MOOCs prompt some faculty members to refresh teaching styles. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before.
The conference, organized Monday in Cambridge by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, featured academics and administrators from elite North American universities and other players in the world of MOOCs discussing the rise of online courses and the future of residential colleges and universities. The new attention to teaching methods and learning sciences is coming from two directions: faculty who want to make sure their teaching is up to snuff for a wider audience, and technology that allows new levels of interaction with students, and new understanding of students' strengths and weaknesses.
Teaching a MOOC: Lessons Learned & Best Balch Practices | the augmented trader. I just completed teaching a MOOC on Computational Investing via coursera.org. I did some things right and a lot of things wrong. Here are my lessons learned from the first round. I’m very excited now about the second go at this, and the ability to make the course even better. Some of these items are coursera specific, but many apply more broadly. Some people will be upset: Be prepared I’m not talking about the students. Your course will be closely scrutinized. One critique MOOCs are susceptible to is an accusation of “dumbing down” or “oversimplification.” Many of these attacks arise from a belief that MOOCs are promoted as “identical” to college course content; Or that the course is “just as rigorous” as graduate course CS XXXX at Georgia Tech.
That being said, I do believe that we can produce and deliver “rigorous” content via MOOCs, and many are working on that. Set expectations for the students You also want to avoid having folks in the course who are “over qualified.” More to come.
Administration / Institution. Student. Designer. How to Organize a MOOC. Instructional Design for Mediated Education | Blog | Thinking MOOCs. The current fad is still “MOOCs,” massive open online courses. A recent provost’s lecture featured a speaker who discussed some MOOC endeavors at his university. Some webinars have focused on the MOOC phenomena. A forthcoming issue in an international journal is focused around MOOCs. That said, there are some who say that the “MOOC hype cycle,” two years in, is heading to the “trough of disillusionment.” Maybe so. More compelling, there are still the demographics: huge human needs for higher education but insufficient infrastructure. For me, the lack of clear self-sustaining revenue models for funding massive open online courses (MOOCs) seems to me to be the least of the concerns currently. Others see the coming of the “star professors” who will outshine their colleagues and dominate the teaching and learning in particular fields.
Increased Responsibility for the Learning New lingo has come out from all of this. Credit for Competency Instructional Design Challenges around MOOCs Re-Use. Developing a MOOC-Inspired Course. During Fall, 2012, I taught a Boise State University EdTech graduate course in Social Networking Learning. I wrote about this course in Educators as Social Networked Learners. I decided to write a separate post about their final assignment, creating a MOOC-Inspired course. The assignment description, some of the group MOOCs produced, the peer assessment, and some student reflections about the project follow: MOOC Assignment Description MOOCs were originally intended to provide for engagement and collaboration. For your final project, your same group will be formulating, outlining, proposing your very own MOOCs. Course Description, Objectives, and ExpectationsCourse descriptionRationale for using a MOOC (for using student-centric, decentralized and networked social learning platforms)Learning outcomesPerformance and participation expectationsSocial Media Use GuidelinesYou will need to have a central hub to share information – WordPress, Google Sites, Wiki, Edmodo.
Example Group Projects.
Competency-based education may get a boost. Competency-based education could be a game-changer for adult students, probably more so than MOOCs. Yet despite the backing of powerful supporters, colleges have been reluctant to go all-in because they are unsure whether accreditors and the federal government will give the nod to degree programs that look nothing like the traditional college model.
The logjam may be breaking, however. Southern New Hampshire University is poised to launch a $5,000 online, competency-based associate degree that would be the first to blow up the credit hour -- the connection between college credit and the time students spend learning. A regional accreditor has signed off on Southern New Hampshire’s “direct assessment” method, and the university will soon apply for federal approval.
Meanwhile, about 20 institutions have joined Western Governors University with competency-based offerings that are linked in some way to the credit hour, many of them new programs, according to the Lumina Foundation. The Massive Open Online Professor. The challenges faced by higher education around the world are daunting and cannot be met by the traditional institution-based education system. For the current model to meet the needs of future generations, we would need to build and fund thousands of new universities. And yet the past ten years have demonstrated that there is another way. Scalable education on the web is increasingly possible, largely through the use of commodity software that is easy to use and available freely or at low cost to anyone.
Consider: Stanford and MIT recently started offering free online courses, and both universities enrolled more than 100,000 users. In one Stanford course, on artificial intelligence, 25,000 users completed all required homework assignments and received a certificate for their participation. Not only is online learning beginning to scale massively, but it is also beginning to do so at almost zero marginal cost.
Massive Open Online Courses Interactions are largely peer-to-peer. The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education (EDUCAUSE Review. Key Takeaways A turning point will occur in the higher education model when a MOOC-based program of study leads to a degree from an accredited institution — a trend that has already begun to develop. Addressing the quality of the learning experience that MOOCs provide is therefore of paramount importance to their credibility and acceptance. MOOCs represent a postindustrial model of teaching and learning that has the potential to undermine and replace the business model of institutions that depend on recruiting and retaining students for location-bound, proprietary forms of campus-based learning.
MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. Colleges have a problem here: the way in which the core services of education are rendered is changing, but the underlying business model is not. A number of converging trends pose a challenge to brick-and-mortar institutions: The End of Nuclear Institutions MOOCs: Quality Matters MOOCs as Precision-Built Courseware.