George Veletsianos, PhD

Category: open Page 7 of 21

What is it like to learn and participate in MOOCs?

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On November 16, 2015

In learner experience, moocs, online learning, open

We recently published a special issue for Educational Media International by asking authors to submit papers focusing on the following question: What is it like to learn and participate in MOOCs? This has now been published.

We developed this special issue to enhance our collective understanding of learner experiences and participation in MOOCs because the scholarly community still has an incomplete mosaic of students’ learning experiences with open online learning.

The following papers are included:

Editorial: Contributions to the mosaic describing learners’ experiences with open online learning (pdf)
George Veletsianos and Vrasidas Charalambos

Learning from MOOCs: a qualitative case study from the learners’ perspectives
Yeonjeong Park, Insung Jung and Thomas C. Reeves

A classroom at home: children and the lived world of MOOCs
Yin Yin, Catherine Adams, Erika Goble and Luis Francisco Vargas Madriz

What makes a cMOOC community endure? Multiple participant perspectives from diverse cMOOCs
Maha Bali, Maureen Crawford, Rhonda Jessen, Paul Signorelli and Mia Zamora

Fulfilling the promise: do MOOCs reach the educationally underserved?
Lorrie Schmid, Kim Manturuk, Ian Simpkins, Molly Goldwasser and Keith E. Whitfield

Examining learners’ perspective of taking a MOOC: reasons, excitement, and perception of usefulness
M. Liu, J. Kang and E. McKelroy

 

  • Note: While the journal is not open access, a number of the authors above have self-archived copies of their paper, like I am doing above.

 

Openness and Digital Learning Symposium

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On November 10, 2015

In online learning, open, Royal Roads University, scholarship

We are hosting a symposium on Openness, Digital Learning, and Networked Scholarship.

 Please consider joining us (for free) by visiting the livestream page (http://livestream.com/royalroads/events/4446545)

November Tuesday 17th 2015, (10am- 3pm Pacific)

Organized by the School of Education and Technology & the Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning & Technology

Purpose

This symposium is intended to raise awareness about open educational resources, open pedagogy, and emerging approaches to digital learning. It provides a showcase for the work being done at Royal Roads University (RRU) and convenes open education practitioners and researchers.

In keeping with the RRU strategic mandate, this symposium builds on the work currently being done at RRU by our Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Innovative Learning and Technology and the School of Education and Technology (SET) to investigate promising innovations in educational technology. It is an opportunity to contribute back to the open community and further the developments in this area.

Agenda

Time Item Who
10:00 – 10:05 First Nations Welcome Asma-na-hi (Asma) Antoine
10:05 – 10:15 What makes RRU unique and a hotspot for innovation? Steve Grundy
10:15 – 10:25 Introductions and context George Veletsianos
10:30– 11:00

 

 What can Open be: Advances at the Provincial, National & International level Mary Burgess
11:05 – 11:40

 

 For whom, for what? Not-yetness and challenging the “stuff” of open education Amy Collier

Jen Ross
11:45 – 12:55 Break  
1:00 – 1:30

 

 Creative Commons: Where are we now? Paul Stacey
1:35 – 2:05

 

 Expansive Openness: Why Reducing Cost is Not Enough for Realizing the Full Benefits of OER Royce Kimmons
2:15 – 2:45

 

 Panel Discussion: What can Open do?

 

* Each panelist to weigh in on panel topic and then open to the floor for questions

 Amy Collier; Jen Ross; Royce Kimmons; Center for Teaching and Learning; RRU Library; George Veletsianos
2:45 – 3:00 Wrap Up Elizabeth Childs

 

* Each session, excluding the panel will consist of a 20 minute presentation followed by a 10 minute Q&A

 

Speaker Bios

Mary Burgess is the executive director of BCCampus which supports the work of the B.C. post-secondary system in the areas of teaching, learning and educational technology. Prior to joining BCcampus in 2012, Mary Burgess was the Director of the Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies at Royal Roads University where she started the University’s first open educational resources project. She is a career instructional designer and longtime advocate of OER.

Dr. Elizabeth Childs is an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University and the Program Head of the MA in Learning and Technology program. Her research interests include the design and implementation of flexible learning; online networked communities and, the professional development and support for learners and faculty in these emerging online learning environments.

Dr. Amy Collier is Associate Provost for Digital Learning at Middlebury College. She provides leadership in creating and sustaining a global learning community at Middlebury through the effective use of digital pedagogies and technologies. Amy studies how digital environments can foster emergence in teaching and learning.

Dr. Steve Grundy is vice-president academic and provost at Royal Roads University. He is responsible for the overall academic direction and quality of the university’s academic programs. He is particularly interested in the directions of post-secondary education, the evolution and development of online learning and new models of university governance and leadership.

Dr. Royce Kimmons is an Assistant Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University where he studies technology integration in K-12/higher education, emergent technologies, open education, and social networks. He received his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin and formerly served as the Director of the Doceo Center for Innovation + Learning at the University of Idaho.

Dr Jen Ross is co-director of the Digital Education group at the University of Edinburgh, teacher and former programme director on the MSc in Digital Education, and co-creator of the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC and the manifesto for teaching online. Her research interests include online distance education, MOOCs, digital futures, reflective practices, and museum and gallery learning and engagement.

Paul Stacey is Associate Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons. Paul’s core expertise is in adult learning, educational technology, and open education. Prior to joining Creative Commons, Paul led Open Educational Resource (OER) and professional development initiatives across all the colleges and universities in British Columbia Canada

Dr. George Veletsianos holds a Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology and is an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University. He has dedicated his research to understanding the practices and experiences of learners, educators, and scholars in emerging online settings such as online social networks and digital environments.

Game design for education webinar

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On October 7, 2015

In open

We (the AECT Research and Theory Division) are hosting a free webinar focusing on game design for education. Please join us!

Presenter: Dr. Kurt Squire, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Director of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative.
Date: Thursday, October 8, 2015
Time: 1 pm CDT

Registration Link: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/b8g9chpvhqq2&eom

mario

Crumpled Paper Mario Wallpaper by Tiger Pixel – CC-lcensed

 

 

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Strategies for designing student- centered, social, open, and engaging digital learning experiences

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On October 6, 2015

In emerging technologies, learner experience, my research, online learning, open, scholarship

Recently, I had the privilege of organizing a workshop for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Athabasca University. The goal was to help the organization work through what they might need to do to put in practice a new strategic plan which calls for student-centered and open digital learning. I used the slides below to assist faculty, instructors, and instructional designers translate theory into practice.

 

Networked scholars – final table of contents

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On August 12, 2015

In my research, networked scholars, NPS, open, scholarship

I’ve received the publisher queries on my book yesterday, and the table of contents has been finalized as below.

I’ve opted for a few first-person narratives, interviews, and descriptions of the habits of academics who use social media in their day-to-day life. One gap in the literature that is becoming increasingly problematic is that researchers are focusing on social media use for scholarship – when social media are intertwined in scholars’ lives in complicated ways. One example is the use of social media for activism and raising awareness (e.g., targeting casualization). A second example is the use of social media to connect with friends and family in social media spaces where colleagues and supervisors are present and figuring out how to navigate the personal-professional tensions that arise as a result of the collapsing contexts.

Social Media in Academia: Networked Scholars

Section

Title

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Networked Scholarship

Chapter 3

Anna: A Social Media Advocate

Chapter 4

Knowledge Creation and Dissemination

Chapter 5

Realities of Day-to-Day Social Media Use

Chapter 6

Networks of Tension and Conflict

Chapter 7

Nicholas: A Visitor

Chapter 8

Networks of Inequity

Chapter 9

Networks of Disclosure

Chapter 10

Fragmented Networks

Chapter 11

Scholarly Networks / Scholars in Networks

Chapter 12

Conclusion

References

References

Index

Index

Automating the collection of literature – or, keeping up to date with the MOOC literature

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On August 6, 2015

In Ideas, moocs, open, sharing, work

Spoiler: We’ve been toying with automating the collection of literature on MOOCs (and other topics). Interested? Read further.

Researchers use different ways to keep updated with the literature on a topic. On a daily basis for example, I use Table of Content (TOC) alerts, RSS feeds, and Google Scholar alerts. Many colleagues have sought to keep track of literature on a topic and share it. For example, danah boyd maintained this list of papers on Twitter and microblogging; Tony Bates shared a copy of the MOOC literature he collected on his blog; Katy Jordan also kept a collection of MOOC literature.

gscholar

A Google Scholar Alert

The problem with maintaining an updated list of relevant literature on a topic is that it quickly becomes a daunting and time-consuming task, especially for popular topics (like MOOCs or social media or teacher training).

In an attempt to automate the collection and sharing of  literature, my research team and I created a python script that goes through the Google Scholar alert emails that I receive (see above), parses the content of the emails, and places it in an html page on my server, from where others can access it. The script runs daily and any new literature is added to the page.

We aren’t there just yet, but here is the output for the MOOC literature going back to November 2012. All 400 pages. I placed it in a Google Document because the html file is 2.5mb (and its easier for people to just download it in a format that they prefer)

In theory this is supposed to work quite well, but there’s a couple of problems with it:

  1. The output is as good as the input. Google Scholar (and its associated alerts) are a black box – meaning there’s no transparency of what is and isn’t indexed.
  2. It’s automated – which means it’s not clean and some “mooc literature” may not really be mooc literature because Google Scholar alerts work on keywords in the body of papers/text rather than keywords describing the papers/text.

We plan on to make the source code available and describe the process to install this so that others can use it for their own literature needs. My question is: How can the output be more helpful to you? Is there anything else that we can do to improve this?

New publication: A case study of scholars’ open and sharing practices

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On August 4, 2015

In my research, open, papers, scholarship, sharing

I have a new paper out that sought to identify and describe faculty members’ open and sharing practices at one North American institution. Part of the goal was to juxtapose open practices and sharing practices. The paper highlights individual and environmental influences on open and sharing practices. The paper also suggests that defaults (e.g., the default youtube license) may be exerting pressures on the ways that scholars share their teaching, research, and scholarship. In other words, one way to instigate further change in this domain might be to rethink the default options.

Although the open scholarship movement has successfully captured the attention and interest of higher education stakeholders, researchers currently lack an understanding of the degree to which open scholarship is enacted in institutions that lack institutional support for openness. I help fill this gap in the literature by presenting a descriptive case study that illustrates the variety of open and sharing practices enacted by faculty members at a North American university.

Open and sharing practices enacted at this institution revolve around publishing manuscripts in open ways, participating on social media, creating and using open educational resources, and engaging with open teaching. This examination finds that certain open practices are favored over others. Results also show that even though faculty members often share scholarly materials online for free, they frequently do so without associated open licenses (i.e. without engaging in open practices). These findings suggest that individual motivators may significantly affect the practice of openness, but that environmental factors (e.g., institutional contexts) and technological elements (e.g., YouTube’s default settings) may also shape open practices in unanticipated ways.

The paper, open access and all, is here in pdf, or directly from the source: Veletsianos, G. (2015). A case study of scholars’ open and sharing practices. Open Praxis, 7(3), 199-209. http://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/206/168 

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