Applied Maths for Ordinary Citizens

Worth a look, as is http://lightsidelabs.com/our-technology/

These are worth reading: 1. "Udacity: Creating A More Engaging MOOC" by David Carr in the 30/7/2013 Information Week. Also http://tinyurl.com/k2shmgv by David Evans, the teacher of the Udacity Introduction to Computer Science, who is now back full time at the University of Virginia - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/

Thoughtful piece by Keith Devlin, who is no naysayer, having put a lot of effort into making and running MOOCs. Key excerpt: "Teaching and learning are complex processes that require considerable expertise to understand well. In particular, education has a significant feature unfamiliar to most legislators and business leaders (as well as some prominent business-leaders-turned-philanthropists), who tend to view it as a process that takes a raw material -- incoming students -- and produces graduates who emerge at the other end with knowledge and skills that society finds of value. (Those outcomes need not be employment skills -- their value is to society, and that can manifest in many different ways.) But the production-line analogy has a major limitation. If a manufacturer finds the raw materials are inferior, she or he looks for other suppliers (or else uses the threat thereof to force the suppliers to up their game). But in education, you have to work with the supply you get -- and still produce a quality output. Indeed, that is the whole point of education."

Keith Devlin provides detailed insights into his increasing focus on "learning by evaluation" in the third run of his "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC, which starts on 2 September.

Longish not very searching piece in Information Week about Udacity's model, with teasing references to adaptive learning and to the way Udacity is turning its attention to adaptive learning.

An (obviously) unusually able Sophia Pink summarises her experience skipping 10th grade to learn online instead. She's gone back to school for 11th grade......

This LA times piece seems to show little other than that the naysayers were too quick to naysay, that the case for "remedial maths" by Udacity-style MOOC is not proven, and that there are a large number of tricky variables at play.

This reads as if it has had the attention of a PR person. Here is the key para concerning maths: "We know that students learn at different speeds. This is particularly the case in the mathematical sciences, where it just takes a while to really understand certain concepts. Rushing students through a timed curriculum with a pre-defined pace cannot be the best way to achieve lasting success. In our remedial math class, we only gave students a single chance to pass various exams. If they even failed the first midterm, they failed the class. On campus, multiple chances are offered. There are clear opportunities to rethink assessment as a whole, especially as we open up new pacing options."

It feels to me there are important lessons from this that should be incorporated in our Marketing and Learner Engagement work. e.g. how much do we leave it open vs target hard-to-reach learners

Runs on Adobe AIR on Mac and Windows (not Linux yet)

Long piece in Information Week by David Carr about Udacity's approach, with more references to adaptive learning, amongst other things.

"I am obliged to say something about calculators and computers. You would protest if I did not. I could refuse because I can prove I am incompetent. I know almost nothing about calculators and computers. It is a lack of knowledge that prevents me from tackling any minor problem of calculators and computers in mathematics education. It does not prevent me from indicating what in my view is a major problem. "Technology influences education. The ballpoint, Xerox, and the overhead projector have fundamentally changed instruction. But this is as it were unintentionally educational technology. Programmed instruction, teaching machines, language laboratories, which were intentional educational technology, founded on big theory, did not fare as well, to say the least of it. "Calculators are being used at school, and they will be used even more in the future. Computer science is taught and will be taught even more. How to do it - these are minor questions. Computer assisted instruction has still a long way to go even in the few cases where it looks feasible. " What I seek is neither calculators and computers as educational technology nor as technological education but as a powerful tool to arouse and increase mathematical understanding."

Worth scan-reading at least.

Definitely worth reading, if only for its excellent diagram.

Of possible interest

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."

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."

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.

"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."

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."