Group items tagged

"Because students come to the course for many different reasons, course designers should make it easier for learners to meet a variety of objectives. Since many participants in online courses may just want to learn a few new things, we can help them by releasing all course content at the outset of the course and enabling them to search for specific topics of interest. as course designers, we should be paying more attention to creating effective, relevant activities than focusing so heavily on course content. We hypothesize that learners also use activities' instant feedback to help them determine whether they should spend time reviewing the associated content  We also believe that we haven't given enough weight to teaching learners how to evaluate their own work. We plan to keep experimenting with self-evaluation in future courses."

"Because students come to the course for many different reasons, course designers should make it easier for learners to meet a variety of objectives. Since many participants in online courses may just want to learn a few new things, we can help them by releasing all course content at the outset of the course and enabling them to search for specific topics of interest. as course designers, we should be paying more attention to creating effective, relevant activities than focusing so heavily on course content. We hypothesize that learners also use activities' instant feedback to help them determine whether they should spend time reviewing the associated content  We also believe that we haven't given enough weight to teaching learners how to evaluate their own work. We plan to keep experimenting with self-evaluation in future courses."

"This course is for teachers of math (K-12) or for other helpers of students, such as parents. After the summer I will release a student version of this course. This course provides an opportunity for teachers and parents to preview the ideas for students and think about how they may be useful, as well as learn from new research ideas and share ideas with other teachers and parents who enroll in the course. The course will also include interviews with some of the world's leading thinkers, such as Sebastian Thrun (Udacity/Google) and Carol Dweck (expert on mindset)."

"In the future, we will provide support for users of the most recent version of Course Builder to import their courses into the Open edX or MOOC.org format. If you aren't running the latest version of Course Builder, we advise that you upgrade in order to align with Google App Engine updates."

Excerpt from concluding section: "Finally, the math picture presents an important cautionary note to math teachers: if I feel stupid, I am highly unlikely to like your course (and math is the least-liked course in the survey). This pattern in math as to why the subject is least favorite is double the overall pattern for all courses. Math is the only subject, therefore, in which feeling stupid is the number one reason to dislike the subject."

Here is a recently published table of courses (some Google's, most from others) using Google Course Builder. Includes the previously reported Scratch-based "Creative Computing".

The Community College Research Center is based at Columbia University. It describes itself as the US's "leading independent authority on the nation's nearly 1200 two-year colleges". Since 2009 CCRC has been doing (amongst other things) a range of interesting and important qualitative and quantitative research about online courses in community colleges (which sit somewhere between FE and HE in a UK context, overlapping with both), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and led by Shanna Smith Jaggars. This page has links to abstracts and presentations, which highlight general and specific disparities in outcomes between face-to-face and online provision, and which point to action that can be taken to deal with these problems. (Instructor presence seems to be key.....)

This publication was developed by Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić and Sir John Daniel who are Senior Advisors to Academic Partnerships as well as Neil Butcher and Merridy Wilson-Strydom. It has a traditional feel, and is HE oriented. But the underlying principles are clear and useful. The 28-page, 2.7MB document is available from http://www.academicpartnerships.com/docs/default-document-library/newbooklet15_singleb.pdf?sfvrsn=2 It covers the following topics: - What is online learning? - How is online learning offered? - What constitutes quality in online learning? - How can institutions assure quality? - What institutional structures and staffing resources do you need for ensuring quality in online learning? - What resources should you allocate to developing quality online learning? - How can students judge the quality of online courses? - How can instructional design, learning materials, and course presentation contribute to quality online learning? - How can the structure of the virtual environment facilitate quality online learning? - What do web design and web usability factors contribute to quality? - How can you use media (video, graphics, audio, animation and simulation) to enhance quality in online learning? - What online assessment and assignment methodologies promote quality learning? - How do you ensure examination security? - What strategies can you deploy for interaction and student community building? - How can teaching and facilitation contribute to ensuring quality? - What support should students receive? - Annotated Reading List: Benchmarks for Quality Online Learning

80 hour OER course from the OU. Pitched at a different audience to Citizens' Maths, but may have some points we can learn from.

[48 p PDF], and worth looking at thoroughtly. Excerpt: "The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students."

This free, hour-long webinar, "The Legal Side of MOOCs," will discuss important legal considerations that come into play with MOOCs. How does copyright apply to the delivery of course materials in the MOOC context? What about laws governing accessibility for persons with disabilities? Are there important privacy issues to address? In this webinar, Madelyn Wessel, associate general counsel for the University of Virginia, will discuss the legal landscape pertaining to MOOCS, including course production, data creation, copyright, privacy, and conduct issues.

Seb, are you going to this? It's slap bang in middle of bath time, so difficult for me.

Based on 2010-2011 data, this BIS study (which I've not read) shows that it is not uncommon for adults who have already got, say, Maths GCSE (or equivalent) at Grade C or above to enrol on a numeracy course at a lower level. This probably strengthens our hunch that there are more people "out there" who might gain from CM than would be assumed from the proportion of adults who have already got a Level 2 Maths qualification.

Argument that MOOCs can be used as part of a 'flipped' and/or blended approach for students in (what they call in the US) community colleges. This quote suggests Bill has lecture-based MOOCs in mind "Of course it's quite controversial, what software can take over, but once you get a great pool of lectures out there that incorporate problem solving and drill practice, this frees up time" for more-personalized instruction in the classroom, Mr. Gates said. With more work done at home and online, students could spend less time on campuses, freeing up classroom space to accommodate more students, he said. That approach works well, he added, with remedial mathematics, where only about 10 percent of students who start courses end up getting two-year degrees within three years."

Staged interview with one of the designers of Saylor's Real World Math courses

For market comparison. Like all Saylor courses, this one largely curates OERs from other sources, including Khan Academy

This is a long shot, but might the IMF want to encourage some of its learners with limited maths competence/confiden to do our course first?

Just saving this to log the commitment "In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder"

"New niche certifications being offered by providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are aimed at satisfying employers' specific needs. Available at a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree, they represent the latest crack in the monopoly traditional universities have in credentialing higher education."

Short paper on characteristics and motivations of learners on Coursera courses. May have some relevance to our learner engagement, though note the comments about possibility that these results may not be generalisable

A constructive review by Donald Clark (Ufi Trustee) of one particular Coursera MOOC (with references to one of Edinburgh University's), with a focus on how the interaction design of the course could have been improved.

A new @coursera #MOOC. Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? Proposed in Open Letter from Bob Meister (President of University of California Faculty Associations) to Daphne Koller (Coursera Co-founder). It concludes: "Would you be willing to co-teach this course with me? I'm sure that together we could reach a very large audience indeed."