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Lisa Levinson

Coursera.org - 1 views

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    I just signed up for this as it looks really interesting. A Professor at Duke, Cathy N. Davidson has created a MOOC about MOOCs and the future of learning, which also is part of a global initiative to examine this topic. Here's the link to the inside Higher Ed article about it: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/11/04/duke-u-professor-plans-massive-collaborative-effort-tackle-challenges-facing-higher Davidson is the co-founder of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaborative, or HASTAC. The MOOC will track the origins of what has become accepted features of higher education, from majors and graduate programs to grades and multiple choice tests, and evaluate new forms of teaching and learning. At the same time, students in affiliated face-to-face courses in disciplines as different as African and African-American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies will contribute to a centralized wiki. The end result could be a massive collection of ideas on how to change higher education.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

The attack on higher ed - and why we should welcome it | ideas.ted.com - 0 views

  • Yet our original vision continues to shape our research and teaching practices: networking individual learners to foster knowledge creation. It remains my firm belief that the complex challenges that society faces can only be met through a learning architecture that emphasizes knowledge generation over knowledge duplication.
  • As 2013 drew to a conclusion, the 18-month intoxicating hype machine produced the inevitable headache.
  • They discovered, on the backs, or within the wallets, of their VC partners, that knowledge building is a complex integrated system with multiple facets. The linear nature of MOOC solutions to the perceived problems of higher education (better instructional software and greater numbers of learners) failed to account for knowledge building as an integrated social, economic and cultural activity of society
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  • Universities have not kept pace with learner needs and MOOCs have caused a much needed stir — a period of reflection and self-assessment. To date, higher education has largely failed to learn the lessons of participatory culture, distributed and fragmented value systems and networked learning. MOOCs have forced a serious assessment of the idea of a university and how education should be related to and supportive of the society in which it exists.
  • MOOCs will begin to include ideas around personalizing and adapting the learning experience. Several projects, such as CMU’s Open Learning Initiative, suggest the role of adaptive learning in MOOCs. Instead of one course for 100,000 learners, each learner gets her own course, reflective of her knowledge profile. Many of the current shortcomings of MOOCs, such as poor completion rates, stem from companies trying to build scale before tackling personalization.
  • For MOOCs or their successors to survive and thrive, the question of offering recognition that is itself widely recognized becomes a critical indicator of success.
  • The discussion they have generated reflects a university system struggling with its transition to a digital world.
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    essay by George Siemens, 1/31/14, on why MOOCs and the discussion/dialogue they promote are good for higher learning overall.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Sebastian Thrun and Udacity: Distance learning is unsuccessful for most students. - 0 views

  • The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.
  • SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit
  • nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.
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    Slate article by Rebecca Schuman, November 19, on why MOOCs a la Udacity do not work except maybe for people who are already privileged, enjoy fast access to the Internet, have good study habits and time management skills, and time to craft their schedules to fit in MOOCs among other assets/strengths.
Lisa Levinson

The Ed Techie: If education were free, what would MOOCs be? - 0 views

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    Germany has abolished student fees for higher education. In his blog, The Ed Techie, Martin Weller explores what would happen to MOOCs if this were the case everywhere. He is a professor of Educational Technology at Open University in the UK. Is the author of: The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Changing Academic Practice
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    You probably know about this blog, but I just discovered this. Interesting and mostly about MOOCs.
Doris Reeves-Lipscomb

Gates foundation solicits remedial MOOCs | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    MOOCs for remedial education
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