Author: dougclow

Data scientist, tutxor, project leader, researcher, analyst, teacher, developer, educational technologist, online learning expert, and manager. I particularly enjoy rapidly appraising new-to-me contexts, and mediating between highly technical specialisms and others, from ordinary users to senior management. After 20 years at the OU as an academic, I am now a self-employed consultant, building on my skills and experience in working with people, technology, data science, and artificial intelligence, in a wide range of contexts and industries.

Password change log

So, it’s mandatory password change day for me today. In line with many organisations, the OU requires its users to change their password at regular intervals – at the moment, every three months/90 days. Also, in pursuit of improved security, they’ve recently reduced the number of unsuccessful login attempts you can make on your account before it locks you out. This has the unfortunate side effect of meaning that when you change your password on your desktop machine,  your phone or tablet – sitting quietly in your pocket or handbag – will keep trying to connect using your old password, which will lock you out of your account.

I had a very bad encounter with this issue six months ago when I lost most of a day to it. The problem was made particularly hard to resolve by the fact that we’d just gone over to IP phones connected to our PCs, so when I was locked out of my account, and therefore my PC, I couldn’t phone IT to get them to unlock my account, and had to go to another office some way away to ring them.  Which meant the ‘Try now – is it working?’ bits of the conversation had big gaps in the middle while I hung up and scurried back to my desk, then went back to room with the phone, redialled, waited to get through, and then updated the new person at the other end of the line with what’s going on. (Things are better now – I have a direct IP phone on my desk, and these days my office usually has people in it, which means I can borrow a phone from someone if that one’s not working.)

Three months ago – the last time I had to update my passwords – I was aware of the problem, and did it carefully and systematically in just under an hour, with no accidental lockouts! I also kept a sketchy list of what I did. Today I did it again, tweaking the list a bit as I went so I can follow it quickly next time.

Here’s my procedure. I’m posting it mainly to make it really easy for me to find in three months’ time (and I’ll print off a copy and leave it in my desk drawer). It’s obviously only directly relevant to me and my devices, but it might be useful to other OU people or people with a similar setups.

Bombe Machine, Bletchley Park
(cc) mendhak on Flickr

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Educational Data Mining for Technology-Aided Formative Assessment

Liveblog notes from a CALRG seminar given by Ilya Goldin, from the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, at the Open University, on 12 Feb 2013, entitled “Educational Data Mining for Technology-Aided Formative Assessment”.

His PhD research was a system to help peer review. Mike Sharples met him at the Alpine Rendez-Vous.

bellamar
(cc) paul bico on Flickr

Postdoc at Carnegie Mellon; PhD at Pittsburgh.

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MOOCs: Fail better

So another week, another high profile MOOC story.

A course on Coursera has had technical problems, which drew attention to shortcomings in the design of the course, which led to a lot of negative comment, and has culminated in the course being suspended. As many have noted, one of the big risks of working in the open is that everybody sees when you get it wrong. (Coverage in Inside Higher Ed, one participant’s account, and another overview of what happened with some interesting discussion in the comments. George Siemens has some interesting stuff to say, as ever.)

If that’s not bad enough, the subject of the course in question is “Fundamentals of Online Education“. Oh dear. Cue much mocking from the I-knew-MOOCs-were-rubbish camp, and wryly raised eyebrows from others.

Is this the end of MOOCs?

Of course not.

Firstly, there are plenty of other MOOCs, particularly on this subject. There’s the Open Learning Design Studio MOOC #oldsmooc, which runs until 13th March, or #ETMOOC, on Educational Technology and Media, which runs until 30 March. There will be more.

And secondly, failing isn’t a problem in and of itself. Everyone fails – or if they don’t, they’re probably not trying hard enough.* That’s particularly true of something like MOOCs where the whole point is to do things that haven’t been fully tried before. If you never get anything wrong, you’re being too conservative in what you’re trying to do.

No, the difficult bit is what you do when you fail. Coursera has taken the first step here: they’ve admitted there is a problem.

What they do next is what really matters, and will be the real indicator of their quality and potential. If they learn, and get better, the chances are they’ll keep doing that until they’re really very good.

As Samuel Beckett put it “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I do feel sorry for Fatima Worth, from Georgia Tech, about whom some rather unpleasant things have been said. The ghastly maxim “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan” seems appropriate. Sure, she made some mistakes which with hindsight look obvious and glaring – but I don’t think they were quite *that* obvious and glaring beforehand. What applies to Coursera applies to her as an individual too: failing is not a disaster. What happens next determines whether or not it turns out to be a disaster. I hope she moves on and in ten years can open keynotes by using this as a self-deprecating anecdote of a hiccup from the early pioneering MOOC days.

At the time of writing (Tue 5 Feb 9.30am GMT), the course is listed with the next session ‘Date to be announced’.

I still think MOOCs Are A Good Thing.**

* Or they work in a safety-critical field, such as the nuclear industry or aviation, where learning-by-failing would entail unacceptable losses. Those fields have their own disciplines and techniques for wringing the maximum learning out of what failings or near-failings do occur, and these are indeed excellent. But they are also very expensive – too expensive for fields where nobody dies if you mess up.

** I’ve decided that to be more effective in communication, I should reduce my thoughts on major issues in my field to pithy oversimplistic slogans, which I will repeat frequently. I’ve already got “It’s Not A Power Law (Probably)”, and I hereby nominate “MOOCs Are A Good Thing” as another. I might also add “Here Comes Private HE”, although that’s a bit UK-centric, and it’s coming a little slower than I expected.

–
This work by Doug Clow is copyright but licenced under a Creative Commons BY Licence.
No further permission needed to reuse or remix (with attribution), but it’s nice to be notified if you do use it.

Futurelearn may or may not succeed but is well worth a try

So there’s a new kid on the MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) block: Futurelearn. (Or FutureLearn or FUTURE/LEARN – I daresay the capitalisation question is one that’ll be answered fairly straightforwardly, at least in letters terms.) I’ll assume you’re already familiar with the basic idea from the press release and related news stories. (If not, Tony Hirst has an excellent roundup. )

The first thing to say is that this is a PR and organisational coup. Hats off to Martin Bean (the OU Vice Chancellor) and all involved (which must’ve been at least a small group) to get this organised and agreed between so many partners. (As an aside, I chatted to the folks setting up to record his latest video message to staff (OU only, sorry) and they said they couldn’t let me see the transcript or they’d be shot. I was slightly surprised – huge secrecy isn’t a usual part of his management style – but now I understand why: his message talks about Futurelearn!)

The second thing to say is that I think this is a great thing for the OU to be doing. As I’ve argued before (https://dougclow.org/2012/11/12/moocs-oer-and-wikipedia-for-great-justice/), MOOCs could open the doors to higher education much more widely, and are therefore a Good Thing. The OU has a track record in this sort of stuff.

I’m not at all sure whether Futurelearn will be a huge success or a flash in the pan, same as I’m not sure whether MOOCs in general will be a huge success or a flash in the pan. But I am increasingly sure that it’s a great idea for the OU to pursue this wholeheartedly. If someone’s going to be doing it, I’d rather it was the OU, with its 40-year tradition and commitment to opening access to higher education, than a venture capitalist with a commitment only to making money.

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SoLAR Flare UK wrapup

The first SoLAR Flare UK ran last week, and was a great success. There’s a really excellent organiser of information from and about it on the event page on the SoLAR website, including the slides presented.

Several others posted liveblog or similar notes, including Sheila MacNeill, who also links to Martin Hawksey’s archive of Twitter data from the #flareUK tag, and a video with some photos from the event, and  Myles Danson who was particularly on top of the JISC CETIS Analytics series of publications that are coming out now. The plenary sessions were all captured on video and should be available for replay soon.

My estimable colleague Naomi Jeffery made PDF versions of my liveblog notes for easy reading on the Kindle, which is cool, and  – even better – she’s passed them on in case anyone else would find them useful, so here they are:

Thanks Naomi!

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SoLAR Flare UK – morning presentations

[Kindle-friendly PDF of this post.]

Liveblog notes from the SoLAR Flare UK, #flareUK, held on 19 November 2012 in the Jennie Lee Building, The Open University, sponsored by JISC.

Simon Buckingham Shum welcomes everyone, on behalf of his co-chairs, Rebecca Ferguson and Doug Clow, Sheila MacNeil from JISC CETIS.

Prof Josie Taylor, Director of the Institute of Educational Technology, welcomes everyone to the building and IET. We think learning analytics is going to be very important, for a wide range of people. Wishes everyone a happy, stimulating and argumentative (in a good way!) day.

Simon Buckingham Shum, SoLAR

This is the first national gathering of people interested in learning analytics, hopefully the first of many. Self-organising, rapid dissemination. Not much lecturing, lots of networking opportunities. This is a rapidly exploding area. In Stanford, with Roy Pea and MOOC people – this is massive there. TIME magazine cover story was MOOCs. EdX – is about big data to allow us to ask big questions about learning. The data scientist is the sexist sexiest job for the C21st. Big business intelligence companies see an exploding market in education – IBM, SAS. Big data, small data, fine granularity of trace too to understand learning.

Similar SoLAR Flares have happened in Purdue, and elsewhere. SoLAR – bringing researchers in to dialogue with senior university managers, companies, practitioners. A systems kind of dialogue. Now incorporated as a not-for-profit, with founding institutions: Athabasca, Open University, UBC, U Queensland, U Saskatchwan. Open Learning Analytics white paper.

Image and story-based activity using cards activity – LAnoirblanc – pick an image and say why it tells you something about learning analytics, post it to the Tumblr.

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