Group items tagged

"the biggest problem as succinctly as possible: Caring Doesn't Scale. This three-word sentence captures so much. First, it clearly communicates that "scale" has become a virtue. More importantly, it implies that old-fashioned virtues - things like caring about people - simply can't compare in importance to modern values like scale."

Nevertheless, my prediction is that the MOOC 2.0 will enable one-on-one learning using personalized, video chat-based help, which is why I founded Teeays, a platform for on-demand TAs for MOOCs. Ultimately, the format of the MOOC 2.0 will be whichever format enables individual learning to scale as dramatically as content distribution has scaled in the MOOC 1.0. In a world where more than 2 billion people are connected to broadband internet, face-to-face learning is bound to go digital.

"This publication, Scaling Solutions to Higher Education's Biggest Challenges, aims to identify the challenges obstructing student success and provide exemplars that, if adequately cultivated, can support the widespread adoption of real solutions."

"First, it has strategically developed its own resources-through satellite campuses, online instruction, and rigorous faculty development-to extend its internal instructional capacity. For the past twenty years, UCF has supplemented its network of physical campuses with a vast, virtual extension of its instructional reach through technology. Now, nearly 78 percent of all UCF students take online or hybrid courses and 38 percent of all credits are earned online."

"Textbook publisher Pearson set off an unfortunate chain of events with a takedown notice issued aimed at a copy of Beck's Hoplessness Scale posted by a teacher on one of Edublogs' websites (You may recall Pearson from such other related copyright nonsense as The $180 Art Book With No Pictures and No Free Textbooks Ever!). The end result? Nearly 1.5 million teacher and student blogs taken offline by Edublogs' host, ServerBeach."

"To ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. The use of ICT and open educational resources (OER) should be scaled-up in all learning contexts. Teachers need to update their own skills through regular training. The strategy also calls on Member States to strengthen links between education and employers, to bring enterprise into the classroom and to give young people a taste of employment through increased work-based learning. EU Education Ministers are also encouraged to step-up their cooperation on work-based learning at national and European level."

"Digg today announced that the first public beta of its Google Reader replacement Digg Reader will launch next week. Digg Reader will roll out in phases to allow the team to scale but the team promises that it will be available to everybody by June 26th."

While most of the headlines-including this one-reference MOOCs, the real issues are quite broad in scope, covering everything from whether higher education as we know it is on the verge of combusting, to big, bold experiments using technology to deliver education in transformative ways on a global scale. While the exact discussions seem to change on a constant basis, some of the current hot topics include proposed legislation in California, the swirl of possibilities around business models for so-called xMOOCs, and increased demand for production and availability of open textbooks.

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC): an online course or content aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access. Open Educational Resources (OER): freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. ($): Requires some financial investment

The recently announced partnership with the University of Edinburgh presented the team with an opportunity to engage and experiment with the much-publicised MOOC format, and foreground issues related to the theory and practice of online education itself. What follows are some of our perspectives on the planning and development of a large scale open course, what challenges the MOOC presents for delivering a worthwhile educational experience, and what questions this type of course format provokes for a team already teaching and researching in the field of e-learning and technology in higher education.

"All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research"

"The same is true in the digital world. Gregory Ulmer, a theorist at the University of Florida coined the term electracy to describe this broader notion of digital literacy. At universities we are all more aware now of the growing significance of digital literacy, as we are seeing a widespread transition from print to digital and an accompanying transformation of teaching and learning practices."

Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered. Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they'd occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great. So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?

""What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about...""

"Anyone who works with children with autism knows the difficulties in regulating emotions.  Within an hour, a child can go from 'sleepy' to 'boiling' and not have strategies to get to the 'green' area."

There's nothing particularly new about MOOCs. Most universities have offered online courses for many years and the basic technologies involved - video lectures, discussion forums, tests, and the like - are the same we have used with on-campus and distance students. The only difference is the scale.

For these reasons, the SUNYCoW opposes the prospect that MOOCs--or any other form of massive-scale instruction--might be accepted for credit in writing, especially in satisfaction of SUNY's Basic Communication requirement. Completion of the Writing requirement should always involve close work with a faculty member who can provide students mentorship, careful assessment and a genuine sense of a human audience.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.

Yes, I can buy a jar of commercially produced pickles (typically including high-fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, dried onions, and chemicals that I do not recognize as food), just as we can scale up our production in the classroom by increasing class size, using computer-graded tests, and reducing or eliminating the student writing that requires a faculty member to provide focused attention to each piece of work.

"THE BOOKSTORE as we know it is doomed, because many of these establishments are going to go from making a little bit of money every day to losing a little bit. And it's hard to sustain daily losses for long, particularly when you're poorly capitalized, can't use the store as a loss leader and see no hope down the road. The death of the bookstore is being caused by the migration to ebooks (it won't take all books to become 'e', just enough to tip the scale) as well as the superior alternative of purchase and selection of books online. If the function of a bookstore is to stock every book and sell it to you quickly and cheaply, the store has failed."