Wednesday 18th September 2013 - The launch of MOOCs

Did those who congregated under the walls of the Bastille Prison in Paris on 14 July 1789 have any inkling of what would result from their actions?  Did those who welcomed Lenin at the Finland Station in St Petersburg in 1917 foresee what might happen next?  Was I today at the start of an educational revolution that will herald a new world for us in higher education?  Frankly, I don't know (just as those in Paris and St Petersburg on fateful dates didn't know).  But I suspect that even if we don't get a revolution out of today's event, we will at least see a world of new possibilities.

The venue was London - to be more precise, the Conference Suite at the British Library.  It was the launch of 'Futurelearn', the UK-based group of universities, led by the Open University, offering MOOCs (Massive Open On-line Courses). Before the formal part of the event I had a long chat with a government adviser about what we were expecting to get out of this new venture.  Frankly, we don't really know.  We don't know who will take our courses, nor in what numbers, nor where they will be.  We don't know how many will go through to the end of them.  We don't know how many will want to get some form of certification for the course.  We don't know how many might want to pursue an interest in the subject further - for example by signing up to a degree programme.  And if they do, we don't know how practicable it will be for them to do so with us (for example through distnace learning programmes) or with someone else.

Martin Bean (VC of the Open Unviersity) and David Willetts both spoke passionately and interestingly, and opened up some new thoughts (at least for me).  I will confine myself to three observations that came from what they said, either directly or indirectly.

1. As Martin pointed out, there was an irony in us meeting in the British Library because via our smartphones and iPads we all had access to more information resources than the whole library that surrounded us.
2. David mentioned the recent launch of a broadband-delivering satellite that will improve mobile coverage for the whole of a continent that is hungry for education but where access is limited.
3. David also posited the example of the learner in another part of the world who takes one of our MOOCs and wants to go deeper and further.  How can we support them if there is no chance of them coming to study within our universities in the UK, and we don't have pure distance learning programmes available?  Is there a case for global alliances of MOOC-delivering universities to direct learners to local providers who themselves then base their programmes on a new internationally-developed pedagogy of materials from across their network?

But I will end with a cautious note.  I do have some doubts about the 'level' and 'depth' of the material on offer.  two familiar clichés seem appropriate.  MOOCs may try to be 'all things to all people', and 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.'  I had a brief conversation with Rita Chakrabarti, the BBC Education Correspondent, and she was interested in the first point.  It also came up from another journalist in the press briefing.  A piece of film we were shown in a persentation concerned how plants fix carbon from the atmosphere and combined it with hydrogen and oxygen (in water) to produce carbohydrate.  As was pointed out by a critic, it was an explanation suitable for a 14 year old, but it was far from enough for even an ageing social scientist such as me.  .The blurb for almost all the MOOCs launched today said they requierd no prior knowledge and were suitable for anyone with an interest in the subject (there were a couple of exceptions aimed particularly at children, including Sheffield's offering on dentistry).  My own view is that if we want to support the MOOCs revolution we will need to be more precise in who we are designing our courses for.  And we also need to convince people that the MOOC is only a start for the journey of learning, and that having done a MOOC they don't know it all.

There is a story that when the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion on what the effects of the French Revolution were he said it was too early to tell.  We shall have to wait to see the longer-term significance of today's events at the British library.

Friday 13th September 2013 - How I got into University despite ....

Several people have obliquely referred to my A level qualifications since they were exposed to the world by Sky News on this year's results day - 15th August.  No one has said it outright, but what they are obviously thinking is 'How did you get into unviersity with those grades?'  For those who don't know, my A level grades were BBC in Geography, History, and 'Economics with British Constitution' (a mixture of Economics and Politics).  Let me explain, and also draw two still-relevant conclusions from my experience.

In my final year at junior school I passed and exam and interview and was offered a place at a 'direct grant' school in West London - Latymer Upper.  Direct grant schools no longer exist, but they included Bradford Grammar, Manchester Grammar, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, Dame Allen's in newcastle and many more.  A few pupils paid to attend but the vast majority were on scholarships paid for by local authorities in the surrounding area.  Such schools drew from more than their own local authority catchment and therefore, I suppose, in a sense 'creamed off' the brightest pupils.  Latymer had five form entry with streaming, and the scholarship boys were in the top four streams and the paid-for boys in the bottom stream.  There was a girls equivalent school - Godolphin and Latymer: more recently I have found out that Dame Susan Greenfield was an exact contemporary of mine there.  Latymer is now an independent school and the social mix of the boys must have changed significantly - my father was, at the time, a printer, and I sat next to a boy whose father was a police constable: another friend had a father who was a signwriter for shops.  I imagine such occupation levels are no longer represented in the school.

There were no league tables of school performance in those days - although there was a bit of competition between direct grant schools as to who could get most pupils into Oxford or Cambridge in any one year.  I wss not a good pupil - coming bottom of the class in several subjects.  But somehow the school singled me out as someone with potential.  They weren't too worried about my current performance, but they believed I could improve in the future.  They put me in a stream that would take O levels (the forerunners of GCSE) after only 4 secondary years insetad of the normal 5.  This also meant that I did only a small number of subjects - nothing like the 10 or 11 that are commonplace now.  Because my birthday is late in the acacdemic year I was not yet 15 when I took my O levels.  Although I didn't do very well (I got only one top grade, and faield one subject which I later retook successfully) the school persevered with me and I entered the sixth form.

So I was still only 16 (nearing 17) when I took my A levels, with the results I have already confessed to.  I was too young to go to university (indeed I hadn't applied in that A level year for that reason) and stayed on into the 'Third year Sixth' to take the Oxford entrance exam and interview.  That was what the school had seen as the outcome for me all along.  So, six months after getting my not-very-good A levels, I was called to Oxford for interview.  I don't think I had made a great leap of performance in those six months, but I was offered a place.  I suspect the college I had applied to had in some ways applied the same test on my application as my school - looking for potential rather than achievement to date.  (Just to show that at some point I must have made some progress I will add that I did graduate with a First at the end of my three years as an undergraduet, in a year when there were only 4 Firsts awarded to around 75 students in my disciplinary cohort.  I add that not to boast but to suggest that this faith in my potential had perhaps been justified.)

What two conclusions do I draw from this? 

Without two aspects of this story my life would almost certainly have been very different.
1. If there had been league tables of school performance at O level and at A level my school would probably have needed to focus on improving aggregate performance there and would not have fast-tracked me and other pupils through O level with the recognition that we might not do very well.  We would have been put into a more 'standard' progression route.  And that would have led me to take A levels at the 'normal' age instead of a year early, and probably go to a university other than Oxford at that point (assuming I had achieved the grades to be accepted at all!).
2. Both the school and Oxford were more interested in identifying potential - and backing their judgement on this - than in rewarding past performance.  I am sure there must have been other applicants who had better A level grades than me, but I was thought to be the better long-term bet.  The rhetoric around A level results and university entry today is entirely geared to a university place being a reward for top A level performance.  If that had been the case in my day I may not have gone to university at all.  Past performance can be measured; future potential can't.  But I certainly benefited from the attempt to do the latter.  Today universities still attempt to identify the potential in candidates, but woe betide the university that then offers places to candidates with lower grades (but potential) than to others with higher grades who are rejected because they are felt to have reached their peak and show little promise for further development.