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Ted O'Neill

Helping Faculty Members Use Technology Is Top Concern in Computing Survey - Technology ... - 0 views

    • Ted O'Neill
       
      University professional staff don't see money coming in.
  • Those surveyed were none too keen, however, on massive open online courses­—and they were particularly wary of the idea that MOOCs would prove to be good sources of revenue for their colleges. While a little more than half of those surveyed agreed that MOOCs were an effective model for online education, only 29 percent said they were a reliable way to gain new revenue.
Ted O'Neill

Citing disappointing student outcomes, San Jose State pauses work with Udacity | Inside... - 0 views

  • After six months of high-profile experimentation, San Jose State University plans to “pause” its work with Udacity, a company that promises to deliver low-cost, high-quality online education to the masses.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      "Promises" but has now demonstrably failed to deliver.
  • San Jose State Provost Ellen Junn said disappointing student performance will prompt the university to stop offering online classes with Udacity this fall as part of a "short breather." Junn wants to spend the fall going over the results and talking with faculty members about the university’s online experimentation, which extends beyond the Udacity partnership and has proved somewhat controversial. She said the plan is to start working with Udacity again in spring 2014.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Let's see how that reboot works. I doubt it comes back at the IIRC 150USD per pupil mark.
  • Preliminary findings from the spring semester suggest students in the online Udacity courses, which were developed jointly with San Jose State faculty, do not fare as well as students who attended normal classes -- though Junn cautioned against reading too much into the comparison, given the significant differences in the student populations.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Right. Bad planning in selection of student groups for this program. MOOCs require autonomous, skilled learners.
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  • A copy of that internal presentation, which Junn repeatedly emphasized was preliminary, was obtained this week by Inside Higher Ed from the California Faculty Association. According to the preliminary presentation, 74 percent or more of the students in traditional classes passed, while no more than 51 percent of Udacity students passed any of the three courses.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Pretty stark difference.
  • The courses were also put together in a rush. That’s apparently because of the timing of the deal with Udacity. The pilot project was announced a fortnight before classes started. (Like other similar deals, it was also the result of a no-bid contract.) The deal came together at the highest levels: On June 16, 2012, Brown e-mailed and called Thrun to talk about how Udacity could help California's higher education systems. “We need your help,” Brown said, according to Thrun. But, because of the haste, faculty were building the courses on the fly. Not only was this a “recipe for insanity,” Junn said, but faculty did not have a lot of time to watch how students were doing in the courses because the faculty were busy trying to finish them. It took about 400 hours to build a course, though the courses are designed to be reused.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Incredibly bad pedagogy. That's what one gets when you allow the edtech bubble to drive educational decisions and take teaching out of the hands of faculty.
  • Another factor in the disappointing outcomes may have been the students themselves. The courses included at-risk students, high school students and San Jose State students who had already failed a remedial math course.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Duh.
  • Student performance data from the San Jose State/Udacity courses are expected to be released in coming weeks.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      That original report leaked to IHED must be pretty damning if it will take weeks to edit it for release
Ted O'Neill

Case Western Reserve University's free online courses exceeded expectations | cleveland... - 0 views

  • For instance, they may offer more breaks during classroom lectures, because they discovered through the online courses that a student's attention span is about 15 minutes.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Waste fo time getting them in and out. This is basic pedagogy. Shift tasks within the class time. Don't just drone on.
  • Richard Boyatzis of CWRU'S Weatherhead School of Management is incorporating aspects from his online “Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence” into his classroom courses. He said that in the future the time it takes for a graduate student to get a degree could be reduced, saving thousands in tuition, by combining the best of online learning with classroom teaching.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Then he doesn't understand the needs of the business school. Less tuition means less funding for him. Pool of available fee-paying students is not growing that quickly is it?
  • More than 58,000 logged on once or more to participate, he said.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Is this how Coursera measures participation "once"?
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  • Boyatzis asked graduate students who enrolled this fall in his courses to sign up for the online class and watch the videos and do the exercises to get acclimated. And he has placed the MOOC material, without exams, on a CWRU internal Blackboard site.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      There is no such thing as "MOOC material"
Ted O'Neill

elearnspace › Neoliberalism and MOOCs: Amplifying nonsense - 0 views

  • If 2012 was the year of the MOOC, 2013 will be the year of the anti-MOOC.
  • There are many reasons to not like MOOCs (including the elite university models, poor pedagogy, blindness to decades of learning sciences research, and its entire identity: just a very bad name). The faculty response to MOOCs is particularly important. Almost every major MOOC initiative over the past 18 months has developed without the inclusion of the faculty voice.
  • The reason MOOCs are being classified as neoliberalist is because entrepreneurs see the changing landscape and have responded before many universities. Universities, in contrast, are actively trying to preserve their legacy models so as to stay relevant, or at minimum, stay in control. Something is not neoliberalist just because neoliberalists are the first to take advantage of the gaps created by the traditional and emerging shadow education systems. Don’t blame the ill motives of others for what was caused by inactivity on the part of the professoriate and higher education in general.
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  • See also: Kathleen Fitzpatrick on “Neoliberal” http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/blog/neoliberal/ — a good reminder that “to say, for instance, that the university-in-general is a neoliberal institution is to say precisely nothing.”
  • I love the notion of a “shadow education system”
Ted O'Neill

New Test for Computers - Grading Essays at College Level - NYTimes.com - 1 views

    • Ted O'Neill
       
      What is Shermis basis for stating that prestigious unis have better pedagogy?
  • Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX,
  • take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers
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  • “There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.”
  • Les Perelman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software compares well to human graders. “My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to human graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a current researcher at M.I.T.
  • Two start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, recently founded by Stanford faculty members to create “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, are also committed to automated assessment systems because of the value of instant feedback. “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.
  • Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings. With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most schools. “Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”
Ted O'Neill

AAUP Sees MOOCs as Spawning New Threats to Professors' Intellectual Property - Faculty ... - 0 views

  • "There is no need for the university to own the online course you create," Mr. Nelson said, because a contract giving a college the right to use the course should suffice. In claiming ownership of a course, Mr. Nelson said, a higher-education institution asserts the right to update or revise the course as it sees fit, threatening the academic freedom of the course's creator.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Watch out for best selection of CC license here. No derivs recommended.
  • "Being a professor will no longer be a professional career or a professional identity," and faculty members will instead essentially find themselves working in "a service industry,"
  • It also plans to publish a book, with boilerplate language for contracts and faculty handbooks, titled Recommended Principles to Guide University-Industry Relationships
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  • In explaining his concern, Mr. Nelson said colleges previously often sought to assert control over patents but generally left faculty members' ownership of their courses and other writings alone. With the emergence of MOOCs, however, colleges have begun asserting ownership of the courses their faculty members develop, raising the question of what is keeping such institutions from claiming ownership of other scholarly products covered by copyright, such as books.
Ted O'Neill

What do Librarians Need to Know About MOOCs? - 0 views

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    Typical example of an article with a scholarly tone/approach but total lack of research. No recognition of anything before or other than xMOOCs
Ted O'Neill

Why Some Colleges Are Saying No to MOOCs, at Least for Now - Technology - The Chronicle... - 0 views

  • Offering MOOCs through edX is hardly free. There are options available to institutions that want to build their own courses on the edX platform at no charge, but for partners who want help developing their courses, edX charges a base rate of $250,000 per course, then $50,000 for each additional time that course is offered; edX also takes a cut of any revenue the course generates.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      I wonder how many, if any, of the edX moocs have generated enough income to cover the setup fees? Seriously doubt it.
  • In the debate at Amherst, which boasts a $1.64-billion endowment, money was no object, and the faculty committee devoted to weighing the pros and cons of joining edX did not seem worried about MOOCs as a distraction to teaching and service.
  • On a larger scale, MOOCs might create a "new and different kind of competition" that could jeopardize more-vulnerable colleges, if not Amherst itself; they could "enable the centralization of American higher education" and "create the conditions for the obsolescence of the B.A. degree."
Ted O'Neill

http://agb.org/sites/agb.org/files/report_2013_MOOCs.pdf - 0 views

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    This paper is based upon a presentation given to the board of directors of the Association of Governing Boards  of Universities and Colleges. Mr. Voss is the vice president and CIO at the University of Maryland's flagship campus  in College Park and also a member of the EDUCAUSE board of directors, serving as vice chair for 2013. AGB White Paper
Ted O'Neill

Why Isn't the Digital Humanities Community Building Great MOOCs? :: Agile Learning - 0 views

  • Here’s what Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor and chair of media studies at the University of Virginia, said about this concern last summer: “For the more pedestrian MOOCs, the simple podium lecture captured and released, the difference between a real college course and a MOOC is like the difference between playing golf and watching golf. Both can be exciting and enjoyable. Both can be boring and frustrating. But they are not the same thing.”
  • Mills Kelly, whose new book Teaching History in the Digital Age looks fantastic, is such a skeptic, writing the following in a thoughtful blog post last summer about teaching online: “We should be thinking carefully about how teaching and learning in the digital realm is different. Then, and only then, should we start creating new approaches to teaching and learning. BlackBoard and its ilk won’t help us. MOOCs won’t help us either.”
  • Vanderbilt’s first two MOOCs came online last month, each with about 20,000 active student participants, it’s become clear to me that MOOCs have great potential for expanding the educational missions of colleges and universities. These students aren’t paying tuition and they aren’t earning credit, but they are interested in learning
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  • Back in 2011 the New York Public Library (NYPL) launched What’s on the Menu?, in which members of the public were invited to transcribe the thousands of restaurant menus in the NYPL’s digital collection.
  • The NYPL decided to crowdsource the menu transcription, allowing anyone with a Web browser to view and transcribe menus. As of this writing, all 16,812 of the available menus have been transcribed!
  • Imagine a MOOC built on such a crowdsourced transcription project, with tens of thousands of people around the world not only contributing transcriptions, but also moving together through a course in which they learn about the history of food and culture.
  • See http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/ The original MOOCs were very much a digital humanities triumph. Institutions have since co-opted the name but not the actual practices. It is important to distinguish between the connectivist MOOC or cMOOC and the institutional brand xMOOC. Probably the easiest illustration of the difference is that in an xMOOC you watch a video, in a cMOOC you create a video.
  • I think we need to begin with the understanding that MOOCs (DH-focused or otherwise) are not replacements for existing f2f and online courses.
  • My goal with my upcoming MOOC, “Human Evolution: Past and Future”, is to build in exactly the kind of collaborative, participatory research you suggest. In our case, we will have students collect some measurement data, and probably some data on the foods they eat for a given day. In a class of 200, no big deal — in a global class of maybe 10,000 respondents, that’s big data in anthropology.
  • Also, using MOOCs as outreach to K12 teachers makes a ton of sense, whether it’s just the teachers participating in the MOOC or both teachers and students. Being proactive about this–not just hoping some teachers somewhere use your MOOC–is very smart.
Ted O'Neill

[Expletive Deleted] Ed-Tech #Edinnovation - 0 views

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    Audrey Watters gets her rant on really well against the media amnesia, ahistorical approach to education, the real moocs and the corporate moocs.
Ted O'Neill

Coursera To Deliver Classes For K 12 Teachers | EdSurge News - 0 views

  • PD courses will likely be shorter, lasting only three to four weeks.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Is this a joke? I t typically takes a week or two for people just to begin to find their way around. 3 week MOOC is not a course:it's a trailer for a course. This is advertising, not significant education.
  • Beginning this summer, Coursera will offer K-12 teacher development courses for free, courtesy of partnerships with seven "traditional" ed schools including College of Education at University of Washington, John Hopkins University School of Education, Relay Graduate School of Education and others, along with more recreational institutions like the American Museum of History, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Exploratorium.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      I do like this mixed approach bringing together traditional higher ed and cultural institutions.
  • The cost to run these PD MOOCs are expected to be lower than what Coursera's "mainstream" college partners pay, which typically range from $10K-$50K for each 10-week course
Ted O'Neill

Essay on the nature of change in American higher education | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • However, in times of massive social change like the transformation of America to an information economy, a commensurate transformation on the part of higher education is required. We are witnessing precisely that today. MOOCs, like the university itself or graduate education or technology institutes, are one element of the change. They may or may not persist or be recognizable in the future that unfolds. What does seem probable is this. As in the industrial era, the primary changes in higher education are unlikely to occur from within. Some institutions will certainly transform themselves as Harvard did after the Civil War, but the boldest innovations are likelier to come from outside or from the periphery of existing higher education, unencumbered by the need to slough off current practice. They may be not-for-profits, for-profits or hybrids. Names like Western Governors University, Coursera, and Udacity leap to mind. We are likely to see one or more new types of institution emerge.
  • In this era of change, traditional higher education—often criticized for being low in productivity, being high in cost, and making limited use of technology — will be under enormous pressure to change. Policy makers and investors are among those forces outside of education bringing that pressure to bear. It’s time for higher education to be equally aware and responsive.
Ted O'Neill

Donald Clark Plan B: MOOCs: Who's using MOOCs? 10 different target audiences - 0 views

  • For MOOCs, several target audiences have emerged: 1. Internal students on course – cost savings on volume courses 2. Internal students not on course – expanding student experience 3. Potential students national –major source of income 4. Potential students international – major source of income 5. Potential students High school – reputation and preparation 6. Parents – significant in student choice 7. Alumni – potential income and influencers 8. Lifelong learners – late and lifelong adult learners 9. Professionals – related to professions and work 10. Government – part of access strategy
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Nice run down of the potential, definitely potential, business model for xMOOCs from large universities. Image promotion worth the cost? Will others be forced to compete in this way?
Ted O'Neill

MOOCtalk | Let's teach the world - 1 views

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    "I'm Dr. Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University. In fall 2012, I gave my first free, open, online math course and this spring I am giving my second. This blog chronicles my experiences as they happen."
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