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Ted O'Neill

The False Promise of the Education Revolution - College, Reinvented - The Chronicle of ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...136305

mooc university crisis

shared by Ted O'Neill on 12 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The pundits and disrupters, many of whom enjoyed liberal-arts educations at elite colleges, herald a revolution in higher education that is not for people like them or their children, but for others: less-wealthy, less-prepared students who are increasingly cut off from the dream of a traditional college education.
  • David Stavens, a founder of the MOOC provider Udacity, as conceding that "there's a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live inside that bubble, is wonderful."
  • "The whole MOOC thing is mass psychosis," a case of people "just throwing spaghetti against the wall" to see what sticks, says Peter J. Stokes, executive director for postsecondary innovation at Northeastern's College of Professional Studies. His job is to study the effectiveness of ideas that are emerging or already in practice.
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  • But "innovation is not about gadgets," says Mr. Stokes. "It's not about eureka moments. ... It's about continuous evaluation."
  • the gap between the country's rich and poor widened during the recession, choking off employment opportunities for many recent graduates.
  • Here's the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all.
  • "The idea that they can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous," says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system.
  • But the reinvention conversation has had a "tech guy" fixation on mere content delivery, she says. "It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the student actually learn the content and do something with it."
  • "To champion something as trivial as MOOC's in place of established higher education is to ignore the day-care centers, the hospitals, the public health clinics, the teacher-training institutes, the athletic facilities, and all of the other ways that universities enhance communities, energize cities, spread wealth, and enlighten citizens,"
Ted O'Neill

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

derekbruff.org/?p=2579

MOOC xMOOC K-12 open data digital humanities open data

shared by Ted O'Neill on 06 May 13 - No Cached
  • 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.
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