Information and Computer Services meeting - what's wrong

This is the annual meeting of the the British University Computer and Information Service community (UCISA). A client has paid me to come here and do some work for them at it. I observe. I participate. I think.

Something's wrong. This fraternity is rearranging chairs while its Titanic goes down.

The talk and the demonstration is of minor tweaks to the way they do things. The game is to show "benefits" to the different parties involved with a faster this or a simpler that. The motors for this are an avid vendor community - which has paid to squat the central meeting and feeding area. They are inescapable, and their solutionist paradigm - "purchase this widget and you will be improving..." has also become inescapable. Proofs, in this paradigm, are of course abundant.

The province of engineers should be to understand the crisis of education as a problem; and to use their skills to give everyone the chance to learn more and to know more. Instead, both the purchasers with their budgets and the sellers with their products are merrily turning a handle that keeps them in jobs while the mission of learning goes to hell in a basket.

The fee for one delegate's two days and an overnight at this conference would have put 100 children through 5 years of primary school at Mbollet-ba village, The Gambia. I have just returned from two weeks there, along with my family and a large cohort of friends, where our partnership took a step on the long road of reforming and improving how they learn. We hope that in time this village will have citizens who are more literate, better skilled, more versatile. Doing this at scale, and for more people, is what IT engineers should be doing. Here, they are just passing time.

The two pictures from today and last month try to say the problem.

Question and Answer with Rt Hon David Willetts MP, 12 Dec 2013

Questions asked to Rt Hon David Willetts MP and note of responses.

Q: What is the role for the Private Sector ?

A: Private Sector engagement is essential. Mr Willetts loves the UK’s public sector university traditions with their fine campus settings and charitable status. But they are not suited to delivering education to 250,000 Indonesians annually. Needs a different scale of financing and management. The scale of investment required for delivering borderless education is different. Futurelearn – we have discovered that it is high cost for partners to get a course on to the platform. There will be a role in the future for private partners to help to meet these costs.

Q: When will extend UK financial aid to overseas-based students studying for UK degrees ?

A: this is an interesting issue. We are looking into it. I was talking about it with David Greenaway during the recent Shanghai missions.

Q: Is there a colonialist dimension in your vision of British satellites beaming down British content and services into African classrooms ?

A: Fair point. The days of nationalism in Education are gone. It will be increasingly a competitive challenge between institutions to supply the best into each market.

After his speech on MOOCs and internationalisation of education, David Willetts took questions. This is my live blog of it. Apologies I have not given names of questioners - but please comment if you want me to add them.

Q: Language is a barrier. Could US and UK deliver content in other languages ? – it would create a huge opportunity, is this feasible.

A. The MOOC movement faster moving in STEM disciplines than Humanities, may be because of ready made international language. It is a genuine concern which Mr. Willetts often hears from Emerging nation ministers. They don’t want their cultures eviscerated by arrival of a bland universal globalized education. Must be a respect of national traditions. This includes languages.



Q: Which African countries will be receiving most UK-based educational services ?

A: My view is Africa is the next big thing. The big opportunities for British HE are in Uganda Nigeria, South Africa. There may also be countries where mobile coverage is weaker which will pick up in importance, as satellite coverage spreads.



Q: What is the potential impact of MOOCs for university administrators, bursars, registrars.

A – We are seeing how much supervision and management is required in the new forms of education. Khan Academy has now processed 50 million students, with staff at 50. The ratio is very different to conventional education. There are peer review opportunities from education analytics. Also, the comments of 5 students aggregate to an assessment as reliable as one experienced academic. Role for conventional staff in HEI is not clear. This is a journey. We don’t know the end. Book industry 10 years ago would not have predicted Amazon and Kindle. MOOC is a force for good and I hope Britain and our HEIs will play learning role with other partners.

DAVID WILLETTS MP, UK Minister for Higher Education, on MOOCs. LIVE BLOG

Live Blog on Rt Hon David Willetts MP's speech on 12 Dec 2013 to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education conference: "The International Higher Education Revolution".

David Willett's talk is entitled: "The importance of MOOCs and their impact on international students, qualifications and partnerships"

Speech started approx 09.30 am

UK is ccelebrating the 50th anniversary of the Robbins report. There remains, even after 50 years, unsatisfied suppressed demand for Higher Education. The UK’s moment of reflection is a microcosm of a larger surge in Developing Economies worldwide. Ministers from emerging nations express to Mr Willetts that massive investment in HE extension is the crucial step to escaping the middle income trap. This is an opportunity for Britain as a global HE leader. What are the ways to respond ?

Students studying in Britain is one way forward. 435,000 foreign students are in Britain today for courses. There are no limits on the number of legitimate students. There will be no limits. But flying people into Heathrow, however great the capacity of runways or universities, doesn’t give a solution that will match the demand of, for example, Indonesia’s additional quarter of a million of students’ yearly.

Setting up foreign campus is a solution that has been developed by several UK HEIs. In China: Liverpool, Nottingham, whose chancellors were with Mr Willetts on the recent Cameron mission to China. Many foreign Governments he has met have strategy of hosting foreign Universities as a way to stimulate these kinds of arrangements. Malaysia a good example.

Third option is: study at distance, from abroad, for a British qualification, like Nelson Mandela at University of London. The total number abroad studying for British qualifications is 570,000.

MOOCs by happy coincidence have arrived as the technology advance that enables HEIs to reach more students, further afield, with better education.

What is underestimated in MOOCs debate, is that while there are poor quality MOOCs, which are merely lectures, there is also a huge advance by MOOC leaders through the use in education analytics. Keystroke studies, seeing patterns of learning, allow educators to see where students are learning best. The educational resource from this is massive and is only just beginning to be harvested. Interactive textbooks and peer group allow better learning. More and more MOOCs will live up this standard.

Implication of MOOCs for the conference theme. Education disintermediation is an opportunity for existing providers. Indian universities are possibly too dependent on Agents – now they can offer direct experience by allowing students to contact them through MOOC sampling. MOOCs will be test of how much Universities are willing to expand and recruit.

Qualifications issue: how credentialise MOOCs. These will use intelligent technologies like iris recognition to offer a compelling evidence of achievement with integrity.

Futurelearn. This is not a winner takes all market (Amazon style) – Futurelearn is not too late into the market. Mr Willetts attended launch of Futurelearn and launch of Inmarsat Alpha a UK satellite aimed at African market to deliver broadband to uncovered territories. African countries are desperate for education content and the satellite can potentially beam learning content of British educational services beamed direct to African classrooms is Mr Willett vision of the future of borderless education.

Report of questions and discussion in next post.

Copyright and MOOC article in MOOC NEWS AND REVIEWS

MOOC News and Reviews has my post on Copyright issues, arguing for a tighter hold by academic institutions on the content in their MOOCs, and on learners' grasp of their data rights.

Looking at language learning technologies for conversation

I have been examining some online language learning tools focussing on conversational English, assessing whether they offer a good experience. And talking to several colleagues about the issues of instructing in accent, tone, personal interplay and so on over the internet.

First up, DuoLingua.



I created an ID as a French speaker wanting to learn English. The whole effort seems to drive to obtaining my Facebook login. I didn't give it. The test and pedagogy were mickey-mouse. The premise that my friends in social media would support me was laughable.

Next, Telelangues (Berlitz recently bought them)

This is full of gimmicks and false promises about support and community. A tracking pentagon representation of progress - these are functions, not products. The idea of communication has become lost. It treats language as a technical skill, and speaking as a subset of that. You can't help feeling that the aim of aggregating eyeballs on site is never far behind its teaching goals.


Language Lab was my next visit. This is a virtual world simulation based approach, focussing on sectors such as Oil & Gas, and Aviation, and Higher Ed, where there is known demand for English communication. There is a principle behind it - immersion, which they compress into the acronym VERITAS. But it's not a pedagogical framework that any educator or course-publisher would recognise. The monetisation model is simple (you pay) so you don't have the annoying feeling that you are being pulled in to support someone's revenue-generating aim.

The feedback on pronounciation is detailed, excellent even, but I wonder how many students can take in a panel of instruction like this:




Pearson is the one to watch, however. What is Pearson's play in this space ? They have Versant, Voxy and Global Education Technology Group (GETG) [Chinese] as the spoken language technology brands, and I can't yet see a single vision for conversation training across the Pearson stable. But a birdie tells me they are surely working on it.

The Economist reports education technology as an opportunity leveler

This week The Economist reports on the use of Desire2Learn's Degree Compass analytics technology for supporting wise course choices.

This is a technology-triumphs-where-policy-has-failed story. And without doubt a triumph for the students whom it liberates from the pain of bad guidance.

I am contrasting it with a small local story this week, which is the inverse. My children's school had been consigned (along with hundreds of others) to "Special Measures" in 2011, a measure either of failure (not my view) or a trick played by those with political determination to inflict painful change on state education. This week parents and teachers celebrated the successful emergence from this grim regime, and the restoration of the school's official reputation as "good".

That was a story of the triumph of old fashioned effort by dedicated human beings, over the manipulation of categories that those in power like to resort to.

MOOCs are the forcing-house for Learning Analytics

The current Times Higher Education podcast gathers at the microphone the brains behind University of London International Programme's recent slew of Coursera MOOC.

What stands out for me is the assertion that the MOOCs are the forcing-house for Learning Analytics technology. With such a standardised and large pool of data gathered in a unified platform, we have a perfect scenario for building powerful statistical models of learning, and data-driven approaches to personalising learning.

Interestingly, the expertise on this is going to go to the course producer, not the platform.