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MOOCs are the buzz, and the buzz this time is so loud it drowns out everything else.  How will MOOCs affect the eportfolio community?

Not a Fad

The MOOC, in hindsight, was probably inevitable.  We had “big data” as an example of the paradigm-changing power of scaling up massively.  “Big Learning,” a term used by companies, initiatives, and conferences already, is perhaps a good parallel descriptor of how learning may be changing in every constituent paradigm (even high impact practices) within the large universe of “learning.”  Big data is changing how research is done and now may be changing how learning occurs at an equally deep level. 

MOOCs are not a fad.  How the MOOC idea is applied may morph quickly. Maybe even the term itself will evolve.  But the enabling technology applications are there, the backbone, the storage, the bandwidth for high resolution, the companies and investments, the promise and, perhaps most importantly, the demand, are all there.  What at first seemed overblown and flawed has quickly become a broadly transformational movement. MOOCs are big learning.

The knowledge economy needs big learning.  College graduates still do better in the job market than those without a degree, although the jobs may not be at the level the graduates hoped for.  The unemployment rate for college grads in general is more or less back to normal while the unemployment rate for those without any college at all continues to rise.  Jobs that previously did not require a college degree now do. No matter how flawed we educators may realize our current system is, education still is the life blood of our society. 

Diverting Attention

We in the eportfolio community have confidently described eportfolios as transformative up until now.  They support DIY learning and active learning and learner-based learning and all the trends we believe are appropriate for today’s economy and culture.  Yet, on many campuses, whatever attention was dedicated to eportfolios, in teaching and learning centers, in faculty development offices, in academic computing, among campus leaders, and so on, is now to some extent or another diverted to the MOOC idea and to online learning. 

I cannot read this diversion as a dismissal of the eportfolio idea, but just as postponement.  Yet, postponement is loss of momentum and memory.  It is one thing to say that those now striving to get MOOCed will necessarily return their focus to eportfolios in the changed landscape, but it is another to say they will easily pick up where they left off. 

The effect on the eportfolio industry is even more profound than in academia.  This period is, once again, for better or worse, all about delivery of course content.  But, not in the classroom.  In the Cloud.  What does this new fully-featured virtual classroom offer?  What are its dynamics and needs?  What business models work in big learning?  What is the relationship between campuses and MOOC companies, for profit and not-for-profit?  These questions and many more are being worked out as the ground continues to shift and new questions come up. 

The Great MOOC Shift; Whither Credits?

Companies that provide both an LMS and eportfolio must focus on the LMS as a delivery platform and how to re-architect the entire enterprise to adapt to big learning.  MOOCs deal with thousands of individuals who are not registered students at any one particular institution.  This is like the Oklahoma land rush – racing to stake your claim in a large territory.  Can the industry deal with millons of individual accounts that are not brokered through institutions? 

Is this the Great MOOC Shift from institutionally-centered learning to learner-centered learning?  Is this what big learning will mean?  Or will our powerful higher education establishment find a way to keep the institution as the arbiter and deliverer of even open education resources, including MOOCs?  Will degrees and credits remain viable and in control as the business model in the world of big learning?

A core reason why credits, at least, may be untranslatable into the world of big learning:  at the core of whatever justification there is for credits is the idea that all students get the same “treatment.”  They all undergo the same learning experiences in the same way.  If the experience is different from a lecture, as in a lab, higher education has traditionally offered one more credit.  So, there is a tiny recognition in the credit system that different learning experiences should be valued differently.

But, what if, as is becoming obvious in big learning, learners have very different learning experiences, or even unknown learning experiences, but are all aiming for certification of their learning?  This conundrum, that the credit system has lost whatever validity it had, is recognized formally in the emphasis over the last decade on outcomes.  Outcomes show real achievement, right?  Outcomes are “real world”? 

In reality, however, “outcomes” often simply mean that a student has received credit in a particular unit of a course, or in a series of courses of increasing complexity over years.  How can outcomes be an antidote to credits when credits validate outcomes?  Are we running around in circles?  Or did the credit monster eat outcomes?

If, even within the current rather structured educational environment, the business model of higher education is beginning to look like only a business model with no credibility as a measure of learning (do a certain number of credits really reflect how much every student has learned?), how is this business model doing in big learning?  In big learning, “delivered” in the cloud, or in the cloud plus on the ground, the myth that all students have the same learning experience evaporates. 

Absurdity Extended in Online Learning

This problem of knowing that learning is occurring for the registered student has always been a problem for online learning.  So, testing centers are set up, and biometric technologies employed to be certain the person “on the other end” is really that person.  This is an effort to extend the myth that the true measure of learning is to be present for a certain amount of time and then prove that you can at least remember something on the surface of what was “delivered.”  This is behaviorism carried to its logical absurdity.  It would seem that since big learning’s first instinct is to extend the traditional classroom, it would also try to extend the myth that presence equals learning.  And therefore, that learning can be measured in hours.

The ameliorative of MOOC supported group work, local mentors and other on-the-ground activities is a powerful counter-measure, of course.  But, in the end, certification of learning boils down to credit hours in the current picture. 

For now, big learning – on campuses and in the MOOC companies and in our culture -- has to focus on the logistics, politics and finances of learning at such a scale.  In the rush to “get out there,” is there the luxury to address issues of evidence of learning? It might seem that on many campuses, among the MOOC companies, and in the industry, there is no time for eportfolios at the moment. 

The ground is shifting and people are grabbing for solid structures based on decades of practice.  Can we just survive the Great MOOC Shift?  Can we find opportunities?  On the business side, the ground may be shifting even more than in higher education.  Many campuses may be unaffected, after all, but probably all technology companies serving learning will be affected.

AAEEBL’s Role in The Great Shift

AAEEBL cannot ignore “the Great Shift.”  In theory, this is the time eportfolio advocates, researchers and practitioners have been waiting for.  AAEEBL is dedicated to a particular kind of learning, whether realized through eportfolio technology or not.  In the Great Shift, thinking may change.  The value of eportfolios may suddenly be recognized.  But, AAEEBL cannot wait for this to happen but must advocate in whatever ways are open to us. 

AAEEBL must encompass this move to big learning in specific ways.  AAEEBL must be as much about MOOCs and MOOC technology as about eportfolios.  It is the real-world learning, valid assessment, and career success that is important to the AAEEBL community and not what the enabling technology is called.  As the Great Shift occurs, entirely new parameters, vectors, relationships, business models, and opportunities of all kinds open. 

Home Base

The eportfolio industry is adapting.  Some in this industry may build out their LMS’s in ways to accommodate big learning and may find a new need to focus as well on their eportfolio offering.  They may find that the two are inseparable in the world of big learning.  Some in the industry may offer neither a full LMS or eportfolio but only some important features of one or the other.  But with open architecture and APIs, functionality may be found in a number of places – that is, you may have a “home base” interface but the back end may be borrowing functions from a number of applications.  You may not need a platform but just a fully-connected home base application. 

This idea of a home base in the virtual world of big learning may apply not only to your technology but to your home institution.  Your home institution may also become your “home base” for finding learning resources borrowed from other institutions.  To some extent both “home base” situations are already happening.  Some institutions have traditionally allowed their students to take courses at equivalent nearby institutions when they did not offer that course themselves.  Now, the courses are available online, but the principle is the same.  Big learning, by extension, could make the “home base” idea the default, or the normal, situation:  your home institution helps you choose learning opportunities from the universe of open learning resources to supplement what you take on the campus itself. 

AAEEBL must broaden the scope of its conferences, publications, and projects to encompass big learning topics and issues.  Authentic, experiential, and evidence-based learning – the words that give rise to “aaeebl” -- may require eportfolios but eportfolio deep learning may fully play out in the arena of big learning.  The eportfolio community has embraced change right from the start and now must itself change. 

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Notes:  AAEEBL.org is moving to YourMembership during the spring and summer months.  This is a community-growth online site, a social site where some of the work of the organization can occur; it is our association management environment.  We see this as a way for AAEEBL to grow and the eportfolio community to gain visibility and influence.  Only with an environment like YourMembership can AAEEBL truly scale up.  Judy Williamson Batson, our Vice President, is leading the migration and is trying to focus almost exclusively on this very complex process. 

Note 2:  the cost of registration at our annual conference in Boston for members has gone down:  the discount for the first three member registrations from an AAEEBL institutional member has increased to $250.  Also, the conference is located in the middle of Boston where dining choices are much more numerous than at Seaport.

AAEEBL is negotiating new alliances with other associations for events in 2014.  We are happy to be adding more services for the whole community. 

A study just published by AAC&U, conducted by Hart Research Associates, available at the AAC&U web site, includes one finding of huge importance to the eportfolio community:

"in addition to a resume or college transcript, more than four in five employers say an electronic portfolio would be useful to them in ensuring that job applicants have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their company or organization." (page 4). 

The Study, It Takes More Than A Major:  Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success, is important, and I plan to write more about it, but I wanted to get this one statement out quickly to alert all in the community how quickly the picture is changing.  Yes, students do need an eportfolio to get a job. 

Is the eportfolio movement about creating transformation or increments?  Do we value eportfolio implementations that (merely) enhance current practice?  Can the movement be satisfied with slow change?  Is any kind of eportfolio use, as long as the term “eportfolio” is used, good?

These are questions I wrestle with.  My whole being wants a new world of learning where all learning designs reflect what we know about how humans learn.  Yet, my whole being is also happy when I hear any story at all about academic use of eportfolios.  But, what if all we end up doing after many years is just adding another kind of assignment (incrementalism)?  What if eportfolios, in the end, are not any different from LMS’s and, in fact, the two kinds of applications become one – the “LMSio”(subsumation)? 

I hear the term “project creep” and I think about “eportoflio creep.”  Do most people think of “eportfolio” the same way as they did 5 years ago?  Is purity slipping? 

AAEEBL

AAEEBL is about developing learners and transforming institutions.  AAEEBL is an association that is not “of” something but is “for” something – in our case, authentic, experiential and evidence-based learning.   It is an association geared to support change. 

The challenge, then, is to “keep our eyes on the prize,” but value whatever incremental eportfolio uses occur.  Increments cannot become the all; nor can transformations.

I am regularly faced with this issue not just in theory but in the moment.  The general concept of “eportfolio” is hot not in the sense of headlines right now, but in the sense of eportfolios being attractive as a business venture.  In my role as President, I talk with eportfolio providers and potential providers weekly.  The trends are quite fascinating right now.

Two companies, one of whom is a new AAEEBL Corporate Affiliate, and another that may become an AAEEBL Corporate Affiliate, follow what seems to me a new business model.  Both of these companies grew directly out of universities as graduates of those universities themselves faced the job market and exquisitely felt the emotions of finding a place in today’s economy.  They are products of the recession job market.

They used this first-hand experience to create companies that help students get jobs through eportfolio technology.  Interestingly, the eportfolios are free to students but access to the eportfolios – companies looking for job candidates – is limited to companies that pay.  Revenue is from the candidate seekers, not from the candidates. The students, of course, provide access for potential employers only to their showcase eportfolio.  Employers then get to search a database of student eportfolios to find candidates.  (The eportfolios are fully-instrumented eportfolio platforms to use while in college). 

This is not unlike other employment or jobs sites, such as Monster or LinkedIn.  But these two companies do not provide eportfolios to students in college.  It seems to me the genius of these two new eportfolio companies I'm writing about is their reaching out directly to students on behalf of companies. 

One of the companies is Seelio, out of the University of Michigan.  Seelio is a new AAEEBL Corporate Sponsor. 

I know that all eportfolio providers are focused on employability.  In fact, we recognize that one of the chief values of eportfolios is to meet the demand that has arisen forcefully in the past few months to “show me evidence of what you can do.”  Seelio is not distinctive in focusing on employability, then, but they are distinctive in their business model. 

In the U. S., the eportfolio community rides two horses – learning and assessment.  When AAEEBL has held conferences that include tracks on employability, we don’t find a great response.  But, we should.  I am encouraged to see a new push to advance our community’s interest in employability.  It is also good to see a concrete bridge between students and employers – beyond internships and temporary employment – to perhaps help campuses better align learning with the current economy.

Back to the Terminology

As I talk with new potential Corporate Affiliates, I do have to answer for myself, for AAEEBL and for the potential Corporate Affiliate, the question of whether that company is offering technology that can benefit learning and education.  For example, another new Corporate Affiliate has a large Web-hosting business.  They are interested in eportfolios?, you might ask, as I did. 

Turns out, they do have a group within the company that has a strong interest in education and their efforts are in fact to improve learning.  BlueHost has become one of our newest Corporate Affiliates in part so they can understand the needs of learners better. 

The same transformative story can be said of many eportfolio providers, as they themselves modified their business strategy:  they may have offered just an educational tracking system that evolved into an eportfolio system, or just an assessment platform that added a learning module, or a creative eportfolio that added an assessment module.  Or they may have been a well-known publisher that saw an opportunity to enter the eportfolio business within the community they have published for over decades. Or, broadened their market space to K-12 or from K-12 to higher education. 

In other words, the concept of “eportfolio” is not abuzz amongst the blogerati, but it is abuzz among those looking for a good business opportunity.  AAEEBL’s job is to help guide them toward recognition of providing value for academia and for learners everywhere. 

The Value of AAEEBL for the ePortfolio Concept

As AAEEBL is increasingly known to represent the global eportfolio community, albeit in collaboration with all other eportfolio initiatives in the world, it is also increasingly apparent how important our Association is to sustain the core eportfolio idea.

We cannot dictate terminology.  But, terminology follows experience.  If all those coming to the eportfolio community learn why eportfolios are valuable – the core eportfolio idea -- then they themselves will be the guardians of our terminology.  Their experience at eportfolio conferences, at webinars, through reading publications, and through email and phone and Skype and all the communication mediums within our community, their experience within this coherent community will determine terminology. 

The community, organized around your Association, AAEEBL, has a strong voice.  The eportfolio idea is suddenly very attractive as a business venture.  We now need our Association more than ever, so that the eportfolio idea does not “fork.”  The word “fork” usually refers to open source where the reference code gets left behind by derivative code and the community goes off in all directions.  The value of collaboration is lost.

We can help prevent the forking of the eportfolio concept through our Association.  We are here because of what we see as value for learning and we are here, all of us, to reinforce each other’s efforts.  This works as long as we are a cohesive community. 

 

 

We read in a New York Times lead editorial --http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-college.html?hp&_r=0 -- that online learning does not work very well.  Or we read or hear, from numerous sources, that MOOCs (as one form of online learning) are either the wave of the future or, maybe, the end of college as we know it.  Confusion reigns.  How should we think about the accelerated growth in online learning opportunities and MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses?

A widely-held but false assumption about education can perhaps help explain the confusion: many people seem to believe that, because we have had essentially one dominant model for formal learning (with slight variations) for centuries, we will similarly continue with a new, single, dominant model of learning once the dust settles.  MOOCs come along, draw massive numbers, receive significant venture capital, are associated with a number of elite universities, and commentators make it seem this is the next silver bullet, the next singular model of learning.  Part of the near hysteria about MOOCs may be grounded in either/or thinking:  we either have the traditional classroom model of today or we all do MOOCs.  We may be laboring under the false assumption that learning can happen only one way; no matter what direction we go in with formal learning, we will have just one dominant model. 

As you may remember from a blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I am taking a MOOC course, offered by Coursera and Johns Hopkins University called Introduction to the U. S. Food System.  We are in the fourth week of the course.  By taking the course and doing the required work, I have learned much about the MOOC experience and how it might evolve.

MOOCs are showing us something significant but unless we understand what it is they are showing us, attempts to replicate MOOCs will falter.  Creating a MOOC is not easy.  Nor is it easy to understand the general idea of “open learning,” the hallmark of MOOCs.  In fact, the only way to understand MOOCs and much of what is going on in the general learning landscape today is by first understanding “open learning.” 

Open learning is generally associated with the Web and in particular with the phase of the Web (roughly since 2004) called “the social Web.”  The social Web is social in more than one way:  first, the popular interpretation is of “social” as people being able to hook up and post and make friends and “like” and so on.  But there is a technical sense of the “social Web” as well:  data and functionality “socializing” with each other.  On many Web sites, you’ll see the icons for Twitter and Facebook and a few other icons.  You can link to Facebook from the Web site you are on without having to actually go to Facebook.  This inter-linking of applications is the second social aspect of the social Web.

You can “be” one place but use data from another “place” on the Web, or use functionality from another place.  The term “Web” is appropriate because both people and applications can connect in many ways not possible before the Web. 

Another way to understand the social Web and open learning is that people now have almost infinite opportunities to interact with other people and with knowledge sources.  The social Web set the stage for “open learning.”

Open learning is a profound concept and phenomenon.  Though the phrase sounds simple, the implications are so complex it takes a while to understand. 

The one implication I am concerned with regarding MOOCs is just this:  with open learning, all connected humans have multiple sources of learning.  This is true right now.  But because most learners are not yet adjusted to guiding their own learning, they cannot yet take advantage of the riches of open learning.  To be your own learner/researcher is not easy, nor are students in formal learning situations usually taught to be their own researchers.  They know one way to learn in most cases and so do most academics.  This legacy “one-way” mindset limits awareness of the multiple ways that learning can occur and how new learning designs can be varied and enticing. 

The notion that learning depends on passive reception of formed knowledge is so deep in our cultural consciousness that the idea of open learning must seem like a chimera – a vision with no substance. 

The MOOC comes along, is a familiar lecture and quiz model, but is open to all, and thousands leap at the chance to take a MOOC course.  MOOCs are nowhere near as good as those thousands think, nor are they as bad as commentators say.  We cannot miss the lesson of the MOOC or we will have missed the chance to further develop a major vector of learning.

MOOCs are “bad” in these ways (I am basing my analysis on my one MOOC course experience and on the dozens of articles I’ve read about MOOCs):

•      They are the standard passive learning model of lecture and quiz.
•      Students have only online contact with each other
•      The “massive” numbers of students means there is little chance of developing even the usual online friendships.
•      Most students do not complete MOOCs.
•      And, they do not engage learning as researchers would advise:  MOOCs seem to ignore the discoveries from research into how humans learn best.

These are the obvious negatives about MOOCs.  But I have found some very positive aspects of the MOOC I am enrolled in as well:

•      Though the course I am taking is in fact lecture-based, the lecturers are very good.  They “deliver their content” (pardon this antiquated and anachronistic phrase) very well.  The visuals are helpful.  The technology is smooth and transparent; the videos have good production values.  As an advanced learner, I am learning.
•      The video lectures are only around 20 minutes long, indicating that Coursera and Johns Hopkins are aware of the limits of attention span for online lecture.  One lecture may be broken into 2 or 3 coherent segments.  The short time for lectures may also reflect Coursera’s awareness of students having to catch a lecture between other tasks of life.
•      The lectures have interspersed quizzes so we students cannot just run the lectures while we do something else and get credit for “watching” the lecture. 
•      The associated reading materials are varied and engaging; they were chosen wisely.  I am reassured that a lot of work has gone into course preparation.  The materials are not textbooks, but PDFs or Websites related to the course subject.
•      The quizzes do test memory but they also point to what the lecturers believe are important pieces of knowledge to understand.  We students can take the quizzes three times so we can learn from the quizzes.  Using quizzes in this way is a step up from the usual “one and done” model. 
•      The forums are fairly active.  Different people start topics that relate to each week’s general topic.  Students can see which topics are most popular and then go to that topic, so in effect there is a moving conversation from week to week, organized around the topic of the week. 
•      When students comment about a problem, the course staff responds quickly and appropriately.  The negative is that technology problems did crop up, but the positive is that they were attended to almost immediately. 
•      The knowledge presented in the course is complex, no holds-barred, and wonderfully assembled with charts and graphs and visuals to help with understanding. 

In other words, I’ve been lucky to be in a well-organized MOOC, well run, with excellent material and lecturers.  I have been able to get a taste of the Johns Hopkins experience.

In general, the technology in this MOOC is more sophisticated than I expected.  It is also easier to use than I expected.  I am using broad band so I cannot judge how my course would have deployed over a modem; however, I did have a chance to indicate what connectivity I had as I registered, so I can only assume an adjustment was made so that those with slower connections were able to receive the course satisfactorily. 

But MOOCs obviously do not, alone, represent the formal education of the future.  For young learners, this course could only be an appetizer to encourage enrollment in a more active-learning course. 

We cannot judge MOOCs based on the false assumption of singularity I mentioned at the beginning of the article.  They don’t have to be the wave of the future to be important.  MOOCs, however, may well be one more key part of the new panorama of multiple learning options.  MOOCs have proven that technology can support a learning opportunity for tens of thousands of people.  This is no small achievement. 

MOOCs can be modified over time to make it easier to include some social pedagogy or experiential learning, and of course the MOOC organizers can offer eportfolio technology to transfer more of the authority and activity in the course to the students.  MOOCs, as they are now structured, seem thin and retro in learning design.  Still, they demonstrate at the very least how powerful our media are now.  They have pushed out the envelope in an important way, opening new territory for learning interaction.  That they are not close to perfect yet is no reason to dismiss them.

Thanks to Stephen Downes, Bryan Alexander, Dave Cormier and George Siemans for their pioneering work with MOOCs just a few years ago.  http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/1.+History+of+MOOC%27s

As the cited article indicates, the open education movement was given a big boost by the Kumar and Iiyoshi book on Opening Up Education in 2008, published by MIT Press, in which I had a chapter. The book citation:  Opening Up Education:  The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, eds. Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar, MIT Press, 2008. 

The idea in my chapter in Opening Up Education was about the problems of “abundance.”  MOOCs are now part of the abundance I wrote about.  The chapter, written with M. S. Vijay Kumar and Neeru Paharia, is “A Harvest Too Large?  A Framework for Educational Abundance.” This chapter anticipated the overwhelming abundance we now struggle with.

Our problem with abundance has a number of facets: 

•       Learning opportunities are growing most rapidly in virtual spaces on the Web.  We have yet to fully understand how best to use these virtual spaces.  It is hard to develop trust with people we cannot touch and can only hear and see through media. 
•       Trust, to some extent, depends on familiarity.  We have yet to settle on the usual human “rules” for interaction in virtual spaces; we know these “rules” by what feels right to us.  It is hard to know what feels right when the nature of the spaces continues to change.
•       We need to figure out how the various new learning models fit together.  Can a curriculum be made up of combinations of learning experiences? Of course it can – but can those combinations include some that are not created by one institution?  What about learning experiences not monitored by faculty?  Can we develop skills and guidelines to assess learning based on evidence and not based on monitoring?

Can we learn to be comfortable with open learning abundance?  Can higher education move away from its legacy of lock-step education and begin to offer self-paced learning and other open learning options on the way to a credential? Can colleges and universities learn to assess learning based on evidence instead of close personal monitoring?  MOOCs are shaking the establishment at the moment and will probably continue to do so.  They are not the one single indication of where education is heading, but the turbulence they are creating is another indication of how quickly technology can change all parameters and vectors overnight. 

Some of you may have noticed a new trend:  the emergence of the “eportfolio” dedicated solely to placement.

I have talked with one of the providers of this new form of portfolio over the past few months and just recently was pointed to another one.  The first is Seelio (http://seelio.com/) and the other is Portfolium (http://www.theportfolium.com/).  I would be surprised if there are not more around.

What I can gather from a brief glimpse at Portfolium is that they help the student develop a sensational multimedia Web site with links to artifacts.  Once the student or learner has the Web site with links, they can look through the posted jobs from Portfolium.  (When searching for “Portfolium” use the term “theportfolium.com”).

Seelio offers a similar kind of service but is also working to create a learning and assessment eportfolio.

The concern for AAEEBL and the community, however, is the further confusion about portfolio terminology.  The placement portfolio takes the term portfolio into an unfamiliar territory – or maybe all too familiar:  making it seem that a “portfolio” is merely a Web site presentation.

I have also heard a number of provider reps for regular eportfolio systems say that “the student can create as many eportfolios as they want to.”  When I asked one rep what that meant, the rep made it clear to me he was referring to Web sites.  The student, that is, could make as many presentations – such as a capstone eportfolio – as they wanted.  The idea that a portfolio is only a Web site trivializes the entire core learning values that are at the center of AAEEBL and the eportfolio community world wide. 

The problem is that, right now, there is no reference definition for “eportfolio.”  A “reference definition” means the standard definition a community agrees upon.  The Wikipedia definition does not serve our current needs very well in that regard.  Therefore, the AAEEBL community needs to address this issue.  We need a group from the membership to provide one standard reference definition at least for the U. S., but preferably for the world. 

We need terminology and a definition for this new placement portfolio, for a capstone portfolio, for an institutional assessment portfolio, a learning portfolio and so on.  We cannot control human discourse, nor would we wish to.  But we can at least let people know they can go to one URL to see a definition ratified by AAEEBL. 

When Tom Friedman writes in the New York Times about MOOCs, you know they’ve reached the level of national conversation, not just in education circles but “out there.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all

How do we, the eportfolio community, consider, evaluate, understand, or encompass MOOCs? 

I wrote an article about MOOCs and eportfolios a couple of weeks ago:  http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/01/16/the-taming-of-the-mooc.aspx

Go to http://hastac.org/blogs, search for “MOOCs” and you will see dozens of articles about MOOCs.  You can do the same at the New York Times site – http://nytimes.com. Or at the Chronicle -- http://chronicle.com/section/Home/5/

MOOCs are at the point where I felt I should register for a MOOC course.  So, I did.  I am new to the course, but I have some reactions to the course already.

I admit that I have been suspicious and nearly dismissive of MOOCs as “lectures writ large.”  So, I went into the registration and discovery process for this particular MOOC, “An Introduction to the U. S. Food System,” taught from Johns Hopkins, with doubt. 

What happened:

First, I was surprised at how easily I could find and sign up for this Coursera course.  My registration was surprisingly simple and quick.  I got email notifications and instructions.  The home page interface for the course is immediately usable. 

I was able to watch an introductory lecture with no glitches and good video production quality. 

The readings, so far, are riveting and astonishing.  As always, I find a well-designed course provides a library of readings that would be hard to come by otherwise.  Having an expert in the field tell me, “these are the articles you need to read to understand the problems we will address in this course,” is invaluable. 

I have, therefore, already become terrified by the food situation in the world! 

I have the option, and was encouraged, to join the Forum.  Well, forums have their problems:  the number of new topics quickly grow and the conversation is therefore fragmented down a whole number of cul-de-sacs.  Who is talking to whom?  Sometimes, it is possible to track down an actual discourse thread and join that particular one.  But, no matter what, the Forum for this course, with 12,000 students, is not only chaotic in organization but overwhelming in number. 

I could probably study the forum and track down a few comments that interest me and try to talk to those people.  And, I may do that. 

I will need to take quizzes and stay on top of the lectures assiduously since the course lasts a mere 6 weeks.  It could end while I am still catching up.  If I pass all the quizzes and complete all requirements, I will get a certificate of completion. 

Why do people take this course?  I can’t quote the forum directly without permission from those who are posting, but I do see that many of the students are already in a related field to the subject of the course.  Some say they hope to build on what they already know.  Others say they may want to enter a course of study related to this field.  And others have a strong agenda about sustainable food production and want to be heard.  I was reluctant to admit, although I did, that I eat meat.

So far, I find the course much better than I expected. But, then, students are often very positive in the few week or so of a course before real work begins.  Still, from a disinterested viewpoint, I am already forming opinions.

First, MOOCs are probably the real thing.  The course is only a week or so into the 6 weeks and I will be very interested to scan the comments as the course moves along.  But right now the course seems solid. 

Second, technology and access are at the point where the technology is invisible.  Everything worked easily and quickly.  I did have to sign up for a free subscription to a journal to get to one of the readings, but that was a one-minute process.  And the course information noted that I would have to subscribe to this particular journal. 

Third, for those already familiar with the field of food productino, this format provides a good learning opportunity.  Or for those, like me, a serious dilettante, er, renaissance man, it is equally valuable. 

Fourth, I would feel uncomfortable taking a course like this in a brick-and-mortar classroom.  I would seem out of place, a seasoned professor with a Ph.D., joining an introductory course.  For me, then, the MOOC is ideal. MOOC advocates claim that these kinds of courses open learning opportunities to those who could not otherwise have any opportunities.  It had not occurred to me that I was among that number.

Finally, the lecture format comes under fire.  “Is this the best we can do?,” asks Cathy Davidson of HASTAC.  I can in fact watch the lectures a number of times, or parts of the lectures.  I can take the quizzes a number of times, using the quizzes as a learning opportunity – I hope they are telling me what is important to understand from the readings. 

More generally, my strongest response to the “MOOC Mania” (Chronicle) is “this is not the replacement for college, it is just one more learning opportunity in the world of open learning.”  We will not replace a predominant single model of learning with another predominant single model of learning.  We are instead going from a near singularity to multiplicity.  The burning question is not "will MOOCs put anyone out of business," but "how will MOOCs fit into our extant educational processes?"

Where are eportfolios in this?  No where. 

This very blog is my own eportfolio entry about my MOOC experience.  Why don’t the students in my course have the opportunity to elect to pay for an eportfolio, if they choose to do so, to add greatly to the value of this experience?  As I said in my Campus Technology article, the most obvious component of the MOOC – the eportfolio – is missing.  Coursera should arrange to provide accounts through an existing eportfolio provider.  Students in the course could choose, themselves, if they wanted to purchase an account. 

Granted, the extra overhead to build in an eportfolio option is not insignificant.  But I do hope to see some of the organizations providing MOOCs, including universities and colleges, offering that option.

More on this experience soon.  Let me know what your own experience is. 

 

Now that Coursera has created a business plan, we may be able to call MOOCs a trend and not a fad.  The business plan is to sell access to the list of those MOOC enrollees who opt in to companies looking for employees.

You wondered how the MOOC companies could sustain themselves by offering free courses?  Well, this new plan is one answer. 

The sudden explosion of MOOC mania says many things:  first, it could of course just be a phase, but if it is not a phase depending on a particularly bad job market for survival, then what does it say beyond "watch out, higher education"?

As Clay Shirky said at EDUCAUSE, MOOCs are not the way to understand what's going on now: it is better to understand the larger cultural context, that of "openness."  Openness is re-shaping all existing knowledge-making processes.  MOOCs are only one indicator of the power of openness.

What is really going on with the Coursera business model?  Primarily, they are extending the potential learner pool way beyond the young learner who is already enrolled in high school or in a 2-year program.  Coursera is plumbing the culture for learners of all ages and situations in all countries; it and the other open-education phenomena are helping to create a learning market orders of magnitude larger than the traditional market. 

Something that enlarges the market significantly is not just a fad.

Openness, where learning resources are everywhere and often are free, redefines how education should function.  No doubt, existing educational institutions will remain vital and may even transform sufficiently to incorporate openness but will need to allow the academic side, not the business side, re-define learning structures.

There is no doubt that this is the age, also, of eportfolios.  Openness in some ways depends on individuals owning eportfolios:  away from a standard and consistent curriculum structure, the eportfolio offers a replacement structure.  The eportfolio is a "retroactive curriculum":  "this is the knowledge structure that resulted from my various unstructured learning experiences."  "This is a record of how I discovered knowledge and then ordered it." 

This is generally called DIY learning -- do it yourself. 

The talk about "dropping out" is now being re-framed as positive, as learners taking charge of their own learning (DIY).  Successful people in Silicon Valley wear the "drop out" badge proudly.  Dropping out is not for everyone and perhaps for only a very few select people.  But this changing cultural view of the necessity of college is in keeping with openness. 

DIY demands an eportfolio.  If you are creating your own record of achievement, you need your own permanent, cloud-based eportfolio. 

The trends toward DIY, badges (micro-credentialing based on peer riview), and MOOCs are all indicators of the move to openness that has roots starting in the 1990s and earlier.  I hear educators scoff at badges and MOOCs.  But, they are, in fact, important indicators of cultural trends.  And, from the perspective of AAEEBL, these trends are pertinent and vital for our work. 

Trent,
I’m currently researching ePortfolios for my university, University of Houston Downtown. I read your articles in Campus Technology and use them as I research to share with UHD’s ePortfolio’s planning committee. We are planning to launch a program that will be used by all of our nearly 14,000 students. I came across some cool tools that can be used free of charge which have the potential to add a lot of pizazz to student ePortfolios. Let’s share with your readers:
ANIMOTO – create extraordinary videos from your photos, video clips, words and music.
http://animoto.com/sample-videos,
GLOSTER – Online Multimedia Posters – http://edu.glogster.com/what-is-glogster-edu/.

Always fun to share!

Back to UHD – We will be looking to use the ePortfolios across campus to 1) record academic performance, 2) respond to core and general ed standards and requirements, and 3) as tools for job seekers and career building. For 1 and 2, I won’t go into details here. For 3 I see this as currently needing to be driven by job applicants rather than employers. My personal experience is that having an ePortfolio can’t hurt (unless it’s a disaster), but that employers find it very impressive when available to them. In general, applying for jobs online is a tedious and trying experience, involving uploading resumes, cover letters, and filling out painfully long applications. Employers interested in a particular candidate can learn so much more about an applicant by viewing and analyzing their ePortfolio that they ever will from there job applications, resumes, or other traditional tools. Ideally, in my opinion, an online job application should only ask a few basic questions like do you have these experiences and education as key, preferably in the form of drop-down boxes. Most of the rest should be included is a really good searchable ePortfolio, the “show me” part of the application. So, one of the few questions asked should be for the link to the ePortfolio. I wish I had an opportunity to experiment with that approach. I’d be glad to partner with anyone wanting to try that experiment.

I find that ePortfolios can be so powerful and rich in content, that I look forward to continuing my investigations and eventual implementation on our campus. The AAEEBL web site has been very helpful. Keep experimenting on your ePortfolio. I look forward to updates on your progress.

Angela Koponen, PhD
Director of Co-Curricular and Operations Assessment
University of Houston Downtown

From the NY Times: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/no-more-industrial-revolutions/?hp

This post, a scholarly blog, rubbed me the wrong way.  The point is made convincingly -- we are past the big "bumps" or "bubbles" in terms of sudden 30 to 50 year GDP growth based on industrial revolutions.  But it is convincing only if you believe that we humans in the connected world can only do industrial revolutions.  Seems to me we humans did an agricultural revolution a few thousand years ago.  There would have been no industrial revolutions without the agricultural revolution. 

What about the revolution we are in now?  This blog writer seems to think the computer revolution has already run its course, at least in terms of computers spurring a rapid growth in wealth. 

Most of you, like me, are directly involved with the computer revolution.  Do we agree that the big changes are over, and that the doc com bubble that burst in the year 2000 was the last computer wealth bubble?

I certainly don't know, so I have no answer.  But I do know what I believe.  It all depends on how one understands humanity's move to digital everything. 

Immediate changes in efficiencies doing what we already do, and doing what we do within existing cultural memes, was easy and is still easy.  Efficiencies in existing processes is the phase we are in now:  efficiencies in marketing, delivery of products and services, efficiencies in communication, in archiving, searching, displaying, efficiencies in social organization, efficiencies in research and big data, in aggregating knowledge and so on.  We do everything faster and with less need for humans to support each embedded process. Even our machines are now more efficient because digital technology manages how they work.  Buildings are designed and built that could never have been built without CAD and CAM. 

But is that all that we can expect in this digital age?  In education, we are beginning to see efficiencies in the creation of learning opportunities -- such as MOOCs.  But MOOCs, albeit provided by gifted educators and superb graphics complemented by social networking, are still teacher-centered and not outside the learning paradigm we are all familiar with. 

Still, MOOCs and other trends -- assessment of prior learning (or recognition of prior learning), eportfolios as a way to evaluate achievement with much fuller data, micro-credentialing (badges -- really a form of peer review at the student level), high-impact educational practices, social pedagogies, new recognition of how people actually learn best, the flipped classroom, and so on -- do in fact indicate an important new phase of the computer revolution. 

This new phase is what we might call "the university of the whole."  Our economy is now a knowledge economy.  The economy has become a learning economy.  And institutions of higher learning are moving toward human processes and structures that are appropriate for "the university of the whole." 

The university of the whole is where the real and lasting and profound knowledge revolution is taking place.  No, this is not an industrial revolution, this is a revolution in how people think.  This is a revolution at the source of all revolutions.  ePortfolios are already native to "the university of the whole."  We are all, in the eportfolio community, going there (to the university of the whole) and already there.  Welcome. 

An article in the Chronicle today, Oct. 1, 2012, confirms, in case you were wondering, that the MOOC and badges movement (or “mania”) continues unabated. 

According to the article -- http://chronicle.com/article/Massive-Excitement-About/134678/ -- written by Katherine Mangan – “led by some of the nation's most prestigious research universities, new players are signing on each month to teach free, online courses that have drawn tens of thousands of students worldwide.”

I have written a couple of blogs about the advent of alternative learning opportunities and the challenge of credentialing learning out of sight of teachers or mentors and outside of a standard curriculum.  The popular answer is badges and certificates.  My question is, Where do you put those badges and certificates and how do you show evidence of their value?

In a recent article I published in Campus Technology -- http://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/09/19/12-important-trends-in-the-eportfolio-industry.aspx -- I mentioned that a number of eportfolio providers are strategizing about how to incorporate badges and certificates into eportfolios.  They are also looking at the “DIY learner” who may or may not be affiliated with a learning institution. 

It would seem that the burgeoning trend toward alternate learning, either within or without institutions, should be ideal for eportfolios.  Yet, as in the article, and others about MOOCs and badges and certificates, no author mentions eportfolios.  How do we get the word out?  It seems those pushing MOOCs and badges have a problem – credibility – and we in the eportfolio community have the answer.  How to let them know?

With Randall Rode of Yale, I’m co-leading a NERCOMP workshop on “Alternative Credentialing: Badges and ePortfolios” on November 1.  See:  http://nercomp.org/index.php?section=events&evtid=194.  Join us if you are interested.  This is one effort to get the word out that the eportfolio movement and the MOOCs-badges-certificates movement are on parallel tracks but should be on the same track.  How can we do more?