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Ed Webb

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Oct 09 - Cached
  • A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Buggeration - the credentialist barrier.
  • the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?
  • The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."
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  • David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man
  • ventures around the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's fund raising à la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.
  • "Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core undergraduate courses,"
  • the unbundling of higher education.
  • MIT, where students pay about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
  • "Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."
  • Peer 2 Peer University
  • University of the People
  • Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education.
  • much open courseware is "lousy,"
  • "There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities,"
  • "It doesn't shift what's happening in some of the very stable traditional institutions of higher education. But there are huge numbers of others who aren't being served. And it's with those that I think we'll begin to see new forms."
  • The model boils down to six words: Do you like this? Enroll now!
  • a Korean university where students competed to produce open lecture notes. The prize was an iPod and lunch with the university president.
  • Carnegie Mellon is trying a different model. When its courses are good enough, with other colleges assigning them as e-textbooks, it asks students to pay a fee as low as $15, says Joel M. Smith, vice provost. "That would be a very, very, very cheap textbook," he says. "If it were used by a large number of colleges and universities, it could sustain the project."
  • the free courses taught him one thing, something important when you've been out of school so long: He can do it. He can follow a Yale class. He has nothing to fear.
Lisa M Lane

More Interaction In Online Courses Isn't Always Better - Michael Horn - Disrupting Clas... - 0 views

  • course home page
  • gradebook and email
    • Lisa M Lane
       
      Looks like they did this by examining time in different areas of a CMS. That seems invalid. I can walk away from the computer with any window open.
  • authors’ sample consisted of community college courses, so perhaps they do not need higher levels of interaction because the content may not need interpretation or further analysis
    • Lisa M Lane
       
      well, my community college classes require a great deal of interpretation and analysis
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  • we should not measure the quality of a program based on inputs like seat time
  •  
    suggested that maybe higher-level courses (at the MBA level, for example) require more interaction; introductory courses need little interaction. The authors' sample consisted of community college courses, so perhaps they do not need higher levels of interaction because the content may not need interpretation or further analysis.
  •  
    good research, is it?
Ed Webb

The Promise and Peril of Ed-Tech Democratization - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 1 views

  • the Indians I heard in London accepted the following premise: university education, at least in part, involves seasoned, well-educated people determining what less seasoned, less well-educated people should know, then proceeding to teach them. By contrast, at the Palo Alto gathering there was much more talk of “hacking college.” This worldview, though certainly not universal, reflects a certain disdain for hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. Instead, it embraces a radically individualistic approach to higher ed, one based on the idea that it’s always a great thing when students create their own education, piecing together courses and educational materials, free from the confines of convention.
  • Lots of students who want a college education, whether at the elite or mass-access end of the spectrum, either want to study a curriculum that has been proven, need support because they don’t have the tools to educate themselves, or both.
  • The edupunk aesthetic certainly has some appeal – why not blow up some traditional assumptions about the structure of education? And it is so varied that it wouldn’t be fair to say its proponents are all blind to questions of giving students the guidance they need to succeed. But its anarchistic edge risks leaving students to their own devices so much that oversight and quality control goes out the window
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  • There’s no reason we can’t use disruptive tools to teach an established body of knowledge, in a particular course sequence, to more people, more effectively.
Lisa M Lane

Interaction in Online Courses: More is NOT Always Better - 0 views

  • data from a course management system that captured time spent in specific interaction activities
    • Lisa M Lane
       
      Not a great idea -- I can walk away from the computer with any page open. I can spend an hour in a Moodle discussion forum looking at pictures of the girls in the class.
  • We found that learner-learner interaction was significantly, but negatively, associated with course completion rates. Learner-faculty interaction and enrollment size were not significantly related to course completion.
  • Second, Rungtusanatham and colleagues (2004) proposed that higher level courses (e.g. MBA level) require more interaction levels; introductory courses need little interaction. Our sample consisted of community college courses. Do they require higher levels of interaction when the content may not need interpretation or further analysis? Arbaugh and Rau (2007) posited that even graduate course faculty should not necessarily push high levels of learner-learner interaction.
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  • neither student nor faculty time spent in threaded discussions made significant contributions to their respective constructs
  • a majority of classes in this study had between 14 and 30 students
  • Efforts to include extensive faculty feedback and interaction in online courses (Bocchi, Eastman, & Swift, 2004) may actually be counterproductive.
Ed Webb

The Future of WPMu at bavatuesdays - 0 views

  • I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.
  • what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.
  • we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.
Ed Webb

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Edupunks and Credit Hours: Fumbling Towards a ... - 0 views

  • Awarding some sort of recognition for task completion or demonstrated competence independent of the time it took to achieve that offers one potential way to break the upward spiral. If you manage to blast through calculus in eight weeks instead of fifteen, more power to you.That said, though, I could easily envision the abandonment of the credit hour as relatively beneficial to those already on top -- in four years at my SLAC, I never heard the phrase 'credit hour' -- and devastating to the rest.
  • To the extent that we move from "here's what you need to do" to "what do you want?," we both enable high achievers to cut loose -- a clear good -- and allow the less savvy to wander aimlessly, which is a real problem.
  • The "edupunk," as near as I can tell, is the nifty-sounding update of the autodidact. And as with the autodidact, the edupunk is susceptible to some predictable shortfalls: uncorrected blind spots, lack of broader perspective, too-early path dependence.
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  • The mode of production of education has to change, and now, can. We'll need to come to grips with that in some sort of serious way, or others will, edupunks or not.
Ed Webb

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Fast Company - 0 views

  •  
    I'm pretty sure this is not about Edupunk. It's about entrepreneurship in the relatively limited sense of making money. Heh.
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