The Problems with Coursera's Peer Assessments Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed When I wrote about the launch of online education startup Coursera back in April, one of the things that most intrigued me most was the description that founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng gave of their plans for a peer-to-peer grading system. I’ve been a critic of the rise of the robot-graders — that is, the increasing usage of automated assessment software (used in other xMOOCS and online courses, as well as in other large-scale testing systems). While some assignments might lend themselves to being graded this way, I’ve been skeptical that automation is really the way to go for disciplines that require essay-writing, despite the contention that robo-graders score just as well as humans do. Coursera said it would offer poetry classes (a modern poetry class starts this fall), and I just couldn’t see how even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence in the world could grade students’ intepretations and close readings. The variability of feedback:
The Best OER Revise / Remix Ever? by david on December 11, 2012 In fall of 2011, I took a new approach to the Project Management course I teach each year. I wanted my students to gain hands on experience managing a project, I wanted them to feel the pressure of hitting deliverables, I wanted them to feel the nausea of having things fall through, I wanted them to learn to navigate managing people, and most of all I wanted them to feel the joy of completing a piece of work that blesses people lives. So I asked my students to engage in a very large scale revise / remix project that would benefit them and many others. We started with Project Management from Simple to Complex, originally written by Russell Darnall and John Preston and originally published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license by Flat World Knowledge. If this new textbook isn’t the best OER revise/remix ever, I’d like to know what is! Congratulations to my IPT 682 students.
» 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. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. 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 people in the music industry weren’t stupid, of course. But who faces that choice?
A MOOC is not a Thing: Emergence, Disruption, and Higher Education | Open Education A MOOC is not a thing. A MOOC is a strategy. What we say about MOOCs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. There is nothing about a MOOC that can be contained. “There is a relational aspect to learning.” MOOCification: to harness (in an instant) the power of a nodal network for learning. Chris Friend writes, in “Learning as Performance: MOOC Pedagogy and On-ground Classes”, “The promise of MOOCs lies not in what the format lets us do, but in what the format lets us question: Where does learning happen? Are organized attempts to harness learning always and necessarily frustrated? True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. Pete Rorabaugh writes, “The analysis, remixing, and socially engaged construction of personally relevant knowledge — often happens when the institutional framework is disrupted, diverted, or left in the dust.” The MOOC is a dialectic.
Audrey Watters Wrestles with MOOCs | Open Education a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as they are situated both inside and outside of traditional higher education institutions, naturally raise questions about those institutions. My recent article, “Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media,” began to uncover some of those questions. In that article, I assert “that academic work must be useful beyond its tower and that digital culture offers new opportunities to achieve that goal.” Perhaps MOOCs are a way to take academic work beyond its traditional boundaries. Or perhaps MOOCs are so extra-institutional that they will work no real changes on higher education. In her article, “Considering Coursera’s Expansion,” Audrey Watters ponders some of the same questions. [<a href="//storify.com/allistelling/audrey-watters-wrestles-with-moocs" target="_blank">View the story "Audrey Watters Wrestles with MOOCs" on Storify</a>] About the Author
Autistic Students Make Music Using iPad Apps (WATCH) The first time you listen to Ryan Rodriguez, Denzel Jackson and Jasmine Latham's music, you might think they sound like any high school band. But the three autistic musicians, along with the rest of their classmates, use a special learning technique and perform on their iPads. The innovative new music program comes out of P177Q, a school for special needs students in Queens, New York. Teacher Adam Goldberg integrated iPads into his class as a way of getting around the challenging, technical aspects of traditional instruments and allowing students to focus on creating music. "Right away, these students are learning to work together, they're learning to share, and cooperate, and to be like a team, because that's really what's going on when people play music -- it's team work," he told Fox News. Goldberg's class performed a challenging jazz song for the reporters, followed by free-styling their own compositions. Are you inspired by the musicians of P177Q?
Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education - Eric Hellweg - Our Editors by Eric Hellweg | 12:12 PM January 29, 2013 The advent of massively open online classes (MOOCs) is the single most important technological development of the millennium so far. I say this for two main reasons. While at Davos, I was fortunate to attend an amazing panel — my favorite of the conference — with a murderer’s row of speakers. Why this disruption is happening: Peter Thiel, partner, Founders Fund “In the United States, students don’t get their money’s worth. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is the nature of education as a good?’ Where we are in the evolution of this change: Larry Summers, former President of Harvard “It’s important to remember this really wise quote when thinking about the transition to online education: ‘Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you think they could.’ Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera “We’re at 2.4 million students now. Raphael Reif, president of MIT “We manage this transition very carefully.
Broadcast Education: a Response to Coursera | Open Education Coursera is silly. Educational technology news has been all a-flutter over the last few months about the work that Coursera is doing to bring higher education into the open. But I tell you what: I signed up for one of their classes — a course on Science Fiction and Fantasy from the University of Michigan — only to discover something really startling. Really: startling. For six years, I worked at the Community Colleges of Colorado Online (CCCO), a personnel-challenged, entirely adjunct endeavor that provides online courses to all thirteen community colleges in the state. Granted, I’ve only gotten a glance at what Coursera is doing; nonetheless, they appear to be offering the same brand of content that CCCO offered a decade ago — but without the innovations and interactivity available when I left the school. Something seems to be very wrong. Broadcasting Education But that’s not what Mark Edmundson noticed and wrote about in his New York Times editorial of July 20, 2012.
Palm Sounds Moocs-- quotes