Open Knowledge Foundation and open education data in development. What chance of a change of business model ?

Today I was speaking at Making it Matter: Supporting education in the developing
world through open and linked data part of the linkedup programme Slides are on slideshare here:

Data and education 16 may 2014 haggard london from stephendhaggard

The discussion session around "what problems need solving" in development world education gave so wide a focus that we all had to think not about specific initiatives, but rather what single cross-cutting interventions might have impact across multiple fields.

Hope, meetings, and change of business model came up as the candidates. We sit on reams of courses, armies of teachers, desks full of policies from Governments - and they often hamper improvements.

The change of business model is worth a look.

It was the key to the single biggest change in the quality of womens' lives in Africa: the business model for getting water used to be the woman standing in the queue. The advent of the cheap chinese bucket changed it: put the container in the queue.

In classrooms, the current business model is waiting or sitting while an unpaid Government-appointed teacher does not arrive, or teaches a poor lesson when they do arrive. Getting the setting to provide something (book ? access to self-guided learning supported by peers or older cohorts ?) might be a candidate. Allowing families to invest to solve the problem might be another solution.



A colleague raised the possibility of Art. It's not a bad idea. It reminded me of the huge impact we got in Mbollet-ba from proposing creative activity in the nursery classes. When we arrived, they were simply sitting and banging bottles on the table. Given the permission to be creative, they thrived. The materials were debris from the school yard.

Thinktank adds to pressure to take students out of net migration figures | News | Times Higher Education

Thinktank adds to pressure to take students out of net migration figures | News | Times Higher Education David Willetts' Conservative think tank Bright Blue is pushing back against mainstream Tory anti-immigration policies, by arguing that immigration quotas should disregard overseas student arrivals in the UK.

One interpretation is that the Universities have got their act together to lobby, as any business would, for policy changes that are in their interests, and have spoken to their Minister. He's got his think tank to fly a kite where other members of the Government will have to see it. (Why didn't he just stand up and say it ? Ah, sorry, that would only work in a functional government.)

For several years the Unis have presented consistent and compelling evidence that their fee income, and international stature, are under threat. Their nemesis is the Theresa May tendency in the Tory party - which would classify overseas students along with every other kind of foreign threat - in deference to immigration anxieties on the Right Wing of the party, and in parties like UKIP beyond them.

Arguments and evidence on student immigration are well rehearsed. An independent consultancy has assembled the policy case for boosting overseas student visits for the NUS. Oxford's Migration Observatory has done the numbers. Applications and entries from overseas learners are entering free fall - which terrifies the universities.

The other (less flattering) interpretation is that the Coalition will need to be able to present a tough story on immigration numbers at the election. Since politicians consistently overstate the reductions they will achieve, and then fail to meet their targets, they are expediently looking around for a justifiable fudge on the numbers. Excluding students from the count does the job.

What's being left out of this argument is the impact of international student flows on the learners themselves. Global classrooms are placing stresses on home students, and visiting students. The value, and the costs, of this approach to education are not being scrutinised.

Has the student voice been tamed? | Features | Times Higher Education

Has the student voice been tamed? | Features | Times Higher Education

McQuillan, Dean at Kingston, makes an analysis from inside the academy, with a bold and unusual impartiality, pointing out the divergence between real student confusion, distress and anger, and the managerial massaging of confectioned student opinion through survey and feedback instruments. An unnamed academic in The Guardian made similar points - "Student feedback is a waste of time". Interesting that they felt unable to name their institution.

This can go two ways.

Either the Unis will get sophisticated at customer response. They will handle it with a mixture of concession, real measures, and PR, and get out of the corner they are in.

Or the Unis will go for repression, denial, and false data. If so, I think there could be some real anger out there waiting to boil over. Many students will pay £100,000 after interest for their three years at Uni and that will not make them a pushover.

What's clear is that the current reliance on opinion management is not going to be sustainable. I think McQuillan's diagnosis is spot on:

when students are in occupation, voluntarily distracting themselves from their primary purpose of study, something has gone badly wrong. If, since 2010, there has been a marked increase in occupation and protest this is because something is very wrong indeed in our universities. We live in a moment of crisis in higher education in which, under the guise of austerity measures, pedagogical interaction between students and their teachers is being redesigned as a consumer relationship and the student experience is giving way to graduate indenture. At the sharp end of the reform of higher education in England, critical student voices are aware of this and are astute enough to recognise it as the active disinvestment by the state in higher education, facilitating the intrusion of private finance into the post-Robbins dispensation of access-for-all within a public university system.

Open Educational Resources Conference

Checked into the OER14 meeting at Newcastle. Discussion MOOC dominated as you'd expect. Martin Weller's www.oermap.org is subjecting the "religion" of OER to proper evidence. JISC Legal is waking up to the copyright problems of MOOCs but not really considering them yet as learning contracts, only publishing contracts.

New data from Nottingham Trent and Desire2Learn - releasing this today

Teacher feedbacks to students up by 500% on @Desire2Learn platform at @TrentUni. New data released today http://t.co/4A8XsefL62

— D2LNews (@D2LNews) April 28, 2014

A new educators journal "EML" for the web age - what will it offer ?

A new online journal Educating Modern Learners (EML) under editorship of Audrey Watters of HackEducation launched last week.

Premise: the objectives of education in the web age are paradigmatically different from all that has preceded. Access has changed everything (although schools tend to little more than distribute devices and logins). The learning process itself is changing and schools are losing their role in it. The learners themselves will be driving learning. The new fundamental right of each learner (which it is now a school's job to enable) is the opportunity to learn on their own. Not any more the right to be taught or have materials. The journal hopes to help school leaders to make better decisions as they write this new narrative.



My friend Doug Belshaw has written one of the first edition articles, looking at what it means to be a literate web user.

The time has come to move beyond discussions of whether the web, social networks, and mobile devices are inherently “good” or “bad.” Debates about whether such things can (or should) be used for learning drag on while the next generation cobble together their own understanding of an increasingly blended online/offline world. It’s time we as educators stepped up and taught more than just “e-safety.” It’s time we started facilitating learning experiences around reading, writing, and participation on the web.

One challenge to educators I like is that they need to rethink the process of participation. The old model of taking a role in the learning process through "joining in" has different meanings now, if EML's premise is correct. Maybe schools and educators will have to rethink how they assess engagement too. Thinking about Learning Analytics, too, would have to develop.

Based last week in Poland (Poland is a top scoring country in the PISA rankings now, has long ago overtaken the USA) and sanity-testing this radical educational rethink on the schooling of my very bright niece Milena (14) who is in secondary education here I note two different kinds of participation have really worked for her.

One is the old fashioned class based one. An upcoming school trip to Paris next week has her bubbling with engagement.

The other participation that has transformed her has been an online community of Manga and Anime writers. Her Anime blog is the most read in the Polish language, a huge motivator for a young teenager.

So I'd give a partial endorsement to the EML mission. But we are still in transition, and for young people the teacher and classroom as locus of traditional socialisation-based learning is still a big deal.

Inequality in UK HE challenged in - wait for it - Daily Telegraph

Daily Telegraph is not on my usual reading list so I am surprised to see them carrying a jeremiad that UK Universities are a bastion of middle class privilege, from Alison Wride, Provost of GSM a London college specialising in non-traditional students.

Wride's numbers and evidence are familiar from what she has said before. What's interesting in the Telegraph context is her challenge to the Unis to desist from their usual game in Widening Participation (WP) of seeking out any bright students from diverse backgrounds. That's what a right-wing readership is comfortable with, because of the "opportunity" flavour.

It is one thing to seek to recruit ABB+ students from WP backgrounds; quite another to recognise that the greatest impact is achieved with those whom the system failed prior to A level study.
Inevitably, in this context, universities can see people from disadvantaged backgrounds as a drain on resources, needing additional 'remedial' support. They are, at best, raw material that needs to be shaped into more 'typical' 2.1 students.

And why is the Torygraph carrying such radical dialectic ? The comment spaces below the article are seething with rage and incomprehension.

Wride may be further ahead of the reform agenda than Telegraph readers think. The Obama college reforms are demanding that US Universities show evidence of impact in order to secure funding. That's to say, their success (and income) will be measured by how far they move students on from where they are when they enter the college. In American political language this gave a headline "A better bargain for the Middle Class" and it proved very popular across the whole political spectrum. I don't talk to many UK Provosts and vice-Provosts who see the job of Higher Education in these terms, except at the OU. They know that degree classifications still drive the funding and the system.

But when digital technology makes assessment about everything and not just the final score, an institution has easy visibility of the progress of each student. Some of the more advanced digital-focussed academies in the UK are (without the political statments) coming over to Wride's view. Nottingham Trent University, where I have had some dealings recently, comes to mind.

Outdoor classroom example - France

An example of a local small school thinking creatively about teaching and learning, using things of interest in its local environment as tools. Is this a model of how technology can be used as well ?

The cantonal school here in Donzenac, Limousin (France) sends its C1 and C2 classes (ages 7, 8) for a full day once a week to the pony stables at Lavaud. The children are accompanied by two teachers, who design and deliver the curriculum there. Using the farmyard chores and the preparation of horses, and ultimately a ride in the local forest, the teachers cover a syllabus of literacy, science, numeracy, social skills, physical education, sport and community content. The content of the day (which is always Monday) then continues to drive work in the classroom the other days of the week, shaping activities in writing, creative curriculum, numeracy etc.

The classes adopt this format for a six-week cycle. The price per child for the riding is 6 Euros ($7.50/UK£ 5) plus transport provided by the Mairie from its vehicle fleet.

I worked today with Isabelle, the instructress, who has been providing the facility at her stables. She observed that the children grew their skills with the horses (shetlands) but also found that the process of listening, taking instructions, understanding sequences, and obedience were easily mediated and transmitted during the sessions.



The teachers observe that the increasing number of city children arriving in Donzenac as overspill from the nearby city of Brive, with problems of challenging behaviour not normally seen in rural children, are well served by the contact with animals. Processes of compliance and attention which are not well transmitted on the school site, are effectively modelled and internalised through the sense of awe and emotional engagement the children have towards the horses.

Transferring all this to learning technology... this school, through the passion of its teachers and an inspired facility on its doorstep, has been able to use the resources of the farm as a gateway to learning. What matters is not just the quality of the experiences at the stables, but also the blend of active learning with conventional instruction.

In that respect, it's no different to good instruction with IT.