Group items tagged

"Can You Really Teach a MOOC in a Refugee Camp? - Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education August 1, 2014 by Steve Kolowich Two men living in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya, would watch lecture videos and take online quizzes at a nearby United Nations compound. (InZone) One narrative that has driven widespread interest in free online courses known as MOOCs is that they can help educate the world. But critics like to emphasize that the courses mostly draw students who already hold traditional degrees. So when Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, published a blog post about how a professor had used one of its online courses to teach refugees near the Kenya-Somalia border, it sounded to some like a satire of Silicon Valley's naïve techno-optimism: Hundreds of thousands of devastated Africans stranded in a war zone? MOOCs to the rescue! Details of the experiment paint a more nuanced picture, one that highlights the challenges MOOC providers face in trying to change the lives of downtrodden people. Barbara Moser-Mercer, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Geneva, ran the refugee experiment and wrote Coursera's optimistic blog post about it. But in an interview with The Chronicle, as well as a more formal article she wrote about the experiment for a European conference on MOOCs, the professor expanded on the logistical issues that come with trying to make sophisticated online courses work in deprived settings."

January 9, 2013 by Jeffrey R. Young "...Setting the Price The company also revealed more details about how it would award certificates and how much it would charge for them. Students who want a verified certificate will have to decide early in the course and pay upfront. Paying that fee will put students on what the company is calling the "Signature Track." The company and colleges are still struggling to decide what to charge for the certificates, though in its latest announcement Coursera said the price would run $30 to $100. "It's a huge decision: You're essentially setting a market," said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, in an interview this week with The Chronicle. "No one has ever priced this before." Officials also stressed that they would offer financial aid to students who demonstrated that they could not afford the fees but could benefit from the verified certificates. Ms. Koller said Coursera would continue to offer free unofficial certificates to students who passed some of its courses. So why would someone pay for the verified certificates? Peter Lange, provost at Duke University, which plans to offer one of the courses in the new pilot, said each free certificate would have a clear disclaimer on it: "It says something to the effect of, We cannot vouch that the person who got this document took the course or did the work." The new Signature Track could mean serious revenue for Coursera, and for the 33 partner colleges that will get a cut of it. Exactly how the colleges will divide that revenue is still being worked out, it seems. Mr. Lange said the question was on the agenda at the next monthly meeting of Duke's Advisory Committee on Online Education." So, when Coursera staff offered free Statements of Accomplishment as "Recognition" to the volunteers of the Global Translator community, they did so in full awareness of their lack of value and of the mentioned disclaimer

"Most people who take massive open online courses already hold a degree from a traditional institution, according to a new paper from the University of Pennsylvania. The paper is based on a survey of 34,779 students worldwide who took 24 courses offered by Penn professors on the Coursera platform. The findings-among the first from outside researchers, rather than MOOC providers-reinforce the truism that most people who take MOOCs are already well educated. The Penn researchers sent the survey to students who had registered for a MOOC and viewed at least one video lecture. More than 80 percent of the respondents had a two- or four-year degree, and 44 percent had some graduate education."

Ma vedi anche il commento di Stephen Downes http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=61414 : "Goodness gracious, the word "MOOCs" does not mean the same thing as "courses offered by Penn professors on the Coursera platform." The Chronicle can be so infuriating at times. Coursera very deliberately targeted an upmarket customer profile, so no wonder that's who they got"

"...MOOCs are just the latest incarnation of bringing watered-down versions of culture, knowledge, and learning to a mass audience. What we see as the courses' flaws may well be their strengths, and they have the potential to carry those strengths to a broader audience than ever before. Problems arise only when we think of MOOCs as university courses rather than as learning for the masses. Yes, the vulgarians who run Coursera and Udacity deserve to be swept into the dustbin of history, and the fact that they seem not to have figured out how to profit from their enterprises suggests that they'll soon be hoist by their own capitalist petard. When they are, the real action can begin. As the history professor Jonathan Rees puts it, the fast-­approaching post-corporate-MOOC world "will almost certainly be a period of real pedagogical innovation conducted by people who are more interested in actual education than they are in becoming famous or just making a quick buck."..."

Giusto! Aspettiamo che l'azione inizi (e forse si può dire che è già iniziata! ;-) )

Non rinuncerei mai alla possibilità di usare i mezzi tecnologici per la diffusione della conoscenza, tuttavia è vero: non c'è nulla che possa sostituire la relazione didattica, nel senso di interazione significativa individuale.

"...I don't mean to imply any untoward motives by the makers of MOOCs. I'm not arguing that the content or methodologies of most current MOOCs are wrong because they are based on the dominant Western academic approaches. But I do believe it is important to point out that a powerful emerging educational movement strengthens the currently dominant academic culture, perhaps making it more difficult for alternative voices to be heard."

C'è MOOC e MOOC, of course...

""A mook? What's a mook?" asks "Johnny Boy" Civello, the fast-talking gambling debtor in Martin Scorsese's 1973 film Mean Streets. For years, "mook" existed in English as an obscure slang term referring to "a foolish, insignificant, or contemptible person" (as Merriam-Webster's Online defines it). According to one Scorsese biographer, Vincent LoBrutto, the term first appeared in 1930 in the work of S.J. Perelman, the well-known writer and humorist. Since then it has occasionally resurfaced-in Mean Streets, for example; and again, around 2000, to classify an emerging class of poor, angry white kids who listen to rap metal. But that particular monosyllable was rarely at the tip of anyone's tongue. Until recently, that is, when college professors began broadcasting their courses to a worldwide audience. They called their courses "MOOCs," which stands for massive open online courses and is pronounced "mooks." Suddenly, that unfortunate syllable could be heard everywhere: in the news and the blogs, at tech conferences and faculty meetings, in legislative hearings and policy proposals. Now, it has been formally enshrined into the English language. Oxford University Press this week inducted "MOOC" into its Oxford Dictionaries Online. The definition: "A course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people.""

Vedi anche i commenti all'articolo.

"...Have you dealt with a systemic tech failure in a course? How did you manage it so students didn't suffer? Please share in the comments below."

Nell'articolo ma soprattutto nei commenti, racconti di problemi tecnologici - e di come son stati affrontati - in classe.

"April 3, 2013, 12:43 pm By Karen Head ...The preparation of a MOOC, unlike that of a traditional course, requires working with videographers, instructional designers, IT specialists, and platform specialists. For many MOOCs this means that an instructor and a teaching assistant must fill most of those support roles. In fact, one of my colleagues who taught a MOOC actually built a recording studio in the basement of his home. Even with our team of 19, we still needed several other people to provide support. We now also have an internal project manager to coordinate our videography needs. I'm very thankful to have these people helping us. ..."

"March 20, 2013, 4:55 am By Steve Kolowich The State University of New York's Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online courses to help students finish their degrees in less time, for less money. The plan calls for "new and expanded online programs" that "include options for time-shortened degree completion." In particular, the board proposed a huge expansion the prior-learning assessment programs offered by SUNY's Empire State College. The system will also push its top faculty members to build MOOCs designed so that certain students who do well in the courses might be eligible for SUNY credit. Ultimately, the system wants to add 100,000 enrollments within three years, according to a news release."

"March 19, 2013, 1:00 pm By Prof. Hacker [This is a guest post by Lisa Rhody, who works for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as the project manager for WebWise 2013....] From early posts about scholarly uses of social media to more recent entries on its usefulness for improving student engagement, there seems to be a general consensus among ProfHacker writers that the use of social media promotes the widening of scholarly networks. Keeping in mind that online social networks extend beyond the obvious Twitter and Facebook-blogs, podcasts, wikis, and photo/video sharing sites are a few other forms of social media-the vexing question to answer has been how to quantify the scope or significance of one's participation in social media to a wider scholarly conversation."