Second Week Reflections: Social Learning in a MOOC | Vandy Maps | Vanderbilt University. Posted by Derek Bruff on Tuesday, July 30, 2013 in Meeting Notes, Reflections. Our discussion on Monday of the social aspects of learning in a MOOC was an interesting one. It’s clear that many of us are benefiting from the interactions we’re having with our local study group, although I wonder what our study group members who weren’t present on Monday would say about that. Perhaps some of them are getting along just fine in the MOOC without interacting with local colleagues… For those who do benefit from the local group, I posited on Monday that it was the smallness of the group that mattered more than its localness.
It’s certainly challenging to build relationships with other MOOC students through the Coursera discussion boards–there are thousands of students, the boards are chaotic, and there are limited social tools for connecting with others. But perhaps, as Todd indicated, it’s the persistence of the relationships in a learning community that is more important than its size. Osez la MOOR. La première conférence européenne d’envergure (sur les MOOC, on s’entend) est organisée en février à l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Nous assisterons à la première grand-messe de la communauté européenne. Recherche, pratique, politique, technologie, c’est une véritable kermesse. En ce qui me concerne, il est absolument vital que je parvienne à publier un article dans cette conférence.
La deadline pour la soumission de l’article était initialement prévue pour ce soir, mais a été repoussée de deux semaines suite à de multiples protestations. Mais tout d’abord, retour sur mes problématiques de recherche… Engagement au sein du cours, personnalisation, scénarisation, fédération des communautés d’apprenants, etc. Qui sont les participants ? Première étape: comprendre le profil démographique du cours et les motivations des participants. Nous avions voulu aller un peu plus loin en posant des questions sur les motivations, mais les résultats sont avant tout qualitatifs. Learner Weblog | Education and Learning weblog. Three Kinds of MOOCs. By Lisa, on August 15th, 2012 We are so into MOOCs now that it’s too much for me.
Gotta apply Ockham’s Razor 2.0 to this stuff. At the Ed-Media conference, I attended a session by Sarah Schrire of Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv. In her discussion of Troubleshooting MOOCs, she noted the dificulties in determining her own direction in offering a MOOC in the “Stanford model” MOOCs versus the “connectivism” MOOCs. I found myself breaking it down into three categories instead.
Each type of MOOC has all three elements (networks, tasks and content), but each has a goal that is dominant. Network-based MOOCs are the original MOOCs, taught by Alec Couros, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier. Task-based MOOCs emphasize skills in the sense that they ask the learner to complete certain types of work. Content-based MOOCs are the ones with huge enrollments, commercial prospects, big university professors, automated testing, and exposure in the popular press. Morgan Magnin (Centrale Nantes) : "Les MOOC permettent d'attirer les meilleurs étudiants étrangers"
MOOC: lancement de la plate-forme nationale, ça va être FUN. Coup de théâtre dans le milieu académique français. Mme Fioraso, Ministre de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, annonçait mercredi matin le lancement de la plate-forme nationale pour MOOC dans le cadre du programme France Université Numérique (ouverture courant octobre, site de présentation à cette adresse). Ce nouveau site dédié aux établissements français est destiné à héberger dès janvier prochain ses premiers cours. Retour sur l’histoire récente du phénomène… Les MOOC, pour Massive Open Online Courses (aucune traduction française ne fait consensus), sont des cours gratuits organisés entièrement en ligne et pouvant accueillir un nombre non limité de participants ; l’audience des cours américains se compte en général en dizaines de milliers, parfois en centaines de milliers pour les plus populaires.
Ces cours sont hébergés sur des plates-formes ad hoc, c’est à dire des sites en mesure d’accueillir des flux importants d’internautes. » Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky. Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.
The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen.
If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war?