Last week there was an interesting news item about Amherst College. The faculty decided not to join the EdX Consortium.
The first interesting thing is that the president didn't want to make the final decision:
Amherst President Carolyn (Biddy) Martin left the final decision about the deal in the hands of her faculty. She expressed public support for working with edX but said she saw risks either way.
According to Adam Heidebrink MOOC platforms can be more dynamic. In his article he made a comparison of the platforms Coursera, Canvas and EdX. He provides 4 preliminary suggestions:
I think these are good suggestions and we'll see what we can do on the EdX platform.
Via: Wilfred Rubens (in Dutch)
Afgelopen donderdag was ik bij de opening van het leercentrum Agora van de KU Leuven op uitnodiging van Fred Truyen. Het leercentrum is gerealiseerd in de binnenstad van Leuven in de oude Pharmacie instituut uit 1932. Er is plaats voor zo'n 550 studenten om te studeren. De KU Leuven heeft 7,5 miljoen euro geïnvesteerd in de renovatie.
Het leercentrum is doordeweeks open van 8uur 's ochtends tot 12uur 's avond. In het weekend en tijdens vakanties is het open van 9 tot 1 9uur.
Het gebouw is opgedeeld in verschillende zones, afhankelijk van de activiteit die de studenten willen doen. Hieronder de afbeeldingen:
Verder gaan ze er vanuit dat studenten hun eigen devices meenemen. Er zijn daarvoor zeer groot aantal stopcontacten gerealiseerd. De netwerkverbinding gaat volledig via wifi (eduroam werkte prima).
De stilteplekken zijn gerealiseerd o.a. gerealiseerd in de oude practicumruimte van pharmacie. Ze hebben daarbij de originele kasten laten staan. Dat geeft een fraai effect:
De andere stilte ruimte is wel helemaal voorzien van een nieuwe inrichting:
Wat mij hier vooral op viel was dat ze aanpassingen aan de akoustiek hebben gedaan, waardoor het veel rustig is. Er is vrijwel geen echo aanwezig. Ze hebben zowel het plafond als de muren voorzien van speciale bekleding om dit te realiseren.
De groepswerkzone bestaat uit verschillende lokalen die studenten online kunnen reserveren. Er zijn verschillende ruimtes, die allemaal naar bekende plaatsen in de wereld zijn genoemd. Zoals Amsterdam, Berlijn, Athens. (Teleurstellend natuurlijk dat Delft er niet bij zit).
Persoonlijk vond ik dat ze die thema's in de ruimtes nog meer zichtbaar hadden mogen maken. In elke ruimte hangt nu 1 prent erover. Waarom niet een hele wand met de skyline van Berlijn?
Qua technische voorzieningen hebben ze alle groepsruimtes voorzien van smartboards. Ook zijn er ruimtes specifiek voor online vergaderen (video-conferencing) of het opnemen van een college. Ook zijn er ruimtes waar studenten video-bewerkingen kunnen doen, inclusief een uitleenmogelijkheid van camera.
Ik denk dat dit een goede aanwinst voor de studenten van de KU Leuven. Zij kunnen hier uitstekend studeren en samenwerken. Persoonlijk vond ik niet heel veel vernieuwds in het gebouw als ik het vergelijk met het TU Delft Library Learning Centre. Een van de opvallende zaken vond ik dat er bij de ingang toegangspoortjes zijn en je dus alleen naar binnen mag met een campuskaart. Dat maakt een niet erg open space.
Wel een interessante mogelijkheid is dat ze ook een studeertuin hebben toegevoegd, zodat je ook buiten kan studeren.
Hieronder nog enkele foto's om een indruk te geven van het gebouw:
More pictures in my dropbox.
Li Yuan and Stephen Powell from JISC CETIS have written an interesting white paper on MOOCs and Open Education. The goal of the authors is to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of MOOCs and trends towards greater openness and the implications for their institutions.
Although the paper is focused on UK institutions this is als for others an interesting read. They raise a lot of interesting questions, issues and challenges.
I fully support their conclusions:
Open education brings new opportunities for innovation in higher education that will allow institutions and academics to explore new online learning models and innovative practices in teaching and learning. At a national and international level, new frameworks for HE funding structures, quality insurance and accreditation to support different approaches and models for delivering higher education will be required. Policy makers will need to embrace openness and make education more affordable and accessible for all and at the same time be profitable for the institutions in an open higher education ecosystem.
An interesting new feature that is coming to the EdX platform is the automated essay grading. This features enables the possibility that essays of students are automatically graded. This means that students can get instand feedback on their work.
The EdX assessment tool requires teachers to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.
The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical rank. It will also provide general feedback, like telling a student whether an answer was on topic or not.
The software will made available as open-source component of the EdX platform.
Off course there are people who say that this won't work. In the New York Times article about this they mention the group Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment.
I personally like the concept and think it will work for at least 80% of the essays. That is already such an hugh time saving for a teacher. As teacher the good essays and bad essay are usually very easy to detect. The difficult part are the essays on the verge of pass or fail (in the Dutch system between 5 and 6).
DelftX gives us a good platform to experiment with the tool and we will certainly do this one of our moocs.
Yesterday EdX and Stanford announced that they will team up their efforts in developing the EdX platform. This means that Stanford will merge their open-source mooc platform Class2Go into the EdX platform. The Chronicle wrote about this:
The move is a merger of sorts between two previously competing software-development projects with the same goal. EdX has long said it would make the software it built to power its MOOCs freely available to anyone as an open-source package. And Stanford was working on Class2Go, its own free software for online courses. Now the two software teams will work together and focus on developing a single platform.
In the same announcement EdX announced that the entire edX learning platform will be released as open source on June 1, 2013. The release will include the learning platform; edX Studio, our course authoring tool; edX101, an online course on how to teach an online course on edX; and assessment tools, such as our peer grader and our AI grader based on machine learning.
Interesting is that Stanford is not a member of the EdX Consortium and according to the Chronicle also doesn't have plans to join:
Despite the joint work on software development, Stanford has no plans to join edX as a partner, and it will not offer courses via edX. Instead, Stanford will create its own branded presence, with the jointly built software platform powering it in the background.
Via: Steve Carson
Peter Rheinhardt wrote an interesting blog article about the retention in online education and then specifically in MOOCs:
I don?t want to tear down these products or the people who?ve built them, I?m rooting for them all the way. They just need some tough love, and so this article explains why I churned: the starting commitment is too high, the re-engagement emails are terrible, and the pacing is impersonal.
He has three suggestions to improve the retention rate:
Especially the second suggestion is very easy to implement and certainly will improve the retention rate.
Salman Khan, the MIT alumnus and founder of Khan Academy, has shared his experience in creating Khan-style videos (KSV) with the EdX Consortium through ?appropriately enough? a Khan-style video.
the Khan Academy has created a library of more than 4,000 short educational videos on Khan Academy, which gets 5.4 million unique visitors a month. The videos have been viewed 240 million times and are incorporated into classrooms around the world. There is also a Dutch Khan Academy.
Yesterday the Guardian featured an article from Anka Mulder about the OCW4STEM project we submitted in January:
Technology is fundamentally reshaping how we work, socialise and communicate, but too few European students are opting to study the subjects that will give them the skills to work in our innovation-led economy. This is a particular problem for women, minorities and other non-traditional student groups.
STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects are declining in popularity at a rapid rate across all European countries, signalling a macro-crisis for future economic competitiveness and more personal micro-crisis among Europe's engineering and technology universities.
The Chronicle has published the result of an survey among professor who have taught a mooc. They invited 184 professors and 104 reacted to the invitation. Although the findings are not scientific. They say "the most enthusiastic of the MOOC professors were the likeliest complete the survey". Below are the most important findings of the survey: