Applied Maths for Ordinary Citizens

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."

"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."

Interesting commentary which I'm sure can be debated...

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"

Credible and very well written piece by maths teacher Ben Orlin.

Mike Schatz from Georgia Tech spoke at the Trieste MOOC workshop I and Donald Clark also contributed to. Mike's running introductory Physics MOOCs on Coursera, with Gates Foundation support. He spoke very highly of Piazza as a forum platform. This PDF describes its features.

Interesting 1/10/2013 post from Keith Devlin about the production of technology based maths education.

Short article hinting at the broader gameplan behind/beyond Open edX

I was reminded of this today. Worth having it in mind. Just about.

Six page PDF from the Open University of Catalonia with some sensible perspectives on two broad classes of MOOC and on issues relating to their design.

Up to date monograph from highly regarded US researchers focusing on the learning effectiveness of several fairly widespread and standard learning techniques. The person who sent it to me said: "Nor is the evidence against some common 'instructionist' practices such as formative MCQ quizzes - in fact the effect size for those and for distributed practice is consistently higher than for more creative teaching and learning practices".

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".

Karen MacGregor has written a useful internationally focused summary drawing on parts of the recently published BIS "Maturing of the MOOC".

50 minute presentation on use of Scratch to teach some maths concepts 10-year-old and 16-year-old kids. Interestingly even the 16-year-olds thought the cat made it look like "kids stuff". There's a recording of the full presentation at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/recording/playback/link/table/dropin?sid=2008350&suid=D.9FA226957D30A14AB25F33DEBBF5D3 (note worth using the Blackboard recording rather than the video, even though it's more of a faff, as the former includes a shot of the speaker where he demonstrates things physically, whereas the latter just shows the presentation)

According to Duolingo, which is the brainchild of the inventor of reCaptcha Luis von Ahn "Since its launch 15 months ago, Duolingo has reached 10 million students and become the most popular way to learn languages online. No ad campaign, no gimmicks; just your support and a mission of free language education for the world." See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

Georgia Tech Computer Science teacher Mark Guzdial is a thoughtful (and in this instance somewhat geeful) opponent of MOOCs. His comment on an introductory physics MOOC that Georgia Tech ran with Gates Foundation funding are interesting. The completion rate was exceptionally low (less than 1%). The completers: "fell into three categories: those who came in with a lot of physics knowledge and who ended with relatively little gain, those who came in with very little knowledge and made almost no progress, and a group of students who really did learn a lot". According to Guzdial, they don't know why nor the relative percentages yet.

This looks (at least superficially) to be a company with an interesting, apparently platform-free approach to adaptive learning. Not that a web site is usually a good way to make judgements, on such matters other than instinctively.

108 page US-oriented report by SRI International funded by the Gates Foundation. Describes the different design approaches taken by six providers, with a profile for each provider. Has some interesting concluding comments about instructional approaches, media design, and approaches to assessment/feedback, with a strong push for better (rather than non) use of analytics and adaptive learning approaches.

[123 p PDF] - This is the BIS literature review of MOOCs and other forms of online distance learning. Published today.

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.