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I’d like to comment on the student fees business, but I can’t because I’m too cross to do it reasonably. Try Martin’s post instead. Here’s something different for Friday afternoon.

Does it make sense for two people from the same group to submit bids for funding to the same call?

(Assuming they’re for different projects – if they’re just retreads of each other then it’s at best duplication of effort, and at worst will mean the funders decide your group is so disorganised it doesn’t know what it’s doing and is not a good bet for funding. And ‘group’ might mean anything from two people who like working together on related projects up to an entire institution.)

Conventional wisdom says no – you don’t want to compete against yourselves.

But I’m not convinced. I reckon putting two bids in increases the chances that the group will get some money from the call. Probably slightly less than double the chance, but still significantly more than putting in just one of them.

Let’s do some toy sums. Assume for modelling purposes that whether a bid is funded or not is purely random – say 1/6, like rolling a six on a die. (I know, I know: we all know that securing funding is absolutely nothing like a random process.) Submitting one bid gives you a 17% chance that the group gets cash.

What happens if you submit two dice – or roll two bids?

The Wrong Answer is to assume that the probabilities add, and that the chances are therefore 34%. You can tell this is wrong, because it implies that if you submitted six bids you would definitely get funding. Anyone who’s sat miserably through seemingly endless rounds of failing to get started in Ludo knows that it’s not certain that you’ll roll a six given six tries.

The Proper Answer is to use the binomial distribution, but you can also do it by working through the possibilities. There are 6 x 6 = 36 possible combinations of the two dice. Of those, 6 have a six on the first die (6:6, 6:5, 6:4, 6:3, 6:2, 6:1), and 6 have a six on the second die. But we mustn’t double-count double-six, so there are 11 out of 36 chances to get at least one six, or about 31%.

Now, it could be that there’s no way that the funders will award two grants in one call to the same group. That would mean we can’t count double-six at all, and the chances reduce to 10 out of 36, or 28%.

That’s still way better than a single bid.

(As an aside, even if there’s the possibility of both bids being funded, the chances of at least one of the two bids failing is 35/36, or 97%. So if you do it, you can be really pretty confident that at least one person in the group is going to be disappointed.)

Obviously, if you can send the bids to different funders, so much the better. Except that on this analysis you might as well send both to both. Journals are usually pretty strict about demanding a promise that you’re not submitting substantially the same manuscript for consideration to any other journals at the same time. (I know, I know: we all know that whether a paper gets accepted or not is even less like a random process.) But the rules about submitting bids are often less strict. You need to be a bit careful that you’re not setting yourself up for conflicting commitments if you win both, of course.

So: two bids are better than one. Much like heads, as my colleague Will Woods pointed out. Heads, tails … I know, I know: we all know that getting bids and papers in is absolutely nothing like tossing lots of coins and hoping for heads.

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Liveblog notes from an OU e-Learning Community event on Podcasting, 16 November 2010. Martin Weller started off with his talk on Academic output as collateral damage.

Nigel Warburton – Will podcasting win friends and influence people?

Nigel is a prolific and popular podcaster on philosophy. Giving a talk direct, no slides, no notes.

Short answer is yes and no.

Continue reading “Podcasting and public engagement”

For the first time in ages, I went to the real, physical library to look some stuff up this morning.

It didn’t go well. The books I wanted were all out on loan to other people, and a problem with my account meant I got a not entirely helpful error message when I tried to recall them. The books that seemed like they might be related – shelved next to them, or matching in the same query to the catalogue – turned out not to be relevant.

My catalogue search suggested that there was a journal in the library that was very relevant. I thought a quick browse through the physical copies would be ideal for a general trawl. (I can’t shake a suspicion that it’s hard to skim stuff online.) But try as I might, I couldn’t find the journal.

I’d forgotten just how much time you waste physically searching for stuff, even in a well-shelved, well-signposted library that isn’t heavily used by students. And even once you find the thing you’re after, you have to pick it up, open it, and flick to the right page before you find the information you’re looking for – and then be sure to put it back in exactly the same place. It was nice to get the extra exercise I suppose, but as a search strategy it seemed silly. I’d never pursue a virtual search strategy that long with such poor results.

Back at my desk, and trying a more digital approach, things went much better, even using the most unrefined and simplistic search strategy. A quick query at Amazon not only offered to supply the books within 24 hours (if I’m prepared to pay for express delivery), but helpfully alerted me that a whole host of very relevant books are scheduled for publication in the next few months. And a quick Google yielded the journal’s home page as first hit – and it turned out to be open access so I could just browse the titles in the table of contents and click through to full text where it looked promising.

One thing that really struck me was that my failure to find the print journal in the physical library was because I had the title of the journal wrong: I was looking for a sort of sub-title rather than what it’s formally called. Online, that didn’t matter at all, but in a physical shelving system it was enough to preventing me finding it. Digital technology actually made it less important to get things precisely right.

I had an epiphany about journal articles some years ago. I wanted to check something in an article I knew fairly well. I knew the journal, the authors, and roughly when it came out. I had a well-organised shelf of the journal in question right behind me: all I’d have to do would be spin my chair round and reach out my hand to browse  … but it was much quicker and easier to just search for the article online. (I got rid of the journals.)

I think it might be time to go more digital with my books, too. Which means Amazon. (Other online book retailers are available.) For wide-circulation books I strongly suspect it’s less money to simply order copies of books I want from them than for the Library to get a copy, catalogue, shelve, issue, etc. Though of course it’s my personal cash rather than the University’s, and the pricing for more obscure scholarly books is rather too eye-watering for me to shell out on a regular basis and probably changes the cost calculation.

For balance I should relate a very positive physical bookshop experience I had recently: there was a book I was after for a potential research collaboration, but the last time I’d looked it up on Amazon it didn’t appear to have a UK publication date. I happened to be walking past Blackwell’s in Oxford, and on the off chance dived in to the subterranean cavern of academic and technical book-lovers’ delight that is the Norrington Room. An assistant quickly located a copy on the shelf and I was back out on Broad Street with a copy in my hands less than five minutes after I’d gone in. (I got away lightly because I had no time for browsing.) Online things are usually all about instant gratification, but this was one occasion where the physical world came up trumps. Alas, not all bookshops are like that.

How ever did anyone keep up with research when they had all that physical stuff to struggle with?

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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.

I’ve done some back-of-an-envelope calculations about the costs of HE, and blogged about the Browne Review of HE. Now we have the Government’s response, which in summary is to lift the cap on fees to £6,000 a year, or £9,000 if certain conditions about access are met.

Anyway, here are my previous back-of-an-envelope calculations (see the original post, including comments, for the horrific details of how I made these numbers up), with some further development.

[Data in a Google Spreadsheet, should you want to do something more meaningful with them]

The main change is to divide the numbers I came up with for a total degree cost by three, to give a (misleading) per-year cost. The total degree cost makes more sense, but nobody talks about that so I won’t either. It means that the ‘Buckingham’ and ‘Open University’ numbers are a bit odd, since students there typically take two or six years to get a degree respectively, not three. But it works as a comparator.

Remember, these are really not the correct figures, and are almost certainly wrong by a long shot. For instance, this has the cost of a home degree at a UK university at slightly less than the £7,000 Browne said was needed just to sustain investment. And the cost of a degree is highly variable – I’m not touching the unit of resource multipliers here.

We won’t know the details of how the residual state funding for universities will be doled out until the funding letter in a couple of months or so, but the strong steer is that the teaching grant will go almost entirely to Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine type subjects – which, handily for my convenience in doing these sums – is likely to mean that lab-based subjects, which cost a lot more  to provide, will be subsidised pretty much  to the degree (sorry) that they they cost more than the basic. Which means, essentially, that UK students are going to have to shift from paying the ‘fees’ figure on the left to paying the ‘Total / 3’ figure on the right. Or more.

With all those caveats out of the way, we can see from these figures why people are reacting the way they are. The Russell Group – who are probably going to be able to get their students to pay £9,000 a year – are happy: they’ll be getting more money, since the fees income will be more than the loss of state subsidy. The Million+ group, who are probably going to struggle to get students to pay £9,000 a year, or even £6,000 – are not very happy at all.  And students – who are facing having to pay three times as much as they do now – are really very unhappy. The nascent private HE sector is likely to be cock-a-hoop – not that any of the press reports I’ve seen have quotes from them, and they’d be wise to be circumspect at this moment of triumph anyway. I said I suspected that there “will be a substantial expansion of private provision of higher education in the UK”; I am now pretty sure there will: there is huge scope to offer very cost-competitive courses in particular areas. Look at the right-hand column: a potential student is facing £6,000 to £9,000 fees at a conventional university per year, or £3,333 with BPP.  And we know there is unmet demand for student places.

Up the other end of the spectrum, there’s the Interesting Question of whether Oxbridge – or some part thereof, or some minor chunk of the University of London (e.g. Imperial, UCL or LSE) – will decide that the £9k cap and the other hassle that goes with taking Her Majesty’s Shilling is not worth the remaining pennies on offer.

So what about the OU?

I don’t know what will happen to our fees – it’s not my department, and I’m not close to the people who’ve been sweating blood and doing real sums on actual data to work out what we have to do. And they are not in a position to give a proper answer until we get the funding details in the grant letter. The official position is, quite reasonably, “We have been modelling figures but it will take several months before we know the full reality of the new funding environment we’re operating in.”

But my back-of-an-envelope spreadsheet suggests our annualised fees might need to jump from £1,800 to £4,700, a factor of 2.6 times higher.

So I suspect that OU students will be firmly in the ‘really very unhappy’ camp.

You must bear in mind that I could be way, way off the mark here – this is rough stuff, and I may well have missed something very important. And the details of the grant settlement are likely to be hugely important for the OU in particular.

The good news for the OU, of course, is that our students will have access to loans to pay fees on the same basis as students at other universities.

The big question for us is whether our students will – given access to loans – be prepared to pay higher fees. Ceteris paribus, they probably wouldn’t, but of course all the other universities are going to be increasing their fees, and probably by a higher multiple of the current ones. This is a big issue, and the OU has set up a campaigning site, FourInTen, “to ensure that part-time students are not overlooked” in this debate.

There are details that matter crucially to us – as you can see in the OU’s official response to the Comprehensive Spending Review,  there’s the prospect of undoing the ELQ funding bar, which particularly hurts us, and if the threshold for funding is reduced from 40 credits to 30 credits, we’d be in much better shape (otherwise, we’ll be wanting to cook up a lot of 40 point courses in a tearing hurry). There’s the they-can’t-possibly-mean-that-to-apply-to-us thing about funding being linked to UCAS points, which would make a complete nonsense of the OU’s open access policy.

I know our Martin Bean, our Vice-Chancellor, is chipper about the situation in broad terms: I hope he’s right. (He’s led us well so far.) But I personally can’t bring myself to be remotely happy about a situation where students are going to have to pay so much more, even if it isn’t up front.

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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.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that academic references are not as important as we make out.

We spend a vast amount of effort teaching students how to Do It Right, from Level 1/introductory undergraduate courses all the way up to PhDs. And one of the major pieces of work in producing journal articles (beyond the writing and refereeing) is checking and fixing the references so they are all perfectly correct and in the journal style. All the way through we’re spending lots of energy and time making sure that the references are just so.

But I don’t think it matters – or at least, not as much as we act as if it does. Consistency and style are important, and help give a professional impression. But really, the function of a reference is to enable the reader to follow up the reference. It doesn’t have to be perfectly correct if it’s a human-readable reference – just unambiguous.

Getting a hyperlink dead right is important – but there are hardly any problems with those, because everyone just cuts and pastes them. There is one format that works everywhere. Whereas for a human-readable citation there are at least twelve widely-used citation styles, which in practice are applied slightly differently in different contexts. So a cut-and-paste isn’t good enough: you have to transform all the citations in to a single style, and the one required by the context for which you’re writing.

Software systems promise to make this easy, but my experience is that it’s taking more, not less effort to manage references since the early 90s when BibTeX solved the problem (for people who can use BibTeX easily). My guess is that in disciplines where LaTeX papers are the norm, there’s less of an issue. Another point to support Patrick McAndrew’s case that Word and other WYSIWYG word processors have seriously impeded academic writing.

When I’m following a reference, I’d much rather have a DOI or a hyperlink to a full text copy than any ‘correctness’ of citation. I can just click – and I’m there. And if there’s no hyperlink, I can just use Google Scholar on the most identifying part of the reference (unusual title, author names, whatever) and be at the paper in seconds. It really doesn’t matter whether the journal title is in italics or not, or whether the paper title is in double or single quotes, or whether I get an issue number, page numbers, or neither (in most cases).

It used to be really helpful to have a proper, full reference. Volume numbers, for instance, were pretty handy if you wanted to locate a paper – it would tell you which tome to grab from the groaning library shelf. Page numbers, too – it’s much faster to simply turn to page 2323 than to hunt down the right issue contents page, then scan to find the page reference, and then turn to page 2323. But that’s just not how most people find references these days.

So I don’t think references are as important as we make them out to be.

Referencing, of course, is a different matter. It actually is really important in academic writing to show clearly what is your contribution and what it is you’re picking up from elsewhere, and where you’re getting it from. And this is more, not less important in a fast-moving digitised world.

I think our time would be better spent if we diverted some of the effort we currently spend on the fiddly references stuff to getting better at the proper and clear referencing stuff.

The big news today is that the Browne Review is out – Securing A Sustainable Future for Higher Education.

The coverage isn’t very focused on part-time provision, but obviously that’s the most interesting bit for us at the Open University. So here’s a quick summary.

The headlines for part timers:

• Part-time students will be eligible for loans to cover the upfront costs of fees. [At the moment, they are not.]
• They will have to study at an intensity of 1/3 FTE to be eligible for this support – that’s 40 points a year minimum in OU terms. [From memory, average OU study intensity is closer to 60 points a year, but we do have many students who take just one 10-point course.]
• Part time students will not be eligible for support for living costs.

 

 

Here are the significant parts of the report that touch on part-time provision:

Continue reading “Part Timers in the Browne Review”

Liveblog notes from IET Technology Coffee Morning on Podstars, presented by Martin Weller and Ross Allen (also included Anna Page, Dave Perry).

(An interesting presentation for me given my background skepticism about the value of video.)

Recruitment via Deans, some people ‘volunteered’ without knowing what they’d signed up for, others who heard about it and really wanted in.

Thirteen people, from across faculties. Got people together, gave them Flip cameras and showed them how to use them and the software. Set up an external Wetpaint wiki and an email list. Ran over 3 months; had half-way meeting and a final one. Have all but one back. There were pre-questionnaires about previous experience; very mixed.

About half of the audience have used Flip cameras – they’re very easy to use.

Weren’t really trying to produce ‘stars’, but trying to get people producing video as a by-product of usual activities – and to explore what people did.

It was very open-ended: come to us, discuss ideas. It’s not formal training in being a presenter (we have those); not intense AV support. It was a safe, supportive space to encourage people to be creative.

Ideas: regular reviews, series of features, book analysis, interviews, vid journalism/event coverage, slidecast, music videos.

Cautions: be careful of rights clearance (CC music – CC Mixter), permission to film (especially events), being controversial, going on a bit (danger for academics – talk for an hour), being drunk.

Examples presented here. Simple catchphrase, interview people with it. D’Arcy Norman’s question – how do you connect to people online? Martin’s own music video about Twitter, and his interview with himself from the future. Slidecasts too – record an audio file, and sync it with the slidecast. Almost frictionless byproduct – record the audio as you go; sync afterwards is a bit of work but not much. Then famous ‘Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us’ – 11m views. Martin’s ‘future me’ video got 469 views. Then up to semi-professional production – Discussing open education with Martin Bean.

Low quality is an invitation to participate. But next level up isn’t hugely difficult to do. Technical level of quality is one dimension – some wanted to move beyond that. But it’s more about being comfortable, speaking about something you’ve thought through, and being passionate.

Important practical tip: Got over the first technical can-you-do-it hurdle in the initial meeting – they left with a basic capability.

Reasons for volunteering: producing stuff to use in teaching, on a low-effort, quick turnaround basis. Or a specific project – one person going on a field trip. Or people with blogs who wanted to jazz them up.

What they produced is on http://podstars.wetpaint.com. Also suggested XtraNormal as a video creation tool. Very interesting range of different videos used.

Feedback was pretty possible. Keen on it being outside OU production systems – doesn’t take months or years to do.

Lessons learned: legitimisation of ‘playing’; need space to do it, be part of a project that says it’s Ok to fiddle around with this. The switch from consumer to producer is a huge leap; it’s a threshold. Different formats – YouTube, Animoto, Slideshare, Xtranormal – and it’s about what suits you. It’s very easy to do. Especially true at the OU where we have the ‘big production’ model in our heads. Context and framing is important – if put it on YouTube and Facebook, they got comments from their friends, not anything educational. YouTube comments in particular are notorious for not being high-quality academic discussion. Perhaps a role for the OU to frame comments and discussion on video better? This wasn’t a traditional project – more unpredictable, loose, not top-down. Telling everyone to produce YouTube videos wouldn’t work; needed to be more open-ended. Hard to say whether it was worth the return on investment.

Finally: being creative is fun! Easy to get ground down in OU course production process. But academics are creative people, important to give an outlet to that.

Next steps: an IET only version Oct-Jan, then another round of recruitment Jan-Apr next year. Along the same lines.

Questions outstanding: Is this scaleable? And what’s the product, and where does the it go? Can it be used in teaching and research? Perhaps more useful as extra, motivational, exciting stuff rather than the hard-work course content; or if students create their own. Also – what if copyright infringement troubles, something offensive, a runaway meme? Also boundary between personal and corporate is tough.

The wiki itself became a bit of a barrier to participation; may be a group blog next time to allow structure.

Questions

Andy Lane: Good stuff. Experimental space is important. Experiment without expectation to produce something that is deliverable. We need that, this is one of many. Bit like LabSpace of OpenLearn. Great. Even if have it as an experimental space, does there become a more formal version? Interested to hear from participants how they think about their educational practices. Especially open educational practices. With the technologies, and the openly-available content – how does that change our practices of teaching? Designing, constructing things for student use, or community engagement. How do the primary users – students – see this?

Martin: Interesting. Nobody said it’s led them to rethink their teaching to do it openly. But might be a seed planted. Cultural and political issues trail in the wake. E.g. if they won’t let me do this, I’ll just go and do it.

Andy: That’s an extreme; at a more mundane level, put together a course, write stuff yourself, find stuff already produced (with their rights) – now there’s openly-licensed stuff. Putting a course together is a mix of one or all of those. The open stuff changes the dynamic.

Martin: Introduce them to Creative Commons; also turning people in to producers changes their perception of other sites; host of stuff comes with it.

Dominic Newbould: Universities utterly conventional, slow to change. Easy to get bogged down. Unpredictability, experimental nature of this is vital. I’d love to see the Openings team use this medium of expression in what they’re doing. And see what students do with it. Instead of getting a conventional 2000-word assignment, you got a video back.

Martin: Can of worms opened up. In terms of teaching students general skills, video is increasingly important.

Dominic: Confidence from using it, and not assumption that there’s just one way to get a message across. Students not just dumped on.

Martin: Any course has limited real estate – teaching YouTube would take up space. But nearly everyone with the kit – or even without (XtraNormal) – are amazed with how easy it is to do. Multimedia presentations. Assessment is the nub of it – change that and change lots of things.

Giles Clark: Interested in e-textbooks. Put some OpenLearn material on to the iPad, mixed text and podcasts. Tremendously exciting for future of textbook and authors. Also in publishing context. Context very important; any of your projects mixed text/podcast?

Martin: No. Writing a book at the moment, they want these sort of outputs to go with it.

Mariano Rico: How much information do you have about the effort they had to put in to doing e.g. scripting?

Martin: It varied. One person fell back on BBC training, 2d to script 1 min video. Others got up and started talking straight away.

Ross: Classics confidential just sat down and did it, but also created website around it, took a lot of time getting to grips with it. We were expecting bigger tech support load, but some individuals spent a lot of time trying to do more sophisticated things.

Martin: Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus – interviewed by TV show, explained about Wikipedia, they said ‘where do people find the time?’ – you know where, it’s from watching TV. Now we have to tools to release that. It’s creative, a form of expression, fits in between bits of your life. Learning curve – initial investment, but not – e.g. – he can create slidecasts very easily. Practices presentation beforehand, that creates the MP3, only extra effort is syncing it.

Andrew Brasher: Any sense that the process changed the direction? With some there was a definite output.

Martin: Not always clear, sometimes very loose ambitions. Came away with appreciation that it’s possible. Rise of being open to that. Switch from consumer to producer is key. Opens your eyes to the possibilities – might be e.g. more inclined to use a YouTube video in their course. Separate anecdote – someone produced a video trailer for a course, said to course team should do more, but was laughed at.

Andrew: Do you have follow-up interviews?

Martin: Yeah, would be good.

Someone: People have an initial barrier, but if do it for a course, or project, or have a blog, already have a platform to show it or use it. If they don’t, they need the knowledge to get the platform too. Only putting it on YouTube doesn’t really do the trick.

Martin: Point about context and framing is important. A video in isolation is only part of the story. Stuff we’re producing here isn’t of the quality to go on OpenLearn or OU-branded YouTube. But a space flagged as exploratory, put in right framing where people understand – would also get an audience.

Mariano: Do you have a sense of this step of going from private to public? How easy is it to overcome?

Martin: Good point. One person put a YouTube thing up privately, invited people to see, but didn’t really work, forced to go public. A few participants were surprised how not bothered about that they were. Obscurity is one thing. But also that shift – it wasn’t as big a barrier as he thought. Did think of doing a password-protected wiki, but couldn’t embed YouTube that way.

Invited people to sign up!

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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.