Five trends in online education

By Morten Flate Paulsen

In Reflections after 25 years with online teaching I wrote about some of the long time trends in online education. In such a long perspective, the following five developments are promising, but immature. One important challenge is how learning providers could develop sustainable business models to maintain these services as an important part of the future learning environment.

 

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open educational resources (OERs) are freely accessible documents and media resources that are useful for teaching, learning, education, assessment and research purposes. These resources are growing in numbers, usefullness and popularity along with international, national and institutional support. UNESCO has for example named several prominent open education institutions as Chairs of OER. Another example is the European POERUP project (www.poerup.info/) that provides national surveys of available OERs.

 

Social neetworks and Web2.0 services

Online learners are facing a growing number of social networks and web2.0 services that can be used for flexible and informal learning. The social networks provide access to experts and peers that can be very helpful for advice and learning. The Web2.0 services allow people to share a vast diversity of multimedial learning resources. Some of these opportunities are for example discussed in the article “Transparency in Cooperative Online Education” http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/671/1267

 

Personal learning environments (PLEs)

All the open educational resources, social networks and web2.0 services allow people to set up their personal learning environments (PLEs) according to their interests, learning styles and ambitions. This is both an oppurtunity and a challenge for the individual learner, as well as a challenge for the traditional educational institutions and providers that are used to be in control of the curriculum.

 

Open Badges

One challenge related to all the available OER and informal learning in the social networks is how this informal learning could be acknowledged and sertified. As a result of this the open badge movement (See for example http://openbadges.org and http://badgestack.com/) which challenge the traditional education institutions “monopoly” in issuing certificates and diplomas.

 

Moocs

Moocs are Massive Open Online Courses, and there is a growing number of such courses that could be of interest for adult learners. The design of and participation in a MOOC may be similar to college or university courses, but MOOCs typically do not offer credits awarded to paying students at schools. The open badge initiatives could therefore be of special interest for Moocs. More information on moocs is available on http://mooc.ca/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

Reflections after 25 years with online teaching

During the fall of 1987, I developed and taught my first online course for NKI Nettstudier. As far as I know, it was the very first online distance education course in Europe. To celebrate the 25^th aniversary, we have now scanned and uploaded the first English report Torstein Rekkedal and I wrote about our pioneering experiences wich is titled The Electronic College: Selected articles from the Ekko project. You may also be interested in the very first article I wrote for an international journal in 1987: In Search of a Virtual School. 

More articles in Norwegian and Englis are also available at http://issuu.com/mfpaulsen.

Since I now design and teach the first courses for Campus NooA, I have made the following reflections about the developments during these 25 years:

The ICT systems have continuously become faster and more powerful. The most important breakthrough for online education came with the web in the middle of the nineties. The second most important development was the proliferation of the learning management systems. Later, open educational resources and social media became increasingly more important for learning. It is also important to point out that the technology gradually has become more mobile and wireless. However, the most significant difference is that very few people were online in 1987. Now, almost everybody is online – all the time.

There has been a lot of focus on technology and digital learning resources, but I will speak up for people who suceed in utilizing the systems well. Learning platforms are important, but I will argue that it is more important how we implement and use the systems. Well organized models, effective student and teacher support, quality content and teachers who really care about their students - are crucial for high quality online education.

Maybe this is why online pedagogy hasn’t changes so much as I expected 25 years ago. The classroom metaphores and mindsets are still too strong. E-mail and online discussion forums are still central elements in online courses and the teacher workload remains high. The students get too litle flexibility, especially regarding individual start and progression. At the same time, they want swift and insightfull feedback from teachers and support personnel. As far as I can see, we have not improved much in these areas during the last 25 years. I therfore urge online educators to focus on how we can organize online education better, for the benefit of all the excellent and hard working online students and teachers.

NooA News, December 2012

  In this issue

• Editorial: NooA’s online education activities in Denmark
• FLUID – Foreningen for Fleksibel Uddannelse i Danmark
• Forfatterskole.dk introduces writing courses in English and Norwegian
• The first Dane enrolled in Certificate in Online Teaching
• Moodle in Denmark
• Open Educational Resources (OER) in Denmark
• The Mall

Editorial: NooA’s online education activities in Denmark

In this first issue of NooA News, we have a special focus on online education activities in Denmark. As a starting point, we challenge Danish online educators to reflect on the development during the decade which has passed since the editor wrote about the challenges in Danish online education (Utfordringer i dansk nettbasert utdanning ) and published Søren Nipper’s personal account: Online Education in Denmark.

Anne Fox is NooA’s Danish Language Area Partner. She has worked with elearning since she moved to Denmark from the UK in 1993. Her first experience with Moodle was in 2002. As co-editor of this first issue of NooA News, she helps us focus on NooA related activities in Denmark.

Since this is the first issue of NooA News, it is appropriate to explain how it all started:
NooA was launched in May 2012 during a pit stop at an Up State New York antique shop. There, among artifacts, antiquities, junk and childhood treasures, some wooden alphabet blocks suddenly appeared that loud and clear spelled out the colorful word NooA. Showing the blocks to people from various countries, I realized that they could easily pronounce and remember the word NooA.

                                 

Ready for new challenges, I decided to establish Campus NooA as an international learning mall for online courses. It is founded on my many years of experience as director of development at NKI Nettstudier, a supportive network of international experts and my Theory of Cooperative Freedom and Transparency in Online Education. (You may for example read about the theory in the article: Transparency in Cooperative Online Education which I wrote together with Christian Dalsgaard from Aarhus University in Denmark).
NooA needed a learning platform, and we never doubted that Moodle was the right choice. Version 2.3 meets most of our needs and there is a very impressive international community we could use to develop better tools for cooperative freedom.

Now, after just a few months of development, we are looking for more partners and course developers that will offer courses through NooA. We are also ready to welcome our first students in the courses that are featured at Campus.NooA.info.

Morten Flate Paulsen
Editor of NooA News and CEO of NooA

FLUID – Foreningen for Fleksibel Uddannelse i Danmark

Campus NooA has joined FLUID, the Danish network of producers, suppliers and users of flexible education. The association has about 60 member institutions.

FLUID’s Secretariat Manager, Astrid Berg welcomes NooA as a new member and writes in an e-mail that she “looks forward to the cooperation with NooA in relation to seminars and conferences in the future. NooA is an interesting new player on the Danish market and I hope the company will benefit from all the knowledge found in the FLUID network”.

Forfatterskole.dk introduces writing courses in English and Norwegian

Lars Rudolf Stadil is a Danish author with a ph.d in Philosophy. He is a founding member of Forfatterskole.dk and a member of NooA's Advisory Board. He explains that Forfatterskole and NooA have signed a memorandum of understanding about the provision of writing courses in English and Norwegian. He also adds that the Norwegian and English versions of the three first courses are now ready for enrollment:

”We have worked closely with NooA to make our introductory courses available in Norwegian and English. We are very pleased that we now can offer our many Norwegian participants an opportunity to follow the courses and get feedback in their native language. We also look forward to welcoming participants who prefer to follow the courses in English.”

The first Dane enrolled in Certificate in Online Teaching

Kristin Lange from Aarhus was our first Danish participant in the course: Certificate in Online Teaching. She has developed the Moodle site www.sprogcafe.dk and taught Spanish, English and Danish face-to-face and online for nearly ten years. She particularly likes cooperative learning and IT driven activities that encourage students to take charge of their own learning process.

When NooA News asked Kristin for a comment about her first experiences with NooA, she replied:

“I like the course structure, with concrete assignments at the end of each of the four study units. In the first module, the tasks are introductory and easy, so it was relatively swift to check them off. In the second module, the tasks are more challenging and time consuming. We must outline and structure the course we want to develop including the chosen course material and market evaluation. This is an interesting challenge which demands time, reflection and focus.

In my opinion, the course is well structured and the Moodle platform seems to work well for quest- or task-based learning.”

Moodle in Denmark

Campus NooA has conducted an introductory study of Danish providers of Moodle courses. Our starting point was the almost hundred sites registered at Moodle's site.
 
The study shows that Moodle is becoming widely used in the Danish Universities and that there are many interesting developments around Moodle in Denmark. Both Innowell and At Work are private institutions with impressive use of Moodle and there are many other interesting initiatives such as for example Phasos andeAftenskolen.

Michael Pedersen, who works at the Academic IT Center at Roskilde University in Denmark, is one of the leading Moodle advocates in the Danish university sector. He explains that Moodle is used as a platform for online teaching activities at Aalborg University, Copenhagen Business School, the IT University, Roskilde University and the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus.

Representatives from these educational institutions teaching units and IT support departments will meet on Tuesday 27/11 at Roskilde University to establish a Danish Moodle user network. The meeting also intends to establish an educational track for discussion of pedagogical challenges universities face when they want to develop research-based online education. Furthermore, the meeting intends to establish a technological track for discussion of technological challenges in relation to Moodle interaction with other university IT systems and joint development initiatives.

Open Educational Resources (OER) in Denmark

Campus NooA has made a study of Nordic OERs for the European POERUP project and here is a summary of some interesting Danish resources which are further explained in the project's Wiki:
 
www.emu.dk is the main public portal for educational content in Denmark. It is provided by UNI∙C which is an agency that delivers a variety of ICT related services to the Danish Ministry of Education. The site provides several portals with OER content including Materialeplatformen and E-museum.

Materialeplatformen is a national repository for all Danish learning resources which provides a single access-point for teachers, students and content producers. The repository includes summaries of all educational resources including professional multimedia clips, publications, and inspirational material from teachers.

http://e-museum.emu.dk is an online museum initiative supported by the Danish Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture which includes pedagogical presentations of the digital content of museums and science centres. The web-site allows students and the general public to visit museums located far from home. The goal of the initiative was to increase accessibility to online exhibitions and develop educational content specifically targeting the educational system.

The Danish Public Broadcasting (DR) provides a portal for academic lectures called “The Academi for Danes".  The portal aims at communicating research based knowledge to the public.

Sundhed.dk is the official portal for the public Danish Healthcare Services which includes comprehensive information about health, diseases, medicine etc for patients and healthcare professionals.

www.duda.dk is a comprehensive site with links to educational resources for school children, parents and teachers. It is a private initiative run by the Jensen family since 2002. According to the information in Danish, the portal included 10,000 links and had 5,000,000 page views in 2010.

Three portals for mathematics are: http://matematikonline.dk , http://ga.randers-hf-vuc.dk/matlex/  and www.matematikbanken.dk/wiki/ .

The Mall

The NooA Mall is an open area where you can meet staff, teachers, students and prospective students. You will be able to access some tidbits of the NooA services and experience some examples of what it is like to be a NooA student.

NooA News is distributed to all registered members of the NooA Mall.

Follow these links to register an account for the Mall  or unenroll from the Mall and NooANews