We are having a day of professional development here at Otago Polytechnic today, and I’ve been asked to give a talk on assessment in open access and flexible learning courses at 2.40pm today NZ time (2.40am UTC) which is in about 30 minutes from now.
Although the talk is taking place in a classroom, I have set up a web conference room for purposes of recording, and opening up potential participation to who knows who! To that end I hope to demonstrate how a standard lecture can be recorded and made available for access both live and after the fact.
Admittedly Elluminate limits access to those who can install it their ends, but rest assured I will be taking an audio file out for backup and access later for those who can’t use Elluminate.
I plan to talk about our work in 2 courses:
I will reference the work of David Wiley, Temmu Leinonen, Steven Downes and George Seimens and their efforts to offer online open access courses.
I will explain how our two courses are run online, and the model we are developing for open access and eventual assessment. I hope to mention our plans to trial the flexible learning course as entirely free in access and assessment, and explain how and why we would do such a thing.
So if you find yourself available in 30 minutes, why not listen in on the webconference. I won’t be able to focus on any text chat while I explain these things, but I hope to get the explaining out of the way within 20 minutes, leaving another 20 for questions and comments.
Hope to see someone in there 🙂
Learn Online 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 6, 2009 at 2:59 pm
bronwyn hegarty
good to hear your talk Leigh. I am interested in how did your ideas went down with the group.
I still disagree with the 10% rule. I believe it is possible to get higher rates of participation online if good learning design is practised. In my talk yesterday, the pros and cons of assessing online discussions, which is going up on my blog soon, we talked about how this can be encouraged.
For example, in the Flexible Learning course in 2007, we had 19 people enrolled plus one informal enrolment. There were 15 in the group who posted material on their blogs and 10 of those interacted regularly with others in the class on their blogs. That is a 50% rate of participation, which came about because we designed the activities and assessment to encourage participation. Don’t you believe there are exceptions to your rule – hasn’t the low rate of participation come about because of lack of skilled facilitation and poor learning design?
February 6, 2009 at 6:00 pm
leighblackall
No I don’t think so Bronwyn. The rate of participation you cite in the flexible learning course is generous to say the least, and the “designed” interactions you talk about are not conducive to wider online communities when we have people from many levels of skill and understanding participating. A better course to measure would be the recent Connectivism course. What was the rate of participation there you think? Up until now our flexible learning course has had the benefit of a captive group, required to do the course so as to meet a job description, and the interactions resulting from assessment requirements. We are preparing to head out into the wider Internet, and try and attract a wider range of people with different motivations, and it is in that context where the 10% rule applies most of all.. In fact, it is more like a 1% rule if wikipedia research is anything to go by. In the context that you are most used to, I still think the 10% rule applies if you take away any extrinsic motivation and look solely at self efficacy. Of course, from time to time there are exceptions, but over all, my personal experience from earliest school memories, through university, my own teaching in highschools, prisons and online, is that 10% participation rates is a good number to set your expectations at. I don’t think I am an unskilled facilitator, nor am I expert.. just average – like most people.
February 9, 2009 at 11:49 am
Michael Coghlan
Thanks Leigh – good to hear the rationales behind what you’re doing. I agree with Bronwyn on the 10% rule though. In a well facilitated course effective participation is 50% plus. Is good facilitation a factor in extrinsic motivation? Unfacilitated, unpaid voluntary environments are an entirely different matter where a very few do most of the contributing.
Still, your basic premises for pursuing an open access model seem sound to me, not to mention the basic altruism of it all! Especially in a land where education is so well subsidised.
March 21, 2009 at 1:21 am
vt
It is difficult to come up with a good rule of thumb. Defining “participate” is an issue. Certainly, in the FOC08 and CCK08 “courses” the actual active posters (measurable) were in the 3-5% range. However, in the broader context of a social learning network, more than 50% (guestimate) derived some learning experience from their association with the blogs, wikis and groups. Lurkers are learners, too.