Hype-hopping at Online Educa Berlin

Last December I once more attended, spoke and chaired at my favorite learning conference: Online Educa Berlin. As usual, the conference brought together diverse stakeholders from the online education and training world (higher education, corporate training, public administrations and policy makers, edupreneurs, ... ) who all look at technology enhanced learning from their own angle. This year's theme was "Learning Moves" and that has a double meaning for me. At the one hand it suggests the continuous advancements made in the many areas of online learning (mobile, video, standards, ... dare I say MOOC?). At the other hand it stands for our calling; why do we do the things we do? Learning moves people out of their comfort zone into new areas of competence. "I never thought I could do this" is probably the best evaluation a trainer can get.

Here is what I remember.

One hype to rule them all

From the very start of the speaker reception on Wednesday evening, it became clear that this conference was going to be the conference about MOOCs. It has been quite a while since any topic has really dominated the online learning conversation - but MOOCs sure did that in 2013. The year before there were hardly any presentations or talks on MOOCs, and this conference had so many it almost led to a MOOC fatigue on the last day. Also the OEB Debate was centered around a MOOC motion: "this house believes MOOCs are doomed". Normally, the OEB debates result in a neck-on-neck race to reject or adopt the motion but this year the audience's vote was super clear: no, MOOCs are not doomed.

The MOOC mania/hype/(r)evolution/uptake did illustrate the speed of change that is happening. Normally you'd have year 1 at the conference where the evangelist would preach the new thing in very fuzzy terms and make us believe it is the promised land on online learning. The year after the conference would fill up with the doom prophets that do just the opposite. And only in the third year you'd get presentations and case studies and actual facts based on research that would show it is somewhere in the middle. For MOOCs, this happened all in one year. I found the audience very knowledgeable about MOOCs, with many having experienced one or two themselves. The discussions in the various sessions were of a high level. What a difference with earlier conferences I've participated in where the unspoken question of the audience was rather: "what is a MOOC and should I pay any attention to it?"

Also for me personally, 2013 has been the year of the MOOC - more specifically of LeaderMOOC. Most of my blog posts have been about the 'behind the scenes' of LeaderMOOC and the lessons learned. I have hardly had any time for anything else on top of my regular work. If there is one lesson I learned it is that piloting MOOCs are exhausting. This sentiment was verified by Inge and Wilfried who also both run MOOCs and can testify just how much work and energy goes into creating and running MOOCs. Maybe MOOCs are doomed after all because we'll run out of energy :-) .

From all angles

Learning is an interdisciplinary field. Learning and development also touch everyone at various stages in their lives. So it is not surprising there are so many different stakeholders in the online learning industry. While they all have their own focus and agenda - the resulting mixture of higher education, policy makers, corporate training, venture capitalists and edupreneurs - is a very rich one, and OEB is one of the only conferences that ties these audiences together.
New this year were the edupreneurs and there was a special session where various young firms were demoing their products. One of them was a pair of 3D glasses Oculus Rift I tried on to travel through our various planets.

Video killed the classroom star

I also attended two workshops of the Video Educa stream - one on sound editing and one on various types of cameras. Video is increasingly becoming the language of online education, and creating short, cheap and good-enough videos is a key skill to have (and not just for creating MOOCs).
One thing I remember is that most training folks use Camtasia Studio to create their videos, much more than the big (and complicated) editing packages such as Adobe Premiere. I also learned in the past year that whereas people will usually say image quality (eg HD) is the most important feature for quality videos, it turns out people are more upset when the sound or lightning are not OK. And since it is very hard to adjust audio in post-production (other than removing some background noise levels), having good sound while recording is critical. There are actually more tips I could give on video making but that probably deserves another post and should be written another time.

It goes on and on and on and on and on and on ...

(We didn't start the fire.)
So, what's next? What will the new hypes be in 2014 and beyond?

I think that the stars are getting aligned to really make some sound progress on personalizing the learning experience through technology. This is not a new idea (I don't think we need new ideas per se, we just need to deliver on some of our promises.) But it is a dream whose time has come to get fulfilled because we have laid the fundaments of it lately.
Over the past years we saw a rise in data gathering: we obviously have MOOCs who by their scale have generated tons of useful data we are now sitting on. But we also for example saw the birth of the Tin Can API that stores data on a range of learning experiences (inside and outside the good ol' LMS) and is getting more and more traction. In the higher education space there are initiatives like Signals that try to predict passing or failing a course early on by using learning analytics. If we combine all of this and extrapolate the next steps we (could) end up with personalizing the learning experience based on smart algorithms.

Personally speaking, I'll be focusing my attention more on self-directed learning, and technology to support it. Unless I do another MOOC and that drains all my attention and energy :-)

Oh, happy New Year!