In 2015-16 I led research exploring how educators learn open educational practices. The research was conducted in collaboration with Dr Nina Hood and Dr Heli Kaatrakoski. This was the foundational work for the #ExplOERer (pronounced ‘explorer’) – a European Commission co-funded project, under the Erasmus+ programme. The work aimed to promote Open Educational Resources (OER) adoption…
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) require individual learners to be able to self-regulate their learning, determining when and how they engage. However, MOOCs attract a diverse range of learners, each with different motivations and prior experience. We carried out a number of studies investigating self-regulated learning in MOOCs. One study (Littlejohn et al, 2015) was an empirical investigation of…
Colin Milligan, Anoush Margaryan, Pia Fontana, George Littlejohn and I carried out a study exploring how finance professionals self-regulate their learning through day-to-day work. Professional learning is a critical component of ongoing improvement and innovation and the adoption of new practices in the workplace. Professional learning is often achieved through learning embedded in everyday work…
Recently I have been thinking about how learners manage their time in MOOCs. This thinking was sparked by discussions with Carolyn Rose, Carnegie Mellon University, who has carried out some fascinating computational discourse analysis in Massive Open Online Courses. At face value its clear that better time management will lead to improved outcomes for learning. There has been a…
Understanding learning in Massive Open Online Courses is difficult, partly because methods and instruments for data collection are under-developed. Published work tends to be from data samples that are too small or skewed. Dropout rates in MOOCs mean that the learners who participate in studies show persistence, therefore samples are not representative. Even if this…
In April 2015 am participating in a panel session at #OER15 led by @YishayMor and Laia Canals. MOOCs enable new forms of organisation mediated by digital technology. However, governments, universities, educators and even learners still apply conventional metrics around learning, assessment, completion which limits the potential of #MOOCs. MOOC providers seem to be concerned with completion rates –…