My new blog

I moved my blog to tomonag.org (only in English) - will continue to post about open education and try to write about other things as well.

The Japanese version is tomogoto.tumblr.com .

How to explain "openness" in open education

The debate on “openness” has been one of the central issues open education folks has tackled - different people have different opinions regarding what constitutes "open" in open education. The recent survey by Babson group made me and others re-think the current status of OER (e.g. posts by Alek Tarkowski, David Wiley  and Phill Hill). Among many points that can be found important, perhaps the most significant one we have to address is about “openness” in today’s open education, which Alek critically argues in his post.

Babson group did a great job. They showed the “mystery” (in Alek's phrase) around the awareness and use of OER:

"While only about one-third of faculty members claim to be aware of open educational resources, nearly one-half report that they use OER. There are even some faculty who said that they were not all aware of OER who report that they have used it once the concept is explained for them."

This happens probably because some users do not realize that they are using “OER”. In other words, there are people who might be very good at utilizing free online resources and integrating those resources in their teaching but haven't thought about the name for those resources. Many OER researchers might have once encountered the difficulty of finding practitioners of OER or users of OER. As David Wiley pointed out five years ago, the “dark reuse” of OER has been the serious problem. Finding those who effectively use OER in their teaching and learning is very very hard.

This issue of unobservable OER users is a great loss for researchers as you can imagine, since there might be very great teachers or learners who effectively use OER to enhance the quality of their teaching and learning but cannot be found only because they don’t call what they are using “OER”. We filter them out when we search for OER users by putting keywords “OER” or “Open Educational Resources” into Google.

One of the underlying reasons for this is the vague definition of "open educational resources", which the Babson report faced when it developed their questionnaire:

"A critical issue in measuring the level of OER awareness is exactly how the question is worded. As the previous studies demonstrated, many academics have only a vague understanding of the details of what constitutes open educational resources. Others will confuse 'open' with 'free' and assume all free resources are OER. Still others will confuse 'open resources' with 'open source' and assume OER refers only to open source software. Because of these differing levels of understanding, the phrasing of the awareness question needs to be specific. The question should outline enough of the dimensions of OER to avoid the confusion, without being so detailed that the question itself educates the respondent sufficiently enough that they can claim to be 'aware.'” 

This ambiguity of what OER means makes us feel confused when we say about OER and OER users. Some may strongly state that “OER users” are those who integrate well-known materials such as OCW or Khan Academy into their teaching with his/her understanding of Creative Commons licenses. Others might note that if a person shows one CC-licensed photo in one of his/her slides in class, it becomes “the use of OER.” If both of these two are to be OER uses, is it reasonable to judge them as the same “OER use?” This kind of questions and vagueness around OER is always the case when I talk about OER to people in different fields. My wife, who previously taught English to Japanese children, once said to me, “I often refer to websites that illustrate how to develop educational materials and modify the idea to make it fit into my teaching style. Is this also the use of OER?”

The definition of OER relies much on what it means to be “open.” As the quote above points out, many faculty equate “open” with “free”. Keeping this kind of problem in mind, I strongly recommend reading TheBattle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory (free and CC-BY licensed!) by professor Martin Weller at Open University UK – I have only read it’s introductory parts so far but I really like it. There are many interesting arguments even in the introduction but I'm not going to introduce them here. Rather, I would like you to get the book (it's free!) and enjoy by yourself. It will definitely bring us thoughtful insights we need to re-think issues around “openness,” leading to the future in which we can further enhance the quality of pedagogical practices using OER/MOOC and innovate teaching and learning. 

Open Education Japan

*This post was originally posted on the blog by Open Education Working Group .

******

Overview of Open Education in Japan

After adopting the concept of OpenCourseWare (OCW) around a decade ago, Japan has been heavily involved in Open Education movements, mainly at the higher education level. Promoting Open Education has been hard but considered very essential in Japan where faculty members at universities often tend to keep their teaching materials closed. Although there are still few scholars and practitioners actively working on Open Education and it has not yet recognized broadly by citizens, I have seen the gradual progress of the movement within the country. Involvement of different stakeholders has raised the profile of Open Education little by little, and some needs that accelerate Open Education can be found at several parts in the country.

Academic Commons for Education (ACE)

University professors located one of such needs in Hokkaido, the prefecture that has the largest land in Japan. Due to the size of the prefecture, national universities in Hokkaido have suffered from the scarcity of professors in different disciplines, which prevents students at every university from learning diverse subjects as liberal arts education. This current situation urged us to collaborate with each other to try a new project. The part of the project I am involved in is called Academic Commons for Education (ACE), which tackles the aforementioned issue by utilizing technologies and OER in higher education. ACE is funded by Ministry of Education, and it tries to find what many Open Education folks might want to know―a sustainable and feasible model for the use of OER. As a part of projects at Center for Open Education, a newly launched centre aiming to promote various Open Education initiatives within the campus, ACE strives to achieve two main goals: to create quality OER that can be easily used at other universities and to develop new pedagogical strategies that let instructors effectively make use of shared OER.

© Academic Commons for Education

Firstly, based on the theories of instructional design, we create MOOC-type OER (short video lectures and quizzes) for credit-bearing general education courses in Applied Ethics, Environmental Studies, Information Society, and Space and Earth Sciences this year. Some are based on the previous courses offered at campus; others are based on existing OER, such as those at Open Learning Initiative (OLI) by Carnegie Mellon University. Considering the achievement gap among students at seven universities, we try to make the contents comprehensive enough even for beginners. At the same time, since OER are generally said to be less credible in terms of quality, we have the OER reviewed by instructional designers, experts in each field, and students. The continuous effort by small number of specialists at Center for Open Education and supportive professors together makes progress, and enables universities to exchange the expertise of scholars in each field, successfully delivering the quality educational contents to the edge of the large prefecture.

© Academic Commons for Education

ACE shares not only contents but also teaching, or how to use created OER. We are experimenting with simultaneous teaching via videoconferencing systems among affiliated universities. By flipping classrooms at each university, students watch the MOOC-type OER at home and do discussions or presentations at class with peers from every part of Hokkaido prefecture. What is great in the simultaneous teaching is that students can feel “connected” as we ask questions to students at other universities and receive comments during class, even though they study in different places. Also, the diverse opinions from students majoring in different fields make class activities more engaging, enabling the deeper understanding of the fields.

Through these new experiments, we have attempted to meet the demand in Hokkaido and establish new pedagogical methods that effectively utilize OER in classroom to ultimately improve the quality of teaching and learning at universities.

schoo, inc.

© schoo, inc.

The demand for Open Education is not only for universities. In Japan, the business sector also paves the way for the education in the future. Launched in 2011, a start-up company called schoo, inc. provides quality video lectures by invited lecturers on the web. Aiming to establish life-long learning culture where no “end of the school life” exists, it was named schoo, removing the last letter of the word, “school.” Provided contents are remarkable in that they focus on specific areas, such as business, technology, management, entrepreneurship, web design, computer programming, and makeup. This focus of subjects is one of its strengths that attract users―in other words, contents offered on schoo reflect learners’ needs. The service is used by young business people who aspire to gain knowledge on marketing, university students who want to study entrepreneurship, or young women who want to enjoy “cute” culture in Japan where many women learn how to put on makeup. Moreover, the reason for its growth can also be found at its live-broadcasting system. The live-broadcasting system is said to produce a high degree of interactivity: users can comment on topics by chatting on the right side of the screen, and these exchanges create the “real web-campus” in which learners sit down on chairs, listen to a lecture, and give comments.

© schoo, inc.

These features of schoo continue to attract its “students” and both staffs and students gradually co-create the life-long learning culture in Japan, which was not so popular before.

eboard

And of course, Open Education is not limited to adults and college students. Children in K-12 education also benefit from the movement. A non-profit organization, eboard, challenges unresolved issues in elementary and secondary schools in Japan by offering free quality videos in various subjects. Recently, Japanese schools have struggled with a serious problem that a lot of students do not attend classes for a long time due to economical, personal, and social reasons. These students are often left behind with their study, and many of them cannot eventually graduate from high schools. With its main focal point on this problem, eboard develops free video lessons based on Japanese school curriculum. Every one of organized lessons is easy to understand for children, which lets them study what they need to learn individually.

© eboard

Also, it provides instructional support at several schools, especially those in rural areas. Because of the lack of sufficient learning opportunities outside schools, which students in urban areas enjoy, schools asked eboard to offer extra lessons using videos after school and on holidays. These lessons have effectively improved the educational situation at rural areas and efficiently mitigated the burden to teachers.

© eboard

As shown, rather than attracting a massive body of learners, eboard uniquely and importantly focus on those “most in need.” It realized the present status of elementary and secondary education in Japan and found the niche we have to take measures.

Conclusions

You may see that the illustrated projects are all different in their interests, but they all move ahead based on demands―what users need to learn and utilize. Although cultural and social barriers, including language, personal, and organizational issues, sometimes make the future direction blurred, the diversity of Japanese open education initiatives may be able to produce insightful lessons to be disseminated. Last but not least, in order to further promote a variety of initiatives, we cannot ignore the current situation in which we lack governmental policies on Open Education as well as international collaboration.

References

Umeki, Y. (2014, March 12). Can schoo become the nico-nico-video of education? Toyo-keizai Online. Retrieved September 10, 2014, from http://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/32672

*Please contact ACE, schoo, or eboard when you want to use images from this post.

Open education vs. Classical concert: Three categories of users

Open education folks are somewhat used to deal with "free" things: free education materials (OER) and free online courses (MOOC) are the two big movements we have today. While we see "free" concept spreading out, the premise of being "free" in open education seems to present some important implications we should explore more.

Last month I was looking for articles that could support my argument on my paper, and came across an interesting one on OER by Prof. Martin Weller at UK Open University.
His argument was insightful, especially when he discuss:

“A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.”It’s usually taken to demonstrate that we don’t stop and appreciate what is around us, and in our busy lives we can pass by things of beauty and value. But it has some lessons for our discussion of OERs also. The first may be that people don’t value free things, or are suspicious of free. We have become accustomed to roughly equating monetary price with value or quality. Free is therefore obviously low quality or suspicious at least. Online there is a general expectation that resources will be free, although the success of iTunes apps is beginning to challenge this. But in education there is still an expectation that high quality education costs. OERs are of course, only part of the educational offering – they are the content, and just as important is the associated support and assessment that forms a higher education degree.

This story of a violinist made me re-think the meaning of "free", and come up with the possible classification of open education users by comparing them to those for classical concerts.
Suppose that classical music concerts become freely available (and accessible not only in urban areas but also in local places). It may impose insightful implication for us.

Let me start by categorizing people who go to classical concerts into three groups:

1-1. People who really love classical music (young violinists or music lovers), afford concert ticket, and live near concert halls
People in this group love classical music and perform music. Classical music is part of their lives and thus they go to concerts regardless of the price of seats. They need to listen to great music in order to improve their own performance and enhance the quality of life of their own. So, even if concerts become free, they continue to go to concerts. They don't judge performers by the price of seats, but the quality of their performances. Money does not matter for them. They pay a lot for getting seats, and therefore there might be no chance for people in this group to change their behaviours even if the seats become free.

1-2. People who need to go concert, but can't afford to buy tickets due to the lack of access to concert halls or because they don't have money for tickets
People in this category are similar to those in 1-1 in that they really need to go to concerts. They are young performers or music lovers. But what makes them be separated from 1-1 type is that people in 1-2 don't have access to concert halls because they live in local places and they can't afford to buy expensive tickets, especially those for famous performers. Thus, they can't go to concerts.
They may benefit the most when those classical concerts become freely available in local places.

1-3. People interested in classical music, but not so much
People here are not music lovers nor those who want to become professional violinists or pianists. They do their own work every day, and classical music is not a necessary part of their daily lives. Of course, they know what classical music is like, they may have visited such concerts before, and they are interested in them a bit. They know seats for good concerts cost much: therefore, they don't buy tickets. I think most of people in the world belong to this category, and people of this type will be a great mass body when tickets for classical concerts become free. They will be sampling classical concerts if tickets are free.

These three categories above can be applied to users of open education (OER and MOOC):

2-1. People who really need education (e.g. teachers, employees who need to get new skills, and students at ivy league colleges), afford college tuitions, and have access to the Internet
People in this group need education to live their lives. Teachers need educational materials for their work. They do not see education as something that should be free. They pay for great educational materials since they need those materials for teaching their students. Elite university students try to pay tuition because they want to receive high-quality education. Money does not matter so much for them because they see education or educational materials worth paying money. Thus, even if education and educational materials become freely available, their behaviours don't change much. They may continue to access to education since they don't judge education by its price. Students go to ivy league colleges because they value what those colleges offer to them. Teachers value educational materials because those materials match teachers' interests, receive high reputation, and other factors.

2-2. People who need education, but can't attend universities due to the lack of access and high cost
People in this category are again similar to those in 2-1 in that they need education for their lives. But they cannot get high-quality education because they don't to have money for it, or they live in rural areas and developing countries. A few people of this type enjoy the free online courses offered by established universities or free educational materials, and they are the very people MIT OCW, Coursera, edX, and other initiatives try to reach.

2-3. People interested in MOOC and OER, but don't need education (compared to people in previous two categories)
People here are not students who need to get degrees nor people who need to try new skills for getting a job offer. They have their own jobs. They are not willing to pay for universities to study more even though they are interested in studying. However, when high-quality educational contents become freely available on the web, they may enroll MOOC or try to see OER. They may be sampling courses. This behavioral change made recent research projects find the fact that most learners of MOOC already have degrees and jobs.

Being "free" lets us realize not only its direct impact, but also its indirect impact. I know it isn't fully convincing to compare classical concerts and open education, but hopefully the comparison at least provide some implications we can further explore. 


References:
Weller, M. (2010). Big and little OER. Proceedings from OpenED2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 November 2010 Proceedings. Barcelona, Spain. Retrieved from http://openaccess.uoc.edu/webapps/o2/bitstream/10609/4851/6/Weller.pdf

MOOC: the degradation of our predictive ability

After the growth of the hype of MOOC around the world, we now enter the next phase of MOOC, in which experimentation and implementation of MOOC are to be examined and analysed. 
     An objective perspective, which sometimes tends to be skeptic, has recently led me to think that MOOC can be seen as the result of the degradation of our predictive ability in the education field.

First I want to begin my discussion by hypothesizing that every technology-enabled product has been created at the intersection of technological development (what technologies can do) and our expectation for better life.
     No one doubts this relationship because humans develop technologies, and I also think people tacitly share that next-generation products should be the ones that go just a bit cooler than what we have in society now (see Fig. 1 ). Let's say communication technologies. People have created new technological products bit by bit from telegraph to smartphones. This gradual changes have enable citizens to gradually adapt to new technologies (of course technological determinism has always existed).

Figure 1. Relationship and flow of technological 

developments and human's expectation

Then what about MOOC?
     MOOC are of course one actualisation of the relationship, except the fact that MOOC just have gone too far. The goal of MOOC, which is to educate the world with free online courses, goes beyond our expectation for the education in next generation. The idea of MOOC is not a gradual change from what we had before, and people cannot simply adapt to this super form of education (see Fig. 2). That's why MOOC bring many problems and fears into our traditional education systems, and that's why we've had a lot of hype.

Figure 2. The relationship between technological 

development and human's expectation of MOOC

Why did it happen? The reason might be the lack of previous tech-related historical events in education fields. We haven't seen any gradual "big" changes in our education for many years. The education-has-not-changed-for-hundreds-of-years argument works here in a way that it supports my view that we have lost our predictive ability of foreseeing educational trends. We cannot predict correctly what future education is like and should be like due to the lack of previous cases.
Thus, new technologies, developed by humans, mispredicted the next form of education and there was no tacit consensus between our expectation and what technologies can do.

By taking MOOC in this way, we'll see that MOOC are just kind of the ultimate ideal form of future education because what MOOC are holding up does not seem to reflect the reality. It's just too far from here. So, MOOC's "failure" is not what we lament for, nor what we should be surprised of (the fact that people call it "failure" ensures the deterioration of predictive ability in education).
     And hence, what we are struggling around MOOC, including flipped classroom using MOOC and MOOC-based textbooks, is not the "utilization" of MOOC, but just one of the points in the process of actualizing what MOOC is saying to do. 

Finally, please keep in mind that I am not trying to say that the MOOC's idea is all about bad things for humans and our education. Instead, it does have many good aspects. This "big" change in education has made us excited and engaged, and MOOC became the motivation for re-thinking what education is and what it should be. "What kind of values universities have?" "Why do we continue to pay for college?" "How college degrees work in societies?"
     Now that we have our ideal, ultimate, and beautiful form of education in the future, why not try to reconstruct our education and gradually catch up with what technologies can do?
    

MOOCs: 教育提供者が多様化するとどうなる？②（MOBCからの脱却！）

先日の記事（だいぶ前になってしまいましたが）、Googleのオープンエデュケーション市場への参入によって教育がどう変わるかについての続きの記事です。


前回の記事①では　“高等教育が市場競争にさらされてどうなっていくか”　について書きました。

後半の今回の記事では　“学習者との関係”　について書いてみようと思います。

２.　ターゲット（学習者）にどうアプローチするのか

（１）MOBC (Massive Open BOnline Courses)という現状

先日、ペンシルバニア大学の研究で、MOOC受講者の大半がいわゆる「恵まれた」層の人たちであることが明らかになりました。
記事はこちら（日本語）↓
大学の大規模公開オンラインコース（MOOC）を受けているのは、実は「裕福な人」だった？

詳細はこちら（英語）↓
The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?

これらによると、
受講者数において現在Coursera全てのコースの約２０％の割合を占める同校の複数のMOOCコース受講者対象の調査で、

"The student population tends to be young, well educated, and employed, with a majority from developed countries. "
（受講者は先進国に多く、その中でも比較的教育レベルが高く、雇用されていて比較的若い層に多い。）

"There are significantly more males than females taking MOOCs, especially in developing countries."
（とりわけ発展途上国において、男性の受講者の数が女性の数を上回っている。）

という結果がでたそうです。

まさに、MOOCならぬ
MOBC (Massive Open BOnline Courses: ボンボンのための大規模公開オンライン講座)　になっているわけです。

これは単なるアーリーアダプターが受講している現状を明らかにしただけなのでしょうか？放っておけば他の層にも広がって行くのでしょうか？

この現状を認識した上で考察をしてみました。


（２）Google参入でMOBCからの脱却をはかる

Googleが参入したことにより、世界中の誰もがMOOCを提供する側に立てるようになります。これによってオンライン教育は大学だけのものに留まらない広がり、例えば

-　企業が社内研修に用いたり
-　家庭教師が自らの指導に用いたり
-　中学生、高校生が生徒向けに講座を開講したり
-　ある人が、同じような趣味を持つ人々に向けて講座を開講したり、等々

を見せるでしょう。
このように、今まである意味で「伝統的な大学の教育」しかMOOC上で行われなかったものが
その型をはずれ、個人的な用途等様々な方向に広がっていきます。

つまり、様々な需要に応じて講座が開かれていくことが予想されるわけです。


需要に応じて講座が開かれれば、例えば

MOOCで途上国のために農業技術を教える講座を開講する農家が現れる

なんてことも考えられるのではないでしょうか。
アフリカ等途上国における農業技術発展の需要に伴って、途上国の気候や土壌に合う農作物の栽培方法を教えるような講座があれば、途上国からの受講者が増えるのではないでしょうか。

このように、学習者の需要も考慮した上で、MOOCを現在の教育システムと完全に置き換わるものとして捉えるのではなく、上手く生き伸びていける場所を見つけて行けるように議論することが大事だと思います。

最近はMOOCに関する調査結果が出てきているので、ますます面白くなってきたと感じています。今後も慎重に動きを追って行きたいと思います。

日本オープンオンライン教育推進協議会（JMOOC: Japan Massive Open Online Courses）が設立

１０月１１日、日本オープンオンライン教育推進協議会（JMOOC）という、

日本で初の、オープンエデュケーションを推進する大きな団体の設立記者会見が行われ、参加してきました。

記者会見後の記事です↓

大学のオンライン講座の無料化を目指す「JMOOC」発足--ドコモがシステム開発

そしてこちらがJMOOCのウェブサイトです↓

JMOOC

設立目的として、JMOOCのサイトには以下のようなことが書かれています。

”私どもは、国境をこえた新たなオープン教育が大学等における高等教育のあり方を変革する１つの駆動因になるとの認識にたち、日本の高等教育を国際的に孤立化させないとの観点から、米国型MOOCとは異なる日本発の、「産学での協働事業」を前提に日本全体の主要大学・企業の連合による事業運営を目指した組織として、日本オープンオンライン教育推進協議会（略称：JMOOC）を2013年10月11日に設立しました。”

米国のCoursera, Udacity, edX, それから英国のFutureLearnの動きを受け、いよいよ日本でも大きな団体の立ち上げが行われたか、という感触です。

しかし、安西祐一郎先生が副理事長になられるなど、運営メンバーの豪華さには大変驚きました。

産学が連携して立ち上げ及び運営をしていくというのが特徴として大きいと思うのですが、これが良い方向に転ぶか悪い方向に転ぶかは今後を見てみないとわかりません。

JMOOCは、５年で成果が出なければ組織を畳むとしており、３年目に成果の評価を行うらしいのですが、その一つの指標としてJMOOC事務局長の福原先生は、「受講者数１００万人」という具体的数字を挙げておられました。この数字は不可能ではないと。

個人的には、日本という国の状況下では受講者数の伸びはあまり期待できないのではという気がしますが、企業と連携しているので、その力を上手く借りて広報をするなど広く日本人に知られるような取り組みになれば未来は明るいかと思います。
ぜひとも、コース開講（２０１４年春から順次）直後に受講者数がぐんと伸び、その後少なくなっていくというようなことが起こらないように、提供コースの選定、質、受講者のニーズとのマッチング等をきちんと考慮したものが提供されることを願います。

しかし当然のことながら「受講者数」のみが指標となるべきではありません。受講者数が多くなることのみを目指すのではなく、講義の質、受講者の学び、コースのユニークさ等様々な要素で成果判断をすることが大事でしょう（運営メンバーの方々はわかっていらっしゃると思いますが）。
「受講者数の多さ」というのはMOOCの一要素であるので、JMOOCの目指す日本発のものとなるために、「受講者数」以外の要素も丁寧に分析し、独自のカタチを目指していって欲しいと思います。

しかしながら、あれこれ予測するよりも、受講者数を始めとした様々な「数値」がデータとして蓄積され可視化されることで、今後の日本及び世界におけるオープンエデュケーションの展望も見えてくると思うので、それを楽しみとしたいです。

関係者の方とお話しながら、日本発のこの取り組みを今後「良い」ものにしていけるように、私も微力ながら研究者として将来的に何らかの形で貢献出来たらなと思いました。