This has been a bit of a meeting-tastic week for me, and so most of my time has been taken up with internal developments here at GCU. All quite exciting for me but not so much in terms of a blog post. However I still have had half an eye on the rest of the world, well parts of it at least. On Monday I went to the 3rd Open Data Glasgow Meet up.  As one of community organisers is was heartening to see a core of regulars building up, and of course welcome new faces.  The presentations were as diverse as ever from using wikipedia for developing research and scholarly skills at the Glasgow School of Art, where a number of secret wikipedians have been ‘outed’;  to using open source designs and 3-D printers to build boat houses in the Hebrides. Added to this mix was a touch of open science and another up date from the Glasgow Future Cities demonstrator Project.  I collated a twitter time line of the event which gives an overview of the presentations. The NMC HE Horizon report was released. I’m not even going to attempt to review it (David Hopkins has done a great round up of reviews), but I can easily match most of the key trends, significant challenges and important developments to activities  and/or areas in need of development within my own institution. I still have reservations the relevance of big data approaches in assessment in my context at this point in time. We are seeing a really big up take in e-assessment which is great. But it is going to take a while for the analytics side of things to become part and parcel of the emerging workflows/practices of our staff.  At this stage, we need to a lot of  work on developing (relatively) small and local approaches to data. We really are just taking baby steps in terms of actually getting the data in the first place never mind be in a position to make any sense of it. A more pressing priority just now is ensuring that e-assessment systems are reliable.  As many of you know many of us in the UK HE sector are more than a little bit cross with certain well known similarity checking system. Probably more interesting to me than the report were the video entries for the ELI video competition which show real examples of a number of the trends, challenges and developments from the report itself. The HEA also released their flexible pedagogies report, which is a bit a contrast to the NMC report, but has some useful overview information in it. Developing staff (and student) digital literacies were featured in the NMC and ALT ‘s Special Issue: Scholarship and Literacies in a Digital Age includes a fascinating range of papers around digital literacy issues - weekend reading for me I think. Elements of the Creative Classroom Research Model - NMC HE 2014 Tagged: #okfn. #opendataGLA, blended learning, NMCHE2014

How do you measure success on a MOOC? It’s a question that has been causing a lot of consternation as our traditional measures of success in education don’t seem to apply. Large drop out rates, challenges of assessment at scale, I don’t really need to go into all the details, it’s documented by others far more eloquently than me. However, despite my unsuccessful attempts in many MOOCs I have managed to complete a few (4 now!).  They all have been successful learning experiences for me. I got a certificate for one of them, but nice as they spacemen are on it, it isn’t really my biggest signal of success. As I blogged about before, it’s been after the MOOC  that the really collaboration and reflection on success has begun. This week at the EMOOCs 2014 Conference my colleagues Paige Cuff and Helen Crump are presenting our paper Signals of Success. Now having a paper accepted for a conference might not be your measure of success for a MOOC, but for me, Paige, Helen, Penny, Briar, Iwona and Yishay, actually pulling of this international collaboration has been a real triumph. You can see a pre-print of our paper and some more information here. And if you are wondering where the title of this post came from, this twitter conversation will give you a clue. @crumphelen @penpln @paigecuffe @mbjamieson @yvetteinmb @yishaym brilliant - next paper: "Cloudworks, purple dots, tea & biscuits"? — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) February 8, 2014 screenshot of twitter conversation Tagged: #emoocs2014, #oldsmooc, #oldsmoop

Despite the best intentions of the weather this week, a number of people from around the UK managed to make it to London on Wednesday for  workshop as of the HEA Digital Literacies in the Disciplines programme.   As I blogged about before, the main focus of our case study will be within nursing programmes in our school of Health and Life Sciences. The workshop was primarily an opportunity to bring the projects together and for us all to get a more in depth overview of the background to the mapping process.  For me the clarification of the ends of the V and R scale in terms of social traces was really useful. Visitor behaviour is where you don’t leave a social trace online and residency is where you interact with others and leave a social trace. The bit in the middle is where you are online to be with people, but within a known group e.g. Facebook. I liked David White’s use of the term "elegant lurking" e.g. a student who follows experts in a certain field on twitter but doesn’t interact with them, but does get a lot of useful information through the wider interaction of that group of people. As someone who isn’t keen at all on the term lurking this contextualization really appealed. As with most mapping exercises it is a not an exact science and the dialogue generated by undertaking the exercise is the most interesting part of the process. We were shown a range of different maps (again really useful to see) and as with most maps they all sparked a range of questions for me. One of the reasons we are keen on this methodology for nursing students is so we can provide a way for them to articulate and understand where and how they interact online in context of their professional, personal and student identities. Hopefully this will allow us to improve how we support them in developing relevant professional and personal practice. We are also interested in wider issues of where and how they use different social spaces for learning. Will they even think to add our VLE to their maps? This links to the use and support of learning spaces at an institutional level. Do we really need to be investing in developing social sharing spaces within our institutions (e.g. Yammer)  when most students use services such as Facebook anyway? And if we try to use these more personal spaces in a formal educational context, will that just make the students move somewhere else where they want to be? We may always be playing catch up. In turn, if these institutional social spaces are relatively closed will they be of any future value to students?  Should we be focusing attention on helping our students use recognised professional spaces such as Linked-In and leave them to use other online spaces in an informal way? I found the mapping exercise fascinating, and it’s really made me think about where and how I exist and leave social traces online.  I thought I had a good overview of my online interactions - particularly in a professional context.  But seeing other maps, and talking with people on Wednesday I remembered a whole lot of spaces where I do have a large social trace but I had actually forgotten about. Like many people I have "played" around with online bio services such as about.me, but I kind of forget about them as they are automagically updated from RSS feeds from my more active and engaged spaces such as my blog and twitter. However I’ve had over 3,500 visits to my about.me page in the past year which astonished me.  I also have a vizify page which again is populated from other services.  It has what I always thought was a good overview of ‘where I am" online Vizify online places But after doing the mapping exercise I think picture is more like this Sheila’s V&R map, Feb 2014 I confess I’ve had to re-do my paper map from Wednesday as I had forgotten quite a few things, and also I wanted to use circles not rectangles. Don’t think it makes any difference but there are a few Venn like overlaps. I was also impressed by fellow delegate who used powerpoint on Wednesday to create his map. We are running our workshop next month and I’m really looking forward to the maps and discussions it generates. Tagged: #HEAVandR

Firstly, thanks to @helencrump for the title of this post. The alternative title was ‘#oldsmooc - the MOOC that keeps giving". But I think Helen’s one sounds much more impressive :-) I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this post but there was a flurry of activity on my twitter stream last night/this morning and I just wanted to try and capture some of the ideas that have been floated. Regular readers of this blog will know that a group of #oldsmooc-ers recently presented a paper at the EMOOCs Conference, called "Signals of success and self directed learning" where we took a collaborative auto-ethnographical approach to create a range of narratives which described our different measures of success in participating in the mooc.  We felt that this personal reflection would help to address some of the gaps in understanding what actually motivates learners in MOOCs and probably more importantly for us as a group to explore the extent "connection, self-efficacy and self-directed strategies facilitate learning in a MOOC".   As a self selecting group we were very conscious that we could not ensure our narratives were typical of other leaners on the MOOC, but we did try and collect some more data from other participants.  I have tried to document the story of our collaboration, which has been a key  signal of success for us all. Getting the paper accepted was a great moment for us all, as was the conference presentation and tweets it generated.  We were still unsure if our approach and methodology really had any traction.  But last night Paige altered us all to this bit of activity on the current #rhizo14 MOOC.  Again through connections and network (aka some of our group taking part in another mooc) it seems our ideas and approach are being explored by other learners. I think this is really important.  We know that existing accepted educational metrics don’t really apply in the MOOC context, particularly for retention. Despite the promise of MOOCs and big data being able to give us insights into how people learn, I, like others, am still not so sure about some of the methods being used and in turn the patterns that are emerging. As well as the quantitative data, we need to get much more qualitative data exploring as many different narratives as possible from learners. It’s only by doing that that can we really start to help develop our understanding of how people define success in MOOCs. And in turn, we can ask more challenging questions of/from the quantitative data. Being a bear of very little brain, I like seeing the pretty patterns and swirly diagrams, but find it confusing when they don’t seem to relate to my own experiences.  Mind you,  if this article in the Sunday Observer is to be believed we won’t need to grapple with big data -v - little data -v- educational theory for much longer as soon the google robots will have worked it out all out for us and will have "fixed" education. My experience of learning on MOOCs has been very different from my traditional educational experiences. I know I didn’t (and still don’t really) enjoy formal education, and I am much happier (and hopefully more creative) in connected, loosely structured learning experiences than read a bit, do the test, read a bit more ones. Anyway below is a collation of the tweets from last night this morning, which range from us being all "check us out with starting an auto-ethnographic revolution" to more serious questions about the nature of open collaborative spaces, self disclosure and the importance of failure. On the last point, Pat Parslow referenced the "confessional" booth at the PELeCon Conference, which again got me thinking about the use of the language of guilt around what are perceived to be non traditional ways of doing things. But that’s probably a post for another day. Tweets by @sheilmcn Tagged: #oldsmooc, #oldsmoop, #rhizo14

It’s been a really busy couple of weeks here at blended learning HQ at GCU.  My colleagues are in the middle of preparing our annual blended learning report. There’s not a huge amount I can add this year, but it is a great opportunity to find out more about what is happening, so data and analytics have been high on the agenda. For the past couple of years there’s been an encouraging increase in the use and access to our VLE, which we call GCU Learn.  This year the web accesses are down but the mobile accesses have increased exponentially with Apple devices far and away the most popular. Tuesdays also seem to be a popular day . . .  We’re also seeing a significant uptake in use of turnitin and trademark.  E-assessment and feedback is definitely something staff and students want and are using. Last Friday we met with Blackboard about and they took us through their analytics platform.  I was in that strange position of being quoted back to myself, as they were referencing the Cetis Analytics Series quite heavily. Still a great piece of work, and if you haven’t had a look, and are interested in analytics I would throughly recommend it.  We are probably not at the stage to start working with their system yet. There are some key questions that need some really serious discussion, not least around benchmarking. But I am now taking a leaf out of my own book and really considering the who, what, where, why and how of data here. Although I’m not exactly a newbie anymore, I am still finding my way around and getting to know what  people are doing in terms of blended learning.  Our Engineering and Built Environment School had a lunchtime "technology taster" session yesterday which gave me the opportunity to see some of the practice in that school. There was a really good mix of activities including the use of WebPA, screen capture and various student response systems packed into an hour. We’re developing case studies of practice just now so a few more names were added to my list of people to speak to.  Library colleagues also gave a demo of BoB  our national broadcasting recording service. You can easily create playlists of clips and or whole tv/radio programmes which can be embedded into webpages and most VLEs. The slight downside for us is that we don’t have complete single sign on and BoB uses Athens authentication so if we embed in our VLE students will have to login with their Athens details to view   . . . but hopefully that will change relatively soon. There is a lot of activity around new IT infrastructure as well as overarching discussions and consultations around a new institutional strategy to take us to 2020. I’m really pleased that I have the opportunity to take forward the work I’ve been doing with Bill Johnston and Keith Smyth on exploring the concept of the digital university as a possible way to link up a number of "things" that  seem to have some kind of digital dependency. Sharing and exploring practice is pretty much at the forefront of everything I’m doing just now.  Although I consider myself an open practitioner, and an advocate for open educational practices, I am aware that my own practices, my networks and connections are changing in response to my new position.  As you’ll be aware, dear reader, it’s Open Education week next week. David Walker has organised a brilliant week of events at Sussex.  I’m delighted to have been given the opportunity to run a webinar with Catherine Cronin about the challenges of being open. The title of our session is "Open and online: connections, community and reality"  and I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts and experiences along with Catherine’s  research on openness, identities and online spaces. I’ll also be blogging more about this next week and using the responses to my twitter question Tweeps do you think I am an open practitioner? Your response will help me with a couple of things for open education week — Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) March 5, 2014 In the meantime tho, my good friend and former Cetis colleague David Sherlock has written a really thought provoking post  in response to my tweet, which takes a different angle on sharing, data and who really benefits. Random picture of a bit of welcome sunshine earlier this week. Morning Sunshine Tagged: #open #practice #learninganalytics, blended learning, openeducationwk, opportunity

Open Education Week 2014 As you are probably aware, this week is open education week, and there is lots happening, so I just wanted to highlight a couple of things to look out for. Firstly something very close to my heart.  A draft version of The Open Scotland Declaration is now online and available for comment (on a paragraph by paragraph basis). Everyone in the Open Scotland Working Group would appreciate as many comments as possible on this document. The University of Sussex has a great line up of events throughout this week. On Friday I’m taking part in a webinar with Catherine Cronin  called Open and online: connections, community and reality.  The webinar will be recorded and made available if you can’t make the time slot on Friday. There are a number of  other UK webinars on this week including Exploring the Battle for Open from the OER Research Hub and  A Pedagogical Look at MOOCs from the University of Leicester. Also later this week I’ll be one of the guest bloggers on the UK Web Focus site . Everyday this week Brian Kelly has invited a guest blogger to share a range of views on open education. If you only do one thing this week, then reading these guest posts is a great option.     Tagged: openeducationwk

Originally posted on UK Web Focus: The third annual Open Education Week (#openeducationwk) takes place from 10-15 March 2014. As described on the Open Education Week web site "its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide ". Myself and my Cetis colleagues are supporting Open Education Week by publishing a series of blog posts about open education activities. The Cetis blog provides a series of posts from Cetis staff which describe Cetis activities concerned with a range of open education activities. These posts are complemented by a series of guest posts on the UK Web Focus blog from people I have worked with who are working in open education. The fourth guest post in the series published on the UK Web Focus blog is written by by Sheila MacNeill. In this post Sheila gives her reasons "Why the Opposite of Open isn’t Necessarily Broken". Why the Opposite… View original 1,245 more words

It’s not been the best week for women in IT. Early In the week we learned that Julie Ann Horvath quit Github due to allegations of harassment. Any story like this saddens me. I have generally had positive  experiences of working in IT, but I have been in many situations where I am one of a few women in a sea of men. I also have had that feeling that I have been judged and my capabilities underestimated due to the colour of my hair. Equally I have, and continue, to work with some fantastically supportive male colleagues. And I am I now working somewhere with a very high proportion of female senior staff which shouldn’t be something I feel need to comment on, it should be normal. But sadly it isn’t. Over the past two years former Australian PM Julia Gillard was subjected to what I can only describe as horrific misogyny. However as many of you know she did make a quite wonderful speech in Parliament in 2012. Today I spotted via BoingBoing that this has now been set to music.  I’m not sure if it is as powerful as the original speech, which still gets me standing up and cheering "go Julia" whenever I see/hear it, but I found the overview from the composer of the piece Rob Davidson very thoughtful. "The resulting choral piece, in which the singers echo and support the Prime Minister’s speech melodies, is initially quite humorous, as we are confronted with the melody that perhaps was not evident to us before. As the music goes on, it passes into something more serious, and (it is hoped) we hear the Prime Minister as a woman experiencing very real emotions." Enjoy - and I am humming, "not now, not ever" as I type

(image: http://www.desktop-nature-wallpaper.com/birds/swan.html) About a year ago I wrote a post called Preparing for the Second Wave after attending and presenting at an internal staff development event at Newcastle University.  At that time Newcastle hadn’t committed to MOOCs and was grappling with issues of being part of the second wave of MOOC activity. After the event I commented: "I suspect that for a number of the UK institutions in the first wave of MOOC activity, the reputational benefits are the key driver. Many of them can afford to underwrite the costs of developing and running the courses in the short term without having to think too much about the longer term benefits/costs . . .Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing for those institutions not involved with MOOCS just now, to take a step back to consider the most beneficial aspect of MOOCs for their aims and objectives before trying to become part of the second wave." A year later and Newcastle is firmly part of that second wave along with a number of other UK institutions as part of FutureLearn. Now I now all the ed tech hipsters are "so-o over MOOCs" but the questions around the long term costs and benefits MOOCs have still to be answered. For an institution like mine who hasn’t been part of the first, second or third wave of MOOC activity, we are still very interested to see what we can learn from others to help us develop our own strategies which may or may not involve an element of MOOC-yness. Yesterday the Jisc RSC Scotland and the University of Strathclyde hosted an event on MOOCs in Scottish Education. Teams from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde shared their experiences to-date with FutureLearn. And the team who just keep giving from the University of Edinburgh shared their experiences from their ever increasing experience and research of MOOCs on a variety of platforms including FutureLearn. If you want anyone to convince you of the positive benefits of MOOCs, then look no further than Professor Niamh NicDaeid, University of Strathclyde. Hearing her speak about the the murder mystery themed introduction to forensic science course almost made even my MOOC weary self consider signing up if they run it again.  What a joy to hear someone continually emphasise the importance of fun in learning. Niamh also talked about the experience of actually running the MOOC and the amount of work behind the scenes to keep its swan like appearance for the learners.  As anyone who has done any kind of online delivery will know once something is live and running there is a huge amount of world that needs to be done behind the scenes. With discussion boards getting around over 6000 posts a week the effect is multiplied beyond most peoples experience. Staff time for both development of courses and running MOOCs is crucial.  We heard yesterday that Glasgow is committing £2.5 million to developing online learning, we know Edinburgh has a pot double that size, and although Strathclyde didn’t quote any figures it has obviously made a substantial commitment. Again for institutions like mine who maybe haven’t got such deep pockets, there are some fundamental investment questions that need to be addressed about where, what and how to invest and future developments. We aren’t in the MOOC club, unlike Glasgow we weren’t invited to the FutureLearn party, unlike Strathclyde we weren’t gallus enough to "chap on the door" and ask to be let in. And now do we even want to be in the club?  Maybe we are better off doing something in a different way. FutureLearn (like many MOOCs, and courses) is pretty content driven, and there was lots in the presentations from both the Glasgow and Strathclyde teams about the development process. My colleague Linda Creanor and I did notice get a bit of a "them and us" division creeping in between academic staff and the learning technologists who seemed to be just doing the ‘techie’ stuff. I hope that this is just an impression and not the truth. Certainly the strengths of the skills of all members of teams was emphasised but there was just a bit of a niggle of LTs being put to the bottom of the pile.   I raise this issue in the hope that I will be shot down with evidence to the contrary. In terms of institutional drivers and evaluation it still seems to be reputation,  staff development and wider engagement with online learning for campus based activities that are key. Presentations from the day will be made available via the RSC website, and I just want to thank everyone involved for providing a very informative session. Tagged: #moocscoted

This week I’m going to try and keep up with the twitter back channel from #lak14 in Indianapolis, already it looks like some really interesting and innovative work is being presented. However, back in my world our learning analytics journey is really just beginning.  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to do some basic investigation, introductions and explorations of learning analytics initially with colleagues from IT and the Library.  We are very much a the who, where, why, when and how stage.  So it’s been really useful to look back at the Cetis Analytics Series and also at the presentations from the UK Solar Flare events.  As ever the generosity of the community in sharing experiences is invaluable.  This presentation from Mark Stubbs at MMU helped to clarify a few things for our IT department in terms of data sources we need along side data from the VLE.  This slide was particularly useful.  BTW we need another one of those SoLar events  soon . . .  However we do have access to some data, particularly from our VLE, GCU Learn.  Every year we produce a Blended Learning report which gives a snapshot overview of activity in GCU Learn across the University.  Getting and cleansing the data is always a bit of a chore and we are aware that the we can only provide a superficial view of activity. I won’t go into the ins and outs of our data access and data gate-keeping issues but I suspect that you, dear reader will understand so of our "challenges".   In broad visual terms we have broken our blended learning activity into four main areas (click on the image to see in more detail, btw the tools/activities are just samples not a definite list for each area.) We can get data at school level (we have three large academic schools) but not at department or module level. Given the dates of our semesters, annual stats are not much use either as they include weeks when there is no teaching so again that can skew the data.  This year we decided to take one month, November 2013, and base the report on that.  So although what we have is a very high level overview there are some clear trends coming through. To quote the Cetis definition of analytics, these trends are indeed giving us some ‘actionable insights’ not only in terms of blended learning activity but also in terms of our wider IT  and support provision.  So get ready here are our headline figures: •        18% decrease in average student accesses to GCULearn via the web •        420% increase in average student accesses to GCULearn via mobile app •        25% increase in number of GCULearn Communities •        82% increase in use of CampusPack blogs •        134% increase in use of wikis •        232% increase in use of journals •        222% increase in online feedback via Grademark in Nov 13 compared to Nov 12 •        167% increase in online Graded papers in Nov 13 compared to Nov 12 We don’t have a mobile or byod strategy and looks like we might not need one.  It’s happening, our users are talking with their mobile devices, and 80% of those devices are iOS.  What we need to ensure is that our content is web enabled and ensure that students can interact fully with activities via mobile devices.  A "switch on" policy and, probably more importantly, culture for learning and teaching is something we need to work with staff and students to develop. Ubiquitous and stable wifi across the institution is key to this. Improvements to Bb’s mobile app would help too and we can’t wait for the roll out of their new web enabled design to be in place.   Staff and students are using the more interactive and student centred functionality of the VLE such as wikis and journals. And the use of assessment and feedback functionality is increasing dramatically.  We estimate that 41% of our modules are making active use of GCU Learn as opposed to just having a course shell and some powerpoint slides. Now we need to drill down into that school level data to get more module level detail on the types of assignments/activities being used, and in tandem develop staff confidence in using, developing and sharing assessment rubrics and their overarching learning designs.  We are only starting to scratch the surface of learning analytics in our context, but the data we are getting is leading us to ask more detailed questions and demand more nuanced data collection and sense making. We are starting to bring people together to have data driven conversations, and share just exactly where our data is, who has access to it, when they have access to it, what format it is in, and how they access it. We have had initial discussion with Bb about their analytics package, however we need to have more internal discussions about what we can and want to do internally before making any decisions about that.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to share the next part of our journey very soon. Tagged: #lak14