Group items tagged

Open online courses are changing higher education. Traditional colleges face dangers-and opportunities."

"Over the past year, MOOCs have opened the doors of access to quality education, and have captured the attention of educational leaders and students worldwide. Today, we're excited to announce the next step in our mission to foster student learning without limits and expand the possibilities that MOOCs and online education can enable."

"Remember when Coursera - the world's largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) - was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business? I know it's hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don't.  Because it's all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it's going to start competing with Blackboard instead"

"MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, have become all the rage, with numerous institutions joining forces with Coursera, edX, FutureLearn, and other providers. The Babson Survey Research Group recently found that although 55 percent of institutions said they were undecided about their plans for offering MOOCs, 9.4 percent said they were in the planning stages of offering one, and 2.6 percent have already taken the plunge;  the same survey showed the number of students taking at least one course online has reached an all-time high of 32 percent."

Massive open online courses (Moocs) fail to support students, offer outdated pedagogy and should not be run by for-profit companies, a conference has heard.

"The Learning to Teach Online (LTTO) MOOC is based upon the multi award winning open educational resource of the same name, developed by Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson. We have built upon these resources in this MOOC, supporting them with a course structure that puts them into a supportive framework for you all to help you find and connect with each other to share your own experiences in the Discussion Forums. This course is not intended as a comprehensive manual for online teaching. Rather, it is intended as a starting point to help you develop your understanding of the principles involved; a place where you can get advice about strategies you might try; and a means from which you can begin to build your confidence and capacity to continue the learning journey in your own contexts and practice"

Australian open-source services provider NetSpot has been bought up by online learning firm Blackboard, along with US-based Moodlerooms.

Thought provoking blog post from David White. Some interesting ideas that have come out of interviews related to his Digital Residents and Natives and Open Edducational Resources research, viz the "emergency collaboration" 24 hours from coursework submission (I'm sure that goes on a lot in Swansea) and Google> Wikipedia> References which is a popular technique with students but is kept hidden because of the overt discouragement of academics for Google and Wikipedia as valid academic research tools. I've personally never had a problem with either G or W in my own learning. Am I prejudiced against them in my students' learning?

"This website provides an introduction to digital collections designed for education. They are mainly aimed at university students, researchers and librarians but many of the online archives are open to anyone. The collections cover areas such as history, social sciences, or science and engineering and include, for example, journals, newspapers and images."

"The primary objective of this project is to investigate how elearning applications can be more tightly integrated with virtual learning environments through the use of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. A range of popular open source and commercial elearning applications (tool producers) are being used to both identify priorities for integrations with VLEs (or other tool consumers) and also to evaluate the benefits which can be derived from adopting this approach."

The series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation.

"The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies."

"BITE: Recipes for remarkable research is an edited field book capturing the research, learning and experiences of an international network of scholars studying effective and creative research environments. The book encapsulates what it is that enables remarkable research, and offers, as Professor Lizbeth Goodman says, "practical, evidence-based instantiations of ideas and innovations" as well as theoretical knowledge. It is set out as a recipe book, with supporting academic papers and case studies"

"Voting for the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2013 is now open.  This is the 7th Annual Survey which will be compiled from the contributions of learning professionals worldwide. Voting closes midnight GMT on Friday 27 September 2013, and the Top 100 Tools list will be revealed on Monday 30 September 2013."

"Teaching with Moodle: An Introduction is a free course for teachers who would like to use (or anyone interested in) learning platforms to enhance teaching and learning in today's educational environment. Designed to provide a good foundation and context to Moodle, the course covers the basics of the open source (and free!) learning platform, including how to set up and effectively use Moodle in teaching. The course features:"

I signed up!

"MOOCs Forum is the only international publication dedicated exclusively to shaping the future development, design, and deployment of massive, open, online courses (MOOCs). Multidisciplinary in scope, this authoritative Forum evaluates the components and modules that are critical in creating a global education system and sustainable revenue models for MOOCs, as well as enforcing the integrity behind the creation and use of these systems."