Blog

Taking part in two Open Online Courses (MOOC #change11 and P2PU) demands a lot of attention and effort. Sometimes it may feel like you have to carry a big backpack or rucksack as we in Germany call it.
Does anybody feel the same??
I have to come up with a learning plan and I have to cover some of the recent stuff on the MOOC #change11. Receiving feedback from other people increases my motivation. I also try to provide feedback to other contributions. And I am experimenting with various social media tools but on the other hand they are time-consuming. Although you can utilize RSS feeds to scan blogs quickly but if you have a big list of blogs than the scanning itself takes some time.But I think all these tools have value for particular purposes which will evolve as you use them.
So I am confident for the next week but still want to know:
What are you strategies to overcome feelings of being overloaded?

As part of my research fellowship at the OLNet I am investigating how people make use of OER and how that is affecting their learning process. I have set up a little survey for this with 16 questions. So it will not take much of your time.
The survey is open for everyone interested in Open Education and Open educational Resources. Your participation will help to better understand the potentials of OER, especially its impact on education. The current transformations towards more Openness in education provide new possibilities but also new challenges to current educational practices. In order to understand and reflect the dynamics inherent in these changes, we definitely need more empirical evidence.
I would be very happy if you could participate in this survey.
Results will be discussed here in my Blog but also in the context of the MOOC #change11.

This week’s topic in the MOOC #change11 is about the digital scholar, a concept thoroughly researched by one of my colleagues in the OlNet team, Martin Weller. He just published a book with the same title which can be accessed here. I found the parallels between Open Education and the music or newspaper industry interesting and helpful to engage other people in discussions.
However, when we consider digital scholarship from an individual perspective, I think that the abilities to manage your own digital learning process (which then leads to scholarship) are different from the abilities for traditional learning. Rita Kop has published a paper in IRRODL which elaborates a little bit on that with regard to MOOC.
Last year and before even knowing about MOOC, I published an article, coincidently also in IRRODL, that describes the concept of volition as a helpful theory to provide a new dimension to explain learning in informal settings. My perspective at this time was Distance Education with its long tradition of using innovative media to bridge the gap between teacher and learner. However, the more „innovative“ or complex these media are, the more challenging are the tasks learner have to do. I have focused primarily on motivation as a key for goal-directed learning and have provided some cases that can endanger motivation when learning at a distance. Then I have introduced the concept of volition that can compensate decreased motivation, for instance with specific action control strategies. These strategies are crucial for self-regulated learning which put a lot of pressure on the learner (e.g., control of attention when facing distractions, monitoring your learning progress).
It seems reasonable to assume that volition is also of importance for learning in open learning networks such as the MOOC #change11. I will follow my line of research as outlined in the aforementioned paper.

The recently raised question concerning cooperation and collaboration in settings of change such as the MOOC #change11 is surely an important issue. Here is an interesting blog post with a related discussion.
I have been involved in a large EU project where we attempt to build a model for team-based development in Higher Education to promote use and resuse of OER. We have analysed different forms of groups and networks, including more loosely structured forms such as the Humanities Network with its new international Course Exchange project. Their work mode can be perceived as somewhat of a connectivist approach, i.e. without clear goals or shared agreements of the partners that should cooperate. On the other side, we have investigated the Mediterranean Network of Universities which is based on clearly defined structure. They have a predefined mission and based on that an agenda of their activities.
Now when it comes to the assessment of the efficiency of these two approaches, we discovered that the more rigid approach seem to be more conducive for the utilization of innovations such as the adoption of OER in current learning and teaching practices. The rather open approach on complementary course production was seen as to be too unstructured to take full advantage of the potentials of OER.
I will provide the full report of this project as soon as it is finalised.
Meanwhile, I am adding the slides from a recent presentation at the EDULEARN Conference in Barcelona with some of our findings.