Is Academia worth paying for?

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Academia

I have uploaded a couple a papers to Academia and received the following message:

Using the free version of this site it tells you how many cited papers mention my name (assuming there is only one Chris Rowell) but it looks like you have to pay a subscription to get more information. I was wondering if anyone out there uses the pay for subsciption and is it worth it?

The benefits of Open Access publishing

Last July I finished editing and published a book called ‘Social Media in Higher Education’ – it was published by Open Book Publishing (OBP). Social Media is a ‘hot’ topic at the moment and there is plenty of discussion and research happening in this field so I was fairly confident there would be a readership for it in colleges and universities, both here in UK and around the world. I deliberately chose an open access publisher becasue I knew that they would make a free version of the book available to those who wanted it. OBP do a free PDF and HTML version of the book and make avaible via their website, Google Books and OAPEN (who make it available to most academic libraries). They also sell a paperback and hardback version of the book.

As you can see from the stats below its sold 14 copies of the hardback and 39 of the paperback in the the last five months, which has hopefully generated a little bit of income for the publishers. It been interesting to the the stats for the free download increasing over the the last few months. Online readership totals 2421 and total ebook downloads amount to 1167! These figures easily surpassed my expectations and really do show the benifits of open access publishing!

The other thing that did surprised me was the global readership of the book. As the book is written in english, the english speaking coutries have viewed the book the most but  there has been a very wide readership across several different continents:

Day 2 – Open Education Global conference 2019 #OEGlobal19

Getting across Milan is very easy on public transport. It only took me 30 mins to get from Navigli in the south of the city to Bovisa train station in the north. Luckily most of the journey was under cover so I managed to avoid getting soaked by the rain! Day 2 started with opening address from Chrissy Nerantzi and Rosa Maiello and then there was a brief introduction to a new Math and Stats resources https://grasple.com/open. Next there was the opening keynote from Carassa Dadda on Advancing Science and Math Education Worldwide through OER: Lessons learned from PhET interactive simulations:  PhET website https://phet.colorado.edu/ gives a good overview of their work: “Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery” The aim is to make STEM learning more interactive and interesting.

The first presentation I went to was ‘What is Open Education? Part 1: Are MOOCs Open Educational Resources?’ (Christian M. Stracke) http://opening-up.education/ First gave a definition of OERs, then looked at OER typologies and frameworks (SAMR, ICAP,7Cs), then he looked at definitions of Massive, Online, Open Courses (MOOCs) – MOOCs are growing with 81m students 800+ universities. MOOCs and quality: drop out rates over 90% but they could still be considered successful because students just go and get what they want from the course straight away and do not return. A quality reference framework has been developed MOOC-quality.eu. What is quality open education? Quality cannot be defined except for a specific location and specific aims and objectives of the course. Some conclusions – the reality is complex, MOOCS, from a resources point of view, are not always OERs whilst from a learning innovation perspective they can be and often are more than a MOOC.

After that I went to a short session on Open Education Resources for students by students: challenges and implications. The aim of this research project was to investigate the use of transmedia skills by current students at Manchester Metropolitan University. Some interesting research is taking place – students are watching videos, especially Instagram vloggers. Students were asked to do a mock presentation and then they get feedback from the tutor. Then the students summarise the presentation and create a short video using Creative Commons licences for the images. The first challenge is to understand the digital literacy skills of the student, like recording the screen. Secondly, to create participatory learning environments. Thirdly, to embed this into other modules on the course. Future plans are to expand the number of students creating these videos. Finally the presenter summed up the project with the following sentence: ‘It’s a lot of work but the students are learning more’!

After lunch I went to check out the Poster presentations. Here are two of the posters:

 

I especially like the poster entitled ‘Sharing the end of the World’ – this is a course at the University of Massachusetts where the tutor asked their students to create a podcast based on end of the world scenarios.  Here is the link to the students podcasts; finalexamination.podbean.com sound interesting!

After the poster diplays I headed to the action lab on Decentralising education using Bockchain was led by Alexander Mikroyannidis from the Open University. This is ‘hot’ topic at the moment so it led to a lively discussion. We were asked to develop personas and describe how blockchain technology could affect these  personas so the discussion focused around the potential for developing long term records of qualifications, skills and experience that would be useful for employers, students and universities. Alexander is working on a prototype blockchain with several universities at the moment – it will be interesting to see the results of this experimentation into the the prototype version whwn they are revealed.

I next went to Martin Dougiamas’ talk on ‘Building an open education technology platform for the next 100 years’. He started with the values of Moodle and how to make it most efficient as a learning platform (using things like plugins), also he descibed the development of MoodleNet – a platform for Moodle developers and educators.  moodle.com/moodlenet Finally, he outlined the Moodle Education Certification Programe – which are 22 courses that teach skills in Moodle.

He argues that we are now living in a complex and dangerous world with lots of scary things happening, Shrinking world, More data (real and fake), More AI, More corporate influences over news, crazier government behaviour, Issues too complex for anyone to understand, 8-10 billion people struggling to make sense of the world. These are masive global issues that humanity has to resolve or we are going to face a desperate future. For Martin, one solution to these problems is a high quality education:

He unpacked some of these issues in the short period of time that he had but it was good to see he did not start explicitly with the technology. The concepts he outlined in the slide above are civic values that will require new ways of doing things – and maybe that’s what universities should be trying to do! The last part of his talk quickly moved on to the Open EdTech Guiding Principles as a way forward to building the future online learning environment and his last slide should the different ways to keep in touch with these developments:

The final Keynote presentation of the day was given by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams entitled ‘The Warp & Weft of Open Education & Social Justice’. Cheryl used the metaphor of the Warp and Weft to understand the relationship between open Ed and social justice in which Warp threads keep the structure and Weft threads make the pattern. The two interrelated to create the Weave like the traditional Shweshwe cloth (the African denim). This was brought by the European settlers to South Africa.

Using Nancy Fraser’s definition of social justice Cheryl argued we need 1. economic equity; 2. cultural diversity.; 3. Politically who has the decision-making power? Open education is looking for these 3 things – these were encapsulated in the Cape Town Open Education declaration. Open education needs to ‘weave’ the economics, cultural and political elements of justice together in the resources and practices it produces:

 

So that was the end of my Day 2 – the Gala Conference Dinner is tonight for the lucky few so I’m off to explore a bit of my local neighbourhood Navigli tonight!

 

 

 

 

 

Day 1 – Open Education Global conference 2019 #OEGlobal19

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UCISA

I am lucky enough to be attending  the Open Education Global Conference 2019. After a short journey across Milan I arrived nice and early at the Politecnico di Milano:

     

I was generously given a bursary by UCISA to attend the conference and as the conference website says, the theme, Open Education for an Open Future, aims to “emphasize opportunities offered by Open Education as a means to empowerment and to increase accessibility and quality of educational opportunities for all”. The first thing that struck me was the number of students on campus! It was great to see the ‘hustle and bustle’ of students on campus for a change. Normally the conferences I attend are usually on a university campus but not usually during term time.

The first keynote was entitled: Students: Storytellers and Creators of Their Own Open Futures. It was great to see the conference open with the students voice – three students from three countries (USA, Germany and Italy) and different backgrounds , Computing, Literature and History. They talked about the many ‘small steps’ they were using to promote and share open education (OE) and the importance of having role models promoting OE – I especially like the quote one of the students used, “If students see themselves reflected in the materials they are using, they will care about the materials they are using. With open you can make that change.” – student and @canyons #OER leader Trudi Radtke. She also stressed the Importance of CC licence. The session also had time for a couple of questions including this one, What would be your one wish that could be granted from your university? And the overriding response from the them was ‘trust the students’…such a good point to end the session on.

Next I went to a short poster presentation on he Quality Reference Framework for the Qulaity of MOOCs:

I really enjoyed Rob Farrow and Markus Diemann’s  presentation on  ‘Philosophical thinking of openness: the ground below us, the stars above: Exploring philosophical approaches to Open education’. Markus started with some general statements about some contemporary issues like, Education is Broken, Can technology fix the problem?, What is the value system of education? What is the philosophy of education? The art of teaching Vs teaching as a duty. Next Rob introduced some philosophical provocations. Rob gave a brief historical background. Open education has several strands of social justice such as, improving access, decolonising the curriculum or increasing access. One of criticisms of open education projects and social justice is that we do not often recognise the tensions between the two. To tease out some of these tension Rob introduced 4 provoacations:

• Provocation 1. Does open education have a philosophy?
• Provocation 2 Is social justice a necessary element of open education
• Provocation 3. How can groups that were traditionally excluded from the conversation be included
• Provocation 4. How important is ethics for open education? Are people doing ethical work in education.

Given the limited time the answers from the audience were very brief but there was some consensus that open education had some common philosophical roots base on social justice, even if this was not know by practitioners when they were doing it

After the afternoon’s coffee break I went to a session  Decentralising education using Blockchain technology. Obviously Blockchain is a hot topic in HE at the moment and we really don’t know if this is going to be the future or not! But that doesn’t stop people spectulating about it. I suppose it depends whether or not it becomes a reliable and authentic place where students can build a portfolio of their qualifications and experience. I do remain a bit sceptical about this but it is definately an area to watch!

The final presentation was from Dublin City University who were granted University of of Santuary status in 2016. It was an inspiring presentiation based on interviews of asylum students describing the ‘dual world’ they were living in and trying to find out what they could do to help and empower these students – a really inspirational note to finish day one of the conference!

VLOG IT! 4 Interview with Tracey Celestin-Radix @LSBU

VLOG IT! 4 Interview with Tracey Celestin-Radix about her Skill for Learning videos:

Tracet Celestin-Radix – Learning developer at LSBU celestit@lsbu.ac.uk

*VLOG IT!* Projects and Dissertations Supervisor Resources @LSBU

VLOG IT! 3 – short interview with Simon and David and the great resource3 they created called ‘Projects and Dissertations Supervisor Resources’:

Dr. Simon Lambe – Learning developer at LSBU – lambes@lscu.ac.uk

Dr. David Dixon – Learning Developer at LSBU – dixond3@lsbu.ac.uk

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Anonymous marking in #Moodle

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#moodle

Video: Assessment in Moodle

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#moodle

Recording of today’s webinar:

And slides:

Video: Approaches to providing feedback in Moodle

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#moodle

Recording of today’s webinar (mainly about rubrics in Moodle):