25 Years of Ed Tech

For this Between the Chapters episode, Laura chats with Joyce Seitzinger about all things badged connected to Chapter 22: Digital Badges. In reflecting back to 2015, we have much to say about microcredential, open badges, and what it means to get digital street cred based on a certificate, credential, course, or training. We share how we have been working to upskill with professional credentials as the world of work is changing, and how higher ed might consider what it means to embed badges, training, or certifications related to the skills needed for employment. Maybe badging and credentials offer ways for colleges and universities to have an ongoing, lifelong relationship with learners? Or perhaps we need more partnerships across sectors of work and education? 

• I Can See Clearly Now - Covered by the #edtechukestra
• The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU
• Academic Tribe
• The SAMR Model: A Powerful Model for Understanding Good Tech Integration
• Open Badges Australia and New Zealand (OBANZ) community; (not Obans)
• The Future of Jobs Report 2020 from the World Economic Forum
• 7 Things You Should Know About… Digital Badges
• Badges and Credentialing
• Micro-Credentials
• Digital, Verified and Less Open
• Closing the Skills Gap With Digital Badges
• Alternative Credentials: How Can Higher Education Organizations Leverage Open Badges?
• RMIT: Digital Short Courses & RMIT Creds
• Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD)
  • Getting Certified in Learning & Performance with the CPLP
• 2017 Digital Literacy Impact Study [REPORT]
• Open badges | Joyce Seitzinger | TEDxRosalindParkED
• The Future of Work: Technology and Robots and Digital Literacy by Laura Pasquini
• Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra
  • TLDR: Experimenting with Identities @ Work
• Stanford Open Loop University
• Shout out to Girl Guide Badges (#TBT)

Questions to ponder from this open/digital badge conversation:

• How can we collaborate and partner education and industry sectors for credentials?
• What would it look like if particular sectors helped train and credential with badges?
• What are the small pieces that you could break down or give recognition that X competency or skill be met (for a badge)?
• What are the opportunities and limitations, within your own system, of how far digital credentials can actually go? How can we make connections to these credentials?
• What are the systems you need to tap into or can you hook your current training/learning programs into that already offer credentials? 

Connect to Joyce’s work at RMIT Online and maybe she’ll badge you.  

Would you upskill if you could get a credential easily? How could open/digital badges offer credentials within your teaching/learning practice? Please share -- send us a message or tweet. Podcast episode art: X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Remix by philippe petitqueux.

Digital badges are a good example of how ed tech evolves when several other technologies, such as those that we have seen in this book, make the environment favourable for their implementation. Badges allow for a more fine-grained representation of skills and experience gained in formal education than a degree classification. In this, they are an extension of the desire of e-portfolios to surface skills and competencies that are useful to employers. Read by Deb Baff.

Read the chapter online or view the book references.

For Between the Chapters episode for Chapter #21 (2014), Laura is joined by Anne-Marie Scott and Dragan Gašević to talk about learning analytics (LA). This conversation outlines a definition of LA, in terms of higher education -- for practice, within products in ed tech, for online learning/teaching, and evidence-based research. There are so many interpretations as to what LA is, and we hope this episode unpacks the myths and misconceptions as to what metrics and data within learning and/or measurement science. For LA, it is important to talk about the use, ethics in data collection, and supporting learner agency talk about the use, ethics, and learner agency when examining learning, teaching, and design of both. Get your notebooks out for this master class in all things learning analytics!

• Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR)
  • What is Learning Analytics? (defined by SoLAR)
  • Learning Analytics in a Nutshell [VIDEO] by Clow, D. (2012). The learning analytics cycle: closing the loop effectively.
• The 11th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference - April 12-16, 2021
• What is Learning Analytics & How Can it Be Used?
• Center for Learning Analytics at Monash (CoLAM)
• Signals tells students how they’re doing even before the test (2009)
• Course signals at Purdue: using learning analytics to increase student success (Arnold & Pistilli, 2012)
• Pareto - open software foundation
• OnTask - personalized feedback for online learners with actionable advice
• Learning Analytics in Higher Education (Educause, 2016)
• A four-country cross-case analysis of academic staff expectations about learning analytics in higher education (Kollon et al., 2021)
• Socio-Technical Systems
• Learning analytics and educational data mining: towards communication and collaboration (Siemens & Baker, 2012)
• Learning Analytics papers by Dr. Leah P. MacFadyen
• Let’s not forget: Learning analytics are about learning (Gašević, Dawson, & Siemens, 2015)
• Self-regulated learning and learning analytics in online learning environments: a review of empirical research (Viberg, Khalil, & Baars, 2020)
• LTI series – Learning Analytics with Bart Rienties (2018)
• Reconsidering data in learning analytics: Opportunities for critical research using a documentation studies framework (Jones & McCoy, 2019)
• Driving Towards a Degree: The Evolution of Student Supports in Higher Ed (2019)
• ‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation (Gourlay, 2015) 
• What changes, and for whom? A study of the impact of learning analytics-based process feedback in a large course (Lim et al., 2021)
• Connecting the dots: An exploratory study on learning analytics adoption factors, experience, and priorities (Tsai, Kovanović, & Gašević, 2021)

Questions to reflect on from this chapter:

• What does learner success look like? What’s the measure of learner success? 
• What are students here for? And what are our higher ed institutions for?
• How can data be used as a form of feedback to develop towards their own goals?
• What are the core values you want learning analytics to promote? 

Connect to the episode guests:

• Anne-Marie: https://ammienoot.com/
• Dragan: https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/dragan-gasevic 

How are you connecting your teaching, learning, and design to effective data measurement? Are you thinking differently about learning analytics after listening to this conversation? Let us know -- send us a message or tweet. Podcast episode art: X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Remix by Terry Elliot.

Data, data, data. It’s the new oil and the new driver of capitalism, war, and politics, so inevitably its role in education would come to the fore. Interest in analytics is driven by the increased amount of time that students spend in online learning environments, particularly LMS and MOOC, but also the increased data available across a university, including library usage, attendance, demographic data, and so on. This chapter is read by Brenna Clarke Gray.

Read the chapter online or view the book references.

In this episode of @YearsEd Between the Chapters, Laura chats with Amanda Coolidge about open educational resources (OERs) and the open textbooks. Listen to this book club chat about Chapter 20 (2013): Open Textbooks as we talk about localization of OERs for all teaching and learning classrooms around the world. It’s more than just digital or a platform, there’s such a great ability to see how grassroots initiatives offer ways to provide open textbooks & OERs multiple formats that are not digital to empower educators and learners' ways to co-create knowledge. Listen in as we get to the root of why open textbooks matter: access for learning! P.s. We love the library.

• OpenStax
• Creative Commons
• SPARC
• Open Textbook Library via University of Minnesota
• Why Are Textbooks so Expensive? 
• Which Major Has the Most Expensive Textbooks?
• TESSA: Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Siyavula
• Open Up Resources
• Open Content David WIley
• Digital Open Textbooks for Development
• Open Educational Resources: Breaking the Lockbox on Education
• Why we fund open textbooks (and plan to do more)
• Open Textbooks? UGH. Robin DeRosa
• Are open textbooks the end game? Rajiv Jhangiani
• Open UBC
• Open UBC Snapshots: Textbook Displacements by Open Resources
• BCCampus Open Publishing
• UBC Library Open Textbooks | OER Grant Project
• BCcampus OpenEd
• H5P - open interactive content & materials 
• The H5P Open Kitchen & Pressbooks
• PressBooks - open publisher
• Project Management for Instructional Designers by Wiley et al.
• Learner Experiences with MOOCs and Open Online Learning by Veletsianos et al.

Pro-Tip: Meet instructors, faculty, and administrators where they are with their teaching and learning practice to build the relationship around open textbooks and OERs.

Questions for the community to ponder about open textbooks & access:

• Why are we creating those walls for education and textbooks?
• Where are the spaces and places for the commons in learning to come together?
• What are the pedagogical positives behind an open textbook?
• What does access mean to you, your institution, and how you are providing that access, when you think about learning resources?

Are you meeting your learners/educators where they are? What does access mean to you for teaching & learning? Tell us about it. Send us a message or tweet. Podcast episode art: X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Remix by Karyn Wisselink.

If MOOC were the glamorous side of open education, claiming all the headlines and sweeping predictions, then open textbooks were the practical, even dowdy, application. An extension of the OER movement, and particularly pertinent in the United States and Canada, open textbooks provided openly licensed versions of bespoke written textbooks, with the digital version being free and printed versions at low cost. Read by Rajiv Jhangiani.

Read the book chapter online & see the complete book reference list.

For this episode of @YearsEd Between the Chapters, Laura chats about almost everything related to the acronym MOOC: Massive Open Online Course with Sukaina Walji, Dave Cormier, and Rolin Moe. We dive into The Year of the MOOC (2012) and Chapter 19 of Martin’s book to share how we stumbled upon MOOCs in our work, research, teaching, and learning life. 

• What’s A MOOC?
• Dave Cormier’s Viral Sensation to Explain: What is a MOOC?
• Questions & Answers About MOOCs
• What Was the First MOOC? By Cathy Davidson
• MOOCs for the win! By George Siemens
• Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: MOOCs by Audrey Watters
• Change 11 MOOC
• Mediocre Middle - David Wiley
• allMOOCs.wordpress.com
• The CCK08 MOOC & About EC&I 831 MOOC with Alec Couros
• Do MOOCs contribute to student equity and social inclusion? A systematic review 2014–18 (Lambert, 2019)
• Perspectives from African MOOC takers: understanding transitions in and out of learning and work
• Deacon, A., Walji, S., Jawitz, J., Small, J., Jaffer, T. (2019) Seizing opportunities: MOOC takers making time for change. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL)
• Small, J., Deacon, A., Walji, S, Jaffer, T and Jawitz, J. (2019). Building capabilities: Using MOOCs to make transitions in work. Open Praxis, vol. 11 issue 4, October–December 2019, pp. 427–441. 
• Online Learning: More Than Just a MOOC by Laura Pasquini
• De-Icing the MOOC Research Conference by Jim Groom
• RIP: MOOC Research Site: http://www.moocresearch.com/ 
• Who Studies MOOCs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC Research and its Changes over Time (Veletsianos & Shepherdson, 2015)
• How Do Online Learners Overcome Challenges in MOOCs? 
• Ed Tech Talk (Community)
• The MOOC Model for Digital Practice (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010)
• Stanford University does a MOOC by George Siemens
• Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement (Cormier & Siemens, 2010)
• Community of Inquiry
• Comparing xMOOCs and cMOOCs: philosophy and practice by Tony Bates
• Rhizo14 –The MOOC that community built  (Cormier, 2014)
• Udacity, San Jose State University offer online classes for credit
• After Cheggification – A way forward (Part 1) by Dave Cormier
• The Chegg Situation is Worse Than You Think by Michael Fieldstein
• MOOCs and Online Education; a real difference
• 2016 – the year of MOOC hard questions by Martin Weller
• The cost of support by Martin Weller
• Remember the MOOCs? After Near-Death, They’re Booming via NYT

Questions for the listening community:

• What is student engagement and what is the value add for higher education?
• How do you sustain and influence the conversation about online/digital learning beyond the pandemic times?
• What are the levers we might have to promote better student learning in multiple modes?
• What advice do you have for others who explain either MOOCs & this book means for others just joining this conversation?
• What does it mean to be truly accessible in our global world of learning in online education?

Beyond MOOCs, these guests do a few other things so you should connect and find them at:

• Sukaina: http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/about/sukaina-walji 
• Rolin: http://profmoe.com/
• Dave: http://davecormier.com/edblog/ 

What does the world of MOOCs mean to you? What have you learned about MOOCs after all the fury died down in 2012?Let us know. Send us a message or tweet. Podcast episode art: -Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Remix by

Inevitably, the selection for 2012 is massive open online courses, or MOOC, with The New York Times declaring it “the year of the MOOC” (Pappano, 2012). We have looked at the roots of MOOC in the explorations of connectivist approaches, but more broadly the MOOC phenomenon can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies: some of the open approach of OER, the application of video, and the revolutionary hype of Web 2.0. The MOOC were an idea waiting to happen. This chapter is read by Laura Czerniewicz.

Read the chapter online or view the book references.

In this Between the Chapters episode, Laura talks to the co-directors of Virtually Connecting -- Maha Bali, Autumm Caines, Helen DeWaard, Christian Friedrich, and Rebecca Hogue about all the things related to networked learning. This group unpacks the differences between personal learning environments (PLEs) and personal learning networks (PLNs), to reflect on how these spaces, places, and more importantly the people in these communities mean to them. We dig into what is in and beyond Chapter 18 related to learning environments, revolutions, online communities, and more!

• Personal learning environment (PLE) - spaces, places, tools, technologies, process, systems, platforms, or devices
• Personal learning network (PLN)  - the people, the groups, collections, gatherings, etc.
• PLE vs. PLN (graphic image): outlining links/connections between personal learning environment and professional learning networks
• Connectivism (hear last Between the Chapter episode Chapter 17)
• 7 Things You Should Know About … Domain’s of One Own
• Learning Management System (LMS)
• Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)
• What is a learning environment? Via Tony Bates
• Hypothesis Annotation with 25 Years of Ed Tech from OLC Innovate 2020 AnnotatedEd Workshop => Thanks for the tweet share, Nate (@xolotl) 
• Thoughts on My PLN via Laura Pasquini
• Clint’s research and work on PLN
• Egyptian Revolution of 2011
• How Egyptians Used Twitter During the January Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Mobi MOOC
• Year of the MOOC (2012) foreshadowing
• MOOC MOOC mini MOOC
• Informal Learning
• A Teach-In Against Surveillance
  • Event to the Teach-In #AgainstSurveillance
• Virtually Connecting - hybrid connections for conferences & events for globally collaboration onsite and online
• Throwback to #et4online from 2015 (recap) + Rhizo15 MOOC 
• #et4buddy pilot project at #et4online – how ideas are born – @bali_maha
• @VConnecting Header Photo
• About Virtually Connecting
• Intentionally Equitable Hospitality in Hybrid Video Dialogue: The context of Virtually Connecting 
• Invisible labor is real, and it hurts: What you need to know
• It’s Not About Raising My Average by Helen DeWaard
• What is HyFlex Course Design?
• 7 Things You Should Know About the HyFlex Course Model: hybrid-flexible
• The Landscape of Merging Modalities by Valerie Irvine
• Community Building Activities: Why is building a sense of community important?
• Equity Unbound
• OneHE

Questions for Martin & the listening community:

• How do you define a learning environment?
• What does it mean to model intentional community building online?
• What mistakes have we learned from being in a PLN on certain platforms?
• How can we look at the past to improve where we go in the future?

Connect to the @vconnecting co-directors on Twitter & their blog or website:

• Rebecca: Website +@rjhogue 
• Maha: Blog + @bali_maha
• Autumm: Website + @autumm
• Christian: Website + @friedelitis
• Helen: Website + @hj_dewaard

PLE or PLN -- what do these letters mean to you? Tell us about it! Send us a message or tweet. Podcast episode art: -Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-BY-SA. Remix by Laura Pasquini.

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) were an outcome of the proliferation of services that suddenly became available following the Web 2.0 boom, combined with the thinking around distributed learning that we looked at in the previous chapter. Learners and educators began to gather a set of tools to realize a number of functions. The collection of these learning-support tools, both formally and informally, began to be referred to as a Personal Learning Environments or PLE. Educause (2009) defined them as “tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals” (p.1). They could be viewed as a useful term for what people were doing with the tools, a framework for educators in how to approach social media in education, or a technical solution that sought to integrate tools. Chapter read by Clint Lalonde

Read the chapter online or view the book references.