Running a hybrid conference using Blackboard Collaborate

The University of Sheffield recently hosted a symposium on Reducing academic flying. There are a growing amount of academic groups who have taken a lead on reducing the amount they fly (e.g. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) or indeed not flying at all.

In the spirit of the subject of the event, the organisers wanted both participants and speakers to attend, and contribute to the symposium virtually. To support this, Blackboard Collaborate was used to host the symposium. Available to all members of staff at the university, Blackboard Collaborate is a modern, web-based video conferencing tool, and this was a great opportunity to use the tool outside of a learning and teaching context.

Matt Watson @sheffielduni kicks off the "Reducing Flying in Academia" conference. "We know we need to get to a carbon neutral society- if academics can't do it, what hope is there for the rest of society?" #FlyingLess https://t.co/ZJ5in2bZS4 pic.twitter.com/YdRoMLANVQ

— Dr Kimberly Nicholas (@KA_Nicholas) November 13, 2019

The symposium was delivered in a hybrid manner - some of the papers were given in person, to an audience of around 30 people in Sheffield, with another 30 or so watching live online using Blackboard Collaborate. Some papers were presented remotely - we had speakers from Europe, North America & Australia. The remote papers were streamed live to the physical symposium venue in Sheffield, and to the other participants watching remotely.

Delivering a symposium in this way did require some careful planning to ensure a positive experience for the physical and virtual attendees. Some of the measures we put in place included:

• Requiring all presenters to submit PDF's of their talk in advance, so they could be pre-loaded into Blackboard Collaborate
• Asking physical presenters to stay in the webcam frame, so they could be viewed remotely
• Having a moderator in the Blackboard Collaborate chat room that was physically based in the symposium venue, to enable questions to be relayed to presenters. 

Coordinating the presentations across various different time zones was handled very effectively by the organisers, and we made use of the timer within Blackboard Collaborate as a visible reminder for remote participants to avoid any confusion about session start times.

We tried to replicate the face to face experience as much as possible for the remote attendees. The Collaborate chat room provided an effective back channel, with resources being shared and lively discussion ongoing throughout the day. The physical attendees split into project groups to create actions plans, and the same activity happened virtually with remote participants using the Breakout Groups feature in Collaborate. The remote participants could then feedback to the physical attendees in Sheffield.

One unexpected benefit of the hybrid conference approach was the extent to which it increased the reach of the symposium. As you can see the screenshot above, one of the virtual attendees was actually viewing the talks in a classroom alongside 30 of their students in Oslo - enabling them to participate in the event (and increasing the total attendees to around 90). All of the talks can be viewed from the Carbon Neutral University Website. 

Dr Stephen Allen, the symposium co-chair said:

At the symposium we were ambitious with the mix of physical and remote speakers and attendees.  However, with good reliability from Collaborate Ultra the event surpassed my expectations for how well a physical-remote international meeting, which did not involve anybody flying could work.  

Whilst I do not feel that I could now use Collaborate Ultra at an event such as the symposium without technical support, I am much more confident that using this technology as part of enabling a successful no-flying international meeting is not out of reach.

Have you had any experience in delivering a hybrid conference?

TELFest 2019

Last month saw our annual TELFest, the University of Sheffield's festival of technology enhanced learning and innovation.

We had a great four days, with nearly 400 delegates attending, from over fifty institutions (with some attending from as far away as Egypt), taking part in a packed programme of talks, case studies, demonstrations and workshops.

Monday saw our University of Sheffield-only pre-conference day, with some learning technologies essentials sessions, and workshops and talks covering topics including distance learning, lecture capture, media assessment, student analytics, and programme-level approach.

Tuesday kicked off the first day of the full conference, starting with a thought-provoking, entertaining and hugely popular opening keynote by the University of Hull's Prof Becky Huxley-Binns, on Generation Z and Graduate Futures.

 

The day continued with sessions covering such topics as escape rooms, analytics, online learning, lecture capture, gamification and much more.

Wednesday's keynote saw TELFest's now traditional game show slot. Following on from our shameless rip-offs affectionate homages of Room 101, Have I Got News For You, Crystal Maze and Family Fortunes, this year saw Would I TEL A Lie To You, in which a panel of academics told learning and teaching stories which could be truths our outright fibs. Prof Tony Ryan did a great job of taking on the Rob Brydon role.



This was followed by another packed day, with topics covered including inclusive design, digital literacies, student collaboration, animation, audio feedback and eportfolios.

That evening also saw the first TELFest evening social, at which a group of delegates enjoyed a night of food and games at the Treehouse Boardgame Cafe.

Finally, Thursday began with our 'Multi-coloured Technlology Swap-shop', and a morning of sessions including ABC Learning Design, virtual reality, student satisfaction, lecture recording and assessing online learners.

Our closing keynote was by Nigel Smith, with an insightful talk on the lessons he's learnt about online learning from his time as Managing Director of Courses and Learning at FutureLearn, before we ended with an exhibition of immersive environments in our Inspiration Corner.



A big thanks to all our presenters, our keynotes, our sponsors (Blackboard, Echo360, Kaltura, WondaVR, Turning Technologies and Turnitin), the staff at the Diamond that make everything run so smoothly, and of course to all the delegates who help make the festival such a success.

Below is a highlights video from journalism student Nick Cassidy which gives you a feel for the festival. We're doing it all again next year, on 29th June to 2nd July 2020. Save the date!

Online Learning Design: What the data told me

How do we know that what we're doing works?

As a designer of online learning experiences, learning analytics and data are my best friends.

Working with the FutureLearn platform to produce courses from University of Sheffield academics gives me access to a world of data stories. We have evaluated and reshaped our course design using this data to publish our short courses (aka MOOCs) and our practice as supporters of the FutureLearn activity has improved no end over time using this approach.

I spent last year drilling into a new set of data that we had previously not analysed and came up with some new and informative results for future learning design.

Are MOOC learners potential online degree students?

I wanted to know if people who take our short courses seriously enough to complete them are also likely to be interested in other online learning experiences we might offer now or in the future, like online degrees.

And, if so, how do they compare their experiences and what do they think about the way we design both types of courses?

I asked those who had completed our short courses about their experience of the learning design and about their experience and interest in online degrees. 

The report is a brief summary of some of the key findings and illustrates what elements of learning design help our learners the most, from their perspective. 

Download the report.

The learners told us that they appreciate bite-sized content, instant feedback on assessment tasks, video demonstrations, insights form experts working in the field and more. They also overwhelmingly advocated for this type of learning design for online degrees, stating that the bite-sized nature of the courses and the design would help them to learn and that previous experiences of degrees had been 'overwhelming' in comparison.

I hope you'll find something useful within the report. If you'd like the full findings, you can request a copy here.

EUNIS - Launch of the UCISA Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) toolkit

In June I attended EUNIS’s (European University Information Systems) 2019 annual conference, held at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. I had been invited to take part in a plenary session to launch the UCISA VLE Toolkit (https://vle.ucisa.ac.uk/). VLEs have remained and continue to remain an integral part of teaching and learning and this toolkit was developed to help institutions that are considering reviewing their VLE. The toolkit is built on the experiences of institutions that have been through this process, including the University of Sheffield’s own VLE review. As a member of the project team that shaped the resource, we were aiming to help those institutions who want to evaluate their current use of the VLE or embark on a review. During this plenary session I was joined by Julie Voce (City,  University of London) and Sally Jorjani (Edinburgh Napier University) both of whom were fellow contributors to the toolkit and were also part of the toolkit’s project team. We began the session by presenting on our experiences of carrying out reviews and then took part in a panel discussion, with questions fielded from our vibrant audience. The session was chaired by Gill Ferrell of Aspire Ltd, who conducted the interviews with the institutions and suppliers as part of the toolkit. All of our experiences of carrying out the reviews had different outcomes, Julie talked about how during her time at Imperial they decided to pilot two VLEs before deciding on the VLE that their institution wanted, whereas at Edinburgh Napier, Sally moved to an open source platform. At the University of Sheffield, we chose not to change VLE, rather we focused on enhancing the use of our existitng VLE to better support learning, teaching and our student experience.

Preparing for our VLE session at EUNIS

The theme of the conference this year, focused on ‘Campuses for the future’ with a number of sessions focusing on the design and evaluation of active learning spaces. We were able to experience some of NTNU’s leading active learning spaces, including their redesigned tiered spaces which made use of technology to support collaboration, as well as their VR and AI labs. As an institution that is split across different cities, it was interesting to hear about the ways in which they were tackling teaching students based across different campuses simultaneously. Some of the sessions that were key highlights for me included:

The State of Digital Ethics in 2019: Excitement, Caution, and Hope By EDUCAUSE’s John O’Brien, exploring the (often masked) ethical entanglements that new educational technology innovation often brings with it. It was valuable to hear that EDUCAUSE had created a CIO’s Commitment on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (which many institutions have signed up to): https://www.educause.edu/about/cio-commitment …

Letting Students Design their Own Dashboards - Learning Analytics from a Student’s Perspective, Alena Droit, Bodo Rieger (Universität Osnabrück)

The approach involved students leading on the development of a learning analytics system, ensuring that they created a product that would offer value to students. The session was awarded best paper at the event.

https://twitter.com/farzanalatif/status/1136615928878239745

Putting learning at the forefront of everything: Active Blended Learning as Northampton’s new normal, by Professor Alejandro Armellini. Alejandro shared Northampton’s approach to moving away from lecture theatres to spaces that support active blended learning. It was interesting to note their approach to move away from ‘wired devices’ (e.g. lecturn PCs) to a wireless BYOD approach.  Thinking towards the future, he has adapted Gilly Salmon’s model to consider what Education 4.0 will look like. As we design spaces for the future it is important for us to consider how the learning that takes place now will change, rather than creating space that meets current demands.

• CAIeRO, Northampton's approach to course design http://northampton.ac.uk/ilt

Links to most of the presentations delivered at the conference can be found here:

https://eunis.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=59fe1ed0cb52d0fe8b8ec749d&id=80f91db551&e=cbda481cb7

Redesigning TELFest

Regular visitors to this blog / long-term University of Sheffield employees may have noticed that we have changed the TELFest logo for the 2019 edition of the festival. This new logo is a variation on the Digital Learning Team branding and is intended to be representative of the new team and the expanded areas of work we now cross.

At last year's TELFest we revealed some TEL themed designs that (abstractly) covered the varying levels of TEL use among colleagues. These were created as stickers and given out to delegates to help them identify like-minded delegates and they were a big hit, especially when they were animated and linked to using the Zappar app.

          

This year, we'll be going one bigger. We have reimagined the essential platforms, apps and services that we regularly use at the University as vintage products and they'll be available as limited edition postcards for delegates at the festival. There will be 12 in total and we thought it would be fun to release a few in advance here on the blog. 

Tickets to TELFest are free and you can register to become a delegate until the 25th June.

      

     

     

You can see the rest of the vintage postcards at TELFest - the University of Sheffield's Technology Enhanced Learning Festival, July 1st-4th 2019.

Blackboard / Turnitin notifications issues

Recently there has been an increased number of queries from students receiving erroneous notifications for overdue assignments. This post will provide an explanation as to what's happened and why.

Two changes have happened recently that have led to some confusion. Firstly Blackboard's (MOLE’s) notification digests have an improved design, and while they give the same information, they are significantly easier to read and seem to be being read more consistently by learners. Secondly an upgrade to the Turnitin building block (the software that enables Turnitin to talk to Blackboard) now means Turnitin due dates trigger notifications in Blackboard, which they didn't previously.

We are exploring with Blackboard and Turnitin to clarify the cause of these overdue notifications but at present we believe there are two main reasons.

The first possible reason for this is when multiple Turnitin submission points are set up in a Blackboard course. An example of this is when different students are required to submit on different dates (perhaps due to a staggered deadline for different groups or extensions for certain students). The issue here is, as the Blackboard grade centre doesn't know which students on the course should be using which submission points, it will send overdue notices to those submission points the students aren't meant to be using. (For example if a student submits to Submission A, and Submission B is a later submission point for extenuating circumstances for other students, they will still receive an overdue notice for not submitting to it).

The second reason we believe may be related to courses which have a Turnitin assignment with anonymous marking enabled. When this option is enabled it doesn’t give a “needs marking” status in the Grade Centre, therefore Blackboard may push out notifications thinking there has been no submission attempt made.

After the changes to MOLE happening in the summer, all users will have much more granular control over the notifications they receive.

If you have had instances of this in your course and could share with us how the assignment is set up please let us know at digital.learning@sheffield.ac.uk as this will help to find a pattern of the triggers of notifications.

MOLE Upgrade

On April 12th we will begin this year's MOLE upgrade. Whilst this is an annual event, this year it is a little different, and not just because we are doing it in April.

For the last few years MOLE has been hosted on servers based in Amsterdam and this has been a very stable platform for us. This upgrade will see us moving to a brand new SaaS (Software as a Service) platform hosted on Amazon servers which will give us the same quality of service we have now but with a number of advantages:

• No more downtime for upgrades
• New features, enhancements and bug fixes will be available much more frequently as the new platform has updates on a monthly basis. Previously we have had to wait for our annual upgrade to get these
• New version of the VLE in the future. Blackboard (what we call MOLE now) have a new version called Ultra that is coming along very nicely, and moving to this new platform could give us the option of using this new VLE if and when it's appropriate for us.

We had originally planned to do the upgrade at Christmas, like we have in the past, however as you may remember we had to abort that at the last minute. So we didn't waste a lot of the work that had been done in preparation for this, the decision was made to do the upgrade as soon as possible without it having an impact on teaching. Having consulted with faculties it was agreed that the slot we are using was the best option to go for.

So, starting at 20:00 on Friday 12th MOLE will be taken offline to begin the upgrade. Because of the move to the new platform it will take slightly longer than previous upgrades but it will be available again for use no later than 18:00 on Monday 15th.

Almost nothing will change from our users point of view, it will look and function exactly like it does now with one main exception. The Manage Users tool, which is an extension to MOLE developed by a third party, has an incompatibility with the new system that stops a user being able to change someones's role in a course and we are exploring how this can be fixed. There will be a small number of new features in there but we aren't going to explore those right now because we are in the middle of teaching - these will be something to look going in to the summer so keep an eye out for more on all things new.

What makes a good video? Applying Mayer's Multimedia Principles

A common concern that staff express to me when considering their own use of video is that they are never sure how crucial high production values will be to their students.

Although learners and students appreciate high quality videos, the way in which we use video (or don’t!) in our online courses is always more crucial to the learning experience than the production quality.

So what makes a good video?

Video is a popular format in learning. Learner feedback from TUoS courses published on FutureLearn shows that videos and animations are highly rated and liked.

Responses from Post-course survey data across all online courses published by TUoS, via FutureLearn between 2013 and 2017

The reasons learners give for liking course videos range from helping them to engage with the information to being well structured and well presented.

The way a video is constructed and presented can be the most crucial aspect to its success. If a video can enhance understanding, it can add value.

Something that has always helped and informed how I think about structuring and presenting a subject through video in our online courses is Richard Mayer’s Cognitive Principles for Multimedia Learning, as outlined in his book Multimedia Learning.

One of the things I like about Mayer’s set of principles is that they are based on  psychological cognitive theories on how people learn, as well as extensive research into how well people have understood e-learning content when it has been presented to them in different ways. They are thoroughly tried and tested.

Mayer’s first principle, the Multimedia Principle, is based on the conclusion from his research that ‘People learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone’ but states that it’s important to be aware that people have a limited capacity for processing information on dual channels (verbal and visual). The principles are there to help you design multimedia that reduces extraneous processing, manages essential processing and fosters generative processing.

Applying some Principles of Multimedia Learning to video

The Principles refer to all forms of multimedia, which includes graphics, images and diagrams as well as videos, so here, I have given a few examples that illustrate applying some of these principles specifically to videos in open, online courses.

Signaling Principle

People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added

Screenshot from ‘Introduction to Close Reading’, Literature of the English Country House

To help learners become familiar with the concept of ‘close reading’ in Literature of the English Country House we used a narrated video where certain words in sentences were highlighted as being important. This helped learners analyse which words might have particular significance within a sentence. As each word was highlighted, a narrated explanation described a possible interpretation of that particular word and hopefully, illustrated the importance of spending more time analysing a sentence than you might on your first reading of a text.

Temporal Contiguity Principle

People learn more deeply when corresponding graphics and narration are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

Screenshot from ‘Applying the muscles of the face’, Forensic Facial Reconstruction: Finding Mr. X

The above image is taken from a narrated video where educator Dr. Katherine Linehan is explaining the function and location of each muscle of our face. At each mention of a new muscle, our animator, Kieran Bentley produces a title and an image to enhance Katherine’s explanation. The video is carefully timed so that all visual and verbal information is presented simultaneously.

The first time we ran the course, the learners expressed that the video was too fast to follow, as they were being presented with a lot of new words and concepts in a short time. The next step in the course is a an article with corresponding images, which explains each muscle in more detail, so for the next iteration of the course, we will swap these two steps. This shows the importance of Mayers Pre-training Principle: People learn more deeply from a narrated animation when they have had training in the names and characteristics of the main concepts. So, a really interesting lesson was learned with this course evaluation on the amount of new information that can be successfully presented using video.

Screenshot of explanatory article preceding the ‘Applying the muscles of the face’ video.

Redundancy principle

People learn more deeply from animation and narration than from animation, narration and on-screen text.

We do break this rule in some of our animated videos. We have examples where we have used on-screen text as well as animation and narration (two of the examples here!) but we’re always careful to keep this to a minimum and to ensure that the on-screen text mirrors the narration. Having a ‘wall of text’ on screen which the learner has to read whilst at the same time listening to narration giving different information means that they are a lot less likely to process it all. So, from our experience, as long as the words and pictures are the same, and are used sparingly together, this can still add value but should be avoided otherwise.

Segmenting Principle

People learn more deeply when a narrated animation is presented in learner-paced segments than as a continuous unit. Mostly relevant for complex material, where the learner has no prior knowledge

Screenshot of ‘To do list’ showing segmented content in Measuring and Valuing Health.

Using a series of short videos and segmenting them into themes can help learners to navigate the material, as well as keep their attention on the topic at hand.

All of our courses are broken up into short steps of content, each leading chronologically (in terms of the learning journey) from the last and onto the next, so that the learning journey is explicit and the topics are clearly labelled and described.

This helps when it comes to revision too, as it’s easier to look back on the materials and find steps that you want or need to revisit.

Personalization Principle

People learn more deeply when words are in a conversational style, rather than a formal style.

People have described our videos as feeling like the conversations you have with the lecturer after the lecture has finished. That informal chat where you can ask questions, put across your point of view and get personal insights from the teacher.

We ask educators to use a friendly and informal style and look directly into the camera, addressing the learners as their educator. This all helps to personalise the content and helps simplify introductions to concepts and make them accessible to a wide audience.

Spatial Contiguity Principle

People learn more deeply when corresponding printed words and graphics are placed near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

Screenshot of animated video from Making Sense of Data in the Media.

Animation can work really well for illustrating complex concepts, but if the learner has to spend time working out what the graphic is trying to say, it can work the opposite way.

The above example is a complex concept illustrating how a number can be made to seem bigger or smaller. The graphic starts simple and builds gradually in complexity. The narrated explanation explains each step of the concept and all of the words are placed near the corresponding part of the graphic, illustrating the journey and labelling the content.

Planning your video

If you have the expertise and equipment to create professional, broadcast quality videos, it does have a real effect on them being well received. In open courses, we’re showcasing teaching expertise, research and Sheffield’s offering to the wider world, so we care deeply about the quality of our outward-facing content.

But our first priority is always in the planning and construction of the video. What shape will it take? How will it help the learner to understand the subject matter?

Mayer's principles are a good place to start when you are planning the shape of a video or any other multimedia content in learning and teaching and as long as there is a clear purpose and media is well-constructed and presented, the production values matter a lot less.

More information on the principles and the full list: http://hilt.harvard.edu/files/hilt/files/mayerslides.pdf

References:

MAYER, R, 2014. Research-Based Principles for Multimedia Learning. [PowerPoint presentation]. Research-Based Principles for Multimedia Learning. Harvard Initiative for Learning & Teaching. Harvard University, 5 May 2014. [Accessed 22 March 2017].

Mayer, Richard E, 2009, Multimedia Learning- 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

University of Sheffield, Literature of the English Country House, Futurelearn.com. Available from https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/country-house-literature/3

University of Sheffield, Forensic Facial Reconstruction: Finding Mr. X, FutureLearn.com. Available from https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/forensic-facial-reconstruction/1

University of Sheffield, Making Sense of Data in the Media, Futurelearn.com. Available from: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/media-data/1

Turnitin - Submission Limit Increased

Turnitin have recently increased the size of submissions you are able to upload to the system.

• Previously the filesize limit for any submission was 40mb but is now 100mb
• The page limit was previously 400 pages but is now 800 pages

The only exception to this is where a submission is made up entirely of text where the limit is 2MB (which equates to around 1000 pages).

New year, new us

New year, new team, new online presence...

It can't have escaped regular readers of this blog that we have had a bit of a facelift; a little nip here, a small tuck there, and we're refreshed and renewed...! The reason for this spring clean is that there's been a spot of reshuffle at the University of Sheffield and we have a brand new, expanded team working in the exciting arena of Digital Learning.

The team that was once Technology Enhanced Learning have merged with the team who were once Online Learning and have become the Digital Learning Team. You can read about the new infrastructure and team members at the Digital Learning page on the University's website.

This means that this blog will continue to give an insight into practices and work of the team as you once knew it, but that our remit has also expanded to include massive open online courses, distance learning and our forays into online degrees, online programmes and micro-credentialling.

It's a brave new world out there, and we're excited to begin exploring.

MOOC update: a look back and a careful step forwards

7 minute read

2018 marked a significant shift in thinking about the courses formally known as MOOCs. Many in the industry have been reflecting and evaluating on where we’ve come since the venture began. We did a lot of evaluating ourselves here at Sheffield and found we’d hit some unexpected milestones during 2018.

Below I’ll summarise some of the global key figures and takeaways involving MOOCs from 2018, introduce you to microcredentials if you haven’t already had the pleasure and let you know what some think was the point of it all by ending with a look ahead at FutureLearn CEO’s vision of a university without walls.

MOOCs in 2018

I attended the FutureLearn partner forum in January at which Dhawal Shah, CEO of Class Central presented his recent report ‘By The Numbers: MOOCs in 2018’.

It showed the kind of big numbers we are used to seeing when we talk about MOOCs, but it also showed a few significant shifts, the main one being that for the first time, there is a decrease, since 2017, in the number of new learners signing up to courses.



(Shah, 2018)

Also significant was the increase in the amount of people paying for courses on MOOC platforms. The four biggest platforms: Coursera, EdX, Udacity and FutureLearn had combined revenues of over $298 million for 2018 (Shah, 2018).

In 2017, Udacity’s VP declared MOOCs ‘Dead’ and announced a focus on its ‘Nanodegrees’. EdX followed with ‘MicroMasters’, Coursera now offer ’Specializations’ and FutureLearn offer ‘programs’.

Essentially, ‘MicroMasters’, ‘Nanodegrees’, ‘specializations’ and ‘programs’ are the same thing but designed and branded differently and with different outcomes for the learner.

What they are all describing is a ‘microcredential’. 

From MOOC to microcredential

MOOC platforms appear to see these microcredentials as the next stage in their evolution. They capitalise on the large audiences attracted by MOOCs and their successful pedagogical approach which engages and captivates diverse learners with high-quality content and specialised learning design by turning (some of) them into paying customers.

They are MOOC-style short, online courses designed, packaged and taken in series that give the learner a chance to learn a subject more in-depth and earn something more valuable and more formal than a MOOC certificate.

According to Shah’s report, at the start of 2019, the four biggest MOOC platforms offered 600 microcredentials between them.

But, as he and I agreed over a pint after his talk, it’s a very confusing landscape for a learner to navigate. They all have different branding and are communicated in different ways. Most importantly, in my opinion, is they all offer something different at the point of completion.

Some offer university credit (some towards a specific course, some that are hard to work out where and how you could redeem it), some offer ‘certification’ from an accredited body and some purely offer a record of what they have learned as informal proof of continuing professional development for career advancers. Many have branded the learner outcomes as a new, branded offer. 

My concern here is that employers are never going to be able to see the value until we start to understand them ourselves and use a universal language to communicate what they mean.

Our offer at Sheffield

As Shah articulated in his presentation, MOOCs are no longer free and no longer massive. Which is probably why we here at Sheffield have joined most MOOC providers and creators in the slow death of the word ‘MOOC’.

We’ve seen our massive numbers drop steadily on our ‘open, online courses’ or ‘free taster courses’ as we now call them. After seeing results from a full evaluation of our activity in 2018, we have been changing and evolving the way we develop courses and what we consider as success.

Despite lower enrolments, we see fantastic engagement from those who do enrol. Our course completions reached the 80,000 mark and we exceeded 100 course runs (or iterations) in 2018. We are listed in Shah’s ‘Top 50 free online courses of all time 2018 edition’ as voted for independently by learners and ‘Finding Mr. X’ achieved a 98% learner satisfaction rate last year across five iterations.

Educators told us in a 2016 educator survey that they consider working with us on developing and delivering a MOOC as ‘training’ and ‘learning new skills’. Many of them reported a change in thinking and an increase in their knowledge of course design and learner engagement since developing a MOOC. We have an unofficial learning community of 200 staff who keep in touch, share practice and collectively keep their courses going on FutureLearn year on year, with most courses now in double figures for the amount of times they have run.

With our portfolio of open, online courses, we’re opening up our offer to those who may not usually have access to HE-level learning. Those who just want to learn something new for whatever reason: to advance or change their career, to be more informed about a subject of interest, to learn a new skill. Because we have 80,000 completions from all types of learners, this gives us access to learning analytics and feedback that is worth its weight in gold. It help us to see what works, how learners interact at a distance, what keeps people at a distance motivated and what learning design techniques are most successful for learning a new concept.

We have many school-leavers among our learners who take courses as preparation for their HE study. Our courses are cited in UCAS applications, in registration information and in UG course interviews, giving incoming undergraduates a base-level introduction to how they will learn here and who they will learn with.

Whilst widening access to these diverse sets of learners, we’re also seeing success in attracting potential new students.

Rather than reaching for enrolments in the tens of thousands, we aim to engage learners who want to complete, who see the value in a taster course from a top 100 university and entice them to want to know what’s available for them to learn next.

Many successful business models are built on offering something for free with the hope that if someone has a great experience, they’ll be willing to pay for more

As long as that free taster experience is of a high quality and high value, this model seems to work (think Headspace, Spotify, Netflix, Creative Cloud). It’s a way of showing how good your product is and having faith that it’s good enough for people to be willing to pay for the next step.

We’ve streamlined our systems of reporting, so that departments get short, business-like reports which show how successful they’ve been in reaching potential new customers (students) with their product (courses). They also see demographic and course rating data to show them what online teaching techniques work and who they reach.

So, in 2019 and beyond we want to slowly and cautiously develop clearly articulated new ways for this audience of learners to take a ‘next step’ with our university.
2019 and beyond: 

Rethinking online degrees

Platforms which originally primarily offered MOOCs now have 48 online degree programmes listed on their sites with most offering flexible pathways made up of micro-credentials (modules) that you can take as and when you can; degrees on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Simon Nelson, FutureLearn’s CEO gave a forward looking overview at the forum outlining their mission statement and aims for the future.

He stated that, according to EY-Parthenon’s projections, based upon current tertiary enrolment growth rate in relation to GDP, by 2030 there will be global demand for degrees from 13.9 million new students per year. This would mean building 700 new universities per year to meet that demand.



He sees universities meeting this global demand by increasing and rethinking their online distance learning offer.

FutureLearn’s advice to partners is to build degrees online by offering ‘programs’ as credit-bearing, stackable micro-credentials, equivalent to a 10-15 credit module.

My feelings on this are that creating a ‘branded’ micro-credential offer entails trying to convince your customers to buy a new and unrecognised product. Instead, creating micro-credentials that are equivalent to a module and earn credit within a clearly articulated pathway towards an award is something we already know is valuable. It’s recognisable to employers and is familiar to us too. Why create something new when credit already has a high value attached?


Add the ‘free taster’ principle as an on-boarding and marketing technique and you have a business model that is clearly defined to its potential customer.

It would go like this:


Free taster course → paid ‘program’ (15 credits MODULE EQUIVALENT)

Take all paid programs within a degree and you’re eligible for the final assessment, leading to your PG Cert, Diploma or Masters award.

Here at Sheffield, we’ll keep a cautious eye on the early-adopters of this model and consider some small-scale testing of our potential market to see if this is something we want to pursue. 

Watch this space.