"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"
"...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."
"Twiddla does EtherPad
Remember EtherPad? They were the the coolest thing around a few years back, with their little collaborative text editor that synchronized everything as you typed. As a product, it was simple and to the point. And it just plain worked in a way that all the other "Online Word Processors" of the day didn't. Then Google bought them and it went away."
"How can games unlock a rich world of learning? This is the big question at the heart of the growing games and learning movement that's gaining momentum in education. The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning explains key ideas in game-based learning, pedagogy, implementation, and assessment."
Il testo che qui segue è stato elaborato pochi giorni fa con il piacevole fruscio delle onde in sottofondo... Da tempo, mi sentivo di nuovo stuzzicare dalla voglia di riattivare il mio blog, cui sono rimasta legata parecchio affettivamente, perché se anche negli ultimi due anni è rimasto letargico, i continui pungoli così densamente riflessivi...
"Colleges and universities, left and right, are launching Massive open online courses (MOOC). Colleges failing to follow are "behind the times".
Do not be fooled by how savvy MOOC advocates sound. They do not understand what they are doing.
Let us start with how they do not even understand what a MOOC is, or should be. MOOCs are supposed to be open platforms. It is right there in the name. Downes' original MOOCs were indeed open. Yet the actual MOOCs that colleges publish are closed platforms, as per Wikipedia's definition: ..."
"By Documentary Film Program on March 1, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.
View (streaming) or download (mp4) the whole film or watch it below
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
Distributed on DVD by The Media Education Foundation."
"In a previous post, I commented on the Massive Teaching course at Coursera and that something odd was happening. Either Coursera deleted the prof from the course or the prof was running some type of experiment. It now appears to be primarily the latter. (...)
3. Criticism ranging from a poorly designed course to poor ethics has been directed to Paul-Olivier Dehaye. Most of it is unfair. There have been some calls for U of Zurich to discipline the prof. Like others, I've criticized his deception research and his silence since the course was shut down. Several days before the media coverage, Dehaye provided the following comments on his experiment:
"MOOCs can be used to enhance privacy, or really destroy it," Dehaye wrote. "I want to fight scientifically for the idea, yet teach, and I have signed contracts, which no one asks me about…. I am in a bind. Who do I tell about my project? My students? But this idea of the #FacebookExperiment is in itself dangerous, very dangerous. People react to it and express more emotions, which can be further mined."
The goal of his experiment, Dehaye wrote, was to "confuse everyone, including the university, [C]oursera, the Twitter world, as many journalists as I can, and the course participants. The goal being to attract publicity…. I want to show how [C]oursera tracks you."
There it is. His intent was to draw attention to Coursera policies and practices around data. Congrats, Paul-Olivier. Mission accomplished.
He is doing exactly what academics should do: perturb people to states of awareness. Hundreds, likely thousands, of faculty have taught MOOCs, often having to toe the line of terms and conditions set by an organization that doesn't share the ideals, community, and egalitarianism that define universities (you can include me in that list).
The MOOC Mystery was about an academic doing what we expect and need academics to do. Unfortunately it was poorly executed and not properly communicated so th
"Overview -
This course is offered by University of Zurich with Prof Paul-Olivier Dehaye and his students. This lesson plan is created by Dilrukshi Gamage (www.sdgamage.weebly.com) a MOOC student from this class due to few reasons.
1. Course started with giving some ideas, but now it appears no more ideas facilitated
2. Forums are closed and we have no clue of what to do
3. Students who take this course or any of coursera for the first time will be wondering and might lose the context of learning.
4. This lesson plan will guide us to collaboratively find solution to be in synchronized and learn from the time we invest in this.
Introduction -
The course named Teaching goes massive : new skills needed. It is our responsibility to find out what are the skills we need when we are teaching to a massive class.. or any class. Prof.Paul mentioned some experiments which we can do and previous forums already started and gone very well until suddenly closed everything.
So let us drive this MOOC , learn to learn ourselves how to be organized and learn from each other. Anyone can suggest things but not like as forums it has to be much more effective. This document will contain how to participate and what can you do in contributing to expand your learning. Don't worry this will not stop suddenly as we the students are in charge.
First step lets set some objectives so we can see did we achieve when we finish this course.
Objectives -
After you complete this course
1. You will learn how to learn yourselves to work without a real teacher or a lecturer.
2. You will learn to make communications and build a network where you can share and learn throughout your interest.
3. You will learn to work on inclusive projects in the same course ( by inclusive what I mean was anyone can work in one project or more)
4. You will gain knowledge on what skills you need and how to handle it when teaching is massive
Where to contact -
Please use the links provided in collaborating
e https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg , il Pad dove Dehaye spiega il contesto della sua decisione. Se qualcuno ne ricancella il contenuto, usate la storia delle revisioni: funziona come PiratePad
"Hi, I'm Paul-Olivier Dehaye, professor of mathematics at the University of Zürich.This course is called Massive Teaching.It's a course about MOOCs. MOOCs in themselves are quite controversial,especially as far as pedagogy is concerned.In this course in the next three weeks, I want to give you some background about MOOCs but also widen this debate to include technology and business aspects of MOOCs. ..."
"MOOC.Well, what's that?
The word MOOC is an acronym. I should at least say once what it stands for: Massive Online Open Course.
That was the easy part, just to give you those words. Now to give a definition, that's going to be very challenging.For every one of those words, I think it's fair to say that there is a generally accepted understanding of what the word means, but then there is a substantial number of people who challenge that understanding, who try to push it further....
... This course only spans three weeks.The structure will be quite simple.In the first week, I'll take a mostly positive tone about MOOCs, describe the promise that many people see in them, including me.
In the second week, I'll take a closer look at the technology and survey the copyright aspects.
In the third week, I'll discuss the business aspects and maybe a bit of science fiction.
In fact I'll prepare some material for the third week, but I'll be ready to add muchmore to it than that, mostly in response to questions that will intermittently pop up in the forums.It's quite a tight schedule, so it might be that atthe last minute, I settle for more text then I originally intended.
In any case, this is just the first run of the course.As soon as possible, I hope to rerun it, this time with a bit more material, that I can reintegrate, to offer a slightly longer course.
"Now, I know that because I write a lot about the universal web and progressive enhancement, people assume that I must hate javascript.
This would be an incorrect assumption.
I simply hate people relying on brittle client-side javascript when there are other alternatives. In the same way as I wouldn't rely on some unknown minicab firm as the sole way of getting me to the airport for a wedding flight, I don't like relying on a non-guaranteed technology as the sole way of delivering a web app.
For me it's a matter of elegance and simplicity over unnecessary complexity."
