The Research Forum: 2012

Tuesday, 30 October 2012

Learning for Free online

Distance learning is increasingly popular and one of the reasons is the growing number of free courses being offered online

Daniel Conn left school at 18 and started work as an administrator for Mercedes-Benz near his home in Brighton. He soon wished he hadn't spurned the idea of going to university and began investigating Open University (OU) courses, but he never quite found the courage to apply. Then he discovered the OU's OpenLearn website, which offers 650 Open University study units free online. After working his way through four in computing and maths (and doing an online Harvard Universitycourse on the side) he thought he might as well get a qualification. Now approaching 30, he is studying for a part-time OU degree in computing, which he hopes to finish in 2015.

"The OpenLearn materials give you the gist of what the course is about and whether you can do it," he says. "It definitely gave me a lot of confidence."

The OU is not the only university that has started offering courses free online. Over the past couple of years increasing numbers of universities across Europe and the US have set up web-based resources known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These MOOCs make recorded lectures, course materials and academic discussion forums freely available to anyone who wants to use them.

Jonathan Kydd, dean of the University of London International Programmes, which last month began offering free courses in psychology, computer programming and law through the US online education provider Coursera, says the involvement of top-rated institutions such as Stanford and Harvard has made this kind of freedistance learning particularly appealing.

"You are going to inspire students because they are going to get [access to] a high proportion of people who are household names and who are both great researchers and great teachers," he says.

Universities use free courses not only as a shop window for the other courses they offer, but also as a way of sharing good practice with other institutions, experimenting with new technology and of seeing what does and doesn't work in distance education, Kydd says.

This is important because the availability of higher bandwidths and progress in developing effective systems of online assessment, combined with increasing demand, means that paid-for distance learning is also booming.

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the number of distance learning students registered at UK institutions grew from 238,800 in 2006/07, to 271,445 in 2010/11.

Tony Hopwood, chief assessor for the Open and Distance Learning Quality Council, says the increase is particularly marked in the university sector, which is now competing with dedicated distance learning organisations.

Gráinne Conole, professor of learning innovation at the University of Leicester, says this is out of necessity. "We know worldwide that bricks and mortar universities don't have the capacity to deal with the number of students there are going to be in future, particularly in places like India and China, so online learning has to be the way to go."

The University of Derby is one institution to recognise this, setting up a separate department to focus on online distance learning students with academic systems and tutors dedicated to their specific needs.

Joy Rickard, who is studying for an undergraduate certificate in educational psychology at Derby from her home near Bath, says she feels the benefits. For her, distance learning means the flexibility to look after her two young children and work part-time in a school while studying alongside a global student cohort.

"I have met some people online who are doing fascinating things all over the world, which wouldn't have happened if I was attending in person," she says.

Certainly online learning deepens the pool of potential students. Kydd says London University's International Programmes distance learning model, which allows students to take courses over time and pay incrementally, makes it affordable for students from Africa who would otherwise never be able to take a degree.

And the University of Leicester is about to launch an MSc in security, conflict and international development, designed to meet the needs of international development workers deployed in post-conflict countries, who would normally find study impossible. Because access to the internet can be tricky in such countries, the students receive an iPad on which they download the course app and related ebooks, all accessible without an internet connection. They can then download other materials when they find a Wi-Fi connection.

Campus life

New courses run by Plymouth University are similarly designed for hard-to-reach students. The university is offering undergraduate and postgraduate diplomas, and master's-level programmes in hydrography for students working on oil rigs and survey vessels, sometimes thousands of miles from the nearest university.

But what about missing out on campus life? Rickard, who studied graphic design at the University of Wales, Newport before having children, says she feels she has "done" student life and is now more interested in developing a career. Conn, who has just started a full-time job as a technology developer off the back of his studies, says his local OU student union and online forums keep him happy. "You don't feel like you're on your own," he says. "The only thing I'm missing is living in a rundown squat for a couple of years and leaving with masses of debt."

This article reproduced here was written by Harriet Swaine for the Guardian and we thought our readers may find it useful. See: guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 October 2012 09.59 BST

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About the Forum

The Forum initially started its work in December 1997 with the intention of promoting research culture and activities among doctoral candidates in one of the British universities in London. The Research Forum convened 8 sessions a year on humanities-related topics between 1997 and 2013.

The Forum now focuses on the production of self-taught courses, articles and commentary on some aspects of the news for students as well as the general public. The last meeting of the Forum took place in July 2015.

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. The school reportedly had over ten thousand students, including masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders.

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish “God-man” who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life. Though accounts of their meeting differ, one story claims that Rumi was teaching by a fountain, and Shams walked up through the crowd of students and pushed Rumi’s books into the water, including his father’s spiritual diary. “You must now live what you have been reading about," Shams told Rumi. Rumi believed both his real life and his real poetry began when he met Shams. “What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

Shams and Rumi were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, travelling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home believing Shams to be a part of him: “His essence speaks through me.”

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi(Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavi as “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion," and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jalal-al-din-rumi

Your Life Discourse!

It is soooo good when you realize that your life and every road you have taken made and makes sense... Even when you feel that the world will not applaud you for what you are doing, you find you have to do it yourself and clap your own hands. Later everything falls into place. In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the self-discourse is constructed along history. It is a fact that we describe our past like a coherent story. Even though we know that the discourse of our life is a construction, our life is actually built by roads and paths we accept, that come and go, and later make all sense because they are part of our own being. Once in a while we feel that our past is actually part of us.

Marcia Neme Buzalaf
marciabuzalaf@gmail.com.

Scholarship and Academia

Benedit Spinoza is one of the original thinkers among Western philosophers. When he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University at age of 31, he turned it down arguing that he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophising “in accordance with his own mind”. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes and telescopes – at the time a new profession.

Being a great philosopher and academic is a rare development: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill or Nietzsche did not teach philosophy. The exceptions are Kant and Hegel.

Nothing much has changed since: academia is still not the right place for real scholars today. Mottos such as ‘publish or perish’ have mainly resulted in the production of shallow, regurgitated or ego-boosting publications. Universities are also no different from other corporate capitalist entities that seek to maximize their profit at the cost of quality service. They neither provide the scholar nor the student with a conducive environment for their development or self-fulfilment.

Thoughtful Sentences

Integrity: When the thoughts we think are the same as the words we speak, others will feel our integrity.

Enthusiasm: Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.

No Task Too Difficult: If you do everything with the feeling of happiness, there will be no task too difficult to perform.

A Long And Healthy Life: There are three ingredients for a long and healthy life: live with attention but without worry, use time in a worthwhile way, keep your thoughts pure, positive and filled with strength.