I think you can say that MOOC get a lot of attention. We have noticed it here in the Netherlands, but you also see this in the US. It is not often that The Colbert Report is talking about education. Yesterday Anant Agarwal, the President of EdX was interviewed. See the interview below.
Michael Fullan and Katelyn Donnelly have written an interesting report. It is an actionable guide to learning technology that will allow founders, funders, and teachers to make better decisions. It identifies persistent gaps in innovation activity and points to what needs to be done if we are to finally make good on the promise of technology to transform learning.
The authors argue that we should seek digital innovations that produce at least twice the learning outcome for half the cost of our current tools. To achieve this, three forces need to come together. One is technology, the other pedagogy, and the third is change knowledge, or how to secure transformation across an entire school system.
The core of the report is the development of an index that brings these three elements together, and which allows us to systematically evaluate new digital innovations.
Reference
Michael Fullan and Katelyn Donnely (2013) Alive in the Swamp, Assessing Digital Innovations in Education
http://www.nesta.org.uk/home1/assets/features/alive_in_the_swamp_assessing_digital_innovations_in_education
Terry Anderson described a research study about time factors in online learning. The study he describes is done with 80 full time online teachers, teaching 4 online courses during the same semester:
Teaching in any context varies a great deal based on personal teaching style, use of synchronous tools, discipline, level and motivation of learners, support and funding for teachers and a host of other contextual factors. Nonetheless aggregate data is very interesting and helps paint the reality as well as vanquish some myths about online teaching. As expected the data confirmed that teachers did spend slightly more time online than literature reports for oncampus. (Averaging 44 hours/week for the 4 courses). But perhaps of greatest interest is the tasks that made up these 44 hours.
What surprised me is the limited time that is spend on Content Development. It seams to me that this research only focuses on running of the courses and not taking into account the development. We notice that this takes large amount of time. Also there is not a lot of information about the context (kind of students, motivation, teaching style, didactical model, etc).
Another issue is the number of students. Especially with the student communication it would be interesting to know how many students were in a 'class'.
Reference
Mandernach, B., Hudson, S., & Wise, S. (2013). Where has the time gone? Faculty activities and time commitments in the online classroom. Journal of Educators Online, 10(2).
http://www.thejeo.com/Archives/Volume10Number2/MandernachHudsonWise.pdf
Via: Wilfred Rubens (in Dutch)
This fall, SURF Academy is organising a masterclass Open Educational Resources (OER). During the masterclass you will get to know everything about Open Education, OER, MOOCs and more. The masterclass is for teachers and staff of higher education institutes and will be in Dutch. The masterclass will be a combination of three face-to-face meetings and online collaboration.
SURF Academy is organising this masterclass in close cooperation between the SURF Special Interest Group OER. The speakers of the masterclass are experts from the SIG, such as Robert Schuwer and Martijn Ouwehand.
If you want to get started with publishing OER or using OER, I think the masterclass would really help you. More information about the masterclass is available on the website of SURF Academy.
Mike Caulfield wrote a long, but very interesting blog about the distributed flip:
The distributed flip is a way of approaching flipped classroom design. It’s worth noting that I’m using a fairly broad definition of flipped classroom here. This is not the simple “homework in reverse” model. Rather, it is the idea that *some* amount of “low-level” activities done inside class (lecturing, quizzing, etc) can be moved outside of class using technology, and the reclaimed time can be used for high-impact activities – project-based learning, peer instruction, guided inquiry, etc.
A more precise definition he uses:
The idea here is that some amount of design of flip materials is done centrally by a group of people, either as a company, consortium, or loose network of individuals. Those high quality materials are then distributed among many instructors who work to localize and modify them for use in their own flipped classrooms.
Interesting are the comments he makes about the use of MOOCs in a flipped classroom. Are MOOCs more than just educational materials?
Read more on hapgood.us.
René Kizilcec and Emily Schneider from the LyticsLab of Stanford are doing an interesting research on the effect of the teacher in view with MOOC video.
The presence of a small picture-in-picture (PIP) of the instructor in online learning videos has become the norm, especially on massive open online courses. Some short threads on discussion forums reveal mixed feelings about this social feature of the instruction: some learners describe it as distracting, while others praise it for helping them pay attention.
With the creation of the videos for our DelftX MOOCs we notice that it is really important that images are related to the story of the teacher. We have as default set-up the teacher in view next to the screen:
But when the slide is more important we show the slide full-screen:
We noticed that in the full slide mode there has to change something after a short period, or a viewer is tuning out. So the slide should be animated or switched back to the view with the teacher.
We are interested to learn when we run these videos in our MOOC what the experiences of the students are.
Tharindu Rekha Liyanagunawardena (University of Reading, UK) , Andrew Alexandar Adams (Meiji University, Japan), and Shirley Ann Williams (University of Reading, UK) performed a systematic study of the published literature on MOOCs between 2008 and 2012:
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some of these academics are taking a research-oriented perspective and academic papers describing their research are starting to appear in the traditional media of peer reviewed publications. This paper presents a systematic review of the published MOOC literature (2008-2012): Forty-five peer reviewed papers are identified through journals, database searches, searching the Web, and chaining from known sources to form the base for this review. We believe this is the first effort to systematically review literature relating to MOOCs, a fairly recent but massively popular phenomenon with a global reach. The review categorises the literature into eight different areas of interest, introductory, concept, case studies, educational theory, technology, participant focussed, provider focussed, and other, while also providing quantitative analysis of publications according to publication type, year of publication, and contributors. Future research directions guided by gaps in the literature are explored.
I agree with their conclusions that there is still limited peer-reviewed research on MOOCs. The papers that are published mostly focus on empirical evidendence from case studies. There hasn't been much research on the learner perspective.
They also mention that the available data is so massive that it limits most researchers. You have to create multi-disciplinary teams of researchers on big data, learning analytics and pedagogy to fully make use of the available data.
Via: Wilfred Rubens (Dutch)
On June 6th and 7th Pierre Dillenbourg from EPFL organised a European MOOC Stakeholder meeting in Lausanne. On behave of TU Delft Nellie van de Griend attended this meeting (I had a more important event).
One of the goals of the meeting was to get a good overview of the activities in Europe with MOOCs. In this presentation all the European initiative are combined.
The presentation has reports from 13 countries. It is interesting to see the difference between countries. That is also the difficulty in Europe: different languages, platforms and strategies.
Vanmiddag organiseert de VVD een ronde tafel over open onderwijs. Samen met TU Delft CvB-lid Anka Mulder ben ik uitgenodigd om daar bij aanwezig te zijn. De middag bestaat uit twee delen, waarbij het eerste deel zich richt op het hoger onderwijs en het tweede deel op po/vo. Bij de sessie over hoger onderwijs zitten de volgende personen:
- TU Delft: Anka Mulder (spreker) & Willem van Valkenburg
- Open Universiteit Heerlen: Fred Mulder (spreker) & Wilfred Rubens
- SURF: Christien Bok (spreker) & Hester Jelgerhuis
- Universiteit Leiden: Rick Lawson (spreker) & Marja Verstelle
Elk van deze instellingen is ook gevraagd om een position paper (1 A4) aan te leveren. Hieronder de tekst die ik samen met Anka hiervoor heb opgesteld.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium launched a survey on their website in March 2011 to collect user feedback. Data was gathered from 1773 respondents from nearly 90 countries. The results are now available on their website.
In addition, the have collected and consolidated user surveys from the OCW Consortium, Tufts University, Education-Portal.com, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-Online) and Delft University of Technology into a user feedback report. The report, which incorporates results from the OCWC Feedback Survey, can be downloaded here (PDF).
44% of respondents indicate that OCW materials help them with the concepts they are studying. 51% also use these materials for specific projects, or to supplement or even create teaching materials. Of particular interest is the fact that 51% of respondents find OCW materials useful in order to update their skills or knowledge for and at work. In addition, 54% reported having found OCW materials useful for their own interests.
