Applied Maths for Ordinary Citizens

An interesting (?) commentary, by implication, on the long division / quadratic equation formula debate. Argues that the reason why learning effortlessly to use "mechanical alogorithms" matters is that this (can) give learners a clear understanding of an alogorithmic approach to solving mathematical problems. Not my field enough to know whether the arguments are well founded, however.

A "how to" about embedding Khan Academy exercises in Google Coursebuilder. Over my head, but worth being aware of this kind of capability becoming available.

Would there be scope to use Mozilla Open Badges as a core element of the Applied Maths Course? If there is, should we be investigating the practicalities?

With apologies for pointing to my own stuff, here is my second report from Keith Devlin's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC. The first report is here: http://tinyurl.com/bqe9jck.

I'm not a fan of lists of most important things, but I like the work of Will Thalheimer and have kept vaguely in contact with him over the years. I think this list is worth having in mind when designing (online) courses

Despite her annoying vocie I found myself laughing out loud at these short videos, which came my way via Aaron Sloman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sloman, who was an interview subject for the Scaling Up report.

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.

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

MOOCs and Open Education. Useful, if HE-focused, 21p report [PDF] by Stephen Powell and Li Yuan from Jisc Cetis. Worth most project people at least scan reading, for orientation purposes.

This caught my eye. I think it is probably run in Google CourseBuilder.

Interesting article, with nice density maps by Koller, Ng and others, about Coursera participation.

Mick Fletcher (whom Seb knows) provides an overview of the double challenge faced by English FE from August 2013 when all those without GCSE Maths or English at Grade C must continue to study hose subjects, and even those with such an achievement should be expected to go further. "The logistical challenge, including the requirement to find hundreds of extra specialist teachers, is immense."

This article gets in a great deal deeper than a lot of other recent coverage. As always, the focus is on HE.

Comprehensive filleting by Donald Clark Edinburgh University's excellent self-review of its first 6 MOOCs. DC's review and the Edinburgh report are each worth reading.

Getting on for 15 years ago I put David Wiley's precursor to Creative Commons "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course that I played a role in, having read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist. Wiley is still active in this field and this post has a very incisive observation in it about personalisation. I do not know whether I agree with it fully (adaptive learning and algorithms may/should have a role too): "There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."

Needs keeping an eye on, as much as anything else in view of Coursebuilder/EdX collaboration points made by Peter Norvig during telco in April.

"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)."

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.....)

You can sign up here for a Udacity 10 minute "mini-MOOC", which from the fact of its target audience, is likely to have been very carefully implemented by Udacity. The promotional video gives some pointers to why Udacity withdrew (their focus is increasinly firmly on "higher" stuff). The min-MOOC should be seen in the context of Udacity wanting to attract Google-focused programmers onto its just launched $7000 Computer Science Masters, done in partnership with Georgia Tech.

Not the clearest learning experience I have known.

I particularly resent the "happy-clappy" over-enthusiastic tone of the feedback