Morten Flate Paulsen taught an online course at Universidade Aberta in Portugal on cooperative freedom and transparency in online learning. The course had students publish their work openly on blogs and learning platforms to demonstrate these concepts. Students created learning objects, annotated bibliographies, and participated in online discussions. Their work was distributed across many websites and difficult to overview. While this extreme transparency provided opportunities for feedback, many tutors and students may not be comfortable with such openness. Paulsen hopes to continue collaborating with UA and other universities on international online courses.

1. Some Experiences with Cooperative Freedom
and Transparency in the MPEL Master
Programme at Universidade Aberta
Morten Flate Paulsen
The presentation is available via my homepage at:
http://home.nki.no/morten/
A 40-minutes presentation,
14.05.2010, The MPEL Conference, Lisboa, Portugal
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2. Introduction for people who not
attended the presentation
This school year, I have lived in the Portuguese coastal town of Cascais just
west of Lisbon. I have an appointment as professor associado at Universidade
Aberta and teach the online course Processos Pedagógicos em Elearning
included in the master program Mestrado em Pedagogia do Elearning. It has
in many ways been an exciting and challenging experience.
The course framework
I have been responsible for both development and implementation of a 16-
week online course with about 20 students in both fall and spring semester.
The course has 8 ECTS credits and students are expected to spend about 8
hours a week studying it. Before the course started, I had to create a learning
contract describing learning goals, content, implementation and evaluation.
The teaching should be conducted in Moodle, but with the active use of Web
2.0 services. I was also told that all students had their own blogs on open sites
such as www.blogspot.com and www.wordpress.com.
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3. http://www.nettskolen.com/in_english/megatrends/index.html
In 2007 Aberta and NKI were among the 26
Megaproviders of e-learning in Europe
• http://www.nettskolen.com/in_english/mega
trends/NKI_Article.pdf
• http://www.nettskolen.com/in_english/mega
trends/Aberta_Article.pdf
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4. Similarities and differences between NKI and UA
1. Private, but some financial support 1. Governmental, but students pay
from the government some tuition fees
2. Secondary, vocational and university 2. University courses
courses
3. Started as a correspondence school 3. Started as a correspondence school
in 1959, used 20 years to become in 1988, used 5 years to become an
an online school online university
4. About 400 online courses 4. About 500 online courses
5. 12.000 online students 5. About 10.000 online students
6. Self developed LMS 6. Moodle LMS and PLEs
7. About 130 part-time tutors 7. Many full-time teachers
8. 250 students per class 8. 25 students per class
9. Payment per submission 9. Payment per course
10. NKI develops the courses 10. The teacher develops the course
11. Individual start up and progression 11. Group based start up and
progression
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5. NKI students have individual progress plans
UA students have collective progress plans
Copyright Atle Løkken 5

6. NKI introduced the individual planning system in 2004
assignments that are completed
assignments that are delayed according to the plan
assignments that are planned 6

7. NKI’s Learning
Partner System
1. Make your personal presentation
2. Decide who may access it (Closed, Limited, Open or Global)
3. Search for potential learning partners
4. Invite somebody to become your learning partner
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8. NKI has 1600 global student
presentations
www.youtube.com/MortenFP#p/a/u/0/gyQ1u977iwk 8

9. NKI’s Philosophy on Online Learning
We facilitate individual freedom
within a learning community
in which online students serve as mutual resources
without being dependent on each other.
We build on adult education principles and seek to
foster benefits from both individual freedom and
cooperation in online learning communities.
Cooperative learning is based on voluntary
participation in a learning community
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10. Cooperative freedom and online teaching
techniques are described in my book, which
you can download from the Internet.
Online Education and Learning
Management Systems: Global
E-learning in a Scandinavian
Perspective..
The book’s website:
www.studymentor.com

11. Six Dimensions of Freedom
It is difficult to combine individual flexibility and cooperation

12. Six Dimensions of Freedom
It is difficult to combine individual flexibility and cooperation

13. One may say that:
Individual learning is conducted alone
Cooperative learning takes place in networks
Collaborative learning depends on groups
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14. 14
This slide is made by Hugo Domingos

15. Transparency improves quality
…of system data, course content, course work etc….
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16. Transparency promotes cooperation
Dalsgaard, C. and Paulsen, M.F. (2009) Transparency in
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Cooperative Online Education. IRRODL, Vol 10, No 3.

17. Trancparency may be good for promotion and
marketing of online courses
A lot of scholars, decision makers,
prospective students and search engines see
what the UA students do
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18. So, I promote transparency -
as long as students can
choose their own
transparency level
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19. I wanted to use the course to demonstrate for
the MPEL-students what I mean by
cooperative freedom, online teaching
techniques and transparency.
Some of the MPEL-students at Futuralia
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20. Processos Pedagógicos em Elearning
The Course has 4 Study Units
1. The Theory of Cooperative Freedom
2. Online Teaching Techniques
3. Transparency in Online Education
4. Final report, reflection and refinement
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21. Each Theme has 4 Week-long Activities
1. Find, study and share materials related to the theme and
organizing it together with ideas and thoughts in an
annotated bibliography in your blog
2. Produce a learning object related to the theme, publish it
somewhere
3. Write reviews in the forum on one annotated bibliography
and one learning object published by colleagues
4. Take part in a structured discussion on issues related to
the theme
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22. The students’ work is available at
http://ppel4.pbworks.com/
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23. Activity 2: Learning Objects
http://issuu.com/svalente/docs/learning_process_-_sv
http://issuu.com/eduardarondao/docs/ppel/16
http://toonlet.com/creator/monicavelosa
http://voicethread.com/#q.b700875.i3706622
http://animoto.com/play/mcWnwcwLlchUW7kikfjkDg?autostart=true
http://lenita.edu.glogster.com/learning-partners-when-students-become-teachers/
http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1mvrs/TransparencyinOnline/resources/index.htm
http://goanimate.com/movie/0t_WqQCZr6m8
http://goanimate.com/movie/0tHSCTHKrJ8U
http://prezi.com/jtuypqux9uoe/cooperative-freedom/
http://prezi.com/vrphgc8096jy/cooperative-freedom/
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6292799/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28688394/Cooperative-Freedom-in-NKI
http://www.youtube.com/MortenFP#p/f/3/g6Oo1-VXsWI
http://www.slideshare.net/nmso/learning-object-theory-cooperative-freedom
http://groups.diigo.com/group/uab-mpel3
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000775922345#!/group.php?gid=206533992596
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http://actividade2.wikispaces.com/

24. http://voicethread.com
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/#q.b700875.i3706651

25. Activity 4: Structured discussion
• One-Question-Interviews
– Terry Anderson: About Cooperative Freedom
– Stephen Downes: Collaboration vs Cooperation
• Debate: Transparency vs Privacy
• Debate: self-paced versus group-paced
progression
• Roleplay on workload
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26. Sónia’s final report:
http://issuu.com/svalente/docs/learning
_process_-_sv
Mónica’s final report:
http://finalreport.ensinoinf.net/
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27. In summary
• The students publish their work in blogs
(Blogspot, Wordpress etc.)
• They share it in Moodle, Facebook and
Diigo
• They make learning objects in
Toonlet, Glogster, Slideshare, Youtube, Is
suu, Voicetread etc.
• It’s much work to overview this distributed learning
environment
• The “entire world” can see our work and give us feedback
• Many tutors and students may not be comfortable with
this extreme openness.
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28. Now What?
• I will return to Norway to work with NKI, EDEN,
Guadalajara, Athabasca, Scandinavian multimedia
journalism and e-teacher 2.0
• If possible, I would like to continue my
engagement with UA
• It would be nice to offer an international version
of our course with for example UA, NKI, UOC in
Spain and University of Guadalajara in Mexico
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29. Muito obrigado!
Algumas perguntas?
The presentation and more information will be available via:
http://home.nki.no/morten
https://twitter.com/MFPaulsen
http://www.slideshare.net/MortenFP
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