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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
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “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.
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