Category: Online Higher Education

Vetiquette – the new Netiquette?

I recently attended the CIPD’s HRD Exhibition and amongst the free seminars was one which covered Vetiquette.  Now the presenter seemed to think that everyone would have heard of this, but I must admit not remembering it if I had.  Indeed a Google search shows that unless you start adding some ‘-vet’ and ‘-pet’s it is not a term with a particularly big footfall.  The basic idea in the talk was that Netiquette was somewhat out-of-date as it came out of early web discussion boards and email; vetiquette relates to the modern web of video conferencing, multimedia collaboration, etc.  I did not think too much about this until this weeks BSN MOOC grouped Netiquette within digital citizenship.  How much citizenship and literacy overlap are probably a matter of opinion but it made me take another look at vetiquette…

Safari books online has Vetiquette as the below:

VEtiquette, is coined to represent the special subset of behaviors required in a virtual team and to explore the difference in context that virtual work creates that makes special attention to such behavior particularly important…VEtiquette, which stands for “virtual etiquette,” is required in work that is typically real time and synchronous. Vetiquette guides team members’ behavior as they collaborate virtually either while speaking or writing using Internet, mobile, or video technologies. It can be summarized as, “Be effective, or don’t be heard.” This extra attention to virtual interaction matters because the effectiveness of the team depends on it.

Thus for the Blended Schools MOOC we perhaps can consider the need for vetiquette in fostering young people’s belief to be effective/heard but not pushy/rude when online.  This is personally interesting for me as my workplace performance reviews in the past have identified a need to be more assertive in getting my ideas across.  This is perhaps my oh-so-polite Britishness coming through in online environments or might simply be that I find the behavior of others too pushy and ‘tone myself down’ as a result.  As we all move towards a globalized world this will be increasingly important and it is difficult to get the balance right across borders.  It can also be easier to pick a level of appropriate virtual behavior with someone if you have met them in person.

When I did draft a netiquette policy for a previous job I included both the traditional ‘net’ and ‘et’ issues, as well as those identified as ‘vetiquette’.  I guess I really saw all of it as ‘netiquette’ within information/digital literacy.  There is a little bit about what I did on this presentation but in general:

  • The policy was drafted by looking at existing netiquette policies from around the web.
  • It was not really enforced, instead it was embedded in training resources for teachers and students.  It was up to individual instructors how they might adopt, adapt and enforce it with their own students.
  • One would hope that as time passes people will be increasingly confident in this area and the need to train people in vetiquette will be something for schools rather than the 16+ education providers.  Thus it is great to see it being considered in the BSN MOOC (see last two blog posts for more on this).

My initial thoughts on FutureLearn

FutureLearn, and MOOCs in general, have of course been in the news a lot recently so I thought I would put my initial response here for my future record.  This is the response I gave to a colleague…

…Ultimately [it has seemed to me that] a lot of [Higher Education] management don’t ‘get’ the possibilities (especially the scale [the University of] Phoenix and others operate on) and have been slow to support online, others continue to be put off by the eUniversity experience.  That said, when institutions have had a branded offer (Ulster CampusOne for example) student numbers have been low so it might make sense to aggregate even if many institutions will see it only as a way to advertise/sell full courses … the OU might steal a leap and continue to take a bigger share of the pie through Apps and other innovations.

Personally, I think the key question is how many resources will be pooled here.  If it’s limited, they would be better opening up their existing course catalogues and online environments so courses are more discoverable via Google, etc.  The idea of creating a portal which people go to because of perceived quality all seems a bit pre-Google to me.

Jisc has announced they are supporting the idea of this but they are perhaps the only organisation which could encourage proper shared systems and resources.  I remember the JISC conference 6(?) years ago talking about this, in terms of SaaS, so it’s only taken half a decade.

… [Is there a] big fear that tutors would just go off and put something on Alison or build a MOOC – [when] there is a real trade off between reputations, publishing opportunities, salaries/bonuses and most tutors/experts actually enjoying classroom teaching beyond any other bit of their job[?]

Lots of great posts on this elsewhere, including:

  1. Donald Taylor (http://donaldhtaylor.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/what-price-moocs/)
  2. Gavin Henrick (http://www.somerandomthoughts.com/blog/2012/12/21/more-thoughts-on-moocs/)

I would also agree with the ALT members lists which seemed to come to the conclusion that the key element will be how the ‘1.0’ generation of MOOCs are evaluated and lessons learned impact on 2.0.

Final post on my online MSc

If you ever read my last blog, you will have seen various posts about the online MSc course I was working through during the last three years.  You will have also seen that I was not always very positive about the experience.  Thus is it was interesting, just as I was graduating from that course, to see the increase in press coverage for MOOCs and the increasing adoption of ‘free’ online course programmes such as coursera.org.

The major question for me is how, in these course formats, the instructor/tutor role is formed and the level of socialisation with other students.  At times my MSc was limited to working through materials with some discussion board or synchronous chat.  This, to me, is eLearning as has existed for some time and in many ways a replication of a lecture-heavy instructional design.  Indeed accessing static eLearning materials will be familiar to many from the workplace and there are plenty of examples online, including via Alison.

The real value of an educational experience is often the support of experts and your peers in giving a context to your learning.  I fear many large-scale courses are not managing this well.  For example, my recent MOOC experience of Google’s Power Searching with Google MOOC, which contained some good instructional video and useful activities, struggled with a very ‘noisy’ discussion platform.  Do you then start to select entrants, as traditional university courses have, to try and ensure a higher quality experience?  Alternatively do you deliver static materials as a way to advertise what is possible for a fully supported experience, in the form of open course ware rather than open courses.