Announcements | Internet History, Technology, and Security. Course Catalog. Welcome to the new online learning platform for the Global Education Database! It’s a free, simple, and quick way to learn new skills, find new education resources, and figure out how to do just about anything a modern teacher or student needs. Take as many courses as you like – they’re free and all you need to do is sign up to get started. Register To Start Learning Free View More Courses.
WordPress LMS | Learning Management System Built on WP. 5 MOOC Building Platforms. Now that MOOCs are hitting the scene, everyone wants to jump on board! Granted, some want to get into the game in the hopes of making a quick dollar (somehow?) , but others genuinely want to know how they can create their own MOOC for educational purposes. Well, you have options! More providers are likely to spring up as we will only cover five potential options. As the entire MOOC industry evolves, expect to see more options at your disposal for this kind of thing. Kind of like when Wikipedia hit the scenes, we saw an influx of “Wikipedia-like” sites, templates, and software. In no particular order, some of your options include: 1. 2.
. … but jokes aside, it’s a good option for setting up your MOOC offering. 3. 4. 5. References: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Coursera experiences glitches, growing pains. Despite the hype surrounding massive open online courses, some challenges remain for both students and educators. This past February, a Coursera class entitled “Microeconomics for Managers” offered through the University of California at Irvine Extension program was canceled halfway through — it was supposed to last for 10 weeks. The professor, Richard McKenzie, cited “disagreements over how to best conduct this course” in a letter explaining the decision. In another instance, a Georgia Institute of Technology course on Coursera taught by Fatimah Wirth titled “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” was suspended after a week with students complaining about technical glitches and confusing instructions.
According to Penn research assistant Andrew Steinmetz, who is assisting Penn Integrates Knowledge professor Ezekiel Emanuel in his “Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act” course on Coursera, admits that certain challenges exist in an online course environment. About. Who Owns a MOOC? Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed Faculty union officials in California worry professors who agree to teach free online learning classes could undermine faculty intellectual property rights and collective bargaining agreements. The union for faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz said earlier this month it could seek a new round of collective bargaining after several professors agreed to teach classes on Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based provider of popular massive open online classes, or MOOCs. The Santa Cruz Faculty Association’s concern highlights an emerging tension as professors begin to teach MOOCs and, in turn, become academic stars to tens of thousands of students who sign up for the free classes.
Santa Cruz is the only UC campus to have a unionized tenure-track faculty, so the exchange there is perhaps unique, but the issues there are not. EdX. EdX MOOC Software Goes Open Source - Education - Online Learning - Non-profit massive open online course startup is open sourcing the software for building interactive course modules.
Educational 'Technology' Across the Ages (click image for larger view and for slideshow) The non-profit pioneer in the phenomenon of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is releasing a core element of its platform for offering online courses as open-source software. On Thursday, edX announced it was releasing the source code to its XBlock software on GitHub under the Affero General Public License, a GPL variant designed for network server software.
Already a MOOC sensation, edX offers courses from leading universities for free, with many of the supporting textbooks and other materials published as open educational resources. . [ You say you want a revolution? "The fact that the platform is open as well is very much congruent with our vision for openness," said Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor who serves as edX's president. EdX is open sourcing the code for course modules. Group work advice for MOOC providers. The most valuable aspect of MOOCs is that the large number of learners enables the formation of sub-networks based on interested, geography, language, or some other attribute that draws individuals together. With 20 students in a class, limited options exist for forming sub-networks. When you have 5,000 students, new configurations are possible.
The “new pedagogical models” (A Silicon Valley term meaning: we didn’t read the literature and still don’t realize that these findings are two, three, or more decades old) being discovered by MOOC providers supports what most academics and experienced teachers know about learning: it’s a social, active, and participatory process. The current MOOC providers have adopted a regressive pedagogy: small scale learning chunks reminiscent of the the heady days of cognitivism and military training.
Ah, the 1960′s. The large MOOCs can improve the quality of learning by creating a model for rapid creation/dissolution of groups. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. The European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning – EURODL is an electronic, multi-media journal on distance and e-learning distributed on the Internet. It publishes the accounts of research, development and teaching for Europe in its most inclusive definition, exploring the potential of electronic publishing.
EURODL presents scholarly work and solid information about open, distance and e-learning, education through telematics, multimedia, on-line learning and co-operation. We are delighted to inform that the EDEN Executive Committee assigned Dr. Ulrich Bernath, Chair of the "Foundation for Research in Open and Distance Learning", Senior Fellow of EDEN, as Chief Editor of EURODL. Dr. Bernath has been working for the journal as Acting Chief Editor since June 2013. His sytematic and professional leadership ensured a smooth operation and continued high quality of the publication.
Current issue. Motives for Lifelong Learners to Choose Web-based Courses. By Ron Mahieu, et. al.; EURODL Due to societal changes there is a growing need for distant and adult learning. The reason to participate in education and the choices that students make may differ. In this study the factors age, gender, rate of studies and parenthood have been analysed in order to see how these relate to different motivational factors for choosing a web-based course.
The data has been based on a questionnaire, covering 1270 beginner students in the spring semester of 2011 and contains their background characteristics and items focusing on their motives. These could be categorized into four different motives: (1) Format, (2) Content, (3) Economic, and (4) Curiosity. 21st Century Learning. Log in into ALISON. Grant helps Idaho schools plug into online learning classes. By TODD DVORAK, Associated Press Thousands of Idaho students in public, private and charter schools big and small next fall will be able to log into math, physics and history classes provided by the Khan Academy, a growing content provider focused on making free education available to anyone, anywhere. With $1.5 million in startup money from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Khan Academy content will be provided in 47 schools, making Idaho the nation’s first proving ground for a statewide implementation of the academy’s free educational content and teaching model.
UK Universities go virtual: Bricks to online learning clicks. By Matt Lee, BBC News How university students do their studies has changed significantly in recent years with the growth in online learning. Instead of physically attending lectures or going to the library, they can download lesson plans and lecture notes to their laptop, have a Skype conversation with a lecturer and submit work online. With more universities now offering e-learning and MOOCs (massive open online courses) is there now a need for them to still have classrooms and a campus? The University of Warwick was one of 12 to sign up with a company called Futurelearn in December to enable them to offer free online degree-level courses and MOOCs to students around the world. The first of which in behavioural science will start in July. Inside a MOOC: Coursera class offers peek into determination of student body. By Mike Cassidy, Mercury News With the class still in the early going I was about a week behind on my assignments, nearly flunking my first quiz and seriously contemplating dropping the class.
So much for the old college try.But two things made me stick with it (at least up until now, with two more weeks to go) — My Coursera class called “Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies” comes with a promise: If I can finish the course work and score at least 70 percent on my assignments, I’ll receive a statement of accomplishment. I want that statement. But more important than that, were the classmates I’ve encountered. Yeah, classmates. I’ve got a few, like 85,000 by the instructor’s count in week two of the course. Let’s just say the lecture hall would have been a little crowded in pre-Internet days.
My Page. The race to platform education. Across the full spectrum of education – primary, secondary, and higher – we are witnessing a race to develop platforms for content, learning, teaching, and evaluation. As liberating as the web is, tremendous centralization of control is occurring in numerous spaces: Google in search/advertising/Android, Amazon in books/cloud computing, Facebook in social networks, etc. I use a smaller range of tools today than I did five years ago. And the reason is simple: companies are in a landrush to create platforms that will tie together previously disconnected activities and tools. Numerous companies are eager to platform the educational sector, with Pearson being the lead runner to date.
More on that in a bit. This post/rant on life at Amazon and Google, from the perspective of an employee (programmer?) Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility | Daniel. Fellow - Korea National Open University Education Master - DeTao Masters Academy, China sirjohn.ca During my time as a Fellow at the Korea National Open University (KNOU) in September 2012 media and web coverage of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was intense. Since one of the requirements of the fellowship was a research paper, exploring the phenomenon of MOOCs seemed an appropriate topic. This essay had to be submitted to KNOU on 25 September 2012 but the MOOCs story is still evolving rapidly. I shall continue to follow it. 'What is new is not true, and what is true is not new'.
This paper is published by JIME following its first release as a paper produced as part of a fellowship at the Korea National Open University (KNOU). Abstract: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the educational buzzword of 2012. Keywords: MOOCs, open, openness, educational technology Introduction MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the educational buzzword of 2012. Methodological note What is a MOOC? E-learning and Digital Cultures. The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses | Open Education. MOOCs are a red herring. The MOOC didn’t appear last week, out of a void, vacuum-packed. The MOOC has been around for years, biding its time. Still, the recent furor about MOOCs, which some have called “hysteria,” opens important questions about higher education, digital pedagogy, and online learning.
The MOOCs themselves aren’t what’s really at stake. In spite of the confused murmurs in the media, MOOCs won’t actually chomp everything in their path. And they aren’t an easy solution to higher education’s financial crisis. MOOCs are like books, good when they’re good and bad when they’re bad. Content and learning are two separate things, often at odds with one another.
Too many people are drinking the MOOC Kool-aid (or dumping it out hastily) when what we need to do is look closely at the Kool-aid to see what we can learn from it. “Massive”: What happens if we take the “Massive” out of “Massive Open Online Course”? “Open”: The first “O” in “MOOC” has been dangerously misread. MOOCs | Innovating Pedagogy. The Future of Learning and Teaching: It's Time for 'Audacious Goals'