6 Quick Tips To Make The Most Of Graduate School Graduating Student Assistants Reception. If you’re interested in becoming a teacher or pursuing graduate school in general, it’s important to understand what it takes and what the payoff is. Sure, you can have a positive influence on others and all that jazz … but what does it actually take to graduate? Let’s walk through some of the best tips for graduate students: Don’t Change What Works for You Some people get off track and start to panic because they think that everything about graduate school will be different from anything they’ve ever done before. Study Aids Think about the specific study aids that you used then, and adapt them for the different requirements of graduate school. See Also: The Edudemic Online College Guide These can be really helpful if you find yourself feeling flustered as you try to copy down what your professors say during a lecture, and can also make it easier to decipher anything that initially seemed unclear. Immerse Yourself as Much as Possible Become A Rock Star
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 course started Monday, January 28, 2013 and problems began on day one when participants were instructed to ‘join a group’. One comment from student in a threaded discussion titled ‘This is a mess’ which was started by another student. What happens When Group Work Goes Haywire Like this: Like Loading...
» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3. The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? The story the recording industry used to tell us went something like this: “Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! The people in the music industry weren’t stupid, of course. We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. But you know what?
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)
EPIC 2020 | Higher Education Reform How One iPad App Changed An Entire School I have been wanting to write a post for a while about the amazing tool that we came across last year, that has truly changed the way we use iPads in our classrooms, but haven’t had a venue to do so. Now that I have my new website, I decided it was a must! If you aren’t familiar with this groundbreaking Nearpod iPad app , I want to take a minute to share it with you and explain how it changed our school. Nearpod is an App that allows teachers to share presentations; but wait, there’s more! Needless to say, it is a presenter’s dream come true. Starting Out With Nearpod I’ll never forget my first experience with Nearpod. At Pine Crest, we differentiate instruction, and the iPad is great for that, but we still also provide whole group instruction. Felipe came to me to share this revolutionary App and he walked me through the experience. Feedback Becomes Reality So, what are you using now that we suggested? Seeing this App grow from the very beginning has been a very rewarding experience.
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”.
#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. But overall, most of the reflections and issues raised focus on the technological side, while for me it is all about the human side: what do people expect, how do people react to chaos, how do learners interact in order to learn and how can virtual mass chaos come to order again? Group dynamics and learner interactions The learner dynamics are of course crucial in any type of learning, but in a MOOC they become exponentially important.
Our #EdcMooc paths to Information and knowledge | Eleni's First Steps The last three weeks have been extremely rich and creative although I haven’t come back to the blog to record my thoughts. One of the things that keeps coming back in my mind are the words of George Roberts few months ago when I started the first UK-based MOOC “First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education“. During the orientation, George encouraged us to dive into the #fslt12 curriculum (the hashtag of the aforementioned MOOC) and make it ours. At that time, his words didn’t make a lot of sense but my enthusiasm was enough to “dive” into the resources, engage with participants and spend a considerable amount of time on further exploration. George’s words make perfect sense to me while engaging with #edcmooc as a student and while trying to encourage, as an educator, my students to internalize their course content and experience it as a whole. This experience is going to help me immensely in a PhD program…so many research questions swirling through my head! What do you do?