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"How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it"

"Suggestions for improvement To be fair, the cons that I have listed above are not unique to the EDCMOOC, nor to online learning in general. I remember similar problems from my uni days on campus. Nonetheless, they inform my following suggestions for improvement… Week 1 should be set aside as a social week to allow the happy greeters to get their social proclivities out of their systems. It may be tempting to set aside a pre-week for this purpose, but the truth is it will bleed into Week 1 anyway. The instructors need to be much more active in the discussions. I recommend they seed each week with a pinned discussion thread, which marks the official line of enquiry and discourages multiple (and confusing) threads emerging about the same concepts. More importantly, the instructors should actively prompt, prod, guide and challenge the participants to engage in critical analysis. Explication of the implications for e-learning must be the outcome. A moderator should delete the spam and ban the spammers. A support page and discussion thread should be dedicated to helping the lost souls, so that they don't pollute the rest of the course with their problems. All in all, I am glad to report my first mooc experience was a positive one. I won't rush out to do another one in a hurry, but that's simply because I know how demanding they are. But one thing's for sure, I will do another one at some stage. I look forward to it!"

Skip to main content The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine The National Academies Press About Ordering Information New Releases Browse by Division Browse by Topic Login Register Help Cart How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures

"How do you train an Innovator? We are born curious. We are born with imagination. The first challenge is to ensure that these very human qualities are not schooled out of us, as Sir Ken Robinson says. Beyond that, in my research, I identified five essential education and parenting practices that develop young people's capacities to innovate: 1. Learning to work collaboratively (innovation is a team sport!). 2. Learning to understand problems from a multi-disciplinary perspective. 3. Learning to take risks and learn from mistakes. 4. Focusing on creating versus consuming. 5. Reinforcing the intrinsic motivations of play, passion, and purpose versus the extrinsic carrots and sticks."

How to Create an APA Style Reference for a Canceled Conference Presentation

"Given your critique of "online education," I find it ironic that learning designers and others who work day-in, day-out on online (and blended) learning spend much of our time saying similar things to our faculty partners and university stakeholders as you so eloquently articulated in the above quotes. The error that you make, and it is a fundamental error, is that you confuse what is going on at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, M.I.T. with edX and Coursera, with traditional online learning. You write as if you are critiquing online classes, but what you are really taking issue with are the new crop of massively open online courses (MOOCs). This error is not merely semantic. Confusing online learning with MOOCs disallows any meaningful analysis of the challenges and benefits of either format. Conflating online learning with MOOCs also closes the possibility of any substantive discussion of how institutions of higher education are responding to challenges around access, cost and quality. And perhaps most troubling, by conflating online learning with MOOCs you are mischaracterizing and devaluing the hard work of your fellow educators to bring the active learning principles, the principles that you yourself espouse, to new teaching modalities."

How Aetna enables 35,000 employees to engage in social media http://t.co/zdGXTLMe via #Edchat in FB

Online discussions are sometimes difficult to get going, and often the students (at least at first) seem to respond too superficially, punctuated by an occasional treatise by an overeager student. Here's how to jumpstart discussions.

I think most students are familiar with using Google to search for things, so the interface is not a big stretch, as opposed to using other science specific databases available through the library. It does come down to what the objectives for the students are though, if you want them to find a few primary lit articles to include in a research project then Google Scholar would probably be just fine, but if you're objective is to get them ready for more grad level research then you probably want them to have to learn how to use some other databases ...

* Better cafeteria food with real ingredients * No school busses - nearly every child mentioned the bullying of bus rides as one of the reasons they hated school * More choice in their assignments or projects * Replace grades with feedback and portfolios (like we did in our class) * Staggered start and end times so that the school would "feel smaller" * More alternative sports in addition to the traditional ones * Off-campus community service once a week * Job-shadowing for one month of the year * A monthly educational field trip * iPads, netbooks or laptops in classes - they even brought up some interesting ways to raise money for these devices * More freedom in terms of leaving to use the restroom, eating a snack or getting a drink of water * More electives - while most of them agreed that we need math, they suggested that maybe they could choose pre-geometry or pre-algebra or in reading, they could have reading classes geared toward certain topics * A school garden

"How to Use Google Search More Effectively [INFOGRAPHIC]"

"How Do Teachers Learn to Teach?"

"Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think."