Coursera forced to call off a MOOC amid complaints about the course Maybe it was inevitable that one of the new massive open online courses would crash. After all, MOOCs are being launched with considerable speed, not to mention hype. But MOOC advocates might have preferred the collapse of a course other than the one that was suspended this weekend, one week into instruction: "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application." Technology and design problems are largely to blame for the course's problems. Among the comments on blogs and Twitter: "Wowzers, 40,000 students signed up for considering google spreadsheets limit of 50 simultaneous editors ... not a good choice!" Those comments weren't coming from random undergraduates. The course instructor -- Fatimah Wirth -- sent an e-mail to the 41,000 students over the weekend saying in its entirety: "We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. Wirth did not respond to an e-mail message seeking details about what happened.
A Quick Guide To The History Of MOOCs This Is How Students Use School Websites 8.45K Views 0 Likes It's important to have a proper appearance online. So why are there so many unhelpful school websites out there? Why TED Talks Have Become So Popular 5.67K Views 0 Likes TED talks are useful and free ways to bring high-level thinking and through-provoking ideas into the classroom and your home.
Stanford, Harvard Scholars Dissect Big Data GOOD DATA, BAD DATA: After blended learning, Big Data, and MOOCs, another edtech term is gaining steam in 2013: learning analytics. The phrase (which refers to finding meaningful data patterns that inform effective learning) is presumably where the Big Data movement in education is placing all bets. The only problem is mining data for meaningful patterns is a bit difficult when there's no strong definition of effective learning. Just ask Stanford GSE Professor Roy Pea. In this recent keynote address delivered at the Educause Learning Initiative, Pea cautions that learning sciences are "largely missing" from MOOCs and expose "a great chasm" in their design. Across the country at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Reynol Junco is equally unforgiving. His call for more learning sciences is a bit more nuanced than Pea's. Still any type of data can be difficult to handle in the context of school environments.
Synthesising MOOC completion rates | MoocMoocher Via a combination of thinking about ‘what makes a successful MOOC?’, and looking for a topic for my final project on the Infographics MOOC, I decided to try to pull together the various statistics floating around online about MOOC completion rates. I’m trying to see if any differences emerge on the basis of platform or the assessment methods used. My draft graph synthesising everything I’ve found so far can be found here: Clicking on any of the data points will pull up a bubble with more information about that course, and a link back to the data source. (note: the interactive version of the chart uses javascript. This is off to quite an interesting start, but I need help sourcing more data and categorising courses according to their assessments. Courses which I have completion rates for, but need more information about how they were assessed, include: 3.091x Introduction to solid state chemistry at EdX, which ended approximately 2013-01 – Used MCQs
Dr. Keith Devlin: Can Massive Open Online Courses Make Up for an Outdated K-12 Education System? Overall, schools seem to be doing a poor job of preparing today's children for the world they will live in. And I'm not just talking about American schools. The problem seems to be almost global. The evidence for this hits me square in the eyes each day when I log on to read some of the forum posts from students from all across the globe who are taking my Stanford MOOC on "mathematical thinking," now into its fourth week. Using some elementary parts of mathematics as a basis, the course sets out to develop the kind of creative, "out of the box" thinking that practically every forward-looking government report around the world tells us is going to be critical as we move through the 21st Century. The kind of creativity that education expert Sir Ken Robinson talks about in his virally famous talks. Other than standard high school mathematics, the only real prerequisite for my course is knowing how to learn. I see that ability in many of my MOOC students. It's definitely not their fault.
Coursera commits to admitting only elite universities If you wonder why your university hasn’t linked up with Coursera, the massively popular provider of free online classes, it may help to know the company is contractually obliged to turn away the vast majority of American universities. The Silicon Valley-based company said to be revolutionizing higher education says in a contract obtained by Inside Higher Ed that it will “only” offer classes from elite institutions – the members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America – unless Coursera’s advisory board agrees to waive the requirement. The little-known contractual language appears in agreements Coursera signed with the 62 universities it partners with, including in a recently signed contract with the University of California at Santa Cruz, one of a handful of non-AAU universities on Coursera. The provision obligates the company, on paper at least, to give AAU members de facto preference. EdX has its own elitism.
U. of California faculty union says MOOCs undermine professors' intellectual property Faculty union officials in California worry professors who agree to teach free online 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. The union said the professors lobbied for a 12-year-old California law to guarantee that faculty -- not universities -- own the intellectual property rights to class lectures and course materials. On March 14, Mayne replied with a letter that said Errington’s concerns were “understandable."
MOOCs and Higher Education’s Non-Consumers If Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are going to truly disrupt the higher education marketplace then non-consumers will need to play a critical role. Justin Reich outlines three categories of people currently underserved in the market and finds that given the diversity of interests involved, designing for all these populations might prove to be quite difficult. A critical component to Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation is the idea of the “non-consumer.” In most of the historical examples of disruption described by Christensen, disruptive innovators build products that served non-consumers, people underserved by the marketplace, and used these populations as a base for reshaping new markets for new products and services. Sony Walkmans, for instance, emerged in a marketplace for audio equipment dominated by people who bought HiFi systems. If MOOCs are going to be disruptive in the ways predicted by Christensen’s theory, then non-consumers will play a critical role.
The Professors Behind the MOOC Hype - Technology Dave Chidley for The Chronicle Paul Gries, of the U. of Toronto, has taught MOOCs on computer science. By Steve Kolowich What is it like to teach 10,000 or more students at once, and does it really work? The survey, conducted by The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC. Hype around these new free online courses has grown louder and louder since a few professors at Stanford University drew hundreds of thousands of students to online computer-science courses in 2011. Princeton University's Robert Sedgewick is one of them. Like many professors at top-ranked institutions, Mr. His online course drew 80,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. It paid off. The Chronicle survey considered courses open to anyone, enrolling hundreds or even thousands of users (the median number of students per class was 33,000). But the participants were primarily longtime professors with no prior experience with online instruction. Why They MOOC Mr.