Skip to main content

Home/ Full Sail Education Media Design & Technology/ Group items tagged takes

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Andrew Barras

The Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses « Unlimited Magazine - 0 views

  • In a traditional university setting, a student pays to register for a course. The student shows up. A professor hands out an outline, assigns readings, stands at the front and lectures. Students take notes and ask questions. Then there is a test or an essay.
  • But with advancing online tools innovative educators are examining new ways to break out of this one-to-many model of education, through a concept called massively open online courses. The idea is to use open-source learning tools to make courses transparent and open to all, harnessing the knowledge of anyone who is interested in a topic.
  • George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Course facilitators, Siemens and Downes, gave learners control over how they learned.
  • The concept was enough to lure in D’Arcy Norman
  • He was one of the 2,300 students who signed up for a free account that would allow him to access class documents, receive emails from the facilitators and participate in online class discussions.
  • Norman was one of the more passive participants, while others participated fully, doing all the reading and the assignments, without receiving recognized credit for their work. The instructors only marked papers and the final project from for-credit students, but others were free to post papers on the course website for other students to view and comment on.
  • “At the beginning, we had quite a number of students feeling quite overwhelmed because you would get 200 or 300 posts going into a discussion forum per day and that’s just about impossible to follow,” Siemens says.
  • “You have people in there who were really interested, but they were afraid to explore the technologies that were being used and they got lost,” Lane says.
  • Even if students in massively open online courses master the technology and overcome their virtual stage fright, a third problem remains: how to recognize the value of a learning experience that isn’t for credit.
  • “If you’re in a business and you’re a young professional and you want to take an open class, how do you get your superiors to respect that, and say ‘Wow, that’s really good professional development. We should put that in your personnel file,’” Lane questions. “If it’s open and everyone can drop in and drop out, it’s just not seen in the same way.”
  • Wend Drexler, a professor and grant administrator at the University of Florida who also took Siemen’s class as a for-credit student, says that as more professors are posting their content online, figuring out how to recognize non-credit learning will continue to be an issue.
  • “You could really piece together a good undergraduate education based on what’s available out there, but how do you prove to an employer that you have done that?” Drexler questions. “I don’t know, but it’s something that everyone is trying to work through.”
  •  
    More details on MOOC
Tom Lucas

paper.li - read Twitter as a daily newspaper - 0 views

shared by Tom Lucas on 02 Sep 10 - Cached
  •  
    This website takes a Twitter feed, the twitters you follow, or searched topics and turns it into a newspaper-style digest of the days tweets. An interesting way to view your Twitter-based information.
chris deason

Welcome to the Procial Network | Teambox Blog - 0 views

  •  
    Welcome to the Procial Network karlgoldfield December 3, 2010 I would like to take credit for coining the phrase Procial Network. I would like to but I cannot. Once I thought of it a quick google search took me to http://sweattnbullets.com/, but AJ Sweatt gives credit to the phrase to Holly J at http://yslibrarian.blogspot.com. It will have to suffice to be the third person to have an original thought, hey I can live with that.
chris deason

The Bartleby Project - 1 views

  •  
    ""The Bartleby Project begins by inviting 60,000,000 American students, one by one, to peacefully refuse to take standardized tests or to participate in any preparation for these tests; it asks them to act because adults chained to institutions and corporations are unable to; because these tests pervert education, are disgracefully inaccurate, impose brutal stresses without reason, and actively encourage a class system which is poisoning the future of the nation." Read John Taylor Gatto's full statement on the Bartleby Project (it's long)."
Andrew Barras

The Ed Tech Journey and a Future Driven by Disruptive Change -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • What is “disruptive change”?
  • On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, and on April 3, 2008, less than five years later, it became the largest music retailer in the US, with 50 million customers and 4 billion songs sold. Then about two years down the road, this past February, Apple more than doubled that sales figure to 10 billion songs. This is what I consider to be disruptive change.
  • As educators, we must ask: Could there be a parallel in our own industry, or the potential for other disruptive changes ahead? What might higher education look like in a future filled with disruptive change?
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • a quick historical review of the digital revolution shows us: huge increases in data speeds and transfer rates, exponential growth in computer power, massive increase of storage capacity—again, all while the technology is getting cheaper and smaller.
  • In a 1960s lecture hall you might typically find TV monitors
  • Then if you jump 30 years into the future, to the 1990s, you find that analog technology was replaced by digital technology: projection systems that were considered very, very sophisticated at that time.
  • ask yourself: What did not change? The instructors still lectured, delivering in a broadcast/absorb model the very same way they did in the 1960s. In terms of learning, this was just a little bit of a shift. While the digital revolution disrupted so much of our society and our lives, it impacted education only in small, incremental ways. And generally, that is still true today in 2010.
  • I often make the argument that over the past 50 years, we’ve been primarily focused on automating education
  • but we haven’t really geared up to change or transform the basic way we’re teaching
  • Open Education Trends
  • At the core of the open content movement in higher education are illustrious efforts that have been going on now for almost a decade, to make high-quality university-level course materials free and openly available to the world, via the web.
  • Connexions has focused on building an environment that allows experts to collaborate on developing textbook content.
  • People have raised questions about the sustainability of open content models.
  • But what we’re starting to see now—and it is still relatively early in the unfolding story of open content—is a commercial ecosystem beginning to grow up around existing open content.
  • Impact of Open Content
  • We’re on the verge of seeing the cost of education content fall dramatically. The $150, $200 textbook model, I believe, is simply unsustainable, and we are going to see that model fall apart in the not-too-distant future.
  • I also think we may see an important movement toward best-of-breed content.
  • For example, I might put out a particular piece of educational material. Someone may take that material, modify or tweak it, and bring his own innovation to it. Over a relatively short period of time, we end up with high-quality, innovative, best-of-breed materials.
  • We’re entering an age when it’s becoming more and more ridiculous that our faculty are, every year, re-creating Econ 101 over and over again at our institutions.
  • largest population of users of MIT/OCW materials are not educators, and they’re not students. They are self-directed learners. They’re people who are coming to MIT because they have a passion to learn something.
  • Personal and Open Learning
  • Let’s move on and look at learning technology trends, especially the emergence of the personal learning environment [PLE] and the open learning network [OLN], e-portfolios, and the semantic web.
  • you’re probably aware of the “post-LMS era” that people feel we’re entering.
  • I have yet to find a standard definition of the PLE, but some of its characteristics include that it tends to be a highly customized environment, built by the learner himself.
  • Learners use web 2.0 tools to aggregate content and connections—so you can gather information from many sources, while at the same time making connections with other people around that content.
  • we see that while the LMS has been out there and in development for 10-20 years or so, it has really been built just to support status quo teaching—lecturing and very traditional forms of education—while personal learning environments like mine tend to be much more open and participatory, as well as learner-centric.
  • The question becomes: Will the LMS and the PLE diverge?
  • The idea here is to leverage some of the open standards that are emerging—the IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability standards, plus standards outside of education like the open social API standards from Google—and to use these standards to allow us to mash up the LMS and personal learning environment.
  • Next, electronic portfolios: Since 2003, the use of e-portfolios on our campuses has tripled.
  • Reflection is a critical component of any really good e-portfolio implementation; it’s a great way for students to engage in learning.
  • A missing piece, I would argue, especially on the reflective side of e-porfolios, is a credentialing model. A new credentialing model will open the doors for better uses of e-portfolios, and possibly unlock the floodgates of disruption in fundamental education practices.
  •  
    Great article about disruptive change in education!
Andrew Barras

Derek's Blog » Creativity vs. stress - 0 views

  • an article from Newsweek titled “the Creativity Crisis“. It begins with the assertion that for the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining.
  • The Newsweek article cites a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. And yet it is declining (apparently), both in society as a whole, and in our schools in particular. The authors identify two of the possible reasons for the decline…
  • the impact of television and the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the lack of creativity development in our schools, there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
  • n her writing about The Neuroscience of Joyful Education, Judy Willis highlights the importance of novelty in our teaching, stress-free classrooms, and pleasurable associations linked with learning as essential pre-cursors to joyful learning and the development of creativity. She goes on to suggest that when planning for the ideal emotional atmosphere we should be mindful of the following;
  • Allow independent discovery learning – students are more likely to remember and understand what they learn if they find it compelling or have a part in figuring it out for themselves.
  • Give them a break – students can reduce stress by enjoying hobbies, time with friends, exercise, or music.
  • Create positive associations – by avoiding stressful practices like calling on students who have not raised their hands, teachers can dampen the stress association.
  • Prioritize information – helping students learn how to prioritize and therefore reduce the amount of information they need to deal with is a valuable stress-buster.
  • Make it relevant – when stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students.
  • Others, including Richard Millwood who has written about ‘delight’ in learning, emphasise similar conditions for learning – minimising stress and allowing for more risk-taking, learning from mistakes, discovery and so forth.
  •  
    Nice article about classroom environments
Andrew Barras

News: The Thinking LMS - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • What can colleges learn from Facebook?
  • Where Facebook has shown unique value is as a data-gathering tool. Never has a website been able to learn so much about its users. And that is where higher education should be taking notes, said Angie McQuaig, director of data innovation at the University of Phoenix, at the 2010 Educause conference on Friday.
  • If Facebook can use analytics to revolutionize advertising in the Web era, McQuaig suggested, colleges can use the same principles to revolutionize online learning.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The trick, she said, is individualization.
  • The most successful commercial websites are already moving in this direction, and higher education — which itself is growing increasingly Web-based — needs to catch up, McQuaig said. “What we really need to do now is deeply understand our learners,” she said.
  • This is where the University of Phoenix is headed with its online learning platform. In an effort ambitiously dubbed the "Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning interface that gets to know each of its 400,000 students personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”
  • “[Each student] comes to us with a set of learning modality preferences,” McQuaig said. The online learning platform Phoenix wants to build, she said, “reject[s] the one-size-fits-all model of presenting content online.” In the age of online education and the personal Web, the standardized curriculum is marked for extinction, McQuaig said; data analytics are going to kill it.
  • Phoenix is certainly not the only institution focusing on how data logged by learning management systems can be used to improve learning.
  • envoys from the South Orange Community College District had unveiled a project called Sherpa, which uses information about students to recommend courses and services. McQuaig said Phoenix has been in conversations with a number of universities that are working toward similar learner-centered online platforms.
  • In any case, she said, it will be expensive to make.
  • But that is where online education, and the Internet as a whole, is headed, McQuaig said.
  •  
    Very cool article. Shows how personalization will arise in Higher Ed
chris deason

Udemy - Academy of You | Find and Create Online Courses - Teach and Learn Online - 0 views

  •  
    Build your own Online Courses
  •  
    "Take and build online courses on any subject "
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20 items per page