organization,” Chambers told the analysts in September, “I would argue that [innovation] will not work.””

Cisco, Chambers argues, is the best possible model for how a large, global business can operate: as a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically, unfettered by a central command.

C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan, in their book The New Age of Innovation argue that there is a fundamental transformation in the way we do business and it is critical for companies to negotiate two fundamental pillars of this change – co-created experiences (N=1) and access (rather than ownership) to global resources (R=G). In their mind the social architecture of the organization (structure, performance measurement, training, skills and organizational values) is equally an important pillar as is the technology architecture.

According to Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling “architecture of participation.” That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products?

Josh Bersin makes the clarion call:

It’s now official. After surveying our entire research membership and having more than 30 conversations with leading HR and learning leaders (including with Xerox, Accenture, British Telecom, Edward Jones, Department of Defense, and Network Appliance), I am now 100% convinced that “informal learning” has become “formal.”  That is, if you want to build a high-impact, cost-effective, modern training organization you must “formally adopt” informal learning.

78% of corporate managers believe that “rapid rate of information change” is one of their top learning challenges (800+ HR and L&D managers surveyed in 2008).

Need quantified

The fundamental enterprise need addressed by Connectivism is of creating an agile, innovation led workforce. If we view agility as the capability to make effective decisions in response to fast changing market conditions and the capability to learn new skills quickly and efficiently, we need a workforce that can learn informally, with minimal supervision, with greater involvement in and control of in their own learning, that can keep itself abreast with fast changing information, that can encourage diversity of opinion and thought which are at the core of effective decision making and that can self organize in order to bring a sense of orderliness in a mostly chaotic and competitive business scenario.

At the same time, since attempting to maintain large budgets and teams to structure formal training (and maintaining the associated infrastructure, processes and overheads), is fast becoming impossible given the pace and the nature of the inflection point upon us, there is a huge need for us  to rethink our approach and strategy for training.

What could the solutions be?

Ideally, connectivist solutions for the enterprise would at the very least require the following:

1. Ability to connect
2. Ability to self-organize
3. Ability to engage in meaningful sharing and collaboration

The ability to connect involves focusing on the tools, processes and policies maintained by the organization. On the tools side, this would typically involve creating multidimensional visibility to people and resources – across dimensions such as roles, departments, learning context, domain, locations and perhaps even customer accounts. This transcends the thought of simply having an address book with contacts.

Also, since the connections are crucial, there must be a way to model and represent the building of these connections using group and network behaviour theory and by measuring/representing the strength of ties.

As one of the key success factors is the ability to build a core inner network of people and resources (the “right” filters) so that relevant information and learning becomes available when you need it, these representations could be multi-level, distributed and contextual.

The policies and processes for connection forming, by themselves constitute a large area of focus. Networks, truly autonomous and diverse ones, would have no barriers to information and connection making – and that is their strength. However, organizations would be wary of breaking silos unless there are clear and compelling reasons to do so. The answer lies somewhere in between – in a balance between the two – unique to every organization.

The second requirement – the ability to self manage – exists both at the level of the person and the group/network. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), an ecology of tools and techniques to manage access to and interaction with knowledge and networks, assume special significance in this context. Existing knowledge management system architectures need to embrace this concept.

The ability to self-organize is critical for collaborative problem solving, for instance, where small focused groups get together to combat a learning challenge or solve a problem. At the personal level, it could refer to capacity to react in a structured and critical manner to a learning problem or challenge. This ability is also contingent, in group settings, on the ability of the group to engage in practice and reflection. As Stephen Downes puts it:

The PLE is not an application, but rather, a description of the process of learning in situ from a variety of courses and according to one’s personal, context-situated, needs. The process, simply, is that learners will be presented with learning resources according to their interests, aptitudes, educational levels, and other factors (including employer factor and social factors) while they are in the process of working at their job, engaging in a hobby, or playing a game.

The third requirement, the ability to collaborate and share meaningfully in a given context, and its corollary, the ability to record these conversations for access and retrieval by an audience in a similar context at a different point in time is also a key requirement.

Collaboration acquires a different complexity in Connectivism. Firstly, the media for collaboration itself is diverse (blogs, video, visualizations, mind maps, media mash-ups, slide-sharing, image sharing etc). Secondly, the collaboration types span a large range between synchronous, immediate & immersive to asynchronous, “slow” & virtually isolated collaborations. Thirdly, key skills for the learner are reflection and practice that really call for a higher level of engagement with the network.

To this end the current landscape offers little, if any, support for structured brainstorming or collaborative construction (imagine an application of Six Thinking Hats on SecondLife, for instance), although tools are emerging as we speak. Therefore, the need of the hour is to bring complex collaboration possibilities using a mix of new tools and formats to learning. For example, the Delphi technique as a means of bringing about consensus and predictability in a discussion area would be a powerful mechanism, as would be the capability to don various thinking hats in a discussion.

While researching structured collaboration techniques, I came across some interesting work people are doing. Mindquarry, for example, provides a model of collaboration patterns based on 4 elements – people, productivity software, collaborative software and methods. I had earlier referred to Mindtools, who provide a rich set of structured collaboration techniques, like for example starbusting, which is a form of brainstorming. Also, Value based management offers a host of techniques, models and theories.

Essentially, structured technology aided collaboration techniques are a medium through which learning efficiencies can be increased. These techniques:

• are contextual to domain
• are contextual to collaboration type (say, brainstorming vs voting)
• are open or close ended (in terms of time, scope, boundaries etc)
• could be ad-hoc or planned
• are quantifiable (both quantitatively and qualitatively speaking)
• are historically referenceable (audit trails for recorded collaborations)
• have rules of engagement
• can be structured to the desired level (sequence of activities, organization of inputs, permissions and access roles)
• are sensitive to scale of audience, available knowledge and other physical parameters
• result in trackable outputs/analytics

The logical next step, from a design perspective, is to attempt to model them.  Aldo de Moor’s paper on Community Memory Activation with Collaboration patterns yields some insights on what patterns could be modelled. The abstract for the paper is:

We present a model of collaboration patterns as reusable conceptual structures capturing essential collaboration requirements. These patterns include goal patterns (what is the collaboration about?), communication patterns (how does communication to accomplish goals take place?), information patterns (what content knowledge is essential to satisfy collaborative and communicative goals?), task patterns (what particular information patterns are needed for particular action or interaction goals?), and meta-patterns (what patterns are necessary to interpret, link and assess the quality of the other collaboration patterns?). We show how these patterns can be used to activate communities of practice by improving their collective, distributed memory of communicative interactions and information. We outline an approach that structures how collaboration patterns in communities of practice can be elicited, represented, analyzed, and applied. By presenting a realistic scenario, we illustrate how community memory could be activated in practice.

The other key component is to understand what the need to collaborate is and the forces impeding the required collaboration. This is key to understanding whether collaboration techniques shall be used, substituted by informal methods or not used at all. It is important to understand if they are “over sold and under used” or are “methods seeking an application” or are really cost-effective or intuitive. We have seen that in software engineering too and this may require change management to implement in enterprises.

In other words, the challenge is not quite really all about the technology or process, but is perhaps more about the individual mindset and the overall objectives with which structured collaboration techniques are to be implemented (basically saying that a great process or tool does not automatically ensure collaboration that follows the process or uses the tool or format).

It goes back to us, as individuals, and how we collaborate as subjects, alone or in teams or in networks. If the capability to collaborate in structured ways is learnt and becomes “native” so will adoption on a more widespread basis. On the other hand, organizations or learning delivery modalities can include, as mandatory components, such patterns, tools or processes as part of the workflow.

There also need to be mechanisms that are able to keep communities and ideas alive and receptive to new inputs past their lifecycle. As Harold Jarche says:

If learning is conversation, then online conversations are the essential component of online learning.

Or, as Nancy White puts it, learning is more than conversation:

…conversation is one of the three legs of my learning stool.

Conversation – making meaning, getting different perspectives, trying out and testing ideas, challenging assumptions.

• Individual reflection – (because group reflection is a subset of conversation, no?) Stepping back, reviewing, observing, evaluating our own learning both in terms of process and content. Reflection provides us needed self awareness and the ideas we bring back into conversation.
• Reification – borrowing from Communities of Practice theory, what we create that expresses what we are learning or have learned. With internet tools makeing self publishing so easy, this area has blossomed – videos, images, blogs — things that manifest both our conversations and our reflections and put them out for wider consideration.

These three are a vortex, always intersecting with each other, even competing for our attention

Obviously, while blogs and wikis provide a good starting point, these three requirements go beyond, perhaps, the sophistication of existing technology and practice, thus building the case for rapid innovations in educational technology and the establishment of best practices.

Benefits to the enterprise

Implementing Connectivist principles in learning and development will bring many benefits to the enterprise. Some of these are:

• Agile, adaptable workforce
• Knowledge base kept current by the learning community
• Community decides using collective insight
• Important challenges are immediately highlighted
• Diversity brings creativity to the forefront
• More space for innovation
• Self organizing learning formations become responsible for managing change
• Informal learning gets channelized/formalized
• Connected enterprise can more efficiently meet needs – now and in future
• Reductions in cost in many ways such as in content development and management of centralized systems and their supporting processes
• Styles of learning more in line with the expectations of the Net Generation

Wenger states the following as a benefit of CoPs:

They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information. Because members have a shared understanding, they know what is relevant to communicate and how to present information in useful ways. As a consequence, a community of practice that spreads throughout an organization is an ideal channel for moving information, such as best practices, tips, or feedback, across organizational boundaries.

They can retain knowledge in “living” ways, unlike a database or a manual. Even when they routinize certain tasks and processes, they can do so in a manner that responds to local circumstances and thus is useful to practitioners. Communities of practice preserve the tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture. For this reason, they are ideal for initiating newcomers into a practice.

They provide homes for identities. They are not as temporary as teams, and unlike business units, they are organized around what matters to their members. Identity is important because, in a sea of information, it helps us sort out what we pay attention to, what we participate in, and what we stay away from. Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations.

They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge. Members of these groups discuss novel ideas, work together on problems, and keep up with developments inside and outside a firm. When a community commits to being on the forefront of a field, members distribute responsibility for keeping up with or pushing new developments. This collaborative inquiry makes membership valuable, because people invest their professional identities in being part of a dynamic, forward-looking community.

Challenges

What are the challenges that organizations will face in this environment?

“Legacy” everything

The first challenge will be related to legacy content, infrastructure and training programs. An important thing to note is that the “legacy” qualifier applies not only to content but also to infrastructure and training processes in the Connectivist context. We need to ask what the migration or transformation path is for all three, not just content.

From the content perspective, a key factor shall be the generation of content by the participants in the learning process, not just by the traditional content developer. Therefore existing content shall be either referenced as-is or repurposed into new formats for easy consumption by the network (e.g. WBT to Wiki sections). Let us take the example of software training. Content that is traditionally found in user manuals or web based training could be used as-is or converted into a wiki. This wiki content could then be updated by the community itself when there is a new release or when they need to update or correct existing content. Obviously, the community will need a process and controls that it owns and is accountable for when making these changes.

For multiple reasons, as discussed above, we shall be challenged to introduce new technology that will render large components of existing technology incongruently positioned. How Learning and Development functions (and vendors of these systems) adapt the infrastructure shall be critical and will go beyond mere addition of (say) a blog component to an existing LMS product. For example, SCORM compliance is something that is a given for most organizations that need to standardize reporting and tracking of learning activity on online courses. With the new technologies, this will certainly no longer be a core requirement for informal learning.

Learning platforms are being “re-examined.”  Most of the companies we talk with are significantly rethinking their entire learning platform strategy (LMS) to understand how to evolve or add new systems which support collaboration.  And today’s LMS is not as successful as one would believe:  across all the organizations we studied (approximately 900 different organizations), on average only 51% of employees use the learning platform at all.

 I firmly believe that this new form of software-enabled collaboration is a revolution, not an evolution.  Like many of the software innovations that I have personally witnessed over my career (e.g. the first color graphics PC, the CD-ROM, the web-browser, Flash, SaaS architectures, and others), social networking is really going to shake things up.  The reason is that these systems are both complex, data-rich, and require a new type of software architecture.  A system which supports 200,000 employees and customers with in-depth employee and customer profiles, active communication and blogging, tagging, content management, custom branding, and tracking each and every communication is quite a complex software solution.  As we examine these vendors we are finding some very significant new areas of functionality which are going to change and upset the traditional HR software companies.

The training processes themselves will need to be rethought from a networked learning perspective. For example, in traditional systems, resource scheduling and management is an important activity for scheduling instructor-led training. This is usually a centralized activity. In a networked learning environment, this would in effect be a decentralized activity managed by the community itself. Similarly, collection of learner feedback from scheduled learning events shall again become a function of the community.

Return on Investment

Secondly, how will return on investment be measured? This is a question that needs to be answered for every initiative. To craft an effective response we must be able to understand what constitute metrics in an organization and what would substitute or complement these metrics at a community level.

Currently metrics that are used are both quantitative and qualitative. In quantitative terms, metrics are based on tracking of attendance, satisfaction surveys, scores and completion in a hierarchical manner across the organizational structure (by division, department, location, portfolio etc). The collection of raw data for the performance metrics is from test and survey questions and their responses. The crucial point here to appreciate is that these metrics are already an ineffective measure of learning in the enterprise, something that leads enterprises to spend time and effort for validating from a variety of supporting sources.

Even a brief survey of the field of assessment design can inform us of the problems in classical test design and development. Due to these, recognized testing agencies like ETS (e.g. GRE and SAT) and psychometric assessment providers use rigorous techniques for item creation and validations (computer adaptive testing, item response theory and now perhaps simulations & virtual worlds led testing) long before these tests make it to the learner.

Secondly, SCORM as a standard or most LMSs do not provide any way to capture more complex performance data such as, for example, the path taken by a learner in a case study or role-play (although there are some current initiatives that may help, such as HLA for simulations, gaming and the convergence between SCORM, DITA and s1000d).

Thirdly, existing content developers may not have an appreciation (even if enterprises had the budgets) of the challenges involved in effective (reliable and valid) item creation and validation in the context of these classical testing theories. A similar challenge may perhaps arise in processes such as the identification of competencies for a specific role in the organization and aligning learning and development plans with existing competency models. Obviously, every effort is made by Learning and Development organizations to correlate and validate this data from a variety of sources.

But if these metrics are inefficient already, the question that needs to be asked is – are the RoI estimates generated on the basis of these metrics efficient? Or are these claims valid?

Over 30% of all corporate training programs (ie. classroom or other formal programs) are not delivering any measurable value (data provided through the same survey).

Qualitatively, the assessment mechanism also suffers significantly. Did the learners actually learn? We know that given already low organizational budgets for training and development, most corporations are unable to deploy more expensive, but qualitatively more efficient, learning materials and experiences to their learners.

As a direct result, a large component of learning (estimated to be as large as 80% by Bersin) is by way of conversations, not included in computing any RoI metric.

80% of all corporate learning takes place through on-the-job interactions with peers, experts, and managers (estimated data collected from over 1,100 L&D managers late in 2008).

Intuitively it seems to be a plausible assertion too. People reach out to their network of people and knowledge for help and mentorship quite regularly, even if it is to ask a question or clarify a procedure. A lot of that time spent goes undocumented, perhaps because the individual instances of learning there are in the form of compressed and short and short bursts, not track-able because of the medium of conversation (often verbal) and the frequency.

These learning events take place outside the formal learning event itself, and in some cases, are the equivalent of the formal learning event (where no formal learning exists). A lot of these conversations also result in serendipitous learning. As Polanyi believed, knowledge is personal and tacit, not directly expressible but “known” and demonstrable through action. Tacit knowledge is hard to measure and possibly a large component of informal learning (“the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them”).

If it is a plausible assertion, then it is plausible as well to think that enterprises are spending 80% of their budgets on the 20% of formal learning.

Then there are questions, like the one below, on the effectiveness of RoI as a measure in it self.

“I don’t know how useful ROI is in determining the value of training,” Valenti says. “Most of the real ROI is wrapped up in the initiative that training is supposed to support, such as a new product launch or a process improvement. I’d rather see people think about return on expectations, such as whether employees actually are following the new process they’re supposed to be following. Being able to demonstrate ROI is great, but there’s lots of training that supports organizational objectives and goals even if the ROI can’t be shown.”

[Diane Valenti, Applied Learning Solutions]

Thus, the other key impact of Connectivism is on re-evaluating the metrics that have traditionally been employed to judge training effectiveness and RoI. Instead of traditional measures, the appropriate quantitative and qualitative metrics could be based on (Albert Bandura’s) self-efficacy (“relates to a person’s perception of their ability to reach a goal”) of the employee and the question “how connected am I?” or “how do I deal with fast changing and exploding information?”. Accordingly, metrics in this context could be based on the following factors:

1. the degree of connectedness of an individual to the network
2. the collaboration between any two networks
3. the quality of interaction in the network, something that network domain managers could be held accountable for (in addition to the learners) and could be measured in a host of different ways – reviews, rating, external assessment, relevance ratings etc.
4. the impact on the business (by measures that correlate things such as the quality of tasks performed by role and the degree or frequency of use of just-in-time materials or resources used in completing that task)
5. tracing the dynamics of performance over a period of time as reflecting in the growth of and participation in individual networks for each individual learner
6. reviews and ratings by peers, experts and managers – both for individual contribution and quality of resources

Charles Coy from Cornerstone makes an interesting comment:

Incorporating multiple modalities of learning is not the challenging part. We can build communities of practice into business workflows and develop social media environments. The challenges, in Cornerstone’s view, revolve around engagement and tracking. Getting people to contribute and then assessing the value of this 80% social learning element for the organization. (emphasis added)

Impact on Talent Management

Thirdly, what will be the impact on Talent Management? There are obvious applications for talent acquisition and retention that can effectively utilize Web 2.0 technologies, but what are the connotations when we deem job descriptions, roles and competencies as emergent in learning cultures – shaped by and shaping enterprises continuously in ways that are as influential as external market factors confronting a business. The organization decides what it needs to do at a point in time and decides to be evaluated in a particular way. In many ways, this mirrors what learners do today – build new competencies regularly to adapt and negotiate in a fast moving environment.

A key question is on how we should include “learning through connection-forming” or “sense-making” as an organization wide competency. Dave Pollard states it succinctly when he writes:

In a world with a billion people online, connected in multiple and unfathomably complex ways, how do you find, and then connect, with just the right people to do what you need to do?

IP Protection

Fourthly, it is important to consider protection of confidential information. In a recent study commissioned by AT&T and conducted by Dynamic Markets, a sample of 2510 adult employees were interviewed who used a computer at work. The top two challenges mentioned were distraction to employees and leaking of confidential company and employee information.

Networks and Evolution

Communities of Practice

Wenger’s approach to Communities of Practice (CoP) also provides specific implementation cues. As Wenger states, CoPs form around three dimensions – what it is about, how it functions and what capability does it (or needs to) produce. This is a useful way of identifying areas of implementation for connective learning.

This will require specialized processes and tools. Processes and workflow (roles, rules and routing) will need to be placed, in-context of the learning and business goals, and best practices created.

For example, Wenger provides a blueprint for some of the roles that can exist for the internal leadership of the CoP, which he believes are key to its development. The roles are:

# The inspirational leadership provided by thought leaders and recognized experts

# The day-to-day leadership provided by those who organize activities

# The classificatory leadership provided by those who collect and organize information in order to document practices

# The interpersonal leadership provided by those who weave the community’s social fabric

# The boundary leadership provided by those who connect the community to other communities

# The institutional leadership provided by those who maintain links with other organizational constituencies, in particular the official hierarchy

# The cutting-edge leadership provided by those who shepherd “out-of-the-box” initiatives.

Network of Practice

Building upon Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice, Brown and Duguid developed the concept of Network of Practice. Ranging from communities of practice to electronic or virtual communities, and differentiated from formal work teams, it focuses on how individuals come together to learn and collaborate in the context of their daily practice or tasks.

Defining networks as a set of individuals that are connected together in a social relationship (strong or weak ties) and practice representing the common area of focus or substrate that links the individuals together, the network of practice is differentiated from other types of networks such as photo sharing insofar as this kind of a network is based on a practice area where individuals engage in a conversation to ask and share in order to perform at their work.

Networks of Practice (NoPs) include communities of practice (where ties are strong and face to face interaction is predominant) at one end of the spectrum, to electronic networks of practice (typically virtual/electronic communities brought together by weak ties) at the other end.

NoPs differ from formal work teams primarily in the way they are structured and by their control mechanisms. They also differ in terms of their size (they can get very large) and by restrictions on membership.

Existing Technology Vendor Approaches

Janet Clarey’s interviews with LMS providers reveal other implementation perspectives, perhaps not all as well informed by connectivist theory, but nonetheless cognizant of the power of networked learning and social media. For example, Jeff Whitney from Outstart states:

We developed our social media platform separate from our LMS as many informal learning initiatives do not require the formal reporting and tracking features of an LMS.

Generation21 believes that the network function is really a feature, an option to customers to exercise if they so require. And Mzinga is prepared to allow customers to balance emphasis between formal and informal learning modes with “deep direct links” to the former for “certifications, compliance, curriculum…”.

Just as CBTs (computer based training) evolved into WBTs (Web based training), we are seeing now the emergence of, what I call, NBTs (Network based Training) and blended training options that include blogs and wikis as one of the components of the blend. Whatever be the exact mode of bringing in networked learning, enterprises can now start assessing this new framework for their own specific uses.

In essence, then, there is the conflict between adopting networked learning as a standalone social platform, a “hybrid” blend of formal and informal learning and as part of a pure Connectivist model of learning.

The LMS providers are thinking of informal learning as either ancillary (supporting a formal learning program, like an additional component that is blended in), optional (that users can use if they want) or for pure collaboration purposes (the individual knowledge sharing community purpose).

However, a pure connectivist model would start from individuals discovering others through weak ties around an area of shared inquiry; a model where learning and knowledge evolves in parallel with the ability of learners to make connections. Too much structure and control upfront, as in the standalone or hybrid approaches, will inhibit the fundamental aim of a connectivist learning approach, which is to build key learning abilities such as wayfinding and sensemaking. It may also mute and morph the change and lull us into believing that Connectivism is yet another way to teach, learn and administer training using Web 2.0 technologies.

For organizations, Connectivist approaches may be applied to some areas, while there may be a mix of other approaches for other areas including the formal training approaches.

Learning Ecologies

As opposed to other theories, Connectivism provides a framework that is based on an explicit understanding of the role of networked, distributed learning. Of core importance to educators, the ecology for learning becomes a key for engendering connectivist learning.

As Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and Jay Cross state:

Most of us agree on where we’re headed: to ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, where members of self-sustaining communities of professionals participate because they take pride in maintaining their standards and doing a great job, and where everyone strives to be all she can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s what we’re after.

A Connectivist learning ecology inherently:

• Enables us to recognize and interpret patterns that exist (way finding, sense making); indeed, generate our own new patterns
• Helps us build adaptively on and capture existing patterns given a rapid changing core and diverse knowledge sources
• Provides a distributed environment (both for knowledge and people)
• Provides avenues for social collaboration
• Is technologically enhanced to deal with diverse processes/circumstances such as negotiating information overload, self organization, determining order within chaos etc.
• Enables us to leverage and expand on a network that is diverse
• Helps us build ties at varying strengths that in turn may determine the efficacy/effectiveness of our learning
• Enables us to negotiate complex learning needs

These ecologies force us to reconsider the roles of the educator, the instructional designer, the visual designer and the learning technologist even as it impacts how managers and vendors contribute to the learning organization.

Learning Formations

In this context, it is important to consider two dimensions – how do groups form and how do they evolve in an enterprise context. Stephen Downes clearly demarcates networks from groups.

A group is elemental, defined by mass and sameness – like an ingot of metal 

A network is diverse and changing, defined by interactions – like an ecosystem

Stages of Evolution

This distinction is an important one because it spans different types of learning collaborations possible. In a learning network, we may expect different types of such collaborations – that I term Learning Formations. Three possible types are:

1. Instant, ad-hoc, workflow based, just-in-time learning formations – these are characterized by short bursts of interactions and great diversity, typically simple collaboration types with no structure that needs to be defined, such as in Twitter, IM and simple media sharing
2. Short term learning formations characterized by heavy bursts of interaction and purposeful collaboration – typically what we would find in training contexts today or blogs
3. Long term learning formations – formations that are cohesively built around a reasonably long term commitment, focussed goals and complex domains. These would be highly structured environments such as in CoPs.

If we tried to map models of group development, such as Bruce Tuckman’s Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing-Adjourning model, or George Charrier’s Cog’s Ladder Polite-Why we are here-Power-Cooperation-Esprit stage model, we can perhaps look at instant learning formations occupying the early stages, the short term learning formations placed somewhere in the middle and the long term learning formation at the end of the spectrum.

It is important to emphasise how network formations could possibly evolve. If we look at George Charrier’s Cog’s Ladder model, there are five stages to forming efficient groups. These are:

• the Polite stage – where members get acquainted with each other, engage in dialogue and verbal spars to really assess each other and what they bring to the group
• the Why we are here stage – where members rally around a common context, whatever their individual motivation is, facilitated by a moderator or leader
• the Power stage – where opinions, dissensions or simple abstentions dominate the interaction
• the Cooperation stage – where members realize that to meet the common goal they need to accept diversity of thought and opinion
• the Esprit stage – where mutual acceptance, team spirit and learning efficiency is the highest

If we look at Bruce Tuckman’s five stage model, it has:

• Forming – similar to the polite stage in terms of making acquaintances and assessing the other members and their abilities, but includes context setting and motivation with a lot of direction being provided by the team leadership
• Storming – where different perspectives compete for attention and conflict may undermine progress towards achieving goals
• Norming – where trust, motivation, agreement on rules of the game and participation become enhanced and team members get more acquanted with the how of achieving shared objectives
• Performing – where team members are highly motivated, become really knowledgeable, manage conflicts amicably and participate at a deep level
• Adjourning – where when the goal has been achieved, teams disband to pursue new tasks or learning goals.

Wenger also depicts about the 5 stages of development for a Community of Practice. These are:

• Potential – people face similar situations without the benefit of a shared practice
• Coalescing – Members come together and recognize their potential
• Active – Members engage in developing a practice
• Dispersed – Members no longer engage very intensively, but still the community is alive as a force and a center of knowledge
• Memorable – The community is no longer central, but people still remember it as a significant part of their identities

In all models, there may be iterative cycles as new members are inducted or issues arise that force the group back to a prior stage.

Whether they are called groups, networks, connectives, collectives or communities, these are learning formations that are characterized by factors such as:

• life cycle – duration and phases (length of the interactions, the progression from one stage to the other)
• interaction frequency (index of user participation in the interactions)
• interaction depth (index of user participation in terms of the quality and inter-relationships in the interactions)
• complexity of domain (quality and amount of knowledge and its complexity)
• extent of formal structures and processes (roles, workflow, leadership, accountability, open-ness)
• formation size (the number of people involved)

If we attempt to connect learning to Tuckman’s stages in development for learning formations and to Web 2.0 technologies that are available today, we can perhaps group them into three segments as depicted above.

The first segment (Ad hoc) is characterized by a high level of diversity of opinion, open-ness, ad-hoc relationship creation and a very utilitarian workflow or just-in-time type of interaction. Examples include a twitter network, IM or Facebook, simple sharing of photos or videos or presentations and quick queries through services such as Yahoo! Answers.

The second segment is where I would place traditional learning and some part of the learning 2.0 style. Formations that occur here are typically those who will get to some extent to the performing phase (and thereon to organizational or institutional excellence). A degree of formal structure starts becoming visible here, whether it is an LMS controlling enrolments or an instructor leading a class.

The third segment is where things start getting complex. These formations are tightly focussed and driven by commonly accepted goals. Examples include CoPs (Communities of Practice) and massively multi-player on-line role playing games (MMORPGs) and where gaming, simulation, e-portfolios and immersive learning environments would fit naturally and play a great role. These formations would be highly structured, deal with higher complexity, have higher frequency of interaction, higher indices of user participation and would move all the way up into the performing stage relatively quickly.

However, as George Siemens cautions when he quotes Uzzi Shapiro in Connectives and Collectives: Learning Alone, together,

“Intense connectivity can homogenize the pool…high cohesiveness can lead to the sharing of common rather than novel information” Uzzi, Spiro (2005)

The thought is that as ties become stronger and individuals aggregate into groups and collectives, the discourse becomes normed (in fact there is a veritable coercion to the norm) that leads to a drying up of new ideas that are novel and diverse.

Barry Wellman describes how communities have evolved from being in “Little Boxes” (densely-knit, linking people door-to-door) to “Glocalized ” networks (sparsely-knit but with clusters, linking households both locally and globally) to “Networked Individualism ” (sparsely-knit, linking individuals with little regard to space).

The basic thesis is that since learning formations may be manifested and may evolve in many ways, an understanding of these types is important to build effective learning ecologies at the enterprise level.

Enterprise Implementation

This brings us to an important question. If there is a strong case for Connectivism in the Enterprise, is there also an implementation methodology that is established and can be immediately used?

One perspective, that was heavily process oriented & steeped in real life experiences, argues that unless processes and workflows (and related metrics) are established, implementing these tools in the enterprise would be exhausting and with little return for the amount of effort it would take to manage and the money it would cost.

Then there are formal approaches for CoPs such as the one laid down in the Defence Acquisition University (DAU)  Community of Practice Implementation Guide, which provides a 14-step, 3 phase process for setting up practices that could contain CoPs, Shared Interest Areas (SIA) and collaborative workspaces. This document is very elaborate and covers processes, roles, permissions, workflow, engagement rules and metrics for setting up CoPs and community knowledge bases.

With true process orientation, this document provides a fairly detailed best practice for the DAU in its community development initiatives. What is important is the fact that it leverages the same principles that we would use to create and manage an enterprise unit.

Another perspective revolves around how useful or participated in really are blogs and wikis. Talk CoPs or networked learning, and all that people think of is Web 2.0 technology and tools, the hype not really difficult to understand, given that major technology vendors are pushing for implementation of these tools in their recent launches.

Endgame. The perception that the process and/or the technology are responsible for making networked learning happen is problematic. This is especially true given the power laws we have experienced in terms of community participation and effectiveness or the constant refrain that elearning is not, perhaps, living upto its potential.

Stephen explains in his post, Connectivist Dynamics in Communities, that connectivist networks produce connective knowledge. Four elements distinguish a knowledge-generating network from a mere set of connected elements. These are autonomy, diversity, open-ness and interactivity & connectedness. There are compelling arguments that Stephen makes, as in the past, that we need to respect these elements if we want to increase the probability of generating new knowledge (and make sense of the current base of knowledge). These elements can also be the basis of metrics and tracking.

George laments the inadequacy of tools for sense-making. He also declares “…But any view of society that does not start with the individual is disconcerting.“

All these views, taken together, suggest that there is something more to networked learning than just processes and technology. It is a connectivist approach, a model that focuses on how we learn, that provides us a different lens through which to regard fundamental questions such as how do we learn to perform in a fast changing environment or how do we get incited to participate in a network to create new knowledge.

The Connectivism Development Cycle

In his book Knowing Knowledge, George Siemens painstakingly describes a possible implementation model (pp124-141) for organizations to adopt. He states (p 128):

Connectivism implementation begins with the creation of new organizational structures. New organizational structures then direct or allow for new affordances. The combination of new spaces and structures and affordances permit the implementation of Connectivist approaches to learning and knowledge flow in learning, communicating, collaborating, marketing and other organizational activities.

Giving us a sense of how deep the change is, Siemens writes (p 128):

Tinkering around the edges, in constant conflict with the balance of the organization, is a taxiing and frustrating process. For these reasons, I have chosen to present a wide scale implementation of Connectivism, instead of smaller scale views.

The Connectivism Development Cycle (CDC), according to Siemens, includes the following domains:

• Analysis and Validation – analyzing and validating the existing knowledge processes (how does knowledge flow?), the social network, structure of the organization, learning mission and culture
• Ecology and Network Design and fostering – the external design of nodes of information, tools and techniques along with the processes for fostering and guiding internal (knowledge) networks.
• Adaptive Learning and knowledge cycle – where digital, network and network formation (connection-making) skills are a new competency to be developed by organizations in their employees. In this domain, organizations can play a crucial role in establishing the purpose of the learning ecology, defining individual and ecology identity, establishing the relevance to daily work, making it easy to use and accessible, allowing network formation through social relationships, encouraging diversity and monitoring change & contribution.
• System review and evaluation – how the organization evaluates the effectiveness of the ecology (metrics such as those for innovation, quality of learning, better customer service) and RoI (metrics such as those for reduced expenses, increased revenue, increased personal effectiveness, capacity to meet new challenges and organizational ability to adapt & transform
• Impacting factors – factors such as the time available for development, budgets for development and change, learning intent, availability of technology and competence to use the new technology.

An alternative approach to Implementation

To this end, I propose a phased approach.

A starting point, in my opinion, would be to create an environment wherein employees could get engaged with the new medium inside the workplace and learn the skills required to operate in this ecology – making connections, navigating information, sharing and collaborating through weak and strong ties. The primary movers in this phase would be community coordinators and subject matter experts who would be responsible for setting up most of the content in a way that can be disseminated to the rest of the community. This would be akin to a Norming stage.

The second step would be to allow the members of the learning enterprise to practice these skills to access information and organize it in a way that is aligned to their work. For example, they could view and comment on what the experts have put together. And this could be among other special initiatives designed by the coordinators to engage members and help them build expertise and interest in participating. At this point, we should see many more ideas from all over the network on how they should be organized into sub-networks or communities of practice and some amount of self organization will begin to emerge. This would be similar to a Storming stage.

Once this has been accomplished, these skills need to be placed inside a work context – a specific domain area, a problem to be solved or an innovation to be pioneered. As individuals and departments experience the power of this framework, and the learning implicit within it, connective learning should be formalized within the context of a business goal – e.g. launching a new product and making sure all employees learn how to market and support the product. The first RoI will and should emerge from demonstrable business results from engaging this framework. This is where networks in the enterprise shall have started performing in response to business needs.

Summary

In summary, enterprises today can greatly benefit from a Connectivist approach to learning and development. Not only that, it is fast becoming imperative for Enterprises to embrace networked learning, leverage social media, recognize changing learner preferences and reduce training costs to survive and grow in an intensely challenging marketplace. Connectivism provides a framework for learning in the digital age that allows us to do exactly that.

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Did someone just learn?

Most of our education system is geared towards a particular conception of a student and her specific way of learning. Let’s face it. We give our children the same amount of time to learn every day. It is the same time in the day for learning. It is mostly the same cohort with which you learn. The same methods applied to each student. The same subjects to learn. The same textbooks to read. The same boundaries of what you can or cannot do. The same metrics to judge performance. The same number of years to study. The same choices each year until they leave, and then precious little choice of what to learn afterwards. Day after day. Year after year.

On the other hand, we struggle with this sameness. No two students are the same, we say. Learning should occur outside too, through real life applications and experience. It should probably also be flipped. We should use digital content and technology to give students more choice and exposure. We strive to be different each day, try to negotiate their individual complexity within these constraints.

It is almost as if these are two different things – schooling and learning. The end results are fairly predictable. Our children learn to cope with the system. Some manage to master it. And some give up.

Does each student take away enough to be all that we desire them to? Are they really equipped to be responsible citizens and family?

The sameness of our system is a dramatic simplification of teaching and learning. Our struggle against it, a Sisyphean challenge. Our success, partial at best. Thousands learn , but millions don’t quite get there. A scorecard we would not and should not find acceptable.

Do we know any better? Perhaps we do know a bit more than we did. We know it is far more important to push and extend the limits of what our childen can do, like athletes preparing for long hard days on tracks they aspire to reach. We know of more ways to reform or beat the system.

But the system stays, inertial and unyielding,  perhaps we collectively do not believe in our own hearts that the any struggle against it can possibly succeed. Perhaps we believe that it is our fault that the system does not work. Perhaps there is a hope that it can still overcome the contradiction between the simple and the complex, the sameness and the diversity.

We can change it if we really want to, if we really care. We can start by making a commitment to all our children that we will help them learn – that we will not have them bear what we had to.

How can we change?

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#Rhizo15 Week 6 The Practical Guide to Rhizomatic Learning

A brief introduction

Rhizomatic Learning is an important way to think about learning and teaching. It describes a learning experience where learning itself is organic and emergent, deeply driven by personal context, flexible boundaries and multiple pathways. It describes a teaching experience that sets the context, facilitates the inter-connections of ideas through conversations, and empowers the community to engineer their own curriculum.

Rhizomatic Learning builds up the core capability to learn in a distributed learning environment. It leverages all the attendant benefits of network-led and community-based learning, but distinguishes itself by describing a personal “self-reproducing” capability to learn.

The agency to learn rests with the learner and the learning community she is part of. The agency to teach is distributed among all the learners, who really establish the curriculum. The resultant is messy and complex, with individual outcomes possibly far in deviation to any expected outcomes from the community.

In Rhizomatic Learning, the definition of a “course” veers away from the traditional. It is a sense of time-bound evented-ness, a shared context which aggregates a community. It’s curriculum is formed by the community, that evolves and extends it continuously through prior knowledge and emergent opinions. It may engender several artistic and creative forms of expression, not necessarily formal artifacts associated with traditional courses.

Rhizomatic Learning is characterized by learning freedom. It draws heavily upon open-ness, lack of centralized control, autonomy, diversity and interaction. Freedom in learning drives most of the interactions, liberating the learning experience.

In contrast, Connectivist models uphold “connection-making”  as the primary source of learning and knowledge. There is connection-making in Rhizomatic learning, but that is merely a medium. The focus is on free, unrestricted sharing and unpredictable pathways in learning. In that sense, the afterthought focus on Critical Literacies in the cMOOCs, becomes the starting point for Rhizomatic Learning. What is “tidy” in  the network model, becomes messy in the rhizomatic one. The replication of learning capability in distributed environments is key – “more of how you can learn, is learning” of rhizomatic learning overwhelms the “those that have, get” rules of networks. In  that sense, rhizomatic learning is deliberately empowering personalized learning.

The Practical Guide

So what would a practical guide to Rhizomatic Learning contain for the learner? Having gone through so many years of learning in all modes – traditional, online, MOOC, rhizomatic – here is a summary of how I learn best. Perhaps there are learners like me who will resonate with my approach.

Liberate yourself

The first important thing to realize is that you are in control. You control what you write, how you perform, who you choose to interact with, the level of effort you put in, how you handle critique – in short, your behavior, goals, motivations, discipline and ethics play an important role in Rhizomatic Learning.

Express yourself regularly

If the community is the curriculum, each one has the capability to contribute, in whatever form of expression. In fact, try out new forms of expression, artistic or otherwise, to experiment with ways to put your point forward. You don’t know which part or form of your expression may inspire several others or motivate them to contribute. The point is to verbalize or demonstrate your participation in some way or the other. It is really important to be regular. Make it a point to express yourself at least once a topic or theme.

Keep Track

We will continuously get better at handling conversation technologies, but it is important to keep up with what others are expressing. Understand that other people will also use a variety of channels and techniques to communicate, and that conversation will sometimes get too unwieldy to keep track of. Navigating and coalescing your spaces into some form of organization convenient for you is important.

Small is better

Pick out threads that pique your interest, focus on a small idea at a time and track its development. These small ideas will eventually bubble up into larger perspectives. Interact in smaller groups, one idea at a time. Don’t “spray and pray” and always watch your stats (such as how many views, likes), because the act of expressing an opinion is itself a work of art – your art – which contributes to your own rhizomic development immeasurably. It helps to get and give concise feedback on small focused ideas. It also helps to give some time for the idea to develop, in your mind and through the interactions. So perhaps it is better to culminate a theme/week with your informed perspective.

Be responsive

It is incredibly important to be responsive to people and events, both in instances where you are explicitly part of the conversation and where you are not. Being responsive helps other people with feedback and a motivation to continue their rhizomatic learning. Respond to comments, like posts and comments where you agree, drop a line or two in response to a new contribution – there are many ways to be a proactive part of the community learning experience. I would include empathy and humor as two very important tools in rhizomatic learning.

Be rhizomatic

Above all, reflect on how you are learning. Use each interaction as an opportunity to build your capability to learn. Find what helped, explore a new direction of thought, make a friend, challenge an argument.

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#rhizo15 Week 5 Communities are the same

Dave Cormier asks many interesting questions in his challenge for Week 5 of Rhizomatic Learning. He asks:

This week take a critical look at the rhizomatic approach. Are we just replacing one authority structure with another? Trading tradition for community? What does this mean in our classroom? How can this get us into trouble? What are the ethical implications of creating a ‘community’ for learning? Community as conformity?

In general, communities tend to homogenize around shared beliefs and practice, agenda/goals, structure and authority. Communities may be open & tolerant by choice, and forever expansive by design.

Within communities, there are similar patterns as groups of people start self-organizing and gaining power. It is to be expected that (as the SNA by Aras shows) as we evolve, we start self-organizing in sub-community clusters or groups. Each cluster (centered around a hub) will feature its own level of density of connectedness and its own sub-community rules of engagement within and with the outside world. If the charter of the community includes outreach, the community will keep on expanding and so will the clusters as new people make themselves felt. Some communities will become extinct for lack of strong leadership or sharing, and some may flourish. That is just how it is with communities, I think.

Communities are very useful entities in many ways – they indoctrinate, foster and grow in specific ways and directions, and come to represent social, political and economic forces. Over time, they may become increasingly cohesive, sometimes acquiring cult status of their own. In  that sense, communities feed on and edify more and more of their own shared beliefs and practices (“more of the same”). To the extent that they believe their beliefs and practices are universal, they also acquire invasive and exclusive dimensions, particularly as their elite start focusing on goals of mutual benefit.

Communities are also able to then interact with other communities in ways dictated by power relationships and mutual value. Their interactions with each other may not be very open because they represent differing shared beliefs and other characteristics. That is just the way they behave, I think.

I believe it is not possible to pose community as an alternative to traditional structures.

I do not mean this in an operational sense (learning is different in a community as compared to learning in a formal educational equivalent), but in a structural way. Of course, it is very reasonable to talk of it as an alternative in the operational sense – at least so long as we are unable to do the “counting” in pure, un-blended community environments. But structurally, the evidence is that it is “more of the same” and will promote “those who have, get” types of structures.

So Dave asks:

How do we make sure there is always room for new and contrarian voices? Do we need to create a them to have a we? How do we cultivate a community learning ecosystem so that it continues to grow outward rather than inward? What does that mean for learning?

There is a natural asymmetry in the terms “ensure”, “make room for”, new and contrarian”, “them and we”, and “outward and inward” symptomatic of the community itself. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have let that homogenizing force compel us to differentiate between these. In that sense, communities are invasive. Not a bad thing at all in a lot of cases, but just how a community structures and evolves over time, I think.

But communities aren’t the only form that needs to become operational. Nor are “courses” the only evented-ness in learning. My own sense is that networks will be far more important in supporting and driving learning processes of the future than communities (or “courses”).

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#rhizo15 Week Two – Counting networks

A rather belated post on #rhizo15 week 2! How do we count or measure learning in our networks or learning rhizomatically? How do we begin to “grade Dave”?

“Counting” evolution of our learning networks is very important. How does a network or community form? When does it acquire critical “mass” of conversation? How does it sustain? And when does it wither away and perhaps die, only to come alive again in the future, like a raw nerve left exposed?

The months before CCK08, then during CCK08, and Change11 and many of the early cMOOCs afforded great opportunities to discuss a multitude of ideas.

I think Stephen sparked it off by talking about Learning 2.0 in an early article. Then came a series of posts around how I viewed collaboration and evolution in networked learning (starting here). Essentially power laws were well in evidence when we looked at conversations – a small number of conversations were held together by many people and these threads were reasonably long (if I remember correctly, this was the pre-‘like’ era), while a majority of conversations were ad-hoc and short lived.

The pattern was not unlike what you would expect on the Internet prompting discussions on the long tail or that the world wasn’t flat, it was rather spiky. It also was scale-free in the sense that it could observed in small classrooms as well as the rather large learning networks of these cMOOCs.

This pattern also prompted me to think that the goal of such educational networks should be to flatten the power law, leading to a more participatory, equitable and democratic system rather than the ‘rich get richer’ bias that we have now (and Stephen writes eloquently about this, especially towards the end of that post) in his recent dialogues with George when he talks about the University system).

Which is why counting is really an important subject. We cannot continue to count the way we have been counting. But we cannot change unless we also redefine what we are counting and how we are counting it. In fact, for cMOOCs to be counted as a credible alternative (and not just a supplement like the xMOOCs), we have to devise a friendly and intuitive mechanism for counting learning in these networks.

This type of counting is necessary for people to be able to share a new common vocabulary for representing and differentiating levels of competence or progress. Unless this new vocabulary emerges, we will not have a way to transact within it, to generate economic and social choices of human capital using it and to create policy around it. It will also be difficult to get any adoption at scale.

This, in my opinion, has been the biggest block to making cMOOCs mainstream as well as the biggest reason that xMOOCs have been credible. xMOOCs have taken the same counting terms from the traditional system which is widely understood – institutional brand, expert professors, certificates and degrees, price, blended learning – which makes them intelligible to the world. cMOOCs don’t yet have a vocabulary to do that.

It is not just the vocabulary though. The vocabulary will only emerge through research and compelling evidence. It will need new tools and techniques for measurement. It will need to be able to fit in the modern world and the needs of the people. If we do not evolve such measures, cMOOCs will be marginalized as hype.

The need of the hour is for such learning networks to analyze what constitutes learning in the network and how to count it. It is easy to say that these learning networks are only suitable for certain domains or for certain types of people. But it is more difficult to believe they are a credible alternative to traditional education systems without the accompanying quantifying justifications that make the educational, economic and social value intelligible and visible to everyone.

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CBSE Open Text Based Assessments – Lip Service or Silver Bullet

The Open Text-based Assessment or OTBA was also notified on May 31, 2013 by the Central Board of Secondary Education. Applicable to select subjects in Class IX and XI, this was made a mandatory component of the Summative exams at the end of the year. Experts hired by CBSE have now made essays/case studies etc. based around the key concepts covered through the second term in that subject and told teachers to hold group discussions, facilitate exploration and to engage students in “discussion, analysis, self-reflection and critical thinking”. They want to discourage “mugging” and encourage active learning. As the circular states:

The main objective of introducing this element is to provide opportunities to students to apply theoretical concepts to a real life scenario by encouraging active and group learning in the Class.

In a later circular, it is reiterated that:

the main objective of introducing OTBA is to relieve the students from the burden of mugging up of content and provide opportunities in effective use of memory and acquiring skills of information processing.

And the board has actually supplied the content for the OTBA complete with sample questions and assessment “rubrics” (which are nothing but itemized phrases or key points, that if they appear in the answer to the question, may be considered worthy of being awarded the right score). The teacher is expected then to create questions based on a revised Bloom’s taxonomy, assign a marking scheme and keep an “open mind” setting aside own biases while grading an answer.

While the concept is laudable – in fact, this is greatly desirable as a technique – the implementation is and will continue to be a great challenge. It assumes and implies several things.

It assumes that teachers will be able to execute if oriented and trained. While this is a good “upward” aspiration, it is unlikely to be true on a significant scale as pointed out by the NCFTE 2009 report itself. The report bemoans that:

Teacher education programmes provide little scope for student teachers to reflect on their experiences…There is no opportunity for teachers to examine their own biases and beliefs and reflect on their own experiences as part of classroom discourse and enquiry.

Teachers who have not experienced or practiced lateral and critical thinking themselves are not going to be able to do so basis an orientation program or workshop conducted by the CBSE per se. For them to be able to do this, they will need extensive on-going coaching and mentoring.

The other thing is the format itself. The beauty of an open assessment like this is that it needs time in the classroom and beyond it to appreciate the text and its interdisciplinary nature. But if the text itself becomes a chapter-like construct, because the same text that is given in advance becomes the one upon which assessment is conducted, it has already negated the technique. In the end, publishers are incentivized to come up with yet another textbook around the passages and the child ends up resorting to cramming it, defeating the very purpose of the assessment.

Not just that, there is no evidence gathering mechanism to demonstrate what the in-class and beyond-class exploration and thinking around the text has really resulted in. This means that teachers have no compulsion to treat this as any different from what they normally do. Even if they  were able and willing, they have little prior experience in negotiating loosely structured learning processes.

Then again, the beauty of any such technique lies in the open interpretation of the text in the context of all the learning that the child goes through. However text based assessments are divided subject wise, automatically constraining the extent of interpretation and analysis to the chapter of the subject being taught. So it is not even a true case based approach. If it were, it would place even a greater load on teachers who would be expected to have that holistic approach and knowledge.

The other important thing is the naming of the assessment itself. The use of “open” as a qualifier to “text based” is contradictory in terms because it restricts the learning context to the text itself (and some supplied references, many of which are dead-ends for discovery and exploration of the theme). The text could be one starting point, but not the only one. And it must be clear of political overtones (like the preoccupation with the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan).

In fact, if it was called open learning assessment, it would be much more appropriate. For these type of assessments, we cannot apply the same context as that for closed learning assessments. The concept is not new and even a cursory examination of the research on the web reveals practices, techniques and critical opinions (see also Can students also learn…) about open “authentic” assessments vs. traditional closed assessments. Of course, one cannot ignore other “get-around-it” methods such as plagiarization and cheating, which must be combated in these kind of assessments if they are truly open, but there are methods to handle these anomalies as well.

The question is how deeply are we thinking about these assessments and learning processes? Are we playing lip service or do we really think this can be a silver bullet? We need to think deeply about the ecosystem we want to foster for deep authentic learning – are our designs going to further learning or are they going to serve entrenched interests?

If we do really intend OTBA type assessments to result in something significant for our students and teachers, we need to address some deeper issues.

1. How can we first engage our teachers (and teacher educators) in ways through which they truly begin to understand and appreciate “open-ness”? How do they start practicing open-ness? What practices and tools are they most comfortable with? How do we ensure that they are given a conducive environment to fill their own learning gaps?
2. How can we start encouraging our students to learn new practices, especially the social and digital ones, to aid authentic learning?
3. How can we plan this in a way that we have the ecosystem in place before we scale it to students and their parents? It is tiring to see students being guinea pigs of every new brainwave.
4. What should the ecosystem contain? This should involve skills development in various areas (student, teacher, parent, school administration), community development for learning and practice, social online literacies, tools and platforms, audit and measurement leading to analytics and actionable insights, and other elements such as linkages with real-life scenarios, experts and data.
5. Perhaps the greatest contribution in these can be made through cMOOCs, because they are truly fit for authentic learning. If platforms such as SWAYAM could be adapted to become the cornerstone of this approach, especially for technology enabled communities, this could really be the platform that would make this kind of learning and assessment possible. Why can’t every OTBA be a MOOC? For those who do not have access to technology or the Internet in a reliable fashion, what are the other ways of dissemination and collaboration (inter/intra-school debates, mock discussions, paper-writing and many other activities could be conducted)?

Is this plain lip service to open-ness and authentic learning? Or is it being thought of as this incredible silver bullet that at some point will transform Indian education. Either way, we need to think deeper urgently.

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EdTechNext – Be the change

My presentation at the Technology in Higher Education at the edTechNext conference today.

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A school without textbooks

Not without books. Books are great. I mean textbooks as they are academi-factured (if that can be a word to denote academic manufacturing) and used now. The written word that becomes the gospel truth for 250 million students and millions of teachers in school today in India.

Seriously, the textbooks we produce are perhaps the greatest barrier in the system to fostering capable and autonomous learners. The fact that something is written in the textbook becomes the gospel truth that children cannot but recite.

There is the fact that most teachers cannot deviate from the text, cannot award imaginative, researched answers to questions given in assignments and tests. Many teachers would neither have the motivation, nor the passion, to understand these deviations.

Then there is the length of the written text, often verbose, and sometimes too simplistic or inadequate on even slightly deeper inquisitions. The sheer length of the discourse simply limits the extent of engagement that a student can have with the topic.

Compounding this litany of problems is the obsession with facts, so microscopic and so many, that you would even wonder later in life, why you were even expected to remember them, particularly as you could get to the net and answer them in a jiffy.

Ironically, TV shows that demonstrate the greatest failures, like the one that asks adults questions to check if they have actually passed the 5th grade, become the subject of great popular mirth and unconscious intellectual debauchery.

Then, as a result of the enlightenment that our students are not learning, they introduce new ways of assessments that actually end up spawning (to the publishers’ delight) new textbooks. And the whole cycle starts again.

There are umpteen examples from our system of textbooks that demonstrate these problems. CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation) is a mechanism that was supposed to induce children and teachers to think more, memorize less. But like the USA with the 21st Century skills curriculum, this got reduced to textbooks and project guides. The travails of the CCE, in the end resulted in diagnostic tests to check the problem solving skills of students with the PSA (problem solving assessment), which again has become the subject of many textbooks (almost like a separate subject).

Again, the system of gradually exposing students to a topic, in a step by step manner in each successive grade, leans exactly in the opposite direction of the non-linearity of learning through discovery, problem solving and peer-negotiation, because it limits the precise extent to which one can explore any topic and restricts, in effect, students to the contours of the author’s creative and intellectual boundaries.

My sincere apologies to the experts, but remember you were children once. In fact, it is a cruel testament to time, that you follow the same general methods that you were steeped in, perhaps with a liberal dose of buzzwords that you choose to believe make crucial differences to the way children learn now.

Perhaps it is time to stop treating children as dumb witted morons who will be developed into fine holistic individuals by using textbooks and allied means, however utopian and unrealistic the alternative may seem at present.

So, let us imagine a school without textbooks.

It will be a load off the shoulders, literally. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief. And then will come the true revolution.

Perhaps then the students will be introduced to a world of themes, which they desire to investigate, alone or in groups. The themes that they choose will be their personal journey into the world, trying to decipher its working to the extent they can, facilitated by not just the teacher, but every adult or peer who can contribute.

Along the way, they will leave a trail of learning and sharing. Themes may span across multiple years, result in multiple explorations and projects, depending upon interest and guidance. In short, the curriculum will be a co-creation, the syllabus a much wider canvas to draw on, and the assessments driven by the capability to learn and master different dimensions and levels of technical complexity.

At all times, the focus will be in fostering skills that promote autonomy, open-ness, collaboration, scientific temper, values and logic and seeing their application to the theme. It will celebrate curiosity and wonder, aesthetics, sensibilities, discovery, inferencing, deduction and a host of skills that will define the individual.

The spaces of learning will become a celebration of coming alive.

And we will have done what is expected of us – we will have given our children not the right to education, but the right to learn. Amen.

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Whither Indian MOOCs?

Today, India is at an important crossroad when it comes to MOOCs. Much has been written and spoken about the potential of MOOCs in this country. Unfortunately, most of the conversation has been around platforms. It has also centered around xMOOCs or XBTs as I term them, ignoring the rather rich discourse around the cMOOCs. And it has centered around who gets to own them (from a public resource perspective). This confusion has led to inevitable delays in the launch of a mainstream MOOCs implementation and accompanying policy. Is there a way out for us?

I think there probably is a way out. But first our educators and policy makers must fully understand core aspects of this revolutionary development in online learning and decide their strategy for the future.

The very first thing to note is that MOOCs are not (or should not be seen as) traditional eLearning. Online courses do not equate with MOOCs. The point of confusion is that bit about “online” and “courses” that confuses many people and leads them to conflate the two things. The distinction between what is meant by online and courses in MOOCs is really important to establish.

In MOOCs, “online” does not only just imply accessibility to digital resources using the technology behind the Internet and multimedia. Online implies the social, the neutral, the connected and the collaborative online practice of learning. Rather than focusing on the message, the focus is squarely on the medium. More than the content, the focus is on the connection and the “dance of conversation”.

Traditional eLearning was constructed within an older paradigm of the Internet that has completely revolutionized in the past few years. In that paradigm, putting WBTs (or web based training) on the web and then monitoring activity and scores with the occasional discussion forum, is the norm. Being predominantly an expedient, factory approach, we had to worry about packaging (SCORM/AICC), interoperability (LMS, Common Cartridge) and rich media (usually Flash/Flex) for interaction. Content factories had sprung up in countries like India to service the huge demand to create vanilla WBTs. These WBTs stereotyped learners, had self-contained learning (I don’t want to use the vitiated term “self-paced”) and were produced in low cost locations for budgetary reasons (cost cutting on face to face training and offshoring advantages). Content development is expensive and most organizations created page turners at scale. Few organizations spent large amounts on advanced eLearning development, such as for serious games and rich interactive WBTs. Return on investment in terms of learning was difficult to demonstrate, but the return on investment in terms of being able to “train” much larger populations at a fraction of the cost was demonstrable.

But the Internet changed. It became writable, connected, social, open and interoperable. However eLearning remained woefully the same, rooted in the old Internet. And when cMOOCs came along, powered by the new Internet, eLearning folks had no tools in their armory to adapt to them. So they ended up interpreting MOOCs as just very large eLearning courses. In fact, if you were to compare a xMOOC to an eLearning course, many people would not be able to tell the significant difference in approach.

With cMOOCs, however, George Siemens (who brought in the theory of Connectivism) had quickly realized that the Internet had changed, and eLearning needed a new approach (often called eLearning 2.0) in the face of supra-abundant information and connectedness. With Connectivism, learning is the process of making connections and knowledge is really a network (Stephen Downes). This meant that the role of the teacher (or instructional designer) had to change to someone who could “model and demonstrate” paths to learning and the role of the student had to be to “practice and reflect” through a greater connectedness. In that sense, learners had to become more heutagogical in nature with a deeper sense of and skill for learning.

The second difference is in the term “course”. The “course” in cMOOCs was a journey of way-finding and sense-making, with minimal facilitation. It is a bit of a stretch to use normal definitions of what a course is, in the cMOOC context. To take an extreme viewpoint, cMOOCs are a bit like learning on the tap, like learning to be, episodes in a continuous stream of learning that you can access by connecting to others. In cMOOCs, both structure and content are loosely defined, with the community determining the nature and the contours of learning (community as curriculum). This “un-course” definition flys in the face of standard understanding of the term “course” which has rigid membership, duration, curriculum and outcomes.

To take an example, in a “course” , the teacher would draft a course outline, supply readings and references, provide a tightly designed progression for learners (read this first, take a test, move to the next topic) and so on. Students are particularly dependent upon the teacher and work in a closed group. In a cMOOC, people form a loose network (open, no membership bar) based on interest, the community members decide to engage on a theme/topic, they supply (as it goes along) the resources that interest them and those they think will interest others, engage freely on certain ideas, contribute to and document/reflect upon their learning and use a plethora of tools they are comfortable with.

The cMOOC platform enables the conversation by aggregating the member contributions, making them accessible, remixing and repurposing them in forms that are useful to search/consume and feeding them forward to members and into newer directions not anticipated when the cMOOC was conceptualized. In this sense, learning becomes an emergent phenomenon with ever changing contours. And learners learn to adapt to these chaotic conditions and to self-organize in ways that are meaningful to them. This is what happens in real life as we learn and evolve. As Stephen Downes remarks:

“What happens,” I asked,”when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is “delivered,” and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created?”

Most people would say that the “course” has value in its traditional format. I do not dispute that. Instead what I am saying is that cMOOCs provide a real alternative to learning in that manner and so instead of ignoring that value, we should embrace this plurality.

The other part of the term talks about another two misrepresented terms – “massive” and “open”.

In popular terms, xMOOCs are known to be massive in terms of the number of students attending one course. However, this is only a conventionally acceptable meaning of massive. What massive also really means in the cMOOC context is to do with how connected the members of the network are (density), how quickly messages reach the members (speed), what is the consumption (flow) of messages in the network and how easily are connections formed and abandoned (plasticity).

To take an example, whenever new information or opinion reaches a node in that network (a member), if that node is disconnected or loosely connected to the rest of the network, the speed of the new information in reaching other nodes will be low, and the information may die before it reaches the rest of the network. In a world where our skill is dependent upon gaining  knowledge of things as they happen, this could be disastrous. Being disconnected or loosely connected with networks that bring us new learning and knowledge will only impair our education.

This is a sharp deviation from traditional eLearning, where these questions are not asked, because the network is the new Internet and eLearning still is stuck in the old Internet age. This implies that we will see the long tail in xMOOCs (where a large number of learners stay disengaged or minimally engaged with their learning, while a few exhibit intense activity) just as we did in traditional eLearning. And this is being evidenced by its high dropout rates.

The last term is “open”. Open-ness is interpreted in different ways in cMOOCs – free or fee, groups vs. networks (closed vs. open), no restrictions on membership, copyleft, diversity, unrestricted sharing, degree of engagement (yes, legitimate peripheral participation is also in evidence), risking public performance of learning (however incomplete), altruism, capacity to change, and ability to take criticism (or barriers to public display of learning). However, the major discourse around xMOOCs has been limited to just one or two of the dimensions listed above.

Hopefully, this understanding of the MOOC phenomenon is the first step that we in India can take while building a long term strategy. It’s important for us to appreciate the differences between traditional eLearning/xMOOCs/XBTs and step away to carve our own interpretations for our needs. If we are able to negotiate the transition successfully, an entire generation of learners will benefit. India has scale and that affords great opportunities for architecting powerful learning systems and for engendering better learners. Let us hope that this happens, rather than us aping the xMOOCs.

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MOOCs have arrived…what next?

First published in The Souvenir, FICCI Higher Education Summit 2014

Viplav Baxi makes the case that MOOCs have arrived in India. Now is the time to reflect on what pitfalls we should avoid and how we can fully leverage them in the Indian context.

The past few years have seen the rapid growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This emergence has been particularly interesting to follow in India, where we seem to have discovered online learning on a massive scale. Indians account for about 10% of the registrations in MOOCs from the top MOOC providers.

MOOCs actually originated out of a new theory of learning called Connectivism proposed by George Siemens in 2005. The first MOOC (the term itself was coined by Dave Cormier) was organized in 2008 by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Hailed as a disruptive model of education, the earliest MOOCs (also called cMOOCs or Connectivist MOOCs) offered a whole new way of teaching and learning.

Much later, in 2011-12, top universities in the USA jumped on to the MOOC bandwagon, lending it worldwide credibility and fame. The reasons behind the quick adoption of these MOOCs was the fact that anyone could learn (or get certified), for free or a small fee, from some of the top universities and top professors in the world. Large investments by private capital and university foundations shaped popular perception about the revolutionary potential of these MOOCs. Also universities viewed them as extending the reach and brand of the University. Open Courseware had existed for a very long time, but the shape and form of these MOOCs was far more accessible and exciting.

MOOCs have now progressed from being higher education-only to school, teacher and vocational education. The top 3 MOOC providers now service about 20 million students worldwide, about 5 times the open and distance learning enrolments in India. MOOCs have also taken over imagination at policy levels, with the Indian Government proposing SWAYAM as the open MOOC platform for India.

However, there remain significant challenges with the MOOC model.

Firstly, the pedagogy behind these MOOCs needs a rethink. The type of MOOCs that have gained worldwide popularity since 2011, adopted the title “MOOC” but ignored the rich underlying Connectivist origins. They merely extended traditional online, instructivist Web Based Training (WBT) and Instructor Led Training (ILT) methods to a massive audience, earning them the term xMOOCs, the “x” standing for “eXtension”.

WBTs and ILTs were designed as eLearning equivalents to reduce training delivery costs and standardize instruction for large scale corporate training. But nearly everyone realizes that this type of eLearning is not scalable because it is designed for learner stereotypes, does not account for real world diversity and in general, predates and ignores the entire social learning revolution.

Both for WBTs/ILTs and xMOOCs, the model is largely teacher (and/or instructional designer) led and content-driven. It not based upon socially negotiated & distributed learning, the hallmark of the Connectivist MOOCs. This is why it is perhaps more appropriate to call them XBTs (or “massive” extensions of WBTs and ILTs) rather than think of them as a variant of the original MOOC approach.

The XBTs augment the traditional systems, giving importance to institutional pedigree, clearly defined institutional structures & processes (such as courses, terms and exams) and certification mechanisms.

The Connectivist MOOCs are very open, emphasize sense-making, operate in a distributed fashion, legitimize learners at the periphery (legitimate peripheral participation or “lurking”) and do not impose the strict conformance to traditional notions of course, exam and certification. For them, learning is the process of making connections and knowledge is the network, which means that the competency and capability to learn critically determines the learning itself. This is the central theme behind heutagogy – the study of self-determined learning – that, unlike pedagogy and andragogy, marks a significant move away from traditional teacher-centred learning.

It will be critical for MOOC providers to evaluate the Connectivist approach as we move ahead, if we are to build meaningful massive open online learning courses and platforms.

Secondly, engagement and retention are key aspects of the learning experience that the MOOCs, in general, have not been able to address effectively. The long tail of learning, which is that a really large number of learners end up not completing the MOOC or remain at low levels of engagement, is nothing new. It is just that the massive nature of MOOCs amplifies some of these known issues.

It is here that the MOOC providers need to spend a lot of time experimenting with techniques such as gamification, badges, adaptive learning and learning analytics. The Connectivist model relies on learners to build capability for their own learning, something that is the desired endgame for any educational system. By increasing learner capability to learn in the digital medium, cMOOCs can potentially flatten the long tail. The traditional XBT model can only reinforce and amplify it.

The third challenge is in establishing sustenance & growth models, whether MOOC providers are for-profit or not for-profit. So far, providers have looked at monetization/cost recovery through various methods such as charging institutions or teachers for MOOC development; charging potential employers; platform provision; training & support; charging students for blended (online plus offline) learning, mentoring/coaching, special finishing school programs and certification.

For example, Coursera now has about 10 mn students and is supposedly making USD 1 mn a month from its verified certificate courses that cost between USD 30 and USD 100. However, even though these models do not appear to have garnered explosive acceptance from a retail student perspective since they are not really integrated into formally recognized certifications, the hope seems to be to acquire large enough numbers to translate into sustainable and/or profitable ventures.

An interesting comparison for XBT providers are the formal open and distance learning systems, where regulated degrees & certificate programs drive enrolments and fees & endowments drive the income. The UK Open University in 2012-13, earned more than GBP 200 mn as fee income (about 60% of which were supported by student tuition loans) from over 200,000 students. The Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, has an annual enrolment of about 500,000 students (in 2012 annual enrolment was 465,000 students), but the fee per course would be a fraction of the fee charged by the UKOU. Of course, the XBT providers are looking at multiples of these figures as they go about targeting a global audience.

The fourth challenge lies with a weak private/non-profit investment climate for MOOCs in India. Significant public effort and money has and is being spent across various pioneering Government initiatives to build open education resources (OERs), MOOCs and MOOC platforms. These can be leveraged by anyone under a very permissive OER policy, which even allows commercial use. However, barely any private investment is flowing into leveraging these resources.

Innovations and investments are required in multiple areas such as awareness generation, access to technology and communications, capability development, content development (including multilingual), pedagogy, development/enhancement of MOOC platforms, collecting and managing learner progress and performance data to improve the learning experience, as well as areas like gamification, Virtual LABs and other forms of technology augmented learning. These innovations and investments should directly impact our education system in terms of improved access, improved learning outcomes and higher employability.

To summarize, MOOCs have arrived, but if we do not deal with these core challenges of MOOCs, we will end up having a dysfunctional system. To avoid later disappointment, stakeholders must reorganize and focus on how to avoid the pitfalls of the current wave of MOOCs.

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Is the classroom a machine?

In a Big Think article, Why Technology Won’t Save an Inefficient Education System, with Dr. Madhav Chavan, and in several other similarly argued contributions, particularly like the ones from Sir Ken Robinson (read a critique here) or Sugata Mitra.

Education over that past 200 years has been fashioned like an assembly line. Children get placed on a conveyor belt that carries them from grade level to grade level. At each stop on the way they are receive the same knowledge as everyone else. Rather than become intuitive problem-solvers, students are expected to simply absorb the facts provided to them.

The argument that the educational system is a machine built for another age implies that the classroom is itself a machine and the teacher an automaton carrying out procedures that fill student brains with knowledge.

I had a group of educators look at me with alarm and disapproval the other day when I dared to suggest that the classroom was anything like a machine. For them, a classroom was an area where each student is different, has different learning styles and demands, and where they work hard to meet the demands of the curriculum (not enough time allocated to complete the syllabus). Challenges faced in each classroom were unique, although some best practices could be arrived at through experience. Similarly no classroom is the same as any other one in terms of its constituents, its infrastructure, its language and so on. The sheer diversity at the classroom level defies machinistic interpretations.

If the classroom is not a machine, the school as a factory analogy should break down here. Why? Because the classroom is the fundamental unit of the assembly process of schooling. And if that is not a machine, then school likely is not.

Similarly, if the counter to everyone being a dumb receptacle for knowledge, is that everyone becomes an “intuitive problem-solver”, we are talking about another kind of deterministic and linear process, another kind of factory that produces a different kind of student. This was exactly what 21st century skills framework in the USA or our Indian Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system has turned out to be – an addition to the curriculum that tries to generically create certain skills and orientation in students, commonly, across the board.

The point to be understood is that we are still thinking deterministically. In the article, Chavan talks about employing technology in an appropriate manner – not as subservient to the linearized school system, but as a tool to collaborate in order to solve problems. Technology enables a non-linear curriculum, emphasizing problem-solving over rote memorization, Chavan says, but impossible to implement under the traditional education system.

I think he has got it mixed up. Firstly, there is nothing intrinsic to technology that promotes any one way or form of learning over another. Secondly technology itself is not monolithic. Thirdly technology is not all pervasive enough to be a systemic component of learning. Fourthly, there is an implicit assumption that we want everyone to be great at problem solving and that there is this one giant universal conception of problem solving, irrespective of domain. Fifthly, non-linearity is a rich feature of existing classrooms, with or without the intervention of technology, in the sense that the classroom is a complex organism.

I think what they all mean to say, is that the traditional system suffers from certain constraints and obsolete practices that are making it very difficult to “enforce” alternate practices and conceptions. Let us look at some of the real constraints – the underlying causes.

Teachers are still learning the way they teach – To innovate the existing paradigm from the inside, teachers must start learning differently. If teachers start learning and using technology-enabled learning methods on their own, it will be a matter of culture for them to start using them in the classroom.

Teachers need to learn – Largely, teachers are like any other adult, and their motivation and ability to learn are immensely important to address. Mechanisms that reward professional and personal learning are largely absent in our system, and for the teachers in the public system, not integrated with career progression and salary increments.

Syllabi are too extensive – Syllabi are following their own inflationary trends. As the volume of knowledge has grown, topics that were earlier taught in higher classes, have been added to the load of the lower classes. The density and complexity of content to be taught/learned has increased significantly. The duration of time remaining the same, teachers have increasingly lesser time to focus on teaching core concepts. As one teacher explained in an alternate manner, “the syllabus is alright, it is just that the system that enforces an end date to the syllabus is wrong!”.

Technology is not ubiquitous – the availability of technology (and electrical power) itself is a core problem. Technology for computation, for storage, for protection against virus attacks, for connectivity and Internet access, for mobility – all these are real challenges in schools (and at home) today. Over time, these will hopefully get addressed by policy thrusts and reducing costs.

Constraints of the system – everything has to be taught in school, there are rigid enrolment schedules, each grade/class is divided into isolated and insular groups or sections in some arbitrary manner creating limitations on collaboration and sharing of knowledge – and many other structural components of the system. In fact, these constraints are the ones that are closer to the industrial age-factory analogy in the sense that they are the pillars of educational management in schools.

For example, putting children into groups and assigning them teachers is an operational decision – one that promotes manageability of the education process primarily. Many people say it is also logical to keep class sizes low to promote greater collaboration (and perhaps, control) and ability for teachers to address individual learning styles. But I believe that the two are different problems – there are many ways to adapt, blend or flip learning emerging now that need not necessarily force us to enforce these structures and ratios.

In summary, I think it is perhaps wrong and naive to treat classrooms as machines and teachers as automatons. Classrooms are complex organisms and don’t easily fall into the determinism of the factory analogy. However, classrooms and teachers operate under a system that tries to enforce determinism and linearity through some of the constraints discussed above.

If we want to change as a system, we need to extend, enhance and celebrate the complexity in education.

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#MOOConMOOCs – Sir John Daniel on MOOCs

The interesting MOOC on MOOCs conducted by Dr. T V Prabhakar from IIT Kanpur and Dr V Balaji from Commonwealth of Learning is in week 3. The theme itself is reminiscent of the CCK MOOCs, which did a deep dive into the Connectivist origins of the original MOOCs. It is timely also because India is really on the verge of something special in this area.

Sir John Daniel, one of the experts in Open and Distance Learning, has the following points to make in his video lecture contributed specially for the course.

• Open and Distance and Online learning did not start with MOOCs or even the Internet.
• Putting courses online does not automatically improve their quality.
• MOOCs are a good example of how computers and networks have increased the power and possibilities of ODL but they lack some of the vital ingredients of a good learning system. Many do not include Holmberg’s “guided didactic conversations” between learners and teachers and most do not include student assessment and certification.
• Everything depends on the design of the teaching learning system around the students’ needs.That must be the next step in  the development of MOOCs.
• In most cases, MOOCs are still simply information distribution systems
• Why have MOOCs been so slow in tackling the challenges of interaction and assessment? Because early 2012 MOOCs were by exclusive universities.

In his 2012 article, Making Sense of MOOCs – Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility, Sir John Daniel makes some important points:

We also agree with Bates that current xMOOCs pedagogy is pretty old hat but this will now change fast. Even if Coursera gave its partner universities great freedom in course formats in order to sugar the pill of signing the contract, this will quickly produce a great diversity of approaches and much healthy experimentation.

Placing their xMOOCs in the public domain for a worldwide audience will oblige institutions to do more than pay lip service to importance of teaching and put it at the core their missions. This is the real revolution of MOOCs.

In a more recent article for the Montreal Digital Conference to be held next month, Are MOOCs the long-awaited technological revolution in higher education?, Sir John Daniel makes some important points:

• It is unlikely that MOOCs shall be considered a revolution in Higher Education unless they are also able to perform the core functions of that system – “the authority to award degrees, diplomas and qualifications”.
• Quoting Laurillard who questions whether MOOCs are solving global education problems like access to universities, spiraling student debt and low graduate pay, he presents MOOCs as perhaps being more useful in professional and vocational development.
• The viability of building and maintaining MOOCs for universities are also called into question. They do not represent a significant return on investment (like the UKOU’s tracking of students who enrolled revealed that 1500 students had prior contact with its free media implying an 8% return on investment in free media) if considered for student recruitment, nor are they likely to make as much money in services like proctoring and assessments as compared to private operators. He sees certification and employee recruitment as the most promising end-uses of MOOCs.

In talking about the legacy of MOOCs, he writes:

This transformation of the methods of teaching and learning will be the primary legacy of MOOCs. It will not be a revolution but it will have a long-term impact on the way higher education operates, much like the important evolutionary stimuli in the earlier history of universities that we examined earlier.

Talking about OERs, he states:

The creation and use of OER developed steadily, but without fanfare, for the next decade. OER were the long fuse that detonated the MOOCs explosion.

On why MOOCs will not be revolutionary for Higher Education,

MOOCs are not revolutionary, both because higher education develops by evolution and also because MOOCs mostly do not lead to formal qualifications. MOOCs are, however, the harbingers of an important transformation that will lead to much greater use of online technologies in teaching, research and academic service.

Not surprisingly, he concludes:

Quality and the quality assurance of ‘post-traditional’ higher education, like the certification of its outcomes, is one of the greater challenges of these new forms of teaching and learning...Our first conclusion is that we should not await a revolution but rather expect digital innovations to transform practice in an incremental manner...Second, the present disruption being caused by digital technologies is a constructive process. We shall see a flurry of evolutionary change as institutions adapt to the new niches that innovations are creating. Third, it is important to let experimentation continue so that the viability of various models for using technology in teaching, learning, assessment and certification can be tested. This is why it was dangerous to present MOOCs as the contemporary revolution in higher education. Fourth and finally, this exciting phase of evolution poses a special challenge for quality assurance, which is caught on the horns of a dilemma.

Daniel is trying to situate MOOCs (specifically xMOOCs) in the Higher Education context, terming them an evolution and not a revolution, experiments that need far more innovation, currently unable to meet global challenges like student debt, unable to perform core functions such as awarding degrees and a logical evolution of the open and distance learning, OER, digital innovations and online learning paradigm. I think Daniel is saying that the incremental innovations in teaching and learning of the xMOOCs will bring about the real revolution over a period of time.

There is also a fleeting aspiration in what he writes:

In the long run heutagogy and cMOOCs may have a greater impact on the evolution of teaching and learning in higher education in an information age than the more common xMOOCs, some of which learners can find trivial rather than confusing.

and from the Musings article:

We quote Illich to emphasise that the xMOOCs attracting media attention today, which are ‘at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’ (Caulfield, 2012), appear to have scant relation to those pioneering (Ed: cMOOC) approaches.

As George Siemens writes while distinguishing between x- and c-MOOCs in What is the theory that underpins our MOOCs?:

As stated above, there is overlap between our model at that of Coursera/EDx. However, Coursera/EDx emulates the existing education system, choosing instead to transfer it online rather than transform it online.

Clearly, xMOOCs are an extension geared for the traditional system of education, where at University or online, open and distance. By his own admission, cMOOCs are pioneering approaches that may have a greater impact on teaching and learning in the long run.

The contention lies in whether Daniel thinks that the xMOOCs and cMOOCs are milestones on some kind of a continuum of evolution of higher education, or whether they are, as I firmly believe, two completely different systems altogether. In my opinion, we could better call the xMOOCs something else so that we are able to focus on the potential of cMOOCs in a better way – perhaps call them XBTs or eXtended-Web Based Training, just like the earlier generations were called CBT and WBT.

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Faculty shortage or learner shortage?

People keep on going on about there being so much shortage of good quality faculty. That, they bemoan, is the most important factor behind the problems that we face in K12 or Higher Ed today. It is definitely true to an extent.

I believe the bigger challenge is to find learners. Not students. But learners. Or capable students who take greater responsibility, initiative and interest in their own education as well as the education of their peers.

If we flip the problem, we can perhaps leverage the scale of learners to overcome most of the problems in education. To do this we have to break from the belief that students have to be led. They don’t. They need to be helped to become more capable of learning in an environment mediated by social and technological networks.

This can reshape how we think about teaching and learning. Teachers then need to make sure that students become more capable (instead of becoming more knowledgeable) and that they have help and facilitation when needed. Students have to acquire critical literacies (and heutagogical capabilities) to transform into Learners. The Government needs to reshape the ability of these new generation of capable learners to acquire credentials that can be interpreted (and later perhaps even replace) at par or higher (or differently) than existing credentials. Our institutions and employers need to reshape structures and practices to allow all this wonderful learning led by the ones that are most impacted by it.

This is why, in the FICCI Vision Paper on MOOCs in Higher Education that I co-wrote, my vision for MOOCs (and in general the educational system) was:

Learning through Massive, Open and Online courses (MOOCs) will enable all Indians who want to learn, earn, teach or innovate, the capability to realize their true potential and transform our country.

The vision talks about building capability, not creating trained engineers or research scientists. Replace “MOOCs” with “our Educational System” and the vision would hold, really.

Are we really chasing the wrong problems?

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Rethinking Learning Environments and Class

Do you go to the football field to learn music? Or to the art gallery to learn fencing? Or to a library to learn oratory? You don’t. However, irrespective of whether you are studying history, economics, physics, languages or architecture, you go to that one singular invention – the classroom.

In the age of networks, this notion of a classroom perhaps needs a serious rethink.

What should a modern day learning environment look like? Should it extend the notion of the classroom (and the class) in the belief that this notion is capable of handling the new digital and social learning environment? Or should it be disrupted by something entirely new?

Extensions of the notion of classroom have been notable. The Flipped Classroom has caught the imagination of the world as a way to use digital technology to invert/optimize the use of learning events/activities inside and outside class. There have been many developments in the physical design of learning spaces that promise enhancements in in-class collaboration and learning by doing. Peer instruction has been found to be another way of extending the notion.

Christensen thinks disruption is the best way to go. Many other folks believe that online education using MOOCs and technology such as adaptive learning is that panacea – a panacea that can personalize learning and address individualized issues of knowledge and motivation.

I believe that class needs to be disrupted. And I believe networks are the key to disrupting the classroom. What if you could learn from someone who could teach the way you learn? What if you learned with people and things that directly reinforced what you were learning? What if you did not just learn to do, but also learned to be – to be a practitioner in networks of practice?

One of the interesting observations seems to be that in  the traditional educational system there is invariance to scale or scale-free behaviour. Scale free behaviour is exhibited by some very interesting networks like the Internet in which a few of the participants make the majority of interactions, and a long tail of participants exist with little or no engagement or levels of activity. Perhaps a disruption will truly arrive if we invert these scale free networks or even if we flatten out the interactions (raise the long tail). Perhaps we need to recast the classroom as the network itself?

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On Teacher’s Day

There is a teacher in everyone of us. It is useful to acknowledge that a whole lot of things are learnt without someone actually teaching us, and that perhaps someone is right now learning from us without our even knowing it. On the Internet, this is possible at a very large scale. We learn from other people’s review of the computers we buy or the places we visit. We learn to dress by looking at what others wear and talk as we hear others speak. We learn from reading a blog post or the fact that a guru likes a particular URL or that an expert just followed an innovative startup’s twitter handle.

So when practicing teachers and real experts, who really do all of this teaching and coaching professionally, start making their actions, their learning, their idiosyncrasies public, a whole lot of people will end up learning even if they are not in their class. Perhaps their class will also learn much more if they share the guru’s network, the guru’s learning trails across the World Wide Web.

As teachers, it is really about how we learn and how we share how and what we learn. It is not learning how to use technology (which is an important enabler, but not an end in itself), but how to embrace a culture of open-ness, sharing and a much heightened consciousness that we are professional performers of a learning process; that as teachers we are actually enacting the role of expert learners.

For that, we have to re-envision the way we learn. We are a product of much the same system that we subject our children to. We bind our students by its same constraints. We are steeped in the routines that we have perfected in years we have taught the same curriculum again, again and again. We cannot change ourselves by thinking in the same ways the system has taught us. We must re-envision our own futures, standing outside the systems of today.

Why it is so phenomenally important to re-learn how to learn in today’s networked environments? Its possible because, invariant to scale, the network has opened up hitherto unknown opportunities to teach and learn. Not that you can now learn something that was previously hidden from you, but that you can now learn and teach in ways that may be much more than the classroom we are so used to. In fact the classroom analogy does not even exist in the networked environment (the closest it gets is “clusters” or “swarms”) – the network is not a class.

Since networks are not classes, you cannot apply traditional teaching-learning techniques to it (or atleast not as-is). So an entire paradigm becomes near-obsolete when one thinks of networked learning. Which is not what the xMOOCs would have you to believe, but that is entirely their loss.

If you can think network, you can break away from the traditional mode. It is what we must do. Case in point. If there is no class, who are you teaching? Answer: You are teaching a cluster of nodes (students) bound to you in some manner (through your institution perhaps), but they are really part of many different networks as well. By connecting to those students and promoting transactions between them, helping them add new connections to their network, and leveraging their existing networks, you will build upon a fabric of learning, much like a weaver or an Atelier. You will help them break away from the monotone of traditional systems, help them celebrate chaos and let them build their capability to learn.

When you become that networked teacher, you will contribute to a scale of learning that will be unbelievable. What you will do within your own small networks, may become amplified or contribute to global knowledge about learning and teaching. Just the sheer scale of your teaching and learning, your networks, the types of interactions, will fast transcend the power of any certificate or degree the traditional system may have to offer.

The revolution is here. It is you. Seize the day.

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A Strategic Inflection Point for Indian Education

I think we are at an inflection point in online education in India the way Andy Grove from Intel had nicely framed in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive.

Andrew writes of how a 10X change in any one force, namely:

• Power, vigor and competence of existing competitors
• Power, vigor and competence of existing complementors
• Power, vigor and competence of existing customers
• Power, vigor and competence of existing suppliers
• Power, vigor and competence of potential competitors
• Possibility that what your business is doing can be done in a different way

can result in profound changes to our business.

Why do I say this? In the past 2-3 years, there have been several interesting things that have emerged.

MOOCs have arrived on the Indian education scene in an informal way gathering unprecedented response from our students. We have the second largest country presence in MOOCs globally with over 2+ mn registrations. This is important to note in the context of total enrolment in open and distance learning in the country which stands at around 4.5 mn. Although the two are different models solving different needs (at this point), it is a far cry from year 2002 when at egurucool.com we were happy having 20,000 subscribers to our online K12 products. This amazing student response to MOOCs has been fueled by social media and networks. Although we have yet to see business models emerge, but they will. And surely this marks a 10X change in the power, vigor and competence of existing customers.

The Government has invested (and is investing) heavily in the creation of open education resources, software and technologies for eLearning for a while now under the NMEICT. For many streams of education such as Engineering (NPTEL) and humanities, arts and social sciences (CEC), a large corpus of open resources have already become available at the under-graduate level (post graduate level work has also been initiated). The NPTEL Youtube channel has now accumulated over a 100 mn hits and over 290,000 subscriptions. Similar efforts by the NROER team are going to make huge amounts of content available for school educators. High quality content becoming available for adaptation and delivery (under the CC-by-SA license), open software for live classrooms and learning management, research in haptics and many other such developments are definitely set to increase the power, vigor and competence of existing suppliers and potential competitors. Early movers such as MyOpenCourses & ClassLE and many traditional players (such as the publishers) are now starting to leverage these resources. The Government too is investing in building up new platforms and content for MOOCs.

In parallel, complementing technologies such as those for gamification, big data analytics, mobile apps, 3D printing and others are finding their way into the Indian expertise lexicon. We can already witness, for example, the power of data analytics used by school performance evaluation tools.

In what may constitute a tipping point, among other possibilities, if the government legitimizes MOOCs by offer credit transfer, recognition and other measures reserved for the traditional degree and diploma courses (and for vocational education), or if the body corporate or professional associations decide to put their stamp on nanodegree like non-formal learning and employment pathways or if universities (including distance education) adopt MOOCs as part of their curriculum, it will catalyze and harmonize these 10X changes. Business models will emerge, quality and scale challenges will be mitigated, and problems of faculty skill & shortage will be ameliorated.

I believe the inflection point, if we are not there already, will be reached fairly soon, catalyzed by some of these possibilities. What do you think?

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xMOOCs and cMOOCs – do we even care?

First published by EDU Tech on 24th July, 2014

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are an exciting new development in online education. In this article, Viplav Baxi explores the origins of MOOCs, their two main (‘c’ and ‘x’) variants and why it is critical to appreciate the distinction.

October 2008. Three Canadians, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier started the first Massive Open Online Course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08) based on a new theory of learning called Connectivism proposed by George Siemens in 2005.

Positing Connectivism as a learning theory for the digital age, Siemens asserted that learning is the process of making connections. These connections could take different forms such as those found in physical, social, cultural, conceptual or biological networks. These connections shape our learning because they help us navigate the increasing over-abundance of information and knowledge, leverage diversity of opinions and build the capacity to know, learn and adapt.

Stephen Downes proposed a new definition of knowledge which he called Connective Knowledge. Downes asserts that knowledge is the network. As Downes states: “at its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks”.

Dave Cormier is credited with coining the term ‘MOOC’ itself! He is also well-known for the theory of Rhizomatic Learning.

CCK08 transformed the way many people, including me, thought of education. The 12-week course was open and free. Over 2,200 people registered from over the world.

Even before CCK08 started, participants shaped the curriculum by suggesting areas of personal interest. Each week of the course, facilitators would briefly introduce the topic and suggest relevant open resources. Experts were invited to engage with course participants on each topic followed by an unstructured online conversation. Learning was distributed – participants interacted through tools they were comfortable with (like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and SecondLife). The facilitators made their network connections and activity public, so participants could follow the leaders in the field and keep abreast of the latest developments.

Each day, using Stephen’s gRSSHopper technology, participant contributions would be harvested from all over the web, important contributions identified and a newsletter sent on to all participants enabling them to keep up with the activity in the course.

A few students (including me) signed up to become the first paid students in this the first ever MOOC. We submitted 3 essays that were evaluated directly by the instructors. The final certificate was awarded by the University of Manitoba (the course hosts) at the end of the course. Like many others, I started a CCK08 Blog that has a collection posts from each week of the course.

Participants self–organized to form many virtual and face-to-face open learning networks (that outlasted CCK08). They adapted material into their own language and context. The facilitators were always available as expert co-learners rather than as instructors. The sheer diversity in the community created tremendously exciting opportunities for learning.

CCK08 also illustrated four key principles of MOOCs – diversity, autonomy, open-ness and interactivity. Learning “emerged” rather than being pre-designed. Participants learnt to be practitioners rather than just “learning to know” or even “learning to do”. CCK08 also redefined the roles of teachers and students. The role of the teacher as an expert learner was to model and demonstrate while the learner had to practice and reflect.

Such a learning ecosystem reflects the reality of learning in a digital age, where information is over abundant, knowledge is increasingly specialized, change is extremely rapid, networks & social media have revolutionized communication and learning has become largely informal.

Such systems of learning can potentially solve the burning problem of employability of our students. It can help them gain the capability to become lifelong learners, negotiating external changes. It can raise the quality of teaching and learning significantly, in an equitable and affordable manner.

Since 2008, there have been a large number of MOOCs on the lines of CCK08. These MOOCs such as the Future of Education, Critical Literacies, Rhizomatic Learning and other versions of CCK itself, have seen rich interaction globally. A lot of published research and a strong community of educators, theorists, developers and thought-leaders have emerged. The new field of Learning Analytics has also emerged as a corollary of this approach.

Later, in 2011, two Stanford professors created an online course in Artificial Intelligence. They took the decision to make this course open and free for anyone who wanted to enrol. To their delight, almost 170,000 students registered for this course!

They discovered that people did in fact like the idea of coming online to learn in large numbers if the course was taught by reputed professors from top universities, was accompanied by a certificate from the university and was free.

Interestingly, they also started calling their online courses, MOOCs. The name stuck and MOOCs, so defined, soon caught popular imagination when more top universities got involved, technology to effectively manage large sets of learners matured and venture capital (& institutional) funds started backing the concept. Soon, we heard of massive investments in MOOCs and some of the top university brands like Stanford, MIT, Harvard and others backing them.

To distinguish between the two, Stephen Downes termed the original MOOCs ‘cMOOCs’ (for Connectivist MOOCs) and the newer ones as ‘xMOOCs’, the “x” standing for being an extension of something else.

That something else was really the type of eLearning that had grown very rapidly since the late 1990s. Corporations and even online learning providers found it expedient to digitize expensive face to face training and create standardized, mass learning experiences for their employees, in order to cut costs and save lost working time.

For the most part, this type of eLearning tried to simply replicate the traditional classroom and curricular practices online. In traditional online learning, all learning is centrally directed, restricted to the closed boundaries of the course, performed generally alone (collaboration features see very low usage patterns), mass personalized with rigid pre-determined learning paths and assessed largely through objective type assessments.

This type of eLearning had already failed to scale for many reasons. It was designed for stereotypes of industrial age learners. It ignored the diversity and overabundance of information that is present in real life. It ignored the autonomy of learners to personalize the learning experience. It ignored the richness of interaction on the World Wide Web. It ignored the “conversation” and “connections” in learning. xMOOCs are extensions of this type of eLearning.

By only incrementally extending this type of online learning, xMOOCs have massively magnified challenges such as low retention, rote learning, low employability and lack of student ownership, motivation, interactivity and engagement. It is as if they have ignored more than two decades of insights from online, open and distance education.

Backed by venture funding, top universities and media hype, xMOOCs have captured popular imagination. India has not remained immune to this hype. Addressing the need for personalized interaction and for integrating LABs, high quality online self-paced content is to be blended with face to face local faculty interactions and LABs. This addresses some shortcomings of the xMOOCs, but in essence remains their extension.

What we should be doing instead, is to build massively open connective learning ecologies that can help our students and teachers to become capable, connected and responsible digital learners – the promise of the cMOOCs (and of an ideal educational system).

These ecologies will both need and encourage experimentation and innovation. And they will yield better results because learners will be better connected and more in control of their learning.

The important question is: do we really care enough?

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India MOOCs and eLibrary

Massive Open Online Courses  (MOOCs) and OERs have captured the imagination of our polity.

The new Government’s election manifesto clearly specifies MOOCs, although not under school or higher education, but under Vocational Training as a means for “working class people and housewives to further their knowledge and qualifications”. Further, there is a firm push, although under the section of School Education, on establishing a “national eLibrary to empower school teachers and students”.

Although, framed under different heads and not explicitly and universally correlated with the underlying issues facing our education system, these two are important areas of focus for the new HRD Minister, whose own enviable background in Media and Communications provide her with some of the necessary insights into how to create engaging media based experiences for our students. I do sincerely hope that this background also translates to many of our teachers who need to enhance their communications effectiveness as also inspires more teachers to use popular media or innovative performing arts led approaches to education (e.g. Theatre in Science or dance in Mathematics education).

National eLibrary

A high quality national eLibrary backed by the right capability, technology and open-ness, can dramatically transform both teaching and learning effectiveness. If these are accompanied by permissive Creative Commons licensing terms that make it possible for any entity to use these materials (like for the NMEICT materials), then this will act as a great stimulant for uptake of these resources.

School OER initiatives such as the National Repository on Open Educational Resources (NROER), NIOS, Karnataka OER, Gyanpaedia, TESS and other national/international OERs like Gooru and MERLOT can be aggregated in the eLibrary. On the other hand, similar OERs for Higher Education and Vocational Education sectors through the MHRD NMEICT projects (NPTEL, CEC-NMEICT, ePG Pathshala and many others across the world like Saylor and edX) can also be combined into the same repository.

Along with these, as NROER and Gooru are fast demonstrating, external data from agencies like NASA or the Indian national archives can really add tremendous value if they are made publicly available.

However, we will suffer since there is no underlying content management architecture or content development (including metadata) standards framework at all. Ultimately, these different initiatives may not be able to inter-operate, quality will not be uniform and scarce expert resources will not be efficiently utilized. Both are solvable existing problems, but need urgent and immediate attention if the national eLibrary is going to succeed in intent and execution.

We shall also suffer if we are unable to decentralize content development and quality review across the board, training both teachers and students to contribute high quality instructional content. We shall also start feeling the pinch very soon for skills such as Instructional Design, which are scarce in the country.

MOOCs

On the MOOC front, we clearly are at a precipitous juncture. On the one hand, the focus on MOOCs and the intent to spread them across sectors makes me really feel that we are on the right path. But, on  the other hand, we need to appreciate the transformative potential of MOOCs as originally conceived.

Also called cMOOCs, these original MOOCs were started in 2008. The term MOOC was coined by Dave Cormier during the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 (CCK08) MOOC. CCK08 and subject cMOOCs were based on the theory of Connectivism coined by George Siemens and of Connective Knowledge posited by Stephen Downes.

These experts believed that eLearning was at an inflection point – that traditional online learning had utterly failed because of it’s design and execution and that we needed a new way of thinking about eLearning. So they forged a new path that would help learners and teachers to revisit their roles in the context of fast changing information and social landscapes.

It is a path that the later MOOCs (like edX, Coursera etc.; also called xMOOCs) have not leveraged, being content to perpetuate the ills of traditional elearning. Only this time, the scale is massive and that has reflected in the massive dropout rates and low engagement ratios on these platforms. In fact, they simply seem to have missed over two decades of insights from the evolution of open & distance learning and e-learning.

In India, we can still make a more informed choice and perhaps evolve our own MOOC methods and models. Hopefully  they shall be ones that are based on learning from the mistakes the world has already made, rather than porting models from the West as-is.

MOOCs and eLibrary – Connecting the dots

These two initiatives – MOOCs and the National eLibrary (or OER) are more deeply connected and pervasive than is generally realized. A strong and efficient eLearning system is one where the content management process connects seamlessly with the learning delivery systems using standards based inter-operability and metadata.

This inter-connnection helps in many ways. Predominantly, it enables resources to be published and re-purposed into multiple formats for different devices & form factors – mobile, tablet and PC. But it enables production and delivery efficiencies to the tune of almost 30%. At scale, this translates into savings of hundreds of crores of rupees. Significant thought must go into designing these systems and their inter-relationships.

In Conclusion

The focus on technology enabled education is indeed extremely good for India. Going forward, we should fill the obvious gaps in capability, technology and pedagogy, so that we are able to fully leverage education technology for the nation.

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Blended Learning in India

There are many positives happening in EdTech in India. A government led mission called the National Mission on Education using ICT (NMEICT) has created massive amounts of content for engineering, arts and humanities, social sciences and natural science. It has also delivered the under 50 USD tablet, Aakash and a slew of innovations including Virtual LABs and the A-View web conferencing tool (that seems to work better than Skype). The school sector is running alongside nicely with initiatives to build content (NROER, K-OER) and delivery systems (Virtual Open School, NIOS). Teacher Ed is also getting the necessary focus from a content perspective (though the technology pieces are still being conceptualized). The Vocational Ed sector is running behind yet (although I have word of some level of content development), but one hopes it will catch up sooner than later.

The writing on the wall is pretty clear – India seems to be moving quickly towards a blended learning strategy that relies on platforms such as edX, existing physical infrastructure & “facilitator” faculty, and video lectures. Learning Analytics and Badging seem to be getting a mention (only just).

It seems an obvious response to scarcity of quality teachers, also exacerbated by the remoteness of interior locations. But interestingly these seem to ignore some of the learnings of the past 20-30 years and even some current work such as Sugata Mitra’s SoLE research and pilots in government schools.

Carefully crafted models of blended teaching and learning can definitely impact the system. However, systems designed to “spray and pray” will cause more harm than good. The current approach to virtual schooling seems to be to provide technology to broadcast lectures by the expert teacher and leave the local facilitator to do the support job. Blends are far more involved than that simplistic view.

Blends place a larger demand on students capability to learn with the help of technology. Learners need to build the capability for self-discipline, self-motivation, self-organization, peer learning, higher levels of exploration & discovery and even how to overcome technical constraints of under-reliable hardware, software and connectivity. 

Blends also place a heavy demand on the local facilitators of such instruction. The “distance” between the teacher and student needs to be filled by the facilitator. This distance is on the emotional plane as well as on the planes of knowledge, coaching, mentoring. contextualization and organizing the process of learning. In that sense, the facilitator needs to work very closely with the remote teacher and needs to understand the very intent and idiosyncrasies of the remote expert.

On the other hand, the remote expert needs to understand the limitations imposed by “distance”, and work to the capabilities of the facilitator. The expert also needs to cope with diversity, since it is obviously a much larger class than before and very diverse. The expert needs to be able to design learning paths that the facilitator can effectively implement. Especially in cases where the facilitator is also a competent and experienced teacher, the expert must allow for some level of creativity & local insight to be exhibited by the facilitator. Additionally, the remote expert must learn how to leverage data – about classrooms, facilitators and learning patterns – to make the blends iteratively more effective.

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The Learning Revolution is Here

I didn’t know it at that time, having been born just a few months later, that the revolutionary Open University, UK was born in January, 1971 with 25000 students. Of course, my parents didn’t know that either when they named me Viplav (my Sanskrit origin name literally means “revolution”). It’s just one of those weird coincidences.

The OU was born amidst great opposition as a “University of the Air”. The concept was being discussed from the early 1960s. Touted as “an experiment on radio and television: a ‘University of the Air’ for serious, planned, adult education”. It was revolutionary also because it did not ask for prior qualifications and placed a premium on students acquiring the skills to study in this medium.

Although the first correspondence (read Distance Education by local mail) based course was organized in India by Delhi University in 1962, Andhra Pradesh Open University (now Dr. B R Ambedkar Open University) was the first Open University in India when it opened in 1982, 3 years before the famous government-owned Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) that opened its doors in 1985. IGNOU has now about 4 million students and serves 20% of Indian Higher Education students.

There are many parallels to the growth of the two systems (UK and India), and the UK OU’s trajectory was a pivotal influence on what our policy makers envisioned. In fact, I have direct evidence that this is so.

Between 16-19 December 1970, there was a seminar organized by the Ministry of Education and Youth Affairs, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the University Grants Commission (UGC). The Seminar’s focus was on an open university.  J C Aggarwal chronicles the event in his book, Landmarks in the History of Modern Indian Education, and states:

In the United Kingdom the proposal for the establishment of an open university, originally called the university of the Air, took 4 years to take definite shape. Profiting by what has been accomplished in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and also by the experience of the correspondence courses conducted by several Indian universities, it should be possible for shortening the time that will be needed for planning and preparation.

It was proposed that a study group be established to work out the details so that an open university be created “at an early date”.

This open university was envisioned to make higher education available to those with “the capacity for it to benefit from the existing facilities.” It was meant for highly motivated adults lacking formal qualifications or means to join universities full-time. In their conception, the Open University could be used for:

1. providing education to capable, independent and mature learners
2. providing education to the masses at a reduced per unit cost
3. making higher education more effective by leveraging scarce resources
4. as a means of employing new and unconventional methods of instruction and exploiting new technologies

Very interestingly, they placed focus on ‘open-ness” to new ideas as fundamental to the open university concept. Perhaps they were prescient about the current xMOOCs when they wanted the  best in curricula from Indian and foreign universities.

It is interesting that the dominant paradigm (as Prof. MM Pant pointed out to me yesterday) was the television, and thereby video. I was told recently that we have many tens of thousands of hours of taped educational videos (between CEC, IGNOU and others). Supporting technologies included the radio, postal communications and localized study centres.

Aggarwal also points to an interesting government committee on Audio-Visual Aids in Higher Education (1967-69) set up by the UGC. Video was preferred because it provided “sight” and sound to enrich the learning process. They acknowledged that:

Films, filmstrips and transparencies are being increasingly used in educationally advanced countries as visual materials which can be used in any teaching situation when it becomes necessary to demonstrate a point, a fact, an idea or a process.

It is perhaps being inspired by these ideas that even today the government is commissioning advanced direct to home channels for education and have created NPTEL (Engineering disciplines OER repository) and NMEICT e-Content (by CEC and others).

Together, India must absolutely have the largest collection of educational material in the entire world. And I would wager that a large percentage of it is really good quality material suitable for leverage by everyone, if only the government would make it really open and accessible.

Over time, the confluence of developments in affordable technology as well as developments in educational theory, has brought many inflections on our policies and curricula. Our educational systems have time and again, faced up to these developments in an incremental fashion to various degrees of success.

Globally as well, when elearning came in, it was more of a response to standardize learning “packages” so that they could be uniformly consumed by a large number of people. Driven by the emphasis on cost reduction by Western corporates, eLearning quickly took off as a time and money saver. Traditional education systems too realized the potential, but were limited by available funds and perhaps a greater aspiration to quality than the corporates.

Now there is a point to which an existing paradigm can stretch and contort to keep up with surrounding developments in technology and learning theory. We passed that point about 10 years ago when dramatic changes in networks and social media started surfacing.

The current thinking is all part of an evolution that is now about 60 years old (perhaps more!). New thinking cannot be built on top of something that ancient. We have to start from scratch, re-envision the educational process and systems from the very ground up so that they reflect our possible futures that are in all honesty going to be dominated by intelligence brought to us by networks and data.

That work has to begin in earnest now. Very soon, we will be seeing the rear end of the demographic dividend (which shall move to Africa). What are we doing to prepare ourselves for that future?

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The hard problems in eLearning

There are some key challenges that we are facing in eLearning today. And I am beginning to think that these are pretty much invariant to scale. I am beginning to think that perhaps many of them happen at smaller scale in traditional face-to-face education. Here is an indicative list.

• High dropout or low completion rates
• Low engagement and retention (motivation)
• Lack of data driven analytics cramps scalability
• Low use of collaboration/networked learning tools & communities
• Lurking as a legitimate activity
• In courses that need them, lack of physical F2F & LAB support
• Increased demand on the student’s capability for self-directed learning
• Need sophisticated auto-grading (or scalable high quality peer review) systems for large scale assessments
• Video lecture fatigue
• Lack of interoperability with traditional institutions (incl. curricular)
• Availability of Localized materials
• Access to power, infrastructure and connectivity
• Credibility / value perception of learning for employers or for credit transfers by traditional institutions

Some of these are definitely challenges that would constrain any system. But perhaps the real challenges lie elsewhere. For example, I am getting convinced that more than anything else, the capability & motivation of the learner to learn, is the most limiting factor.

We see a lot of power laws in the real world of learning – where a few students participate heavily and the largest number contribute to the long tail. Ideally, an efficient and high quality system would be one where the graphs are uniformly flatter indicating wholesome participation in the process of learning. I would think that not much changes at lower scale or with change of modality to traditional classroom scenarios, and that power laws are in fact observable in these scenarios as well.

The aim of most educational systems is to develop students who are prepared for the life to come, who can contribute to  the world as responsible citizens, who are successful in leveraging knowledge and reason to attain their goals and who learn how to learn. I think the last part is really significant – in fact I would say the most significant part.

In thinking about how people can learn to learn, it is obvious that there be a multiplicity of options on how to learn, rather than just any one way of learning. Our education systems have so far taught just the one way to learn, but there are indeed other ways to learn that may or may not be consonant with the traditional approach.

What are some of these paradigms? I think the Connectivist approach crystallizes what learning really means in a digital age. It is sufficiently “alternative” as a paradigm and needs to be explored. The MOOC is perhaps just one instance of Connectivist environments. Other online environments may exist where massive does not necessarily equate to number of learners, and open doesn’t necessarily equate to “barrier-less” and where we let go of the “course” confines.

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#Rhizo14 Community not curriculum and the end is near

Before I begin (and I am going to miss the hangout again as it will be at 3 AM India time), I think Dave rocked again in #rhizo14. Way to go Dave!

Dave is our Elvis

I am conflicted when I think about curriculum. I have experienced it prescriptively in the formal education system and I realize that it is bounded by its philosophical basis as well as the competence of stakeholders to transact it (the two sometimes straining in opposite directions).

In the rhizomatic sense, I am guessing curriculum is evidenced by the community members through their open reflection and practice.There is no core.

In the Community of Practice sense, the community itself evolves through various stages –  Potential, Coalescing, Active, Dispersed and Memorable as in the chart below.

In another take on this, George Siemens in Connectives and Collectives: Learning Alone, together suggests that as ties become stronger and individuals aggregate into groups and collectives, the discourse becomes normed (in fact there is a veritable coercion to the norm) that leads to a drying up of new ideas that are novel and diverse.

In the diagram above, he also ties it up with autonomy to the learner, which he believes to decrease as these ties increase in strength and degree.

I think the strength of Rhizomatic and Connective Learning is the “personal formation” of curriculum and the heutagogical “capability” to contextually adapt the curriculum evidenced by the community to transcend personal learning plateaus.

In that sense learning becomes a process of, among other things, shared discovery of curriculum itself, a way-finding and sense-making exercise.

It also makes sense to think of curricula instead of curriculum – different ways to transcend the same plateau. The community then evidences things such as values, beliefs, patterns of use and engagement that equally constitute any curriculum (one must consider failure in a Rhizomatic community as well. What mechanisms exist when a curriculum itself fails to empower.)

Like a Rhizome, Rhizo14 is an event in my meanderings. The event may end, but the rhizome continues to flourish and grow.

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#Rhizo14 Week 4: Are books making us stupid?

Bernard Fryshman wrote a post titled  MOOCs are Books, too. I responded saying it depends on whether it is an xMOOC you are talking about or a cMOOC, amongst other humble assertions that “MOOCs are not books”. Then I found Dave talking about MOOCs to create/update open textbooks. In Are MOOCs the Next Textbooks, Gregor Kiczales makes the point that in “author” or “expert” videos, the persona of the author is really important. Others comments that free MOOCs could potentially replace textbooks, while others feel that MOOCs (when standardized like JusticeX) may become textbooks themselves, especially when created by A-grade professors and experts.

Dave, in his video challenge for this week of #Rhizo14, asks the question – are books making us stupid. He identifies a few negative connotations and one positive connotation for books in his mind. The negatives are:

• have a finite end to the journey of learning at the end of which judgment awaits us
• deny the orality of the conversation
• bring in objectivity
• amply distance
• are definitive, not relational
• bring in impartiality
• are less participatory
• have a long history of “making us stupid” and are not trustworthy

The positive connotation is that there is value in books as historical records (and emotional pleasures of the medium that we are used, but others ahead may not even desire or be able to experience).

Several things confuse and distort responses to this challenge immediately. Are we talking about book “technology”? Are we concerned with book “processes” of creating, use in curriculum and uses by learners? Are we concerned with the formats, or the design? Are we talking of all types of books or just a specific type of books? Are we talking of making value judgments – “stupid” in the sense of “closed”, or following something “prescriptive”, or “cognitive” instead of “connective” or “rhizomatic”? Is it about how they impact reading or writing literacies and skills, or it about books as standalone artifacts? Is it about their accessibility or cost that makes their unavailability result in a certain stupidity?

Which is also why people have responded variously to this week’s challenge. Shaw contests the negative connotations and believe it is not an either-or. In Print, Stupidity and #rhizo14, Keith showcases Don Tapscott’s talk, and tries to view printed text rhizomatically. Apostolos refutes some of the negative connotations by looking at books as a vehicle to transfer information and knowledge through the ages, and not limiting conversation/participation just because the author isn’t there to discuss the ideas. Jenny Mackness talks about how “Books are not the problem – it is us and the way we think – our lack of ability to critically engage with learning”.

I think what we are really talking about here is the tyranny of the written word insofar as it leads to our pedagogical oppression (Friere). There is intentionality here in the minds of the oppressors (pretty much most of those traditional educational systems that depend upon rote learning, including some of our xMOOCs) and there is mute acquiescence from  the oppressed (those who unquestioningly accept the written word or “common framework” as someone else put it).

I think, we should have so much democratic and accessible written word, that it becomes impossible for us to be stupid. It should become impossible for any one system to authorize or prescribe the tyranny of the word.

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Design of Complex Learning Environments

This year I will focus my efforts on the design of learning environments that are complex – adaptive, emergent, self-organizing, chaotic and personal. As a project description at TU Delft states:

In these situations system content, system structure and system boundaries shift and evolve without any global or central coordinator. Instead, order and regularity emerge from widely distributed bottom-up interactions of subsystems, some with centralized control and others fully distributed.

I am particularly interested in complex adaptive systems in the context of learning because I think that is how learning really is. Somewhere in this area is hidden Illich’s “institutional inverse”, the need to combat Friere’s “culture of silence”, to think of learning as making connections and knowledge as the network. Somewhere in this exercise is the continued feeling of being “continually inspired to change”, the mnemonic for a revolution. Many memes will form part of this discussion.

One such meme shall be open-ness. This will relate to both the extent and nature of open-ness within the system as well that outside the system, and specific mechanisms to initiate, alter or transition to a state of “open-ness”. Another meme shall be self-organization. Equally important will be the meme of “evolution’ – of people, ideas and networks.

I shall also investigate the meme of “flexible boundaries” – boundaries that allow dynamic reconfiguration of the contours of, well everything. Closely related will be the memes of “control” and “structure”.

An important meme shall be that of “language” – the language of learning itself. I think a new vocabulary is definitely required if we are to think afresh. And there may be more that I may discover or abandon as I go along.

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Rhizo14 Week 3: Democratizing Uncertainty

Dave Cormier’s MOOC on P2PU, Rhizomatic Learning, in week 3 is focusing on the topic Embracing Uncertainty. He says:

At the heart of the rhizome is a very messy network, one where not all the dots connect to all the lines. No centre. Multiple paths. Where we have beliefs and facts that contradict each other. Where our decisions are founded on an ever shifting knowledge base. Our challenge this week… how do we make our learning experience reflect (and celebrate) this uncertainty?

Uncertainty exists in all forms of education and learning. It is not mostly celebrated. In fact, it is suppressed. Or attempted to be. In traditional education, it is systematically constrained by the dimensions of time, network boundaries (class/batch), regulatory requirements and pedagogical biases. It is even systematically constrained in other (non-traditional) environments, even informal ones at most times.

However, it underpins these environments in dramatic ways, so much so that it is a wonder that any intended outcomes are even met. As an example, even the understanding of what a degree program in any subject should contain (content, pedagogy, assessments) is not shared or common across the world. It is therefore uncertain, at least to me, what an MBA degree really means!

Let us talk instead of democratizing uncertainty. That implies thinking of uncertainty as by, for and of learning (and its stakeholders).

Uncertainty by learning is the adoption of certain uncertainties  by learners, teachers and administrators. It is their ability to practice those uncertainties.

Uncertainty for learning is the “framework” or the ecology for uncertainty to flourish and where the participants of the educational system are encouraged to embrace certain uncertainties.

Uncertainty of learning is the uncertainty that society owns and celebrates, and that is what change is all about anyways. This is the most important change that can happen to learning – when there is purpose to driving certain uncertainties through the system.

Not all certainties may be “good” or “appropriate”. What is good or appropriate may differ widely, but no uncertainty can be good if it does not result in the “overall” good (atleast directionally and democratically speaking). There could be more consensus on bad and undesired uncertainties – those that result in (directionally) negative consequences such as high unemployment or obstacles to (say) scientific development.

Some people would then argue that uncertainty should be harnessed in certain ways, and this could progressively lead us to the same traditional paradigm that exists today. We shall also need to “prove” in many ways, that more “good” uncertainty in the system will impact social outcomes positively. We may even need to “prove” that either this is an articulate and cogent alternative to the existing system or stands as an important option in a pluralized education system.

What may happen as well (as with the xMOOCs) that these positive uncertainties may be usurped, distorted and made to work within traditional environments in a manner that is ineffective and diluted (e.g. you want 21st century skills to be “built”, so why don’t you create a new subject called “collaboration” and assign it graded assessments and specialized new content & teaching). In fact, I think we need to see uncertainty as culture, as a way of being rather than a specialized skill or value.

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MOOCs are ecologies not episodes

There are two ways one could think of the life-cycle of a MOOC. MOOCs could be thought of as one-time and episodic. They could also be thought of as ecologies, sites or environments for continual learning (for example, a series of MOOCs on the same topics, such as CCK), not use-once-and-throw episodes of learning. I prefer the latter, although some may say the MOOC itself may not be likened to an ecology.

I like the idea of MOOCs as ecologies because communities and networks get created at the site of a MOOC and their value extends beyond the lifetime of a single occurrence of the MOOC. When MOOCs are run as a series of continuously or discretely evolving episodes, they act to extend these communities and networks, each addition bringing fresh insights and diverse experiences into the mix.

This extension is one of the things that really bring the distinction between MOOCs and the traditional courses to the forefront. MOOCs leave a trail of learning experiences, of conversations, that are visible to learners that participate in each succeeding episode. In traditional settings, this knowledge is stored and refined by teachers only who use it to make their teaching more effective over time. However, these are distilled insights, not visible to the learner.

Why I also like thinking of MOOCs as ecologies is that they are shaped by the behavior of agents within them. The agents (instructors, students, administrators, marketing agencies) actively engage with each other. If they collectively succeed in building engagement and value, the ecology thrives. If they are not, we see more skewed participation rates, and the ecology disintegrates quickly.

MOOCs as ecologies also imply that students can remain connected to every episode. So they learn incrementally with every episode they participate in. This has not been addressed clearly and explicitly by MOOCs as yet. In many ways, students who have participated in one or more episodes learn how to stay abreast of the developments in the field of study through their ever-expanding network presence.

Within the MOOC ecology, focus shifts from the content and instructor to the degrees of interconnectedness and interaction in the networks that constitute the MOOC. Conversations become the key to successful learning. Modeling learner interactions and measuring efficiencies at learner, network and MOOC levels becomes very important to gauge the state of the ecology. Each MOOC series contributes, in a dynamic manner, to the understanding of these group dynamics and efficiencies.

For MOOC designers, this should become an important component of your design. Thinking of MOOCs as ecologies allows you to focus on the learning experience and how you can garner insights into how participants want to engage, over successive episodes of learning.

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MOOCs and the Future of Indian Higher Education – FICCI HES 2013

The 2013 FICCI Higher Education Summit was held on Nov 13 and 14, 2013. I, along with Prof. B N Jain (Vice Chancellor, BITS) and Mohan Kannegal (Manipal Global Education), conducted a master class on MOOCs and the Future of Indian Higher Education.

Prof. Jain, in his address made the following points (please read MOOCs as xMOOCs):

• MOOCs are in an evolutionary phase – effectiveness and business models are still not clear
• Although MOOCs claim to provide elite education to many at an affordable cost or for free, there are counter claims that they cannot re-create the quality of face to face teaching and learning.
• Bottomline: MOOCs will certainly improve quality and scale of on-campus or off-campus education.
• MOOCs work well for multi-section classes, provided the content is rich and analytics are used
• Given the fact that India has 28 mn students in Higher Ed today (and expected to go up to 50 mn by 2030), an additional 20 mn classrooms, 300 mn sq ft of space and 2 mn teachers shall be required and we don’t have a choice but to embrace MOOCs.
• Adoption has started in India, with IITs, Manipal Global and BITS taking the lead

In true cMOOC style, we started a conversation rather than a “sage on the stage” master class. We asked the participants what they would like to learn in the session, and we got a spate of interesting questions.

• How can mobile learning be efficiently adopted in a MOOC context?
• How do we adapt/dovetail MOOCs to fit the traditional curriculum?
• Are we falling into a trap – MOOCs will standardize content. How can one expert source be sufficient? What about the richness that a teacher brings in?
• Can MOOCs help in making our students employable?
• Motivation: How can we ensure that our students are motivated and that they follow the learning progression as desired? How do we ensure low dropout rates? How do we get people to register for important courses?
• Credentials: Are there pathways from MOOCs to degrees?
• Blended designs: What are the possible blends that we could have with MOOCs?
• LABs: What are the possible offline support assets that need to be created?
• When should we not use MOOCs?

We also used a guiding presentation that came in handy. In the audience, no one was aware of the difference between an xMOOC or a cMOOC – which is why many of the questions above (and others that came up) were asked. I made the point of how xMOOCs were really an extension of the traditional online learning and classroom practices, while cMOOCs really represented the disruption. The other part of the presentation was on a complete lifecycle covering analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation of MOOCs, which we also got a chance to discuss towards the end of the session. Slides below.

Mohan contributed a practitioner’s view with the experience of Manipal in the traditional eLearning and cohort based learning (with GlobalNxt/U21) models and how Manipal is making its first forays in the MOOC space.

All in all, it was an action packed and fast paced session. I do hope the participants enjoyed themselves!

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The Outcomes of our Educational Systems

Does a particular type of education system tend to produce the same outcome irrespective of the underlying environment?

Or is it that the underlying social, economic and political environment will cause pretty much any educational system to tend to produce the same outcomes?

Or is it that the outcomes emerge as a result of the interplay between the educational system and the components of the ecosystem it lives in?

The reason I am asking is because everywhere I look (at least in democratic societies), the problems of education are pretty much the same, although the scale does vary. I hear people across school, university, professional and vocational education mulling over the same problems with as much inertia or angst, in India or in the UK or the USA or Australia or elsewhere. In the case of democratic, market driven countries, there may be a stronger set of patterns as well (as the case may be for authoritarian regimes or other sociopolitical structures).

Common refrains include ones such as teachers are not trained enough, children are not getting 21st century skills developed in them, employers don’t feel happy with the levels of employability of students that graduate, not enough e-Resources are available, there is an issue getting learning to remote and economically weaker sections of society, and policy makers are slow and bureaucratic. And then there are people who proclaim variously that the education system is broken, or that it is obsolete and cannot be “fixed”.

If it is indeed true that educational systems  are invariant to the underlying environment, then there are obvious design faults, that when rectified should cause the systems to improve dramatically. Perhaps the current educational systems may be replaced by new designs instead of being redesigned or “fixed”. The aim then becomes to understand the elements of design of the educational system and overlay them with the current and estimated future contexts, to arrive at new constellations of those design elements.

If the conclusion is the reverse, that educational systems don’t have much to do with outcomes, rather the outcomes are really driven by the underlying ecosystem, then perhaps the answer lies in reforming or redesigning other structures that provide inputs or receive outcomes and outputs from the educational system.

The possibility that outcomes are emergent (i.e. they emerge out of the interplay between the networks of our education system with the rest of the socioeconomic fabric) exists. People will say that the educational system shapes and is shaped by the underlying ecosystem in which it operates. But that does not explain commonality of outcomes observed globally.

I have also started feeling that traditional educational systems are far more chaotic than Connectivists would like to believe. As an example, a degree is given the same level of recognition in most countries, however the conditions of obtaining that degree, whether it is the curriculum, the quality of teachers, the infrastructure or any other design element, vary hugely from University to University. I did this exercise recently when I tried to compare the same named courses across multiple Indian and Foreign universities, and could not find more than a 20-30% similarity in most cases between the syllabus and teaching method of one university versus that of the other.I don’t think two universities would really agree on what (say) a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics should really contain, but they will still award the same degree! The traditional systems seem very chaotic, but are also very highly constrained (duration, method, engagement, assessment…) and designed towards very fixed goals – like closed loop systems – they do not present much opportunity for non-linearity.

So it is really an interesting question to try to answer, at least for those who are looking to engineer the next generation education system(s).

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MOOCs are not books

A startling post by Bernard Fryshman – Books Are MOOCs, Too, leaves me with conflicting thoughts. If he is talking about xMOOCs, I could perhaps agree to a level. If he is talking about cMOOCs, I couldn’t disagree more!

Bernard makes the points that books are mobile, ubiquitous, accessible, excellent supplementary material for your degree preparation, comprehensive and “massive”. He likens the MOOC hype to the hype that surrounded television based education. He believes that “reading a book requires much more active involvement than watching a MOOC online” and that “(T)eachers find it easier to assign a specific homework assignment in a book than a “viewing” in a MOOC”. Among other insights is his insight that books have the advantage of privacy and a serendipity that is “unlikely in a MOOC” and the prediction that “it is hard to envision more than 5 percent of the 20 million postsecondary students in the US drifting over to MOOCs”.

I guess books have a massive audience, are available online, are (sometimes) open to those who can afford them or if they are free, and they (especially textbooks) are built around the course. Perhaps Bernard’s conception of the BOOK is that of being Best Oracles Of Knowledge, that if consumed well, should predictably result in knowledge replication.

Books and their contents, whether offline or online, whether backed by collaboration or not, whether available openly or not, are simply one element of any learning experience – they are the compiled thoughts of the authors’ state of knowledge that others can benefit from. Textbooks lend themselves to supporting degree preparation since they are specifically written for that context.

However, to liken them to MOOCs on the basis of these, dilutes the essence of what the online learning world has been talking about for the past few decades.

The xMOOCs can argue that MOOCs can extend the textbook experience by bringing in online collaboration, crowd performance reporting, connect with the instructor and engaging multimedia content apart from other online affordances. But they can only do just that – since their current format is merely an extension of early approaches to open courseware with the addition of these online social elements.

The concept of online (free or paid) multimedia instruction from the experts is hardly new or revolutionary, but the hype machines have been active for the xMOOCs. It is a little depressing that they picked up the MOOC moniker, the result of painstaking work by George, Stephen and Dave, put brand and dollars behind it, and got lucky. It seems that we now have nonsensical variants like SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses). Tony Bates makes a huge indictment of the the xMOOCs when he states:

In my view, MIT will struggle to make an impact on educational research if it continues to ignore the potential contribution of educators. It is as if researchers such as Piaget, Bruner, Vigotsky, Carl Rogers, Gagné, and many later researchers had never existed. Can you imagine anyone trying to develop a new form of transportation while deliberately ignoring  Newtonian mechanics? Yet this is what MIT is doing in its educational research.

cMOOCs are incomparable to textbooks, or to xMOOCs, or for that matter to courses in a traditional context. They are a different paradigm altogether that stands outside the conventional lens – I would go so far as to state that the xMOOCs are literally inside the box of traditional education, while cMOOCs stand outside the box – that cannot be viewed by the lens of what we traditionally define as the formal learning or university experience.

So when it comes to textbooks and the cMOOCs, Bernard’s analysis falls flat. Textbooks and cMOOCs are simply not comparable.

In the cMOOCs, any one resource is not as important as the connection making process itself – the sense-making and way-finding is the core of the learning experience. Navigating the “conversation”, “context” and the “network” in a cMOOC and deriving learning therein, are perhaps the most important parts in a cMOOC.

Learning to define and set your own plateaus of competencies, learning to be instead of learning to do or know, learning to navigate the over abundant flow of digital information, learning to grow your network and make it richer all the time – these are the critical literacies of the cMOOC world.

Textbooks may or may not be part of the design of a cMOOC – that is largely irrelevant. What is important is designing a cMOOC environment so that it is suitably complex and adaptive.

The cMOOC starts not from the definition of a syllabus and design of the videos, but from making available the teacher’s network – the continuously changing and adaptive nature of her learning. Within that, she decides to give focus to a sub-network that she wants to engage learners on, with the expectation that her learners will usefully (to them) conjoin their network to hers, resulting in far richer learning for both.

The cMOOC starts from a technology base that is geared to expose that network of people, resources and concepts, for extension through reflection and practice. Exposition is non-existent, the best practice is to model and demonstrate your learning processes to your students.

The cMOOC starts from an understanding that diversity and autonomy in the network is very important. In that sense, and this is especially tough for critics of the format, it is not controlled or predictable. However, I foresee that soon we will have ways to understand how such complex ecosystems can be designed for maximal learning effectiveness.

Which is another point for cMOOCs – they are nascent and evolutionary as of now. They are directional and aspirational, and not transactional in the traditional sense. Does that make them less useful or applicable? Not really, but you need to know the difference in approach to be able to use them successfully, as George, Stephen and Dave have repeatedly demonstrated, whether with CCK or Critical Literacies or EdFutures.

Let us face it. We cannot bemoan the fact that the education system is broken, while continuing to find ways to reform it. We must look at alternatives and not disparage those alternatives because either we do not understand them or we lack the patience and conviction to fix the issues in education.

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Offline Connectivism

In 2008, when discussing the critical role of technology in the existence of a Connectivist learning environment, Stephen commented:

Take the steam engine, for example. It works through a process of burning coal to heat water, which turns to steam, which it then fed through a turbine or engine in order to produce power.

You need quite a but of technological infrastructure to build the engines, and you need coal to burn. Without the technology and the coal, you don’t get the benefits of the steam engine.

Does this mean that the principles behind the steam engine are not generalizable? Of course not. The *principles* apply to everybody, whether or not they have a steam engine.

It’s the same thing with connectivism. The principles apply, even to people who do not have the technology to easily observe them in action.

Again, at EDGEX in 2012 (at about 28 minutes into the discussion), George Siemens asserted that without technology, a lot of the abundance of knowledge, which is one of the fundamental reasons for Connectivism (and that itself requires more technology to interpret and access), would not be exposed to a large number of people. Stephen Downes made the point that networks (that have existed even without technology) are the underpinnings of a Connectivist environment and that technology facilitates the making of connections (for example, the Six Degrees experiment).

This is important for India, and for others at our level of development. The technology required to make globally diverse connections simply does not exist for a large number of people. A large number of people simply are not overloaded by the abundance of information, most do not even know that there is more to knowledge than the community or place they live in.

At low levels of development, perhaps the small local network is all that exists, constrained by things such as customs/traditions, economic & social power and access to educational opportunities. This is also where the bulk of the population is in countries such as India and large parts of Africa. The conditions for access to technology (computing, internet) are yet to be established in these areas and where they are available, reliability and sufficiency is often a constraint (what do you do if the school does not even have power).

What then, are the ways in which Connectivist learning environments could be designed for this audience without an initial reliance on computing and Internet technology (perhaps including even power)? The most pronounced impact would be speed and immediacy.

Let us look at the factors influencing network formation.

Local Infrastructure & Economic Development levels: Safe assumptions about available local infrastructure could be that there is a way to communicate through telephone (more or less) and postal networks, that power is unreliable and that the Internet availability is meagre. This is especially important for remote areas. East and North-east have the lowest tele-density and just 1% of rural households have a computer with an Internet connection (8% of urban households) [Census 2011 report here]. The report also states that “(o)ne-sixth of the country, or 200 million Indians, don’t possess any of the most basic assets like a transistor or TV, phone, vehicle of any kind or a computer.”

Society, Religion & Culture: Networks are influenced by culture. Somewhere there must be an understanding of local culture and its influence on learning networks. Traditions apply barriers to networks (social constraints) that impacts the ability of the network to grow and diversify. Community bonding, existence of sub-communities and influence centers (including religious) are all important factors.

Language: Language homogenizes and localizes. This has a direct influence (especially in India which is a single country with many languages) on how networks are able to grow.

Population Density: This is an important one. Census Data shows a remarkable skew across states (an average of 382 people per square kilometre, half of Indian states below that with Arunachal Pradesh at as low as 17 and Delhi/NCR as high as 11,297!). This is critical because high density areas throw up many more opportunities (sparks) for networks (fire) creation and growth.

Interlinkages with other communities: For ideas to spread outside the local community, we must look at the transaction points of this community with the external communities. This could be commercial trade, medical & other services or unifying through administrative departments.

Out of these (and many possible others that influence network formation and growth), Connectivist learning environments would focus on ones that they can influence in some way. For example, in an offline scenario, can postcards carrying a question to an expert outside local boundaries be an admissible innovation? We also need to look at mechanisms underlying complex systems to see which interventionist approaches will work better. More on this in subsequent posts.

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