Welcome Development Grants

The Vox list of grants for 2013

March 1st, Campus NooA welcomed NOK 400.000  (about 50.000 Euros) in development grants from Vox - the Norwegian Agency for Lifelong Learning.


In the one-year Vox project, Campus NooA will develop a number of online courses and services in collaboration with its Scandinavian content partners.

March 1st was also the deadline for three Nordplus applications NooA took part in. Nordplus is the Nordic Council of Ministers' most important programme in the area of lifelong learning.


Vox is an agency of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Its main goal is to contribute to supporting active citizenship, improving employability and increasing participation in education. The agency handles applications from institutions that want to be certified as providers of online courses. The certified institutions are allowed to apply for governmental project grants handled by VOX

Campus NooA søker deltakere til skandinavisk studentkommisjon

Campus NooA skal opprette en skandinavisk studentkommisjon med seks representative deltakere for NooAs nettstudenter. De velger selv leder og arbeidsform for å gi råd og komme med forslag til økt kvalitet på NooAs kurs og tjenester.

Daglig leder, professor Morten Flate Paulsen, forteller at deltakerne vil bli presentert på NooAs nettsider og få gratis nettkurs så lenge de sitter i kommisjonen.

-Vil du ha: Medlem av NooAs skandinaviske studentkommisjon på CVen din, kan du sende en kort søknad til meg (mfp@nooa.no) med informasjon om hvem du er, hvorfor du vil delta og hvilke nettkurs du eventuelt ønsker å starte med.

Interesserte kan foreløpig velge mellom følgende nettkurs:

• Skrivekurs I
• Skrivekurs II  
• Masterklasse
• Writing class I
• Writing class II
• Masterclass
• Social Media in Education
• Certificate in online Teaching
• Cooperative Freedom and Transparency in Online Education 

 Interesserte kan finne mer informasjon på Campus.NooA.info og www.NooA.no 

Fem aktuelle trender i nettbasert utdanning

Følgende fem trender bidrar til å gjøre nettbasert læring lettere tilgjengelig for flere. Den største utfordringen for aktørene er å finne bærekraftige forretningsmodeller som kan videreføre de åpne gratistjenestene til beste for fremtidens nettstudenter.

1.      Sosiale medier som Facebook, Twitter og YouTube brukes i økende grad i nettbasert utdanning fordi de gir tilgang til ressurser og mennesker som kan støtte opp under læring.

Jeg har skrevet om dette på http://nettstudier.blogspot.no/2010/04/cooperative-learning.html

2.       Åpne digitale læringsressurser (OER - Open Educational Resources) er i økende grad gratis tilgjengelig på nettet. Det finnes mange eksempler på utmerkede ressurser som legges ut av enkeltmennesker, institusjoner, nasjonale initiativ og internasjonale prosjekter.

EU-prosjektet www.poerup.info har laget en oversikt over slike ressurser i mange land.

3.       Personlige læringsmiljøer (PLE - Personal Learning Environments) er et begrep som viser at studentene i økende grad tar styring med egen læring ved å bruke de sosiale mediene og åpne læringsressursene de foretrekker.

4.       Åpne megakurs (MOOC- Massive Open Online Course) benytter seg av åpne læringsressurser og sosiale medier for å gi gratis undervisning til tusenvis av nettstudenter på en gang.

Se artikkelen: NTNU-professor blir norsk MOOC-pioner www.universitetsavisa.no/campus/article15624.ece

Mer informasjon er tilgjengelig på http://mooc.ca/ og http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

5.       Åpne utmerkelser (Open Bages) har som mål å sertifisere den reelle kunnskap vi tilegner oss i de åpne læringsmiljøene på nettet. Dette kan utfordre de etablerte utdanningsinstitusjonenes ”monopol” på vitnemål og kursbevis.

Mer informasjon er tilgjengelig på http://openbadges.org og http://badgestack.com

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

Mandate for the Advisory Board

Which words would you like to highlite in this preliminary version of: Mandate for Campus NooA's Advisory Board?

NooA's mission is to provide quality online education that creates sustainable value, public awareness and footprints to follow.

The International Advisory Board should therefore consist of members that have special qualifications to pursue the mission and give strategic advice on ideal purposes such as:

• Which services, subjects, courses and programs NooA could offer to support online learners in general and learners with special needs in particular.
• Research and development activities that can contribute to the development of NooA, improved online teaching and student support services and general advancement for the benefit for the entire online education sector.
• How NooA could disseminate research, evaluations and good practice in online education to the benefit of the national and international online education communities.
• How NooA can use e-learning to support and contribute to social entrepreneurship and humanitarian activities.
• Any other strategic and ideal purpose that supports NooA’s mission.

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.

Seasons greetings

Seasons greetings to colleagues and friends
as we prepare for the holidays :-)