Paper Review: Realigning Higher Education for the 21st-Century Learner through Multi-Access Learning

Irvine, V., Code, J., & Richards, L. (2013). Realigning higher education for the 21st-century learner through multi-access learning. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 172-186.

 

Summary:

The authors report results from a pilot study on one type of multi-access course, where students were able to choose their mode of access. In this case, remote students accessed the course via webcam and joined their on-campus classmates and instructor who were together face-to-face.

Multi-access learning is defined by Irvine as a framework for enabling students in both face-to-face and online contexts to personalize learning experiences while engaging as a part of the same course. Multi-access learning is different than blended learning because it places the student at the centre of the learning experience as opposed to the instructor or the institution. With multi-access learning, each individual learner decides how he/she wishes to take the course (e.g., face-to-face or online) and can then participate with other students and the instructor – each of whom have their own modality preferences – at the same time.

The paper has addressed following research questions:

• What was the rank order of learner preference for mode of access?
• How important was it for learners to have choice in selecting access modes?
• How did the experience participating in a multi-access course affect learner perceptions of quality of learning?

Research was conducted using a 17-question online survey that included demographic information on age, gender, education program, and teaching area. Items also gathered information on student experience with online courses, preferences for course access mode, and open-ended questions. Following the administration of the online survey, additional qualitative data was obtained through multiple interviews conducted with a subsample of the participants and separately with the instructor. Out of class of 26 secondary education students, 16 gave consent to participate in this study. Fifteen responses were found valid and were analyzed. Following were the results:

• Learners preferred multi-access for course modality
• All responses by the learners who had taken an online course before ranked the choice of delivery as very important.
• 57% of respondents reported they perceived the quality of learning as increased and 42.9% respondents reported the quality of learning as being the same.

The authors argue that the multi-access framework is an alternative approach to the MOOC design for those who want access to higher learning.

Assessment:

The authors have advocated use of multi-access learning as against MOOC to increase accessibility to higher education. Due to small sample size and restricted context, the results may not have universal applicability but they nevertheless argue for suitability of multi-access learning.

 

Reflection:

Multi-access learning has its use in many cases though its feasibility could be low in most of the cases. Nevertheless, more research in this area may help establish its effectiveness over traditional classroom sessions and MOOCs.

Paper Review: Learner Participation and Engagement in Open Online Courses: Insights from the Peer 2 Peer University

Ahn, J., Butler, B. S., Alam, A., & Webster, S. A. (2013). Learner participation and engagement in open online courses: Insights from the Peer 2 Peer University. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 160-171.

Summary:

This paper presents a comprehensive description of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a social computing platform, using its log data. P2PU is non-profit organization and online platform that allows any member to design and create a learning project (study group or course or challenge), which can then be taken by any other member in the online community.

The main research question guiding this study was: How have learners participated and engaged with open online learning in P2PU? Following are the key findings:

·        Statistics suggest that as a platform P2PU is able to successfully encourage individuals to experiment with creating a diverse array of participatory learning environments, but that a relatively small percentage of those projects are ever implemented as operational.

·        Descriptive measures of P2PU's growth and history show an online community that is in an early stage of development, but steadily growing both in terms of individual users and different types of participatory learning environments.

Assessment:

The authors of this paper have conducted descriptive research to investigate adoption of P2PU platform. They processed log data from the platform to find answer to their research question on how learners have participated and engaged with open online learning in P2PU. While presenting their results, they have raised many valuable research questions that can be investigated further.

Reflection:
This paper has answered “what” question while identifying quite a few “why” questions. Some of them are very fundamental questions, investigation of which could create useful knowledge for creators of open learning resources.

Paper Review: Patterns of Engagement in Connectivist MOOCs

Milligan, C., Littlejohn, A., & Margaryan, A. (2013). Patterns of engagement in connectivist MOOCs. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 149-159.

Summary:

This paper addresses two research questions:

1. What patterns of engagement exist within the Change11 cMOOC course?
2. What principal factors mediate this engagement?

The Change11 course was a large-scale cMOOC running from September 2011 to May 2012, organized and facilitated by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier. Over 35 weeks, participants were introduced to the work of a range of instructional design researchers and practitioners. Participants for the study were recruited via an invitation and study description included as the first item in The Daily e-mail sent to everyone registered for the Change11 cMOOC during Week 17 of the course. Thirty-five individuals from a total of 2,300 registered learners agreed to participate. From the initial sample of 35, 29 study participants were able to subsequently take part in a one-hour semi-structured interview via Skype, which explored various aspects of participation including motivation, goal-setting, and planning strategies, as well as exploring study participants' existing and emergent learning networks, their use of tools to support their learning, and their perceptions of their own participation in the course.

As a result of this study, three distinct types of engagement were recognized – active participation, lurking and passive participation. Active participants adapted well to the connectivist pedagogy of cMOOCs, maintaining active blogs and Twitter accounts, actively and regularly discussing the course. Lurkers were actively following the course but did not actively engage with other learners within it. This category of users is somewhat complex as it includes a spectrum of participants from those who lacked the confidence to participate, to those who were so confident they didn't need to participate in the course. What was common among them is that a cMOOC format works for them – they have the skills to leverage what they want from the course, on their terms. The final category of passive participants was characterized by their apparent frustration or dissatisfaction with the course.

In response to second research question, following factors were identified affecting engagement in this cMOOC: Confidence, Prior experience and Motivation.

Assessment:

MOOCs are classified as Connectivist MOOC (CMOOC) and Scalable MOOC (xMOOC). This paper specifically focuses on cMOOC. The authors have studied a specific cMOOC offering to make a point that confidence, prior experience and motivation determines whether the participant would be an active participant or lurker or passive participant.

While the paper has identified three types of engagement, lurking as a type should have been split over few types to have more cohesive categories. On another note, there seems to be possibility of identification of few more determinants of engagement with wider scope of study.

Reflection:

This paper makes an important contribution by identifying confidence, prior experience and motivation as determinants for engagement in cMOOC. This needs to be further validated.s

Paper Review: Wrapping a MOOC: Student Perceptions of an Experiment in Blended Learning

Bruff, D. O., Fisher, D. H., McEwen, K. E., & Smith, B. E. (2013). Wrapping a MOOC: Student perceptions of an experiment in blended learning. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 187–199.

Summary:
This paper provides a case study of students’ perceptions of a blended graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University in Fall 2012. This blended course was offered by Prof. Fisher (a co-author of this paper). who "wrapped" his on-campus course around the Machine Learning MOOC offered on the Coursera platform.

Following techniques were used to collect data:

• Focus group with all 10 students participating
• University’s standard end-of-course evaluation forms
• Post-course survey, which was designed to further explore some of the themes that emerged from the focus group

Qualitative data analysis for this study involved the constant comparative method and the development of case studies.Following were key findings:

• The major advantage of the MOOC over a traditional lecture-based course was its greater flexibility, customization, and accessibility, which students saw as encouraging structured self-paced learning.
• Students described the face-to-face sessions with Prof. Fisher as helping to keep them on track with the material online.
• Students did not actively participate in either the Coursera discussion forums or the study groups formed online due to time constraints. Instead, they used the discussion boards to check for course errata or to quickly troubleshoot questions or problems, but tended to ask questions among their local peers.
• Students suggested more in-class discussion of the material presented in the MOOC.
• Misalignment between Face-to-Face and Online Components was seen as a major challenge.
• Students perceived role of Prof. Ng (Faculty for MOOC) as the lead lecturer of the course. On other hand, they perceived Fisher's role in the face-to-face sessions as that of a "facilitator."

Authors have defined the concept of coupling and cohesion of a blended course. Coupling refers to the kinds and extent of dependency between online and in-class components of a hybrid course, whereas cohesion refers to the relatedness of the course content overall. Authors have further defined subject coupling and task coupling. Subject coupling happens when  subject matter is shared across the online and face-to-face components of a course. Task coupling happens when online and face-to-face components contribute to the completion of a task, typically by learning and applying complementary subject content and/or skills. The authors note that the course under discussion had a relatively low degree of coupling by design but to the apparent dissatisfaction of some students.

Authors have identified following opportunities for future work:

• Possibility to wrap a course around parts of multiple MOOCs
• How can MOOCs be best designed to best leverage differently designed local learning communities?
• Possibility for characterizing student and faculty interactions beyond any single MOOC, to include interactions across MOOCs and across media

Assessment:
This is a case study paper that uses qualitative analysis techniques for data analysis. It seems to have made a contribution by defining concept of coupling and cohesion of a blended course and by further relating them to student satisfaction. Its identification of opportunities for future work indicate vast scope for further research in adoption of MOOC in global education ecosystem.

Reflection: This paper discusses one way by which MOOC could be incorporated in mainstream education. It will be interesting to repeat this experiment with larger student participation so that the relationship between coupling/cohesion of blended course with student satisfaction can be critically examined.

Paper Review: Producing and Delivering a MOOC on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software

Schmidt, D. C., & McCormick, Z. (2013). Producing and Delivering a Coursera MOOC on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software. SPLASH ’13, October 26–31, 2013, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. Retrieved from https://my.vanderbilt.edu/zachmccormick/files/2013/09/posa.pdf

Summary:
Two faculty members from Vanderbilt University produced and delivered a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on “Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software” (known as POSA MOOC) in Spring of 2013. This paper descries their experience.
Launched on 4th March 2013, POSA MOOC ran for ten weeks and had an enrolment of more than 31,000 students. Its section zero provided course overview with an hour of introductory video. Section one provided an introduction to concurrent and networked software using 3.5 hours of videos. Section two provided an introduction to patterns and frameworks with 6 hours of videos. Section three contained 6 hours of videos and focused on how to develop concurrent and networked software by applying patterns and frameworks and grouping patterns into pattern languages. The final section, which was an option one, provided a case study of “Gang of Four” Patterns with 3.5 hours of background videos on object-oriented design and patterns. Students could engage in one of two tracks. Normal track was meant for students who had time/interest in taking the auto-graded quizzes and final exam, but who did not have time/interest to complete the peer-graded short essay questions and peer-graded programming assignments. Students in normal track received a Statement of Accomplishment. Students in Distinction track received a Statement of Accomplishment with Distinction by scoring more than 70% score. The score was based on the weekly quizzes (35% of the final grade), peer-graded short essays and peer-graded assignments (55% of the final grade) and a final exam (10% of the final grade).

Authors have noted following observations and lessons learned:

• An enormous amount of time was needed to prepare the content prior to MOOC launch. Work involved filming high quality video lectures and creating student assessment mechanisms.
• An even larger amount of time is needed to manage a MOOC after launch. Authors spent 40+ hours per week on discussion forum largely to accelerate and amplify the learning process, to dispel common misconception, to build good will and to reward constructive student participation.
• The POSA MOOC student diversity was both challenging and rewarding. Challenged included much greater level of scepticism from experienced students, increased workload to fill knowledge gaps, generalizing from limited perspectives impedes learning and overly narrow focus on programming. Rewarding aspects included highly stimulating discussions with expert software developers and greatly improved course structure and content.
• Assessing student performance in a “design-oriented” MOOC is harder than in “fact-oriented” MOOCs.
• The Coursera platform, which was used to run this POSA MOOC, is a work-in-progress.
• Innovations helped make the POSA MOOC more like a “real” course. The innovations included virtual office hours using Google Hangout and YouTube channel, crowd-sourced programming assignments and grading calculator.
• Interpret MOOC enrolment statistics carefully. Out of 31,000+ enrolments, ~20,000 ever logged in and participated in some way. Only ~1600 of these participants received some form of statement of accomplishment.
• MOOCs can enhance student-centred learning opportunities by increasing asynchrony in courses and by providing location-agnostic learning.

Authors have mentioned following benefits to faculty:

• Significantly better on-campus courses
• Fostering global life-long learning communities that connect students who possess a range of experience

Authors have mentioned following benefits to Vanderbilt:

• Expanding the brand value of a Vanderbilt education
• Better opportunities for engagement with alumni and prospective students.

Besides these benefits, authors have also observed following drawbacks based on their experience:

• Potential for “deskilling” education and educators
• MOOCs require substantial institutional investment and the payoff isn’t clear (yet)
• Detecting and dealing with plagiarism is tedious

Based on their experience, authors are planning to expand their offering with an intentionally-coordinated, trans-institution sequence of MOOCs that focus on patterns and frameworks for mobile device programming. It would showcase how intentionally-coordinated MOOCs can create life-long learning communities that (1) cross-cut traditional institutional/disciplinary boundaries and (2) would not be feasible without the MOOC paradigm and MOOC platforms like Coursera.

Assessment:
This paper is an experience-sharing paper, which documents observations and lessons learned along with commentary on pros and cons of MOOCs. It has also identified a research gap regarding correlations between completion rate and various diversity related factors (such as broadband penetration, English proficiency, age, and types of software jobs available in various countries).

Reflection:
Authors have expressed fear that administrators at some cash-strapped institutions would diminish the quality of higher education via wanton replacement of experienced faculty with MOOCs and inexpensive lecturers. While this fear is very much valid, it may also be looked at from different perspective. Many cash-stripped institutes, particularly in developing countries can actually enhance quality of their delivery of education by combining MOOCs produced and delivered by top-notch educators with in-person mentoring by local inexpensive lecturers. Obviously it requires paradigm change where in the responsibility of such lecturers would change from that of teaching in classroom to facilitating learning experience of students through one-on-one or group mentoring sessions.

Book Review: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is an official biography of Steve Jobs written by former managing editor of Time magazine. In more than 500 pages, Walter has provided a detailed account of life and career of Steve Jobs. One can sense the amount of efforts Walter would have put in gathering facts by interviewing more than 100 individuals and going through loads of records. By providing analysis and insights from these details, Walter has made this book quite readable and engaging from start to end. I would recommend it to every voracious reader.

Installed Zotero today

Zotero is an open source reference management software. It can be used to collect, organize, cite, and share the research sources. I have installed its version 4.0 as Firefox extension. It seems to have a lot of features, which I would explore in coming days.

Before installing Zotero, I also looked at Docear. Docear (“dog-ear”) is an academic literature suite containing digital library with support for pdf documents, reference manager, note taking and with mind maps taking a central role.Its latest version is 1.0 RC2. It seems to be an excellent tool for those who would like to use mind mapping to organize their collection of research sources. I was not sure so deferred its installation and instead installed Zotero.

Docear (“dog-ear”) is an academic literature suite. It integrates everything you need to search, organize and create academic literature into a single application: digital library with support for pdf documents, reference manager, note taking and with mind maps taking a central role. What’s more, Docear works seamlessly with many existing tools like Mendeley, Microsoft Word, and Foxit Reader. Docear is free and open source, based on Freeplane, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Technology and developed by scientists from around the world, among others from OvGU, and the University of California, Berkeley. - See more at: http://www.docear.org/#sthash.DcF7Eydp.dpuf

Docear (“dog-ear”) is an academic literature suite. It integrates everything you need to search, organize and create academic literature into a single application: digital library with support for pdf documents, reference manager, note taking and with mind maps taking a central role. What’s more, Docear works seamlessly with many existing tools like Mendeley, Microsoft Word, and Foxit Reader. Docear is free and open source, based on Freeplane, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Technology and developed by scientists from around the world, among others from OvGU, and the University of California, Berkeley. - See more at: http://www.docear.org/#sthash.DcF7Eydp.dpuf

Book Review: TATA LOG

TATA LOG tells 8 stories from Tata group of companies. Though it is written by a Tata insider, it is not a book that only praises Tata way of working. Rather it takes a critical view of happenings and that is a strength of this book. Written in a very lucid language, this book is both entertaining and informative. I think all eight stories given in this book can become excellent case studies for discussion in MBA classes and corporate management training programs.   

These eight stories are as follows:

1. Launch of TATA Indica car
2. CSR work by TATA Chemicals 
3. Making of Tanishq brand
4. Trouble at Tata Finance
5. Tata Second Career Program
6. Development of EKA - an Indian supercomputer
7. Acquisition of Tetley by Tata Tea
8. Winning of Deming Prize by Tata Steel

Highly recommended book for business book lovers!

 

Book Review: Never Stop Learning

"Never Stop Learning" is a collection of 14 lessons in which business leaders have shared their learning/opinions/advice about learning. These lessons could be inspiring for the ones who generally question the need for continuous learning. I didn't find anything new to learn from this book though. If you are firm believer in continuous learning then you need not read this book. For others, it will really help!

I have now become TOGAF Eertified Enterprise Architect!

Last week, I appeared and passed the exam for TOFAF Part 1 and Part 2 Combined! So now I can call myself TOGAF Certified Enterprise Architect!

Though I attended the four-day course in last year, I kept on postponing appearing for exam due to work pressure. Finally, I decided to give it a shot and it worked. Though I couldn't score 100%, I could pass with comfortable margin.

The biggest benefit of giving this exam is that it forced me to read TOGAF document from cover to cover. I hope I can utilize this knowledge in some assignments in near future!

What is research?

Today while going through various web resources, I made following notes about what is research:

• Research is different from intelligence gathering, which answers 'what' questions such as what percentage of SMEs in India are owned by women. Research aims to answer 'why' questions such as why Indian manufacturers are less competitive than their Chinese counterparts. 
• Good research is characterized by open system of thought, critical examination of data and specification of the limits on the generalization made.
• Research can be classified as exploratory, testing-out and problem-solving.

How Business Rules Define Your Business Strategy

Today I happened to read MIT CISR research briefing titled as "How Business Rules Define Your Business Strategy". Very precisely, this briefing explains how Business Rule Engine (BRE) can be used to implement aspects of business strategy. It describes a case of Citrix, which used BRE for two business areas: partner certification and partner incentives. Few noteworthy points from this research briefing are as follows:

• A business rule is a specification of the action to be taken in a given business circumstance.
• Business rules connect business strategy and operations by informing daily operational decisions and by informing the metrics on scorecards that track individual performance. 
• Digitization of business rules can facilitate development of single source of truth - a data repository that can be used for reporting and analytics.
• Additionally Management needs to be engaged in continuous coaching of individuals, which can help in clarifying the rules and the data.

Softscaling

I always had a feeling that though western management models have been prominent in our business education, there is something about our Indian management, which is worth study by global managers. So I was happy to see a research briefing from MIT CISR, which is based on research done at five top-performing Indian companies viz., Airtel, Hero MotoCorp, HDFC, Tata Motors and Max Healthcare. The researchers have termed the strategy of these firms as softscaling, which involves combining the rational use of data to optimize business process efficiency with the empathic use of data to understand and connect with customers and other stakeholders. I would strongly recommend reading this 3-page research briefing, which is available online at http://cisr.mit.edu/blog/documents/2012/03/15/2012_0301_softscaling_agarwalweill-pdf/.

Customer-facing digitization creates the most value

In a recently published research briefing from MIT CISR, the authors have recommended that digitization of customer facing processes should be given higher priority than that of shared services and operations processes. Their recommendation is based on the study in which they assessed degree of digitization by examining 12 core enterprise processes in three key areas as follows:

1. Shared Services: budgeting and financial management; closing the book; recruiting and hiring; employee performance; corporate performance
2. Operations: supplier performance; fulfillment; logistics and supply chain
3. Customer facing: identifying sales prospects; managing customer relationships; market testing; identifying customer needs

With a sample of two thousand firm, the key finding is that having more digitized customer-facing processes seems to help performance, particularly growth: firms with digitization of customer-facing processes in the top 25% had a median revenue growth of 9%, compared to 4% median revenue growth for the entire sample.

I agree with this recommendation but for a reason other than mentioned in the research briefing. I think digitization of shared services and operational processes can help improve profitability but to increase revenue, you need to enhance digitization of customer facing processes. My two cents worth!

Book Review: Super Freakonomics

If you have read Freakonomics then you will quickly pick up its sequel – Super Freakonomics. Like its predecessor, this book explains how microeconomics concepts get applied in real life. In this book, the authors have vividly shared findings of their own research and that of others to show how economic principles work in domains such as prostitution, terrorism, healthcare, global warming, etc. Simply superb!

Takeaways for a talk: Happy for no reason

Recently I attended a talk by my colleague, Anandkumar NC. He had given a very interesting title to his talk, Happy for no reason. In a very entertaining way, Anand shared some of the academic research findings and his personal experience for becoming happy for no reason. I had following takeaways from his talk:

• Two myths block our happiness: myth of more and myth of I will be happy when ...
• Three things rob our happiness: victimhood, blaming and feeling shame.
• Plan the work and work the plan. Only plan and no work results into daydreaming! Work with no plan leads to nightmare!

Notes from Book: Software Project Survival Guide

Written by Steve McConnell, an author of Code Complete and Rapid Development, Software Project Survival Guide is an useful resource for both aspiring and experienced software project managers. The templates and checklists discussed in this book along with a survival test are available on this book's web site. Here I am noting down some wisdom nuggets spread throughout this book that I found quite relevant for my current work:

• Early in the project you can have firm cost and schedule targets or a firm feature set, but not both.
• Involving users throughout the project is a critical software project survival skill.
• The working software is a more accurate status report than any paper report could ever be.
• Staged delivery is not a panacea. But, on balance, the additional overhead it demands is a small price to pay for the significantly improved status visibility, quality visibility , flexibility, estimation accuracy, and risk reduction it provides.
• It's better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.
• The problem with quick and dirty, as some people have said, is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten.
• No individual is a success who hurts the team, and no individual is a failure who helps it.

Book Review: User Stories Applied

This book provides good guidance on user stories. Actually the first section, Getting Started, is the one that provides enough details for learning to write user stories. Second session is about estimation and planning for user stories. Third section provides supplementary information about user stories in chapters such as “what user stories are not”, “why user stories”, etc. Fourth part provides a complete example case study for learning user stories. Final section provides two appendices: one giving an overview of Extreme Programming and other one providing answers to chapter questions. Overall, this book is good read for those who are planning to use user stories as a technique for requirements gathering and analysis during agile software development.