Three Kinds of MOOCs « Lisa's

The Death and Life of Higher Education | The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (Editor’s note: This article is based on a presentation for a conference sponsored by the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders and directed by John W. Sommer in February 2012. It begins a series of such articles.) We desperately need to equip and inspire our next generation to take on the opportunities and challenges of the twenty-first century. But our traditional universities have become trapped in a bureaucratic death spiral, more interested in preserving and expanding pay and perks for tenured faculty and administrators than serving students. The decline has become so self-evident that students, parents, employers, taxpayers—and even the rabble with Occupy Wall Street—now recognize the problem. Faculty senates at traditional universities seem indifferent to the mounting problems. Those who expect traditional universities to reform on their own are kidding themselves. A Lifelong Adventure 1. 2. 3. 4. A Modest Proposal Portfolios vs. But college degrees also denote status.

15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends One of the great things about TwitterTwitter reviews is that it is a great place to track emerging trends. When major events or big stories occur, people tweet about it and it inevitably ends up at the top of Twitter Search as a top trend. But this only scratches the surface of tracking Twitter trends. There are a wide variety of web applications, Twitter accounts, and even iPhone apps that can help people do everything from track popular hashtags to graph out recent Twitter trends. Web-based Applications 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Twitter Accounts 8. twithority: Twithority is an easy way to have the most recent Twitter trends tweeted to you. 9. 10. 11. gtrend: gtrend is short for "Google Trend." iPhone Apps 12. 13.

Free and Open Source Authoring Tools for e-Learning As an e-Learning consultant I was always a fan of open source software. Why? The answer is simple. Because I could use them as I wish, for whatever I wish, without long-term commitments and with the extra bonus of a community of professionals that use, extend and support them. In this post I am not going to talk about open source learning management systems such as eFront[1] but rather dedicated open source “authoring tools”. The list that it follows is not in particular order. => If you know a free or open source authoring tool that is not included in the list I will highly appreciate if you write a comment with a link! Free & Open Source Authoring Tools for e-Learning What2Learn makes it easy for e-Learning developers to create interactive games and quizzes and track learners’ attainment. xical.org ClassTools.net Create free educational games, quizzes, activities and diagrams in seconds! eXe Wink CourseLab Quandary Hot Potatoes

Learning Object Tools A reader from another country has asked me about Learning Object Tools. I asked him to clarify what they meant and the response was: Learning Object Tools are those that allow you to create, edit and manage learning objects. There is also a bit of language barrier. But it got me to thinking that I've really not looked at Learning Objects in quite a while - and I've not really kept up on Learning Object Tools. So, I was hoping that someone could help me and him: What are good general discussions of learning objects and learning object tools? mics in the classroom: news and resources round up | Teacher Network Blog | Guardian Professional The GTN team struggled (and failed) to suppress our inner geeks earlier this week when news surfaced that superheroes Superman and Wonder Woman are to become a "powers couple" in the DC Comics series. Our main source of excitement, however, wasn't the super-powered love match, but knowing this new fictional romance gave us a reasonable excuse to dedicate our topical resources column to the fascinating topic of teaching with comics. So, we've scoured the Guardian and the rest of the web for some ideas for bringing comics into the classroom. If you've already got comic-themed resources, activities or ideas for lessons, please do share it with the community here. From the Guardian How to draw...How to draw... is one of our favourite regular features to come out of the Guardian's children's books section. The How to draw... aliens activity is pretty topical too - what with the Curiosity rover looking for life on Mars. Resources from Guardian Teacher Network Best of the web Buzz!

NEW READING OPPORTUNITIES IN MOOCDOM ~ CDL Projects you are not logged in. [] [] We have been collecting bits about the world of MOOCs and we wanted to share some of them with you for your perusal. Foof for lots of mental stimulation and lots of incubation material here and maybe even a discussion and blog post or two, or three. CMC11 was developed as a direct result of the Cormier, Downes, Siemens connectivist MOOCs that we followed as learner/participants, though more as lurkers than active contributors/participants. You may recognize yourself in either of those categories ... the learners/participants tend to shape the networks as well as the learning as the cMOOC flows along. The current crop of elite MOOCs seem to be more content driven and as such, have more prescribed theories and pedagogy ... ones that many may be more comfortable pursuing. What sort of MOOC might you develop, if you set out to develop one? Many have difficulties "wayfinding" and making sense of the learning journeys inherent in MOOCs.

Designing a Learning Design MOOC Ld mooc workshop from Grainne Conole I am very excited to be part of a team developing a Learning Design Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which will be delivered in October 2012. As part of our preparation for this I attended a workshop at the OU last week. The first activity was to articulate the main personas involved in the MOOC; from those involved in designing and delivering it, to those who are expected to participate. The next slide shows the Course View map for the course. The final slide shows the storyboard for the course.

#MOOCMOOC Reflection on different MOOCs Will MOOC transform Higher Education? There seems to be great potential for MOOC “to transform higher education at a time when colleges and universities are grappling with shrinking budgets, rising costs and protests over soaring tuition and student debt.” Is free online courses movement good for the higher education? MOOC could be a good platform and hence a driver for education and personalised learning. There are models which could be good on surface, but not always good in outcome. What are those models? “Good MOOCs foreground and sustain the social dimension of learning and active practices, i.e., knowledge production rather than knowledge consumption.” Based on the principles and concepts of MOOC, it could be used in the case of SOOC where Keith is thinking of and he cites Jim’s conclusion: We could scale Online learning up with MOOC – but then the problems, challenges and opportunities scale up too, as I have shared it here on MOOC and online education. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Postscript: