Dr. Paul Richardson
1 Introduction
Background
Radical claims have been made regarding the significance of both Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OERs) on the educational sectors in the UK. This paper looks at some of the
implications of some of these developments for the HE sector in Wales, and discusses how the sector, and the Welsh Government, might respond.
The widespread and contentious discussion in the media has some disparate strands, which imply tensions between conflicting ideas. One of these is that MOOCs can imply, for some people, a ‘democratisation of knowledge’ (for example in the claims made by Daphne Koller for Coursera). At the same time, some authors claim that the cost of education can be driven down by the ‘massification’ of courses and the unbundling of tuition from assessment.
Definitions
OERs are variously defined, for example:
“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning
materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world47.”
“Resources that are designed to be used and re-used in an educational context.”48
“Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and
research”49 (OECD, 2007). 47. www.oercommons.org 48. https://openeducational resources.pbworks.com 49. https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/24836860/What%20are%20 Open%20Educational%20Resources
The discussions about this term often focus on the following questions: • Open is generally taken to mean free of charge. Does it also mean free
of registration, and other conditions?
• Do resources need to be designed for education, or simply used in an educational context?
• Can a resource be too small? Can any digital asset (e.g. a picture) qualify? Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are also hard to define. I quote a recent Universities UK report:
“Massive open online courses are free, open access and scalable online higher education courses. MOOCs use a variety of online resources (such as videos and message boards) and seek to capitalise on high volume student classes by encouraging peer learning
networks in place of more conventional synchronous learning and academic instruction. MOOCs may be developed independently by academics or they may be developed as part of contractual agreements between higher education institutions and third party online platforms. They enable students to access high quality academic content, and academics to engage with a much wider audience.”50
Massive is a relative term, and a huge range of scales of course have been classified as MOOCs: from a few thousand up to hundreds of thousands of students. The use of the word ‘scalable’ gets around the problem of ‘what is massive?’, and the definition also encapsulates some of the possible contractual arrangements. However, it doesn’t probe the meaning of ‘open’ or ‘course’, and fails to make a distinction between ‘xMOOCs’ and ‘cMOOCs’ (see below).
‘Open’ is also worth defining in this context. A simple definition of OER from Into the wild51, a Jisc publication of 2012, states that these are “Freely
available digital materials released under open licence, that can be used and re-purposed for teaching, learning, and research”. However, ‘open’ with respect to courses typically means that anyone may enrol (although they may be required to pay). Hence the ‘O’ in ‘OERs’ is not necessarily the same as the ‘O’ in MOOCs. This issue is also evident in the critical comments made by Lorna Campbell concerning the FutureLearn terms and conditions52. 50. www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/highereducation/Pages/MOOCsHigherEducationDigitalMoment.aspx 51. http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2012/601
52. http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2013/06/05/what-do-futurelearns-terms-and-conditions-say-about-
A potentially elegant resolution to some of the tensions this creates is to be found in the concept of ‘Open Educational Practices’ proposed by Beetham et al. (2012)5353, and the implications of this are explored extensively in Into
the wild. However, these ideas are still in the melting pot, and the notion of
‘open’ may be seen as continuous rather than absolute.
It is already clear that any government policy or initiative in this area will need to show a mature view of what ‘open’ means in its own context, and to elaborate the key implications of this view. An expansion of these implications may be found in the open licences and associated case studies published by Creative Commons54. The site also holds a registry of policies55
(national and institutional) which may help policy makers to understand the overall landscape.
‘Online’ is perhaps the least contentious part of the acronym, but even here there is the potential for confusion. It may mean that the material is delivered online, but could be studied offline. Alternatively, it could imply that a continuous online connection is required in order to participate. This distinction may not be important to many users in the developed world, but digital exclusion is still an issue for some, even in the UK, and may be especially significant at a global level.
A few aspects of the word ‘Course’ are also worthy of discussion. Some questions which need to be addressed include: Does a course need to be validated? Is accreditation necessary? Should there be a definite start and end date? For example, OpenLearn ‘courses’ are validated, but not accredited, and have no start or end dates. Does this make them OERs rather than courses?
Much of the published material on MOOCs is essentially opinion. Where data is included, this is frequently methodologically unsound in origin, e.g. from biased or small samples, or from selected subsets of students. This paper has given precedence to quantitative material wherever this is available, but the predictive power of this information is sometimes limited.