[Infographie] Les MOOCs débarquent en France ! What Will The Ed Tech Revolution Look Like? During the past 40 years, accounting for inflation, we have nearly tripled the amount of money we spend per student in public K-12 education. It was roughly $4,000 in 1971, and last year amounted to $11,000 per student. Over that same period time, our students’ math and verbal test scores have remained unchanged. I am no Warren Buffett, but I can comfortably say to you that that is a lousy return on investment. In an increasingly competitive world, it is clear that our education system--as currently designed--isn’t sustainable.
In a perverse way, I believe federal and state budget cuts will help focus us on doing things differently and more efficiently. Similar to the consumer tech revolution, this ed tech revolution will take some time and happen unevenly in waves. First Wave (0 to 5 years from now): A Change in Perception At School: In spite of all the media coverage about seniority-based firing decisions, the teaching work force is actually getting younger. What Will The Ed Tech Revolution Look Like? The Good MOOC: A review of Udacity's CS253 - Web Development. Following on from Udacity’s successful CS101 course, CS253 - Web development starts from the basics of how the web works and goes through everything necessary to build a blog and scale it to support large numbers of users. Pedagogy The goal of the course is explicit right from the start and CS253 delivers on it.
From hashing passwords to secure logins and cookies, you learn to make a fully-functional blog using Google App Engine. The pedagogy is very ‘hands-on’ and pure Udacity. The course is mostly made up of short video segments of the instructor scribbling on screen or introducing some directly on a computer terminal with frequent quizzes and programming assignments. Professor’s aura Steve Huffman is the co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk. Quality and availability of teaching staff CS253 was Steve Huffman’s first experience teaching a course and it sometimes showed. As usual, Udacity’s teaching assistant are a very dedicated and energetic bunch. Academic rigor Student body Corporate sponsors.
Sebastian Thrun's Online Goal: Act Where College Isn't Working. Online classes can be enlightening, edifying, and engaging — but they're not college. The future of higher education online is, at present, clear as mud. Do Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — college-level classes offered online through a number of corporate providers — offer students better tools for study, increased opportunities at lower cost? Can they provide access to higher education to those who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it? Or do these canned classes portend the selling out of American education to Silicon Valley profiteers? I took the best MOOC I could find over the last several weeks in order to try to answer these questions, as well as the one perhaps too seldom asked: Are even the best of these classes any good, or not?
University professors founded or helped to found all the companies that provide online platforms for serving MOOCs, the largest of which (Coursera, Udacity and edX) all have affiliations of one kind or another with Stanford. Then they go on to address an entirely different concern: And another: AS: Well that was the idea. Learning from the world.
On a spring day in September 2012, Anant Agarwal , a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology taught a course called Circuits and Electronics. Unlike his typical class of small numbers, 1,55,000 students across the world tuned in online to take notes. It was the beginning of Edx — Harvard and MIT’s initiative to take top-class education beyond physical barriers. Today, self-directed learners worldwide are acquiring knowledge of everything from differential equations to art history and taught by the world’s best educators. Welcome to the world of MOOCs — massive open online courses — with structured lectures and syllabi that extend from a few weeks to several months. Edx today is among the world’s top providers of MOOCs, offering 15 courses, ranging from ‘Ancient Greek Hero’ to ‘Human Health and Global Environmental Change’.
India ahoy Currently, Indians are the third largest category of Courserians. MOOCs are also founded on the education principle of ‘connectivism’. Stanford for everybody! Professor launches startup to make elite education available to all. NovoEd students at the Open University of West Africa computer lab in Ghana. [/caption] Studying at Stanford no longer requires maintaining a near-perfect GPA while captaining three sports teams, running the high school newspaper, volunteering with a child literacy program, mastering the cello, serving as student council president, finding a solution to world hunger, and $225,000.
NovoEd launched today to make access to courses from prestigious educational institutions available to anyone, starting with Stanford. The company started out as Venture Lab, a project run by a Stanford professor and a PhD student to make online learning more social, experiential, and interactive. Many Stanford professors were interested in taking their courses online but said presenting material in that format did not allow for the degree of interactivity they desired. “The platform is designed to map more closely how the world really works,” CEO Amin Saberi said in a Q&A. Photo Credit: NovoEd. Study: Online Courses May Be The Worst For Minorities And At-Risk Students.
“Overall, the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses,” writes Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars of Columbia University. “Specifically, we found that males, black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grades.” The research team controlled for an impressive array of student characteristics, class types and demographics, and found a negative impact across most of their variables.
Interestingly, they also looked at courses where more than 75 percent of the students were at risk, and found that the presence of at-risk peers made drop out all the more likely. The impact, or “effect size” as it’s called in statistics, was very large. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age December 12, 2004 George Siemens Update (April 5, 2005): I've added a website to explore this concept at www.connectivism.ca Introduction Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments.
Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime. “One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. Some significant trends in learning: Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime. Background Driscoll (2000) defines learning as “a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experience and interaction with the world” (p.11). Driscoll (2000, p14-17) explores some of the complexities of defining learning. Conclusion: The MOOC Honeymoon is Over: Three Takeaways from the Coursera Calamity. The honeymoon with MOOCs is over.
The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera that brought things to a screeching halt. But this experience can provide an opportunity for institutions to re-focus—identify the role and purpose of MOOCs and move forward with a thoughtful, purposeful strategy. In my last post I discussed the MOOC disaster with Fundamentals of Online Education, which generated a rich dialogue on the purpose and role of MOOCs. The Three Takeaways Below I’ve outlined the key takeaways from the FOE experience. 1) The instructional model is shifting to be student-centric, away from an institution or instructor-focused model.
This new paradigm highlights an existing tension where the control is moving away from the instructor. Resources. MOOC and Open Online Education. What are the implications of MOOCs on Higher Education and University teaching? In this article on single-most-important-experiment-in-higher-education: As Koller and Ng acknowledged in our interview, Coursera is still in some ways a work in progress. Its grading technology, they said, is capable of assessing sophisticated assignments in science and math, but the company is still working out the best way to handle longer written work for humanities and social science programs.
And as with many Silicon Valley darlings, how it will generate revenue is also a bit of an open question. Ng suggested that some schools may sell branded certificates, or that Coursera could begin offering career placement services, matching employers with students who demonstrate specific skills. What do these mean? How to ensure assessment is done consistently and reliably in these x MOOCs? How will MOOCs make money? To what extent would institutions be ready for the development of a business model and plan? Dropping Out of MOOCs: Is It Really Okay? I’m starting to get more than a little grumpy about MOOCs, what with all the hype about the revolutionary disruptions and game-changing tsunamis.
I’m tired of the mainstream media punditry and their predictions that Stanford University’s experiments with online education (and by extension Coursera and Udacity) will change everything; I’m tired of Silicon Valley’s exuberance that this could mark the end-of-the-(academic)-world-as-we-know-it – a future that its press, its investors, and its entrepreneurs are all invested (sometimes literally) in being both high tech and highly lucrative. It’s not a great frame of mind for me to start off two new Coursera classes today, both from the University of Michigan: Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World and Internet History, Technology and Security. Oh sure, there’s the promise that these free online courses will somehow liberate students from the shackles of tuition and student loan debt.
But to quote President George W. #MOOC disasters are human and part of educational innovation and why sandboxes are good. With the Coursera course on the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application being temporarily shut down due to a mix of unfortunate events (human miscalculation, limitations of technology, chaos...), sceptics of MOOC's feel strengthened. But my heart really goes out to Fatimah Wirth, for she dared to test new approaches but ... fell into the trap that all of us tend to fall into at one time or another: dreaming and as a result wanting to go too far, too quickly. Fatimah, the way I see it you took a blow for all of us explorers. And ... you sure got all of our minds going, including mine. From all the talk on the Web I have read on the subject, I like this blogpost by Debbie Morrison the best, it focuses on the learner, linking it to learning theory and overall needs from a learner. I totally agree with her observation that institutions should stop thinking from what was (classroom teaching, teacher in front...) and focus on how to make optimal use of what is.
11 Enlightening Statistics About Massive Open Online Courses. Despite the popularity of MOOCs in higher education, there is precious little data on them. Stories of success and failure are almost universally anecdotal, with some statistics coming from MOOC platforms like Coursera and Udacity. To that end, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $1.4 million to nonprofit research group Ithaka S+R to conduct a “multicampus study of MOOCs” as part of a traditional college education: “Ithaka S+R will monitor, assess, and document lessons learned from these implementations,” [Gates Foundation spokeswoman Debbie Robinson] continued.
Read Assessing Campus MOOCs on Inside Higher Ed. Studies like this could define public perception of MOOCs and will certainly increase the depth of our knowledge on the topic. . $60 million Amount invested by Harvard and MIT to launch edX (Source) $21.1 million Venture capital funding that Udacity has raised (Source) 1.7 million Students who have registered for a Coursera class (Source) 40 Useful Tips For Anyone Taking A MOOC. As these resources have grown in number and the list of institutions providing them has become ever more prestigious, free online courses are gaining legitimacy with employers as a method of learning valuable job skills. While there’s still a long way to go in terms of acceptance, more and more employers are recognizing the value of cheap, effective educational programs that can keep employees up-to-date and engaged in their field without spending a dime.
Whether you’re looking to online education for personal reasons or to get ahead in your career, use these tips to help you get more out of open courses and use what you learn to market yourself, improve your performance, and stand out on the job. Treat them like real classes . If you really want to take away a lot from a free online course, then don’t treat it any differently than you would a course you’ve paid to take.