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OpenScienceMOOC
Should we build our own course/community?
http://info.p2pu.org/2014/07/21/how-to-use-github-pages-to-build-your-open-online-course-and-community/
Not the worst idea..
Can we? Yes. Should we I don't know, I can see advantages to either. In terms of hosting content (lessons videos etc it shouldn't be any/much more difficult. But we'd also have to have some solutions for interaction (like a forum?) which again isn't hard but maybe more to think about. Is there a list of requirements that we need for hosting the MOOC? Then we can decide how many of the boxes we could tick ourselves?
They are called individual blogs and webmentions works great.
On Sun, May 27, 2018, 9:00 AM Alexander Morley [email protected] wrote:
Can we? Yes. Should we I don't know, I can see advantages to either. In terms of hosting content (lessons videos etc it shouldn't be any/much more difficult. But we'd also have to have some solutions for interaction (like a forum?) which again isn't hard but maybe more to think about. Is there a list of requirements that we need for hosting the MOOC? Then we can decide how many of the boxes we could tick ourselves?
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I think one of the plans is to work with others who are working on building an open science forum atm, although I'm not sure how prrogress on that is going. But if we could build our own forum still, that would be amazing.. Would that sort of thing be possible to plug in to the newer site @Kevin-Mattheus-Moerman or way too much work?
Looking at requirements, there do seem to be some basic ones, but nothing too difficult (looking at eg this). @BieTanjade does a check list of sorts for basic MOOC requirements exist anywhere?
My 2 cents... I think there is a difference, though obviously not a complete split, between functionalities required to run the MOOC (i.e. which participants need to participate in to complete the course) and functionalities which would sustain a community beyond/around the MOOC itself.
For the latter, I'd say it's especially important to consider to what extent we'd want to facilitate such community building around the MOOC (with e.g. a separate forum etc) vs. to what extent we'd want to tap into and enrich existing community activities with activities stemming from the MOOC (e.g. by integrating with an existing forum ;-) )
For the former, it would indeed be good to start sourcing a list of requirements (also in consultation with the people developing the modules) and then see if and how these would need to be part of the hard infrastructure of the MOOC itself or can be more distributed or integrated in what's happening elsewhere.
To make this very concrete (still focussing on the forum idea): if the MOOC is offered as a course for cohorts with a set start and end date, and part of the assignments is to discuss things (like assigments) within the cohort in a forum-like structure, that might be best served by a MOOC-specific forum. If, on the other hand, there is continuing/self-paced enrollment and participants are encouraged to participate in broader discussion, then integration/coupling to an external, existing forum might be more suitable.
Having said all that, there seem to be some nice GitHub repos for forum implementation in GitHub pages :-)
Thanks, Bianca! Yeah, the instructions out there seem pretty simple in terms of building the actual site itself (eg here), and this is something I'm learning myself atm too.
My idea has always been to hae this running as a continuous, self-paced program for each module. I know there's the Ask Open Science 'forum', but is there anything else similar do you know? @mrchristian might know more about that. But I would much rather tap into existing platforms in this regard.
In terms of technical functional requirements, good idea. From what I can see from my angle, the only real technical issues would be video hosting, as well as perhaps having an environment in which code could be run - but this might be beyond any MOOC provider atm! Besides that, cross-modular aspects such as having final quizzes and badges/certificates are important.
video hosting, as well as perhaps having an environment in which code could be run
I think there are enough out of the box solutions for both of these now not to worry too much about them :)
If you wanted to deploy your own instance of the Open edX MOOC platform, it's about to become a lot easier. I've learned from my friends over at IBL Studios that they are contributing a production-ready image of Open edX to the AWS Marketplace. Look for OpenIBL.
Open edX is the open-source learning platform developed by edX with contributions from Stanford and powering many MOOC sites around the world.
And I have some shiny new toys to integrate course content from Jupyter notebooks, into Open edX. I'm really excited about these developments. See below. Even if the content doesn't include code, it makes it very easy to incorporate content authored by anyone: all they have to do is put a notebook on a public repo, and you can pull content from it via its URL.
_________ copied from a post on the jupyter-education Google group_____
- Jupyter Viewer XBlock
The idea is that an instructor (like me) writes the course first on Jupyter notebooks. These are like a computable textbook, and of course all openly licensed and available on GitHub. Then she wants to make an online course or MOOC. But she is not planning on making a video-based MOOC, of course. She will integrate the content from the notebooks, and then add assessments, discussions, etc., to craft the learning sequences.
The Jupyter viewer permits adding the content into the course with simply the URL to the public notebook. You can add a whole notebook, or sections of it, using start and end tags.
Here's a demo showing how it's used to add content into a course: https://youtu.be/K8jhWgQnxvI
My latest course, “Get Data Off the Ground with Python,” used the new XBlock http://go.gwu.edu/engcomp1 I added the second half of this course using the XBlock, and it took me less than an hour. You’ll have to enroll to see it, but it’s worth it.
In Open edX, each Section of the course corresponds to one notebook (one full “lesson”). The notebook content is broken down in Sub-Sections and Units within the online course, forming a learning sequence after adding in topic discussions, quiz questions and other assessments, (a few!) short videos…
To provide a way to interact with the notebooks fully, I'm embedding Binder buttons within the course.
- Graded Jupyter Notebook XBlock
This is the Graded Jupyter Notebook XBlock, allowing an instructor to create a graded sub-section in Open edX based on an nbgrader-instrumented Jupyter notebook. The instructor uploads the assignment notebook (instructor version after setting auto-graded cells with their score values), uploads a requirements.txt file with needed libraries, and sets the number of allowed tries and a couple of other parameters. The student downloads the notebook and solves the assignment in their local Jupyter or a cloud service (JupyterHub, Azure Notebooks, CoCalc, etc.). When the student uploads their solved assignment, it gets immediately auto-graded by nbgrader in a container—the score gets sent back to the XBlock and gets displayed to the student (detail by graded cell), and gets automatically added to their progress in the Open edX gradebook.
Here is a demo of the XBlock usage: https://youtu.be/SwRAs8_FIdo
and here is a post on the blog of or tech partners. https://ibleducation.com/gw-and-ibl-release-an-open-edx-xblock-to-add-graded-problems-based-on-jupyter-notebooks/
I'm so excited about this and I can't wait to create more courses with it!
Announcements: https://twitter.com/LorenaABarba/status/989105798881083392 https://twitter.com/LorenaABarba/status/996523241161330690
I realize for this MOOC maybe the coding awesomeness is not entirely needed. But still ... I thought you'd be interested in exploring the possibilities here.
If it helps, The Carpentries uses GitHub Pages, Zoom, Etherpad, Jupyter, etc. Here are our lessons hosted on GitHub:
Software Carpentry https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/ Data Carpentry http://www.datacarpentry.org/lessons/ Library Carpentry http://librarycarpentry.org/#portfolio
Check out the course I built and am teaching https://edu305.jgregorymcverry.com I juts build a static site and everyone runs their own blog. I touch no user data and use an rss reader.
This is all very useful, thanks @labarba @libcce and @jgmac1106. The agony of choice! Do you have any idea which is easier perhaps for someone who isn't too familiar with the tech? I can handle GitHub pages just about, and am learning HTML, and Open EdX seems like it might be a bit complicated to get set up.
I go with this design. I static website and then let people pick a blogging patform of their choice and connect through RSS. It is how #ds106, #rhizo16, #clmooc do it. It is also, in my beliefs the most open approach and you never have to hold on to user data.
Now in my dream world these would all be done on a blogging platform that has the microformat2 mark up so really cool readers using emerging technologies could one day be used.
Can also spin up a multi-user Known site. Those are super easy and super friendly for the least technical to the most.
One idea would be to have the canonical link of the course and then give each user a subdomain with your platform of choice so you can have better access to analytics though now you are responsible for hosting user data.
@Protohedgehog the good news is that we (The Carpentries) can lower the barrier to working with GitHub via our lesson material and we have templates that can help streamline the process. Also, we have an active community that would likely be interested in the MOOC. In fact, I think we just had a session on Open Science MOOC at CarpentryCon. I'm biased though 😃
Oh wow, that would be epic! Do you think a 'How to use GitHub' manual could be added here? This was always the risk of working primarily through here, and it would be great to lower that barrier as much as possible.
Sorry for being quiet over this. Just a few more weeks before I crash into summer.
As I have said in the past: the main reason for choice of platforms like Coursera or Edx would be reaching a wider audience (Coursera for instance boasts a public of 30 milj learners). If your target audience is not necessarily on that platform, you can build something yourself, or at least use open software.
I do strongly recommend making sure you have a community layer to the course experience. It not only improves learner retention and understanding through social interaction (if you have to explain something to somebody else, you need to understand it better yourself) but there might be interesting side effects like collaborations between like minded people, crowdsourcing, "citizen science" (well, in this case perhaps simply open science... ) and many more.
It is crucial to have some community guidelines which manage expectations and set some value standards (but we have those already) and you will want to appoint a few volunteers to emoderate the community and keep it lively. I believe I shared some tools & insights for this already.
Tanja
From: Jon Tennant [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, June 01, 2018 1:17 PM To: OpenScienceMOOC/Main Cc: Bie, T. de; Mention Subject: Re: [OpenScienceMOOC/Main] Should we build our own course/community? (#9)
Oh wow, that would be epic! Do you think a 'How to use GitHub' manual could be added herehttps://github.com/OpenScienceMOOC/Module-5-Open-Research-Software-and-Open-Source? This was always the risk of working primarily through here, and it would be great to lower that barrier as much as possible.
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@Protohedgehog if you did go the GitHub Pages route, would a pre lesson module geared toward contributing/participating in the MOOC via GitHub be the way to go? GitHub's collaborative features might help with participation and continued sustainability, that might be a benefit to the OS MOOC? Here are some recent stats about GitHub as well https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/github-statistics/.
I think that might be a nice idea, yes. Something like this would be perfect I think http://mozillascience.github.io/working-open-workshop/github_for_collaboration/
After today, this discussion might look quite different ;-) #github #microsoft Interesting times!
Ha, yeah, I was just looking at that too.. I don't think it affects things too much, does it..?
Well... it might affect our desire and willingness to use GitHub as a platform, is all ;-)
It's an interesting dilemma as some people in the open science community are fine with using the Google suite of tools for a variety of purposes. Personally, I've been comfortable with working with these tools as long as there is a way to port your data easily to another service. Even if that is the case, a number of services make it very difficult for you to leave by way of their convenient service offerings. Having said all that, there are already a wave of tweets from people saying they'll be leaving GitHub (and going to GitLab). But going back to your initial question @Protohedgehog about the platform, and I guess we got bogged down in the tools conversation, but I think my point was that The Carpentries community is the real platform to work with, to help with OS MOOC. Again, there were some people presenting on it at CarpentryCon 😃
OK, neat. Is there any way to get our hands on those presentations at all? Maybe we should shift to email too to discuss this further - want to get me at [email protected] ? :)
Hey folks! So, now content has been built (finally..), does anyone have any thoughts on this? Or the content itself. Formats are markdown and iPython, so pretty flexible with what we can do.
That sounds good to me @Protohedgehog and just wondering if this can be a use case for an OER lesson we are considering for Library Carpentry (I'll email you about shortly). I'm also going to tell people in the Carpentries Slack channel that this is live and feedback is welcome.
Hi, I'm joining the conversation a bit late. I'll try to not repeat what others have said before but pardon me if it happens.
I think @BieTanjade has a good point saying that "the main reason for choice of platforms like Coursera or Edx would be reaching a wider audience". I'll add to that that using a third-party like EdX would also avoid us to think about the following things :
- maintaning our own platform. That means having/paying someone to keep the servers up-to-date and secure.
- being sure users data is safely hosted.
- dealing with legal notice regarding what kind of data we collect and what we do with it, etc.
- hosting our own platform could cost more money.
On the other hand, hosting our own platform will give us more control on the content :
- We don't need to deal with an other organizations
- We can avoid using proprietary softwares (e.g Google Analytics) that track us, sell users data and so on.
As @labarba mentionned EdX is based on a free and open source software called OpenEdX. More precisely, it is release under the AGPLv3 license. The Free Software Foundation has a page explaining why the AGPLv3 is a good license for softwares hosted on remote servers (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html).
Bonus : Did you know that Google has a contract with the pentagon to develop AI for military drones. It makes me think : Do we have a guideline on how we choose our partners?
Since Coursera and edX appear again, don't forget that these are revenue-seeking platforms. Coursera is for-profit, while edX may be non-profit but is fiercely focused on making revenue. They are not open platforms and they are going to require paid certificates. You can't even do the assessments for free in most courses now.
Also note that to put a course in either platform, you'll have to go through a partner institution. To be an edX partner, institutions pay a large "entry fee"—it used to be half a million dollars just to get in the door. I don't know what the running fee is today. Coursera enters into revenue-sharing agreements with universities. In both cases, there are long contracts to be signed. Also, I hear from course authors that both Coursera and edX try to mess with the course, giving direction to steer course design for optimizing revenue, often with disregard to learning or community experience.
Shockingly, I don't have half a million dollars right now. And anyway, even if I did I would give it to you all instead of spending on Coursera or edX..
I'm not sure if anyone saw this, but TU Delft (Netherlands) just launched an Open Science course on edX here: https://www.edx.org/es/course/open-science-sharing-your-research-with-the-world I really hope they didn't pay half a mil for that.
TU Delft is ahead of the game in online learning. And, yes, they paid at least a million dollars to become an edX "top-tier" consortium member. There's also a yearly maintenance fee with edX that's probably in the order of tens of thousands (depends on the institution and number of courses on the platform.)
Another thing: Coursera and edX may have millions of registered users, and yes that does mean that their newsletter has huge distribution. But that does not mean, necessarily, that a particular course will have many more learners. Despite what they say ...
https://twitter.com/LorenaABarba/status/1004061886520942593
Their catalog is so big now, that individual courses get lost in the forest. So it still rests in the course authors or home institution to reach an audience.
OK, awesome, thank you so much for your insight as always @labarba! And congrats on the 8k enrollments. So, we don't have half a mil, but what we are in the process of setting up is an (EU-wide for the moment) Exeuctive Institutional Board of sorts, that will help with delivery into grad schools.
Btw, the first draft for Module 5 is now available in Jupyter Notebook format..! https://github.com/OpenScienceMOOC/Module-5-Open-Research-Software-and-Open-Source/tree/master/content_development#in-ipython-notebook-format