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Ted O'Neill

The Professors Behind the MOOC Hype - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

  • Many professors teaching MOOCs had a similarly positive outlook: Asked whether they believe MOOCs "are worth the hype," 79 percent said yes.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      This needs to be defined. Worth in what way? Based upon what experience?
  • Many of those surveyed felt that these free online courses should be integrated into the traditional system of credit and degrees. Two-thirds believe MOOCs will drive down the cost of earning a degree from their home institutions, and an overwhelming majority believe that the free online courses will make college less expensive in general.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Most MOOCs are for general survey type or intro classes. The cost of providing those classes is not the driver behind higher education costs.
  • John Owens was drawn to MOOCs because of their reach. He also did not want to be left behind.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      On the other hand, is there a cost to being an earlier adopter? Often.
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  • A number of the professors in the survey said they hoped to use MOOCs to increase their visibility, both among colleagues within their discipline (39 percent) and with the media and the general public (34 percent).
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      MOOC as the driver of star professors, stratifying faculty, not just students.
  • In May 2012, when the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they would enter the MOOC fray with $60-million to start edX, they were emphatic that their agenda was to improve, not supplant, classroom education.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      However, there agenda may include supplanting other online offerings. Free from MIT or paid at University of Phoenix?
  • "Online education is not an enemy of residential education," said Susan Hockfield, president of MIT at the time, from a dais at a hotel in Cambridge, "but an inspiring and liberating ally."
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      For MIT/Harvard the on campus experience is the key. Further class/socioeconomic stratification?
  • Typically a professor spent over 100 hours on his MOOC before it even started, by recording online lecture videos and doing other preparation. Others laid that groundwork in a few dozen hours.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Point this out to your employer if asked to MOOC.
  • Once the course was in session, professors typically spent eight to 10 hours per week on upkeep. Most professors managed not to be inundated with messages from their MOOC students—they typically got five e-mails per week
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      I don't find this at all credible. I've seen more than this in some moocs. I get more email than that each week from 125 on-campus students.
  • In all, the extra work took a toll. Most respondents said teaching a MOOC distracted them from their normal on-campus duties.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      What do employers think of that?
  • "It's out of 'my own' time, which is quite limited," Mr. Owens reported. "So, yes, other areas of my job suffered."
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Pretty candid admission. Is he still employed? Will this affect tenure?
  • In lieu of credit toward a degree, most professors offer certificates to students who complete massive online courses. Three-quarters of the professors surveyed said they offered some sort of document certifying that a student had completed a MOOC. It remains unclear, however, how seriously those certificates are being taken by employers. College degrees are still seen as the coin of the realm.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      "College degrees are still seen as the coin of the realm." and universities will make sure it stays that way if they can.
  • Most professors who responded to The Chronicle's survey said they believed that MOOCs would drive down the cost of college; 85 percent said the free courses would make traditional degrees at least marginally less expensive, and half of that group said it would lower the cost "significantly."
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Were any of them economics professors? "Lower cost significantly" by replacing a few income generating courses with free replacements? Fantasy.
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

Half an Hour: Assessing the Efficacy of Third-Party MOOCs in Hybrid Instruction - 2 views

  • To answer these questions, we will be conducting 14-15 test cases incorporating MOOCs into hybrid sections at the University of Maryland. For these test cases we will create local instances of the MOOC, a MOOC just for that instructor that only the students can enroll in, and where the instructors can release the material at their own rates then. We’ll have two sets of sections, those where the students take hybrid MOOCs and those where students do traditional face-to-face. (SD - So - the study is to 'remove all elements of the MOOC that make it a MOOC, and then compare with traditional learning')
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Wolf in MOOC's clothing.
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

Half an Hour: Everything You Thought You Knew About MOOCs Could Be Wrong - 0 views

  • Next slide: if we look at where MOOCs are most influential, their major influence is not from MOOCs in and of themselves. There’s the suggestion that MOOCs as they are in 2012 is what will replace learning. But this model is still evolving. There’s a difference between the foreign element – the MOOC – and the transforming idea, which is what actually creates change. The xMOOCs in particular are the foreign element that dismantles the status quos, and what creates a lot of the push-back to the idea. And we see a lot of resistance to MOOCs in higher ed these days. There’s a lot of arguing, and a lot of chaos, but change hasn’t started to happen. Our performance during this period could even be worse than what was traditional.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      The idea is not the same as it's current execution. MOOCS of today are not the end state.
Ted O'Neill

Donald Clark Plan B: MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC - 0 views

  •  
    Breaks MOOCs down into... transferMOOCs madeMOOCs synchMOOCs asynchMOOCs adaptiveMOOCs groupMOOCs connectivistMOOCS miniMOOCSs"
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

Half an Hour: The MOOC as a Vehicle for Learning: Observations and Conclusions - 1 views

  • Veronica: one we move away from institutional limitations, all kinds of limitations – payment, platform, credit – then we can focus on what works best – and then we can look at things like disaggregation of the course, modularization of the course, etc. Michael: sure, one of the greatest services MOOCs have provided has been to reawaken the imagination. Let’s invest in trying some things, lift some constraints and see what happens. Phil: It’s already having an impact. It’s really people rethink and get past the Carnegie unit, the seat time.
  •  
    The MOOC as a tool to reignite the imagination of teachers and find out what works.
Ted O'Neill

Half an Hour: What's In It for Us?: Benefits to Campus Course of Running a MOOC - 0 views

  • At Illinois, We’ve had the experience of very large enrollment traditional classes. So an experience in a MOOC can help us learn how to manage an on-campus class of, say, 350. For example, how to manage the discussion forums, especially the graded discussions.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Yes, participating in a MOOC sharpens your online organization and communication skills. Good preparation for any instructor preparing to teach online or blended classes.
  • Another thing is that people can submit material for future offerings of the course. We ask them permission, of course. We have tens of thousands of ‘worker bees’ and many of them have been happy to contribute their materials.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Raid the MOOC and use the crowd to improve content in regular courses.
Ted O'Neill

Half an Hour: MOOC Provider Panel: Coursera, Academic Partnerships, Instructure, edX - 1 views

  • Question: Matriculated students enjoy full support from their institution's library; how can the MOOC provide similar support to the many thousands of students enrolled in the MOOC, the majority of which are not enrolled at the institution that is offering the course. Maria: You must have been monitoring my Twitter stream. I’ve been really frustrated, I have no access to institutional libraries any more. There’s a real irony to an institutional system that teaches students to access the library and then kicks them out with no more access to it. There’s a role for these libraries. But I don’t see a way for them to do it for free.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      This is a huge problem and not just for MOOCs. I am endlessly frustrated by my access to medical journals, but not education or linguistics journals through my uni.
  • Relly: I would say yes. I often bring up the example of the lecture videos, where there is a knee-jerk reaction that we want lecture videos that are really professional. But students want them to seem more real, to see the professor’s office, etc.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      I just want the videos to be watchable. Poor audio and unlit video are not a good way to capture my attention.
Ted O'Neill

(M)OOC in a Box: Turning WordPress into an Open Course Reader #ocTEL Jisc CETIS MASHe - 0 views

  •  
    Read this if you wish to set up a MOOC. Martin Hawksey @mhawksey goes through an extended explanation of choosing WordPress to run a MOOC. Comments are also worth reading. 
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

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

How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it | online learning ... - 0 views

  • there is no way to put a positive spin on my experience with the MOOC I’m enrolled in through Coursera, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application
  • Group work can provide meaningful learning, in the right context with the support of a sound instructional strategy. The example here from the class, Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application demonstrates why a sound strategy is needed, and what happens when one is lacking. MOOCs require a unique instructional strategy, one that is different from small online courses. What exactly the strategy to follow is under discussion. It is through the courses, such as this one that institutions can learn what works and does not. I give the instructor credit for trying something new, and investing the time and energy she has done which is considerable.
Ted O'Neill

Grading the MOOC University - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • “I think my boyfriend is jealous of how charmed I am by the professor,” wrote one of Mr. Zelikow’s students on a discussion thread devoted to his endearing smile.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      MOOCs clearly not the end of "sage on the stage," but a possible mutant overgrowth version threatening to banish local profs to marking papers, or looking for work elsewhere. Except, who will hold office hours? Who will oversee independent study? Who will really listen to a student?
Ted O'Neill

change.mooc.ca ~ #change11 - 0 views

  •  
    This is the first mooc I ever participated in (however briefly and lightly). But even as a brief auditor lurker who got overwhelmed. I learned, made connections I still follow, and started down the MOOC road.
Ted O'Neill

Half an Hour: Backgrounds and Behaviors of MOOC Participants and Implications for Faculty - 1 views

  • There was a cluster of high-use countries and then a massive tail. Canada, Colombia, Greece, the UK, Poland – these were the high-use countries. Now students in these countries have a peer group of unprecedented size.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      This is the power of MOOCs.
  • We had representatives in our course from 194 countries – they didn’t all interact in every part of the course, but imagine how the instructor felt
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Ah, the star faculty member emerges on the stage.
  • We anecdotally observed that students are continuing to participate in the discussion forums nearly a year after the course has finished. So we can ask of LMSs whether we should be allowing students to participate after the course has been completed.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Yes, MOOCs open in time, not just content or access.
Ted O'Neill

Half an Hour: Multiple Lessons Learned from Implementing MOOC Environments at San Jose ... - 0 views

  • Administrative considerations: be clear on the central goal of the MOOC, understand the continuum of F2F to online to MOOC, consider all stakeholders, align institutional resources and leaders, clarify business plan, consider legal issues, and prepare marketing and communications. (SD – There is no continuum - but saying there is one allows you to misrepresent a closed offline on-campus course as a MOOC)
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Wolf in MOOC's clothing.
  • Question: can you speak to compensation? Response: we offered $15K to one faculty member, broken into three installments.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Hard to find info on direct compensation. Often done by profs as part of job. Does this imply an adjunct was teaching this so-called MOOC?
Ted O'Neill

MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact - 0 views

  • RPI professor Jim Hendler, who was recognized by Playboy Magazine as “one of the nation’s most influential and imaginative college professors” who are “reinventing the classroom,”2 talked about how he struggled to flip his classroom in a way that his students would embrace and lamented that he had no training in pedagogy.
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Amazing how many university faculty have no training in how to actually teach.
  • Enter the MOOC In some ways, the xMOOC in its current form is this trend to turn the course into an artifact taken to its logical conclusion (possibly ad absurdum). Course lectures are now artifacts in the form of videos. Assignment and assessment functions are packaged into machine-graded tools. Certification of knowledge is provided by the machines as well. Yes, there are still class discussions, and yes, the course instructors do participate sometimes, but they appear to be rather secondary in most of the xMOOC course designs I have looked at. In general, xMOOCs tend to explore the degree to which the pedagogical function can be fulfilled by artifacts.
  • The sentiment articulated by some of the ELI webinar participants, which was echoed by a presentation at this week’s MOOC colloquium at RPI, is that xMOOCs don’t tend to be able to get at deep skill acquisition because students have limited opportunities to either see those skills modeled for them or to practice them.
Ted O'Neill

DS106: The Open Online Community of Digital Storytellers by Jim Groom - Kickstarter - 0 views

  • Pledge $500 or more 0 backers DS106 in a Box - All of the above, plus a complete software setup for your own online course framework with hosting for 1 year at the domain of your choice and 5 hours of consulting. Estimated delivery: Jun 2012
    • Ted O'Neill
       
      Interesting idea. Graduates of the mooc serve as consultants to a newly starting mooc? Bit of a possible pyramid scheme, but could work. Surprised nobody took this one. Post-hype, this might have had takers in 2013.
  •  
    Successfully funded mooc resource. 
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