- Eco on lists – Eco on lists – (none)
- MOOCs Are Usefully Middlebrow – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education – it's been said before, but this time with an unabashed middle-class stamp on it. "Problems arise only when we think of MOOCs as university courses rather than as learning for the masses.". And don't overlook the mplicit whack at all men corporate as middle-brow, as personified by Gates. – (dh moocs xmooc )
Tag Archives: xmooc
bookmarks for November 16th, 2013 through November 19th, 2013
- New thoughts on Personal Learning Environments – – (ple dh )
- Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Company | Business + Innovation – In the Udacity fallout, one mission-man stands alone. G'bye and thanks for nothin'. – (mooc xmooc udacity )
bookmarks for September 17th, 2013 through September 19th, 2013
- Faculty Governance in the New University | AAUP – – (none)
- MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement? – Long live distributed discussions. But consider that learning can be silent, too. "but that centralized discussion forums do not scale. For MOOCs to be more effective, we need to see different approaches to student engagement." – (cmooc mooc xmooc de discussions )
bookmarks for July 19th, 2013 through July 22nd, 2013
- ‘Introduction to Ancient Rome,’ the Flipped Version – Commentary – Observations on flipping. An observation on outsourcing content
"But in the humanities, at least, a flipped class is unlikely to work very well with content created by someone other than the instructor because doing so reduces the instructor's authority in the eyes of the students. Mohamed Noor, a biology professor at Duke University, used his own Coursera course to flip his campus-based course. But I suspect that the flipped class would have been substantially less successful if he had been required to use someone else's lectures and other course materials as the "textbook" of his own course.
"In basic terms, every instructor tells his or her own story with the course content. Not only is that part of the fun, but it's the place where our research intersects with our teaching. Furthermore, students tell us that an essential component of a successful flipped class is a strong connection between in-class and outside-of-class activities."
And another about generic activities –
"Another key secret about flipping a class: Content delivery is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out what to do in class that keeps students engaged, and motivated to prepare for class. In other words, they have to come to see the value of doing assigned pre-class work and then see that coming to class is an efficient way to learn (or, more precisely, to earn high grades). It will take considerable effort and resources, not to mention additional classroom support staff in larger classes, to run pedagogically sound flipped classes. It will take a lot of energy to develop activities that work for one's particular audience—and what works for my group may well not work for a class at Haverford or Yale. – (xmooc flippedcourse DH outsourcing ) - Student Reading Practices in Print and Electronic Media – "The research found that they almost always used e-book readers, mobile devices, and tablet computers for nonacademic reading but relied on paper printouts for academic reading." and "Perhaps most notably, many of the study participants said they saw themselves as belonging to the generation before the first truly digital generation. " from the Chronicle report on the work. <http:></http:>
– (none)
bookmarks for July 4th, 2013 through July 8th, 2013
- Using GitHub to Power A Web Project: How and Why – Waters is using GitHub to open source her stuff. Makes a good comparison to CourseFork. It's not necessarily the next big thing but using FOSS repositories for OER might be. – (github oer CourseFork )
- “You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves!” | More or Less Bunk – MOOCs are already nostalgia. "1) MOOCs are designed to be frozen in amber.
Do you remember those professors in college who lectured off the same sheets of yellowed (not yellow – yellowed, as in used to be white) note paper for twenty years? MOOCs are like that, only moreso. If it takes twenty people and $250,000 to create a MOOC, you don’t have a lot of incentive to bring the gang back together to make necessary changes, like writing new multiple-choice questions." – (xmooc )
bookmarks for July 2nd, 2013 through July 3rd, 2013
- Surviving the Day of the MOOC – Weller's slidedeck on orienting edu energies towards MOOCs. – (cmooc xmooc oer )
- n+1: Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? – Short answer: no. Longer answer, "My students will thus come to understand that the for-profit logic of their online educational empowerment depends on the fact that while they are consuming information, they are also producing information that Coursera can correlate with other data to predict what prices students with particular profiles will eventually be willing to pay." – (cmooc satire )
bookmarks for June 26th, 2013 through June 29th, 2013
- Straining the Quality of MOOCs: Student Retention and Intention – Case self study, well, anecdote, that nicely counters Stanford's/Coursera's quality contrivances. Like this: " I write to make a point: blaming the students is occurring at the highest and lowest levels of this system, and it is not helping us to learn how to build and use MOOCs. The founders of a major MOOC platform, Koller et al., say that students who don’t finish a course didn’t intend to do so. " – (xmooc )
- [toread] The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses by Stephen Downes | MOOC Quality Project – – (cmooc )
bookmarks for June 22nd, 2013 through June 26th, 2013
- The big picture » A Digital Workflow for Academic Research – A close consideration of a PLE, including using links, from invention through distro. Worth returning to regularly. – (ple cmooc invention )
- Inside a MOOC in Progress – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education – Roll up roll up. Watch as the Amazing Coursera Comp-MOOC does its death-defying stunts for an awestruck crowd.
"Because of the way the Coursera platform is constructed, such wide-ranging decisions have been hard-coded into the software—decisions that seem to have no educational rationale and that thwart the intent of our course. "
and
"When I wanted to make the penalty for not completing peer review a 100-percent deduction per assignment, the Coursera support team responded that the maximum deduction could be only 20 percent. Coursera acknowledged that other instructors had complained about the penalty figure but gave no indication as to when or whether the problem would be addressed. Predictably, many students have not completed the peer review, leaving others with little feedback. In my opinion, the instructor, not the platform, should determine how an assignment is evaluated." – (xmooc )
bookmarks for May 24th, 2013 through May 27th, 2013
- Teachers and Students: Machines and their Products? – "A great deal of what today’s education “reformers” believe is based on the idea that every student is a nascent autodidact. The only thing they are missing is opportunity. Most people, including most children, however, don’t see themselves as “starved” for knowledge or learning. They are getting along quite fine with what they have, thank you." – (xmooc edreform fyc )
- Musicianship Resources – Git Hosted – Interesting for two things: explanation of the practices of the flipped course, and hosting the resources as a blog on GitHub. Oh, and for the design of the materials, too. – (blog github OER flippedcourse )
- A Course in Online Civility – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education – An odd one, where online discussions actually occur and with some politeness. The value points are in Goedde's connection of discourse form – rant, off-hand comment – with lack of development. "Students disagree with each other, sometimes strongly, but they also take pains to be polite.
Their motivation is clear: Their grade depends on it. In my online classes, every assignment, big and small, is written. If the writing is sloppy or dogmatic, it doesn't earn a high grade. For example, students routinely give feedback on one another's drafts. If a student responds with a rant, either in support or opposition, it typically means the ideas are not organized, so I take off points. If a student's comments are offhanded, it typically means that the ideas are underdeveloped, or that claims are made without evidence to support them, and the grade reflects this shortcoming." – (netiquette fyc dialogue )
bookmarks for May 11th, 2013 through May 18th, 2013
- open letter to coursera – in the manner of a course proposal. Bob Meister – (academia coursera mooc moocs xmooc )
- Ian Bogost – The Walled Kindergarten – Bogost on corporate control of MOOCs – (moocs xmooc )
- Ian Bogost – Latour Litanizer – Bogost doing OOO theory – (DH theory doing OOO )
- Microsoft honcho pleads with media: ‘Stop picking on us!’ – How to handle annotating an article, including sarcasm. – (fyw argument annotation )