Literacy Information

I'm attending the World Library and Information (IFLA) Conference, taking place in Cape Town, South Africa http://conference.ifla.org/ifla81 I'm attending a section meeting of IFLA's Information Literacy Section committee (of which I'm a member) and also presenting a poster. This is the poster. The references are at http://tinyurl.com/qddrs33

Professor Shailey Minocha invited me to give a presenation at the Open University on 23 July. I have been a bit late uploading it to slideshare, but now this is it: Reflections on teaching and information behaviour in a Futurelearn MOOC. The first part has a further elaboration on my ideas about MOOC teaching, and the last part identifies information behaviour within the Play MOOC (that I taught on), and implications for information literacy teaching.

On Monday I gave a talk on MOOCs, Information Literacy and the role of the librarian at Edinburgh university on. The abstract for this was "Sheila Webber will start by briefly outlining some general characteristics of MOOCs and her own experience with them. She will go on to identify types of MOOC and the implications for MOOC pedagogy. As part of this discussion she will note some findings from an investigation into the value of learning analytics for MOOC educators (undertaken by Naomi Colhoun at Sheffield University in summer 2014). In the final part of her presentation she will reflect on the various roles that have been, or could be, adopted by librarians."

Dragan Gašević talked about Learning analytics and MOOCs: what we have learned so far as the next talk at the Futurelearn Academic Network meeting in Edinburgh livestreaming at http://t.co/1lkBk6SUh4. There was a lot in his talk, and this is just what I captured liveblogging.
He identified the challenge of giving personalised feedback to students and academics in massive courses. He noted that learners are not just using the main MOOC platform but their own environments (search, blogs etc.) and it is desirable to "harness the digital footprint when they are using these digital technologies". He felt that so far learning analytics (LA) has been focused on issues of attrition and performance.
He cited an article which had analysed mentions of MOOCs in the news (using the Factiva database) and identified that overall the trend is downwards, but some specific MOOC topics have grown. He also mentioned the recent article analysing various aspects of bids for MOOC research (e.g. topic, research approach) (the article is in this issue http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/viewFile/2040/3120) and went on to discuss further the types of research going on. He felt that a good deal was possibly superficial, looking at hits, page views etc. which are not cntextualised. I got quite overexcited when he cited Tom Wilson's article on information behaviour models. So I think he said that the IB field emphasised that you needed to look at context (and in my excitement stopped listening properly), and then went on to recommend using a model of self-regulated learning (and cited this article http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11528-014-0822-x) which meant using "products of learning" (e.g. critical reflections in blogs and comments). He felt we also needed to understand how students where judging their own learning, what standards they used.
Research needed to be carried out into the process nature or learning e.g. looking at sequences of actions, and also to attend to life-long and ubiquitous learner profiles. He felt that "visualizations of learner data can be harmful" to students e.g. if the students are looking at their position within the class (they may be misleading, demotivating etc.).
He stressed that "learning activities do not happen on a single platform", so there is a challenge collecting and aggregating data from various platforms. There are privacy and ethical issues, and the practical issues of accessing the data. He felt that there needed to be "more robust methods and data sharing approaches" and that many institutions did not have policies for sharing MOOC data (unless you do, obviously you can't really track learners through life).

Continuing liveblogging from the Edinburgh FLAN meeting, Andy Wright (University of Birminham) was talking about Good MOOC Bad MOOC 2. He started by giving a report from a conference he attended in Asia and how the discussion matched the MOOC success factors he had mentioned his previous talk to FLAN (see http://information-literacy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/good-mooc-bad-mooc-report-1-flansoton.html). He added “Reuse” to his list of factors that could be used to judge MOOC success. He talked about these factors in relation to his own institution. As regards Recruitment as well as straightforward student recruitment there are also “try before you buy”, “recommended reading” and “prerequisite” aspects (you could charge e.g. if you were requiring a certificate for the last option). In terms of Reuse he mentioned the Good Brain/Bad Brain MOOCs, where the MOOC content can be used to enhance on campus experience, to save academics’ time, develop academic skillsets etc. Also the MOOCs are being translated into Portuguese and republished by the Brazilian MOOC platform Veduca. He also gave an example at Sheffield Hallam University where MOOCs have been integrated into a holistic healthcare CPD offering. In terms of Revenue, he mentioned small private online courses (SPOCs) and CLOCs (closed online courses). Obviously these have to differentiate themselves from the free project, and revenue could come from project funding or per student/group and obviously closed online courses are not new (i.e. the existing online degree courses).
In terms of Research, he mentioned a patient outreach research paper on liver disease treatment he was coauthoring and the subject he was researching for his Masters dissertation, analysing the impact of diversity of MOOC learner communities on the achievement of learner goals.