A Tale of Two MOOCs @ Coursera: Divided by Pedagogy. The Web as a classroom is transforming how people learn, is driving the need for new pedagogy; two recently launched courses at Coursera highlight what happens when pedagogical methods fail to adapt. Divided pedagogy I wrote recently about the Fundamentals of Online: Education [FOE] the Coursera course that was suspended after its first week and is now in MOOC hibernation mode. Over thirty thousands students signed up for the course hoping to learn how to develop an online course.
It was a technical malfunction when students were directed to sign-up for groups through a Google Doc that shuttered the course, along with hundreds of student complaints about lack of clear instructions, and poor lecture quality. The course was suspended on February 2, and there has been no word yet as to when it will resume :(. The Tale of the Two What made e-Learning and Digital Cultures successful and FOE not? There were variables common to each—the platform, the start date and length of course. References. Not All Online Students Are the Same: A Summary of Stanford's MOOC User Study. How the Attitudes of Instructors, Students, Course Administrators, and Course Designers Affects the Quality of an Online Learning Environment. MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact. As Phil mentioned in his last post, he and I had the privilege of participating in a two-day ELI webinar on MOOCs.
A majority of the speakers had been involved in implementing MOOCs at their institutions in one way or another. And an interesting thing happened. Over the course of the two days, almost none of the presenters—with the exception of the ACE representative, who has a vested interest—expressed the belief that MOOCs provide equivalent learning experiences to traditional college courses. Keep in mind, these folks were believers. They were enthusiastic about MOOCs in general. But they tended to describe the value of MOOCs as reaching a different audience than the traditional matriculated college student and provide a different value. They talked about it extending the university mission. On the other hand, there was widespread enthusiasm for using MOOCs as essentially substitutions for textbooks in classes that included instructors from the local campus. Enter the MOOC. On-Campus or Online?: Two Generations Compare MOOC Experiences.
Hello everyone. This is Robert McGuire with MOOC News and Reviews, and today we have a very interesting interview. We’re going to hear from two students who were learning the same online material from different perspectives and for different reasons and at very different points in their careers. However, they have something else in common that should make this an interesting discussion. [Enjoy this interview with two generations of Duke University students who compare MOOC experiences. Before I introduce them, let me explain what class in common they had. Most recently, Professor Noor taught that MOOC and at the same time adapted his on-campus class into a flipped version where the Duke University undergraduates followed along while the masses of people around the world were in the MOOC, and the Duke students were doing that as their homework, and then they would come to the lecture hall for small group work.
Wu Yep, that’s right. McGuire Welcome James. Wu Thank you. Welcome Ben. Somberg No. MOOCs and For Profit Universities: A Closer Look. Moocdraft2 - MOOC_Final.pdf. The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform. A shortened version of this paper was given at UC Irvine last week, with the great Tressie McMillan Cottom talking about MOOCs and for-profit education. You can see video of both of us and the respondents here. Much thanks to Catherine Liu, Michael Meranze, and Peter Krapp for organizing and participating. The MOOC phenomenon has happened very quickly, to put it mildly. Last November, the New York Times declared 2012 to be “the Year of the MOOC,” and while it feels (at least to me) like we’ve been talking about MOOCs for years now, the speed by which the MOOC has become the future of higher education is worth thinking carefully about, both because it’s an important way to frame what is happening, and because that speed warps the narrative we are able to tell about what is happening.
The MOOC phenomenon is also a shift in discourse, a shift that’s happened so quickly and so recently, that it fills up our mental rear-view mirror. For example. I mean that in two different ways. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Good MOOC's, Bad MOOC's - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education. At Conference, Leaders of ‘Traditional’ Online Learning Meet Upstart Free Providers - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education. A Pioneer in Online Education Tries a MOOC - Online Learning - The Chronicle of Higher Education. What It's Like to Teach a MOOC (and What the Heck's a MOOC?) - Robinson Meyer. They may be the future of higher education. But what do people who've, um, educated with them think? The chair of the University of California-Berkeley Computer Science Department called MOOCs a "cheating-rich environment.
" (Shutterstock / Rido) Yesterday, the start-up Coursera announced a collaboration with some of the nation's best research universities: It would offer their classes, for free, online. It would offer them in something called a MOOC: a Massive Open Online Course, made up of chunked quizzes, assignments and lecture videos. In Coursera's model, and most others, MOOCs are free. They seem to be massively successful. And accordingly, the New York Times gave the story the full biblical imagery treatment. But because MOOCs are so new, and so limited before yesterday's news, first-hand discussion of what it's like to teach one has been limited.
Now we have some evidence. The ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC - Parade@Portsmouth. Mackness, J., Mak, S. and Williams, Roy (2010) The ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC. In: Dirckinck-Holmfeld, L., Hodgson, V., Jones, C., De Laat, M., McConnell, D. and Ryberg, T., eds. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning 2010:. University of Lancaster, Lancaster, pp. 266-275. ISBN 9781862202252 Abstract 'CCK08' was a unique event on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge within a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in 2008.
It was a course and a network about the emergent practices and the theory of Connectivism, proposed by George Siemens as a new learning theory for a digital age. MOOCs do not represent the best of online learning (essay) Overnight, MOOCs -- with free tuition for all, attracting unprecedented enrollments reaching into the hundreds of thousands, and the involvement of world-class faculty -- have captured the imagination of the press, public and even legislators looking for ways to expand the availability of higher education at minimal cost.
But thus far little attention has been paid to the quality of MOOCs. Quality in online learning can be defined in many ways: quality of content, quality of design, quality of instructional delivery, and, ultimately, quality of outcomes. On the face of it, the organizing principles of MOOCs are at odds with widely observed best practices in online education, including those advocated by my organization, the Quality Matters Program. Previous nontraditional forms of education have been greeted by widespread skepticism and required to prove themselves, over an extended period of time, as worthy alternatives to traditional classroom education. Enter MOOC 2.0. MOOCs: A view from the digital trenches.
By Kevin Werbach On April 15, 2013 The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m a professor, is among the world’s oldest, largest, and best business schools, with 11 academic departments, 20 research centers, 230 standing faculty, and an endowment nearing $1 billion. With all those resource, it has produced 92,000 living alumni. Now consider this: Over the past eight months, in two sessions of a course, I myself taught more than 140,000 people from 150 countries. In other words, I reached more students than all of my colleagues, combined, ever. To be fair, it was one non-credit course, whereas those alumni spent two to four years with us and earned a degree. If you’re interested in higher education, you’ve probably heard spectacular reports and wild predictions about MOOCs.
What’s more, I’m still getting emails, tweets, letters and other responses from participants telling me how much they loved the course. So, what’s the secret to an effective MOOC? The Big Problem for MOOCs Visualized. MOOCs — they’re getting a lot of hype, in part because they promise so much, and in part because you hear about students signing up for these courses in massive numbers. 60,000 signed up for Duke’s Introduction to Astronomy on Coursera. 28,500 registered for Introduction to Solid State Chemistry on edX. Impressive figures, to be sure. But then the shine comes off a little when you consider that 3.5% and 1.7% of students completed these courses respectively. That’s according to a Visualization of MOOC Completion Rates assembled by educational researcher Katy Jordan, using publicly available data. According to her research, MOOCs have generated 50,000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%.
Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3,700 completions per 50,000 enrollments. If you click the image above, you can see interactive data points for 27 courses. If you’re a venture capitalist, you’re probably a little less wowed by 3,700 students taking a free course. 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.
Stop Polarising the MOOCs Debate. Originally posted on University World News. Re-posted with permission of author. The academic conversation on MOOCs (massive open online courses) is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other. I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of ‘politically and financially motivated greed’ on the one hand and ‘an opportunity to find out more about learning’ on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true. It's always hard to be able to hold two complex and even contradictory ideas in one's mind at once but, well, that's life.
Both can be true. The rhetoric of so many articles seemed to be "is higher education really worth it? " Enter MOOCs Enter massive open online courses: MOOCs. Disparities. Thoughts from a MOOC Pioneer — Academic Technology. A screen capture from Scott E. Page’s MOOC. Recently Scott E. Page did a presentation at the University of Wisconsin Center for Educational Innovation where he reviewed his experience teaching his Model Thinking course twice through online course provider Coursera. (He’s had 150,000 people sign up for the course and over 3,000,000 YouTube video downloads.)
The presentation runs a little more than an hour, including one embarrassing technology glitch. (Fast forward from about 11:40 to 14:40 if you want to miss it.) One of the things that makes Professor Page such an engaging commentator is that he obviously believes the world would be a much better place if more people knew how to use models to make decisions. Seven Different Methods for Sharing Knowledge In his talk, Page identifies seven different methods that he’s used to share his knowledge with a wider audience. How Do You Pay For It? The first question from the audience was, “What’s the business model?”
How Much Time Does it Take? What is the theory that underpins <em>our</em> moocs? If you’re even casually aware of what is happening in higher education, you’ve likely heard of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have been covered by NY Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs, newspapers, and a mess or blogs. While MOOCs have been around since at least 2008, the landscape has changed dramatically over the past 10 months. In this timeframe, close to $100 million has been invested in corporate (Udacity) and university (EDx and Coursera) MOOCs . And hundreds of thousands of students have signed up and taken these online course offerings. Personally, I’m very pleased to see the development of Coursera and EDx. A secondary focus, for me (and far lower on the scale than the primary one mentioned above), is around the learning theory and pedagogical models that influence different types of MOOCs.
In 2008, Stephen Downes and I offered an open online course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08). What is the theory that underpins our MOOCs? 1. 2. 3. 4. Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement (EDUCAUSE Review. © 2010 Dave Cormier and George Siemens. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License ( EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 30-39 Dave Cormier (dave@edactive.ca) is a web projects lead at the University of Prince Edward Island, cofounder of Edtechtalk, and president of Edactive Technologies, a social software consulting firm.
George Siemens (gsiemens@gmail.com) is a strategist and researcher at the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and is the founder of Complexive Systems Inc. Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page. Let attention be paid not to the matter, but to the shape I give it. — Montaigne Over the last decade, as educators have increasingly experimented with social technologies and interactive pedagogies, the concept of a "course" has been significantly challenged. Openness as Transparent Practice. Online learning insights | A Blog about Open and Online Education. Emerging Student Patterns in MOOCs: A (Revised) Graphical View.
In part 1 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared an initial description of four student patterns emerging from Coursera-style MOOCs based on new data from professors. In part 2, I revised the description based on some feedback and added a graphical view. The excellent feedback has continued, primarily through comments to both posts mentioned above as well as a separate Google+ discussion. This process has helped identify a fifth pattern, clarify the pattern description, and improve the associated graphic. In particular, I want to thank Debbie Morrison, Colin Milligan, John Whitmer, Charles Severance and Kevin Kelly – as well as other commenters for the great discussion. The primary changes involve clarifying the previously-described Lurker category. No-Shows – These students appear to be the largest group of those registering for an Coursera-style MOOC, where people register but never login to the course while it is active.
Google+ Comments. Innovation Confusion — Education + Technology. Research publications on Massive Open Online Courses and Personal Learning Environments. The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course | Kop. Don't Confuse Technology With Teaching - Commentary. CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings. MOOCs Are Finally Being Analyzed by Educators . . . What’s the Verdict? An Inside Look at Duke University’s MOOC Initiative. _Bioelectricity_MOOC_Fall2012.pdf. Grading the MOOC University. Major Players in the MOOC Universe - The Digital Campus 2013.
European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning.