Wcel_Team

Excellent article from Audrey Watters on the rewriting of Mooc history and why it is important that such things are not twisted to develop a new narrative that suits those doing the rewriting.

"Evidence shows that engaged students perform better academically than disinterested students. Measurement of engagement with education is difficult and imprecise, especially in large student cohorts. Traditional measurements such as summary statistics derived from assessment are crude secondary measures of engagement at best and do not provide much support for educators to work with students and curate engagement during teaching periods. We have used academic-related student contributions to a public social network as a proxy for engagement. Statistical summaries and novel data visualisation tools provide subtle and powerful insights into online student peer networks. Analysis of data collected shows that network visualisation can be an important curation tool for educators interested in cultivating student engagement."

Why Coursera & Udacity are killing Open Education.

Uses Text to Speech to grab the speaker notes and put a voice to your presentation

"Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. "

Dave Kernohan on Moocs and the Universities UK report - a quick and dirty response when it was released.

MOOCs at Edinburgh - the first year report.

Downes on Mooc quality and why common measurements are flawed.

Universities UK report on Moocs

Great piece on the new mooc movement. Worth engaging with.

Moocs and money. $7k Masters, down from $40k.

Interesting points on video production values.

Clint on misogyny on the web and the massive problem it is through the case of Audrey Watters closing comments at Hack Education.

Interesting - A US academic says that Coursera should run a MOOC on how its own business model could ruin education!

"I have a confession to make. At my workplace a little while ago, I created a smartphone-friendly version of our online induction course. Ownership of smartphones is relatively common in this corner of the world, and a large proportion of our new recruits are Gen Y. So conventional wisdom dictated that a mobile version of the course would be a smash hit. It tanked."

Moodle MOOC!

"While I am not a huge fan of MOOCs (See, "MOOCs - The Opium of the Masses," I think that there is one area in which they might actually be extremely useful - ongoing teacher professional development (PD). They are a good fit to help meet a very specific need, which they could do quite well given teachers' experience with education."

The Chronicle with more surface stuff on MOOCs. There's very little to learn about Mooc design except don't make instructions ambiguous (with which I totally agree!)