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Ted O'Neill

Brown University Creates Online Course for High School Students - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      This could actually add to the competitive admissions process, or ideally replace it with a creative learning activity that builds knowledge in the applicant and connections between incoming first-years.
  • Still, Brown’s online development team is debating whether to offer a certificate of some kind to students who complete the course, which officials know would be used as yet another college application supplement.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Replace! Don't add to the madness! Be courageous and get rid of the other stuff high school students are forced to do to pad or extend their CVs.
  • Now, in what seems to be the first major effort by a university to tailor a massive open online course, or MOOC, specifically to high school students, Brown University is preparing to offer a free online engineering class with the aim of teaching high school students about the merits and challenges of the field.
Ted O'Neill

California to Give Web Courses a Big Trial - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • Ted O'Neill
       
      If they cannot pass elementary courses after their preparation in high school, what does that tell us about their preparation for university? Online courses require learners to already be autonomous and prepared to learn. That does not match well with students who need remedial work.
  • Ellen N. Junn, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Jose, said the California State University System faces a crisis because more than 50 percent of entering students cannot meet basic requirements. “They graduate from high school, but they cannot pass our elementary math and English placement tests,” she said.
  • Recently edX completed a pilot offering of its difficult circuits and electronics course at San Jose State to stunning results: while 40 percent of the students in the traditional version of the class got a grade of C or lower, only 9 percent in the blended edX class got such a low grade.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Would love to see the actual data on these claims and the study methodology if any.
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

Massively Open Online Course on Planning Online Courses Collapses | MetaFilter - 0 views

  • And in my opinion, completion rates aren't a very good measure of success. That's applying a rubric that makes more sense in traditional education than in a MOOC. In a way, it's kind of like asking what the completion rate is for Metafilter. The more interesting (albeit more difficult to measure) metric is how much comprehension a student acquires relative to the amount of time she invests. I think the next generation of MOOCs will be a lot more fluid, with "students" coming and going and spinning off into separate groups and regrouping on the fly. That is, they'll become less like a classroom and more like the internet.posted by roll truck roll at 21:56 on February 4 [+] [!]
  • That is, they'll become less like a classroom and more like the internet. That's an interesting suggestion, but it leads me to wonder why the whole MOOC thing in the first place? If the end-state is basically "the Internet," which we already have, what exactly is the value-add of the MOOC part? Why not just hang out on a specialist forum dedicated to whatever you're interested in, then? That's something we have already and it seems like an awful lot of effort to reinvent that particular wheel, if we really think that's how it'll shake out. And if the value add is in the certification and the testing, then really what you have are slightly less-sleazy versions of those for-profit universities that offer "degrees based on life experience", no?
  • I can tell you in that IT companies are already taking certifications of completions in these kinds of courses seriously. I'm taking one right now -- mandatory from my employer.posted by empath at 6:24 on February 5 [+] [!]
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  • More recently, I tried the HCI Coursera and bailed after the first week because I didn't like the idea of peer assessment. I have been a marker on university courses, it's not a fun task.
  • Peer assessment is my main, really only, problem with MOOCs. Even if they are ostensibly run by Harvard/Stanford/MIT with course content signed off by Big Name Professors, your thousands of fellow students are not going to be mostly Harvard/Stanford/MIT upperclassmen or even, for intro classes, mostly the valedictorians of high schools
  • the comments you will wade through will be a Duke's Mixture of 1) metafilter-or-better, 2) Slate-Salon-Atlantic, 3) Reddit, 4) YooToob, 5) 4chan-somethingawful, 6) stormfront. How much of each? Skewed bellcurve, with the long fat tail on the dimwit end.
  • all graded by actual Harvard/Stanford/MIT TAs The last thing our academic systems need is more bullshit filler work for grad students.posted by maryr at 1:06 on February 7
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

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.”
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