The Digital University: MOOCS & the Humanities Conference | 15 May 2014, Edge Hill University, UK MOOCs and the Future of Education in Latin America Like many regions, Latin America and the Caribbean face a mismatch between what its educational system offers and the skills that are demanded by the market. A recent trend monitoring newsletter by FORO Nacional asks whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could help to bridge this gap. Largely offered by U.S. educational institutions and covering subject matter ranging from global poverty to electrical engineering, MOOCs are free and open to anyone; in fact, two-thirds of users are reportedly based outside of North America. FORO observes a growing practice of linking individual, online work via a MOOC with accredited programs in the region. For example, the University of El Salvador offers an Electrical Engineering course that draws heavily on an MIT’s edX class. In the case of MOOCs, it would mean skipping more expensive and limited in-person education for cheaper education with significant online components. The answers to these questions are still unfolding.
MOOC research Die vieldiskutierten „Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOCs) verbreiten sich zunehmend auch in Deutschland. Erst im April 2014 veranstaltete der Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft eine „MOOC-Woche”, bei der Experten zum Thema zu Wort kamen. MOOCs sind dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass sie eine hohe Teilnehmerzahl haben, dass sie für alle Personenkreise offen stehen bzw. häufig kostenlos sind und dass sie als webbasierte Lehrveranstaltung stattfinden. Die Forschung zu MOOCs steckt noch in den Kinderschuhen. Die Veranstaltung zu „MOOC-Research” beleuchtete Ansätze und Methoden, mit deren Hilfe das MOOC-Format aktuell beforscht wird und in Zukunft beforscht werden kann. Referent des Online-Events war der Kanadier Stephen Downes, der als Erfinder des MOOC gilt und angekündigt hat, "to throw in a few wrinkles that will make the session interesting".
Reports | MOOC Research The discursive construction of MOOCs as educational opportunity and educational threat Project Leads: Neil Selwyn, Scott Bulfin Mainstream news media have restricted public understanding of MOOCs to a set of concerns relating to the ‘economics’ of higher education (i.e. massification, marketization and monetization), while marginalizing debate of ‘educational’ and ‘technological’ issues such as online learning and pedagogy, instructional design and student experience. click here to download Patterns of Persistence: What Engages Students in a Remedial English Writing MOOC? Project Lead: John Whitmer, Ed.D. Learners in a remedial English writing MOOC engage with the course in meaningful ways that are revealed by using clustering methods and other approaches that are different from those used to measure the learning impact of traditional for-credit courses. click here to download Learning Analytics for Smarter Psychological Interventions Project Lead: Daniel Greene click here to download
Learning for free? MOOCs by Mira Vogel on Prezi How are MOOCs Disrupting the Educational Landscape? Being ‘at’ university: paper coming out in Higher Education | Sian Bayne It’s been in review for over a year but at last the paper I wrote with James Lamb and Michael Sean Gallagher is accepted for publication in Higher Education. This comes out of our project on the New Geographies of Learning, and looks at how distance students ‘make’ university space when they never actually attend the campus. We found that the physical campus is more important to these students than you might think. There’s a sneak preview of the paper draft here. Look out also for another paper from the same project, Jen Ross, Michael Gallagher and Hamish Macleod’s paper on ‘Making distance visible’ will shortly be out in the International Review of Research in Online and Distance Learning.
MOOC study creates new "taxonomy of engagement" The study shows that students join the courses with diverse learning goals and intentions. Many MOOC learners may not complete the entire course and its assignments, but they still engage with the material in various ways. The authors established a "taxonomy of engagement" that separates online learners into five different categories based on their engagement patterns. Bystanders are registered for the course, but their total activity is below a very low threshold.Collectors primarily download lectures, but don't participate much.Viewers watch lectures, handing in few if any assignmentsSolvers hand in assignments for a grade, viewing few if any lecturesAll-Rounders balance the watching of lectures with the handing in of assignments In presenting ther findings, the researchers wrote:
Why Do Students Enroll in (But Don’t Complete) MOOC Courses? Teaching Strategies Udacity office in Silicon Valley, ground zero for MOOCs. Less than 10 percent of MOOC students, on average, complete a course. That’s the conclusion of Katy Jordan of Open University, who published her analysis, pulled together from available data of some Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. But do completion rates matter? It’s not that course completion rates don’t inform observers about the nature of MOOCs, said Michelle Rhee-Weise, who follows higher-ed developments in online and blended learning as an education senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly Innosight Institute). Among those reasons: 1. The analysis, which Jordan has continued to update since initially posting it in the middle of February, currently considers the enrollment and completion rate data of 24 MOOCs in all, including 20 offered from different universities over the Coursera platform. THE FUTURE OF MOOCs? Related
Debunking the MOOC myth 17 July 2014 With hype waning for MOOCs and the backlash in full swing, what does the post-MOOC environment look like for Higher Education? Simon Linacre explores an increasingly complicated future of teaching, learning and research If 2012 was the year of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course), according to the New York Times, then perhaps 2015 will be the year of VUCA. As with MOOCs however, a convenient acronym to use as a pigeon-hole will not be of great comfort for university administrators wrestling with the increasing complexity of the environment they find themselves in. What makes the VUCA problem more acute for university leaders is that, while they are more than aware of recent trends and pace of change in educational technology and pedagogy in the last 12 months, the challenge is bridging the gap between the cutting edge and many academic practices. But these dynamics require much greater flex from legendarily sloth-like HEIs. A VUCA world Physician, heal thyself
Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses | Parlor Press Steven D. Krause and Charles Lowe Information and Pricing 978-1-60235-533-0 (paperback, $30); 978-1-60235-534-7 (hardcover, $60). © 2014 by Parlor Press and the respective authors. Invasion of the MOOCs is also available in PDF format for free download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Add to Cart and choose format below. Bookstores: Order by fax, mail, or phone. Description Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promise and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses is one of the first collections of essays about the phenomenon of “Massive Online Open Courses.” Contributors include Aaron Barlow, Siân Bayne, Nick Carbone, Kaitlin Clinnin, Denise K. About the Editors Steven D. Charles Lowe is an Associate Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University where he teaches web design, professional writing, business communication, document design, and first-year writing. Contents © 2014 by Parlor Press.
The failure of MOOCs | Learning with New Media failure, noun: “The fact of failing to effect one’s purpose” (Oxford English Dictionary, failure, n. 3a) Have MOOCs failed us? This depends on their purpose. If their purpose was broadening access to chunks of higher education, they’re a success: Coursera alone has more than four times as many students as the entire Australian higher education system. They seem pretty good at making headlines and extracting venture capital too. Providing higher education to all is more complicated than just enrolling everyone. I’ve argued elsewhere that MOOCs are like exercise bikes: you start with the best of intentions, but most of the time exercise bikes end up under the bed, and MOOCs end up incomplete. Yes, elite athletes may use exercise bikes to great effect in the off-season; and many academics and professionals have taste-tested MOOCs and even completed them. But what about the well-intentioned person who starts with the exercise bike or MOOC and never achieves their goal? So, have MOOCs failed?