Unisa Cambridge International Conference 2013 - Cape Town, South Africa

Cambridge International Conference on Open, Distance and eLearning for 2013 held in Cape Town, South Africa. Unisa (University of South Africa) hosted the event at Spier Hotel Stellenbosch, a beautiful venue for international conferences. Theme of the conference was Continuity, Change and Sustainability in Open, Distance and eLearning. This conference was very different to the conferences I have attended so far.

Image from: http://www.unisa.ac.za/ODeL2013/

There were fewer number of delegates and there was lot of time for brainstorming and group work. For example after each keynote there was a session for delegates to work in groups in exploring few issues raised in the talk, which I found very interesting, educational and fulfilling.

Prof. Asha Kanwar - President Commonwealth of Learning, Prof. Alan Tait - The Open University UK, Prof. Bakary Diallo - African Virtual University were among the keynote speakers.

Our presentation:
 'Globalization and Technology-mediated Distance Education: developing countries perspective'
was among the five presentations sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning. The paper was based on the work of my PhD study and I am delighted to have co-authored this paper with my advisers/supervisors: Prof. Andrew Adams - Meiji University Japan, Prof. Naz Rassool -Institute of Education, University of Reading, and Prof. Shirley Williams - School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading.

In this paper we talk about the global changes that made higher education a 'necessity' for a descent job and the position of developing countries in terms of providing access to higher education for their people. We discuss the possibility of using technology mediated education and the necessity to consider specific circumstances of countries in selecting/using technology for distance education using Bates' (2005) ACTIONS framework. The lack of consideration or overlooking these aspects in selecting/using technology for distance education and their adverse consequences are also discussed taking examples from developing countries. The challenges and opportunities for developing countries are also discussed.

The paper abstract reads:

"The contemporary global economy places great value on highly educated workers but devalues workers in repetitive or low skill jobs. In order to thrive in this new economy, countries must ensure sufficient higher education opportunities for their population. However, a lack of resources is a major barrier faced by many developing countries in expanding their higher education systems. Technology-mediated distance education has the potential to be an invaluable tool in offering educational opportunities to people, if the other necessary conditions for participation are met. Although technology-mediated education was first considered to be a medium to bridge the learning divide across space, today it is feared that it could well become an inequality intensifier. Drawing on examples from developing countries, this paper considers factors regarding implementing technology-mediated distance education, including failure to address contextual issues and possible consequences. Challenges and policy implications are also discussed"

If you are interested in reading the full paper, authors' final version can be found here.

References:

• Bates, A.W. (2005). Technology, Open Learning and Distance Education, (2nd ed), Routledge: London.
• Liyanagunawardena, T.R, Adams, A.A., Rassool, N. and Williams, S.A. (2013). Globalization and Technology-Mediated Distance Education: Developing Countries’ Perspective, Unisa Cambridge International Conference on Open, Distance and eLearning, 29 September - 2 October 2013, Cape Town, South Africa

Story Behind My Engagement with University of Reading MOOC

In one of my previous Blogs I talked about Planning and Creating a MOOC. The first MOOC offered by University of Reading is Begin Programming: build your first mobile game. Despite wanting to blog about our MOOC I had to be abide by an embargo on publicizing too much information before the launch event. Since the FutureLearn launch event was held 18th September now I am free to blog about our MOOC, Begin Programming: build your first mobile game.
We had submitted our MOOC Systematic Review to IRRODL and shared it within the University among our colleagues. Actually it was Prof. Shirley Williams who initiated this sharing and discussion. At the same time the University was interested in MOOCs and because everyone now knew that we had an interest on MOOCs we got the chance to get closely involved in the University's MOOC work. Several departments/schools within the University were interested in offering MOOCs but with strong leadership of Prof. Williams the School of Systems Engineering team got the chance to go ahead with the first MOOC.

Then came the painful task of creating content, which I along with Dr. Karsten, who is the lead lecturer in our Begin Programming MOOC did. We had various templates to fill in, create content, get involved in the quality assurance process and so on. We met at least twice a month, I think, to monitor the progress and the back stage content was developed. All the time Shirley was there with us providing guidance. Then we started the video shooting. Luckily for us Luke Micallef in the Digital Development team at the University came to our aid. With the University venturing into MOOCs, he became the dedicated Open Online Course Developer at the University and we got lot of help from him. Karsten was great in front of the camera and you can see that from this course trailer. Almost all the scenes were videoed in front of a green screen as you can see here. Luke did all the nice graphics etc to make these videos.

So this is our MOOC team from the left it is Prof. Shirley Williams, Luke Micallef, Myself and Dr. Karsten Lundqvist.

(Official Group Photograph: UoR Begin Programming MOOC team)

FutureLearn is still in its Beta stage. Since launching MOOC on 18th September within a day our Begin Programming MOOC has hit the target and now the we are offering registration for 2014 to people who could not get registered in for 2013 run. Now we are looking forward to meeting our MOOC participants and facilitating their learning from 28th October 2013.

The Difficulty of Literature Reviews

One of my worst nightmares when facing the PhD viva was that my examiner would point out some important piece of literature relating to my work that I have missed. I dreaded the question
 'I see that you have not referred to the works of XXX?'
or putting bluntly
'Why have you not referred to XXX in your thesis?'.
Luckily my examiners did not ask me this dreaded question.

Photo credit: Erik Abderhalden http://www.flickr.com/photos/soundfromwayout/2468912536/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Doing a literature review is difficult because you need to make boundaries and find relevant literature and not miss out on important work. This is where your supervisors help you by informing you key people in the field you should read about. But what if you still miss some important work?

Well there are several strategies you could go about:
1. First of all you can stop doing any literature reviews because anyway you will have to leave some work out of it - there is no way one can find all work and refer to them all (at least this is what I believe)
2. Secondly - you can go ahead putting your best effort and still if you fail to address some important work you can accept that fact if someone raise the issue (that is what my plan for PhD viva was)
3. Third - when you have finished your literature review, but you are yet to publicize it, if you find that there has been some new important papers published you could always acknowledge the fact that these papers have been published since you've finished your work
4. You could also do what you want and call it a literature review regardless of whether it refers to important work or not.

When I was doing MOOC systematic literature review (published in IRRODL) I tried my best to find all scholary literature I could find. Even then there are criticism that we have not included some work. But looking at Massive Open Online Courses and Online Distance Learning Review published by the Department of Business Innovations and Skills it seems that they have missed the one and only systematic literature review on MOOCs published so far. This made me question the effort being put into this report because had correct terms used in Google this would have appeared in the top 10 hits.

On the other hand, perhaps the authors knew about this work (systematic literature review) but found it not useful so did not refer to it? A quality systematic review in a topic gives you access to almost all relevant papers published in the period concerned. In my view our MOOC Systematic Review filled a huge gap by collating research relating to MOOCs and summarizing/analysing them. But perhaps I am too attached to my work and may be considering our work too highly? Perhaps it is time to think again?

Telecentres and eLearning

Our short paper "Telecentres and eLearning" is now published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (Colloquium) volume 44 issue 5 (September). This paper was the result of a set of interviews I did with distance learning students in Sri Lanka as part of my PhD research.

The paper describes the issues faced by students; in this case study, in using telecentres for eLearning. It questions whether telecenter implementations have actually considered their users' needs when defining telecentre operational guidelines.

I was shocked to hear that the students who used telecentres were supposed to produce a letter from the vice chancellor of their university if they wanted to borrow a set of headphones to listen to a video lecture.

"There is no point in just watching a video note; we need to listen to it too. Sometimes when we ask for headphones to listen to a video note, they [staff at telecentre] tell us to get a letter from the Vice Chancellor. How can a student obtain a letter from the VC, produce it to the NAC head [telecentre head] and listen to a video note? It is such a bother [very disheartening] for the student." (translated from Sinhala).

Is it practical to ask the vice chancellor of the university to issue letters to students for this purpose? or is it practical to expect the student to carry it around every time they visit the telecentre? As an outsider I saw it as cumbersome and felt that it would deter students from using these facilities meant for them. Perhaps there is a reason for this enforcement - perhaps they had such high demand for headphones that the telecentre could not meet? This was just one of the many obstacles that students had to cope with in using telecentres.

Whatever it may be, a facility that implements excessive administrative policies and procedures that inconvenience users unnecessarily is likely to have fewer number of users. So if the purpose is to popularize eLearning among students, providing them access to the wealth of information available online, I am not sure whether this strategy would work to attract learners.

"When implementing eLearning in countries where many depend on public access services such as telecentres, flexibility offered by them is a key factor determining the success of such system. Thus it is vital to make telecentres student friendly and welcoming. Careful attention is also need to the precise location and opening hours of telecentres, to ensure maximum benefit towards the goals for the investment costs. Though these seem obvious it is worthwhile questioning how many telecenter implementations have actually considered these."

I like to invite you to read our full paper here.
Authors' final version is available from here.

Citation for the paper:
Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., Rassool, N., & Williams, S. (2013). Telecentres and eLearning, British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(5), E156–E158 , doi:10.1111/bjet.12020.

Using non-Personal Computers for eLearning

In most of the developed countries many learners taking eLearning courses have their own computer and connectivity. However, the situation is drastically different in developing countries where computer and Internet penetration is low. In those countries communal facilities (such as telecentres, libraries, or even internet cafes) provide access to students who do not possess their own computers and/or connectivity. 

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23015607@N00/148160389/in/photolist-e6mVt-EM9mQ-EM9nq-EM9nu-EMfir-EMfiF-EMg4f-EMg4o-EMg4s-EMg4w-EMg4J-EMg5f-4miLQt-a1vUav-a1vTwD-a1vU8M-a1yMkG-a1yMom-a1yMdj-a1vTMz-a1vU9k-a1yMpL-a1vTTr-a1vTxH-a1vTkZ-a1vTCP-a1yLLN-a1vTPt-a1yLRs-a1yLHm-a1yMqS-a1yLM5-a1vU9D-a1yLTL-a1yMcq-a1yLTb-a1yM25-a1yLES-a1vTx2-a1vTqc-a1vTHn-a1yLMU-a1vU5D-a1vU2i-a1yM8q-a1yM87-a1yMa5-a1vUb6-a1yLNQ-a1vU7R-a1yLVJ

(Translation of the major text: The spread of the global village project - The services supplied to you: Internet facility, email, local telephone calls, international telephone calls, information and advice on finances for self employment, fax, photos, photocopy, information queries, computer classes)

Are we aware of the difficulties the students face in engaging with eLearning using these communal facilities? During my PhD research I talked to many students (enrolled in either fully online or blended programmes) who were using communal access facilities to engage with the online component of their degree programmes. The paper Using non-Personal Computers for eLearning: Sri Lankan Experience published in the Journal of Education and Training Studies discusses the experiences of Sri Lankan students. I am delighted to have co-authored this paper with my advisers/supervisors: Prof. Andrew Adams - Meiji University Japan, Prof. Naz Rassool - Institute of Education, University of Reading, and Prof. Shirley Williams - School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading.

The paper discusses various issues faced by students such as: cost, excessive administrative procedures, logistics, connection quality and the list goes on. These centres have blocked access to some websites such as Facebook and YouTube claiming that it was a) due to limited bandwidth b) due to students using these sites for chatting, viewing videos etc. However, in my interviews I found students who wanted to use YouTube for educational purposes. They were designing a product and wanted to investigate other similar designs on YouTube videos. But because the site was blocked they could not access it. Sadly none of these students had home internet connectivity, which meant that they had no other way of accessing these blocked resources.

I am not going to spoil the fun of reading the paper by discussing it all here again. But I am going to end this blog with a quote from one of my interview participants who said
“Well if you don't have an Internet connection at home it is very difficult. In my opinion it is compulsory that one has a home Internet connection [in order to take up a course that uses eLearning]” (Translated to English from Sinhala).

We know that generally MOOCs use multiple learning spaces: YouTube videos, Slideshare, Blogs to name some. What does this mean in terms of accessibility to MOOCs? Even when MOOCs are free to enroll and learn, still these students who do have 'access' (in terms of motivation, access to internet - well partly due to restrictions, skills - to use computers for learning) do not have provision to fully engage in them. If these students who are using communal access centres wanted to study in a MOOC, would they be able to access the wealth of resources generated in a MOOC with these restriction in place? 

Liyanagunawardena, T.R., Adams, A.A., Rassool, N., & Williams, S.A. (2013). Using non-Personal Computers for eLearning: Sri Lankan Experience, Journal of Education and Training Studies, 1 (2), 152-158. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/jets.v1i2.96

Planning and Creating a MOOC

I have taken part in 3 Massive Open Online Courses so far and have been thinking how much of an effort would the course creators have had to put into the course to get all the resources prepared for running a MOOC.

I am lucky to be in one of the teams at the University of Reading creating MOOCs to be offered under the FutureLearn partnership. At the School of Systems Engineering - University of Reading I am working in Prof. Shirley Williams’ team along with Dr. Karsten Lundqvist and Luke Micallef (from the University’s Digital Development team) to create a MOOC.

It has taken us a lot of time to plan this course.  We recently recorded the first video for our MOOC and I managed to capture a few moments on my iPhone.

This recording was done in the state-of-the-art filming studio owned by the University’s Department of Film, Theatre & Television. I was more than impressed by the facility but had little idea how to operate any of the equipment. Luke did all the technical stuff while Karsten was the ‘star’ in the video.

MOOCs: A systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012

Since their appearance in 2008, with in a fairly short time, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a 'buzzword'. It was time for the literature to be systematically analyzed to provide an overall picture of the phenomenon. I together with Professor Andrew Adams (Graduate School of Business Administration,  the Centre for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan) and Professor Shirley Williams (School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading, UK) took the challenge to systematically review the literature on MOOCs from 2008-2012.

At the same time we started this work, somewhere in October - November 2012, a call for proposals appeared for MERLOT Special Issue on MOOCs. Our proposal was not successful. Through our literature  search we found that the IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) had published the highest number of MOOC related research papers during the period 2008-2012 and we were keen to finish our literature study and publish our work with them.

When we finally approached IRRODL with our paper we were delighted to hear that the journal was willing to publish our work. This was an important milestone for me personally because this was my very first full paper accepted for publication in a journal. Given the reputation of IRRODL, it was an awesome news. In July 2013 (just 3 months after we first submitted our paper) it is published and online in IRRODL's volume 14 (3).

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., & Williams, S. (2013). MOOCs: a Systematic Study of the Published Literature 2008-2012. International review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(3), 201-227.

In this paper we looked at all published scholarly literature on MOOCs that we could find from: journals, conferences, workshop papers, magazines and reports. Forty-five peer reviewed papers were identified and used as the base for this systematic review.

Because we only used journal papers, workshop papers, conference papers, academic magazines and reports, MOOC related discussions in Blog posts were not captured by this review. We have identified this as a limitation of  study. Blog posts always present difficulties for authors of reviews in determining the credibility of the posts. There are few studies on how researchers use blogs but the transient nature of blogs means that they are difficult to suitably include in a systematic consideration. When the same search terms used to find MOOC related articles for this review was used in Google Web search, it returned over 50,000 items; when used in a Google Blog search resulted in 570 results (December 04, 2012), but we have not analyzed these items in our paper.

Some quantitative highlights from the paper:

The first MOOC related paper was published in 2008, with again just one paper identified in 2009, seven papers in 2010, 10 in 2011, and 26 in 2012.

Looking at articles by the type of publication: the majority of identified articles were published in journals (17 papers), with a smaller number of articles appearing in conference proceedings and magazines (13 and 10 respectively).

Above graph illustrates the separation of articles by publication type and year. From 2009 to 2012 there is a gradual increase of the number of journal articles and conference papers. Notice that the first magazine article about MOOCs appeared in 2011 and the following year there is a fourfold increase!

There is much more qualitative analysis in this paper and I am not discussing it all here spoiling the fun of reading the article itself. You can find the article here.

Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., & Williams, S. (2013). MOOCs: a Systematic Study of the Published Literature 2008-2012. International review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(3), 201-227.