Editorial

This is my final editorial for Open Learning. After three very interesting years I now hand on the role of Editor to two colleagues: Simon Bell and Christopher Douce, who between them, and with the help of our expert Editorial Board, will guide the journal into its next phase. Open Learning in its various incarnations is one of the longest running journals to focus exclusively on the field of open, distance and online education. When established (with a different title) in the 1970s it was read by a small but globally distributed audience of distance education practitioners and researchers. Over the years that audience has grown to include practitioners using distance and online methods in blended and face-to-face learning contexts. Distance and online learning is no longer a discrete specialised form of education offered only by specialised institutions, it is entwined with face-to-face education in many ‘blended’ formats. Open Learning is now one of many journals covering aspects of this field.

Over the past three years that I have been Editor we have been engaged along with other journals in the debate about open access publishing, the usefulness of metrics as measures of journal quality and how to use social media to ensure that our authors reach the widest audience for their work. During this time we have also moved all our editing activity to an online platform, hopefully in a way that was totally seamless for our authors and readers. I would expect the next three years to present new challenges to the new Editors and the Board as the field of academic publishing continues to evolve in often unexpected ways.

I am pleased that in this final issue under my Editorship we are again able to showcase some of the research done by members of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU). Our relationship with the EADTU began in 2013 with a special issue (2013:3) dedicated to the best work presented at that year’s EADTU annual conference. Those papers have proved popular with our readership and we are happy to continue this relationship bringing more of the most up to the minute research from the European distance education community. In this issue we have four papers that have come out the 2014 EADTU annual conference: a paper on the design of MOOCs (Warburton & Mor, 2015); a paper on a topic that often goes hand in hand with a discussion of MOOCs and the accreditation of learning: badging as a recognition of learner achievement (Law, 2015); a discussion of the changing role of students in a neoliberal model of distance education (Moerkerke, 2015) and finally a case study of the use of Open Educational Resources on a nursing programme (Elf, Ossiannilsson, Neljesjö, & Jansson, 2015). This issue also contains one independent case study (Brudermann, 2015) which explores online learning in language learning.

Previous issues have engaged with debates about whether MOOCs are productive, disruptive innovations in distance education (de Langen & van den Bosch, 2013) and whether there is a sustainable business model for free open access MOOCs (Kalman, 2014). The authors of these earlier papers were critical of the role MOOCs were playing in open and distance education (ODE) as have others writing in other journals in the field. However, MOOCs have become popular among learning providers and make a rich source for ODE research and experimentation offering options to the search for affordable lifelong learning and professional development at scale. Warburton and Mor (2015) report on the work of the MOOCs design patterns project which uses a Participatory Patterns Workshops methodology to gather information from designers of MOOCs about the challenges they have faced and successful solutions to these to elicit design principles that others can use when creating a new MOOC. Warburton and Mor provide detailed examples from workshops carried out in the project as well as detailed descriptions of some of the MOOCs that participants discussed. Their discussion is an excellent introduction to the methodology of the project as well as giving a flavour of the kinds of MOOCs people are producing in the UK in particular. The workshops elicited a long list of ‘patterns’ of student engagement that the authors map onto the areas of: structure, participation, orientation, community, learning and management. This comprises, they argue, a design language that can be used to describe all MOOCs, as well as being a tool than any MOOC designer can use.

Law's (Law, 2015), based on work carried out in the Open University UK. It introduces and elaborates the idea of ‘digital badging’ – a concept now applied to MOOCs but one that has developed as a way of accrediting informal learning carried out in open access courses (often using open educational resources, OERs). Badging is sometimes also known as micro-credentializing, because credit is given for very small amounts of study. Digital badging was first discussed in this journal in a paper on the future of adult learning in Europe (Castaño Muñoz, Redecker, Vuorikari, & Punie, 2013), coming out of the 2013 EADTU conference. Digital badges can have a number of functions from being an income generating component of a MOOC or a set of OERs (de Langen & van den Bosch, 2013) to motivating learners, demonstrating individual progression and certifying achievement, which are the aspects that Law focuses on.

Law uses large scale data sets gathered from students at the Open University UK, through questionnaire and demographic analysis as well as usage data gathered automatically from the Moodle platform delivering the OERs. The researched OERs are self-paced independent short courses, which, like MOOCs and in the tradition of much unsupported distance learning, have drop-out rates considerably higher than supported and cohort-paced distance learning. Digital badges, given to students after they have worked through sections of material and completed short quizzes, seem to have the potential to reduce that drop-out. Law is careful to qualify her findings by noting that the students in her sample were of a particular kind. Many would have preferred to have taken traditional supported online courses with regular assessment and accreditation. However in the UK courses delivered by supported online learning are nearly as expensive as those delivered by traditional face-to-face methods, and all course fees have risen significantly over the last few years, pricing some categories of student out of the market and making OERs the only kind of study that is affordable for many people. These students want both motivational feedback and accreditation (at low or no cost if possible), and are very positive about digital badging.

This paper is followed by a case study by Elf and colleagues (2015) on the implementation of OERs on a module of a nursing programme at Dalarna University in Sweden. The context of the use of OERs here is very different from that of the Open University UK. The nursing programme at Dalarna is taught in a face-to-face system that Elf describes as an ‘apprenticeship’ system where students learn from following the demonstrations of practitioners. While Law (2015) evaluated the acceptance and use of OERs in an institution that delivers all its courses by supported open and distance learning methods, Elf et al. look at how acceptable OERs are to students and staff on a module of a nursing programme where all the other modules are taught by face-to-face methods. For these students it was important that OERs were not seen as replacing quality time spent with expert teaching staff. The students in Elf’s study also felt overwhelmed by the resources available to them and needed help in knowing how to select what they needed. These nursing students were not from an academic background and their learning skills needed to be developed as they studied, and they are, in this way, very different from many of the students in Law’s study and Moerkerke’s (2015) study, discussed below. Elf et al. argue that the need for constant professional updating by health professionals necessitates them being able to evaluate and use a variety of online materials; therefore teaching them to use OERs in their undergraduate training delivers a professional skill. Overall the staff and students on the nursing programme welcomed of OERs. However, the students in particular were unsure how to evaluate OERs and other online resources that came from different social and cultural contexts. Most of the health care resources on the internet are in English and reflect national policies and practices in the countries and regions where they originated. It is important for educators to remember that the majority of MOOCs, OERs and other internet resources are in English. Many have been developed in a US context and most do not explicitly acknowledge that they are based in a particular local praxis. This limits the resources available to educators and students working in ‘minority’ (in a global sense) languages.

The final case study from the EADTU selection focuses on a quite different model of course design and applies it to a Masters course with a very small student population. Moerkerke (2015) starts by observing that many open and distance education universities that were originally set up to deliver degree level education to people who had not been able to engage with this through a face-to-face university are now delivering mainly to graduates who are taking distance education courses for professional development. He argues that the traditional model of course design, a product driven model of customer enterprise relationship needs to be replaced by a service orientated relationship model where students/customers are co-creators of value. The language Moerkerke uses is drawn from marketing theory and is likely to be unfamiliar to many readers of this journal. However, the underlying pedagogic principles will look familiarly like constructivist theory. Moerkerke begins with an overview of theories in this field focusing on the DART (dialogue, access, risks-benefits, transparency) model of customer/institutional interaction, and NDL (New Dominant Logic) model of pedagogy (Baron & Harris, 2006). These models have not been explicitly applied to many ODE courses but Moerkerke demonstrates, through using them to evaluate a Masters course at the Open University of the Netherlands, that they can be very valuable in producing a course design that encourages good pedagogy for professional development courses. The Masters course was delivered in what we might classify as traditional supported distance learning, where there is intensive dialogue between academic tutors and students. Moerkerke argues that DART and NDL are models with values worth importing more widely to ODE – which would encompass the MOOC and OERs discussed in the three papers above, although it is worth keeping in mind that, as Elf et al. saw in their study, less expert students can be overwhelmed by a course design that requires them to find and select resources themselves.

This issue also contains one paper not originating in the 2014 EADTU conference: ‘Computer-mediated online language learning programmes vs. tailor-made teaching practices at university level: a foul relationship or a perfect match?’ (Brudermann, 2015). The article contributes to the discussion of language learning delivered through distance education, and more recently online, that has run through this journal since its early days (see Mason, 2011; Perrin, 1992).

Brudermann describes an experimental study that was carried out at University Pierre et Marie Curie with 250 French undergraduate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students, studying English as a foreign language as part of their degree. This institution requires students to become proficient in at least one foreign language during their science studies. In this case the language was English. An online English language course was designed around topics of scientific interest and a system developed which could deliver feedback to each student, as well as tailor made revision programme with input from a tutor to help each student pass a final exam. Unlike the rest of their courses, this course had no face-to-face component. For face-to-face institutions there is always the question of whether students perceive a course with no face-to-face component as ‘lacking’. Brudermann discussed in detail the components of the course and how they operated with the students. This is a very useful contribution to the development of models of successful online language learning. On measures of both performance and satisfaction the course was successful. It is not surprising that more students completed the work and passed the exam in the ‘guided’ course than in a comparable ‘autonomous’ (i.e. unguided) online course, but the improved retention is for the course designers a measure of the success of their efforts to support students through the online pedagogy.

To complete this issue we have two book reviews which relate very closely to topics of papers published in the issue: ‘The Battle for open: how openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory’, (Weller, 2014) and ‘MOOCS’, (Haber, 2014). Both books we believe will be an extremely useful resource to our readers.

Gill Kirkup