Credit: Photo by Thomas Hawk under an Attribution NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license
Image: People interacting together.

The other day Howard Rheingold asked me a question that made me stop and think:

@eingang Would you say Open University UK is the grandmother of today’s emerging p2p learning communities?
April 11, 2011 @17:20, Howard Rheingold.

The Open University (OU) started off in distance education, providing accredited university level courses in the United Kingdom starting in 1971¹. I didn’t join the OU until 2000 when they launched their first online course: T171, You, Your Computer, and The Net. Unlike earlier OU courses, this course required substantial online interaction between students and tutors. Even the assignments were submitted electronically. The whole course, however, was not completely online. It was more of a blended learning approach, as it featured high production quality printed booklets of the study materials, commercial books, and some face-to-face tutorials across the 9-month course, in addition to the forums and course website.

One thing it did attempt to do, and that is evident still in the design of many of today’s OU courses, is encourage students to form a peer learning community. At the time, it did this through FirstClass forums, not just by providing the previously isolated distance education students with forums they could use for communication, but by setting assignments that required students to engage in dialogue with one another. This is a beautiful example of Brown & Adler’s social view of learning (2008), where understanding is socially constructed by members of the group interacting with one another, to share and build upon their existing knowledge. Vygotsky and Dewey would have approved, as this fits in with a constructivist approach to learning, something that is also often very evident in OU courses.

Is a peer learning community the same as a peer-to-peer learning community? I am not so sure about that. However, an example of such a community that occurs to me is Livemocha, a language learning website. Livemocha capitalizes on social knowing by bringing together potential teachers (native speakers) with interested learners to facilitate learning practical, conversational language skills (Livemocha 2011). This also leverages social capital, an important component in maintaining social networks. I would say Livemocha is both a peer-to-peer learning community and a peer learning community, because it specifically seeks to make relationships between people as well as providing an overall, larger community sphere where legitimate peripheral participation (c.f. Lave & Wenger 1991) can occur.

Is the OU a peer-to-peer learning community? I think their “traditional” courses—whether online or offline—probably are not. While we are attempting to form communities, we’re not trying specifically to make them peer-to-peer, although that can occur as a result of people being brought together in a community around a course or a tutor group. To be honest, even after doing this bit of thinking, I’m not sure, so I thought I’d ask for input from other members of the OU community. What do you think? Is the OU the grandmother of peer-to-peer learning communities?

1: Although the OU was established in 1969, the first students weren’t enrolled until 1971 (The Open University n.d.).

References:

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0’ EDUCAUSE Review, 43 (1), [Online] Available from: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 (Accessed April 18, 2011).

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York, NY, United States, Cambridge University Press.

Livemocha (2011). Livemocha Language Learning Method, [online]. Available from: http://www.livemocha.com/language-learning-method (Accessed April 18, 2011).

The Open University (n.d.). History of the OU, [online]. Available from: http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/main/the-ou-explained/history-the-ou (Accessed April 18, 2011).

Image: The Open Source Initiative’s Open Source logo.

One of my jobs at The Open University is chairing TT381, the course on Open Source philosophies and PHP development.  T381 is the fifth of the Web Apps Development (WAD) courses.  I’ve been involved with the presentation and development of the course since its launch.

Although TT381 doesn’t start again until February, I’m forced to remember that the brilliant Keith Evetts has resigned as the Student Café moderator.  I need to make some recommendations for a replacement.  I’m therefore soliciting expressions of interest from former students for the paid position of Café moderator.  In theory, the Café moderator is responsible for overseeing the social forum, which means making the atmosphere fun and inviting.  He or she should also work together with the course team to deal with any issues that are raised in the Café.   Keith Evetts, of course, went far beyond this.  He also actively participated in all of the course forums and ran a series of optional coding exercises where you can never have too many parrots.  He’s set the bar high!

If you’re interested in being considered for the job, please send me an e-mail (M.A.Hoyle AT open -DOT- ac -DOT- uk) with no more than 250 words explaining why you’d like to do it and why you think you’d be good for the job.   As I need to get this sorted soon, please send me the e-mail on or before December 10th.  I’ve been told the fee is £250.  I’m going to claim the prestige and fun is priceless.  (-:

After December 10th, I will consider the expressions of interest that have been received.  Based on what you have written and whatever I happen to remember about you, I will make up an ordered shortlist of people I will be recommending.   My course administrator will then contact people in that order to formally offer them the position.  There is only one job, alas.  I will post an update here and in the Web Apps Survivors forum on FirstClass (if still available) about the shortlist.

I will also take, in comments here as well as in the Web Apps Survivors forum, any recommendations you have for other people who you think would be good as the Café moderator for TT381.

Jo Iacovides  distributed an e-mail containing a list of contact details and descriptions from all of the people who expressed an interest.  I didn’t see it before I arrived in Milton Keynes, but I’m surprised at some of the people on it.  Ian Martin, from the T320 course team and the TT380 chair, is here across from me.  Several people from my Twitter stream, like Doug Clow, are here.  Some people I see on the PlanetOU blogs, like Ray Corrigan and Colin Chambers, are also here.  Not all of the 36 people who expressed an interest are here.  There are 24 people here.  There’s a disparate number of women present.  The two organizers are female and then there are three other women physically present, plus Rita Tingle via Elluminate.  That’s not very many!

Quite a number of people are interested in motivation and engagement.  Some people, like Jo and the guy next me (who is it again?), are interested in methodology.  The guy next me is particularly interested in assessing learning in games and the methodology for that.

There will be a wiki for the people in this group.  One of the first things they want to create a page for is an inventory of where and what games are used at The Open University.  One of the problems at the OU is that it’s so compartmentalized.  There are all kinds of neat people and projects, but it’s so difficult to find out about them, so one of the goals is to introduce us all and harvest our shared knowledge, whether that’s for “blue skies” research or applied use.

What do I want?  I’m very firmly embedded in an the OU’s distance education context.  My love of teaching is one of the three pillars in my life, along with building communities, and playing games.  It’s not just about World of Warcraft, but about the game theory and metaphorical aspects that both motivate and encourage people to persist.  As Tony Nixon mentioned, there’s a lot of boring stuff in games, but players still persist.  Some people have called World of Warcraft “World of Workcraft”.  I think one of the reasons they persist is because of community and peer pressure.  So I’m also interested in the mechanisms in games that encourage and support them in forming their own communities of practice for learning and inquiry.  My end goal is to trans to transfer these successful (in gaming) methodologies into online pedagogies.  I want to encourage students to become more “Susans” than being satisfied with being “Roberts”, particularly in online courses, where it’s difficult to maintain motivation and persist when you, as a student, are basically alone.

This involves both qualitative and quantitative research.  I know my contexts, but some of the methodological bits—connective ethnography and analysis—I’d love to discuss.  Plus I just love hearing ideas and thinking about things.  And, if it involves playing and doing things along the way with real students, all the better!   I’m therefore keen to make connections and find like-minded people with whom to collaborate on those topics within the community in which I, however, tenuously, belong.

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Image: A recent guild meeting where Irana (left) was initiated into The One. As always, there was dancing, but things got a little “hot.”

Colleagues from the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Maths, Computing and Technology at The Open University (OU) are inviting other OU staff interested in gaming research to a meeting next week in Milton Keynes. Here’s part of the blurb from the DigiLab post describing the event:

On Thursday, 21st October, Jo Iacovides (IET) and Marian Petre (Computing) are hosting an informal discussion on gaming research, with the aim of getting people from the OU who are interested in the area to meet up. Whether it’s using games for learning, considering game design, using gaming as a medium for understanding strategy or interaction, or anything else game-related, it would be great to hear from you.

As I’m interested in motivation, learning, and communities of practice formation within World of Warcraft, this is right up my alley. I know Jo Iacovides, one of the organizers, is also interested in some similar topics, as we’ve corresponded previously, but I’m eager to make some other connections.  I doubt it will get as “heated” as some of my guild meetings, but it should be interesting.

PS: If anyone knows of cheap ways to get from Milton Keynes Central to The Open University, please let me know! I currently use the Raffles taxi service and it’s about £5.00 each way; the taxi fare is almost as much as my rail fare from London. Thanks.

1. 60% of MMORPGs players are in the 20-35 year-old demographic (Nick Yee in Escoriaza 2009).
2. In World of Warcraft specifically, 47% of players in 2005 were 26 years or older. (Yee 2008).
3. About 75% of new students to The Open University are 26 years or older (Jha 2010, p. 20).

When you consider that World of Warcraft had more than 11.5 million active subscribers by the end of 2008 (Blandeburgo 2009), that’s more than 5.4 million people in an age group very interesting for my work in higher education via distance education. In particular, remember that these 5.4 million people are often very compelled (sometimes even addicted) to play. What is it that motivates these people and what real-life tangible learning benefits are derived?

Those are questions that I intend to answer in the WoW Learning project, a study of learning in World of Warcraft. Quietly built earlier this month and located at the memorable WoWLearning.org, it will be a repository for data, posts, and papers about my Ph.D. research into the learning, motivation, and communities of practice formation demonstrated by World of Warcraft players, both in the game and on forums.

As the project will include ethnographic work in World of Warcraft as well as surveys, in the interests of transparency and to help foster credibility, postings are made using my World of Warcraft character name “Elsheindra (Michelle)” instead of my full real name or commonly used Internet nickname of “Eingang.”

References

• Blandeburgo, B. (2009) ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed March 30, 2010).
• Escoriaza, J.C.P. (2009) Second Skin. [MPEG 4 Film]. United States: Liberation Ent.
• Jha, J. (2010) ‘Harnessing Technology To Open Up Learning for All: Interview Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor, Open University, UK’, Global: The International Briefing, 2 (March 2010), pp:18-21. Also available from: http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/d118c039 (Accessed March 30, 2010).
• Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed February 21, 2010).

I know people are very curious about the results of my recent E-Mail in the Cloud: An Open University Survey. Time is a bit short for me, so I decided to write up this quick and dirty post outlining the key result. An analysis of the comments people left about why they made the choice they did will be covered in a later posting, as those comments proved to be extremely interesting.

In a more formal report, the order of detail presented would be different. I’ve started with the results first, as that’s likely to be of interest to most people, and then discussed the methodology, survey deployment, and motivation.

Table of Contents

• The Respondents
• Key Findings
• The Specifics
• Caveats
• Motivation
• Methodology
• Conclusions

The Respondents

533 people participated in the week-long survey. This is broken down visually in Figure 1. Of those:

• 71.1% declared themselves as students (379 people)
• 22.5% declared themselves as associate lecturers, academic conference moderators, or script markers (120 people)
• 3.4% declared themselves as permanent members of staff, either academic or support (18 people).
• 3.0% chose the “other” category (16 people).

Figure 1: Graph representing numbers and percentages of respondents, broken down by role

Of the 16 others, 7 were alumni. 3 others should probably have been in the AL category but politically considered themselves permanent members of staff. 3 were combinations of ALs/students, 1 was an AL/external contractor, 1 was a student but hoping to become an AL, and 1 claimed to belong to all three categories.

In this quick and dirty analysis, I have not assigned the “others” to appropriate existing categories, so their input is being omitted for the moment. I’ll leave that for a subsequent post.

Key Findings

1. Microsoft Live@edu is the preferred choice of very few people overall (11.63%)
2. A large number of people don’t know enough to make a choice between the two (36.21%)
3. An even larger number of all surveyed respondents (43.52%) would choose Google Apps Eduction Edition.
4. If a choice had to be made, Google Apps Education Edition was the most preferred by at least 40% of the respondents of a given role, with the exception of the 16 “Other” respondents.
5. If the “don’t care either way” respondents (46) are considered, Google Apps Education Edition would be the choice of 50.28% of all respondents and Microsoft Live@edu 20.26%.
6. If Microsoft Live@edu was chosen, it was by a student, far above any other respondent role (14.78% vs the next closest of 6.25%).

The Specifics

The following data table and graphic illustrates the specific choices of different respondents by role. If you’re examining Table 1 visually, bolded cells indicate that the majority of respondents in that row choose that option. For example, in the first row, which is Google Apps Education Edition, the cells for students, permanent staff, and response totals are all bolded, indicating those groups preferred Google Apps Education Edition over the other choices available.

Figure 2: Graph representing the preferences for a system by role.

Figure 2 shows a cylinder for each role in the survey. Each cylinder shows the percentage of respondents who chose Google Apps Education Edition, Microsoft Live@edu, don’t care either way, and don’t really know enough to make a choice with different colours. Google is red, Microsoft is blue, don’t know is yellow, and don’t care is green. While specific numbers aren’t shown on this graph, the total number of respondents in that category is indicated at the bottom, so you can either consult Table 1 for the number of respondents or do a quick calculation yourself.

Caveats

This was an unofficial survey that was designed and released on very short notice. Although I made a good effort to advertise it widely, the number of respondents is relatively low when compared with the Open University’s population of associate lecturers, permanent staff, and students.

While I specifically advertised in places where I knew Open University community members would see the information, I cannot guarantee that everyone who responded was associated with the Open University. I cannot see a reason why external people would participate, but I cannot preclude the possibility.

SurveyMonkey attempts to prevent the same person from completing the survey multiple times. However, that is based on the respondents’ IP addresses. Therefore, if a respondent changed location or has changing dynamically assigned IP addresses, it is possible they could have completed the survey more than once. This could have been avoided by collecting unique Open University identification information for each participant, but that would also have meant needing more stringent data handling and an increased reluctance to participate.

The rest of this post takes a step backwards and considers motivation, deployment, and survey design.

Motivation

According to David Wilson, director of strategic planning in LTS, a choice is being considered between Google Apps Education Edition and Microsoft Live@edu and should be made shortly (in Snowball 36 – November 2009). Students are definitely migrating. A decision is still being made about what to do with e-mail addresses for associate lecturers.

I thought it would be useful to survey interested parties about their preference if they had to choose between the two systems. I was especially interested in obtaining some indication of preference from students, who are guaranteed to be affected. The Business Steering Group, the group responsible for making the decision, will be meeting again soon and I will forward the findings of the survey to them for consideration.

Methodology

The survey itself was very simple, consisting of only three questions:

1. Which one of the following roles best describes your main role at the Open University? Your main role will be where you spend the majority of your time or where moving your existing FirstClass e-mail to the cloud will have the most impact.
2. Which cloud-based system would you prefer, if you had to choose one or the other? Choices are randomised.
3. I confirm that I am associated with the Open University as a student, associate lecturer, permanent staff, or in some other capacity.

The first question was intended to categorize the different respondents by their role at the university. It was recognized that some people have more than one role. They were asked to choose the one where the change would have the most impact. The role was then used to organize the results of the second question.

The second question is the heart of the survey. Respondents were give four choices:

• Google Apps Education Edition
• Microsoft Live@edu
• Don’t care either way
• Don’t really know enough to make a choice

The choices were randomized to avoid any suggestion of bias on the part of the survey giver.

There was also an opportunity to add some brief free-form comments on their choice. From comments in this section and comments received by e-mail, I know many people wanted the ability to say “Neither”. That was not a realistic choice given that one of the two systems will be adopted. That is also why it is worded as “if you had to choose…”

The third question was where the respondent agrees that they are associated with The Open University in some way. The survey is not very useful if it is completed by parties not affected by the outcome.

The survey was prefaced with some brief information about the motivation for the survey and how the survey results would be used. Respondents were also given two links from Google and two links from Microsoft on their respective products. Respondents were also given links to two articles from independent bloggers or education organizations reviewing the two products.

Respondents were assured that the survey was unofficial and no personal details, including computer IP addresses, were being recorded or stored with the survey. They were also assured that I would only be using the data for providing indicative preferences to the Open University and I had not sought or received permission from the Open University to conduct the survey. Contact details by e-mail or Twitter were included.

Survey Deployment

The survey questions were presented and answered electronically via the cloud-based SurveyMonkey poll service. The survey was open between Sunday, November 22nd, and Sunday, November 29th (23:59). Respondents were initially directed to the survey by one of three methods:

• A microblog entry on Twitter with a shortened URL leading to a blog post with a bit more background information on the survey and slightly expanded commentary on the survey than in the actual survey itself. I made several postings throughout the survey period, each time asking others to also pass the information on, which several people did.
• Postings in several FirstClass conferences consisting of a little background information about why I was doing the survey, how it would be used, and how to contact me. The posting included the URL for the a blog post as well as a direct link to the SurveyMonkey survey. The message asked readers to pass the message along to other interested parties, which resulted in it being posted to an unknown number of OUSA and course conferences. I personally made postings in the following FirstClass conferences:
  • MCT AL Discussion Forum
  • AL Common Room
  • Technology Cafe
  • Science Chat
  • Social sciences Cafe
  • R01 Arts Cafe
  • R03 Arts Cafe
  • OUSA Mac General
  • OUSA Open Access
  • OUSA Office Applications
  • OUSA Linux
  • OUSA London
  • OUSA Chat
  • OUSA Moderators
• A posting was made in the “Lounge” section of Platform, the Open University Community site. The posting was made the 25th of November and Platform claims “0 views”, but that seems to be an error as all threads have 0 views even when they have responses.

Conclusions

Even considering the various caveats in place, I think it is clear there is a strong preference for Google Apps Education Edition if people have to choose between one or the other. Examining the free-form comments, I know there is a belief from many people that e-mail should be kept in-house or that a choice of “none of the above” would have been preferred. Many people are concerned about keeping .open.ac.uk addresses for academic hardware and software purchases. Many people also expressed concern about security and data privacy issues with their e-mail being managed by either Google or Microsoft. I’ll examine these in more detail in a follow-up report.

Thank you to all those who took the time to respond and comment. I would also like to thank those people who reposted or re-tweeted the survey information. As promised, I will be passing this information along shortly to the Business Steering Group who is making the decision.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave a comment here, message me as @Eingang on Twitter, or e-mail me as mah383 on FirstClass server 2 (tutor.open.ac.uk).

[tweetthis]

Windows Live Mail mailbox in Redmond, WA

I joined the Open University (OU) as an Associate Lecturer (AL) back in May 2000 to teach the university’s T171: You, Your Computer and the Net course, the university’s first large-scale foray into online teaching. As one of hundreds of new ALs, I was thrown into the world of FirstClass, the university’s chosen platform for collaboration and discussion in its courses, and among its students and associate lecturers. If you haven’t already heard, the death knell for FirstClass has been sounded. I believe the transition away from FirstClass for courses is expected to be complete by October 2010. As part of that transition, our e-mail accounts need to go somewhere, but where?

Sample Google Mail Spam Folder

Both of the cloud offerings offer considerably more functionality than just e-mail. Google Mail’s been joined by Google Docs, instant messaging, and calendars. Microsoft’s HotMail has been combined with Outlook Live, a remote file locker, calendaring, instant messaging, and Microsoft Office workspace to share documents. If you’re not familiar with some of these systems, here are some resources:

• Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Mail About

• Microsoft Live@edu
• Microsoft Live@edu’s Outlook Live/Hotmail Live E-mail Service Features
• Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps” (March 2008)
• Google Apps for Education vs Microsoft’s Live@edu
  (3-part blog series): Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (Thanks, Lynn, for Part 3 pointer).

The survey is open to any Open University community member, whether staff, consultant, or student. The survey will run between November 22nd and November 29th. I’ve specifically asked in the survey about your role, because I recognise that different university community members will have different needs. The survey results, broken down by role, will be forwarded onto the senior decision-making committee. I can’t guarantee how much attention they’ll pay, but the more of us who participate, the stronger the impact our voice and preferences will have.

You may feel you don’t know enough to make a choice between the two systems on offer. That’s OK, too. There’s a choice in the survey to indicate that or even that you don’t care either way.

No personal details, not even your IP address, will be collected and stored with the survey. It’s completely anonymous. It’s also unofficial. I’m doing this because I think we should have some sort of say and I’m motivated to provide a mechanism, however imperfect, to provide at least an indication of our preferences as a community. Comments or questions can be directed to me on this blog entry or via @Eingang on Twitter.

You’ll find the survey at the short URL of http://tr.im/OUinCloud. I hope you’ll participate. Feel free to point people at this blog entry, re-tweet the survey or blog address, or otherwise let as many of your fellow students and OU associates know about the survey. We only have a week and more participation is better, so let’s make it count!

Thanks!
Michelle A. Hoyle,
Open University Associate Lecturer and postgraduate student

Shortcuts:

• The survey: http://tr.im/OUinCloud or http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=IztCuXuYgqMj_2bVFGct_2f8Qg_3d_3d if the tr.im URL isn’t working.
• This entry: http://tr.im/OUCloudBlog

Images:

• Windows Live Mailbox:
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/timheuer/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
• Google Mail Spam Folder: Michelle A. Hoyle

However, the music industry has been forced to change. The talent was still scarce, but production and distribution were now abundant. As we know, artists can even easily self-publish and promote, taking that power out of the record industry’s grasping hands. Educational resources are now experiencing the same sort of revolution. It’s suddenly easy for content developers to share their content; it’s the age of abundance.

Weller listed several requisites for the pedagogy of abundance:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Social-based
• Network is valuable
• Crowdsourcing

Looking at that list, it’s very heavily influenced by principles of the Open Source movement and, consequently, the Open Educational Resources movement. That movement was given a huge boost in terms of available content, quality of content, and certainly profile by MIT’s large-scale OpenCourseWare project.

One problem, however, with this model is that, while the content is free to consumers, it’s not free to the producers. In a November 10th Guardian article, author Harriet Swain states that it costs MIT between $10,000 and $15,000 to put material for each course online. She also mentions that Utah State University recently had to freeze its own project after failing to raise an addition $120,000 US/year needed to fund their project. MIT’s project is being paid for—at least partially—with donations and corporate sponsors. I suspect some of that cost is rights clearance for materials and converting courses developed prior to the project to the OpenCourseWare format. If so, the cost should go down as authors are encouraged to make use of free materials and develop in a format appropriate for easy publication via OpenCourseWare. Still, it does demonstrate that producing and disseminating high-quality free content is in itself not necessarily free.

Nevertheless, several institutions, including the Open University, are still committed to producing this content, not to mention countless individuals. Free content that we can remix. reuse, and repurpose fits beautifully and naturally into several of Weller’s suggested models, like resource-based learning and problem-based learning. However, it can also fit into constructivism, communities of practice, and connectivism too, where we’re actively building a shared understanding of materials through exploration and collaboration.

With the glut of content available, it’s easy to drown. Backchannel discussion talked about the need for information filters and crap detection (see Howard Rheingold’s excellent article). With too much choice comes uncertainty and second-guessing, something Barry Schwartz has done some research on. Shared exploration and collaboration works well with the “guide on the side” metaphor, where you have subject expert mentors who help create “paths” through the sea of content, providing an intelligent information filter.

George Siemens mentioned that this was similar to Darken’s (1996) “wayfinder” metaphor from gaming, an apt linkage. This skill is necessary for both learners and mentors, because we’re both in a transition period between scarcity and abundance. The information filtering issue probably won’t be as pronounced or maybe even worth mentioning by subsequent generations. Does that render the pedagogy of abundance a meaningless discussion or concept? I don’t think so, because we’re still talking about ways to promote participatory learning and encourage connected constructivism, regardless of the strategies people use to locate the content needed to do that.

Weller’s presentation ends with three conclusions:

1. There’s nothing in a pedagogy of abundance.
2. There are sufficient theories already; they just need to be recast.
3. None of the existing theories adequately captures the technology and behaviour, so a new theory is required.

Initially, I tended towards two, although I commented during the presentation that many of the suggested pedagogies can be mixed and matched. If you’re mixing and matching, you could end up creating something new, which could potentially make it number three.

Resources and References:

• Darken, R.P. & Sibert, J.L. (1996) ‘Wayfinding Strategies and Behaviors in Large Virtual Worlds’, presented at Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Common Ground, Vancouver, Canada, April 13-18, ACM. pp:142-149.
• Rheingold, H. (2009) ‘Crap Detection 101’, SFGate, blog entry posted June 30, 2009. Accessed November 17, 2009.
• Schwartz, B. (2004) ‘The Tyranny of Choice’, Scientific American, April 2004.
• Schwartz, B (2006) A Paradox of Choice – TED talk by Barry Schwartz
• Swain, H. (2009) ‘Any Student, Any Subject, Anywhere’, The Guardian, News -> Education -> Access to University. Accessed November 10, 2009.
• Weller, M. (2009) A Pedagogy of Abundance slides at Slideshare (with audio track)

These are my slides for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the “Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning”. The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education. Each slide has been annotated based on my presentation preparation notes. A downloadable version is available.

Title Slide

Title slide for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the “Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning”. The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education.

E-Learning Challenges

I ran across this paper from Educause Quarterly by John Campbell and Diana Oblinger about the top ten challenges for teaching and learning for 2007. I guess they had to wait until 2007 was almost over before knowing what those challenges were because this didn’t appear until November.

I was particularly struck by issue number four: “Selecting Models and Strategies for E-Learning”. One of the key questions posed there was “What are the learners’ characteristics (educational preparation, desired outcomes, preferred delivery modality, technology, skills, services, and support needed?” This was intended for general e-learning, but I think it’s even more important to e-learning for the disabled.

Range of Disabilities

There’s a wide spectrum of disabilities that people might present with in
higher education, especially with e-learning.

Many people, when thinking about disabilities, probably think of the more
common, visible disabilities in the lower left-hand quadrant: sensory
disabilities, like hearing impairments, visual impairments — including
colour blindness — and speech impairments; or perhaps they think of
the various kinds of mobility impairments: quadriplegics or paraplegics.

I’d rather focus on the more unusual or “invisible” disabilities. For example,
I think we should include RSI — repetitive stress injury –
as that’s a mobility disability that’s affecting an increasing number
of people and presents issues for e-learning.

In the upper left-hand corner, I have the autistic spectrum, with
Aspergers, autism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
which I have myself. These bring with them their own requirements for
information presentation and processing.

Finally, in the right-hand quadrant, the various learning
disabilities, many of which may co-occur with disorders in the
autistic spectrum: dyslexia, dyscalculia — difficulty in learning or
understanding mathematics — dysgraphia–difficulty in the ability to write — and
dyspraxia, the partial loss of the ability to coordinate and perform certain
purposeful movements and gestures.

I have specifically omitted mental disorders like bipolar disorder and
depression, as they don’t affect the presentation or access to learning so
much.

Challenges (1)

So what are some of the challenges affecting the disabled in e-learning? One of them is the variety of interfaces and how accessible those interfaces are to
various disabilities.

At the top we have Plurk, a microblogging service like Twitter,
where you have 140 characters to explore what you’re doing now. Unlike
Twitter, Plurk is threaded (see the threaded example inset) and is
displayed on a timeline. The interface, though, is quirky and
difficult to use by non-disabled on portable devices, like the iPhone.
If you had a mobility problem, with all the fine clicking and
moving of the mouse to choose between different threads, Plurk would be
very difficult to use. Twitter, in comparison, is very linear, and accessible
to people on different devices and those using assistive software.

On the bottom is Seesmic’s interface. Seesmic is a video blogging or
a video conversation site.

Some of the interface issues can be overcome by better design. Unfortunately,
we don’t always have control over the design of materials used in e-learning.
I just read about a new adaptive interface system called Supple, presented by
Dan Weld et al. at this year’s AAAI convention in Chicago in July. If you’ve
ever used a Palm Pilot, you might recall that the first thing it asks you to do
is tap the screen in various corners, so it can calibrate how accurate you are
pointing on the screen with the stylus. Supple does something similar but
with user interfaces and then can rearrange the interface elements to accommodate
motor problems, for example. Dan Weld’s team indicated that one of potential
application areas for this was web pages and I know that Niall Sclater at the Open University is already interested in it for exactly that.

Challenges (2)

Closely related to different interfaces is the multiple methods of
content delivery possible in e-learning: slides, spreadsheets,
PDF documents, word processing documents, and audio-video
presentations. Each of which presents its own accessibility issues.

Some of them require special equipment, like book readers or
screen readers or mobility assist devices to aid in pointing, typing,
or clicking. Some of this equipment is very expensive, so there’s an
issue of financial accessibility as well.

Challenges (3)

Once media accessibility has been addressed, there are still the traditional
issues around content support. This is a challenge that all students
face.

Disabled students may also have a challenge in finding adequate support
for their specialized assistive software or equipment. At the Open
University, a student’s tutor is often their first port of call for problems,
so it’s not unreasonable to expect some ideas about how to solve common
technical issues or know where to point students for help.

Challenges (4)

More so than other students, disabled students are more likely to
suffer from emotional issues related to returning to study or
taking university courses via distance education. That might include
doing too much or too little, perfectionism (not that I know anything
about that!), not wanting to be a special case, confidence, and
self-image problems. The last three are particularly common.

Challenges (5)

A familiar problem to everyone in distance education is that of
students feeling isolated. This is a not-so-familiar problem for
undergraduate students at traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions
and very familiar for many disabled who may have spent a lifetime already
feeling “different” and left out.

The good news here is that a lot of the isolation can be overcome
with Learning 2.0, a topic I’ll return to later on in the presentation.

Modes of Delivery

E-learning modes of content delivery can be broken down into
three areas: Web 2.0, Web 1.0, and printed materials. Web 2.0 can be
thought of as the new, more interactive types of web site and
online activities: Plurk/Twitter, blogs and wikis, Second Life, the video
sites like Seesmic, YouTube, and Flickr. It can also include things
like podcasts, an area the Open University has recently joined in
partnership with iTunes U. These allow people to create content, often
collaboratively, and then easily share it with others who may then
modify it or comment on it.

Web 1.0 is typified by traditional, static web pages,
converted PowerPoint presentations, and PDF documents. The possibilities for
interactivity are very minimal. This is a very traditional and common way
of presenting material online and probably not about to be supplanted
completely by Web 2.0 applications in the near future.

And, as much as we’d like to claim we’re a paperless university, the
truth of the matter is we still have books and other printed materials.
Web-based content can be made accessible sometimes with screen readers. Even
with book readers, though, sometimes printed content is inaccessible. For example,
on TT281, our course text had commentary in inset blocks and code on the rest
of the page. Our blind student was unable to “read” the book satisfactory because
of the layout. We contacted the publisher but, because of when we were first
alerted to the problem, there was insufficient time to have something appropriate
made available.

I just read about two recent initiatives by JISC TechDis, the Publishers
Association, and the RNIB that might help in such situations. The first is
“Publisher Lookup UK” where participating publishers provide contact
addresses for having special arrangements of their materials made available.
The second initiative is a guide to obtaining textbooks in alternative forms,
providing advice on where to go, what to expect, and what questions to ask.

Long-Tail Learning

Wikis, blogs, and social networking sites can help form the backbone of
Learning 2.0, synonymous with long-tail learning. I first read about this
back in January this year in another Educause article called
“Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0“.
In this article, Brown et al. discuss how 80% of sales in a bookstore
come from 20% of the titles. That’s the fat part of the “tail.” Amazon,
Chapters, and Borders turned that around by offering a huge selection, so
large that the majority of their sales actually comes from the “long tail” of the
sales curve. In education, content delivery is the fat part of the “tail”
but the “long tail” comes from people’s interactions with learning and knowledge.

So in “long-tail learning”, Brown says that learning is a social activity
and that understanding is socially constructed. This is contrasted with
E-Learn 1.0, which was
Cartesian learning, where knowledge is substance. That is, teachers
impart “knowledge” to their students who somehow “learn it”. Learning is a
commodity to be boxed up and distributed.

Social networks are a strong, positive force here, especially for the disabled
as they’re not restricted from participating by their disabilities, unlike
possibly real-world social networking. We know that students benefit from
study groups, because they engage more with the material. Blogs, wikis, and
social networks offer a powerful opportunity for the disabled.

E-Learn 2.0 Opportunity

I think e-learning for the disabled isn’t so much a challenge as
an opportunity to provide a level playing field. However, that
opportunity will only be there if we remember certain things.
The first is to adhere to standards, like those
proposed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and WebAIM. Stay away from technologies that are accessibility unfriendly, like
Flash, or provide alternative access to the content if it’s core to the
learning experience.

It’s an opportunity if we focus on accessibility, both in terms of
access to the content and in terms of the content itself. I haven’t spoken a lot about web-based
accessibility as I teach courses here at the Open University and author
course content on it, discussed in my original application and in my CV, but
I will add the following comments about content: write
clearly and comprehensibly, and use white space appropriately; engage in sensible paragraph planning paragraphs for
those with attentional or focussing difficulties. Accessibility
isn’t just about the disabled. Paying attention to these details
benefits everyone.

Finally, it’s an opportunity if we remember our primary motivation:

Primary Motivation

Teach, yes, but also foster a willingness (and ability) to learn and to continue
to learn.

In conclusion, lifelong learning is compatible with long-tail learning. Social networks can go on long after the “course” ends. E-learning does have challenges for the disabled, but it’s also a
great opportunity to move forward by using E-Learn 2.0 and Web 2.0 in a
focussed, accessible way.

Downloadable Resources:
- A4 PDF Version of H810 Interview Talk on Challenges Affecting the Disabled in E-Learning (1.5 MB)

In previous years, the awards were only open to support staff and full-time central academic staff which is reflected in the headline for the article of “AL’s honoured at last.” Alas, while I am mentioned by name in the article, they don’t say very much about any of us. For example, about me. all they said is “Winnings [sic] ALs pictured are … TT280 and TT281 tutor Michelle Hoyle.” Yep, that’s it. We all had a few words in the article.

The cheque arrived in the most recent pay advice and I’m busy plotting what “personal” and “professional” self-development use I can put it to. I’ve started with a new pedometer and a new scale (waiting for the bank transfer to clear and that to be shipped still), and am trying to justify one of those new AirPort Express portable wireless stations with support for streaming to my stereo. I was also considering retroactively including the cost of my rather expensive Rosetta Stone language learning software for German; that’s definitely personal development.

Oh, the agony of deciding!