Warming Up to MOOC's
[This is a guest post by Douglas H. Fisher, an associate professor of computer science and of computer engineering at Vanderbilt University.--@jbj] In Fall 2011, Stanford announced three, free massively open online courses, or MOOCs. Nonetheless, I decided that not using these high quality materials because of insecurity was silly. In both classes, students took a quiz at the start of each class on the online lecture material and readings. The experience in the machine learning class, in particular, suggested the utility of what I call a “wrapper” around a MOOC. More in line with my previous experience with the database course, I am teaching a course in artificial intelligence in fall 2012, using lectures from a variety of sources (enabled by the greater content on the Web since the onset of high-profile MOOCs) to flip my classes. Photo “Lecture Hall” by Flickr user VCU Libraries / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0 Return to Top
Two Weeks With Udacity - Casting Out Nines
One of my professional plans for this semester was to take two of Stanford University’s massively-open online courses (“MOOC” for short), one on Introduction to Computer Science and the other on Cryptography. I had planned on taking these, that is, until the courses started suffering repeated delays. The last email I received from Stanford cited “legal and administrative issues” that have pushed the Cryptography course — which was originally slated to start in January — back into March, and the CS course that was originally scheduled for late February has also failed to materialize. I think I’ll be writing a separate blog post regarding what I think about these delays and what it might mean for Stanford. Let’s just say it doesn’t make Stanford look good. In the meantime, I decided I was ready to learn and didn’t want to wait around anymore, so I signed up for the CS101 class offered by Udacity. The CS101 class focuses on Python and consists of seven one-week units.
Online Courses Look for a Business Model
MOOC Production Values: Costs, Approaches and Examples
At every MOOC-related event I attend, I meet people who say they want to teach online classes. Most are affiliated with a university or school, and often some plans seem imminent, but I rarely hear about new courses sprouting up outside of the most high-profile MOOC platforms. For all the interest in MOOCs, there is precious little guidance for teachers on how to produce them. Beware: MOOC production is a LOT of work Briefly stated, producing a MOOC forces even top-notch professors to “up their game.” The challenge of preparing for a MOOC has been described as like writing a textbook in a matter of months. How to teach this stuff? With the reputation of the professor and their organization at stake, it’s impressive to observe the variety of approaches taken in the first MOOCs. There are other important elements to a MOOC experience. Three examples Here’s a production perspective on the work of three pioneering MOOC teachers. Education’s media evolution has been in the works for decades.
MOOCagogy: Assessment, Networked Learning, and the Meta-MOOC | Online Learning
“Building community doesn’t mean that learning happens.” ~ from an audience comment at InstructureCon 2013 Learning in a MOOC Instruction does not equate to learning. This is the fundamental fly in the ointment of instructional design, and the epistemological failing of learning management systems and most MOOC platforms. Learning, unfortunately, is something no instruction has ever quite put its finger on, and something that no methodology or approach can guarantee. This, though, is like putting a lion in a cage and training it to jump through burning hoops: the lion tamer may master the beast in captivity, but this will not make him master of the African savannah. In the interests of exploring what MOOCs are and can be, Hybrid Pedagogy ran an experimental, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, mini- micro- meta-MOOC about MOOCs endearingly titled “MOOC MOOC”. Community as Learning Learning is by its very nature meta-cognitive. We don’t need courses to scaffold content. [Photo by @Jessifer]
MOOCs and the Gartner Hype Cycle: A very slow tsunami
By Jonathan Tapson On September 13, 2013 A lot can change in a year. Twelve months ago, the traditional universities were doomed, condemned to irrelevance by an onslaught of MOOCs. Not every last one of them was going to die; Sebastian Thrun said that perhaps ten might survive. This was not very reassuring for the executives, staff, students, and alumni of the 20,000 universities which don’t fall into the top-10, when ranked according to the criterion: “Universities which will survive MOOCs.” We haven’t yet seen this category in the Times Higher Ed rankings, but we are sure its appearance is imminent. One year later, it seems that, like Mark Twain’s, reports of these deaths are greatly exaggerated. Experienced observers of technology will recognize this as a familiar stage in a cycle. The Hype Cycle is pretty straightforward. Fig. 1: The Gartner Hype Cycle Some questions we need to ask in terms of MOOCs are: Are MOOCs going to go through the full Hype Cycle? But does it matter?
