George Veletsianos, PhD

Category: online learning Page 10 of 16

Networked Scholars open course #scholar14

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On September 22, 2014

In courses, learner experience, moocs, online learning, open

A few weeks ago, I notified individuals who filled out my Networked Scholars open online course survey, indicating that my open course was open for registration. I’m excited to see that some colleagues have discovered the course, but it’s time to post the news here too, even though some .  I’ve really appreciated the feedback from people regarding the design and content of the course, so if you any thoughts about this, please don’t hesitate to let me know! I am trying to create a  memorable and worthwhile learning experience and hearing from you is a significant way to go about doing that. If you have any other thoughts about the course or about what you think makes open online courses engaging, effective, and memorable, please don’t hesitate to send them my way.

I often sign up for open online courses, often forgetting that I did. So, in case you are like me and are thinking “What course is this, again?!” here’s a short description of the course: In this course we will examine the tools and practices associated with networked, open, and digital scholarship. In particular we will investigate the emergent practice of scholars’ use of social media and online social networks for sharing, critiquing, improving, furthering, and reflecting upon their scholarship.
The course is 4 weeks long. It will start on October 20, 2014 and will end on November 16, 2014.
You can participate in this course in one of two ways:
1. Through the Canvas Network. You can use this space to access readings, activities, discussions, and so on. If you choose this route you can self-enroll to thecourse via this URL: https://learn.canvas.net/enroll/K46NDH. You can also sign up at https://learn.canvas.net/register and use the following join code: K46NDH

2. Through your blog and twitter accounts. The readings and activities will be publicly-available, and you could use your blog/twitter as a discussion/reflection space, so you don’t necessarily need to sign up to Canvas to access this course if you don’t want to.

I hereby confirm the rumour. We will be using an approach similar to Connected Courses and the distributed syndication model. The official Twitter hashtag for the course is #scholar14. If you choose this route, you can indicate your desire to participate through Canvas (see #1 above) or you can just wait and start participating via your social media accounts when the syndication platform is ready (I’ll write another blog post when we are ready to launch).

There are two parts to this course that I want to highlight:

First, I want this course to be about learners and their needs, and not just what I think are significant areas to understand. Therefore, I will be asking you to articulate participants to articulate their needs and  evaluate their own progress towards their accomplishments. For example, you might already know some of the challenges that academics face when they participate on social media (e.g., see Kansas Board of Regents policy regarding social media use) so you might want to spend more time investigating the relationship between academic freedom and social media. That’s absolutely fine! Or, you might be interested in investigating how you can be more effective in using social media to engage with practitioners. That’s great too!  I wrote a little bit about this here.

Second, even though I have experience with and  do research on networked scholarship, there are a number of other people who have experience with these topics. Diversity is important, and for this reason, each week I will be hosting a live Q&A panel on Google Hangouts on Air with other individuals discussing the topic of the week. Even though this panel will be live and you will be able to view it in real-time and ask questions, it will also be recorded for those of you who can’t make it.

That’s all for now. I am looking forward to the course.

MOOCs, automation, artificial intelligence seminar

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On June 5, 2014

In emerging technologies, Ideas, my research, online learning, open, pedagogical agents, scholarship, sharing

I will be visiting my colleagues at the University of Edinburgh in mid-June to give a seminar on MOOCs, automation, artificial intelligence and pedagogical agents. This is a free event organized by the Moray House School of Education at the U of Edinburgh and supported by the Digital Cultures and Education research group and DigitalHSS. Please feel free to join us face-to-face or online (Date: 18 June 2014; Time: 1-3pm) by registering here.

This seminar will bring together some of my current and past research. A lot of my work in the past examined learners’ experiences with conversational and (semi)intelligent agents. In that research, we discovered that the experience of interacting with intelligent technologies was engrossing (pdf). Yet, learners often verbally abused the pedagogical agents (pdf). We also discovered that appearance (pdf) may be a significant mediating factor in learning. Importanly, this research indicated that “learners both humanized the agents and expected them to abide by social norms, but also identified the agents as programmed tools, resisting and rejecting their lifelike behaviors.”

A lot of my current work examines experiences with open online courses and online social networks, but what exactly does pedagogical agents and MOOCs have to do with each other? Ideas associated with Artificial Intelligence are present in both the emergence of xMOOCs (EdX, Udacity, and Coursera emanated from AI labs) and certain practices associated with them – e.g., see Balfour (2013) on automated essay scoring. Audrey Watters highlighted these issues in the past. While I haven’t yet seen discussions on the integration of lifelike characters and pedagogical agents in MOOCs, the use of lifelike robots for education and the role of the faculty member in MOOCs are areas of  debate and investigation in both the popular press and the scholarly literature.  The quest to automate instruction has a long history, and lives within the sociocultural context of particular time periods. For example, the Second World War found US soldiers and cilvilians unprepared for the war effort, and audiovisual devices were extensively used to efficiently train individuals at a massive scale. Nowadays, similar efforts at achieving scale and efficiencies reflect problems, issues, and cultural beliefs of our time.

I’m working on my presentation, but if you have any questions or thoughts to share, I’d love to hear them!

 

MITx and HarvardX make some of their MOOC data publicly available

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On May 28, 2014

In emerging technologies, moocs, online learning, open, scholarship

MITx and HarvardX deserve huge congratulations for making data associated with a number of their MOOCs publicly available. Four months ago, I wrote that the “community would benefit from access to the data that HarvardX and MITx have, as other individuals/groups could run additional analyses. Granted, I imagine this might require quite a lot of effort, not least in the development of procedures for data sharing.” It seems that the researchers at MITx and HarvardX have tackled the issues involved to make the data available, and have developed thoughtful procedures to ensure de-identification. While some of the steps taken may limit analyses (e.g., the de-identification process document notes that “rows with 60 or more forum posts were deleted,” thus eliminating highly active users), this is a big step in the right direction and it should be celebrated.

Now… can we have some qualitative data? If any institutions are interested in making those available, I’d love talk to you, give you input, and work with you toward that goal.

 

Publication: The Structure and Characteristics of #PhDChat

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On May 12, 2014

In my research, online learning, open, papers, scholarship, sharing

One of the highlights of academia is working closely with students and seeing them grow, take on challenges, struggle, and create meaningful change in the world. This happens in classrooms, on the web, in design/development projects, in research endeavors, and so on. Kasey Ford, who was one of my advisees, recently completed her MA thesis examining #PhDChat, an online social network, and we have published a study out of that work in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education. I’m excited to share the abstract below:

#PhDChat is an online network of individuals that has its roots to a group of UK doctoral students who began using Twitter in 2010 to hold discussions. Since then, the network around #PhDchat has evolved and grown. In this study, we examine this network using a mixed methods analysis of the tweets that were labeled with the hashtag over a one-month period. Our goal is to understand the structure and characteristics of this network, to draw conclusions about who belongs to this network, and to explore what the network achieves for the users and as an entity of its own. We find that #PhDchat is a legitimate organizational structure situated around a core group of users that share resources, offer advice, and provide social and emotional support to each other. Core users are involved in other online networks related to higher education that use similar hashtags to congregate. #PhDchat demonstrates that (a) the network is in a continuous state of emergence and change, and (b) disparate users can come together with little central authority in order to create their own communal space.

Ford, K., Veletsianos, G., & Resta, P. (2014). The Structure and Characteristics of #PhDChat, an Emergent Online Social Network. Journal Of Interactive Media In Education, 18(1). Retrieved April 16, 2014, from http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2014-08

Below is a visualization of users mentioning #PhDChat, with users grouped into clusters. Users with frequent or exclusive ties, represented in this study as replies and mentions, are clustered together. Thus, each cluster represents users that are most closely associated to one another based on their frequency of interactions.

phdchat_viz

 

The Beautiful, Messy, Inspiring, and Harrowing World of Online Learning

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On May 1, 2014

In my research, NPS, online learning, open, scholarship

BCNET is a not-for-profit, shared information technology services organization focusing on British Columbia’s higher education system. The organization aims to to explore and evaluate shared IT solutions and hosts an annual conference. I  delivered one of the keynote talks for this year’s conference, and shared examples and stories of online learning initiatives. I framed these examples in terms of research on online learning and the context of the historic realities of educational technology practice. These stories illustrate the multiple realities that exist in online education and highlight how emerging technologies and open practices have (a) broadened access to education, (b) reinforced privilege, and (c) re-imagined the ways that academics enact and share scholarship.  I am including my slides below.

The Beautiful, Messy, Inspiring, and Harrowing World of Online Learning from George Veletsianos

 

Sessions of interest at #et4online

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On April 14, 2014

In emerging technologies, Ideas, online learning, open

I spent part of last week in Dallas at the annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning conference, organized by SLOAN-C. I describe my presentation at the conference in this post, but the sessions below were all relevant to my work:

Jim Groom’s keynote. Jim’s Domain of one’s own work resonates with me. Providing students with digital tools that will enable them to learn the ways of the web is significant, but the idea also resonates with me in the context of digital scholarship, which is one of my research strands. In particular, I see Jim’s project being applicable for PhD students who should be equipped with the tools, skills, and experiences to understand networked, open, and digital scholarship. I’ve met Jim briefly in the past, but we never had a chance to chat much, so it was great to be able to spend some more time together.

Amy Collier’s and Jen Ross’ plenary. The session focused on giving insightful descriptions of the messy and compromised realities of learning in contrast to the narratives of efficiency and ease suggested by numerous educational technology providers.

Andy Saltarelli’s study of belongingness and synchronicity in cooperative learning settings. What’s not to like about rigorous, theory-driven, large-scale evaluations of the socio-psychological constructs that make a difference in online learning contexts?

The session on distributed flips, or re-using MOOC resources in face-to-face/blended courses. MJ Bishop, Mike Caulfield, and Amy Collier came together to share their research on the topic. Mike was unable to join unfortunately, but he shared his thoughts here.

Rolin Moe organized a number of fantastic panels on issues pertaining to the field and I was excited to participate in the one focused on academics in educational technology, along with Jen Ross, Amy Collier, Jill Leafstedt, Jesse Stommel, and Sean Michael Morris. We had a wonderful conversation, but 50 minutes are never enough to cover this topic. The Sloan-C organizing committee should consider making this session a longer (free-to-attend) workshop.

Scholarly networks of care and vulnerability

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On April 14, 2014

In emerging technologies, my research, NPS, online learning, scholarship, sharing

I gave a presentation at the annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning conference last week focusing on aspects of networked participatory scholarship. I kept track of other sessions of interest here.

The concept of networked scholarship is expressed in different ways in the literature, ranging from digital scholarship to social scholarship to open scholarship. In my presentation, I discussed two themes that have arisen from my 3+ years of qualitative and ethnographic studies into the practices of higher education scholars.

Both of these themes help us make better sense of scholars’ digital participation and networked scholarship. They also help us better describe online scholarly networks and the lives and practices of digital scholars.

The first theme refers to the notion of scholars using networks to enact digital/open scholarship and circumvent restrictions to the sharing of knowledge. I have a recent publication on this that you can read here.

The second theme is one that I am still developing. Specifically, in my research I found that social media and online social networks function as places where some academics express and experience care. While debates about the use of digital scholarship and social media use in education have so far largely focused on the professional experiences of scholars, with frequent suggestions to limit personal sharing, professional and personal identity are difficult to separate, and academics frequently collapse the boundaries between personal and professional sharing. Academics demonstrate vulnerability and express care online in many forms. In my presentation, I showed and discussed examples of what these very personal and intimate instances of sharing look like. A version of my slides appear below:

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