What If a Student's MOOC Assignment POs Someone?

What would happen if something a MOOC student submitted for an assignment offended someone not involved in the course? It's bound to happen sooner or later. Considering the global reach of a MOOC there could be a lot of blow back. Wouldn't it be a great idea to take a pedagogically proactive approach to the possibility?

I had such a terrific time taking my first MOOC earlier this year ("How to Change the World" read about the experience here) that I signed up for another one. The MOOC I'm currently enrolled in is called "Beyond Silicon Valley : Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies" led by Michael Goldberg at Case Western Reserve University. I am having as excellent an experience this time around. Beyond Silicon Valley is challenging, thought provoking, engaging and as with "How to Change the World" I'm learning incredibly useful information that has already paid off professionally in more ways than one.

One nice difference this time is that the course faculty are taking active part in the forum discussions. That provides an added sense of connection. On the down side, the assignments are assessed this time based solely upon word count and whether or not you submit the assignment on time. I found this out when I misread a due time (did "midnight" mean the start of the day or the end of the day?) and also when my assignments were scored instantaneously. I have to say that I miss the peer grading from my last MOOC; it wasn't always high quality, but it was interesting. And the opportunity to read and ponder other student assignments was enlightening and sometimes mind blowing.

As with my first MOOC, "Beyond Silicon Valley" asks the student to dig for answers and reflect on their implications for their own situation. But it goes beyond that with a midterm that asks the student to interview local entrepreneurs and write about their findings.

Herein approaches the sticky issue.

Some pretty sensitive stuff can come up when asking business owners about their company. Having interviewed people in a variety of professional settings for years, I know that even the most cautious interviewee let slip things they might prefer not be put in writing. A good interviewer can facilitate this happening. It then falls on the interviewer to employ wise judgement when writing up their story.

Having high journalistic standards (whether as a professional or student writer) is important. I suspect the vast majority of my peer students are not out to muck rake or hurt anyone. Hopefully they pay attention to how and what they write, and in sensitive situations perhaps run proposed text by the people they report on.

But do all students in a given class take such care? Perhaps more important for an educator to ask: Do students even know to think about this?

No, they all don't.

In a Coursera MOOC (both of my classes were by Coursera) the student signs an agreement not to distribute, copy, report or otherwise share anything written by another student without that student's express permission. This is good, and thus, should there be a leak of one student's material by another student, the source of responsibility and liability is pretty clear.

On the other hand, students also sign an agreement when they first sign up with Coursera  acknowledging they are aware that all their contributions will be readable by the university course staff and by Coursera personnel. In addition, the student agrees that Coursera may, at it's own discretion, use portions of student submissions. I can't remember the details, but basically the student agrees that Coursera has wide latitude in how it chooses to use student material. I have no problem with that. Coursera has the right to make that request in return for the educational service they are providing - for free. Until proven otherwise, I default to trusting Coursera not to abuse the situation.

Back to the stickiness.

Consider a scenario in which a student in a course such as "Beyond Silicon Valley"submits an assignment based upon an interview with a business entity. It's good. It's interesting. It's quality. As a result, someone on university or Coursera staff uses part or all of it for training or PR purposes. The business becomes offended for some unforeseeable reason.

The business may have assumed confidentiality, especially as this was a student assignment. The student may have not thought about the possibility that either a) what s/he wrote would bother anyone or that b) it would ever be seen outside the virtual course wall. The student may have not discussed the possibility of the the interview becoming public in whole or part. Yet Coursera has the right to use the student material. Everyone was acting in good faith. Nonetheless, the stuff hits the fan.

Who is responsible? Who is going to take the heat? Who is going to come out ok and who will be severely bruised?

It would be completely counterproductive for all concerned if this situation becomes bogged down in legal and bureaucratic wranglings. We're talking about education here folks; social change. Let's take the high road shall we and try to cut this off at the pass.

In a live or virtual classroom there is an opportunity for faculty to discuss issues of confidentiality, privacy, contractual agreements; implications of what you write, possible scenarios of how material can be used. Especially with regards to interviewing and how the material is written up. We shouldn't assume that intelligent well educated adults (as most MOOC students are) know all about this. Even if they do, the topic bears revisiting. It's good for faculty and students alike to remember that you can have all your facts and knowledge and entrepreneurial ducks in a row, yet if you step on the wrong person's toe you are toast.

Pedagogically, there is an important difference here between a traditional class and a MOOC class. The sense of distance inherent to a virtual environment can lead to increased complacency or denial of interpersonal communication landmines. Thus we have a challenge that needs to be addressed proactively.

Pedagogically we have a great opportunity.  MOOCs such as Coursera's want to change the face of education and benefit society by leveraging the power of the Internet. I'm all for it. In these early entrepreneurial stages of MOOC development, let's watch for these sticky issues and talk about them until we solve them.

UNESCO Mobile Learning Week: Global Initiatives Abound

I spent the last two days attending the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week (UMLW). It has been a while since I have seen so many black and pin striped suits in one gathering. The rare academic in attendance was often identifiable by not having on wing tips. As one might expect, this was a global event, with representation from every continent (perhaps excepting Antarctica), developed and developing countries, industries, governments and teachers - lots of teachers.

The theme of this year's UMLW was "Empowering Teachers With Technology" and I was privileged to hear about initiatives and policy from Chile to Ghana to Pakistan and beyond. Languages abounded, along with excellent simultaneous translations in many of the presentations. I learned a fun piece of international vocabulary when a Portuguese speaker, who offered to speak in Spanish, apologized in advance to the translators if he slipped into "Portagñol". 

So many fascinating projects ... for example, I heard from a Palestinian speaker about coordinated use of SMS for teacher professional development in 5 countries across the Middle East (Gaza, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon) by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). They are working with curriculum contextualized for each country and coordinated with regard to policies. As you can imagine there are interesting challenges to overcome.

It became crystal clear to me this week just why mobile devices hold such promise for assisting in tackling some of the world's fundamental problems (poverty, illiteracy, health care etc). Although (to cite a revealing statistic) 774 million people around the globe are illiterate, (the majority of whom are in a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa), mobile phones have deep penetration among these populations. Mobile phones also have greater connectivity and reliability than Internet connections obtained though more traditional sources. 

Literate and semi-literate people want to read on their phones. People also want to learn on their phones. I heard plenty of data (which I'll skip repeating here) about how people want to learn on their phones - feature phones no less. Many of us may grumble about reading on a 2" feature phone screen, but it turns out that millions of people around the world regularly read entire books on these tiny screens. Not only this, but 2/3 of those who are illiterate across the globe are women, and as I learned in my "How to Change the World" MOOC, providing equal opportunities to women for improving their lives has a direct economic effect on their entire family and community.

Thus, the many ongoing creative projects using feature phones - from delivery of informational, motivational and instructional material via SMS, to customized pedagogical videos. There is a lot going on with tablets as well. There were interesting conversations about which to use, why and when.

One of the over riding themes of the UMLW was how to go from the promise of technology to the expected outcomes. Pretty much everyone in these rooms, as well as most of you I suspect, does not need to be sold on the promise of technology. But many of you, as the attendees this week, have been around long enough to also clearly understand that technology in itself does not solve problems and produce sustainable change for the better.

Whether coming from an education background, development and aid background, or policy leadership position there was repeatedly stated concern for finding ways to perform capacity building and creation of sustainable empowerment of teachers. We heard from those in the trenches all the way up to corporate executives and government ministers. In my next post I'm going to pick up on the policy theme and share some additional observations from this week.

What a MOOC, a Motivational Workshop and a Car Accident Taught Me

This morning there was a very bad traffic accident right outside my front door. Two large SUVs collided, from the look of things more than once. I heard a lengthy squealing of brakes followed by at least two explosive impacts. When I went to look, both of the SUVs were totaled, and one of them could only be entered through the back hatch. The only fortunate thing I could think of was that a fire station was located across the intersection and so help was on the scene within seconds.

I planned to write today about having signed up for a MOOC, and I still will, but what I want to discuss about it today has changed as a result of standing there watching people being carefully removed from a giant piece of  crumpled metal.

Sometimes things just seem to align and when "How to Change the World" came filtering through my Twitter Feed last week, I thought: "Perfect!" I have been writing about issues surrounding online education and MOOCs recently, not just in this blog, but in other venues including my column in ACM Inroads Magazine. There are such heated opinions in the computing community, yet how many of us have experienced a MOOC first hand? Not only that, this topic was perfect for me. Considering it is being taught by someone who is not only a faculty, but the President of Wesleyan University (Michael Roth), I figured this class was likely to be taken seriously.

As if that wasn't enough unexpected opportunity for the week, I was offered complimentary admission to one of those motivational workshops about figuring out how to ...well I wasn't sure exactly. That's why I said "one of those..." because I am fairly cynical about anyone  suggesting they have "the answer" to - whatever. But, I confess that I was just a bit curious, and it was in my backyard, so what the heck. Two days out of my life to investigate first hand what one of these things was all about. I believe deeply in holding onto a spirit of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Here was an opportunity to walk the talk.

Perhaps because I didn't read the syllabus carefully or perhaps I was tired by the time I got to it each night, or perhaps because the website wasn't as intuitive as it could have been, I went straight for the "How to Change the World" readings before listening to the lectures. As a result, it was a bit of a slog but after I moved on to the video lectures I realized that the readings were pretty darned good - provocative even. The video lectures were not lightweight either, sometimes sucking me in and sometimes glazing my eyes over. Once in a while I found myself wondering what could have been done differently?

I am going to suspend judgement on that until I have gone through a lot more of the course because I want to see what happens after we get past the historical/philosophical context setting that Week 1 was all about. Michael Roth is pretty darned interesting to listen to (imo) and he is clearly excited about this topic. It isn't something he usually teaches. I had a good time watching his enthusiastic facial expressions.

I signed this small-print page-long media release form for the motivational workshop, which means that my face and voice could very well be sprayed all over the internet in ways I have no control over, but the alternative was to sit in the back in the "media free" zone and never engage in conversation (everything, I mean everything, was recorded). So I signed the thing and sat in the second row. After all, what was the point of checking it out if I hid the whole time? So I'll just cross my fingers and hope that I don't someday find myself taken out of context online for someone else's marketing purposes. We often tell our students how important it is to stretch outside their comfort zones and I want to walk my talk.

For the sake of the privacy and confidentiality of everyone else in that workshop who agreed to go outside their comfort zone, I am not going to get too specific about what we said and did for two days as we explored this concept of finding out what we were meant to do in life (yeah, I know, it sounds over the top, but bear with me). However, one of the walk away messages I got from two exhausting days of intellectual and emotional mind stretching was that it is really important for anyone who wants to make a difference in the world to get off their butt and do something about it. And to not get pulled down by all the challenges.

One of the ways I got this message was in a side conversation I had with another workshop participant. It was near the end of the second day and I was tired. Darned tired. A woman came up to me and said she had two girls who had taken part in code.org activities and wanted to know what to do next. I found myself starting to explain all the challenges that face getting more students, especially girls, into the computing pipeline. After a few minutes she looked at me in dismay and said that I made it sound so hard that she was discouraged and just wanted to give up on the whole thing.

I could have kicked myself around the room 3 times. I was so annoyed at myself. This was exactly what I didn't want to put out there as the message to people who had been bitten by the coding bug. I realized that it was partly being exhausted and partly because sometimes we get so wrapped up in talking with our peers about the problems that we can momentarily lose site of the big picture. Which is exciting.

I finished the Week 1 lectures from "How to Change the World" last night. I'm pondering the first assignment which is due tomorrow along with the 100 zillion other things I have on my plate today. Sheesh - and it is Sunday no less.

This morning there was a terrible car accident outside my front door. I got the message: there is no time to waste. You never know when you might die. You can't always assume you have time to get to the truly important things later - or to figure out for yourself what those truly important things are. You need to get out there, learn what you need to learn, talk to all kinds of people and take part in activities outside your comfort zone. You want to make the world a better place? Get out there and start now.

UX (and related) Education Listings

As promised, this post contains a listing, with links, to the education options I presented at this evening's San Diego UX Speakeasy meetup. (More on the meetup itself in the next post)

There is an enormous selection of education and training options out there and this is only a small sampling; enough to give you some ideas and get you started. Not listed here for the most part are conferences, because although conferences often have educational activities and workshops, conferences were covered by my esteemed colleague Bennett King and a cohort of other enthusiastic people.

Minus the pithy commentary that was included in the live version, here are those links:

Interaction Design Foundation - Open Education Materials ; included here is the “Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction”, comprised of 40 “textbooks”. Lots of very interesting in depth reading here. Other good stuff as well on their site.

The UX Bookmark - UX books, videos. Awesome resources with in-depth info. Well maintained.

User Interface Engineering (UIE) - Virtual Seminars, Mobile Immersion, UI18 On Demand. Something for every level of engagement.

Cooper - A design and consulting firm. They have "Cooper U" offering in person courses, and also UX Boot Camp (this is the one I'd really like to attend! in my mind I'm already writing the blog post about it!)

Adaptive Path - another consultancy. Offerings include UX Week, an annual conference, and UX Intensive, a 4 day workshop held in various places around the globe.

Neilsen Norman Group - another consultancy. Offerings include Usability Weeks (one of which will be held here in San Diego next month) and a 3 day Usability Camp.

General Assembly -  A training organization with branches in several cities. Set up to resemble in some ways an academic environment. Offerings include one day events such as a hackathon, & several months long classes.Here is the Los Angeles branch.

Open2Study - Free online courses. Based out of Australia, profs are global. Wide offerings including some interesting UX courses and psychology (a hot topic in some UX circles).

Udacity - one of the famous MOOCs. Offerings across the spectrum of fields from the arts to engineering. Offerings include Computer Science, computing applications (such as web dev't and mobile and design)

Coursera - another of the famous MOOCs. Mission statement talks about providing equal access to education; they have the most demographically diverse team of technical people of all the education sites I surveyed for this presentation. Offerings include Computer Science, engineering, data/stats, programming, HCI, lots of business courses (entrepreneurship, management, marketing etc)

HackDesign - an interesting self described "experiment" for developers who want to learn design. Self-paced course that comes to your inbox.

Online User Experience Institute - lots of UX courses. Has been around quite a while compared to its competitors. 

The Stanford Design ("d") School. If you really want to go for it and get a degree. They also offer individual classes, and an interesting 90 minute crash course for pairs.

Did I miss one of your favorites? If you have a listing you'd like added, send it!

ACM Education Council Mtg. Surprises - Online Learning

I am in San Francisco for the ACM Education Council meeting. We covered all sorts of meaty ground today. Far too much to discuss comprehensively, so I'm going to share one or two isolated things that knocked me a bit sideways in my seat, and you can ponder them with me.

This morning we spent time talking about issues of online learning and CS education. Very interesting on so many fronts. This is not an issue one can ignore given the explosion of media and controversy resulting from Khan Academy, various free course offerings by Stanford, Harvard, MIT and others.

We listened to an invited panel discuss various online learning initiatives they are doing. Some of them are incredibly creative.

There are huge issues to address. Scalability is a huge issue. Transferability is a huge issue. Diversity is another issue.

Here is something that concerned me:

One of the panelists claimed that we don't know very much about how people learn.

I have to disagree. We know a lot about how people learn. Educational psychologists, cognitive scientists, educational theorists, cultural anthropologists - there are many many areas in which human learning  has been studied extensively and the research-based data is out there. This begs the question: Are all the necessary people and their fields part of the conversation?

Perhaps in some quarters we need better inter-disciplinary communication.

Who needs to be on board? Computing content experts, yes of course. Cognitive Scientists? Educational psychologists? Sociologists? Yes, yes yes. All these people have solid contributions to add to the conversation. Who else?

There are issues of scalability - which aspects of engagement and learning scale well? To upwards of tens of thousands of students?

There are issues of transferability - if initiatives are started at well financed wealthy institutions, how (can we?) extend them outwards to institutions that lack those same resources?

Issues of diversity - different cultures have different modes of viewing the world, of interacting with their perceptions and reality. Those differences effect how they learn. In some arenas there has been in-depth study of the interaction between culture and learning. How do we incorporate those understandings into large scale online learning? Some cultures learn in a fairly linear and systematic manner; other cultures learn in a fairly holistic and convergent manner.

Here is something else that surprised me:

One of the panelists said something to the effect that online learning spells the end of the community colleges. 

Where did that belief come from? There was so much going on that this claim wasn't followed up on. Unfortunately. From all the evidence I am aware of, the demand for 2 year colleges is growing in a big way. For a lot of reasons, that, if you are in education, you are no doubt well aware of. It seems important to understand what perspective led the speaker to say that. Any thoughts on that one?

What is the difference between training and education and how does large scale online learning address those differences? It may seem to some of us that the differences are fairly clear, but after some of what I heard today, I now believe that the distinctions are not well agreed upon. A bit unnerving because I thought that this was a topic that, although not everyone agreed upon the role of higher education, at least we mostly agreed upon the definitions. Not So.

I learned today that one of the biggest benefits of the explosive controversies surrounding large scale online learning is that it has drawn people into the conversation about teaching and learning who never wanted to talk about it. That is very good news.

On the other hand I learned today that with the expanded conversation, we have to set aside many of our assumptions about what is "well known" and engage in conversations about topics that we thought (hoped) we had settled.