Formative Assessment MOOCs

In the summer of 2012 the team of teachers and researchers associated with the MSc in E-learning programme at the University of Edinburgh began developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for the Coursera platform.

If you're even casually aware of what is happening in higher education, you've likely heard of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They have been covered by NY Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs, newspapers, and a mess or blogs. While MOOCs have been around since at least 2008, the landscape has changed dramatically over the past 10 months.

Well, since Stephen quotes me, and I've fully dived into Lisa Lane's critique (the real juice is in the comments) of the Curtis Bonk/Blackboard/Coursesite's MOOC " Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success , I guess I had better blog my thoughts here on my own space.

The paper aims at conceptual clarification relating context and deep learning design. ► The article first explores the nature of 'deep learning design'. ► Context is proposed as the key unit of organization for deep learning design. ► Learning contexts are articulated in terms of principles, heuristics and scripts. ► The impact of the nested nature of contexts on learning design is explored in depth.

The prevailing assumption by some that deep processing promotes stronger learning outcomes while surface processing promotes weaker learning outcomes has been called into question by the inconsistency and ambiguity of results in investigations of the relation between levels of processing and performance. The purpose of this literature review is to examine four areas that may be contributing to the inconsistency and ambiguity of these research results: conceptualization, operationalization, situational factors, and model specification of deep and surface processing.

Formative assessment functions within online learning. ► Formative assessment by the individual, peers and the teacher. ► Threats to validity and reliability in the context of online formative assessment. ► Ongoing authentic assessment deters threats to validity and reliability. ► Interactive formative feedback addresses threats to validity and reliability. Summary of the 18 key empirical studies included in this review.

From college library

in JOLT

references by Gikandi et al for authentic assessment- does talk about connectivism

in online library

The features of Deep and Surface approaches can be summarised thus: (based on Ramsden, 1988) The Surface learner is trying to suss out what the teacher wants and to provide it, and is likely to be motivated primarily by fear of failure.

short slide show comparing these two terms

based on Cross book

The first report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. You can see a summary of each innovation at the menu on the right. Please contribute with comments on the report and the innovations.

C. Osvaldo Rodriguez [ cor_ar@yahoo.com] Universidad del CEMA, Av. Córdoba 374, (C1054AAP) Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina [ http://www.ucema.edu.ar] Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. From: European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning

Massively open education models have been in the news recently (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18518508). One of the new organisations behind the story is Coursera (see www.coursera.org). On 2 July 2012 we were fortunate to welcome Professor Daphne Koller from Stanford University, a co-founder of Coursera, to the University of London for a talk about "The Online Revolution: Education ......

I've recently started yet another MOOC. This time it's Coursera's Statistics One. It's early days yet (I'm only on lecture two), but there are some interesting contrasts with another statistics MOOC I recently did, Udacity's ST101 Introduction to Statistics. The Coursera offering consists of videos, typically about fifteen to twenty minutes long and totalling around...