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I have now been a tutor for the Open University for longer than I would often care to admit.  During that time the 'how to's' of assessment and formative feedback have been an integral part of my academic life.   We were early on instructed in the wonders of the feedback 'sandwich' as a means to draw the student on from simply reading their mark -  first, positive comments and encouragement; followed  the real nitty-gritty of comment and critique about the way in which the brief has been attempted;  bookended by  a final, summative, positive comment.  This can seem somewhat artificial, and I have been told by some students that they don't read the framing comments because they know the real 'meat' is the critical comments.   Good assessment as a (well-prepared) ham sandwich.

Now I discover that I have also been working to a set of ideas about good assessment practice which I knew nothing about: Bales's (1950) interactional categories.  Bales  suggests  four main categories of interaction within feedback: Category A - positive reactions (shows agreement or solidarity); Category B -  attempted answers (gives suggestions, opinion, information); Category C - questions (asks for information, opinions, suggestions); and finally, Category D - negative reactions (shows disagreement, tension, antagonism.  The parallels between these and the 'sandwich' are clear to see.

Wheeler notes "evidence of systematic connections between different types of tutor comment and the level of attainment in assessment", by which I suppose she means the greater likelihood of Category A in high scoring assessments, and a higher occurrence of Categories B and C in lesser grades.  However, the OU definitely doesn't (supposedly) 'do' the Category D: 'negative' comments, which is surely only right, as demoralising weak(er) students is not a good tactic.  The probably need more positive comments, even if sometimes it is pretty difficult to do, apart from phrase a criticism in a positive tone.

We have been introduced to an electronic assessment monitor, 'OpenMentor', based upon Bales' Categories.  It would seem straight-forward to use, and to offer some possibilities.  However, I did have one big problem with the OpenMentor results.  This again is founded very much on my OU experience.  It  was the implication that there had been too much 'teaching' (B responses) in the higher scoring essays.  I wonder at the reason for this?  Is this because OU TMAs are a rather different entity to essays for conventional f2f/blended learning courses?  Does this suggest that OpenMentor is not, in its present incarnation, not really geared toward e-learning/distance learning, which tends to imply that more 'teaching' will be done via comments to the essays?  Does this mean that electronic assessment monitors such as Open Mentor might indeed not be  not discipline specific, as claimed - but might have to be more context specific?

Reference

Bales, R.F. (1950) 'A set of categories for the analysis of small group interaction', American Sociological Review, vol. 15, pp. 257-63.

I have managed to re-join the project , which has been going without me.   When I returned during  Week 16 I note that perhaps not as much as I expected had been completed, though I don't know why.  In these 2 weeks, however, the project development has really gathered pace, and we have managed to catch up. Other groups do seem to be further ahead.

As a result of advice from  Yishay, the block's overall 'controller',  it is decided that we need to shift our focus to something more defined -  a secondary school focus has  emerged. The various approaches and expertises of the group members has begun to show some dividends  - for instance in our proposals for storyboards.  There was a great variation between how to realise them, though we in the end we don't go for the  artistic (Ignacio), but for the more simply formatted but time-tested in terms of flexibility and readability  (Dave's suggestion).

Group dynamics in this project are good, and everybody is pulling their weight.  There are still glitches in following the given instructions, which are voluminous but at the same time not necessarily easy to follow -and all of us are suffering from how this bears down on the time constraints we all have.  One spends as much time working out what to do, as completing the task.  The whole project seems task led;  my focus feels it is all on the trees and not the woods, and am not getting the chance to read around at all which makes me feel I am not 'learning' much. We are all complaining about this.

Reflection - Blog post

Salas (2005) and Kay et al (2006)  characterise the 'Big 5' of teamwork as:

• 'Team leadership' - to direct and co-ordinate the team, to assess and develop team performance, to motivate team members, team building by fostering a positive atmosphere.
• Mutual performance monitoring - ability to develop mutual environment of the team environment, and develop appropriate strategies to monitor team performance.
• Back-up behaviour - ability to anticipate other team member's needs though accurate knowledge; can involve shifting workload between team members to achieve workload balance during project.
• Adaptibility - ability to adjust strategies based on information gathered from the environment; altering the team strategy in response to changing conditions.
• Team orientation - ability to take others' behaviour into account; belief in team over individual goals.

Of these the issue of 'team leadership' is surely a very important one, but not just from the point of view of leadership in directing the project, assigning tasks and assessing performance.  Instead the sign of a really successful team leader is how s/he motivates and encourages a sense of common purpose in the team.   To be a really successful team leader would seem to involve at least some element of performance monitoring. The term itself is unfortunate as it seem to stress sanctions for any individuals found not to be up to scratch'. However, the summary given by Kay (2005) seems to suggest this task should be an important part of developing both the team as a whole and individuals within that team, so that the overall project aim might be achieved more successfully.

The importance of team leadership as involving both direction and motivation of the team is something which is very much borne out by my personal experience - often as much by the lack of such qualities as by their presence. I am a school governor for a primary school, and it is very obvious that the success of this school is very much due to the head-teacher's abilities not just in directing but in establishing a positive atmosphere and motivating her staff.  My own workplace proves the value of successful team leadership qualities, if only because they are on the whole so totally lacking within those who are supposed to be 'team leaders'.

The 3 'co-ordinating mechanisms' are:

Shared mental models - 'An organizing knowledge structure of the relationships among the tasks the team is engaged in and how the team members will interact'

Mutual trust - shared belief that team members will fulfil their allotted tasks and guard the interests of their  whole team.

Closed-loop communication - exchange of information between team members 'irrespective of the medium.'

In terms of how such mechanisms might be useful within the context of MAODE there are some possible issues.   I am not quite sure I understand the idea of 'shared  mental models'. When first reading the idea it seemed obvious that this must apply. However,  what is meant by an 'organizing structure'  is something which individual team members, particularly when they are not well known to each other (as in case of  MAODE students) must be problematic, and individual competencies and interests must be actually quite diverse.  However, the idea of 'mutual trust should hopefully have been fostered by engagement with course forums earlier in the module (though it might have been somewhat interrupted by Block 2). Closed loop communication must be seen as important, though the issue of 'mediums' of communication when studying online, with students presumably widely dispersed in terms of physical location and whose other commitments mean it might make it difficult to communicate in a timely fashion.

The approach of 'Rhizomatic learning' involves 5 key 'things' (according to Cornier):

• The best teaching prepares people to deal with 'uncertainty'
• The (learning) community can be the curriculum (or can set the curriculum)
• The rhizome (an 'untidy' network of nodes with no discernible central point) is the model for 'learning for uncertainty' as this form grows and spreads via experimentation and can grow regardless of 'breakage'
• Rhizomatic learning (network without central leadership) works in the 'complex' domain (of learning)
• The need is to make students responsible for their own learning (and the learning of others).

Cornier presented a chart ('Cynefin Framework')  of the 'domains' of learning  - simple, complicated, complex and chaotic decision-making.

The 'simple' zone involves problems for which there are yes/no or right/wrong answers;  'the 'complicated' zone is described by Cornier as "good practice" in that it involves choice between a couple of options;  the 'complex' domain is "the  one where uncertainty lives"  in that there is no obvious 'right' answer and involves a process of search and respond via trial and error and at the same time keeping in mind a sense of the various possibilities.

In describing the relationship between these 'zones' of 'learning'  it is immediately apparent how they map onto earlier conceptions of learning,  more particularly social constructivist ideas of  learning as best achieved via a process of 'making it one's own'. What was perhaps even more striking in terms of links to non-technology oriented notions of learning is that what Cornier is surely recommending is 'learning how to learn'.    What is perhaps different is the introduction of the network as a means of gaining 'experience' - and the positioning of this learning process within the context of new  (Web 2.0) technology enabled networks.

As a lecturer in HE the most difficult aspect of Cormier's proposal is surely his advocacy of not 'testing' learners.    If only this was even conceivable in formal education.  This is surely profoundly incompatible with the whole idea of Learning Outcomes, league tables etc etc.   Even in the wider world  of MOOCs and Open Learning it would surely run counter to the  aims and ambitions of all those institutions and VCs who are enthusiastically embracing xMOOCs.

Comparing MOOCs

Coursera

Looking at the public face of courses, what is immediately striking is how  course offerings are pretty much what one would expect of a conventional university prospectus for f2f teaching,  with overall course outline divided into a (numbered) sequence of lectures/topics, delivered in  online (video) lectures by a named lecturer.  The prospective student signs up for the course, which presumably starts at a nominated date and continues for the specified period.   Completion of the course is marked by a 'Certificate of Accomplishment',  though it is not indicated in the initial publicity how this 'accomplishment' is measured -   one would presume that it is most likely measured by the fact  that the student has stayed the course until the end, and has applied for their certificate.  This model would seem to concur to the more recent Wikipedia definition of MOOCs (Daniel, 2012), offering university style lectures but without the kind of accreditation accorded to paying students.

The underlying pedagogy can be linked to Sfard's (1998) 'acquisition' metaphor - the acquisition of bundles of content - or as following behaviourist models of pedagogy. Alongside the video teaching materials, some courses require students to acquire recommended texts, and  there is sometimes mention of assessment via  quizzes or written assignments, but when this occurs there is no clear indication as to if or how feedback might be provided,  and there is no mention of student interaction with their peers.   There is generally no mention of use of new technologies such as blogs or Web 2.0 tools such as twitter to facilitate the student learning experience.  This would seem to bear out what Daniel describes as an  xMOOC, which 'opens' out university courses to an 'open' market, but does little to 'open' out the students' minds as to 'how to' learn (more particularly if one views learning in social constructivist terms as 'learning to learn' is the most 'deep' form of learning).

DS6

Although hosted by a specified institution, and running alongside their f2f courses, the opening statement "an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year ... you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need" gives some indication of ways in which the MOOC version of  DS6 differs from the Coursera model.   What is also immediately apparent is the high level of Web 2.0 technologies required  -  students are expected (need) to have social media accounts on Twitter, flickr, Google, SoundCloud,  to have a  blog,  to be able to upload content on to sites such as YouTube.    Web 2.0 media  - twitter and an web page ('Do Daily Creates') are seeming the main means used to notify students as to the latest task which they are required to undertake, and then post online, for the course.  Together the 'Do Daily Creates'  and the student uploads appears to be  the  main record of the course's progress.

"ds106 is many things, a course and a community. It is ongoing all the time" . Pedagogically DS6 would seem to attempt to depend upon a connectivist model and networking model  i.e. the educator has the role of facilitator only,  while the main learning takes place via "the active engagement of people with resources in communication with others" (Kop, 2011, p 20) -   seemingly more akin to what Daniel (2012) has characterised as cMOOCs.  In contrast to the course offerings at Coursera, a strong element of peer sociability is one of the things which first strikes one when looking at the DS6 home page - it's everywhere. This course would appear to have a number of characteristics noted by Daniel (2012) are linked to the earlier definition of a MOOC as "a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse" -  students are  required to post their own responses to the given tasks, and asked to respond to the work of their peers. Participation is presented as being on two main levels, which require a differing kind of posting of content. An intriguing element is that students can 'choose' their assignment tasks from a repository, and which then need to be set up to be aggregated (what is not made clear in the introductory materials is how these might be 'graded' or given feedback).

Some Conclusions

A comparison of these 2 MOOC models would seem to point to (as surely it was intended to) how great a schism there is within the whole ambit of MOOCs.   The Coursera model (xMOOC) surely reinforces the view that "these elite universities continue to treat xMOOCs as a philanthropic form of continuing education" (Bates, 2012, qtd.  Daniel, 2012). Students signing up for such courses will surely add to their body of knowledge in terms of content, but what  else they will get out of them is more open to question. However, the  one thing conventional f2f continuing education has which such courses don't obviously have is a strong element of peer sociability and 'presence'. It's not surprising that Coursera MOOCs have a high drop out rate.   However, the cMOOC format represented by DS6 is surely not without its own problems.   Despite the claim that the student can "join whenever you like .. and leave whenever you like" that this isn't really the experience that students have (or perhaps want to have), nor is it possible to see from a brief exploratory look quite how many students do indeed get or give feedback to their peers.  Also, the level of technical expertise which students would seem to have to have might well unsettle prospective students (presumably students studying f2f would have easier access to technical support).  The only students who would get most out of this course would be self-motivated high achievers - this is hardly the course for 'everybody' out there.

I have also come across an interesting comparison of 2 (ostensibly similar) MOOCs which seem to fit the x and c categories. See http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-tale-of-two-moocs-coursera-divided-by-pedagogy/

References

Daniel, J. (2012) 'Making sense of MOOCs: musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility', Journal of Interactive Media in Education, no. 18 [online]. Available at http://jime.open.ac.uk/ jime/ article/ view/ 2012-18 (Accessed 13 April 2013).

Kop, R. (2011) 'The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: learning experiences during a massive open online course', International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol. 12, no. 3 [online], http://www.irrodl.org/ index.php/ irrodl/ article/ view/ 882 (accessed 13 April 2013).

This post is in response to H817/Open Learn 3.4 - Acivity 10 (Applying Sustainability Models:

• Consider the following:

• 1. Was the sustainability model for each OER initiative apparent?
  2. Did Wiley's models cover all approaches or did you think a different model was operating for one or more of them?
• You can share these reflections in either the forum or in your blog.

Wiley defines 3 main sustainability models for OER, each characterised by markedly different levels of  institutional involvement,  centralisation,  control and  (paid for) staff involvement.

• MIT model - this is the most centralised, structured and control-oriented form of OER. The goal of MIT OCW is to publish each of the university's courses in OCW format. The project is very large-scale and ambitious. It involves the employment of a team of staff, and involves a large annual budget, and these staff undertake all the technical support needed to place the courses in the OCW format. Costs are high, but sustainability is ensured by attracting foundation and private donor support.
• The USU model - the aim of this model is (Wiley p 8) to 'publish as many of the courses in the USU course catalogue as possible', but does so in a less formally structured manner than MIT. This OCW format provides some technical support e.g. identifies 3^rd party owned content in any contributions to replace with USU owned content. To do the work of placing courses in the project this there is a small team of project employees but also use of student volunteers. Generally the project is medium-sized in scale and relatively cheap to run, although it has been fairly successful in obtaining support from foundations.
• The Rice Model - the intention 'enable the collaborative development of educational modules and course by authors from around the world' (Wiley, 2007, p 9). This OCW model is fully decentralised - courses do not come from only the host university but can come from around the world. There is no central controlling body - the site is (typically) self-organising; no technical support is provided to the course authors. Effectively this model is 'free' as the costs of course development lie with those uploading their courses onto the site concerned.

What is the relationship between these 3 (ideal-typical/polarised) models of sustainability and 4 specific examples of Open Education initiatives?

• OpenLearn - this seemed to be the one closest to the MIT model, in that it had the backing of a large institution, and would seem to use a dedicated team to write and support the OCW modules which are offered.

• Coursera ) These 2 OCW seemed to be more
• Jorum      ) representative of Wiley's USU model - e.g. Coursera is hosted by the University of Geneva -  but with some important differences. Neither featured content which was only provided by the one institution (though it would seem the founding institution for the latter was Stanford). Both would seem to have some kind of technical team (and support) to enable the provision of resources on their sites. JORUM is sustained by several UK institutions and official quangos e.g. JISC. Coursera's sustainability model would seem to involve offering additional fee-paying courses.

• Change MOOC - this would seem to be the closest to Wiley's Rice model.  There is no support team and no central control over resources which are uploaded by a range of academics.

References

David Wiley (2007) 'On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, OECD [online]. Available from www.oecd.org/edu/oer

The 3 articles I have read from the OER reading list were differentiated in date, but included 2 (Hatakka, 2009)  and (Wilson and McAndrew , 2009) as being among the most recent on the list.  The third article read in detail was  Atkins, Seely-Brown and Hammond (2007).

All  3 articles included a definition of the notion of OER:  to provide free access to educational materials, and sharing resources, and 'creating new knowledge rather than reinventing the same resource a number of times in different places' (Atkins,Wilson & McAndrew, 2009).  The Atkins et al report was more general in scope, although commissioned by one of the earlier supporters of OER (Hewlett Foundation) and aimed to describe the development of OER to date, to note the 'major remaining challenges' and to identify the key 'enablers' in the (near) future.  Wilson and McAndrew focussed upon one particular learning environment - 'OpenLearn' as a case study of how educators' use of OER might be improved, and in particular to examine the 'gap' between the open content resources available and the possible 're-purposing of such resources by educators.  Hatakka's study focuses upon the issue of why educators in developing countries were not making use of OERs.

Between the 3 articles it was quite striking that they did not necessarily identify the same issues as being (the most) important.   The 3 issues which I have identified as (potentially) significant are:

• Relevance - content was the original focus of much of the early attempts to foster 'open content', with the underlying presumption that such content was pedagogically 'neutral'. More recent research focuses upon the 'content + context' as being a fundamentally pairing - open content created for one context is likely to be either inappropriate or not usable in another context, whether it is another country, another educational system or level, or another language context.
• Awareness, access and digital literacy - it is difficult for both educators and students alike to know where to find suitable 'open source' resources (whether in terms of course/level appropriateness or 'quality' of the content) from the wealth of sources available on the internet at any one time, or perhaps even to know about the existence of some 'open source' sites which could be accessed.
• Intellectual property issues - institutional use of materials is generally within the bounds of the university community (or VLE) and so covered by institutional licences, but such permissions would not usually cover open access. Educators might be (are?) reluctant to create materials which would run into copyright problems, and/or would be users might be anxious about how to download materials and re-use them legally. If the aim of OER is to enable a by-passing of the expense of developing new courses from scratch by re-purposing learning materials this must be a key issue.

If  intellectual property issues is taken as an example, then there are a few ways in which this is being addressed.  A Creative Commons Search provides a gateway to  services provided by organisations under this licence (though not necessarily only such institutions), while in the UK further and higher education institutions current share 'open' learning and teaching resources via Jorum, and  some individual universities such as Nottingham host open source repositories (Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory)  which will help educators to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.   On an individual level the educator can  access those online services which provide access to Web 2.0 open educational resources e.g.  Flickr (images), YouTube (video), Scribd (the written word) and iTunes U (educational materials).

References

Atkins, D.E., Seely-Brown, J. and Hammond, A.L. (2007) A Review of the Open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges and new opportunities. Report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Available from www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/Hewlett_OER_report.pdf (Accessed  30 March 2013)

Hatakka, M. (2009) Build it and they will come? - Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries. In The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries (2009), Vol. 37, No. 5, pp 1-16.  Available from www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/545/279 (Accessed on 30 March 2013)

JISC (2013) A Guide to Open Educational Resources [online]. Available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2013/Openeducationalresources.aspx (Accessed on 1 April 2013)

Wilson, T. and McAndrew, P. (2009) Evaluating how Higher Education Institutions world-wide plan to use and adapt Open Educational Resources. In International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2009), 9-11 March, Valencia, Spain.  Available from http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/mew3.html#group_2009 (Accessed on 30 March 2013)