Group items tagged

great article by Ernie Smith, January 2017, on studies completed recently by edX (MIT and Harvard) on four years of MOOCs and effectiveness and certifications. good comments too

how edX MOOCs are working 5 years into operation; still free except for credit graded completion

Jenny Mackness does it again: making important distinctions between curriculum led and community led learning within MOOCs; and how the balance may change based on successful formation of learning groups within the MOOC. She also asks about the difference between learning design and planning for learning. 1.14.23 on her blog.

Very interesting graphics for categorizing MOOC participants (lurkers, drop-ins, passive participants, and active participants) and for no-shows at end of week 1 (almost 90%)

Review by Rob Jenkins on the Chronicle, 3.18.13, on why MOOCs are a massively bad idea for wait-listed community college students in California as proposed in new legislation there. Excerpt: "We know that succeeding in online classes requires an extraordinary degree of organization, self-discipline, motivation, and time-management skill. A simple Google search of "how to succeed in online classes" yields a plethora of Web sites-including many college and university sites-offering students such gems as "be organized," "manage your time wisely," and (my favorite) "stay motivated."" Excerpt: So to recap, California's plan (or to be fair, one senator's plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state's least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format. Here's a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into "retention" efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that's another blog post.) Look, I'm not a politician or an economist. I don't know the answer to California higher education's budget woes. But I'm pretty sure herding community-college students into MOOCs is not it.

Great article on DOCC (distributed open collaborative course) by Scott Jaschik, August 19, 2013, that helps inform/substantiate in a small way the Studio Learning Labs model of learning? ""A DOCC is different from a MOOC in that it doesn't deliver a centralized singular syllabus to all the participants. Rather it organizes around a central topic," Balsamo said. "It recognizes that, based on deep feminist pedagogical commitments, expertise is distributed throughout all the participants in a learning activity," and does not just reside with one or two individuals."

Great resources in SlideShare on The Future of Education assembled by Lorraine K. Lee, September 19, 2014, before the Online Learning Conference. MOOCs, and Downes figure prominently.

"Enrolling in MOOCs has a lot to do with what drives me, and what I think drives most adult learners: the desire to understand, to know and to increase personal competency." Organic learning communities are replacing formal lectures. Self-discovery coupled with peer-to-peer interaction, sharing and co-learning is transforming the learning landscape

The New York Times examine the MOOC phenomena.

Fascinating article by Marina Gorbis on Fast Company site regarding how we must be able to learn online in micro-learning episodes that may last minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc. far removed from schools, MOOCs, and other structured and semi-structured curricula. Excerpt: "We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows. Instead of worrying about how to distribute scarce educational resources, the challenge we need to start grappling with in the era of socialstructed learning is how to attract people to dip into the rapidly growing flow of learning resources and how to do this equitably, in order to create more opportunities for a better life for more people." In the comments, this summary: "It doesn't matter if you are a physicist, chemist, sociologist, welder, mathematician, teacher, economist, lawyer, restaurant owner, farmer, trucker, whatever, the information most relevant and valuable to your employment is up to you to find! The task requires you find and digest information, on your own. This task used to be a pain, but now we have near-instant access to the entirety of information across the planet. The author is talking about making this access actually instant, not near-instant. Its really just an inevitable thing. "

MOOCs have hit TIme mag!

Already learned something from the Bonk MOOC--see this page for free hosted CMS and LMS technologies.

MIT and Harvard have teamed up to offer MOOCs, and this month Stanford, Princeton, U of PA, U of MI have created a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

Chapter seven on everyday by design by Jennifer Stratton, HASTAC, 7/2013--used in MOOC that Lisa is taking from Cathy Davidson and others.

blog post by KatieBascuas, May 29, 2014, discusses three types of "fringe" learning benefits: MOOCs, flipping (riding on the idea of flipped classrooms), and microcredentials (badges and such). Only a minority of associations are trying these out. Very interesting assessment and use of terms. Opportunity?

article from Online Learning Insights on video lectures, April 28, 2014

article from Online Learning Insights on video lectures, April 28, 2014

Blog post on MOOC on PLN, PLE, etc.

This is a chapter from a book written by the Ed Techie guy Martin Weller. What is interesting is how he detailed the new methods he used to write his most recent book. Many of the sources and practices that he engaged in for writing the second book did not even exist six years before when he finished writing his first book. These new aids include ready e-journal access, Delicious/social bookmarking, blogs, Youtube, Wikipedia, Slideshare, Scribd, Cloudwords and other sites, his own blog, social network especially twitter, Google alerts, etc. I am not sure how this relates to MOOCs and open landscape learning except he has so much more to manage, and gain from, in having a well developed dashboard of tools for seeking, sensing, and sharing.

LA Times article on free, online, no credit college-level courses, December 9, 2011. Check to see if they are all in directory.

Blog by Clark Quinn on scaling a la MOOC and supporting learning in those contexts, March 26, 2013. Feel that the excerpt below could affect WLS's appeal to buyers. Excerpt: "And it seemed to many of us that the focus could be not just on meeting the job categories that are estimated to be needed, but also on employability and creativity, meta-learning as a layer on top. Others were concerned that learning to learn doesn't mean much until you have a job (what's more important, entrepreneurial spirit or a toilet?), but they don't have to be mutually exclusive."