#FLMobiGame: Using FutureLearn Platform - Viewing Comments

In this blog post I am going to share some tips about using FutureLearn platform comments. These I found to be useful in keeping an eye on what is happening in the MOOC.

Edit : This post was edited January 2015 to accommodate the changes in FutureLearn user interface

Viewing all recent activity:

Click on 'Activity'.

Click on Activity

Once the Activity is clicked it will show all recent activity in the course. So this view is what I use mostly to keep track of all help requests and other comments made.

Viewing all comments made by you:

Well.. almost all comments (as of 20th Nov 2013 only 100 comments are shown).
Click on your profile on the top right corner.

This will give a menu and from this menu select 'My Profile'

It will show all posts you have made in the course

This will be easier way to keep track of your posts.

Viewing replies to your posts:

Click on Replies

Click on replies

#FLMobiGame: Download Begin Programming MOOC's Videos

Edit Oct 2014 -The FutureLearn Platform has been upgraded and the blog on newer instructions can be found here

Begin Programming: Build Your First Mobile Game MOOC offered by University of Reading went live yesterday. We had lots of comments from our participants. Many of them felt it would be useful to download our videos, especially with slow internet connections it can be very frustrating to watch videos online.

We requested FutureLearn and they have given us the functionality already. So in this blog I am going to explain how you can download videos from our MOOC.

In order to do this you must be logged into your account with FutureLearn.

Step1:
Go to the video you want to download. In this example I am using the first video in activity 1.1 - Welcome to Week 1.

Step 2:
Select 'Download this video' link to download it. If you want to save it, right click and select 'save as'.

Now your connection speed will determine how quickly you can download the video :)

Statement of Accomplishment - What does it mean to you?

After participating in many MOOCs, to be precise five MOOCs: Edfuture (CHFE), Learning Design for 21st Century Curriculum (OLDS-MOOC), Open Education (H817), Moons a Short Introduction (accidentally registered on Futurelearn Alpha) and Learn to Program- The Fundamentals on Coursera, I received my first "Statement of Accomplishment".

Statement of Accomplishment for Learn to Program: The Fundamentals MOOC

I feel satisfied to have received this "Statement of Accomplishment" even though I know that I may never use it (for those who didn't know, I have prior experience in software industry as a software engineer). It made me think about why I feel satisfied with this piece of evidence that I fail to see any potential use (at the moment).

I have always been a late starter in MOOCs. In this particular MOOC though I managed to join in week two I didn't realize that there were deadlines each week for Exercises (something similar to home work). This being my first Coursera course I was not familiar with the terminology and I didn't realize I had to look at 'Course Logistics' to know what I was supposed to do. Only when I realized in week 6 that the assignments and final exam in itself did not add up to 70%  I started doing the Exercises. So for me, this 'certificate of accomplishment' came as a surprise by just managing to achieve the grade required. So perhaps it made a difference.

Recently I was involved in a research project with Prof. Shirley Williams and Mr. Pat Parslow, which looked at participants perspectives of success, completion and dropout in a MOOC mainly in a Higher Education setting. We are writing up at the moment but I will soon share our findings in another blog.

In the interviews something that came across strongly was the need for a 'sense of closure'. Many participants associated the statement of accomplishment with 'closure'. Some participants confessed that they were motivated to get the 'certificate' (they were referring to the statement of accomplishment offered free of charge). Some participants confessed of being Start-End person meaning if I start something I will end it and this statement of accomplishment meant that they reached this 'end' - again sense of closure. How important do you think this sense of 'closure' in a MOOC?

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.