Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online - Ian Bogost. With funding tight, the state of California has turned to Udacity to provide MOOCs for students enrolled in remedial courses. But what is lost when public education is privatized? Unlit road at night (MRBECK/Flickr) One night recently, it was raining hard as I drove to pick my son up from an evening class at the Atlanta Ballet. Like many cities, Atlanta's roads are in terrible condition after years of neglect. There are ways to fix such dangers. Such is essentially the logic the state of California has adopted in its plan to offer online classes in the California State University System, a deal the state has struck with "massively open online course" (MOOC) provider Udacity. The startup, which has received more than $15 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, will provide online classes in remedial and introductory subjects for students at San Jose State University (SJSU), in exchange for an undisclosed sum from the state.
That's the political situation. Document: Examine the U. of Michigan's Contract With Coursera - Technology. Creative learning on mass, or the MIT MOOC. Just this morning, I came across MIT Media Lab’s announcement for its Learning Creative Learning online course. You can read about it or skim the outline to make your own judgment; I’m enjoying the laid-back description, which tracks with my previous massive open online course experience: “This is a big experiment. Things will break. We don’t have all the answer.” “We hope that participants will jump in as collaborators rather than passive recipients.” “Check out our shiny new platform.
I’ve registered, I’ve joined the LCL community on Google+, and I’ve set up a place in Evernote to help me organize what I do in LCL. Many of the participants were students, academics, or people closely tied to formal education (schools or colleges). PLENK is an example of a connectivist MOOC. Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning.
ORIENT: Find out where stuff is. We’ll see how well I apply myself. MOOCs and OERs. Instructional Technology / Virtual Speaker Series: Gary Stager Ph.D. 2012-13. Gary Stager, Ph.D. Wednesday, February 6, 2013 This is What Learning Looks Like Wednesday, Feburay 6, 2013 3:30-4:30 pm (EST) Computers and emerging fabrication technology expands the breadth, depth and possibilities of student projects.
Target audience: School administrators, classroom teachers and instructional assistants Gary Stager, an internationally recognized educator, speaker and consultant, is the Executive Director of The Constructivist Consortium. For more information about this session, please contact: Free, Open-Source Digital Textbook Provider, Boundless, Releases Its Content Under Creative Commons. Since first emerging early last year, Boston-based startup Boundless has been on a mission to give students a free alternative to the financial and physical costs of bulky backpacks brimming with pricey hard-copy textbooks.
Co-founders Ariel Diaz, Brian Balfour and Aaron White believe that the incumbents, the old-school textbook publishers (the top four of which still control the market) have been driving up the cost of educational content for years, so Boundless has been fighting the Powers That Be by offering a free, digital alternative culled from existing, open educational resources. Naturally, with their “open” approach to curating educational content, Boundless has been met with a number of lawsuits from top textbook publishers and is currently trying to resolve these differences in court.
But, in the meantime, it’s pressing on and is today officially adding a familiar name — some legitimacy — to its open textbooks through Creative Commons. MOOC to POOC: Moving from Massive to Participatory. JustPublics@365 wants to reimagine higher education. One of the ways we’re doing that is by re-thinking the graduate seminar and rethinking online education. Recently, Thomas Friedman in an op-ed for The New York Times proclaimed “nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC”.
The New York Times dubbed 2012 “the year of the MOOC.” In the context of New York City (and outside of academia), the term is pronounced “mook” (a derogatory term). Aside from the racism this term perpetuates, from our point of view the “MOOC”-model has lots of other problems. Chiefly, the MOOC-model misunderstands how learning works. The way Friedman, among others, talks about MOOCs is that they are a way to educate lots of people from a distance for “relatively little money.” Many are similarly jumping to support MOOCs as a money making venture, ignoring the actual purpose of education to envision new business models. We have a different idea. Revolution Hits the Universities. How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it | online learning insights. I don’t usually like to title a post with negative connotations, but there is no way to put a positive spin on my experience with the MOOC I’m enrolled in through Coursera, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application.
The course so far is a disaster, ‘a mess’ as numerous students have called it. Ironically, the learning outcome of the course is to create our own online course. To be fair, there are some good points to the course, but there are significant factors contributing to a frustrating course experience for students, myself included. Group Chaos There are three key factors contributing to this course calamity and all link to the group assignment.
The first, a ‘technical glitch’ was big enough to cause one of Google’s servers to crash. Another, causing considerable distress to students is the lack of instructions for the assignments and the group activity—there was no clarity provided on the objective or purpose of the groups. Like this: Like Loading... 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. Quality Control in MOOCs. Like traditional education institutions, identity and reputation are important in MOOCs. For providers such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, it means that the end user experience is vital in perceptions of overall quality. If students encounter a poor course (design, video, layout), that experience casts a reputation on the overall course provider. If they can’t offer quality courses, how do we know the assessments will be good quality? Or that plagiarism is being taken seriously?
The first open course that I offered had a big impact on how I have since viewed courses. In mid-2012, I thought Udacity was the most vulnerable MOOC provider. OT: edX is the most exciting MOOC provider – their content is outstanding, the platform is the best of all three providers. Today, Coursera faced a quality crisis as its Fundamentals of Online Education course suddenly went dark. There had been some course rumblings: “The course so far is a disaster, ‘a mess’ as numerous students have called it”.
Negating the learner in the learning process. Yesterday, a Coursera course was closed after the first week of delivery. 40,000 students were left somewhat confused. I posted a few thoughts on this on our xeducation site. The interesting stuff is in the comments and that’s what I’d like to emphasize here. Sarah Pravitra states: Wish they could at least have left the forums open for a limited period so we could have grabbed our group members, found a new tribe home elsewhere to keep talking and working together and been able to share [o]ur whereabouts with other groups. I have never worked so hard in my life. Up till 4am every night. In a follow up comment she states: But don’t ram home the message that the students are just an *inconvenient necessity* by grabbing your ball and walking off with it, while we were in mid game and didn’t know how to contact our teammates once the pitch went “pooof”.
Keith Devlin provides clarification on who likely made the decision to close the forum: This incident is significant. The MOOC Goes to High School - Vander Ark on Innovation. By Dr. Lisa Duty (@lisaduty1 ), Senior Director of Innovation at KnowledgeWorks and a graduate of Columbus City Schools Last summer when Reynoldsburg City Schools connected with Udacity, the highly acclaimed provider of free university-level education, it envisioned a new model for learning with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that would come to life during, not after, high school. MOOCs are gaining some momentum in the post-secondary arena, bringing learning opportunities that are generally free or inexpensive, to the masses. Viewed by some as shaking up higher education, and seen by others as mostly hype, MOOCs have moved into a position of public attention that is certain to endure.
While that dialogue continues, some high school students and teachers at eSTEM Academy are drawing on the best of MOOCs to deepen and personalize learning . Why did they do it? How do they do it? How are the MOOCs impacting students and teachers? Is the pilot successful? Ten Tips: Keep Learners Motivated in Your Open Online Cloud Course or MOOC (Part 6) by Inge de Waard. “Don’t make a fuss about correct use of the English language—it is already difficult entering a course designed in another language. This also means that certain formulations might be awkward due to the misunderstanding of some English terms, which can lead to potential debates. Give every discussion thread or response the benefit of the doubt if at first it seems rude.
It might just be a different cultural perception, or a different use of language.” Setting up an open online course (cloud course or MOOC) is one thing, but keeping the participants motivated can be quite a challenge if you never meet face-to-face. The dropout rate of online courses can be huge, and for collaborative courses this can be disastrous, as it will have an effect on the peer-to-peer learning dynamics.
Luckily, there are 10 easy things you can do to keep your learner audience motivated. Prepare the learners for information overload Provide different options for learner participation The facilitators do this. Course: Semantic Web Technologies. Harald Sack is Senior Researcher at the Hasso Plattner-Institute for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) at the University of Potsdam. After graduating in computer science at the University of the Federal Forces Munich Campus in 1990, he worked as systems/network engineer and project manager in the signal intelligence corps of the German federal forces from 1990–1997.
In 1997 he became an associated member of the graduate program ‘mathematical optimization’ at the University of Trier, where he obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2002. From 2002–2008 worked as a postdoc at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena. In 2007 he received a visiting position at the HPI, where he now is head of the research group 'semantic technologies'. His areas of research include semantic web technologies, knowledge representations and ontological engineering, multimedia analysis & retrieval, machine learning and semantic enabled retrieval. Dr. Plan Your Free Online Education at Lifehacker U: Spring Semester 2013. GMW_2012.indb - Artikel_Bremer_OpenCourse_GMW2012.pdf.
Programm. How to succeed at Mooc-ing without really trying. Heard about MOOCs but far too busy doing more interesting things to sign up to one? Not sure if they’re for you? Feeling pressure to be part of the “mooc crowd”? Keep signing up for MOOCs but keep getting that cba (can’t be a****) feeling after the first week? Fear not, here’s a handy list of tips to ensure you too can get maximum impact, increase your twitter followers, and look like you are at the heart of the next Mooc that takes your fancy. The quickest way to get noticed in MOOCs is via twitter, so start using the course hashtag as early as possible. Post some random musings (the more bizarre the better), the week before the official start date. The first week will be filled with “hello I’ve just signed up for xxx” – go for something more eye catching.
Only sign up for MOOCs where you know someone who is part of the course team. @ them at every opportunity (with the hastag of course). Dazzle people with analytics. If you can’t dazzle with analytics, get someone else to. What is a MOOC? Measuring the Success of Online Education. One of the dirty secrets about MOOCs — massive open online courses — is that they are not very effective, at least if you measure effectiveness in terms of completion rates.
If as few as 20 percent of students finishing an online course is considered a wild success and 10 percent and lower is standard, then it would appear that MOOCs are still more of a hobby than a viable alternative to traditional classroom education. Backers reason that the law of large numbers argues in favor of the online courses that have rapidly come to be seen as the vehicle for the Internet’s next big disruption — colleges. If 100,000 students take a free online course and only 5,000 complete it, that is still a significant number.
However, MOOCs are a moving target. Because they are computerized and networked they offer an ideal medium for quantifying what works and what doesn’t. The company is now working to add Chinese to its list of languages, with a particular focus on teaching English to Chinese speakers. ELearning Trends. Why MOOCs are like Farmville. Another day, another report from one of the thought leaders on higher education. This time it is from Moody’s, which proclaims the death of the traditional model of higher education. While the concerns raised by Moody’s are real – diminished resources due to state budget cuts, declining family incomes, and less willingness by students to take on debt – we should hesitate before leaping to the conclusion that these challenges necessitate a radical change, through massive adoption of online learning technologies such as MOOCs.
Count me among the skeptical – I’m not yet convinced that MOOCs are going to lead students to jettison a traditional higher education experience anytime soon. Over the past few weeks, for every piece of commentary extolling the virtue of MOOCs, I have found another that calls into question whether this particular type of online learning is sustainable over the long term. De-emphasis of the traditional classroom lecture. "MOOCs" for Credit Come to California. The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks. 5 Potential Ways MOOCs Will Evolve.
MOOC's for Credit come to California. Peer-to-Peer Learning Handbook | Peeragogy.org. Ein neuer Stern am E-Learning Himmel: MOOCs - HR-Management - Personal. Statistics Course (ST 095) MOOCs are really a platform. As California Goes? Assessing MOOCs at HigherEdTech conference. MOOC d'entreprise dans le secteur IT. MOOCs EDUCAUSE. Class Central • Free online courses AKA MOOC aggregator. IMC AG: 10 Fragen zu MOOC. Experiences from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how the MOOC could potentially increase diversity, social inclusion & learner engagement | Squire Morley. Changing-course-survey - changing-course-survey.pdf.
MOOCS — Here come the credentials - College, Inc. Competency-Based Online Education: The Rising Tide of College Affordability. Outlook for online learning in 2013: online learning comes of age. What You Need to Know About MOOCs. How To Create a ‘Personal Learning Environment’ to Stay Relevant in 2013. Digitale Revolution der Lehre: Harvard für alle - Wissen. Anant Agarwal: What it’s like to teach 155,000 students online. Providers of Free MOOC's Now Charge Employers for Access to Student Data - Technology. International MOOCs Past and Present. Understanding Connectivism | A Course. Massive List of MOOC Resources, Lit and Literati | Sonic Foundry Blog. MOOCs – The revolution has begun, says Moody’s. Are you ready to MOOC? A conversation with George Siemens. Horizon Report > 2013 Higher Education Edition. Blackboard Coursesites as MOOC-platform.
A New Pedagogy is Emerging...And Online Learning is a Key Contributing Factor. The Most Popular Higher Education Technology Posts of 2012. A list of current and future connectivist MOOCs | Connectivist MOOCs.