Group items tagged

About 15 years ago David Wiley sort of invented Open Content and laid the foundations for Creative Commons. This post is worth reading. Concluding para, but don't ignore the one that precedes it:: "MOOCs provide an extremely rare opportunity to completely rethink pedagogy, from the ground up, for a completely new context and configuration. However, until someone gets serious about this line of thinking and looks for legitimate inspiration outside of classroom-based pedagogies-for-30, it's going to be hard times."

Comprehensive overview by Paul Stacey of MOOC learning methods. (I do not wholly agree with his assessment of the AI/Udacity learning methods.)

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.....)

Article based on an interview with one of the authors of a new study about the importance of teachers' understanding student misconceptions. [The full paper is available here if you have access to the journal http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/06/0002831213477680.full.pdf+html] Excerpt from the paper:"An intriguing finding of this study is that teachers who know their stu- dents' most common misconceptions are more effective than teachers who do not. This particular component of PCK may allow teachers to construct experiences, demonstrations, experiments, or discussions that make students commit to and then test their own ideas. A teacher knowing only the scientific ''truth'' appears to have limited effectiveness. It is better if a teacher also has a model of how students tend to learn a particular concept, particularly if there is a common belief that may make acceptance of the scientific view or model difficult. This finding, too, has practical implications. In PD programs, an emphasis on increasing teachers' SMK without sufficient attention to the preconceived mental models of middle school students (as well as those of the teachers) may be ineffective in ultimately improving their students' physical science knowledge."

Slightly verbose, but authentic blog post by Cathy Davidson about what it is like at the sharp end of MOOC production and teaching. Note her point about 150 hours of production time per hour of MOOC learning time.

Apparently, this is the "first adaptive MOOC", in the area of computational molecular dynamics (CMD). We might have to wait for the second part of the article to understand more about how the adaptivity works.

Yes. I spent a while looking at a talk given by Nish and the kind of adaptivity seemed limited, and not particularly driven by what a learner has been doing.

(This is more to jog my memory of the paper than develop further discussion) Key section of the paper seems to be "Adaptive learning strategy - At the beginning of the course, learners were presented with a diagnostics quiz and were required to answer a few questions about how they learn. This process identified each learner's preferred learning strategy, based upon which each learner then was guided on an adapted learning path throughout the course, by which process designers hoped to accelerate learning and improve score results." I.e. quite different to CogBooks main approach.

"The key is all about the depth of understanding of the subject that they receive - it is not about 'doing maths' but much more about 'thinking mathematically'.